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County Kilkenny Ireland History
Barony of Galmoy
The present name, Galmoy, is perhaps a phonetic translation of Gabhal Magh, the plain of the Gabhal, the branching river which flows south-westwards
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County Kilkenny Ireland History
Barony of Galmoy
The present name, Galmoy, is perhaps a phonetic translation of Gabhal Magh, the plain of the Gabhal, the branching river which flows south-westwards from Co. Laois through the middle of this barony.
The northern section of the cantred of Galmoy was occupied by the Ua Caellaighe (O'Kealy or O'Kelly) in the middle of the 12th century, a section that extended in modern Co. Laois. The central section of Galmoy held the Ua Broithe (O'Brophy) sept at this time. The Ua Caibhdheanaigh (Coveney, Keveney, Gaffney?) of Magh Airbh and Clar Coill are noted in the southern section of Galmoy (modern barony of Crannagh) at the time of the Cambro-Norman invasion.
Following the Anglo-Norman invasion, William Marshall is noted to have made land grants in the late 12th century and early 13th century when Galmoy was divided among the bishop of Ossory and the families of Bigod, Drohull, Fanyn (Fanning), Syward, Archdeacon (Cody), and Smith. As noted by Canon Empey the manor of Aghour (Freshford) was held by the bishop of Ossory. The manor of Aghmacart (in modern Co. Leix) was held by Bigod, as represented by John Bigod in 1286 and Ralph Bigot in 1317. The manor of Tubbridbritain (modern barony of Crannagh) with Killahy was held by Drohull, as represented about 1247 by Hugh, son of David Drohull. The manor of Glothementhau (Clomantagh, modern barony of Crannagh) was held by Thomas, son of Richard Fanyn in 1247. The manor of Ercekerrach (Glashare with Fertagh) was held by Thomas Syward in 1247, and by 1316 it passed to the family of the Earls of Kildare. The manor of Culcassyn (Coolcashin) was held by Gilbert Smyth in 1247 and by another Gilbert in 1317. The manor of Gauleme (Galmoy) was held by the Archdeacons.
From their patronymic ancestor, Odo l'Ercedekne, the Norman family of Archdeacon of Co. Kilkenny early adopted the Gaelic patronymic Mac Oda, later anglicized Cody. Odo may have been the Archdeacon (Archidiaconus) who originally received grants in the barony of Galmoy. He was a witness to early 13th century charters in the Kilkenny area of both Geoffrey FitzRobert and William Marshal I. In the feodary of 1247 we find Stephen Archidekne holding 2 1/2 knights' fees in the land of Gauleme, which is spelled Ganelomey in the feodary in the Calendar of Patent Rolls. In the 1324 feodary Raymond le Ercedekne, son of Richard, held the lands of Gavelmoy, in the barony of Galmoy.
In 1247 recorded names of those holding knights fees in the barony of Galmoy included:
Gilbert Smyth, 1 1/2 and 1/3 fees in Culcassyn [Coolcashin].
John de Ebroicis (Devereux), 2 knights' fees, part in Acheteyr [Achad Togarta, including Aharney].
William de Cromhall, or Hugh Purcell, 1/4 fee in Achenirke [Urlingford].
Roger de Penbroc, 1/8 fee in Lisdumery [Lisdowney, parish of Aharney].
Thomas Syward, 1 1/4 fee at Ercekerrach [Glashare].
William le Poer, 1/2 fee in the land of moiset in Moyharf [Magh-Sedna in Magh Airbh].
Stephen Archid[ekne] or Archdeacon, 2 1/2 knights' fees in the land of Gauleme [ barony of Galmoy]. Raymund le Erchedekne held these in 1324.
In 1317 recorded names of those holding knights fees in the barony of Galmoy included:
Gilbert Smythe, 1 1/2 and 1/3 fees in Coultassyn & elsewhere [Coolcashin].
Stephen de Oxon, or de Excestr (de Exeter), 2 knights' fees in Aghtayr [Achad Togarta, including Aharney].
Philip Purcell, 1/4 fee in Aghuryl [Urlingford].
heir of Philip son of Fulk, or Fulk son of Walter (de la Freyne?), 1 3/4 fee, partly in Rathbetagh [Rathbeagh].
Roger Pembroke, 1/8 fee in Lisdomtchy [Lisdowney, parish of Aharney].
In 1324 recorded names of those holding knights fees in the barony of Galmoy included:
Thomas, son of John, Earl of Kildare, 1 knights fee at Glessar [Glashare].
Roger son of John Pouer of Kyllyn, 1/2 fee in an unspecified location.
Raymund le Erchedekne. 2 1/2 fees at Gavelmoy [Galmoy].
In 1355 recorded names of those holding knights fees in the barony of Galmoy included:
Jordany de Exethr', 1/8 fee in Lysdowy [Lisdowney].
The Bryan family later held territory here. The Mountgarret Butlers and the Purcells had castles in this barony.
The distribution of lands in the barony of Galmoy circa 1640 shows the major landowners to be the Butlers, Lord Mountgarret [Butler], the Bryans,
Archdeacons, Shees, Shortalls and others.
The
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ACCOUNTING TERMS - ACCOUNTING DICTIONARY - ACCOUNTING GLOSSARY
From the web's #1 provider of financial analysis / ratio analysis
RELEVANT ASSERTION Definition
RELEVANT ASSERTION, in accounting, is a financial
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ACCOUNTING TERMS - ACCOUNTING DICTIONARY - ACCOUNTING GLOSSARY
From the web's #1 provider of financial analysis / ratio analysis
RELEVANT ASSERTION Definition
RELEVANT ASSERTION, in accounting, is a financial statement assertion that has a reasonable possibility of containing a misstatement or misstatements that would cause the financial statements to be materially misstated.
Learn new Accounting Terms
VENDOR MANAGED INVENTORY (VMI) is a process in which a supplier generates orders for its distributor based on demand information sent by the distributor. Vendor Managed Inventory was first applie
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For release Tuesday, Sept. 24
Today is Tuesday, Sept. 24, the 267th day of 2013. There are 98 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On Sept. 24
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For release Tuesday, Sept. 24
Today is Tuesday, Sept. 24, the 267th day of 2013. There are 98 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On Sept. 24, 1976, former hostage Patricia Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison for her part in a 1974 bank robbery in San Francisco carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst was released after 22 months after receiving clemency from President Jimmy Carter.
On this date:
In 1789, Congress passed a Judiciary Act, which provided for an attorney general and a Supreme Court.
In 1869, thousands of businessmen were ruined in a Wall Street panic known as Black Friday after financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk attempted to corner the gold market.
In 1929, Lt. James H. Doolittle guided a Consolidated NY-2 Biplane over Mitchel Field in New York in the first all-instrument flight.
In 1948, Mildred Gillars, accused of being Nazi wartime radio propagandist "Axis Sally," pleaded not guilty in Washington, D.C., to charges of treason. Gillars, later convicted, ended up serving 12 years in prison.
In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack while on vacation in Denver.
In 1961, "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" premiered on NBC.
In 1963, the U.S. Senate ratified a treaty with Britain and the Soviet Union limiting nuclear testing.
In 1969, the trial of the "Chicago Eight" (later seven) began. Five of the defendants were later convicted of crossing state lines to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, but the convictions were ultimately overturned.
In 1991, kidnappers in Lebanon freed British hostage Jack Mann after holding him captive for more than two years. Children's author Theodor Seuss Geisel (GY'-zul), better known as Dr. Seuss, died in La Jolla, Calif., at age 87.
In 2001, President George W. Bush ordered a freeze on the assets of 27 people and organizations with suspected links to terrorism, including Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, and urged other nations to do likewise.
Ten years ago: After four turbulent months, three special legislative sessions and two Democratic walkouts, both houses of the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature adopted redistricting plans favoring the GOP. The top candidates vying to replace California Governor Gray Davis joined in a lively debate.
Five years ago: Officials reopened Galveston, Texas, to residents who were warned about Hurricane Ike's debris and disruption of utilities. Japanese lawmakers elected Taro Aso, leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, prime minister.
One year ago: President Barack Obama told the ABC talk show "The View" that the deadly attack earlier in the month on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was not the result of mob violence; he said "there's no doubt" that the assault wasn't spontaneous. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused Obama of minimizing the Benghazi attack as a mere "bump in the road." Provocative ads began appearing in New York City subways, equating Muslim radicals with savages.
Today's Birthdays: Actor-singer Herb Jeffries is 102. Actress Sheila MacRae is 92. Rhythm-and-blues singer Sonny Turner (The Platters) is 74. Singer Barbara Allbut (The Angels) is 73. Singer Phyllis "Jiggs" Allbut (The Angels) is 71. Singer Gerry Marsden (Gerry and the Pacemakers) is 71. News anchor Lou Dobbs is 68. Pro and College Football Hall of Famer Joe Greene is 67. Actor Gordon Clapp is 65. Songwriter Holly Knight is 57. Former U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, D-Mass., is 61. Actor Kevin Sorbo is 55. Christian/jazz singer Cedric Dent (Take 6) is 51. Actress-writer Nia Vardalos is 51. Country musician Marty Mitchell is 44. Actress Megan Ward is 44. Singer-musician Marty Cintron (No Mercy) is 42. Contemporary Christian musician Juan DeVevo (Casting Crowns) is 38. Actor Justin Bruening is 34. Olympic gold medal gymnast Paul Hamm (hahm) is 31. Actor Erik Stocklin is 31. Actor Kyle Sullivan is 25.
Thought for Today: "History is mostly guessing, the rest is prejudice." -- Will (1885-1981) and Ariel Durant (1898-1981), American historians.
(Above Advance for Use Tuesday, Sept. 24)
Copyright 2013, The Associated Press. All rights reserved.Published:
Today is Thursday, Sept. 26, the 269th day of 2013. There are 96 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On Sept. 26, 1789, Thom
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18 March 2011 With 1.8 billion people threatened by absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of the world’s population facing potential shortages, countries must better protect and manage forests to ensure the provision of clean water to
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18 March 2011 With 1.8 billion people threatened by absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of the world’s population facing potential shortages, countries must better protect and manage forests to ensure the provision of clean water to vulnerable communities, a United Nations-backed forum warned today.
“Forests are part of the natural infrastructure of any country and are essential to the water cycle,” said UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forestry Department Assistant Director General Eduardo Rojas-Briales.
The FAO is part of the 14-member Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), a grouping comprising 14 international organizations, including several other UN agencies and bodies.
“They reduce the effects of floods, prevent soil erosion, regulate the water table and assure a high-quality water supply for people, industry and agriculture,” Mr. Rojas-Briales said, speaking ahead of UN World Water Day, which will be celebrated this year on 22 March.
Today, at least one third of the world’s biggest cities, such as New York, Singapore, Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Madrid and Cape Town, draw a significant portion of their drinking-water from forested areas. If properly utilized, forest catchment areas can provide at least a partial solution for municipalities needing more or cleaner water, according to CPF.
“The management of water and forests are closely linked and require innovative policy solutions which take into account the cross-cutting nature of these vital resources,” said Jan McAlpine, Director of the UN Forum on Forests Secretariat.
The UN General Assembly has proclaimed 2011 the International Year of Forests and this “provides a unique platform to raise awareness of issues such as the water-soil-forests nexus, which directly affect the quality of people’s lives, their livelihoods and their food security,” she added.
Moreover, forests and trees contribute to the reduction of water-related risks such as landslides, local floods and droughts, and help prevent desertification and salinization. They are in most cases an optimal land cover for catchments supplying drinking water, and forest watersheds supply a high proportion of water for domestic, agricultural, industrial and ecological needs.
News Tracker: past stories on this issue
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I am looking for more information on the Savoraim such as a list of who they were, what they wrote outside of comments/amendments in the talmud, meaning do they have responsa, ethical or halachik works?
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I am looking for more information on the Savoraim such as a list of who they were, what they wrote outside of comments/amendments in the talmud, meaning do they have responsa, ethical or halachik works?
Any works that deal in detail with the development of the Talmud (e.g. Seder HaKabalah of the Raavad, the Igeres R' Sherira Gaon) will discuss the Savoraim. The Doros HaRishonim discusses them at some length in volume six.
The Savoraim was a very brief and obscure period. Different sources give significantly different information on the period. The Seder HaKabalah of the Raavad writes that the period lasted five generations (over a period of 187 years) and he identifies the following figures as the leaders of each generation:
However, as mentioned above, other sources differ with this account in a variety of ways.
To my knowledge, other than their role in the final compilation and editing of the Talmud, there are no distinct works attributed to Sages from this brief period.
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From Rabbi Yosef Eisen's Miraculous Journey (pg 12)
(he cites Paretsky, Reservoirs of Faith p. 99 and HaLevi, Doros HaRishonim Vol. 6, p.21)
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Alerted by summary on Kurzweil.net
This extensive report is by the Millennium Project, founded in 1996 as a global think tank that connects international experts in corporations, universities, NGOs, UN agencies and governments via 35 Nodes
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Alerted by summary on Kurzweil.net
This extensive report is by the Millennium Project, founded in 1996 as a global think tank that connects international experts in corporations, universities, NGOs, UN agencies and governments via 35 Nodes around the world in a participatory process and that explores how to build a better future.
Summary of summary:
“The world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.”
Accelerating advances in technology have the potential to stabilize or solve many of the greatest problems. But changes in policies, and our collective decision-making are urgently required.
In addition, “We also need changes in human values to be discussed within and among religions, media, entertainment, and the arts. Everyone has a part to play in the great race between the increasingly complex problems and ways to improve the prospects for civilization.”
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So you’ve probably heard the news, but just in case I thought I’d mention it here. The Kepler observatory, up there in orbit keeping an eye on things for us, has found a bumper crop of planets orbiting a sun-like
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So you’ve probably heard the news, but just in case I thought I’d mention it here. The Kepler observatory, up there in orbit keeping an eye on things for us, has found a bumper crop of planets orbiting a sun-like star a mere 2000 or so light years away. It is amazing what you can see if you look closely. Every now and again the star’s brightness dips ever so slightly, and that tells you something has passed in front of it – another planet. Or in this case, once you’ve analyzed the pattern of dips, as the team of astronomers did, six planets!
These are not earths, although the headlines all over the news sure try to grab you in with the idea that they are, but they show such a range of properties – in just this little cluster, and so relatively early in Kepler’s lifetime – that it gives a lot of hope that we’ll soon be able to reliably detect planets with similar properties to the one we know does support life (er… ours) and in the Goldilocks zone too (not too hot… not too cold).
Here’s the NASA-Kepler press release, the Nature paper, and Phil has done an excellent post with more details. There’s also a related story about the 54 candidate Goldilocks planets, and you can find it here and here.
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Thu, Dec 6 11:03 PM
On November 30, the House of Representatives passed a bill to scrap the annual green card lottery that randomly distributes green cards to 55,000 applicants. Created in 1986, the
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Thu, Dec 6 11:03 PM
On November 30, the House of Representatives passed a bill to scrap the annual green card lottery that randomly distributes green cards to 55,000 applicants. Created in 1986, the law technically called the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program does not heighten the skills of the American workforce, reunite families or serve humanitarian function.
The bill would instead give immigrants the ability to become citizens based on their skills and community ties. This would increase the acceptance of those with advanced science or technology degrees who wish to start businesses in the United States.
A 245-139 vote backed the plan, although it is unlikely for it to become a law. Both Democrats and Republicans are in favor of helping foreigners with STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – skills to drive innovation.
"In a global economy, we cannot afford to educate these foreign graduates in the U.S. and then send them back home to work for our competitors," Lamar Smith, who introduced the bill, said in a speech before the vote.
However, some lawmakers are concerned the bill raises issues in the effort for a comprehensive immigration reform. Many lower-skilled immigrants serve a vital role in the economy as well, and ma
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The funny thing about this sonnet is that there's no real location. In fact, there's no real action in the poem. It's more of an intellectual argument than an evening or a story. We're really just getting the speaker's
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The funny thing about this sonnet is that there's no real location. In fact, there's no real action in the poem. It's more of an intellectual argument than an evening or a story. We're really just getting the speaker's voice reciting his poem out there in a galaxy of poem-outer-space. There aren't any details about sitting in a room, or staring at the trees, or walking down a city street.
But the poem takes place in a formal setting, so to speak. The sonnet form is like a setting for the speaker's mind to unravel his mediation about God, life, being black, and being a poet. That's a little abstract, sure, but it's the form of the poem that becomes like a vessel the speaker fills with his voice. This poem can't exist outside of its formal restraints, so that's sort of like the setting of the poem.
Don't forget this poem was written during the Harlem Renaissance, which can act as another kind of setting or context as we read it. Although the poem doesn't take place in Harlem, it is definitely concerned with the ideas of the Renaissance movement.
At its core, the Harlem Renaissance was a period in the early 20th century when the African American community in Harlem began to work for racial equality in America, both socially and artistically. The NAACP was born and across America, the African American community began to unite and promote black culture and civil rights through art, education, and social activism. Countee Cullen was one of the movement's poster boys, and his poetry, among the poems of other notable black poets like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, reflected the movement's ideals of racial equality.
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Thomas Hearne was a contemporary with Rooker. It was a custom at this period for topographical watercolor artists to travel abroad with British Embassies to foreign countries and with Governors to Colonial possessions. Photography had not yet been invented,
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Thomas Hearne was a contemporary with Rooker. It was a custom at this period for topographical watercolor artists to travel abroad with British Embassies to foreign countries and with Governors to Colonial possessions. Photography had not yet been invented, and the drawings by these artists were the only means by which the majority of inhabitants of this island were able to obtain some idea of places beyond the sea. Hearne went to the Leeward Isles, as draught
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Mawson, C.O.S., ed. (18701938). Rogets International Thesaurus. 1922.
Class VI. Words Relating to the Sentient and Moral Powers Section I. Affections in General
Section IV
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Mawson, C.O.S., ed. (18701938). Rogets International Thesaurus. 1922.
Class VI. Words Relating to the Sentient and Moral Powers Section I. Affections in General
Section IV. Possessive Relations
825. [Excess of Sensitive
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'...But what happens when it rains?' Cloud computing may be the latest buzz-word, but half of us think it can be affected by bad weather
By Eddie Wrenn
While 'the cloud' may be the technological buzzword of
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'...But what happens when it rains?' Cloud computing may be the latest buzz-word, but half of us think it can be affected by bad weather
By Eddie Wrenn
While 'the cloud' may be the technological buzzword of the year, many Americans are pretty hazy on what the cloud actually is.
In its most general form, cloud-computing is keeping documents and data on remote internet servers that can be accessed from multiple computers, tablets and smartphones.
And if you have an Internet connection, chances are you have used it, simply by uploading pictures to Facebook, Flickr or Instagram, using a web-email service like Gmail, or sharing files via services like DropBox.
But it seems the moniker is confusing people, for when researchers asked 1,004 people what they knew of the cloud, 51 per cent of participants assumed storms and high winds would cost them their data.
The cloud simplified: Music and documents are kept in an online 'locker', and then computer and tablets can connect via apps or programs
It does not really matter for consumers whether or not they know what the cloud is, as it is generally big business that uses it the most, and the service usually runs 'invisibly' to home users.
Indeed, any sharing website such as Facebook is effectively running a cloud service, allowing people to dip into and out of files, and DropBox, which allows you to synchronise folders on your PC to an online source.
The misconception was uncovered by the team from Wakefield Research and Citrix, who carried out the survey.
Not quite like this: But half of the population get this image in their heads
While 54 percent of those surveyed who said they had never used the cloud - 95 per cent reported using banking online and using online file-sharing sites.
- 65% of responders have banked online
- 63% have shopped online
- 58% report using social networking sites
- 45% have played online games
- 29% store photos online
- 22% have stored music or videos online
- 19% use online file-sharing services
Human nature being human nature, one in five said they had pretended to know what the cloud is when talking about it.
Nearly 14 per cent of people had pretended to know during a job interview, while - surprisingly - 17 per cent claimed to have done the same thing on a first date.
But if you are tempted to lie, the game may be up: 50 per cent of people said they could tell when someone else tried to bluff their way to a definition.
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Bovine Pulmonary Artery
The pulmonary artery emerges above the right chamber of the heart, separating into two branches that enter the right and left lungs. In the lungs, the arteries further subdivide into smaller and smaller branches until they reach
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Bovine Pulmonary Artery
The pulmonary artery emerges above the right chamber of the heart, separating into two branches that enter the right and left lungs. In the lungs, the arteries further subdivide into smaller and smaller branches until they reach the capillaries in the pulmonary air sacs (alveoli). In the capillaries, blood takes up oxygen from the air breathed into the air sacs and releases carbon dioxide. It then flows into larger and larger vessels until it reaches the pulmonary veins. These veins open into the left atrium of the heart, which then pumps the freshly oxygenated blood to the rest of the body.
April 14th, 2012
+ science + microscope + bovine + pulmonary + pulmonary artery + artery + circulatory system
+ 41 notes
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Definitions for incantationˌɪn kænˈteɪ ʃən
Random House Webster's College Dictionary
in•can•ta•tionˌɪn kænˈte
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Definitions for incantationˌɪn kænˈteɪ ʃən
Random House Webster's College Dictionary
in•can•ta•tionˌɪn kænˈteɪ ʃən(n.)
the chanting or uttering of words purporting to have magical power.
the formula employed; spell.
repetitious words used to heighten an effect.
Origin of incantation:
1350–1400; ME < LL incantātiō, der. of L incantā(re) to put a spell on, bewitch; see enchant
in`can•ta′tion•al-təˌtɔr i, -ˌtoʊr i(adj.)
in•can′ta•to`ry-təˌtɔr i, -ˌtoʊr i(adj.)
a ritual recitation of words or sounds believed to have a magical effect
The act or process of using formulas and/or usually rhyming words, sung or spoken, with occult ceremonies, for the purpose of rais
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I'd like to make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship. Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we call African-American or black literature is of recent vintage—in fact, it's just a little more than a century old. Further
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I'd like to make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship. Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we call African-American or black literature is of recent vintage—in fact, it's just a little more than a century old. Further, it has already come to an end. And the latter is a fact we should neither regret nor lament.
African-American literature was the literature of a distinct historical period, namely, the era of constitutionally sanctioned segregation known as Jim Crow. Punctuated by state constitutional amendments that disfranchised black Americans throughout much of the South, legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 with the infamous "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, and stumbling into decline in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, Jim Crow and the fight against it gave rise to—and shaped—African-American literary practice as we have come to know it. Like it or not, African-American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, African-American literature is history. While one can (and students of American literature certainly should) write about African-American literature as an object of study, one can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature.
That this fact should occasion no lament is because the society that gave us what we know as African-American literature is a society that black Americans did not want then and certainly don't want now. In consolidating Jim Crow through violence, state statutes, and judicial decisions, Southern states foreclosed on many of the avenues of political and social participation that had opened up for Southern blacks during Reconstruction and had managed to survive various forms of opposition during the two decades after the 1877 Hayes-Tilden compromise effectively ended Radical Reconstruction. It was in response to the rising tide of disfranchisement and segregation that calls for black Americans to produce a distinct literature began to proliferate and to shape black literary practice.
In light of recent literary criticism, my assertion may seem wrongheaded. Much scholarship has sought to justify taking a longer view of African-American literature: Some work argues that what defines African-American literary texts is the way black authors, consciously or unconsciously, have reworked rhetorical practices, myths, folklore, and traditions deriving from the African continent. Others have defined African-American literature by its prolonged argument with slavery, seeing even contemporary black literature as indelibly marked by the ways that enslaved blacks coped with the brutalities of the Middle Passage. To be sure, before the Civil War, abolitionists had cited and encouraged black achievement in literature to refute charges of black inferiority. For the most part, however, they wanted to demonstrate that blacks could produce literature, not that they needed to produce a distinct literature.
By the end of the 19th century, though, that had changed. From an array of writers—including Frances E.W. Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sutton E. Griggs—came exhortations to blacks to write a literature by and for themselves. Not only had literature been enlisted in the fight against Jim Crow as a way to challenge the enforcement and justification of segregation, but with so many black Americans effectively shut out from the political process, literature, and writers themselves, could play an outsized role in what became a seemingly endless round of trying to figure out just what it was that "the Negro" wanted. The question mattered because defenders of the white South were insisting they had created a society that conformed to the natural order of things, while critics of the region's sociopolitical order were trying to determine how far down the road of equality the nation would need to go to appease its aggrieved black citizens. Both sides solicited black voices for confirmation or denial.
When, in 1944, the University of North Carolina Press brought out an anthology under the title What the Negro Wants, featuring essays by 14 black authors and edited by the African-American historian Rayford W. Logan, the press's publisher, a white man named W.T. Couch, felt compelled to include an introduction telling the reader: "This book was written at the request of the Press. The idea back of the request was that the country, and particularly the South, ought to know what the Negro wants, and that statements from leading Negroes might throw some light on this important question." Among the 14 "leading Negroes" were four whose fame rested significantly on their literary productions: Du Bois, George S. Schuyler, Langston Hughes, and Sterling A. Brown.
In sum, what produced African-American literature as we know it was that, in a Jim Crow society, black writers and their works could plausibly be perceived as voices for a largely silenced population.
As a consequence, literary work by black writers came to be discussed in terms of how well it served (or failed to serv
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The first component is a volunteer diver education and outreach model that provides divers with identification training for target species of concern and introduces them to a new online marine invasive species reporting system. Through this system, known as the MIT Sea Grant/Massachusetts Bay
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The first component is a volunteer diver education and outreach model that provides divers with identification training for target species of concern and introduces them to a new online marine invasive species reporting system. Through this system, known as the MIT Sea Grant/Massachusetts Bay Program Marine Invader Tracking Information System (MITIS) divers can track and report sightings of ten target species identified as current threats (below), and of two additional species of special concern for potential new invasions.
Volunteer Diver Monitoring
During the second component of the project, volunteer science divers developed and tested a scientific diving protocol for marine invasive species surveys in near shore marine waters.
The protocol is intended to be a simple, scientifically-valid methodology for measuring and monitoring the presence and abundance of target invasive species. It may ultimately be used for two purposes:
To verify and quant
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Obituaries and other biographical collections on the life and religious history of Hurley stress the fact that he was a staunch opponent of the apartheid policy and of relevance to the Namibian context. He at some point publicly denounced the barbaric
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Obituaries and other biographical collections on the life and religious history of Hurley stress the fact that he was a staunch opponent of the apartheid policy and of relevance to the Namibian context. He at some point publicly denounced the barbaric acts committed by the South African special insurgency unit Koevoet, against black people in the northern part of the country.
Hurley was born in Cape Town, South Africa to Irish parents. He spent his childhood years at Robben Island where his father is noted to have been a lighthouse keeper.
In 1931, he joined the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which eventually saw him sent to Ireland a year later for his novitiate.
In 1933, he was sent to the former Anglicum University in Rome to study philosophy and theology.
There, he obtained a degree in philosophy in 1936 and went on to study at the Gregorian University. On the 9th of July 1939, he was ordained as a priest and was later appointed as curate
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Revenue and Financing
Governments, private firms, and other types of organizations that provide transportation must raise large amounts of revenue in order to pay for the construction, operation, and maintenance of transportation networks. What types of revenue sources do these organizations have
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Revenue and Financing
Governments, private firms, and other types of organizations that provide transportation must raise large amounts of revenue in order to pay for the construction, operation, and maintenance of transportation networks. What types of revenue sources do these organizations have available? Why are some more frequently used than others? What criteria should be used to evaluate different revenue sources? This chapter will examine these issues in more detail.
It will be useful in the discussion that follows to make a distinction between the funding and financing of transportation. These two terms are often used interchangeably in discussions though there are subtle, yet important, differences. Funding generally refers to the sources of revenue that are drawn upon to pay for transportation infrastructure and services, whereas financing tends to deal with the budgetary issues associated with matching revenues and expenditures in the provision of transportation. Most transportation infrastructure is long-lived, making the use of debt financing attractive since it allows for the conversion of one-time, fixed costs into a series of payments over time.
- 1 Revenue Sources
- 1.1 Direct User Charges
- 1.2 Land-Based Taxes
- 1.3 General Revenue Sources
- 1.4 Voluntary Revenue Sources
- 1.5 Incentives to build infrastructure
- 1.6 Alternative Private Ownership of Infrastructure
- 1.7 Other Revenue Sources
- 2 Financing Programs
- 3 Evaluating Revenue Sources
- 4 Cost Allocation
- 5 Example: Financing Transportation in Minnesota
- 6 Logrolling
- 7 The Choice Between Taxes and Tolls
- 8 References
Over the course of history, several different types of financing mechanisms have been employed in the provision of transportation infrastructure. The following is a short, but by no means exhaustive list.
- Direct User Charges
- User fees (e.g. Gas taxes, Airport facility charges, etc.)
- Land-based Taxes
- Property Taxes
- Assessments on adjacent property
- Value Capture
- General Revenue Sources
- Income taxes
- Statute labor, or the corvee, working out the road tax (a form of Poll Tax)
- Fines for failure to perform statute labor
- Sales taxes
- Voluntary Revenue Sources
- Private subscriptions (stock and bond sales)
- Public lotteries
- Other Revenue Sources
- Public land sales
- Military Funds
Governments have many types of policy instruments at their disposal to finance and build (or encourage the development of) transportation infrastructure. There are three classes of instruments that governments typically use to accomplish this task. The first type of instrument is direct taxation or the imposition of user charges to finance infrastructure. The second and third describe, respectively, financial or regulatory incentives toward the provision of infrastructure and alternative ownership arrangements that may facilitate the private provision of infrastructure.
Direct User Charges
Taxes and tolls have played an important role in the history of transportation network development. Toll roads and bridges have a long history of use, both in North America and in Europe.
In the 1790s, Lancaster Pike was the first significant turnpike in the US. In 1808, Albert Gallatin posited that it was legitimate for government to finance roads and developed a plan for a national network of road and canal routes linking the states of the early republic. Only roads with reasonable returns should be built, but effective transportation was seen as vital to the national defense and to national trade. On the basis of these principles, Congress had previously funded lighthouses, harbors and buoys in coastal states to facilitate trade, and authorized certain road projects, such as the National (Cumberland) Road. While the Cumberland Road Act was passed by Congress in 1806 and approved by Jefferson, authorizing the construction of a road connecting Washington, D.C. and Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) on the Ohio border (thus linking the Ohio and Potomac Rivers), it largely passed because it did not present any conflict between state and federal jurisdiction. This was because the original compact, which was made with a territory, was an undisputed federal power. Later road bills which sought to increase the scope of federal activity encountered stronger resistance as they were seen as superseding state's rights. This resistance was expressed in the debate over legislation authorizing the construction of a 1,500-mile national road linking Buffalo, New York and New Orleans, Louisiana via Washington, D.C. (which was ultimately defeated) and reaffirmed when a successive piece of legislation authorizing federal purchase of stock in a turnpike in Kentucky (the "Maysville Road") was vetoed by then-president Andrew Jackson shortly thereafter. These events solidified the notion that transportation infrastructure provision should be left to the states and the private sector until the early 20th century.
While the federal government played a comparatively small role in the development of early road networks, private individuals and associations were instrumental in financing and providing roads throughout the 19th century. Until the end of the 18th century, many roads in the early U.S. states were built and maintained by towns and counties. Westward expansion and growth within existing urban centers brought pressure for improved trade routes, many of which were financed through the formation of turnpike companies, which collected tolls from road users. Klein notes that many of the early turnpike companies were either marginally profitable or unprofitable, but nonetheless attracted private investment from many local residents. He spe
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6. Madia elegans D. Don ex Lindley, Edwards’s Bot. Reg. 17: plate 1458. 1831.
Madia elegans subsp. densifolia (Greene) D. D.
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6. Madia elegans D. Don ex Lindley, Edwards’s Bot. Reg. 17: plate 1458. 1831.
Madia elegans subsp. densifolia (Greene) D. D. Keck; M. elegans subsp. vernalis D. D. Keck; M. elegans subsp. wheeleri (A. Gray) D. D. Keck
Plants 6–250 cm, self-incom-patible (heads showy). Stems proximally villous to hirsute, distally glandular-pubescent, glands yellowish, purple, or black, lateral branches sometimes surpassing main stems. Leaf blades lanceolate to linear, 3–20 cm × 2–20 mm. Heads in open, corymbiform arrays. Involucres ± globose to campanulate, 4.5–12 mm. Phyllaries ± hirsute or villous, usually glandular-pubescent as well, glands yellowish, purple, or black, apices erect or reflexed, flat. Paleae mostly persistent, mostly connate 1/2+ their lengths. Ray florets (2–)5–22; corollas bright yellow (sometimes with maroon bases), laminae 4–20 mm. Disc florets 25–80+, functionally staminate; corollas 2.5–5 mm, pubescent; anthers yellow to brownish or ± dark purple. Ray cypselae black or brown, sometimes mottled, dull, compressed or ± 3-angled (slightly rounded abaxially, angled 15–45° adaxially), beakless (or nearly so). Disc cypselae 0. 2n = 16.
Flowering Apr–Nov. Grasslands, meadows, open sites in shrublands, woodlands, and forests, disturbed sites, often in coarse or clayey soils, sometimes serpentine; 0–3400 m; Calif., Nev., Oreg., Wash.; Mexico (Baja California).
Madia elegans occurs widely in California outside the deserts and in southwestern Oregon and locally in western Nevada and Washington. It is unusually variable in morphology, ecology, and phenology. Molecular data have indicated that D. D. Keck’s (1959) infraspecific taxonomy for M. elegans needs revision. Putative natural (sterile) hybrids with M. sativa have been collected (e.g., D. D. Keck 2647, UC, from northern California).
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Great Lakes Consortium PCB Protocol
The manufacture of PCBs was banned in the U.S. in the late 1970’s but PCBs persist in the environment and had been found at high levels in Great Lakes fish. In response to the Governors
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Great Lakes Consortium PCB Protocol
The manufacture of PCBs was banned in the U.S. in the late 1970’s but PCBs persist in the environment and had been found at high levels in Great Lakes fish. In response to the Governors’ Council 1986 charge, the Consortium developed the “Protocol for a Uniform Great Lakes Sport Fish Consumption Advisory” (PCB Protocol) – a protocol for determining consumption advice to protect against exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from eating fish. The Consortium evaluated many
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Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato
Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato (August 25, 1609 – August 8, 1685), also known as Giovanni Battista Sal
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Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato
Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato (August 25, 1609 – August 8, 1685), also known as Giovanni Battista Salvi, was an Italian Baroque painter. He is often referred to only by the town of his birthplace (Sassoferrato), as was customary in his time, and for example seen with da Vinci and Caravaggio.
The details of Giovanni Battista Salvi's biography are very sparse. He was born in the small town of Sassoferrato in the Marche region of central Italy, half-way between Rome and Florence, east of Apennines.
Sassoferrato was apprenticed under his father, the painter Tarquinio Salvi; fragments of Tarquinio's work are still visible in the church of Saint Francis in Sassoferrato. The rest of Giovanni's training is undocumented but it is thought that he worked under the Bolognese Domenichino, a main apprentice of Annibale Carracci (c. 1580). Two other Carracci trainees Francesco Albani and Guido Reni also influenced Sassoferrato. In Francis Russell's view, Reni was as much Sassoferrato's mentor as Domenichino was his master. His paintings also show the influence of Albrecht Dürer, Guercino, and above all Raphael. He appears to also have been influenced by Pierre Mignard, whom he may have met in Rome in the 1630s.
Few public commissions by Sassoferrato exist, and, like Carlo Dolci he seems to have concentrated on producing multiple copies of various styles of devotional image for private patrons, a demand fuelled by the Counter-Reformat
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Most of us learned sometime ago that chocolate can be toxic to pets. So I could only imagine how frightening it was when a friend called to tell me she’d been gone most of the day and when she got back home she saw an empty box
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Most of us learned sometime ago that chocolate can be toxic to pets. So I could only imagine how frightening it was when a friend called to tell me she’d been gone most of the day and when she got back home she saw an empty box that had contained chocolate candy torn apart and lying on her dining room floor.
She said she’d immediately rushed the culprit — her family dog — to her veterinarian.
Fortunately, the dog had minor ill affects. Luckily, the chocolate he’d eaten was light in color. The American Poison Control Center explains that the darker the chocolate, the worse the poisoning can be for dogs who ingest it.
Signs of chocolate poisoning can include vomiting, diarrhea, seizures, high heart rate, tremors and death, according to the experts. Cats, they add, do not often have the same “sweet tooth” for chocolate that many people and dogs have.
Yet, chocolate poisoning in pets is not the 2012 top-ranked poison reported to A.P.P.C.
(1) Human prescription medications rank at the top of this potentially deadly list. Pet owners are urged to: store and take medicines in a place away from pets; keep medication containers far out of pets’ reach; and to store their own medicines and their pets’ medications in separate places.
(2) Insecticides ranked second on the danger list. Pet owners are urged to carefully read labels before using insecticides in yards and indoors. Also, it is vital to make sure that products labeled for dogs are not also used on cats and vice versa.
(3) ”Over-the counter” medications rank third in reported pet poisonings to A.P.P.C. with ibuprofen the most common human medicine ingested by pets. Also high on the toxic substances consumed by pets is Vitamin D. Pets are reportedly often attracted to these substances due to their chocolaty and other type flavorings.
These items are labeled “pet killers.” The pet’s veterinarian should always be consulted before any medicines are administered.
(4) Veterinary medications made in chewable form are “a double-edged sword,” the A.P.P.C. emphasizes because they taste good and can be attractive to pets. Toxicity can easily occur. For example, collie-type breeds cannot tolerate the heartworm preventive ivermectin. Keeping pets separate from
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Posted by: Loren Coleman on May 23rd, 2006
Mizoram is a state in northeastern India, bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh, of nearly 900,000 people, with the the second highest rate of literacy (88
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Posted by: Loren Coleman on May 23rd, 2006
Mizoram is a state in northeastern India, bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh, of nearly 900,000 people, with the the second highest rate of literacy (88%) among all the states of India, after Kerala. Mizaram is also the home of the mysterious Shinlung who believe themselves to be ethnically Jewish, descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Reports out of Mizoram today are sweeping the state that giant "rat-like creatures" has been sighted there and have not been able to be captured yet.
Officials have offered cash rewards to local villagers who kill or capture alive the "big rat-like creatures" that have been stalking homes and vegetable gardens. Apparently there have been no takers to date.
"The sighting of such weird rat-like animals the size of a cat is a bad omen and signals the outbreak of a famine," Agriculture Minister H. Rammawi told the Indian media.
It is somewhat confusing as to what the identity of the animals are, as the media is stating that tribal locals "have reported sighting several big rats along with rodents, which have been invading paddy fields and vegetable gardens in the past two weeks."
"We are not sure if the big rats are actually rats or some unknown species. So we have offered cash rewards of Rs.1,000 to anybody who could get the animals dead or alive," said James Lalsianliana, an agriculture scientist with the Mizoram government.
The giant rodent-like animal has so far managed to evade traps set up by villagers.
Traditionally, in the area, invasions of rats have been tied to an indication that a famine may be on the way.
As the source article, “Rat-like Creature Triggers Famine Fears in Mizoram," May 22, 2006, in the Indian New Kerala News notes:
There is a saying in the tiny hill state bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh that when bamboo flowers, famine, death and destruction follow. Behind the superstition lies some scientific truth, as blooming bamboo can trigger an invasion of rats, which proceed to eat away food supplies.
“It is not a myth or any superstitious belief to think that bamboo flowering signals famine. It is a stark reality and we have experienced and witnessed an outbreak of famine in the past under similar circumstances,” Chief Minister Zoramthanga said.
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February 2012, Pub #5507.01
Local Education Agencies (school districts) are now responsible for providing mental health services to students who need them to perform socially and academically. However, there is a lot of misinformation about
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February 2012, Pub #5507.01
Local Education Agencies (school districts) are now responsible for providing mental health services to students who need them to perform socially and academically. However, there is a lot of misinformation about mental health services being shared at Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meetings. This publication clarifies the law so parents and advocates are prepared to challenge the misinformation at the IEP meeting.
“Educationally-Related Mental Health Services” means 30 minutes per week of counseling with the school psyc
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Synchros work in teams. Two or more synchros interconnected electrically form a synchro system. There are two general classifications of synchro systems - TORQUE SYSTEMS AND CONTROL SYSTEMS. Torque-synchro systems
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Synchros work in teams. Two or more synchros interconnected electrically form a synchro system. There are two general classifications of synchro systems - TORQUE SYSTEMS AND CONTROL SYSTEMS. Torque-synchro systems use torque synchros and control-synchro systems use control synchros. The load dictates the type of synchro system, and thus the type of synchro.
Torque-synchro systems are classified "torque" because they are mainly concerned with the torque or turning force required to move light loads such as dials, pointers, or similar indicators. The positioning of these devices requires a relatively low amount of torque. Control synchros are used in systems that are designed to move heavy loads such as gun directors, radar antennas, and missile launchers.
In addition to the two general classifications, synchros are grouped into seven basic functional classes as shown in table 1-1.
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As in the other calendar pages of the Belles Heures, the activity appropriate to the month appears within a quatrefoil frame at the top of each page, and the appropriate zodiacal sign within a corresponding frame at the bottom.
The text
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As in the other calendar pages of the Belles Heures, the activity appropriate to the month appears within a quatrefoil frame at the top of each page, and the appropriate zodiacal sign within a corresponding frame at the bottom.
The text in gold at the top of the page records that February has twenty-eight solar days; blue ink is used to indicate that the month has thirty lunar days. The column of feasts proper to February is recorded below. Candlemas (here, Chandeleur) on February 2 is rendered in gold and the saints days are in alternating red and blue ink.
Both the Presentation in the Temple
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|Written by Steve Dale|
|Friday, 21 August 2009 14:36|
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in
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|Written by Steve Dale|
|Friday, 21 August 2009 14:36|
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.
Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.
RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. You can see an example of RSS feeds being read to the left- you can see the feed from the Curriculum site (our Tweets). Clicking on the links will show the article.
Watch a Video about RSS feeds
|Last Updated on Friday, 21 August 2009 14:48|
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Our mold dog, Hunter, can cover a large commercial area in a shorter time then traditional methods of detection saving your business money.
Mold problems are a product of excessive moisture. Moisture problems often go unchecked and unnoticed for extended periods of time
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Our mold dog, Hunter, can cover a large commercial area in a shorter time then traditional methods of detection saving your business money.
Mold problems are a product of excessive moisture. Moisture problems often go unchecked and unnoticed for extended periods of time. Not because no one cares – but because moisture problems rarely make there appearance until they’re well on their way down the path of destruction. By the time these moisture problems become visible, what you see is often just the tip of the iceberg.
Modern construction methods and materials used today can make moisture problems difficult to detect. The building materials trap moisture, offer nutrition for the mold to grow and at the same time keep it hidden - locked away, out of sight. It would take a tool or someone with x-ray vision to find these problems in their initial phase.
Traditional ways
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Video Games (Encyclopedia of Children's Health)
Video games are electronic, interactive games known for their vibrant colors, sound effects, and complex graphics.
First mass-marketed in the 1970s, video games are played by installing cartridges into
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Video Games (Encyclopedia of Children's Health)
Video games are electronic, interactive games known for their vibrant colors, sound effects, and complex graphics.
First mass-marketed in the 1970s, video games are played by installing cartridges into a game box connected by wire to a television set. The child then manipulates a joystick or controller to control the actions of a character or series of characters as the characters face obstacles displayed on the screen. Video games, designed chiefly to appeal to children and adolescents, can also be played in arcades, on computers, and on small, hand-held screens.
As of 2004 nearly every home in the United States with children had one or more of the most popular game systems, for example, Nintendo GameCube, Sony Playstation2, or Microsoft Xbox. Few children have not been exposed to some form of video game, and access to the games is readily available to children from all walks of life.
Video games for home use proved popular from the start. Children are particularly attracted to them for a variety of reasons. Fantasy characters and situations appeal to young imaginations and provide an escape from everyday routine and the stresses presented by parents, friends, and school. In addition,...
(The entire section is 1608 words.)
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Video Game (How Products are Made)
Video games are played at the arcade, at home on a television or personal computer, and as a handheld portable game. They are packaged in large consoles, game paks that can only be played on the same manufacturer's hardware (i.e. Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Sony Playstation), and as CD-ROMs. Made up of a program that instructs the computer to display specific visual and audio effects, video games utilize cutting-edge technology in order to provide fast paced entertainment. Recent statistics show that 70% of all children in the United States have home video game systems. Over four billion dollars is spent on arcade video games annually.
A precursor to the video game, pinball machines were introduced during the 1930s and remained popular through the 1970s. In 1971, a video arcade game was produced called Computer Space. Invented by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Computer Space was the first real coin-operated video game, but for various reasons, it never became popular. It did however, lay the groundwork for the next video game that Bushnell and Dabney introduced: the phenomenally successful arcade game Pong. Modeled after the game of ping pong, it was an electronic game in which players tried to hit a flashing dot passed their opponent's video paddle. With the success of Pong, Bushnell and Dabney started the Atari Company, and in 1975, they introduced a home version of Pong. In 1976, Warner Communication purchased Atari for $28 million and expanded its home line of video game cartridges.
At the same time Bushnell and Dabney were developing Pong, Ralph Baer, who was working for Sanders Associates, was designing a home video game system called The Odyssey. Developed in 1969, Baer's system was finally manufactured and distributed by Magnavox in 1972. The Odyssey was a package of 12 different plug-in games that were housed on circuit cards. Each game came with plastic overlays that, when placed over the television screen, simulated the appropriate background. For example, a plastic overlay of a hockey rink was included with the hockey game. The Odyssey also offered an electronic shooting gallery with four additional games and an electronic rifle. Eighty-five thousand systems were sold.
Rapid advances in electronics technology during the 1970s led to the development of more complicated games, such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Introduced in 1983 as a joint venture between the Namco Company of Japan and Midway of the United States, Pac-Man has sold hundreds of thousands of games and remains one of the most popular video games.
When personal computers became available, computer games were created. Many of these games were adaptations of arcade or home video game systems, however unique games were also developed. The computer game industry grew swiftly during the 1980s powered by various companies, especially the Nintendo Corporation. In the late 1980s, the CD-ROM was introduced. These disks could hold more information on them, and allowed the development of more sophisticated, interactive games. In 1995, digital video disks (DVDs) were first produced for home computers. Since they have a storage capacity over twenty times greater than CD-ROMs, they promise to revolutionize computer games.
Design is the key aspect of making all video games. It is typically done by a team of skilled computer programmers, writers, artists, and other game designers. During this phase of development, they generate the game's specifications, which includes game type, objective, and graphics.
While creating a video game is rarely a step by step process, there are a variety of tasks that must be accomplished during the development phase. In the beginning, the type and objective
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- Our Town
Diabetes association busts nutrition myths
March is Nutrition Month and the Canadian Diabetes Association is taking the opportunity this month to bring awareness about healthy living for people with diabetes.
This year’s theme is Get the Real Deal on Your
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- Our Town
Diabetes association busts nutrition myths
March is Nutrition Month and the Canadian Diabetes Association is taking the opportunity this month to bring awareness about healthy living for people with diabetes.
This year’s theme is Get the Real Deal on Your Meal! and will focus on busting nutrition myths to prevent people from making uninformed decisions about their health. This comes at a critical time for Canadians, for while we now have unprecedented access to information, knowing which information to trust is becoming more difficult.
When it comes to choosing what food to eat and how much of it, people want to know that the information they rely on will help them to make the right choices for their health. Common nutrition myths need to be busted, so that Canadians know the real deal. Below are some examples of correct information based on sound research that people can rely on:
• Avoid carbs if you want to lose weight.
Although lowering your intake of carbohydrates may help you to lose a few pounds in the first few weeks, you are likely losing the weight from eating less food and taking in fewer calories.
Foods like fruit, starchy vegetables and whole grains provide a number of nutrients, including vitamins, minerals and fibre that the body needs to function well. In addition, they provide variety in your diet. The best weight loss plan should consist of regular physical activity and a sensible diet. This plan is one that you can follow long-term and that will allow you to lose weight and keep it off.
• Sea salt is natural, so it’s better for you than table salt.
Too much sodium can harm your health by increasing your risk for high blood pressure, among other things. Kosher salt and gourmet salts all contain about the same amount of sodium, but depending on how it is made, the taste will be slightly different. People with diabetes are at higher risk of high blood pressure and other heart problems, so it is best to cut the amount of salt consumed by limiting the amount of processed food and restaurant meals. For extra flavour, consider adding lemon juice, garlic, herbs and spices to your meals.
• Cooking meals at home takes way too much time.
Simple, nourishing foods make tasty, quick meals. Planning meals in advance means that you can make big batches to freeze or use the leftovers for a second quick meal.
• Healthy food costs too much.
With some planning and careful choices, you can have tasty and nourishing meals that are affordable. To get the most value, choose foods that are big on nutrients and low in cost, such as in-season fruits and vegetables, legumes, and try buying staples in bulk (e.g. whole grains). Cooking from scratch is another way to lower costs.
• If you eat too much sugar, you’ll get diabetes.
You will not develop diabetes from eating sugar, but it is wise to limit your intake. Foods that are high in sugar, such as cookies and soft drinks, are high in calories but low in nutrients. Consuming too many calories contributes to weight gain and being overweight or obese is a leading risk factor for develop
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University of Washington, Department of History
"The Streets are Yours, the Tenements Ours": The Changing Meanings of Urban Space in post-Holocaust Łódź
The tenement building (or kamienica in Polish) carried
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University of Washington, Department of History
"The Streets are Yours, the Tenements Ours": The Changing Meanings of Urban Space in post-Holocaust Łódź
The tenement building (or kamienica in Polish) carried tremendous symbolic weight in mid-20th-century Poland, concentrating attitudes about modernity, capitalism, and, as commonly accompanied these two issues in Central Europe, nationality and the Jewish question. The reformation of the tenements and the unhealthy and unjust urban modernity they represented provided a focal point for reformist movements and thinkers across the industrialized world; in Poland, these movements were led by conservative Catholic critics who saw the tenements as a sign of a degenerate and immoral urban modernity, at times framed in anti-Semitics terms, as well as by postwar Communist critics, for whom the tenements represented the failure and injustice of capitalism. The Communist Polish government thus made the replacement of the prewar tenements with modern housing a key (and popular) part of their transformation of postwar Poland. By the 1980s, however, opposition to this destruction and a call for the preservation of 19th-century buildings became an important rallying cry for Solidarity and affiliated groups of artists and architects. In the post-Communist period, the symbolic makeover of the tenements was complete, as they became highly desirable housing options for those with the means to renovate and modernize them.
This paper traces the symbolic reinterpretations of the prewar tenement in postwar Poland in the city of Łódź, a 19th-century industrial boomtown that survived the war relatively intact, leaving it with by far the largest prewar housing stock in all of Poland. Yet while the buildings survived, the residents changed, as nearly all of the Jewish inhabitants of Łódź, a third of the prewar population, were killed in the Holocaust, their places literally taken by Polish immigrants from the surrounding countryside. This paper examines the experience of these immigrants to give more nuance and depth to the study of urban reinvention and the memory of the Holocaust in late-20th-century East Central Europe. While many such studies tend to focus on analysis of the discourse of politicians and cultural elites, this paper looks at oral histories, personal memoirs, letters, and sociological data in order to retrace the lived experience of post-Holocaust space. In finds that amongst the residents of the tenements of Łódź prewar ethnic divisions of space (summarized by the popular saying that while the streets belonged to the Poles, the tenements belonged to the Jews), persisted long after the Holocaust, leading to a feeling of insecurity and temporality amongst residents continually wary of a return of rightful Jewish owners which shaped their reception of elite attempts starting in the 1980s to revive interest in the Jewish past of the city.
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There is nothing more disturbing for an educator than to come across children’s books whose authors have little qualification as historians
or who have an implicit agenda to get across. Such is the case with Rickey Pittman’s book, Jim Limber Davis
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There is nothing more disturbing for an educator than to come across children’s books whose authors have little qualification as historians
or who have an implicit agenda to get across. Such is the case with Rickey Pittman’s book, Jim Limber Davis: A Black Orphan in the Confederate White House. Here is the jacket description:
The true story of the adopted black child of Jefferson Davis. Jim Limber Davis was rescued from an abusive guardian by Varina Davis when he was only five years old. Jefferson and Varina Davis welcomed him into their home, the Confederate White House, as one of the family, and Jim lived with them until the fall of the Confederacy. When Union soldiers invaded Richmond, Virginia, they captured Jefferson Davis. Later, they kidnapped Jim Limber in Georgia and spread cruel rumors that he was Jefferson Davis’s slave. This true story provides a glimpse of how Jim was accepted as one of the Davis’s children and reveals their family’s love and compassion for him.
As John Coski noted in his short essay there is a great deal that we do not know about this story. Pittman seems comfortable giving Limber the Davis name, though there are no records to demonstrate that Limber was officially adopted. With any other publisher I would be disappointed, but in this case we are dealing with Pelican, which is one of the most unreliable and agenda-driven publishers out there. The author’s personal website can be found here. He is an active member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Camp Thomas McGuire in West Monroe, Louisiana.
Pittman also provides an online study guide to accompany this book. Students can play games that Limber would have played or inquire into his whereabouts as did Jefferson Davis after the war. Students can draw a picture of the Confederate White House where Limber lived, though I wonder if the family’s slaves are expected to be included in such a drawing. Even better are the statistics on free blacks that Pittman compiled from James and Walter Kennedy’s books, The South Was Right and Myths of American Slavery.
This is a disturbing book that is based on an overly simplistic view of slavery, free blacks, and Jefferson Davis’s own personal history as a slaveowner and leader of a nation whose stated goal was the preservation of slavery. The current push to commemorate this story in marble is based on little more than the outline of this story and it should concern all of us who hope to continue to expand and deepen our understanding of this crucial moment in America’s past.
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Download the structure for interactive viewing
Choose one of the options below, based on which program you want to view the structure with.
For viewing with the demo version of CrystalMaker (more info),
Go to Silicate Minerals
at Stephen Hey
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Download the structure for interactive viewing
Choose one of the options below, based on which program you want to view the structure with.
For viewing with the demo version of CrystalMaker (more info),
Go to Silicate Minerals
at Stephen Heyes' website at Oxford University and click on the image of the tremolite crystal structure to download and open in CrystalMaker for viewing.
For viewing with the commercial version of CrystalMaker (more info),
Open the Crystal Structures Library on the CrystalMaker disc, and click on Minerals > Silicates > Chain Silicates > Amphiboles > Tremolite.
For viewing with XtalDraw (more info),
Click on the TREMOLITE file in the XtalDraw folder.
- What are the coordination numbers for Si, Mg, and Ca?
- Rotate the structure so you are looking down the a axis. Then rotate it so you are looking down the b axis. Then the c axis. Which view gives you an end-on view (so you are looking parallel to the chains of Si tetrahedra? Which view reveals a layered structure showing Si tetrahedral chains (in layers) bonded together by Ca and Mg cation
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Fifty-six years after the Allies landed in France, the National D-Day Museum opened. The museum was the brainchild of UNO historian and author Stephen Ambrose, who was motivated by the forgotten history of New Orleans’ role in building thousands
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Fifty-six years after the Allies landed in France, the National D-Day Museum opened. The museum was the brainchild of UNO historian and author Stephen Ambrose, who was motivated by the forgotten history of New Orleans’ role in building thousands of landing craft used to storm the beaches.
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Within three years the museum had broadened, and was rechristened the National World War II Museum. It has continued an ambitious expansion program that has made it a leading historical center.
The idea for a museum came out of a conversation in 1985 between Ambrose and fellow UNO historian Nick Mueller. The early fundraising capitalized on Ambrose’s fame as an author. But Mueller was the hands-on organizer and became the driving force for the expansion of the museum after Ambrose’s death in 2002.
The opening of the museum on June 6, 2000, was accompanied by a parade with scores of military units, including a rare flyover from a B-1 bomber.
The museum's opening came two years after Steven Spielberg’s movie “Saving Private Ryan” renewed interest in D-Day. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw’s book, “The Greatest Generation,” also peaked interest in the museum. Brokaw hosted the "NBC Nightly News" from New Orleans during the opening, and Spielberg and “Saving Private Ryan” star Tom Hanks spoke at the ceremonies.
The original museum building was once a brewery. The state donated millions for an opening hall which is filled with World War II vehicles and airplanes. The exhibit includes restored New Orleans-built Higgins landing craft.
Congress declared it the official National World War II Museum in 2003, as the museum began an ambitious expansion plan, including several new buildings. The newest is the Kushner Restoration Pavilion, a glass-walled structure that allows people to watch museum artifacts being restored. By the time the $300 million plan is completed in 2015, the museum will have quadrupled in size.
Tomorrow, 2001: Former Gov. Edwin Edwards is convicted.
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NEW DELHI: India's first indigenously developed vaccine against rotavirus, the major cause of diarrhoea deaths among children, was unveiled in the capital on Tuesday. Scientists involved with the project said that the preventive vaccine has cleared all clinical
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NEW DELHI: India's first indigenously developed vaccine against rotavirus, the major cause of diarrhoea deaths among children, was unveiled in the capital on Tuesday. Scientists involved with the project said that the preventive vaccine has cleared all clinical trials and it will be available for sale in the market by next year, subject to clearance from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI).
The cost of the new vaccine, Rotavac, is likely to be around Rs 54 per dose which is 1/40th of the imported vaccines available in the market at present, said Dr M K Bhan, former secretary, department of biotechnology (DBT) who isolated the rotavirus strain in 1985 while pursuing research at AIIMS.
"Rotavac vaccine is similar to the oral polio drop. It will be given under the same regimen - 6, 10 and 14 weeks. Our trials have shown an efficacy of 56% in severe diarrhoea and 61% in very severe diarrhoea cases. There is no side-effect or safety issue," Bhan added.
The Phase III clinical trial of the vaccine was carried out on 6,799 infants in the country at three sites -- a slum cluster in Delhi, a semi-urban locality in Pune and a village near Vellore. The vaccine development has been supported by DBT, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, PATH, National Institutes of Health, Centre for Disease Control, and Stanford University. Bharat Biotech invested technical, manufacturing, and financial resources towards vaccine development, said Krishna M Ella, chairman and managing director of the company.
"The trial design included a strong safety net to identify and treat illnesses, especially gastroenteritis, among infants as early as possible," officials said. They said all infants enrolled in the trial received high-quality medical and emergency care during the trial period.
"The results indicate that the vaccine, if licensed, could save the lives of thousands of children each year in India," K Vijay Raghavan, secretary, department of biotechnology, said.
According to a study in published in The Lancet, Ro
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From the “things that really shouldn’t be difficult, but for some reason are anyway” department comes the following. Do you think you know how to program in C++? Familiar with objects and polymorphism and templates and everything? Then this
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From the “things that really shouldn’t be difficult, but for some reason are anyway” department comes the following. Do you think you know how to program in C++? Familiar with objects and polymorphism and templates and everything? Then this should be dead easy. Should, I said.
Problem: Write a function that takes in a
std::istreamand a size
nand returns a
std::string. The string should contain the first
ncharacters of the input stream, with all formatting (whitespace, newlines, etc) preserved.
You can ignore all concerns about multi-byte characters for the sake of this problem. Sounds simple, right? You’d be able to crank this out in ten seconds if someone asked you this in an interview, right? Okay, now try it with this caveat.
Caveat: You must do this in a purely C++ “style”. To be precise, you must do this without using any character variables or character arrays. Use only a
std::stringobject (or some other memory-managed object in the standard library) as your input buffer.
For as much as the C++ STL tries to encourage you to use RAII-oriented containers instead of raw arrays, this seemingly trivial task requires some surprisingly baroque coding. If you want to test yourself, try writing the function before you click more.
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1990: ELSI Founded
Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) programs founded at NIH and DOE.
The planners of the U.S. Human Genome Project (HGP) recognized that the information gained from mapping and
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1990: ELSI Founded
Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) programs founded at NIH and DOE.
The planners of the U.S. Human Genome Project (HGP) recognized that the information gained from mapping and sequencing the human genome would have profound implications for individuals, families, and society. While this information would have the potential to dramatically improve human health, it would also raise a number of complex ethical, legal and social issues. Among them: How should the newly accessible genetic information be interpreted and used? Who should have access to it? How can people be protected from the harm that might result from its improper disclosure or use?
To address these issues, the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program was established as an integral part of the HGP. The ELSI Program was designed to identify, analyze, and address the ethical, legal and social implications of human genetics research at the same time that the basic scientific issues are being studied. Ideally, potential problems can be identified and solutions developed before the new scientific information is integrated into health care practice.
The NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) committed 5 percent of its annual research budget to study ELSI issues. The DOE Office of Energy Research, NHGRI's partner in the U.S. Human Genome Project, also reserves a portion of its funding for ELSI research and education.
Last Reviewed: May 6, 2013
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Unmanned aircraft systems, or UASs, are often called "eyes in the sky." That is because UASs can film videos of potentially hostile locations and transmit the imagery over many miles while not putting Soldiers in harm's way.
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Unmanned aircraft systems, or UASs, are often called "eyes in the sky." That is because UASs can film videos of potentially hostile locations and transmit the imagery over many miles while not putting Soldiers in harm's way. The aircraft systems are controlled remotely by a pilot on the ground. Specially trained 15E unmanned aircraft systems repairers provide maintenance support for the Shadow 200, Hunter and Gray Eagle, enabling these UASs to execute their missions.
In 2003, as UAS continued to grow, the manpower needed to provide maintenance to the systems began to outstrip the trained manpower available in the military occupational specialty, according to David Duckett, a 15E training instructor. That is why the 15E MOS was developed -- to solely provide system support and maintenance.
"UAS offers a unique vision of the battlefield which provides over-watch for ground troops engaged in combat and convoy operations. Without proper maintenance and support of UAS, the critical missions they support, the risk of casualties to ground forces increase by 30 percent," explained Duckett.
The 15E course on Fort Huachuca is 17 weeks long. There are eight students per class, and generally about 50 classes per year. The Soldiers who attend learn basic aviation maintenance fundamentals, policies and procedures, record keeping, basic electronic theory, maintenance and fault isolation instruction on the Shadow 200 UAS. Selected Soldiers may attend additional training on the Hunter and Gray Eagle UAS. While training here, the students are assigned to Company A, 2-13th Aviation Regiment at the Black Tower Training Facility.
The MOS is taught on Fort Huachuca since unmanned aircraft were originally developed at Fort Huachuca, explained Duckett. At the time, Fort Huachuca possessed the only restricted airspace for UAS in the United States, he added.
Soldiers who enlist for the 15E MOS do so for a variety of reasons. Many are fascinated with aviation and planning for future civilian employment.
"I was looking into aviation before I came in," said Pvt. Joseph Garcia, adding that the 15E MOS was not his first choice. He could not get the aviation-related MOS he originally wanted.
"I started doing my homework on unmanned aircraft systems, and seeing that that's where the Army is going these days, it seemed pretty interesting," he explained.
"I haven't really decided if I am going to make the Army my career yet, but if not, the civilian world seems to [be going] that way. I come from a police background. UAVs [another name for UASs] seem to be making their way to police departments, so maybe I'll make that the next career choice."
"I have a passion for aviation. I just figured unmanned is where the Army is going in the future, and I want to be a part of it," said Pfc. Robert Learned, who has been in the Army since May. "I would like to make it a career and stay in as long as I can." He added that when he gets out, he might continue with a UAS career.
Without highly skilled maintainers, UAS systems in the field could spend many hours of downtime, which would affect their mission-related role. While assigned here, the students learn the skills necessary to keep UASs airborne as much as possible.
"All of the training is valuable," said Learned. "In Enabling Skills Branch they teach us all sorts of stuff we need to know -- forms and regulations. In Basic Electronic Theory we learn electronics."
"We [recently went through] emplace and displace [training], and that seems to be what most of our job will consist of. Setting up our equipment, taking it back down, small maintenance on the actual bird itself," Garcia explained.
"Right now, we are doing maintenance. I like maintenance. It is more of figuring things out, more learning how things work, more hands on," he added.
Most of the 15E instructors are Soldiers, and military training and leadership is blended with the course instruction. Staff Sgt. Shawn Frazzini explained why he teaches.
"The Army actually told me that I was going to do this. I reclassed [reclassified] from infantry to aviation for something else and the Army said, 'we want you to work with the Shadow.'
"It is not so much the MOS. I just want to teach Soldiers to be a Soldier and [teaching] the MOS is just a bonus," he added.
"The most important part [about the training] for me is that everybody needs to strive for excellence. There's the standard, the minimum, but if you are shooting for that then you are not doing your job. … You need to try to be at excellence," he said. This is the standard to which he teaches.
Upon graduation, 15E Soldiers are typically assigned to Shadow platoons located within brigade combat teams in order to provide the brigade commanders with their own on-demand UAS capability, stated Duckett.
"There is no glory in maintenance, but the job satisfaction comes from knowing you are saving lives," Duckett added.
Article by Amy Sunseri, Natalie Lakosil and Joan Vasey, Army.mil
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THE STORY OF PLAY
Over a recent long weekend, I embarked on a family retreat to the mountains where I often found myself embattled in a game of Parcheesi with my five-year old niece. She played with dedication and fer
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THE STORY OF PLAY
Over a recent long weekend, I embarked on a family retreat to the mountains where I often found myself embattled in a game of Parcheesi with my five-year old niece. She played with dedication and ferocity, executing merciless strategies of attack that didn’t seem possible coming from such a cute little 35-pounder. As the game continued, I found my attention diverted to thinking about why she so relished “game-time” and played with such zeal. Although my lack of focus resulted in many a trip back to start, it also provided me with the time and impetus to wonder about play as an evolutionary metaphor. I wanted to explore whether its attributes fit the evolutionary model: a “mindless” algorithm that brings design from order. In Origin of Species, Darwin argues that life evolves from the process of “natural selection.” In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett claims that this evolutionary algorithm applies to everything. Is this true of play, could a “mindless” algorithm be the source of its direction and development? And if so, why is this important? What is the “big picture” result or consequence if play does follow an evolutionary theme?
I started my research by looking at the benefits of play in childhood development. I found articles explaining that it increases social skills and empathy, allows for creativity in implementing your own rules and provides an outlet for role experimentation, just to name a few of its pluses. [3,4] Further, Professor Dalke pointed me to the “playground” in Serendip: a whole section devoted to education as play with the explanation, “ The idea, of course, is that there isn't a whole lot of difference between playing and learning... exploring is the underpinnings and enjoyment inherent in both.” It seems that play is not just fun, but a key source of enlightenment; so let’s take a look at its principles and compare them with biological evolution to see if we find a useful correspondence.
During play, each participant seeks to add to her/his repertoire by learning from others. For example, my nephew loves to play baseball and can mimic the swings of many of the great sluggers, but not exactly. He has his own stature, flexibility, strength and timing, so it’s really a mixture of his skills with the talents of others. In biology, when you combine the traits of two individuals of the same species, you have meosis, a process that leads to the RANDOM variability that is essential for evolution. The difference is that in the case of my nephew, he CHOOSES the combinations of traits to combine with his own, thus adding an architect to a non-architectural process. This runs counter to the randomness that we observe in biological evolution.
Another inherent property of play: the strategies that we discover by accident. For example, the discovery of the knuckle ball, a pitch with an unpredictable path that leaves hitters baffled as to where to swing their bats. When pitchers stray away from the norm to try out new and different ways to hold the ball, rotate their arm or change pitch speeds, they may, on rare occasions, accidentally find a new way of throwing. When these types of random changes occur in biology, they are called mutations, another key ingredient in evolutionary change. But in play, these “mutations” can be repeated at will, again adding an architect to the process, and they can occur as a reaction to an existing circumstance, a principle that has been disproved as a cause of mutation in biology.
Finally, playing well requires changes in reaction to your opponent. For example, once someone figures out how to hit your knuckleball, you need to experiment with new pitches either as a modification of the old version or a complete departure from it altogether. In biological evolution, this correlates to descent with modification and the extinction of less fit strategies. When we play, however, we can switch between our strategies, so do they ever become extinct? And further, where is the heritability in this process? If you copy a pitch from someone else, you are learning it, not inheriting it, and you can learn very large numbers of pitches that you can use as necessary. Conversely, in biological terms, we can’t decide when and where to use a particular gene.
Given that I have explored the “big picture” to evaluate the importance of this argument, it strikes me that there’s another “big picture” that relates: play fits the properties of a meme. It has variance, it can be copied and there is differing “fitness” in strategies. So in setting forth examples to disprove the idea of play as an evolutionary algorithm, let’s see if we can add to our evidence by examining a couple of “big picture” arguments against the comparison of memes with genes.
When an idea moves from one
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Anatomy of a Tornado
The Fujita scale, named after US storm researcher Tetsuya Fujita, is a scale for rating tornado intensity based primarily on the damage tornadoes inflict on human-built structures and vegetation.
The categories are determined
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Anatomy of a Tornado
The Fujita scale, named after US storm researcher Tetsuya Fujita, is a scale for rating tornado intensity based primarily on the damage tornadoes inflict on human-built structures and vegetation.
The categories are determined by meteorologists and engineers after surveying a tornado's damage, ground-swirl patterns, radar tracking and eyewitness reports.
F0 - 0-73mph: Light damage to chimneys, branches broken off trees
F1 - 73-112mph: Cars blown off roads
F2 - 113-157mph: Roofs torn off houses, large trees uprooted
F3 - 158-206mph: Roofs and walls torn from houses, trains overturned
F4 - 207-260mph: Houses levelled, cars thrown some distance
F5 - 261-318mph: Houses swept away, cars hurled 100m+
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December 2011 Issue
De-Bunking the "Alpha Dog" Theory
Why every mention of alpha dogs or dominant dogs is dangerous to all dogs.
The alpha myth is everywhere. Google “alpha dog” on the Internet and you get
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December 2011 Issue
De-Bunking the "Alpha Dog" Theory
Why every mention of alpha dogs or dominant dogs is dangerous to all dogs.
The alpha myth is everywhere. Google “alpha dog” on the Internet and you get more than 85 million hits. Really. While not all the sites are about dominating your dog, there are literally millions of resources out there – websites, books, blogs, television shows, veterinarians, trainers and behavior professionals – instructing you to use force and intimidation to overpower your dog into submission. They say that you, the human, must be the alpha. They’re all wrong. Every single one of them.
The erroneous approach to canine social behavior known as dominance theory (two million-plus Google hits) is based on a study of captive zoo wolves conducted in the 1930s and 1940s by Swiss animal behaviorist Rudolph Schenkel, in which the scientist concluded that wolves in a pack fight to gain dominance, and the winner is the alpha wolf.
Schenkel’s observations of captive wolf behavior were erroneously extrapolated to wild wolf behavior, and then to domestic dogs. It was postulated that wolves were in constant competition for higher rank in the hierarchy, and only the aggressive actions of the alpha male and female held the contenders in check. Other behaviorists following Schenkel’s lead also studied captive wolves and confirmed his findings: groups of unrelated wolves brought together in artificial captive environments do, indeed, engage in often-violent and bloody social struggles.
The problem is, that’s not normal wolf behavior. As David Mech stated in the introduction to his study of wild wolves (Mech, 2000), “Attempting to apply information about the behavior of assemblages of unrelated captive wolves to the familial structure of natural packs has resulted in considerable confusion. Such an approach is analogous to trying to draw inferences about human family dynamics by studying humans in refugee camps. The concept of the alpha wolf as a ‘top dog’ ruling a group of similar-aged compatriots (Schenkel 1947; Rabb et al. 1967; Fox 1971a; Zimen 1975, 1982; Lockwood 1979; van Hooff et al. 1987) is particularly misleading.”
What we know now, thanks to Mech and others, is that in the wild, a wolf pack is a family, consisting of a mated pair and their offspring of the past one to three years. Occasionally two or three families may group together. As the offspring mature they disperse from the pack; the only long-term members of the group are the breeding pair. By contrast, in captivity unrelated wolves are forced to live together for many years, creating tension between mature adults that doesn’t happen in a natural, wild pack.
Enough About Wolves
But that’s all about wolves anyway, not dogs. How did it happen that dog owners and trainers started thinking all that information (and misinformation) about wolf behavior had anything to do with dogs and dog behavior? The logic went something like, “Dogs are descended from wolves. Wolves live in hierarchical packs in which the aggressive alpha male rules over everyone else. Therefore, humans need to dominate their pet dogs to get them to behave.”
Perhaps the most popular advocate of this inaccurate concept, Cesar Millan, is only the latest in a long line of dominance-based trainers who advocate forceful techniques such as the alpha roll. Much of this style of training has roots in the military – which explains the emphasis on punishment.
As far back as 1906, Colonel Konrad Most was using heavy-handed techniques to train dogs in the German army, then police and service dogs. He was joined by William Koehler after the end of World War II.
Koehler also initially trained dogs for the military prior to his civilian dog-training career, and his writings advocated techniques that included hanging and helicoptering a dog into submission (into unconsciousness, if necessary). For example, to stop a dog from digging, Koehler suggested filling the hole with water and submerging the dog’s head in the water-filed hole until he was nearly drowned.
Fast-forward several years to 1978 and the emergence of the Monks of New Skete as the new model for dog training, asserting a philosophy that “understanding is the key to communication, compassion, and communion” with your dog. Sounds great, yes? The Monks were considered cutting edge at the time – but contrary to their benevolent image, they were in fact responsible for the widespread popularization of the “Alpha-Wolf Roll-Over” (now shortened to the alpha roll). Reviewing the early observations of captive wolves, the Monks concluded that the alpha roll is a useful tool for demonstrating one’s authority over a dog. Unfortunately, this is a complete and utter misinterpretation of the submissive roll-over that is voluntarily offered by less assertive dogs, not forcibly commanded by stronger ones.
The Monks also advocated the frequent use of other phys
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PROBABLY no plant has been put or is better
adapted to so many utilitarian purposes as the Heather. It has been
correctly stated that to the inmates of the Scottish shieling Heather
stands in much the same relation
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PROBABLY no plant has been put or is better
adapted to so many utilitarian purposes as the Heather. It has been
correctly stated that to the inmates of the Scottish shieling Heather
stands in much the same relation for its economic uses as does the
bamboo to the Gond or Mandalay. Force of circumstances led to the
discovery of most of these uses. The hardy Highlanders covered their
cabins with Heather instead of thatch, or else twisted it into ropes,
and bound down the thatch with these ropes in a kind of latticework.
They also made the walls of their dwellings with alternate layers of
Heather and a sort of cement made of black earth and straw.
Pennant remarks of the houses in Iona: "Houses are
mostly very mean, thatched with straw of bear pulled up by the roots,
and bound tight on the roof by ropes made of heath."
Boswell thus describes such houses in "Johnson's
Journey of a Tour to the Hebrides": "They (the houses) are thatched,
sometimes with straw, sometimes with heath, sometimes with fern. The
thatch is secured by ropes of heath; and to fix the ropes there is a
stone tied to the end of each. These stones hang around the bottom of
the roof, and make it look like a lady's hair in papers; but I should
think that, when them is wind, they would come down and knock people on
Johnson himself, in his 'Journey to the Western
Isles," remarks as follows: "Such rafters as can be procured are then
raised for a roof, and covered with heath, which makes a strong and warm
thatch, kept from flying off by ropes of twisted heath, of which the
ends, reaching from the center of the thatch to the top of the wall, are
held firm by the weight of a large stone."
Conditions of building in the Highlands have not
materially changed since Johnson's days. in the '90' edition of
Professor Geikie's admirable work on "The Scenery of Scotland," dealing
with the influences of topography on man, he says: "The houses, built of
boulders gathered from the soil, and held together with mere clay or
earth, are covered with frail roofs of ferns, straw, or Heather, kept
down by stone-weighted ropes of the same material."
This method of construction applied equally to
church and cabin. Dunbar, the poet, who was also a traveling friar,
centered his ambition in a house of worship so covered. He says:
Gait abbais graith I will to gather
kirk scant covert with hadder;
For I of lytil wad be lane,
to consider is ane pane.
Dunbar was led to utter this modest plaint because
"in Papist times the cathedrals absorbed the money and the genius of the
day, and the parish churches, especially in Scotland, were too often
barely thatched with heath."
Chalmers says that even as late as the sixteenth
century the churches were generally covered with thatch. The cathedrals
and abbeys, however, were structures of great labor and expense, of
magnificence and taste, as the judicious eye may perceive in their
Logan tells us that many churches were formerly
covered with Heather, some within his own memory, the services from
lands being often a certain quantity of it for this purpose. Its only
disadvantage was in being heavier than straw or rushes. Heather-covered
churches were to be found in Carlyle's days, who fondly refers to one as
"the poor temple of my childhood thatched with heath."
It is recorded in Mclan's history of Clan Drummond
that on one occasion the Heather covering of a church proved disastrous
during an engagement with another clan. The story goes: In the beginning
of the sixteenth century a feud arose with the Murrays, who had
intercepted the rents payable by the tenants of Monievaird, on which
William, then chief, and Duncan Campbell, of Dunstaffnage, went against
them to compel restitution and punish them for their aggression. Not
daring to meet this force, the Murrays retired to the church, and
Drummond, respecting the sanctuary, gave orders to retire; but as they
commenced their march a shot was unhappily fired by which one of the
Campbells was killed, when so enraged were they at this cowardly act,
that they immediately returned, and, not taking the trouble of storming
the sacred edifice, they set fire to its Heather roof and burned to
death the miserable inmates. This was more particularly the crime of the
Campbells, but Drummond was brought to trial for it, and being
pronounced guilty, he was executed in 1511.
A story is told that in ancient days a woman was
fined so many marks by her kirk se
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As the salmonella outbreak from peanut-butter products has unfolded, we’ve highlighted how convoluted the food-safety system can be, with the FDA conducting some inspections and relying on states for others. The Associated Press puts the issue in particularly
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As the salmonella outbreak from peanut-butter products has unfolded, we’ve highlighted how convoluted the food-safety system can be, with the FDA conducting some inspections and relying on states for others. The Associated Press puts the issue in particularly stark terms today by using a basic example: pizza.
If you go into a restaurant and order a cheese pizza that arrived there frozen, the FDA is in charge of inspecting it, the AP says. But if it was frozen and has pepperoni on it, that would be the Agriculture Department’s problem. Meantime, both the FDA and the Agriculture Department would be responsible if the pizza were made fresh at the restaurant and the pizza had meat on it.
There’s more. Some fish is inspected by the Commerce Department, the AP explains. And while the FDA handles most foo
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At the edge of a lake amongst reeds and lake grasses, a mother goose perches upon an unusually large clutch of eggs, a full dozen, while a protective father guards the nest. Over the course of two days each egg hatches
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At the edge of a lake amongst reeds and lake grasses, a mother goose perches upon an unusually large clutch of eggs, a full dozen, while a protective father guards the nest. Over the course of two days each egg hatches excepting one. Hoping for a miracle Momma goose snuggles against her last egg until finally Grady, the last of twelve goslings, is born.
Denise Brennan-Nelson's tale of Grady the Goose delivers a gentle story of the development of a young Canada goose from birth to migration. Grady’s life – and that of her parents – is complicated by her tendency to stray from her family and wander off on her own. Drawing upon the grouping instincts of Canada geese Brennan-Nelson weaves a gentle thread of family togetherness through the various stages of Grady’s growth and maturation.
Despite repeated warnings from her mother and father to stay with the family, Grady’s penchant for independent exploration finds her separated from the family flock following their departure for their winter-feeding grounds. My daughter’s spike of anxiety for Grady’s well-being was resolved within a matter of minutes as Grady is discovered by a kind farmer and finds herself re-united with her loved ones, now keenly aware of the importance of familial solidarity.
Some sensitive young children experience distress when confronted with tales of familial separation, and my oldest was such a child between the ages of three and four. At six however, the gentle tension presenting the story is manageable for her. My middle child, now three, experiences no anxiety with such stories. Parents who have noticed this tendency in their own children will need to judge from their child’s previous reactions if this story is appropriate.
Here in Canada, Grady’s adventures are a perfect bi-annual family read-aloud for spring and fall, when the skies are peppered with migrating geese, and mated pair
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||My Country, Thematic Unit
By Teacher Created Resources
Thematic Units from Teacher Created Materials are literature based, cross-curricular, and ready to use. They provide activities, many of them hands-on, for all areas of the curriculum
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||My Country, Thematic Unit
By Teacher Created Resources
Thematic Units from Teacher Created Materials are literature based, cross-curricular, and ready to use. They provide activities, many of them hands-on, for all areas of the curriculum, including math, science, language arts, social studies, physical education, art, and music. Each book offers two or more literature-based units and lesson plans plus cross-curricular activities and worksheets, a culminating activity, management ideas, and a bibliography. Complete and comprehensive, these reproducible units are designed with student interest and teacher usability in mind. The planning is complete. The books used in "My Country" (that will need to be purchased or borrowed) are: "Oh, What a Thanksgiving!" by Steven Kroll "George Washington: A Picture Book Biography" by James Cross Giblin "The Star-Spangled Banner" illustrated Peter Spier The poem, "Over the River and Through the Wood" is also used.
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The Jerusalem District Court recently rejected an appeal by the Caesarea Edmond
Rothschild Development Corporation to build a new neighborhood abutting the
coastline at Caesarea.
The judge said that approval of the plan would
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The Jerusalem District Court recently rejected an appeal by the Caesarea Edmond
Rothschild Development Corporation to build a new neighborhood abutting the
coastline at Caesarea.
The judge said that approval of the plan would
cause “irreparable damage to ancient remains, harm the cultural heritage of the
State of Israel, as well as eliminate one of the important archeological sites
of the country.”
Caesarea is the site of a famous port city constructed
by King Herod in 22 CE that was once home to almost 100,000 people. Modern
Caesarea is home to a more modest 4,500 people.
Yet this dispute between
developers and environmental-historical interests is symbolic of a larger
struggle over the fate of the nation’s coastline and coastal
According to a paper by Hebrew University geographer Noam Levin,
Israel’s coastal dunes have declined from 462 square kilometers in 1948 to fewer
than 185 today.
During the pre-state period the sand dunes were seen as a
threat to attempts to carve out Jewish communities in the Coastal Plain, since
the dunes used to expand inland at a rate of several meters a year, laying waste
potential agricultural land. With the massive development of coastal communities
after 1950, such as Ashdod, Ashkelon, Tel Aviv and Netanya, however, the dunes
gave way to development and vacation communities.
Today, housing and
tourist projects are seen as threats to some of the last remaining large areas
of sand dunes and coastal cliffs. For instance, a recent plan for an industrial
park next to Ashdod would see construction over an estimated 13 hectares of sand
dunes. According to the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, the
project would “reduce open, natural spaces that are home to a wide variety of
flora and fauna and damage the largest concentration of sycamore fig trees in
the belt of sycamore figs between the Dan region and Ashkelon. This is a unique
habitat, resembling nowhere else in Israel.”
Palmahim Beach, another wild
portion of the coast south of Tel Aviv, home to a large air force base, was also
the site of planned construction, of a vacation resort, that caused a major
controversy. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Ministry canceled plans to
build a 350-room hotel there.
Plans to build a coastal promenade at
Zevulun
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Don’t Let It Happen to your Pet
It’s a warm summer day and you’re on the way to the grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread. In the parking lot you pass an older model Plymouth with a poodle pant
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Don’t Let It Happen to your Pet
It’s a warm summer day and you’re on the way to the grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread. In the parking lot you pass an older model Plymouth with a poodle panting inside.
- Smile and acknowledge the cute pet
- Run into the grocery store and page the dog’s owner
- Buy the dog a treat
If you choose “B”, then you choose wisely. The panting poodle may be minutes from death – a victim of heatstroke. You need to get the poodle out of the car and reduce its body temperature.
Every year, thousands of pets die from overexposure to heat. It’s usually because people leave their pets in cars while they shop or run a quick errand. It doesn’t have to be extremely hot outdoors for a pet to suffer heatstroke inside a car.
Leaving a pet inside a closed automobile for just 15 to 20 minutes is risky on an 80 degree day as temperatures can quickly rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit – enough heat to kill a pet. Even 10 minutes inside a hot car is enough to cause exhaustive heatstroke in cats and small dogs. Hamsters, guinea pigs, and birds have even less of a chance of survival.
An Open Window? No Good
Leaving windows wide open in the car is not the answer. Additional dangers come with that option. Your pet may jump out of the vehicle and become a traffic casualty. Also leaving the windows open “just a crack” isn’t enough to prevent heatstroke.
Heatstroke can be prevented quite easily if you follow one Petland Rule: Leave your pet at home when running errands in the summer months.
If it is not possible to leave your pet at home, then take these precautions to combat heatstroke during short trips:
- Run errands during cooler times of the day, dawn or dusk
- Leave car windows down, and protect with pet-secure window screens that allow maximum air flow
- Carry a gallon jug of fresh, cool water from home along with a bowl from which your pet may drink
- Check on your pet’s health every few minutes
Signs of Heatstroke
Heatstroke in a pet is very easy to diagnose. Some first signs are quite visible. They include excessive panting, salivation, and a racing pulse. The pet also will have a high body temperature and may even vomit. In latter stages of heatstroke, a pet lapses into a coma. At this point, many pets suffer brain damage and die.
When your pet experiences some of the warning signs of heatstroke, Petland advises trying to lower your pet’s body temperature on the way to the veterinarian.
Submerging or pouring cold water over your pet’s body can help. Ice packs, if available, can be used, too. You should also rinse your pet’s mouth with cool water, offering only small amounts to drink.
Educate on the Spot
Petland is asking pet owners to carry copies of the above card, stashing them in wallet, purse, and glove compartment to use when a potentially dangerous pet-heatstroke situation presents itself. If you see a cat or dog locked in a car and you can’t locate the car’s owner, then Petland suggests you tuck the information card under the car’s windshield wiper to warn the owner of possible dangers.
Every summer, many caring pet owners return to their cars to find a best friend needlessly lost to heatstroke. With this free informative card, Petland hopes to prevent this from happening.
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Can you name the 4 or more letter words that can be made from the word PRESENT?
- Answers do not have to be guessed in order
- Source: Scrabble Solver
- There are 14 six letter words and 3
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Can you name the 4 or more letter words that can be made from the word PRESENT?
- Answers do not have to be guessed in order
- Source: Scrabble Solver
- There are 14 six letter words and 3 seven letter words.
- The numbers indicate how many points the words would be worth in a game of scrabble.
- This quiz has not been verified by Sporcle
Mixed Up: Christmas 'Present' Quiz
- Created Dec 21, 2011 in Language
- Game Plays 78
Go to the Sporcle.com Mobile Site →
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The Triennial Act 1641 (16 Cha. I c. 1) (also known as the Dissolution Act) was an Act passed on 15 February 1641, by the English Long Parliament, during the reign of King
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The Triennial Act 1641 (16 Cha. I c. 1) (also known as the Dissolution Act) was an Act passed on 15 February 1641, by the English Long Parliament, during the reign of King Charles I. The act requires that Parliament meet for at least a fifty-day session once every three years. It was intended to prevent kings from ruling without Parliament, as Charles had done between 1629 and 1640. If the King failed to call Parliament, the Act required the Lord Chancellor to issue the writs, and failing that, the House of Lords could assemble and issue writs for the election of the House of Commons. Clause 11 was unusual because it explicitly stated that this Bill would receive the Royal Assent before the end of the Parliamentary session. At that time, Bills did not customarily gain Royal assent until after the end of the Session. Thus, if Clause 11 were not present, the Act may not have come into force until the next Parliament.
In 1664, it was repealed by the Triennial Parliaments Act 1664 (16 Cha. II c. 1). Though the new Act kept the requirement that a Parliament be called least once in three years, there was no mechanism to enforce this requirement. Thus, Charles II was able to rule for the last four years of his reign without calling a Parliament.
Under the Triennial Act 1694, also known as the Meeting of Parliament Act 1694 (6 & 7 Will. & Mar. c. 2), Parliament met annually and held general elections once every three years. The country now remained in a grip of constant election fever (10 elections in 20 years) and loyalties among MPs were difficult to establish, which increased partisanship and rivalry in Parliament. This state of political instability is often known as the 'Rage of Party'. In 1716, the Septennial Act was passed, under which a Parliament could remain in being for up to seven years. This Act ushered in a period of greater stability in British politics, with long-lasting Parliaments and Governments typical throughout much of the 18th century.
References and notes
- 'Charles I, 1640: An Act for the preventing of inconveniences happening by the long intermission.of Parliaments.', Statutes of the Realm: volume 5: 1628-80 (1819), pp. 54-7. Date accessed: 27 February 2007.
- Using the Julian Calendar with the start of year adjusted to 1 January (see Old Style and New Style dates)
- 27. The Triennial Act, Constitution Society Accessed 7 May 2008
- 'Charles II, 1664: An Act for the assembling and holding of Parliaments once in Three years at the least, And for the repeal of an Act entitled An Act for the preventing of Inconveniences happening by the long Intermission of Parliaments.', Statutes of the Realm: volume 5: 1628-80 (1819), p. 513. Date accessed: 5 March 2007.
- Robert Blackburn (1989). "The summoning and meeting of new Parliaments in the United Kingdom". Legal Studies 9 (2): 165–176. doi:10.1111/j.1748-121X.1989.tb00392.x.
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Planned laser-fusion project will keep US at cutting edge of nuclear research
WHEN President Clinton announced on July 3, 1993, that the United States would continue its moratorium on nuclear-weapons testing, he declared our intent
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Planned laser-fusion project will keep US at cutting edge of nuclear research
WHEN President Clinton announced on July 3, 1993, that the United States would continue its moratorium on nuclear-weapons testing, he declared our intent to develop alternative means of maintaining confidence in the safety, reliability, and performance of the nuclear stockpile.Skip to next paragraph
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This task will require investments in scientific facilities that simulate some aspects of nuclear-weapons tests. I recently announced that the Department of Energy would proceed with design of one of the most significant of such projects, a laser called the National Ignition Facility.
Some believe this project could impede US nonproliferation objectives. I respectfully disagree, but have committed to addressing such concerns directly and fully before proceeding with construction.
As secretary of energy, I have no more important objective than to help reduce the nuclear danger. This means achieving the president's goals of a worldwide ban on nuclear-weapons testing and ending production of nuclear-weapons materials. It also means maintaining a high level of scientific expertise in nuclear weapons.
The National Ignition Facility would be the largest laser system ever built, consisting of 192 laser beams that focus their energies on a small pellet containing hydrogen isotopes. The pellet would reach temperatures found inside the sun - causing it to burn and release fusion energy. The process would be like that which occurs in stars, although there would be no prospect of an explosion or radioactive release since the events would be so small and self-contained. The facility would not violate a comprehensive te
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This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information:
150 153rd Ave,
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
Step Counting Increases Exercise More Than Timed Walking
Posted: Thursday, April 21,
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This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information:
150 153rd Ave,
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
Step Counting Increases Exercise More Than Timed Walking
Posted: Thursday, April 21, 2005
"With the high prevalence of physical inactivity, an important responsibility of health and fitness professionals is to create activity programs that are feasible, motivational, and effective for individuals," write Cherilyn N. Hultquist, MD, from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and colleagues. "While research has shown that an increase in physical activity is associated with several benefits to overall health, debate about the optimal physical activity recommendation continues."
For baseline physical activity assessment, subjects wore a sealed pedometer for two weeks, and 58 sedentary women (mean age, 45.0 ± 6.0 years; </= 7,000 steps per day) were randomized to either the 10 K group or the 30-minute group for the four-week intervention. The former group was instructed to walk 10,000 steps per day, and the latter to take a brisk, 30-minute walk on most, preferably all, days of the week. All women wore a sealed pedometer for data collection, and women in the 10 K group also wore a second pedometer for viewing their daily steps.
Although both groups were similar (P >.05) in baseline steps, the 30-minute group walked 8,270 ± 354 steps per day during the intervention compared with 10,159 ± 292 steps per day in the 10 K group (P <.005). In the 30-minute group, average number of steps per day was 9,505 ± 326 on the days that a 30-minute walk occurred, and 5,597 ± 363 steps per day when no walk occurred (P <.05). The 10 K group averaged 11,775 ± 207 steps on days when they walked at least 10,000 steps and 7,780 ± 231 steps on days that they did not achieve this goal (P <.05).
All four of the study dropouts were from the 30-minute group. Three of these women stated they did not care for this recommendation and therefore were unwilling to continue.
"Women walk more when told to take 10,000 steps per day compared with those instructed to take a brisk 30-minute walk," the authors write. "On days when women took a 30-minute walk, their average
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Radiation is both a natural and man made phenomena. Radioactive materials, which by definition emit radiation, also occur in nature as well as being created by man. Considered a hazard to biological life, including man, it has been regulated by
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Radiation is both a natural and man made phenomena. Radioactive materials, which by definition emit radiation, also occur in nature as well as being created by man. Considered a hazard to biological life, including man, it has been regulated by various authorities in the U.S. since the creation of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.
As radiation and radioactive materials are used in several areas of research conducted here at UNCW we are required by law to be licensed to possess and use radioactive materials as well as register any machine that generates radiation. Along with our radioactive material license and registrations of x-ray equipment, a written radiation safety program is also required.
General Program Provisions
Ionizing radiation, the particular category addressed in UNCW’s Radiation Protection Program, is a highly controlled and regulated activity. Specified quantities and types of radioactive materials are required to be listed on our license, issued by the State of North Carolina. Use of man-made radiation, such as in an X-Ray tube, require that the devices that generate the radiation are registered with the State.
To address the human safety considerations, as well as to be compliant with the law, UNCW has developed a Radiation Safety Manual which policies and procedures lay out the requirements of our Radiation Protection Program. The manual is based upon the States rules given in 15NCAC 11 (North Carolina Regulations For Protection Against Radiation) and also on what is considered good practice in the field of health physics and radiation safety in particular. Additionally, because of our use of radiation and radioactive materials for research, the State has asked that we maintain a Radiation Safety Committee. The RSC consists of volunteer representatives from each department that uses radiation or radioactive materials in their work. The RSC reviews and authorizes all use of radioactive material and radiation at UNCW with the support of Environmental Health and Safety and its Radiation Safety Officer (RSO) George Accattato.
All prospective users of radioactive materials require a permit application be submitted and approved by the RSC prior to purchase of any material or for the relocation of any radioactive material already possessed onto UNCW property. Radiation generating devices require an application to register be submitted to the RSC prior to purchasing or locating such equipment on UNCW property. Please contact the RSO for additional information on the permit and application process well in advance of beginning any work. It is also highly recommended that you review the Radiation Safety Manual.
Training and Awareness
Students, faculty and staff who need to work with radiation or radioactive materials require sufficient training and /or prior experience to understand both the physical principles involved as well as the safety measures to be taken. EH&S can provide the class room portion of the required training. Contact the RSO if you expect to work with radiation or radioactive materials. The Primary Investigator is the person responsible for providing the hands-on portion of the training requirements. You will need to have either prior experience or complete the class room portion of the training prior to getting the hands-on portion through your PI.
For all personnel, including faculty, staff, contractors and students, who may need to enter or frequent a lab where radiation or radioactive materials are used; general awareness training is required. More information can be found in the Radiation Safety Manual under Section 4. Please contact the RSO to discuss and arrange for this training.
Assistance and Advice
If you still have questions or if you are interested in learning more about this program or radiation in general, please feel free to contact me at the ‘RSO’ link above (or go to EH&S staff directory).
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'Personalized' Vaccines Help Treat Chronic Leukemia
Wed, 08/07/2013 - 10:26am
Patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) often receive donor transplants that effectively “
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'Personalized' Vaccines Help Treat Chronic Leukemia
Wed, 08/07/2013 - 10:26am
Patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) often receive donor transplants that effectively “reboot” their own immune defenses, which then attack and potentially cure the hard-to-treat disease. However, these patients have a high rate of relapse, and the transplanted immune cells may also harm normal tissues, causing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD).
Now, scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that they observed a strong and selective immune response in some patients who received, shortly after the transplant, several doses of a “personalized” tumor vaccine composed of their own inactivated leukemia cells combined with an immune stimulant, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF). Thus the vaccine boosted the power of the transplanted immune system’s ability to attack the cancer— known as the graft-versus-leukemia (GvL) effect.
“Our studies suggest that autologous tumor cell vaccination is an effective strategy to advance long-term leukemia control” following transplants from donors, says senior author Catherine Wu, a Harvard Medical School associate professsor of medicine. “Although this was a phase 1 study and not powered to look at questions of clinical efficacy, we did see promising clinical activity.”
There are few treatment options for advanced CLL. Standard transplants, which involve powerful doses of pre-transplant chemotherapy to wipe out as much of the leukemia as possible, have proven too toxic for older patients and those with co-existing diseases. Over the past decade, researchers have developed reduced-intensity conditioning (RIC) regimens, using lower chemotherapy doses that are more tolerable but rely entirely on the activity of the transplanted immune cells to battle the leukemia. Usually this is insufficient to keep the cancer at bay long-term and the disease progresses.
Furthermore, research has shown that the identifying antigens on the surface of CLL cells in individual patients may differ— that is, they have “personal tumor antigens,” the scientists says. “Based on these principles, vaccination with autologous irradiated leukemia cells”— the patient’s own stored leukemia cells— “is an attractive approach to expand leukemia-reactive T cells, since this vaccine formulation reliably includes personal tumor antigens.”
To make the vaccine, the researchers mixed the patients’ irradiated leukemia cells with cells that produce GM-CSF and then injected them back into the patient. The combination stirs up a strong response by immune T cells, and the distinctive antigens on the injected leukemia cells direct the T cells to attack similar leukemia cells wherever they are present in the body.
In the Phase 1 trial, the vaccine was administered between 30 and 100 days after the transplant, with some patients receiving as many as six vaccine doses. The study enrolled 22 patients with advanced, aggressive CLL. Thirteen of the patients had evidence of the leukemia in their bone marrow at the time of transplant.
Four patients did not receive the vaccine because they developed GVHD following the transplant. The remaining 18 received at least one vaccine dose; seven patients stopped receiving the vaccine after they developed GVHD.
When examined six months post-transplant, the majority of patients showed evidence of clinical response: 10 had complete remissions and six had partial remissions; an additional patient had an early complete response but then relapsed at four months. After a median follow-up of 2.9 years, 13 patients (72 percent) had remained in continuous complete remission; one patient had stable disease; three patients developed progressive disease, and two of those patients died.
The results support the safety and biological activity of whole tumor-cell vaccination in hematological malignancies, say the authors, and giving the vaccine shortly after transplant may have been critical in its effectiveness. In addition, they says a key to the vaccine’s potency was the development by Dana-Farber scientists of GM-CSF-secreting “bystander” cells that can be used against lymphoid malignancies— which was not possible previously.
However, the authors noted that further randomized studies in larger patient groups will be necessary to determine if this strategy “will translate into a true clinical benefit for patients with advanced CLL.”
The first author of the report is Ute E. Burkhardt of Dana-Farber.
Source: Harvard University
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Better Students Ask More Questions.
How can I write an essay about the book "Christy" by Catherine Marshall if I...
2 Answers | add yours
High School Teacher
Basically, this book is about the character Christy Huddleston and
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Better Students Ask More Questions.
How can I write an essay about the book "Christy" by Catherine Marshall if I...
2 Answers | add yours
High School Teacher
Basically, this book is about the character Christy Huddleston and the experiences she has when she goes to teach in a very rural area of Tennessee. The link below gives you a brief summary of the work and may help you to gather some thoughts to begin your essay. The book lends itself to a comparison/contrast essay because of the way it is written. You could compare the life Christy used to live with the life she experiences in Tennessee. Or you could compare and contrast the different characters she encounters in Cutter's Gap and how she interacts with them. The book is lengthy but it is rich in development of character and setting.
Posted by cmcqueeney on July 13, 2007 at 5:47 AM (Answer #1)
High School Teacher
You could also write about the themes of the book. One theme is the belief that something good can be found even in an event that's wrong, senseless, or sad. Christy's search for the meaning of life renews her faith in God, giving her the strength she needs to be able to rise to the challenges of the future. Another theme is the characters' search for their own identity. This teaches them to respect the values and beliefs of people who are different from themselves. Christy must learn not to stereotype the people of the Smoky Mountains. A third theme is the need for people to learn to accept and understand death as a part of life. Christy is devastated when Fairlight Spencer dies, and she turns to Alice Henderson, a Quaker missionary.
You could also write about the social issues in the book. The people who live there are poor and illiterate. The conditions under which they live are primitive and challenging, and some of them hate outsiders so much, they threaten violence against Christy. They are deprived in every way a culture can be, socially, economically, and educationally. The people are suspicious of modern medicine and believe in superstitious folk lore.
You don't say whether you have a specific topic for your essay, but if you do, don't hesitate to ask for help. Good luck!
Posted by bmadnick on July 13, 2007 at 9:51 AM (Answer #2)
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Lesson Plans and Worksheets
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Golf Teacher Resources
Find Golf educational ideas and activities
There seems to be an interesting relationship between the increasing numbers of golf courses and divorce. Assess student understanding of correlation and causation by asking them
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Lesson Plans and Worksheets
Browse by Subject
Golf Teacher Resources
Find Golf educational ideas and activities
There seems to be an interesting relationship between the increasing numbers of golf courses and divorce. Assess student understanding of correlation and causation by asking them to explain what it is. Use this short activity as a class warm up, a simple assessment at the end of a lesson, or as a small part of a more lengthy assessment.
It's very important to have good practice routines. It's kind of like going to the gym to workout in the weightroom. There should be a routine for each workout. There
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Time will end within a few billion years, say physicists
Physicists have calculated that time is likely to end within the next 4 billion years due to a catastrophe that no one alive at the time will witness.
Fri, Oct 01
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Time will end within a few billion years, say physicists
Physicists have calculated that time is likely to end within the next 4 billion years due to a catastrophe that no one alive at the time will witness.
Fri, Oct 01 2010 at 4:25 PM
Spacetime must have an end or else probabilities are impossible to calculate. That's the reasoning being used by a few physicists wrestling with the problem of how to calculate probabilities in a universe, like ours, that appears to be eternally inflating, according to PhysOrg.com.
The problem boils down to a simple philosophical dilemma. As predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, current empirical evidence suggests our universe is expanding at an accelerated rate and will continue to do so forever. If true, one consequence of this "eternal inflation" is that time is endless.
But if time is endless, then it poses a significant problem for anyone who relies upon calculating probabilities to predict future outcomes-- a methodology perhaps most important to science. This is because when time is infinite, any event that might occur, will occur-- eventually. In fact, even the most unlikely of events are certain to occur an infinite number of times! Thus, in an eternal universe, probabilities are impossible to calculate because every event is equally likely to happen.
In a brazen effort to save the validity of probabilistic predictions, Raphael Bousso, a physicist from the University of California at Berkeley, is one of a few scientists making the bold suggestion that, rather than throw out probabilistic predictions because they aren't consistent with the logic of an ever-expanding universe, we throw out the empirical evidence instead.
In other words, Bousso thinks we can avoid the philosophical conundrum about the validity of probabilistic predictions if we simply conclude, instead, that time does have an end.
In fact, Bousso thinks he can predict when the end will come. Using rigorous probabilistic calculations based upon a number of assumptions about allowed events, Rousso has calculated that time will most likely end somewhere between 3 and 4 billion years from now.
Bousso admits that his conclusion rests upon assumptions which can be refuted by current empirical evidence about the actual state of the universe, not to mention resting upon an extreme view about the pragmatic limits of probabilistic calculations. But his conclusion is not meant to be taken as correct, just rational.
Even so, it's worth asking: What would the end of time be like for observers around at the (for lack of a better term...) time?
"The observer will necessarily run into the cutoff before observing the demise of any other system," Bousso and his coauthors write. Or, in other words, anyone alive at the end of time wouldn't notice it happening.
One moment time would exist, and the next moment... well, there wouldn't be a next moment.
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Guest commentary by Sarah Feakins
Our recent study in Nature Geoscience reconstructed conditions at the Antarctic coast during a warm period of Earth’s history. Today the Ross Sea has an ice shelf and the continent is ice covered; but we found
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Guest commentary by Sarah Feakins
Our recent study in Nature Geoscience reconstructed conditions at the Antarctic coast during a warm period of Earth’s history. Today the Ross Sea has an ice shelf and the continent is ice covered; but we found the Antarctic coast was covered with tundra vegetation for some periods between 20 million and 15.5 million years ago. These findings are based on the isotopic composition of plant leaf waxes in marine sediments.
That temperatures were warm at that time was not a huge surprise; surprising, was how much warmer things were – up to 11ºC (20ºF) warmer at the Antarctic coast! We expected to see polar amplification, i.e. greater changes towards the poles as the planet warms. This study found those coastal temperatures to be as warm as 7ºC or 45ºF during the summer months. This is a surprise because conventional wisdom has tended to think of Antarctica being getting progressively colder since ice sheets first appeared on Antarctica 34 million years ago (but see Ruddiman (2010) for a good discussion of some of the puzzles).
Where did this record come from?
The ANDRILL program is a multinational collaboration involving scientists from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States to drill through ocean sediments around Antarctica. The drilling effort in the austral summer of 2007 involved a rig perched upon the Ross Ice Shelf, drilling down through the ice, 400m of water below that and then grinding down 1km into the sediments. The sediments are bagged and then transported back to the storage facility in Florida from where they are parcelled out to analysis laboratories across the world.
It can take years to process all this sediment and perform all the compositional, elemental and isotopic analyses that need to be done. Numerous scientists work on getting the most information possible out of the core. One of the early findings was the unexpected discovery of abundant pollen in the Miocene part of the core by Sophie Warny (Warny et al, 2009). The pollen came from types of tundra vegetation and indicated summer temperatures above freezing, which was also inferred from the presence of freshwater algae.
After Sophie found the pollen, I began to search for molecular fossils of those same plants. The waxy coating of plant leaves is remarkable for its resilience in sediments. In addition those leaf wax molecules capture an isotopic record of past rainfall. It is these isotopic signatures that allow quantitative insights into temperature and rainfall.
To extract the leaf waxes we don’t look for visual fossils, instead we use organic solvents to dissolve and extract the leaf waxes out from the sediments. Those organic molecules are then purified by passing through a series of filtering steps in the lab. Ultimately we wind up with a pure concentration of the leaf waxes which can be analyzed by mass spectrometry (see photo).
How are the results interpreted?
The leaf wax hydrogen isotope evidence was interpreted in comparison to model experiments. Jung-Eun Lee (JPL) conducted experiments, after adding water isotopes into a model dubbed GRAM (Frierson et al, 2006) because it requires a gram of computational effort rather than a ton in a full general circulation model. With the aid of the isotope-enabled model version, iGRAM, we can simulate the movement of water around the planet and track the water isotopic signatures. The goal was to see if modern relationships between different points in space that have different isotopes in precipitation and temperature are valid when we instead consider changes at the same point over time. Model experiments suggested a small upwards tweak in the temperature
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Posted by craig.brouwer in 21st Century Teaching and Learning, CRDC, FAQ, Instructors, Teaching and Learning, Technology and Teaching, video on October 7th, 2010
This video provides instruction on how
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Posted by craig.brouwer in 21st Century Teaching and Learning, CRDC, FAQ, Instructors, Teaching and Learning, Technology and Teaching, video on October 7th, 2010
This video provides instruction on how to start up the classroom computer, log in, and access your files.
classroom, Classroom Technology Training, Computer, File Access, Information Technology, Login, Start up, technology, training
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Theme modifications by CRDC
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The harlequin has a distinctive head marking
A UK-wide survey is being launched to track an alien ladybird that threatens the existence of native species.
The harlequin (Harmonia axyridis) was first spotted in Britain
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The harlequin has a distinctive head marking
A UK-wide survey is being launched to track an alien ladybird that threatens the existence of native species.
The harlequin (Harmonia axyridis) was first spotted in Britain in September last year and is largely confined to the South East.
But the invader is a voracious predator that easily out-competes home bugs for food and is likely to spread north.
Scientists want gardeners and wildlife enthusiasts to report sightings of the pest to www.harlequin-survey.org.
The launch of the survey, which takes place at London's Natural History Museum, is timed to coincide with the coming of milder spring weather.
"I understand from the Met Office that we could have temperatures of 17-19 Celsius by the end of the week and that will wake the ladybirds up," Dr Michael Majerus, of Cambridge University, told the BBC News website.
"We're hoping not only to monitor the harlequin and its impact but also to use the whole study as a model for how to deal with invasive species."
Originally from Asia, the harlequin was probably imported into the UK on plants that came in from continental Europe.
Sightings of the beetle have been mainly restricted to the south east, extending to Hampshire in the west and Norfolk in the north.
The insect has a huge appetite for greenfly, leaving little for native ladybirds who then starve.
Worse still, the harlequin will turn on other ladybirds if food resources diminish for the whole population. The invader will also prey on other types of insects, eating butterfly eggs, caterpillars and lacewing larvae.
Harlequin ladybirds are also partial to soft fruit, particularly pears.
"The harlequin may sound like a bit of a jester but there is nothing funny about it at all," said Matt Shardlow, from invertebrate conservation group Buglife.
"There're a whole lot of problems it will bring with it. It out-competes native species and eats them.
"Everyone should be vigilant for the species and record where it is."
"I'm afraid it's damage limitation now - but hopefully we may be able to develop a pheromone-specific trap," explained Dr Majerus.
"They are attracted in large swar
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Hildebert and Mechtild, her parents, had promised this (their tenth child) to the Church's service, and gave the precocious 8-year-old as novice to Jutta of Spanheim, who led a small cell of
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Hildebert and Mechtild, her parents, had promised this (their tenth child) to the Church's service, and gave the precocious 8-year-old as novice to Jutta of Spanheim, who led a small cell of nuns attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, near Bingen and the cathedral town of Mainz. Hildegard took her vows at the age of 15, and on Jutta's death in 1136 succeeded her as prioress of the small eremitic community. In 1141, God granted her a vision of flaming tongues descending upon her from heaven, and she devoted her life to following this mystic vision. Pope Eugenius III officially validated her religious visions at the Synod of Trier in 1148, and gave her permission to record them in written form. In addition to her writings, she began to attract further women to her community, and, between 1147 and 1150, she founded (against the wishes of her male superiors at Disibodenberg) a new abbey at Rupertsberg in the Rhine valley. Her ministry thrived and she established a daughter abbey at Eibingen around 1165. Four times in the 1160s she took preaching tours through the German lands, and after her death in 1179, Popes Gregory IX and Innocent IV proposed her canonization, followed by Clement V and John XXII, to no avail.
With the aid and encouragement of her monastic secretary Volmar, Hildegard began in 1141 to record her revelations; twenty-six visions comprise her first work, the Scivias, compiled over a ten-year period. Her prophetic and apocalyptic writings would later include the Liber vite meritorum (1158-63) and Liber divinorum operum (1163-70). In the interval between these volumes, Hildegard wrote two works on natural history (Physica) and medicine (Cause et cure), a commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, lives of two saints, and a number of surviving sermons on sundry topics. Her interest in devotional poetry first shows up in the Scivias. In the early 1150s, she collected a large number of liturgical and devotional poems, each with associated music, such as the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, which also included her liturgical drama the Ordo virtutem. This work she continued to enlarge and embellish through her life. The "Sybil of the Rhine" also left a voluminous correspondence -- some three hundred surviving letters -- sending advice, prayers, teachings, encouragements, and often chastisement to popes, emperors, kings, archbishops, abbots and abbesses throughout Europe. Read less
Select a specific Work or Popular Work below
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- Development & Aid
- Economy & Trade
- Human Rights
- Global Governance
- Civil Society
Saturday, December 7, 2013
- Half a century of films about indigenous peoples have been removed from forgotten corners of store
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- Development & Aid
- Economy & Trade
- Human Rights
- Global Governance
- Civil Society
Saturday, December 7, 2013
- Half a century of films about indigenous peoples have been removed from forgotten corners of store rooms, recorded on compact discs and launched on the Mexican market, in order to bring to light views and realities that are seldom shown on commercial television and in movies.
State bookshops and offices of the government’s National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI) have been selling the DVD-format series titled “El cine indigenista” (roughly, films on indigenous people) since early December. Nearly 20 films, the earliest of which was made in 1958, are included.
The attempt to rescue from oblivion films in which indigenous people are not portrayed as backwards or deserving of mockery or pity is praiseworthy, but it is unfortunate that they have not been sufficiently publicised, Homero Santacruz, a young anthropologist who works to spread culture in art galleries and other spaces, told IPS.
The series, mainly made up of documentaries, was assembled by the CDI from its extensive film and video collection with the goal of giving the public access to films that will increase their knowledge of original peoples.
Among the selected films are “Todos somos mexicanos” (We Are All Mexicans) (1958), which shows governmental social programmes in action in the southern state of Chiapas, and “En clave de sol” (In the Key of G) (1981), about how a Mixe indigenous community preserves its traditions through music.
Other films include “Tejiendo mar y viento” (Weaving the Wind and the Sea) (1987), which documents the first film workshop for indigenous women in Mexico, and a 1983 film titled “Raramuri ra’itsaara” (The Tarahumara Speak) about deforestation in an indigenous territory.
“The state’s DVD productions of this kind are presented as important milestones in spreading different ideas or realities, and in this case for appreciating and getting to know our indigenous peoples, but they don’t reach the general public; they are limited to very small circles,” Santacruz said.
Unless it gets publicity and is advertised in the media, the film series will go unnoticed by the market, even though it is interesting, timely and necessary, he said.
Commercial movies have generally portrayed Mexican indigenous people as savages, as well as characters evoking pity, mockery or laughter, for example in several successful Mexican comedy films in the 1970s and 1980s starring “la india María” (Indian Mary), a character played by actress María Elena Velasco.
Mexico is the Latin American country with the largest indigenous population, which is variously estimated to make up between 12 and 30 percent of the country’s 104 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who actually speak an indigenous language).
The overwhelming majority of the Mexican population is of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry.
The CDI said parts of the series indicate the nature of state policies towards indigenous peoples over the past 50 years. These have changed from paternalism and the concept of assimilation to the present-day approach, which extols diversity and respect for indigenous cultures and their autonomy.
Museums, schoolbooks and the official discourse all exalt the country’s indigenous cultures. But studies show that indigenous people have lower incomes than the rest of the population and suffer from social rejection and discrimination.
According to nearly every development indicator, indigenous Mexicans are underprivileged in relation to the rest of the population.
The illiteracy rate among indigenous people is 31.1 percent, compared to the national figure of 9.2 percent. As many as 53.5 percent of indigenous people live in houses with dirt floors, and 13 percent lack drinking water, sanitation and electricity.
Mexican schools teach children to take pride in the country’s indigenous roots and in the peoples who built great cities and developed advanced knowledge before the arrival of the Spaniards, but many present-day indigenous people can be seen begging for coins on the streets.
According to official statistics, 86.1 percent of the indigenous population lack guaranteed access to health care, and nearly 30 percent have not completed primary school.
Infant mortality among indigenous people is 48.3 per 1,000 live births, compared to 28.2 per 1,000 for the country as a whole.
Juan Urrusti, who has directed films about indigenous issues, praised the CDI’s efforts to reach wider audiences through film, in an interview with the local newspaper Reforma. He said such initiatives were necessary to raise indigenous people’s self-esteem, as they hardly ever see themselves reflected in the media.
Santacruz concurred, but repeated that it was a pity that “El cine indigenista” should be launched on the market without adequate promotion. He added that the product was unlikely to be seen by indigenous people in Mexico.
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It may look like an ironing board welded on top of a clothes rack, but the Papa Mau Wave Glider is a record breaking robot.
At the end of last year, it set a new benchmark for the longest distance ever travelled by
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It may look like an ironing board welded on top of a clothes rack, but the Papa Mau Wave Glider is a record breaking robot.
At the end of last year, it set a new benchmark for the longest distance ever travelled by an autonomous vehicle.
Named after a late navigator from Micronesia, Papa Mau was developed in the US by Liquid Robotics and has just completed a 9,000 nautical mile (16,668km) trip from California to Australia.
Spending more than a year at sea, the self-reliant robot gathered data from wind speed to ocean temperature, as well as examining living organisms under the water. Oh, and it also powered its way through shark-infested waters and more than a dozen hurricanes. Not bad for something that you might be inclined to hang your washing on.
Crucially, Papa Mau can also predict wave movement, which could become a vital component in the scientific pursuit to predict natural disasters such as tsunamis.
It is part of a new generation of robots which could help save human lives, as opposed to wiping out humanity, which we reported on a few months ago.
One of four such contraptions created by Liquid Robotics which are roaming the world’s seas, Papa Mau doesn’t burn fuel, instead making its energy from the waves it travels on to create forward thrust, while solar panels are harnessed to power its data-collecting sensors.
Bill Vass, chief executive of Liquid Robotics, said the robot had originally been designed to track and listen to whales in Hawaii, which helped it develop as a non-polluting, silent device.
‘It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me if you’re a scientist monitoring the ocean that you go out and pollute it a lot to monitor it, and then complain about the pollution,’ he told Metro.
He said the robot’s year-long trip had two goals – to prove the concept could work and to collect information about the sea. Liquid Robotics insists its creation can offer a more detailed view of the world’s oceans than those provided by satellites.
It has ambitions to build technology which can perform search and rescue at sea. It already does tsunami monitoring and had a robot in the middle of Hurricane Sandy.
‘Our robots like bad weather,’ said Mr Vass, saying Papa Mau had been through up to 15 hurricanes.
‘The bigger the waves are, the faster the robot goes. It loves things like hurricanes. Like a surfer, if the wave starts t
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Stuff during this time
become more responsible, start deepening relationships with others.
important to encourage them with everything they do to build it
They grow 2-3inches and 5-7lbs/year by 9 or
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Stuff during this time
become more responsible, start deepening relationships with others.
important to encourage them with everything they do to build it
They grow 2-3inches and 5-7lbs/year by 9 or 10. Muscles start to develop and tone.
Gross and fine motor skills
expanding; start to learn cursive and typing.
More social, peer interactions, less anxious, happier. better diet effects overall health and attitude.
weight more than 20% above avg for height and weight.
obesity can trigger this.
Asthma, accidents from mobility (bicycle, car)
kids are vulnerable at this age, this can effect their health and well being.
Depression symptoms are different
fear, avoidant, persistently sad, guilt, not doing well in school.
worry about everything, irritable, muscle tension.
reason for anxiety
they feel stress
Brain dysfunction. Genetics and environmental factors. ADD/ADHD, dyslexia.
problem in the part of brain responsible for breaking words into sound elements that make up language.
3-5% school age population. Begins around 7. related to delay in neural development.
Boys are 3x more likely
Concrete operational stage
Piaget. Period of cognitive development between 7-12, characterized by the active and appropriate use of logic. Ex- knowing that change in amount of liquid is same even when switched to a smaller bottle.
taking into account more than 1 thing at a time.ability to take multiple aspects of a situation into account.
EX- knows that it's a cat wearing a dog mask, and not just a dog.
memory- remembering it and storing it
metamemory-understanding what memory is and the process of it.
understanding what memory is and the process of it.
Knowledge about the form and structure of language. an understanding of ones own use of language.
How language promotes self control
using self talk to help regulate own behavior. How hearing others choice of words/tone helps them recognize.
Language development mechanisms
syntax- how to speak (order of words and sentences)
pragmatics- how it's used (take turns, stay on topic)
teacher can make or break y
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Comprehensive Conservation Plan (CCP)
Tybee NWR was established on May 9, 1938 as a breeding area for migratory birds and other wildlife. The majority of the 100-acre refuge is covered with sand deposits from the
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Comprehensive Conservation Plan (CCP)
Tybee NWR was established on May 9, 1938 as a breeding area for migratory birds and other wildlife. The majority of the 100-acre refuge is covered with sand deposits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' dredging activities in the Savannah River. The more stable portions of the island are densely covered with such woody species as eastern red cedar, wax myrtle, and groundsel. Saltwater marsh borders parts of the island. At low tide the shoreline provides a resting and feeding place for many species of migratory birds.
The refuge is located in the mouth of the Savannah River, adjacent to the Georgia state line and directly opposite Fort Pulaski National Monument which is 12 miles east of Savannah on U.S. Highway 80. Tybee NWR is closed to public use.
Tybee NWR is one of seven refuges administered by the Savannah Coastal Refuges Complex. This chain of national wildlife refuges extends from Pinckney Island NWR near Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, to Wolf Island NWR near Darien, Georgia. Between these lie Savannah (the largest unit in the complex), Wassaw, Tybee, Harris Neck, and Blackbeard Island refuges. Together they span a 100-mile coastline and total 56,949 acres. The Savannah Coastal Refuges are administered from headquarters located in Savannah, Georgia.
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"Animal Olympics" Wildlife: 4-6th Grade
- Grade Level:
- Fourth Grade-Sixth Grade
- Biology: Animals, Biology: Plants
- 60 minutes
- Group Size:
- Up to 36
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"Animal Olympics" Wildlife: 4-6th Grade
- Grade Level:
- Fourth Grade-Sixth Grade
- Biology: Animals, Biology: Plants
- 60 minutes
- Group Size:
- Up to 36
- indoors or outdoors
- National/State Standards:
- Next Generation FLORIDA SUNSHINE STATE STANDARDS
OverviewThe students will be able to: a) compare and
contrast differences between animals and themselves, b) define
the concepts of variation and biological diversity, and c) develop
a classification system to group the animals in this activity; i.e.
runners, swimmers, fliers, two-legged or four-legged.
Our "Wildlife" unit is broken into 16 lesson plans, each taking from 20 minutes to several class periods to complete, and targeted mainly at 4th-6th grade students. A class needn't complete every lesson in the unit, though some lessons do refer to one another and are better done in sequence. However, each lesson comes with its own set of objectives and resources.
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Serbia, in Southeastern Europe, is a landlocked country bordered by Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. Its land mass totals about 88,361 sq km; it's
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Serbia, in Southeastern Europe, is a landlocked country bordered by Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. Its land mass totals about 88,361 sq km; it's slightly larger than the state of South Carolina. Serbia has a continental climate in the north with cold winters and hot, humid summers; in other parts, it has a more Mediterranean climate, relatively cold winters with heavy snowfall and hot, dry summers and autumns. Its capital is Belgrade; other major cities: Pancevo, Novi Pazar, Uzice, Novi Sad, Subotica, Bor, and Nis.
Serbia's terrain is varied: rich fertile plains in the north; limestone ranges and basins in the east; and ancient mountains and hills in the southeast. Natural resources include: oil, gas, coal, iron ore, copper, lead, zinc, antimony, chromite, nickel, gold, silver, magnesium, limestone, and salt. Its population is estimated at 10,150,265 (July 2007). Its ethnic population is 82.9% Serb, 3.9% Hungarian, 1.4% Romany, 1.8% Bosniaks, and.9% Montenegrin. Religions of Serbia include: Serbian Orthodox (85%), Catholic (5.5%), Muslim (3.2%), Protestant (1.1%), unspecified (2.6%), and
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The treatment of complex industrial wastewater systems laden with items, such as ferric chloride, ferric sulfate, hydraulic oil, animal fats and antibiotics, involves brine treatment and removal of solids and oils, as well as biodegradable organics.
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The treatment of complex industrial wastewater systems laden with items, such as ferric chloride, ferric sulfate, hydraulic oil, animal fats and antibiotics, involves brine treatment and removal of solids and oils, as well as biodegradable organics. During waste processing, liquid level measurements are needed at raw and finished water tanks to quantify liquid volume and overflow controls to prevent pollution. The repeatability and stability of the readings are very important in order to ensure accurate measurements for closed-loop control systems.
The Value of Level Sensors
Level sensors are used extensively for the processing of wastewater in industrial wastewater treatment. Due to the size of tanks and floatation of oils and waste,
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Lewis Wickes Hine (American), Sadie Pfeiffer, Spinner in Cotton Mill, North Carolina, negative 1910, print about 1920s-1930s, Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14-
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Lewis Wickes Hine (American), Sadie Pfeiffer, Spinner in Cotton Mill, North Carolina, negative 1910, print about 1920s-1930s, Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14-1/16.
Milton Rogovin (American), Cuba, 1989, Gelatin silver print, 7-1/16 x 6-15/16".
Unknown, American, Man with Carpentry Tools, about 1848, Hand-colored daguerreotype, 2-11/16 x 2-1/4".
J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
In Focus: The Worker
November 3, 2009-March 21, 2010
The more than 40 prints in this exhibition are drawn from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection — from daguerreotypes to gelatin silver prints. Some represent key moments in history and have become icons. Others, less well-known, demonstrate a occupations and trades that interested photographers. Together, they reveal shifting attitudes toward the worker over the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Industrial Revolution was transforming life in the Western world when photography was invented in 1839. All
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The Kodak records that I am familiar with give no dates, but merely show that Sheppard began the use of Sulfur as allyl thiourea to sensitize emulsions chemically. Later reports show use of Thiosulf
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The Kodak records that I am familiar with give no dates, but merely show that Sheppard began the use of Sulfur as allyl thiourea to sensitize emulsions chemically. Later reports show use of Thiosulfate and then Thiosulfate with Gold. Agfa records show Thiocyanate as being used and then Thiocyanate + Gold. Both companies used a S + Au sensitization from before mid century, but it is unclear when the practice started as it is shrouded in "secrecy". One thing is clear and that is that both companies used these but with different compounds in play in the actual chemical reaction.
The use is usually 1 part of Gold to 3 parts of Sulfur. If you use Thiosulfate, then Thiocyanate can be added to accelerate the reaction or intensity the reaction. TAI (Tetra Aza Indene) can be used to restrain fog, but there are many publications listing alternate chemicals that inhibit excess fog growth.
Now, the above applies to AgBrI emulsions. It was not until the mid to late 70s that S+Au was applied to AgCl or AgClBr emulsions due to the excessive fog growth and lowering of contrast.
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WALKS IN FLORENCE: CHURCHES, STREETS AND PALACES
SUSAN AND JOANNA HORNER
Chapter XVII: San Martino - The Badia
Leaving the Piazza della
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WALKS IN FLORENCE: CHURCHES, STREETS AND PALACES
SUSAN AND JOANNA HORNER
Chapter XVII: San Martino - The Badia
Leaving the Piazza della Signoria by the Via Calzaioli, and taking the third turning to the right, a few steps lead to the obscure little piazza, or piazzetta, which is divided in two by the diminutive Church of San Martino, once a chapel belonging to the larger church of the same name. San Martino was built A.D. 986, by an archdeacon of Fiesole, who in 1034 presented it to the monks of the Badia - Abbey - of Florence: it was nevertheless maintained as the parish church until 1479, when the abbot suppressed the cure, and gave half the building to the Guild of Tailors, who had their residence in this quarter. The piazza nearest the Via Calzaioli is still called the "Piazza dei Cimatori," from cimare, to shear cloth. St. Martin, who divided his cloak with the beggar, is a saint equally appropriate to the Guild of Tailors, and to the charitable institution to which all that remains of the old church now belongs.
In 1441, the good Bishop Antonino156 engaged twelve pious citizens of Florence to form themselves into a society for the secret aid of persons brought to penury by misfortune, who were ashamed to beg, and who were therefore called I Poveri Vergognosi - "the shamefaced poor." The members of this society assumed the title of Procuratori dei Poveri Vergognosi; but they were more generally known as the Buonuomini di San Martino - "the good
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Getting Students Actively Involved Using "The Mistake Buster" TechniqueHai K.P. Huynh
theteaeggs [at] dng.vnn.vn
American-Vietnamese International English Center (DaNang,
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Getting Students Actively Involved Using "The Mistake Buster" TechniqueHai K.P. Huynh
theteaeggs [at] dng.vnn.vn
American-Vietnamese International English Center (DaNang, Vietnam)
This article demonstrates how teachers can get students actively engaged in the learning process and take charge of their learning by giving them the opportunities to find and correct mistakes themselves. This technique works well with beginner to high intermediate students. Step-by-step explanation of how to employ this technique will be given to help interested teachers adapt it for their own classes.
IntroductionIn my years of teaching ESL/ EFL experience in various settings, I have always found that teaching and learning become so much fun and exhilarating when my students are actively involved in the lesson. Their active engagement, however, does not come automatically. In rare cases I have had students who are so motivated and eager to learn that they seem to "absorb" so quickly what I explain to them, but in most cases I have to find ways to get them involved.
The reason behind this idea is simply to help students learn better by creating good opportunities for them to reflect on what they have learned and now take a look at it from a different angle. One way I have tried and found effective is to prepare an activity where my students take over the role of correcting mistakes (which is normally done by the teacher), while I deliberately become the "mistake maker".
This technique can bring forth several benefits. For instance, by switching
the role of the "mistake corrector" I often observe that students get excited.
The level of excitement is even increased when the class is divided into
two teams to compete with each other in finding and correcting the mistakes.
Another benefit is that they have the opportunity to identify the possible
mistakes themselves instead of me telling them what the mistakes are, thus
giving them a sense of accomplishment. This technique can also help
me check my students' understanding of a grammar point or comprehension of
a reading task. It can be used to reinforce and improve their production
skills such as writing and pronunciation. Last but not least, it is
non threatening and fun which is one the best conditions for learning to
Choosing a Mistake CategorySelect a mistake category that is pertinent to the focus of the lesson being taught. For the purpose of demonstrating the employment of this technique, the past tense of irregular and regular verbs will be used as an illustration.
Preparing the Mistakes (Regular and Irregular Verbs in the Simple Past Tense)The wrong verbs to be found and corrected by the students can be prepared in the form of a verb list, in short sentences, in long sentences or in a narrative. Some samples are provided below:
- Sample verb list: want, need, work, visit, repair, take, eat, bring, think, wash, change, enjoy, study, use, make, clean, finish.
- Sample short sentences: "I go to bed at 10:00 last night" or "My mother call me this morning".
- Sample long sentences: " I don't go to school last week because I have a motorbike accident, but fortunately I don't broke a bone or anything." " Last night we have our family photo taken by a professional photographer who just opening a new studio the day before."
- Sample narrative: " I have a really good day yesterday. First my sister calls me from California in the morning and we talk for nearly an hour. She tells me many exciting things about life in California and promise to call me again soon. Then I go to school and taken a test. It were quite easy because I study very hard last week to prepare for it. On the way home I run into my best friend and we decide to go for coffee. We find a nice place and enjoy great coffee there. We just have a good time together."
Sample ActivitiesThis will show how the "Mistake Buster" is employed to check students' ability to use regular and irregular verbs in the simple past tense.
Step 1. Warm up: (A verb list can be used.)
- Tell students they are going to have an activity to review the Simple Past Tense.
- Divide the class into two teams and tell them they are going to compete in the activity.
- Make two columns on the white board and ask students to fill the left column with many verbs in the Present Tense.
- Tell them they have to find the past tense forms for all the verbs. They have to raise their hands quickly to get the permission to give an answer. For each correct answer, the team will score ten points.
- Begin the activity and add up the scores for each team when all the verbs have been changed to the Simple Past Tense.
Step 2. (Short sentences and long sentences can be used.)
- Tell students that they have to listen to short sentences and then long sentences to find the mistakes in the verbs and correct them by putting them in the Simple Past Tense.
- Start reading one sentence at a time. Repeat the sentence if they did not understand it the first time.
- Students have to raise their hands quickly to get the permission to give an answer. For each correct answer, the team will score ten points.
- Keep scores and add them up after all sentences have been read and corrected.
Step 3. (A narrative can be used.)
- Tell students they are going to listen to a narrative and write down the verbs they think are wrong.
- Read the narrative at a normal speed once.
- Read it again if necessary.
- They have to raise their hands quickly to get the permiss
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Advice to cut saturated fat has actually increased cardiovascular risk – and high fat dairy and red meat have been unfairly demonised, claims cardiologist Aseem Malhotra in the British Medical Journal.
Malhotra, interventional cardiology specialist registrar
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Advice to cut saturated fat has actually increased cardiovascular risk – and high fat dairy and red meat have been unfairly demonised, claims cardiologist Aseem Malhotra in the British Medical Journal.
Malhotra, interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital in London, said that too much focus on saturated fat and government obsession with cholesterol had meant other dietary components – like sugar – had been overlooked, and statins had been over-prescribed.
“Recent prospective cohort studies have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk,” he wrote. “Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective.”
“…It is time to bust the myth of the role of saturated fat in heart disease and wind back the harms of dietary advice that has contributed to obesity.”
However, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) disagrees, and said in a statement that there was conflicting evidence on the dietary risk factors for heart disease.
“Studies on the link between diet and disease frequently produce conflicting results because, unlike drug trials, it’s very difficult to undertake a properly controlled, randomised study,” said BHF medical director professor Peter Weissberg.
“However, people with highest cholesterol levels are at highest risk of a heart attack and it’s also clear that lowering cholesterol, by whatever means, lowers risk.”
Advice to reduce saturated fat is based on its role in raising levels of LDL (low density lipoprotein) cholesterol in the blood. But Malhotra points to several population studies in healthy adults that suggest high total cholesterol is not a risk factor for heart disease for the general population. However, he does acknowledge that there is strong evidence that trans fats increase heart disease risk.
Food industry reformulation
He also said the food industry was at least partly to blame for increasing rates of heart disease, as it had compensated for saturated fat reduction by adding sugar to many products.
“The scientific evidence is mounting that sugar is a possible independent risk factor f
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The Solander Islands are a small chain of uninhabited volcanic islets lying at, close to the western end of the Foveaux Strait in southern New Zealand. They lie some 38 km south of Prices Point on the southern coast of
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The Solander Islands are a small chain of uninhabited volcanic islets lying at, close to the western end of the Foveaux Strait in southern New Zealand. They lie some 38 km south of Prices Point on the southern coast of South Island, New Zealand, close where Lake Hakapoua drains through Big River to the Pacific Ocean due west of Te Waewae Bay, and 64 km WNW of the Putatara (Rugged) Point in the northwest of Stewart Island, or 56 km from Codfish Island west of Stewart Island. They measure about 0.7 km² in area. Administratively, they are part of Southland District.
The islands are remnants of an isolated extinct Pleistocene volcano with andesite rocks one to two million years old. They lie on a bank with depths less than 100 m, but are separated from the continental shelf around Foveaux Strait by a 4 km narrow trough with depths in excess of 200 m (at least 237 m). Therefore, the islands are included in the New Zealand Outlying Islands, despite their proximity to the mainland. The Solander Islands are the only New Zealand volcanic land features related to the subduction of the Australian Plate beneath the Pacific Plate.
A few thousand pairs of the southern subspecies of Buller's Albatross (Thalassarche b. bulleri) are commonly breeding on the islands. This subspecies is only found here and on The Snares. The flora is dominated by ferns and orchids. There are 53 vascular plant species, one third of which are very rare.
The main island, Solander Island/Hautere, covers some 65 ha in area, rising steeply to a peak 330 metres above sea level. It is wooded with the exception of its northeast end, which appears as bare, white rock. There is a deep cave on the east side, Sealers Cave.
Solander Islands have lots of wildlife, which are mainly endangered species such as the Bullers Albatross
Little Solander Island is 1.9 km west of the main island. It is 148 m high, with an area of 4 ha. It has a barren appearance and is guano-covered.
Pierced Rock is 250 m south of the main island. It rises to 54 m and measures just 2000 m² in area.
The island chain was sighted by Captain James Cook on 11 March 1770 and named by him for the Swedish naturalist Dr. Daniel Solander, one of the scientific crew aboard Cook's expedition's ship Endeavour. The Maori name Hautere translates into English as "flying wind", an apt description of the island's weather.
The island has only ever been briefly inhabited, and then only due to shipwreck or other marooning. Five Europeans were marooned here between 1808 and 1813, the longest continual period of habitation for the island group.
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A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family examines how single mothers’ religious participation may influence their young children’s behavioral outcomes.
Using a Princeton University survey that followed over 1,100 urban single-mother families for the first five years of
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A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family examines how single mothers’ religious participation may influence their young children’s behavioral outcomes.
Using a Princeton University survey that followed over 1,100 urban single-mother families for the first five years of the children’s lives, the study finds that mothers’ religious attendance was associated with lower risk of displaying aggressive and delinquency behaviors among five-year-olds. Compared to no religious attendance, even a moderate level of attendance (e.g., several times a year on average) was associated with reduced risk of behavioral problems in children.
Moreover, single mothers’ religious attendance was also linked to their being more involved in their children’s lives, more support from the children’s fathers, less parenting stress, and lower likelihood
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CAS No. 7440-06-4
Platinum is a silver-gray, lustrous metal found naturally in extremely low amounts in the earth's crust and is typically associated with sulfide-ore bodies of nickel, copper, and
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CAS No. 7440-06-4
Platinum is a silver-gray, lustrous metal found naturally in extremely low amounts in the earth's crust and is typically associated with sulfide-ore bodies of nickel, copper, and iron. Important properties of platinum are resistance to corrosion, strength at high temperatures, and high catalytic activity. Platinum compounds are used in electrodes, jewelry, dental alloys, thick-film circuits printed on ceramic substrates, as oxidation catalysts in chemical manufacturing, and as drugs (e.g., cisplatin, carboplatin) in the treatment of cancer. Platinum-rhodium and platinum-palladium crystals are used as catalysts in petroleum refining and in vehicular catalytic converters to control exhaust emissions. Platinum-rhodium compounds are also used in glass and glass-fiber manufacture and in high-temperature thermocouples. Higher environmental soil concentrations of platinum from vehicular emissions have been found near roadways (Farago et al., 1998); however, the ambient air concentrations of platinum associated with its use in automotive engine catalytic converters are estimated to be thousands of times lower than occupational exposure limits.
Human health effects from platinum at low environmental doses or at biomonitored levels from low environmental exposures are unknown. Toxicity is determined by the type of compound (e.g., metallic, inorganic salt, or organometallic), route of exposure (e.g., intravenous medicinal use, inhalational, cutaneous, oral), and duration of exposure. Platinum metal is biologically inert, whereas soluble platinum compounds (e.g., halogenated salts) encountered in occupational settings can cause platinum salt hypersensitivity with symptoms that include bronchitis and asthma after inhalational exposure and contact dermatitis after skin exposure. Animals exposed to cholorplatinate salts used in industry have demonstrated severe hypersensitivity with asthma-like symptoms and anaphylactic shock (Parrot et al., 1969; Saindell et al., 1969). Platinum metal and insoluble salts can produce eye irritation. When ingested or inhaled, platinum metal and insoluble salts are very poorly absorbed (<1% of a dose) and cleared from the body within a week after a single dose. Most absorbed platinum accumulates in the kidneys and is excreted in urine (Moore et al., 1975a, 1975b). The pharmaceutical cisplatin is an animal carcinogen and reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen as determined by NTP. The carcinogenicity of other platinum compounds remains uncertain. Workplace air standards for external exposure are established for soluble salts of platinum by OSHA and ACGIH, or recommended for the metal form by NIOSH (Czerczak and Gromiec, 2000). Information about external exposure (i.e., environmental levels) and health effects is available from the International Programme on Chemical Safety at http://www.inchem.org/documents/ehc/ehc/ehc125.htm.
Urinary platinum levels reflect recent exposure. Levels of platinum in urine for the U.S. population were below the limits of detection, which have ranged from 0.009-0.07 µg/L in the National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals (CDC, 2012). Several studies have shown that background concentrations in general populations were usually less than 0.005 µg/L (Iavicoli et al., 2004; Wilhelm et al., 2004) or less than 0.01 µg/L (Becker et al., 2003; Herr et al., 2003; Schierl et al., 1998).
One study found that traffic-control officers had no greater urinary platinum concentrations than office-based control subjects (Iavicoli et al., 2004). Gold-platinum dental restorations were correlated with increased urinary platinum concentrations, which elevate urinary platinum by five to twelve-fold (Begerow et al., 1999; Herr et al., 2003; Schierl, 2001). Platinum-industry and precious-metal workers had urinary concentrations about one-thousand times higher than general populations (Schierl et al., 1998). Modest (ten-fold or less) elevations in urinary platinum concentrations were associated with handling of cisplatin and carboplatin by pharmacy and other hospital personnel (Ensslin et al., 1997; Pethran et al., 2003).
Finding a measurable amount of platinum in the urine does not imply that the level of platinum causes an adverse health effect. Biomonitoring studies on levels of platinum provide physicians and public health officials with reference values so that they can determine whether people have been exposed to higher levels of platinum than are found in the general population. Biomonitoring data can also help scientists plan and conduct research on exposure and health effects.
Becker K, Schulz C, Kaus S, Seiwert M, Seifert B. German environmental survey 1998 (GerES III): environmental pollutants in the urine of the German population. Int J Hyg Environ Health 2003; 206:15-24.
Begerow J, Neuendorf J, Turfeld M, Raab W, Duneman L:Long-term urinary platinum, palladium, and gold excretion of patients after insertion of noble-metal dental alloys. Biomarkers 1999;4(1):27-36.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental C
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Sewickley Academy's Lower School fosters learning in action, freedom of thought and expression, independent and critical thinking, and creativity. Successful beginnings are best achieved when the earliest learning experiences are positive ones. When a young child feels good about
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Sewickley Academy's Lower School fosters learning in action, freedom of thought and expression, independent and critical thinking, and creativity. Successful beginnings are best achieved when the earliest learning experiences are positive ones. When a young child feels good about school, attitudes are formed that promote a lifetime of intellectual growth and inquisitiveness.
Lower School faculty inspires and creates an environment and passion for learning that encourages each child's emotional, social, and academic development. The academic program is both stimulating and carefully geared to each child's learning abilities and styles. In a variety of structured settings, they learn independence, cooperation, and tolerance. Each year they expand their knowledge and skills, laying a firm foundation for Middle School.
Of equal importance is the need to help youngsters establish good citizenship habits, respect for themselves and for others, and pride in their accomplishments in and out of the classroom. As active and contributing members to a great community, Lower School students embrace and celebrate diversity on campus and in our world.
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The interactive Web site Whyville lures girls into the world of science
By RICHARD LEE COLVIN
Times Staff Writer
July 8 2002
The mysterious spots began popping up without explanation on the digital faces of Why
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The interactive Web site Whyville lures girls into the world of science
By RICHARD LEE COLVIN
Times Staff Writer
July 8 2002
The mysterious spots began popping up without explanation on the digital faces of Whyvillians.
At first, the spots looked like freckles on the cartoon-like avatars of visitors to the science education Web site called Whyville. Then they developed into red acne-like welts. When users tried to chat, an electronic "ah-choo," courtesy of the site's San Marino-based programmers, wiped out their words.
Dubbed "Whypox," the plague was designed to trigger an interest in learning more about epidemiology and the spread of diseases. And it proved to be a terrific motivator on a site dominated by adolescent girls who are as image-obsessed in cyberspace as they are in the hallways of their junior high schools.
It also was an example of why an innovative attempt to mine the educational potential of the Internet is gaining international attention among adolescents and researchers alike.
The philosophy of Whyville ( http://www.whyville.net) is what its founder calls "edu-tainment" because it taps the Internet's interactivity to get kids engaged in learning.
Some close watchers of Whyville worry, however, that users get so wrapped up in activities such as choosing lips and noses for their digital faces and chatting that science becomes secondary to socializing. Yet researchers also theorize that those aspects of Whyville help explain why more than two-thirds of its 225,000 registered users are female, most between 11 and 13.
That statistic "runs very counter to what we know about girls being interested in science and technology," said Yasmin B. Kafai, a UCLA researcher who studies computerized learning environments.
Educators say many girls lose interest in science starting in middle school, apparently because of misgivings about their math abilities and fears that they'll be seen as unfashionable nerds.
Computer use among girls drops off dramatically after age 13, experts say, citing a dearth of games and activities that don't involve speed, fighting or competition.
Whyville, launched in 1999, didn't start out with the intention of countering those trends. But its apparent success in capturing girls' attention has caught the eye of the National Science Foundation, which over the years has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to achieve that same goal.
Now the agency is underwriting a study to figure out the formula and how it can be improved upon in designing computer software, and even in setting up classrooms.
Caltech's Brian Foley, one of the researchers, says Whyville's winning combination includes noncompetitive games and activities, social interaction and, especially, the opportunity for girls (and boys) to create their own identities. "Those are things girls really appreciate and look for," Foley said. "It probably shouldn't have been a surprise that there were a lot of girls on there."
About 500 new users a day join Whyville's population. Although it's free and has no advertising, those willing to buy a Whypass for $4.95 a month get priority for accessing the site. That's important because Whyville has become so crowded that, for about 12 hours each day, more users want in than can be accommodated.
Those who succeed in entering see the face they've designed float into the 3-D Whyville town square. They can remain and chat with other users or they can visit popular gathering spots such as the town swimming pool, the "Sportsplatz" or the playground.
Or they can go shopping at the "mall"--a hugely popular activity on the site--for new face parts, virtual clothing or accessories, such as glasses or jewelry for their online persona, all drawn and "sold" by their fellow Whyvillians.
The coin of this realm is "clams," and they're earned in two ways: by engaging in one of the Web site's 12 science or four math activities or through profits generated by the sales of one's products. A third way--which Whyvillians came up with on their own--is for "newbies" to beg for handouts from the better-off "oldbies." Once someone has enough clams, she can buy a plot of land, build a house, decorate it and have friends over for chat fests.
One goal of the NSF study is to analyze how much the citizens of Whyville are actually learning about science through all those activities.
"Is it entertainment as a means of learning or is it just entertaining?" asked Ruta Sevo, who directs the NSF's program for gender equity in math- and science-related fields. "I doubt that no learning is happening, but the question is how much."
Consider the case of Whypox.
Just after Valentine's Day, the site's designers at Numedeon Inc., a privately held company, infected the online identities of a handful of the most frequent users with the pox. They also posted a memo on the site's bulletin board suggesting that users check out " 'what's new' at the Whyville version of the national Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention]."
From there, the pox spread through contact. And as it did, so did rumors and panic. "I became sad and horrified," wrote one user, screen name Girlyleo, in an article posted on the site's o
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Our ability to see depends on two factors: light-sensitive rods and cones in the retina, and the nerves that transmit signals from these cells to the brain (along with the brain itself, of course). When the rods and cones die, which can
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Our ability to see depends on two factors: light-sensitive rods and cones in the retina, and the nerves that transmit signals from these cells to the brain (along with the brain itself, of course). When the rods and cones die, which can occur as the eye ages or in the retina-damaging eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, the nerves can sometimes still function—if they have a new, working sensor for light. To replace the rods and cones, previous treatments have used electronic implants, which require surgery, or gene therapy, which relies on injections deep into the eye. But in a new technique, all it takes to restore vision—at least partially—is a much less invasive injection of the chemical AAQ.
Embryonic stem cell treatments are edging closer to mainstream medicine. An experimental treatment just approved for clinical trials may provide hope to the 10 to 15 million elderly patients in the United States who suffer from a common form of macular degeneration, which causes gradual blindness.
The biotech company behind the treatment, Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., previously won FDA approval to try an embryonic stem cell treatment on patients with a rare, juvenile form of macular degeneration. The new FDA-approved trial will use similar techniques, but targets a much broader patient base.
“ACT is now the first company to receive FDA clearance for two hESC (human embryonic stem cell) trials, and is now a true translational leader in the field of regenerative medicine,” said chief executive Gary Rabin. “It marks a major step forward, not just within the stem cell sector, but, potentially for modern healthcare techniques.” [AFP]
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(v) (1) To copy a piece of data to a temporary location. In word processing, for example, copying refers to duplicating a section of a document and placing it in a buffer (sometimes called a clipboard). The term copy differs
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(v) (1) To copy a piece of data to a temporary location. In word processing, for example, copying refers to duplicating a section of a document and placing it in a buffer (sometimes called a clipboard). The term copy differs from cut, which refers to actually removing a section of a document and placing it in a buffer. After cutting or copying, you can move the contents of the buffer by pasting it somewhere else.
(n) A duplicate of a piece of data, such as a file or a directory.
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One of the themes of our Community Forum held January 2007 was "Multicultural Understanding and Awareness." As a result of the Forum and the increased diversity of the student population and school community of Dallastown Area School District, a "
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One of the themes of our Community Forum held January 2007 was "Multicultural Understanding and Awareness." As a result of the Forum and the increased diversity of the student population and school community of Dallastown Area School District, a "Diversity Committee" was formed in 2008 to study and to determine needs and initiatives for this goal. The Committee, now referred to as the Diversity Council, continues to examine both quantitative and qualitative data from various district and community sources as it moves forward with the implementation of a DIVERSITY STRATEGIC PLAN.
Included in the district's 2008-2014 Strategic Plan is a focus on building awareness and sensitivity to our increasingly diverse community. These resources may be helpful in promoting an understanding and discussion about the topic:
Last Modified on March 17, 2008
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PRONOUNCED: KLER, KLAR [key]
Meaning & History
Medieval English form of CLARA
. This is also the name of an Irish county, which was originally named for the Norman invader Richard de Clare
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PRONOUNCED: KLER, KLAR [key]
Meaning & History
Medieval English form of CLARA
. This is also the name of an Irish county, which was originally named for the Norman invader Richard de Clare (known as Strongbow), whose surname was derived from the name of an English river.
OTHER LANGUAGES: Clara (Catalan), Klara (Croatian), Klára (Czech), Klara (Danish), Claire, Clarisse (French), Clara, Klara (German), Klára (Hungarian), Chiara, Clara, Clarissa, Chiarina, Claretta (Italian), Clara, Claritia (Late Roman), Klāra (Latvian), Klara (Norwegian), Klara (Polish), Clara, Clarissa (Portuguese), Clara (Romanian), Klara (Russian), Klára (Slovak), Klara (Slovene), Clara, Clarisa (Spanish), Klara (Swedish), Klara (Ukrainian)
| United States || ranked #727|| |
| England/Wales || -|| |
| Northern Ireland || -|| ||
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Geophysical features of the six
Philippine Turtle Islands
Taganak. Taganak is the largest of the islands in the Turtle Islands Group. It has an estimated land area of 116 hectares, and the highest relief with its
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Geophysical features of the six
Philippine Turtle Islands
Taganak. Taganak is the largest of the islands in the Turtle Islands Group. It has an estimated land area of 116 hectares, and the highest relief with its maximum elevation of 148 m above sea level (ASL, US Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1940). The substrate of Taganak is basalt, with coralline sand at the southern end. Soil cover of the hilly part is red clay derived from the volcanic bedrock. The coastal plain is covered by coralline sand.
Sandy coastline rims the flatlands at the southern end, while shingles beaches made up of coralline rubbles are common in small coves. At the northern end, the coastline is generally rocky. A short stretch of mangrove coastline is found in Bakkao, the western side of the island. The beach area is generally narrow and in most parts bounded by steep slopes of the volcanic hills. At the southern part of the island, the beach and backshore widen due to the presence of a wide coastal plain.
Erosion scars are evident at the southern end of Limao-limao. Shore erosion at the western side of the southern end of Bakkao, on the other hand, has affected a number of houses along the shore. Bare slopes and landslide scarps indicate high rates of soil erosion. A layer of reddish silt is observed along the coast of Bakkao.
The dominant land cover is grass, which covers about 81 hectares of the island's total land area.
Groundwater is available both in the volcanic substrate as well as in the coralline sand flatlands. Water in the volcanic rocks is available in the weathered portion. Water stored in the fractures of the basalt apparently recharges water along the coastal area.
Boan. With an estimated land area of 76 hectares, Boan is the second largest island in the Turtle Islands Group. It is tadpole-shaped, elongated along the northeast-southwest direction. It has a low relief with topography varying from flat to low hills at the northeastern end. Maximum elevation on the island is about 59 m ASL (US Coast and Geodetic Survey 1940).
The substrate of the island is sandstone. Continued extrusion of mud by diapiric activity built up the hill, though residents report that the outflow of mud has ceased for a number of years now. The flat part of the island is made up of an accumulation of coralline sand, coralline rubbles and some sandstone boulders.
The coastline of Boan is dominated by a rocky and shingles beach made up of coralline rubbles. A small patch of mangrove is located at the northeastern side. The sandy part of the coastline is now occupied by settlements. Shoreline retreat is evident in the toppled coconut trees at the eastern part. Scarp also rims this part of the island. To protect houses from shore erosion, fences of round logs have been set up in some parts of the sandy beach. Several berms made up of corraline rubble have been mapped at the northeast
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From National Adaptation Strategy to the Deltaprogramme
In 2006, on the initiative of the national government, the National Programme for Spatial Adaptation to Climate Change (ARK) was launched. For this programme several ministries worked closely
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From National Adaptation Strategy to the Deltaprogramme
In 2006, on the initiative of the national government, the National Programme for Spatial Adaptation to Climate Change (ARK) was launched. For this programme several ministries worked closely with the umbrella organisations of the provincial authorities, municipal authorities and water boards. They formulated an adaptation strategy to climate-proof spatial planning in the Netherlands (over a time horizon of the next 100 years). The strategy focused on climate proofing location options, spatial planning and building design. Resistance, resilience and adaptive capacity were key criteria. Flood protection, living environment, biodiversity and the economy were the main social themes motivating spatial adaptation. The relationship between climate change and public health became a special attention point.
The 2006/2007 policy already addresses some of the above mentioned tasks. Current flood protection policy (for the coast and major rivers) takes account of the effects of climate change for the next 50 to 100 years (rising sea levels, increased river discharge volumes). Making use of the characteristics of natural systems has also already become a focal point of water policy. For example, a sand replenishment strategy was already used for coastal defences. And providing more space for water was already a cornerstone of river policy, including spatial reservations for higher standard flow rates in future. Flood protection was and still is a focal point of policy development and legislation, as are developments in the field of flood disaster management. The national adaptation strategy generated many local and regional initiatives focused on climate proofing regions.
A new Delta Commission had been formed in 2008, as the current approach taken to coastal defense may no longer be viable in future and the approach needed to be scaled-up. On September 3rd, 2008 the Delta Commission presented their advice to the Dutch Cabinet. The Delta Commission formulated twelve recommendations for the short and medium term.
The Dutch government responded to the advice of the Delta Commission with the start of the Delta Programme in 2009/2010. With the Delta Programme the Dutch government formulated new priorities in the field of adaptation to climate change.
- National Programme for Spatial Adaptation to Climate Change (ARK)
- Memorandum for policy discussion: Make room for the climate! Initial steps towards a national adaptation strategy
- Towards a climate-proof Netherlands, Summary routeplanner
- Delta Commission Advice
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Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2005 August 2
Explanation: Last week, crew members of the International Space Station (
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Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2005 August 2
Explanation: Last week, crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) watched carefully as the Space Shuttle Discovery did a planned but unusual back flip upon approach. Discovery Commander Eileen Collins guided the shuttle through the flip, which was about 200 meters from the ISS when the above picture was taken. The ISS crew took detailed images of the dark heat shield tiles underneath during a 90-second photo shoot. The images are being analyzed to assess the condition of the dark heat shield. Later the shuttle docked with the space station. On the more usually photographed top side of the Space Shuttle, the above image shows Discovery's cargo bay doors open toward a distant Earth below.
Authors & editors:
NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings, and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: EUD at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
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The online news organization Daily Yonder is a great way to keep tabs on all issues rural in America, and one thing it does particularly well is portray data at the county level.
The Daily Yonder’s national maps are often a quick way to
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The online news organization Daily Yonder is a great way to keep tabs on all issues rural in America, and one thing it does particularly well is portray data at the county level.
The Daily Yonder’s national maps are often a quick way to see how rural Minnesota fits into the grand scheme on a variety of topics, and this week’s striking example shows health insurance rates. In particular, it shows how much more insured rural Minnesotans are than people in the rest of the country.
Almost all Minnesota counties are under 12 percent uninsured. Compare that to the pink and red of Texas, Montana and Georgia, for example.
Minnesota as a whole always comes out near the best when it comes to health insurance. The latest statewide information from the Minnesota Department of Health indicated 9.1 percent of residents don’t have insurance. That’s on the low end nationally but higher than it used to be.
The Daily Yonder map makes you realize that geography might not be the best way to drill into the statewide numbers. As the health department said in a release last spring, breaking out groups by race and ethnicity shows where bigger differences lie.
Twenty six percent of Hispanics don’t have health insurance, the state says.
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The most dangerous thing you can do with a cellphone is probably something you see other drivers do every day. It may even be something you’ve done occasionally yourself.
A new study funded by the Canadian government shows that turning left (right if you’re
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The most dangerous thing you can do with a cellphone is probably something you see other drivers do every day. It may even be something you’ve done occasionally yourself.
A new study funded by the Canadian government shows that turning left (right if you’re driving in countries where they drive on the left side of the road) while talking on the phone is more dangerous than you might have imagined. You aren’t just distracted, your brain literally shuts down crucial parts of the brain needed to see and pay attention.
This wasn’t an easy study to carry out. Researchers at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital spent more than a year figuring out how to integrate MRI machines to driving simulators, so they could see what the brain did in various driving situations. They used healthy, young volunteers with at least a few years of driving experience.
Making a left-hand turn, especially in traffic, requires more of your attention. But making one while trying to chat actually caused part of the brain to shut down. Blood moved from the part of the brain that handles vision, shutting down its function by 50%. It didn’t matter if the drivers were going hands-free – their brains were still engaged.
So, if you’ve ever asked yourself if other drivers are using their brains, it’s quite possible they weren’t.
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Fidgeting Clownfish Benefit Anemones
Author: Ella Davies
Source: BBC Nature News
February 28, 2013
The relationship between the reef animals is well known, with the fish hiding in the anemone's
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Fidgeting Clownfish Benefit Anemones
Author: Ella Davies
Source: BBC Nature News
February 28, 2013
The relationship between the reef animals is well known, with the fish hiding in the anemone's stinging tentacles to avoid predators.
But US researchers have discovered the anemones also benefit from the night-time presence of the fidgety fish.
As clownfish move around, they boost water flow over the anemone and increase its oxygen consumption.
The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
At night there is less oxygen available on the reef because photosynthesis ceases once the sun goes down. But night is also when the main predators of clownfish hunt.
To read the full text of this article, click here.
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The second most common seabird in the Hawaiian Islands, the laysan albatross, has a population of about 874,000 and its numbers are decreasing.
According to the 2006 IUCN Red List, the laysan al
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The second most common seabird in the Hawaiian Islands, the laysan albatross, has a population of about 874,000 and its numbers are decreasing.
According to the 2006 IUCN Red List, the laysan albatross is categorized as Vulnerable. 19 of the 21 albatross species are threatened with extinction.
Ways to identify this species:
The laysan albatross is a large seabird but small (81cm) for its family. The laysan has a dark grey back, mantle, tail and wings, and a white underbelly and head. The plumage resembles that of a gull but the beak is a pinkish color with a darker tip.
- Albatrosses occupy all of the world's oceans except the Arctic. Seventeen of the 21 species only occupy the Southern Ocean.
- The laysan albatross ranges across the North Pacific and is named for its breeding colony in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
- Albatrosses feed on squid, fish, and krill that they acquire by scavenging, surface seizing, or diving.
- It takes pairs of males and females many years of courtship to form, but once they have chosen their partner, they stay together for life.
- From laying to fledging, breeding can often last a year or more. Only one egg is laid per breeding season and both parents incubate it during a 65 day period. The chick takes around 160 days to fledge, and are fed a rich stomach oil by their parents. Both parents are equally invested in the process.
- Gliding on wind currents, the albatross travels thousands of miles with little flapping of their wings. Some species of albatross cover distances equal to flying around the world at the equator 3 times each year! The wandering albatross flies up to 6,250 miles to gather food for its chick and it is estimated that a 50 year old albatross has flown at least 3.7 million miles over its lifetime!
- Albatrosses can live for over 60 years; however, it is now rare that they survive that long.
- Longline fisheries currently pose the greatest threat to albatross as birds are attracted to the bait and become hooked on the lines and drown. Approximately 100,000 albatrosses are killed this way every year, 1/3 of which are caused by illegal and unregulated fishing fleets.
- An even more tragic cause for albatross mortality is consumption of marine debris, mainly plastic, that they mistake for food. Birds are found with bellies full of trash, including cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, syringes, toys, clothespins and every other type of plastic material. On Midway Atoll, 40 percent of albatross chicks die due to dehydration and starvation from trash filling their bellies providing no nutrition. It has been estimated that albatross feed their chicks about 5 tons of plastic a year at Midway Atoll.
- The marine debris collects through a system of currents called the North Pacific subtropical gyre, located half way between Hawaii and San Francisco. Greenpeace refers to this region as the Trash Vortex, and it is also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch. Slack winds and low currents in the center of the vortex enable trash from all around the Pacific to collect causing high concentrations of plastic debris.
- Some of the island populations are also threatened by feral cats.
- This species is in real danger of extinction because they are unable to breed fast enough to keep up with population declines.
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Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say
Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.
The family includes
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Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say
Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.
The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.
Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword....
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Wood is considered humankind’s very first source of energy. Today it still is the most important single source of renewable energy providing over 9% of the global total primary energy supply. Wood energy is as important as all other renewable energy sources altogether
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Wood is considered humankind’s very first source of energy. Today it still is the most important single source of renewable energy providing over 9% of the global total primary energy supply. Wood energy is as important as all other renewable energy sources altogether (hydro, geothermal, wastes, biogas, solar and liquid biofuels).
More than two billion people depend on wood energy for cooking and/or heating, particularly in households in developing countries. It represents the only domestically available and affordable source of energy. Private households’ cooking and heating with woodfuels represents one third of the global renewable energy consumption, making wood the most decentralized energy in the world.
Woodfuels arise from multiple sources including forests, other wooded land and trees outside forests, co-products from wood processing, post-consumer recovered wood and processed wood-based fuels. Wood energy is also an important emergency backup fuel. Societies at any socio-economic level will switch easily back to wood energy when encountering economic difficulties, natural disasters, conflict situations or fossil energy supply shortages.
Woodfuels are a very important forest product. Global production of fuelwood exceeds the production of industrial roundwood in terms of volume. Fuelwood and charcoal production is often the predominant use of woody biomass in developing countries and economies in transition.
Today wood energy has entered into a new phase of high importance and visibility with climate change and energy security concerns. Wood energy is considered as a climate neutral and socially viable source of renewable energy, but only when meeting the following conditions:
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The New York Times, Jan. 26
J. Lamar Worzel, Expert on Ocean's Depths, Dies at 89
MSNBC, Dec. 10
End of Oil Could Worsen Warming, Study Finds
N
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The New York Times, Jan. 26
J. Lamar Worzel, Expert on Ocean's Depths, Dies at 89
MSNBC, Dec. 10
End of Oil Could Worsen Warming, Study Finds
NPR, Dec. 5
Climate Change From Poland to the Poles
CBC News, Nov. 19
Wallace Broecker: How to Calm an Angry Beast
LoHud, Nov. 12
Tougher Rules Sought on Sewage Dumping
Reuters UK, Nov. 7
Scientists Say a Rock Can Soak Up CO2
The New York Observer, Oct. 30
Professor Steve Cohen's Blog: A Discussion on a Sustainable Planet, City and Campus
Jan. 26, 2009
Antarctica is getting warmer, according to a new study co-authored by Drew Shindell, a research scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, an affiliate of Columbia University's Earth Institute. Scientists have known that ice shelves collapsing on the continent's northerly peninsula were the result of rapid warming, however evidence on temperature change in the continent's interior have been unclear; some have believed it might actually be cooling. This new research, however, shows temperatures are rising throughout the continent, at about the same pace as the rest of the world, consistent with rising levels of greenhouse gases in the air. The study is the cover article in the Jan. 22 issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.
Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / University of Washington / US Geological Survey
In its report last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that six of the world's seven continents were getting hotter, but that Antarctica still needed more investigation. Skeptics of human-caused climate change have used the idea of Antarctic cooling to debunk global warming. But the researchers of this new study say with a high degree of certainty that over the past 50 years, the continent as a whole has warmed nearly as fast as the rest of the world—about 1°F (.5°) on average. The western part has warmed even more rapidly over the same period—nearly 1.6°F (.85°C). The West Antarctic ice sheet is particularly susceptible to warming because much of it lies at low elevation. The complete melting of West Antarctica alone—equal to the combined size of Alaska, Texas, California and Kansas—would raise global sea levels by an estimated three to five meters.
"We're almost certain that increases in greenhouse gases on other continents are contributing to this warming in Antarctica," said Shindell, who is also an adjunct associate research scientist at Columbia's Center for Climate Systems Research.
Incomplete weather records had led scientists to think that much of Antarctica was cooling. About 100 manned and unmanned Antarctic weather stations have been gathering temperature data since 1957, but most are on the coast or the peninsula that juts toward South America, leaving most of the vast, inaccessible interior uncovered. Since 1981, satellite-generated data measuring the amount of infrared light reflected by snow gave a fuller picture. By correlating the weather station data with the satellite data, the scientists were able to reconstruct temperatures over the whole continent for the last 50 years.
"While some areas have been cooling for a long time, the evidence shows the continent as a whole is getting warmer," said the study's lead author Eric Steig, a glaciologist and g
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Hours of active play in a fun, musical way! Twenty upbeat songs encourage children to explore and learn on the go--all in a kid-friendly portable player. Four activity modes teach little ones about movement as they build gross motor skills. Learning Skills
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Hours of active play in a fun, musical way! Twenty upbeat songs encourage children to explore and learn on the go--all in a kid-friendly portable player. Four activity modes teach little ones about movement as they build gross motor skills. Learning Skills: Letters & the alphabet Numbers & counting Movement & rhythm Shapes Animals The
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Republic Act No. 4670 or the Magna Carta for teachers is a declaration of policies for teachers about their rights, provisions, and compensations to promote and improve their living and working conditions, their terms of employment and career prospects and
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Republic Act No. 4670 or the Magna Carta for teachers is a declaration of policies for teachers about their rights, provisions, and compensations to promote and improve their living and working conditions, their terms of employment and career prospects and to attract and retain in the teaching profession more people with the proper qualifications.
The Magna Carta sets the measures for teachers to be qualified to teach for each year level of their choice. This is an important aspect because it emphasizes that certain education should be met before on can be a teacher. Let’s take for example the minimum requirement for Kindergarten and elementary level, a teacher in this level should at least be B.S. Elementary Education graduate. This would mean that a teacher in a vocational course cannot easily shift to teaching Kindergarten unless this criterion is met.
The working hours of teachers were also specified, and the corresponding compensations when one exceed on its regular work hours. The criteria for salaries was also provided to insure that teachers are compensated within reasonable standard of life for themselves and their family and they shall be properly graded so as to recognize the fact that certain positions require higher qualifications and greater responsibility than others. Special hardship allowance will also be provided for teachers working in the remote areas, those who have difficulty commuting to the place of work as determined by the Secretary of Education.
Medical examination shall be provided free of charge for all teachers and shall be repeated not less than once a year during the teacher’s professional life. If in case medical examination show that treatment and/or hospitalization is necessary, same shall be provided free by the government entity paying for the salary of the teachers. This also goes the same for injuries. Teachers shall be... [continues]
Cite This Essay
(2012, 07). R.A. 4670 Provisions and Significance in the Teaching Profession. StudyMode.com. Retrieved 07, 2012, from http://www.studymode.com/course-notes/r-a-4670-Provisions-And-Significance-In-1041738.html
"R.A. 4670 Provisions and Significance in the Teaching Profession" StudyMode.com. 07 2012. 2012. 07 2012 <http://www.studymode.com/course-notes/r-a-4670-Provisions-And-Significance-In-1041738.html>.
- MLA 7
"R.A. 4670 Provisions and Significance in the Teaching Profession." StudyMode.com. StudyMode.com, 07 2012. Web. 07 2012. <http://www.studymode.com/course-notes/r-a-4670-Provisions-And-Significance-In-1041738.html>.
"R.A. 4670 Provisions and Significance in the Teaching Profession." StudyMode.com. 07, 2012. Accessed 07, 2012. http://www.studymode.com/course-notes/r-a-4670-Provisions-And-Significance-In-1041738.html.
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Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County both witnessed the ravages of America's defining drama. This is the story of a town forced into exodus by the harsh hand of war and of the strength that helped its residents find rebirth from
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Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County both witnessed the ravages of America's defining drama. This is the story of a town forced into exodus by the harsh hand of war and of the strength that helped its residents find rebirth from the ashes of destruction. This shared experience would bring people like John Henry Myer and Joseph Walker into a united community, despite diverse backgrounds and racial differences. Fredericksburg had enjoyed prosperity as a colonial-era tobacco port, but economic and agricultural changes diminished this importance. By the 1850s, Fredericksburg had been eclipsed by Richmond to the south and Alexandria to the north. Shortly before the Civil War, a small industrial boom revitalized the town only to be cast asunder by the events of 1861-1865. Ten miles south is Spotsylvania Court House, the county seat. Here too, fate would deal a blow as warring armies raged over the pastoral setting, leaving destruction in their wake.
Author Bio: Free-lance writer John F. Cumming
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The scientific species name of the Albanian water frog (Pelophylax shqipericus) derives from the word Shqipëria, which means ‘Albania’ in the native language. This species is a medium-sized
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The scientific species name of the Albanian water frog (Pelophylax shqipericus) derives from the word Shqipëria, which means ‘Albania’ in the native language. This species is a medium-sized member of the western Palaearctic water frog group, and its highly webbed feet are a clear indication of its preference for aquatic habitats (2).
The back of the male Albanian water frog is green to light brown with relatively large brown or black spots. A light green stripe is sometimes present along the spine. The inner thighs are darkly mottled, and the male also has paired, external vocal sacs, which are light olive to grey. The male usually becomes more brightly coloured during the breeding season, ranging from grass green to yellow-olive, and the spots and markings on the skin are either reduced or completely absent (2).
The upperparts of the female Albanian water frog are light brown to olive, with large, distinct chocolate brown to black spots. The belly is cream-coloured with very few spots, while the groin area is yellow (2).
- Also known as
- Albanian frog, Albanian pool frog, Balkan frog, Virpazar frog.
- Male length: c. 71 mm (2)
- Female length: c. 74 mm (2)
Albanian water frog biology
Members of the Ranidae family, such as the Albanian water frog, are known as ‘true frogs’, as they are what many people consider to be typical frogs (3) (7) (8) (9).
There is no diagnostic feature common to all Ranidae (10), however, like the Albanian water frog (3), most have life cycles closely associated with still or slow-moving water bodies (8) (11). Many species within the Ranidae family reproduce through larval development, with the production of aquatic tadpoles (3) (9) (10), although some groups have direct development of juveniles (9) (10).
Albanian water frog range
The Albanian water frog is a lowland species (1) (2) (3) (4). It is restricted to coastal areas of the eastern Adriatic region (2) (5), in parts of western Albania and southern Montenegro (1) (3) (4) (6), where it generally occurs at elevations below 500 metres above sea level (1) (3) (4).
Albanian water frog habitat
An aquatic species, the Albanian water frog is found in heavily vegetated wetland habitats including marshes, swamps and ditches. It can also be found on the edges of slow-flowing rivers, as well as the shoreline of Lake Skadar (1) (3) (4).
Albanian water frog status
The Albanian water frog is classified as Endangered (EN) on the IUCN Red List (1).
Albanian water frog threats
The main threats to the Albanian water frog are the drainage of wetlands, and agrochemical and industrial pollution of aquatic habitats. Over-collection of this species for commercial purposes is a significant threat in the northern parts of its range, such as along the shores of Lake Skadar (1) (3) (4).
An additional threat to this species is the accidental introduction of non-native water frogs to the Albanian water frog’s aquatic habitats, as these species may compete for space and food (1) (3) (4).
Albanian water frog conservation
The Albanian water frog is listed on Appendix III of the Bern Convention, which means that it should be afforded protection (12).
This species is known to occur within the Lake Skadar protected area, on the border of Montenegro and Albania (1) (3) (4).
Find out more
Learn more about amphibians:
IUCN/SSC Amphibian Specialist Group:
Gascon, C., Collins, J.P., Moore, R.D., Church, D.R., McKay, J.E. and Mendelson III, J.R. (2005) Amphibian Conservation Action Plan. The World Conservation Union (IUCN), Gland, Switzerland. Available at:
Find out more about the habitat of this species:
This information is awaiting authentication by a species expert, and will be updated as soon as possible. If you are able to help please contact:
- Of or relating to the immature stage in an animal’s lifecycle, after it hatches from an egg and before it changes into the adult form. Larvae are typically very different in appearance to adults; they are able to feed and move around but are usually unable to reproduce.
- Palaearctic region
- The region that includes Europe, North Africa, most of Arabia, and the part of Asia to the north of the Himalayan-Tibetan barrier.
IUCN Red List (November, 2011)
Hotz, H., Uzzell, T., Gunther, R., Tunner, H.G. and Heppich, S. (1987) Rana shqiperica, a New European Water Frog Species from the Adriatic Balkans (Amphibia, Salientia, Ranidae). Notulae Naturae, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 468: 1-3.
Stuart, S.N., Hoffmann, M., Chanson, J.S., Cox, N.A., Berridge, R.J., Ramani, P. and Young, B.E. (Eds.) (2008) Threatened Amphibians of the World. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona, Spain.
AmphibiaWeb - Rana shqiperica (November, 2011):
Tockner, K., Uehlinger, U. and Robinson, C.T. (Eds.) (2009) Rivers of Europe. Academic Press, London.
Gorman, G. (2008) Central and Eastern European Wildlife. Bradt Travel Guides, Buckinghamshire, UK.
Harding, J.H. (1997) Amphibians and Reptiles of the Great Lakes Region. University of Michigan Press, USA.
Grismer, L.L. (2002) Amphibians and Reptiles of Baja California, Including its Pacific Islands, and the Islands in the Sea of Cortés. University of California Press, USA.
AmphibiaWeb - Ranidae (November, 2
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Desert locust outbreak in Eritrea
Alert level increased to “caution” in the Red Sea area
23 February 2007, Rome – In Desert Locust early warning, vigilance is critical, particularly on the Red Sea
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Desert locust outbreak in Eritrea
Alert level increased to “caution” in the Red Sea area
23 February 2007, Rome – In Desert Locust early warning, vigilance is critical, particularly on the Red Sea coastal plains where a Desert Locust outbreak developed in Eritrea in December 2006, FAO says. Locust numbers continued to increase along the coast between Massawa and the Sudanese border during January. Recently infestations have also been reported in adjacent coastal areas in Sudan.
Other countries along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden could face important locust infestations this winter because of unusually good rains and favourable ecological conditions.
Small-scale breeding is in progress in coastal areas of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and reports of locust concentrations on the northwest coast of Somalia have been received by FAO.
In Eritrea and Sudan a second generation of breeding is underway that could cause locusts to rapidly increase in number.
"When vegetation begins to dry out, these locusts may form hopper bands and swarms that could move to neighbouring countries," said FAO expert Keith Cressman.
FAO is closely monitoring the situation as continuing rains could lead to further deterioration and greater threat to the countries around the Red Sea in April/May.
Control operations against locusts are continuing in outbreak areas on the Eritrean coast.
Eritrean ground teams have treated more than 15,000 hectares of hoppers and adults that wer
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Benton County, Tennessee
|Benton County, Tennessee|
Benton County Courthouse in Camden
Location in the state of Tennessee
Tennessee's location in the U.S.
|Founded||December 19, 1835|
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Benton County, Tennessee
|Benton County, Tennessee|
Benton County Courthouse in Camden
Location in the state of Tennessee
Tennessee's location in the U.S.
|Founded||December 19, 1835|
|Named for||David Benton (early settler)|
|• Total||436 sq mi (1,130 km2)|
|• Land||395 sq mi (1,023 km2)|
|• Water||41 sq mi (107 km2), 9.48%|
|• Density||42/sq mi (16/km²)|
|Time zone||Central: UTC-6/-5|
Benton County is located in northwest Tennessee, bordering the western branch of the Tennessee River and 30 miles south of the Kentucky border. Aside from Camden, other major communities include agrarian communities Big Sandy and Holladay. It is known well in the area for its duck hunting and fishing industries, and in the past, was recognized for sorghum production, although it is no longer produced there.
Benton County was formed in 1835 from part of Humphreys County. It was named in honor of David Benton (1779–1860), who was an early settler in the county and a member of the Third Regiment, Tennessee Militia in the Creek War.
- Stewart County (northeast)
- Houston County (northeast)
- Humphreys County (east)
- Perry County (southeast)
- Decatur County (south)
- Carroll County (west)
- Henry County (northwest)
National protected area
State protected areas
- Big Sandy Wildlife Management Area (part)
- Camden Wildlife Management Area
- Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park
- Harmon Creek Wildlife Management Area
- Lick Creek Wildlife Management Area
- Natchez Trace State Forest (part)
- Natchez Trace State Park (part)
- New Hope Wildlife Management Area
As of the census of 2000, there were 16,537 people, 6,863 households, and 4,886 families residing in the county. The population density was 42 people per square mile (16/km²). There were 8,595 housing units at an average density of 22 per square mile (8/km²). The racial makeup of the county was 96.44% White, 2.10% Black or African American, 0.33% Native American, 0.24% Asian, 0.20% from other races, and 0.69% from two or more races. 0.95% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There were 6,863 households out of which 27.30% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 58.10% were married couples living together, 9.50% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28.80% were non-families. 25.70% of all households were made up of individuals and 12.30% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.37 and the average family size was 2.82.
In the county, the population was spread out with 22.00% under the age of 18, 7.00% from 18 to 24, 26.20% from 25 to 44, 27.00% from 45 to 64, and 17.70% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 42 years. For every 100 females there were 93.80 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 91.40 males.
The median income for a household in the county was $28,679, and the median income for a family was $32,727. Males had a median income of $29,177 versus $19,038 for females
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Ever feel embarrassed because you don’t understand some of the terms that your fertility doctor is using when talking about possible treatment? Ever feel overwhelmed by the intricacies of how your reproductive system works?
I call this blog, all about your cervix and
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Ever feel embarrassed because you don’t understand some of the terms that your fertility doctor is using when talking about possible treatment? Ever feel overwhelmed by the intricacies of how your reproductive system works?
I call this blog, all about your cervix and endometrium. Maybe more than you know, maybe more than you wanted to know. This comes straight from Reproductive Medicine Associates of CT glossary of terms.
Cervical Factor: Infertility due to a structural or hormonal abnormality of the cervix. This can be induced by previous surgery on the cervix (such as a LEEP or cone procedures) that leaves the cervical canal scarred or closed, termed stenosis. Also applied when there are factors associated with the cervix which inhibit sperm function such as thickened mucus which prevents the sperm from traveling through the cervix into the female reproductive tract. Cervical factor infertility can usually be overcome using inseminations of sperm past the cervix in to the uterus.
Cervical Mucus: Normal secretions of the cervix which change in volume and consistency throughout the menstrual cycle. Its quality is a reflection of hormonal stimulation.
Cervix: The lower section of the uterus which protrudes into the vagina and serves as a reservoir for sperm. Its anatomical functions include being a natural barrier to the inner uterus, and also keeping pregnancies from delivering prematurely.
Endometrial biopsy: The extraction of a small piece of tissue from the endometrium (lining of the uterus) for microscopic examination.
Endometrial Cavity: The space in side the uterus that is created by the inner lining of the uterus that responds to female hormones during the menstrual and treatment cycles. This lining, when properly prepared, forms the area of attachment and implantation of the embryo. Commonly referred to as the womb.
Endometriosis: The presence of endometrial tissue (tissue that normally lines the uterus) in abnormal locations such as the ovaries, fallopian tubes and abdominal cavity. These lesions lead to local irritation and inflammation that can cause scarring to occur which can bind-up pelvic organs to the point of dysfunction and pain. Click here for more in depth information.
Endometrium: The inner lining of the uterus that responds to female hormones during the menstrual cycle and treatment cycles. This lining, when properly prepared, forms the area of attachment and implantation of the embryo. A portion of this lining is shed each month with menstruation.
Here’s the take away message, if you’re not sure of a term or a phrase, ask your health care professionals. If you’re not with them, please do use our glossary.
It’s there to help you. As are we.
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Government regulation was justified on the theory that telephone companies, like electric utilities, were natural monopolies. Competition, which was assumed to require stringing multiple wires across the countryside, was seen as wasteful and inefficient. That thinking changed beginning around the
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Government regulation was justified on the theory that telephone companies, like electric utilities, were natural monopolies. Competition, which was assumed to require stringing multiple wires across the countryside, was seen as wasteful and inefficient. That thinking changed beginning around the 1970s, as sweeping technological developments promised rapid advances in telecommunications. Independent companies asserted that they could, indeed, compete with AT&T. But they said the telephone monopoly effectively shut them out by refusing to allow them to interconnect with its massive network.
Telecommunications deregulation came in two sweeping stages. In 1984, a court effectively ended AT&T's telephone monopoly, forcing the giant to spin off its regional subsidiaries. AT&T continued to hold a substantial share of the long-distance telephone business, but vigorous competitors such as MCI Communications and Sprint Communications won some of the business, showing in the process that competition could bring lower prices and improved service.
A decade later, pressure grew to break up the Baby Bells' monopoly over local telephone service. New technologies -- including cable television, cellular (or wireless) service, the Internet, and possibly others -- offered alternatives to local telephone companies. But economists said the enormous power of the regional monopolies inhibited the development of these alternatives. In particular, they said, competitors would have no chance of surviving unless they could connect, at least temporarily, to the established companies' networks -- something the Baby Bells resisted in numerous ways.
In 1996, Congress responded by passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The law allowed long-distance telephone companies such as AT&T, as well as cable television and other start-up companies, to begin entering the local telephone business. It said the regional monopolies had to allow new competitors to link with their networks. To encourage the regional firms to welcome competition, the law said they could enter the long-distance business once new competition was established in their domains.
At the end of the 1990s, it was still too early to assess the impact of the new law. There were some positive signs. Numerous smaller companies had begun offering local telephone service, especially in urban areas where they could reach large numbers of customers at low cost. The number of cellular telephone subscribers soared. Countless Internet service providers sprung up to link households to the Internet. But there also were developments that Congress had not anticipated or intended. A great number of telephone companies merged, and the Baby Bells mounted numerous barriers to thwart competition. The regional firms, accordingly, were slow to expand into long-distance service. Meanwhile, for some consumers -- especially residential telephone users and people in rural areas whose service previously had been subsidized by business and urban customers -- deregulation was bringing higher, not lower, prices.
Next Article: Deregulation: The Special Case of Banking
This article is adapted from the book "Outline of the U.S. Economy" by Conte and Carr and has been adapted with permission from the U.S. Department of State.
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Since Roman times, economists have struggled with the difficulty of measuring the “real-wage rate” across nations: How much product can a given period of work buy? Such a measure could provide a valuable index of the standard of living of workers but is
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Since Roman times, economists have struggled with the difficulty of measuring the “real-wage rate” across nations: How much product can a given period of work buy? Such a measure could provide a valuable index of the standard of living of workers but is plagued by pitfalls.
Suppose one asks, “How many wagons can a wagon-maker buy with a year’s salary?” Alas, wagons don’t look the same in Estonia, Egypt, or El Salvador and require very different skills to construct. Wagons provide a flawed measure.
To this age-old problem, economics professor Orley Ashenfelter *70 has found a solution: a product that is basically the same everywhere — the McDonald’s Big Mac. Since the late 1990s, Ashenfelter has compiled what he calls the Big Mac Index, which cleverly gauges the real-wage rate in more than 60 countries. (A separate Big Mac Index, by The Economist, calculates the value of international currencies.)
To plug a nation into his Big Mac Index, Ashenfelter requires just two pieces of information: How much does a Big Mac cost locally? And how much does McDonald’s pay its crew there? The Big Mac Index demonstrates that workers are paid vastly different amounts to perform the same tasks, depending on the country.
Not only is the Big Mac standardized, but “workers are doing the exact same thing” when they make one, Ashenfelter says. If they are paid less to make one in the Third World, it’s not because the work is easier or the workers less competent. Developing countries’ economies are less productive, which pushes down prevailing wages. McDonald’s workers may be just as productive in India as in, say, the United States, but they are paid the going wage rate, which is less in India.
Before the Industrial Revolution, real-wage rates were the same everywhere, barely above subsistence level, Ashenfelter says. Ever since, rates have varied, employers being forced by competition to pay workers more in developed countries.
The index shows huge growth in real-wage rates in India, Russia, and China since Ashenfelter began measuring there in the late 1990s. But since the recession, “it’s kind of a sad story,” he says. Among emerging economies, “The least democratic countries are the ones doing the best — Russia and China. India is starting to backslide.”
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