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Posted by The Locke via The Soap Box
On a previous blog post I wrote about Ancient Alien theorists believe that not only have aliens visited us in the past, but that they also believe that information that would prove this to be true is being covered up.
Besides the fact that you really couldn’t cover up something, the stories that are told by ancient peoples you really can’t take at face value and say that it’s entirely true.
Ancient alien theorists tend take myths way to literally, and that ancient humans were basically trying to best make sense of what they saw, and in a sense, this is true. The problem is that ancient alien theorist believe that these myths are maybe only two or three hundred years older then when they were first written down. In reality these myths are probably several thousands of years older then when they were first written down. The simple matter of fact is that we have no idea just how old these myths really are. Even if those myths were only a couple of hundred years old before they were written down, it still doesn’t mean that the details didn’t get messed up along the way.
- Ancient Aliens Debunked – Part 8 – Now Posted (illuminutti.com)
- Embarrassing Conspiracy Theories: Ancient Aliens Cover-up (illuminutti.com)
- Ancient Aliens, are They Right? (socyberty.com)
- ECT Follow-up: Chemtrails and Vinegar (illuminutti.com)
- Aliens & UFOs – Re: Proof of Ancient Alien Technology (disclose.tv)
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73 Locust St. Dover, NH 03820 (603)516-6050 Mon-Wed 9-8:30,Thurs & Fri 9-5:30, Sat 9-1
Dover's Second City Hall
The first city hall was built in 1842 and burned November 23, 1866. It was located at the corner of Washington Street and Central Avenue where the Masonic Temple now stands. The second City hall was also located here. It was built in 1868 and burned March 22, 1889.
Ruins of the second City Hall
The present City Hall is the fourth city hall.
This historical essay is provided free to all readers as an educational service. It may not be reproduced on any website, list, bulletin board, or in print without the permission of the Dover Public Library. Links to the Dover Public Library homepage or a specific article's URL are permissible.
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Google’s long awaited social networking service, the Google+ project, debuted this past Tuesday, albeit as an invite only service at this point.
Google+ is looking to differentiate themselves from rivals, Facebook and Twitter, by emphasizing privacy and user customization, which are much publicized Facebook issues of late and are often described as confusing, self-serving, and in a constant state of flux. Case in point, where is that darn button to turn off my “Likes”?! To be fair, you can “Unlike” if you are on the page you once liked, but how many know that… It can all be very confusing.
The Google+ network is designed around users’ social circles (called +Circles) and lets users selectively share with specific groups within their personal network, rather than sharing with all their social connections at once. In Google’s own words, Google+ allows “you to share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.”
With that said, I believe Google is addressing consumer privacy concerns with their Circles feature and is a first attempt to solve one of the major weaknesses associated with other social networking services; protecting your personal information and online identity. Now that Facebook has a credible competitor to push them to innovate once again (MySpace Dead?), I am looking forward to the future of both services.
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If you’re a family that loves creative play and learning, you’ll love Kiwi Crate. Hours of fun per dollar spent, it’s an investment that really is worth your money.
I love it because of . . .
- clear, kid-friendly directions.
- engaging and interesting to my kids of different ages.
- plenty of supplies –you can do the activities several times over.
- high-quality materials.
Look at these easy-to-follow directions from an activity in the Colors crate:
We followed the directions to make stained glass window art. Both my kids LOVED this activity.
Included in the kit were blue glasses. The kids put them on to figure out what happens. Whoa!
Next the girls made lots of colorful designs for the wooden spinning tops.
The point was to change the colors, shapes, and patterns to observe. AWESOME! The kids continue to make new designs days later. And, these tops spun forever!
The last activity in the Color crate was to make a tie-dye bag.
The wet canvas and eye dropper helped the tissue paper bleed into the material, creating a beautiful design. So cute, right?
Kiwi Crate online has more about colors — experiments, crafts, links, and books. Thanks to their links, we’re now addicted to the They Might Be Giant’s “Roy G. Biv” song!!
GIVEAWAY – Wand or Comet
PURCHASE Kiwi Crate
If you’re interested, here are the Kiwi Crate shopping options.
*Links are affiliate.
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It all started with posh toilets
Back in 2010, Robert Muñoz and I were two friends with separate web UI/UX agencies which we ran from a shared space in Barcelona, Spain: Fat-Man Collective and Pulpolab.
Robert had at the time a client called Roca. They design and fit posh bathrooms and were looking for a unique solution for an exhibition. The brief: build a contact form that would stand out on an exhibition floor, and look great when presented on the large display of an iMac.
Robert got me and my team on board, and we set to work.
No normal form would do, and inspiration would come from an unlikely source.
“Shall we play a game?”
Have you seen the film “WarGames”? If you haven’t, watch this clip. If you have, you’ll remember a scene where David, played by Matthew Broderick, gains access to the computer of Dr. Stephen Falken and the computer asks David a series of questions.
It was whilst researching sources for how to design a new form experience that we remembered this scene. If you look at the interaction with the computer screen in that clip, you’ll see two very important things which form the backbone of the typeform concept:
- The computer is asking David questions in conversation form
- There is no input box for the answer, just a cursor
Being that it was 2010, we set about creating a solution in the prevalent technology of the time: Flash. A concept was born, in the form of QuickyForm.
QuickyForm displayed one question at a time, just like in human conversation. It presented the question clearly, and the user just had to type to enter their answer. Simple.
You can play with a prototype of QuickyForm for yourself. It’s an early version, so it’s a little broken and incomplete. You need to click on the first input to give the form focus, and then it works fine.
Both concepts of asking one question at a time, and just typing to answer were brought forward into Typeform. You need to ask a question to get an answer. Just saying ‘Name:’ and providing an input box just doesn’t cut it. You need to bring the human element of conversation into the fray to engage people into answering.
You can see how Typeform has evolved by comparing the QuickyForm you saw earlier, with a typeform created using the latest version of our platform.
Typeforms (on the desktop) don’t use the classic input box for text input that we’re all used to. It’s just the cursor and nice big fonts. A massive departure from web forms of the past, and our competitors.
It was clear from the off that we had to keep focus. We were just a small team, learning as we went. We made mistakes, but we also focussed on our two goals:
- Make asking questions online more human and more like conversation
- Make it really easy for users to fill in the form just by typing
These two goals guide us in every decision we make. Typeforms still only display one question at a time, unlike traditional forms where you can see everything at once. You can still navigate using just your keyboard, and the keys you have to press are always displayed on screen. The experience is the same across all platforms, so you don’t have to relearn every time.
Every feature we add and every change we make is considered. We think about how it will affect the user experience, and we look at how popular a request it is. Every new feature is mocked up, tested, and feedback is used to mould how it looks in the end.
Typeform has come a long way since launching it’s beta in April 2013. Over 50,000 people have signed up for the service and over 2,000,000 responses have been collected. We’ve secured seed funding and the team has grown to 17 people (and we’re hiring!).
We want to democratize the way people ask questions online, and be THE platform they use to do this. We think we’ve got off to a good start, but there’s a lot of work ahead of us. We’re looking to the future, working on improving what we have and adding new features. Features such as:
- Build API (build typeforms programmatically)
- Stripe integration (accept payments with typeforms)
- File upload (upload files through typeforms)
- Advanced reports (build custom reports with sexy graphics)
- The Noun Project (include the world’s best icon library)
We’ve got some other ideas we’re fleshing out at the moment, but we’d like your thoughts. Is there a Typeform feature that you’d love to see? Let us know.
READER OFFER: Typeform is and always will be free. Our paid PRO plans give you access to advanced features. We’d love you to try them out, so use the coupon code INSPIREDM before April 4th to get THREE MONTHS FREE monthly PRO plan.
David Okuniev is Co-Founder and Joint CEO of Typeform. Typeform makes it easy to build and share beautifully designed online forms. We call them typeforms, and they mix human creativity with the power of modern, cross-platform web technologies to create new and exciting ways to ask questions online.
Typeforms are used by people all over the world to get to know each other better. From customer feedback, contact forms and presentations to quizzes, wedding invitations and interactive stories; typeforms rewrite the rules, letting you “Ask Awesomely”.
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Smile, for you are not on Candid Camera. This is especially true if you are sporting the Flashback line of clothing which is made from a material whose sole purpose is to reflect light. Read on to learn more about this innovative way to foil paparazzi by ruining their photographs.
The world's food supply and distribution methods are being challenged by a growing population, climate change, over-cropped soil, chemical contaminants and other environmental factors. The challenges are many and so are the possible efficient solutions, and you are being invited to develop a solution based on one of nature's ways of solving them. Sponsored by the Biomimicry Institute and the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, The Biomimicry Global Design Challenge (BGDC) awaits your solution with a $100,000 "Ray of Hope" prize for the winner and access to the tools you need to get your design manufactured and ready to go to work!
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University of Rochester scientists believe that they have found the reason why mole rats live significantly longer than other rodents.
Science Recorder reports that biologists Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov found out that the proteins of mole rats could be the reason why these animals live up to 30 years. The scientists examined the ribosome RNA of these creatures and they found that they are more robustly constructed than regular proteins.
Amino acids tend to make mistakes when constructing proteins but scientists found that it is 40% less likely for the protein of mole rats to make these mistakes. This research can be linked to the longevity of these animals by showing that proteins with no aberrations can help a body function more effectively.
Biologists are hoping to use this data to improve protein creation in humans.
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Japan's nuclear power plant was exploded. It was not just one but 3 out of 4. 4th one is unstable also. After explosion, many deformed plants and animals are spotted. People in Tokyo starting to move to the west side of Japan where is safe from earthquake in fear of earthquake in Tokyo. They are predicting that big earthquake will strike soon. Japan's Fuji mountain is also about to explode.
What do you think of this story?
Select one of the options below. Your feedback will help tell CNN producers what to do with this iReport. If you'd like, you can explain your choice in the comments below.
Be and editor! Choose an option below:
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A great video from TED. Robert Full: Learning from the Gecko’s tail. The combo of biology and robotics make this a fun lesson. Dr. Full also demonstrates the nature of scientific discovery by following each discovery with another concise question that can be answered through experimentation. If I were a teacher, I’d have my students first watch the video on their own and individually try to count the number of times he asks a question, then watch it in groups to pull the questions and describe how each one was answered.
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|Nihad Awad, National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, speaks at a news conference in front of the proposed Islamic center and mosque site near ground zero, Monday, Sept. 20, 2010.|
Who's fault is it that people think Islam promotes violence. Fox News can't be that great. Here are some passages of the words of the man Muslims want to world to believe was the perfect example.
Muhammad told him: "Woe to you, O Abu Sufyan. Is it not time for you to realize that there is no God but the only God?" Abu Sufyan answered: "I do believe that." Muhammad then said to him: "Woe to you, O Abu Sufyan. Is it not time for you to know that I am the apostle of God?" Abu Sufyan answered: "By God, O Muhammad, of this there is doubt in my soul." The 'Abbas who was present with Muhammad told Abu Sufyan: "Woe to you! Accept Islam and testify that Muhammad is the apostle of God before your neck is cut off by the sword." Thus he professed the faith of Islam and became a Muslim."
Muhammad sent Khalid Ibn al-Walid to the tribe of the children of Haritha and told him: "Call them to accept Islam before you fight with them. If they respond, accept that from them, but if they refuse, fight them." Khalid told them: "Accept Islam and spare your life." They entered Islam by force. He brought them to Muhammad. Muhammad said to them: "Had you not accepted Islam I would have cast your heads under your feet"
Personally I think Muslims are capable of better than this.
A narrow majority of Americans hold a generally unfavorable opinion of Islam, and 45 per cent feel Islam is a religion that encourages violence, according to a new national Angus Reid Poll.
The poll found that just 24 percent of Americans agree that Islam "is a peaceful religion" with 30 percent unsure.
By contrast, only one American in 10 believes that either Christianity or Judaism "encourages violence": 80 percent agree that Christianity "is a peaceful religion" with 59 percent holding the same view of Judaism.
Americans have been hit by a barrage of anti-Islamic commentary on the airwaves of late.
Radio talk show hosts and the right-wing Fox News Channel have tirelessly used a planned Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York as a vehicle to gin up public anger. Almost forgotten have been President Bush's post-9/11 characterizations of Islam as a religion of peace.
The poll of 1,024 Americans, conducted Sept. 14 and 15, showed that a vast majority (91 percent) feel they have "a good basic understanding" of Christianity's teachings and beliefs.
After that, three is a precipitous decline. Forty-three percent believe they understand Judaism's beliefs, 34 percent claim a basic understanding of Islam, 31 percent of Buddhism and 22 percent of Hinduism.
While America is an increasingly pluralistic society, the Angus Reid survey showed up its limits.
The pollster asked: "Do you personally have any friends who are followers or these religions, or not?"
The "Yes" answers for Christianity stood at 92 percent, but fell to 39 percent for Judaism, 21 percent for Island, 21 percent for Buddhism, and 14 percent for Hinduism.
Out of the religions evaluates, Islam is the only one to elicit unfavorable opinions from more than half of respondents in the poll, and the only religion to be seen as violent by a substantial number of those polled.
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A company that sells by instalments is asking for a percentage on the price of a car, varying between 6 and 8%. It takes from the purchaser information about the car he wants then buys it and registers it in the name of the customer, after completing their procedures. What is the ruling on that?.
There is nothing wrong with that, if the product is owned by the company and is in their possession. There is no reason why they should not sell it for a certain price, some of which is to be paid on the spot and some to be paid later on, or all of it to be paid later on, in instalments large or small.
But it must be after the company takes possession of the car. But there is nor eason why the one who wants to buy should not describe the kind of car that he wants or the kind of land that he wants, then the company can buy it and take possession of it, then sell it after that to him or to someone else, and the one who wants to buy is not under any obligation to do so until the sale transaction is done after the company has acquired the item in question. End quote.
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Basic Academic Skills - the BAS resource is a unique collection of videos designed to help first-year University students be more successful. These videos were created by Amy Kelly with the support of the Inukshuk project.
Island Magazine - In partnership with the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation, the Robertson Library has digitized the complete Island Magazine collection. Since its inception in 1976, The Island Magazine has become an integral part of Prince Edward Island's heritage, publishing thousands of articles on our social, cultural, and natural history.
- In recognition of the important role the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation members play in sustaining The Island Magazine, on-line access to the most recent two issues is limited to Foundation members only.
- The Island Magazine is being made available on-line for the sole purpose of private research and study. Questions regarding rights and permissions for any other re-use or re-production of magazine content should be directed to the editorial offices of The Island Magazine.
Prince Edward Island Magazine - This collection is currently being revised and migrated to UPEI servers. We hope to have it available soon.
PEISAMIA [Prince Edward Island Sound and Moving Image Archive] - This pilot project provides proof-of-concept for a sound and moving image (audio and film/video) archive on Prince Edward Island. In early 2005, we received funding from the AV Preservation Trust to create archival descriptions for several significant collections held by the PEI Sound and Moving Image Archive. Five collections were arranged and described according to Rules for Archival Description (RAD) and samples from each collection were identified and digitized. Those descriptions and digitized samples were then made available on-line. It is hoped the success of the PEI Sound and Moving Image Archive Pilot Project will lead to further acquisitions and funding, allowing the Library to continue to preserve and maintain the Island's sound and moving image history.
Please let us know if you have ideas for other Island collections, or how we can improve on the growing list of items available at IslandArchives.ca today.
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Interim profile, incomplete information
Taxonomic name: Phyllostachys flexuosa A.& C. Rivière
Organism type: herb
Originally from China, Phyllostachys flexuosa is a bamboo growing 6 to 10 metres in height. Phyllostachys flexuosa has a strong growth rate and spreads very easily via a particularly vigorous network of underground stems which emit shoots. It forms dense stands which prevent native vegetation from growing.
natural forests, ruderal/disturbed
Native range: China.
Known introduced range: New Caledonia (PIER, 2006)
Compiled by: Comité français de l'UICN (IUCN French Committee) & IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group (ISSG)
Last Modified: Friday, 14 March 2008
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Introduction to Automation testing:
Testing is an essential part of a software development process. While testing intermediate versions of products/projects being developed, testing team needs to execute a number of test cases. In addition, prior to release every new version, it is mandatory that the version is passed through a set of “regression” and “smoke” tests. Most of all such tests are standard for every new version of product/project, and therefore can be automated in order to save human resources and time for executing them.
Benefits of using automated testing are the following:
- Reduction of tests’ time execution and human resources required
- Complete control over the tests’ results (“actual results” vs “expected results”)
- Possibility to quickly change test’s preconditions and input data, and re-run the tests dynamically with multiple sets of data
Automation workflow for the application can be presented as follows:
- First of all it is required to identify tasks that an application has to accomplish.
- Second, a set of necessary input data has to be created.
- Third, expected results have to be defined in order one can judge that an application (a requested feature) works correspondingly.
- Fourth, Executes a test.
- Finally, Compares expected results with actual results, and decides whether the test has been passed successfully.
- Selenium Webdriver (Supports all major browsers, we use Mozilla, chrome and IE)
- Eclipse IDE
- AutoIT Tool (Used to handle Windows popups for Document Uploads and Downloads.)
This Framework has the following tools:
1. Selenium - Selenium is a well know open source testing framework, which is widely used for testing Web-based applications. It has different components and in that Webdriver has rendered the Selenium Remote Control obsolete, and is commonly referred to as Selenium 2.0.
Selenium Webdriver supports most of all browsers to run your test cases and many programming languages like C#, Java, Python, Ruby, .Net, Perl, PHP, etc.. to create and modify your test scripts.
2. Eclipse IDE: Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. The Eclipse IDE is the most known product of the Eclipse Open Source project.
3. TestNG - Is a testing framework inspired from JUnit and NUnit. It has extended new functionalities which made it more powerful and easier than the other testing frameworks.
It supports ReportNG (simple HTML reporting plug-in) and XLST (Graphical / Pictorial reports) plug-ins to customize or extend the default TestNG reporting style.
4. AutoIT - AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks which is not possible with selenium.
File Formats Used in the Framework:
- Properties file – We use properties file to store and retrieve the UI elements of an application or a website and data set file paths. It contains id of the elements, name, xpath or Css selector etc.
- Excel files – Excel files are used to pass multiple sets of data to the application.
- Xml file – Is used to execute the test scripts. Based on the package or classes or Tests mentioned in the xml file scripts will be executed.
The following figure explains physical structure of files required for Test Automation Framework
The Project Folder Structure: All the basic required folders are created with the sub folders and classes under each folder:--
The Following explains the structure in detail:-
UIMap is a concept for defining, storing, and serving UI elements of an application or a website. The UIMap properties file contains a set of ‘key-value’ pairs, where key is an alias of the UI element, and a value is the locator. Click here for more..
Data set stores the data files, Script reads test data from external data sources and executes test based on it. Data sets increases test coverage by performing testing with various inputs and reduce the number of overall test scripts needed to implement all the test cases. Click here for more..
A test is considered as a single action or a sequence of actions, that defines whether a specific feature meets functional requirements. It has multiple test files / packages / class files which will be executed based on the configurations defined in testng.xml. Click here for more..
Test report/results is a document which contains summary of test activities. After execution is completed, it is very important to communicate the test results and findings to the project manager and with that decisions can be made for the release. Click here for More..
In order to create a test suite and run separate test cases, we need framework which drives the automation. Here testng.xml can be called as "driver" which drives several test cases automated using selenium code. Advantage of using TestNG with Selenium is of running multiple test cases from multiple classes using xml configuration file .Click here for More..
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According to Wikipedia, it would be "舒适区" IN CHINESE- I would like to know if this is valid and recognizable in Japanese, too, or if there are more specific/nuanced terms to convey the same idea in Japanese.
Some examples of the meaning I am looking for, taken from Google definition of the term:
Comfort zone - noun
- a situation where one feels safe or at ease. "the trip is an attempt to take the students out of their comfort zone"
- a settled method of working that requires little effort and yields only barely acceptable results. "if you stay within your comfort zone you will never improve"
Finally, Google Translate gives you "安全地帯" for it.
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“A rising tide lifts all boats.”
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
I haven’t had a chance to read the details yet, but from the executive summary of the new results released today by the School Choice Demonstration Project, it looks like vouchers have done a good job of improving education for all students in the city of Milwaukee.
What? That’s not the way you heard it?
Of course not. Because the new result, taken in isolation from other information, simply says that after two years, the voucher students are making learning improvements about the same as public school students. The scores for the voucher students are higher, but the difference is not statistically certain.
However, let’s plug that into the larger universe of information. We know – from the very same research project – that vouchers are improving education in Milwaukee public schools. The positive incentives of competition and the improved matching of student needs to school strengths are causing public schools to deliver a better education.
So if the voucher students and the public school students are doing about the same, and vouchers are improving results for public school students, it follows that vouchers are improving results for everybody.
That, of course, is the consistent finding of a large body of research. The overwhelming research consensus is that vouchers improve public schools.
Also, let’s not forget that in several previous longitudinal studies, the results from the first one or two years were similar – the voucher students ahead, but the difference not statistically certain – and in those cases, in later years the difference always became statistically certain. It just took the accumulation of more data to reach the high bar of statistical certainty.
So here’s a toast to the great news that vouchers in Milwaukee are making everybody better off!
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a1 Department of Physical Therapy, School of Allied Health Professions, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA 92350, USA
a2 Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA, USA
a3 Department of Nutrition, School of Public Health, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA, USA
Background Evidence suggesting that a diet high in fruits and vegetables may be beneficial to bone health has sparked interest in the potential benefit of a vegetarian diet. However, other studies have raised a question regarding the adequacy of protein in such a diet.
Objective The aim of the present study was to take a whole foods approach in examining the effects of foods high in protein on the risk of wrist fracture (WF) in a cohort with a significant proportion consuming a meat-free diet.
Design A cohort study of women who completed two lifestyle surveys 25 years apart.
Subjects One thousand eight hundred and sixty-five peri- and postmenopausal women at the time of the first survey.
Results There was a significant interaction between meat consumption and foods high in vegetable protein. Among vegetarians, those who consumed the least vegetable protein intake were at highest risk for fracture. However, increasing levels of plant-based high-protein foods decreased WF risk, with a 68% reduction in risk (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.32, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.13–0.79) in the highest intake group. Among those with lowest vegetable protein consumption, increasing meat intake decreased the risk of WF, with the highest consumption decreasing risk by 80% (HR = 0.20, 95% CI 0.06–0.66).
Conclusions The finding that higher consumption frequencies of foods rich in protein were associated with reduced WF supports the importance of adequate protein for bone health. The similarity in risk reduction by vegetable protein foods compared with meat intake suggests that adequate protein intake is attainable in a vegetarian diet.
(Received February 06 2006)
(Accepted June 05 2007)
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[JURIST] The US Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] on Tuesday announced [press release] that it would not post criminal prosecutors at the polls for the November 4 presidential election, responding to concerns raised by civil rights groups. The decision represents a departure from the DOJ's longstanding practice. Grace Chung Becker [profile], assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division [official website], issued the following statement:
On Election Day, the primary responsibility of the Civil Rights Division is to ensure all eligible voters are able to cast their ballot in an environment free of discrimination, suppression or intimidation. The Division has and will use every statute within its purview to provide all voters with a free and fair electoral process.Civil rights advocates have criticized what they perceive as the DOJ's emphasis on preventing voter fraud [Wall Street Journal report] rather than ensuring minority access to the polls, questioning whether the presence of prosecutors intimidates minorities [NPR report] in some communities. AP has more.
On November 4, 2008, hundreds of federal government employees will be deployed in counties, cities and towns across the country to monitor polling places and to ensure compliance with federal voting statutes. In light of questions we have been asked regarding who will serve as election monitors, I want to inform the public that no criminal prosecutors will be utilized as election monitors on Election Day this year. This decision was made as a precaution and is not the result of any instance of intimidation or complaint regarding any specific incident.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing [materials] earlier this month, Becker testified [prepared remarks, PDF] that elections monitors are "among the most effective means of ensuring that federal voting rights are respected on election day." She reported that this year, 364 federal observers and 148 other DOJ personnel have monitored 47 elections in 43 jurisdictions. In July, Attorney General Michael Mukasey told the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing [JURIST report] that enforcing voting rights would be a priority for the remainder of his tenure. The Voting Rights Act [text; DOJ backgrounder] authorizes federal courts and the attorney general to appoint federal observers [DOJ backgrounder] to monitor elections for voting-rights violations.
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Let Nature Inspire Your Perfect Beauty Palette
Director of the Pantone Color Institute, Leatrice Eiseman knows everything there is to know about what colors top celebrities (and you) should wear to set off their intrinsic beauty.
Eiseman, who is also the author of More Alive With Color says: “The best way to judge your coloring is to think in terms of how color appears in nature at various times of the day.” Skin tones fall into three categories: sunrise, sunset, and sunlight. The color range reflected off the sun at different times of the day dictate which hues are most flattering for each skin tone, your wardrobe and makeup choices.
To check which category you fall into, look at the veins in your wrist. If they’re green consider yourself a “sunset”, if they’re blue you’re a “sunrise”. If you’re a mix of both you’re in the “sunlight” palette.
Sunrise: “In the morning, the sunrise palette colors are clear, clean and crisp,” says Eiseman. “Primarily blue undertones evolve into jewel tones.”
Coloring: Fair-skinned, dark-haired brunettes; fair-skinned silver-haired women; fair-skinned cool blondes; dark, blue-black skin tones with dark hair; and olive skin with dark hair.
Palette: Shimmering jewel-tones like emerald, sapphire, aquamarine and amethyst.
Sunset: An earthier, darker selection of colors reflect the waning day.
Coloring: Tawny redheads with fair to medium skin; golden blondes or brunettes with golden skin-tones; brunettes with mocha-colored skin.
Palette: Warm gold, russets, hot pinks, red-violets and twilight blues.
Sunlight:“Between the two extremes is the sun-drenched palette, when sun or reflected light is strongest and colors are very subtle, muted and soft,” explains Eiseman.
Coloring: Light to mid skin-tones with hair that is medium in hue.
Palette: Peony pinks, hazy violets, placid blue and cameo greens.
[Source: Yahoo! Shine]
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Today I tried reading what was intended to be an uplifting and inspirational tail about a family's journey. Instead I got to this line:
One important segment of an American family's journey from the humiliation of slavery to the very top of the nation's ruling class.
Ruling class? What the hell are they talking about? Where did I wake up this morning? No matter what some people may think, we don't have a ruler, we have a president. Somebody who presides. Somebody who serves the citizenry. Not a king. Not a grand poo bah. Not a high priestess in charge of blood sacrifices. The way Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin had it planned out, we would elect people to represent us, and we'd let them do so if it suited us.
In the last part of the 19th century it became popular among some segments of wealthy European society to purchase large ranches on the American frontier. Books could be filled with the many examples of the two different cultures clashing, but the story I like best fits my view of this situation and politics in general. Most versions have it taking place up in the Panhandle.
A proper Englishman rode up to a dusty ranch house and found a cowboy shoeing a horse. "I say good man, might there be something available to drink, my throats quite parched?"
Talking out from between the nails he was holding in his lips, the cowboy pointed and said "The well's right there."
The foreigner repeated his statement, but this time the busy Texan only had time to jerk his head in the direction of the well.
When his demand for his horse to be held was met only with a glare, the flustered Englishman said "Tell me, where is your master?"
Spitting the nails from his mouth and standing straight, the dirty cowboy told him "That son of a bitch ain't been born yet."
Panola Regional Match Photos, May 2, 2015.
3 weeks ago
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Fouke Group Creates Memorials for the Boys
Citizens for a Better Community (CBC) is working to make Fouke a better place to live. But they also want to reinforce the community’s patriotic pride as they remember the boys lost in war.
Kenneth Jenkins fought in the army during Operation Desert Storm. Killed during the Gulf War, he is one of many Fouke boys who never made it back home. “That’s why we’re renaming the 71 corridor through Fouke the Kenneth Jenkins Expressway,” says Mayor Terry Purvis.
“Fouke is very patriotic,” he says as he and Ann Fowler show me a mural that was painted by local artists Joe Davis and his son Joey, who have painted two murals in the community.
“That’s why everyone loves this painting,” Purvis says, showing me the wall of the old Fouke bank building that is emblazoned with a bald eagle, the stars and stripes and the words ‘A Tribute to Veterans.’
But a newly renamed expressway and mural aren’t the only two ways Fouke is remembering its veterans and the patriots who supported them. The community, with the help of the CBC has built the Veterans Memorial Park.
“We really got everyone involved,” says Fowler. “Teachers, students, and people in the community all came together to make this happen.”
CBC Chairwoman Nelene Harris, a local science teacher, had visited the Belcher Veterans Memorial in Belcher, La. and returned to Fouke with the dream of creating a similar structure in Fouke. “This memorial became not just my dream,” Harris is quoted as saying at the memorial, “but the dream of a whole community.”
“Nelene was really the driving force behind this project,” Fowler says. “She saw the park as an educational tool, so she wanted to be sure it was located near the schools.”
The park opened in June 2010, directly across the street from the Fouke Schools administration building. Harris was presented with a plaque dedicating the park in her honor that same year.
Students played a big part in building the monument too, Fowler explains. Students designed the metalwork that supports the large panels giving Fouke’s history with various wars. Welding students created the ornate birds and plants that decorate each one.
A 10,000-pound stone monument stands at the heart of the park and is inscribed with the words, ‘A tribute to all veterans who served honorably in the military service of our country – Thanks and well done.’
Surrounding this massive testament of patriotic pride are brick paths, laid out in a starburst pattern. Families purchased bricks from the CBC for $40 each and engraved them with names of their fallen loved ones, including name and official rank.
Bricks have names dating back to the Civil War, like one for Charles A Hutt, 33-AR Infantry who served in the military between 1862 and 1865. However, not every engraved brick contains the names of soldiers from Fouke.
Some people from California purchased bricks for the monument, says Mayor Purvis. So the soldiers listed are really from all over.
The CBC hopes the park will continue to grow, serving as a place of remembrance and a symbol of pride for the community for years to come.
If you’d like to purchase an engraving brick at the memorial, you may contact Nelene Harris at (870) 653-4889 or Ann Fowler at (870) 653-4427 for more information.
We Want to Hear From You!
Know a person, place or event we should highlight on our Small Town Tour? Send your suggestions to [email protected].
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an member station
Latinos in Nevada are struggling to keep up with whites and African Americans in most major categories like: education, economic well-being and business development.
This is according to a new report from the Guinn Center for Policy Priorities.
And not only are Latinos struggling against other groups in Nevada, they are far worse off than Latinos in other Intermountain West states.
What are the biggest challenges for Latinos here in Nevada? What role should government play compared to private industry? Why and how does this affect everyone else?
Nancy Brune, Executive Director of Kenny Guinn Center for Policy Priorities
Andres Ramirez, President, Ramirez Group
Patrick Hickey, Nevada assemblyman
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Usarufa is a language of Papua New Guinea with just 1200 speakers (ISO-639 code "usa"). There's no fluent speakers under the age of 25, so the language must be considered moribund. Before posting recordings of this language online, I needed to get informed consent, so I introduced some speakers to the World Wide Web. We poked around for a while, finding useful sites about about insecticides for dealing with the taro beetle. Then we turned our attention to audio.
I played them a recording of the "last words" of the Jiwarli language of Western Australia. After some questioning looks I explained that this language is now dead, and we were listening to its last speaker before he died. As one they all looked down, shaking their heads in disbelief and saying sorry, sorry, sorry…. It was as if I told them a mutual friend had died. They urged me to put that recording on a cassette tape so they could take it back to their village. That way, everyone would surely understand what will happen to the Usarufa language unless there are serious attempts to revitalize it.
I wasn't prepared for the intensity of their response. Now I'm wondering if a collection of such recordings might be a useful tool in promoting language revitalization, and also in explaining the concept of language archiving. (Thanks to Ima'o Ta'asata, James Warebu, Sivini Ikilele, and Waks Mark for their dedication to the preservation of Usarufa oral culture, and to Aaron Willems and SIL-PNG for facilitating this work.)
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by Eve Blossom
Story-telling is a process for healing. As we hold in our hands the technology to address global problems, we can foster a new world of creativity & community through individual expression & shared visions. Globally, artists and technologists are empowering other artisans and creators by celebrating their spirit, talents and traditions - giving them a stronger voice for their future. Eve Blossom, founder of Lulan Artisans and author of Material Change, will share stories of her journey of creating a business that merges design and social change. Material Change offers actionable holistic models for designers and social entrepreneurs, and explains an open-source model for others to adapt, customize and share. Eve will debut We've, a digital extension of Lulan Artisans: a novel approach for buying, and selling artisanal goods through relationships and story. We've allows new forms of communication and business to evolve from communal creativity, capturing the zeitgeist of the planet.
by Khoi Vinh
What comes after just reading on iPad? A new form of creation that's much closer to consumption than what we saw on desktops and laptops. Mixel co-founder and CEO Khoi Vinh takes a look at the journey that led him to create Mixel, the world's first social collage app. Its goal is to get non-artists making art, and Vinh will look at the ways in which the social network has met, exceeded and fallen short of that goal.
by Andrew Coulton and Kath M Mainland
Arts festivals are all about bringing people together, creating shared experiences and introducing them to cultural gems that they might not otherwise have found. How can festivals make best use of new technology to develop their audiences, enhance the impact of their content and remain relevant in the Information Age? What role can festival data play in the semantic web, and does it have more to offer than just what's on where? How might social platforms, ticketing innovations and mobile applications help audiences to navigate and explore the content available at a major arts festivals? In 2011 we opened our data to the developer community through www.culturehackscotland.com . Culture Hack Scotland was an outstanding event and was one of the strongest ever demonstrations of the value of open data in the arts. Hear how Edinburgh's Festivals Innovation Lab is beginning to answer some of these questions and explore what value the Edinburgh Festivals, a significant test bed environment, can add to the SXSW community.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world, and works with the other 11 major festivals in the city through Festivals Edinburgh.
Turin, once the capital of Italian cinema, has created a tech art scene. Turin's "Share Festival" began six years ago as an international fiesta of Internet art, and has since become famous for installations, interventions, provocations and freedom-of-expression issues. Share director Simona Lodi will show video work by Paolo Cirio, Liens Invisibles, Stelarc, Lia, and Lucas Bambozzi. Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic will describe the work of judging tech art, and how a Texan and a Serbian gleefully participate in a European creative scene.
by Jeff Wilson
Throughout history, technology has been responsible for artistic movements often influencing entire genres. Typically, these movements impacted styles, composition, or more subtle, conceptual meaning implied by the work. In recent years, a few, key technical advances have produced an interesting twist changing not simply popular subjects or composition but changing the way we may experience art.This session will look at how today's technology impacts the industry of art, define a digital "art experience", and what it means to extract work off the gallery walls. We will cover what new ways art will be consumed, how it will be distributed and owned, and what it means to be both an artist and an art lover of the future.
9th–13th March 2012
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Sunday, June 20, 2004
The stories of such discoveries make fascinating reading in their own right. In World War II, the British were building a munitions dump at Tura, outside Cairo, when native workers discovered a hidden cache of ancient manuscripts, including hitherto unknown works of Didymus the Blind. Roger Pearse has an interesting account of the discovery.
Only about 35 books survive of the 142 written by the ancient Roman historian Livy. Throughout the centuries there have been periodic and persistent rumors about the lost books of Livy coming to light. There's a witty and erudite essay on this subject by B.L. Ullman, entitled "The Post-Mortem Adventures of Livy," in his Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2nd edition (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1973), pp. 53-77.
The most recent rumor was a false claim by Dr. Mario Di Martino Fusco in 1924 that he had discovered a copy of the lost books of Livy. The hoax was at first believed even by the eminent classical scholar R.S. Conway, but was finally exploded when A.E. Housman identified a printed facsimile purporting to be a few lines of one of the manuscripts as actually part of Sulpicius Severus' Life of Saint Martin of Tours.
Ullman hopes that the rumors and hoaxes continue, and ends his essay with the words:
When the Lost Books of Livy disappear into Lethe, the River of Oblivion, we shall know that the Renaissance has come to an end and another tombstone may be erected, inscribed on which will be the words: "Hic iacent studia humanitatis et spes librorum Livianorum reperiundorum; requiescant Livi manes in pace." "Here lie humanistic studies and the hopes of finding the books of Livy; may the shade of Livy rest in peace."
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Delta robot with three arms
|Plotting a very rough Fibonacci curve||433.3 KB|
All my projects & progress are available at marginallyclever.com.
This version of the Delta3 is complete. I have mounted it upside down in a box and added a pen to make it a plotter. I could add a dremel to make it a 3-axis CNC or a reprap nozzle to make it a 3d printer. It has fewer parts than most 3-axis CNC and can be very accurate.
I have deprecated this project and now offer a newer version with better, affordable parts on my website.
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A colourful and provocative survey of anarchism in America, the film attempts to dispel popular misconceptions and trace the historical development of the movement.
The documentary is the work of Emmy and Guggenheim Award-winning filmmakers, Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher. They take a road trip to map anarchism as a distinctly American tradition. Starting with the premise that Americans embody anarchist principles of freedom and independence, the filmmakers were not disappointed. Along with archival footage of luminaries like Emma Goldman, they introduce us to Mildred Loomis, 80 years old and sill advocating back to the land individualism; beat poet Kenneth Rexroth; science fiction author Ursula LeGuin; long-distance trucker Li'l John; punk rockers the Dead Kennedys and, among many others, AK Press author Murray Bookchin.
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Showing 1 to 8
of 8 items tagged as books
Provider: Internet Archive (nonprofit organization)
Descriptions: The Internet Archive, a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts, holds a great many free diversions, and many of these are educational-- full-text books, university lectures, music, films, photography and software. There is also the Wayback Machine, for viewing earlier versions of websites: "Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago." In collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind, Internet Archive now also provides free access to more than a million books for blind, sight-impaired and dyslexic readers.
Keywords: books, collaborative, continuing education, culture, digitization, education, full text, general reference, history, images, Internet, libraries, multicultural, multidisciplinary, multilingual, open access, popular, technology, video
Provider: National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health
Descriptions: Features include digitized books viewable with "turning the pages" technology, and oral history audio files. The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine collects, preserves, interprets, and presents materials documenting the history of medicine, biomedical science, health and disease across all time periods and cultures. It provides access to manuscripts, books, photographs, films and other historical resources. The Division promotes, conducts, and facilitates scholarly research and public education through seminars, lectures, exhibitions, film programs, Web sites, databases, publications, catalogs and finding guides.
Keywords: archive, books, digital, digitization, films, history, history of medicine, images, interactive, links, NIH, NLM, video
Provider: Library of Congress and UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
Descriptions: Initiated as a joint project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and launched in 2009, the World Digital Library is a curated collection of a variety of digitized items- books, art, film, periodicals and more, many of them considered primary source materials- representing the cultural identities and histories of UNESCO's member nations through every branch of learning. In the initial exploration one can view thumbnails of content according to time, place, topic, item type or institution.
Keywords: archive, books, collaborative, culture, digital, digitization, films, full text, general reference, history, history of North America, images, international, libraries, maps, monographs, multicultural, multidisciplinary, multilingual, museum, repository, research, serial
Provider: U.S. Government Printing Office
Descriptions: In Beta stage at this writing, FDsys is the new Government Printing Office (GPO) website, which will soon contain all the information from the old GPO site and will incorporate more up-to-date features, like the capability to search all content from a single search box. Presidential documents are posted here, often within days of their inception. This is the best location for finding Congressional bills, documents, hearings and reports, as well as the Congressional Record.
Keywords: books, database, federal agencies, federated search, full text, gateway, general reference, links, multidisciplinary, public administration, public affairs, search engine, U.S. Government
Provider: Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program
Descriptions: This resource is a "...digital collection of resources for students of the history of medicine and for researchers seeking a historical context for epidemiology." (MLA News, Novermber/December 2008.) This collection provides general background information on diseases and epidemics worldwide, and is organized according to significant episodes of contagious disease. A timeline of dates of diseases and epidemics between 1494 and 1948 highlights events covered in the collection. Includes more than 500,000 pages of digitized copies of books, serials, pamphlets, incunabula and manuscripts.
Keywords: books, digital, full text, history of medicine, images, infectious disease, journal, policy, research, sociology
Provider: Project Gutenberg
Descriptions: "Project Gutenberg is the place where you can download over 33,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device. We carry high quality items: Our books were previously published on paper by bona fide publishers and digitized by us with the help of thousands of volunteers. All our ebooks can be easily downloaded: Choose between ePub, Mobipocket, HTML and simple text formats. Our books are free in the United States because their copyright has expired. They may not be free of copyright in other countries. Readers outside of the United States must check the copyright laws of their countries before downloading or redistributing our ebooks."
Keywords: books, collaborative, digitization, free, full text, literature, open access, publishing
Contents: Bibliographic Records, bibliographies, Citations, full text, general reference, images, index, multiple databases, primary source materials
Access Level: Licensed, On-Site Visitor, TMC Academic User
Descriptions: A literature reference database suite designed for all levels of researchers, Literature Resource Center provides biographical, bibliographical and critical content. Full-text articles from scholarly journals and literary magazines are combined with critical essays, work and topic overviews, full-text works, biographies, and more to provide a wealth of information on authors, their works, and literary movements.
Keywords: biographies, books, gateway, humanities, literary criticism, literature, poetry, student
Contents: Abstracts, Citations, index, links
Access Level: Licensed, On-Site Visitor, TMC Academic User
Descriptions: Index of published book reviews.
Keywords: books, culture, literary criticism
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Assessing Journal Quality Guide
Resources for Evaluating Journal Quality
Start by looking up a journal or publisher in the resources listed below.
Tips for Evaluating Journal Quality
A particular publishing peril in recent years is the advent of many "open access" journals with publishing fees that purport to have genuine peer review, yet their contents seem to belie that. Besides examining the articles in fields with which one is familiar, how can quality be determined? There are no "hard and fast" rules that allow one to determine whether a journal is of low quality. A "yes" answer to just one question may not be a problem, but affirmative answers to several of the questions below may be an indicator. Examine the journal's and/or publisher's Web site with these questions in mind.
Is the journal's subject coverage broad and vague? Journals with the true primary purpose of making money from author fees want to be able to accept as wide a variety of papers as possible, so they may have titles such as "Journal of the Social Sciences and Humanities."
Does the journal publisher list many specialized journal titles, and lots of them? An alternate tactic to broad journals is to have specific subject coverage, but list so many titles (dozens to hundreds), that the maintenance of quality has to be questioned, especially when the publisher was recently established. Some of the listed journals might not have had any issues published.
Are the article reviewers and editorial board members of high reputations in their fields? Be aware that even if they are, they may not actually be affiliated with the journal. This can only be determined through contacting the person listed. Searching for an author in Web of Science (covering sciences, social sciences, and humanities) will let you know how much they have published and how many times they have been cited.
Are there many disparate articles in one issue with little or no organization? This tends to be characteristic of the broad, general subject journals. Wide subject coverage; no organization into "case studies," "research notes," etc.; no manuscript history information -- all may be indicators of low quality.
Are there repeat lead authors, sometimes in the same issue? Certain authors, especially in the sciences, are prolific. But multiple articles with the same author leading, or as sole author, published within a year or so in the same open access journal may be cause for question.
Is the journal indexed in multiple selective databases by different publishers? This is something that can be looked up in Ulrich's, and should not be accepted as true based on what the publisher says. Indexing in one database does not guarantee quality. Although journals cannot pay to get indexed in databases, sometimes database publishers slip up and let lower quality journals into their list.
Does anything come up if you search the Internet for "publisher name" scam or "publisher name" fraud? Others may have already found a particular journal or publisher questionable.
Jeffrey Beall, who has pioneered in guarding against predatory open-access publishing, has a more extensive list of criteria.
Be aware that filling out this survey is anonymous, unless you provide an email address. So the librarian cannot directly respond to you without a contact method. You might see your feedback reflected in changes in the guide. Thanks for all input!
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This study presents a synchronic description of the main dialect of the
Muɹinyapata language of North-West Australia.
It is divided into six chapters. The first is introductory placing Muɹinyapata in
the context of Australian languages, giving some background to the area In
which the language is spoken and assessing previous work on this group.
The second chapter provides a phonological description and an account of
morphophonological change. The segmental phonology is presented in a
distinctive feature format. Some tentative rules are advanced to account for
stress. The third chapter establishes the word classes of Muɹinyapata, briefly
discussing their defining characteristics. A preliminary discussion on noun
classification is embarked upon which is given a fuller semantic basis in
chapter six. Chapter four presents the morphological facts of the language:
data which assist the description of verbal morphology are presented in
Appendics 2 and 3.
Chapter five provides a preliminary discussion of Muɹinyapata syntax. A brief
account of the semantics of the language is given in chapter six, with
particular emphasis on noun-classification. Three sample texts are provided
in Appendix 4.
The bulk of the text is concerned with synchronic description of the
phonology and morphology of the language. Their unusual complexity
demand lengthy discussion with a more detailed account of the syntax and
semantics being reserved for a later study.
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Searching the internet has proven useless. All the modern links say it
was used by the German military during WW2, but it never says when it
began to be called NVIS. I saw a couple references to Pat Hawker's
Technical Topics on NVIS and I have the complete antenna collection that
I'll browse for some history.
80s sounds like when the name was invented. I recall commenting at a
radio club meeting when the topic of NVIS was announced that we'd been
doing that for eons, so what's new? The name I guess.
My dad and I started out with a 40m vertical in '55 for our novice
station. After I moved away from home I had a 10m beam and a short 80
meter wire that worked home quite well. Later I got up longer wires but
not very high. When I raised the middle of the 80 meter double extended
zepp to 55 feet, it worked home OK but not as great as when it was at 30
feet end to end.
73, Jerry, K0CQ
On 12/30/2010 9:25 PM, Ken Brown wrote:
>> We used low antennas out of necessity long before the military called
>> them NVIS and on 80 and 40 worked the surrounding states very well for
>> ragchews, nets, and FD.
> When I was a Novice, my mentors called it "short haul skip." One of
> those was a former Air Force radio man, and if NVIS had been a common
> term used by the Air Force, I probably would have heard it from him. I
> did not hear that term until perhaps the 80s. Maybe it did come from the
> military. I'm curious about it's origin. Maybe the Army or Navy used it,
> but I'm pretty sure the Air Force did not use that term back in the 60s
> or 70s.
> DE N6KB
TenTec mailing list
|
>>>>> "Frank" == Frank Oellien
> <Frank.Oellien@stripped> writes:
Frank> Michael Widenius wrote:
>> Any way you can reproduce a table, that you can give us access to,
>> that shows this on Linux with the 3.22.26 version ?
>> If yes, please make a tar of the .frm, .ISM and .ISD files and this
>> mail and ftp it to ftp://www.mysql.com/pub/mysql/secret
>> and we will check this out.
Frank> I have put the tables into your secret folder - mysql_min_bug.tar.gz
Frank> Try this command
mysql> select min(logGI50) from gi50;
Frank> | min(logGI50) |
Frank> | -0.000 |
Frank> 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Frank> With regards
Frank> Frank Oellien
The problem seams to be a key on decimal(7,3).
The easiest way to solve this is to convert the number to a
double(7,3) or remove the key on logGI50, until I can provide a patch
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At 12:30 PM -0500 12/29/00, Ruben I Safir - Brooklyn Linux Solutions CEO wrote:
>Why does SELECT MAKE_SET(1 | 4 ,'hello','nice','world');
>return hello, world.
>There is no 4th element
Set elements have numeric values that are powers of two, because they're
implemented as bit values. 1 | 4 refers to the elements in the first
and third positions. You're not asking for the first and fourth.
Paul DuBois, paul@stripped
|• MAKE_SET||Ruben I Safir - Brooklyn Linux Solutions CEO||29 Dec|
| • Re: MAKE_SET||Paul DuBois||29 Dec|
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usb mass media storage
"Marco Trevisan (Treviño)"
mail at 3v1n0.net
Mon Sep 8 05:43:36 CEST 2008
shawnzier at gmail.com wrote:
>> The host has direct access to the block device, so it is important
>> that /dev/mmcblk0p1 is not mounted on both the phone and the host at
>> the same time (unless it's mounted ro on both).
> What if it was mounted ro on the phone side and rw on the host side? Would that cause problems?
It shouldn't, but I'd like to get a confirmation too :P
Btw I think that the safer way is that of using a "memory-stick" file
saved in SD as explained by Christian Adams...
Treviño's World - Life and Linux
More information about the community
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[PD] g_save-0.1 Storage system with pool
fbar at footils.org
Tue Feb 13 23:50:27 CET 2007
guillaume rabusseau hat gesagt: // guillaume rabusseau wrote:
> I didn't really know sssad-saving system, i think i tried it once... i
> gonna look at how this is done and try to continue learning...
> ....But afterall, no matter, it was a good exercise.
Yes, writing a state saving system is a really good exercise, as it
touches a lot of the deep, important parts of Pd, like execution
order, local and global scoping, abstractions, list processing etc.
I guess you will find several of your ideas realised in sssad as well,
as I saw several of the sssad idioms in your state saver. Another good
one is included in netpd.
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__
More information about the Pd-list
|
Lists Home |
Date Index |
- From: "Sam Gentile" <[email protected]>
- To: "'David Megginson'" <[email protected]>,"'XML Developers' List'" <[email protected]>
- Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 10:13:58 -0400
Thanks for your answers. I'm still a little confused.
> > We have a spec called "XML-Data W3C Note 05 Jan 1998", which
> > discusses schemas. It is not clear from the document what a
> > schema is used for or what it's purpose is. Is it for designing
> > the XML buffer only or is it read by the parser? Is it an
> > extension to XML? Are they even necessary in basic XML?
>>>XML-Data is a note that was submitted to the W3C by Microsoft and a
>>>couple of partners -- it has no official status (a W3C "Note" means
>>>roughly "here's a neat idea from one of our members").
Ok, that's clear.
>>XML 1.0 DTDs and proposed replacements/enhancements such as
>>Microsoft's XML-Data and XML-Dev's XSchema perform three distinct
>>1. Provide a schema for validating the *logical structure*
>> (element/attribute/data) structure of an XML document; as a side
>> effect, structural schemas can also provide enough information to
>> control a guided XML authoring tool.
How is this different from what DTDs do? Don't DTDs validate the *logical
structure* of an XML document?
>>2. Declare the entities (internal strings or external objects) that
>> make up the *physical structure* of an XML document.
Don't DTDs do this?
3. Provide default logical content for an XML document (such as
default values for attributes, though XML-Data goes further).
Some people have argued -- quite convincingly, I think -- that these
roles should be kept separate: they are mixed together right now for
historical compatibility with ISO 8879:1986 DTDs.
How about the question of namespaces? Is this legal XML?
or do you need namespaces?
xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:[email protected]
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:[email protected] the following message;
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:[email protected] the following message;
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:[email protected])
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First entered a band of Ryls from the Happy Valley, all merry little sprites like fairy elves. A dozen crooked Knooks followed from the great Forest of Burzee. They had long whiskers and pointed caps and curling toes, yet were no taller than Button-Bright's shoulder. With this group came a man so easy to recognize and so important and dearly beloved throughout the known world, that all present rose to their feet and bowed their heads in respectful homage, even before the High Chamberlain knelt to announce his name.
"The most Mighty and Loyal Friend of Children, His Supreme Highness--Santa Claus!" said the Chamberlain, in an awed voice.
"Well, well, well! Glad to see you--glad to meet you all!" cried Santa Claus, briskly, as he trotted up the long room.
He was round as an apple, with a fresh rosy face, laughing eyes, and a bushy beard as white as snow. A red cloak trimmed with beautiful ermine hung from his shoulders and upon his back was a basket filled with pretty presents for the Princess Ozma.
"Hello, Dorothy; still having adventures?" he asked in his jolly way, as he took the girl's hand in both his own.
"How did you know my name, Santa?" she replied, feeling more shy in the presence of this immortal saint than she ever had before in her young life.
"Why, don't I see you every Christmas Eve, when you're asleep?" he rejoined, pinching her blushing cheek.
"Oh, do you?"
"And here's Button-Bright, I declare!" cried Santa Claus, holding up the boy to kiss him. "What a long way from home you are; dear me!"
"Do you know Button-Bright, too?" questioned Dorothy, eagerly.
"Indeed I do. I've visited his home several Christmas Eves."
"And do you know his father?" asked the girl.
"Certainly, my dear. Who else do you suppose brings him his Christmas neckties and stockings?" with a sly wink at the Wizard.
"Then where does he live? We're just crazy to know, 'cause Button-Bright's lost," she said.
Santa laughed and laid his finger aside of his nose as if thinking what to reply. He leaned over and whispered something in the Wizard's ear, at which the Wizard smiled and nodded as if he understood.
Now Santa Claus spied Polychrome, and trotted over to where she stood.
"Seems to me the Rainbow's Daughter is farther from home than any of you," he observed, looking at the pretty maiden admiringly. "I'll have to tell your father where you are, Polly, and send him to get you."
"Please do, dear Santa Claus," implored the little maid, beseechingly.
"But just now we must all have a jolly good time at Ozma's party," said the old gentleman, turning to put his presents on the table with the others already there. "It isn't often I find time to leave my castle, as you know; but Ozma invited me and I just couldn't help coming to celebrate the happy occasion."
"I'm so glad!" exclaimed Dorothy.
"These are my Ryls," pointing to the little sprites squatting around him. "Their business is to paint the colors of the flowers when they bud and bloom; but I brought the merry fellows along to see Oz, and they've left their paint-pots behind them. Also I brought these crooked Knooks, whom I love. My dears, the Knooks are much nicer than they look, for their duty is to water and care for the young trees of the forest, and they do their work faithfully and well. It's hard work, though, and it makes my Knooks crooked and gnarled, like the trees themselves; but their hearts are big and kind, as are the hearts of all who do good in our beautiful world."
"I've read of the Ryls and Knooks," said Dorothy, looking upon these little workers with interest.
Santa Claus turned to talk with the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, and he also said a kind word to the shaggy man, and afterward went away to ride the Saw-Horse around the Emerald City. "For," said he, "I must see all the grand sights while I am here and have the chance, and Ozma has promised to let me ride the Saw-Horse because I'm getting fat and short of breath."
"Where are your reindeer?" asked Polychrome.
"I left them at home, for it is too warm for them in this sunny country," he answered. "They're used to winter weather when they travel."
In a flash he was gone, and the Ryls and Knooks with him; but they could all hear the golden hoofs of the Saw-Horse ringing on the marble pavement outside, as he pranced away with his noble rider.
Presently the band played again, and the High Chamberlain announced:
"Her Gracious Majesty, the Queen of Merryland."
They looked earnestly to discover whom this queen might be, and saw advancing up the room an exquisite wax doll dressed in dainty fluffs and ruffles and spangled gown. She was almost as big as Button-Bright, and her cheeks and mouth and eyebrow were prettily painted in delicate colors. Her blue eyes stared a bit, being of glass, yet the expression upon her Majesty's face was quite pleasant and decidedly winning. With the Queen of Merryland were four wooden soldiers, two stalking ahead of her with much dignity and two following behind, like a royal bodyguard. The soldiers were painted in bright colors and carried wooden guns, and after them came a fat little man who attracted attention at once, although he seemed modest and retiring. For he was made of candy, and carried a tin sugar-sifter filled with powdered sugar, with which he dusted himself frequently so that he wouldn't stick to things if he touched them. The High Chamberlain had called him "The Candy Man of Merryland," and Dorothy saw that one of his thumbs looked as if it had been bitten off by some one who was fond of candy and couldn't resist the temptation.
The wax doll Queen spoke prettily to Dorothy and the others, and sent her loving greetings to Ozma before she retired to the rooms prepared for her. She had brought a birthday present wrapped in tissue paper and tied with pink and blue ribbons, and one of the wooden soldiers placed it on the table with the other gifts. But the Candy Man did not go to his room, because he said he preferred to stay and talk with the Scarecrow and Tik-tok and the Wizard and Tin Woodman, whom he declared the queerest people he had ever met. Button-Bright was glad the Candy Man stayed in the Throne Room, because the boy thought this guest smelled deliciously of wintergreen and maple sugar.
The Braided Man now entered the room, having been fortunate enough to receive an invitation to the Princess Ozma's party. He was from a cave halfway between the Invisible Valley and the Country of the Gargoyles, and his hair and whiskers were so long that he was obliged to plait them into many braids that hung to his feet, and every braid was tied with a bow of colored ribbon.
"I've brought Princess Ozma a box of flutters for her birthday," said the Braided Man, earnestly; "and I hope she will like them, for they are the finest quality I have ever made."
"I'm sure she will be greatly pleased," said Dorothy, who remembered the Braided Man well; and the Wizard introduced the guest to the rest of the company and made him sit down in a chair and keep quiet, for, if allowed, he would talk continually about his flutters.
The band then played a welcome to another set of guests, and into the Throne-Room swept the handsome and stately Queen of Ev. Beside her was young King Evardo, and following them came the entire royal family of five Princesses and four Princes of Ev. The Kingdom of Ev lay just across the Deadly Desert to the North of Oz, and once Ozma and her people had rescued the Queen of Ev and her ten children from the Nome King, who had enslaved them. Dorothy had been present on this adventure, so she greeted the royal family cordially; and all the visitors were delighted to meet the little Kansas girl again. They knew Tik-tok and Billina, too, and the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, as well as the Lion and Tiger; so there was a joyful reunion, as you may imagine, and it was fully an hour before the Queen and her train retired to their rooms. Perhaps they would not have gone then had not the band begun to play to announce new arrivals; but before they left the great Throne-Room King Evardo added to Ozma's birthday presents a diadem of diamonds set in radium.
The next comer proved to be King Renard of Foxville; or King Dox, as he preferred to be called. He was magnificently dressed in a new feather costume and wore white kid mittens over his paws and a flower in his button-hole and had his hair parted in the middle.
King Dox thanked Dorothy fervently for getting him the invitation to come to Oz, which he all his life longed to visit. He strutted around rather absurdly as he was introduced to all the famous people assembled in the Throne-Room, and when he learned that Dorothy was a Princess of Oz the Fox King insisted on kneeling at her feet and afterward retired backward--a dangerous thing to do, as he might have stubbed his paw and tumbled over.
No sooner was he gone than the blasts of bugles and clatter of drums and cymbals announced important visitors, and the High Chamberlain assumed his most dignified tone as he threw open the door and said proudly:
"Her Sublime and Resplendent Majesty, Queen Zixi of Ix! His Serene and Tremendous Majesty, King Bud of Noland. Her Royal Highness, the Princess Fluff."
That three such high and mighty royal personages should arrive at once was enough to make Dorothy and her companions grow solemn and assume their best company manners; but when the exquisite beauty of Queen Zixi met their eyes they thought they had never beheld anything so charming. Dorothy decided that Zixi must be about sixteen years old, but the Wizard whispered to her that this wonderful queen had lived thousands of years, but knew the secret of remaining always fresh and beautiful.
King Bud of Noland and his dainty fair-haired sister, the Princess Fluff, were friends of Zixi, as their kingdoms were adjoining, so they had traveled together from their far-off domains to do honor to Ozma of Oz on the occasion of her birthday. They brought many splendid gifts; so the table was now fairly loaded down with presents.
Dorothy and Polly loved the Princess Fluff the moment they saw her, and little King Bud was so frank and boyish that Button-Bright accepted him as a chum at once and did not want him to go away. But it was after noon now, and the royal guests must prepare their toilets for the grand banquet at which they were to assemble that evening to meet the reigning Princess of this Fairyland; so Queen Zixi was shown to her room by a troop of maidens led by Jellia Jamb, and Bud and Fluff presently withdrew to their own apartments.
"My! what a big party Ozma is going to have," exclaimed Dorothy. "I guess the palace will be chock full, Button-Bright; don't you think so?"
"Don't know," said the boy.
"But we must go to our rooms, pretty soon, to dress for the banquet," continued the girl.
"I don't have to dress," said the Candy Man from Merryland. "All I need do is to dust myself with fresh sugar."
"Tik-tok always wears the same suits of clothes," said the Tin Woodman; "and so does our friend the Scarecrow."
"My feathers are good enough for any occasion," cried Billina, from her corner.
"Then I shall leave you four to welcome any new guests that come," said Dorothy; "for Button-Bright and I must look our very best at Ozma's banquet."
"Who is still to come?" asked the Scarecrow.
"Well, there's King Kik-a-bray of Dunkiton, and Johnny Dooit, and the Good Witch of the North. But Johnny Dooit may not get here until late, he's so very busy."
"We will receive them and give them a proper welcome," promised the Scarecrow. "So run along, little Dorothy, and get yourself dressed."
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Here is a story that has lain dormant for seven hundred years. At first it was suppressed by one of the Plantagenet kings of England. Later it was forgotten. I happened to dig it up by accident. The accident being the relationship of my wife's cousin to a certain Father Superior in a very ancient monastery in Europe.
He let me pry about among a quantity of mildewed and musty manuscripts and I came across this. It is very interesting -- partially since it is a bit of hitherto unrecorded history, but principally from the fact that it records the story of a most remarkable revenge and the adventurous life of its innocent victim -- Richard, the lost prince of England.
In the retelling of it, I have left out most of the history. What interested me was the unique character about whom the tale revolves -- the visored horseman who -- but let us wait until we get to him.
It all happened in the thirteenth century, and while it was happening, it shook England from north to south and from east to west; and reached across the channel and shook France. It started, directly, in the London palace of Henry III, and was the result of a quarrel between the King and his powerful brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester.
Never mind the quarrel, that's history, and you can read all about it at your leisure. But on this June day in the year of our Lord 1243, Henry so forgot himself as to very unjustly accuse De Montfort of treason in the presence of a number of the King's gentlemen.
De Montfort paled. He was a tall, handsome man, and when he drew himself to his full height and turned those gray eyes on the victim of his wrath, as he did that day, he was very imposing. A power in England, second only to the King himself, and with the heart of a lion in him, he answered the King as no other man in all England would have dared answer him.
"My Lord King," he cried, "that you be my Lord King alone prevents Simon de Montfort from demanding satisfaction for such a gross insult. That you take advantage of your kingship to say what you would never dare say were you not king, brands me not a traitor, though it does brand you a coward."
Tense silence fell upon the little company of lords and courtiers as these awful words fell from the lips of a subject, addressed to his king. They were horrified, for De Montfort's bold challenge was to them but little short of sacrilege.
Henry, flushing in mortification and anger, rose to advance upon De Montfort, but suddenly recollecting the power which he represented, he thought better of whatever action he contemplated and, with a haughty sneer, turned to his courtiers.
"Come, my gentlemen," he said, "methought that we were to have a turn with the foils this morning. Already it waxeth late. Come, DeFulm ! Come, Leybourn !" and the King left the apartment followed by his gentlemen, all of whom had drawn away from the Earl of Leicester when it became apparent that the royal displeasure was strong against him. As the arras fell behind the departing King, De Montfort shrugged his broad shoulders, and turning, left the apartment by another door.
When the King, with his gentlemen, entered the armory he was still smarting from the humiliation of De Montfort's reproaches, and as he laid aside his surcoat and plumed hat to take the foils with De Fulm, his eyes alighted on the master of fence, Sir Jules de Vac, who was advancing with the King's foil and helmet. Henry felt in no mood for fencing with De Fulm, who, like the other sycophants that surrounded him, always allowed the King easily to best him in every encounter.
De Vac he knew to be too jealous of his fame as a swordsman to permit himself to be overcome by aught but superior skill, and this day Henry felt that he could best the devil himself.
The armory was a great room on the main floor of the palace, off the guard room. It was built in a small wing of the building so that it had light from three sides. In charge of it was the lean, grizzled, leather-skinned Sir Jules de Vac, and it was he whom Henry commanded to face him in mimic combat with the foils, for the King wished to go with hammer and tongs at someone to vent his suppressed rage.
So he let De Vac assume to his mind's eye the person of the hated De Montfort, and it followed that De Vac was nearly surprised into an early and mortifying defeat by the King's sudden and clever attack.
Henry III had always been accounted a good swordsman, but that day he quite outdid himself and, in his imagination, was about to run the pseudo De Montfort through the heart, to the wild acclaim of his audience. For this fell purpose he had backed the astounded De Vac twice around the hall when, with a clever feint, and backward step, the master of fence drew the King into the position he wanted him, and with the suddenness of lightning, a little twist of his foil sent Henry's weapon clanging across the floor of the armory.
For an instant, the King stood as tense and white as though the hand of death had reached out and touched his heart with its icy fingers. The episode meant more to him than being bested in play by the best swordsman in England -- for that surely was no disgrace -- to Henry it seemed prophetic of the outcome of a future struggle when he should stand face to face with the real De Montfort; and then, seeing in De Vac only the creature of his imagination with which he had vested the likeness of his powerful brother-in-law, Henry did what he should like to have done to the real Leicester. Drawing off his gauntlet he advanced close to De Vac.
"Dog !" he hissed, and struck the master of fence a stinging blow across the face, and spat upon him. Then he turned on his heel and strode from the armory.
De Vac had grown old in the service of the kings of England, but he hated all things English and all Englishmen. The dead King John, though hated by all others, he had loved, but with the dead King's bones De Vac's loyalty to the house he served had been buried in the Cathedral of Worcester.
During the years he had served as master of fence at the English Court, the sons of royalty had learned to thrust and parry and cut as only De Vac could teach the art, and he had been as conscientious in the discharge of his duties as he had been in his unswerving hatred and contempt for his pupils.
And now the English King had put upon him such an insult as might only be wiped out by blood.
As the blow fell, the wiry Frenchman clicked his heels together, and throwing down his foil, he stood erect and rigid as a marble statue before his master. White and livid was his tense drawn face, but he spoke no word.
He might have struck the King, but then there would have been left to him no alternative save death by his own hand; for a king may not fight with a lesser mortal, and he who strikes a king may not live -- the king's honor must be satisfied.
Had a French king struck him, De Vac would have struck back, and gloried in the fate which permitted him to die for the honor of France; but an English King -- pooh ! a dog; and who would die for a dog ? No, De Vac would find other means of satisfying his wounded pride. He would revel in revenge against this man for whom he felt no loyalty. If possible, he would harm the whole of England if he could, but he would bide his time. He could afford to wait for his opportunity if, by waiting, he could encompass a more terrible revenge.
De Vac had been born in Paris, the son of a French officer reputed the best swordsman in France. The son had followed closely in the footsteps of his father until, on the latter's death, he could easily claim the title of his sire. How he had left France and entered the service of John of England is not of this story. All the bearing that the life of Jules de Vac has upon the history of England hinges upon but two of his many attributes -- his wonderful swordsmanship and his fearful hatred for his adopted country.
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LA City Council Opens Up More Land To Urban Gardeners
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — The Los Angeles City Council is making new grounds — formerly off limits — available to urban gardeners.
KCAL9’s Greg Mills spoke to one urban gardener who has planted crops in an unlikely place — alongside a parkway in South LA.
“Why am I going to water grass, when I could be watering food and feeding myself and feeding my neighbors?,” said Ron Finley.
He started his garden about three years ago.
“I just wanted to eat healthy food,” Finley says.
The garden is big and occupies land Finley doesn’t own. He said he used to get hassled by the city.
But City Hall had a change of heart and listened to Finley and fellow parkway gardeners from South LA to Los Feliz. The City Council recently voted unanimously to allow parkway gardens.
“I cannot even tell you how overjoyed I am,” said Finley.
Neighbors don’t seem to mind either — especially because he allows them to pick a banana or pomegranate.
“He allows people to come and pick them as long as they don’t destroy the area,” says neighbor Darnell Clay, “which to me is a pretty unselfish thing,”
Finley, a self-taught gardener, has been able to grow everything he wants — except ginger. Finley said he’s tried and tried with no luck.
Mills said there is something else surprising about Finley, owner of an apparent green thumb and grower of organic vegetables — he’s actually a big carnivore and a meat-loving man.
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lion-cachet & dijsselhof & nieuwenhuis, oh my! (the calendars)
three additional dutch artists included wonderful calendars in their bodies of work, and in research- ing van hoytema i've come across them frequently.
The striking impressionist group portrait by Isaac Israels is not only a demon- stration of his dexterity as an artist, but also illustrates the friend- ship that existed between, and is characteristic of, the artists of the Eighties Movement in Amsterdam.
This movement determined the artistic climate in the last decades of the 19th Century. In the present lot, three (decorative) artists are portrayed who worked in the area of the applied arts and were important representatives of the 'Nieuwe Kunst' group, which developed in the Netherlands under the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. Depicted are, from left to right, Carel Adolph Lion Cachet (1864-1945), Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof (1866-1924) and Theodoor Willem Nieuwenhuis (1866-1951).
These three men would become emblematic of the applied arts department of the firm Van Wisselingh & Co., which founded a furniture and crafts workshop in Amsterdam in 1898. Israels' portrait of his three friends and contemporaries was painted in 1894 when they were around thirty years old and thus predates their commercial success with Van Wisselingh & Co.
Israels, who moved to Amsterdam in 1887, soon befriended his peers like the artists and designers that are portrayed in the present lot. From 1888 until 1904 he lived in the house on the 1e Parkstraat 438, which would later become Oosterpark 82 and is currently known as the 'Witsenhuis'. This house was bustling with artists and writers; George Hendrik Breitner (1857- 1923) had his studio there from 1887 until 1891, Israels' friend, the writer Frans Erens (1847-1935), lived there regularly and Willem Witsen (1860-1923) bought the house in 1891.
Dijsselhof lived on the ground floor of the house at the beginning of the 1890's, when he had just achieved his first successes with his paintings of aquarium fish. Just before Witsen married Marie Schorr in 1907, the front room on the first floor was adorned with wallpaper which was decorated with dragonflies and flowers designed by Theo Nieuwenhuis which can still be admired in the 'Witsenkamer' today.
Isaac Israels was, next to Witsen, a key-figure as friend and host in this lively house on the 1e Oosterparkstraat which was so popular amongst artists. (see: Jessica Voeten, Het Witsenhuis, Amsterdam 2003, passim).
It is very likely that Israels painted the portrait of his three friends in his studio by the Oosterpark, which they regularly visited. Some careful planning can be detected in the composition: behind Lion Cachet and Dijsselhof we can see a section of the 'Delftsche Slaolie' lithograph which was designed by Nieuwenhuis in 1893.
The compo- sition of the group portrait, a cropped close-up, can be related to the then developing and popular art of photo- graphy. Breitner, Witsen and Israels were active photographers, and both Witsen and Israels used photographs as study material for their paintings.
A photograph by Witsen or Israels that could have formed the basis of the present lot has not yet been found. This being the case, we may assume that Israels painted this spirited work from life. Nieuwenhuis' role in the creation of the present lot is not confined to his poster for 'Delftsche Slaolie' in the background and his portrayal in the picture.
He also made a carved frame for the panel with decorations burnt into it and monograms above the portraits of the three sitters. Unfortunately, the location of the original frame is presently un- known, but the knowledge that it was made for this painting adds to the value of the work as an extraordinary docu- ment of four 'Tachtigers' which so clearly reflects the creative spirit of the era.
We are grateful to Drs Wiepke Loos for writing the catalogue entry. 1
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Both titles are from Storey Publishing.
The Beginner's Guide to Preserving Food at Home by Janet Chadwick
"You don’t need lots of time or years of experience to preserve garden-fresh fruits and vegetables. Simple step-by-step instructions give you the confidence and know-how to freeze, dry, can, root cellar, and brine your favorite vegetables and fruits. Grate and freeze excess zucchini; it will be perfect in quick breads and muffins all winter long. Pick up a crate of inexpensive, less-than-perfect tomatoes at the farmers’ market and turn them into jars of spicy salsa, or buy a few extra peaches and can a delicious batch of jam. Use the overflow of green beans from your garden to make tasty dilly beans to give as holiday gifts. These techniques and recipes will have you eating locally all year long."
Put 'em Up by Sherri Brooks Vinton
"With simple step-by-step instructions and 175 delicious recipes, Put ‘em Up will have even the most timid beginners filling their pantries and freezers in no time! You’ll find complete how-to information for every kind of preserving: refrigerating, freezing, air- and oven-drying, cold- and hot-pack canning, and pickling. Recipes range from the contemporary and daring — Wasabi Beans, Cherry and Black Pepper Preserves, Pickled Fennel, Figs in Honey Syrup, Sweet Pepper Marmalade, Berry Bourbon, Salsa Verde — to the very best versions of tried-and-true favorites, including applesauce and apple butter, dried tomatoes, marinara sauce, bread and butter pickles, classic strawberry jam, and much, much more. "
Anybody else freeze/can/preserve besides me?
(Over the Counter is a regular feature at A Bookworm's World. I've sadly come the realization that I cannot physically read every book that catches my interest as it crosses over my counter at the library. But... I can mention them and maybe one of them will catch your eye as well. See if your local library has them on their shelves!)
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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The tornado that obliterated contractor Robert Rapley’s house also swept away his livelihood, destroying his saws, his paint sprayer and his truck. Like thousands of others in a region already struggling with high unemployment, he now faces the prospect of trying to recover with no way to earn a living.
“We lost everything,” Rapley said as he climbed on the wreckage. “I can’t even go to work.”
Thousands were thrown out of work by the twisters last week that killed 328 people across seven states in the nation’s deadliest tornado outbreak since the Depression. Hundreds of factories and other businesses were destroyed.
The financial and economic toll is still being tallied, but officials in hardest-hit Alabama — which had more than two-thirds of the dead — said the damage there alone could rival the $1 billion in insured losses the state suffered in Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Many people were struggling to make ends meet even before the twisters flattened neighborhoods in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi, where unemployment in March ranged from 9.2 percent in Alabama to 10.2 percent in Mississippi.
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Blow Flies (Bottle Flies)
Like other true flies, blow flies have only one pair of wings, short antennae, and large compound eyes. Distinguishing them from other kinds of flies, blow flies are often shiny, metallic, blue, green, or black, with hairlike bristles. Special details of antenna anatomy, wing venation, and placement of body bristles are used by experts for exact identifications.
The larvae are grublike maggots that are tan, whitish, or brownish.
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The GCS School Nutrition Department has started its Summer Nutrition Program by offering free breakfast and lunch to students at the schools listed below this summer. Through the Summer Nutrition Program, breakfast and lunch will be served to school age children 18 and under at no cost. The program operates Monday through Thursday. Breakfast will be served between 8 a.m. - 8:30 a.m. and lunch will be served between 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
The Greensboro locations are Alderman Elementary, Hunter Elementary, Irving Park Elementary, Jones Elementary, Peck Elementary, Rankin Elementary, Foust Elementary, Jackson Middle, Hairston Middle and Dudley High.
The High Point locations are Fairview Elementary, Montlieu Academy of Technology, Oak Hill Elementary, Parkview Village Elementary and High Point Central High.
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Board Books - It's a good Thing!
Ah, board books! Don’t you just love these types of books!? Well, at first I wasn’t a big fan. I must admit I was swayed by others thinking and didn’t do my own thinking. Plus, I lacked experience with them, as we really don’t carry this type of book in the elementary (K – 5) library setting. Unfortunately, I went into parenting with a slanted view thinking these books were really only for babies and many were just used to teeth on. I am happy to say that I have now truly experienced board books and have seen what great joy they can bring to little ones.
We have had board books since the wee one was born and have found most of them to be a delight. Many of the books we started with were the basic infant books with simple pictures, words, shapes, numbers, etc. Then about a year ago we added board books with more depth to them. It was then I noticed a number of picture books were being re-released into board book format and I wondered is this really appropriate for the toddler age group. Of course, my ignorance and lack of experience were definitely doing the thinking and speaking here.
1. Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (which is great considered the pages are odd sized)
2. Alyssa Satin Capucilli Illustrated by Henry Cole Katy Duck (looks to be the start of a series)
3. Amy Hest & illstrated by Anita Jeram Kiss Good Night
4. Susan Boynton’s The Barnyard Dance
5. Jany Yolen & illustrated by Mark Teague How Do Dinosaurs Play With Their Friends
Labels: board books
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It’s rumored that Albert Einstein made up this logic puzzle and that he claimed that 98% of the population could not solve it. Are you among the 2%?
There are 5 houses, each of a different color. Each of their owners has a unique heritage, drinks a certain type of beverage, smokes a certain brand of cigarette, and keeps a certain variety of pet. None of the owners have the same variety of pet, smoke the same brand of cigarette, or drink the same beverage.
• The Brit lives in the red house.
• The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
• The Dane drinks tea.
• Looking from the front, the green house is just to the left of the white house.
• The green house’s owner drinks coffee.
• The person who smokes Pall Malls raises birds.
• The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
• The owner of the center house drinks milk.
• The Norwegian lives in the leftmost house.
• The owner who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
• The owner who keeps a horse lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
• The owner who smokes Blue Masters also drinks beer.
• The German smokes Princes.
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
• The owner who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
Who owns the pet fish?
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|GOP Obstruction in Florida. Long Lines|
stretch into the dark because of GOP-shortened
voting periods. The GOP has obstructed voters
nationally as the more Americans voting, the less
likely Republicans can win.
Nate Silver predicts an Obama victory (86 percent probability), also giving the critical state of Ohio an 87 percent probability of voting for Obama.
Obama's winning Ohio means Romney will have to win Wisconsin to have any chance of prevailing, a prospect for Romney that is blocked in Wisconsin since much of the GOP's voter obstruction program was struck down in court as unconstitutional.
Silver rates Obama winning Wisconsin as a 94 percent probability. Silver also says Virginia is a likely Obama state, giving president Obama a total 307 electoral votes (270 to win).
With a slight, unexpected lift provided by Hurricane Sandy, Mother Nature’s October surprise, President Barack Obama appears poised to win his second term tomorrow. Our final Electoral College projection has the president winning the key swing states of Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wisconsin and topping Mitt Romney, with 290 electoral votes.Sabato predicts a Romney victory in Virginia, differing from Silver on this swing state.
In Wisconsin, Silver and Sabato predict a Tammy Baldwin win over hedge fund consultant, Tommy Thompson, with Silver giving Baldwin a 77 percent probability of winning.
By the way climate change denier, George Will, predicts a Romney landslide.
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Despite many high-end retailers in China reporting a slower growth rate this year compared with 2011, there is still a clamor of brands wanting to get into China and open new stores in the hundreds of new malls opening across China.
These malls are doing a great job of attracting the biggest international retailers and giving people the option of dressing head-to-toe in foreign brands. Meanwhile, many Chinese are still happy to mix and match designer labels with a wide range of nameless or non-logo items For these, Chinese often shop in the wide array of markets prevalent in every city across the country.
China has amazing markets for fashion and accessories shopping with wide ranges of merchandise at affordable prices, some of these markets are even the busiest shopping destinations of all. The downside of markets in China is that a great proportion of the merchandise is counterfeit, yet as outlined in this piece on Taobao, millions of Chinese are quite content to knowingly purchase fake goods.
Shopping in the country’s markets can be an exciting and rewarding experience and you may just discover a special one-of-kind item that you can purchase for next to nothing.
In China entrepreneurial street vendors regularly set up makeshift markets in popular shopping districts, train stations and generally anywhere with high pedestrian flows. These street vendors sell mix of counterfeit fashion products and other random merchandise cunningly sourced directly from factories or on the grey market. They display their wares on car boots, blankets or tables complete with portable clothing racks and mirrors.
While illegal, they are often tolerated by authorities and add a certain vibrancy to the city as they attract people and create their own retailing atmosphere.
One of Beijing’s most fascinating clothing markets is dubbed the ‘Beijing Zoo’ market. Aptly named, this multi-building, multi-level market often feels more like a jungle or a rabbit-warren-cum-maze than a fashion and accessories market.
For the uninitiated, this market completely overwhelms visitors as thousands of vendors try to hustle any and every fashion item known to man. At their wholesale prices you can opt to buy one, or one thousand of any item and its not uncommon to see non-Chinese buying bulk merchandise here to ship overseas for resale.
Products sold at the Zoo Market range from nameless brands and Chinese brands all the way to a selection of top international brands. Many of the products are outright fakes and others appear to be legitimate products with defects that should have been destroyed at the factory but find their way into the markets. The problem is you never really know what you’re buying, but there are still great discoveries and things to buy.
For aspiring fashion designers China provides a viable ecosystem to design and make your own fashion collections. Firstly, fabric is cheap and designers are free to roam massive markets to find fabrics, buttons, zippers, sequins and anything required for making garments. Secondly, China’s cheap labor pool gives designers an economical way of producing samples with tailors and seamstresses able to cater to designer’s requirements for relatively little cost.
Muxiyuan is the biggest and best fabric market in Beijing. Only 20 minutes drive southwest from the CBD, Muxiyuan Fabric Market is distinctly more ‘ghetto’ than most other parts of the city. Chances are you’ll come across a fishmonger selling the day’s catch in-between reels of fine cashmere and mass-produced mannequins, yet its still well worth a visit.
While the big modern malls full of entertainment and dining facilities are the future of retail in China, there are still plenty of other ways for consumers to access fashion products in China. For those wishing to find something unique and well priced one of China’s clothing markets is bound to hold a few treasures waiting to be uncovered.
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It’s no surprise that progressives at the turn of the twentieth century supported minimum wages and restrictions on working hours and conditions. Isn’t this what it means to be a progressive? Indeed, but what is more surprising is why the progressives advocated these laws. A first clue is that many advocated labor legislation "for women and for women only."
Progressives, including Richard Ely, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the Webbs in England etc., were interested not in protecting women but in protecting men and the race. Their goal was to get women back into the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic duties and competing with men for work.
Unlike today’s progressives, the originals understood that minimum wages for women would put women out of work – that was the point and the more unemployment of women the better!
Much more on the secret history of the minimum wage in Tim Leonard‘s paper, Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work.
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The Bible Lessons:
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
1 Peter 1:3-9
The Prayer of the Day:
Almighty and eternal God, the strength of those who believe and the hope of those who doubt,
may we, who have not seen, have faith in you and receive the fullness of Christ's blessing,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
1. Last Sunday was the first in the seven-Sunday Season of Easter. The risen Jesus, the New Testament tells us, walked among and taught His followers for forty days following His resurrection. (Paul says that more than five-hundred of Jesus' followers, or disciples, saw Hims after His resurrection.) The Easter season therefore, incorporates forty days plus ten days, recalling the time between Jesus' ascension into heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, traditionally described as the birthday of the Church.
2. This Sunday, as on all the Sundays of Easter, the only lesson from the Old Testament is the Psalms. Usually, the first lesson also comes from the Old Testament. But during Easter, the first lessons are drawn from the New Testament book of Acts. Acts is the second volume of Luke the Evangelist's two-volume work, the first being the Gospel that bears his name.
Acts gives the early history of the Church from the day of the resurrected Jesus' ascension through approximately 60-65AD. It recounts the tale of how a group of not especially reliable witnesses of Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection carried the Good News that forgiveness of sin and new life belongs to all who believe in Christ first to their fellow Jews and then into the world beyond. Within thirty years of Christ's resurrection, the Church was becoming established and growing throughout the Mediterranean basin.
Acts says that this happened not because the first Christians were more able than others. Nor did they gain thousands of converts through power or coercion. The early Church knew the truth of Paul's affirmation that believers are their strongest and most convincing when they are weak, that is, dependent not on themselves, their own cleverness, or their native persuasiveness, but when they are utterly dependent on God's Spirit to give them strength and inspiration. This fact may explain why the Church of today is in the greatest risk of extinction in places where Christians are likelier to be more well-off and comfortable. Wealth and ease can delude us into believing that we are self-sufficient. In places like Africa and Asia, people know better. There, the growth of the Church makes Christianity, in 2008, the fastest-growing religion in the world.
1. Acts 2:14a, 22-32: The first lesson is part of the sermon which the apostle Peter preached on the first Pentecost and that will be the first lesson on Pentecost Day in a few weeks.
In both of his New Testament writings, Luke, himself a Jew, perhaps writing to a predominantly Jewish audience, is at pains to emphasize the consistency between the Old Testament and the ways in which God revealed Himself to ancient Israel and the ministry of Jesus in New Testament times.
Foreign to Luke and the incidents he recounts both in his Gospel and in the ministry of the early Church is any notion that Jesus represents a "new covenant" (or a "new testament"). That's an idea gets more from reading John's Gospel.
In this lesson, as in Jesus' appearances to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the emphasis is to show how Jesus fulfilled what God always planned to do from Old Testament times.
2. Psalm 16: In his sermon recorded by Luke in Acts, Peter quotes from Psalm 16, although he takes some liberties with the passage, presumably because, as happens when I teach classes sometimes, he's citing it from memory.
3. The psalm is called, "A Miktam of David." As explained by a note in The Life Application Bible, "Miktam comes from a term that may mean 'to cover.' It could mean a covering of the lips, a silent prayer, or a prayer to be covered (a plea for protection)."
4. What so intrigues me about this psalm is its emphasis on human volition in choosing one's god. (Our "god" is whatever is of ultimate importance to us. The Bible emphasizes that there is really only one God and urges all people to choose Him as their ultimate foundation and allegiance.) In verse 4, we're told, "Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows..." In verse 5, the psalmist declares, "The Lord is my chosen portion..."
5. 1 Peter 1:3-9: First Peter, one of my favorite books of the Bible, is a letter meant to be circulated among Christians living in Asia Minor, located in what is today Turkey and part of the Roman Empire. Traditionally, it's been believed that this letter was written about 62AD to Christians facing persecution and marginalization for their faith in Christ.
6. Here, Peter calls attention to how God can use our trials of faith to strengthen our faith, increasing our dependence on the God we know through Jesus Christ.
7. Verses 8 and 9 anticipate our Gospel lesson and may reflect Peter's memory of the very incident involving Thomas and Jesus that makes up part of it. The "outcome of your faith" in Christ, Peter tells believers who never saw Jesus, is "the salvation of your souls." The same promise belongs to believers in Jesus today.
The Gospel Lesson: John 20:19-31
19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 24But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
26A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” 30Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
A Few General Comments:
1. This passage recounts the second and third appearances of the resurrected Jesus in John's Gospel. There is a fourth appearance to come, in John 21.
2. As Brian Stoffregen points out, in each of the resurrection appearances recorded by John:
...words and sight are important -- although neither Greek words: logos nor rhema are used. The first appearance ends with Mary announcing [aggello -- only occurrence in NT] to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord" and then telling them what Jesus had told to her (20:18).Verse-by-verse comments: v. 19: (1) The phrase "the first day of the week" is deliberate and significant. The creation motif is strong in the Gospel of John, starting with its opening echoes of Genesis' first creation account and the designation of Jesus as "the Word" who was both God and with God before the universe came into being. Jesus has come, according to both John's Gospel and the writings of Paul to usher in a new creation (Second Corinthians 5:17). The rabbis often taught that creation fell into sin on the seventh day and that God would renew His creation or create anew on a new first day, sometimes called the eighth day. (John also likes to speak of things happening on the eighth day or eight days later.)
The second appearance results in the disciples telling Thomas, "We have seen the Lord" (20:25) -- (the same words that Mary had used). The same word is used by Jesus to Thomas in v. 29: "Have you believed because you have seen me?" This suggests that believing involves more than just seeing the risen Lord. Each of these verbs is in the perfect tense, which implies a past action with continuing effect in the present. They saw something in the past and that seeing continues to affect their lives in the present.
The writer concludes the third appearance with his statement about the purpose of the declaration of his words in writing. The story does not end with "seeing the Lord," but by believing and sharing the message.
(2) M. Craig Barnes, the wonderful preacher, suggests that disciples were afraid of their fellow Jews not just because of the possibility of their being killed, but also because they were ashamed for their disloyalty to Jesus.
(3) "Peace be with you" was a common greeting in Old and New Testament cultures. There is though, a particular irony in its use here and a particular need the disciples would have felt for God's peace.
v. 2o: (1) Jesus allows the disciples to see His wounds, confirming evidence that the full-embodied form before them is the Savior they had seen die.
(2) After satisfying themselves that this is Jesus and He is risen, the disciples rejoice. The only basis for joy that a Christian has--indeed, the only way people can call themselves Christian--is when they too, have their own satisfaction seen, for us through the eyes of faith, that Jesus is risen. Paul writes:
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (First Corinthians 15:12-19)v. 21: (1) Jesus underscores the peace that He gives by repeating this blessing to the disciples.
(2) Through Jesus, we're deputized and empowered to share the Good News as He had been. This echoes words from Jesus' high priestly prayer found in John 17.
v. 22: This is a sort of Pentecost, when you think of it. (Acts 2) The word spirit is pneuma in the Greek of the New Testament and ruach in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Both words can mean wind, breath, and spirit.
In the second Genesis creation account, God breathes His ruach into inanimate dust and the first man comes to life.
In the first creation account, God's Spirit, like a mighty wind, bears down on the stormy waters of primeval chaos and life comes into being.
According to John's Gospel, when Jesus exhaled His final breath on the cross, He literally "gave up His spirit." (John 19:30)
Through the impartation of His Spirit, Jesus, God-enfleshed, creates the Church, the community of believers in Him who proclaim forgiveness of sin to all who repent and turn to Christ and the need for repentance and believe to all.
v. 23: "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Here, Jesus entrusts what's called "the Office of the Keys" to the Church.
Martin Luther explains this in The Small Catechism:
What is the Office of the Keys?Christ not only conveys this frightening authority to the Church in John 20:23, but also in Matthew 18:18, where He says:
It is that authority which Christ gave to his church to forgive the sins of those who repent and declare to those who do not repent that their sins are not forgiven.
Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.v. 24: (1) Thomas' nickname, the Twin or Didymus, has often been seen as an indicator of "double-mindedness" on his part. This would fit well with James' New Testament admonition to believers who don't really believe:
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. (James 4:8)That's because Thomas always struggled with unbelief.
In John 11, with word already having arrived that the Jewish authorities are intent on having their Roman overlords execute Jesus, Jesus announces that His friend Lazarus has died and He must go to him and wake him from death. Thomas says to the others, "Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
Given what we know about Thomas, this isn't piety, but sarcasm. It makes no sense to him for Jesus to get closer to those who conspire against him. Nor does it dawn on him, in spite of all that he's seen to this point, that Jesus can raise Lazarus from the dead.
(2) We often often call the Twin, Doubting Thomas. But as Brian Stoffregen points out, the text, in the original Greek, never speaks of Thomas as one having doubts. The battle raging inside of Thomas throughout is instead, between belief and unbelief.
v. 25: An interesting question to consider is where Thomas was when Jesus first appeared to the others? I don't know the answer to that.
v. 26: (1) A whole week has passed; it's another first day of the week. Once more, Jesus transgresses locked doors, indicating that He is no longer limited by time and space as He had been before His death and resurrection.
(2) Once again, Jesus greets the disciples with the words, "Peace be with you."
v. 27: (1) Jesus goes directly to Thomas with the evidence of His resurrection. I think that there's an important principle at play here: If we want to believe, Christ will help us to believe.
(2) Jesus doesn't tell Thomas, "don't doubt." (Although that's not a terrible translation.) He literally says, "Be not faithless; be faithful." The point is that we must make a decision whether to allow God to create faith in us or not. We must cease and desist from our resistance and ask God to do this. We must put our dukes down and let God be God.
v. 28: To me, Thomas' response is so ironic. The faithless, double-minded one issues the most emphatic and all-inclusive confession of Jesus to be found in the Gospels: "My Lord and my God!"
v. 29: These words are really about all of us who haven't seen the risen Jesus (YET) and still believe in Him.
vv. 30-31: (1) I've called this the mission statement of John's Gospel.
(2) The unspoken implication here is this: I've told you everything you need to know in order to believe in Jesus Christ. To come to faith in Christ, we don't need more evidence; we only need to surrender! This is the choice of faith that Psalm 16:4 and 5 mention.
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The installation of high resolution cameras should worry everyone, it's only a matter of time before they are everywhere and every movement we make will be tracked.
Fire a gun and your location can be pinpointed, your face photographed and your identity instantly determined -- all thanks to a new technology tag team.
When Safety Dynamics’ acoustic sensors detect a gunshot, they zero in on the shooter’s location and point a high-resolution camera at his or her face. Airborne Biometrics Group’s FaceFirst software then runs the shooter’s image against a biometric database to determine identity, even creating a new record if it can’t find one.
The companies say this is the world’s first such detector to instantly ID a shooter, and aim to make it available to law enforcement agencies and private physical security firms.
"Facial recognition is a technology that captures individual faces in real time – in photos or video – and give precise identification based on database photographs and to do this, they provide service facial recognition software which is known as FaceFirst. This allows you to identify individuals with prior arrest records, suspected shoplifters and persons of interest on the internal watch/ban lists."
It provides an affordable way to reduce crime as it has real-time, government-grade facial identification technology which instantly matches with a huge central database thereby providing an alert in seconds so the crime can be stopped before it happens.
It is the only complete, turnkey facial recognition service available today.
It uses the world’s most highly developed facial recognition software and support is available seven days a week during business hours. If there are special requirement, you can contact us.
You can select your own facial databases and add or delete individual records at will.
You can also choose your delivery system whether it be e-mail, SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), cash register alerts or log-only and they provide the complete installation service.
They have a massive, centrally-managed database and server farm at their headquarters which allows us to provide you with state-of-the-art technology for much, much less than other facial recognition firms.
- Provides automated alerts in real time to cell phones, PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant), computers, cash registers.
- Utilizes your filed-and-forgotten lists of persons of interest.
- Customized database access – your watch list, lists from other participating companies and public databases you choose.
- FaceFirst operator center allows your operators to optionally verify identifications when an automated match is not possible.
- Affordable for all applications, because the heart of the system is managed off-site.
- No technical jargon to learn, no need for time-consuming training.
- Easy to integrate with existing security systems.
- Inconspicuous camera.
- Doesn’t affect normal traffic patterns.
- Lightning fast – up to 1 million facial comparisons per second.
- Operates up to 100 feet from subject.
Gun-shot detection and facial recognition technologies have proliferated in recent years: Safety Dynamics competes with other solutions for threat recognition and localization such as Shotspotter, which relies on wide-area acoustic surveillance and GPS technology to triangulate the source of gunshots.
It goes a step further by adding facial recognition, an area in biometrics that has made huge progress in the past decade. Today’s systems often exploit 3D algorithms to boost accuracy, for example.
The company says the successful identification rate has improved from approximately 75 percent ten years ago to better than 95 percent by 2006 in government-sponsored tests. In tests run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, its technology was given top ranking.
Companies are also discouraged from identifying people where they would not want to be identified and give a bathroom or locker room as an example.
Software that identifies facial images such as an “app that allows users to identify strangers in public places, such as on the street or in a bar” is also discouraged by the FTC.
They are also encouraged to ensure the facial images are secure, notify people their faces are being captured and retained and obtain express permission for using the image.
Facial recognition technology has the potential to both better protect civilians and their privacy as well as invade it.
FaceFirst (Video) demo: http://www.facefirst.com/demo.html
Police are testing a hand-held version of FaceFirst.
San Diego, CA - A groundbreaking new facial recognition system is being tested in San Diego. It can identify faces in a split second.
"We believe facial recognition will be in every day society," said San Diego native Joseph Saad.
Saad is the business development director for FaceFirst, the Camarilo, Calif. based company that has become the first to develop software that makes facial recognition almost instantaneous. Right now, there are limitations to facial recognition systems. Once cameras spot a person, it could take some five minutes to make a match. By that time, the person could be long gone.
Those concerns have limited facial recognition to places like airports and casinos, until now.
Using unique algorithms, FaceFirst can compare millions of photos per second, which can lead to a match in one second.
10News has learned an unnamed law enforcement agency in San Diego County has been testing a handheld version for about five months.
"If they spot someone who doesn't have identification, they can take their picture with their phone and immediately get a result," said Saad.
10News was told the software has led to several local arrests.
FaceFirst is now looking to expand beyond law enforcement into the military and retail, where photos of shoplifters can be stored and would-be criminals spotted the moment they enter into a store simply by showing their face.
The San Diego chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union tells 10News, "Americans should be able to move about and not live under the constant watchful camera lens like characters in a George Orwell novel."
In response, FaceFirst points out that databases used for face matches usually are filled with criminals and suspects.
Facial recognition software can now reveal almost everything about us.
Carnegie Mellon University researcher Alessandro Acquisti says that he has proven that most people can be identified through one photograph.
Acquisti found that the convergence of facial recognition software with social networks like Facebook tilt those odds wildly in favor of the would-be exposer, or stalker.
Acquisti searched for dating site users within 50 miles of a zip code, found about 6,000, and then found 110,000 Facebook profiles where users said they lived near that same zip code. After eliminating some profiles that didn’t match his criteria, he instructed computers to churn through about 500 million pairs of possibilities.
It would take a human about 2 million hours to compete such a task, but Carnegie Mellon’s cloud computing cluster got results in about 15 hours. One in 10 members of the dating site were positively “outed” by the database search. A bit of fine-tuning — limiting the geographic area further or allowing approximate matches — produced even better results. And one sobering reminder: The researchers didn’t even need to log in to Facebook to get these results.
Acquisti’s team enjoyed even better results when they could obtain photographs themselves for matching purposes. Random students who agreed to be photographed on the Pittsburgh campus of Carnegie Mellon could be positively identified at three times the initial rate — or more than 30 percent.
The researchers didn’t stop there. Next, they linked the photos and names to student likes and dislikes gleaned from their profiles, with about 75 percent accuracy. Then, they combined this effort with work Acquisti had done in 2009 on predicting Social Security numbers, and found that they could predict the Social Security number for 28 percent of the subjects within four guesses. Finally, they built a mobile phone application that could achieve the same results while wandering around campus.http://nhne-pulse.org/facial-recognition-software-can-now-reveal-almost-everything-about-us/
Store mannequins that spy on consumers.
Mannequins in fashion boutiques are now being fitted with secret cameras to 'spy' on shoppers' buying habits.
Benetton is among the High Street fashion chains to have deployed the dummies equipped with technology adapted from security systems used to identify criminals at airports.
From the outside, the $5,072 EyeSee dummy looks like any other mannequin, but behind its blank gaze it hides a camera feeding images into facial recognition software that logs the age, gender and race of shoppers.
This information is fed into a computer and is 'aggregated' to offer retailers using the system statistical and contextual information they can use to develop their marketing strategies.
The EyeSee looks ordinary enough on the outside, with its slender polystyrene frame, blank face and improbable pose. Inside, it’s no dummy. A camera embedded in one eye feeds data into facial-recognition software like that used by police. It logs the age, gender, and race of passers-by.
Demand for the device shows how retailers are turning to technology to help personalize their offers as growth slows in the $245 billion luxury goods industry. Bain & Co. predicts the luxury market will expand 5 percent in 2012, less than half last year’s rate.
“Any software that can help profile people while keeping their identities anonymous is fantastic,” said Uché Okonkwo, executive director of consultant Luxe Corp. It “could really enhance the shopping experience, the product assortment, and help brands better understand their customers.”
The mannequin, which went on sale last December and is now being used in three European countries and the U.S., has led one outlet to adjust its window displays after revealing that men who shopped in the first two days of a sale spent more than women, according to Almax.
A spokesman for Benetton declined to elaborate on where or why the clothier is using the EyeSee.
Max Catanese, chief executive officer of the 40-year-old mannequin maker, declined to name clients, citing confidentiality agreements. Five companies, including leading fashion brands, are using a total of “a few dozen” of the mannequins with orders for at least that many more, he says.
Burberry Group Plc (BRBY) and Nordstrom Inc. (JWN) are among retailers that say they aren’t on the list. Even so, they are helping blur the line between the physical shopping experience and Web retailing by setting up WiFi, iPads and video screens at their outlets to better engage shoppers.
Nordstrom, a U.S. chain of more than 100 department stores, says facial-recognition software may go a step too far.
Others say profiling customers raises legal and ethical issues. U.S. and European Union regulations permit the use of cameras for security purposes, though retailers need to put up signs in their stores warning customers they may be filmed. Watching people solely for commercial gain may break the rules and could be viewed as gathering personal data without consent, says Christopher Mesnooh, a partner at law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse in Paris.
How can you protect your privacy from surveillance cameras?
First, you need to understand how the technology works. There are certain points on the face that are targeted by the software: particularly eyes, nose, and mouth; where they meet, and the distance between them. The trick is to obscure these points without drawing undue attention to yourself through your efforts to camouflage them.
Black geometric shapes painted on the face seem to “fool” the devices into not recognizing the photo as a human face. However, it isn’t exactly subtle to walk around with black triangles and squares painted randomly on one’s face. One researcher from NYU, Adam Harvey, has been working on reverse engineering the technology in order to protect privacy. In the photo below, the faces with the red squares around them were identifiable by the software.
The places you want to obscure are:
- Distance between the eyes
- Width of the nose
- Depth of the eye sockets
- The shape of the cheekbones
- The length of the jaw line
Hats, hoodies and big sunglasses can help obscure some of the targeted facial areas but can also make you look suspicious, especially if the weather conditions don’t support the wearing of those items.
If you are identified, take steps to limit the amount of information that is available about you.
- Limit your use of photographs on photosharing websites like Picasa and Photobucket.
- Don’t provide personal information about yourself and your family on social media sites like Facebook.
- Check your privacy settings on Facebook to be sure that others cannot “tag” you in photographs.
- Don’t use a photograph of yourself as a profile picture on Facebook – use a pet, a cup of coffee or something unidentifiable. Profile pictures cannot be made private.
- Resist the urge to have your work place, your Alma Mater, and your family members linked to your Facebook profile.
- Do some Google searches of yourself and see what information comes up. Take steps to remove as much information as possible.
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Hello, Nichelle,Originally Posted by Nichelle14
I'm puzzled, because it is not clear for me, what you mean. Do you mean:
So sorry I can't help you.
Here's a general technique that may help. I'll tackle the example . The trick is to write down a function for which the sum is a special value. Here we consider , so that you want . We look at in order to be able to integrate term by term. So is the derivative of , which is . Hence and your sum is .
When you have a series of the form:Originally Posted by malaygoel
with and numerical constants,
we consider the function:
each term of this is obviously the derivative wrt of:
So we can integrate term by term to get:
Now if RHS is a geometric series and may be summed:
(you will need to check this last sum, I did it in a bit of a rush )
Now you need only play around with the values of a, b and c (and the odd
limiting process to get the required result).
This is quite a common trick employed to find the sum of series.
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"A Russian city ...." Fergana Things to Do Tip by TheWanderingCamel
Fergana Things to Do: 17 reviews and 63 photos
...named for a 9th century astronomer (al-Farghani - or to give him his full title - Abu'l-Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani), Fergana (or as the Uzbeks spell it - Farg'ona) was founded in 1876 to be the regional centre for the Tsarist regime that had annexed the Khanates of Turkestan (Bukhara, Khiva and Kokhand) one by one as Russia and Great Britain played out the tactical battles of brinkmanship known now as The Great Game. The collapse of the Soviet empire a century later saw the Russians move out, leaving behind a city built on a Russian model of broad tree-lined streets dotted with Russian-style buildings, some of which have been put to new uses whilst others are left empty and abandoned.
There's not much in Fergana for tourists to see or do but, as the airport is here along with most of the hotels catering to tourist groups, this is where you'll probably end up staying, using the town as a base for exploring this part of the Fergana Valley. Margilan is nominally 11 km away - in reality the two towns are all but conjoined. Kokhand and Rishtan are a comfortable day-long excursion. These three towns together take up most of the time allocated to the area for those on an organised tour - independent travellers can make their own decisions about how long to stay and how to spend their time - even so, in all likelihood, Fergana will only earn itself a few hours of all but the keenest sightseer's time.
Having said that, the centre of town is a pleasant place for a stroll before dinner. Al-Fargani himself has pride of place in the huge park that bears his name, the gardens and fountains around his statue are popular with wedding parties and families out for an evening outing. The grand green building near the park entrance on Mustakillik Kushasi was built in 1877 as the residence of the Russian military governor - now it's the regional theatre. Across the street, the Tsum department store has a style all its own and, if you are a total bazaar-junkie, you could double-dose by visiting both Fergana and Margilan's on the one day.
I don't know what we missed by not visiting the Museum of Local Studies, not a lot if Wanderboy43's comments are anything to go by.
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Family and friends offer better examples of decency than politicians, celebrities or Olympians, a new poll has revealed.
Seven out of ten people fear levels of decency are on the decline in modern Britain – while most believe family and friends are more influential than celebrities or sports stars.
Some 69 per cent say morals are falling, according to a Harris Interactive poll for Metro published this week.
Only one in 20 actually believes behavior is getting better nowadays – though this rises to 15 per cent among youngsters.
Recent weeks have brought widespread acclaim for Team GB’s Olympians – not only their athletic achievements, but also their behaviour and demeanour.
Yet only one-quarter of people say they look to sportsmen and women for guidance on how to behave themselves.
This is even lower than the 26 per cent who follow the lead of celebrities or 34 per cent picking public figures – chiefly, politicians.
By contrast, just over half believe their local community is among the most significant influences – and 65 per cent opt to follow family and friends.
The survey also showed one in four believe law-changes are needed to enforce better standards of behaviour, while 30 per cent want better control of the media.
However, the majority – some 72 per cent – suggested everyone has a responsibility to boost decency levels, whether in their own day-to-day lives or across society as a whole.
Harris Interactive surveyed 1,037 people between July 31 and August 7 as part of the kick-off a new Metro campaign, supported by ING Direct, to explore attitudes to decency and encourage people to do their bit.
Over the coming weeks we will be identifying news stories that are evidence of decency with the orange stamp and also launching a hunt for some of the nation’s most decent people.
For more information and to nominate someone you think is a champion of decency for a reward worth £1000 head to the online hub at the address below.
For a daily dose of decency head to www.metro.co.uk/ingd
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Thorn's lovely solstice poem got the better of me. So on my part, today I offer a little scientistic myth.
There are four forces in the universe. Gravity bends the universe into its shape from end to end, attracts and never repels, but is by far the weakest of these forces. Electricity and magnetism, one and the same in the eye of Nature's God — attracting, repelling, and turning — is the second weakest force, far stronger than gravitation. This second force accounts for almost everything we know: the strength of stone, the flow of water, the kiss of wind, the source of fire's energy. Even light itself is a ripple in it.
There are two stronger forces, and one of them powers the heart of the Sun.
In the heart of the Sun, the press of the Sun's enormous weight makes a world unlike anything we can touch. In the heart of the Sun, the hydrogen and helium we know as wisps lighter than air are a dozen times the density of lead — pressed until they are no longer gasses, nor even anything like the liquids or solids we know, but a plasma like a soupy flame.
In the heart of the Sun, there are not atoms but the hearts of atoms, nuclei rattling among the electrons which would cloak them on Earth, shoulder to shoulder but not bound together. The second weakest force in the universe tries to drive the nuclei apart from one another while the weakest force presses them together and the heat whirls them in a mad dance. In this unearthy mælstrom those nuclei collide. And then another force, one with far greater strength and far lesser reach then its two familiar sibilings, takes hold and grafts the nuclei together.
A fire is powered by the release of energy bound in knots of the twins electricity / magnetism. So is your flesh. But the Sun is powered by the release of energy bound up in that far stronger force which circumscribes the nuclei. The strength of the hearts of atoms warms the heart of our Sun. As nuclei cleave together, energy escapes as a ripple of light. Thus the inconceivably thick plasma deep in the Sun is awash in light, which bounces and spins through it.
It takes a long time for a ray of light to find its way to the Sun's surface, where it can finally live its destiny to soar unobstructed through the vacuum of space — and perhaps to come to rest on the world we know. The light you see today was born before anything human walked. It has been a long time coming.
Remember the Sun's gifts today.
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A vintage ad from 1940. In another one, they described it as a hat with the “crown slopped rakishly”.
Under a “Keep it under your Stetson” campaign, the company created a number of ads during World War 2 that were very much in line with other slogans used at the time: “Let’s bring him home quicker!”, “Loose Talk Can Cost Lives!”, “Idle Words Make Busy Subs!”. They also offered a number of “freedom” inspired models for both men and women.
Not quite willing to buy one online yet, I instead stopped by Seattle’s only hat store – Byrnie Utz Hats. It’s been open since 1934 and the interior decor probably hasn’t changed much since. Brands carried: Borsalino, Stetson, Dobbs, Christys, Scala, and many many more.
After about spending an hour in the store trying on and comparing panamas, I picked out one – a Stetson. (next post)
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High-speed 4G LTE-based in-flight connectivity service from AT&T is coming for airlines and passengers in commercial, business and general aviation. The solution will be capable of providing in-flight broadband for users including fast, reliable Wi-Fi and onboard entertainment. Following the launch, users can also expect improved connectivity solutions such as cockpit communications, maintenance operations and crew services.
To deliver this new service, the company plans on building an air-to-ground network in the continental United States—based on global 4G LTE standards—to provide fast speeds and efficient utilization of spectrum.
“Everyone wants access to high-speed, reliable mobile Internet wherever they are, including at 35,000 feet,” said John Stankey, Chief Strategy Officer at AT&T. “We are building on AT&T’s strengths to develop in-flight connectivity technology…based on 4G LTE standards. We believe this will enable airlines and passengers to benefit from reliable high speeds and a better experience. We expect this service to transform connectivity in the aviation industry—by mobilizing the sky.”
Working with Honeywell
Honeywell recently issued its Wireless Connectivity Survey indicating that in-flight Wi-Fi currently causes frustrations for nearly 9 in 10 users worldwide, most often due to inconsistent or slow connections. AT&T plans to work with Honeywell to provide hardware and service capabilities to deliver the in-flight connectivity solution.
With the planned new network, passengers will gain mobile capabilities such as browsing the Internet, checking email, keeping in touch with friends and family through social networking and messaging services and increasing business productivity. The network also offers the potential for improved communications between the plane and the ground through transmission of real-time aircraft data for optimizing, monitoring and evolving airlines’ operations.
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- For investors looking at emerging markets, Monday's announcement about Wal-Mart looking to enter South Africa was louder than a bomb.
The retailing giant wants to acquire Massmart, South Africa's third largest chain, in a bid to establish its presence in what many of us consider the final frontier market.
Africa has confounded investors since the very beginning of overseas investing. So far, the challenges of poverty, disease, violence and corruption have outweighed the positives, such as the vast natural resources of the continent and the potentially cheaper-than-China labor force.
This may be changing as mineral wealth finds its way to the people, who in turn seek a better standard of living like the formerly poor in so many other developing regions of the world.
So when companies like Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) or McDonald's (MCD, Fortune 500), which also has a presence in Africa, make a foray into an emerging market, they are signaling, to some extent, that they've done the homework and that there is enough potential in that country to justify the logistical, financial and infrastructure costs.
As formidable as the challenges are in a place like South Africa, it is important to remember that ten years ago corruption, violence, civil strife and political uncertainty also dogged Russia and Eastern Europe. But investors who braved the "difficult investing climate" were rewarded handsomely.
Investing in fragmented markets like Africa is not for the faint of heart, but one method cautious investors may find palatable would be through an Africa-focused ETF. The below rundown is not meant to be a list of recommendations, but rather a jumping off point for your own African research safari.
Market Vectors Africa Index (AFK) AFK probably offers the broadest exposure to Africa as it seeks to replicate the performance of the Dow Jones Africa Titans 50 index. While it does hold a wide variety of both local shares and ADRs, the fund has a few flaws to be aware of.
For starters, it only has around $60 million under management. It is also highly exposed to the banking sector, which makes up about 42% of the holdings. This is not necessarily a fatal flaw; a recent Barron's article gave Africa's large banks higher marks than their European and American brethren.
As can be expected, the largest sector weighting is toward basic materials at 30%. Gold miners and oil companies make up the bulk of this fund, followed by the banks. MTN Group, the nation's largest telecom, gets a 10% weighting.
If you believe that Wal-Mart's entry into South Africa will push the country's modernization, this fund would be the right way to get exposure. But it is a big if, of course, at this early stage.
PowerShares MENA Frontier Countries Portfolio (PMNA) This ETF seeks to give you exposure to the other end of the continent, namely Northern Africa and the Middle East. There is an interesting mix here of countries that are in vastly different stages of development.
Jordan and Morocco, two of the riskiest markets in the region, make up a combined 24% of the fund. In the meantime, their more developed neighbors like Kuwait and the UAE make up a bit more than 40%.
Investing in Africa carries all of the excitement of the more mainstream emerging markets but significantly more risk. Investors who wish to follow Wal-Mart's lead should do so cautiously, as the $200 billion behemoth from Bentonville, Ark. can afford to take on a lot more risk than the rest of us.
The improving markets of Africa may represent the final investing frontier but homework will be the key.
Joshua Brown is a New York City-based financial advisor at Fusion Analytics and the author of The Reformed Broker blog. The commentary above is for informational purposes only and does not in any way constitute a solicitation to buy or sell any securities.
|Overnight Avg Rate||Latest||Change||Last Week|
|30 yr fixed||3.90%||3.85%|
|15 yr fixed||3.07%||3.00%|
|30 yr refi||3.96%||3.92%|
|15 yr refi||3.12%||3.10%|
Today's featured rates:
Google filed a patent for a toy that will have sensors and cameras, and can control connected devices. More
Rents increased 4% in April from last year while home values only rose 3% during the same time period. More
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He, Zhongfang (2009): Forecasting output growth by the yield curve: the role of structural breaks.
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This paper proposes a new structural-break vector autoregressive (VAR) model for predicting real output growth by the nominal yield curve information. We allow for the possibility of both in-sample and out-of-sample breaks in parameter values and use information in historical regimes to make inference on out-of-sample breaks. A Bayesian estimation and forecasting procedure is provided which accounts for the uncertainty of structural breaks and model parameters. We discuss dynamic consistency when forecasting recursively with structural break models, which has been ignored in the existing literature, and provide a solution. Applied to monthly US data from 1964 to 2006, we find strong evidence of structural breaks in the predictive relation between the yield curve and output growth in late 1979 and early 1983. The short rate has more predictive power for output growth than the term spread before 1979 while the term spread becomes more significant since the breakof 1983. Incorporating the possibility of structural breaks improves out-of-sample forecasts of output growth from 1 to 12 months ahead.
|Item Type:||MPRA Paper|
|Original Title:||Forecasting output growth by the yield curve: the role of structural breaks|
|Keywords:||Vector Autoregressive Model; Structural Break; Forecast; Output Growth; Yield Curve, Chib Model, MCMC, Bayesian|
|Subjects:||C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C5 - Econometric Modeling > C53 - Forecasting and Prediction Methods ; Simulation Methods
E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E4 - Money and Interest Rates > E44 - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C1 - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General > C11 - Bayesian Analysis: General
|Depositing User:||Zhongfang He|
|Date Deposited:||19. Jan 2011 12:36|
|Last Modified:||24. Mar 2015 10:06|
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Gray, S. F. (1996): “Modeling the Conditional Distribution of Interest Rates as a Regime-Switching Process,” Journal of Financial Economics, 42, 27–62. 28
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Koop, G. (2003): Bayesian Econometrics. Wiley, Chichester, England. Koop, G., and S. Potter (2007): “Estimation and Forecasting in Models with Multiple Breaks,” Review of Economic Studies, 74, 763–789.
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Maheu, J., and T. McCurdy (2007): “How Useful are Historical Data for Forecasting the Long-Run Equity Return Distribution ?,” Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, forthcoming.
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Hasan, Zubair (2011): Scarcity, self-interest and maximization from Islamic angle.
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This paper clarifies some misinterpretations of three foundational concepts in mainstream economics from Islamic viewpoint. These are scarcity of resources, pursuit of self-interest and maximizing behavior of economic agents. It argues that stocks of resources that God has provided are inexhaustible. But important is the availability of resources out of stocks to mankind. Availability is a function of human effort and the state of knowledge about resources over time and space. In that sense resources are scarce in relation to multiplicity of human wants for Islamic economics as well. Self-interest must be distinguished from selfishness. The motive operates on both ends of human existence: mundane and spiritual. Its pursuit does not preclude altruism from human life. Counter interests keep balance in society and promote civility. Islam recognizes the motive as valid. Maximization relates to quantifiable ex ante variables. Uncertainty of future outcomes of actions makes maximization a heuristic but useful analytical tool. The concept is value neutral. What is maximized, how and to what end alone give rise to moral issues. Modified in the light of Shari’ah requirements the three concepts can provide a firmer definition for Islamic economics centered on the notion of falah.
|Item Type:||MPRA Paper|
|Original Title:||Scarcity, self-interest and maximization from Islamic angle|
|English Title:||Scarcity, self-interest and maximization from Islamic angle|
|Keywords:||Scarcity; self-interest, maximization, Islamic Economics, israf; Shri'ah, heuristics|
|Subjects:||B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B1 - History of Economic Thought through 1925 > B10 - General
A - General Economics and Teaching > A2 - Economics Education and Teaching of Economics > A22 - Undergraduate
B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B2 - History of Economic Thought since 1925 > B21 - Microeconomics
B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B1 - History of Economic Thought through 1925 > B13 - Neoclassical through 1925 (Austrian, Marshallian, Walrasian, Stockholm School)
|Depositing User:||Zubair Hasan|
|Date Deposited:||08. Mar 2011 10:25|
|Last Modified:||12. Feb 2013 15:32|
1. Ahmad, Khurshid (November 6, 2007): Capitalism, socialism, the welfare state and Islam, Prize winner’s lecture at IRTI/IDB Jeddah (Power point slides).
Addas, Waleed A. J. (2006): Methodology of Economics: Secular Versus Islamic, Research Management Centre, International Islamic University of Malaysia.
Barry, Norman (2010) The Tradition of Spontaneous Order: A Bibliographical Essay, The Forum at the online Library of Liberty. Accessed: 28 September 2010 http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_content&task=view&id=169&Itemid=259. BBC Report (August 11, 1984) on Zola Budd story.
2. AI 3 (2006): The Biggest Disruption in History: Massively Accelerated Growth Since the Industrial Revolution http://www.mkbergman.com/250/the-biggest-disruption-in-history-massively-accelerated-growth-since-the-industrial-revolution/
3. Coase R. W (1984): Adam Smith’s View of Man in J.C. Wood (ed.) Adam Smith: Critical Assessments Croom Helm.
Ekelund Jr, Robert B. and Hebert, Robert F. (1997): A History of Economic Theory and Method, (Fourth Edition), MacGraw-Hills, New York
4. Elmessiri, Abdel-Wahab (2006): Epistemological Bias in the Social and Physical Sciences, International Institute of Islamic Thought, London - Washington (The work has recently appeared as an excellent Urdu translation rendered by Dr. Ausaf Ahmad (2009) and published by the Institute of Objective Studies, Delhi. 5. Farooq, M. Omar (2006): Islamic law and the use and misuse of Hathith, New Horizon. Also available at: http://ww w.globalw ebpost.com/farooqm 6. 7. Haneef M. Aslam and Furqani, M (2004): Contemporary Islamic Economics: the Missing Dimension in Genuine Islamization, Journal of Thoughts on Economics Vol.19, No.04, pp.29-48.
8. Hasan, Zubair (2006): Introduction to Microeconomics: An Islamic Perspective, Pearson-Prentice Hall, Kuala Lumpur
9. ---------------- (2002): “Maximisation Postulates and their efficacy for Islamic Economics “American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 19, No.1
10. --------------- (1998a): Book Review: “Teaching Economics in Islamic Perspective“ By M.N.Siddiqi, Islamic Economic Studies Vol. 6, No. 1, 1998 pp. 111-132
11. ------------- (1998) “Islamization of Knowledge in Economics: Issues and Agenda” IIUM Journal of Economics and Management Vol. 6 No.1, pp. 1-40, (Special. Issue)
12. ------------ (1996): Book Review: “An Introduction to Islamic Economics” by Akram Khan , The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 4, Winter, pp. 580-585.
13. ------------ (1992): ‘Profit Maximisation: Secular Versus Islamic’ in Sayyid Tahir et al (Ed) ‘Readingsin Microeconomics: An Islamic Perspective’ Longman, Malaysia (Chapter 20, PP. 239-255). 14. ----------- (1988): ‘Distributional Equity in Islam’ in Munawar Iqbal (Ed.) ‘Distributive Justice and Need Fulfilment in an Islamic Economy’, the Islamic Foundation Leicester, U.K. (Chapter 1, PP. 35-62).
15. ----------- (1985: “Determination of Profit and Loss Sharing Ratios in Interest-Free Business Finance”, Journal of Research in Islamic Economics, Jeddah Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 13-27.
16. ----------- (1975): Theory of Profit, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi 110002. . 17. Kahf, Monzer in Sayyid Tahir et al (Ed) ‘Readingsin Microeconomics: An Islamic Perspective’ Longman, Malaysia (Chapter 9, The Theory of Production PP.113-119). 18. 19. Khan, M. Akram (1994): An Introduction to Islamic Economics, International Institute of Islamic Thought and Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad Pakistan.
20. Khan, Mohsin S and Mirakhor A. (1992): Islam and the Economic System, Review of Islamic Economics, Vol.2, No.1 pp.1-29.
21. Kuran, Timur (1989): “On the notion of economic Justicein contemporary Islamic thought” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 21, No.2 pp.171-191.Available also at http://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:fth:socaec:m8814.
22. League Table (2007) in Does Human Knowledge double Every 5 Years? Web http://newsfan.typad.co.uk/does_ human knowledge double/ Monday 9.8.2010 11.10 PM
Matt Rosenberg (2009): About.com Guide [http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm]
Ptak, Justin (2009): The pre-history of Modern Economic Thought: The Aristotle in Austrian Theory, Institute for Business Cycle Research, Harvard University.
Robbins, Lionel (1935): An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 2d. ed. 1945 reprint Macmillan, London.
Sen, A. K. (1977): Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 6, No. 4. pp. 317-344. 23. 24. Siddiqi, M. N (1998): Teaching Economics in Islamic Perspective, Scientific Publishing Centre, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah S.A
25. ------------ Teaching Economics in Islamic Perspective in Sayyid Tahir et al (Ed 1992) ‘Readingsin Microeconomics: An Islamic Perspective’ Longman, Malaysia (Chapter 1, PP. 1-30). 26. 27. Silva, S.S da and Reis R.P and Ferreira, P.A (2009: Concepts of nature value: Are the particular characteristics of nature goods being considered? VII International PENSA Conference, Sao Paulo, Brazil 28. Smith, Adam (1776): An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, E-Book No. 3300, Jun1, 2002, Web site copyright © 2003–2010 Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.
29. Syed Agil, Syed Omar (1992: Rationality in Economic Theory, in Sayyid Tahir et al (Ed 1992) Teaching Economics in Islamic Perspective ‘Readings in Microeconomics: An Islamic Perspective’ Longman, Malaysia (Chapter 2, PP. 31-48).
30. The World Economy, Historical Statistics 1950 – 2001 Tables 7a, 7b, and 7c (World Economy (WE) website)
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|Plot||Making a kite|
|Air date||April 24, 2003|
|Season||Season 34 (2003)|
|Syndication||PBS Kids Sprout|
Zoe and Elmo want to fly kites after watching a film of the spring kite-flying festival (EKA: Episode 3492), but Alan's store doesn't have any. Gabi solves their dilemma by helping them build their own kites using instructions from a book. But now there's another problem: There's no wind!
- Film: Kids about the art they made.
- Bip Bippadotta sings about "Air." (EKA: Episode 2534)
- The Number of the Day: The number 14 emerges from a cannon after The Count learns that it is the number of the day. (First: Episode 3988)
- Cartoon: Jerry Nelson sings about 14s appearing in the desert. Artist: Joey Ahlbum (EKA: Episode 3482)
- Film: Kid mural painting #14 (EKA: Episode 3676)
- Cartoon: "Above it All" (EKA: Episode 2572)
- Cartoon: Dr. Annie Eyeball looks at air. (EKA: Episode 2616)
- Journey to Ernie: Big Bird searches for Ernie at the beach. (EKA: Episode 4039)
- Ernie's Show and Tell: Devon shows his seashell collection to Ernie.
- Global Grover: Malaysia, kites
- Global Thingy: Popcorn Thingy learns to share.
- The Letter of the Day: Cookie Monster decides to take his mind off eating the letter of the day cookie by naming words that begin with W. Prairie Dawn shows up, but Cookie Monster is too deep in thought to notice her. When she finally gets his attention, he eats the cookie. (First: Episode 3992)
- Film: The floating kids fly form the letter W. (EKA: Episode 3454)
- Whoopi Goldberg says, "Whoopi!" (EKA: Episode 2900)
- Elmo's World: Sky (First: Episode 3982)
|Previous episode:||Next episode:|
|Episode 4043||Episode 4045|
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Stabbing Westward was an American industrial rock band. They formed in 1985 in Macomb, Illinois and began recording in the 1990s. The band announced a dissolution in 2002.
Regarding the band's name, Andy Kubiszewski said: "essentially when Chris and Walter were putting the band together, they had a gig and there was a deadline for a name for the band, so they pulled out a bunch of album covers and they pulled out a record cover and it had an excerpt from, I believe it was an Eisenhower speech, where he was talking about communism coming to the west and he used the phrase "stabbing westward," and they went oh well, "Stabbing Westward", that will work."
In truth, the phrase was used in a 1947 newsreel and spoken by an unknown announcer. The newsreel is included as part of the 1982 documentary film The Atomic Cafe.
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Born: October 1, 1945 | Died: January 13, 1979
A cult figure which continues to loom large in the annals of soul singers, Donny Hathaway in his short time on earth, left behind an inspiring legacy of elevating the music into a more spiritual plane.
This short bio is to pique the interest in Hathaway, and guide readers to the more extended profile of the man here @ all about jazz in an outstanding article by C.N. Harold entitled: Donny Hathaway; Celebrating the Spirit and the Soul.
Hathaway was born in Chicago on October 1, 1945, but spent much of his childhood in St. Louis, where he lived in the Carr Square public housing project with his grandmother, Martha Pitts, who also went by the name Martha Crumwell. Pitts was a professional gospel singer, and Hathaway spent his early childhood time in church, watching her rehearse and perform. Inspired by this environment and the natural development of his talents he was drawn to a life of music....
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- This week we bring our series on Ruth, “Unexpected,” to a close. Whether you are on your own or in a small group, take time to read Ruth 4:13-22 aloud.
- These last verses in Ruth bring together many themes and loose ends from the book. The first theme relates to God’s provision for Ruth and Boaz (Ruth 4:13). Compare the end of Ruth and Boaz’s story to their beginnings (Ruth 1:3-5, 8-9, 16-18; 2:1-2, 8-12, 19-20; 3:9-13). How do you see God at work in their story?
- A second theme relates to God’s restoration for Naomi, moving her from emptiness to fullness. How has God been at work in Naomi’s life? Look specifically at Ruth 1:1-5, 19-21; 2:20-22; 3:1-5, 16-18;4:14-16.
- Naomi’s restoration does not necessarily bring answers to all of her suffering. Part of her restoration involves a new ‘calling’ as a primary caregiver – perhaps even a foster-mother of sorts – for Ruth’s new child, Obed. How does Naomi’s experience of restoration relate to your life?
- The women who celebrate with Naomi speak a significant phrase about Ruth: “For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth” (Ruth 4:15). In the ancient near-east, a mother of seven sons has received the greatest blessing of fullness from God. How has Ruth loved Naomi in such a way as exceeds seven sons in this story?
- The significance of the genealogy at the end of chapter four brings a connection between the times of the judges (Ruth 1:1) and the times of the monarchy (Ruth 4:22). It also points to a larger reality about how God works in the middle of ordinary circumstances. What is most striking to you about how God is at work through the broader picture of Ruth’s role in Old Testament history?
- Take a moment to read Matthew 1:1-17. As New Testament believers, what is the significance of the story of Ruth for us?
- What is the biggest thing God has been speaking to you through our study of the book of Ruth? If you are in a small group, discuss this with one another. If you are on your own, write it down, reflect on it, and put it into practice this week.
Next week we will hear from Bertil Enqvuist as part of our Global Initiatives Gathering (GIG). Pray that God would prepare us as a church to hear from Him.
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The Puerto Rico Democracy Act
The Puerto Rico Democracy Act (H.R. 2499) would authorize a federally-sanctioned plebiscite (vote) of the people of Puerto Rico regarding their political future. H.R. 2499 provides for a two-step voting process. The first vote would allow the people of Puerto Rico to choose between selecting a “different political status” or maintaining their “present political status.” If the majority of the people vote in favor of a “different political status,” then a second vote would be held allowing people to choose between three options: independence, free association with the U.S., or statehood.
While it is said that the results of the plebiscites are non-binding, H.R. 2499 sets the stage for potential Congressional action as soon as next year on making Puerto Rico the 51st state.
The people of Puerto Rico should be able to go to the ballot box and express their views on their future political status. However, there are serious questions regarding the implications of this bill that have gone unanswered. If Congressionally-sanctioned vote is specifically sought as with H.R. 2499, then it must come with an open, thorough understanding of what independence or statehood would mean to Puerto Rico and the existing 50 states.
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Thursday, August 19, 1999 Published at 18:17 GMT 19:17 UK
The history of xenotransplantation
Baby Fae: Lived for 20 days with baboon heart
Transplants of organs and tissue from animals to humans have a long history but it was not until the 1960s that they moved from simple trial and error to systematic scientific study.
At that time, donor organs were not available and the use of animal organs seemed promising.
Hopes were raised further in 1972 with the introduction of cyclosporin, a powerful drug that minimises the rejection of foreign tissue. Until 1992, organs generally came from chimpanzees or baboons, but in that year a pig liver was used to help a patient survive whilst a human liver was found.
So far no animal to human transplant of a whole organ can be considered successful.
1682: Bone from a dog was used to repair the skull of an injured Russian aristocrat. The operation was reportedly a success but angered the church.
1963-4: Baboon kidneys were grafted into six patients by transplant pioneer Thomas Starzl in Denver, US. The patients survived between 19 and 98 days.
1963-4: Chimpanzee kidneys were transplanted into 12 patients in New Orleans, US. Most failed within two months but one recipient survived for nine months with no sign of rejection.
1964: A 68-year-old man received a chimpanzee heart in Jackson, US, but only survived for two hours.
}1969-1974: Three children received chimpanzee livers but only survived between one and 14 days.
1984: The Baby Fae case: A newborn baby received a baboon heart in California. Cyclosporine was used and she lived for 20 days.
1992: A four-drug cocktail assisted a baboon liver transplant. The patient died of a brain haemorrhage after 71 days. The type of rejection typical in cross-species transplantation was not seen.
1992: A pig liver was implanted next to patient's own liver to buy time for a human organ to be found but the patient died after 32 hours.
1993: Baboon bone marrow and kidney transplant carried out in Pittsburgh, US with same drug cocktail used as in 1992 case. However, the patient's suppressed immune system succumbs to infection after 26 days.
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Fighting continues in Iraq. Most days there are attacks on coalition soldiers - foreign soldiers led by the US - or unrest between Iraqi groups with different beliefs.
President Bush has said the US troops were victorious in the battle in Iraq. He said that because Saddam Hussein was no longer in charge.
But he won't say the war is over. Part of the reason is that coalition troops are still being killed.
Another important reason is that if the war is said to be over then a new set of rules will apply.
Without a war all prisoners of war must be freed - something the US government isn't prepared to let happen.
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Business schools are feeling smug; in times of crisis, their student intake is higher than usual. People see a business school degree as a way to protect themselves from staff reductions, or better yet, to ensure quicker promotions. But when it comes to specific choices, should a finance specialist go for a CFA certificate or an MBA programme?
You should choose a CFA if:
— You have a clear idea of the field you are going to work in
Vladimir Tutkevich, General Director of the Russian CFA Association, says that investment banking and asset management specialists usually get a CFA certificate, which is also the preferred choice of finance directors and investment directors working outside the financial sector.
“For me and for our company, a CFA, at least a Level 1 CFA exam, represents a substantial advantage when making hiring decisions,” says Alexander Golovtsov, head of research at UralSib Asset Management.
— You have limited funds
According to Vladimir Tutkevich, the CFA program is geared, among others, to people at the start of their careers, who cannot leave work to do further studies.
— You value the knowledge acquired during the course above all else
“For me, the CFA was a way of bringing together all the aspects of investment management, not to mention the prestige associated with the certificate itself,” says Vladimir Soloviev, Chief Executive Officer of Raiffeisen Capital Asset Management Co. and Head of Investment Management at ZAO Raiffeisenbank.
Conversely, you should choose an MBA if:
— You have not yet decided on your career field
An MBA is the better choice for those who are still undecided as to the specific field within economics and finance that they are going to work in, leaving more room for choice in the future, while a CFA is a highly focused programme for investment professionals, Tutkevich believes.
— You can leave employment for one or two years (or can have your employer pay for your course)
“You will spend US$200,000 to US$500,000 on an MBA if you take into account the foregone income. A CFA seems free by comparison. You can get it simply to have the certificate “just in case”. Of course, the MBA and CFA yield different returns; I’ve never heard of anyone getting a higher salary because they did a CFA,” says a Russian private equity fund employee who asked to remain anonymous.
— You are familiar with business school ratings and can afford the best
“In my opinion the value of an MBA varies significantly depending on the business school where it was obtained,” says Soloviev from Raiffeisen Capital Asset Management.
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At the same time, Lee became a true admirer of the insect. When he moved into his Baltimore apartment near campus, he found a cockroach. Most people's first instinct probably would have been to kill it, but Lee gently nudged the pest into a cup and threw it down the trash chute into cockroach nirvana.
The robotic cockroach antenna has several functions. But the researchers are focusing on its mechanical sensors, which include receptive "hairs" and sensors that measure strain along the antenna.
Live cockroaches have control mechanisms at the bases of their antennae that allow them to sweep their antennae back and forth and up and down. This helps the insects gather rich sensory images of what's happening around them.
However, when cockroaches run rapidly (say when you flick on your kitchen light), they keep their antennae at a fixed angle. In this case, their antennae interact with objects, allowing the insects to make corrections in their locomotion patterns to avoid obstacles and follow along surfaces.
"Our first approach was to study that behavior in cockroaches as a possible model for rapid locomotion control in robotics," Cowan said.
The most recent version of the robot antenna is made of cast urethane, a flexible rubberlike substance, encased in a clear plastic sheath. Embedded in the urethane are six strain gages, sensors that change electrical resistance as they are bent.
Cowan says he's not trying to exactly duplicate any specific function of the cockroach.
"It wouldn't be wise to copy exactly what nature is doing," he said. "[Instead] we're trying to understand the principles involved and apply them in an engineeringly sound way."
The scientists attached their mechanical antenna to a commercially available wheeled robot. Data is fed from the antenna to the robot controller, enabling it to sense its position. When the antenna signals that the robot is veering too close to a wall, for example, the controller steers the robot away.
Mitra Hartmann, a mechanical and biomedical engineering professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said Cowan's design imaginatively applies the multisensor, multisegment aspects of real cockroach antennae.
"That it worked on a real robot, instead of just in computer simulation, is particularly important, because noise and system dynamics are often difficult or impossible to model in simulation," Hartmann said.
Cowan believes the cockroach antennae could eventually provide a new generation of robots with an enhanced ability to move safely through dark and hazardous locations.
"I can imagine, for example, a collapsed building with lots of debris and dust and not much light, where you have to get a robot into a very small space," Cowan said.
The researchers will present their project this month at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Barcelona, Spain.
Other robotics engineers are also drawing inspiration from nature in their work. Mitra Hartmann, the Northwestern professor, is building sensors modeled after rat whiskers.
"Just as cockroaches use their antennae for wall-following and obstacle-avoidance, rats use their whiskers to navigate through the environment," Hartmann said.
The two systems differ in several important ways, Hartmann noted. "An antenna generally consists of multiple rigid segments and is covered all along its length with sensory receptors," she said. "In contrast, a whisker consists of a single, flexible, tapered hair and has tactile sensors located only at its base."
Still, bio-inspired robotics is just in its infancy.
"There's a lot of interesting and useful low-hanging fruit here, in that a myriad of animals use this kind of sensing to get around," Cowan said. "And so far it has found extraordinarily limited applications to robotics."
But scientists are increasingly looking at some of nature's solutions to help them overcome several of the problems that hamper progress using traditional engineering methods.
The U.S. military is particularly interested in bio-inspired robotics, as scientists are reverse-engineering the mechanics of insects and designing miniature robots to scout battlefields or to search for victims trapped in rubble.
"There hasn't been that much success on the perceptual side as there has been on the locomotion side," Cowan said. "I predict that in 10 to 15 years, the perceptual side will begin to catch up with the locomotion side, with people taking more ideas from nature."
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By now the problems of the euro are well understood, at least on this side of the Atlantic. As hundreds of Canadian commentators have patiently lectured Europe, the basic — elementary, really — mistake was to attempt to form a monetary union without also forming a fiscal union. Members of the euro faced no real constraint on their appetite for debt, but rather could borrow as much as they liked, without regard for the consequences for the others.
The effect, as we tried to explain to the Europeans, was to allow the weakest states to borrow on the good credit rating of the strongest. The consequences of any member defaulting on its debts would be so horrible for the rest, markets reasoned, that they were bound to be bailed out. The potential for moral hazard was childishly obvious: with other states implicitly guaranteeing their debt, yet without corresponding formal limits on their borrowing capacity, member states had every incentive to … to …
Er, hang on. Isn’t that more or less how the system works in Canada?
Like Europe we have a single currency. And like Europe, we maintain within that common currency a number of sovereign fiscal authorities, each seeking funds from credit markets in splendid isolation from the others, and each entitled to borrow without restriction of any kind. We, too, are attempting to run a monetary union without a proper fiscal union.
Indeed, it has long been a subject of debate among economists whether Canada is an “optimal currency area.” The various regions have such disparate economic bases, it is sometimes argued, that it makes little sense for them to share the same currency: When one is expanding, the other may be contracting. Moreover, the former’s good fortune may in part be the cause of the latter’s woes, so far as it contributes to a higher exchange rate. See: “Dutch disease.”
That certainly has been part of the trouble in Europe. At a given level of the euro, German firms may be able to compete, while Greece’s cannot. When the drachma was its currency, Greece could address this problem by devaluation; as a member of the euro that option is not available to it. Ontario faces a similar dilemma.
Of course, there are differences between the two situations. In addition to the provinces, Canada also has a federal government, with full taxing and borrowing powers of its own. As regional economies wax and wane, it can redistribute funds between them, not only via explicit inter-governmental transfers like equalization, but also through its own operations, collecting more in taxes from one region, less from another, and varying spending inversely.
Canada, what is more, arguably enjoys a higher degree of labour mobility: Workers from depressed regions can more easily move to booming areas. It’s probable, too, that prices and wages are more flexible here, allowing some degree of “internal devaluation” in response to economic shocks, in place of a falling currency.
When it comes to member states’ borrowing, we’re exactly like the Europeans. Or rather, we’re worse
Still, when it comes to member states’ borrowing, we’re exactly like the Europeans. Or rather, we’re worse: There were, after all, supposed to be conditions attached to euro membership, as in the Maastricht treaty — a debt-to-GDP ratio of less than 60%, deficits no greater than 3% of GDP — even if these were widely ignored. In Canada, uniquely, there are no such rules. The system depends entirely on the provinces behaving responsibly on their own.
As, for the most part, they have. No province has had to be bailed out since the 1930s. Neither is any province likely to face that ignominy in the near future: there are no Greeces here. There are, however, troubling signs for the longer term.
The problem, as ever, is the aging population. Other things being equal, it portends relatively fewer workers, slower growth, lower revenues and escalating costs, especially for health care. As such, its impact is almost entirely confined to the provinces. The federal government, having restrained the growth in transfers to the provinces and reformed its own pension programs, is in relatively good shape, as the parliamentary budget officer has recently reaffirmed. But past a certain point, a problem for the provinces becomes a problem for the feds.
A new study for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Provincial Solvency and Federal Obligations, calculates most provinces face a better than 50% probability of default over the next 30 years, based on current trends; for some it’s a near certainty. Perhaps surprisingly, it predicts Alberta is the most likely to default in the long term, while Quebec, though it has the highest current debt load, is the least likely. The reason: Alberta’s population is projected to age the most, while Quebec is least exposed to a collapse in commodity prices.
Yet this variance in risk is not reflected in the interest rates charged on provincial bonds. That may, as the study allows, reflect investors’ confidence that the provinces will take action in time to avert a default: Again, these numbers are based on current trends, i.e. if nothing were done. Or, possibly, it may reflect a more disturbing conjecture: That the federal government would step in to bail out a failing province, if it came to that.
Would it? Should it? Can we afford to allow such expectations to take hold? Or, given the magnitude of the fiscal challenge facing the provinces in the longer term, should we not begin to think about laying down some ground rules for provincial borrowing — to complete the fiscal union our monetary union implies?
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Extended Validation SSL certificates are now a year old, with the total number of EV SSL sites now above 4,000 representing 0.5% of the valid third party certificates that the Netcraft SSL Survey finds on the Internet. Absolute growth of EV SSL certificates has remained largely constant for several months, and the total is dwarfed by the 809,000 sites that use traditional SSL certificates.
A year ago, Netcraft’s SSL Survey found a total of 81 sites using EV SSL certificates, five of which have since reverted to conventional SSL certificates. Interestingly, three of these sites belong to certificate authorities. VeriSign no longer uses EV SSL certificates for either admin-manager.verisign.com or onsite.verisign.com, while Entrust no longer uses an EV SSL certificate for www.entrust.com, although this site redirects users to secure.entrust.com, which does use EV SSL. The two other sites to have stopped using extended validation are www.dunbarvalutrak.com, a system for tracking valuables and cash in transit, and www.senderra.com, a service mark of Avelo Mortgage, L.L.C.
The number of desktops which recognise EV SSL certificates is set to increase this month. On February 12th, Microsoft released the Windows Internet Explorer 7 Installation and Availability update to Windows Server Update Services. After this date, customers who have configured WSUS to auto-approve Update Rollup packages will have all instances of Internet Explorer 6 upgraded to version 7. Microsoft Knowledge Base article 946202 describes how administrators may deploy Internet Explorer 7 using WSUS, or to postpone the update.
For users of Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 turns the address bar green when a user visits a site which offers a valid EV SSL certificate, helping to boost consumer confidence in such sites and reduce fraud. By default, Windows XP users will not see the green address bar unless they install an optional Root Certificates Update, which will enable the use of EV SSL certificates.
In addition to the Internet Explorer 7 push, nightly builds of the Firefox web browser now also support EV SSL certificates, using the VeriSign EV root for testing purposes. Other EV SSL certificates are currently treated as conventional SSL certificates, although when Firefox 3 is ready to be released to the public, it is expected to have full support for all EV SSL certificates.
Further trends and observations are made in Netcraft’s monthly SSL Survey.
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Embedded multimedia cards are the sort of storage units that smartphone and tablet makers liberally make use of. Thus, Samsung has always made sure to stay ahead of the game, or close enough to the front as possible.
To preserve that trend, Samsung Electronics has officially introduced eMMC cards based on 10nm NAND Flash memory.
By using 64 Gb (Gigabit) memory chips, the company was able to create the new 64 GB eMMC Pro Class 2000 memory solution, which is 30 percent faster than the first Samsung embedded memory supporting the eMMC 4.5 interface.
For those curious, the first memory product of this sort was launched five months ago.
Speaking of which, compared to the advanced 20nm-class 64 Gb MLC NAND, which was first available last May (2012), manufacturing productivity is 20% higher.
Spec-wise, the newcomer has a random write speed of 2,000 IOPS (input/output per second), a random read speed of 5,000 IOPS and sequential read and write speeds of 260 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 50 MB/s, respectively.
That's 10 times better than the 24 MB/s and 12 MB/s of Class 10 external memory cards.
“The new high-speed, small form factor eMMC reinforces Samsung's technology leadership in storage memory solutions,” said Myungho Kim, vice president of Memory marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics.
“We look forward to expanding our line-up of embedded memory solutions in conjunction with the new chip's design, in pursuing a system-level adoption of application processors and other key components that form the foundation for the most advanced mobile platforms. This will allow us to better attend to time-to-market demands enabling the design of more convenient features for next-generation mobile applications.”
Samsung did not specify pricing and availability, but this is one case when such details can easily enough be guessed. Since this is not a consumer product per se, only smartphone developers will need the information, which they will get when negotiating supply deals.
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BEIJING, July 15 (Xinhua) -- During the World Cup, employees of the Brazil plant of Chinese car maker Chery were given time off for every match of the Brazilian team.
The games became a "happy-hour"; a time for Chinese and Brazilian employees to socialize together.
Chery has been operating in Brazil since 2009, a recent chapter in cooperation stretching back to the early 19th century, when Chinese tea growers took their skills to Brazil.
"Brazil does not have its own car brands. It is vital for Brazil to improve car manufacturing capability," said Luis Curi, deputy general manager of Chery Brazil.
Chery has plans to invest 400 million U.S. dollars in an industrial park in Jacarei, a small city in the state of Sao Paulo, creating more than 3,000 jobs.
"I hope our city can one day become a motor city," Curi said.
As members of BRICS, China and Brazil cooperate as emerging powers. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Brazil for a state visit on Monday and will attend the BRICS summit in Fortaleza.
"China-Brazil relations are a driving force in the relation between China and Latin America," said Zhou Zhiwei, a Latin American studies researcher at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China's official think tank. "The relationship is deepening, not only for the benefit of the two countries, but as part of the establishment of a new world order."
According to Zhou, China's growing investment in Brazil suggests economic cooperation has entered a new phase. Brazil's rapidly expanding middle-class has huge consumption needs that Chinese companies are doing their best to accommodate.
China is Brazil's biggest trade partner. Trade volume between China and Brazil increased 5.3 percent to about 90 billion U.S. dollars in 2013. In addition to bulk commodities, investment has begun to play an important role. Chinese companies have been heavily investing in Brazil's mining and energy sectors.
In 2013, the two countries' central banks signed a currency swap agreement, the first such deal between China and a BRICS country.
As China and Brazil deepen economic cooperation, more Brazilians are becoming interested in Chinese culture. Soon after joining the finance department of Chery Brazil, Miguel Gomez signed up for Chinese language and cultural programs at a nearby Confucius Institute. Brazil now has seven Confucius Institutes. Chery invites Brazilian engineers to its headquarters in east China's Anhui Province for training.
Brazilian art and music also appeal to Chinese people. The Brazilian Embassy is an active user of Sina Weibo, China's microblogging site, and more than 60 Brazil interest groups can be found on the popular cyber community Douban.
Brazil's defeat in the World Cup saddened many Chinese football fans. A sports center built with Chinese money opens on Tuesday in the state of Sao Paulo, and in 1993, Brazil helped train a group of teenage football players who took the Chinese team to the World Cup 2002, China's only foray onto the world football stage so far.
"Only deep understanding with a sincere attitude can win respect and trust in overseas investment," said Du Weiqiang, deputy general manager of Chery's international business.
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Laws vs. pit bulls
In 2007, state Rep. Paul Wesselhoft, R-Moore, tried to pass dog bite legislation that would have pet owners facing up to a year in prison and a minimum $10,000 fine if their dog attacked. While the legislation was not breed specific, Wesselhoft said then it was aimed at curtailing people from owning pit bulls.
The initiative failed, but in 2008 lawmakers passed a restriction that kept licensed pit bull breeders from kenneling dogs within 2,500 feet of a school. That law was prompted by the concerns of the Carmelite Sisters of St. Theresa, who oversee a Catholic elementary school near pit bull terrier breeder Kenneth Gonzales’ operation south of Oklahoma City.
On March 31, Gonzales lost his fight to keep the kennels when the state appeals court sided with the nuns, ruling Gonzales’ operation was not grandfathered in under the law because he was not licensed when it was passed.
Rush Springs and Del City are among the many cities in Oklahoma that have either discussed or passed ordinances to ban pit bull terriers from their city limits. The cities threw out their ordinances when the Legislature determined breed-specific bans were unfair, but encouraged cities to tighten vicious dog ordinances.
Edmond in 2006 revised its animal ordinances and included a section on vicious animals.
The ordinance defines a vicious animal as any animal that unprovoked is a threat to people or other animals. An unprovoked animal is one that is not abused, teased or tormented, or protecting its owner’s property.
Christy Taylor said Otie and Fergie did injure the dachshund when they escaped from their yard. She thinks the dogs may have been protecting her children from the smaller dog that was in its front yard with its owner, Taylor said.
Edmond City Attorney Steve Murdock said if deemed vicious, the judge can impose several restrictions rather than euthanizing the animals.
The Taylors can be fined up to $500 and required to pay all impound fees. They could be required to confine the dogs to a locked kennel, and muzzle and leash them when out, the ordinance states.
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Protect Yourself From Mosquitoe Bites is the Warning
Protect yourself from mosquitoe bites. That’s the message from the Yakima County Health
District after a Yakima man was treated for the West Nile virus last month. One
of the first human cases in the state in 2 years. Spokesperson Mary Ann Patnode
says don’t take the advice to cover up lightly because the virus is deadly. In
2009 a woman from Yakima County died of the West Nile virus. Patnode says the
message to cover up and use a repellent hasn’t changed over the years. Avoid
going outside if you can during the times when mosquitoes are most active, in the early morning and evening hours.
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Boscawen Community Kitchen Survey Underway
A New Hampshire college student's proposal for a community kitchen in Boscawen is in line to undergo a USDA-funded feasibility study.
A community kitchen would provide farmers and entrepreneurs with access to processing, packaging and storing facilities. For smaller enterprises, the access to such a facility would mean a chance for expanded production and profits.
Drew Pehoviak graduated from Colby-Sawyer College in May with a degree in environmental studies. For his senior thesis, Pehoviak argued that Boscawen would provide the ideal location for a community kitchen in southern New Hampshire. Along with his written report, Pehoviak used GIS mapping technology to create a map demonstrating that 63 farms and up to 33 percent of New Hampshire residents are within a 45-minute driving parameter of Boscawen.
"GIS is a really important part of the project because it illustrates just how many people this potential kitchen could have an effect on," says Pehoviak.
Local farmers have voiced support for the project. Ray Conner of Evandale Farm in Pittsfield notes that "a number of farmers who don't have access to this kind of equipment would find this resource to be amazing...a lot of New Hampshire farmers would be able to benefit".
The project was taken up in partnership with the Boscawen Agricultural Commission (BAC). Director of the BAC John Keegan remains conscious of the project's vulnerabilities.
"We don't want to create something that has to be subsidized, which is why we're doing the survey. We are now in the process of looking at what the market can do if we can put the pieces together," says Keegan.
Sarah Waring is the Executive Director of the Center for an Agricultural Economy (CAE) in Harwick, Vermont, and oversees the Vermont Food Venture Center (VFVC). The center is cited as a model for successful community kitchens, but Waring warns that the business is far from stable.
The VFVC has been operating for two and a half years, she says, and has yet to hit capacity for member space.
"For people trying to start a community kitchen, my advice is to take things slow and find out if you have enough people to fill the space," Waring says.
Although the venture is risky, the VFVC provides farmers with the opportunity to make connections with distributors, which expands sales from weekend farmer's markets to year-round shelf time in grocery stores. .
Requests for feasibility study proposals from the BAC closed July 18. Keegan estimates that once a consultant is chosen, the comprehensive study will be completed within 6 months.
For more information about how New Hampshire food networks differ from other local food economies, check out Across The River, Vermont Puts Its Money On Local Food.
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Been a while since I’ve put up a Curiosity update. The rover has been busy as we can see. The rovers really are marvels, an unimaginably complex project working perfectly..
The NASA/JPL description of the image:
This image from the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows two holes at top center drilled into a sandstone target called “Windjana.” The farther hole, with larger pile of tailings around it, is a full-depth sampling hole. It was created by the rover’s hammering drill while the drill collected rock-powder sample material from the interior of the rock. The nearer hole was created by a shallower test drilling into the rock in preparation for the sample collection. Each hole is 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter. The full-depth hole is about 2.6 inches (6.5 centimeters) deep, drilled during the 621st Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars (May 5, 2014). The test hole is about 0.8 inch (2 centimeters) deep, drilled on Sol 615 (April 29, 2014). This image was taken on Sol 621 (May 5).
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INTERNET EXPLORER USERS:
There is a known problem displaying the drop-down menu selections. While a solution is being worked on, the map works best on Google Chrome.
Scroll down for Map Tips
1. The map scale (located in the lower right of the map) always defaults to kilometers and meters and is beyond my control. To get it to miles, click the scale and it will toggle between the two.
2. When the ‘Mile Markers’ layer is clicked, the mile marker number will display when scale is 500ft or closer.
3. If wanting to utilize the ‘Quarter Sections’ layer, it is recommended only to turn it on when the scale is 500ft or closer or it will dramatically slow down the moving of the map and searching functions.
4. The ‘Detailed Roads’ layer is helpful for viewing road names that are not labeled by default. The layer is only viewable from the 2000ft and 1000ft scale.
5. The crosshair button will center your geo-located position. If using on a mobile phone, and approval is given to track your location, this tracking will be extremely accurate and will follow your movement. If using on a computer or tracking is denied, tracking will not be very accurate and may not work.
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Oral History Project Explores Dartmouth’s Diversity (The Boston Globe)
March 13, 2013
Dartmouth’s oral history project is documenting the stories of members of the Dartmouth community whose voices have not often been heard, The Boston Globe reports.
Although Dartmouth already had audio recordings of former presidents, Trustees, and administrators, Rauner Special Collections Library staff decided to expand the oral archives to include interviews with current and former faculty, students, and staff, according to the story.
“We wanted everybody to feel eligible, and I think it’s fair to say all of us in our lives at some point feel like we don’t belong … so we wanted to have a lens to look at this community through that would allow everybody to speak to that topic,” Oral History Project Editor Mary Donin says.
Read the full story, published 3/10/13 in The Boston Globe via the Associated Press.
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NEW ULM - Mark Berle, Gibbon, Reuben Bode, Courtland, and Steve Sorenson, Madelia, recently completed their final seminar with the Minnesota Agriculture and Rural Leadership program and traveled to Morocco with 27 classmates from across the state. Berle, Bode, and Sorenson are involved with Class VI of MARL. MARL's mission is to develop the skills of state agriculture and rural leaders to enhance their effectiveness and impact in local, state, national and international arenas.
"Our 10-day educational trip opened our eyes to a culture very different than ours," says Bode. "We observed Muslim religious practices, toured historical sites, ag research centers and farms, and dined on deliciously spiced food. The U.S. and Morocco have a great relationship dating back to George Washington so we were graciously welcomed everywhere we went and encouraged to return," Berle added.
Sorenson added, "In Morocco, Class VI visited a donkey veterinary hospital and the historic medina in Fez; learned about ag research (olive trees and oil) and visited farms near Meknes; enjoyed dinner at the home of U.S. Ambassador Sam and Sylvia Kaplan, also from Minnesota, in the city of Rabat; visited the U.S. Embassy in Rabat; toured a poverty-stricken area of Kenitra and visited an after-school enrichment program for students and mothers; and toured a feedlot/dairy cooperative and dairy farm near Taroudant."
Members of the Minnesota Agriculture and Rural Leadership program, Class VI, recently traveled to Morocco for an educational tour.
"The eye-opening study, tours and cultural immersion that MARL Class VI experienced while in Morocco will help class members be better leaders in their home communities, in agriculture and in Minnesota," says Dan Hoffman, MARL executive director. "They learned the importance of diplomacy, trade relations and trade agreements to Minnesota farmers by visiting the U.S. Embassy and visiting a feedlot that purchases and uses corn and soybeans from the United States"
"Morocco has been considered a prime MARL destination for more than a decade," says Mike Liepold, University of Minnesota Extension educator and MARL program leader. "Class VI members were offered a rare opportunity to experience Morocco's rich differences in history, culture, food production and climate," he adds.
Liepold, other U-M professionals and various agency personnel helped pave the way for the trip. They include Hassan Ahmed with the USDA Foreign Ag Service, and U-M graduates Mohammed Boulif, professor of horticulture, and Hakima Bahri, professor of agronomy. Bahri studied in Minnesota as part of a state department-funded program that trained more than 400 of Morocco's agriculture professionals in the 1970's and 1980's. MARL also received support from Houcine Rhazoui, business attach at the Moroccan Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Embassy staff in Morocco.
"This kind of in-country support provided a high degree of safety in a culture vastly different than our own," Liepold adds.
Class VI is comprised of 32 professionals from across the state. Two-thirds of the participants are active in farming and one-third work in ag-related industries, rural businesses and rural communities. Class VI began its 18-month program in November 2010 with an orientation seminar in St. Cloud. Since then, it has met in Marshall, St. Paul, Washington, D.C., Itasca, Duluth, Moorhead, Rochester and Windom. Each location features leadership and regional studies.
The MARL program is led by a board of directors that represent interests of the agricultural sectors and rural communities in Minnesota. The board partners with the U-M Extension and Southwest Minnesota State University to deliver the program.
Applications are currently being accepted for Class VII and interviews will be scheduled in April. For more information, please visit www.MARLprogram.org.
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Nursing Care Plan – Hirschsprung’s disease (Congenital Aganglionic Megacolon)
Hirschsprung’s disease (Congenital Aganglionic Megacolon) is the congenital absence of or arrested development of parasympathetic ganglion cells in the intestinal wall, usually in the distal colon.
Signs and symptoms may vary with the severity of the condition. Sometimes they appear right after the baby is born. Other times they may not be apparent until the baby becomes a teenager or adult. In newborns, signs may include:
- Failure to pass stool within the first or second day of life
- Vomiting, including vomiting a green liquid called bile — a digestive fluid produced in the liver
- Constipation or gas, which may make a newborn fussy
In older children, signs can include:
- Swollen abdomen
- Lack of weight gain
- Problems absorbing nutrients, leading to weight loss, diarrhea or both and delayed or slowed growth
- Infections in the colon, especially in newborns or very young children, that may include enterocolitis, a serious infection with diarrhea, fever and vomiting and sometimes a dangerous expanding (dilation) of the colon
In older children or adults, signs may include chronic constipation and a low number of red blood cells (anemia) because blood is lost in the stool.
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I have been troubled recently by a number of articles claiming that DHA is nutritionally essential. The posters often promote the taking of fish oils. To their credit there do seem to be a number of papers suggesting clinical benefits for fish oils, and also that vegetarians have lower levels of DHA. There is also research linking these low levels to Alzheimers, and poorer performance in school children.
On the other side I am reminded that there are 3rd generation vegans who seem to be okay, and I also note that the founder of the vegan society is still alive and well after over 50 years as a vegan.
It is my belief that this topic is still controversial, but there is no RDA, so this nutrient must be considered non-essential. There seem to be certain cases, when ingesting excessive omega 6 oils, where DHA supplements are useful, but that is not a case for them being essential. What is your take on this?
Your question is not only interesting for the question of DHA itself but also is an interesting in reference to the definition of nutrition in general.
The meaning of nutrients has tended to be reserved for those food chemicals that are required (or essential) for life because we, as mammals, cannot make them. Thus we have determined minimum intakes and recommended allowances (about 2 standard deviations above the minimum intakes) for these essential chemicals.
However, this meaning (history) was–and still is–a very superficial, narrowly focused view. It was based on choosing which endpoint is used to decide what is “essential”. It tended to be life itself, but not always. In my view, when a broader view is taken–as exemplified by Nature herself–we discover that there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of food chemicals that contribute to important life events/reactions that can be regarded as health. We only know an extremely small number of such chemicals and an even smaller number of these ‘known’ nutrients have RDAs.
Most importantly, however, we need to understand that these chemicals (nutrients) work in a highly integrated, virtually symphonic manner to produce their health effect. Thus it is a matter of thinking about the collection of such chemicals in large groups of foods. I hold that we need to discard the traditional view of nutrition, based on the effects of single nutrients, and take seriously the symphonic nature of food chemicals working together. In effect, the ‘whole’ nutritional effect is greater than the sum of its parts.
If I must answer the DHA question, I would only say that we can get plenty of that type of chemical from the consumption of the omega-3 fatty acids that are found in certain plants–certain nuts, flaxseed, etc. Indeed, it also is related to a dietary balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids and this balance can be readily met with a good quality diet of wholesome vegetables, fruits, grains and nuts.
Vegans do just fine when eating in this way. Indeed, there are new findings that for those who have even gone only part of the way toward that goal, they live 10 years longer and have much less of the chronic degenerative diseases than those who still consume regular American fare.
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A ceiling collapse injured dozens of patrons of London’s Apollo Theatre, but it everyone escaped with their lives.
During a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a partial collapse of the roof sent patrons and staff clamoring for the exits.
Emergency crews were called about 8:15 p.m. local time, which is 3:15 p.m. North American Eastern Time. About 700 people are thought to have been attending the performance. But by 9:20 p.m. local time, London Fire announced on their official Twitter account that all people trapped beneath the rubble had been freed.
Initial reports suggested the balcony had collapsed, but later reports clarified it had been the roof. The Guardian reports that the balcony began making creaking noises about halfway through the first half of the performance.
A writer for The Independent said there was a cloud of dust obscuring the stage “after parts of masonry appeared to fall away.” He also said there did not appear to be any damage visible from the street outside the theatre.
Police reported seven serious injuries and 81 injuries but that no fatalities.
“Heavy, ornate” plaster fell from the ceiling on to theatre-goers, London Fire said, striking the balcony and orchestra seating areas.
Martin Bostock was in the audience with his family and told Sky News it was “complete chaos” in the theatre.
“I was in the stalls with my family in the early stages of the show,” he said. “I think the front part of the balcony fell down. At first we thought it was part of the show, it was very dramatic.”
Another witness told Sky News it was nearly impossible to see in the immediate aftermath of the collapse.
William Rolt told the news organization: “Everyone who was in there wanted to get out as quickly as possible but you couldn’t anything it was pitch black in there.
The Apollo Theatre was built in 1901 and has 775 seats. As a precaution, all of the cities historic theatres are now performing additional inspections and safety checks.
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The Holy Martyr Calliopius was born in Perge, Pamphylia of the pious woman Theoklia, wife of a renowned senator. Theoklia was childless for a long time. She fervently prayed for a son, vowing to dedicate him to God.
Soon after the birth of her son Theoklia was widowed. When St Calliopius reached adolescence, a fierce persecution against Christians began. Theoklia, learning that her son would be denounced as a Christian, sent him to Cilicia in Asia Minor.
When the saint arrived at Pompeiopolis, Paphlagonia there was a celebration in honor of the pagan gods. They invited the youth to take part in the proceedings, but he said he was a Christian and refused. They reported this to the prefect of the city Maximus. St Calliopius was brought before him to be tried. At first, he attempted to persuade Calliopius to worship the gods, promising to give him his own daughter in marriage. After the youth rejected this offer, Maximus subjected him to terrible tortures. He ordered the martyr to be beaten on the back with iron rods, and on the stomach with ox-hide thongs. Finally, the prefect had him tied to an iron wheel, and he was roasted over a slow fire. After these tortures, they threw the martyr Calliopius into prison.
When Theoklia heard about the sufferings of her son, she wrote her last will, freed her slaves, distributed her riches to the poor, and hastened to St Calliopius. The brave mother gave money to the guard and got into the prison to see her son. There she encouraged him to endure suffering to the end for Christ.
When on the following day the saint refused to renounce Christ, Maximus gave orders to crucify the martyr. The day of execution happened to be Great Thursday, when the Savior’s last meal with His disciples is commemorated.
Theoklia begged the guard to crucify her son head downward, since she considered it unworthy for him to be crucified like the Lord. Her wish was granted. The holy martyr hung on the cross overnight and died on Great Friday in the year 304.
When the holy martyr was removed from the cross, Theoklia gave glory to the Savior. She embraced the lifeless body of her son and gave up her own spirit to God. Christians buried their bodies in a single grave.
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Sunday, August 28, 2011
While Hurricane Irene bears down on much of the mid Atlantic states on its way north, and residents of the Washington, D.C. area have been advised to remain indoors, the elite soldiers who are the sentinels at Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns remain at their posts.
Since taking over the mission on April 6, 1948, Tomb Sentinels from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment’s “The Old Guard” have guarded the Tomb for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year regardless of the weather.
Sentinels trade off marching in front of the tombs that are the final resting place for unknown soldiers from World War I, World War II and the Korean War. The Changing of the Guard at the Tomb is a popular stop for Washington tourists.
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Published: 3:30 PM 12/19/2014
... it hovered in the same spot rotating around
by Cheryl Costa
It was late August 2011, Puerto Rico and the Great Antilles had been battered by a category three hurricane; that stormís name was Hurricane Irene. Coastal areas up the eastern seaboard braced for the worst as the storm and itís 120 mph winds made its way northward, causing significant storm surge and coastal flooding.
On the north shore of Long Island, the Suffolk County bayside community of Nissequogue, NY was dealing with surge flooding.
Charlie, a local boat owner concerned for the safety of his boat, began regularly checking a webcam that monitored the Defeo Marina five miles east at Port Jefferson, where his boat was moored.
It was about 2:30 pm on Sunday August 28 when Charlie logged into the camera to check the flood conditions.
Charlie tells us: ďI witnessed a large silver round disc type object in the sky over the flooded bay. I watched it live for a few minutes as it hovered in the same spot rotating around. My first thought was that someone might be launching a weather balloon but I soon realized that the object had lines and a structure that didnít look like a balloon.
Charlie took three screenshots of the live web cam, each of the images were about 10 seconds apart.
ďIt appears in the pictures that you can see the craft rotating toward the camera.Ē
Later Charlie spoke to the marina management to see if the live cam was recorded but unfortunately it wasnít. Charlie tells us that because of the severe weather warnings at the time of the UFO sighting most of the coastal communities were evacuated; likewise no airplanes were flying in or out of the regional New York airports.
Charlie later filed a report and posted his photos with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), case number is 31318.
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I am not going to copy the countless other threads on the countless other forums, however I do want to review the options....
On the 1125R and CR there is a solenoid, which when activated, closes the throttle butterflies a tad, to make the bike compliant with noise regulations.
During my brief flirt with an 1125R, I never had this happen to me... However, there are plenty or people that have had this as an issue.
There are two options to disable the controller:
1. Disconnect the solenoid
2. Disable it in the ECMDisconnecting the solenoid
The solenoid can be electrically disconnected by removing the driver's seat to gain access to the connector. It can also be physically disconnected by removing the airbox and disconnecting the cable from the throttle body...
The issue is, that when you disconnect, the ECM knows by two ways:
i. It sees that the solenoid is now open circuit
ii. When the controller should be working, it checks to see if the TPS has changed
In both cases (I know for a fact that i is true, but ii may be a myth), it will set the Check Engine Light.
You have two options to turn the CEL off.
a. Use a resistor (as shown in all the de-noid guides)
b. Turn the ECM error checking offUsing a Resistor
Check our very own Plumpton's How To - Here
Rhumor has it that the CEL will still come on if the ECM tries to activate the solenoid and the TPS doesn't change...Turn the ECM error checking off
You can gain access to the ECM with a handful of tools now. I am brand loyal to ECMSpy, and the PCSpy version 1.12.x will do the job just fine.
The data you are most interested in is that contained in "Error Mask Bytes" 4 and 5, check the ECMSpy website for it's location for your ECM type.
Error Mask Byte 4 looks after the physical disconnection (TPS) check
Error Mask Byte 5 looks after the electrical disconnection check
The Error bytes are organised as shown in the picture below.
So depending on firmware, you need to set the following bytes to the following values:
BUEZD 0x05ED 224 (decimal)
0x05EE 23 (decimal)
BUE2D 0x072D 224 (decimal)
0x072E 23 (decimal)Disabling the solenoid
The solenoid can be disabled in the ECM, just like the white wire mod, using the Active Intake Configuration byte.
So depending on the firmware, you need to set the following byte to the following value:
BUEZD 0x0287 3 (decimal)
BUE2D 0x035F 3 (decimal)
The question is, what would I
Answer is, disconnect the solenoid and set the Error Masks...
Why cant you just say what the resistance is so i can bust up an old tv set for the resistor,or can i just measure the solenoid and then bust up my tv. Also wont this get hot when it powers up.
If you take off your LH pod cover, you will see the same resistor terminating the CAN bus connector. You can measure the resistance of this one.
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Academic Year Gallery Hours:
Tues, Wed, Sat: 12-3pm
Thurs, Fri: 12-6pm
Closed Monday, Sunday, and University Holidays
Summer Gallery Hours:
Wed, Thurs, Sat: 12-3pm
Closed Monday, Tuesday, Sunday and Federal Holidays
Edith Freeman: Montana Seasons
May 31 - August 25, 2012
Edith Freeman (1913-1992) was a noted artist and rancher who taught in Billings public schools for over 30 years. Her serene woodblock prints capture the harsh beauty of central Montana in all its varied seasons. A master of reduction woodcut printing, she studied with noted Billings artist Isabelle Johnson. Freeman based her compositions on studies of the prairie, rimrocks, river valleys, wildflower meadows, backyard garden and household plants. This exhibition is drawn from the Yellowstone Art Museum’s significant holdings of Freeman’s work and includes the artist’s woodcarving and printmaking tools. The exhibition is touring under the auspices of the Museum and Art Gallery Directors Association of Montana.
Cultural Homesteaders: Montana Institute of the Arts from the Permanent Collection
May 31 - August 25, 2012
This exhibition presents the Montana Institute of the Arts (MIA) permanent collection, which began in 1954 when there were few other collecting institutions in the state and none focused exclusively on fine art. Since 1994, this collection has resided with the Montana Museum of Art & Culture (MMAC) at The University of Montana. The history of this collection and the MIA is central to the cultural landscape of Montana. The MIA was a unique organization of artists who acted collectively to enrich the artistic and cultural opportunities across the state at a time when there was not an established or formal cultural infrastructure. The founders and member artists of the MIA were pioneers, supporting one another and creating artistic opportunities during a time when resources were limited. This collection offers the art object as a tangible record of the experiments and sentiments found in Montana art over the course of 30 years, providing an insight into Montana art history.
Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib: Black Hole/Whiteout
March 2 - May 19, 2012
A collaborative work by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, Black Hole is an immersive video installation installed in a pitch-black room and projected onto a black screen accompanied by a minimal soundtrack arranged by Eugene Lew. The motif and conventions of film noir serve as a metaphor leaving the viewer awash in a deeper mystery. Black Hole examines power structures and the origins of power, relating these observations to political systems.
Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib live and work in Philadelphia where they founded Screening, Philadelphia’s first gallery dedicated to the presentation of works on video and film. Hironaka’s films and video installations have been exhibited internationally at venues including Rencontres Internationals, Paris; Shang Elements MoCA, Beijing, China; The Center for Contemporary Arts, Kitakyushu, Japan; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia;The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Morris Gallery, Philadelphia; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe. She is a recipient of the 2006 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Suib's projects have been exhibited at Philadelphia Museum of Art; Kunstwerke Berlin; Mercer Union, Toronto; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, D.C.; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the 2007 Moscow Biennale.
Curiosity: Selections from the Permanent Collection
March 2 - May 19, 2012
The title of this exhibition is a play on the term ‘cabinet of curiosities,’ an expression derived from the German wunderkammer, the encylopedic16th century assemblages that served as the first examples of museum collections. Early cabinets attempted to catalog scientific knowledge and included an eclectic range of geological, natural history and fine art objects that elevated the status and symbolically expressed the collector's worldliness and influence through the breadth and variety of its contents. ‘Cabinet’ originally referred to a room rather than a piece of furniture, though both served as repositories for the wonderful, curious and mysterious.
Meant to provoke, amuse and delight, this exhibition will highlight the seldom seen and hidden aspects of the vast treasury of the Montana Museum of Art & Culture Permanent Collection which numbers nearly 11,000 objects.
Fra Dana: American Impressionist in the Rockies
December 2, 2011 - February 25, 2012
Fra Dana (1874-1948), a cattle rancher who lived near Great Falls, was one of the leading artists of the Rocky Mountain Northwest at the turn of the twentieth century. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana on November 26, 1874, Dana studied art at the Cincinnati Art Academy, the Art Institute of Chicago and New York School of Art. In 1893, Dana moved with her family to Parkman, Wyoming and met her future husband, Edwin L. Dana. The two married in 1896 and worked together to develop what was by 1918 America’s largest purebred Hereford operation in Montana and Wyoming. Her desire to study and create art was often in conflict with her obligation as a ranch wife.
Dana traveled annually to major urban centers such as New York City, London and Paris to pursue her artistic studies. During her life, she associated with Mary Cassatt, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Maurer and Joseph Henry Sharp and was a student of William Merritt Chase. Her bequest to the Montana Museum of Art & Culture’s Permanent Collection in 1948 of her own artworks as well as those by some of history’s most accomplished artists is central to the richness of the MMAC Permanent Collection and integral to the development of American art. Her collection includes traditional Japanese prints, a large number of prints by Honoré Daumier and Jean Louis Forain and paintings by Joseph Henry Sharp, Alfred Maurer, William Merritt Chase, Douglas John Connah, Elling William Gollings and others.
The Montana Museum of Art & Culture is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of the first-ever full biography of Dana, authored by Sue Hart, Professor of English, Montana State University – Billings and Dr. Valerie Hedquist, Associate Professor of Art History and Criticism, The University of Montana and edited by Caroline Patterson.
Frances Carroll Brown: Bitterroot Portraits
December 2, 2011 - February 25, 2012
Granddaughter of Marcus Daly, Frances Carroll Brown had strong ties to Montana and the Bitterroot Valley. She regularly visited the Stock Farm outside of Hamilton to attend social events and celebrate holidays. She traveled to Europe and lived in France before fleeing at the onset of WWII. Her psychological portraits are artistically and historically significant, ranging in subject from workers and day laborers to members of high society. Brown’s work is fundamentally humanistic, revealing a fascination with a variety of racial, religious and class background, emphasizing the essential unity of people everywhere. Frances Carroll Brown’s art contributes to an expanding category of significant female artists who played a compelling role in Montana art history.
The Montana Museum of Art & Culture exhibits the art of WWII Veteran, Bataan Death March survivor and Montana artist Ben Steele. As a POW, Steele endured 41 months of starvation, dehydration, hard labor, torture and Japanese ‘hell ships’ while crippled by dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, blood poisoning and beri beri. As a prisoner, he created drawings which record the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, the capture of American and Filipino POWs and the degradation and cruelty to which the prisoners were subjected. Steele credits art for his survival and recovery. His record of the Bataan Death March is an aesthetic and historical testimony by a native son who taught generations of art students at MSU - Billings. Part of the MMAC Permanent Collection, this gift by Ben and Shirley Steele is an important part of Montana’s cultural heritage. The exhibition coincides with the 38th annual Montana History Conference at UM, themed “No Ordinary Time: War, Resistance and the Montana Experience” taking place September 22-24, 2011.
Image: Ben Steele, The Bataan Death March, 1880, oil on panel, ca. 1950, 30 x 48 inches.
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Brewing coffee using a French press is now more and more common in the past few years since it produces a tasty, highquality walk efficiently. By permitting the coffee to jumpstart prior to compelling the reasons by way of a steel filter, then the French pressreleases sebum that make a robust, refreshing flavor that is not really feasible with drip coffee manufacturers.
Our next choice may be your Bodum Chambord. French Press Coffee Maker Bodum is your ideal manifestation of this glass French media. Its double filters — just one metal net and something vinyl — block coffee grounds in the cup, so which makes it probably one of the best presses we analyzed.
We spent 20 hours reading blogs, specialization java sites and forums to come across the top rated consumer-reviewed along with expert-tested French presses readily available now.
We chose the most notable nine services and products and, over an extremely caffeinated noodle stretch, conducted four comprehensive tests on preference, endurance, heat retention, and quantity of coffee grounds staying following having a pour. Additionally, we contrasted their primary metrics: cost, capacity, cleanup simplicity, substance, accessories, and durability. Our finalists are wholly manufactured from highquality stuff, such as borosilicate glass and metal.
Throughout our testing and research we found the very best way of brewing coffee with a French media.
Based on James Hoffman, ” World Barista Champion at 2007, the ideal method to take up a carafe could be your “break-and-clean” system, which will help to reduce the bitterness that many folks taste using French press coffee.
Another means to decrease resentment would be to make use of a water filter to purify your own water before making java.
Why You Need to use a French media
First, and above all, a French press is likely to create your coffee taste great. Drip coffee manufacturers count on newspaper filters which consume a number of the special and delicious organic oils in java. The French-press helps to ensure these oils allow it into your own cup, which creates a richer, stronger flavor.
Electric drip coffee manufacturers also suffer in their inability to become thoroughly and properly washed. ReviewsGeek.org As time passes, residue necessarily builds round the innerworkings of one’s java system. This may lead to your coffee to taste rancid or old.
Unless it’s fresh, a drip coffee kettle stays onto a heated surface, which has been cook and burn off the coffee once it’s brewed, again rendering it taste rancid. Coffee is most useful if it is fresh, and also a French media is a easy approach to have fresh coffee.
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My recent post on demographic myths unleashed a lively discussion on the issue of race and IQ in the comments section. I’m not too interested in wading into it: not out of any misplaced respect for political correctness, of course, but simply because though I think there are good arguments for both sides, it misses the largest issue. On the one hand, that there exist differences in measured IQ between races in the US and between nations is beyond dispute, and there is strong evidence to suggest that IQ is a strongly hereditary trait. On the other hand, one must also keep in mind that culture plays an indelible role on the formation and very definition of IQ. One striking demonstration of this is a “similarities test” administered by Michael Cole on members of the Kpelle tribe in Liberia, in which they were asked to group objects into categories such as food, tools, etc. They chose functional pairings – e.g. knife and potato, because a knife could not not cut a spoon – because a “Wise man could do such-and-such”. It was only when the researchers asked “How would a fool do it” that the tribesmen rearranged the items into their “correct” categories. So can the Kpelle really be called dumb? Isn’t their form of intelligence, though demented in the eyes of industrial man, actually eminently suited for their natural environment?
However, once upon a time, European peoples too had this psychology. Throughout the world the illiterate peasant tended to be dull, uninquisitive, childlike. (In stark contrast to the slick, lettered, cosmopolitan city-dweller). For instance, in an earlier post I mentioned the article Reconsidering Weber: Literacy and the Spirit of Capitalism by Russian sociologist Andrey Korotayev.
Literacy does not simply facilitate the process of perceiving innovation by an individual. It also changes her or his cognition to a certain extent. [A study by Soviet psychologists on Central Asians during the 1930's] shows that education has a fundamental effect on the formation of cognitive processes (perception, memory, cognition). The researchers found out that illiterate respondents, unlike literate ones, preferred concrete names for colors to abstract ones, and situative groupings of items to categorical ones (note that abstract thinking is based on category cognition). Furthermore, illiterate respondents could not solve syllogistic problems like the following one – “Precious metals do not get rust. Gold is a precious metal. Can gold get rust or not?”. These syllogistic problems did not make any sense to illiterate respondents because they were out of the sphere of their practical experience. Literate respondents who had at least minimal formal education solved the suggested syllogistic problems easily (Luria 1974, 1976, 1982: 47–69).
Therefore, literate workers, soldiers, inventors and so on turn out to be more effective than illiterate ones not only due to their ability to read instructions, manuals, and textbooks, but also because of the developed skills of abstract thinking…
So, 1970′s Kpelle = 1930′s Central Asians? Now fast forward to today. Many Central Asians are Turkic, and their level of social development – if not economic development (due to an adverse geography and a socialist legacy) – is similar to Turkey’s. The Turks are estimated to have a national IQ of 85-90; not retarded, but substantially less intelligent than average Europeans and East Asians. For instance, the IQ of the US is estimated to be around 10 points higher. But if American children during the 1930′s had taken the IQ tests of the 1990′s, it is estimated they’d have performed about 20-25 points lower (that’s like today’s India or Brazil, or 10 points lower than Turks)! This is explained by the rapid secular rise in intelligence during the past century called the Flynn Effect.
[Map of world IQ (Richard Lynn & Tatu Vanhanen, 2002). Click to enlarge.]
Such an increase is beyond the power of genetics. According to Flynn – and I find this to be convincing – his effect can be ascribed to the environmental changes produced by modernization and the industrial system. He cites the following example: in response to the question “What do a dog and a rabbit have in common?”, whereas a modern respondent would say they are both mammals (abstract answer), someone from a century ago might say that one would catch rabbits with dogs (a concrete or functional answer). It would appear that it’s not so much general IQ that has improved – though probably it did too thanks to better nutrition – but the specialized IQ (abstract, categorizing) that is needed to sustain an industrial system.
But I’d prefer to imagine it in the following way. Think of the brain as hardware. Just as human races* possess various skin colors and physiologies that have evolved over eons in their environments, so it is likely that there appeared subtle racial variations in the genetic component of intelligence. To take a (very idealized) example, it would seem intuitive that someone descended from “hunters” would have a predilection for motor skills (to chuck spears at prey), while someone whose distant ancestors were “gatherers” would be relatively more adept at pattern recognition (to notice berries and be able to tell which are poisonous and which are not).
Nonetheless, three factors would mitigate these differences. First, the human species is very mixed and interbred; apart from small groups that spent a long time in isolation (such as the Tasmanian aborigines), inter-racial distinctions are unlikely to be very sharp. Second, the brain’s hardware works much more effectively if properly maintained; to that end, improvements in nutrition would have the effect of raising IQ levels, especially from the lower end of the scale (as indeed happened in the US during the 20th century). Third, and most importantly, the actual software of intelligence – the intangible of culture and memetics, which is a product of an (ever-changing) environment – has been evolving far, far faster than the hardware. Whatever their racial differences, a Gaelic office worker has far more in common with an ethnic !Kung physicist living in Ireland (mentally, psychologically) than with his own ancestors of a mere century ago.
Peasants and hunter-gatherers may not have much skill in abstract thinking, but they do tend to be intimately aware of the world around them and cognizant of things that will help them get food on the table or cure a sickness. Today’s Arabs in the Middle East may score low on IQ tests and have the lowest literacy rates outside sub-Saharan Africa – even bin Laden complained that more books are translated into Spanish every year than have ever been translated into Arabic! – but many of them are phenomenal mentats who can recite the Koran from cover to cover (if not necessarily actually read the script!). Very impressive, but not that useful for building an industrial base, let alone an innovation economy. As for the typical Westerner, unlike a few decades ago – or unlike today’s Russians, for that matter, who still memorize Pushkin and Lermontov by heart at school – he or she can’t recite a single classical poem. But Westerners are unparalleled at creating and inventing new products and services in the unfolding Information Age…
Why have some human societies been much more successful at industrializing and modernizing than others? The roots are unlikely to be racial differences in IQ. The work of people like David Landes or Jared Diamond explains this better…
Furthermore, the link between modernization and IQ is not one way. The main determinant of long-term economic growth is a country’s human capital (see 1, 2, 3), which for the most part consists of the educational attainment of its population, which in turn is strongly correlated with its level of national IQ**.
[In my old post Education as the Elixir of Growth, I worked out a Human Capital Index for a range of countries - based on things such as literacy, international standardized test scores (which are closely correlated with national IQ) and tertiary enrollment - and plotted them against their levels of GDP per capita. Red dots are countries with a socialist legacy and are below the level they are expected to be at; green dots are countries propelled into being upper outliers by virtue of resource windfalls, such as Saudi Arabia. Cyan dots are all other outliers. Click to enlarge.]
[Countries are marked by GDP / capita growth rates from 1997 to 2007. The colors go as follows: white (1.0-1.9%); yellow (2.0-2.9%); orange (3.0-3.9%); red (4.0-5.9%); dark red (6.0%-7.9%) and black (8.0%-14.9%). GDP per capita figures (on the y-axis) are for 1997 – this is because what we are interested in is the influence of education levels on future growth, which we know for the period from 1997 up until today. Unfortunately, educational stats for 1997 are much less comprehensive (PISA and TIMMS embraced much fewer countries then), plus it would take a lot of time digging them up – hence I made a rough assumption that they were the same as for 2007 (which is fairly accurate - it is impossible to radically change a country's human capital profile within the space of a single decade). Note how almost all the fastest-growing countries were well below the logical level dictated by their human capital potential. Click to enlarge.]
This, incidentally, explains my fundamental optimism about the long-term prospects of China and Russia (1, 2) – and my pessimism on India and Brazil. (Amongst the Economist-reading class which thinks liberal democracy is a panacea the impression tends to be the inverse). In summary:
- China is the biggest creditor and set to become the world’s biggest manufacturer in 2011; though its level of tertiary attainment is still low, it has good basic education and a high national IQ. Russia has superb human capital, energy windfall and fiscal firepower. Similar things can be said for most of the rest of Eastern Europe, East Asia and Eurasia.
- Many Indians remain functionally illiterate; though Brazil has progressed further, international standardized tests confirm its woeful educational standards. Similar things can be said about most of the rest of Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. These regions are unlikely to converge to developed levels anytime soon.
- In the West itself, the Flynn Effect has stalled and may even have gone into slow retreat – in any case, human capital development is no longer a driver of growth. Meanwhile, it faces many challenges, such as fiscal (un)sustainability and aging populations. It will remain near the theoretical upper boundaries of development, but these boundaries are likely to start contracting in the years ahead under the pressures of energy depletion.
None of this is due to the fact that Estonians or Chinese are “superior” to Indians or Germans. These are deep structural factors we’re talking about. Quite simply, unlike Mexicans, the former have the type of culture, education, IQ (call it what you will) that will enable them to sustain a developed techno-industrial base. According to the results of the PISA 2006 standardized tests in science, only 15% of Brazilians, 11% of Indonesians, 18% of Mexicans and 22% of Turks possessed skills beyond those needed for purely linear problem-solving, in contrast to 40% of Israelis, 48% of Russians, 51% of Americans, and 68% of Koreans. In other words, the latter nations have about 2-5x as many cadres capable of moving into hi-tech and high added-value manufacturing or services as the former. Is it really a logical leap then to consider their long-term development prospects that much brighter?
Likewise, the reason that Russians and Chinese will gain on Germans and Americans is also simple – the former have the capacity to absorb modern productivity-enhancing technologies, whereas the latter are already developed. This is just catch-up growth. Interestingly, I suspect that their catch-up will be very rapid in historical perspective due to 1) the economic waning of the Western world due to unsustainable fiscal policies, debt and rising costs of energy inputs and 2) the unprecedented ease of technology transfer (and theft!) bequeathed by the Internet.
In the near future, there will appear definite limits to further growth of the global techno-industrial base. Consequently, in a globalized world in which capital resources flow to where they can produce the greatest returns, we can expect nations like China to expand their share of global manufacturing to levels commensurate with their skilled industrial workforces. In fact, this seems to have been the case in the oil shock-induced crisis of 2008-2009: for instance, whereas global vehicle production fell by 14%, it expanded by a blistering 48% (!) in China, which now accounts for nearly a quarter of world output.
* Yes, I realize some scientists deny race and prefer to talk of genotypes, phenotypes and clines. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use the term “race” with the understanding that it is highly qualified.
** See my first post Education as the Elixir of Growth for the original argument. I didn’t bother connecting education with national IQ there, though I was familiar with their close relation, because I didn’t want to incite controversy. (Now I realize that’s a bad idea for a popular blogger!). In the last comment Steve Sailer made the connection explicit.
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By Juan Carlos Sosa Azpúrua | PETROLEOYV.COM
04.07.05 | PETROCARIBE makes a demented mockery of the Venezuelan petroleum industry's image. This South American country insists upon developing a peculiar kind of business that consists of moving away from its normal markets; weakening its own production capacity; turning vital assets such as CITGO into sculpture studio models for artists to sculpt a bad reputation; writing its contractual obligations in invisible ink; using its ankle to kick aside companies that produce more than a million B/D in Venezuela; speculating irresponsibly in a market where if an Arab coughs West Texas Intermediate goes up by a dollar and, if that were not enough, publicly proposing the development of nuclear reactors and the massive purchase of bicycles into a country that, including the contents of the Orinoco Oil Belt, has the highest volume of petroleum reserves on the planet.
Faced with this, it is fitting to put things in context a bit. The world demand is for a little over 84 million barrels per day and by the end of the year it will have a demand higher than 86 million B/D. The U.S. GDP will maintain its growth rate of 3% and China will do its own thing by exceeding 8%. This economic pulse will be felt in the world's veins, favoring India, all of Europe and the Far East, especially Japan and Southeast Asia.
Presently, OPEC produces a little over 30 million B/D and Venezuela hardly even reaches 2.5 million. New investment opportunities have opened up in Nigeria, Namibia, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Sahara, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Ghana. A new pipeline has just been dedicated that will allow more than a million barrels per day to be transported from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. Canada is drawing ever so much interest in its bituminous sands and Saudi Arabia has embarked on a $50 billion investment plan, indicating important activities in the Abu Hadriyah, Fadhili, Khursaniyah (AFK) and Khurais that will increase its production to 12.5 million B/D within about three years. The Chinese (CNOOC) are offering $18.5 billion for UNOCAL, a company coveted by Chevron and with basic operations in the U.S. and Asia. For its part, the U.S. Senate has just passed new legislation that seeks to reduce its dependence on oil by developing new sources of energy.
Among measures being considered are fiscal incentives in the amount of $18 billion for the development of renewable or sustainable sources of energy and tax reductions on the purchase of more energy efficient machinery, such as hybrid vehicles. Policies have been established that will reduce oil consumption by one million barrels daily by the year 2025.
Likewise, a few days ago a consortium made up of European Union, the United States, South Korea, France and Japan will build a new type of nuclear reactor that will reproduce the way in which the sun produces energy; it will be like making a star on earth. From this they expect to obtain non-polluting and inexhaustible energy. The thermonuclear reactor is based upon nuclear fusion, the generation of energy like that produced by stars such as the sun, but without noxiously affecting the Environment, a problem that existing nuclear plants have.
We are able to summarize the scenario based on these facts:
1) World economic growth will continue and ever more oil is needed.
2) Producing countries such as Saudi Arabia are increasing their potential and becoming more trustworthy.
3) New oil areas are opening up and competition for investing there is increasing.
4) Oil companies are purchasing assets for tapping these opportunities and are tightening their circles of influence in order to protect their captive markets.
5) Legislative and technological advances aim to replace, during this century, petroleum as the primary energy source.
Having understood the context, it is obvious that Venezuela has an energy role to fulfill and quickly.
Its priorities ought to be:
1) Strengthening its presence in the U.S., a country that imports more than 12 million B/D and consumes 21 million B/D: In order to accomplish this, there ought to be: a) Signing of bilateral agreements between the Governments of both nations that would make Venezuela the primary supplier for the aforementioned market, the largest in the world; b) Increasing the volume of crude being refined on U.S. territory; c) Covering the U.S. map with the CITGO logo; d) Pressing for the acquisition of new refineries and storage capacity.
2) Increasing the volume of extraction in Western Venezuela.
3) Intensifying the development of the Orinoco Oil Belt through new strategic contracts.
4) Optimizing the operation of existing refineries.
5) Professionalizing PDVSA and thereby facilitating its technical and financial operations.
6) Reforming the hydrocarbons law so as to attract more investments and guarantee respect for existing contracts in order to allow the long term success of present investments and in order to encourage new projects.
7) Maintaining a presence in Europe and expanding into Asia and Africa with assets that would allow triangulation agreements tied into its power over the market with the U.S. and
8) Developing business in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia with PDV and with CITGO in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Canada. These are just a few of the matters that ought to take up the Venezuelan government’s time.
The matter of PETROCARIBE is fundamentally worrisome because it makes it evident that the priorities are not being taken into account.
There is a political schizophrenia that splits the country apart when faced with two realities. The first reality is the world described above; the other consists of the hallucination of a government that invests the time and resources of an entire nation in promoting a political model that shoots the first reality straight in the heart, thus killing Venezuela’s energy potential.
Financing an oil invoice for over 17 and even 25 years that will never be paid, providing free shipping and investing millions of dollars in shipping, storage and distribution infrastructure for countries that do not pay and that do not represent necessary alliances for Venezuela’s economic and social growth, does not appear to be sane.
One can understand that Caribbean countries, poor as they are, require help and incentives. But the Venezuelan government’s responsibility is to defend its country's interests as its sole priority and this priority begins with developing and defending its energy potential. If one wants to help Caribbean countries, there are more effective ways to do so that do not compromise Venezuela’s energy future.
PETROCARIBE is part of the hallucination that is dragging Venezuela to the brink of madness. Venezuela’s energy future dangles from a pathologic hook.
Using oil as a building crane, the Venezuelan Government is constructing a gigantic building. That is where, together with the poorest countries on the planet, the government intends for Venezuelans to live. From the barred window of one’s room, one will be able to view the modern world, but it will be only from that window.
Translation by W.K.
© by Vcrisis.com & the author
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Adult stem cells represent a sort of blank clay from which a myriad of different cell and tissue types are molded and as such are of critical importance to health, ageing and disease. In tissues that turn over rapidly, such as the intestines, the self-renewing nature of stem cells and their susceptibility to cancer-causing mutations has led researchers to postulate that these cells also act as the cell of origin in cancers. The rarity of adult stem cells relative to their differentiated daughter cells has, however, made them historically difficult to study.
Over the years, researchers have hypothesized that the body maintains a population of mutation- and injury-resistant “reserve” stems cells that serve as a kind of dormant reservoir from which all other cells in a given tissue can be derived. Yet researchers have been conflicted about the precise identity of this population of cells.
Now, a team from the University of Pennsylvania has helped identify key characteristics that distinguish reserve stem cells from other stem cell populations that had been purported to have similar properties. The work, which employed single-cell gene expression analyses as well as other cutting-edge techniques, demonstrated that, in the intestines, reserve stem cells are a distinct population from so-called “label-retaining cells.” The two populations were long believed to be one and the same.
“The devil is in the details,” said senior author Christopher J. Lengner, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences in Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine and member of the Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “You need an assay with single-cell sensitivity to address the potential heterogeneity in the cell population being study and thus to truly understand what these cells are. Now that we have that level of resolution, we can begin to ask questions that are relevant to questions such as how cancer is initiated, a process that starts in a single cell.”
The paper appears in the journal Gastroenterology.
Lengner collaborated on the work with Ning Li, the paper’s lead author, and Angela Nakauka-Ddamba, both of Penn Vet; John Tobias of the Penn Genome Analysis Core; and Shane T. Jensen of Penn’s Wharton School.
The concept of the reserve stem cell arose in the mid-1970s, when biologist John Cairns formulated a theory that became known as the immortal strand hypothesis. His idea was that reserve stem cells remained immune from mutation by protecting the “mother strand” of DNA. During each cell division, the theory went, only the newly replicated strands of DNA were passed to the daughter cell, while the mother strand was maintained by the original stem cell.
In search of evidence to test this hypothesis, researchers conducted experiments in which they coaxed stem cells to incorporate a radioactive DNA label and then tracked it through cell divisions.
“What they saw then was after two months there were still rare cells that had retained this label,” Lengner said. “They took this and some other experiments as evidence for the immortal strand hypothesis.”
In other words, they believed that the cells that retained the label were the reserve stem cells that had held onto the mother strand of DNA.
A few decades later, the immortal strand hypothesis lost favor due to a lack of supporting evidence, but scientists explained the existence of the so-called label-retaining cells by noting that they could be a population of stem cells that divided only rarely. In the early 2000s, researchers used different labels, including green fluorescent protein, or GFP, fused to histone proteins that are stably incorporated into the chromatin, to track cell division. Using GFP had the added benefit of allowing researchers to prospectively isolate living cells using fluorescence-activated cell sorting and to subsequently analyze cell behavior and gene expression in the purified cell populations.
These types of experiments have been used even more recently to suggest that label-retaining cells are the same as reserve stem cells. These recent studies have indicated that at least some cells within the label-retaining population could give rise to all the different cell lineages in the intestine, just as a stem cell ought to.
The Penn team, however, decided to take a closer look at the label-retaining cells to see if they were truly the same thing as the indispensable reserve stem cells. To do so, they created an experimental system whereby they introduced GFP into young mice targeted to intestinal stem cells and then monitored the loss of fluorescence over three months. As observed previously, they found cells that retained the GFP label. Over the short term, these label-retaining cells were at and above the base of the intestinal crypt, an invagination at the base of the intestinal villi protected from the contents of the lumen. As more time passed, over one and then three months, the cells were found more rarely and became localized exclusively at the very base of the crypt.
“This was one piece of data that confused people,” Lengner said, “because label-retaining cells and reserve stem cells can both be found roughly at the same position relative to the crypt base. This led people to speculate that they were one in the same.”
To establish whether they were indeed the same, the Penn team bred two populations of mice together, one with the GFP marking label-retaining cells and another with reserve intestinal stem cells labeled with a genetic marker controlled by the Hopx gene in red. In the resulting offspring, they found a few cells with both labels, but the majority of labeled cells fell into mutually exclusive populations.
The researchers then used single-cell gene expression profiling to look for genes in the different cell populations. They found that the short-term label-retaining cells, reserve intestinal stem cells and a cell population known as active crypt base columnar intestinal stem cells, which are known to be susceptible to injury and mutation, each had distinctive gene expression profiles and were thus distinct populations.
Subjecting the various cell populations to radiation injury, they found that the majority of the Hopx-marked cells, or reserve intestinal stem cells, survived and entered the cell cycle to regenerate the damaged tissue, while short-term label-retaining cells did not. These cell populations had additional functional differences. While the majority of Hopx-marked stem cells were in the resting, or quiescent stage of the cell cycle, most label-retaining cells were arrested in the G1 phase of the cell cycle, characteristic of differentiated cells.
Finally, the researchers showed that Hopx-marked intestinal stem cells could form intestinal organoids in culture while long-term label-retaining cells could not, indicating that the long-term label-retaining cells were already terminally differentiated and could not revert back. Short-term label-retaining cells did form organoids but only about half as efficiently as the Hopx cells did.
“The conclusion we come to is that these short-term label-retaining cells are progeny of active stem cells and are undergoing a bifurcation to be one of two types of intestinal cells,” Lengner said. “They retain some ability to revert to the stem cell state in culture, but they’re not the radiation-resistant reserve stem cell that we and other groups have long studied.”
The findings, which challenge decades of previous work, provide researchers with a new framework with which to study intestinal stem cells.
“It’s like you’re watching a soccer game and the players all have numbers on their backs,” said Li. “If they didn’t have those numbers, it would be very difficult to talk about the game and know whether the player I’m talking about is the same player you’re talking about. It’s the same with these cell populations.”
Now that they’ve established that reserve stem cells are distinct from the label-retaining cells, the Penn researchers would like to put more emphasis on studying the true reserve stem cells to determine how cell populations in the intestine are organized and, eventually, perhaps to understand how these and other cell populations figure in the emergence of cancer.
The study was supported by the National Cancer Institute and National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disorders.
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Everyone has the right to enjoy their home in peace. You should try to be a good neighbour and keep good relations.
As your landlord, we will:
We do not expect to get involved in less serious problems, such as disputes over parking or doors being slammed, until you have talked, or attempted to talk, to your neighbour.
So if you are having a problem with a neighbour, talk to them first. Explain exactly what is causing you a problem and why. Most people are reasonable if spoken to calmly and politely, and sometimes they may not be aware they are causing a nuisance.
If you are unable to sort out the problem, please report it to us.
Domestic abuse includes physical, emotional, psychological or sexual abuse experienced by people in a relationship. It can affect you, your partner, your children or any other person living in your home.
If you, or someone you know, are experiencing domestic violence, please call the National Domestic Violence Helpline on 0808 200 0247. This is a 24 hour free and confidential service with translation facilities and a service for callers who are deaf or hard of hearing.
You can also speak to your housing officer or call us on 0800 435 016.
If you are abusing your partner, and he or she leaves your home because of the abuse, we have the right to apply to the court to evict you.
Harassment is the real or perceived interference with a person’s comfort or safety by using intimidation, physical or psychological abuse. This may be verbal, written or by action and can include references to a person’s physical disability, appearance, marital or employment status. It can also include attacks on or damage to property.
Racial harassment is abuse or intimidation because of a person’s ethnic or national origin, race, nationality, colour, religion or belief. Hate crime can also occur because of issues such as a person's disability or their sexual orientation.
If you are experiencing racial harassment or hate crime, you should call the police. Please also report it to us by calling 0800 435 016. We will start investigating the problem within 48 hours and will liaise with the police and other agencies.
Where appropriate, we will take legal action. Your safety as a witness is very important so we will offer support to help you feel safer and more confident before, during and after any court case.
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Many millions of people frequently experience themselves in a pronounced state of unreality, in what can be described as an out-of-body, vague, dreamlike mental-emotional condition.
This affliction—known as depersonalization—gets little attention in the media. Yet it is, in fact, the third most common psychological complaint, after feelings of anxiety and depression. According to the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, “The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”
The manual says that episodes of depersonalization “are characterized by a feeling of unreality or detachment from, or unfamiliarity with, one’s whole self or from aspects of the self.” In addition, the depersonalization experience “can sometimes be one of a split self, with one part observing and one part participating, known as an ‘out of body experience’ in its most extreme form.”
Depersonalization is commonly associated with childhood trauma, stress, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic attacks, migraine, sleep deprivation, and recreational drug use. The affliction does not produce discontinuity of consciousness, a symptom associated with dissociative identity disorder.
Experts say the exact cause of depersonalization is unknown. I am making the case, however, that the origin or cause of depersonalization, as published in psychoanalytic literature in 1950, is, in fact, known.* [Read more…]
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Was it a windy day in Australia, or is this simply the way you trap a crocodile?
Police officials and a few residents in Queensland were able to surround a brute crocodile and keep it off the street until wildlife officers could get there.
It seems that the huge croc wandered into someone’s backyard to work on its sun tan. That was when alarmed folks in the area alerted the police.
Hoping the oversized reptile would find its way back to the water, officials made the interesting decision to surround the croc with garbage bins in an effort to funnel him back to where he came from.
The nearly 12-foot-long croc was ultimately penned in by hay bales and guarded for safe keeping until wildlife keepers could remove it to a reptile farm, to the sound of cheering on New Year’s Eve.
No telling if the big brute was smiling about the whole affair, but his teeth were surely seen.
Photos via My Police/Queensland
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Two men face a slew of charges in what looks to be the largest poaching case in Minnesota’s history.
A two-year investigation by the Minnesota DNR, which began as the result of a tip for a wolf caught in a snare, has resulted in poaching charges against two men. The pair are accused of running 638 illegally set snares.
“That is such a number that it’s unheard of,” said Tom Provost, DNR regional enforcement supervisor in Grand Rapids. “This number of sets has not been surpassed in Minnesota before. Our average for fail-to-attend traps or snares would be one to 10. Ten would be a big number in any other case.”
Douglas Anthony Marana, 70, and Roderick Robert Kottom, 68, of Chisholm, northern Minnesota, were charged with gross misdemeanors for illegally taking or possessing pine marten, otter, fisher and wolverine. The pair was also charged for failing to tend snares daily and for making snare loops too large. It is also alleged that the snares weren’t properly identified. Officers also seized 17 foxes, five snowshoe hares, two fisher, and one deer that had been taken illegally.
Using technology to their advantage, conservation officers obtained a warrant that allowed them to place a tracking device on Kottom’s vehicle. Subsequently, during a search of Marana’s residence, a GPS device was found that contained waypoints to traps.
Although Marana has a clean record in relation to wildlife offences, Kottom has previous convictions.
If found guilty, the pair face one year in prison and $3,000 in fines.
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The opinions posted on the Pagan Perspective pages are those of individuals and are not neccessarily shared or endorsed by the Witches' Voice inc.
Posted: Nov. 17, 2002
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Question of the Week: 93 - 1/6/2003
Should Pagans Apply For Federal Funds?
Under the new U.S. ‘faith-based’ initiatives, religious groups cannot be denied federal money if they otherwise qualify for a social service program grant. Should Pagans go for a piece of that pie?
Do you think that an openly Pagan organization, all qualifications being met, would have a real chance at obtaining funding from the current administration?
What about the separation of church and state issue?
Federal funds and tax money going to religious organizations in order to provide social programs: A good idea or not?
| Reponses: There are 56 responses posted to this question.
|| Reverse Sort
| NO ||Jan 8th. at 5:45:59 pm UTC|
|Carla (Florida) ||Age: 27 - Email |
I don't think that it would be wise. People aren't anymore open to the idea than they used to be. They just hide their hatred for us better.
| Make Y'r Presence Shown! ||Jan 8th. at 2:45:17 pm UTC|
|Operanut (Austin Texas) ||Age: 70 - Email - Web|
Roust the "demons" of the past with a robust ethical presence. Pagan compassion recommends itself to good works. Take the money and use it for good with no "expenses" taken out.
| We Must Become Visable ||Jan 8th. at 9:22:51 am UTC|
|V. (Madison, WI) ||Age: 24 - Email |
I think it is very important that Wiccans, Pagans, etc., become more outspoken, and do so very soon. Each time you explain what we are to someone who does not know, you have removed the veil of ignorance from their eyes, and they are forever changed. We are good people. Let people know we are pagan that they may associate our goodness and our good deeds with our religions. Do not hide. Do not be ashamed. Just be calm and clear and non-offended, even when you are clearing up the same misconception for the millionth time. Just speak up. Be brave! Once we are recognized as a force for good, old conceptions of us will change. I am very open with my religious beliefs, and I have some strictly Christian friends. But they like me. Some of them love me! And they know I am Wiccan. I have told them. They know me, they know I am good, and so through me they are getting a picture of what Wicca is and what Wicca can be. As far as this faith-based initiative, once you, as a Pagan group, are running a shelter, soup kitchen, etc...once you are established and open and out there in the communities doing good work, go ahead and ask for money. If they deny you, find a lawyer who will help. This could all blow up in Bushie's face...imagine, Pagans come out of the woodwork, stand up for themselves and the other mistreated segments of society, change the world for the better, and then are denyed federal funds??? What news that will make! What publicity! What a chance for Paganism and Wicca to throw themselves in the faces of the majority and say, "Hey! We are doing everything you have asked of us as good American citizens...yet you discriminate against us. Who is the evil one now?"
| To See What We Shall See... ||Jan 8th. at 1:12:37 am UTC|
|Glass (Beloit, WI) ||Age: 19 - Email |
I agree with much of what has been said already in other's posts. I believe that, if any group needs these funds, then they should be encouraged to apply. I believe that all faiths, Witches and Pagans included, should be equally eligible and equally likely to receive these funds based solely on their need for them.
However, I also believe that Witches and Pagans would be at a disadvantage when applying for these funds because of the negative images, stereotypes, and ideas often associated with our diverse faith. This saddens me, but it also makes me bold. I say that someone with need and a legitimate cause should apply for them, if for no other reason than to see the reaction.
This may sound rather juvenile, but I still have some hope, even for our current administration, and I believe that the attempt should be made if the need exists. There is no reason not to try. Yes, records would have to be opened to inspections, if need be, but what have we to hide?
I think the availability of these funds could lead to great opportunities, depending on how open our minds are to the possibilities, how well informed we are of what we are doing, and how willing the world is to let us be who we are. A lot of "what if" type considerations, but I just can't shake of my darned hope for great things.
| Do We Need It??? ||Jan 7th. at 8:48:23 pm UTC|
|AthalaReika (Oregon USA) ||Age: 16 - Email |
My answer to this question is another question, do we need federal assitance?? How badly does your coven need money? And how many of you are solitaries? I think that if a coven is big enough to need Federal Assitance then they should apply for it, but only if its needed. I dont like the thought of mixing church and state!
| Absolutely Not ||Jan 7th. at 7:53:28 pm UTC|
|Bittersweet (New Jersey, USA) ||Age: 29 - Email - Web|
The separation of Church and State is one of the pillars of what personal freedom we have left in this country. If the current administration is composed of individuals from one particular type of path (fundamentalist Christian) don't you think they might just be doing this to benefit themselves? Would it be crass of me to just say, "DUH!"
If you support the separation of church and state, and subsequently apply for federal aid as a charitable Pagan organization, where do your loyalties lie? Can you truly rally for separation when you've got a hand in Big Brother..err.. I mean, Uncle Sam's pockets?
When you become dependent on someone else's wallet (whether it be government or advertisers) you become beholden to them. You are no longer on your own two feet. In other words, it's harder for you to just walk away when you realize you no longer agree with their methods or morals.
At best, "faith-based initiatives" are political bribery. At worst.. well, I'll leave that up to your imagination.
| Not A Chance ||Jan 7th. at 7:01:12 pm UTC|
|Starlady (Jacksonville, Florida) ||Age: 45 - Email |
Since someone high up in the government already stated that Pagan groups would NOT be given any funds, it won't happen. That's the result of the fundies being in power. They pass laws that benefit themselves.
| Would You Want The Government To Dictate Us? ||Jan 7th. at 3:59:17 pm UTC|
|foreverknightfan (Dardanelle, Arkansas) ||Age: 39 - Email |
While it seems like a good idea to have federal funds so some of our Pagan groups can actually DO the good work that we wish we can do, I see a few problems.
Assuming that we COULD get federal funds, anyone want the Government ( a really bureaucratic, mire filled process) to DICTATE what we do and do not do or risk losing the funds?
Then there's the matter of privacy. You accept federal funds your records could be open for public scrutinty. Let's say, for example, that you run a battered women's shelter. An abuser with a lawyer and a judge in his pocket could legally force you to give up the location of his spouse.
I do wish that more Neopagan groups did have open charitable organizations, but like restrictiong our freedoms in the name of "home security", the idea sounds good on the surface but is one tar baby of you get sucked into the whole mess.
| Do We Want It! ||Jan 7th. at 3:22:46 pm UTC|
|Jade (canada) ||Age: 16 - Email |
I am Canadian, but I feel that this is a very important question. Wicca has recently been recognized as a religion in the US, but I don't believe that the gouvern,emt is ready for such a request. Most people view Wicca as a satanic (according to stereotypes) based religion, and they would laugh in your face. They would think it was a joke. By law, you should have the right to ask for the money, but do we want it? Right now, Wicca is still in the Broom Closet, and nobody really knows what it's about unless you follow the Wiccan path. In my city, you would be thought to be a threatening person if you openly admitted to being a witch. But...if other religions are allowed this money, then we should ask for it to. what do we have to loose?
| As Most Others... ||Jan 7th. at 1:59:47 pm UTC|
|Lunae (rural St. Louis, MO) ||Age: 31 - Email |
I'm against the faith-based, government-funding scheme. I believe 100% in separation of church and state.
There IS a correlation in this separation and the greater freedoms enjoyed by members of a society. It's not just for individuals, it aids groups too whether that's political, religious, or other.
Since this is going to be the way of it, I see nothing wrong with a Pagan based charitable organization applying. Mr. Bush has already commented (when he was running for office) that he doesn't see Wicca as a religion. I'm not Wiccan, I'm Pagan but I see organized, chartered groups of people who form a "church" as Religious Groups. He doesn't. This is enough to tell me the government will not allow Pagan based organizations matching funds.
I think it's sad that we aren't recognized as the honorable people we are. I think intolerance can never be "okay." This is where we live. We must continue to strive to let others know WE DO GOOD WORKS and especially COLLECTIVELY. This of it as a Pagan "Love" P.A.C.
| Confusion ||Jan 7th. at 3:15:24 am UTC|
|Stella (Pasadena, CA) ||Age: 24 - Email |
OK, I know I already posted, but I am a little confused. I am totally against this program, for previously stated reaons, but it seems like my understanding of what it is differs from is being talked about here. The focus of this program is religious based charity organizations, not religious groups, isn't it? For example I used to volunteer at a restaurant that was run by a Lutheran church. It gave the profits and tips from the restaurant to hunger related charities. While the restaurant itself gave no signs of any religous affiliation, it was technically a faith-based organization. The church itself, without the charitable program, would not be eligble, would it?
That said, it seems like a program which could be easily abused and unfairly applied.
| Political Payback ||Jan 7th. at 1:17:01 am UTC|
|Silver (Ft Worth, Texas) ||Age: 41 - Email |
This bit about taking out tax money to subsidise certain cults is political payback for the
fundies and ilk those who support the Republican party.
Rest assured that amy Pagan group, no matter how established and "qualified" by guidelines will NOT receive one cent. There will be controversies, and this court-appointed administration tends to go by their own rules. Note the coming war on Iraq. John Ashcroft first made a name for himself by helping the state of Missouri get around civil rights legislation.
We must resist this "faith-based" program for the cynical political pay back scam that it is.
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Edmonton (January 9, 2015): The World Sikh Organization of Canada condemns the racist vandalism of the Sri Guru Singh Sabha gurdwara in south Edmonton. Two phrases, including “Leave Canada” were found spray-painted on the outside of the gurdwara today.
The WSO has been in contact with members of the Sri Guru Singh Sabha gurdwara and offered its support and assistance in dealing with this incident.
The WSO’s Alberta Vice-President, Tejinder Singh Sidhu said, “these sort of incidents are born out of ignorance and fear and we feel the best way to deal with them is to educate and reach out to those in the community who may not know who Sikhs are. The vandals would have made better use of their time if they simply went inside the gurdwara, asked a few questions and enjoyed the free meal available to all visitors.”
WSO National Vice-President, Kulmeet Singh Sangha said, “Sikhs have been in Canada for well over a century. This is our home and we are proud of it. The vandalism of the Sri Guru Singh Sabha in Edmonton shows that racism is still out there and we must continue to remain vigilant. We commend the managment committee at the gurdwara who have reacted to this situation with grace and recognized that the best way to combat ignorance is education.”
The WSO encourages community members to remain alert and to report any suspicious activity around gurdwaras to the authorities.
The World Sikh Organization of Canada (WSO) is a non-profit organization with a mandate to promote and protect the interests of Canadian Sikhs as well as to promote and advocate for the protection of human rights for all individuals, irrespective of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, and social and economic status.
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7. Service lives
Normal failure of butterfly valves
is leakages, and butterfly valves' leakages include external leakages and internal leakages. External leakages are mainly caused by erosion or corrosion, and internal leakages are caused by damage to sealed auxiliaries. Service lives usually refer to sealed auxiliaries' using time or times of actions, which depend on types, temperatures, pressure, opening and closing frequency and opening and closing speeds of butterfly valves
. Thus, we can choose materials which can meet working conditions, materials with scratch resistance, fatigue resistance and electrochemical corrosion resistance, and have necessary heat treatments for these materials. In addition, the service life of the sealing auxiliary is closely related to the rationality of the structural design and the manufacturing accuracy.
8. Selection of main parts' materials
The main part of the butterfly valve
includes the valve body, the butterfly plate, the valve stem, the valve seat and the sealing ring. We choose materials based on working conditions, and we should especially pay attention to corrosion resistance and applicable temperatures of materials. The following table shows the applicable temperature and the applicable medium of the commonly used material.
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