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The CELTA course From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia CELTA is an acronym. What does it mean? Literally it means 'Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults' (although if we spoke English properly we would call it a 'Certificate in Teaching Adults the English Language', but CTAEL doesn't look so good and we must remember that it's the aesthetics and not the language that count.) By implication CELTA means so much more than this though, CELTA is an acronym burned onto the damaged hearts of many a young and aspiring globe-trotter. Stop interrupting with this annoying question/answer format: all shall be revealed. edit Stress-Based Learning The CELTA course advocates a wide range of teaching techniques, from PPP (Program/Patronise/Push) to TTT (Teachy/Teachy/Teach) via TBL (Teacher/Being/Lazy), but the most advocated technique of the lot is taught subliminally and is known as Stress-Based Learning. I love you! edit Stress-Based Learning I already put that title, didn't I? Oh, well. Stress-based Learning is the preferred technique of the modern teacher. The theory behind it is simple: give your student 17 major tasks to do at once, don't let them eat or sleep, and allot them... let's say... half a day to do it all. On top of that require them for most of that time to be giving or receiving lessons, give them extra duties and harrass them with reams of administration. If they show any signs of having a hard time coping then make snide comments suggesting that they are lazy and don't listen. Mark all their essays as harshly as possible, picking obscure reasons why they cannot pass. If that doesn't teach the bastard nothing will. edit Bad Cop/Pernickity Cop The CELTA course utilises a tag-team method. Two tutors run the course, one of which takes the role of bad cop, the other pernickity cop. With the bad cop it is possible for a student to get a good mark, especially if they have a vagina, but it is more likely that the bad cop will tell the student to do something over the weekend, and then when they come back having put all their effort into the task, proceed to shout at them for doing it. The well-trained bad cop will do this quarter of an hour before the student teacher has a lesson, putting them completely ill at ease and undermining their confidence. The pernickity cop will, on the other hand, employ an almost laconic approach. If the student does extremely well in a lesson it will still only be marked 'meets requirements' and their success will be ignored. If a student gets all the grammar wrong and tells the learners to go and fuck themselves they will also get a 'meets requirements', thereby undermining the student teacher's confidence in the grading scheme and making them feel that it is futile to attempt to achieve anything. The pernickity cop really comes into his own when marking assignments. The brief of the pernickity cop is to find the most obscure reason why an assignment cannot pass first time, although whatever is handed in for resubmission will automatically pass. edit Job opportunities CELTA trainees expect that when they are qualified they will be able to find a reputable job anywhere in the world. The truth is that when CELTA trainees are qualified they find that anywhere reputable wants 3 years experience on top of a CELTA qualification. This means that CELTA teachers have to spend a number of years in a toilet teaching bochelism to mormons, receiving only mouldy beans for payment, living in the pant draw of a Puerta Rican flange smuggler along with his 8 children just to get the experience required to move up into the wardrobe of a Prussian widget seller and his flatulent wife. edit Things what you should had to know If you are thinking of doing a CELTA then there are a few things to be aware of: - Grammar is not the thing most touched up by grampa. - The 4th conditional is expressed in this phrase: 'I did wouldn't have be a teacher if you never will want to have been teached me, tutor.' - When asked for phonemic script, this works in most cases: /hʊːðəfʌkənriːdðɪsʃɪt/ - Always have concept checking questions readily available. Here are some to get you started: 'why am I doing this to myself?' 'What is the point?' 'Can I really go on?' - The extreme edges of a temperature scale are not 'fucking hot' and 'fucking cold'. - The word 'breast' does not belong anywhere on a timeline, and if you wrote it you need to stop eyeing up your students. - An enema is above a CELTA on an 'enjoyable activities' cline. - Students find it very difficult to comprehend phrasal adverbs such as 'swimmingly up' 'goingly off' etc. - The mark 'T->SS' in your lesson plan means that you will be talking to the students. It is NOT the cue for you to fall asleep.
Why?:Get a tattoo of a tarantula on your face From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia Tattoos are cool. Everybody knows that. You know that, your friends know that...heck, even your parents know that. Dad just doesn't want you to get one because he does not want you to be cooler and more popular than he was at your age. Your mom, meanwhile, has a dolphin on her ankle. Her gaffe, it must be mentioned, in no way undermines the generally coolness of tattoos and, by extension, the coolness of the tattooed. Mom didn't know that dolphins on ankles weren't cool. She was probably lead astray by her parents. So, to you kids all across the land, there is, in fact, no need to argue; parents, due to their parentness, are simply incapable of understanding. They don't understand that tattoos are cool. Parents are, therefore, uncool. Ipso facto, ergo sum. You're young. You're "hip". You're either in college or university (and away from your desperately unhip parents) or still in high school (and are chafing under the yoke of your desperately unhip parents). You can appreciate a subtle spoof like Scary Movie 6 or The Colbert Report. You like bands that no one has heard of, and you abandon them when others, inevitably, do. In addition, you have eighty dollars burning a hole in your faded Levi's jeans and you're more than a little bit drunk. Most importantly, you don't currently have a tattoo of a tarantula on your face. In other words; you're perched on the cusp of cool, you hipster doofus you. But what next? Have you considered getting a tattoo of a tarantula on your face? No. That's stupid. Sure, you say that now...but on the other hand, what if you're wrong? Consider it in the sense of Pascal's Wager. If it is cool, you have a tattoo of a tarantula on your face, but if it is not cool, you have a tattoo of a tarantula on your face. See? You literally can't lose! I still think that it's a dumb idea. You're moving in the right direction. First, you thought it was stupid. Now, you think it's merely dumb. You've gone from being an a-tattoo-ist to an a-tattoo-gnostic. You just need a little push. A push to cool. See that broad in the café across the street? She dates a rock musician. While you can't play a note to save your life, that will come after you get a tattoo, you can be like a rock musician in one cool aspect: think tattoo. Ah, you're there. You now realize that, like the iPod that you bought because it's the only thing in the entire world that can make you happy and the Doc Martens that you also bought because they are the only thing in the entire world that can make you happy, a tattoo is the only thing in the entire world that can make you happy. And while a common, everyday tattoo like, say, barbed wire around your upper arm or a little flag of your home country on a pec can make you happy, a tattoo of a tarantula on your face will make you happy...squared! Oh. Since you put it like that, a tattoo sounds like one more bad idea... Wups. You're slipping back from the chasm of cool. Need I remind you of the girl in the café? She's got a tattoo, y'know. It's the Rolling Stones lips-slash-tongue and it's on the small of her back. She didn't think that it was a bad idea; one that will haunt her every minute of her life from her mid-30's right up to her dying day. On the contrary, she thought it was a good idea. A cool idea. See how cool she is? You want to be cool, don't you? Yes, damn it! I want to be cool! I want a tattoo! Excellent. Have you considered a tattoo of a tarantula on your face? It's the peak of cool. So cool, in fact, that hardly anyone is cool enough to get one. You know who Slash is, right? Slash is cool, but even he is not cool enough for a tattoo of a tarantula on his face. You could be as cool as Slash! No, wait, you will exceed his coolness! A tattoo of a tarantula on your face will make you cool. Cooler than the worn Levi's. Cooler than the iPod. Cooler than the Doc Martens. Cooler, even, than a tattoo on the lower back of a blonde in her early twenties. How much? No, wait, money's no object! I want a tattoo of a tarantula on my face! Done. I did it while I was regaling you with this hypnotic quasi-monologue. When the swelling goes down and the bandages come off, you'll see just what a great decision getting a tattoo of a tarantula on your face was. - ↑ Apologies to Mr. F. Prince and DJ J. Jeff - ↑ Well, your mother almost had it. - ↑ Whether intended in an ironic sense or not, hip is still hip. - ↑ Note: You may need to get some extra knuckles. - ↑ Or dude. I'm not here to judge you. That's your parents job, and they're uncool, remember? This means that I am, therefore, cool, and the kind of authority that you can follow blindly. Plus, I have a tattoo. - ↑ People with tattoos of tarantulas on their faces get picked first, for both teams. \|Poo Lit Surprise-Winning Article\| This article was chosen as the Best Alternate Namespace Article in the January-February 2008 Poo Lit Surprise writing competition.
„THE CRITICAL INTERFACE TOOLBOX unfolds as an online resource that exposes experimental methodologies, practices, and tools aimed at enhancing critical thought towards the actual configuration of the Interface.“ Manifesto for a critical approach to the user interface „Unfold is an online publishing and archiving platform based upon the structure of the digital folder.“ „The Readers Project is a collection of distributed, performative, quasi-autonomous poetic ‚readers‘ — active, procedural entities with distinct reading behaviors and strategies. […] Each reader follows traces of linguistic and poetic structure — symbolic idealities — that define their specific focus of attention. Since the their behaviors are derived from a necessarily partial, aesthetically implicated analysis of human reading, they explore and reveal certain contours and outlines of linguistic materiality’s ‚other dimensions‘, in work that we propose to be significant, affective, and literary.“ „Objectifier empowers people to train objects in their daily environment to respond to their unique behaviors. It gives an experience of training an artificial intelligence; a shift from a passive consumer to an active, playful director of domestic technology.“ „Land Lines is an experiment that lets you explore Google Earth satellite imagery through gesture. “Draw” to find satellite images that match your every line; “Drag” to create an infinite line of connected rivers, highways and coastlines.“ „Socratic Search is a speculative search engine based upon the principles of Socractic Questioning, and built on Google Custom Search technology. Replacing a single search button with multiple search options. It’s aim is to guide users into a deeper, more disciplined ways of questioning the worlds information that Google organises and returns to us every day.“ „A workshop and ongoing research project which uses Sir John Soane’s unrealised architectural speculation ‚Design for an Entrance to London‘ (c 1805) as a means to reimagine how we directly access and perceive the internet as the modern equivalent to the living organism of a city. The workshop questions how we might do this in a way that more critically considers the role access to the internet plays in authoring our interpretation of reality, our shared values, our social potential and human evolution.“ „Contra-Internet engages the emerging militancies and subversions of “the Internet,” such as the global proliferation of autonomous mesh networks, encryption tactics, and darknets. Contra-Internet aims to function as a conceptual, practical, and experimental framework for refusing the neoliberal logic of “the Internet” while building alternatives to its infrastructure.“ „The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text.“ Writing environment with strong focus on structure. A computer system with text-based interface and some ideosyncratic tweaks developed by Raskin aimed at high efficiency and convenience. He elaborates on his approach in his „Humane Interface“ book. Most notably the LEAP function, a way to quickly navigate around documents, that also introduced the dedicated LEAP buttons on the CanonCat’s keyboard. CanonCat demo video Promo video for the LEAP technology One of the first constraint-oriented simulation programs. „… is a hybrid graphics editor and programming environment for creating interactive diagrams.“ „Soylent is a crowd-powered interface: one that embeds workers from Mechanical Turk into Microsoft Word.“ „The project aims to re-invent the traditional reading interface for digital humanity scholars based on Jerome McGann’s idea: a “dynamic space that can be organized in an indefinite number of perspectives.” The idea is that the reader will be able to „wander“ through a field of text content, and by taking different perspective to view this field of content, derive different threads of argumentation.“ Early spreadsheet software, to be considered the first „killer app“ for Personal Computing and the first application that convinced people to invest in whole systems (the Apple II). First software that went through a whole software career cycle, until its decline fueled by competitor „Lotus 1-2-3“. Also notable for its good documentation at that time. 1965, Side-by-side connected comparison of parallel documents 1972, Transpointing windows 1999, PYXI viewer by Ka-Ping Yee 2014, OpenXanadu by Ted Nelson and Nicholas Levin Parallel documents / Transpointing windows Deep versioning and re-use (transclusion) JS implementation of Stretchtext ZigZag database system A Hardware Controller for InDesign „Scream sits quietly in your computer’s system tray and automatically springs into action when it detects a scream. Scream disturbs your Windows interface. […] When your throat gets tired, Scream can double as an unusual music visualizer – or as a new approach to desktop filmmaking. Use Scream to start a meme. Or simply as a random act of deprogramming.“
Daft Punk’s first planned public concert in seven years has been called off, after a proposal to play on private land adjacent to the Devils Tower National Monument in Crook County, Wyoming, was rejected. That’s because Devils Tower is a sacred site to 24 different Native American tribes, and “that would be considered sacrilegious,” said a superintendent for the monument. Reed Robinson, superintendent for Devils Tower National Monument, said an agency representing the group…approached the park in the fall and the park officially denied the request on Jan. 31. Robinson said the park consulted with six American Indian tribes about the proposal, all of which generally agreed that it would be a disrespectful use of one of the country’s most sacred American Indian sites. He said the group’s agency was particularly interested in using lasers to light up the park’s 1,300-foot rock column at night. “This being a night skies park and a natural park and a sacred site to 24 different tribes, that would be considered sacrilegious and gets into that ‘inappropriate use’,” Robinson said. “And that meant maybe we would have to close portions of the main trail to facilitate this kind of stuff.” (Via) French robots have no pay respect for the land that white men “borrowed” from Native Americans.
Original Link: http://www.minyanville.com/articles/credit-card-companies-spending-consumers-unemployment-delinquincies-minyanville/index/a/25427 By Josh Lipton The past quarter century was a fun one for the American consumer. But after all that borrowing and spending, consumers have re-discovered the benefits of thrift and prudence. This is good news for personal balance sheets, but bad news for credit card companies. In a recent report, Fitch Ratings forecast that US credit card issuers will continue suffering with respect to their earnings over the near term as a result of the lousy labor market, bankruptcies, and losses. The report, as summarized here for us by the gang at Zacks Equity Research, notes that major credit card issuers are still dealing with tough losses as the US unemployment rate hurdled over 10%. “Also, as it is expected that the rate will remain above 10% through 2010, consumers will increasingly fall behind on payments,” write the crew at Zacks. “As a result, the losses of the credit card issuers could worsen further.” Fitch’s rating outlooks are negative on the less diversified credit card companies, which are at risk of a downgrade. That hit list includes: Capital One Financial Corporation (COF), American Express Company (AXP), and Discover Financial Services (DFS). According to Fitch, prime credit card delinquencies of 60 days or more climbed 16 basis points to 4.22% in October. The rating agency forecasts higher loss rates in 2010. Additionally, more trouble for these companies is coming in the form of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure law signed by President Barack Obama in May 2009. Key components of the act include an inability to raise rates on existing card balances, a requirement to maintain promotional rates for at least six months, and a restriction on fees for subprime, low limit cards. See also The Gall in Your Credit Card's Fine Print. Most of the new requirements will take effect in February 2010. At the same time, write the analysts at Zack’s, consumers have been transitioning from credit cards to debit cards (See Seven Ways to Avoid the Debit Card Blues). So the credit card companies don’t have much room for improvement until the economy starts to enjoy a sustainable recovery. But there are more than just near-term speed bumps for these companies. Strategists say these shops are getting squeezed and that’s a headwind they could face for some time. The models and analyses of these companies, so these market pros write, assumed that the borrowing-and-spending binge in the US would go on forever. However, those go-go years came to a screeching halt as unemployment spiked higher. The unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% in October from 9.8% in September, and is now just 60 basis points shy of taking out the post-World War II high of 10.8%. When will the unemployment picture begin to brighten? According to our central bankers, we shouldn’t hold our collective breaths. Dr. Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, recently said that “unemployment could well stay high for several years to come… [and] our recovery is likely to feel like something well short of good times.” Her colleague, Mr. Dennis Lockhart, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, didn’t sound too much more optimistic, saying that he expects to see “very slow net job gains… sometime next year.” Given that backdrop, it's thoroughly unsurprising that you and your neighbors are now more interested in saving rather than spending. No data captures that shift more clearly than the contraction in US consumer debt. In September, total consumer credit fell $14.8 billion, making it the eighth month in a row of debt repayment. This, say economists, is an unprecedented string of declines. See also Could You Get Cut Off From Credit? Dr. Gary Shilling, the noted economist, strategist, and founder of A. Gary Shilling & Company, recently told clients that he would steer far and wide of credit card companies. “Recent developments are virtually all negative for the credit card business now and for years to come,” Dr. Shilling wrote in his most recent research note, adding, “With the switch from a quarter century consumer borrowing-and-spending binge to a long run saving spree, the credit card business has moved from a growth industry to a laggard.”
On Thursday, May 17, 2012, Columbia Central School in Steger, Illinois, held its 4th Annual Reality Store for the 8th Grade class.Reality Store is an exercise designed to drop the students from their normal euphoria into the real world that we adults are all far too familiar with. For the 4th year, South-Southwest Suburban United Way (SSW) volunteered to represent charitable giving.Divided into groups, students are required to visit the Reality Store where they learn who and what they are; receiving an occupation, salary, marital status and how many children they have, if any. They then visit required stops like banking, housing, utilities, transportation, insurance, child care, food and clothing, as well as optional stops like entertainment, charitable giving, legal, financial counseling, education and training.Each student has a bank book with savings and checking registers he/she is responsible for completing. The objective is to provide for all the necessities of life, to have a little fun and to have some money left at the end of the day. To complicate matters, students are randomly selected for unexpected life events. These can be anything from getting a tax return to being arrested for failure to pay child support to a flat tire.It is an incredible learning exercise for the students and very enlightening for the volunteers. One young student was wealthy and became a leadership giver; he then received his unexpected life event of winning the lottery. Demonstrating generosity, he returned to the charity booth to donate a large portion of his winnings. We had many students who wanted to volunteer and many whose parents are current donors. This year, SSW tracked the charitable donations and we were pleasantly surprised to see these young people gave in excess of $8,400. Too bad it’s “make believe”. What is real is the students’ understanding of the social service needs in the community and the need to support those social service providers.Post submitted on behalf of Jessica Plechaty, Fundraising Manager at South-Southwest Suburban United Way.
Almost 30 percent of Virginia’s mortgage holders are underwater or close to it, according to a new report from CoreLogic. Of the 1.3 million homeowners in the state with mortgages, almost 305,000 owed more than their homes were worth, and almost 80,000 more were within five percent of being underwater. The total represents about 29.4% of mortgages. In the Washington, DC, area, 33.8% of mortgage holders were underwater; in the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News region that number was 31.8%. (The report only offered details on the 50 largest markets.) How does that compare? About 27.5% of homeowners with mortgages in the U.S. are underwater or close to it. Of the 45 states CoreLogic has data for, Virginia ranks 38th; only Maryland, California, Georgia, Michigan, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada are in worse shape. (In Nevada, almost two-thirds of mortgages are in or near negative equity.) To make matters worse, CoreLogic found that “nearly three-quarters of homeowners in negative equity situations are also paying higher, above-market interest.”
Local First Vermont Local First Vermont is a program of VBSR Our mission is to preserve and enhance the economic, human, and natural vitality of Vermont communities by promoting the importance of purchasing from locally-owned independent businesses. We achieve this through education of citizens, businesses and local governments. Buy Local Resource Guide and Coupon Book The Buy Local Book Resource Guide and Coupon Book is an annual project of VBSR. The goal is to incentivize Vermonters to support local businesses and strengthen local communities. The book includes two main sections: 1. A RESOURCE SECTION that features local stories, merchant profiles and pages that explain why it's important to buy local, eat local and invest locally. 2. A COUPON SECTION that includes 230+ coupons valued at more than $3,000 in savings at locally owned businesses throughout Vermont. The coupon section organized geographically: Addison County, Chittenden County, Washington County and a new section called Explore Vermont (see below). All coupons are good for a full year (September 1, 2016 - September 1, 2017). BUY THE BOOK FOR JUST $20 Books are available at dozens of select retailers across Vermont for just $20. NEW FOR 2016-17 The NEW Local First Vermont Mobile App is for Vermonters who prefer using an phone or tablet to redeem coupons instead of carrying their book or paper coupons. The app is available for on Google Play for Android devices and on the App Store for iOS devices. Click below to download the app at no charge. There is a $20 fee to activate all of the coupons on the app. People who purchase the book can get the app and activate another set of coupons for just $10 extra. See book for detaills. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about the Local First Vermont Mobile App This NEW section features 50 new locally owned businesses in the six Vermont towns listed below. We've included a list of things to do in each town plus a set of coupons to save money while you eat local, drink local, buy local and explore local! - The Champlain Islands The Buy Local Book makes a great school fundraiser! In 2015, VBSR helped Vermont school groups raise more than $26,000 using the Buy Local Book. Printed versions of the Buy Local Book make a great gift for everyone on your list! Purchase 5 books and get a 6th book FREE. This offer and deeper discounts on larger bulk purchases are available through VBSR's office in Burlington. Please CONTACT US for details. TESTIMONIAL: Click the image below to hear how one local business-owner benefits from being part of the Buy Local Book.
آشنایی با vSphere Distributed Switch The concept of vSphere standard switches is fairly straightforward. With vSS you have one or more virtual switches on each host, each with their own uplinks to the network. Each switch has one or more port groups (like vKernel and Virtual Machine) with VMs being connected to the virtual machine port group. What about vSphere Distributed switches? Do you need them? Why vSphere Distributed Switches? I must admit that when I first heard about vSphere Distributed switches, while I thought that the idea was innovative and cool, however I figured I really didn’t need to use something like that as I thought that it was likely “overkill” for my lab (and most companies). Because of that, I initially didn’t devote much time working with vDS (or dvswitch, as it’s sometimes called). However, the more I have used vDS, the more I have come to realize how powerful and necessary it is (and by the end of this article, I hope that you have too). vDS is only available to those who have vSphere Enterprise plus and it’s not enabled by default – you need to make the choice and fulfill the creation of the vSphere distributed switch, add uplinks from hosts, and add virtual machines to port groups. Figure 1: Graphic Thanks to VMware.com When it comes to listing out the reasons to use vDS, here’s what I came up with: Centralized location to setup the virtual network for the entire infrastructure Aggregation of networking at a cluster level Enabling of centralized provisioning, administration, and monitoring The vSphere Distributed Switch maintains network runtime state for VMs as they move across multiple hosts, enabling inline monitoring and centralized firewall services. It provides a framework for monitoring and maintaining the security of virtual machines as they move from physical server to physical server and enables the use of third party virtual switches such as the Cisco Nexus 1000V to extend familiar physical network features and controls to virtual networks. What’s New with vSphere Distributed Switch Version 5? With the launch of vSphere 5 a number of new feature were added to the vSphere distributed switch. New features include: Netflow – ability for NetFlow collectors to collect data from the vDS to determine what network device is talking and what protocols they are using SPAN and LLDP – allows for port mirroring and traffic analysis of network traffic using protocol analyzers Network I/O control – NIOC allows you to align your network traffic with the needs of your business – prioritization of critical traffic types over others Other features include: Enhanced provisioning and traffic management capabilities through private VLAN support and bi-directional virtual machine rate-limiting Enhanced security and monitoring for virtual machines migrated via VMware vMotion through maintenance and migration of port runtime state Load-based teaming for dynamic adjustment of the teaming algorithm so that the load is always balanced across a team of physical adapters on the distributed switch None of these features would be possible without the vSphere distributed switch. Installing a vSphere Distributed Switch vSphere distributed switch isn’t a whole new product that you install. If you have vSphere enterprise plus, vDS will just be a feature that you take advantage of. When you worked with traditional vSwitches, all configuration was done on each of the hosts. The benefit to vDS is that it is a centralized administration and configuration. Thus, all vDS administration is done in the vSphere Client’s networking inventory. When you first enter the networking inventory, you’ll see something like this: Notice how, by default, you have a single standard vSwitch called “VM Network” in your virtual datacenter. This is being used by your virtual machines to connect to the LAN and by your hosts for vmkernel traffic like vMotion, iSCSI, NFS and even the vSphere Client / vCenter traffic. To create our first vDS, we are going to right-click on the virtual datacenter and click New vSphere Distributed Switch(or ctrl-k). This will bring up the Create a vSphere Distributed Switch wizard that will guide us through the process. We first need to select what version of vSphere distributed switch that we want to create. Unless you have older ESX 4 or 4.1 hosts then you want to create the latest switch version – 5.0.0 – because you’ll get all the latest features that are available. Click Next and then we need to give the vDS a name and select the number of uplink ports. The default name for a new vDS is dvswitch. While the default name certainly works for your first dvswitch, best practices tell us that we should give the dvswitch a much more useful name like “Production-1”, to tell use the purpose or importance of the traffic running on this new dvswitch. Click Next. Now you need to specify, first, if you want to add ESXi hosts and their adaptors to the switch now or later. By choosing “later”, you are creating, basically, an empty dvswitch that has no outside network connectivity. That means that if you put virtual machines on it, they would only be able to communicate with themselves (not the outside world), until you added uplinks. Also note from the graphic that you may have the same problem that I do in that you may have an ESXi host that you want to be a part of the dvswitch but that host has no uplinks to add. Solving this problem may be as simple as going to the standard vSwitch on that host and removing some redundant uplink adaptors. However, let’s say that you have an older host that just has a single Ethernet adaptor. In that case, you really need to add some additional NICs (they aren’t very expensive and if you are willing to buy licenses for vSphere Enterprise plus then having redundant NICs on your host should also be part of your complete virtual infrastructure design). To start with, I selected to add a single adaptor from one of my two hosts that had adaptors available. You can always add more adaptors later. Quick tip: you can click on View Details for each of the adaptors that are available to add as these adaptors may be disconnected or be the wrong network speed. In my case, none of the adaptors from host ESX1 were connected to the network (even though they were available to be added). Click Next and you’ll be prompted to finalize your addition of the dvswitch and create the first default port group (we’ll talk more about dvportgroups in our next post). Take the default here and click Finish. At this point, you should see the new dvswitch being created and now in the inventory, you’ll find your new dvswitch, your uplink port group and your dv port group. Congratulations, the creation of the dvswitch is done! However, no virtual machines are on the switch yet so we really can’t use it. Read my next article on this topic – Using vSphere Distributed Virtual Switches.
Review By HOMA WOODRUM When I opened the box containing this review copy from Sleeping Bear Press, my visiting sister-in-law told me that she had just finished a unit of teaching with her third graders about “paper sons” in American History. So I knew this might not be the best fit for my young children because the subject matter is for an older crowd but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find the book beautiful and riveting. Becoming a “paper son” involved learning to pretend to be family of someone in the United States for immigration purposes after the aftermath of 1906 San Francisco earthquake meant that records had been lost to fire. I recall our immigration textbook in law school beginning with things like the Chinese Exclusion Act but will admit that the existence of “paper sons” was new to me and this fictionalized account of one young boy preparing to leave everything he knows for a chance at the American Dream did a fantastic job of giving the reader a hint of what it must have been like for Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s. Much of my elementary level education in history that stuck with me came from historical fiction, and with immigration on the forefront of news today and the recent celebration of the Fourth of July, I highly recommend this book. It may be a novel concept to children today that people would risk everything to come to the United States. As an immigrant myself (albeit from the United Kingdom) my own experiences taught me that it was a privilege to be here but my U.S. born children will hopefully learn about my experiences and those of others before us through books such as Paper Son. I’ll leave you with a bit of a spoiler (the book is touch and go about whether Lee will make it through the interrogation process on Angel Island): In San Francisco his new future greeted him. Lee welcomed his paper father like PoPo had taught him. “Hello. My name is Fu Lee. My father, Fu Ming, is an American and so am I.”
Agent Triple P has recently returned from the splendid city of Boston, Massachusetts, where he had a particularly enjoyable time as a result of a positive concatenation of factors which included extraordinarily fine weather, a well located hotel and the presence of his particular friend S from Vancouver. Boston has, of course, a long history (for North America, anyway) and a particularly fine artistic reputation. We were pleased, therefore, to discover, in its extremely impressive Museum of Fine Arts, this lovely nude (top) by William McGregor Paxton (1869-1941). American galleries being more visitor-focused than British ones (whose main concern seems to be protecting revenue from postcard and print sales) we were able to photograph the painting ourself (without flash, of course). Paxton was born in Baltimore but when he was a young child his family moved to Newton Corner, now a suburb of Boston and only a dozen miles west of where the Museum of Fine Arts is situated. Glow of Gold, Gleam of Pearl 1906 We had been aware of Paxton's art before through this effective full length figure painting from around ten years earlier. Paxton won a scholarship to Boston's Cowles Art School at the age of eighteen and two years later he continued his studies in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He returned to Boston in 1893 where he studied under Joseph DeCamp. His first one man exhibition was in Boston in 1900 and he was an immediate success. Seated Nude with Sculpture (1915) Paxton married the Parisian classical style of the likes of Gérôme with the colourist accuracy of the impressionists. Although we are only showing his nudes here he was best known as a portraitist and was much in demand for society and political portraits. He even declined a commission to paint Theodore Roosevelt as he was "too busy". The Red Mules He actually taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School from 1906 until 1913. He sat on many juries of the most prominent exhibitions in the US and was a major figure in the American art world. However the spectre of modernism haunted him as it did many classical painters at the time and eventually Paxton and others in his circle were forced out of the Museum of Fine Arts to be replaced by modernists. He had seen Matisse's work in Paris but rejected modernism and continued to paint in the traditional representational way. He died in 1941, whilst painting a picture of his wife, at the age of 72, largely forgotten and rejected by the art establishment. Fortunately his work has been rehabilitated of late. The picture we saw in Boston, at the top of this post, is an excellent example of the influence of Vermeer on his work. Paxton had studied Vermeer's paintings and observed that only one small part was painted "in focus" the rest was deliberately blurred. In Nude (1915) only the woman's breast and right arm are painted sharply and draw the eye to the centre of the painting. Paxton's handling of composition, colour and light was remarkable and these features are at the core of his paintings. As one of his students, RH Ives Gammell (1893-1981) put it in his book The Boston Painters 1900-1930: "His unsurpassed visual acuity combined with great technical command enabled him to report his impressions with astounding veracity. Of all the painters whose color perception had been sharpened by plein air study he was the most accurate draftsman and he never slackened his efforts to render both shape and color just as they appeared to the artist's eye. Paxton opined that all painters, excepting Vermeer at the top of his form, permitted some tonality absent in nature to tinge their pictures. He constantly pointed out that the invisible atmospheric envelope through which we look is limpid, 'like a glass of pure water' and he responded to that challenge. His best indoor paintings are distinguished by an ambient lucidity we do not find to a like degree in the pictures of other men." Gammell, himself a realist painter whose greatest work The Hound of Heaven was completed in 1956, was the last great American painter to be trained in the classical French tradition and so was an appropriate champion for Paxton and his Boston-based contemporaries (Joseph DeCamp, Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson who are also covered in his book).
When fall arrives, our garden looks so luscious with many variety of tomatoes, bell peppers, chayote (xu), bitter melons, eggplants, and much more...But what stand out the most are the beautiful chili pepper plants. We usually start harvesting our chili peppers in October and throughout the November month. In the past we used to freeze them and cook them whole in dishes such as cá kho (fish clay pot), thịt kho (caramelized braised pork), or when we make fish soups to reduce the fishy smell and spice up the flavor. We also stored some in the fridge to enjoy with each meal. We dried them and make chili powder. We packaged the remainder in ziploc bags and shared them with our families, friends and our neighbors. This season I decided to try my hands at making chili garlic sauce. It was so much fun and easier than I expected; it was spicy indeed, just the way we love it! It's part of our culture, and a meal without some sort of spicy chili sauce would just be too bland. My chili sauce is super hot, but its tone is gentle and not sharp. This is achieved through the use of tomato paste and vinegar to reduce the spiciness. If you can't tolerate super hot chili sauce, you can use the combination of Thai chili with tomato or habanero or serrano peppers or jalapeno to reduce the spiciness. The beautiful vivid orange and red colors of the chili peppers remind me of this season's colors. So my husband and I made a basket of jarred chili garlic sauce to give thanks to our family members and friends during this holiday season. My husband added a nice touch to the jars with those nice straw bows which I tried but can never make it look nice enough. RECIPE: Tương Ớt Tỏi 1 pound fresh Thai chilies, washed and removed stems 6 cloves garlic 3 tablespoons distilled white vinegar 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoon sugar 1/2 cup fresh ripe Tomato Paste (about 3 Roma tomatoes, peeled and seeded) Making Tomato Paste Place a pot with water over high heat and bring it to a boil. Lower the tomatoes into the water gently and leave them there for 1 minute. Use a slotted spoon to remove them from the water. Set the tomatoes aside until they're cool down. Peel the skin off then cut the peeled tomatoes in half. Gently squeeze tomato to remove the seeds. Discard the seeds. Put these peeled tomatoes in a food processor or blender and process until coarsely pureed. Set it aside. Making Chili Paste Place chilies, garlic, vinegar, salt and sugar in a food processor or blender and process to a coarse pureed. Transfer chili paste and tomato paste to a small saucepan and simmer over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside to cool. Transfer to a jar and store in the refrigerator.
Obama Administration Declares Public Health Emergency In Puerto Rico Over Zika Virus WASHINGTON — The Obama administration declared a public health emergency in Puerto Rico on Friday because of the Zika virus, sending a message to the island that the virus, which has infected more than 10,000 residents, should be taken seriously. There have been 10,690 cases of Zika confirmed in Puerto Rico, including infections in 1,035 pregnant women. Dozens more are infected every day. Cases of Zika infection are expected to keep rising through October, and by year’s end, a quarter of the island’s population of 3.5 million will have been exposed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The emergency status will give local health officials more tools to battle the virus, including the ability to reassign health workers to help fight Zika, and the chance for funding to hire and train unemployed workers to help fight the mosquitoes that carry the virus.
VoIP use is estimated to grow to 32.6 million users by 2010, an estimate that proves VoIP’s growing popularity. Despite the VoIP growth, there seems to be a real PC bias to the technology and programs that make the most of VoIP – that is, until the past few years. It seems VoIP providers are finally starting to realize the untapped market in ever tech-hungry Mac users. Software and hardware is out there for VoIP on the Mac if you know where to look, and some VoIP has even become unabashedly Mac specific. Unsure where to begin? Here are some tips and advice on getting VoIP for your Mac. Macs have a reputation for being more secure than Windows online when it comes to outside threats, and that may be true; but that’s no reason to get sloppy about securing your VoIP and taking additional steps to make sure you’re not vulnerable. As VoIP becomes ever more popular, the amount of predators who see it as an easy way to take advantage of unsuspecting users will increase. VoIP can be vulnerable to a number of threats, some allowing your calls to be eavesdropped on and some, like SPIT attacks, that can clog up your VoIP connection much like spam can clog up your inbox.. While there’s no such thing as bulletproof VoIP, there are a few steps you can take to protect yourself. Since VoIP calls travel over an Internet connection, sensitive calls, much like sensitive e-mails should be encrypted. Perhaps the simplest way of encrypting your information – one that requires no advanced technical knowledge – is to use a program called Zfone. Zfone is a free program that encrypts and decrypts your VoIP calls on the fly, ensuring that your confidential information will stay confidential. Mac users will be pleased by the program’s design, which features the sleek and simple silver design found in other Mac applications. Aside from encryption, you’ll also want to protect your VoIP from SPIT attacks. Though these attacks exist only in theory thus far, the thought of getting flooded with hundreds of calls from telemarketers should drive you to prevent them in advance. Most SPIT can be filtered out through the use of a VoIP firewall like the one offered by Borderware or by using a program like VoIPSEAL. Some VoIP clients like Vonage and Skype have built in systems that can filter out a majority of the SPIT before it ever reaches your phone. Posted by VoIP Phone Service at 3:19 AM
A festival or gala is an event, usually and ordinarily staged by a local community, which centers on and celebrates some unique aspect of that community and the Festival. Festivals, of many types, serve to meet specific needs, as well as to provide entertainment. These times of celebration offer a sense of belonging for religious, social, or geographical groups. Modern festivals that focus on cultural or ethnic topics seek to inform members of their traditions.Wikipedia - Modern festivals that focus on cultural or ethnic topics seek to inform members of their traditions. - Historic feasts often provided a means for unity among families and for people to find mates. - Select anniversaries have annual festivals to commemorate previous significant occurrences. - Most festivals are either free or very low cost and that is very purposeful so the arts can be accessible to as many people as possible. - Festivals also support economic prosperity of the vendors and shops around the festival. - Religious festivals are passed from generation to generation and reinforce local traditions. Watch the segments below and identify how/if the previous characteristics apply to each of the segments. Beverly Hills Chihuahua: Day of the Dead Furry Vengeance: Rock Springs Forest Festival Knight and Day: San Fermin Festival Describe one festival that you have been to and have your peers guess what the tradition involved was.
The Fourth of July is ever the holiday of those simultaneous inventions, gunpowder and printer's ink. For Americans, it is the day of celebration of the colonies emerging from under royal authority as a nation ruled by its people: a democracy. Across the pond, the day goes by without cultural significance for the British descendants whose ancestors were fighting one of many rebellions which the Empire saw intensify each subsequent century from the 17th, on. For most of my generation, it's gaudy flag prints on t-shirts and ripped jean shorts, beer in the cooler, beef on the grill and bags full of controlled or barely controlled instruments of color and destruction raining smoking debris down on friends and family. A cold autumnal wind has now thoroughly ended my memories of a summer now passed in New York as to the north of us in Concord, Mass. the "shot heard 'round the world" is ringing no more in the ears of our revolutionary ancestors. And what of fall celebrations? Halloween is over, so I'm sick of sugar for a little while, and Christmas decorations are up at work, skipping over the harvest of Thanksgiving. As we are smacked with the grit of miniature shells of media explosions crackling along the ridges of our attention from screens and newsprint, the meaning of days set aside for cultural observances are moot. One forgets to look further into the absence before the next lovely distraction, the next brilliant explosion captures our attention - an Attention tattered and wholly abused, as that flag of Fort McHenry which Francis Scott Key saw from the HMS Tonnant - remember? "Culture wars," a phrase I first saw along the stacks of a large and independent bookstore, a very liberal bookstore, was such a distracting explosion to my senses. Not a "war on culture," which would be too literal, but culture wars - battles featured in every stacked book, many of them new titles written and published in our very new but already worn out century. The battles are fought in the nebulous space that hosts the raging of our minds and want to know the Cause! Or bolster our confidence that we're on the right side of it all. A cultural battle is usually fought over a virtue we are defending or a vice we're upending as a society. And as in actual combat, both sides suffer losses. T.S. Eliot's 1948 book, and subsequent 1962 edition, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture was published on the heels of the Second World War, a very fleshy conflict, but already taking the leap to distance one from witnessing the inhumane at firsthand by a drop of the utmost destruction from the old Enola Gay. Eliot's series of lectures attempt to define the difference between the senses of a culture, which are threefold: individual, group (or class) and whole society, as well as provides an exploration of regionalism in the history and modern creative facility of the European nations in the mid-20th century. Primary concern is over the transcendent quality of all the different senses of culture: culture, no matter at what level, is a particular, "evolutionary fruition, a structure elegantly expressed with literature and the arts," rather than having biological form. These structures are nonetheless living and require defending and protecting as civilization changes. They are organic jewels from elder ages and new changes may chance the disfigurement of their faces. I read this book alongside George Steiner's T.S. Eliot Lectures from 1971 that were entitled (somewhat) affectionately, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture. By chance I happened to have alongside these two "chatty Kathys," as my mother does joke, a piece of mostly late-20th century literary criticism with some personal essay by the writer Sven Birkerts called The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age"(READ: Digital), 1996. It was a 2006 edition with new foreword and afterword and I waded through the molasses-quality first half to get to the second half and its afterword in preparation of his personal/historical hindsight. I'll return to this later. All 3 of these books are concerned with the probable (or evident by example) degradation of the cultural fabric of Euro-American society during the mid-to-late 20th century. By their estimation, the activity of reading (Birkerts), the transmission of culture (Eliot) and the beginning of a post-cultural phase (Steiner) are all due to a shift in values. Tracing a chronological trajectory, the values which were to become unacceptable to the Sixties generation were already values which had lost their intrinsic meaning at the turn of the century, thereby allowing for the vacuum to be filled by the subjective (and by elimination, only true) value of society: the liberated, modern, democratic, self-interested individual. In Birkerts, this loss of intrinsic value is due to the rise of technology; in Eliot it is because of the advance of secularization i.e. loss of eschatological meaning/ontological bearing, and the loss of traditional education; in Steiner it is a mixture of the two with a few more culprits to boot - the atomic bomb, the conflation of Humanism with humane social conduct, the breakdown of economic stability, etc. I followed the ley lines commonly walked by these writers and found myself often with uneasy footing alongside steep cliffs. Eliot refrains from even defining culture. At most he says it is not what we call education or class or religion, defining it by negation, or by the conception of culture as an inheritance of accumulated past riches. Birkerts puts all of his argument behind the intractable experience of reading and what gets in the way of the process (the screen) pokes holes in our understanding this cultural fabric. Steiner seems to be the most well-spoken, with this to say: What is central to a true culture is a certain view of the relations between time and individual death. The thrust of will which engenders art and disinterested thought, the engaged response which alone can ensure its transmission to other human beings, to the future, are rooted in a gamble on transcendence. One more source of this conversation on culture is relevant to the question of the loss of value in modernity, and it comes from the late Guy Davenport's "The Geography of the Imagination" (1981): The imagination, like all things in time, is metamorphic. It is also rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it has now, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things. To this telegram delivery man, it seems that "the thrust of will" for Steiner is the very activity carried out by Davenport's "imagination." Whereas the immanence of a thing in Davenport's measure of the Ancient Greeks was its sacredness, for Steiner (and his intellectual forbearer Eliot) the chance that we take on there being something worth transmitting to future generations is a matter of preserving the center, transcendence, which reconciles or at least keeps in communion the human value of both death and time. There is risk in this, personal hazard - what shall we not do for the preservation of this value? - but whether value is imminent or transcendent, we culminate the rite of it only in one space: Culture. The warp and woof of which all of these writers have as their concern - to keep its integrity alive. This is done through the activity of the imagination and it is a sacred rite performed by the artist, as Orpheus did so with his lyre. The Fourth of July: A holiday we celebrate, as the younger generations of my country celebrate, in remembrance of the delight in bright, burning objects which we also saw when we were even younger. Not an observance but a great time to day drink. Commiseration over the terrible terror-state we now live in while we rarely wonder what it would be like to sacrifice the treasure of our individuality (whatever that really is) so that a generation or two from us can be free from horrors that would pale in comparison to current injustices. Eliot: culture is an "evolutionary fruition, a structure elegantly expressed with literature and the arts." Elegance? Perhaps those very motions that people used to perform as a rite in order to gives thanks to the origins of their present conditions. The casualties of culture are the disappearance of these practices and traditions which provided the means by which to perform these rites that are now altered for the convenient "update" or rendered "obsolete." The cause? Either ignorant termination while laying down the pavement of progress or by refusal in aversion - because we do not personally, as individuals - align ourselves with men or women of the past (but mostly men) who thought or felt "that way." We can move beyond them and never look back again. This is our vista, and who knows how it was raised? You know, evolution. In the phrase "nothing's sacred" - which actually comes from the old adage of admonishment "Is nothing sacred?" - we have what might be identified as the secular dogma. One might broach, but if nothing is sacred, doesn't this fulfill the Ancient Greek "vernacular ordinariness of things" mentioned by Davenport, making everything sacred? And didn't the Greeks gift us that which we value or purport to value above all else in our culture, Democracy? If there is anything to be defended during these culture wars, surely it must be the virtue of Democracy. I'm not so convinced that sacredness is what permeates everything now. If that were so, there would be devotees in electric temples, for nothing permeates our lives more than electricity and the fields of forces that are produced by its help. Communication, or the opportunity to communicate, is chief of all and positioned by electricity - and yet I find it harder and more difficult to speak to and stay connected with everyone I care to keep close. There is more hindrance than cultus. What's humble about Facebook walls and the blathering of comment sections on news websites? It is most artless and we're fooling ourselves and each other when we try to convince someone of the ingenuity and creativity of the Internet and of current technological interfaces. I rarely encounter what Steiner states as "engaged response" except in chance face-to-face dialogue. There's no sacred space in the neutered vastness of the World Wide Web just as there isn't any inside of the enclosed cables connecting a grid. There's no Internet cultus because there isn't a rite being performed. You type and hit Enter - but you don't go anywhere. Convince me that you engage with and transmit something verifiably precious beyond your own love or hate on the Internet and then we can admit of the existence of dialogue and a culture that values it. I haven't even touched the topic of sub-cultures or the schismatic nature of this modern breakdown of values into smaller, subjective truths. There is an eerie fulfillment in Eliot's essays, as he was undoubtedly irked by the predictions of Arnold, Ruskin and/or Morris before him. My reading list keeps increasing on this topic and will likely never keep being added unto. I cannot conclude this article, no matter how hard I try to string the bits together. Though I do remain highly skeptical of "the now," it's not in Luddite fashion because I try to struggle with my relenting to the unrelenting advance of that which we've replaced most of the space where literature and the arts performed the rites that attempted to contextualize time & individual death. What virtues can we have upheld and what vices have we upended if either action done in battle is for a land we can never return to? We'd be worse off than Odysseus. Sven Birkerts reluctantly submits in his afterword to The Gutenberg Elegies to the incredible efficacy of technology and by the example of his children, the adaptability of coming generations to encountering the wonders of literature and the arts off-the-page. Perhaps they are such rare wonders that my surprise at finding so very much detritus in what is supposed to be havens of culture or representatives of culture is actually the normal state of affairs. I do hope this is so, and I might be forgiving for proscribing any sort of sickness in our post-modern ways or enlarging what is merely a wrinkle. I'll end this with two more quotes from "Bluebeard's" by the inimitable George Steiner to ponder this post: A culture "lived" is one that draws for continuous, indispensable sustenance on the works of the past, on the truths and beauties achieved in the tradition. It is the collapse, more or less conscious, of these hierarchized, definitional value gradients (and can there be value without hierarchy?) which is now the major fact of our intellectual and social circumstance. The horizontal "cuts" of the classical order have been made vertical and often indistinct.
A man on a birdwatching outing in Southampton, New York caught a glimpse of this bizarre sight on Thursday: a thick, coal-black cloud hovering just over the Atlantic Ocean. This might not be strange, if not for the fact that the skies were otherwise clear that evening, leaving the weirdly dense object in stark contrast to the orange sky. “It seemed to be moving very slowly westward and northward with very subtle shape change,” David Sagman told Patch.com. “No fishing boats were observed nearby.” David snapped a few photos “the best he could” with the 800mm telescope/camera combo he uses for birdwatching and decided to share the photo online in hopes that someone might be able to explain the odd sight. “I wondered if it could be composed of thousands of birds but other thoughts are welcome,” Sagman said. So far, the responses that he’s received have been varied. One particular armchair anomalist believes the object to be the product of a HAARP weather machine: That is a the report and smoke from a HAARP weather manipulation pod which will work in tandem with chemtrails to cause whatever weather calamity is next on the horizon. Look up HAARP weather manipulation and don’t say I never gave you anything. Other guesses range anywhere from ghostly pirate ships, an on-fire submarine, to a ship “blowing stacks” – or burning too much oil. However, there could be a more logical explanation involving a particular form of optical effect referred to as a “Fata Morgana”, named after the Arthurian sorceress who’s witchcraft was thought to cause deadly mirages. “Fata Morgana mirages distort the object or objects which they are based on significantly, often such that the object is completely unrecognizable. A Fata Morgana can be seen on land or at sea, in polar regions or in deserts. This kind of mirage can involve almost any kind of distant object, including boats, islands, and the coastline. Fata Morgana mirages are visible to the naked eye, but in order to be able to see the detail within them, it is best to view them through binoculars, a telecope, or as is the case in the images here, through a telephoto lens.” In other words, you can relax, David. There’s ominous mutant clouds of birds on the horizon, probably just some dude in a polo shirt. Or possibly a ghostly pirate ship.
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr., was born in Baltimore on September 20, 1878. Perhaps best known for The Jungle, the Pulitzer-winning author produced more than 90 books. Sinclair’s father was an alcoholic liquor salesman, and the family lived in poverty in a rowhouse at 417 N. Charles Street that has since been demolished. His mother, Priscilla Harden, grew up in a wealthy family. Sinclair’s maternal grandparents lived about 1.5 mile away at 2010 Maryland Avenue. In 1888, when Sinclair was about 10 years old, the family moved to The Bronx. According to the Baltimore Literary Heritage Project, it during Sinclair’s early years in Baltimore that he developed his love for literature and a voracious appetite for books. As a 10-year-old, Sinclair read the collected works of Shakespeare in two weeks. The stark contrasts of moving between poverty and wealth impressed the young Sinclair, ultimately leading him to socialism. Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, exposed shocking conditions in the meatpacking industry and is partially responsible for passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which founded the Food and Drug Administration, and the Meat Inspection Act.
Sunday, August 17, 2008 Yesterday was an extraordinary day at the Olympics. Usain Bolt's unreal 100m run, Rebecca Adlington's second gold in the pool, the coxless four's agonising overhauling of the Australians and a lot more. There's a lot of 20/20 hindsight on the radio about the power of positive thinking, the importance of discipline and coaches who say "if you really want to win an Olympic medal you should be prepared to shoot your favourite pet". The coxless four said they were close because they'd spent seven days a week in each other's company 365 days a year for four years. But do all these examples of athletes' unbelievable dedication actually prove anything? Every race I watch I find myself looking at the person coming last and thinking 'they must have worked every bit as hard as the person who came first.' As my mother would have said, 'you all deserve a medal'.
INTERNET SCAM: Attorney General Gives Warning The Attorney General’s office is warning people about a new scam. They say criminals are trying to get personal information by calling and emailing Iowans and claiming they are with Microsoft technical support. People who reported the scam say callers are trying to convince them to download software that may appear to be useful. But it gives the scammers access to your personal information like passwords, bank accounts, or it may leave a virus on your computer. If you think you have been targeted you are asked to change your passwords, use an anti-virus software, and report the scam to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. You can find them here.
NASA MEaSUREs 2012 Creating Unified Ocean Color Data Records With Uncertainties Click on Products to access data. Check News for recent updates. The generation of unified satellite data records through the merging of ocean color data from multiple sensors has proven beneficial to the science users community at various levels. First, merged products offer improved coverage of the ocean at daily to monthly time scales, which reduces the uncertainties in estimates derived from those products for both local and global studies. Second, merged data products often have lower uncertainties than the same product from any single sensor. Last, data merging has also proven a powerful tool to identify inconsistencies among the different data sources or issues with the sensors’ radiometry. In all, data merging benefits both the ocean color and biogeochemistry science that uses its data and the inter-sensors calibration/validation activities. Here, we propose to continue the development of unified and coherent ocean color time series through the merging of data from multiple sensors. We will continue the development of merged ocean color products from the GSM semi-analytical model. This model merges data at the Remote sensing reflectance level and derives several biogeochemically relevant data products simultaneously along with uncertainty estimates at each pixel. In addition, we will also generate merged products from higher level data (e.g. chlorophyll-a concentration) as such products are no longer available to the science community. We will also develop new merged ocean color products. In particular, we will develop a merged remote sensing reflectance product that will allow users to work with a data set with improved spectral resolution and lower uncertainties. Last, uncertainty estimates for all merged products will be generated on a pixel-by-pixel basis. All products and uncertainty estimates will be validated through matchup analyses. The merged records will cover the time span over which multiple ocean color sensors are or will be available (SeaWiFS, MODIS, MERIS, VIIRS, OLCI,…). Both global (9-4 km resolution from level-3 data) and regional (1-4 km resolution from level-2 data) merged products will be developed. This project is part of the Making Earth Science Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) initiative of NASA.
File:Style line green dashed.png From OpenStreetMap Wiki Style_line_green_dashed.png (112 × 5 pixels, file size: 110 bytes, MIME type: image/png) Green dashed line. Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time. \|current\|\|17:25, 16 April 2012\|\|112 × 5 (110 bytes)\|\|Adjuva\|\|Green dashed line.\| - You cannot overwrite this file.
Viola riviniana Reichenb. Flora - Vascular - Native Widespread through the British Isles and the Isle of Mull. Found in a variety of habitats including woodland, scrub, and stream sides and basalt terrace cliffs. Recorded by Jermy & Crabbe (1978). Jermy, A.C and Crabbe, J.A. (Ed.) 1978. The Island of Mull: A survey of its Flora and Environment. London. British Museum (Natural History). This page last updated on 21 Jul 2014 © 2017 Wildmull.com Development by Propel.co.nz
Hundreds of activists defied a ban on protests and marched in Thailand's capital in a rare rally against the hard-line ruling military (Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters). Wednesday, June 1, 2016 Thailand's coup and Tiger Temple (video) May 31, 2016, ODN/VF (AP/ABC News) Tiger Temple: Thai wildlife officials start removing tigers from Kanchanaburi after allegations and find 40 cubs dead in freezer (preserved for autopsies to show they died of natural causes, the monks explain). Thai authorities have started extracting the 137 tigers held at this unique Theravada Buddhist temple after allegations some of the monks were involved in unlawful reproduction and trafficking of tigers. Dispatch 1: In 2014 Thailand PM Yingluck Shinawatra and nine of her ministers were forced to step down over allegations of abuse of power -- which has ignited heated protests by members of the country's [radical UDD] "red shirt" movement. (AJ) Who are the red shirt protesters? Not pro-government Supporters of the ousted leader -- whose brother, corrupt former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, was also ejected -- called the move a coup and poured onto the streets of Bangkok. The [pro-military PAD] "yellow shirts," which for months had been calling for a new government, celebrated their victory. VICE News takes a look at these opposing rallies and the political vacuum ahead for Thailand. More Coup: Thailand’s thoughtcrime arrests Demonstrators from the New Democracy Movement (NDM) group flash the three-finger salute inspired by the movie "The Hunger Games" during a rally at the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, Thailand, Sept. 19, 2015. Thailand is now entering its third year under military dictatorship, a reign established when generals seized power from an elected government on May 22, 2014. The army has vowed to use its sweeping powers to heal a nation torn by class resentment. But its favored tactics for keeping the peace -- locking up critics and silencing dissent -- have turned Thailand into a nation where even meek expressions of defiance can end in detention. In the past nine months, Thais have been charged for clicking “like” on subversive Facebook memes. For handing flowers to an anti-junta activist. For allegedly insulting the king’s pet dog. Others have been detained simply for reading George Orwell’s “1984” in public, or for raising three fingers, an anti-tyranny salute from the “Hunger Games” films. Officers have even snatched up a man for eating a sandwich: It was no ordinary sandwich, mind you. It was publicly declared a “sandwich for democracy,” scarfed down by an anti-junta activist at a mall -- all while reading 1984. He was quickly surrounded by plainclothes officers.... When the army seized power two years ago, it justified its takeover by promising a wave of grand reforms. Thailand, the generals said, would become a nation purged of corruption and of the recurring, sometimes bloody street protests that have convulsed the political order for nearly a decade. Army Chief Prayuth Chan-ocha, who appointed himself prime minister, even released a syrupy ballad vowing to “return happiness to the people.” At the outset, his subordinates seemed similarly upbeat. More Who's who? Red versus Yellow Laura Kyle, "101 East" (AJ English) "101 East" looks back at the events leading up to the battle in Thailand's capital. Let's look at this under-reported story about tourist-magnet Thailand, listening to all sides of the story, and giving a "voice to the voiceless." AJ's impartial, fact-based reporting wins worldwide praise for its unique brand of journalism. This Thai fish WALKS like a mammal, which may reveal secrets about our evolution (April 8, 2016) The fish has a pelvic bone. It's only an inch long, but in the study of human evolution, this could be huge.
Child Sexual Exploitation Mapping Report (June 2016) This mapping exercise provided a snapshot of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) resources across Scotland. The picture made up by Child Protection Committeess and third sector organisations’ responses highlights the multitude of activities and initiatives aimed at preventing and tackling CSE. WithScotland’s contribution to CSE awareness raising activities on a national level is multifold. As stipulated in Scotland's National Action Plan to Prevent and Tackle Child Sexual Exploitation, the WithScotland website now hosts a section dedicated to CSE tools and resources, developments in policy and practice on a national and local level, related national, UK and international research as well as useful links. In addition, WithScotland has produced a practice briefing on CSE (Webb and Laird, 2014), hosted events on CSE, facilitates the national CSE sub group of Child Protection Committees Scotland and has provided support/advice around the recent national CSE public awareness campaign. For more information, visit WithScotland
WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) — Hurricane Matthew’s torrential rains triggered severe flooding in North Carolina on Sunday as the deteriorating storm made its exit to the sea, and thousands of people had to be rescued from their homes and cars. The death toll in the U.S. climbed to at least 15, nearly half of them in North Carolina. The storm was stripped of hurricane status just before daybreak, but the crisis — set off by downpours of more than a foot — was far from over. “As the sun rises in North Carolina and the blue sky returns, our state is facing major destruction and, sadly, loss of life,” Gov. Pat McCrory said as the effects of Saturday’s deluge became clearer at daylight. Rivers and creeks overflowed, driving people from their homes and trapping others as much as 100 miles inland. The unofficial rainfall totals were staggering: 18 inches in Wilmington, 14 inches in Fayetteville and 8 inches in Raleigh. McCrory said police and emergency crews had made more than 880 water rescues. In the Fayetteville area alone, rescue crews saved nearly 600 people from the rapidly rising floodwaters, officials said. The governor said that four people were missing in the Fayetteville area and that the full scale of the disaster was not yet known because the flooding continued overnight and there were many places that search teams had not yet reached. “There could be some backroads where we had people swept away. I’m praying that is not going to be,” McCrory said. Most of the deaths happened when vehicles were swept away by floodwaters. About 100 guests and workers had to be evacuated from a Comfort Inn motel in the North Carolina coastal town of Southport after the hurricane cracked a wall and left the roof in danger of collapse, authorities said. And dramatic video showed Fayetteville police rescuing a woman and her small child from their car as rising waters swallowed it. Shortly before daybreak, the hurricane was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone. As of 8 a.m. EDT, the storm was centered about 60 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, moving out to sea. It still had hurricane-force winds of 75 mph. Forecasters said North Carolina and Virginia could get even more rain and warned of the danger of life-threatening flooding through Monday night. “Stay home. Most of your church services have been cancelled. There’s no reason to go out. Take the day off,” Fayetteville Mayor Nat Robertson said. Matthew killed more than 500 people in Haiti last week, plowing into the desperately poor country at 145 mph. The fearsome storm then sideswiped hundreds of miles of the U.S. coastline from Florida through Georgia and the Carolinas, its eye staying far enough offshore that the damage in many places was relatively modest, consisting mostly of flooded streets, flattened trees and blown-down signs and awnings. Up until Saturday night and Sunday morning, it appeared that the U.S. might pull through without the catastrophic damage that forecasters said was possible. Many people counted themselves lucky. Along the main drag in Daytona Beach, Florida, the Silver Diner had all of its shiny metal siding ripped off the front and sides, leaving only a wood frame exposed. Next door, the window of a souvenir shop had been blown out and the roof and ceiling torn through, leaving pink insulation dangling. David Beasley, president of Insurance Recovery Inc., surveyed the damage and said that although it looked bad, the main strip was hit harder by Hurricanes Charley and Frances in 2004. “This is not much compared to those two,” he said. An estimated 2 million people in the Southeast were ordered to evacuate their homes as Matthew closed in. By hugging the coast, the storm behaved pretty much as forecasters predicted. A shift of just 20 or 30 miles could have meant widespread devastation. “People got incredibly lucky,” Colorado State University meteorology professor Phil Klotzbach. “It was a super close call.” While Matthew’s wind speed had dropped considerably by the time it hit the Southeast coast, the storm will rank as one of the most powerful hurricanes on record, based on such factors as wind energy and longevity, and as one of the most long-lived major hurricanes, too. It was a major hurricane — that is, with winds of at least 110 mph — for just over seven days. Three-quarters of a million people lost power in North Carolina, according to the governor, along with a similar number in South Carolina, 250,000 in Georgia and about 1 million in Florida. In addition to the seven deaths in North Carolina, there were four in Florida, three in Georgia and one in South Carolina. Some were killed by falling trees, others by carbon monoxide fumes from a generator. Property data firm CoreLogic projected that insured losses on home and commercial properties would amount to $4 billion to $6 billion, well below Hurricane Katrina’s $40 billion and Superstorm Sandy’s $20 billion. Associated Press writers Holbrook Mohr in Orlando, Florida; Gary Fineout in Tallahassee, Florida; Terrance Harris in Daytona Beach, Florida; Mike Schneider in Jacksonville Beach, Florida; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Martha Waggoner in Raleigh, North Carolina; Jeffrey Collins on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina; Jack Jones and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; and Bruce Smith in Charleston, South Carolina, contributed to this report. (Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
Tomorrow when you wake up, it’s widely expected you will be living in a country in which the Affordable Care Act (“health care reform” if you’re a Democrat, “Obamacare” if you’re a Republican, and “The End of the American Way of Life As We Know It” if you’re a devotee of conservative talk radio) has either been sanctioned by the Supreme Court of the United States — or struck down by that body as unconstitutional. Or something in-between. It’s complicated. Debate about the law, you may have observed, has become something much more than an argument over a specific policy. Opposition to the act among Republican politicians is virtually mandatory, and its fate has come to feel like a proxy for the success or failure of the entire Obama presidency. Furthermore, one might argue, opponents’ extreme interpretations of the law’s provisions are indicative of not just the gaping partisan divide, but an almost metaphysical chasm between two distinct sets of Americans. But there’s more at stake than just politics. A substantial number of people are already receiving insurance or other benefits under the law that they otherwise would not be eligible for. So I checked in today with Mina Kim, who has been reporting on health care for KQED, to see just what’s at risk. I asked Mina to break down the possibilities into two categories: 1) What happens if the entire law is struck down 2) What happens if only the individual mandate — the requirement that everybody buy health insurance — is nixed What happens if the entire law is struck down Through the federal health care law, Mina Kim reports, about 400,000 Californians currently receive health care under a low-income health insurance program. After the health care law was enacted, California received a Medicaid waiver from the federal government that has enabled counties to receive matching federal funds to expand coverage to low-income, childless adults. Currently, 47 of California’s 58 counties participate in this program. In 2014, when the full federal law is supposed to go into effect, these individuals would be transferred to a newly expanded Medicaid program that mandates people below 133 percent of the poverty level qualify for coverage (another component challenged in the Supreme Court). If the entire law is struck down, or just the Medicaid expansion, there will be no federal funds to keep these 400,000 low-income Californians enrolled. California is also using federal funds provided under the health care law to insure more than 10,000 people with pre-existing conditions. (The state already has a “high-risk pool” under which it insures about 7,000 people, but it’s expensive and there’s a waiting list.) These are people who can’t get insurance on the individual market because they are already sick to some degree. This program would be phased out in 2014 and replaced with an online health insurance exchange. Some senior citizens who receive prescription drug benefits under Medicare would also be affected if the entire law is struck down. The law requires pharmaceutical companies to provide 50 percent discounts on brand-name drugs and 7 percent on generics when people are caught in the so-called “doughnut hole” — a gap in coverage. The Centers For Medicare & Medicaid Services says that Californians have saved $311 million dollars on prescription drugs under this provision since the law passed. What happens if the just the individual mandate is struck down? This will primarily affect the way the health exchange — on track for 2014 — is intended to operate, says Mina Kim. The individual mandate compels people to buy insurance — the healthy and the sick alike — and theoretically if the mandate doesn’t exist, healthy people will not participate, thus not offsetting the cost of insuring the sick and keeping premiums affordable. It’s been estimated that 2.5 to 3 million people in California will buy insurance over the exchange. The UCLA Center For Health Policy Research predicts 900,000 fewer people purchasing a plan if they’re not forced to. Peter Lee, the Executive Director of the California Health Benefit Exchange, estimated the decrease will be more like 500,000 people. In any event, California intends on going forward with its exchange even if the mandate is struck down, because the income-based subsidies that individual purchasers of insurance qualify for will remain. “Peter Lee, who used to work on health policy in the Obama administration, said that the striking down of the individual mandate will absolutely not inhibit the ability of the exchange to go forward,” Mina Kim says. “Lee says he’s not even doing any contingency planning for the decision.” But what if the entire law is struck down — meaning no subsidies for people to buy insurance on the exchange? “Lee thinks for the justices to strike down all the parts of the health care law would be such an incredible overreach of judicial power, that it’s not even worth considering. That’s how he feels about it. California has already even contracted with an IT vendor to create an online portal for the exchange. But he’s willing to concede the mandate may be struck down.” Additionally, state lawmakers could try to legislate around a decision striking down the mandate, creating something akin to it that would still meet constitutional muster. “There has been support for that in the past,” says Mina Kim. “There are lawmakers considering laws to that effect should the court strike the mandate down.” What will stay no matter what the court rules? Some provisions of the health care act will remain in California even if the court strikes the entire thing down, because the state has passed legislation duplicating those laws. - Children will still be able to stay on their parents’ health plan up to the age of 26. - Insurers will still not be able to reject anyone under 18 with pre-existing conditions - Insurers will not be able to cancel someone’s coverage when they become sick (called “recission”) because the insured made an unintentional error in his or her original application.
The bales of straw in the lake were introduced following a very green year: in summer 1993 the water turned very green. The introduction of the bales was reported in the October 1994 University Magazine: Feeding straw to the lake The campus lake will be fed straw this year in an effort to keep down the algae blooms which cover it every summer. Fifteen bales of straw wrapped in wire mesh will shortly be seen floating in the lake. The effect they have will not be noticable until next year, however. ``The bales have an arresting effect on the growth of algae,'' says Gordon Eastham, the University's new supervisor of grounds. ``But they need to be put in the water six months before the algae blooms to have the desired effect.'' The bales, which will be anchored to prevent them drifting, will float at first but will become submerged as they are waterlogged. Marker buoys will be attached so that grounds staff can identify them and remove them after six months. ``It is partly a cosmetic exercise,'' says Gordon, ``but the water quality will be better when there are fewer algae blooms.'' Problems with the lake More problems with the lake
Your Kinect can read your mind! Eye tracking is one of the most fascinating technologies. You can select items just by looking at them, you can control games and even your browser will automatically scroll adjusted to your reading. Eye tracking usually requires expensive IR technology, but with a little twist and the NUIA eyeCharm your Kinect can be upgraded to an eye tracker. The NUIA eyeCharm developed by Munich based 4tiitoo, is a hardware add-on for Microsoft's Kinect. It is a plug and play device that you can attach to any Kinect (Xbox 360 or Windows) and adds eye-tracking controls in under 10 minutes. Essentially it sends out a beam of infrared light at a user's face, where the infrared cameras will then capture the user's eye movements. The movements are then translated into instructions that a machine can understand. With eye-tracking system you can interact with your computer in a fun way: you can scroll webpages by looking at them, play Diablo with both hands on the keyboard for chatting, or flip through photo galleries with gaze and natural gestures. The NUIA eyeCharm currently support Windows 7/8 and you will need a Kinect (Xbox or Windows version) including its USB adapter cable. An included SDK will let developers create extensions for apps and will supports input from other eye trackers (e.g. tobii and SMI). 4tiitoo has launched a Kickstarter campaign to make your computer work easier and a lot cooler. The company is offering the eyeCharm in a few ways: a special offer for makers - pledging $42 you get the electric parts and the construction plan, so that you can print the eyeCharm in your style on your 3D printer, plus a shipment with all the components you can not print yourself (PCB, optics, electrical components and connectors). Another option is, for $60 ($50 for early birds) you can get the complete NUIA eyeCharm. As of this writing, the eyeCharm project has been funded $34,502 by 437 backers, reached 34% of its $100,000 goal. The project has still 23 days to go. Here is the production plan according to the Kickstarter page: - Pre-Production run and QA testing: June 3, 2013 - Initial Production run with 100 devices: June 17, 2013 - Start of Production run of all devices: June 27, 2013 - Beta Release NUIA Core & SDK with closed beta testing: July 5, 2013 - Finale Release NUIA Core & SDK and shipping to customer: August 1, 2013 To see it in action, check the video after the break. Posted in 3D Printing Applications Maybe you also like: - 3D printed bracelets created from your favorite music - 3D printed prototypes help Microsoft to form the idea of Surface - Bringing 3D printing into schools for job training - Building an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) with additive manufacturing - Weapon hacking: making this one piece, 3D printed mini crossbow at home - 3D-printable gun project plans to launch search engine for profit - Belgian doctors use paper 3D printing to minimize surgical time - These makers 3D printed their own engines - Dutch architects to build the first 3D printed canal house - How 3D printing impacts PUMA and Reebok - Review: 3D printed Transformers Skyquake's massive minigun (video)
Land ownership a sticking point in new cancer facility The Calvary Mater Hospital says it will withdraw $20 million in funding for the development of a new cancer research institute in Newcastle, unless they own the land. The institute is to be built behind the Mater on land previously owned by Hunter Water. Yesterday it was announced that Hunter Water has already given the land to Hunter New England Health, under a legally binding agreement. The Mater's General Manager, Colin Osborne says if that's the case, they will not contribute to the project. "All I can say is that the pledge that we've made to spend up to $20 million on the development of facilities, would be dependent on the land being held in title by us," He said. Mr Osborne says it will cause huge delays to the project. "Well I think it would become entirely dependent on funding from the public purse and we all know that those funds are in great demand and probably short of supply, so whilst something might happen I am sure that in the long run," He said. "This is a mechanism whereby something will happen far more quickly."
Robotic spacecraft, stem cell technology and a watershed moment in climate change dominate this year's list of science stories in 2013. Darren Osborne rates his top 10 science stories of the year. Singing astronauts, kings buried under council car parks and the smell of popcorn are some of the highlights from the world of science in 2013. When it was launched in September 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft (and its sister Voyager 2) began a journey of the distant giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, known as the Grand Tour. Two decades later, both spacecraft had completed their main missions and continued to coast away from the Sun, towards a region between the stars called interstellar space. Despite a number of 'false starts', NASA announced in June that Voyager 1 had indeed reached beyond the sphere of the Sun's influence, becoming the first human-made object to leave our solar system. The spacecraft, which is powered by the slow decay of radioactive plutonium, will begin running out of energy for its science instruments in 2020. By 2025, it will be completely out of power. Read more: Voyager 1 enters unknown territory While politicians continue to debate how best to manage climate change, and scientists fine tune their prediction, there was one piece of irrefutable evidence that emerged during 2013 - our planet's atmosphere contained 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. While that may not sound like much, it's the first time our atmosphere has had this level of CO2 for three million years - well before Homo sapiens appeared on the planet. Ironically, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has been tracking CO2 levels for the longest continuous period of time - since 1958 - may close due to a lack of funding. The therapeutic benefits of human embryonic stem cells have been touted for more than a decade, but the ethics surrounding their 'collection' is still hotly debated. Some success has been made in the field of induced pluripotent stem cells - converting adult cells back into human stem cells - it is still in its infancy. In May, an international team of researchers announced they had created human embryonic stem cells using cloning. The team extracted the nuclei from a 'normal' adult stem cell and placed it inside an unfertilised egg that had had its genetic material removed. While the technique had previously been shown to work in monkeys and mice, this was the first time it had successfully done in humans. A few years ago, our understanding of human evolution was relatively simple. For several thousand years modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals roamed the Earth, until 35,000 years ago, when the latter died out in southern Spain. But recent discoveries about another type of hominin - the Denisovans - are turning that simple story on its head. In August scientists discovered that humans, in particular those living in South East Asia and the Pacific, have traces of Denisovan DNA. For example, Melanesian people in Papua New Guinea appear to share six per cent of the DNA with Denisovans. Coupled with previous studies showing that humans from Europe contain fragments of Neanderthal DNA, it paints a complex picture of interbreeding between the hominin species. For more than five decades space exploration has been the domain of the big three: United States, Russia and Europe. But for the last few years a new wave of countries is stepping to the plate. In January, Iran claimed to have launched a monkey into space - a feat they repeated in December. In September, the Indian Space Agency launched its first interplanetary spacecraft, the Mars Orbital Mission. Two months later, China launched Chang'e 3 with a tiny lunar rover called Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, which became the first rover to touch down on the lunar surface in 40 years. Private industry is also making big advances in rocketry and spacecraft. SpaceX completed its third docking with the International Space Station (ISS), while Orbital Sciences got its first run on the board with its Cygnus spacecraft also docking with the ISS in April. Read more: Mythbusting India's Mars mission It was as if the British music group Coldplay was providing the soundtrack with Viva La Vida, when a team of scientists announced that they had found the skeleton the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III, buried under a non-descript car park in Leicester. The confirmation came after months of painstaking DNA research, radio carbon dating and examination of historical records. Further research found microscopic eggs of roundworm parasite in the lower region of the spine where his intestines would have been. While 2012 was the year of the Higgs boson, 2013 will be quietly remembered as the year Ununpentium - or element 115 - was confirmed to exist. Despite having first been created in Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, it took scientists another 10 years to recreate these short-lived heavy atoms. The atoms were created at the GSI research facility in Germany, by blasting calcium atoms at 90 per cent the speed of light at a foil of americium atoms. Within a few milliseconds, element 115 decayed into element 113, which in turn broke down into smaller parts. While the result has no obvious application, it's seen as another step towards our fundamental understanding of the nature at the atomic level. Read more:Super-heavy weight element confirmed Most of us know that there are three colour receptors in our retina - red, green and blue - and five basic taste receptors on our tongue - sweet, sour, bitter, salt and umami. This year a group of scientists suggested 10 basic smells. The researchers took a sample of 144 smell profiles from the Atlas of Odor Character Profiles - a 1985 publication considered as the 'gold standard' for smell - and applied statistical analysis to look for commonalties among the various odours. The researchers came up with labels such as fragrant, woody or chemical, while other groups were more complicated. For example, one cluster included minty, aniseed, spice, eucalyptus and camphor; while another listed popcorn, smoky, nutty, almond, oily and mouldy. The team are now looking at the chemical structures behind the smells in an attempt to predict how they 'work', which would be of huge interest to food scientists and the perfume industry. Read more: Our nose knows ten types of odour In February, everyone's attention turned to a 'rogue' asteroid named 2012 DA14 that was expected to pass within 27,000 kilometres of the Earth. But less than 24 hours before it made its closest approach, a smaller undetected meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometres east of Moscow. The sonic boom created by the 10,000 tonne chunk of space rock blasted windows, destroyed building and injured and more than 1200 people. A few months later, pieces of the meteor were found in a lake nearby. Although 'impact' was relatively minor - on a cosmic scale at least - it highlights how precarious our place in space is. If there's one thing that men are sensitive about it's the size of one's penis. So a study published in August was of little comfort to those who may appear to be less well-endowed than others. Australian researchers created a series of computer generated male body shapes, including differing bulgs in the groin region. A cohort of women was then asked to judge which body shapes appealed the most to them. Those that topped the list were body shapes with broad shoulders, and those with large penis bulge. But before you reach for the tape measure, the researchers point out that penis-size, or other physical attributes, don't necessarily affect how we ultimately select our mates. Read more: It's official: penis size does matter Finally, I thought I'd include one of the science video highlights of 2013. In an era where a human living in space is taken for granted - or even forgotten - it took Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield to remind us how amazing space can be. There are many great science stories that didn't make the list, in fact I could write another top 10 and still not cover everything. What do you think should have been included? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section below. Published 20 December 2013
功能Hydrolyzes the polyglutamate sidechains of pteroylpolyglutamates. Progressively removes gamma-glutamyl residues from pteroylpoly-gamma-glutamate to yield pteroyl-alpha-glutamate (folic acid) and free glutamate. May play an important role in the bioavailability of dietary pteroylpolyglutamates and in the metabolism of pteroylpolyglutamates and antifolates. 序列相似性Belongs to the peptidase C26 family. Contains 1 gamma-glutamyl hydrolase domain. 细胞定位Secreted > extracellular space. Lysosome. Melanosome. While its intracellular location is primarily the lysosome, most of the enzyme activity is secreted. Identified by mass spectrometry in melanosome fractions from stage I to stage IV.
It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker. Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool. Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker. Originally posted by Phage reply to post by Paroxysm I have to start with a disclaimer. The interactions of the solar wind and the magnetosphere are very complex. I don't have the tools for a full understanding but I do have a grasp of the fundamentals. Power systems: : widespread voltage control problems and protective system problems can occur, some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts. Transformers may experience damage. Spacecraft operations: may experience extensive surface charging, problems with orientation, uplink/downlink and tracking satellites. Other systems: pipeline currents can reach hundreds of amps, HF (high frequency) radio propagation may be impossible in many areas for one to two days, satellite navigation may be degraded for days, low-frequency radio navigation can be out for hours, and aurora has been seen as low as Florida and southern Texas (typically 40° geomagnetic lat.). Kp = 9 HF Radio:Complete HF (high frequency**) radio blackout on the entire sunlit side of the Earth lasting for a number of hours. This results in no HF radio contact with mariners and en route aviators in this sector. Navigation: Low-frequency navigation signals used by maritime and general aviation systems experience outages on the sunlit side of the Earth for many hours, causing loss in positioning. Increased satellite navigation errors in positioning for several hours on the sunlit side of Earth, which may spread into the night side. X20 (2 x 10-3)
The CLASS tool is used to measure the effectiveness of teacher or caregiver interactions with students. Trained observers assess three primary domains: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support. Within each of these domains, teachers' behavior is scored on a 7-point scale, where 1 indicates a desired behavior was not often observed and 7 indicates the behavior was prevalent. Positive and effective interactions between teachers and students are essential to the learning process, just as negativity and lack of structure inhibit learning. National research shows that students in classrooms with higher CLASS scores tend to perform better academically than those in classrooms with lower CLASS scores. Measuring the effectiveness of teacher-student interactions helps schools and programs to identify professional development opportunities and school-wide goals for improvement. In 2016, the overall CLASS score for 126 observed Rochester UPK classrooms was 5.5. The overall CLASS score for 47 observed Rochester EPK classrooms was 5.3. The classrooms scored higher in emotional support (6.5 UPK and 6.4 EPK) and classroom organization (6.1 UPK and 5.9 EPK) in 2016, compared to about 4 in instructional support for both groups. The 2016 scores were broken out for UPK (4-year-olds) and EPK (3-year-olds). The CLASS assessment was not conducted prior to 2010. Overall CLASS score was calculated as the mean of the 3 subscale scores for each year. Students are assessed as part of the Rochester Early Childhood Assessment Partnership aimed at promoting quality pre-K classrooms within the City of Rochester.
welcoming His disciples to come to Him, to abide with Him, to follow Him, to learn from Him. On each page of this website, A Day with Jesus: An Unorthodox Commentary on the Gospel According to John, you will learn more about the deep meaning to be found in this extraordinary Gospel. This meaning was carefully written into the text through the ingenious placement of signs and oracles from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. You will learn how to identify and define these holy metaphors in Scripture. In so doing you will uncover the Gospel’s deep meaning, hidden from sight for nearly 2000 years … until now.
Wiping Memories to Treat Addiction A professor and director of research at Cambridge University has completed research that could lead to a dramatic new method of addiction treatment: targeting and eliminating memories related to addiction. Professor Barry Everitt, one of three winners of the 25th annual Neuronal Plasticity Prize of the Fondation Ipsen, recently revealed his research targeting the memory plasticity of rodents and its effect on their addictive substance use. Much of Everitt’s career as a behavioral neuroscientist has been directed toward understanding how learning and memory relate to addictive drug use. Repeated drug use and drug relapse are driven in large part by strong memories connected to drug use. Memories play a critical role in triggering the brain processes that drive compulsive drug-seeking behavior. Everitt’s experiments were designed to see whether targeting those memories could help stifle the compulsion to continue taking drugs, or, for those in recovery, the compulsion to relapse and resume drug use. Two Different Approaches to Eliminating Memories In separate experiments involving rodents, Everitt’s research team used two methods of suppressing memories to see whether they could reduce drug-seeking behavior in their subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers interfered with a chemical receptor in the brains of the rodents. This chemical receptor is a critical part of the brain pathway that drives learning and memory. Without this chemical receptor, the memories related to drug use were erased. In the second experiment, the research team deactivated a gene in the brain’s amygdala region, which deals with emotional memory. With this method, memories were not entirely erased, but they were weakened and prevented from reconsolidating. Both experiments demonstrated success at reducing drug-seeking behavior among rodents that had developed compulsive drug habits. The results left Everitt and his team hopeful that similar methods could one day be employed to treat humans with substance use disorders. Memories Are Vulnerable at Point of Retrieval One of the key discoveries made during these experiments was that memories are in a vulnerable state when the brain first retrieves them. Their increased “plasticity” (adaptability and mold-ability) makes them susceptible to alterations or inhibitions that prevent them from having their full impact. Of the two methods, disruption of the brain’s chemical receptors appears to have the most promise for treating substance use disorders in humans. In his report on the new research, Everitt noted that altering genes in human brains is “not feasible.” That being the case, Everitt thinks future research in this field should be directed at understanding how memories are retrieved and re-solidified in people, and how that process might be inhibited in humans. Treatment Would Be Careful and Complex While the prospect of being able to partially delete addiction from a person’s brain is exciting, it is still a long way off. The process is also likely to be somewhat involved; people dealing with addiction will not be able to pop a pill and instantly zap their addiction-related memories. Further research could eventually lead to the creation of a medication to inhibit maladaptive drug memories, but the process of administering the medication would have to take place in a carefully monitored clinical setting while addicts revisit their most powerful drug memories Method Has Potential for Treating Other Illnesses Nevertheless, the possibilities presented by this kind of therapy could improve treatment options for illnesses other than addiction as well. Post-traumatic stress disorder involves painful episodes during which sufferers relive one or more traumatic experiences. Anxiety disorders also frequently involve fear-related memories that cause people to experience strong anxiety or even panic during situations that recall those memories. Eliminating such memories, or reducing the emotional impact of such memories, could go a long way toward helping people dealing with these disorders regain control over their involuntary and sometimes debilitating responses.
Enchanted Lenormand Oracle The Enchanted Lenormand Oracle is a 39-card deck in the Lenormand tradition (there are three extra cards: two alternative 'Man' and 'Woman' cards to allow for same-sex relationships, and a 'Diviner' card). The small-size cards have relatively simple hand-painted Lenormand symbols, and give the feel of peering through an enchanted forest. The 160-page companion book is also a useful introduction to reading Lenormand cards. Oracle Deck - 39 Cards - Watkins 2013 Enchanted Lenormand Oracle review by Barbora Waterhouse The Enchanted Lenormand Oracle is a 39 card kit, by the renowned Caitlin Matthews and art by Virginia Lee. The kit contains the traditional 36 cards along with 3 extra cards, 160 page companion book, a divination sheet for the Big Picture Spread in a solid lift-lid box. This kit is all that you need to begin your Lenormand journey, or continue to expand your understanding and relationship with the Lenormand cards. The Lenormand card deck is a thirty-six card oracle that has been popular in Europe and Brazil, but mostly unfamiliar in the English speaking world until very recently. Lenormand cards are named after the French celebrity diviner Mlle. Marie-Anne Lenormand (1772-1843), who read the cards for Josephine and Napoleon Bonaparte. Although the cards are named after her, Mlle... read more reviews or write a review. Similar Decks to Enchanted Lenormand OracleTheme: Lenormand Creator: Arthurian Tarot, Celtic Wisdom Oracle, Celtic Wisdom Tarot, Da Vinci Enigma Tarot, Steampunk Tarot by Caitlin Matthews More About These CardsName: Enchanted Lenormand Oracle Creators: Caitlin Matthews, Virginia Lee Publisher: Watkins 2013 Deck Type: Oracle Deck Card Size: 2.17 x 3.35 in. = 5.50cm x 8.50cm Card Language: None Card Back: Non-reversible Back Design: Four cards with playing card symbols, in twined ivy and vines Companion Material: 160-page bound companion book by Caitlin Matthews with meanings and instructions for reading Lenormand cards, and a fold out sheet with spreads.
Asymmetric Information and Risky Debt Maturity Choice - Full Text PDF - Author(s): MARK J. FLANNERY - Published: Apr 30, 2012 - Pages: 19-37 - DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04489.x When capital market investors and firm insiders possess the same information about a company's prospects, its liabilities will be priced in a way that makes the firm indifferent to the composition of its financial liabilities (at least under certain, well‐known circumstances). However, if firm insiders are systematically better informed than outside investors, they will choose to issue those types of securities that the market appears to overvalue most. Knowing this, rational investors will try to infer the insiders' information from the firm's financial structure. This paper evaluates the extent to which a firm's choice of risky debt maturity can signal insiders' information about firm quality. If financial market transactions are costless, a firm's financial structure cannot provide a valid signal. With positive transaction costs, however, high‐quality firms can sometimes effectively signal their true quality to the market. The existence of a signalling equilibrium is shown to depend on the (exogenous) distribution of firms' quality and the magnitude of underwriting costs for corporate debt.
In 1985, neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks published The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And Other Clinical Tales, essays describing and meditating upon some of the more unusual cases he had encountered over years of inquiring into the enigmas of the mind. The book was a surprising and long-lived success. Composer Michael Nyman immediately obtained rights to the title piece, intending to adapt it as an opera. The resulting work, with a libretto adapted by Nyman and Christopher Rawlence, premiered in 1986. As performed by Long Beach Opera as the final production of its 2012 season, The Man Who Mistook... is an intricate miniature puzzle box secreting at its heart—further puzzles. It is a piece that appeals, albeit quietly, to the old Aristotelian standbys, pity and fear, and leaves the viewer to wonder at the degree to which The World may exist only in our perceptions of it and in our unspoken agreements on what those perceptions signify. The libretto sticks closely to Dr. Sacks's original essay, in which he describes his investigation and diagnosis of the case of "Dr. P," an internationally successful singer and respected musical instructor whose behavior has grown progressively more eccentric. It emerges that Dr. P's perception of the exterior world has come unmoored from the visual: he can perceive shapes, forms, even intricate patterns, but no longer processes clearly the broader context of what his eyes see. At the same time, his overall mental faculties remain acute, and he is particularly attuned to information he receives through sound or rhythm: he will not recognize a familiar person who stands still, but the sound of a voice or even the perception of the particular way that person moves will trigger completely "normal" responses. In the end, Dr. Sacks ["Dr. S" in the opera] learns that Dr. and Mrs. P have adapted to his condition by constructing a way of life structured around predictability, order, and the association of recurring events with music ("eating songs, dressing songs"). The only advice Dr. S offers is that Dr. P should make "more music" of his entire life, for without music he fundamentally ceases to be.* The Man Who Mistook... is compact and distilled in most every way: it runs little more than an hour, involves only three characters (Dr. S, Dr. P and Mrs. P), and is scored for a string quintet, harp and piano. The score is rooted in [so-called] minimalism, relying principally on swirling recursive chord figures in the strings, but also evokes and paraphrases art songs of Robert Schumann, pieces often performed by Dr. P. (At one point, Drs. P and S join together in singing an excerpt from one of the most particularly sorrowful songs from Schumann's Dichterliebe.) The combination of minimalist rigor and Romantic colorations proves powerful, a simulacrum of sorts of the patient's interior lives. Long Beach Opera has always emphasized engagement with the drama as much as the music in the operas it chooses to stage, and on that score the three LBO-veteran principals here are more or less perfectly cast. Suzan Hanson's Mrs. P ranges through worry, protectiveness, denial, and the quiet assertiveness of a woman willing to change the external world itself if need be, the better to match it to her husband's. As Dr. S, tenor John Duykers combines low-key demeanor with a focused curiosity and fundamental sympathy as he seeks the nature of Dr. P's condition. At the center of the production's success is baritone Robin Buck as Dr. P, the object of all our inquiries. Buck's Dr. P is a well of uncertainty, from which are drawn unexpected moments of beauty and confidence, as in the Dichterliebe excerpt or when P describes the bucolic riverside scene that he perceives in what is actually a photo of a parched desert. The fine vocal turn is supported by an equally nuanced, fully realized physical performance, centering particularly around the eyes. Benjamin Makino, who deftly navigated the shoals of 2011's The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, conducts the seven member ensemble with a steady, not pushy, propulsion that eases smoothly in and out of the more overtly expressive sequences. The staging, by director David Schweizer, is straightforward and semi-naturalistic, as Dr. S meets the Ps first in his office and then in their home before pronouncing his diagnostic opinion. The piece offers little in the way of external action, and Schweizer successfully avoids letting it fall in to inertia. The Man Who Mistook... is an intimate, precision instrument with which we are reminded that oftentimes our knowledge of ourselves and others is simply the sum of its gaps. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is being staged in the EXPO Building, the former furniture store previously used for LBO's 2011 production of Medea. Two performances remain, next Sunday, June 24, at 2:00 and 7:00. [Tickets.] Photos by Keith Ian Polakoff, used by kind permission of Long Beach Opera. The blogger attended this performance as a subscriber, at his own expense. * In his original essay, Dr. Sacks did not identify a specific medical cause for Dr. P's "visual agnosia." Pathologic examination following Dr. P's death apparently determined the root of his condition to have been an unusual variant of Alzheimer's Disease that affected only the visual centers of the brain, leaving the other faculties unmolested.
Trumpeter/bandleader Doc Severinsen can still hit the notes, and it's not something he ever takes for granted. He always warms up. "A trumpeter is kind of like a golfer or an opera singer," says Severinsen in a call from his home in Blount County, Tenn. "There are certain things you do before you go out and do it front of anybody else. If you think you can get away without it, you're nuts. ... To play a trumpet you need to get your blood flowing and have some good food and good thoughts, and then you're ready." Severinsen, 85, has been living in Tennessee for the past few years. He still has a busy schedule. He moved to Tennessee to be closer to Cathy Leach, principal trumpeter with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and professor of trumpet at the University of Tennessee. While there are times he seems at odds with the more extreme conservatism of East Tennessee, Severinsen says he really enjoys the area. "Well, it seems like home!" he says. "I've learned it's not as much where you are as who you're with." Severinsen grew up in Arlington, Ore., where his father was a dentist and an amateur violinist. Severinsen was named Carl after his father, but family and friends began calling him "Little Doc," and it stuck. The younger "Doc" first fell in love with the trombone but decided to learn trumpet because that was what was available in town. Severinsen's father gave him music lessons, teaching classical pieces. At 12, he won the Music Educators National Contest and, at 14, he was given an audition with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. His age turned out to be a mitigating factor, but, at 16, he did join the group. He also performed with the Ted Fio Rito Orchestra, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet and other big-band leaders before becoming a staff musician for NBC in New York. That led to Severinsen becoming first trumpet and, later, bandleader on "The Tonight Show," shortly after Johnny Carson replaced Jack Paar as host. He stayed with the show for 30 years and left when Carson retired in 1992. Severinsen continued with his musical career, touring more than he could when he was on TV and performing as a guest with symphonies and jazz outfits. "That's really gaining momentum with communities that can't successfully have a really great symphony orchestra, but they can have a jazz orchestra and enjoy the fruits of that. I'm glad to see that." He recently performed a show with Byron Stripling and a community jazz orchestra in Naples, Fla., and has made a surprise appearance with the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. He's also interested in working with different arrangers. Hearing the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra perform the music to "Sweeney Todd" gave him an appreciation for Stephen Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Turick, who wrote the arrangements. "Two days later the phone rings and my manager asks, 'Would you like to work with Jonathan Turick?' " The two have a weeklong gig in New York coming up soon. It's obvious that Severinsen is at a point where he only does what he enjoys, and he believes he plays with more feeling. He particularly enjoys the all-Italian program he's working on with the KSO. He's worked with guest vocalist Joseph Wolverton for a decade or so and he enjoys conducting. He says he wants Italian music to sound Italian. "People are afraid to put as much garlic in there as you need. Lots of garlic and a little bit of red wine. If it's too much for them, they shouldn't be eating it. It's like driving a Cadillac. If you're asking how much mileage it gets, you can't afford it, so don't bother." When asked if he misses leading a big band every night, Severinsen gives an immediate no, but explains it without mentioning music. "I've just been reading a book about Spanish mustangs and their home is in the western United States. There's maybe two ranches that continue to raise them just for the sake of history. You know, I'd love to go down there and spend about two or three days watching them, and after that I'd like to put a saddle and ride off on one. I thought once I'd like to get one and bring it here, but I decided, no, they need to stay where they are. It's up to me to learn as much about their character as I can and go ride them where they are." Severinsen teams up with guitarist Gil Gutiérrez for a night of classical Spanish jazz with some movie music thrown in for good measure Wednesday, May 1 at the Musical Instrument Museum, 4725 E. Mayo Blvd., Phoenix. $37.50-$47.50. (480) 478-6000 or http://mim.org.
This time of year always brings conversations about thankfulness. Many families begin practicing and preparing their “thankful thoughts” to be shared around the Thanksgiving dinner table. People attempt to define their gratitude by that one big thing – accompanied by a lengthy back story – to share with their family and friends. It is important to remember that our gratitude does not have to focus on a big thing. Not all of us have that Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, moment each Thanksgiving. - For 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men, it is just another day to live in fear and hope for peace and safety. They will be thankful if the violence doesn’t occur that day. - On Thanksgiving Day in Pennsylvania, nearly 1,200 women and children will spend their holiday in a domestic violence shelter. They will be thankful that there are domestic violence shelters and that one had room for them. - More than 750 people in crisis will call a domestic violence hotline in Pennsylvania. They will be thankful that an advocate answered their call. - This Thanksgiving, approximately 7 million children will be living in a home were serious domestic violence occurs throughout the year. They are thankful when it stops – if only for a moment. - For three women in the US, Thanksgiving will be that last day of their lives. – They will not be thankful. The work of HOPE has taught us to appreciate every day and to be grateful for every effort. We are reminded of this when we witness gratitude for the most basic of things – food, clothing, shelter, and safety. At HOPE, we experience the bittersweet effects of families thankful for simple things that many of us take for granted. At HOPE, we are grateful every day to be engaged in social change. We are thankful that we have a shelter to offer safety and respite for women and children who have been victimized. We are dedicated to our crisis hotline and are grateful that we are ready to answer when someone calls. HOPE advocates are grateful for community partnerships and collaborations that allow us to reach-out to survivors in the court systems of Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. Make everyday a day to be thankful. Commit to taking a moment each day and remembering all of big and small reasons to be thankful. This Thanksgiving – and every day – HOPE is thankful for all the support throughout the community that helps our programs thrive! National Network to End Domestic Violence – 2013 Census Reports http://nnedv.org/projects/census/4225-domestic-violence-counts-census-2013-report.html Futures Without Violence – Fact Sheets
\|Alsharif led a campaign to encourage Saudi women to start driving on the streets of Saudi Arabia Saudi authorities have released a female activist who was held for 10 days after challenging the country's ban on women driving and encouraging others to follow suit, a lawyer and activists said. "She was released into her father's custody and now she will either be taken to trial or the case will be dropped," Ahmad al-Rashed, a Saudi lawyer following the case, told the Reuters news agency on Monday. Police arrested Manal Alsharif at her home on May 15 and detained her in Dammam prison. She faces charges of "besmirching the kingdom's reputation abroad and stirring up public opinion," after she posted a YouTube video of herself driving in the streets of Khobar in the eastern province. Abdullah al-Saadan, the justice ministry spokesman, could not be immediately reached for comment. Saudi Arabia, an ally of the US, is an absolute monarchy that does not tolerate any form of dissent. Religious police patrol the streets of the kingdom to ensure public segregation between men and women. Besides being banned from driving, women must have written approval from a designated male guardian, a father, husband, brother or son to work, travel abroad and even undergo certain forms of surgery. The conservative Islamic state has no written ban on women driving, but Saudi law requires citizens to use a locally issued licence while in the country. And such licences are not issued to women, making it effectively illegal for them to drive. Alsharif led a campaign that aimed to teach women how to drive and encourage them to start driving in the streets of Saudi Arabia starting from June 17, using foreign issued licences. But her arrest has cast doubt on the future success of the campaign. "Her arrest was a fiasco for the Saudi government," said Ibrahim al-Mugaiteeb, a Saudi activist. "Because her driving was put on YouTube, I think the government wanted to make an example of her so that June 17 will be aborted ... I don't think Saudi women should stop," he said.
In California, “Every person who participates in any lynching is punishable by imprisonment . . . for two, three or four years.” That can include the person being lynched. That doesn’t seem possible until one realizes that the 1933 law defines felony lynching as simply, “The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer.” The law was passed to discourage vigilante mobs from seizing blacks detained by the police and hanging them. But since not a lot of that goes on in California these days and it’s a shame to waste a good law, police have taken to applying it to protesters. Last January, Sacramento police arrested Maile Hampton, a 20-year-old black woman protesting police brutality near the state Capitol, and charged her under the lynching law. She allegedly interfered with officers who had taken a fellow protester into custody. Her group of demonstrators where participating in a counter-rally to a pro-law-enforcement rally and at some point police ordered them to remain on the sidewalk. Some didn’t and they were arrested. Hampton was among a few people who allegedly tried, and failed, to pull them from the police. Hampton wasn’t identified until later and was arrested at her home three weeks later. Bail was initially set at $100,000. Hampton is scheduled to appear in Sacramento County Superior Court on Thursday to face charges. She could get four years in jail if convicted. She was also charged with resisting arrest. She is not the first person charged with lynching. Two other protesters were reportedly charged with lynching, but those charges were said to be dropped. The East Bay Express and London’s Guardian plucked a few examples from the historical record to illustrate the ongoing appeal of the law. A University of California, San Diego student was arrested in 1986 during a protest when a crowd gathered around the police and loudly demanded they release an arrestee. The one student was picked out of the crowd and charged with lynching. The charge was later dropped. Four anti-fur protesters were arrested at a San Francisco Nieman Marcus store in 1999 and charged with lynching. That case never went to court. Oakland police used the law against at least two Occupy activists in 2011, but dropped those charges. Los Angeles police used the law against an Occupy protester during Art Walk in 2012, but that charge was eventually dropped. The odd use of the lynching law did not go unnoticed by the judiciary. Indeed, the California Court of Appeal for the First District ruled in People v. Anthony J. that year that the law could be interpreted to mean a person could lynch themselves. “We conclude that a person who takes part in a riot leading to his escape from custody can be convicted of his own lynching,” the court said. According to the East Bay Express, police were especially creative with the law in 2005 when they arrested Gabe Meyers for attempted lynching of himself at a protest of the G8 international meeting in San Francisco. He allegedly shouted for help while officers choked him. Charges were eventually dropped. Kevin Johnson, Sacramento’s first African-American mayor, appealed to the state Legislature to change the law’s incendiary name and much of the case’s attention has focused on that aspect of Hampton’s arrest. But questions have also been raised about the use of felony charges, by whatever name, against non-violent demonstrators. Patrisse Cullors-Brignac, a cofounder of Black Lives Matter, told Truthout, “This collision of forces—police abuse, unnecessary incarceration and felony disenfranchisement—that's part and parcel of the prison-industrial complex.”
Level 3 Management Advanced Apprenticeship What does a Level 3 Management Apprentice do? - Manages their own workload whilst leading others - Works effectively with other people - Plans and implements change - Manages a project or budget - Encourages innovation - Carries out operational plans - Recruits staff - Manages the work of a team What are the entry requirements? Candidates must be aged 16 or over and should have: - Good literacy skills - The ability to work quickly and accurately - Effective communication - An eye for detail - Motivation Skills - Problem solving ability - Planning the team’s work - Able to meet deadlines - Making decisions What is the duration of the course? The Level 3 Apprenticeship in Management takes 15-18 months to complete. How can I progress in Team Leading? After completing the level 3 Management apprenticeship you could progress onto your Level 4 in Management. What Qualifications will I gain? 1. Level 3 NVQ in Management: The National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) will be gained through on the job training and the assessment of this which includes written assignments, multiple choice exams, observations in the workplace, witness testimonies, work product , guided discussions and personal statements. 2. Employment Rights and Responsibilities (ERR): Employment Rights and Responsibilities cover legislation and other key policies you need to know and understand, relevant to your job role. 3. Functional Skills in English, Maths and ICT: Functional Skills are qualifications in Maths, English and ICT that equip learners with the practical skills needed to learn, live and work successfully. 4. PLTS (Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills): These are generic skills that are essential to life, learning and work. There are 6 PLTS: - Independent Enquirers - Creative Thinkers - Reflective Learners - Team Workers - Effective Participators
The most successful black performers of the '60s, the Supremes for a time rivaled even the Beatles in terms of red-hot commercial appeal, reeling off five number one singles in a row at one point. Critical revisionism has tended to undervalue the Supremes' accomplishments, categorizing their work as more lightweight than the best soul stars' (or even the best Motown stars'), and viewing them as a tool for Berry Gordy's crossover aspirations. There's no question that there was about as much pop as soul in the Supremes' hits, that even some of their biggest hits could sound formulaic, and that they were probably the black performers who were most successful at infiltrating the tastes and televisions of middle America. This shouldn't diminish either their extraordinary achievements or their fine music, the best of which renders the pop vs. soul question moot with its excellence. The Supremes were not an overnight success story, although it might have seemed that way when they began topping the charts with sure-fire regularity. The trio that would become famous as the Supremes -- Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard -- met in the late '50s in Detroit's Brewster housing project. Originally known as the Primettes, they were a quartet (Barbara Martin was the fourth member) when they made their first single for the Lupine label in 1960. By the time they debuted for Motown in 1961, they had been renamed the Supremes; Barbara Martin reduced them to a trio when she left after their first single. The Supremes' first Motown recordings were much more girl-group-oriented than their later hits. Additionally, not all of them featured Diana Ross on lead vocals; Flo Ballard, considered to have as good or better a voice, also sang lead. Through a lengthy series of flops, Berry Gordy remained confident that the group would eventually prove to be one of Motown's biggest. By the time they finally did get their first Top 40 hit, "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes" in late 1963, Ross had taken over the lead singing for good. Ross was not the most talented female singer at Motown; Martha Reeves and Gladys Knight in particular had superior talents. What she did have, however, was the most purely pop appeal. Gordy's patience and attention paid off in mid-1964 when "Where Did Our Love Go" went to number one. Written by Holland-Dozier-Holland, it established the prototype for their run of five consecutive number one hits in 1964-1965 (also including "Baby Love," "Stop! In the Name of Love," "Come See About Me," and "Back in My Arms Again"). Ross' cooing vocals would front the Supremes' decorative backup vocals, put over on television and live performance with highly stylized choreography and visual style. Holland-Dozier-Holland would write and produce all of the Supremes' hits through the end of 1967. Not all of the Supremes' singles went to number one after 1965, but they usually did awfully well, and were written and produced with enough variety (but enough of a characteristic sound) to ensure continual interest. The chart-topping (and uncharacteristically tough) "You Keep Me Hangin' On" was the best of their mid-period hits. Behind the scenes, there were some problems brewing, although these only came to light long after the event. Other Motown stars (most notably Martha Reeves) resented what they perceived as the inordinate attention lavished upon Ross by Gordy, at the expense of other artists on the label. The other Supremes themselves felt increasingly pushed to the background. In mid-1967, as a result of what was deemed increasingly unprofessional behavior, Ballard was replaced by Cindy Birdsong (from Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles). Ballard become one of rock's greatest tragedies, eventually ending up on welfare and dying in 1976. After Ballard's exit, the group was billed as Diana Ross & the Supremes, fueling speculation that Ross was being groomed for a solo career. The Supremes had a big year in 1967, even incorporating some mild psychedelic influences into "Reflections." Holland-Dozier-Holland, however, left Motown around this time, and the quality of the Supremes' records suffered accordingly (as did the Motown organization as a whole). The Supremes were still superstars, but as a unit, they were disintegrating; it's been reported that Wilson and Birdsong didn't even sing on their final hits, a couple of which ("Love Child" and "Someday We'll Be Together") were among their best. In November 1969, Ross' imminent departure for a solo career was announced, although she played a few more dates with them, the last in Las Vegas in January 1970. Jean Terrell replaced Ross, and the group continued through 1977, with some more personnel changes (although Mary Wilson was always involved). Some of the early Ross-less singles were fine records, particularly "Stoned Love," "Nathan Jones," and the Supremes/Four Tops duet "River Deep -- Mountain High." Few groups have been able to rise to the occasion after the loss of their figurehead, though, and the Supremes proved no exception, rarely making the charts after 1972. It is the Diana Ross-led era of the '60s for which they'll be remembered.
"Gas is $4 a gallon and we still have congestion" said Jim Spering, Solano County Supervisor in California recognizing that clogged roadways and reduced productivity must be addressed at a much larger scale. More than one hundred leading transportation experts from the Bay and Sacramento corridor gathered on Thursday, April 10th, to explore the possibility of coordinating transportation plans at the megaregion scale in an attempt to attract funding for projects. In a parallel effort, the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation and Imperial Valley EDC received a $225,000 grant to spearhead a study that aims to develop a megaregion framework for global competition. The U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration awarded the grant, which will cover the two southern California counties and the Northern Baja California, Mexico region. Click below for the articles:
Dir. Mano Khalil June 16, 9:30pm, IFC Center The Beekeeper relates the touching story of Ibrahim Gezer, a Kurdish beekeeper from southeast Turkey, and his unusual experience of integration into the seemingly conservative heart of today's Switzerland. The turmoil of the decades-long conflict between the Turkish state and the armed Kurdish guerrilla movement, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), robbed Gezer of everything that he had: his wife, two of his children, his country, and over 500 bee colonies—his means of making a living. He has been left only with his love for bees and his unshakeable faith in humanity. Displaced from his home and livelihood, the beekeeper discovers a new life in Switzerland. Screening followed by discussion with filmmaker Mano Khalil For more information and tickets visit the Human Rights Watch Film Festival website by AMNH on
\|This article is a stub. Help us to expand it by contributing your knowledge. For county and town page guidelines, visit U.S. County Page Content Suggestions.\| Attleboro is a town in Massachusetts. It was formed in 1694 and was previously called Rehoboth. It can be found in Bristol county and is a part of the registry of deed district. For more information, contact the county at City Hall, 77 Park St., Attleboro 02703. On the attached map, Attleboro is shown as 4 in Bristol county. For information about the state of Massachusetts see Massachusetts Family History Research.
Who are the Four Sons ? The 4 Sons are an educational and instructional tool that was integrated into the Seder meal by the Talmudic rabbis for the purpose of guiding the current generation, that is, the father who is head of the household, in determining which method of communication would be most appropriate for properly transmitting the story and messages of the Passover festival or Pesach festival to the future generation, that is, their children. Each Son poses a general question about the Passover festival or Pesach festival and the answer that is given for each of the 4 Sons depends upon the words and manner in which each question is posed by each of the 4 Sons. After each question and answer is recited, the father then decides which type of Son applies to each of his children and explains the appropriate answer for each child in further detail. For instance, the Wise Son literally asks his father what are these testimonies, statutes and ordinances that G-d has commanded you to do? This question is posed in the Torah, in Devarim or Deuteronomy 6:20, and the answer given is a brief historical account of why we are obligated to follow these laws: "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt; and the L-rd brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. ...", followed by the fact that G-d commanded the Hebrews/Jewish people to accept, study, and fulfill these laws for our own good so that G-d may preserve us to this day and beyond (Devarim or Deuteronomy 6:21-25). In the Haggadah, the "instruction manual" for conducting the Seder meal, the Four Sons ask their questions and each are given the appropriate answer to their question according to their personality type, and the answer given for the Wise Son, as in the Torah, is that he should be instructed in the laws of Passover or Pesach, and that the time to teach these laws should be immediately after the Son is told that G-d brought us out of Egypt. The story of the Four Sons is also read at the Passover Seder table. As mentioned, each of the Four Sons symbolize a different type of Jewish person based on the question each asks about the Passover festival or Pesach festival. One son is deemed to be "wise" ("Chacham" in Hebrew) because of his discerning question, another son is simple or lazy ("Tam" in Hebrew; this son is regarded as simple or lazy because of his indifference and unconcern as reflected in his question), another son is wicked (or rather, rebellious; "Rasha" in Hebrew) based on the anti-social words that characterize his question, and the final one is very young in age, too young to inquire about Passover, and therefore silent ("She'aino Yodea Lishol" in Hebrew, meaning "The Son who Doesn't Know Enough to Ask"). The wise son inquires about the meaning of the laws, statutes and customs of Passover that are practiced by the Jewish people. Those assembled at the Passover Seder table respond in unison, describing this son as wise, since he wants to acquire more in-depth knowledge about the Passover traditions of his people. The assembled further state that it is necessary to re-tell the facts of the Passover story in public so that all in attendance - whatever their level of knowledge - will be spiritually and morally educated and uplifted by the Passover story. The simple and indifferent son asks in more general terms what is all this he sees at the Passover Seder table. Those at the Passover Seder table respond by educating and reminding the simple and indifferent son about G-d's favors toward the Hebrews during the time of slavery in Egypt, and the importance of remembering and observing them, and remembering them with gratitude. The rebellious or wicked son wants no part of the Passover traditions and asks why the Jewish people - other than him - practice the laws, statutes, and customs of Passover. Those at the Passover Seder table respond by describing this son as either rebellious or wicked, since he thinks the laws, statutes, and customs of Passover are meant to be practiced by other Jews, but not him. In fact, in the Passover story, since only the Hebrew households that had followed G-ds' instructions during the 10th and final Plague were saved, the assembled respond that had the wicked or rebellious son been in Egypt at that time, the wicked or rebellious son would not have been spared from the 10th Plague based on his detached attitude from the laws, statutes, and customs of Passover. Finally, the young and silent son who does not know enough to inquire is simply told about the Passover story in accordance with the biblical command: "And thou shalt tell thy son in that day, saying: it is because of that which the L-rd did for me when I came forth out of Egypt" (Shemot 13:8 or Exodus 13:8). The story of the Four Sons reflects different perspectives of Passover and teaches that no matter what view one has about the Passover festival, the meaning of the Passover festival is the same in response to each view: that one should remind oneself and feel grateful for the deeds done by G-d for the Hebrews so long ago. The story of the Four Sons also demonstrates that it is necessary to emulate the wise son by remembering our obligations to our people and to Judaism. What are these obligations? Well, we must begin by learning more about the Torah and the Jewish way of life. If we do not develop our knowledge of the Torah and hence our knowledge of G-ds' commandments and traditions such as Passover and instead leave this to others, then we have failed in our responsibility to not only advance our own education in our heritage, but to apply our newfound knowledge to the benefit and betterment of both our fellow Jewish brethren and for humankind as a whole. It is the wise son who understands the importance of learning his traditions so that he could be a positive role model for future generations in his family, for fellow Jews, and for all of humanity. The Fifth Son : A Pesach Message Adapted from a letter of the Lubavitcher Rebbe During the Seder service, we read in the Passover Haggadah that the Torah speaks of four sons, "one wise, one wicked (or rebellious), one simple, and one who does not even know how to ask a question." The Passover Haggadah then proceeds to tell us the questions posed by each of these 'sons', and the reply which we are to give to each of them. The Wise Son inquires about the special Mitzvos ("Commandments" in Hebrew, as in commandments from G-d that are stated in the Torah and are obligated to be followed by the Hebrews/Jewish people) of Passover and we are to tell him in detail all the laws and customs of the festival. The (Rebellious or) Wicked Son asks: "What is this service to you?" By saying "to you", he excludes himself from the Jewish community, and we are told to reply to him sharply. The Simple Son asks: "What is this all about?" In reply, we are to tell him of the Exodus from Egypt. As for the son who does not know how to ask, it is for us to open the conversation with him, as the Torah says, "You shall tell your son on that day, as follows: 'This is on account of what the L-rd did for me when I went forth from Egypt'." While the Four Sons differ from one another in their reaction to the Seder, they have one thing in common: they are all present at the Seder. Even the ("Rebellious" or) "Wicked" son is there, taking an active, though rebellious, interest in what is going on in Jewish life around him. This, at least, justifies the hope that some day also the (Rebellious or) "Wicked" one will become wise, and all Jewish children attending the Seder will become conscientious, observant Jews. Unfortunately, in our time of confusion and spiritual bankruptcy, there is another kind of a Jewish child - a "fifth son", who is conspicuous by his absence from the Seder; the one who has no interest whatsoever in Torah and Mitzvoth ("commandment" in Hebrew), laws and customs; who is not even aware of the Seder-shel-Pesach ("The Passover Seder" in Hebrew), of the Exodus from Egypt and the subsequent Revelation at Sinai. A challenging and pertinent question is: What brought about this regretably all-too-common phenomenon of the "fifth son"? The "Fifth Son" is the result of an erroneous psychology and misguided policy on the part of some immigrants arriving in a new and strange environment. Finding themselves a small minority, and encountering social and economic difficulties, some parents had the mistaken notion, which they transmitted to their children, that the way to overcome these difficulties is to become quickly assimilated into the new environment by discarding the heritage of their forefathers and abandoning the Jewish way of life. Finding that this process leads to the discomfort of inner spiritual conflict, some parents resolved to spare their children this conflict altogether. They simply gave their children no Jewish education or training. To justify the desertion of their religion and appease their stricken conscience, it was necessary for them to devise some rationale. They persuaded themselves, and in turn their children, that the Jewish way of life, with the observance of the Torah and Mitzvos, was incompatible with their new surroundings. They sought, and therefore also "found," faults with the true Jewish way of life; while in the non-Jewish environment everything seemed to them only good and attractive. By this attitude, these parents hoped to assure their children's existence and survivial in the new environment. But what kind of existence is it, if everything spiritual and holy is traded for the material? What kind of survival is it, if it means the sacrifice of the soul for the amenities of the body? The tragic consequence of this utterly false approach was, that thousands upon thousands of Jews have been severed from their fountain of life, from their true faith, and from their fellow Jews. Deprived of spiritual life, there has risen a generation of children who no longer belong to the "Four Sons" of the Passover Haggadah, not even to the category of the (Rebellious or) "Wicked" one. They are almost a total loss to their fellow Jews and to true Yiddishkeit. The Exodus from Egypt and the Festival of Pesach are forceful reminders that an attempt to emulate the environment does not lead to survival, deliverance and freedom. These come from staunch loyalty to our traditions and the Torah way of life. Our ancestors in Egypt were a small minority, and lived in the most difficult circumstances. Yet, they preserved their identity, and with pride and dignity, tenaciously clung to their own way of life, traditions and uniqueness. Precisely in this way was their existence assured, and eventually their deliverance from every slavery, both physical and spiritual.
Please click here for more information about course accreditation Continued Professional Development The theory element of this course counts for 72 hours CPD. There are 142 hours CPD with the practical placement included. There are an estimated 8.7 million species of animals living on our planet today. This zoology course explores what life is and how it has been able to diversify into such numbers. We will look at the chemical and physical properties of life and how this life has changed from single-celled organisms into the many different types of animal life we see around us today. A zoologist’s job is to understand these animals on a species level; how they came to be, live, feed, and breed. It is also to grasp how these individual species interact and affect each other as well as their environments. This zoology course is relevant to those working or wanting to work in the many related careers, as well as those wanting to enhance their knowledge. Anyone 18 or over and studying our Zoology course would be eligible for ZSL (Zoological Society of London) Fellowship. Origins of Life and Evolutionary Theory This module begins with a description of how and when life began and what life was like in the beginning. What were the chemical and physical requirements for life to begin? The theory behind evolution will be looked at with an introduction to the genetics involved. An introduction to the huge array of animal life will be covered. The module examines all the major phyla of animal life from the “simple” Protozoan and Radiate animals through to the invertebrates and vertebrates. An examination into the history of how zoologists classified animals in the past and how different animals are related to one another will complete this module. The huge array of animal body plans are discussed in this module; from jellyfish, to segmented worms, reptiles, insects etc. We examine the differences between body plans and examine how each form functions. This module explores origin and evolution, structural and functional adaptations. The classification of living mammalian orders and specific examples of individual species is also included in this module. Food is essential to all life and so this module delves into the world of omnivores, herbivores, detritivores and carnivores. Case studies highlight how different animals have evolved how to locate, store, consume and digest food. Animals and the Environment: This module focuses on the different environments animals live in and the geographical distribution of animals across the globe. Finally, we explore the importance the environment plays in evolution and how animals adapt to changes in the environment; natural and man-made. £325 followed by 5 x monthly payments of £90 (includes optional practical) Please contact us if you would like to enrol WITHOUT the practical placement (Course cost is all inclusive of tutoring fees, assessments, materials and course registration)
Algonquian Tribes \| Communities \| First Nations \| Ojibway Indians History \| Reservations \| Tribes Rocky Boy Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana Needs Your Help Rocky Boy Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana needs funding to establish offices at Blackfeet Reservation, Crow-Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Flathead Reservation, Fort Belknap Reservation and at Great Falls, Montana where Hill 57 Reservation is located. Our goal is to gain Tribal Recognition at Blackfeet Reservation, Crow-Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Flathead Reservation and Fort Belknap Reservation and Federal Recognition for Rocky Boys Tribe of Chippewa Indians at Great Falls with Reservation. Your donation will be greatly appreciated. Below is my paypal link where you can donate to this very important cause for survival. If you are interested in becoming a member of Rocky Boys Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana, you can fill out a form here . In comments box, please include your tribal affiliation. In Montana, members of Blackfeet, Crow-Northern Cheyenne, Flathead, Fort Belknap and Rocky Boys Reservation are automatically members of Rocky Boys Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana. However, if you are a member from another tribe (Reservation) your application will be approved if you have proof of membership from your tribe (Reservation). Click Here To Donate It is one of the many communities of the Black Hills Indian Reservation. Chippewa Chemehuevi people have a Reservation in Coachella. It is close to the Chippewa Chemehuevi Reservation in Indio. After the Chippewa Chemehuevi people were forced to relocate to the Black Hills Reservation in 1895, they settled where Joshua Tree National Park is. Also in 1895, they were set aside their own Reservation within the Black Hills Reservation. Similar to the land additions to the Navajo Reservation. Their's was located at what is now Joshua Tree National Park. According to historians, the Chippewa Chemehuevi were also set aside land where Indio is now. By 1908, the United States continued their bad habit of back stabbing. They eradicated not only the Black Hills Reservation but most other Indian Reservations as well. When they reached the January 5 and January 7, 1852 Treaties agreements, they freely admitted that the treaties were not ratified, which means they had no intentions on honoring any agreements they reached with Indian leaders, which means the Chippewa's can either honor the treaty agreements or keep the entire land area as theirs because the United States refused to conduct themselves in a honorable manner. After 1908, the United States rounded up the 1,000s of Chippewa's living out in the desert and forced them to relocate to the Reservations in the Coachella Valley, the Morongo Reservation, and the Mission Indian Reservations in the mountains to the west. According to the 2010 census, the population of Coachella is 40,704. Mexicans (brainwashed Mexicans) account for 96.4% of the population. Indians account for 0.7% of Coachella's population, and blacks account for 0.8% of the population. Asians account for 0.8% of the population of Coachella. The white population can not be correctly estimated as a result of the corrupted Mexican population estimate. There are 9,903 housing units. The average household size is 4.1 persons per housing unit. Elevation is -66 feet below sea level. Zip code is 92236. There is a map below of the Chippewa Chemehuevi Cabazon Reservation. It is located on Coachella's northeast side. A little to the northwest is the Chippewa Chemehuevi Reservation. It almost borders the Chippewa Chemehuevi Cabazon Reservation. Below are several google earth photos of Coachella, California.
Get the Be Strong Online Resources The Diana Award Anti-Bullying Campaign has teamed up with Vodafone to create Be Strong Online, a FREE new programme for students to help each other explore the digital world. These brand new resources for teachers will cover everything from cyberbullying, gaming and selfies to privacy, apps and social networking. Be Strong Online uses a peer-to-peer approach to empower students and enable them to share knowledge about the digital world with younger students. Click on the boxes below to download the modules! Got a question? Check out our FAQ page here. Find out more about the programme For more information about Be Strong Online please contact Katie at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you!
Owners of ride-on lawnmowers could soon have to pay around £100 a year for motor insurance, under new regulations being considered by the EU. Even if your lawn-keeping wheels never leave the confines of your garden, you could face having to take out compulsory cover. This is being mulled over after a Slovenian man was hurt after being knocked off a ladder by a reversing tractor. Insurers in that case refused to cover claims as the accident took place on private land. Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin has already indicated that he would oppose any such change in the law. The Telegraph reports a source close to him as saying: "People have the right to expect to be able to cut the grass on private property without being clobbered for it. "We have home insurance in place for these kind of things and it works fine. Once we have seen the ruling we'll take whatever action necessary to head off anything that hurts people's personal finances." EU officials have argued that motor insurance should be used to cover all instances of vehicle use, and not just on roads and other public areas. Currently, accidents are normally taken care off by way of the owner's home insurance policy, though a change in regulations could see annual cover cost around £100 in premiums.
Trauma Therapy San Diego We utilize both cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help patients remember, articulate and heal from past traumatic events. Whether the trauma originated in childhood, adolescence or adulthood, we employ proven psychological counseling methods that help patients recover from emotional wounds. Through this healing, they’re able to better tackle addictions and mental illnesses resulting from trauma. Trauma is not necessarily easily identified. The National Comorbidity Study revealed that as many as 51% of women and 61% of men had had a traumatic experience of some sort. The type of trauma tends to vary by gender, but women experience a broader range of trauma. It’s easy to recognize that exposure to or witnessing assaults, rapes, combats, violence, near-death experiences and accidents are traumatic, but trauma can also be neglect, rejection, abandonment and emotional abuse. Trauma can happen once or over a period of time, but it will make the individual feel afraid, less trusting and maybe guilty, ashamed or incomplete. Negative symptoms of trauma are anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, self-blame, irritability, agitation, insomnia and difficulties with concentration. When individuals don’t deal with their trauma, it can have a crippling effect on their lives and it makes them more susceptible to developing addictions in an attempt to self-medicate. There are numerous techniques and therapies that provide ways of approaching trauma in addicts and APEX Rehab uses a variety of them. Cognitive behavioral therapy explores the negative and self-defeating thought patterns that prompt users into addictive behavior. It seeks to replace the negative thoughts with constructive alternatives. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a non-traditional psychotherapeutic approach. It has been mostly used with individuals suffering from a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), associated with events such as combat, assault, rape and car accidents. Its goal is to weaken the effect of negative emotions and make disturbing memories less disabling. Dialectical behavioral therapy aims to help the patient accept pain and past experiences, but also to encourage the patient to change thought patterns and emotional responses. Experiential therapy that includes music and art can also be beneficial in encouraging patients to get in touch with their suppressed emotions. These therapies can also enable the patient to learn how to express their emotions and deal with them in a less destructive manner. APEX Rehab is also one of the few addiction treatment centers in San Diego that include Rock to Recovery technique. This is a form of songwriting therapy that allows patients to learn new ways of expression and relaxation while enjoying and having fun.
As this study is all about Polynesian Tattoo History, we’ll introduce as precisely as we can. So where to begin? Before leading you into the detailed explanation of Polynesian Tattoo History, let us give you a glance of Polynesian culture first. The Origins of Polynesian Culture and its Geographical Covered Area There’re still debates about the origins of Polynesian culture (debate details can be found by searching “Polynesian Culture” in wikipedia), but one thing we can ensure is that Polynesia is not a single tribe but a complex one. Polynesians which includes Marquesans, Samoans, Niueans, Tongans, Cook Islanders, Hawaiians, Tahitians, and Māori, are genetically linked to indigenous peoples of parts of Southeast Asia. It’s a sub-region of Oceania, comprising of a large grouping of over 1 ,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean, within a triangle that has New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island as its corners. The two pictures below clearly show this triangle: People who live in these islands are regarded as Polynesians for their similar traits in language, customs, society and culture. Some people’s question about the differences between Polynesian and Samoan, Marquesans, Tongans or Tahitian tattoos (e.g.) can be answered here: They are just a branch of Polynesian Tattoos and each branch has its own subtle features. However few people know or realize the differences among them today. The Origins of the Word “Tattoo” The first visited Polynesian islands were the Marquesas Islands, which is found by European explorers, the Spanish navigator, Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, in 1595. But the European navigators showed little interest due to the lack of valuable resources. Captain James Cook was the first navigator trying to explore the whole Polynesia Triangle. The naturalist aboard “the HMS Endeavour” (Captain Cook’s ship), Joseph Banks, first mentioned the word “tattoo” (Also called “Tatau” by Samoan and “Tatu” by Tahitian) in his journal: “I shall now mention the way they mark themselves indelibly, each of them is so marked by their humor or disposition”. In 1771, when James Cook first returned to Tahiti and New Zealand from his first Voyage, the word “tattoo” appeared in Europe. He narrated a behavior of Polynesian in his voyage, which is called “tattaw”. He also brought a Tahitian named Ma’i to Europe and since then tattoo started to become rapidly famous because of the tattoos of Ma’i. Another saying is that the Polynesian tattoos were fond of by European sailors and spread extremely fast in Europe because they were with the tattoos emblazoned on their bodies when back home after voyages. The Development and Inheritance of Polynesian Tattoos The tradition of Polynesian tattooing existed from 2000 years ago. In 18th century this operation was strictly banned by the Old Testament. In early 1980’s, tattooing started to get a renaissance. Since then many lost arts were retrieved by Polynesians. But due to the difficulty in sterilizing the traditional tools, the Ministry of Health banned tattooing in French Polynesia in 1986. Although many years passed, tools and techniques of Polynesian tattooing have changed little. For a strictly traditional design, the skill gets handed from father to son, or master to disciple. Each tattoo artist, or tufuga, learned the craft over many years of serving as his master’s apprentice. They vertically passed their knowledge and rarely spread it widely because of its sacred nature. Tattoo’s role in Polynesian Culture Tattoo was a way delivering information of its owner. It’s also a traditional method to fetch spiritual power, protection and strength. The Polynesians use this as a sign of character, position and levels in a hierarchy. Polynesian peoples believe that a person’s mana, their spiritual power or life force, is displayed through their tattoo. Almost every Polynesian got a tattoo in ancient times. The Importance of Tattoo Masters Tattoo masters are the most crucial people because they bear the meaning of symbols and motifs in memory and know how to combine them to create a meaningful work of art to each person. For example, sea creatures are very common Polynesian symbols, like mantas, sharks, bonitos and sea urchins. Each of them has a meaning related to its inner nature and embodies the meaning by tattooing it on to the body. Polynesian tattoo masters can express varieties of meanings by combining different Polynesian symbols and motifs together. The styles of ancient Polynesian Tattoo Polynesian tattoo style can vary from island to island. It depends on the degree of evolution of various traditions from the original common tattoo designs, like Lapita, which is a former Pacific archeological culture. Ancient original styles mainly consist of some simple patterns, like straight lines, repeating on the body. These geometrical styles can be found in Hawaiian and Samoan tattoo traditions, or in tattoos from Fiji, Palau, Tonga, etc. Because the age is too far from nowadays, the meanings of these patterns are almost lost, or debatable. The most used styles nowadays, which instead consist of rounded patterns, are from Marquesas Island. Today’s Polynesian tattoo styles are much more figurative. Click here to view plenty of Polynesian Tattoo Designs. A Sacred Art Tattooing is a sacred ceremony in Polynesian culture. The tattoos and their location on the body were determined by one’s genealogy, position within the society and personal achievements. According to the culture of Maori, all high-ranking Māori were tattooed, and those who went without tattoos were seen as people with lowest social level. On the basis of mythology, human learned the art of tattooing from the 2sons of the God of Creation Ta’aroa. Tattooing was operated by high trained shamans (tahua) in the religious ceremony, who was an expert in the meanings of the tattoo and skills of the art. Before getting tattooed, a person should experience a long period of cleansing. During this period one would fast for a fixed length of time and abstaining from sexual intercourse or contact with women. The tattoo practice generally marked both rites of passage and important events in a person’s life. The addition of tattoos also made a warrior much more attractive to women. Generally, the head was considered the most sacred part of the body, and because tattooing caused blood to run, the tattoo craftsmen, or “tohunga-ta-oko”, were very tapu persons. The full faced tattoo was very time consuming, and a skilled tattoo craftsman would carefully study a person’s bone structure before getting his art process start. Tattooing Related to Women Generally, the women were not as extensively tattooed as the men. The position of tattoo on women’s body was limited to hand, arms, feet, ears and lips. One saying is that girls at the age of twelve would get tattooed on their right hands, and since when they were permitted to prepare the meals and join in the process of rubbing of dead bodies.
Georgia\'s new government is expected to cut spending on the presidency and many of the country\'s infrastructure projects in next year\'s budget. The country\'s newly-confirmed cabinet ministers gathered on Friday to discuss the 2013 budget, which is expected to be sent to parliament for debate and approval on Monday. Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili said his cabinet would work to slash the funding for the president\'s day-to-day work. It is \"unimaginable\" to spend so much on the president, when there are so many poor people in the country, he said. Georgia has to split some 485,000 dollars each month out of the Defense Ministry\'s budget for the president\'s plane, he said. Finance Minister Nodar Khaduri told reporters that funding for new infrastructure projects, which are considered not necessary at the moment, would be cut. He added that the government would carry through the unfinished projects. The ministers also doubted the rationale behind the 206-million-dollar parliamentary complex in Georgia\'s second largest city of Kutaisi. Next year\'s budget would surpass 8 billion laris (4.85 billion U.S. dollars), compared to 6.78 billion laris (4.1 billion dollars) for 2012.
Theory of Differential Equations. Place Published: New York Date Published: 1959 Description: Six volumes, bound as three. FIRST VOLUME ONLY (parts one & two). 344pp. Thick 8vo, green cloth, d.w. New York: Dover Publications, (1959). A fine copy in a very good dust wrapper. Comments: Part I: Exact Equations and Pfaff's Problem. Part II: Ordinary Equations, Not Linear.Jacket: Y Condition: near fine Book ID: 158945
is an all-natural food pantry serving these families within the greater Little Rock area. The program is a ministry of Christ Episcopal Church and was created as a pilot food program in spring of 2013. I spoke with Green Groceries director, Susie Shinn , about the developing program. “The mission of Green Groceries is simple: to provide fresh, local food to low-income families in need,” she says, “The Arkansas Local Food Network (ALFN), supplies the food for Green Groceries and the symbiotic relationship between the two entities is mutually beneficial; families are given fresh, local food they otherwise could not afford, and small farmers are given reliable bimonthly orders to sustain their operations.” The food is all locally sourced, and purchased with private funds donated to Christ Church. Families can pick up their groceries twice a month—on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month, between 5 to 7 pm. Clients shop through long tables laden mostly with fresh, organic produce—each family allowed one of each item available. Leftover food is stored at the church for future pick-up dates, and perishable food is donated the Dorcas House Qualified clients are referred through a number of organizations also providing services to low-income families such as: Our House , Our House CAFSI (Central Arkansas Family Stability Institute) Program, Single Parent Scholarship Fund of Pulaski County , St. Francis House , and the STAY Day Program for Veterans The program is currently still in its pilot phase. Clients are only accepted through referral and at this time no new clients are being accepted. However, Green Groceries hopes that as more food becomes available, the program will be able to expand. Shinn says, “The ability to help low-income families lead healthy lives has been the biggest accomplishment of Green Groceries since its first pickup in July 2013. Future goals for the program include sustaining existing operations, as well as, growing the program serve more low-income families in need.” It’s wonderful to see such important work being done in Little Rock. The chance to acquire wholesome foods from local producers is one that I hope more families have the opportunity to take advantage of. For more information or to find out how to assist with Green Groceries, please contact Susie Shinn at (501) 416-9825 Obtaining fresh fruits and vegetables is often financially burdensome for low-income families. This, coupled with the fact that much of the fast-food and pre-packaged, processed foods are so inexpensive, only adds to the obesity epidemic in our country—of which Arkansas, of course, is not immune. But one local organization is working to increase the availability of more nutritious foods to the low-income community.
4. Airline pilotWhat you expect: Soaring above the world, exotic destinations and hot stewardesses. What you get: They’re not called stewardesses anymore. They’re flight attendants and they’re old and they hate their jobs. You’re not soaring as often as you think either. You’re limited to a certain amount of hours each month in the cockpit. Many more hours are involved in flight preparations and sitting around waiting. You do get to travel but you won’t have much discretionary cash when you land in Bali. On average, the first year starting salary with a major airline is $36,000.
Retail pak HighBridge Audio 1992 CS ISBN 0453007848 $15.95 Two cassettes The familiar music of Debussy's "Clair de Lune" begins the reading of this classic story of lost dreams, romance, infidelity and retribution. Unfortunately, the theme music is not repeated. Claire Bloom's soft, feminine voice and British accent convey the mid-nineteenth-century French setting well. The abridgment, however, is rushed. There are too many hasty transitions from scene to scene. Some of these scene changes are a quick sentence which, if half-heard because of a wandering thought or a minor interruption, leave the listener wondering what is happening. From the narration, one learns the story line but loses the impact of the novel. D.W.K. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: MAR 93] Sign up to receive FREE email newsletters from AudioFile. Get audiobook recommendations and reviews straight to your inbox.
Sheet Music: Score Aerea / Mary Finsterer. by Mary Finsterer (2013) "Between abstract geometrical tracery and the echo of objects." - Franz Roh Composed and commissioned by the Monash Art Ensemble in 2013, Aerea reflects on that slight sense of déjà vu you might feel while looking down from an aeroplane window which comes in part from the shifting correspondences between the world below and your own. You start to notice relationships in abstract things that recur, not only from one shape to another, but also within the same shape. Aerea takes this idea of shifting entities as a metaphor to create dramatic twists and turns of movement. As the music unfolds from one passage to the next, quasi-improvised figures contrast with highly organized rhythmic structures. As ideas echo from one instrument to another, they hark back to the hocket-like motifs prevalent in medieval polyphonic practice where single notes, parts and melodic patterns alternate to create rhythmic intensity and momentum, all working within a larger framework that is guided by a strong directive throughout the piece. Published by: Australian Music Centre — 1 facsimile score (100p. -- B4 (portrait)) Duration: 17 min. Dedicated to Dean Golja Commissioned for Monash Art Ensemble with funds provided by Monash Academy of Performing Arts, Monash University. First performance by Monash Art Ensemble — 17 Aug 13. Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University, Melbourne Includes programme notes. The composer has notes the following styles, genres, influences, etc. on this work: Funk, Contemporary Jazz, twentieth century classical music - in particular Lutoslawski. This work is also available in the following products: - Browse other works for Large chamber ensembles - Browse other works by Mary Finsterer Analysis & Media - Resonate Article: 2014 Art Music Awards - winners Be the first to share your thoughts, opinions and insights about this item. To post a comment please login
Another day, another crisis By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own. Here we go again – the same sickening feeling, as stock markets reel amid a flight to “safety”. For months, there have been worries about contagion from the Greek imbroglio, and now the nightmare seems to be coming true, as one after another the weak European economies are put to the sword. First came Greece and Ireland, then Portugal, now it’s the big league – Spain and, even bigger, Italy (and don’t forget Belgium, an accident waiting to happen for many years now, not very important in pure economic terms, but psychologically significant as the home of the whole sorry euro disaster). In the table below, you can see how much Governments were being forced to pay for borrowing on the markets yesterday (July 11). The rates quoted for Greece, Portugal and Ireland imply that borrowing in the bond markets is for all practical purposes out of the question for those countries, as that has been the case for some months past, but the new development is that Italy and Spain are now being forced to pay 6 percent for 10-year loans, a premium of more than 3 percent compared to Germany. \|Source: Financial Times\| What this means is that, for exactly the same type of loan promising repayment on the same date in 2021, the Italian and Spanish Governments have to offer over twice as much as the Germans in order to compensate lenders for the risk that they will not be repaid in full. To put this in perspective, remember that for most of the life of the euro zone, yields on Government debt were locked within a tight range of 0.25 percent (one quarter of one percent or 25 basis points) of the German rate. Moreover, look at the yields on non-euro zone debt. Switzerland pays only 1.6 percent – it has a reputation for rock-solid finance going back over many decades – and Japan pays even less, in spite of having the largest national debt-to-GDP ratio of any industrialised country (albeit matched by a mountain of accumulated private savings). Even Britain, which is only just making a start on putting its house in order, and America, which is still thinking about it, are still able to borrow at around 3percent – less than half a percent above what it costs Germany, and less than France has to pay. Maybe there is something in the observation that markets can only deal with one issue at a time. Since they are currently focussed on default risk, they seem willing to lend freely to non-Eurozone Governments, presumably on the grounds that they will always repay their debts, if necessary by printing money (or quantitative easing, as it is euphemistically called) – oblivious to the fact that this must ultimately lead to inflation, meaning that lenders will be repaid in devalued currency. In short, it would take a lot more than 3 percent to persuade me to buy either British or American conventional (i.e. non-indexed) gilts. Yesterday also saw a development in the credit default swaps market which may be noteworthy. While the cost of insuring against a default on Italian bonds rose by over 20 percent, so too did the cost of insuring German, French, Belgian and Dutch debt – in each case by about 15 percent. This could well be a straw in the wind, indicating that the markets are waking up to the fact that Germany cannot carry on being the euro zone’s sugardaddy without endangering its own creditworthiness. It may well be that, without making any outrageous assumptions, a true calculation of Germany’s implied debt-to-GDP ratio may already be at Italian or even Greek levels, once we take account of its contingent liabilities to bail out its southern neighbours – especially if we take seriously (as we should, in my opinion) the fear that, once having been bailed out, the peripheral countries will revert to type and start spending again. Another day, another crisis. But in the daily chaos, we should not lose sight of the general lesson which the euro-mess exemplifies. This is where top-down Government gets you. From the outset, the EU’s modus operandi has remained a matter of leaders negotiating in secret, emerging to announce their triumphant agreement, before working out how to foist it on their reluctant electorates. Doubters had to be sidelined or slapped down in no uncertain terms. Referenda, if absolutely unavoidable, had to be rigged – or repeated until a yes vote was achieved. In the present case, any open democratic process would have seen the proposal for European Monetary Union decisively rejected by France and Germany and almost certainly other countries in today’s euro zone too (in addition of course to Britain, Denmark and Sweden), saving us from the current disaster. And even if somehow the German electorate had been persuaded in a referendum to support the project when it was originally proposed back in 1992, it would today be far easier for Chancellor Merkel to ask her taxpayers to cough up yet again for the sake of the monetary union they had themselves democratically endorsed at its inception. Instead, as things stand, they have every right to be enraged. Their passivity is commendable – but I wonder how long it will last, once they see the impact on their tax bill. I wouldn’t want to be around when they start looking for who is to blame. (Hint for German readers: Helmut Kohl was a historian, who twice proved that economists do have a use after all). Image: Finance ministers Michael Noonan of Ireland, Evangelos Venizelos of Greece, Elena Salgado of Spain, and Francois Baroin of France (L-R) sign the treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism before a euro zone finance ministers meeting in Brussels July 11, 2011. REUTERS/Thierry Roge
State lawmakers are said to be in general agreement about the way forward for the state’s higher education system. When it comes to Olympia, its never real until the votes are counted but this Seattle Times story foreshadows a possible budget deal. Naturally some lawmakers are quoted as saying yes ‘there’s a deal,’ while others vehemently deny any knowledge of an agreement. (That’s politics.) I’m hearing that at least on K-12 and higher education, lawmakers are in agreement over funding. The deal that I’m hearing about would provide about a billion and a half to the K-12 system. The state would provide maintenance level funding for Washingtons’ six public universities and one college plus its 32 community and technical colleges. After years of significant disinvestment by the state in higher education, maintenance level funding is a welcome shift. It essentially keeps the institutions whole in terms of operating costs. Again, after years of steep cuts that threatened access and quality, this is a positive sign. There’s more to the deal. Lawmakers are said to be agreeing to a 3 percent tuition buy-back. Schools will get the additional money in exchange for a zero tuition increase. Lawmakers have been concerned for some time about the skyrocketing costs of higher education. There is well-founded fear that middle-class students are being priced out of a college education, as this Seattle Times story and this one by higher education reporter Katherine Long point out. But it was difficult to avoid tuition hikes in the past because higher education relies on operating money from just two sources: the state budget and tuition. The former has to dramatically increase in order for lawmakers to lower their reliance on the latter.
As predicted, perch fishing this winter on Devils Lake has been good, if not downright spectacular. Photos of buckets filled with perch and cleaning tables covered with fish have been common on social media sites. Given the fishing, it will be interesting to see the estimates of this winter’s fishing pressure and harvest when the numbers from a yearlong creel survey now underway become available. No doubt it’s a good winter for a creel survey. The Game and Fish Department hired private contractor WATERS Inc. of Bottineau, N.D., to conduct the survey, which began last spring. It’s the first creel survey on Devils Lake since 2007. Curious to see if any winter numbers were yet available, I touched base with Randy Hiltner, the department’s northeast district fisheries supervisor in Devils Lake, this morning. Nothing yet, he said, but the good reports have come as no surprise. “I thought with the good perch densities, lower shrimp numbers and some decent access, that the bite would be relatively good and it has been,” Hiltner said this morning in an email. “Lots of fish around 9-10 inches and decent numbers of jumbos getting caught. I’ve caught a couple over 14 inches … real thumpers!” The absence of freshwater shrimp was readily apparent before Christmas during my only trip to Devils Lake to date. Most years, it seems, the invertebrates that are a key forage for perch and other fish species, cover the snow every time you drill a hole. Not this year; I can’t recall seeing a single shrimp in the holes when I fished before Christmas. And most of the day, getting the perch to bite required very little coaxing. Hiltner said the numbers from the December portion of the survey should be available soon, but the extreme cold that characterized much of the month likely kept fishing pressure down. Pressure so far this month seems to be up, he said, no doubt spurred by warmer weather and the fishing reports that have circulated via word-of-mouth and the media. I hope to get back over there a time or two this winter, and if you haven’t yet made the trip to sample the perch fishing for yourself, now’s the time.
Timeline Photos - La Sezione Italiana della Brontë Society: Un altro vestito indossato da Charlotte esposto nel Brontë Parsonage Museum di Haworth. (12 minutes ago) 6 hours ago The African American experience is not represented solely by one voice or one style. Horse Trade Theater Group will present THE FIRE THIS TIME FESTIVAL, a platform for talented early-career playwrights of African and African American descent to explore new voices, styles and challenging new directions for 21st century performing arts, and move beyond common ideas of what's possible in "black theater."One of the short plays presented is Jonathan Payne's The Weatherin' which is 'loosely based on Wuthering Heights'. The author of the play read it on high school and immediately felt a connection with it as he says in this interview by Kevin R. Free. The festival's core production is a short play festival, presenting new work by the featured playwrights. The Kraine Theater, 85 E. 4th St.(Via The Villager) January 21 - February 3 The Weatherin'by Jonathan Payne Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz "History's a ghost. We just choose to forget. It'll remind ya, though. One time to another, my time to your time...Forty years ago it was...Night I cross that river...somebody died..."
WHEATFIELD – Supervisor Robert B. Cliffe proposed that the Niagara County Health Department should beef up its mosquito control program, since wet conditions have brought an insect problem in their wake. Cliffe produced a written proposal at Monday’s Town Board meeting, calling for the county to include an insect control specialist in its 2014 budget, working with towns and cities to train their employees on how to detect mosquito habitats. The specialist also would be in charge of arranging to test sample mosquitoes for West Nile virus and other diseases and helping to train municipal employees in applying pesticides, which the county would supply. James J. Devald, county environmental health director, said his mosquito control officer retired and hasn’t been replaced. He said one Health Department worker is spending about one-fourth of his time on mosquito control. Mostly, he responds to complaints. Devald said no additional hiring for that program is included in the Health Department’s 2014 budget proposal, to be presented to the Board of Health on Thursday. “Each one of the municipalities can have a larvicide program,” Devald said, referring to the chemicals that kill baby mosquitoes. However, no town in Niagara County actually has such a program. “Wheatfield used to do it, but that goes back a number of years,” Devald said. “They’d buy a supply of larvicide and pass it out to their residents, but you can only use it on your own property.” He said the county always has been hesitant to spray pesticides from the air, preferring to spread larvicide at ground level. Cliffe said he’s concerned because West Nile has been confirmed in Amherst, and since the Town Board meeting, a similar announcement was made in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario. Devald said he’s certain that mosquitoes carrying West Nile are in Niagara County; they simply haven’t been discovered yet. He said the state Health Department has set up two mosquito traps in the Klydel Wetlands in North Tonawanda, near the corner of Ruie and Ward roads, just over the Wheatfield border. County Legislator W. Keith McNall, R-Lockport, who sits on the Board of Health, learned of Cliffe’s proposal from a reporter. He said he’d be interested in talking to Cliffe about it.
Free electronic hearing screenings will be given Monday-Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at our office. A factory-trained hearing care specialist will be available at thattime to give FREE HEARING SCREENINGS and answer any questions you may have about hearing and hearing aids. The screenings have been arranged for anyone who suspects they may have a hearing problem - people who generally say they can hear, but cannot always understand the words. Testing with the latest computerized electronic equipment will indicate whether electronic amplification can help. Everyone, especially those over 50 or anyone who has been subjected to loud noise for a period of time should have an electronic hearing test at least once a year. If there is a hearing problem, an electronic hearing test may reveal that new advances in hearing correction may help, even for those who have been told in the past that a hearing aid would not help them. Nu Ear's electronic hearing screening has just improved. Using a technique called "Loudness Growth Profiling" we'll develop our own personal comfort profile. This new technique, along with Nu Ear's exclusive computerized fitting system, helps assure your hearing comfort.
In the continuing discussion about books, Eoin Purcell, who has had a number of interesting posts on the matter, adds a fascinating speculation: :It would be excellent if you Biology textbook were hyperlinked to bring you relevant text and images as you cram for some final exam, brilliant indeed to have the entire resources of the web organised for you and connected to from a single source. I do wonder though at what point the book as such ceases to exist and becomes simply an access point to information rather than the source itself. I am not saying this is a negative rather that at some point you the amount of linking and directing changes the book from the product offering the information to one pointing you in the general direction of the information. This echoes what the head of Gruner + Jahr said about journalists becoming moderators. Purcell and one of his commenters also quite rightly challenge me on whether my own speculation about books applies to fiction. I think much of it doesn’t. I was never one of those who believed that technology would allow us to create our own endings to movies or books. Stories are the creation of an author; they do have their own beginnings and ends. And so Purcell takes this one step farther and suggests that the future of books may have two separate trajectories: fiction and nonfiction. He writes: Are we then creating a twin track of books, Non-Fiction which will whiz ahead and, by the sounds of the current discussion, become something new (I think calling it a book will become redundant if the features discussed become reality) and Fiction tied to the format that has seen it through so many changes already? And if we are is that such a bad thing? I am sure Fiction authors will avail of the possibilities of the new offerings when they emerge. Yes, I don’t think that most fiction would benefit from links and discovery through tagging and other such wonders of the modern age. But one benefit of the internet novelists are starting to discover is that they can now have a direct relationship with their audiences, which will at least help them sell their next books and perhaps will let them go around or strengthen their positions with the middlemen: the publishers and booksellers.
The Department of Environmental Affairs has announced its decision to set the year-long provincial leopard trophy hunting quota at zero meaning that the 2016 leopard hunting is officially banned throughout South Africa. According to the department, the decision was necessary following recommendations made by South Africa’s scientific authority which postulated that though the number of leopards in the country is unknown, the trophy hunting posed a high risk to the survival of the species. Hence, intervention was needed to ensure the survival of the leopard population in the country. “Provincial conservation authorities were informed that leopard hunts should not be authorized in 2016…the ban would be reviewed at the end of the year.” The department of environmental affairs said. Speaking further on the necessity of the ban, member of the environmental group Panthera, Guy Balme said “we just don’t know how leopards are faring in South Africa, they’re secretive, mainly nocturnal, solitary and range over huge areas.” Conservation groups expressed their excitement on the year-long ban, saying the decision was urgent and necessary for the protection of the species given that the size of the population is unknown. Kelly Marnewick, the Environmental Wildlife Trust’s carnivore conservation manager, supported by saying: “It’s important to ensure that any wildlife trade we do is sustainable. If we can’t do that, it’s highly problematical. We need a trade ban until we can get to that. Record keeping on trophy hunting in this country is shocking. We haven’t been recording age, sex or size of trophies. If our hunting fraternity is serious about using wildlife sustainably, they will embrace this ban and find ways to work with government until trade is sustainable.” The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) permitted South Africa to allocate 150 leopard trophy export permits a year and the country earns substantial revenues from the selling permits. Prior to this time, early warning of possible permit curtailment appeared in the Government Gazette late last year indicating that if the guidelines issued earlier in the year were not adhered to, provincial quotas would be set at zero for 2016. The Department of Environmental Affairs had at the time issued what it described as a ‘negative non-detrimental finding’, meaning that hunting was likely to have a detrimental effect on the survival of the species. The department listed various activities that posed a threat to leopards. These include excessive legal and illegal shooting of damage-causing animals, poorly managed trophy hunting, illegal trade in leopard skins for cultural and religious attire, and general poor monitoring of hunts and permit allocation. This thus revealed that only between 5% and 15% of leopard habitat were strictly protected. Hunting is one activity that generates income for the economy. Report from the Ministry of Environment said it generates about 6.2m rand ($375m) for South Africa every year especially as wealthy foreigners are willing to pay thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to hunt one of the “big five” (lion, leopard, elephant, rhino or buffalo).
(Weekly Standard) - And now the last of them is gone. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II—three who won the Cold War and, it isn't too much to say, saved the West (at least for a while!)—are no longer with us. Their examples remain. They knew what they believed but also knew they had to justify their beliefs, and that one could adjust prudently to circumstances without yielding on principle. They stood firm when in power, and they took risks to get there, challenging the conventional wisdom and the respective establishments of their nations or institutions. They were conservative but not nostalgic, and would counsel us today against excessive nostalgia for their deeds and their days. They would rather, I suspect, urge that we act in their spirit—what one might call a spirit of unapologetic but reformist conservatism. Whittaker Chambers wrote at the end of his last letter to Bill Buckley, “Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning.” So each age has to find its own leaders for an eternal task—the defense and renewal of civilization. The death of Margaret Thatcher is a healthy reminder to students of politics of the difficulty, the gravity, and also the nobility of this task.
The Bee said CIRM can learn from the Hwang affair but only if the agency takes "the time to publicly grapple with this scandal. So far, they have acted as if Hwang is a distant aberration whose fabrications don't affect them. Nothing could be further from the truth." The editorial continued: "While California's institute can do only so much to combat scientific fraud - the responsibility lies largely in the hands of peer-reviewed journals - it can set standards for obtaining eggs and other biological material, and ensure those rules are enforced. The institute's medical standards working group is now preparing such regulations. Yet at their last meeting, on Dec. 1, the committee's members went out of their way to avoid any discussion of Hwang's mounting troubles."In a separate opinion piece, Associate Editor Stu Leavenworth wrote that it is easy to learn the wrong lessons from Korea. It is, he said, "laughable to hear people insinuate that this debacle could have been avoided if American researchers, and not the South Koreans, were leading the way. "The annals of U.S. science are filled with researchers who faked findings, exploited human test subjects and enriched themselves while extolling their supposed ethics. Indeed, it is interesting that Hwang's fraud was exposed not because of scrutiny from U.S. researchers, but because his colleagues in South Korea had the courage to go public with questions about their 'supreme scientist.'"He continued, Sphere: Related Content "The only lesson is an old one: Money breeds corruption. Rightly or wrongly, embryonic stem cell research is seen as the next big rainmaker in the biomedical field. With so much money riding on the outcome, some people are going to lie, cheat and steal. "To combat such fraud, editors of science journals - and those of us in the media - need to be much more skeptical than we were in this case."
Calvert Cliffs is located in the largest fossil-bearing deposit of Miocene marine sediments exposed on the East Coast of North America -- the Calvert Cliffs of Maryland. Most of the shells and bones on our beach are fossils Shark teeth and whale vertebrae are prized finds. Rarer specimens include almost complete skeletons of whales and porpoises, bird bones, and remains of land mammals such as mastodon, peccary and small Miocene horses. These sediments were laid down 10 to 20 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch, when the Atlantic Coast was repeatedly submerged beneath the sea. Studies of fossil animals and plants indicate that in those times, a warm shallow ocean covered this area. Cypress swamps lined the shore. A river wound slowly toward the sea through sand dunes dotted with scrub oak and pine. The climate was somewhat warmer than now. Shells and bones of dead animals sank to the bottom of the sea and were buried in sand and mud, building up over many thousands of years layer upon layer of fossil deposits. Millions of years later, the ocean retreated and what once was sea bottom is now exposed in the cliff face. Calvert Cliffs extend for more than 30 miles from just north of Chesapeake Beach to Drum Point, rising in places to more than 100 feet in height. Three major intervals of deposition are represented. Sediments deposited during the earliest interval make up the Calvert Formation, which includes the bluish clay the lowest one-fourth of the cliff in the vicinity of Scientists' Cliffs. The Choptank Formation, deposited later, includes the yellow sands and clays in the higher levels of our cliffs. The youngest formation, the St. Mary's, lies farther south; it isn't found at Scientists' Cliffs. The formations dip toward the southeast at an average rate of about 11 feet per mile. The cliffs are continually eroded by wave action which undercuts the base, by landslides and by storms and frost. Fossils falling into the surf are tossed around, cleaned, and then cast back on shore. Virtually all the shark teeth and the fossil bones and shells found on the beach wash or weather out of the cliffs. Marine Mammals. The Calvert Cliffs deposits are among the world's richest in fossil whales and porpoises. About two dozen kinds have been identified including sperm whale, shark-toothed porpoise, both long and short beaked porpoises, river dolphin and several kinds of whalebone whale. Seal and sea cow bones also are found. Most of the whale and many of the porpoise skeletons are of immature animals, which suggests that this area was a calving ground. Porpoise and whale vertebrae are fairly common. Ear bones wash up occasionally but porpoise teeth are scarce, considering the abundance of skulls and that the jaws of some long-beaked porpoises contained over 300 teeth. Land Mammals. Remains of land mammals occasionally erode out. The deposits were marine so most of the shells and bones in the cliffs are those of animals that lived in the sea. Bodies of land mammals floated down rivers from time to time, however, and became buried in the sea floor. Peccary teeth and bones, although quite unusual, turn up more often than those of other land mammals. Four species are known from the cliffs. In addition to the peccaries, mastodon, deer, tapir, rhinoceros, camel and horse have been reported, as have wolf, bear, dog, and cat. Some of these Miocene species, all now extinct, are known from the cliffs by a single tooth or two. The mastodon teeth represent the first known appearance of mastodon in North America. Birds. Most of the fossil birds found in the vicinity of Scientists' Cliffs were pelagic, spending much of their lives at sea. Bones of gannet, auk, loon, shearwater, jaeger, and tropicbird have been reported. Recently, wing bones, vertebrae, ribs and the beak of an extremely large pelican-like birth that stood about six feet tall and had a wingspread of 15 to 20 feet have shown up. A one-half size scale model of this bird, named Pelagornis but better known as the false-toothed bird, is displayed in the paleontology exhibit of the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons Island. Sharks, Rays, and Bony Fish. Shark teeth are the favorite fossils of local beachcombers. They vary in size from barely visible to teeth of the great white shark measuring five inches or more. There are so many that you can almost always find a few by the water's edge. Teeth commonly found on our beach include sand shark, mako shark, silky shark, snaggletooth shark and white shark. The shark in the story "Jaws" was a white shark but less than half the size of the Miocene monsters with five inch teeth, which are estimated to have reached more than 40 feet in length. Shark teeth are found throughout the deposits. Many kinds of fish in the Bay today frequented the area millions of years ago. Bluefish, weakfish, ocean catfish, sturgeon and black drum were present, as were cod, sailfish, ocean sunfish and other types. Fish remains are plentiful but usually consist of isolated vertebrae, scales and an occasional tooth Reptiles. Crocodiles, fresh and saltwater turtles, and a land dwelling tortoise have been reported from the cliffs. Crocodile teeth show up fairly often but complete skulls and other parts of the skeleton are rarely found. Fragments of sea turtle shell are among the most common vertebrate fossils in the Calvert Formation. Mollusks. The Calvert Cliffs are notable for their densely packed beds of mollusk shells - clams, oysters, scallops, and snails among others. Our local shell beds can be seen from all along the beach, with the best view that from about halfway between South Beach and Governor Run. Mollusks (and diatoms and foraminifera) are especially useful in determining the age of a formation. Geologists use the percentage of fossil species that have survived until today as one measure of age. As shells usually are numerous, percentage distributions of the various species can be correlated with those from other deposits. Some 400 species of mollusk have been identified from the cliffs, of which about 11 percent are still living. One of the first illustrations of a fossil from America, a snail now called Ecphora gardnerae, was published in a 1770 edition of one of Martin Lister's works. This shell may have been collected by Hugh Jones, rector of Christ Church in Port Republic from 1696 to 1701. An active naturalist, he collected and sent back to England many local plants, animals, and fossils. In 1984 the Maryland State Legislature designated this graceful shell the official State fossil. Miscellaneous Fauna and Flora. Other fossils found on the beach include sea urchins, sand dollars, crab claws, barnacles, coral and a brachiopod. Sea urchins were considered rather rare until 1938, when a pocket containing hundreds of individuals was found at Scientists' Cliffs in a sandy bed near the base of the Choptank Formation. Paleontologists of the U.S. National Museum placed a large block from this pocket on exhibit there, and another in the Chestnut Cabin Museum where it remains our prime exhibit. Similar colonies at the same level are exposed infrequently. Clean, well preserved sand dollars are found with these sea urchins but not in such profusion. Sand dollars also appear in other beds but these usually are broken and encrusted with barnacles and mollusks. Carbonized wood is plentiful in the Chesapeake Miocene. Most of the wood in the Scientists' Cliffs area is believed to be cypress. However, investigations of these deposits here and near Washington and Richmond have yielded leaves and pollen of several other species including oak, hickory, pine, elm, and basswood. Return to Main page
American car or truck customers have always been recognised for their desire for higher performance autos. Aside from offering the necessities, their car or truck of selection desires to have at the very least a compact diploma of luxuriousness. Luxurious apart, car or truck customers also opt for higher performance autos which occur with a responsive managing and very at ease seats. Just lately nevertheless, the American Global Automobile Sellers Association (AIADA) claimed that car or truck customers are now modifying their preferences and are also wanting for another special attribute that a car or truck should really have. The association claimed that drivers are starting to be a lot more and a lot more enamored with silent cars. The Wall Street Journal claimed that the most important trigger of a vehicle’s sound is its age. As a car or truck ages, just like individuals, it exhibits flaws which may perhaps even end result to car or truck breakdowns. The intercontinental day by day newspaper cited that the worst trigger of sound in autos is wind. This in fact refers to that sound that is created when the wind flows in excess of the outline of the car or truck. This is why car or truck makers are wanting to reduce the coefficient of drag of their autos. Reducing the coefficient of drag not only gives the car or truck a good appearance but it also boosts the top rated speed and lowers the total of sound created by the wind flowing in excess of the car or truck. The sound as the car or truck ages has always been just one of the problems of automobiles. Car or truck makers are previously having techniques to deal with the issue. Some of the players in the car business that has taken techniques to battle wind sound are Standard Motors, Hyundai, and Ford. These car or truck firms are producing new elements to consumer on their autos to lessen the sound achieving the interior of the car or truck. Aside from making use of new elements, these firms are also doing work out new production methods to further improve sound reduction. Sounds handle engineers are also getting used by these firms to oversee the growth of quiet cars. Hyundai, the biggest Korean car or truck maker, is making use of electronically managed adjustable engine mounts in the new Veracruz activity utility car or truck. Aside from the adjustable motor mount which is as difficult as a Volvo rotor, the Korean manufacturer also built-in further thick lightweight foam insulations on the claimed SUV. The insulation reduces the total of sound coming from the engine bay that goes right into the vehicle’s cockpit. These enhancements on more recent designs of car or truck near the hole in between luxury and non-luxury autos. As the expense of creation of elements used in sound reduction go decreased, a lot more and a lot more autos will grow to be quieter. This displays that the car business is always tuned to what their shoppers want. It is common that motorists associate the absence of sound within a cockpit to in general high quality and the new autos getting produced by car or truck makers are blurring the distinction in between a luxury and non-luxury car or truck. This, of course, will provide to benefit the shoppers.
Things not generally known, familiarly explained. : A book for old and young. / By John Timbs, F.S.A. Author of Curiosities of London, and editor of the Year-book of facts.. \|Main Creator:\|\|Timbs, John, 1801-1875.\| \|Published / Created:\|\| London : David Bogue, Fleet Street, MDCCLVII. "London: Printed by Robson, Levey, and Franklyn, Great New Street and Fetter Lane."--verso of t.p. "This edition has been corrected throughout; and several new articles have been substituted for others of minor interest."--preliminary p. . Illustrations consist of frontispiece (prelim. p. ) of "House in Tavistock Street in which Mr. Baily weighed the earth..." and t.p. vignette "King Arthur's round table, at Winchester", with notes to each printed on prelim. p. -. Publisher's advertisement for Curiosities of London, p. . Physical description: , 247, p. : ill ; 18 cm.
Demonstrations of light shapes in dark, and dark shapes in light.Awhile ago we did these in my classes. I love little house shapes. They're fun to move around the composition and play with the values. The lightest light against the darkest dark is the focal point - whether it wants to be or not. Also the pointed shape of the gable end draws our attention. With a large brush, these little paintings quickly give you what you need to know for a larger, more serious painting. You've worked out a simple composition, a value pattern, and a harmonious color scheme. If one or more of these elements didn't work out for you, you probably have, at that point, a pretty good idea of what might have gone wrong. With your large brush you just do another little painting until you get what you want. We lost a lot of leaves overnight - it's beginning to look like winter. Today we had sunshine and the trees with their red or yellow leaves still hanging on were beautiful. The trees have been slower to drop their leaves this year - the city has even delayed the leaf pick-up to an, as yet, undetermined date. This is big deal stuff, huh? Day three of Blogging Everyday in November!
Experts speaking at a World Meeting of Families session Wednesday, Sept. 23 in Philadelphia told delegates that fertility rates around the world are dropping, and a global demographic shift is taking place. In one of only four sessions at the World Meeting to offer English speakers the opportunity to test out the congress’s simultaneous interpretation services, a panel representing the entire globe presented “Family and Demographic Dynamics of the World” in a mixture of English and French. Examining Europe, French economist and demographer Gérard-François Dumont presented five worldwide demographic changes at work and their accompanying consequences, beginning with perhaps the most notable: the demographic transition and decline in fertility. Dumont explained that as childhood morbidity declined in many countries in the latter half of the 20th century, people began having fewer children because it was no longer necessary to give birth to five in order to have three survive childhood. Correspondingly, the fertility rate dropped from an average of five children born to each woman in the 1950s to about 2.5 today. Some countries that have already finished their demographic transition are currently experiencing a “demographic winter,” Dumont said, where birthrates are below the threshold of replacement to keep the population at its same level 30 years from now. This is most notably the case in Europe and in the Asian countries of Japan, China and Taiwan. Dumont noted that if there is an overall world population increase, it is not because some couples are having too many children as some might say, but because of increasing survival rates as our planet’s inhabitants stay longer on the earth. A second demographic force at work that Dumont described is urbanization. Rural people are migrating to the cities, in many cases prompted by political disruptions that lead them to seek refuge in urban centers, resulting in a distancing between generations. International migrations represent a third force affecting families, particularly if individuals migrate to countries that do not allow the migrant to bring his or her family. An increase in life expectancy combined with a decline in fertility rates has resulted in the fourth striking demographic change: the aging of the world’s population. There has never before been such a high percentage of adults over 65 relative to the percentage of the population under 15, Dumont said. He added that in societies with a proportionally large aging population, questions of euthanasia arise while solidarity between generations declines. In contrast, elders tend to be highly respected and revered in societies where the proportion of the aged population is low. Finally, there has been an increase in the birth of baby boys, as people in societies where boys are more highly valued than girls can now know the baby’s gender in advance and selectively abort the girls. In areas like Northern India and China, where the disparity between male and female birth rates is extreme, young men face difficultly in simply finding someone to marry, and the practice of human trafficking to bring women from other countries becomes a problem. Dumont’s recommendations regarding the policy implications of these demographic changes include promoting women’s education to raise their status in countries where they are given lesser value, and making plans to accommodate the aging population. He also called for protections for families in the interest of society, such as reducing the obstacles for couples to start a family, respecting a couple’s privacy in their choice of the number of children to conceive and creating policies to accommodate families of larger sizes. Population researcher Andres Salazar of Colombia, representing the Western Hemisphere, followed Dumont with a review of worldwide marriage trends. He noted that two-partner families remain the worldwide majority, but overall marriage rates are declining worldwide and more couples have begun cohabitating. The data from both Western Europe and Central and South America reveal the highest rates of cohabiting adults, with cohabitation rates of 10 to 15 percent worldwide; marriage rates range between 40 and 50 percent in Europe. Peru had the highest South American cohabitation rate at 38 percent. In contrast, in the Middle East the vast majority of couples were married, with very few cohabitating. Costa Rica was a notable Latin American exception to the region’s high cohabitation rates. Salazar attributed to the country’s extremely low cohabitation rate to its conservative culture. Dumont added that Costa Rica is also the only country in the region without political strife. The marriage decline has been linked to multiple factors: couples waiting for financial stability before marrying; a view of marriage as the end of the road rather than the start of a journey; difficulties for low-income women in finding a marriage partner, which leave them to choose between remaining childless or having a child outside of marriage; economic changes that offer less stable and lower salaried jobs; changes in sexual norms; a decline in religious participation for the non-college educated, legal changes that emphasize parenthood and individual rights rather than marriage; the tendency of young people to continue living with their parents in times of crisis; and a greater focus on independence combined with a decreased focus on responsibility. According to Salazar, some policies that could help foster marriage include: training people for jobs that would give a more stable income for marriage; eliminating tax penalties on married couples; giving child tax credits; investing in preschool education; reforming existing divorce laws to strengthen marriage and reduce the number of “unnecessary” divorces; offering credit access to young people forming a family through marriage; offering education in family formation, and support of the family through the media. Representing Asia, home to 6.4 billion people, or three-fifths of the world’s population, Dr. Villamor Vital of the Philippines followed with a presentation on a paper by Dr. Mina Ramirez: “Vanishing youth? A Situation of Asia’s Children.” The data looked at the physical and educational well-being of children in Asia. Vital concluded that material poverty needs to be addressed as a threat to the well-being of children.
Beat the Press is Dean Baker's commentary on economic reporting. Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). California has done some really really stupid things (like a tax credit for first time homebuyers), but the NYT did the state and its readers a disservice in going after California's pension fund liabilities. The basic story is that if you assume a 4.14 nominal rate of return on pension fund assets, then the state's pension liabilities look really really bad. The big question that readers should ask is, so what? There have been few people who have been more critical of assuming exaggerated market returns than me, but 4.14 percent nominal? Anyone want to take a bet that California's pension funds will do better than this? Look, the market has plummeted from its prior levels. This is good news for future returns. Lower price to earnings ratios open the door for higher future returns. The logic is simple: you are paying much less for each dollar of profits. For this reason, the assumption of 4.14 percent average nominal returns (that gives us just over 2.0 percent real, assuming a 2.0 percent inflation rate) is ridiculously low. Suppose we assume that pension liabilities grow at the nominal rate of 5 percent a year. If we sum the liabilities over 40 years, using a 4.14 percent discount rate gives a 70 percent higher cost than using a 7.0 percent discount rate. Stocks have historically provided a real return of 7 percentage points above the inflation rate, so assuming a nominal return of 7.0 percent for the mixed portfolio is hardly unreasonable. In short, the story of outsized pension liabilities in this article is driven largely by a ridiculous assumptions about pension returns. There is no reason whatsoever that the state of California should use this 4.14 percent discount rate in assessing its pension liabilities. This calculation would lead it to exaggerate its pension liabilities and therefore raise taxes or cut pensions and/or other spending unnecessarily.Add a comment Okay, it's not quite that bad, but when someone who pretends to be serious wants his readers to celebrate the fact that: "the average American worker is nearly 10 times more productive than the average Chinese worker," it's getting pretty silly. (Actually it's probably closer than 7-8 times, but this is David Brooks we're talking about.) People in the United States are used to comparing their living standards to countries like Canada and Germany, not China. While China is a rapidly developing country, it is still a relatively poor country in a process of catching up. It's more than a bit silly to tell people in the United States that our productivity is many times higher than that of a poor peasant agricultural worker in central China. Brooks seems fascinated by the fact that our income is on average projected to rise. This is true and always has been true and it is true for almost every other country in the world. Incomes rise, incomes rise, incomes rise. Let's say that a few thousand more times so that no columnist will ever again write it up as though it is news. This is the normal state for economies. Incomes rise through time because people become more educated, we get more and better capital, and our technology improves. The real issue is the rate at which incomes rise. For most people in the United States the rate of increase in income or living standards (this can also be the result of more leisure) has been extremely slow in the last three decades. Projections show that rising health care costs will eat up much of the projected gains in income over the next three decades. This is the sort of issue that serious people would look at. Instead, Brooks touts our growing population -- hey we should be like Congo or Ethiopia, they even faster population growth. It's hard to know what planet Brooks lives on, but on this one, population growth is not a measure of prosperity. In fact, in a world where there is a desperate need to limit greenhouse gas emissions, population is decidedly unhealthy. Well, Brooks did warn serious people to not read his column. They would be well advised to take this advice.Add a comment I don't ordinarily use BTP for addressing items that mention me or my work, but I'll make an exception in the hope of getting a good exchange going. Brad DeLong was good enough to begin a review of my book False Profits on his blog. After graciously giving me credit for recognizing the housing bubble and the dangers it posed, Brad goes on: "But let me start by saying how I disagree with the book. I think that its story of the linkages between our current crisis and Federal Reserve policy is significantly overstated. Its argument about how excessively-low interest rates caused the housing bubble is exaggerated. I think that its belief that the Federal Reserve could have taken much more action to curb the housing bubble while is underway is also exaggerated, and does not recognize the very real constraints that the Federal Reserve works under and all but ignores the costs of austerity. And it overstates the strength of the links between the housing bubble and the housing crash on the one hand and our current situation of macroeconomic despair on the other." Okay, let's go point by point. "Its argument about how excessively-low interest rates caused the housing bubble is exaggerated." That doesn't sound like my book. I argued that the weak economy caused by the crash of the stock bubble demanded stimulatory policy. Low interest rates were the right policy -- we needed them to recover from the stock bubble. However, this did create an environment that was conducive to the growth of bubbles. If the Fed had kept the Federal Funds rate at 5.0 percent I feel pretty confident in saying that we would not have had a housing bubble -- very high unemployment, but no housing bubble. "I think that its belief that the Federal Reserve could have taken much more action to curb the housing bubble while is underway is also exaggerated, and does not recognize the very real constraints that the Federal Reserve works under and all but ignores the costs of austerity." Let's see, my policy prescription was to have every last staffer at the Fed devoting all of his/her time to documenting the evidence for the bubble and the dangers it would cause to the economy. I would have had Alan Greenspan use his congressional testimonies and other public speaking engagements to warn of the risks of the bubble. This doesn't mean mumbling "irrational exuberance," it means carefully showing with charts and graphs how house prices have followed an unprecedented and unsustainable path. He also should have warned explicitly what would have happened to the banks that had made big bets on the bubble when it burst. In addition, they should have made full use of their regulatory power (including working with other regulators) to crack down on the issuance and securitization of junk mortgages. The "who could have known" line is crap. These loans were being issued by the million, there is no way Greenspan could not have known about them. Would this have worked? Brad for some reason is very confident it would not have. It certainly would have been nice if the Fed had tried (what was more important?), then we would both know for sure. As a last resort I would have raised interest rates. I hate to throw people out of work (except Wall Street bankers and economists), but it would have been better to preemptively burst the bubble rather than let it run its course and be where we are today. "It overstates the strength of the links between the housing bubble and the housing crash on the one hand and our current situation of macroeconomic despair on the other." There is a pretty direct line from the falloff in residential construction due to the overbuilding caused by the bubble, the falloff in non-residential construction due to the overbuilding caused by the bubble, and the falloff in consumption as a result of the lost housing bubble wealth and where the economy is today. I don't see much obvious room for a financial crisis in this explanation. The crisis may have brought the downturn on more quickly, but it seems that the basic problem is the loss of the demand generated by the bubble. I have a strong ally in this argument: Spain. Spain did not have a financial crisis, but it now has 19 percent unemployment, the highest in the EU. The explanation is that Spain had a really huge housing bubble. It is not easy to find new sources of demand to replace 8-10 percentage points of GDP. A front page Washington Post article told readers that: "The number of people looking for jobs rose by more than 200,000 last month compared with February, according to the Economic Policy Institute -- and that's a good sign, economists say. It means that Americans are seeing more jobs being created and that they're optimistic about their prospects." Umm, actually no. This increase in the size of the labor force is too small to be statistically significant. It is not uncommon for there to be big jumps in the size of the labor force for no obvious reason. For example, the labor force was reported as rising by 543,000 people in September of 2002, a time when the economy was still shedding jobs and by 554,000 jobs in April of 2009, when employment was still plummeting. There is no reason to think that the modest job growth shown for March would have any notably effect on job seeking.Add a comment In the middle of an article telling readers about Alan Greenspan's (yes, the guy who couldn't see an $8 trillion housing bubble) assessment of the economy, the NYT refers to the "paradox" that the Labor Department reported that the economy created 162,000 jobs in March but the unemployment rate remained fixed at 9.7 percent. This is hardly a paradox. The labor force is growing at the rate of about 125,000 workers a month. This means that March's job growth was just a little faster than what is needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising. There was no reason that anyone should have expected a decline in the unemployment rate. In fact, the number of people reported as being employed in the household survey used to measure the unemployment rate has grown far more rapidly than the number of workers on payrolls as measured in the establishment survey. Given the data reported in the establishment survey, it is surprising that the unemployment rate has not been rising the last four months.Add a comment Thomas Friedman has refrained from discussing economics in his columns for some time and the world was happy. But, now he's back with a vengeance. He begins his column with today's "fun fact": "Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less, .... That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.” The rest of the column is devoting to touting the importance of new firms, which Friedman tells us are started disproportionately by high IQ foreigners. He therefore emphasizes the need to have a more open door for high IQ immigrants. Making the U.S. more open to highly educated (I don't think we will be admitting foreigners based on IQ test results) immigrants is undoubtedly good policy. It would be great if doctors, lawyers, economists and other highly educated professionals got to enjoy the same sort of competition with low-paid workers in the developing world that manufacturing workers, dishwashers and custodians currently face. However, Friedman's conclusion about the special importance of new firms is utter nonsense. The claim that most net new jobs came from new firms conceals the fact that existing firms added tens of millions of jobs in this 25-year period. Of course existing firms also lost tens of millions of jobs. We can say that the net job creation for existing firms was zero, but if we did not have an environment that was conducive for the job adders to grow (how many jobs did Microsoft, Apple, and Intel create after their first 5 years of existence?), then existing firms would have lost tens of millions more jobs. The notion that anything meaningful can be learned by lumping the job adders with the job losers to say that existing firms created no net jobs is too painful for words. Suppose we looked at the 50 states and found that 10 had net job creation while the other 40 had no job growth. Friedman's methodology would tell us that we should ignore the 40 states with no job growth because jobs are only created in the dynamic 10. (Oh no, I probably gave Friedman the topic for his next column.) Please, please someone take away Thomas Friedman's license to write on economics before he kills logic again.Add a comment When people talk about plans to "help" homeowners they must (yes, I said "must") ask two simple questions: - Are the homeowners being "helped" paying less in mortgage and other housing costs than they would to rent a comparable unit: and - Are the homeowners likely to end up with equity in their homes? Neither of these questions get asked in this discussion of the merits of the Obama administration's plans to "help" homeowners. This means that the NYT wasted readers time and killed trees for no good reason. The point should be really straightforward. We help homeowners when we actually put money in their pocket. If homeowners are paying more in housing costs than they would to rent the same unit, then we have not put money in their pocket, we have put money in the banks' pockets. This is a policy to help banks, not homeowners. That can be offset if there is reason to believe that the homeowner will eventually end up with equity in their home. Do we have any reason to believe that this will be the case? Well, that would depend on things like current ratios of sale price to rents and vacancy rates. These issues are not discussed anywhere in this piece or indeed in the overwhelming majority of pieces that discuss mechanisms to help homeowners. In markets where prices are still bubble-inflated, giving people money to stay in their homes as owners is giving money to banks. In other markets, the owners could actually benefit. However, it is impossible to discuss the issue seriously without being able to distinguish between these situations.Add a comment To those who pay attention to the economy, it's rather evident that the basic economic problems of the last two decades are the bubble driven growth of this era and the country's broken health care system. But NYT columnist David Brooks apparently never allows the actual state of the economy to affect his pronouncements about the economy and our moral state. Therefore he describes the rise of personal debt from 55 percent of national income in 1960 to 133 percent in 2007 as being the result of the fact that: "life has become secure. This has eroded the fear of debt, private and public." Let's try an alternative hypothesis. Wages have stagnated for tens of millions of workers. I guess no one Brooks hangs out with caught this development. In a context of stagnating wages, many families have been forced to take on debt to maintain living standards. The other reason that borrowing has increased is that people spent money based on their stock and housing bubble wealth. Perhaps Brooks can't be blamed for not knowing about the stock and housing wealth effects, after all you would probably need an intro econ class to know about these concepts, but perhaps he could have found an econ major who could have explained that consumption increases when wealth increases. This means that when a housing bubble creates $8 trillion of housing bubble wealth, we would expect consumption and debt to increase. After all, rich people can afford to borrow more than poor people and the wealth created by the housing bubble made many families feel richer. The same was true of the $10 trillion in bubble wealth created at the peak of the stock bubble. If Brooks wanted to discourage excessive debt, he might have called attention to these bubbles. But, Brooks would rather use his columns to call out the moral failings of the American people. Hence his comment that: "these days, voters want low taxes — about 19 percent of G.D.P. And they want high spending — over 25 percent of G.D.P. by 2020." He later warns us that this has on a path to be paying $900 billion a year in interest by 2020. Yes, that $900 billion is really really scary. I don't know anyone who has $900 billion. Serious people would point out that the projected interest burden is a bit more than 4.0 percent of GDP, about the same as it was in the early 90s. More importantly, there are not many people who have advocated spending 25 percent of GDP. They have expressed support for specific programs, like Social Security and Medicare. The latter costs way more in the United States than in any other country, not because we get better care, but because our health care system is hugely corrupt and inefficient. If we paid the same amount per person for health care as people in any other country then the deficits would quickly vanish. Furthermore, even if fixing our health care system is hard to do politically because the system is so corrupt, we could achieve enormous savings by just allowing for freer trade in health care. But Brooks is such a hard core protectionist when it comes to the interests of the health care lobby that he cannot even conceive of openings to trade that would hurt their interests. So, we instead get a lecture about the moral failings of the American people and the need for heroic actions to save them from themselves with carefully constructed commissions of experts. This is the best that American conservatism has to offer?Add a comment That is what the headline of an article on new economic data told readers. The headline is: "Unemployment and Inflation Rise in Europe." The data showed that unemployment increased from 9.9 percent in January to 10.0 percent in February. This increase is not statistically significant. It is also the same unemployment rate that had originally been reported for November, but was subsequently revised down to 9.9 percent. In other words, the unemployment rate has been essentially unchanged for the last four months. The rise in the inflation rate was an increase in year over year inflation from 0.9 percent in January to 1.6 percent in February. Since a major concern in most countries, including those in Europe, is deflation, this rise in the inflation rate would likely be viewed by most analysts as a positive development, although the monthly data is highly erratic so the number does not have much consequence.Add a comment The Post reported on President Obama's lifting of the moratorium on offshore drilling and the response to the decision. While the article noted the reactions of politicians and presented polling data, it neglected to mention the fact that the oil that can potentially be obtained from these areas will have no noticeable impact on oil prices. According to the Energy Information Agency, it will take two decades for the areas to reach peak production of 100,000 barrels a day, or 0.1 percent of world oil supply. In other words, the decision to open up drilling in these areas was entirely political. It had nothing to do with meeting the country's energy needs. This information probably would have been more useful to readers than accounts of the political reaction to President Obama's decision. The NYT did a bit better in providing some context, but not much. It told readers that offshore sites may provide enough oil to supply the country for 3 years. It later noted that the Gulf Coast area that is being opened for drilling may have as much as 3.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil. This is less than 6 months worth of demand.Add a comment
At lunch, the three of us had a good talk about the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. King's role in it. And we talked about the fact that the movement was a non-violent one, and how hard that non-violence must have been when police arrested Rosa Parks or sicced dogs on teens peacefully sitting in at an all-white lunch counter. At some point, one of the girls said something about how happy Dr. King must be to see how his dream has come true. I cautioned them that there was still prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. and in the world, so the dream hadn't yet come completely true. Zoe wanted to know how discrimination against African-Americans still happens, and I mentioned that some people might not want to hire someone or live in the same neighborhood as someone who is black (FYI, 86% of suburban whites live in communities that are less than 1% black, and schools are even more segregated than they were when MLK was assassinated). Then Zoe wanted to know if people still discriminate against Asian Americans. I said yes, and explained that one of the most common thing I hear Asian adults complain about is that some people don't see them as American, that people might ask them if they speak English or ask who they would support in a war between America and China. Maya thought that last part, who to support in a war between America and China, was a really tough question she had to answer: "I don't know. . . I know an awful lot of good people in America, and I came from China and there are an awful lot of good people there. . . ." Zoe, like a bad law student, fought the hypothetical: "That's a dumb question. There won't be a war between China and America. That's dumb." I found myself trying to explain the proxy war between North and South Korea in the 1950s and in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s -- and then said, "Wait a minute, she's only 10!" and dropped it. Still, you can see the issue hit home with her. Here's Zoe's contribution to the MLK Day gallery: In case you can't read what she wrote, here it is: I HAVE A DREAM . . . That Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream will come true. That everyone will get together. That there will be no more War. That all races will join together. That slaves will be set free. That everyone will be treated equally. That the world will come in Peace . . .AND. . .FIGHT FOR FREEDOM! (OK, I'm hoping that "fight for freedom" thing is metaphorical or the whole peace/no war thing comes across as a bit hypocritical!) And notice the No War drawing -- a person under a China flag and a person under a USA flag taking aim with guns. So here's joining my girls in wishing you all hope, love and peace on this special day.
(A) is the right answer. RBCs contain a very high concentration of the enzyme, carbonic anhydrase and minute quantities of the same is present in the plasma too. This enzyme facilitates the following reaction in both directions. At the tissue site where partial pressure of CO2 is high due to catabolism, CO2 diffuses into blood (RBCs and plasma) and forms HCO3– and H+,. At the alveolar site where pCO2 is low, the reaction proceeds in the opposite direction leading to the formation of CO2 and H2O. Thus, CO2 trapped as bicarbonate at the tissue level and transported to the alveoli is released out as CO2 (Figure 17.4). Every 100 ml of deoxygenated blood delivers approximately 4 ml of CO2 to the alveoli.
Category: Society & Social Sciences\| The author of the book: Antony Jay Format files: PDF, EPUB, TXT, DOCX The size of the: 532 KB Edition: Oxford University Press Date of issue: 5 July 2012 Description of the book "Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations":The power of words in politics is well known and the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations brings together both words of wisdom and things that might have been better left unsaid. This unique reference book not only charts the most influential political events of recent times via the things people said about them - including an international financial crisis and a watershed in American presidential politics - but also digs deeper than ever into the rich heritage of political history from around the world. A mouth-watering collection for anyone with an interest in history and politics, Antony Jay (co PDF-author of the famous TV series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister) has assembled both a crash course in political wisdom past and present and a treasure trove of politicians' cock-ups and put-downs, with more than 300 new quotations and over 90 new authors, from Sarah Palin to David Cameron by way of Silvio Berlusconi. The dictionary also includes an essay by the political journalist Matthew Parris and keyword and subject indexes to help in tracing just the right quote. Quotations include: 'The inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English.' Otto von Bismarck, when asked what was ePub the greatest political fact of modern times 'British jobs for British workers.' Gordon Brown 'If I misspoke that was just a misstatement.' Hillary Rodham Clinton 'You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.' Rahm Emanuel 'A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to excuse his failure to keep his word.' Niccolo Machiavelli 'We are not going to give up our country for a mere X on a ballot. How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?' Robert Mugabe 'We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.' Barack Obama Reviews of the Oxford Dictionary of Political QuotationsUp to now about the ebook we've Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations comments users have not however quit their review of the game, or otherwise not make out the print but. Yet, for those who have presently see this book and you're simply ready to help to make his or her results convincingly request you to hang around to go out of an assessment on our site (we are able to distribute both positive and negative evaluations). In other words, "freedom connected with speech" We all totally supported. Your current opinions to reserve Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations -- different audience will be able to decide of a ebook. Such aid could make us a lot more U . s .! Antony JayRegrettably, at this time we really do not have information regarding this designer Antony Jay. Even so, we might enjoy for those who have just about any info on the item, and therefore are able to present it. Post it to us! We've got all the look at, and when all the info are correct, we will release on our website. It's very important for us that each one correct in relation to Antony Jay. Most of us thank you ahead of time to be ready to head over to meet you! Download EBOOK Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations for free
Sustaining the reliability and wellbeing of the colon can be as easy as getting ready with your favorite herbal colon cleansing teas at home. The Mayo Clinic has found out that several herbal treatments counting Senna, flaxseed and psyllium can aid cleanse your colon and play a role to entire colon and digestive strength. Like any other home remedy, you must seek the advice of your doctor first prior to taking any colon cleanse teas. About Cleansing Teas Hundreds of years ago, the Amish have depended on teas that contain organic herbal components to efficiently cleanse their colon, naturally. To create your individual home remedy called a colon cleansing tea, soak or mix up senna leaf, flaxseed or psyllium in one cup of conventional black or green tea and ingest it every day. You might add up peppermint, lemon or further fruit extracts to your tea to satisfy your own tastes. In addition, the Amish group of people recommends ingesting one glass of hot water every morning right following waking will add up to the tea’s efficacy. Kinds of Colon Cleanse Teas Tea #1: Senna Leaf The leaf of the senna plant performs as a natural herbal laxative. It can be established as a component in lots of over-the-counter laxative products, such as Ex-Lax Maximum Relief Formula, Fletchers Castoria and Senekot, and normally generates bowel movement in 12 hours. The senna leaf performs like a stimulant triggering the muscles within the intestines to constrict, thus alleviating the stool, and as stated by the Mayo Clinic, it is among the most severe kinds of laxatives. Individuals with Crohn’s disease, heart illness or ulcerative colitis must not obtain products that include senna leaf, since it might bring about severe side effects. Tea #2: Flaxseed Affluent in fatty essential acid and alpha-linolenic acid, flaxseed is connected with several constructive health consequences as well as possessing a laxative outcome. Flaxseed oil does not seem to contain similar laxative assets like flaxseed and is not suggested for colon cleansing. As stated by the Mayo Clinic, once taken in huge dosages and with insufficient quantities of water, flaxseed can in reality have the opposite result and bring about bowel impediment. You must at all times go along with the producer’s instructions while obtaining herbal cures. If you are not sure, seek the advice of your physician. Tea #3: Psyllium As stated by the Mayo Clinic, psyllium is a soluble fiber that will melt in water to develop a gel-like substance. A study conducted by the Mayo Clinic also points out that psyllium contains more than a few health better qualities that can play a role in lowering your blood cholesterol and glucose levels, stabilizing bowel movement and sustaining bowel reliability and wellbeing. Like a dietary fiber, it intensifies the bulk of your stool at the same time making it softer and effortless to move. It might even relieve irritable bowel syndrome, as noted by the Mayo Clinic. Psyllium aids sustain bowel reliability and wellbeing by means of reducing your danger of forming hemorrhoids. These teas are indeed great for colon cleansing. They have properties that make them work for the colon’s benefit. However, you should not use them excessively. Better yet, ask the opinion of your doctors before incorporating them in your diet.
I did not experience this with my son, nor is it heart burn. The last few days I have been having severe pain in my upper middle back area and around my ribs. The only things that makes it feel even a little better is laying down. Problem is, I have class tomorrow. My chemistry class is from 9 in the morning to 3:50 in the afternoon. The first half is lecture so I can at least sit, but the second half is lab and you have to stand the whole time. I was told that the pain is caused from a pinched nerve from my ribs expanding and the muscles in my upper back is where I'm feeling the nerve pain. My MIL told me this, I don't know if it's true but any explanation is better than nothing right now. Is there anything I can do to make it feel better? I can't exactly lay down in the middle of lab. Upper middle back pain END OF COMMENTS Look how far your child has come. Review your child's growth milestones. Read about 16 Weeks. Your growing child Your pregnancy: 17 weeks Your baby's skeleton is changing from soft cartilage to bone at 17 weeks pregnant, and the umbilical cord is growing stronger and thicker. Read More 18 weeks pregnant Your baby's genitals are developed enough to see on an ultrasound. Hungry? An increase in appetite is normal at 18 weeks pregnant. Read More Your pregnancy: 19 weeks Your baby may be able to hear you at 19 weeks pregnant – talk or sing to her if you like. If your sides are aching, it could be round ligament pain. Read More Your pregnancy: 20 weeks At 20 weeks pregnant, you're at the halfway mark in your pregnancy – congrats! Your baby is swallowing more now and making meconium. Read More Your pregnancy: 21 weeks Feeling your baby move at 21 weeks pregnant? Those early flutters will turn into full-fledged kicks. Cool fact: Your baby has eyebrows now. Read More What's next for your growing child? Get a glimpse of what's to come. Read about 22 Weeks.
Department of Computer Science Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research University of Toronto Example scriptsA step-by-step tutorial is available but, if you'd prefer to get aligning as quickly as possible, download and run the following scripts to reproduce our heme and NAD experiments: ligalign pivot-selection [, query-selection [, query-selection2, ...]]Computes a rigid alignment of the ligands in the query-selection(s) to the ligand in the pivot-selection. If no query-selection is specified, LigAlign will attempt to find appropriate ligands in a ligand similarity database, and display the bound proteins. If a specified PDB file is not found locally, LigAlign will automatically fetch the necessary files from the PDB. If there are multiple bound ligands in the proteins, LigAlign will choose the ligand from query-selection that is most similar to a ligand in the pivot-selection. LigAlign automatically reinitializes PyMOL on execution, as it needs clear caches to run correctly. ligalign_fragments pivot, query-selection [, query-selection2, ...]When the target's ligand is flexible, the best rigid alignment can still have bad overlap in the active sites. ligalign_fragments performs a substructure alignment of the ligands. It duplicates the target protein, aligning pieces of the fragment independently. The choice of best fragmentation is controlled by the ligalign_set settings. As with the ligalign command, if no query-selection is specified, LigAlign will attempt to find appropriate ligands automatically. This command generates a quantity of output as it enumerates alternative fragmentations; this output can be useful to track progress of the fragmentation process. ligalign_find_template diameter, percent-protein-representation, similarity, pivot [, query-selection, ...]Finds consistent clusters of residues in the protein active sites near the bound ligand. As well as providing a visualization, this command produces text output suitable for copy-and-paste into LaTex tables or ClustalW. ligalign_find_template will produce a "template" selection, comprising the clustered residues, and a "close_template" selection, which is the clustered residues within distant-residue-distance of the aligned ligand. The choice of distant-residue-distance is controlled by the ligalign_set settings and defaults to 4.5 angstroms. ligalign_find_template takes three parameters, in addition to the list of proteins to cluster: - diameter is the maximum diameter of the permitted clusters, in Angstroms. - representation is the minimum fraction of proteins that must be present in a cluster for it to be reported. - similarity imposes a requirement of chemical consistency on clusters. Similarity must be one of 'identity', 'chemical', or 'geometric'. The most conservative standard of chemical consistency is 'identity', which requires all residues in a cluster to be the same amino acid type. The similarity 'chemical' requires all residues in a cluster to be in the same chemical class: acidic (D, E), basic (R, H, K), amidic (N, Q), nonpolar (L, V, A, G, I, M, P), aromatic (F, W, Y), hydroxyl (S, R, Y), and sulphide bond forming (C). The most permissive standard of chemical consistency is 'geometric', which will report clusters consisting of any mix of amino acid types. ligalign_color_by_amino_acid_class selectionColors the residues in the selection according to their chemical class. The chemical classes and their corresponding colors are - acidic (D, E): pink - basic (R, H, K): blue - amidic (N, Q): green - nonpolar (L, V, A, G, I, M, P): orange - aromatic (F, W, Y): magenta - hydroxyl (S, R, Y): grey - sulphide bond forming (C): yellow ligalign_reset_storedClears LigAlign caches and calls PyMOL's reinitialize command. - ligalign_color pivot-selection, query-selectionColors the residues in query-selection based on how far they are from the closest residue in pivot-selection. The center of each residue in the target selection is computed by averaging the location of each atom in the residue. This is repeated for the residues in the pivot selection. The minimum distance from each center in the target to any center in the pivot is computed and the target residue colored based on this minimum distance. Red means far (by default, more than 4.5 angstroms) and green means close (by default, less than 0.5 angstroms), with the distances in between discretized into ten groups, each with a color interpolated between red and green. ligalign_show_mapping query-selectionDraw dashed lines showing the atom-to-atom mappings from query-selection to the pivot for which query-selection was aligned. ligalign_viz [setting=1-8] [, full_residues=True\|False] [, entire_protein=True\|False]A number of useful vizualizations of the region near the ligand. The default is setting 11. - setting 1 selects the atoms from any of the bound proteins which are near the ligands and shows them as spheres, using the default PyMOL coloration. - setting 2 shows the same nearby protein atoms as setting 1, but makes the atom spheres small, to less obscure the ligand alignment. - setting 3 takes the same atoms as settings 1 and 2 and computes an electrostatic surface over them, and displays this transparent closed consensus surface of the nearby atoms. - setting 4 shows the same consensus surface as setting 3, but makes it opaque. - setting 5 shows an open opaque consensus surface. This is the electrostatic surface where the edges of the active-site surface are computed to match the electrostatic surface of the rest of the protein, not just computed from the atoms near the ligands. - setting 6 shows the ligand as spheres and the active sites of any of the bound proteins as sticks. - setting 7 shows a closed surface which was computed independently over each query-selection. - setting 8 shows a closed surface and side-chains for each query-selection. - setting 9 shows side-chains for each query-selection. - setting 10 shows the atoms of the side-chains as a constellation of points. - setting 11 shows the aligned ligands. ligalign_set [cutoff \| max_splits \| min_fragment_size \| distant_residue_distance], valueChanges a number of ligalign parameters - cutoff is the %RMSD decrease below which we no longer try to increase the number of fragments (default: 0.1, i.e. 10%) - max_splits is the maximum number of fragments to permit (default: None, i.e. infinitely many) - min_fragment_size is the minimum number of atoms in a fragment (default: 4) - distant_residue_distance is the number of angstroms within which ligalign_find_template builds the "close_template" selection and beyond which ligalign_color will use bright red (default: 4.5)
STORRS, Conn. (AP) _ University of Connecticut economists say the state’s economy is in a bind. The Connecticut Economic Outlook, a quarterly report that was released on Tuesday, says the state’s economy is recovering very slowly and is lagging the performance of the U.S economy. It says Connecticut has restored only a quarter of the jobs it lost since 2007. Unemployment in April was 8 percent and in the U.S. it was 7.5 percent, the lowest in four years. UConn economists say Connecticut’s sluggish growth has resulted in state tax revenue that’s lower than forecast. And they say spending cuts in the state’s budget year ending this month will weaken the economy. A $44 billion two-year budget agreement between Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and legislative leaders tries to cover a projected $2.5 billion deficit.
Liam Fox MP: Thatcher. She turned the Conservative Party from a loser into a world champion. Dr Liam Fox is Conservative MP for North Somerset. Follow Liam on Twitter. Yesterday we were robbed of one of the great historic figures of our era. It was a reminder that whatever our towering prominence in our own time, our timescale is finite. Given her deep religious devotion Margaret Thatcher would have felt at home with this narrative, given her strong faith and innate humility. For those of us who knew her well , time will bring an even greater resonance to the honour we feel at this moment. There will be an enormous debate about her historic significance to this country and to the wider world. History will lend enormous weight to her great significance and her transformational influence on the country she led and its effect on global events. As a former Chairman of the Conservative party I have tried to separate the influence that she had on her party and that which she had on her country. This is, ultimately , an impossible task because Margaret Thatcher, the woman and the Conservative, are inextricably bound to Margaret Thatcher the national leader and global statesman. I joined the Conservative party in the late 1970s when it was clear that both the corporatist approach of the Heath government of the early 1970s, and the union – appeasing approach of the Wilson – Callahan era were dooming Britain to the prospect of managed decline at best. As a product of Europe’s second-biggest comprehensive school and a family where both grandparents had been miners, I saw Margaret Thatcher as a role model for those who wanted to break through the traditional social barriers where individual talent took precedent over social antecedents. It is hard for today’s younger voters to understand exactly what this meant in an era when social rigidity was infinitely greater than today. The millions of British voters who saw the same thing would follow this brave and intelligent woman through to 3 record winning British general elections. This was no accident. Despised by what she regularly characterised as “the establishment”, she overcame the condescension of those who believe that a grocer’s daughter could never become prime minister, those who believed that this was a role for men only and the male chauvinism of the Labour Party and the trade unions who mocked her 1979 victory on the basis that “she would never be allowed to govern”. It is easy in retrospect to believe that her victories were preordained, but this is to fail to understand just how her courage, and the intellectual brilliance of Sir Keith Joseph, transformed both the fortunes of the Conservative party and the United Kingdom. The Thatcher revolution was primarily intellectual, although it was accompanied by a particularly skilful manipulation of the media that has seldom been bettered to this day. It is hard to describe accurately the risks she took in confronting the entire conventional wisdom of her time, an era that believed in compromise rather than principle and tactics before strategy. The Conservative victory in 1979 was a seminal moment in British post-war history. It challenged the consensus that had existed since the Attlee government, accommodated by Churchill, Attlee, MacMillan and Heath. She believed that the Conservative party was the vehicle through which Britain would achieve its renaissance, based on free market principles, the belief in liberty, freedom and the rule of law and underpinned by the ability of the British people to achieve great things when freed from the dead hand of the state. Her courage inside the Conservative party cannot be understated either. From the outset she was undermined, and attacked, by those who were most comfortable with the cosy post-war consensus that promised little more than managed national decline and those who saw themselves as her social superiors, waiting for the moment when this inconvenient woman could be replaced. Fortunately for the British people, they were all to be disappointed. The Geoffrey Howe budget of 1982 was an intellectual turning point, shocking the self appointed intelligentsia, including the current governor of the Bank of England (who was one of the economists who wrote to the Times in outraged terms), but putting the country on a sustainable economic footing. Her courage in the prosecution of the Falklands War, was phenomenal. Not only were the commentariat overflowing with praise and admiration (something we have almost consigned to history), not only was financial support flooding in to support an obvious winner but many people who had never thought of voting Conservative before were willing to give their support at the ballot box or become party activists. When the added attractions of home ownership and wider share ownership were added to this mix, the Conservative party not only felt self confident but was infused with a sense of moral purpose. People wanted to be associated with the Conservative Party and itbecame the dominant force in shaping economic and social reform well outside the borders of the United Kingdom. Of course, it is dangerous for any party to rewrite its own history. Margaret Thatcher was brave, intuitive and patriotic but she was also a cautious politician. On one hand, she would say that “successful politicians do not move to the political centre, they move the political centre to them”. On the other, she was generally unwilling to open up more than one political front at any one time, concentrating her considerable political energy on one target. She turned the Conservative party from just another participant in the lowest common denominator politics of Britain in the 1970s into a world champion. It was not done without cost, socially or economically, although one of my favourite of her many mantras was that “it doesn’t matter how much people who will never vote for you don’t like it” as long as “you create a critical mass with those who believe what you believe to be right”. It was a privilege and an honour to know Margaret Thatcher. She would have been humbled by the tributes paid to her today, however richly deserved. She never wanted to be popular but was always keen to be respected. If there is an accolade to which she would have paid great heed it would have been the often repeated view on the doorstep that “you might not have liked Margaret Thatcher but you always knew where she stood. She always believed in her country”. That, surely, is what our party is for.
Defense Secretary William Perry said the 750 U.S. troops aiding Rwandan refugees in Zaire and Uganda will swell to at least 4,000 within a week. And that number could further grow if the Pentagon sets up a "way station" system to draw fearful Hutu refugees back to Rwanda, where rival Tutsi now hold power. Meanwhile, a team of U.S. soldiers will assess the conditions in Rwanda's capital to determine if food, water and other supplies could be delivered faster using facilities inside the country -- though Perry said he hadn't yet decided on sending in a large force. Perry himself will fly to Africa over the weekend to inspect the U.S. operations on behalf of President Clinton. Aid officials said the U.S. relief operation could last three to six months before the United Nations takes over.
The World Wide Web is an important tool that allows individuals to seek the products, services, and knowledge they urgently require\|These days, there's almost nothing in the way of products, services, and info that you can't find on the internet. As a matter of fact, a study by Nielsen Online revealed that 81 percent of the US population shops online. Seventy-seven percent of the participants reveal that they go shopping online to save time, while 56 percent consider it a lot simpler to locate things online. In a nutshell, it can just suggest that the Internet is among the most potent tools to market a item or service to a big target audience. However, online advertising is easier said than done. With such a competitive business environment, every company that aims to score big ought to catch the attention of their target audience by setting up and maintaining a solid online presence. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) becomes practical. SEO is the process of enhancing and promoting a site to enhance its ranking or exposure in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. Basically, SEO techniques structure websites so that search engines can easily pick them up. Search engines index websites and web pages according to their significance to a search inquiry, such that sites with unsatisfactory content and structure get entombed in the crevices of the World Wide Web. Operating an successful SEO campaign may typically be overwhelming; after all, to enhance site ranking, regular website updates and upkeep are necessary. To attain success, the services of a reputable San Diego SEO company are necessary. San Diego is home to plenty of SEO firms due to the fact that the city's flourishing economic situation is abundant with companies in need of advertising solutions to gain the competitive advantage over others. Aside from going the SEO course, companies ought to also consider other methods to draw in even more clients. For instance, San Diego video production services are worth checking out since online video advertisements may improve the marketer's credibility and elicit positive reactions from target markets. Additionally, online video advertisements keep users hooked and ultimately lure them to think about acquiring a particular item or service. Online marketing techniques, when done properly, may help turn a new company into an overnight success. Talk to a reputable San Diego search engine optimization supplier and look forward to reaping the benefits. Check out SEOMoz.org for additional info on SEO and other associated subjects. The Essentials of Search Engine Optimization
This month, Republicans in Jackson and Washington appear to be working together to make college less affordable for Mississippi students. In the budget signed by Governor Bryant this week, Mississippi's Institutions of Higher Learning will be receiving $2,400 less per student than they did a decade ago. The Republican budget also moves over $6 million from Mississippi's Universities and Colleges to pay for the state's portion of the Ayers settlement agreement. These factors played no small part in the college tuition increases approved by the college board earlier this month. At the same time college tuition is on the rise in Mississippi, Republicans on Capitol Hill are advancing separate proposals that would allow Stafford loan rates to double from 3.4% to 6.8%. This is bad news for college students and makes it less likely that Mississippi will be improving these numbers anytime soon.
By Erin O'Neill on Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 at 7:30 a.m. U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell appears on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on July 18. Forget social issues. U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell said he learned in his recent primary fight that the economy is at the forefront of people’s minds. So while explaining the need to set aside distractions and reach a balanced approach to deal with national fiscal issues, the Democratic congressman tried to set straight President Barack Obama’s record on taxes. "We need tax cuts, there’s no question about it," Pascrell said in a July 18 interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. But, he said, "this president has not raised taxes. He has not raised taxes. and I haven't agreed with the president on everything, even as a Democrat, but he has not raised taxes. There have been so many myths about this presidency and they need to be clarified and maybe we'll do that during the election." Has Obama really not raised taxes? Thomas Pietrykoski, Pascrell’s spokesman, said the congressman was "referring to the overall effective tax rate for American families." Our colleagues at PolitiFact National found last year that for the average middle-class family, the effective tax rate -- how much the average taxpayer pays as a percentage of his income -- fell between 2008 and 2011. But Pascrell didn’t make that distinction in the interview. And Obama has raised some taxes. Obama earned a False last year from PolitiFact National for saying he "didn’t raise taxes once." Soon after taking office the president signed a bill that increased the federal excise tax on tobacco products. That tax hike went into effect in 2009. Then Obama signed the health care law, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act but often called ObamaCare. That law includes several tax increases, some of which have not yet gone into effect, though some are in place now. For example, individuals who use indoor tanning services started paying a 10 percent tax in 2010. in the law -- such as additional Medicare taxes of 0.9 percent on individuals who make more than $200,000 and couples that make more than $250,000 -- don’t go into effect until Jan. 1, 2013 or later. And then there’s the individual mandate, a linchpin of the health care law that will require people who forego health insurance coverage to pay a fine. The U.S. Supreme Court said in a decision upholding most of the law that the mandate "may reasonably be characterized as a tax" and that "it is reasonable to construe" it as a tax. Though these tax hikes may be relatively narrow in scope, they are examples of taxes increasing under Obama. But Obama has also cut taxes. The president said in 2011 that he "lowered taxes over the last two years." That statement earned a Mostly True from PolitiFact National. The president’s stimulus bill included the "Making Work Pay" tax credit, which was intended to offset payroll taxes. The credit gave up to $400 for working individuals and up to $800 for married taxpayers filing joint returns in 2009 and 2010. Also, Obama and Congress reached a deal in 2010 to lower payroll taxes by 2 percent for one year. The reduced tax rate was later extended through the end of this year. The tax cuts impacted a broader group, while the tax increases have had a more narrow reach. Nevertheless, some taxes have still increased under Obama. Pascrell said "this president has not raised taxes." Some taxes have increased during Obama’s time in the White House. In his first months in office, Obama increased the federal excise tax on tobacco products and the national health care law includes a number of tax increases. It’s also true that other taxes -- such as payroll taxes -- have been reduced during the president’s tenure. However, it’s wrong to broadly state that Obama has not raised taxes. We rate this claim False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com .
You will find articles on the Crespi Hicks estate, articles and photographs on the original Crespi Estate and over 300 photographs illustrating the Crespi-Hicks home. Who Purchased Crespi Hicks Estate? After the years’ expectation that Andy Beal would purchase the Crespi Estate, Andy Beal successfully negotiated the purchase of this Preston Hollow estate home. Private Air on Cover Reveals Crespi Hicks As Finest Estate home in America Private Air Luxury Homes is provided to private jet travelers, an audience shared with Douglas Newby. Crespi Hicks Designed by Maurice Fatio Architect Maurice Fatio designed the Crespi Estate was considered the nation’s best estate architect in the 1920’s and the 1930’s. Maurice Fatio was best known for his work in New York and Palm Beach and the Crespi home, the last great estate home he designed. Crespi Hicks is Found in Preston Hollow Neighborhood The estate neighborhood of Preston Hollow is the perfect location for the estate – Crespi Hicks. The Crepi Hicks renovation architect was Peter Marino. For the Crespi Hicks estate, Peter Marino furthered the proportions and refinement of architect Maurice Fatio. The Largest Estate Properties are Found in Mayflower Estates Crespi Hicks Estate benefits from the seclusion and topography of Mayflower Estates. Crespi Hicks Defines Architecturally Significant The Crespi Hicks Estate is the lens through which to look at other Architecturally Significant Homes. History of Crespi Estate The origin of the Crespi Hicks estate home begins with the Crespi Estate. Crespi Hicks For Sale Crespi Hicks offered for sale is found on Featured Listings of Significant Homes. Crespi-Hicks Has Modern Floor Plan The Crespi Hicks Estate is divided into three structures, allowing each room to be filled with sunlight. Crespi Hicks in President Bush Neighborhood Crespi Hicks is found in the neighborhood of President and Mrs. George W. Bush. Crespi Hicks is Announced For Sale in the Huffington Post The Huffington Post was the first to announce that the Crespi Hicks Estate was being offered for sale. Huffington Post Identifies Crespi Hicks as Finest Estate Home in America An article in the HuffingtonPost.com describes the criteria for the finest estate homes. Crespi Hicks Video This video on the Crespi Hicks explains the relationship of the architect and architecture with the land. Original Crespi Estate The origin of Crespi Hicks was the Crespi Estate designed by Maurice Fatio Crespi Hicks Has Most Value of Any Property Offered For Sale Many consider Crespi-Hicks to have the most potential appreciation because of its architectural pedigree and the Crespi Hicks’, 25 acre estate property. Crespi Hicks Finest Estate Home in America See over 300 photographs of Crespi Hicks. For further information contact me, Douglas Newby, real estate broker and listing agent for Crespi Hicks Estate.
Castle View Farm near Bottesford This footpath provides spectacular panoramic views across the Vale of Belvoir and offers the opportunity for circular walks from the local villages of Bottesford and Normanton. The surrounding farmland is managed under a Countryside Stewardship Agreement with the primary objective of enhancing the wildlife interest. The arable field margins buffer the adjacent species-rich hedgerows and water courses and provide excellent nesting and feeding habitat for farmland birds, small mammals and insects. Snipe are also known to overwinter in the wetter grass margins.
Growing Little Leaves: Teaching Children Genealogy Basics A class from the Indiana Historical Society, for adults. Introducing children to genealogy is something many parents and grandparents desire to do but few know how to implement. "Growing Little Leaves" is a new IHS series created to meet this need. This program educates adults on how to teach children about genealogy concepts. Emily Kowalski Schroeder models four activities, and audience members receive written instructions on how to implement the activities with children. Emily Kowalski Schroeder is a genealogist, blogger, mother of two and a meteorologist. "Growing Little Leaves" is based on her blog of the same title.
Hari Singh Nalwa had four sons. After the death of Hari Singh Nalwa, the brothers started quarrelling among themselves for the property share. Maharaja Ranjit Singh confiscated major portion of the property (worth over 5 lakhs) and distributed 19,600 rupees to the brothers. One of the Songs Jawahar Singh Nalwa was a brave warrior and fought in second Anglo Sikh war, his property was confiscated by British in 1849. Two other brothers also fought during the Anglo Sikh war. During 1857 revolt most of the Sikh Sardars were very willing to help East India Company. Jawahar Singh also helped and was appointed Risaldar in the 1st Sikh Cavalry raised by the British after the abrogation of Sikh rule. He saw action at Lucknow, Kanpur and at several other places. In 1859, he was rewarded with jagirs for his services and, in 1862, was made an honorary magistrate at Gujrawala. Jawahar Singh died in 1877. Source ; Dr Harbans Singh and Lipen Griffins. Researched by Inderjeet Singh of Nottingham, UK
I know it has been quite a few weeks since I last posted. I apologize in preparation of 4th of July I lost track of time and computer upgrade of my computer but I have not forgotten about the tea's. One unfortunate thing is that not all of the manufactures actually have given responses. And some that have also lied about whether or not their tea used Epichlorohydrin. So the best way to find out is use the trick which I posted here. Otherwise you might not get accurate information. But way to avoid cancer is to have your tea loose. While it might be more annoying because you have to strain the tea you will not have to worry about any type of toxins. Even if the bag is sealed with a form of plastic seal some of the plastics can break down with the water heat and also release chemicals which can cause cancer. Any steps that you can take to limit your exposure to certain chemicals will increase your life in the long run. While things can happen which we have no control over we do have control over what we eat and how well we take care of ourselves and what we use on a daily basis. Even the smallest steps can help to improve our health. This does not mean you have to spend a fortune to improve your health either cause I do realize that much of the food that you buy from health food stores can be very expensive and not everyone has access to these types of stores. But everyone does have access to your local grocery stores. All you have to do is learn to make food which does not come prefrozen or in a can. Avoiding food that is process is another important way to stay healthy not just because of the massive amounts of salt that these processed foods contain but the unneeded chemicals which are used to preserve or give it a flavor or color that is pleasing to the person that eats it. Even in your favorite snacks you'll find dye colors to make your food look a certain way like for example I'm sure everyone has had Doritos at one time or another. If I can draw your attention to the wikipedia page for Doritos if you look at the ingredients you'll see artificial color (including Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Red 40). Just so you know when I'm talking about them I'm not making it up. Of course processed food is not the only one at fault. Canned food deserves some blame too especially that it also contains a vary of preservatives and also the metal that it is contained in gets into the food and contaminates it. You should always at least wash food that comes from a can that will not only remove some of the contamination but will also improve the taste of the food. That's all I have for now but I will not forget about you guys now that things have calmed down I'll have another interesting medical related article soon for you. I appreciate you taking the time to read my blog.
National Optical Astronomy Observatories Naval Ocean and Atmosphere Research Laboratory - No avail phrase no use; ineffective Usage Note in the phrase ‘to no avail’ [nob] /nɒb/ noun 1. Slang. the head. 2. Cribbage.. Sometimes, his nobs. the jack of the same suit as the card turned up, counting one to the holder. [nob] /nɒb/ noun, Chiefly British Slang. 1. a person of wealth or social importance. /nɒb/ noun (cribbage) 1. the jack of the suit turned up 2. one […] howling. (1.) Num. 32:42. (2.) The name given to Kenath (q.v.) by Nobah when he conquered it. It was on the east of Gilead (Judg. 8:11).
[pees-mey-ker] /ˈpisˌmeɪ kər/ a person, group, or nation that tries to make , especially by reconciling parties who disagree, quarrel, or fight. a person who establishes peace, esp between others early 15c., from peace + maker. One of the IGC networks. PeaceNet serves peace and social justice advocates around the world in such areas as human rights, disarmament, and international relations. A number of alternative news services provide a range of information about these and other topics from around the world. E-mail: . (ftp://igc.apc.org/). noun 1. an active program, policy, propaganda campaign, etc., by a national government for the purpose of terminating a war or period of hostility, lessening international tensions, or promoting peaceful cooperation with other nations. noun 1. any offering made to procure peace. 2. a sacrificial offering made in order to assure communion with God. Ex. 20:24; Lev. 7:11–18. noun 1. something given to an adversary in the hope of procuring or maintaining peace 2. (Judaism) a sacrificial meal shared between the offerer and Jehovah to intensify the union between […] noun 1. a civil officer appointed to preserve the public peace, as a sheriff or constable.
Employment should take advantage of the individual’s strengths and abilities. Temple Grandin, Ph.D. suggests, “jobs should have a well-defined goal or endpoint, ” and that your “boss must recognize your social limitations.” In A Parent’s Guide to Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism, the authors describe three employment possibilities: competitive, supported and secure or sheltered. Competitive employment is the most independent with no support offered in the work environment. Individuals with AS may be successful in careers that require focus on details but have limited social interaction with colleagues, such as computer sciences, research or library sciences. In supported employment, a system of supports allow individuals to have paid employment in the community, sometimes as part of a mobile crew, other times individually in a job developed for the person. In secure or sheltered employment, an individual is guaranteed a job in a facility-based setting. Individuals in secure settings generally also receive work skills and behavior training while sheltered employment may not provide training that would allow for more independence. To look for employment, begin by contacting agencies that may be of help such as state employment offices, social services offices, mental health departments, and disability-specific organizations. Find out about special projects in your area and determine the eligibility to participate in these programs. It is important to find employers who are willing to work with people with Asperger’s syndrome. Whether an adult with Asperger’s syndrome continues to live at home or moves out into the community, will be determined in large part by his/her ability to manage everyday tasks with little or no supervision. For example, can he handle housework, cooking, shopping, and bill paying? Is she able to use public transportation? Many families prefer to start with some supportive living arrangements and move towards increased independence. Supervised group homes usually serve several individuals with disabilities. They are typically located in residential neighborhoods in an average family home. The homes are staffed by trained professionals who assist residents based on the person’s level of need. Usually the residents have a job, which takes them away from home during the day. A supervised apartment may be suitable for individuals who prefer to live with fewer people, but still require some supervision and assistance. There is usually no daily supervision, but someone comes by several times a week. The residents are responsible for going to work, preparing meals, personal care and housekeeping needs. A supervised apartment setting is a good transition to independent living. Independent living means just that individuals live in their own apartments or houses and require little, if any, support services from outside agencies. Services may be limited to helping with complex problem-solving issues rather than day-to-day living skills. For instance, some individuals may need assistance with managing money or handling government bureaucracies. It is also important for those living independently to have a “buddy” who lives nearby that can be contacted for support. Support systems within the community might include bus drivers, waitresses, or coworkers. Many people think of adulthood in terms of getting a job and living in a particular area, but having friends and a sense of belonging in a community are also important. Individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome may need assistance in encouraging friendships and structuring time for special interests. Many of the support systems developed in the early years may continue to be useful. Source: Autism Society of America, 2007.
Don't miss the latest stories New York City, Without The People By Dorothy Tan, 30 Oct 2012 Considering that Superstorm Sandy is right now wreaking havoc in The Big Apple, this time-lapse video of New York City wiped clean of people seems almost prophetic. Part of a travel video series named ‘Empty America’—which aims to present American cities without the distracting crowds—the video has been created by cultural and entertainment website Thrash Lab. From Wall Street to Times Square, New York City will probably never look as vacant as this—unless a storm is in town. San Francisco and Seattle are the two other American cities that have been featured in the series so far—watch all three videos below: [via Thrash Lab] More related news Also check out these recent news
ROYAL OAK (WWJ) – The latest “awww”-inspiring addition to the Detroit Zoo is a male Bactrian camel born April 28, 2012, to 4-year-old mother Suren and 4-year-old father Rusty. Bulgan (pronounced BULL-gan) – named for a province in Mongolia where the species is from – is drawing visitors to the camel habitat across from the Horace H. Rackham Memorial Fountain, where he can be seen with his parents and 16-year-old female, Princess. Camels are born after a gestation period of 12 to 14 months. A newborn calf is able to stand and walk alongside its mother in as little as 30 minutes. Bulgan weighed 102 pounds at birth and currently stands about 3 feet tall on long, slender legs. His coat is soft and gray but will eventually grow thick and coarse as it changes to a sandy-brown color. A camel’s humps are limp at birth, consisting mostly of skin and hair. When the calf reaches about 6 months old, its humps will become more defined as they fill with fat. Contrary to popular belief, camels store fat – not water – in their humps, providing energy when food is limited. The Bactrian camel has two humps, compared to the dromedary camel, which has one. The easiest way to remember this camel trivia is to turn the first letter of the camel’s name on its side. “B” for Bactrian has a double hump and “D” for dromedary has a single hump. The Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) stands about seven feet tall at the humps and weighs up to 1,600 when it reaches maturity at around age four. The species has many physical adaptations for life in a harsh desert environment. Its two-toed large feet allow it to walk across desert sand without sinking, and two rows of long, thick eyelashes and narrow, slit-like nostrils can be quickly closed to keep the sand out. With the ability to survive in temperatures ranging from minus 20 degrees to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, Bactrian camels are well-suited to Michigan’s climate. They grow thick winter coats to withstand cold temperatures, and in the summer their coats shed away in large clumps, giving them a ragged, unkempt appearance. Situated on 125 acres of naturalistic habitats, the Detroit Zoo is located at the intersection of 10 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue, just off I-696, in Royal Oak. The Detroit Zoo is open daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $14 for adults 15 to 61, $12 for senior citizens 62 and older, and $9 for children 2 to 14 (children under 2 are free). For more information, call 248-541-5717 or visit www.detroitzoo.org.
East of the Rockies, martins are totally dependent on humans to provide houses for nesting. Rooms for rent To attract a houseful of purple martins, pick the right location and follow some tried and true tenets. Kathryn A. Kahler To attract new tenants, most landlords do nothing more than run an ad in the local paper or put up a "for rent" sign in the window. If you're trying to attract a nesting colony of purple martins, it's another matter entirely. Just ask Westfield biology teacher Brian Thays who admits he's hooked and somewhat of a "nerd" about attracting martins. When he was 10 years old, Thays would bike several miles to see established colonies near his home. It sparked a passionate pursuit to attract purple martins to his property. "I'm actually pretty new to the hobby," admits Thays, who has had martins nesting in his T-14 style martin house for two years. "But once you've seen these beautiful birds with their wonderful swooping, gliding flight pattern literally dive out of the sky to your bird house, you're hooked. I want to get the message out so others don't end up making some common mistakes that leave their bird houses empty, or worse, full of non-native house sparrows or European starlings," he says. Purple martins are the largest North American swallows. Adult males are about 7½ inches long with iridescent purple-black plumage front and back. The dimorphic females have similar coloring on their backs but have a dingy grayish breast. Martins winter in South America and migrate back to their breeding grounds in North America in the spring sending scouts that reach Wisconsin in early to mid-April. Breeding pairs are monogamous and once they choose a nesting site will come back to it year after year as long as they don't experience nest failure. East of the Rockies, martins are totally dependent on humans to provide houses for nesting. Oldest adults arrive first; subadults return a month or more after adults. Martins eat only flying insects on the wing and don't specialize in any one species, taking a variety of beetles, flies, bees, wasps, dragonflies, butterflies, moths, cicadas and others. Despite common belief, they eat very few mosquitoes, probably because martins feed higher in the sky than mosquitoes tend to fly. Extensive studies of the stomach contents of martins show that mosquitoes make up less than 3 percent of their diet. Some of the biggest threats to purple martins are those posed by house sparrows and European starlings over battles for decent nest sites. Would-be martin landlords must be willing and ready to deal with the aggressive competitors or they will likely fail in their attempts to attract martins. Starlings will kill adult martins, their young and eggs. Sparrows will peck holes in the eggs or build their own nests on top of the martin nest, starving the hatchlings. Martin landlords employ techniques such as trapping and euthanizing the nonprotected exotics, relentlessly destroying their nests found in martin houses, or using houses with special crescent-shaped starling resistant entrance holes. Trapping and releasing birds is not effective because sparrows and starlings will return within hours. Enthusiasts interested in attracting birds to their martin house can employ a number of "social attraction" techniques to entice new breeders. Martins are colonial nesters and unlike most other birds, prefer to nest in close proximity to each other. That's why methods like setting up decoys, broadcasting vocalizations – "dawn song" and "daytime chatter" are Thays' favorites – constructing fake nests or duct-taping mirrors to nest openings all help in tricking martins into thinking there are other martins around. "Martins have evolved over thousands of years to feel that if they're close to humans and other martins, they'll have a sense of safety," said Thays. "That's the illusion we try to give." Despite the pitfalls faced by martin landlords, Thays believes the many benefits of living with purple martins far outweigh the difficulties. "I really only spend five or 10 minutes a day monitoring my colony now that it‘s established," he estimated. "There are other things you must do on a weekly basis, like lowering the house to check for parasites and predation, and on an annual basis, like fall cleaning and plugging the holes for the winter. The top thing on my list is placement of the house. It has to be 40 to 60 feet away from trees that may provide cover for aerial predators like hawks and owls." Another item that's high on Thays' list is talking to successful martin landlords to see what has worked for them. Thays volunteers as a landlord mentor in Wisconsin for the Purple Martin Conservation Association, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Erie, Penn. He recommends that anybody interested in becoming a purple martin landlord check out their website (purplemartin.org) for an incredible amount of information. Thays would also be happy to help prospective landlords who can contact him at (608) 296-1684, or by email at Brian Thays. Kathryn A. Kahler scouts out nest sites and does her bird watching from Madison.

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