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OrthoSensor (Sunrise, FL) won FDA clearance for its VERASENSE device, an electronic wireless sensor used in place of tibial trial spacers during total knee replacement procedures to help guarantee proper alignment and balance. The device, which is compatible with a number of implants on the market, provides real-time feedback on its orientation and soft tissue balance as the new knee is being positioned.
Last year we spoke with Jay Pierce, the CEO of OrthoSensor about what the company is up to and how their technology was developed.
VERASENSE utilizes advanced, proprietary sensor and communications technologies to give surgeons real-time feedback on limb alignment, implant position and soft tissue balance during knee replacement. By delivering this dynamic, quantitative data, VERASENSE empowers surgeons to make evidence-based decisions regarding component placement, limb alignment and soft tissue balance to optimize clinical outcomes and enhance patient satisfaction.
VERASENSE integrates seamlessly within the current surgical workflow and is compatible for use with multiple knee implant systems. VERASENSE enables surgeons, for the first time, to rapidly make a total kinetic (force and motion) assessment of knee function and make adjustments to achieve balance and stability through a full range of motion. |
Director of Polish World War II Museum Forced to Step Down
Pawel Machcewicz, a Polish historian, has been fired as the director of Gdansk's Second World War Museum, writes Julia Michalska of the Art Newspaper. The museum, which opened on March 23, is considered one of the largest historical museums in the world. Machcewicz's dismissal comes on the heels of a court ruling that allows the museum to merge with the as-of-yet-unbuilt Westerplatte Museum—an institution focused on the Battle of Westerplatte, an invasion by German forces that marked the beginning of World War II. The merger will allow Poland's right-wing PiS government to organize a new state-approved cultural institution. The first task for Karol Nawrocki, the newly appointed acting director of the unified museums, will be to assess the institution's financial standing and employment situation.
The Second World War Museum has bothered members of the PiS government for a long time, as officials claim the museum's permanent collection is "too universal." In 2015, Poland's minister of culture, Piotr Glinski, requested that another museum be made to focus exclusively on the Battle of Westerplatte. Only months later, Glinski ordered that the museums combine, which would allow the government to rid themselves of Machcewicz and change the focus of the exhibits. On April 5, the Polish Supreme Administrative Court allowed for the merger to occur. |
The iPhone 7S could have a glass back, just like the Galaxy S7
By James Rogerson 2016-05-20T11:42:00.14Z Mobile phones
But not all models will sport the design
The idea of an all-glass iPhone has been bounced around recently, with suggestions that Apple could stick a curved glass panel on both the front and back of the 2017 flagship coming after this year's iPhone 7.
Now that possibility is looking surprisingly likely, as the CEO of one of Apple's supply chain companies has revealed that such a phone may be in the works.
Nikkei reports that speaking at his company's annual shareholder meeting, Catcher CEO Allen Horng revealed that "one model" of the iPhone 7S (or iPhone 8 as it might be called) "will adopt glass casing next year". Catcher makes the metal casing for the current iPhones so Horng should know what he's taking about
He went on to say that "I don't think this move will have an impact on Catcher's revenue as glass casing still needs a durable metal frame which requires advanced processing technology and would not be cheaper than the current model."
Glass clash
A glass front and back with a metal frame: sound familiar to anyone? It will to Samsung, as that exact description could apply to recent members of its Galaxy S range. If both panels are curved, as was previously rumored, the iPhone 7S could bear more than a passing resemblance to the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.
Of course this isn't the first time Apple has dabbled with a glass back for its phones, having first rolled one out on the iPhone 4, so you could see this as Apple imitating Samsung imitating Apple, or something. Regardless, it would certainly bring these long-time rivals closer than ever, unless Samsung also refreshes its flagship design for the Galaxy S8.
It's worth noting that even if the iPhone does go back to glass, Horng says only one model will do so, suggesting that Apple could offer two different designs on its phones. With the iPhone 7 largely rumored to look similar to the iPhone 6S, we're expecting a significantly new design for the iPhone 7S anyway, whether Apple goes for metal or glass.
An all-glass Apple patent could point to the future of the iPhone |
Except for their lives, the families lost everything.
In just minutes, fires ravaged a number of side-by-side homes on Cruz Lane, leaving their inhabitants homeless, helpless, and bewildered.
Cruz Lane, we can be certain, is not on any visitor's tour of the Cayman Islands. It is a short spur off Bodden Road in a disadvantaged neighborhood tucked behind Kirk Home Centre. It is the kind of neighborhood that nobody notices and rarely makes the news – unless there is a crime, a fire or, in this instance, most likely both.
But even 17 minutes was more time than the families had. These were highly flammable wooden structures – construction susceptible to nothing more than a match.
And that match was supplied, according to family members, by an arsonist. They say they know who did it.
In the aftermath, police are investigating what may be a crime of massive proportions. If those inhabitants had succumbed to flame or smoke, the result of a purposely set fire, the perpetrators could have been facing charges of mass murder or manslaughter.
Even in the present circumstances (no lives were lost) charges of attempted murder do not seem far-fetched.
In any case, what happened on Cruz Lane in the early morning hours of July 31 should raise a four-alarm warning throughout our community.
As everyone knows, there are literally hundreds of shanties, shacks and slum dwellings throughout Grand Cayman that appear to be dangerous firetraps.
Likewise, we know that Cayman's most respectable and responsible developers such as the Darts, Fraser Wellon and Brian Butler all must meet stringent fire and safety requirements before they are issued a "certificate of occupancy" for their buildings. This is a good thing and signals why Cayman enjoys a reputation as the "best of the rest" of the countries in the region.
But those good safety practices inexorably should lead government to the issue of the lack of building and fire code inspections and enforcement for the many ramshackle (but occupied) houses that are present in every district.
The conflagration on Cruz Lane, thankfully, did not lead to the loss of life, but it has now put the spotlight on a most intractable and too-often invisible reality: the dangerous condition of too much of our housing stock.
We are literally playing with fire.
Of course my heart goes out to these families who have lost just about everything in this recent fire. For most people this is an unthinkable event in their lives. For those who have experience it, especially young children, and youth, this will have a life long effect.
Hopefully we will see agencies such as the Red Cross, and other disaster support organizations step up to the plate and assist these families with temporary housing, clothing and assistance. I know the Caymanian population as a whole will do so. After all a God fearing Christian society knows a main purpose of Church and Community is to help those in need.
In regard to Government, rather than establishing new departments, commissions and agencies, perhaps it should focus on responsibly managing the systems, departments, and programs it already has. Then all living in Cayman can have a safe and productive life. |
Q: How grab filename from url? I write simple script for my VIP user by PHP. now I need to change many (+4000) links format to compilable with my script.
I need grab file name from url's.
URL e.x dw.example.com/download.php?d=blabla/blabla/2014/test.zip
URL e.x dw.example.com/download.php?d=blabla/blabla/test.zip
The big problem is the files are not in the same path (directory), I try to use .htaccess to rewrite url's to something like dw.example.com/download.php?d=blabla/blabla&f=test.zip
But it's not work.
Is there any way for resolve the problem by .htaccsess? if not, how can I get the file name from this url type:
URL e.x dw.example.com/download.php?d=blabla/blabla/2014/test.zip
A: Thanks to Bor691 by array_pop(explode('/',$url)) can grab the file name.
|
Hot Toys Iron Man 3 Gamma Armor Figure
Tony Stark has a lot of toys in his life, but his best toys include a range of Iron Man armors. This is a tradition that holds in both the comics and the Marvel films. Today, Hot Toys unveiled an expansion in their line of Iron Man "House Party Protocol" collectibles adding the the Gamma (Mark XXVI) Heavy Construction Suit Upgrade sixth scale figure as a Hot Toys Exclusive!
The Mark XXVI (26 for those of us that don't read Roman numerals) was one of a mix of new armor unveiled in Iron Man 3. It was created as part of the Iron Legion which the film unveiled down at Tony's Malibu house. In the Marvel Universe film timeline, this armor came into existence sometime after the Battle of New York and debuted when Tony ordered J.A.R.V.I.S. to initiate the "House Party Protocol" which Hot Toys is celebrating. This was the film moment when an army of automated armors entered the fray with Aldrich Killian.
Designed to resist intense temperatures and electrical surges, it takes its name from the fact that it can also withstand gamma radiation. You know, the stuff that gave us the Hulk. Here, the figure stands at 34 cm tall and features those pneumatic hammer arms that made it so memorable. There is dark green, gray, and silver painting on the armor with a beautiful mix of weathering effects. It even has LED light-up functions and comes with its own figure stand.
Expect this one to ship by the first quarter of next year!
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In The Market For A $135,000 BB-8?
Covered in roughly 860 diamonds, this is a droid of a kind we've not seen before (and may not again). Rolling right off the screen of the upcoming The Force Awakens, this newly designed and highly detailed BB-8 is one of a
Chuck Moore 5 Dec 2015 • 1 min read
Activate Interlocks! Dyna-Therms Connected! Let's Go Voltron FunKo Force!
If you grew up with Voltron in your life, you are undoubtedly a fan of the franchise and animated series. It was a massive hit in the 80s and helped open doors for other Japanese-style properties in the US market. Voltron defended our universe |
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter One
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere: Chapter One. 1
About the Visible and the Invisible. 1
What It's About and Why It's Important 1
Fear of disenchantment. 1
On the Usefulness of Ethnography and the Difficulties to Be Surmounted.. 2
The dissimilarity of ethnoi. 2
The complexities of the terminology employed. 3
Summaries and scruples. 3
Limits. 4
'The historian without geography stumbles'. 6
Nature and History. 6
The combination of nature study and history. 6
Formations and ethnoi. 7
Can one trust the historical sources?. 8
Can we believe the memorials?. 9
Are There Ethnoi?. 10
There are no signs for defining an ethnos. 10
An ethnos is not a society. 11
Language. 11
Descent from a single ancestor. 13
Ethnos as an illusion. 14
Between West and East. 14
A country and people without a name. 16
'States' and 'processes'. 17
NOTES.. 18
About the Visible and the Invisible
in which it is shown that superficial observations lead the investigator up the garden path, and means of self-control and self-checking are proposed
What It's About and Why It's Important
Fear of disenchantment.
When a reader of our day buys and opens a new book on history or ethnography, he is not sure he will even read it to the middle. It may seem boring to him, mindless, or just not to his taste. Still it's all right for the reader- he's simply lost a few dollars or roubles. But what of the author? The collecting of information. The posing of the problem. Decades of searching for the answer. Years at his desk. Discussions with publishers' readers. Battle with the editor. And suddenly it's all to no purpose-the book isn't interesting! It lies in libraries ... and no one takes it out. Which means his life has been in vain.
That is so terrible that one must take steps to avoid such a result. But what steps? During his training at university and in postgraduate studies it is often hammered into the future author that his job is to copy out as many passages as possible from sources, to put them into some kind of order, and to draw a conclusion: in antiquity there were slave owners and slaves. The slave owners were baddies but things were good for them; the slaves were goodies, but it was tough for them.
All that, of course, is correct but that's the trouble. No one wants to read about that, even the author himself. First of all, because it is so well known, and secondly, because it does not explain, for example, why some armies won, and others were defeated, and why some countries grew stronger and others weaker. And, finally, why powerful ethnoi arose, and where they vanished to, although there was obviously no complete extinction of their members.
All these matters are wholly related to my chosen theme, i.e. the sudden strengthening of one people or another and their subsequent disappearance. A clear example of that is the Mongols in the twelfth to seventeenth centuries. But that pattern has also governed other peoples. The late B.Ya. Vladimirtsov formulated the problem succinctly: 'I want to understand how and why all that happened'; but like other scholars, he did not provide an answer. I shall come back to this subject time and again, firmly convinced that the reader will not shut the book at the second page.
Quite clearly, in order to solve the problem posed we must first of all investigate the method of research. Otherwise it would have been solved long ago, because the facts are so numerous that the point is not one of adding to them but of selecting those that relate to the matter in hand. Even contemporary chroniclers have drowned in a sea of information that has not brought them closer to understanding the problem. Archaeologists and chroniclers have assembled, published, and commented on much information over the past centuries, and orientalists have increased the stock of knowledge even more, codifying sources in various languages Chinese, Persian, Latin, Greek, Armenian, and Arabic. The amount of information has grown, but has not developed into a new quality. It has still remained unclear how a small tribe sometimes gained hegemony over half the world, then increased in numbers, and later disappeared.
I have posed the question of the extent of our knowledge, or rather ignorance of the subject this study is devoted to.
On the Usefulness of Ethnography and the Difficulties to Be Surmounted
The dissimilarity of ethnoi.
When a people has lived for a long time in its homeland it seems to its members that their mode of life, manners of behaviour, tastes, opinions, and social relationships, that is to say everything that is now called the 'stereotype of behaviour', are the only possible and correct ones. And if any deviations are encountered anywhere, it is because of 'ignorance', by which is often understood simply dissimilarity from themselves. I remember when I was a child and was fond of Mayne Reid, a very cultured lady said to me: 'Negroes are muzhiks just like ours, only black'. It could not have occurred to her that a Melanesian witch-doctor might say with equal grounds: 'Englishmen are headhunters just like us, only white'. Narrow-minded Philistine judgments sometimes seem internally logical, even though based on ignorance of reality. But they immediately crumble when confronted with it.
Ethnography was not topical for the mediaeval scholars of Western Europe. Europeans' communion with other cultures was limited to the Mediterranean basin, on the coasts of which lived descendants of subjects of the Roman Empire, some of them converted to Islam. That, of course, separated them from the 'Franks and 'Latins', i.e. from the French and Italians, but the existence of common cultural roots made the difference not so big as to exclude mutual understanding. But in the age of the great geographical discoveries the position was radically changed. While it then seemed justified to call Negroes, Papuans, or North American Indians 'savages', that could not be said of the Chinese, or about the Hindus, the Aztecs, or the Incas. Other explanations had to be found.
In the sixteenth century, European travelers and explorers, discovering lands remote for them, involuntarily began to look in them for analogies of the forms of life they were used to. The Spanish Conquistadors began to give baptized caciques the title 'Don', considering them Indian noblemen. The chiefs of Negro tribes were elevated to the rank of 'kings'. Tungus shamans were considered priests, although they were simply doctors who saw the cause of illness in the influence of evil 'spirits' that were just as material in their understanding as animals or members of other tribes. Mutual incomprehension was intensified by a conviction that there was nothing to understand, and then collisions occurred that led to the murder of Europeans who wounded the feelings of the aborigines, in response to which brutal punitive expeditions were organized. The civilized Australian aborigine Waipuldanya or Phillip Roberts relates stories of tragedies that were the more terrible that they happened without visible causes. Thus aborigines killed a white man who was smoking a cigarette, considering him a spirit that had fire in its belly. They ran another through with a spear because he had drawn a watch from his pocket and looked at the sun. The aborigines decided that he was carrying the sun in his pocket. Misunderstandings like that were followed by punitive expeditions that led to the extermination of whole tribes. And tragic collisions occurred for Australian Aborigines and the Papuans of New Guinea not only with whites but also with Malays, collisions that were aggravated by the transmission of infections.
Fairly recently, on 30 October 1968, on the bank of the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon, the Indians killed a missionary and eight of his companions for nothing, from their point of view, but tactlessness. The padre, having come to the Atroari's country, announced his arrival by shots, which was improper according to their customs; he went into a small hut, despite the protest of its owner; he tweaked the ear of a child; and forbade them to take his saucepan of soup. Only the guide survived, who knew the Indians' customs and abandoned Father Cagliari, who had paid no attention to his advice and had forgotten that the people who live on the banks of the Po were not quite like those on the banks of the Amazon.
Some time passed before it was asked whether it was not better to adapt oneself to the aborigines than to exterminate them. In order to do that, however, it was necessary to admit that peoples of other cultures differed from Europeans, and from one another, not only in languages and beliefs but also in the whole 'stereotype of behaviour', which it was a good idea to study so as to avoid conflicts. So ethnography arose, the science of the differences between peoples.
Colonialism has gone, under the blows of the national liberation movement, but interethnic contacts have remained and been extended. The problem of establishing mutual understanding has consequently become more and more urgent on both the global scale of world politics and the microscopic, personal scale during meetings with people who are not like us. And so a new question has been posed, a theoretical one despite its practical significance. But why are we, people, so unlike one another that we must adapt ourselves to one another? Must study others' manners and customs, look for acceptable ways of intercourse instead of those that seem natural to us, are quite adequate for intraethnic intercourse and satisfactory for contacts with our neighbors? In some cases ethnic dissimilarity can be explained by diversity of geographical conditions, yet it is also observed where climate and relief are similar. Obviously, one cannot do without history.
In fact various peoples arose in various ages and had different historical fates, which left traces on them as ineffaceable as personal biographies that mould the character of individuals. The geographical environment influences ethnoi, of course, through man's everyday communion with the nature that feeds him, but that is not all. Traditions inherited from ancestors and traditional enmity or friendship with neighbors (the ethnic environment) play their role; cultural influences and religion have their significance, but in addition to all that there is the law of evolution or development, which applies to ethnoi just like other phenomena of nature. It is manifested in the multifarious processes of the rise and disappearance of peoples that I call ethnogenesis. Unless we allow for the peculiarities of this form of the motion of matter we cannot find the key to the riddle of ethnic psychology on either the practical or the theoretical plane. We need both, but unexpected difficulties crop up on the path I have elected.
The complexities of the terminology employed.
The abundance of initial information and the poor development of the principles of systematizing are felt particularly painfully in history and ethnography. For the bibliography alone fills volumes, to look into which is sometimes no simpler than looking into the scientific problems themselves. The reader needs to be able to see the whole aggregate of events simultaneously (the principle of actualism), or all the modes of formation (the principle of evolutionism), and not a multi-volume list of the titles of articles and papers, for the most part out of date. The works of the founders of Marxism contain the program of a systematic approach to understanding historical process, but it has not yet been applied to questions of ethnogenesis.
Some attempts to introduce a systems method are known in old, often forgotten historiography but, in contrast to the natural sciences, their authors met with neither understanding nor sympathy. Polybius's conception is now regarded as an elegant rarity, ibn Khaidun's (fourteenth century) as a curiosity. Giovanni Battista Vico is remembered only in the history of science, while the grandiose, though perhaps unsuccessful constructions of N.Ya. Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee have become an excuse for rejecting the construction of historical models in general. The result of this process is unambiguous. Since it is impossible to remember the whole concatenation of historical events and since there is not and cannot be a common terminology in the absence of a systems even communion among Historians gets more difficult year by year.
By attaching various nuances to terms and investing them with a different content, historians convert them into polysemantic words. In the first stages of this process the speakers can be understood from the context, intonation, and situation in which the dispute is conducted, but in the last phases this unsatisfactory degree of understanding disappears. So the Russian word rod (gens, family) is usually employed for the concept 'clan or gentile system', but the 'clan (rod) of the Shuisky boyars' clearly has no relation to that. It is even worse with translation: if a clan (gens) is a Celtic clan, it is impossible to call any Kazakh branch of the Middle or Junior Zhus (ru) such, or the Altain kost (seok), and -vice versa, because they differ in functions and genesis. Yet all these, by no means dissimilar phenomena are named identically and, worse, are equated on that basis with one another. Willy-nilly the historian studies not the object but words that have already lost their meaning as real phenomena, while the latter elude him. Let us now assume that three historians are discussing a problem, one of them investing the concept 'gens' with the sense of clan, the second of seok, the third of the boyar family. Obviously they not only will not understand one another, but even what they are talking about.
It may be objected, of course, that agreement can be reached about terms, but the number of concepts increases proportionately with the accumulation of information; ever new terms are appearing that, in the absence of a system, become polysemantic and consequently useless for analysis and synthesis. But a way out can also be found here.
So far I have been speaking of the conditions of research; let me now speak about its perspectives. Study of any subject only has practical significance when it is possible to survey it as a whole. The electrical engineer, for example, must deal with the phenomena of ionization and thermal efficiency, the electromagnetic field, etc., but not to the same degree; the physical geographer, when speaking of Earth's envelopes, has in mind the troposphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and even the biosphere. But the historian can only draw conclusions that are more weighty and interesting for the reader when he covers a broad complex of interconnected events in a single argument, at the same time reaching agreement on terminology. It is difficult, but not impossible. It is simply important for the conclusions to correspond to all the facts taken into consideration. If anyone puts forward a more elegant and convincing conception for the facts cited in my book, I shall bow to him with respect. But if, on the contrary, anyone declared my conclusions final, not requiring review and further elaboration, I would not agree with him. Ordinary books do not live longer than people, and the development of science is an immanent law of the shaping of mankind. I therefore see it as my job to pay what honour I can to Beautiful Lady History, without whom no people can exist, and to her Wise Sister Geography, who creates people's bond with their ancestress, the Biosphere of Planet Earth. [+1]
Summaries and scruples.
The species Homo sapiens, which has spread over the whole land surface of the planet, and a considerable part of its marine surface, has made such significant changes in its configuration that they can be equated with small scale upheavals. [+2] But it follows from this that we distinguish a special historico-geographical category of laws that requires a special method for examining and studying them that combines historical and geographical techniques of research. In itself that is nothing new, but the approach to the problem has so far been eclectic: the use of C14 analysis, for example, to date archaeological finds, of resistivity prospecting (a business too laborious for practical application), and of cybernetic techniques to study 'stone Venuses' (which has given the same results as visual estimates), and so on. But the most important thing has been lost sight of! In my view this 'main point' is the ability to extract information from the silence of the sources. The inductive way limits the historian's opportunities to a simple or critical rendering of foreign words, the limit of the investigation moreover being distrust of the source. But this result is negative and therefore not conclusive. Only the establishing of a certain number of indisputable facts will be positive, and these, being derived layer by layer from the source, can be reduced to a chronological table or plotted on a historical map. In order to interpret them, a philosopheme or postulate is needed, but that infringes the accepted principle of inductive research. A blind alley!
So! But the geographer, geologist, zoologist, and soil scientist never have more facts, yet their sciences develop which happens because natural scientists employ 'empirical generalization' instead of a philosophical postulate and it, according to Vernadsky, has a reliability equal to observed fact. [+3] In other words, the natural sciences overcome the silence of the sources and even extract something useful for science from it, since they avoid the false that is always contained in a source or introduced by ourselves through inadequate perception. So why reject sources because of that? When taking nature as a source we also have to resort to a method of study, but that gives us wonderful prospects that enable us to lift the veil of Isis.
One of the tasks of science is to obtain the maximum information from a minimum of facts, to make it possible to single out precise patterns that enable the most varied phenomena to be understood from a single point of view, and subsequently learn to find one's bearings in them. These patterns are invisible but not invented. They are discovered through generalization. Let me give an example from biology.
Stars and planets move across the sky. Balloons rise, but a stone dropped from a cliff falls in space. Rivers run to the sea, and sediments slowly settle in the ocean forming layers of sedimentary rocks. Mice have very thin paws and elephants huge extremities. Land animals do not attain the size of whales and giant squid. What do those facts have in common? They are all based on the law of universal gravitation, which is intertwined with other laws, just as real, invisible, but mentally comprehensible. [+4]
Terrestrial gravitation has always existed but it needed the insight of Newton observing the fall of an apple from a branch for people to recognize its existence. And how many other powerful forces of nature that surround us and govern our fate lie outside our understanding. We live in an underdiscovered world and often move feeling our way, which sometimes leads to tragic consequences. That is why the magic eyes of science, by which I mean the insight of scientists of genius, are needed in order to understand the world around us and our place in it, and to learn to foresee even the immediate consequences of our actions.
Studies to establish the functional link of phenomena of physical geography and paleontology in material of the history of Central Asia and the archaeology of the Lower Volga, enable us to draw three conclusions. (1) The historical fate of an ethnos resulting from its economic activity is directly linked with the dynamic state of the area occupied. (2) The archaeological culture of an ethnos, which is a crystallized trace of its historical fate, reflects the paleogeographical state of the terrain in an era amenable to absolute dating. (3) The combination of historical and archaeological material makes it possible to judge the character of the areas occupied in one age or another, and consequently the character of their changes.
Precision is relative here, of course, but a tolerance of plus or minus 50 years for diffuse boundaries does not affect the conclusions and is consequently innocuous. Much more dangerous is the striving for scrupulousness in the direct sense of the word.
Scrupulus (Lat.) means a bit of grit that has got into a sandal and is irritating the sole of the foot. The ancients considered it is senseless business to study the distribution of these grits; one simply had to take off one's sandal and shake it. The word 'scrupulousness' therefore meant unnecessary concern about trifles. Now the word is used in the sense of 'superexact'.
Unfortunately the demand for 'scrupulousness' is not always innocent and harmless, in particular when natural phenomena are being correlated with historical events, because the legitimate tolerance may be as much as 50 or 60 years, and cannot be reduced since the link being sought is mediated by the economic geography of ancient epochs. The system of livelihood, cultivation, stock-breeding, or even hunting, has its own inertia. If it is undermined, say, by drought, the state founded on it is only weakened when reserves are exhausted, and the constant malnutrition (and not short-term famine) undermines the strength of the reproductive population. This process can only be discovered through a broad integration of a number of historical events, and not by a scrupulous correlating of natural and historical phenomena. In that connection one must remember the words of a famous natural scientist:
you could never learn what a mouse is like by carefully examining each of its cells separately under the electron microscope any more than you could appreciate the beauty of a cathedral through the chemical analysis or each stone that went into its construction. [+5]
Of course, when we examine one or even two facts in isolation from others, we remain trapped by old authors who were able to impose their opinion with skill and talent on the reader. But when we extract direct information from sources, and take not two facts but 2 000, we then get several causal chains that not only correlate with one another but also with the model we propose. It is not a simple functional dependence like that sought in the eighteenth century by champions of geographical determinism like Montesquieu. Here we find a systemic link, underlying the science of the relationship of mankind and nature.
The universality and specificity of the interaction I have noted makes it possible to single out study of it as an independent boundary field of science, and as a combination of history and geography, called ethnology. But here there is a new sore point. Can we find a tangible definition of ethnos?
Limits.
What do we know precisely about ethnoi? Very much and very little. We have no grounds for asserting that an ethnos occurred as a phenomenon in the Lower Paleolithic. Behind the high brow ridges, and within the huge brainbox of Neanderthal man, were lodged thoughts and feelings. But what they were we still have no right even to guess if we want to remain on a platform of scientific authenticity and reliability. We know more about the people of the Upper Paleolithic. They were splendid hunters, made spears and javelins, dressed in clothes of animal skins, and drew no worse than the Parisian Impressionists. The form of their collective life was seemingly similar to those that are known to us, but that is only a supposition on which we cannot even build a scientific hypothesis. It is not excluded that there were features in ancient times that have not come down to us.
But we can consider the peoples of the Late Neolithic and Bronze Ages (third and second millennia B.C.) similar to historical ones with a high degree of probability. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the ethnic differences then is fragmentary and scanty, so that if we rely on it we risk not distinguishing the patterns that interest us at the moment from local features and, by taking the particular for the general or -vice versa, falling into error.
So-called historical time gives us reliable material for analysis, when written sources throw light on the history of ethnoi and their interconnections. We have the right, when studying this period of time, to apply the observations obtained to earlier times and to fill the gaps in our knowledge arising in the first stage of study by extrapolation. We thus avoid the aberrations of distance, one of the most frequent mistakes of the historical critic.
It is convenient to take the beginning of the nineteenth century as the upper date because we need only completed processes in order to establish patterns. One can only speak of uncompleted processes for purposes of forecasting, but for that we have to have a formula of regularity available - the same as the one we are looking for. In addition, when we are studying twentieth-century phenomena, there is the possibility of an aberration of propinquity by which phenomena lose scale just as with the aberration of distance. I shall therefore limit myself to the 3 000 years between the twelfth century B.C. and the nineteenth century A.D., for posing the problem, or for clarity of representation, from the fall of Troy to the overthrow of Napoleon.
To begin with I shall investigate our abundant material by a synchronic method, basing myself on a comparison and collation of information about whose reliability there is no doubt. The new element that I shall decide to introduce will be the combining of facts in the aspect I propose. That is necessary because the kaleidoscope of dates in the various chronological tables does not give the reader any idea of what happened with peoples throughout their historical life. The method proposed is not as characteristic of the humanities, as it is of the natural sciences. Empirical generalization is neither a hypothesis nor a popularization, although it is built on facts already assembled and tested rather than on original material (experience, observation, and reading of primary sources). The introduction of material into the system and the construction of a conception is the middle stage of comprehension of the problem that precedes philosophical generalization. For my purposes I need precisely this middle stage.
It would seem that the more detailed and numerous the information about a subject the easier it is to form an exhaustive idea of it. But is that so in fact? Most likely not. Unnecessary and too fine information, while not altering the picture as a whole, creates what they call 'noise' or 'interference' in cybernetics and the study of systems. But for other purposes it is precisely nuances of mood that are needed. In short, in order to clarify the nature of phenomena one must take in the whole concatenation of facts relating to the problem under consideration, but not all the information available in the arsenal of science.
But what are we to take as 'relating to the problem'? The answer will obviously be different in different cases. The history of mankind and the biographies of famous people are not equal phenomena, and the pattern of development will be different in both cases, but there are as many gradations as you like between them. The point is complicated by the fact that any historical phenomenon (war, the promulgation of a law, the building of an architectural monument, the founding of a princedom or republic, and so on) has to be treated in several degrees of approximation, the comparison of which, moreover, yields contradictory results at first glance. Let me take an example from the history of Europe. After the Reformation a struggle began between the Protestant Union and the Catholic League (approximation A). Consequently all the Protestants of Western Europe should have been battling against all the Catholics. But Catholic France was a member of the Protestant Union, and Protestant Denmark stabbed Protestant Sweden in the back in 1643, i.e. political interests were put before ideological ones (approximation B). Does that mean that the first statement was not true? By no means. It was only more generalized. In addition, mercenaries fought in the armies of both sides, for the most part indifferent to religion, but avid for plunder. That means that one could characterize the Thirty Years' War in the next approximation (C) as an orgy of banditry, and that, too, would be to some extent correct. Finally, real class interests lay behind the religious slogans and the golden diadems of kings, interests it would be wrong not to take into account (approximation D). And one can add to that the separatist tendencies of the different, separate regions (approximation E) discoverable by paleoethnography, and so on.
As will be seen from this example, the system of successive approximations is a complicated business, even when we are investigating a local episode. Nevertheless we need not lose hope of success because there remains the path of scientific deduction. Just as the motion of Earth is composed of many regular motions (rotation around its axis, rotation around the sun, movement with all the planets of the solar system through the galaxy, and many others), so mankind, the anthroposphere, experiences in developing not one but several effects that are studied by separate sciences. The spontaneous movement, reflected in social development, is studied by historical materialism; human physiology is a field of biology; man's relation with the landscape - historical geography - lies in the, sphere of the geographical sciences; the study of wars, laws, and institutions is political history, and of opinion and thoughts the history of culture; the study of languages is linguistics, and of literary creation philology, and so on. Where does our problem fit in?
Let me begin with the point that an ethnos (any one), like a language, for example, is not a social phenomenon, because it can exist in several formations. The influence of spontaneous social development on the molding of an ethnos is exogenous. In order to affect the forming or the break-up of an ethnos, social development operates through history, both political and cultural. One can therefore say that the problem of ethnogenesis lies on the boundary of historical science where its social aspects pass smoothly into the natural ones.
Since all phenomena of ethnogenesis originate on the earth's surface in certain geographical conditions, the question of the role of terrain and relief inevitably arises, as a factor presenting economic opportunities for human collectives (ethnoi). [+6] But the combination of history and geography is not sufficient for my problem because it is a matter of living organisms which, as we know, are always in a state of evolution or involution, or monomorphism (stability within the species), and interact with other living organisms, forming communities, and geobiocoenoses.
I must thus put my problem at the junction of three sciences: history, geography (study of relief), and biology (ecology and genetics). But that being so, we can make a second approximation of the definition of the term 'ethnos': an ethnos is a specific form of existence of the species Homo sapiens, and ethnogenesis is a local variant of the intraspecific form-making determined by a combination of historical and choronomic (landscape) factors.
The aspect in which mankind appears as an anthropofauna may seem extravagant, but Darwin and Engels laid the foundations for such a study. Following the scientific tradition, I shall turn my attention to this aspect of human activities which has been missed by most of my predecessors.
'The historian without geography stumbles'.
Man's dependence on the world around him, or rather on his geographical environment, is never disputed, although the degree of dependence is assessed differently by different scholars. In any case, however, the economic life of the peoples who have inhabited Earth and now live in it is closely linked with the relief and climate of the territories inhabited. It is quite difficult to trace the rise and decline of the economy of ancient periods, again because of the incompleteness of the information obtained from primary sources. But there is an excellent indicator - military power. As for modern times, there are no doubts whatsoever about that, but for 2 000 years matters remained precisely the same, for nomads as well as for settled peoples. Not only were well-fed, strong, tireless people needed for a campaign, capable of drawing a bow 'to the ear' (which enabled an arrow to be shot for 700 meters while with drawing 'to the eye' the range of an arrow was 350-400 meters), and of fencing with a heavy sword or (much harder) with a curved saber. It was also necessary to have horses, roughly four or five per man, taking the wagon train or pack train into account. A stock of arrows was needed, and making them was a laborious business. Stocks of provisions were needed, for example, for nomads, a flock of sheep and consequently shepherds for it. A reserve guard was needed to protect women and children. In short, war required funds even then, and big ones at that. It could only be waged at the enemy's expense after the first, considerable victory, and in order to win it a strong rear was required, a prosperous economy, and consequently optimum natural conditions.
The significance of geographical conditions, for example, relief, for military history has long been talked about, always, one might even say. Suffice it to recall some examples from ancient history. Hannibal won the battle of Lake Trasimene by making use of several deep valleys disposed at right angles to the lake's shore and the road along which the Roman troops passed. Thanks to that he attacked the Roman army in three places at once and won the battle. At Cynoscephalae the Macedonian phalanx was scattered on broken ground, and the Romans easily broke the heavily armed enemy, who had lost formation. Examples like these have always been in historians' field of vision and gave the eighteenth-century Russian scholar Ivan Boltin grounds for a famous comment: 'The historian who is not strong in geography stumbles'. [+7] But it is pointless to dwell on such an obvious problem in the twentieth century, because history is now faced with more profound tasks than it used to be, while geography has moved away from simple description of the marvels of our planet and has acquired possibilities that were inaccessible to our ancestors.
I shall therefore put the question differently: not only how does the geographical environment affect people 6ut also how far do people themselves constitute part of the envelope of Earth that is now called the biosphere; and also to what extent, precisely, do the patterns of mankind's life influence the geographical environment and to what extent do they not. That posing of the matter calls for analysis, i.e. an artificial breaking down of the problem for convenience of investigation. It consequently has only subsidiary significance for understanding history, since the aim of our work is a synthesis. Alas, however, just as one cannot build a house without a foundation so it is impossible to generalize without preliminary differentiation. Let us limit ourselves to the minimum. When we speak of the history of mankind we usually have in mind the social form of the movement of history, i.e. mankind's progressive development, as a whole, along a spiral. This is a spontaneous movement and for that reason cannot be a function of any external causes whatsoever. Neither geographical nor biological effects can influence that aspect of history. So what do they influence? Organisms including human ones. L.S. Berg had already drawn that conclusion in 1922, legitimate for all organisms, including people.
The geographical landscape necessarily affects the organism, compelling all individuals to vary in a certain direction insofar as the organization of the species permits. The tundra, forest, steppe, desert, mountains, water medium, life on islands, etc. all put a special stamp on organisms. Those species that are incapable of adapting must migrate to another geographical terrain or perish. [+8]
But by 'terrain' is meant
a sector of the earth's surface that differs qualitatively from other sectors, framed by natural boundaries, and representing a whole, and reciprocally conditioned, natural aggregate of objects and phenomena typically expressed over a considerable area and inseparably linked in all respects with the topographical envelope. [+9]
Berg called this thesis the choronomic principle of evolution (from the Greek choros, place), so linking geography and biology. In the aspect I have adopted history is added to these two sciences, yet the principle remains unshakeable. Furthermore it has received unexpected confirmation, and that obliges me to continue the examination of an ethnos's patterns of development, but now with allowance for the dynamic moment, the development of new ethnoi, i.e. of ethnogenesis, on the basis of a description of the phases of ethnogenesis. But that is the theme of another chapter.
Nature and History
The combination of nature study and history.
In antiquity, when the world seemed a whole to man, in spite of its obvious diversity, and interconnected, in spite of the seeming isolation, the problem of coupling natural science and history could not even arise. All events considered worthy of perpetuation were entered in the annals. Wars and floods, revolutions and epidemics, the birth of a genius and the flight of a comet were all considered phenomena of equal significance and interest for posterity. The principle of the magi then prevailed in scientific thought, viz., 'like breeds like', which made it possible, through broad associations, to catch the connections between phenomena of nature and the fates of people or of 'individual persons. That principle was developed into astrology and mantiké (the lore of divination), but with the development of the separate sciences, as knowledge accumulated, it was discarded as unsound, and not substantiated in practical application.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thanks to the differentiation of the sciences, a huge amount of information was accumulated, which had become vast by the beginning of the twentieth century. Figuratively speaking the mighty river of Science had been diverted into irrigation ditches. Life-giving moisture watered a broad area, but the lake previously fed by it (i.e. integral world-contemplation) dried up. And now the autumn wind drifts the bottom sediments and blows salty dust onto the friable land of fields. Soon, in the place of steppe which, even though dry, fed herds, salt marshes arise, and the biosphere gives way to inert matter, not forever, of course, but for a long time. For when people quit a doomed land, the ditches begin to silt up, and the river again cuts a channel, and fills a natural depression. The wind blows a fine layer of fresh dust over the salt marshes, grasses sprout and die, uneaten by ungulates. In a few centuries a humus layer is formed on the plain, and plankton in the lake; then herbivores arrive, and waterfowl carry fish spawn to the lake on their feet. Life again triumphs in its diversity.
So it is in science. Narrow specialization is only useful as a means of accumulating knowledge. The differentiation of disciplines was a stage, necessary and inevitable, that inevitably becomes disastrous when dragged out for a long time. Accumulation of information without its systematization into an object of broad generalization is a quite senseless task. Were the principles of ancient science indeed false? Perhaps its unsoundness was not rooted in its postulates, but rather in lack of skill in applying them. For there is an interaction 'of the history of nature and the history of men' that can be caught by employing the total of accumulated knowledge and a method of research that is developing under our eyes. So I shall endeavor to follow this path and to formulate the problem as follows: can the study of history be of benefit for interpreting phenomena of nature?
Social and natural phenomena are obviously not identical, but they do have a point of contact somewhere. And it is necessary to find it, because it cannot be the anthroposphere as a whole. Even if we understand the anthroposphere as the biomass, we must note two aspects of the phenomenon: (a) its mosaic structure, because various collectives of people interact differently with the environment; if we take into account the well-known history of the past 5 000 years, this diversity and elucidation of its causes will prove the key to the problem posed; (b) the many-sided character of the object being studied, i.e. mankind. This has to be understood in the sense that every person (or mankind as a whole) is a physical body, and an organism, and the upper fink of any biocoenosis, and a member of a society, and a member of a people or ethnic national grouping, and so on. In each of these the object (in this case man) is studied by a corresponding scientific discipline, which does not deny other aspects of research. It is the ethnic aspect of mankind as a whole that is important for my problem.
Let me make a slight excursus into epistemology. Ask yourself what is accessible to direct observation. It is not the object itself, but the limits of object. Thus we know that time, as a category, exists, but unless we see its limits we have no chance of giving a generally accepted definition of time. And the greater the contrast, the clearer objects a-re for us that we do not see but dream up, i.e. imagine.
We constantly observe history as a chain of events; consequently history is a boundary. Happily we know of what - the social and the four natural forms of the motion of matter. That being so there is, together with the sociosphere and the technosphere generated by it, a living essence that not only surrounds people but is also within them. And these elements are so contrast that they are caught by human consciousness without the least effort. Humanitarian conceptions have proved unnecessary, or rather inadequate, precisely because they pose the question of the influence on the historical process, or processes, of geographical, biological, social, or ('in idealist systems) spiritual factors, and not of the connection of the one and the other, thanks to which both the process itself and its components become accessible to empirical generalization. The approach suggested here is nothing other than the analysis, i.e. 'breaking down', needed to untangle the unclear places in history and then pass on to a synthesis in which the results of the various methods of research are taken into account.
In the historiography of the nineteenth century the interaction of the social and natural was not always allowed for. [+10] But now the dynamics of natural processes has been sufficiently studied for their comparability with social events to be obvious. Biocoenology has shown that man enters the biocoenosis of the terrain as an upper final link, because he is a major predator and, as such, is dependent on the evolution of nature, which by no means rules out the existence of an additional element, i.e. the development of the productive forces, which produce the technosphere, lacking self-development and capable only of disrupting.
Formations and ethnoi.
If, however, we look at all world history, we will note that coincidences of changes of formation and the appearance of new peoples are only rare exceptions, while ethnoi very dissimilar to one another constantly arise and develop within a formation.
Take the example of the thirteenth century when feudalism nourished from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The French barons were hardly like the free peasants of Scandinavia, the slave-warrior Mamelukes of Egypt, the unruly population of the Russian veche towns, the indigent conquerors of half the world, the Mongol nomads, or the Chinese landowners of the Sung Empire. Common to them all was the feudal mode of production, but little else. Agriculturists' and nomads' attitudes to nature did not coincide; receptivity of things foreign, or capacity for cultural borrowings, was higher in Europe than in China, no less than the striving for territorial conquests that stimulated the Crusades; Russian slash-and-burn agriculture was simpler and more primitive than the viticulture of Syria and the Peloponnese, but yielded a fabulous harvest with less expenditure of labour; languages, religion, art, education were all unlike each other, but there was no confusion in this diversity because each fife style was the property of a definite people.
It should not be thought, however, that the degree of ethnic individuality is determined only by nature. Centuries passed and the relations of ethnoi changed, some disappearing, others appearing; it is accepted in Soviet ethnography to call that process ethnogenesis. The rhythms of ethnogenesis are coupled in world history with a pulse of social development, but the coupling does not mean coincidence, let alone unity. History is a single process, but its factors are different, and my task, i.e. analysis, is to single out the phenomena directly inherent in ethnogenesis, and so to clarify what an ethnos is and what its role in the fife of mankind.
It is necessary, to start with, to agree on the meaning of the terms and the limits of the investigation. The Greek word ethnos has many meanings in the dictionary, of which I have chosen one, viz., 'species, breed', implying by that people. There is no point, for my posing of the theme, in singling out such concepts as tribe or nation, because I am interested in the common denominator; in other words the general that exists among Englishmen and among Masai, among ancient Greeks and modern Gypsies. This is the property of the species Homo sapiens to group together so as to counterpose themselves and 'theirs' (sometimes close, but often quite remote) to all the rest of the world. This singling out is characteristic of all epochs and countries: Hellenes and barbarians, Jews and the uncircumcised, Chinese (people of the Middle Kingdom) and Hu (the barbarian periphery, Russians included), Muslim Arabs in the time of the first Caliphs and 'infidels'; Catholic Europeans in the Middle Ages (the unity called the 'Christian world') and 'godless', including Greeks and Russians; 'Orthodox' (in the same period) and unbaptized, including Catholics; Tuaregs and non-Tuaregs, Gypsies and all other people, etc. This opposition is a universal phenomenon, which indicates its deep foundation, but in itself it is only the foam on a deep river, and I have still to bring out its essence. But the observation already made is enough to attest the complexity of the effect which can be called ethnic (in the sense 'stock' or 'breed') and which can be taken as an aspect for constructing an ethnic history of mankind. My task is therefore first of all to find the cause of the process.
There is an undoubted link between ethnic history and geography, but it cannot exhaust the whole complexity of the relationship of the diverse phenomena of nature and the zigzags of the history of ethnoi. Furthermore, the thesis: 'Any attribute by which ethnoi can be classified is adaptive to a concrete environment' reflects only one aspect of the process of ethnogenesis. As Hegel wrote: '...the mild Ionic sky certainly contributed much to the charm of the Homeric poems, yet this alone can produce no Homers'. [+11]
However, when an ethnos that has taken shape in a definite region where adaptation to the terrain has been maximum migrates, it retains many of the original features that distinguished it from the aboriginal ethnoi. The Spaniards who settled in Mexico, for example, did not become Indians - Aztecs or Mayas. They created an artificial microlandscape for themselves - towns and fortified haciendas - and preserved their culture, both material and spiritual, in spite of the fact that the moist tropics of Yucatan and the semideserts of Anlhuac were very different from Andalusia and Castile. But the separation of Mexico from Spain in the nineteenth century was largely the work of the descendants of Indian tribes that had adopted the Spanish language and Catholicism, but that were supported by the free tribes of the Comanche who had migrated north of the Rio Grande.
Let me now draw a first conclusion, which will be the starting point for the further exposition. The mosaic anthroposphere, which has been constantly changing in historical time and interacting with the topography of planet Earth, is nothing else than an ethnosphere. Since mankind has spread everywhere, though unevenly, over the land surface, and always interacts with Earth's natural environment, but differently, it is sensible to treat it as one of Earth's envelopes, but with an obligatory correction for ethnic differences. So I am introducing the term 'ethnosphere' which, like other geographical phenomena, must have its own patterns of development, different from the biological and the social. Ethnic patterns are observable in space (ethnography) and in time (ethnogenesis and the palaeogeography of the anthropogenic landscape).
Can one trust the historical sources?
Yatsunsky, the author of fine surveys of the geographical thought of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, justly remarked: 'Historical geography does not study the historical ideas of people of the past but the concrete geography of past centuries'. [+12] The initial data for this quest obviously have to be sought in the historical works of past ages, but how? Unfortunately, there are no pointers to a possible method of research. And here is why.
Historical materials, as sources for the reconstruction of ancient climatic conditions, have been and are employed very widely. A famous polemic developed on this plane between Berg [+13] and Grumm-Grzhimailo [+14] on the desiccation of Central Asia in the historical period. They tried to solve the problem of the fluctuations of the level of the Caspian Sea in the first millennium A.D. associated with this question by selecting citations from the works of ancient authors. Special digests of information from Russian chronicles were made so as to draw conclusions about the change in Eastern Europe's climate. But the results of the numerous, laborious studies did not come up to expectations. The information of the sources was sometimes confirmed, but tests by other ways sometimes refuted them. Hence it follows that the coincidence of the data obtained with the truth was a matter of chance, which suggested that the method was defective. In fact the method of simple references to the evidence of an ancient or mediaeval author leads to a false conclusion, or at best to an inexact one. And so it should. The chroniclers either mentioned phenomena of nature among others or, starting from the ideas of the science of their time, treated storms, floods, and droughts as omens or punishment for sins. In both cases the phenomena were described selectively, when they came into an author's field of view, and we cannot even guess how many got left out. One author would draw attention to nature, but another, in the next century, did not; and it could turn out that rains were mentioned more often in a dry time than in a wet one. The historical criticism is unable to help here because it is power. less as regards omissions of events not linked by a causal dependence.
Ancient authors always wrote their works with a definite purpose and, as a rule, attached exaggerated importance to events that interested them. The degree of exaggeration or belittling is very difficult to determine, and is not always possible. So Berg concluded, from historical works, that the conversion of cultivated land into desert was a consequence of wars. That idea is now taken without criticism; P.K. Kozlov's find, the dead Tangut city of Yijing-ai known as Hara-Hoto [+15], is often cited as an example. This is so significant a point that I shall concentrate attention on one problem the geographical location of this city and the conditions of its death.
The Tangut kingdom was located in the Ordos and the AlaShan, in places where there are now sandy deserts. This state, it would seem, was poor and thinly populated, but in fact it maintained an army of 150 000 horsemen, had a university, an academy, schools, a legal procedure, and even a trade deficit, because it imported more than it exported. The deficit was covered in part by gold dust from its Tibetan possessions; the main export was live cattle, which constituted its wealth.
The city discovered by Kozlov lay in the lower reaches of the Edzin-Gol, in a locality now uninhabited. The two ox-bow lakes that surround it on the east and west indicate that there used to be water, but the river changed course to the west and now falls by two arms into lakes (a salt one - Gashun Nor, and a fresh one - Sogo Nor). Kozlov described the valley of the Sogo Nor as a freshwater oasis in the desert surrounding it, but noted at the same time that it could not feed a large population. But the citadel of Hara-Hoto alone is a square with sides of 400 metres. Around it there are traces of lesser structures and fragments of ceramics that indicate the existence of handicraft suburbs. The destruction of the city is often ascribed to the Mongols. In fact Genghis-khan took the Tangut capital in 1227 and the Mongols brutally made short work of its population. But the city discovered by Koziov continued to exist still in the fourteenth century, as is attested by the dates of the many documents found by members of the expedition. Then the end of the city was linked with the change in the river's course, which was diverted by the besiegers, according to Torgod folk tradition by means of a dam made of sandbags. The dam has survived to the present in the form of a wall. So, it seemingly existed, but the Mongols had nothing to do with it. In the descriptions of the capture of the city of Urahai (Mongolian) or Heshuicheng (Chinese) there is no such information. And it would simply have been impossible since the Mongol horsemen were not equipped with the necessary trenching tool. The death of the city was ascribed to the Mongols by an evil tradition that began back in the Middle Ages of ascribing everything bad to them. In fact the Tangut city perished in 1372 and was captured by Chinese troops of the Ming Dynasty, who were then waging war against the last of the Genghisites, and was laid waste as a base of Mongols who were threatening China from the west.
But why didn't it revive? The change in the river's course was not the reason, since the city could have migrated to another tributary of the Edzin-Gol. An answer to that can be found in Kozlov's book. With the powers of observation characteristic of him, he noted that the amount of water in the Edzin-Gol had got less, and the lake Sogo Nor had grown shallower, and overgrown with reeds. The shifting of the river bed to the west had played a certain role in that, but it alone could not explain why the country had fed a huge population in the thirteenth century, but had been converted into a sandy desert at the beginning of the twentieth.
So the blame for the desolation of the cultivated land of Asia does not fall on the Mongols but on changes of climate which I have described in special works. [+16]
Can we believe the memorials?
But why were Genghis-khan and his sons blamed for the devastation of Asia, while other events of a much greater scale (for example, the defeat of the Uighurs by the Kyrgyz in A.D. 841-846, or the general extermination of the Kalmycks by the Manchurian emperor Ch'ien Lung in 1756-1758) [+17] have remained outside historians' field of view?
The answer has to be sought in historiography rather than in the history of peoples. Talented books on history are not often written, in any case, and besides do not all come down to us. In the Near East the age of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a period of the flowering of literature, but the struggle against the Mongol yoke both in Persia and in Russia then was the most pressing problem, and a host of works was devoted to it there that have survived to our day. Among them were both talented and brilliant works, judging by those that have come down to us. They evoked imitations and repetitions, which increased the total number of works on this question. The extermination of the Oirats did not find its historian, or he perished in the massacre. Thus, it turned out, events were not illuminated uniformly and their significance was distorted, since they were presented, as it were, on different scales. Hence, too, a hypothesis arose that ascribed the almost total annihilation of the population of the lands conquered by Genghis-khan, and the complete alteration of the landscape, to his hordes, which by no means corresponds to the truth. It should be noted that the maximum desiccation did not occur in countries ravaged by the hordes, but in Uighuria, where they were not at all, and Jungaria, where no one decided to destroy the grassy steppeland. The historical and geographical information of the sources is consequently unreliable.
And, finally, it is tempting to consider tremendous historical events, like the Mongols' campaigns of the thirteenth century, as migrations. The eminent British scholars Ellsworth Huntington and C.E.P. Brooks, for example, yielded to this temptation. But the Mongol campaigns were not associated with migrations. The victories were not won by crowds of nomads but by smallish, beautifully organized mobile detachments that returned to their native steppes after the campaigns. The numbers on the move were insignificant even for the thirteenth century. The khans of the Juchid branch, for instance, Batu, Orda, and Shayban, received by Genghis-khan's will only 4 000 horsemen, i.e. around 20 000 persons, who were settled over a territory from the Carpathians to the Altai. The real migration of the Kalmycks in the seventeenth century, on the contrary, remained unnoted by most historians because it did not have great resonance in works of world history. Consequently, a more solid knowledge of history is required, in order to tackle the problem posed, than what is readily derived from summary works, and a more detailed knowledge of geography than that to which historians or agricultural economists usually limit themselves. The main point is that it is necessary to extract reliable information from the subjective perceptions characteristic of many authors of written sources from Herodotus to our day.
We are well acquainted with the dates and details of battles, peace treaties, palace revolutions, and great discoveries, but we do not always know how to link these data up with definite phenomena of nature. The method of comparing the facts of history and changes of nature only began to be developed in the twentieth century.
Le Roy Ladurie, the historian of climate, has noted that the tendency to reduce booms and slumps of the economy in the various countries of Europe to periods of increased or lowered precipitation, cooling or warming, was based on an ignoring of economic and social crises, whose role was not doubted. He thus considered that the increase in imports of Baltic (i.e. Russian.-L.G.) grain into the Mediterranean, and reduction of the number of sheep in Spain in the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth centuries, are more easily correlated with the destruction inflicted on European countries by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation than with insignificant changes in annual temperatures. [+18] He is right! Suffice it to note that there was a fall in population in that century not only in Germany, on whose territory the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) was fought, but also in Spain, a country that did not suffer ravages (in 1600, 8 000 000, and in 1700, 7 300 000). But that was due to a large part of the young men having been mobilized in America or the Netherlands, as a consequence of which there were not enough working hands in the country to maintain the economy and families.
What would we think of a historian who undertook to explain all the economic progress of Europe since 1850 by the retreat of glaciers established beyond doubt in the Alps,
Ladurie wrote; [+19] it is impossible not to agree with him. It is consequently necessary, in his opinion, simply to amass facts dated as accurately and unambiguously as possible, so as not to encourage contradictory interpretations.
There is no exact method of determining absolute dating in geography. A mistake of a thousand years is considered quite acceptable in it. It is easy to establish, for example, that deposits of silt have covered strata of loams, and consequently to note the existence of flooding, but it is impossible to say when it happened 500 or 5 000 years ago. Pollen analysis indicates the existence, for example, of xerophilous (drought-tolerant) plants in a place where moisture-loving ones now grow, but there is no guarantee that the swamping of a valley occurred because of a shifting of the channel of a near-by river, and not through a change of climate. Remains of groves have been discovered in the steppes of Mongolia and Kazakhstan but it is impossible to say from them whether they died out from desiccation or from being chopped down by people; and even if the latter were demonstrated, the time of savage treatment of the landscape would still remain unknown.
Perhaps archaeology can help? Memorials of material culture distinctly mark periods of the flourishing and decline of peoples, and are amenable to quite accurate dating. The things found in the ground, or old burials, do not tend to mislead researchers or inspire them to distort the facts. But things are mute, which gives the archaeologists plenty of scope for imagination. And our contemporaries are also prone to romance and let their imagination run away with them; and although their way of thinking is very different from the mediaeval one, there is no certainty that they are any closer to reality. In the twentieth century we sometimes meet blind faith in the power of archaeological excavations, based on the truly successful finds in Egypt, Babylonia, India, and even in the Altai Mts., thanks to which we have been able to discover and investigate forgotten countries of ancient history. But that is the exception; for the most part the archaeologist has to be satisfied with shards got from the dust of scorching steppes, fragments of bones in rifled graves, and remains of walls, the height in one imprint of a brick. And one must remember, moreover, that the find is an insignificant part of the lost. It is never known what precisely is lost, but it is a mistake to consider the lost to be non-existent, and not to make allowances for it, a mistake that leads to obviously incorrect conclusions. In short, archaeology without history can lead the researcher into error. Let us try otherwise.
Are There Ethnoi?
There are no signs for defining an ethnos.
According to my suggested definition, the form of existence of the species Homo sapiens is a collective of individuals opposing themselves to all other collectives. It is more or less stable, although it arises and disappears in historical time, which constitutes the problem of ethnogenesis. All these collectives differ more or less from one another, sometimes in language, sometimes in customs, sometimes in system of ideology, sometimes in origin, but always in historical fate or destiny. An ethnos is consequently, on the one hand, a product of history, and on the other is linked, through productive activity or the economy, with the biocoenosis of the landscape and country in which it was formed. Consequently an ethnic national group can change this relation, but with that it is altered beyond recognition, and continuity is only traceable by the scientific method, with the strictest criticism of sources, because words are deceptive.
Before I go any further, we must agree on the concept 'ethnos', which I have not yet defined. We do not have a single real attribute for defining an ethnos as such, although there has never been, and is not, a human being who is unethnic. All the attributes listed define an ethnos 'sometimes', but their aggregate defines nothing at an. Let us check this thesis by the negative method.
In the theory of historical materialism the basis of society is recognized as the mode of production, which develops through socioeconomic formations. That is why self-development plays the decisive role in it; the influence of erogenous factors, including natural ones, cannot be basic in the genesis of social progress. The concept 'society' signifies an aggregate of people united by the concrete historical conditions of material life common to them. The main force in this system of conditions is the mode of production of material goods. People are united in the course of production, and the result of this uniting Is social relations, which are formed in one of the five known formations (primitive communal, slaveowning, feudal, capitalist, and communist).
It is impossible 'to be united in an ethnos', since membership of one ethnos or another is directly perceived by the subject himself, and the surrounding ones take it as a fact not subject to doubt. Feeling or sensation consequently underlies the ethnic diagnostic. A person belongs to his ethnos from infancy. It is sometimes possible to incorporate strangers, but if that happens on a broad scale it disintegrates the ethnos. An ethnos can be broken up, but it is preserved in a diasporic state, forming numerous relict forms. The historical conditions are altered more than once during the fife of an ethnos; conversely, divergence of ethnoi is often observed during the predominance of one mode of production. Starting from Marx's idea of the historical process as an interaction of the history of nature and the history of men, [+20] we can propose a first, most general division into social stimuli arising in the technosphere, and natural stimuli constantly operating from the geographical environment. Everyone is not only a member of some society or other that is at a certain level of development, but is also a physical body subject to gravitation, and the final link in some biocoenosis, an organism capable of adaptation and existing at an age determined by the effect of hormones. The same can be said about the long-living collectives that socially form class states or tribal unions of various character (social organisms), and in nature form ethnoi (tribes, nationalities, nations). Their non-coincidence is obvious.
An ethnos is not a society.
But there is another point of view, in accordance with which
an ethnos ... is a socio-historical category, whose genesis and development are determined, moreover, not by the biological laws of nature but by the specific laws of the development of society. [+21]
How is that to be understood? According to the theory of historical materialism, the spontaneous development of the productive forces causes changes in the relations of production which generates a dialectical process of class formation that are transformed by processes of class abolition. This is a global phenomenon, a peculiar social form of the development of matter. But what does that have to do with ethnogenesis? Surely the appearance of such well-known ethnoi as the French or English did not coincide chronologically or territorially with the moulding of the feudal formation. Or did these ethnoi disappear with its collapse and the transition to capitalism? But in that same France the 'socio-historical category', the Kingdom of France, already embraced, in the fourteenth century, Celtic Bretons, Basques, Provencals, and Burgundians in addition to the French; so surely they were ethnoi? Doesn't this fact, one of very many, indicate that the pedigree definition is one-sided? And so that is grounds for scientific dispute.
Dialectical materialism distinguishes various forms of the motion of matter. The mechanical, physical, chemical, and biological are natural forms, while the social stands alone; by virtue of its specific nature it is characteristic only of mankind in all its manifestations. Every person and collective of people with technique and domesticated things (tame animals and cultivated plants) is subject to the effect of both social and natural forms of the motion of matter, which are ceaselessly correlated in time (history) and space (geography). When we generalize the material in a single complex (historical geography), amenable to observation and study, we have to examine it in two aspects - the social and the natural. In the first we see social organizations (tribal unions, states, theocracies, political parties, philosophical schools, etc.), in the second, ethnoi, i.e. collectives of people that arise and break up in a relatively short time but in each case have an original structure, a unique stereotype of behaviour, and its own rhythm of development, existing within the limit of homeostasis.
It is accepted, of course, to call classes, for example, sometimes juridically registered in estates or castes, socio-historical categories. In pre-class society tribal or gentile unions, for example the Celts' clans, were their analogue. In its broad sense 'social category' can be extended to stable institutions, the state, for example, or church organization, the polis (in Hellas), or the fief. But everyone who knows history is aware that such categories only coincide with the boundaries of ethnoi in very rare cases, i.e. there is no direct link here. And, what is more, the economy, which belongs completely to the social form of the motion of matter, demolishes national boundaries. With the existence of a common European market, similar technique, similarity of education in the various countries, and widespread study of related languages, it might seen, that ethnic differences would be wiped out in twentieth-century Europe. But are they in fact? The Irish broke away from Great Britain and spared no efforts to study their ancient, almost forgotten language. Scotland and Catalonia lay claims to autonomy although they had hardly considered themselves oppressed for the past 300 years. In Belgium Flemings and Walloons, who lived in harmony until recently, have suddenly begun a violent struggle that has come to street fights between students of the two ethnoi. And since only chance coincidence of social and ethnic peaks and slumps were also observed in antiquity, it is obvious that we are observing an interference of two lines of development or, in the language of mathematics, of two independent variables. This can only be ignored with a very strong desire to do so.
Let us try to discover the nature of the perceptible manifestation of the existence of ethnoi, the phenomenon of the counterposing of itself to all others, i.e. the 'we' and the 'not us'. What gives rise to this opposition and feeds it? Not unity of language, because there are many bilingual and trilingual ethnoi and on the contrary different ethnoi that speak one language. The French, for instance, speak four languages - French , Celtic, Basque, and Provencal, which does not prevent their present ethnic unity in spite of the history of the unification, or rather the Parisian kings' conquest of France from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, having been quite bloody. On the other hand, the Mexicans, Peruvians, and Argentines speak Spanish, but are not Spaniards. For some reason torrents of blood were spilled at the beginning of the nineteenth century only in order for war-torn Latin America to fall into the hands of trading companies of Great Britain and the USA. The Englishmen of Northumberland speak a language close to Norwegian because they are the descendants of Vikings who settled in England; and until recently the Irish knew only English but did not become English. Several different peoples speak Arabic; for many Uzbeks their mother tongue is Tajik, and so on. In addition there are group languages, like French in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Greek in Parthia in the second and first centuries B.C., Arabic in Persia from the seventh to eleventh centuries A.D., and so on. Since the integrity of the ethnic national group was not disrupted, one must conclude that it is not a matter of language.
Furthermore, linguistic diversity often finds practical application, the practice bringing people speaking different languages closer together. During the U.S.- Japanese war in the Pacific, for example, the Japanese succeeded so well in decoding American radio transmissions that the Americans lost the possibility of transmitting secret information by radio. But they found a clever, unexpected way out, by teaching the Morse code to called-up Indians. An Apache transmitted to a Navajo in Athabaskan, an Assiniboin to a Sioux in Dakota, and the receiver translated the text into English. The Japanese broke the code but were helpless in face of the texts. Military service often brings people together; the Indians who returned home remained friends with their paleface war comrades. It did not, however, assimilate the Indians; the command, moreover, valued precisely their ethnic features, including bilingualism. So, although language may serve as an indicator of ethnic community in separate cases, it is not the cause of it.
The Weps, Udmurts, Karelians, and Chuvash, let us note, still speak their our languages at home, but study Russian in school, and on quitting their villages are practically indistinguishable from Russians. Their knowledge of their native language does not in the least prevent them from working on a common footing.
Finally, the Ottoman Turks! In the thirteenth century the Turkmenian chieftain Orthogrul, escaping from the Mongols, led around 500 horsemen and their families into Asia Minor. The sultan of Iconium settled the arrivals in Brussa, on the border with Nicaea, to wage a border war with the 'infidel' Greeks. Under the first sultans volunteer ghazi gathered in Brussa from all over the Near East, attracted by the allure of booty and land for settlement; they constituted cavalry, spahis. The conquest of Bulgaria and Macedonia in the fourteenth century enabled the Turkish sultans to organize infantry from Christian boys, who were torn from their families, converted to Islam, trained for warfare, and given the status of guards - the 'new troops' (janissaries). In the fifteenth century a navy was created, manned by all the adventurists of the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the sixteenth century light cavalry (akinji) were added, formed from emigrants from conquered Diarbekr, Iraq, and Kurdistan. French renegades became diplomats, and Greeks, Armenians, and Jews financiers and economists. These people bought wives in the slave markets (Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Italians, Georgians, Greeks, Berbers, Negroes, etc.). These women were the mothers and grandmothers of the Turkish troops. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Turks were an ethnos, but the young soldier received orders in Turkish, talked with his mother in Polish, and his grandmother in Italian, traded in the bazaar in Greek, read verses in Persian, and prayed in Arabic. But he was an 'Ottoman' because he behaved as an Ottoman did, a brave, pious warrior of Islam.
The numerous European renegades broke down this unity in the nineteenth century, and formed the Young Turks in Paris. In the twentieth century the Ottoman Empire fell, and the ethnos broke up - people passed into other ethnoi. The descendants of the Seljuks raised a new Turkey from the depths of Asia Minor, and the remnants of the Ottomans lived out their remaining days in the alleys of Istanbul. So, a religious community, not a linguistic one, united the Ottoman ethnos for 600 years.
Ideology and culture are sometimes also attributes, but not necessary ones. Only an Orthodox Christian could be a Byzantine, for example, and all Orthodox were considered subjects of the Constantinople emperor, and perceived as 'ours'. But that was disrupted as soon as the baptized Bulgars started war with the Greeks, while Rus, having adopted Orthodoxy, did not dream of submitting to Czargrad. The principle of like-mindedness was also proclaimed by the Caliphs, the successors of Muhammed, but it did not withstand the rivalry of living reality - ethnoi again arose within the unity of Islam. On the other hand, preaching sometimes unites a group of people, which becomes an ethnos-the Sikhs in northwest India, for example, and the Ottoman Turks (see above). But in the Ottoman Empire there were Sunni Muslims, subjects of the Sultan, Arabs, and Crimean Tatars, who did not, however, consider themselves Turks. Even linguistic closeness to the Ottomans played no role for the Tatars. So faith, too, is not a common attribute of ethnicity.
A clear example of the confessional self-awareness of an ethnos is the Sikhs, a sect of Indian origin. The caste system established in India was considered obligatory for all Hindus. It was a special structure of the ethnos. Being a Hindu meant being a member of a definite caste. It was not a political unity, but the stereotype of behaviour was firmly maintained, even quite brutally. Each caste had the right to a certain type of occupation, and those on whom military service was settled were few. That made it possible for Afghan Muslims to master India and jeer at the defenseless population, the inhabitants of Punjab suffering most. In the sixteenth century a teaching appeared there that at first proclaimed non-resistance to evil, but later set an aim of war against Muslims. The caste system was abolished, which distinguished the Sikhs (the name of devotees of the new faith) from Hindus. They isolated themselves from the Indian community by endogamy, developed their own stereotype of behaviour, and established a structure of their own community. According to the principle I have adopted, the Sikhs should be regarded as a rising ethnos counterposed to Hindus. And so they perceive themselves. The religious conception has become a symbol for them, and for us an indicator of ethnic divergence.
The teaching of the Sikhs cannot be considered just a doctrine, because if anyone in Moscow were to embrace this religion fully he would not become a Sikh, and they would not consider him one of them. The Sikhs became an ethnos on the basis of religion, the Mongols on the basis of kinship, the Swiss through a successful war against Austrian feudalists, who welded together a country where four languages were spoken. Ethnoi are formed by various means, and our task is to find the common pattern in that.
Most major peoples have several ethnographic types that constitute a harmonious system but that differ very much from one another both in time and in social structure. Compare seventeenth century Moscow with its boyar hats and beards, when women spun behind mica windows, or eighteenth-century Moscow when magnates in wigs and camisoles took their wives to balls, and nineteenth-century Moscow when bearded nihilist students educated young ladies from all estates; and add the decedents of the early twentieth century. Comparing them all with our age, knowing that they are one and the same ethnos, we see that ethnography could lead the investigator without a knowledge of history into error. No less indicative is a spatial cross-section for one year, say 1869. White Sea Russians, Petersburg workers, Transvolga Old Believers, Siberian gold prospectors, peasants of the forest provinces and peasants of the steppes, the Don and Ural Cossacks were outwardly quite unlike one another, but that did not disrupt the folk unity, while the closeness of the everyday life of the Greben Cossacks and the Chechens did not unite them.
Strange as it may be, the point of view put forward here has met active resistance precisely where it should attract attention. Kozlov and Pokshishevsky, whose paper I cited above, have opposed their view to mine both on the relationship of ethnography and geography and on the history of the question, i.e. on historiography. While not desiring to polemize, I nevertheless cannot ignore another conception that lays claims (without grounds) to canonicity. That would be academically incorrect.
These scholars represent the formation of ethnography as a science as follows. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century geography and ethnography developed together, but ethnography later split into socio-historical and geographical trends. Lewis Morgan, J.J. Bachofen, E.B. Tylor, Sir James Frazer, and L.Ya. Sternberg belonged to the first trend, and Friedrich Ratzel, L.D. Sinitsky, and A.A. Coubert and the French school of 'human geography' to the second. There is a substantial defect in the classification proposed, which reduces it essentially to nought. The members of the 'trends' were interested in different subjects and devoted their attention to different themes. And that being the case, it is unjustified to counterpose them. For when Ratzel tried to substantiate the geographical character of ethnographic division into districts he by no means disputed the conception of animism, sympathetic magic, or ritual murder of a priest, i.e. the subjects to which Frazer devoted his Golden Bough. But it was to the existence of versatile scholars' diverse interests that authors ascribed the separation of ethnography from geography, and its rebirth as a social science. There was a certain confusion in that fraught with sorry consequences. Any science develops by broadening its range of investigation, and not by a simple change of thematic. Consequently, when historical aspects were added to the achievements of geographical ethnography, that was progress of the science, but when some subjects were replaced by others that was marking time, which is always extremely damaging.
Equally, one must not replace ethnography by a theory about 'economic-cultural types' characteristic of peoples that are approximately at an identical level of socioeconomic development and living in similar natural geographical conditions (for example, the type of 'Arctic marine-mammal hunters', 'herdsmen of the and steppes', and so on). [+22] This trend is fruitful for paleo-economic geography, but does not and cannot have any relation to ethnography - there are, for example, reindeer Chukchi i.e. pastoralists, and Chukchi hunters of marine mammals. According to the classification proposed they should be put into different groups, although they are one ethnos. And surely the Russian peasants of Moscovy, the White Sea Russians (Pomors), and Siberian sable hunters are one ethnos. And there is indeed no end of examples.
It, is also incorrect to equate ethnos with biological taxonomic units, i.e. races or populations. Races differ from one another in physical attributes that have no essential significance for man's life activity. [+23] A population is an aggregate of individuals peopling a definite territory, in which they freely cross-breed, and are separated from neighboring populations by isolation of some sort. An ethnos, in my understanding, is a collective of individuals that has a unique inner structure and an original stereotype of behaviour, both components being dynamic. Consequently an ethnos is an elementary phenomenon that is not reducible to either sociological biological, or geographical phenomena.
Reduction of ethnogenesis to 'linguistic-cultural processes' distorts reality, removing the complexity of ethnic history, which Bromley pointed out when he proposed introducing the supplementary terms 'ethnikos' and 'eso' (ethno-social organization) in order to clarify the problem. [+24] I believe one can be not satisfied with his solution, but it is incorrect to ignore it altogether.
Descent from a single ancestor.
In ancient times such descent was considered obligatory for an ethnos. Often an animal, which was not always a totem, figured as the ancestor. For the Turks and the Romans it was a she-wolf wet-nurse; for the Uighurs a wolf that fertilized a queen; for the Tibetans an ape and a female rakshas (forest demon). But usually it was a man whose image was distorted beyond recognition by legend: Abraham, the ancestor of the Jews, his son Ismail, the ancestor of the Arabs, Cadmus, the founder of Thebes and initiator of the Beotians, and so on.
Strange as it may seem, these archaic views have not died out; only in our time we try to put some ancient tribe in the place of a person, as the ancestors of an existing ethnos. But that, too, is incorrect. As there is no person who has only a father or a mother, so there is no ethnos that had not been produced by various ancestors, And one should not confuse ethnoi with races, as is often done, but without justification. The grounds for temptation is the preconceived idea that 'the processes of racial origin (like the processes of ethnogenesis.- L. G.) probably developed in certain areas of the world and were governed by the specific nature of the natural environment,' [+25] i.e. by the climate, flora, and fauna of geographical zones.
There is an impermissible substitution of an object here, i.e. the initial race is arbitrarily equated with ethnos. Let us examine this.
During the Upper Paleolithic, when sub-arctic conditions prevailed in Europe, with a very arid climate, the valley of the Rhone was settled by the Grimaldi Negroid race, while the tropical forests of Africa were inhabited by the Khoisan race, which combined Mongoloid and Negroid features. This race was ancient; its origin is unclear, but there are no grounds for considering it a hybrid. The Negroid Bantu pushed the Khoisan to the extreme south of Africa in a quite historical period, beginning in the first century A.D. up to the nineteenth century, when the Bechauna drove the Bushmen into the Kalahari Desert. Negroid features did not arise at all in equatorial America, although the natural conditions were similar to the African.
The arid zone of Eurasia was peopled by Europeoids of the Cromagnon type and by Mongoloids, but that did not lead to a wiping out of racial features. In Tibet the Mongoloid Bod (Bodyul) were neighbors of the Europeoid Dardi and Pamirtsy, and in the Himalayas the Gurkhas of the Patani. But the similarity of natural environment did not influence the racial character. In short, one must recognize that the functional connection of anthropological differences among various populations and the geographical conditions of the areas peopled by them is not clear. Furthermore, there is no certainty that there is one in general in nature, the more so that the idea runs counter to the achievements of modern paleoanthropology, which bases racial classification not on zones of latitude but by meridional regions (Atlantic, to which Europeoids and African Negroids are assigned; and Pacific, to which the Mongoloids of East Asia and America belong). This point of view rules out the effect of natural conditions on the origin of races because both groups took shape in various climatic zones.
Ethnoi are always linked, on the contrary, with natural conditions, through active economic activity, which is manifested in two directions, viz., adaptation to the terrain, and of the latter to the ethnos. In both cases, however, we come up against an ethnos as a really existing phenomenon, although the reason for its origin is not clear.
It is also not necessary to reduce the whole diversity of my theme to some one thing. It is better simply to establish the role of certain factors. The terrain, for example, determines an ethnic collective's possibilities during its rise, but a newly born ethnos alters the terrain in accordance with its requirements. Such mutual adaptation is only possible when a rising ethnos is full of strength and is seeking to apply it. Later, however, it becomes used to the established situation, which becomes near and dear to its descendants. Denial of that leads inevitably to a conclusion that peoples have no homeland, understood here as a combination of topographical elements dear to all hearts. Hardly anyone will agree with that.
That alone indicates that ethnogenesis is not a social process, because spontaneous development of the sociosphere only interacts with natural phenomena, but is not a product of them. But it is precisely because ethnogenesis is a process, and a directly observed ethnos is a phase of ethnogenesis, and consequently an unstable system, that any comparison of ethnoi with anthropological races is ruled out, and so with any racial theories. In fact, the principle of anthropological classification is similarity, and the people who comprise an ethnos are diverse.
Two or more components always operate during ethnogenesis. The crossing of various ethnoi sometimes yields a new stable form, but sometimes leads to degeneration. A mixture of Slavs, Ugrians, Alans, and Turks merged into the Great Russian nationality, while the Mongolo-Chinese and Manchurian-Chinese mixtures that often took shape along the line of the Chinese Great Wall over the last two thousand years proved unstable and disappeared and did not form independent ethnic units.
Central Asia was inhabited by Sogdians in the seventh century A.D., and the term 'Tajik' already meant 'Arab' in the eighth century, i.e. warriors of the Caliph. Nasr ibn Sayyar, when suppressing a rising of Sogdians in A.D. 733, was forced to recruit Khorassan Persians, who had already adopted Islam, to his depleted forces. He picked many of them, so that Persian began to predominate in his Arab army. After his victory, when the Sogdian men were slaughtered, and the children were sold into slavery, but the beautiful women and flourishing gardens were shared out among the victors, a Persian-speaking population developed in Sogdiana and Bukhara, that resembled the Khorassians. But in 1510 the fates of Iran and Central Asia diverged. The Turk Ismail Safevi, a zealous Shiite, conquered Iran and converted the Persians to Shi'ism. But Central Asia fell to Sunni Uzbeks, and the Persian-speaking population retained the old name 'Tajik' which, before the fall of the Bukharan dynasty of the Mangyts in 1918, had no significance attached to it. When the Uzbek and Tajik Republics were formed m the old Turkestan Territory, the descendants of the Khorassan Persians, the eighth-century conquerors, who lived in Bukhara and Samarkand, were counted as Uzbeks in the census, and the descendants of the Turks, the conquerors of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, living in Dushanbe and Shakhrisabz, as Tajiks. They knew both languages from childhood, were Muslims, and were indifferent to how they were recorded. Over the past 40 years the position has altered; Tajiks and Uzbeks have been formed as socialist nations, but how were they to be regarded before then, when religious affiliation determined ethnic affiliation (Muslims and Kafirs) and there were no clans among Tajiks? For both ethnic substrata Turks and Iranians --were 'imported' ethnoi in Central Asia a thousand years ago, quite a long enough period for adaptation. There is obviously a certain pattern here that needs to be brought out and described. But clearly community of origin cannot be the indicator for determination of an ethnos. It is a myth inherited by our consciousness from the primitive science of primitive society.
Ethnos as an illusion.
But perhaps 'ethnos' is simply a social category that takes shape with the formation of a society. [+26] Then 'ethnos' is an illusory value and ethnography a meaningless past-time, since it is simpler to study social conditions directly. That point of view is mistaken, however, which becomes obvious when speculation is replaced by observations of natural processes accessible to a thoughtful person. Let me clarify this from real examples. Celtic Bretons and Iberian Gascons live in France. In the forests of the Vendée and on the slopes of the Pyrenees they dress in their own costumes, speak their own language, and distinguish themselves distinctly in their homeland from the French. But can one say of Marshal Murat or Lannes that they were Basques and not French? Or about D'Artagnan, both as a historical personage and the hero of Dumas' novel? Can we not consider the Breton nobleman Chateaubriand and Gilles de Retz, the companion of Joan of Arc, Frenchmen? Wasn't the Irishman Oscar Wilde not an English writer? The famous Orientalist Chokan Valikhanov said of himself that he considered himself equally Russian and Kazakh. There is any number of such examples, but they all show that the ethnic affiliation discoverable in peoples' consciousness is not a product of consciousness itself. It evidently reflects some aspect or other of the person, much deeper, and external as regards consciousness, by which I understand a form of higher nervous activity. But in other cases, ethnoi for some reason manifest immense resistance to the effects of their surroundings and do not assimilate.
The Gypsies have now been separated from their society and India for a thousand years, have lost their link with their native land, and nevertheless have not merged with the Spaniards, or the French, or the Czechs, or the Mongols. They did not adopt the feudal institutions of the societies of Europe, remaining an outsider group in all the countries where they lived. The Iroquois still live as a tiny ethnic group (totaling 20 000 persons), surrounded by hypertrophied capitalism, but do not adopt the 'American way of life'. In the Mongolian People's Republic there are Turkic ethnoi (Soyots or Uranhaitsy, Kazakhs, etc.), but in spite of a similarity of the 'material and spiritual development of society', they have not merged with the Mongols, but constitute independent ethnoi. And conversely, French settled in Canada in the eighteenth century and still retain their ethnic face. Jews lived in Salonika as an endogamous group more than 400 years after their expulsion from Spain, but according to the data of 1918 they were more like Arabs than their neighbors the Greeks. Exactly the same way Germans from Hungary outwardly resembled their confréres in Germany, and Gypsies Hindus. Selection alters the correlation of attributes slowly, and mutations, we know, are rare. Any nationality living in a terrain customary for it is therefore almost in a state of equilibrium.
But one must not think that a change of conditions of existence never influences an ethnos. Sometimes it exerts such a strong impact that new attributes are formed, and new ethnic variants that are more or less stable. We must therefore examine how these processes come about and why they yield different results.
Between West and East.
When we acquaint ourselves with the cultures of the Mediterranean, we rind ourselves in an environment of accustomed concepts and values. Religion signifies belief in God, the state is a territory with a definite order and authority, countries have names, peoples an ethnic affiliation, and rivers and lakes are in definite places.
Only the customary titles 'West' and 'East' do not behave quite geographically. Morocco is considered 'East' and Hungary and Poland 'West'. But everyone manages to adapt to this convention, and there is no confusion of the concepts. Non-specialists' familiarity with the subject as a consequence of reading fiction, and the availability of living tradition, are very conducive to this.
But as soon as we cross the mountain passes that divide Central and Eastern Asia, we come into a world of another system of reckoning. Here we meet religions that deny the existence not only of a divinity but also of the world around us. Regimes and social structures prove to contradict the principle of the state and authority. We find ethnoi in nameless countries without a community of language and economy, and sometimes even of territory, while rivers and lakes will migrate like pastoralists. The tribes that we are accustomed to consider nomads prove to be settled, and the strength of armies will not depend on their numbers. Only the patterns of ethnogenesis remain unchanged.
Other material calls for another approach and consequently another scale of investigation. Otherwise it will remain incomprehensible and my book will become unnecessary for the reader. That is to say, the reader accustomed to European terms. He knows what a 'king' is, and a 'count' or 'earl', a 'chancellor', and a 'bourgeois commune'. But in the East of Oecumene there were not equivalent terms. A 'khaghan' was not a king or an emperor, but a military chieftain elected for life who combined with it the performance of rituals of honoring ancestors. But can we imagine Richard the Lion-Hearted saying a funerary mass for Henry II, whom he drove to heart failure? And even that members of the Gascon and English nobility were present at this mass? Indeed, it is nonsense! But in the east of the Great Steppes, he would have been obliged to do so, otherwise he would have been killed.
Such appellations as 'Chinese' or 'Hindus' are not equivalent to 'French' or 'Germans' but to West Europeans as a whole, because they are systems of ethnoi but united on other principles of culture. Hindus are linked by a system of castes, and Chinese by hieroglyphic writing and an education connected with it. As soon as a native of Hindustan was converted to Muhammedanism, he ceased to be a Hindu since he became an outcast or renegade for his fellow-countrymen and fell into the category of untouchables. And a Chinese living among barbarians according to their customs, was treated, according to Confucius, as a barbarian. But a foreigner who observed Chinese etiquette was regarded as a Chinese.
In order to compare the ethnoi of East and West we have to find a proper correlation with an equal scale of division. For that purpose I shall study the properties of an ethnos as a natural phenomenon characteristic of all countries and ages.
To achieve this purpose one must be very attentive to ancient traditional information about the world, and not to reject it in advance because it does not correspond to our modern notions and ideas. We constantly forget that people who lived several thousand years ago had the same consciousness, capacities, and aspiration for the truth and knowledge as modern people. Treatises that have come down to us from the various peoples of various times testify to that.
The ordinary approach is not suitable for understanding the history and culture of Eastern Asia. When we study the history of Europe we can divide it up -- into the history of France, Germany, England, etc., or ancient history, mediaeval, and modern. Then, studying the history, say, of Rome, we are interested in neighboring peoples only insofar as Rome clashed with them. For Western countries such an approach is justified by the results obtained, but when we study Central Asia by this means we do not get satisfactory results. The reason lies deep; it is that the Asian and European understanding of the term 'people' ('folk') is different. In Asia itself ethnic unity is perceived differently, and even if I take off the Levant, and India with Indo-China, as without direct relation to my theme, there remain all the same three different understandings, the Chinese, Iranian, and nomadic. The last-named, moreover, varies particularly strongly with the epoch.
In Europe an ethnonym is a stable concept; in Central Asia it is more or less fluid; in China it is absorbent, and in Iran exclusive. In other words, in order to be considered a Chinese in China, a person had to adopt the fundamentals of Chinese morality, education, and rules of behaviour. Origin was not taken into account, nor language, because the Chinese spoke different languages in antiquity. It is therefore clear that China inevitably expanded, swallowing and absorbing small peoples and tribes. In Iran, on the contrary, a Persian had to be born one, but above all, in addition, had to honour Ahura Mazda and hate Ahriman. Without that it was impossible to be an 'Aryan'. The mediaeval (Sassanid) Persians did not think it even possible to include anyone in their ranks since they called themselves 'well-born' or 'noble' (nondoron), and others did not belong to that number. As a result, the number of the people steadily fell. It is difficult to guess at the Parthian conception, but it seemingly differed from the Persian only in being rather broader.
With the Hunni it was necessary, in order to be considered one, to be a member of a clan, but a clan could only be joined through marriage or by the command of a shanyui, by which a person became a member of a clan. The heirs of the Hunni, the Tyrians, began to incorporate whole tribes. Mixed tribal alliances arose on the basis of acceptance, for example Kazakhs, Yakuts, etc. Among the Mongols, very close in general to the Turks and Hunni, the horde was given predominance, i.e. a group of people united by discipline and leadership. Neither origin nor language, nor religious belief was required for that, but only courage and readiness to submit. The names of the hordes were clearly not ethnonyms, but with the existence of hordes ethnonyms fell out of use in general since there was no need for them; the concept 'people' coincided with that of 'state'.
In that connection we have firmly to remember that the concept 'state' differs in all the cases mentioned above, and is not intertranslatable. The Chinese 'guo' is represented by a hieroglyph, viz., an enclosure and a man with a spear. That does not, by any means, correspond to the English 'state' or the French 'état', or even the Latin 'imperium' and 'respublica'. It is also remote in content from the Iranian 'shahr' or the above-mentioned term 'horde'. The nuances of the difference often prove more significant than the elements of similarity, and that determines the behaviour of the figures of history. What seems monstrous to a European is natural for a Mongol, and vice versa.
We cannot help regretting, of course, the widespread idea that all state forms, social institutions, ethnic norms, and even manners of exposition not like the European, are simply backward, imperfect, and defective. Banal Eurocentrism is sufficient for Philistine perception but not suitable for scientific comprehension of the diversity of the observed phenomena. For from the standpoint of a Chinese or an Arab West Europeans seem to be defective. And that is also incorrect, untrue and unpromising for history. We obviously have to find a system of reckoning by which all observations will be made with an equal degree of accuracy. Only such an approach will make it possible to compare dissimilar phenomena and so yield reliable conclusions.
In the West countries are distinguished by name, but in the East?
A country and people without a name.
Between the eastern boundary of the Muslim world and the north-western outskirts of the Middle Kingdom which we call China, lies a country that has no definite name. That is all the more strange since its geographical frontiers are very exactly delineated, the physical and climatic conditions within it are original and unique, the population numerous, and long concerned with culture. This country was very well known to Chinese, Greek, and Arab geographers; it was visited by Russian and West European travelers; archaeological excavations have been carried out in it many times; and everyone called it descriptively someway or other, but it did not have a name of its own. We therefore only know where it was located.
Two mountain ranges stretch eastward from the Pamirs -- the Kunlun Shan, to the south of which lies Tibet, and the Tien Shan. Between these ranges lies a sandy desert, the Takla-Makan, intersected by the river Tarim. This river has neither source nor mouth. Its beginning is taken to be the 'Aral', i.e. the 'island' between the branches of three rivers, the Yarkand, the Aksu, and the Khotan. Its end is sometimes lost in the sands, sometimes gets to the lake Karaburunkul and sometimes fills Lop Nor, a lake that constantly changes place. [+27] In this strange country the rivers and lakes wander, and people huddle in the mountain foothills. Fresh brooks flow down from the mountains, but then and there disappear under heaps of scree and come out on the surface at a considerable distance from the ridges, There are oases there; then the rivers again disappear, this time into the sands. In this very continental country there is a very deep depression, the bottom of which lies 154 meters below sea level, and in this depression there is an ancient cultural center, the Turfan oasis. How were sciences and the arts studied there in a summer heat as high as 48°C and winter frosts as low as -37°C, in the unbelievable dryness of the autumn air and the strong spring winds?! Yet they were, and with no little success.
The ancient population of this country had no name for itself. It is accepted now to call these people Tocharians, but that is not an ethnonym, but a Tibetan sobriquet -- tha gar, which means 'white head' (blond). The inhabitants of the various oases spoke various languages of the Indo-European group, including even a West Aryan one unlike those known in Europe. In the south-west of the country, in the foothills of the Kunlun Shan, roamed Tibetan tribes that were in close contact with the inhabitants of Khotan and Yarkand, but did not mix with them. In the early centuries A.D. Sakas penetrated this country from the west, who settled south of Kashgar as far as Khotan, and Chinese emigrants escaping the terrors of civil wars. The Chinese built themselves a colony Gaochang, in the Turfan oasis, which lasted until the ninth century A.D. and disappeared without trace.
As you will see, it is impossible to choose a name for this country by ethnonym, but this was a cultured population which organized an economy that must be considered the best in the ancient world.
The nature of the oases of Central Asia was brought into harmony with the needs of man. The Turfan people assimilated the Iranian system of underground water supply, keriz, thanks to which the irrigated area fed a big population. Two harvests a year were gathered. Turfan grapes can rightly be considered the best in the world; there were melons, watermelons, and apricots from spring to late autumn; the sowings of long-fiber cotton were protected from the winds by Lombardy poplars and mulberry trees. And around was a stony desert of fragments of disintegrated rocks, shingle, and boulders, through which neither tree nor shrub penetrated. This was a reliable defense of the oasis against big armies. It was very difficult to send foot soldiers across the desert, because they had to carry not only food with them, but also water, which greatly increased the baggage train. And raids of the nomads' light cavalry were not terrible for the fortress walls.
A second large center of this country, Karashahr, lay in the hills around the freshwater lake Baghrash-kul. This town 'has rich lands... abounds in fish... It is well fortified by nature and is easily defended.' [+28] From Baghr-ash-kul flows the Konche-darya, which feeds Lop Nor. The full-flowing Tarim river, bordered by groves of poplars, tamarisks, sea buckhorn, and tall reeds that give cover to deer and wild boars, can be reached along its banks without suffering thirst.
The old ideology of the settled dwellers of this country was Buddhism in the Hinayana form ('Lesser Way' or 'Lesser Vehicle', i.e. the most orthodox teaching of the Buddha without admixtures), which it is impossible to call a religion. The Hinayanists deny god, putting the moral law of karma (causal succession) in his place. A Buddha is a man who had achieved perfection and is an example for anybody wishing to liberate himself from sufferings and rebirths through the achievement of Nirvana, the state of absolute peace. Only a purposeful person or arhat (holy man) could achieve it, without depending either on divine mercy or on outside help.
It goes without saying that achieving the 'path of perfection' is the affair of the few. But what are the rest to do? They simply concerned themselves with everyday affairs, respected arhats, listened to sermons in their spare time, and hoped that they themselves might, in future rebirths, become holy ascetics. But we have already seen, by way of other examples, how insignificantly dogmas influence the ethnic stereotype of behaviour. The arhats, merchants, soldiers, and farmers of Turfan, Karashahr, and Kucha constituted a single system for which Hinayana Buddhism was only a coloring.
The coloring of an object plays its role, however, sometimes an essential one. The Hinayana community lasted until the fifteenth century, but the Mahayana, also a Buddhist doctrine, but a vague, complicated one of different character, which spread in Yarkand and Khotan, obviously not accidentally, had already given way to Islam in the eleventh century.
The Uighurs who arrived in Turfan professed Manichaeanism, but seemingly as formally as the Turfanites professed Buddhism. Manichaeanism had already disappeared as an independent confession before the twelfth century, but Manichaean ideas passed into certain Buddhist philosophical currents, and into Nestorianism which made a victorious march throughout Central Asia in the eleventh century. And in those centuries the inhabitants of Turfan, Karashahr, and Kucha began to call themselves Uighurs.
The Nestorians in Uighuria got along with the Buddhists in spite of their inherent intolerance. Christianity was seemingly welcome to people of a religious mentality remote from the atheistic abstractions of Hinayana. The merchants also became Christians, because the Buddhist doctrine forbade 'those who have taken the path' to touch gold, silver, and women. Religious people who were actively involved in economic life were therefore compelled to seek a faith that did not prevent them from living and working. One can consequently conclude that convenient ecological niches were found for both ideological systems.
The wealth of this country was mainly based on a favorable geographical position. Two caravan routes passed across it: one north of the Tien Shan and the other south of them. Chinese silk flowed by these routes to Provence, and luxury articles of France and Byzantium to China. The caravaners rested in the oases from the arduous desert crossings, and fattened their camels and horses. In that connection the local women widely practiced the first oldest profession, while the husbands permitted their wives these earnings, part of which went into their pockets. The Uighurs were so accustomed to this that even when, thanks to an alliance with Mongols, Uighuria became fabulously rich, its inhabitants begged the Mongol khan not to forbid their wives to entertain travellers. [+29]
This custom, or more correctly element of the ethnic stereotype of behaviour, proved more stable than language, religion, political system, and own name. The stereotype of behaviour developed as an adaptive attribute, i.e. as a mode of adaptation of the ethnos to its geographical environment. The names changed here more often than the ethnoi bearing them, the change of ethnonyms being explained by the political climate.
The rich, numerous population of these fertile oases could, without difficulty, feed the warlike nomads, the more so that the Uighurs, and later the Mongols, took on themselves the defense of their subjects against foreign enemies. For three hundred years the Uighurs mixed with the aborigines, but forced them to change from the Tocharian language to Turkish. That did not need much effort, incidentally, because in the eleventh century all peoples from the azure waters of the Sea of Marmara and the forested slopes of the Carpathians to the jungles of Bengal and the Great Wall of China spoke dialects of the Turkish language. Such a broad distribution of Turkish-speaking made this language convenient for trading operations, and the inhabitants of the oases of both halves of Central Asia were identically fond of trading. Change of a native but little used language for a generally accepted one therefore happened without difficulty, not only in the north-east of the Tarim basin but also in the south-west, where the role of the Uighurs had been taken on by the Turkish Yagma and Karluk tribes. But the difference between them and the Uighurs was immense. The Uighurs did not affect the way of life, religion, or culture of their subjects, but the Karluks, who had adopted Islam in A.D. 960, converted the Yashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan oases into likenesses of Samarkand and Bukhara.
A geographically monolithic region thus proved to be divided into two ethno-cultural provinces by no means friendly to one another. But the forces were balanced, and the distances between the oases were vast and almost impassable. The position therefore became stabilized for a long time.
This situation explains why the country remained without a single name. In antiquity the Chinese called it Xiyu, i.e. the 'Western Territory', and considered its end to be the 'Bow Mountains', the Pamirs and Altai. The Hellenes called this land 'Serika' and the precious commodity obtained from it serikos (silk). I shall not bother to explain the etymology of this word.
In modern times conventional names have also been used Kashgaria, Eastern Turkestan, or Sinkiang, i.e. literally the 'new frontier' established by the Manchurians in the eighteenth century. None of these names are suitable for our times. What was the 'West' for the ancient Chinese became the middle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. To call a country inhabited by Indo-Europeans who have learned to understand Turkish speech 'Turkestan' is stupid. Kashgar never became the capital, and the 'New Frontier' did not seem to be even the horizon. Best of all we are left with the geographical conventional name, the Tarim basin. The river is a reliable reference point, in any case neutral and lasting. In addition the term 'Sinkiang' includes Jungaria (also a conventional and later name), located north of the Tien Shan, which had a quite different historical fate.
The eastern boundary of Uighuria is difficult to define. Since the disappearance of the river it has shifted significantly and many of the changes have not been dated. It can be thought that the Hami oasis belonged to the Uighurs, and perhaps the cave town of Tunhuang, a treasure-house of Buddhist art. But the more eastern lands, the oases of the Nan Shan foothills, were taken from the Uighurs by the Tanguts. These were a people which, like the Uighurs, do not now exist, although there are people who call themselves such. But that, too, is a mirage. The people calling themselves Uighurs are Ferghana Turks who settled in the east in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. And those who are taken for Tanguts are nomadic Tibetans, a relict ethnos who were once the most savage enemies of the Tanguts.
So, a historical critique shows that the meaning of name and the sound of it do not always correspond in Asia. In order to avoid annoying and, alas, frequent mistakes, one must develop a system of reckoning that would be real for Europe and Asia and America, Oceania, Africa, and Australia. But in this system sense will be preferred to phonetics, i.e. it will be based on history rather than on linguistics.
'States' and 'processes'.
The aggregate of adduced facts indicates that the system of reference taking socioeconomic formations as its basis does not apply in principle to ethnogenesis. This system fixes 'states' of society determined by the mode of production, which in turn depends on the level of the productive forces, in other words on technosphere. This system of reference is very convenient for studying the history of material culture, state institutions, styles in art, philosophical schools, in short for everything created by people. It has become so customary over the past century that it has been mechanically transferred to the analysis of ethnogenesis.
The concept 'state' has its place in both nature and society. In nature there are four states: solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma. The transition of a molecule of inanimate matter from one state to another occurs through a certain expenditure of energy (the latent heat of melting or the generation of steam), i.e. a small jump; and the process is reversible. In the live matter of the biosphere this transition is linked with death of the organism, and is irreversible. That can mean that there are only two states, viz., life and death, for an organism, but since death is annihilation of the organism as an entity, it is ridiculous to call this moment of transition a 'state'. As for an organism's life, it too is not a 'state' but a process - from birth through an acme form in which there is reproduction, to death. The analogy of the process of life in inanimate matter is the crystallization of minerals and their subsequent metamorphosis into amorphous masses.
When studying 'states' and 'processes' we always employ different methods: for 'states', classification, by any conventionally accepted principle convenient for surveying the phenomenon as whole; for 'processes', particularly linked with evolution or the formation of species, systematics is needed, based on a hierarchical principle, i.e. the correlation of similar although not identical groups of different rank. Such is Linnaeus' systematics perfected by Darwin. The hierarchical character of the system of the organic world is governed by the course and character of evolutionary processes inseparable from life and obligatory for it. But as soon as life dies a state' arises, more or less rapidly broken up by the action of the environment, although the latter is constituted by other dead 'states' also subject to irreversible deformation. For an organism, including the human organism, of course, there is only one mode of reaching a 'state', viz., to become a mummy, and for an ethnos to become an archaeological culture.
It is otherwise with the technosphere and the relations of production associated with it. In it there are 'states'. It is easy to make scrap of a tractor, and a tractor from scrap. Only expenditure of a certain (alas, not small) amount of energy is required. There are also 'states' in social life. They used to be called estates (état). In a metaphorical sense one can call class affiliation a 'state', but it must be remembered that it is the product of relations of production and of the productive forces, i.e. also of the technosphere. This state is extremely unstable. A warrior taken prisoner became a slave, but having run away could become a feudal lord. There is no place or need for the hierarchical principle in the fate of such a person. simple recording is sufficient. Changes of social states are similar (though not identical), for instance, to changes of natural states they are reversible and require, for passage from one state to another, an investment of additional energy. But what is an ethnos? Can one, by making an effort, change one's ethnic affiliation? Seemingly not! But that already indicates that an ethnos is not a 'state' but a 'process'.
A second argument against the conception of 'state' is the erosion of boundaries between ethnoi in zones of ethnic contacts. If the change of social state is, as a rule, a once-and-for-all act, for example, the ennobling of the gentry, demotion to the ranks, sale into slavery, emancipation from bondage, etc., the mixing of peoples in the valley of the Huangho or in Constantinople, or in North America, is always a painful, long, and extremely variable process, in the sense that the results of interbreeding often prove unexpected and are always uncontrollable, which is due mainly to the absence of a developed ethnological theory that would make it possible to act with due allowance for the consequences of one's actions, and not blindly.
[+1] Biosphere, a term introduced by Vernadsky, signifies one of Earth's envelopes that includes, in addition to the aggregate of living organisms, all the fruits of their past life activity, viz., soils, sedimentary rocks, and the free oxygen of the atmosphere. The established links of ethnogenesis with biochemical processes of the bio. sphere is not 'biologism' as some of my opponents suggest, but rather 'geographism', though such a label is hardly appropriate, for everything that is on the surface of Earth is part of the sphere of geography in one way or another, either physical, economic, or historical.
[+2] V.I. Vernadsky. Khimicheskoe stroenie biosfeyy Zemli i ee okruzheniya (The Chemical Structure of Earth's Biosphere and Its Environment), Nauka, M 1965, p 273.
[+3] V.I. Vemadsky. Biosphere. Izbrannye sochineniya v 5 tomakh, Vol. 5. Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1960, p 19.
[+4] A.A. Matinovsky. Puti teoretichkoii biologii (The Paths of Theoretical Biology), Znanie, Moscow, 1969, p 7.
[+5] H. Selye. From Dream to Discovery. On Being a Scientist. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, London, Toronto, 1964, p 68.
[+6] S.V. Kalesnik. Osnovy obshchego zemlevedenia (Fundamentals of General Geography), 2nd ed. Uchpedgiz, Moscow, 1961, pp 412-416.
[+7] I.N. Boltin. Primechaniya na istoriyu droniya i nyneshniaa Rossii g. Leklerka, sochinennye general-maiorom Ivanom Boltinim (Notes on M. Leclerc's History of Old and Present Russia, compiled by Maj.-Gen. Ivan Boltin), Vol. 11. St. Petersburg, 1798, p 20.
[+8] LS. Berg. Khomogenez (Homogenesis), Moscow, 1922, pp 190-181.
[+9] S.V. Kalesnik. Op. cit, p 455.
[+10] See: G.V. Pickhanov. Some Remarks on History. Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 11. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, p 227.
[+11] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History Translated by J. Sibree. Dover Publications, New York, 1956, p 80.
[+12] V.K Yatsunsky. Istoricheskaya geografiya (Historical Geography), Moscow, 1955, p 3.
[+13] L.S. Berg. Klimat i zhizn (Climate and Life), Moscow, 1947.
[+14] G.E. Grumm-Grzhimailo. The Growth of the Desert and Death of Pastures and Cultivated Land in Central Asia in the Historical Period. Izv. Geograficheskogo obshchestva, Vol. 1 1, Issue 5, 1933.
[+15] N.Ya. Merpert, V.I. Pashuto, LV. Cherepnin. Genghis-khan and His Heritage. Istoriya SSSAR 1962, 5: 56.
[+16] LN. Gumilev. The Heterochrony of the Moistening of Eurasia in Antiquity (Topography and Ethnos, IV). Vestnik Leningradskogo univversiteta, 1966, 6:64-71; idem The Heterochrony of the Moistening of Eurasia in the Middle Ages (Topography and Ethnos, V). Vestnik Leningradskogo universileta, 1966,18:81-90.
[+17] The Chinese emperor Ch'ien Lung carried out a mass extermination of the Oirats, the Manchus, moreover, hunting down women, children, and old people giving quarter to no one. Official Chinese history limited itself to a simple reference: 'More than a million Oirats were killed'. A tremendous event sank into red tape; and was it really the only one?! We know human history, alas, in various degrees of detail, equivalent to a geographer having a 1:200 000 map on one plane table and one of 1: 100 on another.
[+18] E Le Roy Ladurie. Histoire du clirnal depuis l'an mil. Flammarion, Paris, 1967, pp 16-17.
[+19] Ibid, p 17.
[+20] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology. Progress Publishers, 1976, p 34.
[+21] V.I. Kozlov, V.V. Pokshishevsky. Ethnography and Geography. Sovetskaya Etnographia, 1973,1: 3-13.
[+22] B.V. Andrianov, N.N. Cheboksarov. Economic-Cultural Types and the Problems of Mapping Them. Sovetskaya etnografiya, 1972, 5: 12.
[+23] Ya,Ya. Roginsky, M.G. Levin. Osnovy antropologii (Fundamentals of Anthropology), M University Press, Moscow, 1955, pp 325-329.
[+24] Yu.V. Bromley. Experience of Typologizing Ethnic Communities. Sovetskaya Etnographia, 1972, 5: 3-4.
[+25] V.I. Kozlov, V.V. Pokshishevsky. Art cit.
[+26] See: V.I. Kozlov. Dinamika chisknnosti narodov (The Dynamics of the Size of peoples), Nauka, M, 1969, p 56.
[+27] F.M. Murzaev. Priroda Sintsyana i formirovtanie pustyn Tsentralnoi Asii (The Nature of Sinkiang and the Formation of the Deserts of Central Asia), Nauka, Moscow, 1968, pp 185-190.
[+28] N.Ya. Bichurin (Iakinf). Sobranic svedenii po istoricheskoi geografii Vostochnoi i Sredinnoi Azii (Digest of Information on the Historical Geography of Eastern and Central Asia). Compiled by L.N. Gumilev and M.F. Khvan. Cheboksary, 1960, p 558
[+29] See: The Book of Sir Marco Polo. Translated and edited, with notes by Sir. Henry Yule. 2 Vols. 3rd ed. London, 1903. |
VOTD: Breaking Down The Dragon Visual Effects In 'Game Of Thrones' Season Five
By Ethan Anderton/Aug. 10, 2015 6:00 am EST
Just last month, not long after the fifth season of Game of Thrones came to an end, we featured a look at some of the impressive and sometimes invisible visual effects of HBO's hit fantasy series. And before that, there was a special emphasis places on the visual effects of the exciting episode "Hardhome." But we've yet to dive into the visual effects of the dragons.
That changes today with a new featurette that looks at how the dragons were created in the episode "The Dance of Dragons." Keep in mind though that this is the second to last episode of the fifth season, so if you're not caught up, then you will want to wait to watch this featurette to avoid spoilers. But if you're all good, then watch the Game of Thrones dragons visual effects featurette below!
Thanks to Wired for this look at the Game of Thrones visual effects:
The visual effects used to bring the dragons (who are much bigger than when they first appeared) to life have gotten much better in the relatively short amount of time that the show has been on the air. And this one is particularly tricky since the dragon has to interact with a few different elements, such as attacked warriors and most importantly, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) hopping on its back.
And as you can see, there are tons more visual effects here at work than just a giant computer generated dragon. These kind of effects were once just a dream, but now they're used on the relatively cheaper medium of television to great effect. And if you're curious to see just how the visual effects of Game of Thrones have evolved over the years, check out another in-depth featurette right here.
Are you impressed by the visual effects of Game of Thrones? |
Major depression can be a serious and debilitating condition. For some patients in a treatment resistant depressive episode, electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) is the only treatment that is effective. Although ECT has shown efficacy in randomized controlled trials, the treatment is still controversial and stigmatized. This can in part be attributed to our lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of action. Some reports also suggest potential harmful effects of ECT treatment and memory related side effects have been documented.
The present study will apply state of the art radiology through advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to investigate structural and functional brain effects of ECT. As a multi-disciplinary collaboration, imaging findings will be correlated to psychiatric response parameters, neuropsychological functioning as well as neurochemical and genetic biomarkers that can elucidate the underlying mechanisms. The aim is to document both treatment effects and potential harmful effects of ECT.
Sample: n = 40 patients in a major depressive episode (bipolar and major depressive disorder). Two control groups with n = 15 in each group: age and gender matched healthy volunteers not receiving ECT and patients undergoing electrical cardioversion (ECV) for atrial fibrillation (AF). Observation time: six months.
The study will contribute to our understanding of the pathophysiology of major depression as well as mechanisms of action for the most effective treatment for the disorder; ECT.
Bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder (MDD) are mental disorders with a 12-month prevalence in the EU of about 1 and 7%, respectively . They are associated with a reduced quality of life, an increased mortality risk, and are a major cause of inability to work [2,3].
The management of depression includes psychosocial treatment approaches, pharmacotherapy and, for the most severe and treatment resistant patients, electroconvulsive treatment (ECT).
The idea that convulsions could treat mental illness can be traced to the 16th century, when camphor oil was used to induce convulsions. Seizure-induction by application of electrical current to the human brain was introduced by the Italians Cerletti and Bini in 1938 . Since its introduction, ECT has been applied to various psychiatric and some somatic conditions. Modern ECT has fewer indications and has been developed with the aim to reduce side effects .
For some patients in a treatment resistant depressive episode, ECT is the only treatment that is effective. ECT is generally considered to be safe and has shown efficacy in randomized controlled trials . A recent randomized controlled trial found ECT to be more effective than pharmacological treatment for treatment-resistant bipolar depression . However, the treatment is still controversial and stigmatized . This can in part be attributed to our lack of knowledge, since the mechanisms of action is still largely unknown.
Some have compared ECT to lobotomy or hypothesize that ECT affects the brain in a manner similar to severe stress or trauma . Others regard it as a safe treatment that is underused , and a systematic review found no persistent cognitive deficits after ECT . A recent randomized controlled trial of right unilateral ECT in treatment resistant depression found no changes in general neurocognitive function, but reduced autobiographical memory consistency after ECT . This finding is in line with subjective patient reports , and further research is required.
The NICE guidelines states: "Consider ECT for acute treatment of severe depression that is life-threatening and when a rapid response is required, or when other treatments have failed" . This is in line with the Norwegian national guidelines that recommend ECT in major depression when other treatments have been ineffective (Evidence level A, ), and there has been an increase in its use in recent years .
Increased knowledge gained through thorough scientific investigations can reduce stigmata and inform patients and health care providers to make appropriate use of ECT. Better understanding of ECT and its mechanisms of action may help patients to cope with side effects and contribute to the development of new treatment options.
More than one hundred theories have been suggested for the effects of ECT . Although changes to brain structure in major depression have been confirmed by several meta-analysis [18-20] and ECT-induced structural and functional changes have been characterized (for recent reviews see [21-23]) we still lack a unifying theory for its mechanisms of action. The project will focus on three suggested effects of ECT, each reflecting proposed pathophysiological changes and mechanisms of action, see below. As a multidisciplinary study, results from the neuroradiological measures can be correlated to biomarkers in blood and behavioral parameters; e.g. improvement/remission after ECT should be correlated to improved performance on neuropsychological testing. For dichotic listening, improved scores in the forced left condition would indicate better cognitive control.
The human nervous system adapts to challenges. It can be changed by learning as well as by pathological conditions, such as psychiatric disorders. One structure that has been studied in large detail in this regard is the hippocampus; a structure that is important for learning and memory. Hippocampal volumes are reduced in major depressive disorder [19,24,25] and in a number of other psychiatric and somatic disorders (reviewed in ). The volume reduction of the hippocampus has been associated with duration of untreated depression . On the other hand, increased hippocampal volumes can occur after extensive learning, e.g. studying to become one of London's taxi drivers [28,29]. The increase in hippocampal volumes may be related to neurogenesis, which has been shown to occur in animal models [30,31]. In primates, the proliferation of granular cells in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus was shown to be reduced by stress . Seizures induce neurogenesis in rodents , and animal models have shown electroconvulsive seizures to have effects on neurotransmitters, gene expression, growth factors (such as Brain derived neurotrophic factor - BDNF, Vascular endothelial growth factor - VEGF, Fibroblast Growth Factor - FGF) and neuropeptides (such as neuropeptide Y - NPY, Thyrotropin-releasing hormone - TRH, VGF) and lead to synaptic remodeling and cellular proliferation (reviewed in ). Research from animal models also indicate that electroconvulsive shocks can reverse the effect of cortisol and even cause an increase of hippocampal volumes (reviewed in ).
Increased levels of BDNF has been reported following ECT , and BDNF has been suggested as a potential biomarker for depression . Neurogenesis has been shown to occur in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus in adult humans , and ECT-induced neuroplasticity is gaining more focus as a framework for understanding the effects of ECT . A few studies of humans have reported increased hippocampal volumes and/or other structural changes following ECT [37-41]. Nordanskog et al. [39,41] performed manual segmentation without complete blinding of the MRI time point that was traced (before or after ECT), introducing a potential observer bias. Dukart et al. used voxel-based morphometry, while Tendolkar et al. and Abbot et al. both used FreeSurfer for volumetric segmentation and analysis. Compared with these studies we will recruit more patients, use state of the art automatic segmentation procedures, and radiology readers will be blinded to study group and the time point of MRI scans. In addition, by applying multimodal imaging, structural changes can be assessed with respect to changes in diffusion properties, susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) and fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) imaging. Our design will allow longitudinal tracking of brain changes; 1-2 hours after the first ECT, after treatment completion and at 6 months follow up.
ECT has anticonvulsive effects and is sometimes used in the treatment of status epilepticus . One hypothesis suggests that the magnitude of increase in seizure threshold, induced by ECT, is important for the antidepressant efficacy . Drugs that enhance GABAergic neurotransmission are known for their anticonvulsant effect, and the role of amino acid neurotransmission systems, particularly reduced function of GABAergic neurotransmission has been increasingly appreciated in major depression (for reviews, see [45,46]). Tiagabine, a selective GABA reuptake inhibitor was shown to be effective in treatment of depression with anxiety . A post mortem study of gene expression in elderly depressed patients found alterations in GABA and glutamate pathways markers indicating diminished activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) . A recent meta-analysis suggested increased resting-state activity in the rostral ACC as a biomarker for treatment response in major depression, and a shift from GABA- to glutamate-mediated modulation was suggested .
Interestingly, one early study found increased concentrations of cortical GABA after ECT in depressed patients by use of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) , however this finding has to our knowledge not been reproduced by other groups.
It has recently been suggested that "hyperconnectivity" in networks involved in mood regulation can be reduced after a course of ECT [51,52]. This finding may seem contrary to findings of increased fractional anisotropy (FA) in frontal limbic projections after a course of ECT [53,54]. FA is often regarded as a measure of white matter tract integrity and increased axonal integrity may seem contra-intuitive if one expects reduced connectivity after ECT. Possible explanations could be that the projections that are "enhanced" by ECT are GABAergic, or that improved integrity of certain projections may lead to more coordinated electrical activity in these projections, which overall is detected as "reduced connectivity".
Our project will encompass measures of neurotransmitters (GABA and glutamate by 1H-MRS) and diffusion parameters (e.g. fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity and separation of restricted and hindered water by Restriction Spectrum Imaging, RSI ), enabling longitudinal investigations of GABA- and glutamate levels as well as white matter properties in the same patients.
ECT has been a controversial treatment from its introduction. The most important side effects are related to memory impairments and it is recommended that the patients' cognitive functioning is monitored both during and after treatment . A recent randomized controlled trial in treatment-resistant bipolar depression found reduced autobiographic memory consistency after ECT but no deterioration of general neurocognitive function . Structural damage to the human brain has to our knowledge, never been documented to be caused by ECT. Case studies with rare complications, such as subdural hematoma, have been published , however a study using cerebral Computer Tomography in 40 patients before and after ECT detected no changes caused by ECT, even with convulsions lasting several minutes . Both conventional MRI and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI; a sequence that is sensitive to edema) have failed to find structural damage . However, changes on DWI have been shown for patients after status epilepticus . If brain injury occurs as a consequence of ECT, one may expect to find micro hemorrhages. SWI is extremely sensitive to hemorrhages, and is routinely used in imaging of stroke . However, SWI, as an indicator of microvascular dis-integrity, has to our knowledge never been applied after ECT. In addition, by using 1H-MRS we will measure N-acetylaspartate (NAA), which is primarily localized in neurons and considered a marker for neuronal integrity .
Our project will use high field strength, state of the art MRI and combine RSI, SWI and 1H-MRS which should enable detection of more subtle post-ECT effects.
Hippocampal volumes increase after ECT treatment. A) Specifically there is increased volume of the dentate gyrus, which would suggest that the increase is caused by neurogenesis. B) Changes in hippocampal structure correlate with treatment response, neurocognitive measures and increased concentrations of neurotrophic factors in blood samples.
ECT causes increased levels of the neurotransmitter GABA and changes the glutamate/GABA balance. A) GABA concentrations correlate with treatment response. B) Genes regulating GABA synthesis and cycling are up-regulated or activated. C) A subset of cortical projections is strengthened; a possible mechanism causing reduced connectivity in frontal areas.
ECT does not cause measurable signs of harmful effects to the brain. A) No changes are detected on microvascular (SWI) and microstructural (RSI) imaging. NAA (measurend in the ACC) is unaffected. B) Possible immediate post-ECT effects, e.g. edema, that is detectable by diffusion weighted imaging, are reversible.
The study is prospective and observational, and all patients will receive the standard ECT treatment, as it is provided at the ECT-department at the Haukeland University Hospital.
A flow chart of the study design is shown in Figure 1, and details on study measures and variables are listed in Table 1.
Relevant patients with depression are addressed in order to establish whether they are willing to be screened for the study. The patients must be assigned a patient number and sign the consent form after receiving oral and written information about the study prior to undergoing any study procedures.
Forty patients accepted for ECT at Haukeland University Hospital will be included. After inclusion of 8 patients, the protocol was slightly revised and the remaining 32 patients will follow the protocol as described here.
Patients (age > 18) referred to the ECT-unit and accepted for treatment because of moderate and severe depression, fulfilling the criteria for the following ICD-10 diagnoses: F31.3 and F31.4; F32.1 and F32.2 and F32.3; F33.1 and F33.2 and F33.3. In addition the symptom intensity must be verified by a score ≥ 25 on the Montgomery and Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). There is no upper age for participation; however, the responsible clinician will consider if patients are eligible for inclusion (functioning, enable to give written informed consent).
ECT treatment within the last 12 months. Pregnancy. Patients unable to give written informed consent (according to the responsible clinician or ECT responsible). Patients who cannot participate in the MRI scanning because of contraindications to MRI.
There will be two control groups; a group of patients undergoing ECV for AF (controls 1) and healthy controls undergoing the same investigations as the ECT patient group, but not receiving ECT or anesthesia (controls 2).
In order to control for the potential effect of anesthesia on MRI images (particularly with regard to the spectroscopy) and blood samples, 15 patients referred for ECV of AF will be recruited. This is a patient group that receives similar anesthesia to ECT patients. This control group will have 2 MRI scans; one 1-2 hours before ECV and another MRI 1-2 hours after ECV. Blood samples will also be collected for the biobank at time points indicated in Figure 1. In addition to being a control group, data that is acquired will be used in a pilot investigation of potential effects of ECV of AF, if there are silent emboli to the brain. Such emboli would readily be detected on the diffusion images. Antithrombotic treatment must be Warfarin with an INR value above 2,0 at all measurements for the last 3 weeks prior to DC cardioversion or absolute compliant everyday use of Non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs) for 3 weeks. There will be no changes in the treatment of their AF, patients are only asked to participate in additional examinations (MRI, blood samples) before and after ECV.
When analyzing longitudinal MRI data, it is important to control for effects on imaging parameters that are a consequence of repeated measurements/time, rather than effects of the treatment. 15 healthy, age and gender-matched volunteers will be recruited for repeated MR imaging, blood samples and neuropsychological testing; following the protocol for the ECT patients (see Figure 1) but with no ECT or anesthesia.
ECT will be administered with a Thymatron System IV Somatics Inc. providing brief-pulse, square wave, constant current.
Anesthesia will be obtained with either the short acting anesthetic thiopental or propofol. All patients will be hyperoxygenated with oxygen-enriched air 1 to 2 minutes before and during the initiation of anesthesia to optimize induction of seizures [62,63]. Other medication necessary during anesthesia (e.g. for premedication or termination of prolonged seizure) will be left to decision by the anesthesiologist.
Stimulation electrodes will be placed ad modem d' Elia (Right unilateral electrode placement, RUL), as high dosage ECT with unilateral placement of stimulation electrodes has shown to be as effective as bilateral placement [65,66]. Three sessions per week will be given until remission, with a maximum of 18 sessions.
The duration of the stimulus pulse will be set to 0.5 ms. The initial stimulus energy will be determined by an age based method, where the energy (E) is calculated as following : Patient's age in years × 5 ≅ stimulus charge in mC. The Thymatron delivers a charge of 25.2 to 504 mC in 20 equal steps, set by the % Energy dial. According to the above formula this makes: Patient's age in years ≅ % Energy. In order to consider gender specific differences in seizure threshold, the % Energy was adapted as following: For male patients: % Energy + 5 to 10%. For female patients: % Energy - 5 to 10%.
The adequacy of each seizure will be evaluated by the ECT-clinician based on seizure duration, δ-waves, reorientation time and clinical effect. The treatment should be followed by a comatose state, from which consciousness is gradually regained . If a sufficient seizure was not obtained in one session the patient will be either re-stimulated in the same session or/and stimulus parameter will be adjusted in the next session.
Clinical assessments and monitoring will be performed largely in accordance with a recently used protocol , as detailed below and summarized in Table 1.
Patients will be diagnosed on the basis of a clinical interview supported by information from hospital records. The diagnoses will be subsequently verified by the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI; specifically the MINI-Plus) . Symptom intensity will be measured with MADRS and the Clinical Global Impression (CGI) .
Patients will be assessed before the treatment, and weekly during the ECT-series with the Mini-Mental State (MMS) by their treating clinician.
A neuropsychological test battery that includes both standardized and normalized tests and experimental methods to assess memory, attention, psychomotor speed and executive functions, will be applied at inclusion, after treatment and at follow up, as listed in Table 1. The neuropsychological assessment will consist of standardized tests measuring cognitive functioning within verbal and visual memory with California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II) Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) and Digit span from Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Revised (WAIS-R), executive functioning with Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), and test from the Delis –Kaplan Executive Function System (D-kefs): Color-Word Interference Test (CWIFT), Verbal fluency (VF), Tower, Trailmaking test (TMT), attention measured with Conners' Continuous Performance Test-II (CPT), Digit symbol from WAIS-R and motor speed (Pegboard), in addition to general levels of intellectual ability Wechsler's Abbreviated Scales of Intelligence (WASI). Autobiographical memory will be assessed by using the Autobiographical Memory Interview-Short Form (AMI-SF).
Placement of electrodes on the non-dominant side (unilateral stimulation) is important to reduce cognitive impairment as a side effect of ECT treatment [65,73]. Traditionally, hemispheric dominance is evaluated by handedness measures, which however is a crude measurement when it comes to subtle differences in function between the cerebral hemispheres. It is therefore suggested to use a neuropsychological task, dichotic listening, which has been shown to be comparable in sensitivity to reveal functional differences between the hemispheres to the Wada test [74,75]. We will apply the Bergen dichotic listening test both as a measure of language dominance and as an effect parameter, i.e. as a measure of cognitive control since it has been shown that varying instructions about attention focus while performing the dichotic listening task reveals capacity for cognitive control . A recent development makes it possible to deliver the test bedside, by use of an application on a hand held device; iDichotic, Bergen fMRI group . The prediction is that treatment response correlates with improved results for the instruction condition that requires highest cognitive control.
Imaging will be performed at 4 time points: ~1-2 hours before and ~1-2 hours after ECT, ~ 7-14 days after ended treatment and at follow-up 6 months after ended treatment. The same MRI protocol will be applied at each time point (Figure 1).
Initial imaging will be performed on a 3T GE Signa HDxt system with 8 channel head coil, but most of the subjects will be scanned on a 3T Discovery MR750 system with 32 channel head coil. The protocol (details specified for the MR750 system) includes a T1-weighted fast spoiled gradient echo, FSPGR (TE/TR = 2.9/6.7 ms; TI = 600 ms, flip angel = 8°; FOV = 25.6 cm; voxel size = 1.0 × 1.0 × 1.0 mm3, acquisition time = 10:32 min.); a T2-weighted CUBE FLAIR sequence (TE/TR = 129/6000 ms; TI = 1855 ms; FOV = 25.6 cm; voxel size = 1.0 × 1.0 × 1.0 mm3, acquisition time = 08:51 min.); for RSI, a single-shot pulsed-field gradient spin-echo EPI sequence (TE/TR = 85/7000 ms; FOV = 24 cm, matrix = 96 × 96 × 55 with 4 b-values (b = 0, 500, 1000 and 4000 s/mm2 and 6, 6 and 15 unique directions for the nonzero b-values, respectively), acquisition time = 3:30 min.); for SWI a gradient recalled echo 3D Ax SWAN sequence (TE/TR, 23/37 ms; slice thickness 2 mm; acquisition time 3:30 min.). For 1H-MRS, both single-voxel point-resolved spectroscopy, SV PRESS, and a spectral editing method, MEGA-PRESS , will be used. The SV-PRESS (TR = 1500 ms, TE = 35, 128 scans; acquisition time = 3:48 min.) voxel will measure 2 × 2 × 2 cm3 and the placement alternate between right and left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) for each new patient. For MEGA-PRESS (TR = 1500 ms, TE = 68 ms, 192 scans, acquisition time = 10:06 min.) the voxel will measure 3 × 3 × 3 cm3 and cross the mid-line, covering both right and left ACC in every patient.
Structural data will be analyzed using FreeSurfer and Quarc . In a preprocessing step, structural images will be corrected for distortions caused by gradient non-linearity , diffusion weighted (DW) images will be corrected for motion, eddy currents and magnetic susceptibility artifacts [82,83] and the DW volume will be co-registered to the structural volumes. SWI data will be analyzed using Statistical Parametrical Mapping (SPM8/SPM12) analysis software package (Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology) running under MATLAB (Mathworks). RSI data will be analyzed using custom made software and processing and/or with FSL [84,85] and MRS data by using LCModel Software . SPSS will be used for statistical analyses.
Analysis methods and software may change if newer versions or other software is found to be more suitable than the above mentioned.
We will analyze multiple peripheral blood biomarkers relevant for the hypotheses outlined in the introduction. Due to the constant progress in the field, the decision on the specific markers to analyze and how to perform the analysis should not be taken too early. However, candidate markers include neurotrophic factors (e.g. BDNF), pro-inflammatory cytokines, neurotransmitter related amino acids, monoamines and related metabolites (e.g. GABA, glutamate, kynurenines, neopterin) and S100B (a marker of damage to the blood-brain barrier). Measurements of peripheral biomarker levels will be supplemented by analyses of DNA variants and peripheral blood mRNA levels (array based genome wide DNA genotyping, methylation profiling of target genes and real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction mRNA measurements). Blood samples (up to 30 ml) will be collected and stored as whole blood, serum and on an RNA stabilization medium at -80°C for later analysis. A dedicated research biobank "Imaging and Depression - ImDep" has been generated for the project using existing infrastructure (storage, alarm and registration) established in a previous project.
Only one study has measured GABA changes after ECT by MRS in humans, and found an increase from 0.85 (SD = 0.34) to 1.51 (SD = 048) mmol/kg brain tissue, N = 8 . Using a mean difference of 0.6 and a SD of 0.5, α = 0.05 and power of 0.8 the total sample size needed would be 8 (calculated using G*Power 3.1.3, paired t-test, two-tailed).
For analysis of hippocampal volumes, data from Nordanskog et al. were used. For the right hippocampus the mean difference in volumes after a course of ECT was 133 μL with a SD of 123 μL, similar analysis as above indicates that the sample size needs to be at least 9.
We found no studies on SWI and DWI imaging that could be used to estimate power of the suggested study protocol. Based on the analysis above, a total of 10 patients is a minimum. Due to wide inclusion criteria, expected heterogeneity of the sample population and in order to increase the robustness we intend to include 40 patients.
The study is based on written informed consent. Patients will receive standard ECT treatment. The study, and the specific Biobank, are approved by the Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics, REC South East, Norway.
Participation in the project will for the patients include MRI scans (4 time points) and blood samples (5 time points) as well as neuropsychological testing (3 time points) that are not part of the standard treatment regimen. For controls1 (AF-ECV) participation will include MRI (2 time points) and blood samples (2 time points) that is not part of the standard clinical treatment. For controls2 participation will require MRI scans (4 time points) and blood samples (5 time points) as well as neuropsychological testing (3 time points). Controls2 will be economically compensated for participating.
There are no known adverse effects related to MRI scanning when standard safety procedures are followed. However, scanners are noisy and scans will last up to one hour. Blood samples will require venous puncture. A neuroradiologist will screen the first MRI scan for each participant. In the case of incidental findings of relevant pathology, the participant will be offered referral to medical consultation.
As health care professionals we are obliged to ensure that our treatments are well documented and safe. Thorough investigations of ECT effects will improve patients' feeling of safety and possibly reduce stigmata related to the condition. Depression is a common disorder with substantial costs for individuals, employers, and health and welfare systems. New knowledge about the pathophysiology of major depression as well as mechanisms of action and possible harmful effects of ECT is crucial and may lead to new prospects for future treatments.
By use of multimodal neuroradiological imaging as well as multidisciplinary investigations spanning from genes to behavior, the study aims at increasing knowledge about what ECT does to the brain, such as: a) Does ECT affect microvascular integrity? b) How are hippocampal volumes related to ECT parameters and treatment effects? c) Does GABA-levels increase after ECT?
Several of the measures have to our knowledge never before been applied in this setting, e.g. RSI, SWI, Dichotic listening, and a control group that receives a similar anesthesia and electrical stimulation to the chest. Strengths of the study are comprehensive investigations and a moderately large sample size. Potential weaknesses are the rather broad inclusion criteria and expected heterogeneity in the patients' use of medications, both of which may increase the variance in study measures. However, ECT is an unspecific treatment and although we expect that its effects on the brain and the human physiology should be largely independent of diagnosis, medication use and age, it will be interesting to see how ECT-induced changes relate to treatment effects and clinical parameters.
Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics, REC South East ID: 2013/1032 ECT and Neuroradiology. Approved first in June 2013, last revision December 2014.
This study is supported by Western Norway Regional Health Authority, Haukeland University Hospital and the University of Bergen, Norway.
Anders M. Dale is a Founder of and holds equity in CorTechs Labs, Inc, and serves on its Scientific Advisory Board. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), and receives funding through research agreements with General Electric Healthcare (GEHC) and Medtronic, Inc. The terms of these arrangements have been reviewed and approved by the University of California, San Diego in accordance with its conflict of interest policies. The other authors declare that they have no competing interests.
LO and UK drafted the manuscript. LO conceived of the study and coordinated the work. UK, LE, RG, PIH, OAA, JH, AMD, ÅH, KH and KJO contributed to the background and/or design of the study. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript. |
Jennifer Steinhauer and Stephanie Strom reported in today's New York Times that, "The Senate will grapple this week with perhaps the most contentious issue in the food industry: whether the government should require mandatory labeling on foods containing genetically engineered ingredients.
"On Wednesday, the Senate is set to vote on a measure that would create voluntary national standards for labeling food with genetically modified ingredients. The bill would prevent states from mandating labels just before Vermont was set to become the first in the nation to impose such requirements.
The Times article noted that, "This month, for example, the Corn Refiners Association released a study concluding that nationwide labeling — and a consequent shift in ingredients by food companies seeking to avoid the labels' stigma — would raise the average family's grocery bill by more than $1,000 a year.
The article added that, "A Stabenow aide said the fundraiser had been in the works for months and was not timed to coincide with action on the Republican-authored bill. The legislation, however, has been a topic of heated debate in Washington and the agricultural industry for months, and Stabenow played a key role in negotiations on the issue.
"On Tuesday, Stabenow sided with organic food companies and came out against the bill, authored by Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). Opponents argue the legislation fails consumers by preventing states from requiring labels on food products that contain genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Stabenow's opposition is a serious blow to the bill's chances of clearing a Democratic filibuster.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) (full transcript)- "We are where we are because the Vermont law is not written in a way that merely impacts the citizens of Vermont. It is astonishing to hear the misleading claim that the Vermont law is about the right to know. If the Vermont law is about the right to know, why is it that the law exempts so many products? |
A new version of an app allows meeting attendees to name and shame groups that don't show diversity in their panels. Also: a comprehensive look at the health of the internet.
Are you tired of seeing all-male panels?
Gina Glantz, a longtime Democratic strategist and founder of GenderAvenger, certainly is.
"Avenger's mission has been to help amplify the voices of people who witness an all-male event and want [to] draw attention to—and hopefully convince the organization to correct—the imbalance," writes Kristen Bellstrom in a recent piece for Fortune.
To help with this, the nonprofit has created an app called GA Tally, which allows users to measure the gender and ethnic breakdown of a panel and account for how long each person talks. "The app turns the information into a simple graphic that can be shared (along with any appropriate hashtag) on social media," writes Bellstrom.
GenderAvenger also gives a "GA Stamp of Approval" to panels or groups that they believe are getting it right.
Is the internet healthy? That's the central question being answered in a new report from Mozilla.
"Working with researchers, digital rights activists, Mozilla fellows and our community, we tell a collaborative story of how the internet is––and isn't––healthy from a human perspective," states the report's introduction.
The report delves into issues, including who controls the internet, how open it is, safety, and web literacy.
Taking a look at the safety section, you'll find insights and analysis on ransomware, passwords, unwarranted surveillance, and the vulnerability of the internet of things.
Are you looking for more millennials to join your board? Know Your Own Bone shares compelling reasons for why you should.
Believe it or not, there's a museum out there devoted to the selfie. BizBash says there is a lot event pros can learn from it when it comes to creating photo ops at your next meeting.
Sometimes the devil really is in the details. Engaging Volunteers reveals how a change in one organization's nametags made volunteers happier. |
Wander trough the siberian taiga.
Help building trails in the north of Lake Baikal. Take part on of three workcamps in 2015.
We offer a wide selection of russian and siberian maps.
Help building hiking trails around lake Baikal and work together with volunteers from all over the world.
© 2014 Baikalplan e.V. All rights reserved. |
One of the most prominent contemporary artists today, William Kentridge is best known for his animated films based on charcoal drawings. He also works in prints, books, collage, sculpture and the performing arts. His work has been widely exhibited, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Musée du Louvre (Paris); Whitechapel Gallery (London); the Reina Sofia museum (Madrid); and the Kunstmuseum (Basel). He has participated a number of times in Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale. His awards and honours include honorary doctorates from several universities including Yale and University of London; the Kyoto Prize (2010); the Princesa de Asturias Award for the arts (2017); the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize (2018); and the Praemium Imperiale award (2019). He presented the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 2012, and has been an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy in London since 2015.
Select Non-Fiction from the Africa List
Accounts and Drawings from Underground
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE and ROSALIND C. MORRIS
That Which Is Not Drawn |
I've several versions of this blog. The task of writing it was at first daunting; not knowing where to start or how to keep from boring people with my workaday take on running. I'm no athlete. I'm certainly not fast. I've not achieved any mean feats of distance (yet). I even find it difficult to get myself out of the door for more than one run a week.
As such, I brainstormed to decide which topic was least asinine. Injuries? Boring. Nutrition? Boring. Form? Boring.
Full disclosure. I think those things: injury prevention, nutrition and form, are dead important. On a professional level I do know about them all and I'm very happy to discuss them with anyone interested, but a generic piece about how to perfect them is not riveting stuff.
I'm new here at Flow; what do I want people to know about me so that they will feel like they've had an insight before they come to me for help with their own corporeal complaints? Well. I suppose I'd just like you, the reader, to know this: I find it just as hard as you do. Not only the very task of firing up my cardiovascular and respiratory systems and begging them to hold out while I plod the streets. All of it. Feel like you might be doing it wrong? Me too! Worried you'll end up in a heap on the ground? Me too! Don't much feel like running today (tea and biscuits sounds like a more beneficial use of time)? Me. Too.
I do have some advice. It goes some way to help overcome most all the challenges that try their damnedest to stop us getting out there. Here it is: Be part of a community. This doesn't mean you have to join a running group. Running groups are amazing havens full of wisdom, experience, kinship, friendly competition and motivation but that doesn't mean you need one. Some people prefer to run alone and that's okay. But join an online community. Read blogs. Invite friends to use the same app to track their runs so you can see each other's hard work. Talk to your friendly running-enthusiast Osteopath. However you do it, immersing yourself in a community is inspirational and guaranteed make you feel like getting out there. Seeing my friends hit milestones never fails to make me think "I can do that!" because I know their challenges are just like my own.
Along with inspiration, a valuable thing that comes from community is wisdom. I'm not saying that every piece of advice you get will be good advice, and as such always take it with a pinch of salt. Yet, some of the most valuable advice I've ever been given has been completely non-technical, easy-peasy stuff mentioned mid-run by friends. I have a tactic for keeping my training fairly consistent. Fairly is a significant word as I gladly admit to still finding it difficult to execute every run I put in my diary, but my tactic is this: book races. Don't ever be frightened by the word "RACE". It's just a run with lots of strangers. In fact, I have twice finished a race so late they packed up the finish line as I crossed it. I'm not winning anything unless they're handing out wooden spoons.
During one race, a gentleman who must have been 40 years my senior and whose ankles were swollen and barely moving as he ran, shuffled up behind me and kindly let me know that if I didn't pick up my pace I'd finish last since he would overtake me. We ran the rest together so it was a good finish to a hard race. In another, a lady who again appeared a less likely runner than even myself, ran with me for the last mile or so in solidarity only to sprint finish and leave me trailing in her dust. Nevertheless, having a date in the diary and knowing in advance the distance I need to run on that day keeps me working towards it, and having a nice collection of medals at home is a cheerful reminder of the good, the bad, the ugly and the momentous! If you can convince people in your running community to join you at a race; even better. Having the same goal is a great way to share training, whether that is sharing actual runs or just anecdotes.
Races don't need to be flashy or time-consuming either. A quick 5k or 10k not too far from home can see you home before lunch time if you so wish. To give you some information about my current goal and the races I'm working towards, I need only utter two words. London Marathon. Frightening stuff. Prior to writing this, the longest race I had participated in was a 10 miler. I've another of those in a week, followed shortly thereafter by a fairly brutal half marathon and then the big one.
So far my training plan has not exactly been sleek. I'm working a lot and as a result, my short runs often comprise my bolting up and down the nearest hill for half an hour whenever I find the time. My long run this week will be 9 miles, then it's the 10 mile race next week. I've tried to stick to training plans, both generic ones and personalised ones and I will commend anyone else who can work with them but for me they are just a constant reminder that I've missed a run or I couldn't manage to do the session the way it was planned. They get me down about running and make it feel like a drag. Running shouldn't feel like an obligation. The joy you feel when you're moving along at speed and some physiological miracle has made sure you don't feel like a lorry going uphill in first gear. That should be the reason you're out there. Having said that, even when you do feel like a lorry grumbling uphill in first gear, you still pat yourself on the back when you get home and tuck into your tea and biscuits knowing you worked for them.
So my training plan is experimental, my motivation is sometimes lacking and my schedule is jam-packed. On top of that I'm not exactly built for running speed or distance. So when I run this marathon, I hope you'll realise you could probably do it too.
Liz works at Flow Tunbridge Wells offering osteopathy, sports massage, pregnancy massage and general running and foodie banter on a Thursday and Saturday morning. She is in our Groombridge practice on Wednesday afternoons and evenings. Liz is a Registered Osteopath and is also qualified in Sports Massage, Pregnancy Massage as well as dry needling. She is passionate in helping people of all ages back to health. Liz charges £45 per session for osteopathy. Your first session being up to one hour and subsequent sessions half an hour. Sports and Pregnancy massage are £45 for half an hour or £60 for three quarters of an hour.
Call 01892 671764 or click this link.
Or click here to read more about osteopathy. |
The hi-low skirt trend appeared this season with a bang, and I'm kind of liking it, a lot. It is a great way to show off some leg while still maintaining that conservative vibe. The trend looks good in both skirts and dresses. If you are trying this out for the first time, and not sure if you can pull it off, some of the items below are under ten dollars! Check it out.
These skirts can be found at Target for under ten dollars! Loving both options. Click here to purchase.
Have you purchased any hi-low skirts/dresses this season? |
Easypaisa Introduces First Ever Money Transfer Facility Through Biometric Verification Devices
Press ReleaseLast Updated: Jul 29, 2016
Easypaisa, Pakistan's leading Mobile Financial Service provider, has introduced the first ever Biometric Money Transfer facility on the extensive network of Easypaisa retailers across Pakistan.
Customers using Mobile Financial Services had frequently requested for higher limits that catered to their financial needs. Before the launch of biometric money transfer service, customers could send or receive up to PKR 15,000 in a month from Easypaisa retailers. Now, using biometric services, customers can avail advanced limits of up to PKR 50,000 and transfer higher amounts. Customers who are not comfortable with sharing their CNIC copies, and thus do not use Mobile Financial Services, will now be able to trust and use the services easily.
With the addition of thumbprint, Easypaisa retailers ensure that the customer's CNIC is neither expired nor blocked by the government. Currently, more than 20,000 Easypaisa retailers are equipped and trained to facilitate its customers with biometric verification to transfer and receive funds, with more retailers being rapidly added.
Ali Riaz Chaudhry, President and CEO of Tameer Bank, said: "With a network of over 75,000 retailers across rural and urban areas, Easypaisa has been the most popular and successful over-the-counter (OTC) money transfer service crossing 650,000 transactions per day. Introducing biometric methods of identification further enhances transparency, safety and ease of the transaction."
Muhammad Yahya Khan, Head of Easypaisa, said:
"With Biometric verification as the strongest KYC available anywhere in the world, Easypaisa is ensuring real-time verification of the customers and using latest technology to support our valued customers. Easypaisa's higher money transfer limits will address growing segment of the market who want to send higher amounts hence increase customer's reach and trust, helping in tapping the true potential of branchless banking industry in Pakistan." |
A useful resource for Black Orc modeling and painting. I'll archive this thread.
Quite interesting, although they all seem quite similar. I think I like the crusher ones best.
This post was last modified: 08-03-2007 02:56 AM by balck ork. |
Margaret Carr1
Last Edited=28 Mar 2016
Margaret Carr was born in 1729 at Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 She was the daughter of Hugh Carr and Margaret Demaine.1 She was christened on 16 February 1729/30 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1
[S6265] Unknown compiler, compiler, "Wharfedale & Craven Genealogicial Study"; Ancestral File unknown repository, unknown repository address. Hereinafter cited as "Wharfedale & Craven Genealogicial Study."
[S6109] Unknown author, Bolton Abbey Parish Register (1689-1812). edited by A.P. Howes, M.A. (Rector of Bolton Abbey). 'Craven Herald' Office, High Street, Skipton (1895) (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date).
Mary Carr1
F, #537212, b. 1732, d. July 1733
Last Edited=9 Jul 2012
Mary Carr was born in 1732 at Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 She was the daughter of Hugh Carr and Margaret Demaine.1 She was christened on 5 April 1732 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 She died in July 1733 at Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 She was buried on 12 July 1733 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1
She was Daughter (Hugh Carr) Type: Burial Status.1 She was Hugh Carr & [.....] Type: Parentage between 1732 and 1733.1
Thomas Carr1
Thomas Carr was born in 1741 at Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 He was the son of Hugh Carr and Margaret Demaine.1 He was christened on 8 June 1741 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1
He was Hugh Carr & [.....] Type: Parentage in 1741.1
William Carr1
M, #537214, b. 1736, d. June 1739
William Carr was born in 1736 at Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 He was the son of Hugh Carr and Margaret Demaine.1 He was christened on 20 December 1736 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 He died in June 1739 at Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 He was buried on 7 June 1739 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1
He was Son (Hugh Carr) Type: Burial Status.1 He was Hugh Carr & [.....] Type: Parentage between 1736 and 1739.1
Jane Umpleby Carr1
Jane Umpleby Carr was born in 1813 at Summerscales, Beamsley, Addingham, Yorkshire, England.2,1 She was the daughter of John Carr and Elizabeth (Betty) Umpleby.1 She was christened on 20 March 1814 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 She married James Hodgson on 3 January 1843 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.3,1
She was 28 years (1842) Type: Reported age.1 Her married name became Hodgson.1 She and James Hodgson were Licence Type: Rites.1 She and James Hodgson were William Hodgson, Anne Carr Type: Witnesses.1 She and James Hodgson were James Hodgson (bach. - butcher) [of Manchester, Lancashire] & Jane Umpleby Carr (spnr.) of Storiths Type: Partners.1 She was John Carr (farmer) & Elizabeth Type: Parentage in 1814.1
Child of Jane Umpleby Carr and James Hodgson
Elizabeth Carr Hodgson+1 b. 1844, d. 3 Jan 1926
[S6188] Unknown author, Bolton Abbey Parish Register (Baptisms 1837-1981). transcribed by Gerald Lawson. (WFHG) (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date).
[S6201] Unknown author, Bolton Abbey Parish Register (Marriages 1837-1929). transcribed by Derek & Susan Halliday; edited by Gerald Lawson. [WFHG] (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date).
James Hodgson1
James Hodgson was born in 1816 at Manchester, Lancashire, England.2,1 He married Jane Umpleby Carr, daughter of John Carr and Elizabeth (Betty) Umpleby, on 3 January 1843 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1
He was 26 years (1842) Type: Reported age.1 He was Butcher (1842.)1 He and Jane Umpleby Carr were William Hodgson, Anne Carr Type: Witnesses.1 He and Jane Umpleby Carr were Licence Type: Rites.1 He and Jane Umpleby Carr were James Hodgson (bach. - butcher) [of Manchester, Lancashire] & Jane Umpleby Carr (spnr.) of Storiths Type: Partners.1 He was John Hodgson & [.....] Type: Parentage in 1842.1
Child of James Hodgson and Jane Umpleby Carr
Priscilla Hudson1
F, #537217, b. 1801, d. 23 June 1872
Priscilla Hudson was born in 1801 at Appleby, Westmorland, England.2,1 She married William Carr, son of John Carr and Ann (Nancy) Atkinson, on 27 May 1849 at Collegiate Cathedral Church of St. Mary, St. Denys & St. George, Manchester, Lancashire, England.3,1 She died on 23 June 1872 at Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.4,1 She was buried in June 1872 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.4,1
She and William Carr were William Carr & Priscilla Hudson Type: Partners.1 She was Widow (William Carr) Type: Burial Status.1 She was 49 years (1851), 71 years Type: Reported age.1 Memorial Inscription Transcript:
William Carr, of Bolton Abbey, who died August 31st 1855, aged 59 years.
Also of Priscilla, relict of the above named William Carr, who died June 23rd 1872 aged 71 Years.
[Source: Churchyard of the Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton - (WFHG)]1 Her married name became Carr.1 She lived in 1851 at Draughton, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.1
[S6105] Unknown author, UK Census Returns. Public Records Office. Scanned Documents - Online (1841-1911) [www.ancestry.co.uk] (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date), (1891).
[S463] Unknown subject, International Genealogical Index (IGI) (unknown repository address: unknown repository, 1969-).
[S6152] Unknown author, Memorial Inscriptions (Bolton Priory). edited by John Hartley. [WFHG] (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date).
Ann Chadwick1
F, #537218, b. 1808, d. 1868
Ann Chadwick was born in 1808 at Leeds, Yorkshire, England.2,1 She married Anthony Demaine, son of William Demaine and Ann Lowcock, on 13 August 1834 at St. Peter's Church, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.3,1 She died in 1868.4,1
She was Assumed Type: Burial Status.1 She was 42 years (1851), 59 years Type: Reported age.1 Her married name became Demaine.1 She and Anthony Demaine were Anthony Demain & Anne Chadwick Type: Partners.1 She lived in 1851 at 4 Spenceley Street, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1
Children of Ann Chadwick and Anthony Demaine
Benjamin Demaine+1 b. 1836, d. 1905
Mary Demaine1 b. 1838
William Demaine1 b. 1840
[S6104] Unknown author, General Register Office Index (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date), 1868-3q-Leeds-9b-393.
Anthony Demaine1
M, #537219, b. 19 December 1805, d. 1876
Anthony Demaine was born on 19 December 1805 at The Scale, Barden, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 He was the son of William Demaine and Ann Lowcock.1 He was christened on 5 January 1806 at Priory Church, Bolton Abbey, Skipton, Yorkshire, England.2,1 He married Ann Chadwick on 13 August 1834 at St. Peter's Church, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.3,1 He died in 1876.4,1
He was Butcher (1851/71.)1 He was 45 years (1851), 65 years (1871), 70 years Type: Reported age.1 He and Ann Chadwick were Anthony Demain & Anne Chadwick Type: Partners.1 He was William Demaine (farmer) & Anne Lowcock Type: Parentage in 1806.1 He lived in 1851 at 4 Spenceley Street, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1 He lived in 1871 at 97/98 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1
Children of Anthony Demaine and Ann Chadwick
Benjamin Demaine1
M, #537220, b. 1836, d. 1905
Benjamin Demaine was born in 1836 at Leeds, Yorkshire, England.2,1 He was the son of Anthony Demaine and Ann Chadwick.1 He was christened on 30 October 1836 at St. Mark's Church, Woodhouse, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.3,1 He married Sarah Norfolk in June 1864.4,1 He died in 1905.5,1
He was Butcher (1871/81/91/1901.)1 He was 14 years (1851), 34 years (1871), 44 years (1881), 64 years (1901), 68 years Type: Reported age.1 He and Sarah Norfolk were Benjamin Demaine & Sarah Norfolk Type: Partners.1 He was Anthony Demaine & Anne Type: Parentage in 1836.1 He lived in 1851 at 4 Spenceley Street, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1 He lived in 1871 at 97/98 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1 He lived in 1881 at 18 Cemetery Place, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1 He lived in 1891 at 13 Reservoir Street, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1 He lived in 1901 at 30 Reservoir Street, Leeds, Yorkshire, England.1
Children of Benjamin Demaine and Sarah Norfolk
Joseph Demaine+1 b. 1865
Sarah Ann Demaine+1 b. 1869
[S6105] Unknown author, UK Census Returns. Public Records Office. Scanned Documents - Online (1841-1911) [www.ancestry.co.uk] (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date), (1851/71/81/91/1901).
[S6104] Unknown author, General Register Office Index (n.p.: n.pub., unknown publish date), 1864-2q-Great Ouseburn-9a-137.
[S6104] Unknown author, General Register Office Index, 1905-3q-Leeds-9b-312. |
An ordinary person might not think that Ethiopia and Myanmar have anything in common, but an analysis of their latest leadership changes shows that these two Chinese Silk Road partners actually share five structural vulnerabilities with one another, and identifying these points of pressure could reveal some crucial insight about the US' latest Hybrid War plans in the New Cold War.
The past month has seen the formal leaders of Ethiopia and Myanmar resign from their posts, with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn stepping down at the end of February and President Htin Kyaw doing so in the middle of this week, respectively. On the surface, these two events on opposite ends of the Afro-"Indian" Ocean appear to have nothing to do with one another, nor would an ordinary person think that these countries have anything in common whatsoever, but these peaceful "regime changes" actually reveal five structural vulnerabilities afflicting both Ethiopia and Myanmar. Identifying these points of pressure is more than just an academic exercise, however, since it could provide some crucial insight into the US' latest Hybrid War strategies that it's employing against these two Chinese Silk Road partners in the latest stage of the New Cold War.
Ethiopia watchers know that the country's Prime Minister is mostly a figurehead for the powerful Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, modelled off of the Chinese Communist Party) that rules the country behind the scenes, with the real decision-making competencies of the state reportedly resting in the hands of the party's Tigrayan minority elite who are supposedly deeply entrenched in the military-security services.
Something similar can be said about the Myanmarese President, since he too is a symbolic leader who merely acts as a stand-in for powerful military interests, though it should be mentioned in the same vein that unelected "State Counsellor" Suu Kyi also wields disproportionate influence, though she too has lately come to be considered as more of a military instrument than the independent power center that she previously was thought to be in her own right.
There's speculation that Premier Desalegn resigned because of growing rifts within the EPRDF between its de-facto Tigrayan coalition leader and the front's Amhara & Oromo "junior" partners. While no such rumors have yet to arise in Myanmar, there have been clear signs that foreign forces endeavor to drive a wedge between the civilian government and its military backers, the stress of which might have contributed to President Htin Kyaw's recent resignation.
Ethiopia has been in an off-and-on state of Hybrid War unrest for nearly the past 18 months as its largest ethnic group of the Oromo violently agitated against the government on the pretext of defending their communal land rights from the state's "eminent domain" encroachment, and other disturbances that have since sprung up with the country's second-largest ethnic group of the Amhara and geographically expansive one of the Somalis are thought to have contributed to the aforementioned deep state divisions.
By the same token, Myanmar has been beset by Hybrid War violence in recent months as a result of "Rohingya" "rebel"-terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country's northwestern Rakhine State along the Bangladeshi border, with this sudden conflict prompting the military to decisively intervene and in turn trigger a flurry of international condemnation, some of which may have succeeded in pressuring members of the civilian government such as the president into distancing themselves from the former junta and resigning out of unstated protest over what happened.
Ethiopia is officially a federation but the manner in which it functions has given rise to accusations that it's really just a thinly disguised centralized state, with this claim being used as the basis (whether rightly or wrongly) for "justifying" the recent ethno-regional violence in the country that purports to be motivated by a desire to "reform" the system through "decentralization".
Myanmar, on the other hand, is a centralized state that's formally moving towards "federalization" per what's been called the "Panglong 2.0"or "21st-century Panglong" process in honor of its pre-independence powwow that previously decentralized the country prior to the 1962 military coup, and the "Rohingya" issue is yet another ethno-regional conflict that adds credence to the argument that "federalization" is the only sustainable "political solution" to Myanmar's many problems.
The Chinese-built Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway (DAAR) could easily be called "Africa's CPEC" because of its strategic importance to the People's Republic, which among other things connects the Asian Great Power to its top continental partner that also doubles as one of the world's fastest-growing economies.
Myanmar, for its part, hosts the Chinese-built port of Kyaukphyu which is expected to function as the terminal point for a forthcoming "China-Myanmar Economic Corridor" (CMEC) that will run parallel to the two oil and gas pipelines that already transit the country en route to Yunnan Province.
The common thread connecting these five structural vulnerabilities together in each of these two countries and between them is that the US can exploit them individually or altogether in order to contribute to the Hybrid War "containment" of China. The external aggravation of preexisting identity conflicts within each of these two geostrategic transit states along the New Silk Road is comparatively easy for the US to pull off and cost-effectively pays for itself many times over if it succeeds in catalyzing a situation of "scenario superiority" whereby manufactured crises become "self-sustaining".
Ethiopia and Myanmar are both "National Democracies", though this relatively more stable form of government has nevertheless been weaponized by foreign forces in order to tear apart their nation-states via "Identity Federalism" ("Bosnification"), all with the intent of creating a checkerboard of quasi-independent statelets through which the US can then exert influence along each country's crucial Silk Road corridors. The challenge that both countries face is in simultaneously managing their "grassroots" pressure and deep state divisions as they progressively "reform" their systems, taking care not to drag their heels in this regard but also not to move too fast either.
The latest leadership changes in Ethiopia and Myanmar indicate that there are serious problems behind the scenes in both states and that the US' Hybrid War campaigns have worked to the extent that they've begun to produce visible results in shaking up the state of affairs in both countries. China will need to assist its partners as needed if it's to ensure the strategic security of its Silk Road transit routes and not surrender them to American proxy influence, but therein lays the danger because Beijing will also have to avoid falling into the US' "mission creep" trap as it navigates the latest turns in the New Cold War. |
Q: How to get a notification in Android when a built-in app finishes loading I am trying to create a benchmarking app that launches a few apps and measures the load time. Starting a timer and launching an app (via intents) is the easy part. And, if I have source to the child app, I can either have it record the time and pass that back, or I can just have it kill itself completely at some point. But, how do I know when stock apps have finished loading? Or, how can I make them close automatically so that mine is brought to the foreground again to stop the timer? I know the source for stock apps is public, but I don't think it's practical for me to try to modify it. Or is it? I can't tie my benchmarking app to a specific version of Android.
Specifically, I'm interested in measuring load times for the browser, youtube, and mail.
I've looked at using the ActivityManager to get info about running apps, but I think in that case I would have to poll in the background, and I've read that ActivityManager info is not necessarily always up-to-date, anyway.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
A: I decided to just modify the source and build a version of my app for each version of Android/processor. I won't have to target each device specifically, just processor families (Atom/armV7/etc.)
Getting and compiling Android source is easy
Building a custom version of a stock AOSP app is also not that bad
From there, it's just a matter of using intents to invoke activities and pass information.
|
UNION — Robert M. Linscott passed away suddenly at his home in Union on January 30, 2019.
Bob was born on May 24, 1935, in Washington, Maine, to Robert and Doris (Finn) Linscott. Bob was educated in Washington and graduated from Union High School in 1954.
He worked for many years at Boynton Chevrolet, Fuller Equipment and Fuller Cadillac. After retirement, he continued to work, driving trucks and mowing fields for Allen's Blueberries in Union.
Bob married Janice Mae Gorden on June 17, 1956, and made their home in Union. They had two sons, Milton and Rick.
Bob joined the Union Fire Department in 1957 and had faithfully served for 62 years. He was the 1996 Fireman of the year and had a pump truck dedicated in his honor in 2009. Bob was a Mason, and a lifetime member of the Knox County Firemen Association.
Bob was a gentle soul, with a quick smile and a heart of gold. He loved to hear a good story, and tell one or two of his own. He had a love of tractors and trucks, and never passed up an opportunity to drive one. He had a passion for John Deere, but would happily drive a tractor of any color.
He enjoyed cutting firewood with his son Rick and his brother Berkley. The past four winters, he has helped Rick in the woods, driving a skidder and pulling wood out to the lot. He loved his family dearly, and enjoyed spending time at the family cottage, looking at the lake and watching the kids swim.
Bob was a loved and respected member of his community, and will be missed by many. He was loved deeply by his family and friends.
He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Janice, son Milton and wife Pam of Fort Myers, FL; son Rick and his wife Kim of Washington; grandson Harrison and wife Catherine of Union; and grandson Ben and great-grandson Ethan of Cape Coral, FL,; brothers Mahlon and wife Barbara; Berkley and wife Nancy; and sister Marguerite, all of Washington.
Also sisters-in-law Joyce Hills and Lorna Hills of Union and Sally Gorden of Connecticut, nieces, nephews and extended family.
Visiting hours will be held Friday, February 1, from 5 to 7 p.m., and a funeral service will be held Saturday, February 2, 2019, at 2 p.m., both at Hall Funeral Home, 949 Main Street, in Waldoboro.
A reception will follow the service downstairs at the Union Town Office.
Donations may be made in Bob's name to the Union Fire Department, P.O. Box 186, Union, Maine 04862.
Condolences may be shared at www.hallfuneralhomes.com. |
Banks Jack Up Treasury Fees
List prices for corporate account and transaction services rose 3.6% on average in 2009, despite the plunge in inflation in 2008.
Vincent RyanDecember 7, 2009
In a year when corporate treasury departments are straining to conserve cash, more of that money may be going to pay banks — not for credit, but for cash-management services such as wire transfer, lockbox, account reconciliation, and check and ACH handling.
That's because banks introduced larger-than-normal price hikes for cash-management services in 2009, according to the latest edition of The Blue Book of Bank Prices, released this fall by Phoenix-Hecht, a financial-services research firm.
The list prices of 49% of treasury products increased more than 3%, with 22% of service fees rising more than 6%, according to the account-analysis statements Phoenix-Hecht collected from corporate banking customers last April. The highest one-year increases occurred in account-reconciliation and lockbox services, but many transaction fees also rose. For example, list prices on ledger overdrafts rose 8.4%, to $41; those on internal automated wire transfers climbed 5.6%, to $4.94; and fees on intraday balance reporting rose 5%, to $61.67.
Although it's not unusual for treasury-management fees to rise year-over-year, they usually track the previous year's movement in the Consumer Price Index. Not so for 2009. While CPI growth in 2008 was nearly flat at 0.1%, banks raised service fees an average of 3.6% this year, says Phoenix-Hecht. "Banks appeared to have completely ignored inflation as a price determinant for 2009," the report says.
"The banks did it because they could," observes David Bochnovic, an executive vice president of Phoenix-Hecht. "They needed any kind of earnings they could get."
The only good news for treasurers: banks offered discounts more often in 2009, based on volume and how much they valued the customer relationship. Discounting frequency rose to 43%, after declining in 2007 and 2008. The average depth of discounts, however, remained largely unchanged, at 37%.
The higher fees the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is assessing banks, and the additional cost of the Transaction Account Guarantee Program — which provides FDIC insurance on noninterest-bearing accounts of more than $250,000 — are also causing banking costs to rise. Banks passed on insurance-related costs of 10 to 33 basis points, based on corporate customers' ledger balances, in the first quarter of 2009. FDIC premiums are risk-based and change quarterly.
"FDIC/TAGP assessments have become a major cost of doing business to the banks, and as these fees are passed to corporate customers, they have caused total account analysis charges to rise significantly in cases where the company has significant checking-account balances," says Phoenix-Hecht.
While the credit crunch provided banks an opportunity to charge more for services, industry consolidation and the failure of 149 thrifts and banks in the past two years could give them even more pricing power. The top five banks already command more than 60% of the treasury-management revenues from companies with annual sales greater than $40 million, says Phoenix-Hecht. "Only competition for market share among the largest and the next tier of banks for companies with the highest credit ratings likely kept the services increases in check," concludes the report.
More in Cash Management
Why APIs are the Future of Business-to-Bank Connections
Treasurers and CFOs are pushing banks for technology that enables real-time balances and payments.
Corporate Cash Finally Finds Some Yield
Balance sheet cash can earn income while the Fed is still hiking interest rates.
By Vincent Ryan | October 11, 2022
How CFOs Should Gauge Risk Versus Reward in Investments
Executives are feeling the burn of inflation in their cash reserves. Can conservative investing preserve the value of capital?
By Adam Zaki | October 3, 2022 |
Alien Vs. Predator (2004)
Bil's rating (out of 5): BB.5
USA/Germany/Czech Republic/United Kingdom, 2004. Twentieth Century Fox, Davis Entertainment, Brandywine Productions, Lonlink Productions, Stillking Films, Kut Productions, Studio Babelsberg, Inside Track Films. Screen story by Paul W.S. Anderson, Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson, based on characters created by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Jim Thomas, John Thomas. Cinematography by David Johnson. Produced by Gordon Carroll, John Davis, David Giler, Walter Hill. Music by Harald Kloser. Production Design by Richard Bridgland. Costume Design by Magali Guidasci. Film Editing by Alexander Berner.
Silly action film attempts to bridge the gap between two franchises but is really just an obvious excuse to make money. An expedition team is taken to Antarctica to investigate the appearance of a building structure that has been found deep beneath the ground. What they unearth is a breeding ground of the nasty alien creatures that used to piss Sigourney Weaver off so much. Trouble is, they're the enemy of the alien race that used to piss off Arnold Schwarzenegger, and our human survivors are trapped inside an ancient maze while the two super creatures battle it out.
The visual effects are pristine, but the story starts out cliched and goes into a downward spiral very quickly. A shame, because both the creatures are still so superbly designed and even downright frightening at points. The backstory is interesting (the film takes place before the Alien movies so you get a lot of insight into what would happen later), but the playing out of it is cheap and unimaginative. Cast members Raoul Bova, Sanaa Lathan and others just look lost in the mess.
Posted in 2004, BB.5Tagged Adrian Bouchet, Agathe de La Boulaye, Alexander Berner, Andy Lucas, Brandywine Productions, Carsten Norgaard, Carsten Voigt, Colin Salmon, Czech Republic, Dan O'Bannon, David Giler, David Johnson, Davis Entertainment, Eoin McCarthy, Ewen Bremner, Germany, Glenn Conroy, Gordon Carroll, Harald Kloser, Ian Whyte, Inside Track Films, Jan Pavel Filipensky, Jim Thomas, John Davis, John Thomas, Joseph Rye, Karima Adebibe, Kieran Bew, Kut Productions, Lance Henriksen, Liz May Brice, Lonlink Productions, Magali Guidasci, Paul W.S. Anderson, Pavel Bezdek, Petr Jákl, Raoul Bova, Richard Bridgland, Ronald Shusett, Sam Troughton, Sanaa Lathan, Stillking Films, Studio Babelsberg, Tom Woodruff Jr., Tommy Flanagan, Twentieth Century Fox, United Kingdom, Walter HillBy BALeave a comment
← Logan's Run (1976)
Meet The Robinsons (2007) → |
Santucci Associates Inc.
Santucci Associates started business in 1959 as a nut and dried fruit broker, and formed the Specialty Food division in 1964. It introduced specialty foods and confectionery products to department stores such as Wanamakers, Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbels, Hutzler's, Hoschild Kohn's, Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoades, along with German delis, cheese/gourmet shops, gift shops and upscale independent grocers. As times changed, and the department stores faded away, Santucci Associates began focusing on grocery chains through Specialty Food Distributors.
"Today, it is primarily supermarkets through distributors with most of the old department stores and German delis gone," Jerry Santucci says.
Santucci Associates is a food brokerage house. "We are the manufacturers' representatives," Vice President Stephen DeLeo explains. "We are basically a salesforce for hire. We contract with different vendors who we represent and sell their product within a defined geography or by account."
DeLeo describes it as an exciting business with many product offerings. "You have to have a passion for fine food and specialty natural, organic, ethnic and Kosher varieties," He says. This includes dried fruit, nuts, cookies and crackers, preserves, coffee, tea, specialty sauces, pasta, spices, cereals, juices, snacks and cocktail mixes, among other products.
Specialty foods are fast-moving product categories with trends quickly changing. Santucci Associates was among the first to help introduce balsamic vinegar to the U.S. food market. "Now, it's found everywhere," Jerry Santucci says. "We also brokered Extra Virgin Olive Oil when no one knew what that was. Many of the lines we represent have become category leaders." These include Twinings Tea, Walkers Shortbread, Colavita Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Rao's Pasta Sauce, Near East Rice Pilaf and Cous Cous, Maille Mustard, Bonne Maman Preserves, Kitchen Basics Soup Stocks and Mariani Dried Fruit Snacks."
"Everything is always changing in this business," notes Steve Santucci, Vice President. "Demographics, lifestyles and consumers are changing so we stay flexible. People are eating fewer big meals and snacking more." This trend bodes well for Santucci Associates.
"In fact, snack items, in particular, healthy snack items, are a huge growth area in the food industry.
Many Moving Parts
"We concentrate on product, innovation, quality, excitement and market fit," DeLeo explains. "Our formula is simple: service. We present our products to the Specialty Food Distributors and also to the trade they cover, providing retail coverage such as setting stores, obtaining off-shelf displays, working out promotions, educating store personnel and managing product demonstrations." Jerry Santucci adds… "And at times, we have been known to unload trucks."
Steve DeLeo notes "Promotions have lots of moving pieces. It is our responsibility to walk these promotions through as simple or complex as they are and make sure they are effective," "It is a very important aspect of what we do. Manufacturers are spending dollars to promote their product. If these efforts do not end up at the store level, the dollars are wasted."
Santucci Associates excels at honest, transparent representation, he says. "We communicate very well with vendors, distributors and retailers to face any issues at hand and manage through them," DeLeo says. "Vendors, Distributors and Retailers form the triangle of who we deal with and all three are part of the formula of bringing innovative product to market."
Santucci Associates is a rapidly growing, family owned company that emphasizes long-term relationships for long-term success.
The company was founded in 1959 by the late Anthony Santucci, one of the founders of the National Association of Specialty Food Brokers. Jerry Santucci, Anthony's brother, is a two time past President of this Brokers Association and was initiated into the Specialty Foods Hall of Fame in January of 2015. Jerry Santucci joined the business in 1964, starting the Specialty Food Division. Steve Santucci, Anthony's son, got started in the business in 1975 and worked under his uncle Jerry Santucci, learning the specialty side of the business. He now manages the nut and dried fruit division, both retail and commodities. His son, Colin Santucci, entered the business in 2008, and is involved with both sides of the business. Stephen DeLeo joined the company over 29 years ago and spearheads the Specialty Food Division and is largely responsible for its growth.
"We are a family business and all our employees are considered a part of the family and a large part of our success is due to their hard work and dedication," Jerry Santucci says. We currently have 23 salaried associates and our salesmen are not on commission as we want them involved in all accounts. We take pride in providing a dedicated account manager at all our chain accounts and are not afraid to get our hands dirty. We all feel lucky to be a part of a business that we love. |
Canada leaves interest rates unchanged – as it happened
"Recent economic developments … have increased the uncertainty about potential outcomes," the central bank said in its unanimous decision to leave its benchmark interest rate at 1.75 per cent. The Bank of Canada has been in a tightening cycle since last year, when it followed the US Federal Reserve in lifting rates. But despite some slowdown in Canada, the economy has remained in growth mode, partly because of a lift in exports to the US. Analysts had said the central bank could raise rates again this month but the panel was split on the evidence the economy was strong enough for the hikes to continue.
The central bank said the economy appeared to be running close to capacity, a change from its assessment last month that capacity is "significantly" above its long-run average. The Bank of Canada, along with the Fed, has lifted its key overnight lending rate four times since the summer of 2017. By January of this year, the Bank of Canada raised rates by a total of 50 basis points, to 1.75 per cent. This time, Governor Stephen Poloz opted to hold rates in Canada and leave the door open for a hike in July. Poloz said he might raise rates again before the July rate meeting.
Read our full coverage of the announcement:
Categories entertainment Tags clinical trials, influenza, nobel prizes, politics, showtime, television
Attack on Syrian chemical weapons facility sparks concerns over sarin
New York Times: Racial profiling is still happening — but you can't tell from the data |
Outline of energy Energy Units Conservation of energy Energetics Energy transformation Energy condition Energy transition Energy level Energy system Mass Negative mass Mass–energy equivalence Power Thermodynamics Quantum thermodynamics Laws of thermodynamics Thermodynamic system Thermodynamic state Thermodynamic potential Thermodynamic free energy Irreversible process Thermal reservoir Heat transfer Heat capacity Volume (thermodynamics) Thermodynamic equilibrium Thermal equilibrium Thermodynamic temperature Isolated system Entropy Free entropy Entropic force Negentropy Work Exergy Enthalpy
Manufacturers often claim that their vertical axis turbine is better at extracting power from low speed winds. Unfortunately the laws of physics get in the way here: There is very little power in low speed winds. The blade of a vertical or horizontal type turbine is equally good at extracting that power, though with the vertical type the blades move at an angle to the wind where they do not extract energy for part of every rotation, adding drag and making a vertical type turbine just a little less efficient than a similar sized horizontal one. There is no advantage when it comes to low winds.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that supports the organizational procurement of renewable electricity by offering expert advice, technical support, tools and resources. This can help organizations lower the transaction costs of buying renewable power, reduce carbon footprint, and communicate its leadership to key stakeholders.[88]
In the mid-1990s, development of both, residential and commercial rooftop solar as well as utility-scale photovoltaic power stations, began to accelerate again due to supply issues with oil and natural gas, global warming concerns, and the improving economic position of PV relative to other energy technologies.[34] In the early 2000s, the adoption of feed-in tariffs—a policy mechanism, that gives renewables priority on the grid and defines a fixed price for the generated electricity—led to a high level of investment security and to a soaring number of PV deployments in Europe.
"What Changes Will Maine's New Government Bring to Your Life?" • Swept to sizable majorities in last week's elections, Maine's Democrats will be in full control of state government for the first time since 2010. They are likely to look for ways to address a number of pressing issues, one of which is climate change. [Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel]
Since having the Peimar Solar Panels installed and listening to the advice of the owner I have saved a lot of money on my electric bill. Texas Solar Integrated did the work as quickly and efficiently as promised. If the panels look dirty, since I live around cement plants, I just get my high pressure water hose and spray them off. Thank you to this company and the installers. The owner or another contractor in the office is always ready to answer your questions before and after installation.... read more
As local wind speed increases, so does the power output. Since this type of generator uses wind as 'fuel', it is important to choose an appropriate site for mounting the turbine. The ideal location for a wind generator is 20 feet above any surrounding object within a 250-foot radius. Wind speed increases with height above ground, so a taller mast can provide significant gains in energy production.
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) are a new type of geothermal power technologies that do not require natural convective hydrothermal resources. The vast majority of geothermal energy within drilling reach is in dry and non-porous rock.[161] EGS technologies "enhance" and/or create geothermal resources in this "hot dry rock (HDR)" through hydraulic stimulation. EGS and HDR technologies, such as hydrothermal geothermal, are expected to be baseload resources which produce power 24 hours a day like a fossil plant. Distinct from hydrothermal, HDR and EGS may be feasible anywhere in the world, depending on the economic limits of drill depth. Good locations are over deep granite covered by a thick (3–5 km) layer of insulating sediments which slow heat loss.[162] There are HDR and EGS systems currently being developed and tested in France, Australia, Japan, Germany, the U.S. and Switzerland. The largest EGS project in the world is a 25 megawatt demonstration plant currently being developed in the Cooper Basin, Australia. The Cooper Basin has the potential to generate 5,000–10,000 MW.
Energy engineering Oil refinery Fossil-fuel power station Cogeneration Integrated gasification combined cycle Electric power Nuclear power Nuclear power plant Radioisotope thermoelectric generator Solar power Photovoltaic system Concentrated solar power Solar thermal energy Solar power tower Solar furnace Wind power Wind farm High-altitude wind power Geothermal power Hydropower Hydroelectricity Wave farm Tidal power Biomass
In 2007, the world's first turbine to create commercial amounts of energy using tidal power was installed in the narrows of Strangford Lough in Ireland. The 1.2 MW underwater tidal electricity generator takes advantage of the fast tidal flow in the lough which can be up to 4m/s. Although the generator is powerful enough to power up to a thousand homes, the turbine has a minimal environmental impact, as it is almost entirely submerged, and the rotors turn slowly enough that they pose no danger to wildlife.[48][49]
Electricity produced by wind generators can be used directly, as in water pumping applications, or it can be stored in batteries for later use. Wind generators can be used alone, or they may be used as part of a hybrid system, in which their output is combined with that of solar panels, and /or a fossil fuel generator. Hybrid systems are especially useful for winter backup of home systems where cloudy weather and windy conditions occur simultaneously.
The International Energy Agency projected in 2014 that under its "high renewables" scenario, by 2050, solar photovoltaics and concentrated solar power would contribute about 16 and 11 percent, respectively, of the worldwide electricity consumption, and solar would be the world's largest source of electricity. Most solar installations would be in China and India.[2] In 2017, solar power provided 1.7% of total worldwide electricity production, growing at 35% per annum.[3]
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Return to Coronavirus in Conflict Zones: A Sobering Landscape
Yemen and Coronavirus
Ahmed Nagi
No matter how widely the coronavirus spreads across Yemen, fighting has continued and even escalated in the last two months.
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As the coronavirus spreads globally and the international community is preoccupied with the pandemic, some sides within Yemen's ongoing war are taking advantage of the moment to reopen battlefronts. No matter how widely the virus spreads across Yemen, the fighting between the Saudi-backed, internationally recognized government; the Iranian-backed Ansar Allah group, known as the Houthis; and the United Arab Emirates–backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) has continued and even escalated in some fronts in the last two months despite the recent announced ceasefires. Even more troubling, all parties are already using the pandemic as a chance to advance their own agendas.
Last month, after UN Secretary General António Guterres and others called for a global ceasefire during the coronavirus pandemic, a two-week ceasefire announced by the Saudi-led coalition was received with high optimism by the UN envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, and other international representatives. They viewed it as a step toward establishing a conducive environment for a lasting nationwide ceasefire. However, the Houthis did not consider it to be a ceasefire, and they said "they will continue to fight." In the meantime, they published what they call a "comprehensive vision to end aggression," in which they put forward several maximalist conditions.
Ahmed Nagi is a nonresident scholar at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where his research centers on Yemen.
@AhmedNagiYE
Two weeks before Saudi's truce announcement, the Houthis and Yemen's government welcomed the UN's call for a global ceasefire. But soon after releasing their statement, the Houthis launched an offensive in several districts of the northeastern governorates of Marib and Al-Jawf, erupting massive military confrontations with government forces. They also fired two ballistic missiles at the Saudi cities of Riyadh and Jizan, marking the first Houthi assaults inside the kingdom since their twin strikes on Saudi oil installations in September 2019. Saudi air defenses intercepted these new strikes; in turn, the Saudis conducted multiple airstrikes on Yemen's Houthi-held capital, Sanaa. In the western city of Hodeida, clashes broke out between Houthi and government forces. Meanwhile, in the south, tensions escalated between the Saudi-backed forces and the STC fighters in Abyan and Aden. This reflects that the reality on the ground has nothing to do with those political declarations. The warring parties released official statements to improve their own images and shift the blame for the conflict onto their adversaries, and at the same time their ongoing battles on several fronts have only intensified in recent weeks. There is no indication that the warring parties are truly committed to implementing the ceasefire so far, despite the UN envoy's "virtual" consultations with all actors. Each party is convinced that the war is still incomplete. None of them are ready to pursue peace before achieving their wartime objectives, even when the coronavirus threat is at their door.
Meanwhile, five years of warfare have nearly destroyed Yemen's public health system, compounding suffering among a desperately poor and hungry population. The World Health Organization has provided some support to medical centers in Aden, Sanaa, and Mukala to respond if a case is confirmed. Up to now, there has been just one reported case of the coronavirus; however, many health activists doubt this for two reasons. First, Yemeni medical facilities are not equipped to test suspected cases. Thousands of Yemeni travelers returned to Yemen in the past month from affected countries, including Egypt and China, without being tested at the country's ports. Second, the warring parties are all eager to hide suspected coronavirus cases, because they hope that low numbers will show their capability to contain the pandemic in their respective areas. For example, two weeks ago, after news began to spread about the discovery of coronavirus cases in multiple countries, the minister of health in Yemen's government-in-exile gave a televised speech reassuring his viewers that Yemen is free of the virus. However, he did not provide details on what steps his ministry is taking to curb the pandemic, and he gave no explanation about what (if any) testing procedures his ministry has followed to sustain his claim.
Even more troubling, some factions view the pandemic as an opportunity to recruit more fighters. For instance, some Houthi activists state in their media discourse that "it is better to die a martyr in heroic battles than dying at home from the coronavirus," and suggest that "being in a battlefront is safer than being at risk in crowded towns."
All parties are also using the pretext of pandemic prevention and response measures to make money or push their objectives. In some areas, they use the excuse of pandemic prevention to extort money from civilians hoping to be allowed to pass through local checkpoints. Another key source of revenue, aid provided by international nongovernmental organizations, has been instrumentalized in the struggle between the STC and the internationally recognized government in Aden. STC forces held essential coronavirus-related equipment, sent by the WHO, in the port to prevent government medical staff from accessing it. By compelling the international community to deal directly with the STC, the council hopes to gain recognition for its ongoing de facto rule of Aden, which it has been fighting to maintain since last August.
The current escalation during the coronavirus echoes the cholera catastrophe of the past three years, an experience that the warring parties have kept in mind. Even as that highly communicable disease affected more than 1 million people and caused thousands of deaths, the fighting continued, and armed actors exploited the crisis to make money from international aid flows. All sides will most likely use the same approach with the coronavirus, demonstrating their indifference toward victims and the gap between civilian concerns and militia interests.
As the war in Yemen enters its sixth year, hopes for peace seem elusive, and the virus will compound the already deep humanitarian crisis. The pandemic diplomacy that the UN envoy has attempted to utilize to bring the actors to the negotiating table is not being taken seriously. In previous years, hostilities continued despite the high number of casualties, caused either directly by the armed confrontation or indirectly through diseases and famine. There is little reason to expect that the warring parties will deviate from this approach. Neither external mediation nor the virus can stop this war if none of the Yemeni factions are willing to end it.
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Home Business Your Paycheck Next Year Will Be Affected by Inflation. Here's How.
Your Paycheck Next Year Will Be Affected by Inflation. Here's How.
Employers surveyed by WTW expect health benefit costs to rise at least 6 percent next year, and to continue going up for several years because health care providers typically sign multiyear contracts with health insurers.
"It's not over after this year," Dr. Levin-Scherz said.
More than half of Americans get health coverage through an employer. Workers on average pay more than a quarter of the total premium for family health coverage, while employers pay the rest. Employers may shift more of that cost to workers — but probably not all of it, since recruiting and retaining staff remain challenging.
"I'm advising my employer clients to eat the health care costs," said Allen J. Reynolds, a tax adviser in Sioux City, Iowa. Workers are already struggling to manage costs, he said, including higher mortgage rates, which make it difficult to buy a home: "The employee is getting hit from all different angles."
Contributions to 401(k)s
The contribution limit for 401(k)s will increase next year to $22,500 from $20,500 this year, the I.R.S. announced on Friday. (Extra contributions for workers 50 and older will also increase, to $7,500 from $6,500 this year.) These contributions are deducted from your paycheck — but they go into accounts to help you fund your retirement, and employers often match them to encourage saving.
Contributions to health spending accounts
Inflation has increased those amounts as well. If you have a flexible health spending account, which employees contribute to pretax to help cover medical costs, you can contribute an extra $200 next year. The limit for 2023 rose to $3,050 from $2,850 this year, the I.R.S. announced this week.
If you have a health savings account, a different type of tax-favored account available with certain high-deductible health insurance plans, you can contribute $3,850 as an individual and $7,750 for family coverage next year. (Extra contributions for people over 55 remain capped at $1,000.)
Taxes withheld
With so many variables, it makes sense to check your withholdings early next year to make sure they are not too high or too low, especially if you have had a life change, like getting married or having a baby, Mr. Reynolds said. If you overpay, you'll get a refund at tax time. If you underpay, you may owe a penalty.
The I.R.S. offers an online withholding estimator to help you make the calculations. You can make changes by submitting a revised W-4 form to your employer. |
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Miss Winter? Portsmouth Holiday Parade Is Happening This December 2021
Sean McKenna
Sean McKenna Published: June 11, 2021
Portsmouth NH Holiday Parade & Tree Lighting via Facebook
The temperatures have been rising in New Hampshire on the Seacoast and thoughts of the beach and fun in the sun are probably on most people's minds.
But we've got an early Christmas present for you.
After being canceled in 2020 because of COVID-19 concerns, the Portsmouth Holiday Parade will be making its triumphant return for 2021.
According to a Facebook post from Portsmouth NH Holiday Parade & Tree Lighting, the 2021 parade has been given the green light.
The holiday parade has been set for 6 p.m. Saturday, December 4, per the Facebook post.
Additionally, the tree lighting, which was all that occurred for 2020, will take place 5:30 p.m. right before the parade.
An event page has been set up on Facebook already highlighting the festive return of the parade, and you can find that here.
The event notes that the parade begins at Islington Street and that there will be a parking ban downtown for the night of the parade.
The rain date, in case it happens to rain instead of snow during the winter, will be the next day for 6 p.m. Sunday, December 5.
Check out this video of the Thriller Dancers dancing to "Jingle Bell Rock" while adorned in snowman outfits.
And here's a few photos from past holiday parades to get you even more excited to hit the streets and bring in the festive season this December.
Be sure to look out for more details on the city of Portsmouth website or the Portsmouth NH Holiday Parade & Tree Lighting Facebook page in the months leading up the event.
Categories: Articles, Things To Do
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The most beautiful platter of roasted spring vegetables with a sweet & tangy tarragon mustard vinaigrette. It's simple, effortless, and the perfect recipe for entertaining!
With Easter quickly approaching, and Mother's Day shortly after, I am in full spring entertaining mode! Yesterday I shared these lamb chops and the day before this decadent salted chocolate coconut tart, with a lot more new recipes coming to you this week.
Something about the warming weather, sunny skies, fresh blooming flowers, and vibrant produce has been keeping me extra excited in the kitchen. Everything is a bit more colorful, and tasting extra good.
And these roasted spring vegetables are no exception.
My roasting method is pretty simple, and I typically like to stick to it no matter what vegetable I'm roasting – lots of olive oil, a generous seasoning of salt, 425F for *as long as the vegetable needs*.
All ovens are different, so cooking times will sometimes vary. On a regular basis I actually cook in two different ovens, and one is so much stronger than the other, so all of my cooking times are cut down when using that oven. Vegetables themselves cook at different rates, too, so you'll want to start some before the others (for example, bulky carrots will take longer to cook than thin asparagus).
I recommend to follow my base amount of time in the recipe below, but use your best judgement when things are done. For these vegetables, you're looking for them to be tender, but still have a bite to them. They should be caramelized and slightly browned, but still have bright beautiful color to them as well.
Once the vegetables are prepped and roasted, it's simply a matter of spooning the tangy, delicious tarragon mustard vinaigrette over top. When the vegetables are warm, they'll sort of soak in the flavorful dressing and become infused with flavor.
This is such an easy dish for entertaining that I just love because it creates the most beautiful presentation on a spring table. I hope you enjoy!
Whisk the grainy mustard, honey, and white wine vinegar together in a bowl. Slowly drizzle in both oils, whisking continuously until emulsified.
Stir in the tarragon leaves. Season with salt to taste.
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Prepare the vegetables as directed in the ingredients section (the blog text provides a visual of how each vegetable should look once prepped).
Arrange the carrots, parsley root, and radishes onto a sheet pan in an even layer. Arrange the leeks, spring onions, and fennel onto another sheet pan. Arrange the green and white asparagus onto another.
Coat all of the vegetables with a good drizzle of olive oil and generous seasoning of salt.
Place the carrot pan into the oven first. Roast for 10 minutes before placing the leek pan into the oven next. Roast for 5 more minutes before placing the asparagus pan into the oven. Roast for another 10 minutes. All of the vegetables should come out at the same time. Note: All ovens are different. Start with these times and adjust as needed. The goal is tender, vibrant, caramelized vegetables.
Arrange the vegetables onto a serving platter. Spoon the tarragon mustard vinaigrette over top.
You can easily omit one of the vegetables or really use any combination that you'd like! |
Rockdale Archives
Celebrity game fundraiser for daycare shooting victims
Kimya Roberson
Daycare shooting victim identified (Sept. 20, 2011)
Roberson appears before judge (Sept. 21, 2011)
Fundraiser for daycare shooting victims (Oct. 25, 2011)
Rockdale and Newton communities are coming together in a celebrity basketball fundraiser for the mother and daughter attacked in a shooting outside a daycare center.
On Sunday, Dec. 4, Springfield Baptist Church, will host the "Rockdale - Caring, Sharing and Redeeming" benefit celebrity basketball game at Salem High School from 5 p.m. – 8 p.m. in support of Kimya Roberson and 10-year-old Corinne Williams.
Springfield Baptist Pastor Eric Lee said the event is aimed at several goals, in addition to providing a way for the community to help the family.
"We wanted to allow her community to respond to their needs," he said. "We also wanted the community to celebrate their survival and the miracle of their survival.
"The third thing we wanted to do is celebrate the first responders and all the people that responded that day who contributed to her survival."
Although the mother and daughter are back at home after multiple surgeries and being in a coma, they have a long road of recovery ahead of them. The event will help cover the costs of medical expenses from reconstructive surgery, physical therapy, and other rehabilitative measures.
"It's incredible," said Lee. "They have a real good chance of recovering from this completely. We want to be in a position to contribute to the money that is necesary for their recuperation. Miracles cost money eventually."
The event will collect food for Rockdale Emergency Relief's food pantry.
Organizers also hope to bring more awareness about domestic violence.
"As a pastor I've been called on to do eulogies for murders, and probably 90 percent of those are domestic violence related," said Lee. "It is by far the biggest crisis in terms of bodily injuries and murder and deaths in our community."
Tickets are available at Rockdale County High School, Newton County High Schools and elementary schools including Lorraine Elementary and CJ Hicks Elementary, and Springfield Baptist Church. They are $10 in advance and $15 at the door. VIP tickets are $50. Sponsors will receive complimentary game tickets, recognition throughout the game and VIP seating on game day. Lorraine Elementary and RCHS are among the schools participating in the event with performances. The celebrities participating in the game will be confirmed later in the week.
The goal is to sell 1,800 tickets, with all the proceeds going to the family.
An account has also been established at Bank of America. Checks can be written to the "Corinne Williams and Kimya Roberson Contribution Fund." Contributions can also be mailed in c/o Springfield Baptist Church, 3001 Old Salem Road, Conyers GA, 30013.
Held in partnership with area churches, Rockdale County Public Schools, Rockdale County Sheriff's Office, Project ReNeWal and Rockdale Emergency Relief, the event will also bring awareness to domestic violence in Georgia.
Domestic violence continues to be one of the leading causes of injuries for women and girls between the ages of 15 – 44 in Georgia. The state ranks 14th in the country for female homicide rates where men kill women in single-victim homicides. Many of these homicides are due to domestic violence. (2010 Georgia Family Violence and Sexual Assault Statistics Report, Governor's Office for Children and Families)
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'Heat of the Night' homecoming reunion Oct. 10 in Covington |
Medicaid is a jointly funded health insurance program between the Federal and State government for low-income families and persons with disabilities. School Based Services allows districts to receive partial reimbursement for services provided to students with special needs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
The Administrative Outreach Program offers partial reimbursement for the cost of administrative activities that support efforts to identify and enroll potentially eligible persons into Medicaid and that are in support of the state Medicaid plan.
The Time Studies are conducted for School Based Services to track the time spent on direct service and outreach activities in support of special education students. The results are then used in calculating the reimbursement claim.
This is a work in progress. Documents will be added soon. |
Trump Administration Rolls Back Important Health Care Protections for People with Disabilities and Chronic Health Conditions
By: Dania Douglas
On June 24, 2020, the Trump Administration announced it would roll back regulatory provisions protecting against discrimination in health care. Delivered in the midst of a global pandemic, this news was particularly devastating to people with disabilities and chronic health conditions who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID 19.
Prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), people with disabilities and chronic health conditions routinely faced discrimination in obtaining health coverage and accessing critically important services and supports. Insurance companies regularly denied coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, charged higher premiums for care, and often imposed treatment limits, restrictions and caps on certain types of services.
Existing civil rights laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act did not protect people with disabilities from discrimination in private insurance. The ACA helped dismantle decades of discrimination by prohibiting these practices, paving the way for people with disabilities and chronic health conditions to access health services.
Section 1557 of the ACA prohibits discrimination against people on the basis race, color, national origin, language proficiency, sex, sex stereotypes, gender identity, age, and disability. A final rule implemented in 2016 helped ensure that these protections were robustly enforced.
Yet, a new final rule issued by the Trump administration would gut many of these provisions, making it harder for people with disabilities and chronic health conditions to enforce their rights and access health care. The COVID 19 epidemic has highlighted the depth of disability discrimination in health care. If anything, this pandemic should serve as an example of how important these nondiscrimination protections are. Despite this, the Administration has pressed forward in its attempts to deconstruct these protections
Section 1557 applies to all health programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance, health programs and activities that are administered by the federal government, and entities created under part of the ACA such as the federal Marketplaces and insurance plans sold through the Marketplace.
Under the law, any entity that receives federal financial assistance would be subject to Section 1557. However, the 2020 rule would create a major exemption to this provision by claiming that health insurance companies are not primarily engaged in providing health care. This faulty interpretation would exempt most private health insurance plans from the nondiscrimination provisions. This interpretation would be especially harmful to people with disabilities, their families, and caregivers who receive health insurance coverage through their employer.
The new rule also eliminates provisions of the 2016 rule that expressly prohibited discrimination in insurance plan benefit design and marketing. Historically, people with chronic health conditions and disabilities have been subject to these discriminatory practices. For example, in 2014 the National Health Law Program and The AIDS Institute filed a complaint against four Florida insurers who placed all drugs used to treat HIV in the highest cost tiers, limiting access to treatment.
The 2016 rule clearly prohibited such practices. The ACA and prior civil rights laws still contain protections against disability discrimination. However, the elimination of the Section 1557 regulatory provisions along with the narrowed scope of the rule, makes it especially difficult for people with disabilities pursuing discrimination claims, particularly against employer-based health insurance sold outside the ACA marketplace.
Additionally, the rule eliminates notice and tagline requirements that informed people of their rights under Section 1557 and detailed how to file a complaint in the event of discrimination. This requirement shifts the burden of compliance and enforcement from providers to individuals.
People with disabilities and chronic health conditions are frequently seen by multiple specialists and are regularly juggling multiple sources of information, paperwork, and care coordination issues. Health care is complex and people need to be clearly informed of their rights, and ways to enforce them. The elimination of notices and taglines is likely to deter people with disabilities from asking for the supports and assistance they are entitled to and from filing complaints when they do encounter discrimination.
Finally, the rule eliminates important protections for people with limited English proficiency, for people seeking reproductive and sexual health care, and LGBTQ individuals. People with disabilities often live at the intersection of multiple identities. Many are non-native English speakers, an issue which can be compounded by intellectual, developmental, or sensory disabilities.
For example, an individual with an intellectual disability, who has limited English proficiency, may have a difficult time accessing appropriate materials and information. People with disabilities often face discrimination in their choices about reproductive and sexual health and it is critical that they be provided with clear, accurate, and easy to understand information about their rights and choices.
A significant portion of LGBTQ individuals also have disabilities and have difficulty accessing appropriate care. This Administration's repeal of nondiscrimination regulations creates irreversible harm to individuals who are already struggling to receive appropriate health care.
For more information on the final rule, check out NHeLP's overview—HHS Eliminates or Weakens Regulatory Protections Against Discrimination in Health Care.
And see the rest of our blogs in our series on Section 1557:
Como se dice "discrimination" en Espanol?
Trump Administration Rolls Back Important Health Care Protection Roll Back for People with Disabilities and Chronic Health Conditions
Fighting Fire with Lighter Fluid: Trump Administration Rule Incites Health Care Discrimination and Jeopardizes Reproductive Health
Health Insurers Should Be Wary of Trump Regulatory Rollback
Home-Based Care under COVID-19: A Do No Harm Approach to Assessing Needs
David Machledt and Elizabeth Edwards
Medicaid commonly uses functional assessments to determine eligibility for services as well as the type and amount of services…
Telehealth and Disability: Challenges and Opportunities for Care
Daniel Young and Elizabeth Edwards
In response to the COVID-19 public health emergency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently published guidance…
Expanding Telehealth Under COVID-19: Supporting Access to Care
Daniel Young, Elizabeth Edwards, and Fabiola Carrión
Telehealth is an increasingly important tool for states to address patient needs under COVID-19 social distancing requirements. Federal COVID-19… |
The US Navy said the 18 unsafe encounter expert with China: robber logic.
2018-11-05 05:01:54 category:Military
Global Times reporter Guo Yuandan Wang Huicong reported on Wednesday that US military statistics show that since 2016, the US Navy has experienced 18 unsafe or unprofessional encounters with Chinese troops in the Pacific Ocean. Zhang Junshe, a researcher at the Naval Academy, told the Global Times on the 4th that the so-called unsafe and unprofessional encounter of the US side is due to the unauthorized entry of US warships into Chinas territorial waters or adjacent waters of islands and reefs, too close to Chinese warships, resulting in close contact between the two sidesnaval and air forces, and their own actions are causing air and sea accidents. The source of the piece.
According to CNN reports, the commander and spokesman of the US Pacific Fleet, Christensen, said 19 unsafe or unprofessional encounters have taken place between China and Russia since 2016, including 18 with China and 1 with Russia. During the same period, the U.S. Navy and Iran experienced 50 such encounters, 36 in 2016 and 14 last year, but not this year.
Sources said that the unsafe encounter with China occurred most frequently in Trumps first year of office (2017), at least three times in February, May and July of that year, involving the US sides view that Chinese warplanes conducted unsafe interception of its naval reconnaissance aircraft. CNN said that in addition to the 18 encounters related to the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force also experienced unsafe encounters with China during this period.
Reported that the U.S. Navy carries out hundreds of air and sea operations in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea and Japan Sea every year, and U.S. officials say they take such unsafe encounters seriously. The security of our army is of paramount importance. Any time there are unsafe incidents, we will worry about them. To solve these incidents, the United States responds through appropriate diplomatic and military channels afterwards. Comments said that such frequent encounters are increasing the possibility of collision or collision between the two sides, which triggers crises or even conflicts between the two major powers. The collision in 2001 over the South China Sea caused a serious diplomatic crisis in the US and China. Last month, Chinese destroyers approached American ships in the South China Sea, recently only 41 meters, forcing them to turn to avoid collision.
Zhang Junshe told the Global Times Thursday that under the guise of freedom of navigation and flight, US warships entered Chinas territorial waters or the adjacent waters of islands and reefs without authorization to show off their force. The provocation at Chinas doorway did not allow Chinese warships to identify, verify and warn to drive away, which was purely the logic of robbers. None of the 18 so-calledunsafe or unprofessional encounterstook place on the West Coast of the United States or in the Hawaiian Sea and Airspace, when American warships entered Chinas territorial waters or adjacent waters without authorization, and the responsibility rested entirely with the United States. Zhang Junshe said that the Chinese Navy has identified and verified U.S. warships entering Chinas territorial waters or adjacent waters without authorization, and warned them to evict them. The Chinese Armys handling of sea and air situation is in line with international law and international practice. The repeated provocative actions of the US side will only urge the Chinese army to strengthen its defense capability. Source: Global Times - World Wide Web. More brilliant, please log on to World Wide Web http://www.huanqiu.com responsible editor: Zhao Nan _NBJS6829
Zhang Junshe told the Global Times Thursday that under the guise of freedom of navigation and flight, US warships entered Chinas territorial waters or the adjacent waters of islands and reefs without authorization to show off their force. The provocation at Chinas doorway did not allow Chinese warships to identify, verify and warn to drive away, which was purely the logic of robbers. None of the 18 so-calledunsafe or unprofessional encounterstook place on the West Coast of the United States or in the Hawaiian Sea and Airspace, when American warships entered Chinas territorial waters or adjacent waters without authorization, and the responsibility rested entirely with the United States.
Zhang Junshe said that the Chinese Navy has identified and verified U.S. warships entering Chinas territorial waters or adjacent waters without authorization, and warned them to evict them. The Chinese Armys handling of sea and air situation is in line with international law and international practice. The repeated provocative actions of the US side will only urge the Chinese army to strengthen its defense capability. |
Every day brings new stories about the impact of digital technologies on every aspect of the world around us, including their transformative impact on companies in just about every industry. Some of the articles are about the creation of innovative new technologies and applications, while others are about the creative destruction such innovations leave in their wake. Lately, the latter kind of stories seem to predominate.
For a while now, companies have been racing to try to keep with the relentless advances of digital technologies. But, the race keeps getting tougher every year. We seem to be heading toward a kind of digital perfect storm, where four major IT trends are each gathering speed while interacting with and amplifying each other: mobile devices, cloud computing, social networks and big data and analytics.
These widely discussed technologies are still in the early stages of deployment to a greater or lesser degree. Mobile is furthest along while cloud adoption is taking off. Data science applications are starting to get deployed, although we are just beginning to appreciate their profound implications. And while consumer social networks have been thriving for years, their use in business has been slower than expected.
The disruptive impact of this digital perfect storm is already being felt by technology companies as well as by those in industries whose transformation is already underway. And perhaps most important, we know that even greater disruptions are in store in the not too distant future. The resulting creative destruction makes for interesting stories about the changing fortunes of companies as well as their leaders.
People have been writing stories about the rise and fall of the rich and powerful at least as far back as ancient Greece. A common theme in Greek tragedy was the actions of leaders who out hubris, that is, arrogance and overconfidence, disregarded the gods and their laws, which eventually led to their downfall. Our human nature and organizational cultures have not changed all that much in the intervening millennia.
Each company is different, as are its reactions to major disruptive innovations. Yet, their stories have certain patterns in common, not only with present companies but with others that are no longer with us. For example, in How Not to Stay on Top, NY Times columnist Joe Nocera writes about BlackBerry, which until just a few years ago was the undisputed leader in the early days of the smartphone market.
"In its heyday, the BlackBerry was so popular that it was nicknamed the CrackBerry," he writes. "Chief technology officers loved its emphasis on security. Corporate employees loved its compact keyboard, which they mastered with their thumbs. As recently as 2009, the BlackBerry had about 22 percent of the smartphone market." But, this was before the iPhone and Android-based devices totally redefined the smartphone by introducing apps, app stores, touch screens and other functions that appealed to consumers. Blackberry was not able to keep up, and today it has less than a 3 percent share of the smartphone market.
Nocera compares the decline of Blackberry to that of Wang, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the leader in office systems. "At Wang's peak, some 80 percent of the top 2,000 corporations used the company's word processors, according to Bloomberg Businessweek." But then came the IBM PC, which in addition to word processing could run many other different kinds of applications. Wang tried to protect its market and was thus late in trying to reinvent itself as a software company by moving its word processing applications to PCs.
Why do once-dominant companies have so much trouble embracing disruptive innovations? This important question has been best explained by Harvard professor Clay Christensen in his 1997 classic, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.
Like in Greek tragedy, the stories seem to follow a similar arc. Initially, the new technology or product is nowhere near as good as the older ones it will ultimately displace. But, since the new offering is significantly less expensive and/or offers attractive new functions, it starts getting traction in good enough marketplace segments that don't require the highest quality and performance.
After a while, the emerging innovation, - having significantly improved as it made its way through the learning curve that all technologies go through, - can now be used in more demanding applications, where it competes head-on against the entrenched players. It then starts winning away those customers of the older technology who are happy to now have a product that is less expensive and generally more useful and simpler to use.
Soon, a new low-cost innovative business model begins to develop around the new technology, which the older companies have trouble competing against. Their business models are hard to change because they are based on a different set of more expensive assumptions. In addition, instead of focusing on their critical need to change, they may well be spending their energies trying to protect their declining markets. Eventually, an entirely new eco-system and value chain is built around the new technology, which now has essentially displaced, - and often finished off, - the older technology in the marketplace.
Examples abound, from mini-mills in the steel industry, to digital photography and music. The Innovator's Dilemma explains how PCs and client-server computing displaced the word processing systems from Wang, caused the demise of minicomputers, including industry leaders like DEC, and brought mainframes and supercomputers to their knees. IBM barely survived.
It's interesting to note that some of the IT industry's leading disruptors of the 1980s and 1990s are themselves being disrupted today. "If there is a common thread among these older outfits, long considered bellwethers for their industry, it is that they are all struggling to adapt to a computing world where people use the Internet on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets," writes Quentin Hardy in an August 21 NY Times article. ". . . On a very personal level for employees of these companies, it's an odd time. Many, particularly early employees, were there when their innovations and more-affordable products displaced the last generation of big tech companies. Now they're on the downside of that cycle." What goes around, comes around.
I think of cloud as the next model of computing, following the centralized model that prevailed from the early days of the IT industry through the mid-1980s, and the client-server model of the past few decades. A new computing model affects every single aspect of our increasingly digital economy. Over the next few years, cloud-based infrastructures and applications will likely disrupt the business models of companies in IT as well as across a variety of industries.
Cloud is a classic disruptive innovation. But, it should also be viewed as a major step forward in the world of complex IT-based systems, not unlike the engineering advances of the 20th century which have enabled us to design and build highly sophisticated bridges, skyscrapers, cars and airplanes. Cloud is now driving a much needed industrialization of IT data centers and IT infrastructures in general, the vast majority of which are nowhere near ready to support the increasingly smart mobile devices that billions around the world use every day, or the huge number of smart sensors that are being embedded in just about every thing in the physical world around us.
Over time, I expect that cloud will help standardize many of the components of the growing IT stacks, as has been been the case for decades with complex engineering products and systems across the industrial sector of the economy. This standardization is enabling many new companies to become part of the growing IT ecosystem, which will undoubtedly lead to lower prices and increased innovation.
This is what creative destruction is all about, - rewarding innovative startups, as well as those established companies that are willing to reinvent their business models and move forward.
The commoditization of proprietary technologies and the standardization of layers of the stack is very painful to those companies who previously controlled and profited handsomely from them. But, as was the case with the explosive growth of microprocessors in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, Linux in the 2000s and mobile devices in the last few years, all kinds of new innovations and growth possibilities are now possible. Life goes on, leaving some species behind while others adapt and thrive, co-existing with the many new ones that will become part of the changing landscape.
Thought provoking analysis of technology.market dynamics. Two thought provoking books are The Death of Distance on telecom revolution and The Long View on Shell's use of scenario building to identify major disruptions at their incipient stage.
Irving, good to see this blog. I tried to subscribe but the link did not work.
Not sure if you would remember, but we met in my ISG days about the time of good old "fort Knox" system. I think you were in research at the time.
I am not really wanting to post this comment on the article, which i really like, but would like to include the analogy of comparing SAAS to the old time sharing days of IBM.
Talk about holding on to old technologies while watching a new one sweep you away (wang), how about IBM losing the communications battle by holding on to SNA while tcp/ip ran off with the gold meadal.
Anyway, i look forward to reading more of your observations. |
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Published 04/20/2019 07:15:48 am at 04/20/2019 07:15:48 am in 1 Gallon Stainless Steel Pot.
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Briefingpaul manafort trial
Paul Manafort Could Face New Charges, Prosecutor Says
Natasha Bach
New charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort haven't been ruled out, a U.S. attorney said Friday
The announcement came at a federal court hearing in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller's office disclosing Manafort had violated his plea deal.
Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said a "determination has not been made yet" regarding plans to file new charges against Manafort.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered prosecutors to provide more details surrounding their claims Manafort lied to investigators. She set a Dec. 7 deadline for Mueller's office to report back and made a tentative Manafort sentencing date for March 5, reports The Associated Press.
Mueller's office argues Manafort lied to his team and the FBI after entering the plea deal, which prosecutors say constitutes a crime, according to a Monday court filing. The filing did not list specifics, noting only that it was on "a variety of matters."
On Thursday, Trump suggested that a pardon for his former campaign chairman was "not off the table."
A federal jury convicted Manafort in August of eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud. He pleaded guilty to two additional charges in September and agreed to cooperate with Mueller's investigation. He remains in custody in an Alexandria, Va., jail. |
Congratulations to the Lawrence North girls basketball team on a great season!
Sectional & Marion County Champs!
The Wildcats did something this year that no other team in school history has accomplished; the team won the Marion County championship, completed an undefeated dual meet season, and won the IHSAA Sectional Championship in the same season! |
NanoDesign ltd. is a SME company focused on design of smart microelectronics systems and solutions.
NanoDesign ltd. is a spin-off company, founded in 2007 by a group of specialists in field of precise measurement in bioelectronics. Today are the research and development projects focused mostly on design of precise bioelectronics measurement devices and testing machines for semiconductor devices testing and characterization. Today new high-precision devices and measurement test stations are developed and employed in new projects. The measurement tool for multipulse UIS test facilitates the load testing of new devices and technologies in GaN or power - Si.
Within the project NANO will realize the diagnostics and testing of reliability of new GaN and extreme Si based devices characterization by multipulse UIS tester at max voltage up to 2 kV and maximum current 100 A. The tests will be realized as single shot repetitive testing of 100 000 – 1 000 000 cycles. Measurement and analysis of electrical characteristics (I-V, C-V) after multipulse stress will be realized to analyze overvoltage/overcurrent induced degradation.
The UIS tester module will be optimized in relation to requirements and specifications, based on this project. Additionally a new high-temperature UIS tester module will be further developed to carry out the high-temps UIS measurements over 200 ºC on device in package in order to characterize devices during real operating conditions. |
Not the Same Kind of Creature
The reason for racial differences in per capita crime rates isn't poverty. The leftist's "poverty causes crime" argument sounds plausible at first.
(National Vanguard)
by David Sims
The Myth of Ashkenazi Jewish and East Asian Intellectual Supremacy
The idea is that poor people, seeking food and the bare necessities of life, are forced to commit crimes in order to survive. Thus, the per capita crime rate among poor people should exhibit a strong correlation with socio-economic status, but no correlation at all with race. But I've checked, and there's an even stronger correlation between crime and race than there is between crime and social class.
Poor Whites don't behave as poor Blacks do. Each race has a characteristic statistical spread of behaviors. The conjecture that poverty causes crime is disproved by the evidence. It is a myth whose tellers hope to blame "social injustice" for racial differences. On the contrary: Blacks and Whites simply aren't the same kind of creature.
The myth serves as the leftists' road to political power, which is their true goal. The Marxists want to be able to dominate, and thus to exploit, everybody else. They want to supplant the natural elite, the elite of merit, with themselves — and to enforce their rule by murdering dissidents and by starving defiant populations into submission. All of their talk about social justice is mere hypocritical deception.
The sooner you deal with a problem, the easier the task will usually be. If Americans had recognized a fundamental racial difference between Whites and Blacks in 1995, or, even better, in 1950, or, better still, in 1850, and had dealt with it rationally, with a clear grasp of the facts, then their great-grandchildren would not be suffering from race-related crime and violence today, in 2020. Instead, they believed polite fictions about the equality of the races, and they believed them to the point of punishing anyone who did not believe them. People who told the truth were ostracized. They lost their jobs.
Similar things are going on in other countries — it's as if the lunacy were being orchestrated by an international conspiracy. Which it is. The conspiracy is mostly a Jewish one. In a few countries, it has become illegal to tell the truth about race. Telling the truth has become a crime called "inciting racial hatred," and people who tell the truth are arrested and bum-rushed through a show trial, in which the judge takes judicial notice that the truth must be false because the lies are legally required to be true. And then he sends the defendant to prison.
The law does not create virtue. At its best, the law reflects virtue. When the law is dirty, it doesn't.
National Socialism – The Struggle for a Higher Cause
Developing a National Socialist Countryside
The Black Hole of the Caribbean
Simple and Vital Truths, Hidden by Jews
Chilean Newspaper Draws Jewish Outrage with Tribute to Hermann Göring
Let Jewish Billionaires Rewrite My Genetic Code? Sign Me Up! (Not)
Adolf Hitler's War Directive for July 1941 (No. 32)
German Police Arrested National Socialist Man Who Called for Help
Adolf Hitler's Speech at the Opening of the International Automobile Exhibition in the Exhibition Halls on the Kaiserdamm (March 7, 1934)
The Beast as Saint: The Truth About Martin Luther King Jr.
Leon Degrelle: Nuremberg – In the National Socialist Mind
No, the Rothschilds and Jewish Bankers Did Not Finance Hitler
Adolf Hitler's Speech in the Berlin Lustgarten (January 30, 1936)
Martin Heidegger and the Self-Assertion of National Socialism
Roosevelt's Fraud at Yalta and the Mirage of the "Good War"
Discovered: Thor's Shattered Viking Army and their Sacred Hammer of the Gods
Wernher von Braun: Wotan of NASA
The British Who Fought with the Germans
Viking Honey Mead Could Curb Antibiotic Resistance
When Hitler Declared War on the United States
The First Legal Slave-owner in America was a Black Man
1942 Wehrmacht & Waffen-SS Army MG-42 Machine Gun Firing Demonstration (VIDEO)
What We Find Beautiful – That is Race!
German Soldiers in Stalingrad
German Soldier Sitting atop a Panzer V Panther in Normandy, During the Summer of 1944, around the Time of D-Day
German King Tiger Heavy Tanks with Porsche-Built Turret at Canteloup, France (July 1944)
Members of the League of German Girls Sewing in Berlin, Germany (July 1942)
A Newly Built Tiger I Heavy Tank Being Loaded onto a Rail Car at the Henschel Factory in Kassel, Germany (1942-1944)
Adolf Hitler at the Funeral of Admiral Ludwig von Schröder in Berlin (26 July 1933) |
Activate's expertise in harnessing the power of engagement as a leading indicator to business performance is the single most efficient path to organic growth for your organization available today. We measure what matters to align your organization to achieve higher levels of performance.
We define employee engagement as discretionary effort. This extra effort leads directly to improved business performance. At Activate, our job is to measure engagement and give you the tools you need to improve. Doing so positively impacts your financial performance and assists you in building a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Customer engagement is all about the strength of customer relationships. In both B2B and B2C environments, the strength of customer relationships is a leading indicator for important lagging metrics such as loyalty, revenue and profitability. At Activate, our job is to help you measure customer engagement, analyze results against the financial contribution each customer has made to the organization, then help you act to enhance the value of current and future customer relationships.
As a company, our experience crafting data-driven solutions is what sets us apart from our peers in the consulting space. Activate's expertise in engagement, organizational effectiveness, and measuring the return on our clients' investment guarantees significant, measurable results for our clients. At Activate, we leverage our expertise and scientifically validated tools to help clients drive significant improvements in business performance. |
'It's not me in that video,' says teen accused in fatal beating of Bronx man over $1
By Carla Roman and John Annese
This still image taken from surveillance video provided shows suspects in the Dec. 24 murder of 60-year-old Juan Fresnada in the Bronx. (NYPD)
The Bronx teen charged in the fatal Christmas Eve beating of a man during a $1 robbery tearfully denied taking part in the horrifying attack, insisting "I never touched that man."
Abu Conteh said he was hanging out with a group of friends and stumbled upon the brutal beatdown as it was underway — and then made the mistake of retrieving the killer's jacket for him.
This still image taken from surveillance video provided by NYPD shows suspects in connection to a mugging of 60-year-old Juan Fresnada in Morrisania, the Bronx on Dec. 24. Fresnada died Dec. 27, at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. (NYPD)
"We was at the wrong place at the wrong time," Conteh, 18, told the Daily News in an interview Wednesday on Rikers Island. "Now I'm afraid I'll be sentenced for something I didn't do."
Conteh is charged with murder, gang assault and robbery in the vicious attack that cost 60-year-old Juan Fresnada his life. He's the only suspect to be arrested in the case so far.
Fresnada was mortally wounded trying to protect his boyfriend, Byron Caceres, from a band of muggers outside a McDonald's on Third Ave. in Morrisania in the Bronx.
Juan Fresnada in his hospital room after he was attacked Dec. 24 in the Bronx. (Obtained by Daily News)
Witnesses told police that Conteh and four others beat and stomped Fresnada in the head and upper body, and the teen made incriminating statements, according to a criminal complaint.
Caceres has previously told The News how four relentless assailants beat his partner for 15 terrifying minutes before leaving him on the street. Fresnada appeared helpless to defend himself, as one of the attackers pummeled his head.
On Wednesday, Conteh appeared both frightened and confused about the charges.
[More New York] Alleged drunk driver who fatally struck NYC homeless man indicted on manslaughter charges »
"They brought me in for questioning and now I'm here," he said in a soft voice. "I didn't do it.... I never touched that man. I was scared too."
Conteh said he and two friends were at a house party earlier in the night, along with the attackers.
He and his two friends left about 1 a.m. to go to a deli, he said.
Byron "Chi Chi" Caceres, surviving victim of the beatdown that took the life of his partner, Juan Fresnada (Gregg Vigliotti/for New York Daily News)
"That's the surveillance shot they got. That was before the attack happened," he said. "I'm there with my two friends and I don't know the guy next to me. He was just going to the store too."
They came out of the store and stumbled upon the attack, he said.
"The footage of the attack.... I told the detectives it's not me in that video," Conteh said. "They got me because I was there and I was scared, and the attacker came to me and told me to go get his jacket.
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"He had taken off his jacket nearby and he tells me get my jacket and I was scared. I dunno what this guy could do. He had just beat a man so I went and got it for him and gave it to him."
For four days, Juan Fresnada (pictured), 61, was hooked up to ventilator in the intensive care unit at Lincoln Hospital after the beating on Christmas Eve.
After that, he and his friends tried to return to the party. When the party's hosts wouldn't let him back in, he went home, he said.
"Police have that footage and so they think I was with them but we wasn't," he said. "I'm scared I'm going to get like a life sentence. My lawyers told me its murder in the 2nd degree but I didn't even touch that man."
Conteh, who remains held without bail, returns to Bronx Criminal Court on Friday.
[More New York] Ex-con groped NYPD sergeant's behind at Chelsea 7-Eleven: sources »
He said if he gets out, he just wants to finish high school and improve his grades.
"I want to tell my mom I'll be home soon. I want to be home soon," Conteh said.
Violent crimes occur in New York
Latest NYC Crime
Alleged drunk driver who fatally struck NYC homeless man indicted on manslaughter charges |
You often wonder why your detergents and soaps lose effectiveness or your plumbing system is reducing its flow to appliances and taps. To understand why these things happen, you have to know about hard water. Hard water contains magnesium and calcium. These minerals affect the ability of the water to function in terms of washing and plumbing.
When soaps and detergents (used in the dishwasher or washing machine) combine with hard water, the minerals will cause soap curd. The soap deposits will then leave spots on everything you washed. In the case of your plumbing system, the minerals will be deposited resulting to build up over time. This will reduce the flow of taps and appliances.
A water softener is an appliance that is installed in your water supply system. There is a mineral tank that is filled with polystyrene beads called resin or zeolite. These beads carry a negative charge. Now, remember that calcium and magnesium carry positive charges. The minerals will stick to the beads as the water passes through the tank. A brine solution will be flushed through the tank with enough volume of sodium ions. The sodium ions will be enough to remove the calcium and magnesium from the beads. Basically, this process trades the minerals (calcium and magnesium) for something else (sodium).
How long does water softener last?
Water softeners will last many years. Just you need to properly maintain its condition.
Water softeners have this separate tank that houses salt to facilitate the creation of brine solution. There are three types of salt that can be used – rock, solar and evaporated salt. Most households use rock salt because it is not water-soluble and it is cheaper compared to other types of salt. However, if you consider this, you have to know that cleaning will take up much of your time and energy because you need to do it regularly.
Is it harmful to mix different salts?
It is not harmful but you have to know that there are softeners that are created to cater a specific salt. If you use other salts, the softener may not function well. It is better to follow the manual before you put anything. The best thing to do is to empty the salt tank before putting another to avoid clogging or other related problems.
The prices may differ according to the manufacturer, type, and energy used. There are two types of water softeners – time operated and water meter-controlled. Of these two, the latter produces the softest water.
Softened water is generally safe to drink. It still contains minerals that you need. Sodium is added, which is safe to consume. The softened water should only contain 300 mg per liter of sodium.
If you want to know more about water softeners, click this link. You will surely find the right one with the help of experts. Do not ignore these minerals because it can affect the washing process and other things. |
Crypto News Outlet CoinDesk Explores Sale as DCG Crisis Worsens
Kevin George
Kevin George is a freelance crypto writer and editor for Investopedia. He holds a master's degree in finance and has extensive knowledge and experience in the area of trading, markets, and economics.
George / Getty Images
Cryptocurrency news provider CoinDesk, which broke the news that led to the collapse of FTX, hired financial advisory firm Lazard to explore a potential sale as its parent, Digital Currency Group, faces financial strain from the collapse of the cryptocurrency platform.
Crypto news outlet CoinDesk, acquired by DCG in 2016, is looking for a purchaser.
CoinDesk is seeking an exit as its parent company suffers ongoing FTX contagion.
CoinDesk was the first to report about FTX's financial irregularities with a scoop on the balance sheet of the crypto exchange's hedge fund, Alameda Research, in early November 2022.
CoinDesk Hires Lazard to Explore Sale
CoinDesk CEO Kevin Worth told The Wall Street Journal: "Over the last few months, we have received numerous inbound indications of interest in CoinDesk."
The offers for CoinDesk—coming in for months—have exceeded $200 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. CoinDesk posted $50 million in revenue for 2022 from online advertising and its index and events business, the story said.
Interest in the company, founded in 2013, intensified after parent group DCG became embroiled in the FTX collapse. DCG subsidiary Genesis Global Trading is reportedly set to file for bankruptcy this week, as the crypto lender owes creditors $3 billion.
Genesis warned of a potential bankruptcy as early as Nov. 21, 2022, after the company disclosed it had $175 million locked in the FTX group. That led to problems with the project's Earn lending program, which was a partnership with Gemini, a crypto exchange privately owned by the Winklevoss twins. Gemini was said to be owed $900 million by Genesis. The situation turned nasty recently, with Cameron Winklevoss accusing DCG of defrauding its 340,000 customers and calling for DCG CEO Barry Silbert to step down.
CoinDesk Scoop Eventually Imperils Parent
Digital Currency Group first acquired CoinDesk in January 2016 for a sum said to be in the region of $500,000 to $600,000. CoinDesk said at the time of the sale: "As this industry evolves and new players emerge, it's clear that the informational needs of the individuals and companies in this space are increasing."
CoinDesk's reporting on FTX eventually unleashed shockwaves that hit Digital Currency Group and its subsidiaries, including the crypto news outlet itself. An article about FTX and its sister company, Alameda Research, revealed that a large portion of the company's assets was held in its own FTT native token.
Shortly afterward, the Binance crypto exchange, which owned up to $2.1 billion of FTT, announced that it would be liquidating its entire holdings of the coin. That led to a run on the FTT token, and a proposed takeover of FTX by Binance swiftly failed after due diligence exposed the mess at the now-bankrupt FTX.
The disclosure by crypto news agency CoinDesk that it's seeking a sale from its parent, DCG, and has received expressions of interest may give CoinDesk an exit from the financial pressures and strained crypto industry relations swamping DCG. CoinDesk's announcement, only a day after DCG halted its dividend, also raises further questions about the health of the parent company.
The Wall Street Journal. "Crypto Media Outlet Taps Bankers for Sale."
CoinDesk. "Divisions in SBF's Crypto Empire Blur."
CNN Business. "How a Scoop by a Little-Known Crypto Site Led to the Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and Implosion of FTX."
The Wall Street Journal. "Crypto Media Outlet Taps Bankers for Sale." (Subscription required.)
TechCrunch. "CoinDesk Gets Acquired by DCG."
Bloomberg. "Crypto Firm Genesis Bankruptcy Filing."
Twitter. CZ Binance. "Changpeng Zhao." Nov. 6, 2022.
Gemini's Winklevoss Claims Fraud, Calls for Removal of DCG Chief
Crypto Lender Genesis Slashes 30% of Staff, Considers Bankruptcy
The Collapse of FTX: What Went Wrong With the Crypto Exchange?
Digital Currency Group Halts Dividend Amid Genesis Crisis
More Trouble For Winklevoss Brothers As SEC Sues Over 'Gemini Earn' Program
Bankruptcy Reveals $1 Billion FTX-Tied Stake in Bitcoin Miner
Who Is Changpeng Zhao?
Changpeng Zhao is the founder and CEO of the world's latest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.
Gemini Exchange
Gemini is a digital asset exchange founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in 2014.
Tether (USDT): Meaning and Uses for Tethering Crypto Explained
Tether (USDT), one of the most important stablecoin cryptocurrencies, is pegged to and backed by the U.S. dollar.
Cryptocurrency Airdrop: What Is It and How Does It Work
A cryptocurrency airdrop is a marketing stunt that involves sending free coins or tokens to wallet addresses to promote awareness of a new currency. |
1. The stock signal bolts are too long. If you try to use them, you chance tearing up the wiring inside the new turn signals. You can either stack washers to make up for the space, cut down the stock bolts… or, replace them all together. I just replaced the bolts with grade 8 equivalents. I like this better, because the end of the bolts don't stick out towards your fork lowers… Makes the look a bit cleaner.
2. These signals will only work as turn signals and NOT running lights. If you want them to work as both, you will need to get the Duel Intensity Module.
Alloy Art LED Front Turn Signals are a great solution for riders looking to replace the big, bulky front turn signals on Harley-Davidson FLH and FLT models. CNC machined from billet aluminum, these trick turn signals feature an injection molded polycarbonate lens and super bright LED output with a single-function design.
Available in your choice of black anodize with smoked lens or chrome with clear lens.
Fit '98-'13 Harley-Davidson Road Glide; '97-'13 FLHX / FLHT models and '94-'13 Road King models.
Lets begin by removing the stock turn signals.
Next, we are going to cut off the factory connectors. Be sure to leave enough wire so we can reuse these to finish out our new harness. The Alloy Art LED Turn Signals come with matching factory connectors, however they only come with two pins per terminal. If you plan on using these as running lights, you will need the third pin… this is why I just cut the factory harness and re-purposed it.
Now lets get these ready to solder to our Duel Intensity Module by stripping off the insulators.
Now that everything is stripped, go ahead and cut your shrink tube to length.
Make sure you place the shrink tube on the wires BEFORE soldering… this will save you from throwing an object at something that may or may not be breakable on the receiving end.
Now that all of the soldering is done, position the shrink tube and use a heat gun, hair dryer, lighter, etc to shrink the tube and protect those beautiful soldering joints!
Next, we cleaned up the long wires with some zip ties. We could have cut the wires shorter, but I wanted to leave plenty of room should I change these out in the future.
Once the assemblies are setup, plug them into the turn signal harness and blend them into the factory wiring so they are nice and secure.
Install the outer fairing using the existing bolts or with new bolts. If you use the existing bolts, you will need to stack some washers to fill the gap. I used 5/16-18 grade 8 bolts (1.5″ long)… they sit within the fairing supports and offer a bit cleaner of a look.
Now we are good to go and the lights looks great!
This was super helpful through the whole install process. I installed similar Alloy Art LED turn signals on a 2012 Street Glide and it went without a hiccup thanks to this blog post. I also picked up the Custom Dynamics Eclipse 2 module from Iron Aces, great customer service and super fast shipping. The president emailed me twice just to check if everything was good and if I needed any further assistance. More seed all around, thanks again. |
Last week, I decided to take the bus to my destination. With auto prices soaring, the bus seemed rather attractive, given that it would be just one-fifth of the total fare by auto.
Two well-dressed young girls boarded the bus along with me. As we bought tickets, one of the girls discovered that the bus didn't really go where she wanted. A hasty conference with the conductor, the other girl who had got onto the bus with her, and someone else on her mobile, the issue was resolved. The conductor waited patiently for her to determine her exact destination and then issued her a ticket.
Another young woman was peacefully dozing in a window seat. As if woken up by an alarm, she opened her eyes just a minute before her stop came, redid her hair, and fresh as a daisy, got off at her stop.
Another woman suddenly realized her stop had passed, and had a word with the driver, who obligingly pulled up somewhere in the middle of the road for her to get off.
A couple of stops later, a tiny old woman boarded the bus. No sooner than she had sat down, her mobile began to ring loudly from somewhere deep within her bag. Cursing all modern gadgets, she tried to answer the phone, but missed the call. A young lad sitting next to her, along with the conductor, helped her figure out where the phone was and how to see who the missed call came from. The phone rang again, and she answered in a mixture of Tamil and Kannada. It sounded like her son was checking to see if she had got the bus, and she assured him in an irritated tone that she had, which is why she could not answer his call.
A little later, the bus pulled up at a small kerbside repair shop. The driver stopped the bus and jumped off. Bewildered passengers began to call out to him, but he held up an imperious hand which silenced all. He got hold of a wrench from the shop and began doing something to the front right wheel. The conductor sat quietly in the front seat, counting out his money. The driver hopped into the bus and tried starting it. Apparently dissatisfied with whatever sounds emanated, he hopped off again. This time, a couple of curious passengers decided to get off the bus and check if the driver needed any help. The driver had obviously decided that whatever the problem was, it was fixed. Everyone trooped cheerfully back into the bus, and we started off again.
At this point, the little old lady suddenly realized that the bus was not going where she wanted to go. She was very upset. The conductor reasoned with her that she had been fiddling with her phone when she boarded the bus and hadn't heard his reply. She maintained that he had misled her. Another passenger intervened to bring about peace. He told her to get down with him, and that he would put her onto the right bus. After some minor squabbling, she agreed.
It was time for my own stop. The passenger who had provided the solution spoke to the driver, and told him to drop the old lady off at the next stop, where she would get "plenty of buses" going where she wanted to go. The driver and conductor told the old lady not to worry; they would make sure she reached her destination.
I disembarked along with the other passenger.
The entire bus journey took me back more than a couple of decades, when bus journeys were like this: lazy and laidback, with no overwhelming sense of urgency, no rush to get anywhere, small talk, helping hands, and a general sense of camaraderie and geniality.
As long as it is off peak hours, BMTC is still a decent ride. Peak hours…even in the late 80's/early 90's was tough.
It's been such a long time since I travelled by bus for a decent distance, so everything stood out.
Yeah, it was off-peak hours. I agree – peak hour travel can be quite an ordeal. |
Copiers have long since become a necessity for the small business owner. Whether for legal documents, having duplications in multiple files or simply creating copy of an original that must be mailed, copiers are an integral part of a successful office. If you're in the market to buy a new copier, but not ready to pay the excessive expense, used canon copiers will not only fall within your budget, but will also provide you with reliable service for many years. But when purchasing a copier that is used, it is important to evaluate the distributor, the process by which the copier was refurbished, and the ongoing warranties and service provided for long-term support.
Before selecting a used machine, identify and assess the techniques that were used to refurbish the copier. Simply cleaning the exterior of used canon copiers is not adequate. After a full check list inspection, the copier should then have any worn parts replaced, and have a thorough cleaning performed, both inside and out. Any items that did not pass inspection should also be corrected by the distributor before put up for sale. The copier distributor should be willing to discuss with you the refurbishing process to which your used copier was subjected, as well as disclose any issues found and the procedures that were performed to repair or correct them.
Since used canon copiers, during the refurbishing process, do indeed have issues discovered and subsequently resolved, a lengthy warrant should be provided. Warranties generally come in 30, 60 or 90 days. This warranty should correspond to the age and previous usage of your copier. The older the machine, or the more copies it has made in its earlier life, a longer warranty would be expected to be provided by the seller. You will be investing sometimes thousands of dollars for your used copier, so be sure that your funds are protected.
You may be required to pay extra for an extended maintenance agreement. Maintenance agreements for used copiers generally cover parts and service for items that usually break or wear out, such as drums or belts. Since refurbished canon copier may be more likely to wear out more quickly than a brand new machine, an extended maintenance agreement is certainly a good investment. Finally, watch out for dealers who sell machines in "as is" condition. Although these copiers may be substantially less money, they generally will not include warranties or maintenance agreements, and will tend to cost more money in the long run in additional fees for parts and service. |
cleaning the litter box and playing with or brushing your cat, if he's willing.
what we did with your cat, his general mood, and anything addtional we think you would want to know.
We will also administer medication if needed.
In addition, we take in your mail and water your plants, if requested.
Please call us at (617) 323-1652 for pricing, which is tailored to our customers' individual needs. |
Hello Autumn, Goodbye Energy? I Don't Think So!
This is a guest post by Kati Mora, MS, RD from Around the Plate.
When the weather is cold and the skies are dark, it can be a real challenge to stay energized throughout the day. It can be even more of a challenge staying motivated as you put on an extra layer or two of clothes and feel bogged down by the icy breath of winter.
Yet with the proper planning, staying energized during even the coldest moments of fall and winter is possible. Getting enthusiastic about your workout or training routine can happen and will happen if you know how to prep for the brisker months of the year.
One of the most important ways to stay energized, is by making sure you get the proper nutrition. Since our body kind of goes into hibernation mode during the winter, it can become much more difficult to say no to quick pick-me-ups like an extra cup of coffee, glass of soda, or an energy drink. It can also be much more difficult to say no to higher calorie treats when your energy starts to wane.
Luckily, there are many ways to keep your energy up all day long so you are ready for action no matter the season. Instead of relying on foods that only give temporary energy boosts, incorporating the following nutrition tips into your day can help you feel great and make better decisions about the types of food you eat.
Breakfast really is the greatest meal of the day. Not because you haven't had a chance to eat the other ones yet, but because it can set the tone for the rest of your day. If you are looking to start your day off right, oatmeal is a great choice! Its considered a complex carbohydrate and slows down the absorption of glucose in your bloodstream which causes you to feel energized longer. It also helps keep your immune system strong and helps you fight off some of those pesky illnesses that often strike during the colder months of the year. My favorite oatmeal recipe? Try the Perfect Oatmeal from WHFoods.com – delicious!
Incorporating small, frequent meals or snacks into your day can be a great way to avoid mid-day energy slumps. Plus, this will additionally help keep your blood glucose levels steady throughout the day. A favorite mid-day snack of mine is homemade trail mix. Combine granola, dried cranberries, almonds, raisin, and coconut shreds for a delicious high-fiber, high-protein snack that satisfies cravings and keeps you feeling energized.
During the winter months, its easy to get dehydrated. Its important to continue to get enough fluids throughout the day, but if you find yourself getting a little bored with your traditional bottle of water, its okay to think outside the glass – especially if you are sticking to an intense training plan. After a vigorous workout, try a warm glass of apple cider or even hot chocolate. This is a great way to warm up after an outdoor workout and re-energize for the next.
Although its easy to let the fall and winter seasons get the best of us, making a concious effort to stay energized can help you enjoy the many wonders that the colder months have to offer. Starting with a solid nutrition base is important, but it's just the beginning. Making sure you get enough sleep and regular exercise are also integral parts to feeling your best any time of the year.
Bio: Kati Mora, RD is a private-practice dietitian in Michigan. She has a master's degree in nutrition and dietetics. Kati specializes in realistic nutrition guidance for weight management, diabetes, cardiovascular health, and HIV/AIDS management. She is a proud mom to two little boys and is the lead dietitian at http://aroundtheplate.org.
Next post: Everything's Coming Up Kale! |
Exciting changes are afoot at Herongate Leisure as management transfers at the end of April to its local owners the Bennet family who will be running the newly renamed HERONGATE CLUB on a not-for-profit basis and implementing a massive upgrade plan to the building and its facilities.
Those changes include a purpose-built dance studio, larger gym facilities, a new spin studio, improved air conditioning and a new boiler system and showers. The club will also be offering a brand new virtual spin class as well as sun bed facilities.
The space at Herongate Club lends itself well to use as a local meeting place and new superfast broadband encourages business use as well as social and community. The vibrant and lively restaurant is to continue its success as is.
The Bennett family are keen to further develop the club as a community-orientated hub and welcome contributions and ideas from local people. One such venture, working with the England Squash Partnership, will be offering subsidised use of the squash courts.
New options such as a simple swim-only membership are hoped to encourage broader engagement.
Members can be reassured that a smooth transition will be made from their previous memberships with Herongate Leisure. Get in touch with your ideas and suggestions by emailing: [email protected] or visit their microsite for more information about Herongate Club. |
Belle of Georgia PeachPrunus persica 'Belle of Georgia'
Large fruit with brilliant red flowering. Very firm and highly flavored. White flesh, freestone. Fruit trees need a minimum of 6-8 hours of sunlight daily and regular water. They are not drought tolerant. (Self-fertile) (zones 5-8)
The belle of georgia peach can be expected to grow in Hardiness Zones 5–8. View Map
The standard Belle of Georgia peach grows to a height of 15–25' and a spread of around 8–20' at maturity. The dwarf variety grows to a height of 8–10'.
This tree grows at a fast rate, with height increases of more than 24" per year.
The Belle of Georgia peach grows in sandy and well-drained soils. It is not drought-tolerant.
Produces large, creamy white freestone fruit with a bright red cheek. The flesh is firm, white with a tinge of red, and highly flavored--ideal for eating, baking and canning.
Yields ripe fruit typically in late August.
Is self-fertile but provides a better crop when planted in multiples.
Begins to bear large crops at ages 3–4 and reaches full potential at ages 8–12.
Blooms in the spring, with a profusion of bright pink to brilliant red flowers.
Is available in standard and dwarf sizes. Our standard Belle of Georgia seedlings are budded to Nemaguard rootstock, and our dwarf seedlings are grafted to Prunus besseyi (Sand Cherry). Dwarf trees should be staked to help them bear the weight of the fruit and prevent leaning.
Has a chill hours (CU) requirement of 800–850. (Chill hours are the average hours of air temperature between 32° and 45° F in a typical winter season.)
Grows in a rounded shape.
The fruit of peach trees are attractive to birds and squirrels |
TheBlast
Russell Simmons Denies He's Hiding Out in Bali, Plans on Returning to the U.S. Soon
Gary Trock
Russell Simmons is responding to the Jane Doe accusing him of fleeing the country to allegedly avoid a prosecution for sexual assault, and reveals that he plans on touching back down on U.S. soil shortly. A spokesperson for Simmons tells The Blast, "The anonymous accuser's assertion that Mr. Simmons is hiding out in Bali, a […]
The post Russell Simmons Denies He's Hiding Out in Bali, Plans on Returning to the U.S. Soon appeared first on The Blast.
Russell Simmons is responding to the Jane Doe accusing him of fleeing the country to allegedly avoid a prosecution for sexual assault, and reveals that he plans on touching back down on U.S. soil shortly.
A spokesperson for Simmons tells The Blast, "The anonymous accuser's assertion that Mr. Simmons is hiding out in Bali, a country that does not have any extradition treaty with the United States, is false, as are her other accusations against Mr. Simmons, which she claims took place 31 years ago."
As we reported, the woman suing the ex-Def Jam CEO believes he has fled to Indonesia in the midst of sexual assault accusations from multiple women.
Simmons' rep says, "The accusation that Mr. Simmons has traveled to Bali many times over the years, but in the midst of multiple accusations last year, has not yet returned is also false." He adds, "The fact is Mr. Simmons has been in and out of the United States six times in the last year and will be back for his child's graduation."
Simmons has denied all of the allegations made by his accusers, but has claimed to be on a journey of enlightenment in Indonesia. He's also been continuing his studies in yoga.
The Jane Doe who sued Simmons has not identified herself, but his spokesperson claims to know who she is, and says, "The accuser, who has been convicted of a crime, is hoping to hit the lottery in this case, asking at least $10 million based on these false allegations." |
You'd think that elections this November and in 2008 would yield Democratic victories, hands down. It won't happen. Not, at least, until Democrats understand the fundamentals of political behavior.
With an incumbent president and party mired in a manufactured war, rampant corruption, higher debt levels, and swollen executive power, momentum favors Democrats. But they are still aiming for votes and contributions, not for the most basic of all convictions – trust.
The Democratic candidates in the 2004 primaries missed the core issue for voters. John Kerry stressed electability, Howard Dean focused on Web-based contributions, and John Edwards insisted that we have become two unequal Americas. But the public trusted none of them enough to make a difference.
If presidents and congressional majorities were elected primarily on the issues, Democrats would have won in 2004 and should win in 2006 and 2008. Surveys show the unpopularity of President Bush and his policies. But elections are decided on feelings, not issues.
In 1992, the Clinton campaign team's mantra – "The economy, stupid" – was not about policy. It was about selling a mistrust of President George H.W. Bush and his awareness of Americans' daily challenges. Bill Clinton won.
America is not a country of intellectual voters. We do not calculate our ballots on the basis of financial or class interests. Sure, advocacy groups back candidates by virtue of their sympathy with cherished causes. But more often, voters base their decisions on sentiments that are more amorphous. Traits such as toughness and likability are key factors, subject to the standards that media establish.
In 2004, viscerally negative feelings about Mr. Kerry were generated by impugning his Vietnam War record and by mocking his elite manner. Sept. 11 made George W. Bush a wartime president even though he never served in battle. But he was simple and ordinary. He won. If Democrats want to win, they must convey grace, not false charm, and the depth of ordinary experience, not pseudo-exuberance. It's called populist charisma.
Democrats should know more about checkout lines at Wal-Mart, and less about windsurfing. They should also show an ability to speak different "languages" depending on their audience. If they cannot speak evocatively to union members in Seattle one day and an African-American congregation in Georgia the next, they can't win.
It's not enough for Democrats to repeat: "We have had enough." They have to tell people what they'd get if elected. And they have to create trust in their ability to make Americans more secure.
I'm not advocating "feelings, nothing more than feelings." But Democrats must know that the best candidates are not the most produced, doctored, or managed. Al Gore fell victim to such control in 2000, and he became a caricature.
The primary system is skewed toward state party organizations, Beltway and Wall Street assessments of electability, and money. The emotional tie between citizens and candidates counts, too. This tie depends on a candidate's charisma – one grounded in the needs and challenges of American life. Democrats can win. They just need to remember who elects them.
• Political consultant Daniel N. Nelson was a senior adviser to Democratic congressional leaders. |
AFM Téléthon
Biotherapies Institute
I-Stem
Institute of Myology
Genethon
Institut Des Biothérapies
New step towards the treatment of myotubular myopathy: gene therapy restores strength and prolongs lives in affected dogs
A team of researchers in France, led by Dr. Ana Buj-Bello (Genethon/Inserm) and teams at the University of Washington and Harvard Medical School in the United States, achieved a new step towards the treatment of myotubular myopathy by gene therapy. The researchers demonstrated the efficacy of administration of a therapeutic vector by a single intravenous injection and identified the dose that restores long-term muscular strength in a large animal model of the disease.
This work, published today in Molecular Therapy, has been achieved thanks to donations from the French Telethon and the support of the Myotubular Trust.
In the present study, Genethon's team developed and manufactured an adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector able to deliver a normal copy of the MTM1 gene in the entire musculature. The AAV product was administrated by a simple intravenous injection in ten week-old dogs manifesting the first symptoms of the disease – instead of the locoregional route of administration used in previous studies (Science Translational Medicine, January 2014).
The treatment restored whole-body muscle strength and function, and prolonged the life of affected dogs. Treated dogs were indistinguishable from normal animals 9 months after product injection. |
Owle Bubo
Stabiliser & Tripod Mount For Apple iPhone
By JG Harding
Stability is a problem with most small cameras, especially lightweight mobile phones. With its handles, extra lenses and mic, the Owle Bubo is designed to add some weight to mobile shooting.
Not too long ago I set myself the task of shooting and editing a music video entirely with the iPhone 4 (SOS December 2010). This experiment was inspired not only by the impressive HD video‑capture capability of the device, but the fact that it is capable of running editing software, in the form of iMovie and Vimeo for iOS.
Despite its limitations, the iPhone actually has a lot going for it as a video camera. It's small, portable and always in your pocket, plus if you're already paying for one over the course of a network contract it saves you having to pick out a new camera! It may only have a fixed lens, but the wide angle of view allows plenty of composition options and close focusing.
One problem when shooting with such a tiny device is that low weight most often equals low stability. Without body‑weight to anchor the device in your hands, and lacking the ergonomic features of a purpose‑built video camera, the mobile is hard to keep steady. Hand‑held footage is prone to some of the most distracting shaking imaginable.
This particular type of shaking can also attributed to the CMOS sensors used in such devices, which scan the image very quickly, line by line and from top to bottom. As a result, moving the camera horizontally during recording will result in a unnatural skewing of the image, also know as the 'rolling shutter' or the 'jello effect'.
Owle hope to solve these issues with their 'Bubo' stability device. Designed to make filming easier with an iPhone 3G, 3Gs or iPhone 4 (with two versions available), it also makes it possible to attach numerous accessories, and comes with a microphone and a two-part wide-angle lens.
The Bubo looks a more like a Formula One steering wheel than a standard tripod! It's milled from a single piece of solid aluminium, and as such feels pretty much indestructible, a great thing considering the reputation the iPhone 4 has for being easy to crack. A silicon case for the iPhone is provided, and after easing the phone into this, you can place it into the Bubo.
It took me a couple of tries to work out the best way to do this: rest the bottom edge of the phone in the indent and press on the top. To remove the phone, push through the cutout on the front of the Bubo. The fit is very snug, and I'm confident it would withstand plenty of movement without the precious phone becoming dislodged. In fact, I gave it a very thorough shaking just to make sure!
There are cutouts in the aluminium to allow easy access to the volume buttons, as well as the 3.5mm jack socket and the charge and sync-cable socket. There's also a cold‑shoe cutout on the top of the Bubo. This is precisely the same shape as a camera's 'hot shoe', which is used to hold accessories like powered flashes and microphones, and so is compatible with many add-ons designed to fit on top of cameras. One such accessory is the clip for mounting a Rotolight RL48, one of which is included if you buy the HD Video Kit (see 'HD Video Kit' box).
In order to maximise usability in confined spaces, the Bubo has a tripod thread on each 'corner' of the device, allowing four orientations. The phone is smart enough to flip the video the right way up, so whichever way you have to twist it to fit into your location, you won't be shooting upside‑down.
One setup tip though: be sure to turn on the 'flight mode' setting before you start filming, so you don't get interrupted by tweets, messages or calls while shooting your masterpiece!
The weight of the Bubo can make a difference to the stability of your footage, particularly with pans and other movements where your feet remain still. It definitely helps with judder when walking with the phone, but since it's not a balance-based system, you won't achieve the 'floating' or 'steadicam' look, and footsteps are still evident.
Like any camera-support system, the Bubo requires a little practice to get the best from it. Gripping too tightly will transfer a lot of your movement to the sensor — think of the difference between a car with soft, comfortable suspension and one with hard, sporty ride. If you want to keep things smooth, be sure to stay loose and allow your arms to absorb some movement before it reaches the phone. The same goes for your grip: a tight grip allows precise control, but also transfers more movement to the footage. The Bubo's biggest advantage, stability-wise, comes from the tripod mounts, which allow any standard tripod to be attached.
Ready For Your Close-up?
To the left is a shot using iPhone camera alone, while the image in the centre was shot the wide angle lens, which is brighter and wider but has softer edges. To the right is a shot using the macro adapter, which allows closer focus.The additional wide‑angle lens comes in two parts. The first is a macro adaptor. For those unfamiliar, a macro adaptor is a positive 'diopter', a lens that allows closer focus than is usually available, just like a lens used in glasses for the far‑sighted. This macro lens allows the phone to focus as close as 4cm, which increases the versatility of the device: it's useful for capturing cutaways for editing together in iMovie or the new Vimeo app.
If you want a wider view, a 0.45x wide‑angle adaptor can screw onto the front of this macro lens; this also makes the depth of field shallower when focusing on close objects.
Visual Verdict
A shot taken with the iPhone lens alone (top), and an example with the wide-angle lens (above). Note distortion on the straight, vertical lines, and the higher colour saturation produced when using the adaptor.Adding the wide angle lens to the Bubo has a couple of effects, some of which are easier to understand than others. The most obvious effect is that it widens the angle of view, meaning that from a given position your footage will show more of your surroundings than if you don't use the adaptor. This is great for working in confined spaces, or when you're trying to capture something big from a short distance.
The side-effect, given that it's a simple optic with few corrective elements, is that the lens distorts the image to a degree: straight lines become curved. In some shots — such as images of architecture (see image at the bottom of the previous page) — this can quite distracting, while in other shots it's not such a problem.
When using the wide-angle lens, the corners of the image are subtly 'softer' (less in-focus) than without, another side‑effect of an adapted lens system. The fact that the lens focuses more light onto the sensor, coupled with the fact that light is passing through coated optical glass, also makes the image brighter, slightly higher in contrast and a little more saturated than that captured by the iPhone lens alone. Whether you prefer this look or not is a matter of taste.
The macro adaptor brings with it no obvious distortion side-effects, and is extremely useful. While the quality of wide-angle, distant shots is always going to be compromised by the limitations of the iPhone itself, the macro lens provides an excellent way of getting more detail into a close-up without any real down sides. Cutting some macro footage into an iPhone video edit (or indeed any edit) can raise the interest level significantly, as it adds another point of view separate from the main shot.
Super Sound
This small mic is included with Owle Bubo, and gives the iPhone clearer audio quality.The mic in the iPhone is designed just for making phone calls (though it can be useful for taking notes) and it's ill‑positioned for capturing decent audio when shooting video. The Bubo's additional mic plugs into the jack socket at the top of the iPhone, hingeing 90 degrees to point in the same direction as the lens. Because the mic is positioned very close to the lens, it's able to significantly improve on the quality of recording compared to the iPhone mic in terms of directivity, even before we talk of timbre or headroom.
Though it's a simple and inexpensive mic, it does increase the clarity of recording a fair bit. The frequency response is very much focused around the 1‑3kHz band where speech tends to sit, and there's not much low end to speak of. Once again, this lends itself very much to interview situations, where voice clarity is of paramount importance.
There was one question that was posed to me repeatedly during my review time with the unit, both by shooters and laymen alike: "Is it worth it just to shoot with an iPhone?" The answer really does depend on whether or not you have an iPhone already, and what you want to shoot with it.
If you own an iPhone and would like to take some relatively simple video, then downloading the free Vimeo app or Apple iMovie gives you a 720p shooting and editing system. Granted, manual control options are limited, but you will be able to shoot and edit footage easily. If you find you like this way of working, then having a Bubo, Rotolight and simple tripod or Gorillapod is a good way of expanding the potential of the device without adding too much complexity or spending too much cash.
There are already plenty of people shooting with mobiles, especially for blogging and interview situations, so for them it's a useful solution. They can use the phone with a tripod for an interview or similar, then trim and edit the clips and upload directly from the device. If you don't intend to run around shooting with the iPhone, then the kit adds quite a few options and expands the usefulness of the phone as a video tool.
Though I've yet to find an alternative iPhone mount that allows the attachment of other lenses, there are alternative methods of stabilisation available. The Steadicam Smoothee is designed for portable devices, and unlike the Bubo, uses a balance system to eliminate 'jello' and shake. It costs £159$180. Using the same method as the Smoothee is the iSteady Shot, which is also adjustable for use with many different devices ,including other phones and Flip pocket video recorders. It costs £179$233 from the US.
The HD Video Kit
The Bubo is available in a package called the HD Video Kit. Along with the Bubo comes a Rotolight RL48A: a 48-LED light powered by three AA batteries, as featured in the Rotolight Interview Kit reviewed in SOS Video Media October 2010. That kit consists of two Rotolight RL48As plus case, filters and stands. The iPhone HD Video Kit includes the case, a clip and the basic filter pack. It's a nice addition to the Bubo, since the iPhone's own LED isn't up to much, and feasts on the battery. The case is also designed to house the phone as well as spare AA batteries and all of the other included accessories.
The Rotolight is a decent tool for close-lighting at distances of around a metre in relatively bright conditions, and can bring a nice lift to interviewees. Especially good are the included filter gels, which can be stored neatly in the back of the light when not in use.
Bubo Blockbuster
At least one critically acclaimed short film has been produced using the iPhone 4 and a Bubo. Paranmanjang (which translates as Ups And Downs, but has been renamed Night Fishing for Western audiences) is a ghost story about a fisherman. It's the work of South Korean director Park Chan‑wook, who directed the famed Vengeance trilogy, the most popular instalment of which was 2003's Oldboy, winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. The iPhone was used for all of the location scouting, auditions, documenting and shooting of Paranmanjang.
As well as extensive lighting setups and grip work, the production team made use of the Owle Bubo iPhone and a number of adaptors, which allowed them to attach Canon EF lenses to the diminutive device (check the September 2010 issue of Sound On Sound for my earlier coverage of this method).
This does go some way to proving what many established film-makers say: that the format you shoot on is not as important as the story, acting and lighting, and it's quite possible to capture a great story on simple equipment. That said, the total budget for the piece was around $130,000 and was provided in part by KT Corporation, who distribute the iPhone in South Korea. Paranmanjang joins The Commuter as a high‑profile mobile phone movie, the latter being shot using only a Nokia N8 mobile phone. While we're unlikely to see many big‑budget films shot on the iPhone 4, at least it's proven possible, which bodes well for independent film‑makers of the future!
For those using the iPhone for scouting and previsualisation (a term for a draft video) the Bubo is pretty useful. You can record storyboard shots or video clips with greater stability, and also have access to a couple more views than the standard iPhone allows. One viewfinder app, Cinematic Viewfinder, already contains a mode complete with lens simulation data for wide-angle lenses when you're using the Bubo,, allowing you to simulate the point of view of a wider lens.
Stabilises iPhone footage.
Allows tripod mounting.
Varies available shots with extra lenses.
Mic improves audio quality.
iPhone video quality is limited.
A balance-based system is better for motion shots.
The Owle Bubo is certainly useful for shooting video with an iPhone, adding handheld stability and the option of tripod mounting. The wide-angle and macro adaptors add variety to the footage you can capture, while the microphone improves speech clarity and audio headroom. Though it's not right for running about while filming, and the video quality is limited by the iPhone, it expands the possibilities offered by mobile video recording.
£153; HD Video Kit £275. Prices include VAT.
Appleworld Distribution +44 (0)8707 605713.
www.appleworld-distribution.com
$169; HD Video Kit $299.
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Yiannis Boutaris (Greek: Γιάννης Μπουτάρης; born 13 June 1942) is a Greek businessman, politician and current mayor of Thessaloniki.
Yiannis Boutaris was born in Thessaloniki in 1942, the son of winemaker Stelios Boutaris and Fanny Vlachos. Both his parents were from Vlach background. His mother's family has its roots in the town of Krusevo, now in the Republic of Macedonia, while his father's family originates from the town of Moscopole, now in Albania.
His primary education was at the Experimental elementary school of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, his secondary education at Anatolia College, and he graduated in chemistry from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1965 and in oenology from the Wine Institute of Athens in 1967. In his youth he was associated with the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).
From 1969 to 1996 he worked for the family wine company Boutari, based in Naoussa. He left the family company to create the Kir-Yianni wine company, based on two estates in abandoned village of Giannakochori and in Amyntaio, in 1998.
Boutaris has spoken several times openly about his struggle with alcoholism and his successful effort to quit drinking back in 1991. He is also a supporter of LGBT rights and the legalization of cannabis.
During the last decade he is one of the prominent figures of progressive views and politics in Greece as well as a founding member of the ecological organization Arcturos .
In 2012 he was chosen as 'the best mayor of the world' for the month of October, by the City Mayors Foundation, based in the UK.
In his program was the restoration of Agias Sofias Square and Eleftherias Square, as well as the construction of a Holocaust Museum in the city.
Boutaris also declared his wish to build an Islamic mosque, monuments to Thessaloniki's Jews and to the Young Turk Revolution. According to Boutaris, the construction of these monuments will attract Jewish and Turkish tourists to Thessaloniki, who will want to visit their fathers' hometown. As a result of Boutaris' systematic efforts to attract tourists to Thessaloniki by showing the multicultural past of the city for three years from 2010 to 2013, visitors to the city from many countries, among them Israel and Turkey, increased impressively. Before Mayor Boutaris came into office in 2010 the sleepovers of foreign tourists in the city of Thessaloniki were around 250.000. In 2018 the sleepovers of foreign tourists is estimated to reach 3.000.000. As a result, it is estimated that due to the efforts of the Mayor to make Thessaloniki a popular touristic destination, thousands of jobs were created in the greater Thessaloniki area.
On May 20, 2018 he was treated in hospital after being beaten up by a group of Greek ultra-nationalists angry over his appearance at a remembrance event for the Pontic Greek victims of Turkish genocide. The hardliners claimed that Boutaris made a controversial remark on the issue ("I don't give a sh**" if Kemal Atatürk killed Greeks or not"). Boutaris has repeatedly angered hardliners in Greece because he tried to facilitate relations between Greece and its neighbors and because he opposed nationalist views on the naming dispute with the Republic of Macedonia, the history of the Greco–Turkish relations and the Holocaust of the Jews in Greece.
^ a b c "Yannis Boutaris speaker profile". IMIC 2012 conference. 15–16 February 2012. Retrieved 2013-11-05.
^ "The Mayor of Thessaloniki Yiannis Boutaris will build a house in his hometown Krusevo, identical to the one where his mother, from the Vlach Nichota family, lived, with recognizable ambiance and traditional Krusevo architecture". Kanal 5 (in Macedonian). Archived from the original on June 25, 2012.
^ Γιάννης Μπουτάρης Βιογραφικό σημείωμα υποψηφίου Δημάρχου Θεσσαλονίκης (in Greek). protovoulia2010.gr. Retrieved 15 November 2010.
^ "Thessaloniki mayor, Golden Dawn clash over bear sanctuary donation". Kathimerini. 22 August 2013. Retrieved 2013-11-05.
^ "Γιάννης Μπουτάρης" (in Greek). Drasi. Retrieved 15 November 2010.
^ Greek mayor (75) kicked and punched by 'far-right thugs' at WWI event. May 20, 2018, TheJournal.ie.
^ BBC News, May 20, 2018, Thessaloniki mayor Yiannis Boutaris beaten up.
^ Thessaloniki's Yiannis Boutaris hospitalized after attack at event commemorating Greeks massacred in Turkey in early 1900s, 20 May 2018, The times of Israel.
^ Erickson, Amanda (20 May 2018). "Greece's most liberal mayor beaten by a bunch of far-right protesters". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 23 May 2018.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Yannis Boutaris.
Movie "One Step Ahead" (2012) "Ena vima brosta" (original title) Directed by Dimitris Athyridis in 2012.
This page was last edited on 10 April 2019, at 06:12 (UTC). |
My Money Sense by Andy Ong: Depression in Bangkok!
I just got back from Bangkok and I was rather sad. I am working on a Bangkok IPO and things are getting very interesting over there. There is a wave of interest in investing in South East Asia and countries like Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand are benefitting. Given their young populations and natural resources, it is no wonder that the dogs of the Asian financial crisis are now darlings of the market again.
I am a fan of Khao Pad Poo. Nothing fancy, just fried rice with crab meat. I walked into a coffee shop and ordered my dish, turned out to be yucky. What was interesting however, the waiter turned out to be Singaporean. Surprise, surprise. He is a youngish chap of about 30 and was selling vegetables in the former Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market. He just found it too competitive in Singapore, sold his HDB and is now waiting for his payout. He has no long term visa and is making monthly trips to Cambodia to stamp his passport. He can only take on odd jobs and is competing with the likes of the Burmese and other low cost labour.
There is a generation of Singaporeans who are not in tune with the changes of the Singapore economy. This reminded me why I studied Economics as a major in the first place. To help with any countries advancement economically! That was my lifelong ambition. I suppose I am doing my part given the hundreds of people my companies are employing in Singapore and thousands internationally.
I certainly wish my own countrymen well in this new era and hope the government can do more for this segment. However, what they can do must go in tandem with the iron will of our people. Many seem to be disillusioned and I hope all the best for them. |
Q: Kestrel: error if I use URL with non-ASCII characters I'm using Kestrel for hosting my ASP.Net Core web apps. I need to use special charachters (non-ASCII) in the URL.
If I use IIS Express in the Visual Studio I can use non-ASCII characters in the URL. If I use Kestrel I can't use it. Can I configure Kestrel so that I can use non-ASCII characters in the URL?
If not: is there a way in .NET Standard 1.4 to encode a unicode URL to an ASCII URL?
Thank you in forward.
Regards
Matthias
A: In general, any special characters should be urlencoded. That is the only safe way to include them in the URL. Specifically, this is not an ASCII-only issue, as much as it is a non URL-safe character issue. URLs can be unicode, so there's tons of non-ASCII characters that are perfectly fine.
The System.Runtime.Extensions NuGet provides urlencoding which should be supported in .NET Standard 1.0+.
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Junaid Jamshed mosque opens in Karachi
Web Desk On May 24, 2018
KARACHI: A mosque built in the memory of late religious scholar Junaid Jamshed has opened in Karachi's Korangi area.
The pictures of the mosque named after the deceased singer-turned-evangelist were shared by actor Sanam Baloch on her Twitter account on May 22.
"The Junaid Jamshed Masjid' has been inaugurated today at Singer Chowrangi, Korangi at J. Unit 2, Karachi. Such a beautiful mosque. It has been named in loving memory of our beloved and dearest JJ. Please do remember Junaid Bhai in your prayers," Sanam Baloch said on Twitter.
Junaid Jamshed was on board an aircraft that crashed into a mountainside on December 7, 2016 in Islamabad.
Jamshed rocketed to fame in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s as the singer for the Vital Signs rock group, and later launched a solo career, with a string of chart-topping albums and hits. Melding new wave, rock and pop, Vital Signs blazed a trail for musicians in Pakistan as it emerged from 11 years under military ruler Zia-ul-Haq.
Jamshed retired from music in 2001 and announced that he was devoting his life to Islam, joining the Tableeghi Jamaat religious organisation.
Combating perjury essential for justice-based society: CJP Khosa |
growth mindset motivational video for kids
10 Awesome Flipped Math Geometry Videos Your Students Will Love
Effective flipped math geometry teachers know that relying on only one video (or one type of video) for every topic is a poor strategy for meeting the needs of a diverse group of students.
When it comes to geometry, which is much more visual that algebra, concepts must be presented in a number of ways. For flipped math geometry students to achieve success, video lessons must be differentiated to give students the opportunity to apply their strengths and have some choice in how they learn the material.
And while there are tons of video lessons on YouTube and elsewhere that apply to common flipped math geometry topics, very few of them are highly visual and appealing to students with a visual learning preference.
So, if you are looking for some free, helpful, and highly visual flipped math geometry video lessons to share with your students, check out my top ten list:
10 Awesome Flipped Math Geometry Videos
1.) Is a square a rectangle?
2.) Geometry Proofs involving Isosceles Triangles
3.) Finding Arc Length and Sector Area of a Circle
4.) How to Dilate a Figure
5.) Exploring the Triangle Congruence Theorems
6.) Parallel Lines Cut By Transversals
Could YOU use some free. helpful, and engaging math resources? Access over 100 FREE K-12 Math Video Lessons and Animations on YouTube? Subscribe to our channel (100% free with your Gmail account) and access the full library. We add new video lessons every week!
7.) Finding Area and Perimeter of Rectangles in the Real World
8.) Translating Figures on the Coordinate Plane
9.) Exploring Tangent Lines and Circles
10.) Rotating Figures on the Coordinate Plane
Did I miss your favorite flipped math geometry video? Share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below!
11 Famous African American Mathematicians You Should Know About
February is Black History Month, a time to celebrate and honor the generations of African American men and women and their struggle to achieve citizenship and equal rights in American society.
Black History Month provides a special opportunity for students to explore and learn more about famous African American mathematicians and their contributions to our culture and modern institutions.
When it comes to STEM classes, one of the best ways you can celebrate Black History Month in your classroom is by sharing the contributions of famous African American Mathematicians that you and your kids may not be familiar with (but definitely should!).
Some ideas for celebrating these famous African American Mathematicians is by focusing on a different individual each day, assigning individuals for a famous African American Mathematician research assignment, or by sharing this article on your classroom's bulletin board.
And while you can share this list with your students and admire the accomplishments of these incredible mathematicians any time of the year, the month of February provides a focused opportunity to provide your students with deeper historical context and make connections between the past, the present, and the future.
11 Famous African American Mathematicians
Stock Montage / Contributor/ Archive Photos/ Getty Images
1.) Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806)
Banneker, a mostly self-educated man in mathematics and astrology, is best know for building America's first clock—a wooden device that struck hourly. Using his rich understanding of trigonometry and astronomy, he accurately predicted a solar eclipse in 1789.
Banneker was also a passionate civil rights advocate. In 1791, he famously penned a letter to then secretary of state Thomas Jefferson asking for his help in improving conditions for Africans living in the United States, which highly impressed Jefferson and convinced many that blacks were intellectually equal to whites.
He died at age 74 on October 9, 1806.
2.) Fern Hunt (1948-Present)
Fern Hunt is best know for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology. Throughout her great career, she has been involved with biomathematics, patterns in genetic variation, and chaos theory.
She currently works as an educator and presenter with the aim of encouraging women and minority students to pursue graduate degrees in mathematics and other STEM fields.
Hunt is a strong support of student choice, following one's passion, and surrounding yourself with a strong support system, which are all factors that she credits to her own personal success in mathematics.
Source: https://lsc.org
3.) Mark Dean (1957-Present)
Dean is a famous computer scientist and engineer, credited with assisting in the development of several breakthrough computer technologies for IBM.
He invented the first gigahertz computer chip and co-invented the Industry Standard Architecture System for computing, which allows for common plug-ins such as personal printers and modems.
Dean was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1997
Source: web.usi.edu
4.) Elbert Frank Cox (1895-1969)
In 1925, Elbert Frank Cox was the first black man to earn a Ph.D in mathematics not only in the United States, but in the entire world.
After receiving this honor, Cox became a professor of mathematics at Howard University in Washington D.C. and eventually became chairman of the Mathematics Department in 1957. He would hold this role with great esteem until his retirement in 1965.
In 1975, the Howard University Mathematics Department established the Elbert F. Cox Scholarship Fund for undergraduate math majors to encourage young black students to pursue degrees in mathematics.
5.) Katherine Johnson (1918-Present)
Katherine Johnson was the main character of the critically-acclaimed film Hidden Figures. Her contributions in the field of orbital mechanics, alongside fellow female African American mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, were critical to the United States' success in putting astronaut John Glenn into orbit in 1962.
During her 35-year career at NASA , she held a reputation for being a master of complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computer programming for performing complex calculations.
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015.
Video: Katherine Johnson: The Girl Who Loved to Count by NASA
Source: www.MIT.edu
6.) Valerie Thomas (1943-Present)
Valerie Thomas is a scientist and inventor best known for inventing the Illusion Transmitter in 1980. This technology was the first of its kind in the field of 3D-imagery and is the basis for modern 3D-televisions, video games, and movies.
From 1964 -1995, Thomas worked for NASA, developing real-time computer data systems and managing the team that developed the Landsat technology that supported the first satellite to transmit images from outer space.
Today, she continues to serve as a mentor for youth through the Science Mathematics Aerospace Research and Technology and National Technical Association.
Do YOU want free math resources, lesson activities, and puzzles and games for grades 1-8 in your inbox every week? Join our mailing list and start getting tons of free stuff!
Source: http://www.panitchlaw.com
7.) Lonnie Johnson (1949-Present)
Lonnie Johnson is a famous inventor, mathematician, and engineer who holds over 120 patents. He served as an engineer for the U.S. Air Force, where he worked on developing the stealth bomber, and later for NASA's Jet Propulsion program.
He is best known for inventing the Super Soaker water gun while working at the U.S. Air Force, a product which has grossed nearly $1 Billion since 1990. He also invented a "toy projectile gun," which eventually became the Nerf Gun.
8.) John Urschel (1991-Present)
John Urschel excelled in both mathematics and playing football at Penn State University and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics. In 2014, Urschel was drafted from Penn State into the NFL by the Baltimore Ravens, where he played his entire NFL career before retiring at age 26 to further pursue mathematics.
He is currently working towards his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT where some of his mathematical fields of interest include graph theory, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning.
Source: www.agnesscott.edu
9.) Euphemia Lofton Haynes (1890–1980)
Euphemia Lofton Haynes is famous for being the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, which she achieved from the Catholic University of America in 1943.
After earning her Ph.D., she embarked on a 47-year career of advocacy for students of color, improving schools, and overcoming the harmful effects of racial segregation. During this time, she was also a math professor at the District of Columbia Teachers College, where she managed the Division of Mathematics and Business Education department.
Haynes died at the age of 89 on July 25, 1980.
Source: www.commons.wikimedia.org
10.) Annie Easley (1933-2011)
Annie Easley is famous NASA computer and rocket scientist and mathematician who contributed to several space programs , inspired others through her participation in numerous outreach programs, and broke down barriers for both women and African Americans in STEM. Most notably, she was a leading member of the team that developed the breakthrough Centaur rocket, which opened the door for the launch of many of NASA's most important missions.
Easley was known for being a "human computer" and always fought to do her best in the face of adversity. In a 2001 interview she shared that "I just have my own attitude. I'm out here to get the job done, and I knew I had the ability to do it, and that's where my focus was."
Source: www.nteu.org
11.) Mae Carol Jemison (1956-Present)
Mae Carol Jemison is a mathematician, engineer, physician, and astronaut. In 1992, she became the first African American woman to visit space when she went into orbit aboard NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Jemison also spent time as a general practice physician and in the Peace Corps before joining NASA's astronaut program.
She continues to be involved in several initiatives and recently served on the council for an initiative called "Science Matters" which aims to encourage young children to understand and pursue careers in STEM.
Are you looking for inspirational printable quotes to share with your kids?
How are you planning on celebrating Black History Month in YOUR classroom? Share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below!
10 Inspiring Growth Mindset Quotes for Kids
When you empower your kids with a growth mindset for learning, you teach them to embrace their mistakes as learning opportunities, persevere through challenging problems, and focus on individual growth.
Nurturing a growth mindset with your kids requires a purposeful and well-planned strategy to ensure that they consistently hear the right messages.
Fortunately, there are plenty of positive growth mindset messages from relatable sources that will help your kids to better understand the importance of learning from their mistakes, embracing challenges, and being lifelong learners.
Here are 10 inspiring growth mindset quotes that you can share with your kids today to help them change their attitude towards learning:
1.) "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." -Albert Einstein
2.) "When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important." - Ellen DeGeneres
3.) "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
– Michael Jordan
4.) "Failure is an important part of your growth and developing resilience. Don't be afraid to fail." -Michelle Obama
5.) "Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing." - J.K. Rowling
6.) "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." – Thomas Edison
Do YOU love these quotes? Access over one hundred printable Growth Mindset quote posters for your classroom in our brand new PDF eBook!
7.) "Learn from your mistakes. Take responsibility and forgive yourself." -Ariana Grande
8.) "Success is no accident. It is hard work, perserverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do." – Pele
9.) "You can't be afraid to fail. It's the only way you succeed. You're not gonna' succeed all the time and I know that." -Lebron James
10.) "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the ones you did. So… sail away from the safe harbor. Explore. Dream. Discover." – Mark Twain
Did I miss your favorite kid-friendly growth mindset quote? Share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below! |
Three weeks ago I hopped on two planes en route to Northern Washington to visit my dear friend. While my trips to see her are relatively consistent, this one was different; her mother had halted her cancer treatments and things were changing. Nearly four years had passed since Tricia was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer, and she had defied her initial diagnosis five times over. Forever the unwavering optimist, Tricia was an inspiration to many and was affectionately known among her team of doctors as "Bubbles." As life began to shift, I spent a week with the incredible family that has become an extension of my own, and said my goodbyes to the woman who had been a second mother to me for 11 years. Exactly one week later, as the morning sun broke through the horizon, Tricia passed away, surrounded by those who love her most.
Yesterday the family held a celebration of Tricia's life and nearly 300 people joined to share stories of her spirit, her humor, and her legacy of love. By always leading with positivity, Tricia guaranteed that she will continue to be a part of our lives. We now see her in life's little moments, such as while watching her grandchildren create giant bubbles in the backyard during her favorite time of day. And so, in Tricia's memory, I'd like to share the latest Photo Focus – Sunset Bubbles.
Very nice Ali! Trisha leaves a legacy of love for her family and friends. My heart is with her family now. |
Because of the Palm Sunday outdoor procession on 14th April there will be no parking available until 12 noon. The following Mass will start at 12.45pm (not 12.30pm).
Spiritual discourses, music and prayer in the tradition of St Philip Neri in the Little Oratory at 6.30pm on Wednesdays during Lent. The next evening on Wednesday 10th April with the Oratory Junior Choir includes movements from Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. See also here.
Every Friday in Lent at 6.30pm.
In response to an initiative of Pope Francis, the Bishops of England and Wales designated the Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent (Friday 12th April this year) to be observed as a Day of Prayer for Survivors of Abuse. Cardinal Vincent Nichols asks that this Day of Prayer is observed in all our parishes and chapels. It is important that we do so. Day by day, the pain of those who have suffered abuse, and its lasting corrosive impact, are brought more fully into the light. The pain of that betrayal of trust is all the more profound when the abuse took place within the community of the Catholic Church. We also see so clearly the failures in leadership in the Church that have exacerbated the sufferings of those who have been abused. We have plenty of reasons to pray. A Mass of Reparation will be offered in our church on Friday 12th April at 6pm.
This "Come and See" weekend at Minster Abbey in Kent is open to young single Catholic women, who will be able to join the sisters in the work and prayer of the community. It will be also an opportunity to speak with the Benedictine sisters about their vocation. Friday 12th to Sunday 14th April, at Minster Abbey, Church Street, Minster, Nr. Ramsgate, Kent CT12 4HF. Contact: [email protected]. For more information, see here. |
Coke commercial causes controversy
Coca Cola's Super Bowl ad has caused quite an uproar on Twitter and Facebook. It seems a lot of people think the song "America the Beautiful" should be sung in English. And English only. They are angry and offended and say so in no uncertain terms.
I was first made aware of the controversy on Pandionna's blog, but within half an hour I saw a report about it on CNN. And of course when I checked the Internet, I found many stories about it.
I confess the ad got my attention because of the foreign languages. I wasn't paying much attention to just another pretty, patriotic ad until the foreign languages kicked in. That they made me stop and think was probably intended, and to that extent, it worked. I probably wouldn't have paid much attention otherwise. However, I was not one of those who immediately thought or wrote or texted, "It should be sung in English. They should learn English."
Instead, my own prejudices kicked in. "God shed his grace on thee." I couldn't help wondering at that instant, "Aren't there any patriotic songs that don't mention religion? Do we have to have religion in everything?" And I wished they'd picked a different song to accompany the beautiful images.
And then, instead of thinking all those immigrants should learn English, I found myself wondering how many of them were in the country legally. No, that certainly wasn't the ad's intent. But immigration reform was brought up again recently in Obama's State of the Union address and it's a political hot potato. I've got some strong feelings on the subject, detailed in other posts (basically, no one should enter or stay in this country illegally).
As for whether the song in the ad should have been sung in English, I'd say, "not necessarily." If Coke intended those people to be aspiring or newly arrived immigrants, fine. It's logical that they'd be singing in their first language. But like those who took exception to the ad, I think all immigrants in the US should learn English. If those in the ad are meant to be foreign-born Americans who've been here awhile, they should be proudly singing in English.
It's not Coke's style to deliberately provoke controversy. Harmony has always been their shtick. But if important issues have been raised, if important issues are being thought about and talked about … maybe that's not such a bad thing.
February 3, 2014 May 24, 2021 · Posted in advertising, immigration, language, Politics, television, US, Video Content ·
19 thoughts on "Coke commercial causes controversy"
Pandionna says:
February 3, 2014 at 5:27 pm MST
I see the usefulness of a common, or even national, language. Were I to move to France (beautiful dreamer, I know), I would speak French, and love every moment of it. But what I take exception to is not the opinion that immigrants should learn English, but that they shouldn't be allowed to sing a song in their own language just because it's about the U.S. And then to use racial epithets in expressing a point? That's just hatred.
Yes, it is. And it's sad that so many people will unleash it so quickly and so viciously.
Is there really anger over this one or is it just the media? (I haven't checked around – but the media seems to be foaming at the mouth as usual)..And the Cheerios one which is also cute and a typical scene around here. Don't really get the outrage there – but the media is all hyped about it
It was a pretty ad – I kept trying to figure out which language was which…kinda like going to the mall here. Coke does the "one world – we are all alike/things in common" thing a lot – I'm surprised people were surprised. It's a commercial. Calm down people?
I agree with the learning the language where you are. Like you say, if in another country, you are expected to learn quickly and obey the laws…all of them.
A glance at the comments on Coca Cola's Facebook page convinces me the media have a point, even after allowing for their usual hype.
February 4, 2014 at 9:53 am MST
How sad. So much real stuff to be attended to – and people are focused on a marketing strategy by a multinational corporation. The consumption of coke is down in the states, so maybe wise to encourage other world markets to think Coke is aware of them? It will be interesting to see if in the future this ad becomes "classic" like the like the coke and perfect harmony. Marketing is always interesting. (and how sad it is people have/take time to rage on a Facebook page?…more attention! Free publicity! Winner, fools)
February 3, 2014 at 11:09 pm MST
Yes, there was a rather disgusting and widespread display of hatred on the internet in response to the ad.
February 4, 2014 at 10:05 am MST
With everything going on in the world to think people take time to be the ugly commenter…oh, the internet makes overly emotional people so brave over non issues.
Wondered if anyone would object to the deod. commercial about "you think these people are scary, but they really aren't" and the image mirroring the brave young man in front of a tank in China…Then Bob, Bobby D…no irony about pushing big business and consumption of cars? Was that supposed to be patriotic maybe? Marketing and people's reactions are always fascinating. Always a great show.
That's how I see it, too. So many REAL problems in the world. Getting bent over a commercial is the consummate First-World problem. What a luxury, to have nothing more pressing to worry about.
I don't know. I have mixed feelings about it myself. I understand the anger – you take a truly iconic American song, televise it during a purely American television event and then put the multicultural spin on it. The backlash isn't all that surprising to me. Yes, immigration is a hot potato politically and this commercial I'm sure inspired many people's frustration over the constant politicizing of the issue, where nothing ever really gets done, other than using it to score points.
For me, while I love that America is a nation of immigrants, I don't love the idea that you should come to America and try to create your own small version of your 'home' country here. Which is what the whole mufti-culturalism thing seems to be to me.
Hey, you're from another country and now want to live in America and be an American? Fabulous. Welcome. So be an American. Embrace our culture, live the dream. But please don't come here and demand that I have to turn my country into the country you just left.
Anyway, I thought the commercial sucked. What was the point? And who was the intended market? From a marketing standpoint, I wouldn't give it high marks. I mean, who do they think watches the Super Bowl? You know what I'm saying?
While I understand the beauty of our multiculturalism, it seems to me that if you learn one of our songs, you have to learn it in English first, before you can translate it into your native language. So why not just sing it the way you first learn it — in English? I'm not explaining that very well. Just trying to say I don't understand why anyone would not be singing the song in English. Anything else requires more work. Even when you don't know the language, you learn lyrics phonetically and sing a song in the language in which it was written. (A different language messes up the rhyme and meter.) For example, when Americans sing "La Marseillaise," they sing the French lyrics, not an English translation.
Heh, do you know the translation? It is one of the bloodiest anthems in the world. In fact, the Americans who spewed epithets and hatred onto the Internet in response to the commercial would probably love it, because it's an ode to xenophobic paranoia: It's written on the premise that foreign soldiers are "coming to slit the throats of our sons and wives."
I looked up the translation when I commented. And sure enough, sung in English, the syllables, meter, etc., just don't work. It sounds so regal and stately in French, when you don't understand the words. Previously I'd had no idea what was actually being said. Just as well, huh?
It seemed to me on first hearing that the ad was a celebration of America's immigrant origins. The controversy, which is politically timely, is like politics wherein one's reaction is immediately colored by one's political leanings. Personally, I like the commercial and I'm glad Coke made it.
That how I took it when it first started, and is probably how it was intended. But then I started thinking … Too critical an eye, perhaps, but that's where my thoughts went.
It was also timed to appear right before the *Pepsi* half-time show. Great marketing maneuver. The next day everyone was talking about Coke, not Pepsi. That, and how overrated Bruno Mars is.
Bruno who? 😉 Personally, I used the half-time break to fix dinner.
Exactly. Total snoozefest. Not even the Red Hot Chili Peppers could save that show.
Gabbygeezer says:
I enjoyed the song and saw nothing offensive in the presentation. What really was offensive was the Broncos' lack of one. Lighten up, folks. Humans singing in any language to honor a beautiful country deserves praise, not criticism.
Obviously in some people's minds, the commercials warranted more attention than the game.
Legion of Boom dominates; Seahawks school Broncos 43-8
Zeman named one of best nature photographers |
WHISPER FROM THE HEART (article first published : 2006-07-24)
South African poet Stan Almendro launched the Whisper from the Heart Poetry Club some three years ago. He recently announced that the competition has now been expanded to include Poetry; Short Stories; Art (sketches) and Photography.
Apart from offering to publish the works of the students, the club has a host of related services.
The team, IT specialist Wynand Labuschagne; administration manager Giselle Visser and Stan Almendro (as editor and poet) has developed a club catering for a wide spectrum of the arts. It offers competitions for scholars and adults, pen pal club, African art by Cameron Juby, etched leather art from Danie Potgieter, a range of pottery by Adrian Kirston as well as art, for the ardent art lover through an affiliation with Art Price.
The Club has paid out in excess of R80,000 in prizes to scholars (poets) and schools since its inception in 2004 and has now also launched the 2006 schools competition for English and Afrikaans Poems; Short Stories; Art (sketches) & Photography The closing date for the schools competition is September 30. The Adult (open) competition which is only for poetry, also closes on this date.
The club has published its first schools anthology, Whisper from the Heart, and is in the process of publishing more anthologies this year. All anthologies available from the office on fax 013 93 23182.
"We have also formed an association with Amazon where we offer books, CD's and DVD's that are of specific interest to poetry and art lovers," says Stan. "Our aim is to grow African poetry and art. The talent in our country is immense and we feel that by joining our club and sending in contributions will make the literary and art world stand up and see what we have to offer. Our hopes for the web site are to show our country's valuable source of talent. We welcome poetry and art contributions."
The club has also formed an alliance with an African tour facility that is being offered via the web site. This opens up prospects for visitors to visit South Africa and see what is on offer by way of tours and art of the African wild game.
"Our current competition is open to scholars, who need to enter via their respective schools," comments Stan. "Non-scholars may also enter under an adult category. Super prizes can be won and this also opens up the opportunity to have poems published in a number of anthologies."
Interested poets (adults and schools) can visit www.whisperpoetry.com or contact the office on 013 932 3182.
Correspondence can be addressed to Whisper from the Heart Poetry Club, PO Box 1466, Alberton, 1450, South Africa. |
Webb's Tire Company was started in 1948 by Martin L. Webb. We relocated in a new building in 1958 with additions and renovations in 1968 and 1975.
We carry a full line of tires including such name brands as General, Michelin, Delta, B.F. Goodrich, Bridgestone and Firestone, and is constantly striving to provide the best tires at the best prices possible.
We employ A.S.E. certified mechanics so that we can provide professional auto service to the people of Central Virginia.
Nobody gives you better quality service and products than...Webb's Tire Company. Every tire we sell, every car we service, is backed by our customer satisfaction.
We offer tire and auto service including new tires for autos, trucks & industrial; computerized wheel alignment, suspension service; brake service; wheel balancing; tire repair service; oil & lubricating service; custom wheels; and batteries.
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I expected the [Illinois] statute to be phrased in a way that would at least strongly imply that the ceremony has to be solemnized by a person. But I'm not sure it's totally clear.
Ending a marriage is another story. According to a number of news stories, a Dallas attorney developed a divorce app which helps clients determine cost and documents necessary to complete a divorce.
Virtual Law Offices: The future of these kinds of virtual legal services is starting to get serious consideration by state bars. New Jersey's bona-fide office rule prohibits virtual offices. See 2010 WL 1829019. North Carolina seems to have taken a more balance approach: See 2005 NC Eth. Op 10 and more recently, the North Carolina Proposed Formal Ethics Opinion Number 7 dealing with 'cloud computing.' See the Social Media Law Student article.
WestlawNext Query: can a robot solemnize a marriage? |
Waves, Celo, and Injective Protocol (INJ) breakout as DeFi reawakens
Bitcoin (BTC) extended its relief rally on Tuesday and reclaimed a market capitalization above $1 trillion.
While many traders panicked during Bitcoin's recent fall below $47,000, fund manager Dan Tapiero said that he spotted a rare TD sequential buy signal during the low. The last time this signal was seen was in March 2020 when Bitcoin price traded near $3,600. Tapiero believes Bitcoin remains on target to reach $100,000 this year.
However, even after the recent rise above $55,000, Bitcoin's market dominance continues to lag at 49.5%, according to CoinMarketCap data. This shows that crypto investors are focusing on altcoins, with several hitting new all-time highs.
Crypto market data daily view. Source: Coin360
The altcoin season is not entirely driven by retail investors. A recent report by crypto investment advisory firm Two Prime Digital Assets highlights that the eightyfold growth in Ether (ETH) options open interest, from $50 million to $4 billion in a year, points toward hedging by institutional money managers to protect their "net long portfolios against outsized volatility events." Even the Ether futures market has increased by 20, cementing the involvement of institutional investors.
Keeping the focus on altcoins, let's study the fundamentals and technicals of three tokens that have done well in the past few days.
WAVES/USDT
Many crypto enthusiasts are interested in investing in digital assets, but they do not have the required trading experience. Therefore, they miss several opportunities or end up leaving money on the table. Others work full time and, therefore, cannot devote time to trading. For such investors, a well-devised algorithmic trading product could be suitable, but it comes with its own risk.
Waves launched a new algorithmic trading investment product called "Lambo Investments" on April 15. The protocol's exchange platform announced it would give away a Lamborghini Huracan to a random investor in the product, which could have lured traders.
Along with decentralized finance (DeFi) and algorithmic trading, Waves has also made a splash in the nonfungible tokens (NFTs) sector. While the overall NFT craze has subsided, select investors continue to focus on them. The first Waves Duck NFT, called "Perfection," was sold for 1 million Neutrino USD (USDN) — an algorithmic stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and collateralized by the native Waves token, WAVES — on Sign Art on April 12.
To further boost growth, Waves founder and CEO Sasha Ivanov recently laid out ambitious plans to reach $10 billion in total value locked by October and average 10 million daily transactions by February 2022. Traders are likely to keep a close watch on the developments, which could decide the level of investors' interest in the project.
WAVES rallied from an intraday low of $11.09 on April 23 to an all-time high of $21.09 on April 27, a 90% gain in five days. However, the long wick on April 27's candlestick suggests profit-booking at higher levels.
WAVES/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
The WAVES/USDT pair could give back some of its gains and drop to the $16–$17 zone. If the bulls can flip this zone into support, it will suggest that sentiment remains positive and traders are accumulating on dips.
The 20-day exponential moving average (EMA) of $14.64 has started to rise, and the relative strength index (RSI) is in the positive zone, indicating the path of least resistance is to the upside.
A strong bounce off the support zone could result in a retest of $21.09. If buyers can drive the price above this resistance, the pair could resume its uptrend and reach $25.
This bullish view will be invalidated if the bears sink the price below the 20-day EMA. Such a move could pull the price down to the 50-day simple moving average (SMA) of $12.65.
INJ/USDT
Injective Protocol recently announced that it secured $10 million in funding from several investors, including Pantera Capital and billionaire Mark Cuban, for its DeFi protocol, which is alleged to have the best of both centralized and decentralized exchanges. Injective's aim is to build a decentralized competitor to Robinhood.
On the development front, the protocol announced on April 15 that it had achieved "Trezor support for the EIP-712 signature standard," which will allow Trezor users to access Ethereum-based applications.
Injective has been partnering with several blockchains to improve the experience for its users. Thus far in April, it has announced collaborations with API3, Harmony, Staked, Litentry, Persistence, Big Data Protocol and Klaytn.
Additionally, periodic token drops in Equinox Staking may have been an added attraction to the investors.
Injective's native token, INJ, rose from $10.91 on April 20 to an all-time high at $21.55 on April 22, recording a 97% increase in three days. The bulls could not sustain even higher levels on April 20, as seen from the long wick on the candlestick.
INJ/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
This encouraged the bears, who tried to trap the bulls and start a correction. However, the buyers purchased the dip to the 50-day SMA ($13.40) on April 23 and defended the 20-day EMA ($15.26) on April 23. This suggests that the sentiment remains positive and the bulls are accumulating on dips.
The buying momentum picked up on April 26, and the bulls cleared the first hurdle at $18.15. If the bulls can sustain the price above $18.15, the INJ/USDT pair could rise to $21.55. A break above this resistance could start the next leg of an up-move that may reach $26.44.
Contrary to this assumption, if the bears pull the price below $18.15, a drop to the 20-day EMA is likely. A break below this support would signal that the momentum has weakened, and the pair may drop to the 50-day SMA.
CELO/USDT
CELO was previously featured on Cointelegraph on Jan. 26 when its price was $3.24. From there, the token rallied to an all-time high of $7.23 on April 21, a 123% rally in just under three months.
Celo announced on April 20 that Deutsche Telekom made a "significant purchase" of CELO tokens through its strategic investment fund, Telekom Innovation Pool. Although the size of the investment was not disclosed, it is likely to be a major sentiment booster for the token.
A new gas-efficient bridging standard dubbed "Optics," connecting Celo to Ethereum, was announced on April 21. This is the first step toward building an open, connected blockchain ecosystem, which eventually will include Cosmos, Polkadot and others.
The payments platform announced the launch of the stablecoin Celo Euro (cEUR) on the mainnet on April 22. This is the second stablecoin, after Celo Dollar (cUSD) — which was launched on Celo in June 2020. This increases the user base for Celo users who want to send or receive money from relatives and friends.
CELO has been consolidating between $3.50 and $5.76 for the past few days. The bears pushed the price below the support of the range on March 25, but the bulls reclaimed the level on March 26, indicating buying at lower levels.
CELO/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
The sharp rally on April 20 and 21 propelled the price above the overhead resistance of the range, but the bulls have not been able to consolidate their advantage. The bears pulled the price back into the range on April 22.
Although the CELO/USDT pair broke below the 20-day EMA ($5.01) on April 23, the bulls purchased the dip to the 50-day SMA ($4.39). The buying momentum picked up again, and the bulls cleared the $5.76 hurdle on April 25 but could not sustain the breakout.
The Doji candlestick pattern on April 26 and the inside day candlestick pattern on April 27 suggest uncertainty among the bulls and the bears. If the bulls sustain the price above $5.76, a retest of $7.23 may be in the cards. A breakout of this resistance could result in a rally to $8.02.
Conversely, if the bears sink the price below the 20-day EMA, it will suggest that the pair could remain range-bound for a few more days.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Written by Blockchain Consultants · Categorized: blockchain technology · Tagged: altcoin, altcoins, Applications, art, author, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Price, blockchain, blockchains, Celo, ceo, coinmarketcap, correction, crypto, data, decentralized, Decentralized Finance, DeFi, deutsche telekom, Developments, Digital, ether, ethereum, events, exchange, Exchanges, finance, founder, Fund Manager, funding, Futures, index, Injective Protocol, Investing, investment, Investments, mark cuban, Market, market capitalization, Markets, money, nft, NFTs, nonfungible tokens, opinions, pantera capital, payments, Polkadot, price analysis, Robinhood, signal, stablecoin, Study, token, Tokens, Trading, tradingview, u.s., view, Waves
'Doge4Amazon' Petition Gathers Steam As Thousands Call on Amazon To Accept Dogecoin
No less than 130,000 people have signed a petition for Amazon to accept Dogecoin as a payment option. This comes at the back of Dogecoin's price surge in recent weeks.
Dogecoin Petition for Amazon
The petition called Doge4Amazon now has a total of 130,000 signatures of people from the Dogecoin community.
It was first launched by an anonymous user named Mark E back in September 2018 on Change.org, where it targeted only 25,000 signatures.
However, it surpassed the 100,000-signature mark last month, which may be attributed to the price rally of the cryptocurrency.
A link to the petition was reportedly posted on Sunday to the active Dogecoin community on Reddit, where it gained 1,100 upvotes.
Mark E disclosed in a recent update that Amazon was contacted by staff at Change.org on behalf of the petition after the petition surpassed 100,000 signatures.
Founded by former IBM software engineer Billy Markus and product manager Jackson Palmer as a joke in 2013, the price of the Shiba Inu dog meme-based coin has soared, before it crashed recently.
Its valuation is around $29 billion now, falling off a high of $50 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
Even though small business owners and entrepreneurs are already adopting the cryptocurrency, the petition aims to push Amazon into becoming one of the first major corporations to use it as a payment method.
With Amazon's massive 47% market share of the e-commerce retail market in the US and net revenues of over $280 billion as reported in 2019, many expect that it would accept Dogecoin. This is however wishful thinking as the retailer is still yet to accept Bitcoin as a mode of payment.
Early this year, Amazon reportedly posted job vacancies that show that it may be planning to launch its own digital currency project and trial it in Mexico soon.
The yet-to-be-announced project, which the company sketched out across the job posts, appeared to be a digital currency that will be directly converted for cash and will be used to pay for goods and services on the platform.
Dogecoin's Steady Rise To Popularity
Thanks to celebrities and billionaires like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Dallas Maverick's Mark Cuban, Dogecoin has been steadily rising to popularity in recent months.
Musk has been very vocal about his love for Dogecoin. He posted several tweets hyping the digital asset and even once called it his favorite cryptocurrency.
Shark Tank investor Cuban also recently announced that his NBA franchise would accept Dogecoin as payment for tickets and merchandise.
After his announcement, Cuban revealed that the inclusion of the digital asset as a payment option had paid off as he said the team sold 122,000 DOGE worth of merchandise in March.
Written by Blockchain Consultants · Categorized: blockchain, cryptocurrency · Tagged: amazon, Billionaires, Bitcoin, Business, Cash, celebrities, ceo, CoinDesk, cryptocurrency, Currency, data, Digital, Digital Asset, digital currency, dogecoin, e-commerce, elon-musk, engineer, entrepreneurs, google, IBM, mark cuban, Market, Mexico, reddit, Software, tesla, tickets, us, youtube
WINk (WIN) soars as retail DeFi investors flee high Etheruem gas costs
Decentralized finance has exploded in popularity over the past year and many analysts have pointed to the 2020 'summer of DeFi' as the primary catalyst for the rallies seen in Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC).
In the beginning, investors were able to easily secure 4-digit annual percentage yield (APY) on an almost endless number of attractively priced assets on Uniswap but the increased activity on the Etheruem network eventually led to unsustainable spikes in gas fees and serious network congestion.
These skyrocketing gas fees have priced out the average retail investor from participating in even the simplest protocol interactions like token approval or staking. The current Etheruem proposals do not provide an immediate solution to these issues and this has motivated investors to look for non-Ethereum-based networks that offer yield farming and other DeFi opportunities.
Average Ethereum gas price. Source: Etherscan
With no simple network-wide solution to high ETH fees planned in the near future, it is worthwhile to explore some of the other options available on competing blockchain networks.
One such option is WINk (WIN), a Tron-based (TRX) gambling platform that allows users to play, socialize and stake assets across multiple blockchain ecosystems through the utilization of the native WIN token.
Low-fee, multi-asset staking
Interacting with the WINk protocol requires a Tron wallet with about 8 TRX which is roughly $0.48 at the current price.
When compared to $40 (or more) in fees per transaction on Ethereum, the ability to make multiple transactions over several days for less than a dollar becomes quite appealing to the average investor.
Similar to many DeFi platforms, WINk's platform has many staking opportunities for tokens within the ecosystem, including TRONbetDice (DICE) and TRONbetLIVE (LIVE), which allow token stakers to earn a portion of the proceeds from the activity which takes place within those games.
According to the most recent monthly report from the project, the APRs for staking WIN, DICE and LIVE on the protocol for the month of January were 64%, 123% and 137% respectively.
With WIN currently trading at $0.000394 and DICE and LIVE priced less than $0.05, the low entry cost and price of staking and unstaking might be more appealing for the average retail investor when compared to the sky-high valuations of tokens like Yearn.Finance (YFI) and Aave.
Evidence that traders have begun to notice this opportunity can be found in the recent price performance of WIN which has rallied 700% from a low of $0.000058 on Jan. 1 to a high of $0.000477 on March 20 thanks to a record $344 million in trading volume.
WIN/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for WIN on March 18, prior to the recent price rise.
The VORTECS™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historic and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.
VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. WIN price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro
As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score registered a high of 65 multiple times on March 18 and the most recent pop to 65 occurred roughly six hours before WIN rallied 90%.
Increased activity for the cryptocurrency sector due to mainstream exposure from institutional investors and big-name influencers like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban has the ecosystem poised to see a continued influx of new users looking to earn a high return on smaller-sized investments.
Projects like WIN are well-positioned to capture some of this growth as smaller investors look for options outside the Ethereum network.
Written by Blockchain Consultants · Categorized: blockchain technology · Tagged: Altcoin Watch, author, Bitcoin, blockchain, btc, Cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency, data, DeFi, elon-musk, ETH, ether, ethereum, Ethereum network, Fees, finance, Gambling, Games, investment, Investments, Mainstream, mark cuban, Market, Market Sentiment, Markets, opinions, other, Tokens, Trading, tradingview, TRON, twitter, Uniswap, wallet, WIN, Yearn
Andreessen Horowitz leads $23M round for NFT marketplace OpenSea
OpenSea, one of the largest digital collectible marketplaces, has secured backing from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, and others in a new funding round.
According to Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is leading a $23 million Series A round for OpenSea alongside a16z's Cultural Leadership Fund, as well as angel investors Ron Conway, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss, Belinda Johnson, Naval Ravikant, Ben Silberman, and others.
"OpenSea makes NFTs searchable, usable, and organized," said a16z general partner Katie Haun. "But it goes further and provides a marketplace that brings all platforms together and eases transactions among all parties, the way eBay and Amazon do."
The venture capital firm cited OpenSea's growth in its decision to back the non-fungible token, or NFT, marketplace, saying it had been "off the charts" in the last six months, with transaction volume having grown 100-fold. In addition, a16z praised the marketplace's leadership, including CEO Devin Finzer and CTO Alex Atallah.
As one of the first venture capital firms to enter the space, Andreessen Horowitz has invested in a variety of crypto projects so far, including Libra, Maker DAO, and Coinbase. Last month the firm backed Optimism's L2 scaling solution.
This story is developing and will be updated.
Written by Blockchain Consultants · Categorized: blockchain technology · Tagged: a16z, amazon, ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ, Business, ceo, coinbase, crypto, CTO, DAO, Digital, eBay, funding, Katie Haun, leadership, Libra, maker, mark cuban, marketplace, nft, NFTs, nonfungible tokens, opensea, partner, Space, Venture Capital
Much fun, no work: DOGE must ditch meme status to be valued as money
There is no denying the fact that Dogecoin (DOGE) is by far one of the most polarizing crypto projects in the market today. On one hand, many think of the cryptocurrency as largely being a joke that has long overstayed its welcome; however, there also those people — including many celebrities, business moguls, etc. — who evidently believe it's a viable financial instrument that will stick around for a long time to come, or at least they are leading people into believing that.
For example, the owner of NBA franchise the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, recently stated that he is fairly confident that DOGE is here to stay and even has the potential to hit a price point of $1 in the near future. This proclamation comes a few days after the Mavericks started accepting Dogecoin as a form of payment.
He further revealed that fans were already behind this latest payment avenue, and as of March 7, the Mavs had already sold 20,000 Dogecoin — roughly $1,018 at press time — worth of merchandise, adding: "If we sell another 6,556,000,000 Dogecoin worth of Mavs merch, DOGE will definitely hit $1."
It is worth mentioning that over the course of the last few months, DOGE's list of prominent mainstream followers has been growing at a furious pace, with celebrities like Kiss co-lead singer and bassist Gene Simmons, former adult film star Mia Khalifa and American rappers Snoop Dogg and Lil Yachty all showcasing their support for the digital asset.
However, the most prominent backer of the "meme coin," by far, is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has been vocalizing his support for DOGE through his Twitter account in a big way for nearly a year now.
Is the hype here to stay?
DOGE, just like any other cryptocurrency, is dependent on how many people adopt it. As a result, who's to actually say that the currency can't become the "future of money" if enough people were to start supporting it?
On the subject, Kadan Stadelmann, chief technology officer of Komodo — an open-source cryptocurrency project and blockchain solutions provider — told Cointelegraph that contrary to what Cuban and some other folks may believe, DOGE reaching $1 is practically impossible until some Bitcoin-level buy-ins are witnessed in the near future:
"We aren't currently seeing this even with increased adoption by Mark Cuban and other NBA owners. DOGE does certainly already have a use case as a niche currency with avid fans, and adoption can certainly grow from here. But for it to genuinely be considered 'future money,' the narrative of DOGE as a meme coin will have to erode."
On a more technical note, Stadelmann pointed out that when one takes into consideration the amount of new DOGE that is being minted every day — 10,000 per minute/14.4 million per day/5.2 billion per year — the price action of DOGE faces some harrowing challenges in the near term.
Furthermore, 14.4 million DOGE/day or 5 billion/year will soon become a small drop in the bucket, and the coin's price action will be expected to stabilize as the 14.4 million/day today already represents only just over a ~4% supply increase/year of its available circulating supply.
Another way to talk about DOGE, its price speculation and its use as a legit financial instrument, as per Stadelmann, is by looking at the amount of United States dollars it absorbs every day to maintain its current price action levels against fiat. The token is currently trading at around $0.056, which requires Dogecoin to have $806,000 of new fiat in addition to its existing inflow in order to maintain its value, according to Stadelmann.
However, Johnny Lyu, CEO of KuCoin, pointed out to Cointelegraph that he is quite optimistic about the future of Dogecoin since it's already one of the symbols of crypto for many people today: "I won't be surprised to see DOGE being used in hotels, restaurants or cinemas in the future." That being said, he believes that despite its potential, the token is unlikely to break into the top five anytime soon, adding:
"The search interests of DOGE have overtaken BTC from time to time. Compared to Bitcoin, DOGE is more suitable to be futures money for higher supply, lower price and faster transactions. It's tailored for daily payment, and its community culture can easily resonate with the general public."
Not everyone is sold on DOGE
Though DOGE's recent success makes for an amazing feel-good story, a lot of industry experts are not entirely buying into the hype. For example, Stadelmann pointed out that when compared to other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), institutions are far less likely to adopt Dogecoin or other similar coins: "DOGE doesn't have a narrative like 'digital gold' and isn't being seen as a store of value."
In this vein, it bears mentioning that the price action of coins like DOGE is driven largely by their respective communities rather than by changes in the value of their underlying technology or use cases.
On the subject, Joel Edgerton, chief operating officer of cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer, told Cointelegraph that coins like DOGE are meant to be fun rather than solve real-life problems and that it has not proven its value just yet: "Any asset can reach a certain price target if people are willing to pay for it. However, that type of momentum investing, without underlying value, is pure speculation."
Where is DOGE heading?
DOGE has been on a tear recently as is made evident by the fact that over the course of the last 12 or so months, the currency has seen gains of over 2,440%. As a result, it's worth delving into the question: Where does DOGE's monetary ceiling actually lie?
In Lyu's opinion, $0.20–$0.30 is a reasonable range in this bull run; however, he believes that there's still a long way for DOGE to go before it can become anything more than a sort of short-term cultural phenomenon. For starters, it will have to be regulated — an aspect that will have a major impact on the currency's future use and overall potential:
"Compliance is almost a must if it wants to be widely used in our daily lives, while it can also exist in a niche market without any regulation. Not bad for the future of DOGE in both ways. If the price of Dogecoin rises to $1, its market cap will be $100 billion, becoming the third-largest crypto. I think this is unlikely to happen in the short term."
Written by Blockchain Consultants · Categorized: blockchain technology · Tagged: Adoption, Bitcoin, blockchain, btc, Business, celebrities, ceo, chief, crypto, Cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency exchange, Culture, Currency, Digital, dogecoin, elon-musk, ether, exchange, fiat, Futures, Go, Investing, Mainstream, mark cuban, Market, money, opinion, other, Regulation, Technology, tesla, Trading, twitter, United States |
By Air Force News on August 9, 2012
JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-RANDOLPH, Texas (AFNS) -- If you have children, especially teenagers, you already know the harrowing statistics that illustrate the dangers they face in the world today. Daily we see news about kids left to their own devices after school who have taken the wrong path in life.
Air Force youth programs help combat potentially negative influences in our kids' lives by providing healthy, interesting, educational and fun activities where they can channel their creative energy.
Air Force wide, more than 63,000 kids between 6 and 18 participate in Air Force youth programs including sports, fitness, arts and technology, leadership opportunities and outdoor adventures. Those kids are thriving in an environment focused on enabling them to reach their potential and achieve their personal dreams. Our adult staff members work to help participants grow and develop into confident young adults, artists, athletes, leaders.
Past participants have used what they learned as Air Force youth program participants to seize their dreams. From a full scholarship to Marquette University to participation in the Miss USA Pageant, our kids are excelling in their chosen fields. More than a dozen Teen Aviation Camp participants have been accepted into the Air Force Academy.
Others, as participants in the Youth Employment Skills program, have learned career skills, supported their communities as volunteers, and earned cash toward their post-high school academic or training pursuits. While they earned money for their own educational needs, their participation in YES also earned money for their home base youth programs, enabling them to benefit personally and pay it forward as well. Many YES alumni today are serving in military leadership roles, pursuing graduate degrees and mentoring others in communities around the country.
This summer, more than 250 installation teens attended and all-expenses-paid trip to participate in Close Up Washington D.C., a nonprofit program established in 1971 that educates and inspires young people to become informed and engaged citizens. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the teens who attended, and typical of the developmental programs for Air Force youth.
In an increasingly perilous world, Air Force youth programs offer a healthy alternative to the detrimental, self-destructive activities we so often hear about in the news. Under the loving guidance of our staff, your kids will make connections with others of similar and varying experiences, and they'll have opportunities to stretch their wings, learn about themselves, pursue their gifts, and grow into tomorrow's leaders.
Contact your installation youth programs for further information about local opportunities. For more information about Air Force youth programs and other quality of life programs, visit www.usafservices.com or www.myairforcelife.com.
Lewis Army Museum renovations continue, new exhibit planned
Sgt. Mark Miranda/5th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment on August 8th, 2012
Salmon Run brings fish and fun to Joint Base Lewis-McChord
By Staff Sgt. Adam C. Keith on September 16th, 2014
JBLM teen seeks crown
By J.M. Simpson on April 23rd, 2013
Children's musical performance highlights weeklong workshop
By Dean Siemon/JBLM PAO on April 11th, 2013
Putting at-risk youth into the pilot's seat
By Marques Hunter on January 28th, 2013
4th AS's newest C-17 pilot is only 8 years old
By Staff Sgt. Sean Tobin/62nd Airlift Wing Public Affairs on January 2nd, 2013
Life After Death: 45 tumors didn't slow down this Airman |
Groups of teachers in collaboration with local grassroots collectives kicked off solidarity school-tutoring, demanding the use of local schools for this function or holding solidarity classes in local social centres. Departing from the experience of solidarity teaching for second generation migrants and refugees, these schools are self-organized, horizontal and engage parents, students and teachers in decision-making processes, linking also the school with the local community and broader socio-political issues.
OLA members participate actively in the everyday activities of the solidarity school of Mesopotamia (for example through providing English language courses, co-organizing cultural events, participating in assemblies etc.).
Our engagements with the solidarity schools and the school of Mesopotamia has contributed significantly to our understanding of the operation of solidarity structures in Greece and played an important role for our most recent HCI and solidarity publications. |
Subject > State and/or City budget(x)
Press Release – A New Experimental College
In this press release, The City University of New York's Office of University Relations announces the creation of a new, experimental, two-year college to be "established on a community-oriented basis in central Brooklyn." The press release [...]
Subjects: Board of Higher Education, Board of Trustees, City / State Relations, Community Colleges, Open Admissions, Pedagogy, Relationships with Communities, Remediation, State and/or City budget
Tags: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, Chancellor Albert Bowker, Community College Number Seven, Experimental Education, Medgar Evers College, Porter R. Chandler, The City University of New York Office of University Relations
Interview conducted by former Vice Chancellor Julius C.C. Edelstein with former CUNY Chancellor Albert Bowker
In 1986 former CUNY Vice-Chancellor Julius C. C. Edelstein conducted this interview with former Chancellor Albert Bowker about Bowker's tenure as the second Chancellor of CUNY. The discussion focuses on whether CUNY is a "system" or a "university" [...]
Item Type: Text (Transcription)
Time Periods: 1961-1969 The Creation of CUNY - Open Admissions Struggle, 1978-1992 Retrenchment - Austerity - Tuition
Subjects: Board of Higher Education, Board of Trustees, City / State Relations, CUNY Administration, CUNY Centralization, State and/or City budget
Tags: Chancellor Albert Bowker, CUNY Graduate Center, Donna Shalala, Julius C.C. Edelstein, Lawrence Mucciolo
"Before Open Admissions there was a lot of the haves and the have-nots." – An Oral History Interview with Donal Farley
Following almost 10 years at the NYC Budget Bureau, Donal Farley began his employment at CUNY Central in 1967 as Assistant to the first Vice Chancellor for Campus Planning and Development Seymour Hyman. Under Chancellor Albert Bowker, he eventually [...]
Time Periods: 1961-1969 The Creation of CUNY - Open Admissions Struggle, 1970-1977 Open Admissions - Fiscal Crisis - State Takeover, 1978-1992 Retrenchment - Austerity - Tuition
Subjects: 1970s Fiscal Crisis, Austerity, Board of Higher Education, Board of Trustees, Buildings and/or Architecture, City / State Relations, CUNY Administration, Founding of CUNY, Open Admissions, Politics, Relationships with Communities, State and/or City budget, Tuition
Tags: Chancellor Albert Bowker, CUNY Construction Fund, CUNY Office of Campus Planning and Development, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor John Lindsay, Seymour C. Hyman, State Dormitory Authority
Bedford-Stuyvesant (1)
Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (1)
CUNY Construction Fund (1)
CUNY Office of Campus Planning and Development (1)
Community College Number Seven (1)
Donna Shalala (1)
Julius C.C. Edelstein (1)
Lawrence Mucciolo (1)
Mayor John Lindsay (1)
Oral Histories on Open Admissions and the Imposition of Tuition at CUNY (1)
The Founding of Medgar Evers College (1)
CLAGS Archive (1)
LaGuardia and Wagner Archives (1)
Medina, Douglas (1) |
Season Recap/Grades: Kris Draper and Mike Modano
By Graham Hathway@GrahamWIIM Jun 15, 2011, 9:00am CDT
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It was no secret heading into this season that the Red Wings were once again going to be one of the oldest teams in the NHL. For the past 10 years, the Wings have relied heavily on seasoned veterans to be the leaders, supplemented by a few young players.
As we continue our postseason series of grading the Red Wing players. we focus on two of the more experienced members of the team. One has been a fixture in red and white, a player that was obtained for $1 and has been around since before the Wings were known as Stanley Cup Champions. The other was a former superstar who was "coming home" for one more shot at glory. For potentially the last time, let's review the seasons of Kris Draper and Mike Modano.
PRESEASON EXPECTATIONS: In the pre-season, it was clear that both players were going to play significant roles as depth players. Modano was coming off a season in which he missed time due to injury and had been discarded by the only franchise he had ever known. Draper was going to be his usual energetic self, killing penalties and winning faceoffs, but in a reduced role as the kids got more playing time. Modano in particular was seen as a piece that could vault the Wings ahead of the pack and give them the forward depth necessary to contend for a Cup.
Follow the jump as we dish out some grades for two of the Wings' elder statesmen.
Kris Draper
#33 / Center / Detroit Red Wings
2010 - Kris Draper 47 6 5 11 1 12 0 0 1 57
The last remaining member of the Grind Line, Draper has seen his role evolve over his years in Detroit. Obtained in 1993, at times he has been the Wings' best penalty killer, top checking center, defensive specialist, and now is a mentor to younger players like Darren Helm and Patrick Eaves. Casey predicted that Draper would see reduced playing time as he was caught in the revolving door to the Leino Lounge, but it was hernia surgery that kept Draper out of the lineup for the first 2 and a half months of the season. He played in only 47 games, the lowest percentage of games played vs team games since his first season in Detroit.
WHAT HE DID WELL: Despite the injury, he made an immediate impact in the faceoff dot, leading the team in faceoff percentage and finishing 15th in the NHL among centers who played in at least 41 games. Together with Patrick Eaves and Darren Helm, they formed a line that was often one of the best trios for the Wings on any given night, a testament to how hard that line worked (and how poor the top lines played at times this season). Despite appearing in a limited number of games, he was able to score 6 goals, a pace that likely would have gotten him in double-digits for the first time since 2006-07. While losing some of his defensive abilities, he was still an asset against the other team rather than a liability.
WHAT HE DIDN'T DO WELL: Draper has never been known as an offensive force, and this year was no exception. His 6 goals, while only in 47 games, came within a stretch of 22 games, and he did not score a goal after February 13. In the playoffs, he kicked in 1 assist in 8 games. However, he was not kept on to score goals.
OVERALL GRADE: There's some sentimentality at play here, because we all know that Draper might not be back with the Wings next year. However, this is not about what he's done over his career, but rather what he did this season. He missed the first 23 games of the season due to hernia surgery, than was unable to escape the 13th forward rotation. While in the lineup, he was effective in his role as a fourth line winger, but his inability to remain in the lineup diminshed his impact. If this was Draper's swan song, it was probably not the way he wanted to go out, but he played hard and with passion when on the ice. I'll give him a C+ for being a solid, if unspectacular, contributor to the team.
Mike Modano
Born: Jun 07, 1970
2010 - Mike Modano 40 4 11 15 -4 8 1 0 0 79
There hasn't been a free agent signing by the Wings that was as anticipated as Mike Modano. The storylines were in abundance: the Livonia native coming back to Michigan to play for his hometown team after a Hall of Fame career as the face of the Dallas Stars franchise for one last chance at winning the Stanley Cup. His Red Wing career began with a bang, scoring in the first game of the season against the Ducks. After that, he struggled to adapt to the Wings' system, and he only tallied one other goal over the course of the first 20 games. Then in a game against Columbus, R.J. Umberger's skate came up accidentally and struck Modano's right wrist, severing tendons and causing him to miss 41 games. Upon his return, he struggled to catch up, and by the time the playoffs rolled around, he was relegated to the press box while the Wings attempted an epic comeback.
WHAT HE DID WELL: When reviewing Modano's season as a whole, he really wasn't the factor that many of us thought he'd be. It was well understood that he was not the Modano of 10 years ago, but 10-15 goals and 35 points were not unreasonable goals. In the preseason, he told the press he was not used to the conditioning the Wings employed. However, a lot of his struggles can be attributed to being in a new system, and then due to coming back after a significant injury. Towards the end of the regular season, Modano was playing with a step in his game that was not there previously, and he had 7 points in his last 20 games. Before he got injured, he was playing better as he adapted to his new team.
WHAT HE DIDN'T DO WELL: In a few words, a lot. At the beginning of the season, he struggled to mesh on a line with Jiri Hudler and Danny Cleary, and when he returned, the team was playing so well that his place in the lineup was tenuous at best. He couldn't score to save his life early in the season, and the injury he sustained took a lot of momentum away from him (although the injury was through no fault of his). His defense was pretty much non-existent, he was inconsistent offensively, and before the playoffs began, he took a lot of the focus away from the team by announcing that he would likely retire if the Wings made a deep run. Unfortunately for him, he only played in 2 playoff games, and only because of injuries to Johan Franzen.
OVERALL GRADE: I think it's safe to say the Mike Modano experiment was a bust. I know a lot of people were excited at the prospect of the greatest American-born player joining his home team, but the Modano of 2010-11 was a shell of his former self. He never seemd to fit in with the Wings, and he sustained an accidental injury that derailed his season. I won't go so far as to give him a failing grade, because I think had he not gotten injured, his season would have turned out differently. Still, he was not good when he was in the lineup, never becoming the player many thought he would be for the Wings. For that reason, I give Modano a D and wish him well with whatever he decides to do next in his career.
Red Wings Look Flat in 2-0 Loss to Islanders Detroit looked like a team who started their all-star break a night early
The Future of The Community is Uncertain |
I'm pretty excited to show my latest DIY home decor project – DIY felt flower canvas.
I used Carley's tutorial as the basis for this project. It has fantastic step by step instructions on how to make one of these. I just wanted to share a couple of my own steps which I added in. I made one canvas first off, just to test out Carley's instructions. I knew I wanted three (I think most decorations look better as an odd number), so I tested the one out first.
You can refer to the pictures in the gallery which will detail some of the steps for you.
Canvas – whatever size you like, and how many. The one I used was 12″ x 10″.
Hot glue your backing fabric onto the canvas. Cut corners out of the fabric though, otherwise you'll get bulky corners like you can see on one of the photos of the gallery. I suggest adding a little cross to your fabric to mark out the middle. Don't worry, you won't be able to see the marks at all .. I found it helped just to space out my petals accurately.
Cut rectangles as per Carley's instructions. I added another 4 of the smaller size though, but I'll explain why later.
Fold rectangles in half put a dot of glue in the middle. Be careful not to burn yourself! Carley's instructions say to flip the rectangle over and add more dots of glue, but I decided to cut my petals out first. Whilst the rectangle is still folded, cut one side of the rectangle at a curve to create a petal. I liked mine to be more pointed, but you could make them round if you wanted – it's entirely up to you! Once cut, flip your rectangle and add dots of glue to either side like Carley's tutorial.
Layer them in the centre of your canvas. They will overlap if we stick with the 10 large petals, and they won't sit perfect (believe me, I tried), but you won't really see it at the end, so don't stress.
Rinse and repeat the gluing / flipping / cutting process for the 2nd layer. Space them in the centre of the large petals.
Rinse and repeat the gluing / flipping / cutting process with 7 of the small size petals. Space these evenly over the 2nd layer of petals.
Carley's tutorial said to only half glue 4 of the small size petals, in order to fill up the centre a bit. For each of my 3 canvases, I used a total of 6-7. I found that 4 left too big a gap, and uneven spacing which really bugged me so I just cut out a few more and half glued them and spaced them until I was happy with them. I also found cutting these final layer of petals at a slight angle made it easier for me to glue my middle piece in.
Using your remaining petals, shape a rosebud type centre piece and glue together. There's no hard and fast rule for this, just shape whatever you think will look good, and will cover the middle section of your piece.
Primp and fluff the petals until your heart's content. You've finished, and can now hang your piece on the wall!
I hope you find Carley and my's tutorial helpful. If you have any questions regarding any of the steps at all, I'd be more than happy to help so leave a comment below and I'll be sure to try and lend a hand – good luck!
what a lovely idea, I may try this at some point- maybe with different colours of felt, to jazz it up a bit!
Hi can you tell me the sizes you cut the felt. I've searched the web. Can't find that info anywhere.
Hi Sarah – oh I'm sorry! The tutorial I linked to seems to have an expire domain, sorry about that!
Those sizes depend on your canvas size though, so play around with the sizes if you feel like those don't work! Good luck – let me know how you go. |
Do you consume 2 servings of fruit every day? It might not surprise you that most Americans don't meet national recommendations for fruit intake, but did you know that low fruit intake (including 100% fruit juice) has been linked to numerous chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease and cancer?
100% fruit juice may offer a convenient, accessible, affordable and practical solution to help increase your intake of fruit. Consumption of 100% fruit juice has been associated with overall better diet quality and may even contribute to increased satiety and weight management. A new study shows that the antioxidants (i.e. polyphenols) present in fruits may be better absorbed in processed fruit juice as compared to whole fruit. Outside of its potential antioxidant effects, 100% fruit juice (just like whole fruit) is packed with essential nutrients such as potassium and vitamin C. Some 100% fruit juices may even have greater amounts of certain nutrients since only fully ripe fruits are used in manufacturing. Disgusted by the bland taste of grocery store tomatoes or blueberries? That's because many grocery store fruits are picked green and allowed to ripen during transportation.
So what's the downside of 100% fruit juice? Most juices lack the dietary fiber that whole fruits provide. The sugar in 100% fruit juice is also more quickly absorbed by the body since whole fruit must first be broken down during digestion. For this reason many companies have introduced products where a portion of the naturally present sugar has been removed. Like always moderation is always the key to a healthy diet and lifestyle.
The take home message is that if you're only getting an apple a day… you might want to consider one serving of 100% fruit juice to help meet your fruit intake requirements. Parents – remember that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children age 1-6 limit their consumption of 100% juice to 4-6 ounces per day. For more information visit the Produce for Better Health Foundation website. |
Do you want add 120 more templates to your inventory of videos to sell to other businesses?
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Now we are still firm believers that a real human in video is best, BUT whiteboard and animation still as a certain 'flashy appeal' that businesses want.
Think about how easy it would be to close a sale if you had the ability to offer a whiteboard and/or animated video in combination with a spokesperson commercial!
This is all about adding value and giving you more options to offer as a part of your service. Please, don't pass up this offer if you're really serious about using the EZ Spokesperson Creator platform to start your own video service. This addition of whiteboard and animated templates will only add to the value you can offer and help you lock in more clients!
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Championing Lynhaven, Education and Voter Registration
Rosa Byrd: Protecting her neighborhood, improving her city.
Living Legends: The Project
Living Legends of Alexandria is an ongoing 501(c)(3) photo-documentary project to identify, honor and chronicle Alexandria's Living Legends. The project was conceived by artist-photographer Nina Tisara to create an enduring artistic record of the people whose vision and dedication make a positive, tangible difference to the quality of life in Alexandria.
Platinum and Gold sponsors this year are the Alexandria Commission for the Arts, Club Managers Association of America, Renner & Company, CPA, P.C., Goodwin House, Inc. and SunTrust Bank.
This is one of a series of profiles that will appear this year. For information, to volunteer, become a sponsor or nominate a Legend for 2014, visit www.AlexandriaLeg... or contact Nina Tisara at 703-625-2330.
Alexandria — Rosa Byrd and her husband Jack have lived in Alexandria for more than 50 years and for much of that time she has been a community leader and champion for causes to make her Lynhaven neighborhood a safe place to live. They are the proud parents of Patricia Yancey (Alex) and Julious Byrd (Semone) and grandparents of Chanel Yancey, Jordan Byrd and Jalen Byrd.
For more than 35 years, Byrd and her friends inspected alleyways of Lynhaven for code enforcement violations, sanitation problems and lighting outages. They were lovingly referred to as the "Snoop Sisters" by their neighbors. Byrd developed a working relationship with the mayor, members of City Council and the city manager that helped to solve many of the neighborhood's problems. She and her neighbors were successful in transforming a vacant lot into a playground for their children. Later, then Mayor Charles Beatley was on hand for the opening of a second park in the area. One former business owner was so appreciative of Byrd's volunteer efforts in her community that he established the Lynhaven/Byrd scholarship at T.C. Williams High School. Del Pepper, Alexandria City Council member, said, "In many ways, large and small, Rosa has truly made a positive difference in the neighborhood and community. She has shown courage when that was needed as well as determination, commitment and perseverance. It's caring people like Rosa that have made Alexandria such a wonderful place to live."
Unfortunately, in the late '80s, Alexandria began to attract drug dealers from New York and Washington, D.C. Lynhaven was targeted as an area whose streets would become "open air drug markets." The loss of so many youths to drugs and gang activities inspired Byrd and others to take on the dealers and gang leaders to make their neighborhood safe. Byrd was in constant contact with the mayor, members of council, city manager and the Alexandria Police Department to bring all resources to bear for an all-out attack on the problem. She was instrumental in encouraging her neighbors to establish a bond of trust and respect with the undercover police officers. Residents allowed their homes to be used by police to observe active drug sales. Byrd activated telephone trees to assist a special unit of the Police Department called the, "Jump-Out Boys." The dealers feared this unit because of its success.
Lynhaven was selected to become the first neighborhood in Alexandria to participate in a program called Community Oriented Policing (COP). This program entailed having one particular police officer assigned exclusively to Lynhaven. The officer worked in conjunction with the residents to establish neighborhood patrols, united with the transportation and environmental services department, code enforcement and the traffic division to help clean and beautify the neighborhood again. Absentee landlords were held accountable for the maintenance of their properties. The COP's program is still in operation. Sergeant Robyn Nichols, Lynhaven's liaison officer since 1996 said, "Rosa held the Police Department and elected officials accountable for combating the drug problem in the neighborhood."
Byrd's influence also extended outside of Lynhaven. Her concern for quality education in all the city's public schools, especially for minority students led to many educational endeavors. She has led by example. In 2011, Byrd and her daughter, Patricia, were honored with the "Generation to Generation" award for community service by Senior Services of Alexandria.
Her concern for quality education in all the city's public schools, especially for minority students led to many educational endeavors. Byrd has served as officer of the PTA's of Cora Kelly Elementary School, Francis C. Hammond Middle School and T.C. Williams High School.
Byrd knows the importance of having input into the day-to-day decisions made by politicians. She knew that the way for the disenfranchised to have a "voice" was through their vote. She actively recruited neighbors to register, she volunteered at the polls, served as a precinct chief, campaigned for city, state and presidential candidates, arranged for transportation to and from the polls and provided any other service necessary in her efforts to get people out to vote.
Former City Manager Vola Lawson said, "Rosa Byrd is a real dynamo. She has worked successfully for years to benefit and improve her beloved Lynhaven community. She has also been a strong advocate for the rich diversity of our school children. Rosa's energy, commitment and effectiveness for the causes she cares about are legendary."
Living Legend Ferdinand Day considers Rosa Byrd to be one of his "ladies," a group of community activists who have worked with him and Living Legend Melvin Miller throughout the years. The group includes three Living Legends and two nominees. Day said, "Working with Rosa has been a pleasure. I have known her for many years and I have been impressed with her dedication to the city. Her nomination to Living Legends honors the concept of the Legends."
Fighting for Her Neighborhood Led to School Roles
Alexandria: Learn How To Dance in the Rain
Helping Low Income and Public Housing Residents
Dirty Dozen Off Streets |
We need the sun for many biological processes.
The sun produces ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
UV can cause free radicals in skin cells and this is what causes skin cancer, wrinkles, photo-aging, and sun burns.
This diet will help protect the skin against the damaging effects of UV, without the need for conventional sunscreens. |
Hard as it was to say goodbye to a pet bias, I felt relieved. A space opened somewhere.
Despite the fact that there is a great amount of art that I will likely never enthusiastically embrace, I'm always amused on those occasions when I come to the realization that a specific dislike for certain art has been motivated by my own ignorance.
Well intentioned but ill-conceived biases – too often precipitated through blind adherence to some form of entrenched artistic "rule" or axiom – have occasionally precluded me from engaging certain types of photography that might otherwise have served to greatly enhance my own life experience. Though not always the case, such biases revealed themselves to be the culprit more often than I like to admit, particularly during my formative years as a photographer.
Now, you might think I'm trying to suggest that all art has merit and that all art remains worthy of your attention. I'm not. Well-reasoned biases are an integral part of rational discernment and personal taste when it comes to matters of art. After all, personal bias is the very portal through which each of us is able to perceive art in an individually meaningful way. At the same time, not all biases are rationally conceived. And those ill-conceived biases can lead us to dismiss a great amount of art that might otherwise carry the potential to enhance our own circumstance through increased awareness, personal insight, aesthetic enrichment, and spiritual awakening.
In my own experience with art, I've found that that which I dislike is often that which I simply do not (yet) understand. By endeavoring to learn more about what it is that is actually motivating me to reject a particular approach to photography, I am occasionally led to the disillusionment of what is ultimately discovered to be an irrational bias. And, by learning more about the art, itself, I am then rewarded with far greater appreciation, potential acceptance (and dare I say, even enjoyment) of that which I had previously rejected through my own lack of discernment.
Sometime in early 1970, I was told (or perhaps I read this somewhere) that cropping one's photographs by any means other than through the strict use of camera placement was a sin from which redemption was simply not possible. Cropping a negative in the enlarger (enlarger, meaning Lightroom or Photoshop to you younger readers) was a sure-fire way to be branded a rank neophyte. Simply put: Photography: Rule #1: "Professional photographers do not crop their photographs!" So, of course, not wanting to be labeled a novice (and not knowing any better at the time due to actually being a novice), I faithfully and blindly bought into what eventually proved to be an absurd proposition.
Under normal circumstances each photographic composition consists of two outside dimensions. Those dimensions are of course height and width. Typically, one of those two dimensions will always be able to be successfully cropped – strictly within the camera frame – while the other may not (at the same time) fit within the remaining dimension associated with the overall frame. When this situation occurs, I simply choose the dimension that requires the additional area of coverage and I position the camera to strictly crop (in-camera) to that particular dimension. And of course, I'm then left with the other dimension showing unwanted area outside the limits of my intended composition. That area will be summarily cropped in "post-processing." It's a simple method for cropping a single-frame composition that allows one to use the maximum available camera coverage (for reasons of optimal image quality) while also allowing for the reality that not every scene will fit snugly into the same fixed proportion. And most important, it is a method that does not (in any way) imply a haphazard approach. It's a procedure formulated through careful consideration, an acceptance of reality, and the understanding that meticulous attention is best paid to the final composition prior to tripping the shutter.
There are, of course, any number of other legitimate and well-reasoned methods for cropping photographs (to include multi-frame composites, image stitching, etc.) but those methods remain outside the scope of my originally intended point.
So, back to my original point… (What was my original point, anyway?) Oh I know… my own ignorance (ahem). Once I was able to free myself of the arbitrary constraints associated with Rule #1 in Photography, I quickly picked up on the fact that most every other rule in art was there to be thoroughly examined and carefully considered, prior to being exercised. And, ultimately, what I've come to find is that there are very few instances in which any rule (pertaining to art) will apply in all circumstances.
Obviously, it's a good idea to know what the rules of photography are so that you can then use them to your best advantage. However, when those same rules inevitably don't work to your advantage, I highly recommend that you drop them... like a hot rock! And, if my own experience is any indication, it's also probably a good idea to keep your eyes peeled for any rule that you may be holding onto that even hints at being in conflict with basic common sense. While the rules are there to help, they can, with overzealous adherence, too easily lead to a surprising amount of lost opportunity.
Come to think of it, I'd like to suggest that when it comes to photography (or any other form of art for that matter) Rule #1 should more properly be expressed as follows: Rule #1: The words "always" and "never" should be universally greeted with a healthy dose of unbridled skepticism! |
Misa Shimomura
Submitted by Mathias on Sat, 2012-12-01 20:39.
Misa Shimomura is a Japanese pianist, composer and improviser. For the past fifteen years her work has centred on free improvisation and the contemporary art scene. From 1999 to 2006 she was a pianist in the Kyoto neo-classical duo THIS=MISAxSAIKOU together with the violinist and improviser Saikou Miyajima in the Mie Prefecture of Japan. During this period she began improvising herself and presenting her own solo piano concerts.
Since then she has been in contact with many other artists including the film makers Werner Penzel (Cinenomad) and Ayako Mogi; the contemporary dancer Maki Morishita; the painter Mikolaj Polinski; the sound artist Atsushi Nishijima; the musicians Balts Nill and Fred Frith and also with Kyogen performers (Japanese traditional theatre), with DJs and with poets. As a pianist she performs works by Johann Sebastian Bach and John Cage. Each new interaction has opened new doors in her acoustic education: her interests now include the physiology of sound perception, the relationship between physical space and acoustics and experiments with new musical instruments.
In October 2010 Shimomura moved to Germany where she has performed and exhibited in many places including B-flat, Berlin (November, 2010); BR2 radio "hör! spiel! art mix" in Munich (July, 2011); the Emerson Gallery, Berlin (January, 2012) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Gruppenanalyse und Gruppenpsychotherapie (June, 2012).
Misa Shimomura was born in the Mie Prefecture of Japan in 1977. For 10 years she studied classical piano. In 1999, as a result of her contact with Saikou Miyajima she became interested in improvisation and collaborated with him, as THIS=MISAxSAIKOU, for eight years.
In 2006 she was invited to join the international art project Laboratoire Village Nomade in Switzerland. From 2008 to 2010 she was a member of the art project there, jour par jour cie, working with the German filmmaker Werner Penzel (Cinenomad) and the Japanese photographer Ayako Mogi. In 2009 the film project moved to the island of Awajishima, Japan. THIS=MISAxSAIKOU was the subject the documentary film Ask the Wind by Ayako Mogi which took the Special Prize at the 2002 Nyon International Documentary Film Festival in Switzerland. She plays piano in the film Touch the Sound - A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie by Thomas Riedelsheimer in 2003 with other guest musicians including Fred Frith and Ondekoza. In 2010 Misa received a major award in the music section of the Aichi Arts Challenge.
During her life as a musician she has lived in many different places: in the Mie Prefecture, in Osaka, Shiga, Kyoto and Awajishima; at La Corbiere in Switzerland; in Berlin; and in Poznan in Poland. All these travels and experiences have influenced her work; in the meantime she also performs with other instruments including violin, guitar, percussion and voice, giving readings of her poems and lyrics, and works as a composer for both film and radio.
Misa Shimomura currently lives and works in Berlin.
http://www.misashimomura.com
http://www.myspace.com/misashimomura
Piano Spezial Shimomura/Eichmann+Weins/Binder+Rose
Piano Spezial
Misa Shimomura - piano solo; Dietrich Eichmann - piano + Astrid Weins - doublebass; Claudia Binder - piano + Simon Rose - baritone/alto saxophones |
I tried chicken tortilla soup at Amardillo Willy's a couple of weeks back and I was pleasantly surprised how good it is. The soup has a nice blend of spicy and sour taste with melt-in-your mouth tender chicken. It is nicely complemented by the crisp and crunchy tortilla strips.
This is probably my first post of a Mexican dish, but certainly won't be the last. It strikes a cord with me because the ingredients are so colorful and so are the serving dishes!
Prepare tortilla strips by brushing each tortilla skin with some olive oil and sprinkle with kosher salt. Cut each skin into 1/4 strips. Arrange on a baking tray in a single layer. Bake for 10 mins until the strips are golden and crispy. Cool completely and store in air tight container.
Place all ingredients for soup in a slow cooker and cook on low for 8 – 10 hours.
Remove and shred the chicken tenders if they are still in big pieces. Return the shredded chicken to the slow cooker. Adjust taste of soup with salt, pepper and additional squeeze of lime if desired.
When ready to serve, stir in diced avocado, tomatoes, and chopped cilantro.
Ladle soup into serving bowl, and garnish with cheese, tortilla strips and additional pinch of chopped cilantro and lime wedges. |
Pollution in the Gulf of Mexico is a serious issue in the world. One of the highest amounts of sea plastic is released in the gulf, such as plastic six-pack rings and this can damage sea life.
Sea birds and sea turtles can wrap themselves in the plastic and create a risk to their own life.
In order to make a contribution to saving the planet, a brewery in Florida made biodegradable six-pack rings that wildlife can use as a snack.
These rings are made from wheat and barley.
Even though it looks like they are made from cardboard, the wheat and barley products that they are made from are compressed in a durable material, which cannot be torn easily by transport or storing.
These biodegradable rings are produced by the Saltwater Brewery, located in Delray Beach, with a startup called E6PR (meaning Eco Six Pack Rings).
Their hope is for other breweries to start using this product and exchange it with the plastic they normally use.
The head of the brand at the brewery, Peter Agardy, has told in an interview that this product is a big investment for his small brewery that was created by surfers, fishermen, and people who love the sea.
The president of Delray, Chris Gove, hopes to inspire the other owners of bigger companies to get on the board and start using this product.
A report from CBS News stated that the product was a project between the New York ad agency We Believers, Entelequia, a Mexican biodegradable supplier, and investors from the packing industry for beverages.
If they end up getting littered, the rings will be biodegraded because of the by-product waste materials that they are made.
The rings are tested with a group of other craft breweries at the moment but they do not discuss any specifics at this time.
With their help, we can finally move to a solution that will solve the pollution in the Gulf of Mexico. |
Sleep is key to reducing stress
Summerlyn Smith, Staff Writer
Whether it's involvement in sports, academic excellence or trying to work that part time job, it's quite obvious that sometimes the average student struggles to find a healthy balance between living up to the standards society sets and having fun living life.
The average student usually has a job and is involved in some type of sport; put that on top of full time school, and that's a lot. In several recent studies it's obvious that the schedule most young people keep is unhealthy. Whether People's Magazine is covering it or Dr. Phil is doing a segment on it, the media all covers it the same: School expectations mixed with society's makes most students exhaust themselves.
"Getting enough sleep is important for students' health, safety, and academic performance," Anne Wheaton, the lead author and epidemiologist in the CDC's Division of Population Health, said in a statement. "Early school start times, however, are preventing many adolescents from getting the sleep they need."
From recent studies done on obesity, depression and car accidents in teenagers these problems can almost all be tied back to lack of sleep from school starting too early or staying up all night trying to get that essay done.
Lack of sleep mixed with everything else going on in a young person's life can add up and lead to serious mental health issues, such as anxiety, panic attacks, or depression.
In a recent survey done on 147 students, results reveal some interesting opinions.
Some students feel teachers are helping them relieve stress by preparing them to be successful in school.
"They [teachers] offer help before and after school and care about grades," Brant Plowman, freshman said.
"As an honor student, I know my teachers are trying their best to teach us what we need to do, so we can all be successful," Eljen Caseres, freshman said.
While there is a large number of students that feel teachers are helping to set them up for success, some students feel a bit differently.
"I think our school's curriculum isn't updated to society and the technological advances. In higher education these advancements will be stressed, and I don't think that our school prepares us for that," Kaiya Hietikko, junior said.
"They kind of hold your hand through high school," Brandon Calsor, senior said.
On the other hand, some students have mixed opinions.
"I think some do and some don't. Some just expect you to know everything, and others guide you and help," Amatul Husna, junior said.
"I feel regular classes are made too easy, but AP and honor classes are good for preparing you enough to be successful in school," Basima Dous, junior said.
There are so many different opinions when it comes to good and bad stress, especially in the learning environment. It all depends on how each student learns, which can be hard when in a large class.
Finding a balance between sleep, school and work may be the key to reducing stress. |
Gravity Forms Capture Webcam Field allows your visitors to take their snapshot from their webcams in your forms.
Get the best quality information from your visitors with their images.
Allows multiple instances at the same form. |
Saint-Constant is the name of several places:
Saint-Constant, Quebec, Canada
Saint-Constant station
Saint-Constant, Cantal, France
See also
Saint Constant (died 777), Irish priest and hermit
Saint Constantius
Saint Constantine (disambiguation) |
So very true and beautiful!
Thank you from the depth of my heart.
This is a beautiful gift for Valentine's day.
Thank you for this lovely message of peace.
May love touch every soul and every part of the earth on this Valentine's day.
Thank you Margherita for your beautiful message of love and peace. May it touch every soul.
Thank you for your beautiful words Margherita.
Sending peace and love to you.
Thank you my dear friends for the loving replies. Happy Valentine's Day to all of you.
May you all feel wrapped in love and share it with those you love and with those you get in touch with.
Thank you also for the magnificent pictures!
Thank you for this beautiful valentine dearest dpm (Dancing Pearly Margherita)! And what beautiful replies!
I've been under the weather, this is just what I needed. Thanks!
Dear Teo, thank you too! Under the weather? Oh ... (((((Teo)))) may you be well and full of energy and enthusiasm as always!
for the beauty of your words.
Thank you for these words dear Margherita.
They are much needed now.
Thank you dear departed Margherita.
Thank you yoko for bringing back this beautiful little poem. |
'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for April 27
Guests: David Was
BRIAN UNGER, GUEST HOST: Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?
The Watergate investigation. Not plumbers, this time it's hookers, prostitutes. Duke Cunningham and the FBI investigation into whether the Dukester and others in Congress exchanged sexual favors were exchanged for political ones.
Libby and the Brain. Scooter's motion to dismiss shot down by the judge in his perjury trial.
And why Karl Rove is reportedly more worried after his latest trip to the grand jury.
FEMA, the disaster cleanup agency, is itself a disaster. The Senate calling for an complete overhaul about a month before hurricane season begins. It's going to be a heck of a job.
Road test rock. Music industry icons and Pink taking on the Bush administration through the gift of song, clearly in response to this pro-Bush shot across the bow.
And an NBC exclusive, Ann Curry's journey in Africa for an exclusive interview with the actress, the activist, the children's advocate, Ms. Angelina Jolie.
ANN CURRIE, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: Giggling is something I understand you're doing a lot more lately.
ANGELINA JOLIE: I actually am. I've gotten (INAUDIBLE), it's really horrible.
UNGER: Wow!
And good evening. I'm Brian Unger, in for Keith Olbermann.
The three key ingredients of any D.C. key political scandal are as follows, sex, money, and the Watergate apartment complex. With President Nixon, it was a combination of money and Watergate. With President Clinton, sex and Watergate. It's where Monica Lewinsky lived, as if you'd forgotten. And now, finally a scandal with all three.
Our fifth story on the Countdown, the Duke Cunningham corruption probe, now with hookers. The only thing more compelling than that, a Karl Rove indictment. And it looks like we might be getting one of those too.
Federal prosecutors now said to be investigating whether the former congressman was bribed with a steady supply of prostitutes that he may have been meeting up with at the Watergate Hotel.
"The Wall Street Journal" also reporting that investigators are looking into whether other congressmen may have been bribed with the very same, how you say, services.
I guess the lesson no one seems to be learning, if you're going to do something illicit in Washington, do it at, say, the Comfort Inn in Tyson's Corner.
As for Karl Rove, Wednesday's grand jury appearance apparently no trip to the Watergate, if you know what I'm saying. The presidential adviser now more worried, not less, that he could get indicted.
Time now to call in correspondent David Shuster in Washington, who's had a very busy day keeping track of both stories.
Hello, David.
DAVID SHUSTER, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Brian.
UNGER: Let me begin by asking about the Cunningham investigation. This sounds like something straight out of the Hoover years. But if the FBI is now knocking on the doors of escort services, talking to prostitutes, how nervous is the mood in Washington?
SHUSTER: Well, the mood right now is certainly on e of intrigue. I think this article from "The Wall Street Journal" got a ton of play all over Capitol Hill.
But between the lines, what a lot of people are talking about is the fact that right now, this all seems to be aimed at flipping one of two key defense contractors in this case. One of the defense contractors is already cooperating. Of course, he got Duke Cunningham, who's already cooperating. But this seems to be a lot of pressure on a man by the name of Brent Wilkes. And according to the other contractor, it was Brent Wilkes who did some work with Duke Cunningham. He's the one who's got the little black book, and perhaps the memory of which congressmen were getting these prostitutes.
But until that particular defense contractor flips and actually substantiates the allegation of the other defense contractor, right now, people think there's still a little bit of breathing room. But if that other defense contractor soon becomes a government witness, then everything changes, and that's where it really gets interesting.
UNGER: David, let me ask you, how widespread might this be? I mean, what are - are there other names involved here?
SHUSTER: Well, you always hear, you always hear rumors about this congressman or that congressman who sort of gets drunk with power in Washington and engages in these sort of activities. But until, I think, we get some substantial allegations, I'm not going to drop any names.
But any members of Congress who did business or had interactions with these two defense contractors, those officers are nervous tonight, not so much for the prostitution allegation, but simply because of fears that they're going to get caught up in this sort of prosecution of bribery or corruption.
UNGER: Here we go again. Very unseemly.
Turning to your reporting on the Karl Rove story, was he pleased with how his latest testimony went?
SHUSTER: Well, that depends on who you ask. A spokesperson for Karl Rove said that his testimony was just fine. But a supporter of Karl Rove, at a party last night where they were both in attendance, the supporter of Karl Rove said that Rove described his grand jury experience as "hell," and that Rove was surprised both by the tone of the grand jury questions and also the length, three and a half hours.
And that taken together, Rove thought that the experience, his experience at the grand jury made it more likely, not less likely, he feels, that he's going to get indicted. Rove's lawyers say that he's got no reason to worry, that anything he said at the grand jury yesterday might have implicated him, but the very fact that he spent three and a half hours there has at least signaled to Karl Rove, and Rove is at least telling a few friends, that certainly he's very worried about what's going on.
UNGER: Hell, never good.
Let's go back a little bit, though. Does this look like his dubious status in the CIA case may have played a role in narrowing his responsibilities to focus on the November elections, then?
SHUSTER: Well, Rove's legal team has admitted that they were in contact with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for several weeks. They were talking with him frequently. And that Karl Rove was keeping his new boss at the White House, the new White House chief of staff, Josh Bolten, informed.
So while the White House suggests that Rove had his duties shifted for other reasons, it's easy to imagine that if you're the new White House chief of staff, and your top policy guy is telling you, Hey, I'm not clear of the CIA leak investigation, and I'm having talks with the prosecutor, and, by the way, the poll numbers are so bad, that maybe if you're the new White House chief of staff, you say, Look, let's give this guy some (INAUDIBLE) breathing room, let's give him less responsibility right now, just in case he's going to be distracted with this other matter.
UNGER: Possibly a little preemptive mood. Is there a chance he might resign?
SHUSTER: Well, we'll have to see. I don't think there's any chance that Karl Rove is going to (INAUDIBLE) resign barring an indictment. And perhaps that's why the stakes are so high. You remember that Scooter Libby, he only got notification that he was a target of the - of his indictment that very morning when the grand jury actually returned the indictment. So he simply didn't have time.
It doesn't look like Karl Rove is going to get any sort of advance notification either, if he gets indicted. So we'll just have to wait and see.
UNGER: David Shuster, thank you very much.
SHUSTER: You're welcome.
UNGER: With just about a month left until the start of the next hurricane season, a Senate committee has figured out what went wrong with the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. Their conclusion, FEMA is in shambles, and is beyond repair, say, like Michael Jackson's nose. As for FEMA, the Senate investigation came up with a bold recommendation, scrap that agency, put together a brand-new one, and give it a different name.
Our correspondent is Chip Reid.
CHIP REID, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The report says it took Hurricane Katrina to reveal that FEMA is so dysfunctional it should be scrapped.
SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R), MAINE: FEMA has become a symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy in which the American people have completely lost faith.
SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: It is beyond repair. And you need to dissolve it and begin again.
REID: Begin again, the report says, with an entirely new disaster-relief agency, the National Preparedness and Response Authority. In 86 recommendations, the report describes the proposed agency as far more powerful than FEMA, with a much larger budget, a director who would report directly to the president during a crisis, so powerful, the report compares the position to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
And there would be 10 regional strike teams, where federal, state, and local emergency responders would work and train together.
The report has the committee's bipartisan support, except on one key issue. Democrats heap blame for FEMA's failures on President Bush.
LIEBERMAN: The president and the White House were not sufficiently engaged...
REID: Republicans blame the president's advisers, especially former FEMA director Michael Brown.
COLLINS: I don't think that that is the president's fault.
REID: With the president today in New Orleans, a top White House adviser flatly rejected any proposal to abolish FEMA.
FRAN TOWNSEND, WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: I don't think it's productive to talk about dismantling the agency. I mean, I really think what the point of this is, is to strengthen the inherent (INAUDIBLE) response and preparation capability.
REID (on camera): Even supporters of abolishing FEMA and replacing it with a bigger, stronger agency say there's no way that's going to happen before this year's hurricane season, which begins in about a month. And whether it ever becomes law will depend on how well FEMA responds in the future.
Chip Reid, NBC News, the Capitol.
UNGER: NBC's Brian Williams spoke with President Bush after his visit with volunteers in New Orleans. He asked the president about the proposal to kill FEMA. Mr. Bush did not sound like he was ready to seriously considering scrapping anything.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My thoughts are is that we've got to make sure it functions well. We're coming into a hurricane season.
I ordered an executive branch review of what went wrong in Katrina. The Congress is doing its part as well. Some of the things that we found, I think the Congress might have found as well, is we need to preposition assets better. We need to make sure there's clear coordination between the federal, state, and local governments.
Obviously there's a communications problem, as you well know, and we have prepositioned communications equipment, or have communications equipment ready that is available that'll help us in case of a big storm.
UNGER: Well, if that answer felt a little tortured, try this. S&M at the gas pumps. Yes, your pain is the oil company's pleasure. The huge profit numbers are out for big oil, and it's leading to big political drama on Capitol Hill.
And dissing The Decider in satire, in song, in satirical song. The pop-culture backlash against W.
You're watching Countdown on MSNBC.
UNGER: Well, before you finish the paperwork on that second mortgage, or loot your kid's college fund just so you can fill up on your next tank of gas, two things you should know about in our fourth story on the Countdown.
Congress is hard at work on a solution, and oil companies are making more money than ever. Don't you feel better now?
Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon staging a five-hour filibuster in the Senate in an effort to get energy companies to pay royalties on domestic oil exceeding $65 a barrel. There goes their lunch money.
Other Democrats voicing their outrage at a gas station near Capitol Hill, before getting back into their SUVs to drive away.
Senate Republicans, meanwhile, unveiling an eight-point plan that would give a $100 rebate to every car-driving taxpayer, but only if we open up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve for drilling first.
All of this to break our addiction to oil?
SEN. BILL FRIST (R-TN), MAJORITY LEADER: Republicans come forward with a bold agenda that looks at supply, demand, alternative sources, to make sure that the markets are working boldly, are working fairly, are working transparently. There is no silver bullet. There's nothing, nothing we can do that can compensate for the fact that today we're 60 percent dependent on foreign sources of oil. But we can put forth a bold agenda. It will be introduced today, and it's an eight-point plan, you've heard it.
UNGER: Those darn car alarms. I think somebody just stole the senator's Prius.
Of course, on no one has the situation been hardest than on the oil industry itself. I think we should hear sad music here, maybe. The corporations, they're struggling to get by. ExxonMobil, for example, reporting earnings of a puny $8.4 billion for just the first quarter.
Senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers with all the sad details on why it's hard out there for a pump.
LISA MYERS, MSNBC SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over):
For outraged consumers, the staggering profit numbers boil down to this. Exxon earned 9.5 cents on every dollar of gasoline and oil sold, cashing in at every stage of the process.
JOHN KILDUFF, OIL TRADER: The big money for ExxonMobil is being made by taking crude oil out of the ground, and refining it into gasoline, and selling it at the street corner.
MYERS: So consumers clearly feel gouged. Are oil industry profits out of line with other industries?
An oil industry ad dubbed "Straight Talk" claims they are not, and highlights a multiyear average that is lower than current profits. In fact, the oil industry's profit margin last year was 8.5 percent, higher than the average for all industries, but less than half the profit of banks.
KILDUFF: Their profits rank well behind the profits generated by the financial services industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and several other industries...
MYERS: But consumer groups argue that oil companies are profiting unfairly from their own failure to invest in refineries, which is now driving up gas prices.
MARK COOPER, CONSUMER FEDERATION OF AMERICA: People's budgets are being clobbered by companies who have failed to expand capacity, failed to compete, and then stockholders get rewarded, executives get rewarded, and the people suffer.
MYERS: What about CEO pay? Chevron's CEO received $$37 million in total compensation last year. ConocoPhillips' CEO, $17 million. Big numbers, but experts say in line with Wall Street's inflated standards.
Then there's Exxon's CEO and his stunning $400 million pay and retirement package, which an industry spokesman still defends.
JOHN FELMY, AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE: One has to compare any executive's compensation with the performance of the companies that they manage.
MYERS (on camera): Oil industry officials also argue that some profits are passed on to average Americans who invest in the companies. But critics say, in most cases, those dividends won't begin to offset the high cost of gas, and the outrage.
Lisa Myers, NBC News, Washington.
UNGER: Oh, yes, big oil companies, you and the horse you road in on, buddy. Wait, horse?
Countdown on your side, how to ease your pain at the gas pump, next in Oddball.
And there is no easing the jitters in Tinseltown. It's called Hollywood's Watergate. And when it's all said and done, there's no telling how many celebrities could be implicated. Inside the Pellicano case, later on Countdown.
UNGER: I'm Brian Unger, in for Keith Olbermann.
As we take a step back from the so-called hard news of the day, to find out how these hot-button issues, such as rising gas prices, are affecting the lives of everyday people, like Texan cowboy hairdressers and Russian guys with really strong ears.
We begin in Arlington, Texas, where hairstylist Egon Settle (ph) says the price of gas is so high, he's got to ride a horse to the salon every day. Settle says he rides his trusty steed Freefall around town on his lunch break. But when he's cutting hair, he just leaves the big guy in the parking lot next to the Corvette.
EGON SETTLE, HAIRSTYLIST: I have people ask me, Are you scared somebody'll steal him? Well, I tell you what, if you can get on this horse right here and ride away, you take him.
But if you do get on him, I hope you got a pillow on your butt, because he's sure going to (INAUDIBLE) you for a ride.
UNGER: And on to Tblisi, Georgia, where a man with a broken hand has tied a rope around his ear and is pulling two trucks with it. We cannot confirm this has anything to do with the high price of gasoline, we just know Lasha Petaraya (ph) has got some crazy strong ears. This was a new world record for the Georgian engineer, who pulled the four-and-a-half-ton rig more than 40 yards. Petaraya told reporters the honor of being listed in the "Guinness Book of Records" would be worth the lifetime of hideous disfigurement and chronic ear pain.
And finally, here's a Dalmatian riding a bicycle. Oh, yes, look at him go. Put your foot up (ph) there. It's another award-winning piece of video from the magic makers of Japanese television. (INAUDIBLE) this dog was interested in bike riding ever since he was a puppy, yet here he is, full grown, and still using training wheels. So I think that Dalmatian's kind of a loser.
Three very different rockers, all singing the same message to President Bush. Here's a hint, it's not "Happy Birthday."
And she's asked the press to respect her privacy while she rounds out her pregnancy in Africa. But that didn't stop Angelina Jolie from granting an exclusive interview to NBC.
Those stories ahead.
Now here are Countdown's top three newsmakers of this day.
Number three, "The City Pages" newspaper of Minneapolis-St. Paul. The editors are receiving a bit of criticism over its Best of the Twin Cities issue, which named as this year's best cheap thrill in town crystal meth. The paper says it was a bad joke.
Number two, Mark King of Lake Okanor (ph), California. He's under arrest for bank robbery after his brilliant criminal scheme went awry. Police say he accosted an employee outside the bank as she was the doors for the morning, went into the vault, and told the woman to go back out and pretend everything was normal, or else.
She went outside and locked him in. Oh, we can never plan for that kind of thing, can we?
And number one, William Bethel (INAUDIBLE) Pennsylvania. Apparently the 24-year-old has been working two jobs to make ends meet. By day, he's a delivery guy for Domino's Pizza. By night, he transports corpses from the Philadelphia Morgue to area funeral homes in the same car.
Police say they pulled him over for an outdated registration and found two pies waiting to be delivered sitting on a makeshift stretcher in the back next to a sack of wet clothes. Yeesh. That will do a number on the old crazy bread.
UNGER: And welcome back to Countdown. I'm Brian Unger, keeping the seat warm for Keith Olbermann.
Since the war began three years ago, pundits and critics have been making numerous comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq, that we're fighting a homegrown insurgency, that it will last for years, that it's ultimately an unwinnable war.
Now, in our third story on the Countdown, another trait the two conflicts have in common, a plethora of protest songs. Of course, this being 2006, not 1966, protesters have updated the folk singing and flag burning with a lot more electricity, like in that most accessible of technologies, the Internet, where an artist can combine the parody style of Jib-Jab, rip off - sorry, emulate the Beach Boys and add a little Hogan's Heroes to produce this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Move our pieces to Afghanistan. Move into Iraq and control the waterways. Sign that new treaty with India. We can party right there. Have a business relations with the Saudi. We got it covered.
Dick, you scared me.
I think you forgot Halliburton?
Halliburton right there. I found a new place to put Halliburton. Away go the colored people. Now what do we do next. I just can't seem to figure it out?
Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran. Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran. Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran.
We'll do nothing to it. Bomb Iran.
UNGER: OK. And then there are the mainstream protesters, Neil Young is about to release an entire album of anti-war and anti-Bush songs with titles like "Let's Impeach the President," "Living with War" and "Shock and Awe."
UNGER: And elsewhere Bruce Springsteen, a local supporter of John Kerry in 2004 releasing a new album covering music by folk singer and protestor Keith Seger. When asked if the songs make a political statement about the president, Springsteen told the "Associated Press" quote, "I'll let somebody else sort that part of it, but a lot of them seem pretty applicable, you know. Mrs. McGrath is basically an Irish anti-war song, but it's ripped right out of the headlines every day today."
And there's a more obvious indictment of the president coming from a relatively new artist, Pink, in her acoustic song "Dear Mr. President."
UNGER: And to discuss this sudden influx of protest rock, I'm joined by David Was, a contributor to "National Public Radio's Day to Day" and half of the musical group "Was Not Was." Thanks for your time David.
DAVID WAS, CONTRIBUTOR NPR'S DAY TO DAY: Thanks, Unger.
UNGER: Rock n Roll by its nature is rebellious. And it's a long tradition of music encompassing political protest when Peter, Paul, and Mary sang "If I Had a Hammer" it was figurative. This Neil Young song is quite literal it is a litany of Bush offenses that might appear on an op-ed page. Is that unusual?
WAS: Well the hook being impeach the president is sort of, with a republican congress in control, it seems like if you were an Iranian folk singer you would say embrace the Jews and love them. It's sort of an impossibility politically. The classic empty gesture I'm glad there is discourse, but I don't think it's heading towards anywhere practical.
UNGER: During this administration country music has been very vocal. We heard the Dixie Chicks criticize the president in 2003 and Faith Hill and Tim McGraw criticized the president recently over the Katrina recovery. We've heard rappers be critical. Has mainstream rock been kind of slow to add their voices?
WAS: I think so. I think it's far more risky in country music in that political world to stick your neck out. I think the Dixie Chicks are to be congratulated. Neil Young has an old tradition though of speaking his mind since Ohio dealing with the Kent State killings. So it may be late but I think everybody put an exorbitant amount of faith in this war and its prosecution and it's been given a lie recently, I think.
UNGER: Will any of these songs actually change the political landscape? Could these artists actually have an impact on 2006 or 2008?
WAS: Well I tend to think, I hope so, I would hope that people would take the word of the airwaves and that people would respond. But I tend to think of music and pop culture just like the instantaneity of the news world where everything is cycled through in about 48 hours and forgotten. I wish there was something other than the short attention span theater of politics in America these days.
UNGER: Does though, and aside from partisanship, does rock 'n' roll have the same influence today as it did in 1966, in actually changing people's minds?
WAS: Well, you know, I think hip-hop carried the cajole for a long time and I give credit to those writers for dealing with things more directly. Although the old tradition and it dates back to the 1600's, the broadside is to carry the word of political events or floods or earthquakes in a song so it's memorable, has a chorus. But for my money "Masters of War" by Dylan which is a timeless song and could deal with any era is going to be more enduring than a temporal call for the president's impeachment whether I'm for it or not.
UNGER: So you're not into the date stamping or time stamping the lyric as Neil Young may have done here?
WAS: It's like cottage cheese, you know, you put a name in a song and you know that in 30 years people, you might as well have mentioned Gabby Hayes or Roy Rogers in a song, people are going to say who is that? You're going to look for the footnotes.
UNGER: That's Neil Young you're talking about there, sir.
WAS: I love Neil Young, don't get me wrong.
UNGER: No, no, no, I'm just teasing you. Let me ask you this, is there a distinction between what music resonates in red states versus blue states? Because, you would think Neil Young's music seems to span the country roots and the blues tradition of red states and the folk rock of blue states. Is there a distinction between the red and blue and what music they sort of sink their teeth into?
WAS: Well, do you know, I think it's a question of these days how narrow cast radio is and that there's not a great difference in character with these great conglomerates like Clear Channel broadcasting the same 18 songs 24 hours a day. I think just as the political map goes red and blue, tastes aren't going to be that much different. But I would say that you are preaching to the converted already when you write a song with political leanings. You are sort of resonating with the audience that's already there. I'm not sure you're changing hearts and minds on the other side of the color spectrum.
UNGER: Interesting perspective. Thank you David Was of "National Public Radio's Day to Day." Thank you for sharing all of that with us tonight.
WAS: Thank you.
UNGER: Some of the biggest celebrities are finding no excitement in the latest Hollywood thriller. It's no script. It's all too real and there's no telling how many stars will get fingered in the west coast version of the Abramoff scandal.
And an NBC world exclusive, where in the world is Ann Curry? Namibia in a super secret location talking to one very pregnant Angelina Jolie. Those stories ahead, but first here are Countdown's top three sound bytes of this day.
The victim says it all began with a minor complaint.
I said how can you be out of iced tea?
When the victim who asked us not to identify him left the window, he says the employee handed him not iced tea, but a soda instead. The soda came without ice just like he asked. But something was floating on top.
It had a strong mucus of somebody who had a cold.
It's alarming to think you could, you know, just go through a drive through and end up getting spit in, you know. It's not your fault. You just want to get some fast food.
CONAN O'BRIEN: The other day Snoop Dog announced that he is writing a novel. Yeah, Snoop Dogg's writing a novel, yeah. Snoop says he can't wait to buy a copy of the book, hollow it out and use it to store weed.
Oh. [laughter] .
BUSH: Maybe we can find somebody here who will voluntarily take a puppy?
Are you volunteering your staff -
Or you take it.
Are you giving that dog away?
No, not now. I'm retracting.
UNGER: Thirteen years ago this summer, Heidi Fleiss, the 27-year-old Hollywood madam was arrested for operating a prostitution ring catering to L.A.'s rich and famous. Not since the rumored existence of her little black book supposedly containing names of her celebrity Johns and how much money they paid for sexual services rendered have we seen Tinseltown go into a silent panic. The book was never made public of course and Hollywood breathed a sigh of relief.
Our number two story on the Countdown, panic has struck again in what is the second biggest wiretapping story in the nation, involving everything you'd want in a feature film, spies, sex, violence, power and money. Our Jennifer London with more on the scandal dubbed, the Hollywood Watergate.
JENNIFER LONDON, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: He was Hollywood's go-to guy for celebrities in trouble, Anthony Pellicano. A powerful private eye whose client list included Tom Cruise, Chris Rock, even the king of pop. Pellicano was Michael Jackson's private investigator during the 1993 sexual abuse case.
LAURIE LEVENSON, LOYOLA LAW SCHOOL: He's the P.I. who's sent out there to get the dirt on people.
LONDON: But Hollywood loves a good twist and the hunter is now the hunted. In February Pellicano was indicted on a slew of felony counts including illegal wiretapping, conspiracy and destruction of evidence.
JOHN CONNOLLY, VANITY FAIR: He wiretapped people, he used police officers, paid them off to gather people's information illegally and on occasion was not afraid to resort to violence or thuggery to scare people or terrorize people.
LONDON: John Connolly knows all about Pellicano and his unusual tactics. He's written an expose for "Vanity Fair" on newsstands in June.
CONNOLLY: I think it sends a chilling affect throughout Hollywood, who is going to get called, whose name is going to be dragged in front of maybe a trial or maybe another trial, maybe a civil case. I think this opens up Pandora's box for all kinds of legal problems.
LONDON: If Pellicano's going down, he may not be alone. The largest scandal to hit Hollywood now threatens A-listers. "Die Hard" director John McTiernan has been charged with lying to the Feds about his involvement with Pellicano.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The big question is, is when he was hired by some of the big name lawyers and law firms in town and big clients. Did they really know what Anthony Pellicano was up to?
LONDON: It's not clear if the stars themselves knew about Pellicano's dirty practices, but he's reportedly been connected to some of the biggies, like John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Barry Bonds and the head of Paramount Pictures.
NEVILLE JOHNSON, PRIVACY ATTORNEY: The legal equivalent of Watergate in my opinion. The reason being, that its tentacles reach out so far across this community, into police departments, major institutions such as the phone company, major players in business and in Hollywood.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Anthony Pellicano is Hollywood's Jack Abramoff. A lot of people have known Pellicano. A lot of people have worked with him, used him. It doesn't mean that they're all dirty but I can guarantee you right now, everyone hopes there's no picture of them with Anthony Pellicano.
LONDON: Like many great Hollywood dramas, this one will play out for some time. Pellicano's trial isn't scheduled until October and you can bet this will be one blockbuster that keeps Tinseltown on the edge of its seats. For Countdown, Jennifer London, NBC News, Los Angeles.
UNGER: And an easy turn to our round up of celebrity and entertainment news, "Keeping Tabs." And Rosie O'Donnell's return to the daytime talk show, this time with company. She'll be the newest co-host of "The View." ABC's expected to make it official on Friday, according to the celebrity news magazine "Extra." O'Donnell will be named as co-host of "The View." Her first day on the job not yet known, but it will mark her first regular gig on television since she hosted her own daytime chat show, "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" which ended in 2002.
"Extra" is also reporting that the short list for the job included Connie Chung, Patricia Keaton and Soledad O'Brien. O'Donnell will be replacing Meredith Vieira, who will be replacing Katie Couric on the "Today Show" who will be replacing Bob Schieffer on the "CBS Evening News." You got all that?
Snoop Dog in the pound. This time in London. The rapper and five other men in his posse were arrested late Wednesday after a disturbance that allegedly injured seven police officers. The entourage was on its way to Johannesburg, South Africa for a concert and tried to enter a British Airways first class lounge. But some of them were denied entry because, well, they were flying coach. A spokesman for British Airways said Snoop Dogg's group, "Became very rude and abusive to our staff and we took the decision to offload the party and refuse them travel." At that point some men in the group became abusive and pushed police officers according to a police spokesman. Snoop Dogg has now been released on bail. His lawyer said he was not charged but will return at a later date.
And another Tom Cruise, shocker. He prefers to call Katie Holmes Kate. So she is going to make it official. Ms. Holmes will reportedly change her first name to Kate to reflect her newfound maturity according to "The Sun." Mr. Cruise explained it himself, "Katie is a young girl's name. Her name is Kate now. She's a child-bearing woman." Look for a run to the social security administration by child bearing women whose names end in "E" wanting to change their names. As for Cruise's use of his girlfriend's new name, we have a sample from earlier this week.
TOM CRUISE, ACTOR: Yeah, I don't want to leave her, you know Kate. I wasn't going to come and then Kate said, you know, go, go.
UNGER: Tom go, please, go.
On to that other (INAUDIBLE) celebrity mom, Angelina Jolie, talking exclusively to NBC about her pregnancy, her kids and her latest cause, that's next. This is Countdown.
UNGER: Well she has retreated into the African nation of Namibia for privacy as she awaits the birth of her third child. The Hollywood sex symbol Angelina Jolie is not just hiding from the swarms of paparazzi, she's submerging herself into another important topic dear to her heart. It's not the script to "Laura Croft Tombraider 3". It's helping kids get an education. It's not a movie, it's a humanitarian act. Our number one story on the Countdown, girl interrupted by our own Ann Curry. The nearly eight months pregnant pillow lipped star sat down with Ms. Curry in this exclusive interview to talk about her new mission for children and the upcoming delivery of her baby with Brad Pitt.
ANN CURRY, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: In what seems to be the middle of nowhere on the edge of Namibia in Southern Africa, a very pregnant Angelina Jolie emerged from her private family vacation to speak on behalf of children in poor countries who don't get to go to school.
What is the worst in your mind of that?
ANGELINA JOLIE, ACTRESS: God, I mean there is just so many things. It's really that thought of those, of the potential of a human being. The lack of education causes death. More children die under the age of five when the parents are not educated. More people get AIDS when they haven't had an education. Statistics prove that if every child was in school, every year 700,000 less people would get AIDS.
CURRY: It seems also for you kind of a personal thing. You have two children you've adopted, both of whom might have been in this same circumstance if not being able to get educated. And when you look at them and you realize that -
JOLIE: I look at them and I just think, you know, I look at especially my daughter and how many million kids are out of school in her country and especially girls. And I know how families with AIDS when parents die of AIDS, how there is no possible way the children can make a school fee. There is no possible way she would have gone to school. And she is so smart and so strong and her potential as a woman one day is great.
You multiply her by thousands and that is the thing I can so clearly see when I look at her. The amount of street children in his country, in all probability what would have happened to Maddox, he would have probably been one of the kids doing the garbage picking in the streets and he would have been on his own.
CURRY: It must mean so much to you as a human being to be able to give them an opportunity that they would never have gotten.
JOLIE: You know I'm happy for them that they're going to have all this education and I hope with it they do some good things and they're good people. Yeah, when I visit Cambodia and I see all those other moms, it's the worst thing in the world not to be able to give your kids everything you know they deserve.
CURRY: Like when you announced it, how many kids showed up for school?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Last year we had a total of 23 or 24.
CURRY: Why should the American people push this when there are so many issues at home, including educational problems, why should they call their congressman on this one?
JOLIE: Because if we just fix home and the neighborhoods around us fall apart, what kind of a place are we going to live in? It doesn't make any sense to just fix your own house and your neighbors are falling into chaos.
CURRY: There is another very famous person who talks a lot about education and you sound a lot like her. Laura Bush.
JOLIE: Really?
CURRY: She talks a lot about this issue, specifically educating girls.
JOLIE: Well she should nudge her husband.
CURRY: Well I think she does. And I think that it also could be said that the U.S. does spend a considerable amount of money helping poor people get educated. So what's your message?
JOLIE: They do? But no child left behind means no child left behind. That isn't with what we feel we can give right now, but with whatever it takes. Britain gives three times more than us right now. They're not richer than us. So I don't know what the great excuse is.
CURRY: Children are a priority for Angelina Jolie, especially now as she awaits the birth of her third child, her baby with Brad Pitt.
How do you feel about the birthing part are you good are you ready?
JOLIE: Yeah. I'm quite, you know, we're just hoping it doesn't happen when we are - we don't know where it's going to happen or where we are going to be. We'll see.
CURRY: Yeah, well you have a doctor nearby? I don't want to be too
prying, but you know -
JOLIE: We have been smart about that. We're as prepared as, things will be as they will be. So, I'm ready for anything.
CURRY: Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?
JOLIE: Yes.
CURRY: Would you like to keep that a secret or you want to share that with the American public?
JOLIE: No I'd like to keep it to myself.
CURRY: Giggling I understand is something you're doing a lot more lately. I hear that from a very good source. Your right hand woman, Holly. She said you are giggling a lot lately. Is it pregnancy?
JOLIE: I am. That's what I've gotten from pregnancy. It's my, I actually have gotten - see? Brad said that to me too. I get hysterical now. Like it will go on for hours. It's horrible.
CURRY: And look at you, you're a mess. You're laughing, you're hormonal. Keep it up. Be pregnant more often because this is working.
UNGER: You're right, it's really hard on Brad Pitt suffering through all that giggling, I'm sure. You can see the rest of Ann Curry's exclusive interview with Angelina Jolie on "Dateline". That's Sunday night at 7:00, 6 o'clock central time on NBC. Well that'll do it for this edition of Countdown. I'm Brian Unger in for Keith Olbermann, he'll be back here Friday night, I promise you. Thanks for watching. |
Edward III. - Incursions of the Scots under Douglas and Randolph - Edward's First Campaign against them - Schemes of Mortimer - Execution of the King's Uncle, the Earl of Kent - Fall of Mortimer, and Imprisonment of the Queen Isabella - Enterprise of Edward Baliol and the disinherited Nobles against Scotland - War by Edward III. in Support of Baliol.
The sceptre of England, taken by the indignant nation from the feeble grasp of Edward of Caernarvon, was once more in the hand of a strong man. Edward III., sprung immediately from a feeble parent, was, however, of the stock of mighty kings, and the grandson of the first of his name, the stern "Hammer of Scotland," and conqueror of Wales. In the youthful monarch all the vigour and ability of Edward I. revived; and in his reign the fame of England rose far higher than it had ever yet reached, bringing the two words of martial glory, "Cressy" and "Poictiers," into the language, and making them like the notes of a trumpet in the ears of Englishmen in every age. True, the conquests which they marked soon faded away; but the prestige of British valour which they created was created for all time. In no period of our history did the spirit of chivalry show more in the ascendant than in this reign, nor leave names of more knightly lustre on the page of our history; including not only the monarch and his illustrious son, but a numerous list of leaders in the field. Whether the practical utility or the political wisdom of the great deeds done, exclusive of the-renown conferred on the nation, was equal to their �clat, remains for us to determine after our record of them. But at the commencement of his reign the future conqueror of Cressy was but a boy of fourteen. The lion of England was yet but the ungrown and playful cub and was under the guardianship of a mother of tarnished reputation, and in the real power of her bold paramour, Roger Mortimer.
For appearance sake, indeed, a council of regency was appointed during the minority of the young king; and this council was composed of twelve of the most influential noblemen and prelates of the realm; namely, five prelates - the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, the Bishops of Winchester, Worcester, and Hereford; and seven lay lords - the Earls of Norfolk, Kent, and Surrey, the Lords Wake, Ingham, Piercy, and De Boos. The Earl of Lancaster was appointed guardian and protector of the king's person.
Having named this regency, the Parliament then passed an act of indemnity, including all those engaged in the deposition of the late king; reversed the attainders against the late Earl of Lancaster and his adherents confiscated the immense and ill-gotten estates of the Despensers; and granted to the queen-mother a large sum of money to discharge her debts, and a jointure of �20,000 a year - a sum quite equal in value to �100,000 now. This last enactment, in fact, established the supremacy of the queen and her paramour Mortimer: the council became, as they meant it to be, a mere empty figure of state policy; Mortimer, who had taken care not even to have his name placed on the council, as affecting the modesty of a private man, now all appeared secure, assumed the state and establishment of a king.
Boy, however, as the king was, his spirit was too active and inquiring to leave him with safety unemployed about the court: he would be sure there to be soon making observations, which, ere long, might bring trouble to the usurpers. Mortimer tried to keep him entertained by various frivolous amusements; but there needed something more active and engrossing, and which would lead him. to a distance from the court; and this was speedily furnished by the Scots. Their successes over Edward II., and especially their grand triumph at Bannockburn, had greatly elated them; and the present crisis, when there was a deposed king, and a mere boy on the throne, appeared too tempting to omit a profitable incursion into England. Robert Bruce was now growing, if not old, yet infirm; but he was as full as ever of martial daring.
At this distance of time it appears equally impolitic and ungenerous in the Scots to make this attack. There was a truce existing between the kingdoms, and it might seem as if it would have been more prudent every way for the Scots to strengthen and consolidate their internal forces than thus wantonly to provoke their old and potent enemies. But the state of rancour between the two countries no doubt impelled them to this course. Probably, too, the hope of regaining at such a period the northern provinces of England, which had formerly belonged to Scotland, was an actuating cause. Bruce appointed to this service his two great generals, the good Lord James Douglas and his nephew Thomas Randolph, now Earl of Moray, some of whose daring exploits we have had already to record. They were to lay waste the counties of Durham and Northumberland, and do all the injury to England that they could. They made an attempt on the castle of Norham, but were repulsed with heavy loss. They then increased their army to 25,000, summoning the vassals of the crown from every quarter, Highlands, Lowlands, and isles.
This army of Scots has been most graphically described by Froissart. He represents them as lightly armed, nimble, and hardy, and, from their simple mode of living, capable of making rapid marches or retreats, being totally unencumbered with baggage. There were 4,000 cavalry, well-mounted and well-armed; the rest were mounted on ponies, active, but strong, which could pick up a subsistence anywhere. The men carried no provisions, except a small bag of oatmeal, and, says the chronicler, "they had no need of pots or pans, for they cooked the beasts, when they had skinned them, in a simple manner." That is, they killed the cattle of the English, of which they found plenty on their march, and roasted the flesh on wooden spits, or boiled it in the skins of the animals themselves, putting on a little water with the beef to prevent the hides being burnt. They also cut up the hides for their shoes, fitting them, to their feet and ankles while raw, with the hair outwards; so that from this cause the English called them the rough-footed Scots, and red-shanks, from the colour of the hides.
Every man carried at his saddle an iron plate called a girdle, on which, whenever they halted, they could bake cakes of thin oatmeal. Thus armed, and thus provisioned, the Scots could speed from mountain to mountain, and from glen to glen, with amazing rapidity-, advancing to pillage, or disappearing at the approach of an enemy, as if they were nowhere at hand. With such forces Douglas and Randolph crossed the Tweed, ravaged Durham and Northumberland, and advanced into the county of York.
To oppose these invaders, the English raised rapidly an army said to amount to 60,000 men. They had recalled John of Hainault and some cavalry which they had dismissed; and the young king of fourteen, burning with impatience to chastise the Scots, marched hastily towards the north. His progress, however, suffered some delay at York, from a violent quarrel which broke out between the English archers and the foreign troops under John of Hainault. The archers, and especially those of Lincolnshire, who probably had an old feud with the natives of Flanders, displayed a dogged dislike to these troops, and in the streets of York they came actually to downright battle, and many men were killed on both sides. This difference quelled, if not settled, the English army moved on. Very soon they came in sight of burning farms and villages, which marked the track of the Scots. These Scots, however, themselves were nowhere visible, for they retreated with double the celerity with which the English, heavily loaded with baggage, could follow them. The Scots did not retreat directly north, but took, according to Froissart, their way westward, amongst the savage deserts and bad mountains and valleys, as he calls them, of Cumberland and Westmoreland. The English crossed the Tyne, trusting to cut off the homeward route of the enemy; but the utterly desolated condition of the country compelled them to recross that river, for no sustenance could be procured for the troops. After thus vainly pursuing this light-footed foe for some time, Edward, excessively chagrined in not being able to come up with them, or even to find them, offered a freehold worth �100 a year and the honours of knighthood to any one who would bring him intelligence of the enemy. After severe hardships, and enormous fatigue to the soldiers, wading through waters and swamps, a man, one Thomas of Rokeby, came riding hard to the camp, and claimed the reward offered by the king. He said he had been made prisoner by the Scots, and that they had said they should be as glad to see the English king as he would to see them. This was not very probable, as they might have waited for the king, which they had taken care not to do. There, however, they lay, at not more than three leagues distant.
The reason of the Scots now halting was visible enough when the English same up. They found them posted on the right bank of the Weir, where the river was deep and rapid, and there was no possibility of getting at them. Even could they cross the river, they must climb a steep hill in face of the enemy to attack them. Under these circumstances, Edward sent a challenge to the Scottish generals to meet him on a fair and open field, either by drawing back and allowing him to cross the river to attack them, or giving them the same option to cross over to his side. Douglas, piqued at this proposal, advised to accept the challenge; but the more politic Moray refused, and replied to Edward, that he never took the advice of an enemy in any of his movements. He reminded the king, as if to pique him to dare the unequal attempt of crossing in their faces, how long they had been in his country, spoiling and wasting at their pleasure. If the king did not like their proceedings, he added, insultingly, he might get over to them the best way he could.
Edward kept his ground opposite to them for three days; the Scots at night making great fires along their lines, and all night long, according to the chronicler, "horning with their horns, and making such a noise as if all the great devils from hell had come there." In the daytime some of the most adventurous knights from the English army swam their strong horses across the river, and skirmished with the Scots - rather to show their gallantry than for any real effect. On the fourth morning it was found that the Scots had entirely decamped, and were discovered after awhile posted in a still stronger position higher up the river. Here Edward again sat down facing that, confidently hoping that they must be forced, from want of provisions, to come out and fight. As, however, they did not do this, the young king's patience became exhausted, and he desired to pass the river at all hazards, and come to blows with the Scots. This Mortimer would not assent to; and while lying, highly discontented with this restraint, on the bank of the river, Edward had a narrow escape of being taken prisoner.
The brave Douglas, being held back by Moray, as Edward was by Mortimer, from a general engagement planned one of those heroic exploits in which he so much delighted. Making himself acquainted with the English password for the night, and taking an accurate survey of the English camp, lie advanced, when it was near midnight, with 200 picked horsemen, silently crossed the river, at some distance above the English position, and then, as silently turning', made for the English camp. He found it carelessly guarded, and, seeing this, he rode past the English sentinels, as if he had been an English officer, saying, "Ha, St. George! you keep bad watch here! " Presently, he heard an English soldier say to his comrades, as they lay by a fire, "I cannot tell what is to happen here, but somehow I have a great fear of the Black Douglas playing us some trick."
"You shall have cause to say so," said Douglas to himself. When he had got fairly into the English camp, he cut the ropes of a tent with his sword, calling out his usual war-cry, "A Douglas! a Douglas! English thieves, ye are all dead men." His followers immediately fell upon the camp, cutting down the tents, overturning them, and killing the men as they started up to seize their arms. Douglas, meanwhile, had reached the royal pavilion, and was as near as possible seizing the young king, but the chaplain, the chamberlain, and some of the king's household, being alarmed, stood boldly in his defence, and enabled him to escape under the canvas of the tent, though they lost their own lives. Douglas, being now separated from his followers, many of whom were killed, endeavoured to make good his retreat, but was in danger of being killed by a man who attacked him with a huge club. This man, however, he slew, and escaped in safety to his own camp; his party having, it is said, killed about 300 men.
Soon after this the Scots made an effectual retreat in the night by having beforehand cut a pathway through a great bog which lay behind them, and filling it with faggots; a road which is still remaining in Weardale, and called from this cause the "Shorn Moss." The young king, on entering the evacuated place of encampment the next day, found nothing but six Englishmen tied to trees, and with their legs broken, to prevent them carrying any intelligence to their countrymen.
Edward, disgusted with his want of success, returned southward, and the Scots arrived in safety in their own country. On reaching York the English king disbanded his army. He then returned to London, highly dissatisfied, young as he was, with the state of things. Mortimer had usurped all power. Edward believed that from cowardice, or from some hidden motive, he had prevented him taking ample vengeance on the Scots. At court he had set aside the whole of the royal council; consulted neither prince of the blood nor the nobles on any public measure, concentrating in himself, as it were, all the sovereign authority. He endowed the queen with nearly the whole of the royal revenues, and enjoyed them in her name. He himself was so besieged with his own party and parasites, that no one else could approach him, and the people of all ranks now hated him as cordially as they had once done Gaveston.
Sensible of this growing public odium, he now sought to make a peace with Scotland, to secure himself from attack on that side; and perhaps the king was not so far wrong in attributing his backwardness to attack the Scots to some private motive. Certain it is that the following year, 1328, he made peace with Robert Bruce on terms which astonished and deeply incensed the whole nation. To give the greatest firmness to the treaty he proposed a marriage between Joan or Joanna, the sister of Edward, then only seven years of age, and David, the son of Robert Bruce, then only five. That the Scots might accede promptly to this offer, he agreed to renounce the great principle for which the English nation had been so long contending, its claim of right to the crown of Scotland. These terms were of course eagerly accepted, and the treaty, to make all sure, was at once carried, into effect. About Whitsuntide a Parliament was called together at Northampton, which ratified the treaty, thus acknowledging the full independence of Scotland, and on the 22nd of July the marriage was solemnised at Berwick, where Isabella had brought her daughter. This young bride was significantly called by the Scotch "Joan Makepeace," and with her was delivered up many jewels, charters, &c, which had been carried away from Scotland by Edward I. |
Equity Residential paid its President and CEO David Neithercut $9 million last year, a 41 percent jump from 2012, as the company granted him a big batch of stock to reward him for leading its acquisition of the Archstone apartment portfolio.
The Chicago-based apartment landlord gave Mr. Neithercut $2 million in stock in 2013 for "his exceptional leadership" of the Archstone transaction, according to a proxy statement filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Through the acquisition, Equity Residential took over about 23,000 apartments around the country.
"Under Mr. Neithercut's stewardship, the company significantly and positively transformed its asset portfolio and long-term market position with the Archstone acquisition," Equity Residential said in its proxy.
In 2013, Mr. Neithercut, now 58, received a $900,000 salary; $5.4 million stock award, including the $2 million grant connected to the Archstone deal; $1.1 million in options, and non-equity incentive pay of $1.5 million, the proxy said. While the $9 million total represented a 41 percent increase from 2012, it was less than the $11.3 million he made in 2012.
Equity Residential, who chairman is billionaire financier Sam Zell, is the nation's largest public apartment landlord, with about 110,000 units at the end of 2013. A spokesman for the real estate investment trust did not respond to a request for comment.
Comparing apartments owned at least a year, Equity Residential's revenue rose 4.5 percent in 2013, and its net operating income rose 5 percent. Including dividends, the company's shares returned a negative 5.3 percent last year, versus a 6.0 percent decline for the Bloomberg REIT Apartment Index.
Equity Residential shares have returned 11.8 percent so far in 2014, vs. 13.2 percent for the index. |
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Supply Logistics
July Safety Champion
By Kirsty Fletcher-Reid on 02 Aug 2019
Congratulations to this month's Safety Champion Winner: Mr Gustavo Alves!
Gustavo works on board FS Carrick as an AB and has always been an avid supporter of our safety card initiative, having submitted several cards during his time on board.
His most recent submission was an observation with regards to the rescue craft lashings. Gustavo noticed that the current lashings could potentially be difficult and slow to remove in an emergency in bad weather. He proposed a safety knife be made available nearby as an aid. Gustavo's pro-active mindset to seek out and improve safety on board is highly commendable, and greatly appreciated.
We would therefore like to thank Gustavo for his continued support and contribution to the health and safety on board.
As always, we appreciate all safety cards that are sent in and look forward to receiving more for this next month.
Oil & Gas,
Vessel Management,
"Fletcher's flexible and innovative approach to business and the professionalism of their crew has played an important role in helping us deliver a safe, reliable and cost-effective service to our clients. We look forward to building on this going forward as we continue to seek new and exciting opportunities in an exceptionally competitive marketplace."
Oilchart, 2016
"[We would] like to thank you and the rest of the crew on the FS Aberdour for your assistance, positive attitude and total flexibility during the last 5/6 weeks since we started this Project. The communication has been invaluable with all the challenges that have faced us. Thank you very much for your assistance, you're all a credit to your team on-board the FS Aberdour and also Fletcher Group."
Centrica, June 2017
"It was a pleasure to work with all of you, especially when the project is completed without any operation issue on the fluids / cement / waste management side. It was a great success to complete this."
Perenco, August 2017
"I cannot thank you enough for the work that you have done for us, all credit to you and your crew. I will be passing back some very positive comments. On behalf of both the Standard Princess and her crew and also the Standard Supplier, I appreciate all your help."
Centrica, November 2017
"[We] would like to take the opportunity to thank you and your Team for the level of support that you have given us with both vessels through this campaign. The vessel Masters and crews have been an absolute credit to your organisation and I would look forward to working with Fletcher Group again in the future if this is the manner in which you conduct your business.
I would like to wish you all every success and I am sure that we will work again in the not-too-distant future."
Ineos, July 2018
It has been a please working with you! Thank you for your support the past few months and th flexible attitude of your crew. This was much appreciated by our team.
Allseas, February 2019
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AUTOMATIC TARGET RECOGNITION SYSTEMS
PROACTIVE EMERGING THREAT DETECTION (PREVENT)
MACHINE LEARNING IN THE FACTORY
MACHINE LEARNING FOR PATTERNS OF LIFE
RAYTHEON PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE (RPM)
STRATEGIES FOR RAPID PROTOTYPING MACHINE LEARNING
CLASSIFICATION OF HANDWRITING
LEADERS CORNER
EYE ON TECHNOLOGY
Stephanie Yung, mechanical engineer, hosts a table of aspiring engineers. She was one of eight Raytheon engineers who offered advice to more than 100 young women from the Los Angeles Regional FIRST Robotics Competition.
FROM ONE ROBOT-MAKER TO ANOTHER
WOMEN ENGINEERS MENTOR 100 NEXT-GEN ROBOT-MAKERS AT FIRST® COMPETITION
Hundreds of students packed a Pomona, California, fairplex; makers of robots that would do battle at the Los Angeles Regional FIRST® Robotics Competition. The atmosphere in the arena, themed to recall the 8-bit video games of the 1980s, was electric as teams made last-minute modifications.
The competition brought together high school students from across Southern California to compete head-to-head with robots they designed and built over a six-week period. Raucous cheers bounced off the walls as each team's robot hit the arena floor. Operators, armed with controllers designed by their teammates, deftly moved their robots along the arena floor, picking up bright yellow boxes and depositing them into bins for points.
After six weeks of design and testing, the robots hit the competition floor. Teams competed in 2.5 minute rounds, where their robots picked up and moved " power cubes"
to earn points.
During a break in the competition's action, 100 of the young women behind the robots met with eight Raytheon women engineers at a speed-mentoring event in the conference center next door. Their mission? Share important lessons about making it in a field where women are often underrepresented.
"I am most looking forward to learning about confidence," said one of the students before the speed-mentoring event. "I know women are held to a different standard to do things a certain way. I think that talking about it helps relieve the stress of wanting to be perfect in a society where no one is perfect."
The engineers encouraged the young women to own their chair as future leaders in science, technology, engineering and math — the subjects known as STEM.
"You need to play to your strengths. As you go through high school and college and then get into the workplace you're going to have an opportunity to find what your strengths are," advised Angela Juranek, a Raytheon Space Systems program manager. "My strengths are motivating and inspiring teams to get the job done, and that's how I ended up becoming a program manager."
As the young women rotated from table to table, the conversations covered a wide variety of subjects, from choosing a college to tips on navigating a career. Many of the attendees were interested in hearing the engineers tell their own career stories.
STEM advocate Angela Juranek shares college and career advice with future women engineers at the speed-mentoring event.
"'Higher education will open doors of opportunity,'" said April Sanders, a Raytheon systems engineer, when asked about her story. "These are words that I heard repeatedly as a child of a single mother and high school dropout."
In an ongoing effort to narrow the gender gap and increase diversity in the workplace, Raytheon sponsors FIRST Robotics teams from across the country. Employee volunteers spend thousands of hours coaching robotics team members and providing mentorship to students looking to make their mark in science, technology, engineering and math.
After the speed-mentoring event, the next generation of robot-makers charged back to the arena floor, ready to take on the challenges at the competition — and beyond. Juranek and her fellow engineers hope that the advice they offered will inspire the young women to join their ranks in STEM careers.
"I support STEM programs with the hope that I will be able to help young women see the potential in themselves," said Juranek. "The new generation of women engineers approach problems differently than my generation did — I want them to be part of my future teams, sit at the table with other engineers and design incredible things."
Copyright © 2019, Raytheon Company. |
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← Polyelectrolyte Multilayers
__NOTOC__ '''Polyelectrolyte Multilayers (under construction)''' ''UNDERSTANDING THE STRUCTURE, STABILITY AND DYNAMICS OF POLYELECTROLYTE MULTILAYERS'' * Self-assembly processes of charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) involving electrostatic interactions can be used to build-up multilayered materials with unique properties. In the early 90's Decher et al [1] demonstrated the feasibility of the self-assembly of polyelectrolyte multilayers (PEMs) using the so-called Layer-by-Layer (LbL) technique. The versatility of the LbL process has allowed the fabrication of thin multilayer films made of synthetic polyelectrolytes (PE), DNA, lipids and proteins, which has resulted in a boost of novel applications in recent years. For instance, PEMs are used as matrix materials for enzymes and proteins in sensor applications [2], and also as a matrix for active components in solar cells. PEMs are used as a coating for protecting and control the healing process of damaged arteries [3]. In addition, PEM's can be used as permeable membranes for nanofiltration [4], gas separation, and fuel cells. Furthermore, PEM's are also used in the fabrication of non-linear optical materials [5], coloured electrochromic electrodes (future display devices), and to tailor the properties of photonic crystalls [6]. Other uses of PEM's include analyte separation processes (chromatography) [7], and the fabrication of thin-walled hollow micro- and nanocapsules (see [8], and ref. therein). These capsules have a great potential for drug carrier and nanoreactors. * The present knowledge about PEMs has been summarized in a few reviews [9-13]. Experiments have established several important features for PEM's: the thickness of each adsorbed layer shows almost a linear dependence on the salt concentration. Flexible polyelectrolytes in two component multilayers are known to intermix over several adjacent layers. This layer intermixing can be suppressed by using more rigid blocks for the assembly [13]. Intrinsic charge compensation by polyions accompanied by overcharging and the kinetically irreversible nature of deposition has also been reported. In the case of weak polyelectrolytes, very interesting variations of the stability, the thickness, the stiffness, the permeability and the porosity of PEMs have been observed by adjusting the pH of the dipping solutions; this change not only modifies the new layers, but also has an effect on previously adsorbed layers [14]. The measurements of the Young's modulus of PEMs show a strong correlation with ionomers, and therefore it could be possible that the structure of PEMs is close to that of ionomers. The role that the charge density of the PE plays on PEMs growth is somewhat unclear. Despite the existence of considerable data in the literature concerning the influence of the charge density on PEM formation, there is little consensus, and conflicting results have often been reported [15]. As an example of such controversy, some works have reported the existence of a critical minimum charge density below which is not possible the formation of PEMs whereas other works have observed multilayer buildup with PE of very low charge density [15]. From the extensive research over the past few years on PEMs, it is clear that unlike single layer films or polymer gels there is no general description of the physicochemical properties of different PEMs systems, especially for those assembled from weak polyelectrolytes. Another clear example of the previous claim is found in the buildup mechanism of PEMS [16]: whereas strong polyelectrolytes usually observe a linear growth for the PEM's thickness, weak polyelectrolytes do not always follow this pattern and can exhibit an exponential growth. The assembly conditions, even in the case of using the same PE, can modify the buildup regime. Thus, for instance, it has been shown very recently that an increase in temperature has a profound influence on the rate of the layer-by-layer buildup [17]. Furthermore, an elevated temperature is shown to swap the buildup from a linear to an exponential regime. The exact mechanism behind the phenomenon of the nonlinear growth is unknown at present. There are studies that suggest the surface roughening as responsible of the exponential growth (see ref. in [18]). Instead, other models are concerned with a certain active volume of the PEM, or the diffusion of polyions in and out of the film (see ref. in [17]). Another example of the complexity of the behaviour of weak PE is the shift in the charge density of weak PE depending on if they are adsorbed to the PEM or remain in solution. Furthermore, recent experimental reports ([18] and ref. therein) suggest that non-electrostatic short-range interactions, like for instance the hydrophobic interaction, also play an important role in the multilayering process. Moreover, it has been reported that the structures formed usually are metastable at some film buildup stages and little knowledge exist about the film relaxation during these stages. Thus, the complex nature of PEMs possesses a challenge when one tries to choose a PEM system for a particular application. Therefore, one must first try to learn more about the fundamental properties of PEMs before it is possible to understand how to use these films for specific applications without a large and exhausting process of trial and error. *There have been very few attempts to describe theoretically the electrostatic self-assembly, and all of them are build-up on severe assumptions hard to test experimentally; specifically they assume that PEM are equilibrium structures. Netz and Joanny [19] considered the formation of multilayers in a system of semiflexible polyelectrolytes (PE), assuming that the deposited layer structure was fixed, providing a solid charged substrate for the next layer. Mayes et al [20] applied a similar idea to flexible PE. Both these models neglect interpenetration (interdigitation) and chain complexation between the layers, which are usual features found in experimental works about PEMs. The oppositely limit of strong intermixing of PE between neighbouring layers was considered by Castlenovo and Joanny [21] by incorporating the complex formation between oppositely PEs into self-consistent field equations. Unfortunately this equations are limited to solutions of high ionic strength, were electrostatic interactions can effectively be treated as short-range interactions. Despite these huge efforts, the strong correlations existing between oppositely charged polyions, provides a formidable challenge for their theoretical description. In this respect, numerical simulations could be of great help. * There exist few computational studies about electrostatic self-assembly of PEM. In a seminal paper on layer formation on a spherical substrate [22] it has been demonstrated that additional non-electrostatic forces are needed to produce nice PEMs. This suggests that multilayering is possibly not an equilibrium phenomenon evidence of which has been also observed experimentally [23]. Similar conclusions have been drawn for other geometries using either Molecular Dynamics (MD) or Monte Carlo (MC) techniques [24, 25]. Another outcome is, that these studies have confirmed the fuzzy nature of PEMs (molecules in one layer interpenetrate other layers) , although almost perfect periodic oscillations of the density differences between monomers belonging to positively and negatively charged PE have been found. MC studies (see refs. in [26]) have reported stability as well as the microstructure of the PE layers to be especially sensitive to the strength of the non-electrostatic short range attraction between the PE and the charged substrate. In addition, the thickness of the adsorbed layer is observed to decrease when increasing PE concentration or surface charge density, although the total adsorbed amount displays a non-monotonic dependence on polymer concentration. It was also demonstrated that the formation of multilayers as well as the extent of layer intermixing depends on the molecular weight of the PE chains and the fraction of charge on its backbone. The presence of ionic pairs between oppositely charged PE that form the layers have been claimed as a possible important factor in stabilizing the multilayer films. In the last year, MD studies for the assembly of flexible PE onto flat charged surfaces [26] have suggested the formation of thermodynamically stable structures from bulk mixture solutions. This is a controversial, very basic issue that opposes to some experimental reports, and we will try to resolve this issue. * In short, despite the amount of work done during the last 15 years, the understanding of the multilayer formation process and the knowledge about how slight differences during the growth process are able to strongly modify the properties of the multilayer materials is still in its infancy. Doubtless, the understanding of such issues is of paramount importance to improve current building-up methods and devices, tune finely the properties of such materials for specific purposes, and in turn devise new potential applications for such materials. Such knowledge will not be only of benefit for the Scientific Community but also for industry as well as society due to the huge potentiality of such materials for new devices and applications. == Useful References == [1] Decher G, Hong JD, and Schmitt J, Thin Solid Films, 210, 831, (1992). [2] Tran D, and Renneberg R, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 18, 1491, (2003). [3] Thierry B, Winnik FM, Merhi Y, and Tabrizian M, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 125, 7494, (2003). [4] Malaismy R, and Bruening M, Langmuir, 21, 10587, (2005) [5] Jiang L, Lu F, Chang Q, Liu Y, Liu H, Li Y, et al., Chem. Phys. Chem., 6, 481,(2005). [6] Arsenault AC, Halfyard J, Wang Z, Kitaev V, Ozin GA, et al., Langmuir, 21, 499, (2005). [7] Kamande MW, Fletcher KA, Lowry M, and Warner IM, J. Sep. Sci., 28, 710, (2005). [8] Khopade AJ, Arulsudar N, Khopade SA, Hartmann J, Biomacromolecules, 6, 229, (2005). [9] Messina R, Holm C, Kremer K, J. Poly. Sci. B, 42, 3557, (2004). [10] Klitzing RV, Wong JE, Jaeger W, and Steiz R, Current Op. Coll. Interf. Sci., 9, 158,(2004). [11] Schönhoff M, Current Op. Coll. Interf. Sci., 8, 86, (2003). [12] Hammond PT, Current Op. Coll. Interf. Sci., 4, 430, (2000). [13] Decher G, Science, 277, 1232, (1997). [14] Kharlampieva E, and Sukhishvili SA, Langmuir, 19, 1235, (2003). [15] Schoeler B, Kumaraswamy G, and Caruso F, Macromolecules, 35, 889, (2002). [16] Kujawa P, Moraille P, Sanchez J, Badia A, Winnik FM, J.Am.Chem.Soc, 127, 9224, (2005) . [17] Salomäki M, Vinokurov IA, Kankare J, Langmuir, 21, 11232, (2005). [18] Guyomard A, Muller G, Glinel K, Macromolecules, 38, 5737, (2005). [19] Netz RR, Joanny JF, Macromolecules, 32, 9013, (1999). [20] Park SY, Rubner MF, and Mayes AM, Langmuir, 18, 9600, (2002). [21] Castlenovo M, and Joanny JF, Langmuir, 16, 7524, (2000). [22] Messina R, Holm C, Kremer K, Langmuir, 19, (10), 4473, (2003). [23] D. Kovacevic, S. van~der Burgh, M.A. Cohen-Stuart, Langmuir 18, 5607 (2002). [24] Patel PA, Jeon J, Mather PT, and Dobrynin AV, Langmuir, 21, 6113, (2005). [25] Panchagnula V, Jean J, Rusling JF, and Dobrynin AV, Langmuir, 21, 1118, (2005). [26] Abu-Sharkh B, J. Chem Phys., 123, 114907, (2005). == Aim of the Research == * The present project is intended to shed light on some still not clearly understood aspects governing multilayer formation and the control of their properties. At this stage, numerical simulations that use the state-of-the-art algorithms to deal with charged soft matter offer a very valuable and useful tool in order to elucidate the mechanisms governing multilayering assembly and the properties of PEMs. These numerical simulations can build a bridge between the detailed experimental results and the relatively coarse grained analytical models, helping us to understand several non-well understood issues. == Scientists == * ''[[Joan Josep Cerdà]]'' * ''[[Christian Holm]]''
Return to Polyelectrolyte Multilayers.
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https://www.barrons.com/news/a-stranger-stroked-my-horse-french-police-inundated-with-oddball-virus-queries-01585241408
'A Stranger Stroked My Horse' - French Police Inundated With Oddball Virus Queries
"Can my husband spend the weekend with his mistress?" "A stranger stroked my horse, could he have infected it?" France's police emergency number has been inundated with queries, some downright odd, since the country went into coronavirus lockdown.
The quick-dial emergency "17" number reserved for matters of a criminal nature, has been abused more than usual with thousands of calls since a period of home confinement for French residents started on March 17, duty officers told AFP.
"There has been an explosion in the number of calls, multiplied by three," said a police official in northern France.
"People are calling for everything and nothing, because they are bored. Some just want to talk," another policeman said.
In Dijon in the country's east, a woman called the number seeking romantic advice.
"After my divorce, I managed to find someone. But he lives 25 kilometres (15.5 miles) from my place. How do I deal with confinement?" she asked an incredulous responder on the other end.
"We get serious calls for information" but also "abusive calls that border on stupidity," said another police member.
"We had one rather libertine couple call to ask if the husband can spend the weekend with his mistress as he normally does!"
Police on patrol have also encountered some gems.
One motorist from Picardie in the north explained in all earnestness at a checkpoint that he was 50 km from home "because he needed to buy cassoulet" -- a typical bean and sausage dish.
While sometimes amusing, police are especially riled by misuse of the emergency number at a time when home confinement has led to a rise in reports of domestic violence and neighbourly disputes.
Of course, many in France have also taken to dialling "17" to snitch on neighbours receiving guests at home against the lockdown rules, or to report people they suspect of leaving the house too often, personnel reported.
burs-cha/mlr/sjw/har |
Are we as humans capable of interacting with such a powerful communication source?
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The extended essay must be written in the language for which it is registered the target language.
The areas of Lewisham and Greenwich have become more densely populated and the flood risk has increased, due to the continued development, and so more is needed to be done to protect the surroundign area. So, according to the revision guide we need to know about flooding in Bangladesh and Gloucestershire, hard-engineering in the Mississippi and a soft engineering case study either the river Quaggy or river Rhine.
It consisted of three estates. DBQ French Revolution Essay words - 2 pages History can be seen as a series of changes people put upon one another.
This course offers you writing modules based on interactive graphic novels to help you learn the art of writing. So, instead of stuffing yourself with dry theory out of context, you will understand the main concepts of research better when it is placed with business writing.
Essays must be at least two and no more than three double-spaced pages, computer or type written please do not staple submissions. Noncompliance with these conditions may result in forfeiture of the Prize, and Sponsor reserves the right to select alternate winners in such circumstance.
You can use interesting facts, quotations, or definitions of important terms you will use later in the essay. The writer may next ask what characteristics dogs have that make them true friends.
You need to account for this lag when calculating exactly when you expect to see your revenue.
In some cases, the students and their parents are part of dysfunctional families, which lead to psychological problems of students. Welcome to the Blackboard e-Education platform—designed to enable educational innovations everywhere by connecting people and technology.
Words With The Greek Root Thesis — Iranewage Soma means "body", animal or human, or it can refer to a group or a body of people, and so forth.
25 words found. anthesis · antithesis · biosynthesis · chemosynthesis · counterhypothesis · diathesis · epenthesis · esthesis · esthesises · hypothesis · kinesthesis. Presentation on theme: "Latin & Greek Roots Movement & Images Words. thesis Pronunciation: [THE sis] (THEE sis) Definition: put, place, position.
The OED was useful in providing the etymology of words and indicating the morphology. Poor — an inadequate experience with a lot of friction.
The two indexes above, one for the prefix dictionary, and the other for the suffix dictionary, allow you to find prefix and suffix meanings by clicking on the first letter of the particular prefix or suffix you're looking for. Morality is a set of cultural norms The Characters Of Harry Potter Words 4 Pages concept through her characters by linking her characters names to classical folklore charismas that share similar personas.
Start studying Thesis (Greek Root Word). Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. Start studying Syn and Thesis- Greek root words. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.
Contrary to canny Taboo Language Words 13 Pages prohibitions relating to any area of human activity or custom that is sacred or forbidden based on moral judgment and religious beliefs. Ignore words Lack of time to deal with the essays and other assignments leave the students to be stressed and it is very vital for words with the greek root thesis students to write down an effective essay as per the instructions of the professors.
In the later works of Latin writers on metre, the arsis is invariably considered the first part of the foot see below. In constructing these terms, nearly always, a Latin prefix goes with a Latin suffix, and a Greek prefix goes with a Greek suffix.
In English, its etymology is straightforward. Befriended by a man robbed by the gang, Oliver ultimately learns his true identity and gains a new home, a fortune and a brand new family! The following is a brief view of the complex etymology of the word humor.
When Sarah went to the grocery store, she found that the abarognosis in her hands made it difficult for her to even estimate how heavy the pineapple she wanted to buy was. The Creative Writing programme was a positive step towards learning the craft of the art of writing.
The first activity is a group project in which a small cohort of students are given an audio clip that illustrates a feature Robotics: List all words that contain thet. Keep in mind the Greeks did not have the letter C. Length restrictions and the condition set out, to use The Norton Anthology of English Literature as the only source to show the synchronic use of the word, have forced me to take a more narrow approach.
But a thesis may also be an idea; so in the course of the paper the student may put forth several theses notice the plural form and attempt to prove them. Try to make steady progress in the online writing course.
Meaning: "unaccented syllable or note," from Latin thesis "unaccented of a metrical foot," from Greek thesis "a proposition," also "downbeat" (in music), an arranging; position, situation," from reduplicated form of PIE root *dhe- "to set, put. essays for sale Thesis greek root words Thesis statement examples on drunk them thesis greek root of the grave, becoming, and sublime deportment they.
There are conflicts as to whether abiogenesis has any validity. Earliest sense was less severe: Or perhaps you have been too productive last month and you want to balance things out.
Alicia was able to move her legs while she was lying down, but she had abasia when she tried to stand up. Ramil Mondejar 1. In many fields, a final thesis is the biggest challenge involved in getting a master's degree, and the same is true for students studying for a Ph.
Semantics as a branch of lexicology, its goals and tasks.
Business plan for maize milling plant in english and ukrainian. That which is devoid of life; nonliving: When he sits down to work, make sure he has enough light and few distractions.
Earliest use[ edit ] The ancient Greek writers who mention the terms arsis and thesis are mostly from rather a late period 2nd-4th century ADbut it is thought that they continued an earlier tradition. The models of phonology are places where sounds remain the same up through Modern English.
In comparison with the Turkish nouns, the number of verbs and adjectives taken over by Bulgarian is small and can be recognized by the suffix "s".
According to Stefan Hagel, it is likely that within the thesis and within the arsis au pair job application letter divided into two equal parts, there was a further hierarchy with one of the two notes stronger than the other. Etymology The word robotics was derived.
Etymology Despite a healthy body of research literature, very little is known about the etymology of pedophilia. Our favorite shows and binges," 24 Dec. The frontier area was often without a pastor and so abaptism usually existed for quite awhile. |
Loan duo continue development
Burey on target...
Millwall's Hayden Muller and Tyler Burey have been busy in action whilst on loan at St Johnstone and Hartlepool United respectively.
Burey, 20, scored his second goal in as many matches by netting the opening goal in a 2-0 Sky Bet League Two win over Walsall this past weekend.
The winger played 72 minutes in a more central attacking role for David Challinor's side, and Burey told the The Northern Echo of his "adjustment" to a new position whilst "learning" at the fourth-tier side.
"I am an out and out winger so I've been a winger from when I started playing football," he said. "I am more of a winger.
"However, I'm doing well playing as a striker so I don't really mind. I just wanted to do what I can for the team. It's just more of a learning curve playing as a striker but I don't mind because I'm doing well."
Muller, meanwhile, was an unused substitute as St Johnstone defeated Arbroath 3-2 on penalties after a 2-2 draw in the Premier Sports Cup, and also as Callum Davidson's side earned a creditable 1-1 draw at LASK in the UEFA Europa Conference League last week, but the defender did play 69 minutes in Sunday's 1-0 defeat to Dundee United at McDiarmid Park.
The Poolies now face a double-header against near-rivals Carlisle United, firstly in League Two this weekend before a Papa John's Trophy meeting three nights later, whilst St Johnstone will be hoping to advance in the Europa Conference League as they entertain LASK on Thursday night.
Muller and his side will then travel to St Mirren in the cinch Premiership on Sunday.
Tyler Burey
Hayden Muller |
Dorma and its Poultry Farm
Eric Callaway, May 2016
Documents and photos courtesy Eric Callaway
Dorma is the house going up Box Hill on the left, just set off the road. This is Eric Callaway's story of the house and the smalholding run by his father, Eddie, called Dorma Poutry Farm, which existed there before and during World War 2.
Right: Eric's grandmother, Rhoda, known as Daisy, (right) in service for
the Wills family at Fogleigh House
Mineral Water Plant
The area known as Quarr Close field was famous for a mineral water bottling business operated by David Milsom in the early 1900s. There were fewer houses in that location than now but the two garages further up the hill did exist and were part of the bottling business. You can see how the bottling plant worked from the JB Bowler Mineral Waters display at the Museum of Bath at Work, Julian Road, Bath.[1]
Photo courtesy Carol Payne
The source of the water is still in existence and I remember spending hours pumping up the water which we used for domestic purposes when our family house at Dorma had been built.
We used a semi-rotary pump and piped it across to our house with a leather flapper at the end of the pipe to stop the water from flowing back.
In the late 1950s a child nearly fell down the well and my father and I decided to replace a wooden cover with a stone block. Before we did so, we measured the well and it was 33 feet deep to water and 16 feet of water below in the well. Bottling of water ceased prior to 1934.
Dorma and our Poultry Farm
My father, Ernest Edward (known as Eddie) Callaway, bought the site of Dorma as a domestic house in the 1930s. He negotiated with George's Brewery for the Right of Way to facilitate entrances for the pub and the house. Dorma is seen marked in green on the Appeal Site map (ight).
The present house was built in 1934 by the builders, Osbournes of Corsham. Eddie started the small holding in 1932-33 and married my mother, Lillian May Oatley in 1936.
Dorma marked in green in an Appeal Site map.
Below left my mother and Judy the dog in front of the pig sty at Dorma and below right my grandfather, Edward Callaway, carrying the milk churn.
Money was very different in those days. Eddie's accounts book shows that in January 1937 he received £1.18s for 24 dozen eggs and on 24 December 1937 he paid himself £3 as his Xmas wages. He built up quite a varied smallholding there selling milk at times and meat from the pigs housed in the pigsty above.
When the Second World War came, my father was too old to be called up at first and anyway he was in a reserved occupation. Instead he worked almost every evening as an Air Raid Precaution warden surveying the night skies for enemy aircraft movement and recording the bombs that dropped in the Box area.
The business was officially recognised and Dorma Poultry Farm was licensed to sell produce. I still have the licences for 1939 and 1942 (below left) and his weights and measures clearance from 1943 (below right).
Seen below the Dorma Poultry Farm smallholding on the left and the poultry houses on the right in the 1930s.
But Eddie had to give up farming in 1943 and apply for full time war work. He disposed of his equipment and sold his hayrick for £10, never returning to farming again. Instead he was offered a job by the War Agricultural Executive Committee to drive up to twenty prisoners of war from Easton Grey, Malmesbury, and to supervise them when they were doing essential ditching, drainage and seasonal agricultural work for up to 9 hours per day, six days a week. He declined the job and instead went to work at Spring Quarry, Corsham, for the British Aircraft Factory, where his sister already worked as a nurse.
After the war, Eddie became an insurance agent for the Prudential, travelling around the area. It was the years of rationing and
he had to obtain a licence to get tyres for work in April 1947. Life in Box Hill was a completely different world after the war.
Dorma returned to being a private residential house and the poultry farm became a thing of the past.
Thanks to Eric and Sandra Callaway for ensuring this story is not forgotten.
[1] http://www.bath-at-work.org.uk/about/ |
Canadian rap rock band, Down With Webster is a force to be reckoned with! Their third album, Time To Win Vol. II peaked at #9 on the Canadian Albums Charts and they've toured all over Canada and in the U.S. The album has won us over from the first to the last song.
The guys worked and collaborated with new people such as producer and fellow Torontian Boi-1da, who surprises us with cool pop/dance beats on the tracks, "Professional" and "I Want It All" and DWW gets us hooked on their very catchy party anthem "Work" with Cali's electro hop group Far East Movement. We also can't forget their smash hits "She's Dope" and "Big Wheels" which we have on repeat!
Bestfan has grown close with the creative, super funny and down to earth guys from interviews and being on set at their video shoots that we know how hard they've work on this album and it definitely shows – with 13 amazing tracks, it's hard to choose a favourite!
We definitely recommend everybody to buy and support Down With Webster's brand new album, now available on iTunes and in stores. |
0%105°78°Sunny with a high of 104 °F (40.0 °C). Winds NW at 7 mph (11.3 kph).Night - Clear. Winds variable at 4 to 7 mph (6.4 to 11.3 kph). The overnight low will be 78 °F (25.6 °C).
0%110°80°Sunny today with a high of 110 °F (43.3 °C) and a low of 80 °F (26.7 °C).
0%110°82°Sunny today with a high of 110 °F (43.3 °C) and a low of 82 °F (27.8 °C).
0%105°76°Sunny today with a high of 105 °F (40.6 °C) and a low of 76 °F (24.4 °C).
0%100°78°Sunny today with a high of 100 °F (37.8 °C) and a low of 78 °F (25.6 °C).
Today - Sunny with a high of 104 °F (40.0 °C). Winds NW at 7 mph (11.3 kph).
Tonight - Clear. Winds variable at 4 to 7 mph (6.4 to 11.3 kph). The overnight low will be 78 °F (25.6 °C). |
Gluten-Free Cheese Ravioli – *comes with gluten-free garlic bread…………..Angel Spiral Pasta – *comes with gluten-free garlic bread……………………….
We use separate cutting boards and knives and package separately to avoid contamination.
**Sandwiches are $0.50 more than a small sub and flatbread sandwiches are $1.45 more than a large sub. |
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/2019/04/rock-climbing-added-to-olympics-2020.html
Photograph by Marco Kost, Getty Images
Czech rock climber Adam Ondra, considered one of the world's strongest climbers, competes during the finals of the International Federation of Sport Climbing's World Cup on April 6, 2018, in Meiringen, Switzerland. Ondra is considered a frontrunner to compete in the 2020 Olympics' inaugural climbing event.
Exploration & Adventure
Rock climbing will be a 2020 Olympic sport. Here's what to expect.
Climbers are eager to see how the sport—and Olympic format—will change with time.
By Freddie Wilkinson
Last weekend, 450 of the world's best rock climbers convened in the outskirts of Moscow at the CSKA Sports Complex for the second stop on the International Federation of Sport Climbing's (IFSC) World Cup tour. All eyes were on Czech climber Adam Ondra, the reigning king of really hard rock climbing and a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. A week prior, Ondra had made a win at the first bouldering World Cup of the 2019 season, proving he deserves to be considered a frontrunner for competitive climbing's first Olympics.
With rock climbing's debut in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo less than 16 months away, the effects are already being felt. Top athletes are vying for Olympics slots while a rush of business dollars and media attention bear down on the emerging sport. While most of the competitors in Moscow were not household names, the high level of competition highlighted how far the nascent sport has come.
In January, USA Climbing inked a multi-year agreement with ESPN to broadcast the National Championships and other climbing events across the country. Then in February, the Organizing Committee for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games announced their proposal to expand climbing's presence in the event by creating two separate medal events per gender, guaranteeing that the sport will continue to evolve at break-neck pace.
"It's going to be different," says Canadian climber and Combined World Cup winner Sean McColl. "I don't think competitive climbing will settle down until it's been in three or four Olympics. Right now, everything is still evolving."
Olympic Travails
When it was formally announced in 2016 that climbing would be a medal sport in the 2020 Olympics, the format was derided by many throughout the climbing world. At the Tokyo games, climbers will compete in three disciplines—bouldering, lead climbing, and speed climbing—for one combined set of medals per gender. In particular, speed climbing's inclusion was widely criticized. (Learn more about the sport's different styles and history.)
"I am NOT in support of the format that imposes that all climbers must compete in speed climbing," legendary free climber Lynn Hill told Climbing Magazine. "That is like asking a middle distance runner to compete in the sprint. Speed climbing is a sport within our sport."
"I think speed climbing is kind of an artificial discipline," Ondra declared in an interview at the time. "Climbers compete on the same holds and train on the same holds, which doesn't have much in common with the climbing philosophy in my opinion…anything would be better than this combination."
For insiders like McColl, who serves as the president of the International Olympic Committee's (I.O.C.) Climbing Athlete Commission, however, the awkward format was a necessary growing pain for the sport to get its foot in the door with the greatest individual competition in the world.
"The I.O.C.'s process is just that, a process," McColl says. "It's really hard as a new sport that's never been seen much on TV, or by anyone very far outside of climbing, to come and say, 'Hey, we've got this great sport, we want four medals per gender, and 160 athlete spots.' There are constraints in the Olympics."
For McColl, last month's news that organizers of the Paris Games would like to separate speed climbing from bouldering and lead climbing to make two events was vindication that the strategy is working. "For 2020, we got one medal and 40 spots. Now, we have 2 medals and 72 athletes in 2024. My hope is we'll get four medals by 2028."
According to McColl, the evolving Olympic format is having a trickle-down effect that will be felt throughout competitive climbing's ranks. "For 2020, we've been encouraging all the [national] federations and competitive climbers to do combined events with all three disciplines. But for 2024, with speed being taken out, combined competitors won't need to do speed," he says.
Marianne van der Steen of the Netherlands competes in the Petzl NK Lead indoor climbing competition on November 24, 2018 in Utrecht, Netherlands. Competitive climbing is seeing a surge of interest as the sport becomes a medal event in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Top contenders are working on diversifying their abilities to include the three types of climbing that will be in the game—speed climbing, lead climbing, and bouldering.
Photograph by Dean Mouhtaropoulos, Getty Images
Rise of the Specialists
By the summer of 2018, Ondra begrudgingly began training for speed climbing to bolster his Olympic chances. Another leading outdoor climber, 24-year-old German ace Alex Megos, recently announced his own Olympic bid despite similar misgivings about the format.
"I think what tipped the scale for me and actually made me decide to try and qualify for the Olympics was the fear of regretting not having tried it," Megos wrote in a recent email. "Considering my age and the fact that I want to shift my focus more on outdoor climbing in the future, the 2020 Olympics will be my first and last chance to ever compete in the Olympics."
Megos and Ondra are rare specimens, however. Few other outdoor climbers–even luminaries like Chris Sharma, Tommy Caldwell, or Alex Honnold–have the skill set to allow them to compete in the Olympics, even if they were so inclined. "Competition bouldering is now very different from actual climbing. If you rarely train in this particular style you have little chance," Megos explained in an interview. So far, Megos has placed 16th and 15th in this year's World Cup bouldering events.
"At the very highest levels of competition climbing, you need to be training indoors full time," says Chris Danielson, an American World Cup route-setter. And even for seasoned competitive climbers, excelling in all three disciplines simultaneously is a herculean task.
"It's a bit like asking Usain Bolt to run a marathon and then do the hurdles," British climber Shauna Coxsey explained in an interview to the Olympics News. "No one has really transitioned before. No boulderer has transitioned to speed and lead, and no speed climber has done it to bouldering and lead."
Danielson notes that because of the unusual amount of uncertainty in competition climbing, it's really hard to predict favorites. "Odds from past experience show that teams like Japan and Austria are in good position to do very well… the hard part is predicting who the stars will actually end up being. That's not just because there's a lot of high-level athletes, but because of the nature of competition climbing. There's luck involved."
In Moscow, Ondra slipped on the beginning of the final boulder problem, which he was unable to complete, ultimately coming in second to Slovenian Jernej Kruder. Coxsey also came in second to another Slovenian, Janja Garnbret. Perhaps most notably, an astonishing seven Japanese climbers placed in the top 19 of the men's bouldering event.
MEIRINGEN, SWITZERLAND - APRIL 06: Akiyo Noguchi of Japan competes during the finals of the IFSC Climbing World Cup Meiringen on April 06, 2018 in Meiringen, Switzerland.
Skate-Style Climbing
One big reason even the best rock climbers in the world might struggle in an indoor competition has to do with a wild new style of climbing movement that indoor climbing has spawned. Incorporating wild, all-points of dynamic jumps and large, featureless holds known as "volumes" that force climbers into awkward body positions, the modern brand of competition bouldering sometimes appears to have as much to do with parkour or skateboarding as it does with rock climbing.
"What volumes can do is create the possibility of more variable terrain," says Danielson. "Rather than grabbing and pulling up a single face, you're moving and navigating through holds on different angles."
In the first World Cup bouldering event this year, for instance, route setters used volumes to create a crack that competitors needed to ascend. While most of the field struggled, Ondra used several hand jams—an old-school outdoor technique—to solve the riddle and win first place.
"Bouldering used to be about grabbing on really hard to hold, bad holds," says Caldwell, an elite outdoor climber who free climbed El Capitan's Dawn Wall in 2015. "The new indoor style demands way more coordination, flexibility, and timing." Caldwell notes that it's even percolating into outdoor climbing. "It actually translates pretty well to granite big-wall climbs, where you're frequently trying to span blank gaps between holds or crack systems," he says. "I find it really fun."
It doesn't hurt that the new-school approach makes for telegenic viewing, either. "More and more we'll see lead climbing adopt the tricks and flare that bouldering already has," McColl predicts.
Danielson is cautiously optimistic about the sport's next phase. "I think there's no question that greater viewership and attention to competition climbing will mean changes to certain elements," he says. "Being someone really embedded in it, I don't think the way climbing competitions work today has been perfected for the athletes or for a core audience of climbers… Imagine what football or baseball were like when those sports were only 25 or 30 years old. Competitive climbing is still so young and has great room to grow." |