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European Painting before 1900, Johnson Collection Green Park, LondonMade in London, England, Europe 1870 or 1871 Claude Monet, French, 1840 - 1926 Oil on canvas W1921-1-7Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1921 LabelIn the autumn of 1870, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, Monet and his wife left France for exile in London, where they remained until June 1871. There the artist painted this panorama of a park in the heart of the city. In later years Monet would return to London, painting numerous views of city sights, including the Houses of Parliament. Social Tags [?]green park [x] impressionist [x] landscape 19c [x] london [x] monet [x] [Add Your Own Tags] * Works in the collection are moved off view for many different reasons. Although gallery locations on the website are updated regularly, there is no guarantee that this object will be on display on the day of your visit.

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European Decorative Arts and Sculpture Cloister with Elements from the Abbey of Saint-Genis-des-FontainesMade in Roussillon, France, Europe 1270-80s, with medieval elements from southwestern France and modern additions Artist/maker unknown, French 1928-57-1bPurchased with funds contributed by Elizabeth Malcolm Bowman in memory of Wendell Phillips Bowman, 1928 LabelAt the heart of every medieval monastery stood a cloister, an arcaded walkway surrounding a courtyard. The Museum’s cloister is modeled after a thirteenth-century example at the Abbey of Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines in the Roussillon region of southwestern France, and includes sculpture originally from the abbey, contemporary elements from the province, and early-twentieth-century reproduction carvings. Medieval cloisters served both practical and spiritual purposes. Most were open air, often with a garden in the courtyard. A ninth-century architectural drawing known as the Plan of Saint Gall, which is considered a blueprint of the ideal monastic compound, features a large, centrally located cloister that would have been reserved for the monks. At Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines, the outer walkway held doors that opened into the dining hall, the chapter house (where the abbey was administered), and the church. In addition to functioning as a connecting space, the courtyard and its colonnade were used by the religious community for processions, services, and communal readings. The cloister also provided an area where individual monks could engage in private prayer and contemplation. Social Tags [?]european art 1100-1500 [x] period room [x] st-genis-des-fontaines [x] st-michel-de-cuxa [x] [Add Your Own Tags] * Works in the collection are moved off view for many different reasons. Although gallery locations on the website are updated regularly, there is no guarantee that this object will be on display on the day of your visit.

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Thursday, September 1st, 1859, 11:18am: Thirty three year-old Richard Carringto, widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomer, was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw. On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and "being somewhat flurried by the surprise," Carrington later wrote, "I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled." He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear. Friday, September 2nd, 1859: Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii. Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted. [Click the following images for better reading.] Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Forecasting the Impact of an 1859-calibre Superstorm on Satellite Resources THE 1859 SOLAR–TERRESTRIAL DISTURBANCE AND THE CURRENT LIMITS OF EXTREME SPACE WEATHER ACTIVITY May be read online. Space Radiation Hazards and the Vision for Space Exploration: Report of a Workshop

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Acrophobia is defined as a fear of heights. Unlike a specific phobia like aerophobia -- fear of flying -- and other specific phobias, acrophobia can cause a person to fear a variety of things related to being far from the ground. Depending on the phobia's severity, an acrophobic person may equally fear being on a high floor of a building or simply climbing a ladder. Acrophobia and Related Conditions True vertigo is a medical condition that causes a sensation of spinning and dizziness. Illyngophobia is a phobia in which the fear of developing vertigo can actually lead to vertigo-like symptoms. Acrophobia can induce similar feelings, but the three conditions are not the same. See a doctor for tests if you experience vertigo symptoms. Medical tests may include bloodwork, CT scans and MRIs, which can rule out a variety of neurological conditions. Bathmophobia, or the fear of slopes and stairs, is sometimes related to acrophobia. In bathmophobia, you may panic when viewing a steep slope, even if you have no need to climb the slope. Although many people with bathmophobia have acrophobia, most acrophobia sufferers do not also experience bathmophobia. Climacophobia is related to bathmophobia, except that the fear generally occurs only when contemplating making a climb. If you suffer from climacophobia, you are probably not afraid to see a steep set of stairs as long as you can remain safely at the bottom. However, climacophobia may occur in tandem with acrophobia. Aerophobia is the specific fear of flying. Depending on the severity of your fear, you may be afraid of airports and airplanes, or may only feel the fear when in the air. Aerophobia may occasionally occur alongside acrophobia. Symptoms of Acrophobia If you experience acrophobia, you may never experience vertigo symptoms. Instead, you may feel a sense of panic when at height. You may instinctively begin to search for something to cling to. You may find that you are unable to trust your own sense of balance. Common reactions include descending immediately, crawling on all fours and kneeling or otherwise lowering the body. Emotionally and physically, the response to acrophobia is similar to the response to any other phobia. You may begin to shake, sweat, experience heart palpitations and even cry or yell out. You may feel terrified and paralyzed. It might become difficult to think. If you have acrophobia, it is likely that you will begin to dread situations that may cause you to spend time at height. For example, you may worry that an upcoming vacation will put you into a hotel room on a high floor. You may put off home repairs for fear of using a ladder. You might avoid visiting friends' homes if they have balconies or upstairs picture windows. Danger of Acrophobia The biggest danger that most phobias present is the risk of limiting one's life and activities to avoid the feared situation. Acrophobia is unusual, however, in that having a panic attack while high in the air could actually lead to the imagined danger. The situation may be safe as long as normal precautions are taken, but panicking could lead you to make unsafe moves. Therefore, it is extremely important that acrophobia be professionally treated as quickly as possible, particularly if heights are a regular part of your life. Causes of Acrophobia Research shows that a certain amount of reluctance around heights is normal, not only for humans but for all visual animals. In 1960, famed research psychologists Gibson and Walk did a "Visual Cliff" experiment which showed crawling infants, along with babies of numerous species, who refused to cross a thick glass panel that covered an apparently sharp drop-off. The presence of the infant's mother, encouragingly calling him, did not convince the babies that it was safe. Therefore, acrophobia seems to be at least partially ingrained, possibly as an evolutionary survival mechanism. Nonetheless, most children and adults use caution but are not inordinately afraid of heights. Acrophobia, like all phobias, appears to be a hyper-reaction of the normal fear response. Many experts believe that this may be a learned response to either a previous fall or a parent's nervous reaction to heights. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a main treatment of choice for specific phobias. Behavioral techniques that expose the sufferer to the feared situation either gradually (systematic desensitization) or rapidly (flooding) are frequently used. In addition, the client is taught ways of stopping the panic reaction and regaining emotional control. Traditionally, actual exposure to heights is the most common solution. However, several research studies performed since 2001 have shown that virtual reality may be just as effective. A major advantage of virtual reality treatment is the savings in both cost and time, as there is no need for "on-location" therapist accompaniment. This method is not yet readily available, but may be worth trying to find if you can. The drug D-Cycloserine has been in clinical trials for anxiety disorder treatment since 2008. It appears that using the medication in tandem with cognitive-behavioral therapy may improve results, but the research remains preliminary at this time. Acrophobia appears to be rooted in an evolutionary safety mechanism. Nonetheless, it represents an extreme variation on a normal caution, and can become quite life-limiting for sufferers. It can also be dangerous for those who experience a full panic reaction while at a significant height. Acrophobia can share certain symptoms with vertigo, a medical disorder with a variety of possible causes, as well as with other specific phobias. For these reasons, if you experience the signs of acrophobia, it is extremely important to seek professional help as soon as possible.Sources: Gibson, E. J., & Walk, R. D. "The 'visual cliff'." Scientific American. 1960. 202, 67-71. May 5, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.wadsworth.com/psychology_d/templates/student_resources/0155060678_rathus/ps/ps05.html Emmelkamp, Paul, Bruynzeel, Mary, Drost, Leonie, van der Mast, Charles. "Virtual Reality Treatment in Acrophobia: A Comparison with Exposure in Vivo" CyberPsychology & Behavior. June 1, 2001, 4(3): 335-339. May 5, 2008.

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With the worlds energy needs growing rapidly, can zero-carbon energy options be scaled up enough to make a significant difference? How much of a dent can these alternatives make in the worlds total energy usage over the next half-century? As the MIT Energy Initiative approaches its fifth anniversary next month, this five-part series takes a broad view of the likely scalable energy candidates. Of all the zero-carbon energy sources available, wind power is the only one thats truly cost-competitive today: A 2006 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration put the total cost for wind-produced electricity at an average of $55.80 per megawatt-hour, compared to $53.10 for coal, $52.50 for natural gas and $59.30 for nuclear power. As a result, wind turbines are being deployed rapidly in many parts of the United States and around the world. And because of winds proven record and its immediate and widespread availability, its an energy source thats seen as having the potential to grow very rapidly. Wind is probably one of the most significant renewable energy sources, simply because the technology is mature, says Paul Sclavounos, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture. There is no technological risk. Globally, 2 percent of electricity now comes from wind, and in some places the rate is much higher: Denmark, the present world leader, gets more than 19 percent of its electricity from wind, and is aiming to boost that number to 50 percent. Some experts estimate wind power could account for 10 to 20 percent of world electricity generation over the next few decades. Taking a longer-term view, a widely cited 2005 study by researchers at Stanford University projected that wind, if fully harnessed worldwide, could theoretically meet the worlds present energy needs five times over. And a 2010 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that the United States could get more than 12 times its current electricity consumption from wind alone. But impressive as these figures may sound, wind power still has a long way to go before it becomes a significant factor in reducing carbon emissions. The potential is there with abundant wind available for harvesting both on land and, especially, over the oceans but harnessing that power efficiently will require enormous investments in manufacturing and installation. So far, installed wind power has the capacity to generate only about 0.2 terawatts (trillions of watts) of energy worldwide a number that pales in comparison to an average world demand of 14 terawatts, expected to double by 2050. The World Wind Energy Association now projects global wind-power capacity of 1.9 terawatts by 2020. But thats peak capacity, and even in the best locations the wind doesnt blow all the time. In fact, the worlds wind farms operate at an average capacity factor (the percentage of their maximum power that is actually delivered) somewhere between 20 and 40 percent, depending on their location and the technology. Some analysts are also concerned that widespread deployment of wind power, with its inherently unpredictable swings in output, could stress power grids, forcing the repeated startup and shutdown of other generators to compensate for winds variability. Many of the best wind-harvesting sites are far from the areas that most need the power, necessitating significant investment in delivery infrastructure but building wind farms closer to population centers is controversial because many people object to their appearance and their sounds. One potential solution to these problems lies offshore. While many wind installations in Europe have been built within a few miles of shore, in shallow water, there is much greater potential more than 20 miles offshore, where winds blow faster and more reliably. Such sites, while still relatively close to consumers, are generally far enough away to be out of sight. MITs Sclavounos has been working on the design of wind turbines for installation far offshore, using floating platforms based on technology used in offshore oilrigs. Such installations along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States could theoretically provide most of the electricity needed for the eastern half of the country. And a study in California showed that platforms off the coast there could provide more than two-thirds of the states electricity. Such floating platforms will be essential if wind is to become a major contributor to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, says research engineer Stephen Connors, director of the Analysis Group for Regional Energy Alternatives (AGREA) at the MIT Energy Initiative. Wind energy is never going to get big if youre limited to relatively shallow, relatively close [offshore] sites, he says. If youre going to have a large impact, you really need floating structures. All of the technology needed to install hundreds of floating wind turbines is well established, both from existing near-shore wind farms and from offshore drilling installations. All thats needed is to put the pieces together in a way that works economically. But deciding just how to do so is no trivial matter. Sclavounos and his students have been working to optimize designs, using computer simulations to test different combinations of platforms and mooring systems to see how they stand up to wind and waves as well as how efficiently they can be assembled, transported and installed. One thing is clear: It wont be one design for all sites, Sclavounos says. In principle, floating structures should be much more economical than wind farms mounted on the seafloor, as in Europe, which require costly construction and assembly. By contrast, the floating platforms could be fully assembled at an onshore facility, then towed into position and anchored. Whats more, the wind is much steadier far offshore: Whereas a really good land-based site can provide a 35 percent capacity factor, an offshore site can yield 45 percent greatly improving the cost-effectiveness per unit. There are also concerns about the effects of adding a large amount of intermittent energy production to the national supply. Ron Prinn, director of MITs Joint Center for the Science and Policy of Global Change, says, At large scale, there are issues regarding reliability of renewable but intermittent energy sources like wind that will require adding the costs of backup generation or energy storage. Exactly how big is offshore wind powers potential? Nobody really knows for sure, since theres insufficient data on the strength and variability of offshore winds. You need to know where and when its windy hour to hour, day to day, season to season and year to year, Connors says. While such data has been collected on land, there is much less information for points offshore. Its a wholly answerable question, but you cant do it by just brainstorming. And the answers might not be what wind powers advocates want to hear. Some analysts raise questions about how much difference wind power can make. MIT physicist Robert Jaffe says that wind is excellent in certain niche locations, but overall its too diffuse that is, too thinly spread out over the planet to be the major greenhouse gas-curbing technology. In the long term, solar is the best option to be sufficiently scaled up to make a big difference, says Jaffe, the Otto (1939) and Jane Morningstar Professor of Physics. Connors is confident that wind also has a role to play. This planet is mostly ocean, he says, and its pretty windy out there. This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching. Explore further: Study IDs two compressed air energy storage methods, sites for the Northwest More information: Tomorrow: Vast amounts of solar energy radiate to the Earth constantly, but tapping that energy cost-effectively remains a challenge. -- Read part 1: "What can make a dent?"

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The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft is expected to discover its 1,000TH comet this summer. The SOHO spacecraft is a joint effort between NASA and the European Space Agency. It has accounted for approximately one-half of all comet discoveries with computed orbits in the history of astronomy. "Before SOHO was launched, only 16 sun grazing comets had been discovered by space observatories. Based on that experience, who could have predicted SOHO would discover more than 60 times that number, and in only nine years," said Dr. Chris St. Cyr. He is senior project scientist for NASA's Living With a Star program at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "This is truly a remarkable achievement!" About 85 percent of the comets SOHO discovered belongs to the Kreutz group of sun grazing comets, so named because their orbits take them very close to Earth's star. The Kreutz sun grazers pass within 500,000 miles of the star's visible surface. Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, is about 36 million miles from the solar surface. SOHO has also been used to discover three other well-populated comet groups: the Meyer, with at least 55 members; Marsden, with at least 21 members; and the Kracht, with 24 members. These groups are named after the astronomers who suggested the comets are related, because they have similar orbits. Many comet discoveries were made by amateurs using SOHO images on the Internet. SOHO comet hunters come from all over the world. The United States, United Kingdom, China, Japan, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, France, Germany, and Lithuania are among the many countries whose citizens have used SOHO to chase comets. Almost all of SOHO's comets are discovered using images from its Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument. LASCO is used to observe the faint, multimillion-degree outer atmosphere of the sun, called the corona. A disk in the instrument is used to make an artificial eclipse, blocking direct light from the sun, so the much fainter corona can be seen. Sun grazing comets are discovered when they enter LASCO's field of view as they pass close by the star. "Building coronagraphs like LASCO is still more art than science, because the light we are trying to detect is very faint," said Dr. Joe Gurman, U.S. project scientist for SOHO at Goddard. "Any imperfections in the optics or dust in the instrument will scatter the light, making the images too noisy to be useful. Discovering almost 1,000 comets since SOHO's launch on December 2, 1995 is a testament to the skill of the LASCO team." SOHO successfully completed its primary mission in April 1998. It has enough fuel to remain on station to keep hunting comets for decades if the LASCO continues to function. For information about SOHO on the Internet, visit: Explore further: Long-term warming, short-term variability: Why climate change is still an issue

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What leadership traits can we learn from wolves? In The Wisdom of Wolves author Twyman Towery shares the milieu of the wolf pack where teamwork, loyalty and communication are the norm rather than the exception. Whether it�s their traits of curiosity, perseverance, loyalty or play, wolves exist for the survival of the pack - a lesson humans can apply in business, family or personal relationships. The Wisdom of Wolves shows us that not only has the teamwork of the wolves among themselves been critical to their success, but the teamwork between humans and wolves has helped boost the life environment for both species. The Wisdom of the Wolves provides food for thought: The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack. Simple Truths provides customers with inspirational and motivational gift books and movies. Our books and movies are comprised of short inspirational stories and motivational quotes that are certain to make a positive lasting impression. Simple Truths gift books and movies are great for friends & family, co-workers, teachers, students, corporations and businesses.

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Forcing yourself to look at the big picture, or pretending that you are a fly on the wall observing a scene as it unfolds, can be an effective anger management strategy. Experts say that changing the focus from being a participant in a stressful situation, to being an observer from a distanced perspective can help an individual come to a true understanding of their feelings. Researchers call this strategy “self-distancing.” In a new study, college students who believed a lab partner was berating them for not following directions responded less aggressively and showed less anger when they were told to take analyze their feelings from a self-distanced perspective. “The secret is to not get immersed in your own anger and, instead, have a more detached view,” said Dominik Mischkowski, lead author of the research performed at Ohio State University. “You have to see yourself in this stressful situation as a fly on the wall would see it.” While other studies have examined the value of self-distancing for calming angry feelings, this is the first to show that it can work in the heat of the moment, when people are most likely to act aggressively, Mischkowski said. The worst thing to do in an anger-inducing situation is what people normally do: try to focus on their hurt and angry feelings to understand them, said Brad Bushman, Ph.D., a co-author of the study. “If you focus too much on how you’re feeling, it usually backfires,” Bushman said. “It keeps the aggressive thoughts and feelings active in your mind, which makes it more likely that you’ll act aggressively.” Study findings are found online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition. To prove the concept, researchers performed to related studies. The first involved 94 college students who were told they were participating in a study about the effects of music on problem solving, creativity and emotions. The students listened to an intense piece of classical music while attempting to solve 14 difficult anagrams (rearranging a group of letters to form a word such as “pandemonium”). They had only seven seconds to solve each anagram, record their answer and communicate it to the experimenter over an intercom. But the plan of the study was to provoke the students into anger, which the experimenters did using a technique which has been used many times in similar studies. The experimenter interrupted the study participants several times to ask them to speak louder into the intercom, finally saying “Look, this is the third time I have to say this! Can’t you follow directions? Speak louder!” After this part of the experiment, the participants were told they would be participating in a task examining the effects of music on creativity and feelings. The students were told to go back to the anagram task and “see the scene in your mind’s eye.” They were put into three groups, each of which were asked to view the scene in different ways. Some students were told to adopt a self-immersed perspective (“see the situation unfold through your eyes as if it were happening to you all over again”) and then analyze their feelings surrounding the event. Others were told to use the self-distancing perspective (“move away from the situation to a point where you can now watch the event unfold from a distance and watch the situation unfold as if it were happening to the distant you all over again”) and then analyze their feelings. The third control group was not told how to view the scene or analyze their feelings. Each group was told to replay the scene in their minds for 45 seconds. Then the researchers tested the participants for aggressive thoughts and angry feelings. Results showed that students who used the self-distancing perspective had fewer aggressive thoughts and felt less angry than both those who used the self-immersed approach and those in the control group. “The self-distancing approach helped people regulate their angry feelings and also reduced their aggressive thoughts,” Mischkowski said. In a second study, the researchers went further and showed that self-distancing can actually make people less aggressive when they’ve been provoked. In this study, 95 college students were told they were going to do an anagram task, similar to the one in the previous experiment. But in this case, they were told they were going to be working with an unseen student partner, rather than one of researchers (in reality, it actually was one of the researchers). In this case, the supposed partner was the one who delivered the scathing comments about following directions. As in the first study, the participants were then randomly assigned to analyze their feelings surrounding the task from a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective. Participants assigned to a third control group did not receive any instructions regarding how to view the scene or focus on their feelings. Next, the participants were told they would be competing against the same partner who had provoked them earlier in a reaction-time task. The winner of the task would get the opportunity to blast the loser with noise through headphones – and the winner chose the intensity and length of the noise blast. Investigators discovered participants who used the self-distancing perspective to think about their partners’ provocations showed lower levels of aggression than those in the other two groups. That is, their noise blasts against their partner tended to be shorter and less intense. “These participants were tested very shortly after they had been provoked by their partner,” Mischkowski said. “The fact that those who used self-distancing showed lower levels of aggression shows that this technique can work in the heat of the moment, when the anger is still fresh.” Of interest is the discovery that those who used the self-distancing approach showed less aggression than those in the control group, who were not told how to view the anger-inducing incident with their partner. This suggests people may naturally use a self-immersing perspective when confronted with a provocation – a perspective that is not likely to reduce anger. Thus, the tendency to immerse oneself in a problem (anger) to work through the situation, may backfire and make an individual more aggressive. A better technique to use when angry is distraction – thinking of something calming to take the mind off the anger. However, even this technique is only a short-term strategy. Mischkowski believes the research clearly shows that self-distancing is the best method to mitigate anger. “But self-distancing really works, even right after a provocation – it is a powerful intervention tool that anyone can use when they’re angry.” Source: Ohio State University

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Within the next 10 years the EU-funded Diabetes Prevention study, part of an international study called TRIGR (Trial to Reduce IDDM in the Genetically at Risk), coordinated at the University of Helsinki, Finland, will generate a definite answer to the question whether early nutritional modification may prevent type 1 diabetes later in childhood. Type 1 diabetes is a growing health problem among European children. European data indicate that the disease incidence has increased five-six-fold among children under the age of 15 years after World War II, and there are no signs that the increase in incidence is levelling off. The most conspicuous increase has been seen among children under the age of 5 years. The TRIGR study is the first study ever aimed at primary prevention of type 1 diabetes. The study is designed to answer to the question whether excluding cow's milk protein from the infant's diet decreases the risk of fu-ture diabetes. All subjects are followed for 10 years to get information on whether the dietary recommendations for infants at increased genetic risk of type 1 diabetes should be revised. Starting in May 2002, 76 study centres from 15 countries (Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and USA) have been recruiting families for the study. To be eligible the newborn infant has to have at least one family member (mother, father and/or sib) affected by type 1 diabetes and carry a HLA genotype conferring increased risk for type 1 diabetes. The initial recruitment target of 2032 eligible infants was reached at the be-ginning of September 2006, but the Study Group has decided to continue recruitment till the end of December 2006 (when the EU contribution will finish) to make the study even more powerful statistically. A majority of the study participants (52%) have been recruited in Europe. The International Coordinating Cen-tre (ICC) is located at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland and the Data Management Unit (DMU) at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA. The trial has logistically been a true challenge for both the ICC and DMU. DMU has been successful in establishing a secure, real-time, web-based, interactive data management system that works extremely well. This system can be directly applied to future international mul-ticentre studies. The TRIGR study is generating a wealth of information on breast-feeding practices, infant nutrition and growth in young children in various countries. At 2 weeks of age almost all the participating infants were breast-fed. Exclusive breast-feeding continued longer in Europe than in North America. More than one third of the infants (35 %) received other foods in addition to breast milk and/or infant formulas at the age of 4 months, while WHO recommends that supplementary food should be introduced at the earliest by the age of 6 months. In Europe the first foods to be introduced are typically vegetables and fruits, whereas gluten-free cereals are most commonly introduced in North America. Newborn infants in Northern Europe (NE) had a higher birth weight but a shorter birth length than infants in Central and Southern Europe (CSE). The NE children remained heavier than those from CSE at least up to the age of 18 months. The NE children were also taller than the CSE children starting already from the age of 3 months up to the age of 18 months. Accelerated growth in infancy has been identified as a risk factor for type 1 diabetes later in childhood. Accordingly the observed growth pattern may contribute to the higher incidence of type 1 diabetes in NE compared to CSE. Professor Mikael Knip, University of Helsinki Phone: +358 40 844 7671 Study websites: http://www.trigr.org Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 21 Feb 2009 Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.

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- The growing field of global health delivery is in need of technological strategies to improve transparency and operations research. - Our organization has implemented several simple “Web 2.0” strategies while delivering medical and public health services in rural Nepal. - These strategies help Nyaya Health improve transparency, receive critical commentary from outside experts, and compare approaches to organizing budgets, pharmaceutical procurement, medical treatment protocols, and public health programs. - The platforms include quantitative outcomes data and logistics protocols on a wiki; an open-access, online deidentified patient database; geospatial data analysis through real-time maps; a blog; and a public line-by-line online budget. Nyaya Health and Global Health Delivery 2.0: Using Open-Access Technologies for Transparency and Operations Research Publicado por Manuel Menéndez January 23, 2010 Etiquetas: Benefits of Open Access

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The clutch assembly consists of a clutch disc, a clutch pressure plate, and a clutch release bearing. All these components are usually replaced at the same time. The clutch assembly has two key functions: it transmits power produced by the engine to the gearbox, and it allows that power to be interrupted when the clutch pedal is depressed. Power produced by the engine requires this interruption. It makes it possible to change gears and to shift into neutral at a traffic light or stop sign. When the clutch assembly is not operating correctly, two things can happen. It either doesn't interrupt the power from the engine to the gearbox, which causes grinding sounds and difficulty in selecting gears. Or it fails to transmit the drive from the engine to the gearbox. This results in the engine “revving up” without the vehicle speed increasing. In the case of a complete failure, the engine will rev up, but the vehicle will not move. Clutch components naturally wear out. Clutch components may fail or wear due to; bad driving habits, being driven with the clutch improperly adjusted, or from exposure to oil. To replace the clutch assembly, the driveshaft (or half shafts where applicable) and the manual transmission (gearbox) must be removed to gain access to the clutch components. New clutch components are fitted and the gearbox is then reinstalled.

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People who struggle to find enough food to eat are poor. The World Bank’s poverty line is an income of less than $1.25 a day. Financial Times readers, who spend more than that amount on their morning newspaper, are in no position to dispute that judgment. In the past two decades, economic growth in China and India has reduced global poverty by an unprecedented amount. That achievement is not diminished because some individuals in both these countries have become very rich. Fundamentally, poverty is about absolute deprivation.Kay observes that there is also a relative definition of poverty: Under the definition that I have proposed on this blog for wealth, poverty would simply be an absence of wealth, or a deficit of valued outcomes. The median income is the level that equal numbers of people are above and below, so that a rise in Sir Martin Sorrell’s bonus does not lead anyone into poverty – that would confuse poverty and inequality. But the choice of median income as a reference level has a wider significance. It encapsulates the idea that in a rich society, poverty is an enforced inability to participate in the everyday activities of that society. You might therefore be poor if you lack access to antibiotics or Facebook, even though in this respect you are no worse off than the Sun King or John D. Rockefeller, and in other respects considerably better off than most people in the world. However, to define poverty as social exclusion takes the definition far away from the assessment of income. It is not hard to imagine places in which few, if any, people experience a sense of exclusion. These might include both sophisticated societies with high incomes per head – towns in Scandinavia – and simple cultures without access to modern essentials – rural villages in the developing world. Poverty becomes a cultural and political phenomenon rather than an economic one. But once we define poverty in terms of outcomes beyond simple incomes as measured in currency units, we have indeed entered the territory of culture and politics, and ultimately, what constitutes a life worth living. Just as GDP doesn't measure all that matters when it comes to wealth, I am deeply skeptical of efforts to define multi-dimensional metrics of "poverty" that integrate different valued outcomes. Statistics are indeed important inputs to policy, and I prefer mine simple and transparent. So let's leave poverty defined in terms of absolute income, as defined by the World Bank and others. If we care about obesity, lack of access to antibiotics or even Facebook -- all perfectly legitimate valued outcomes -- then let's track these outcomes on their merits and based on transparent variables that measure these outcomes. Just don't label these issues "poverty" as it will conflate arguments about what it means to be wealthy with efforts to attain whatever valued outcomes we as a society decide to pursue.

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- Giovanni Battista Montini Son of a prominent newspaper editor. Ordained in Brescia, Italy on 29 May 1920, he continued his studies in Rome, Italy, and became part of the Vatican secretariat of state in 1922. One of two pro-secretaries to Pope Pius XII. Archbishop of Milan from 1954 to 1963 where he worked on social problems and to improve relations between workers and employers. Created cardinal-priest of Santi Silvestro e Martino ai Monti on 15 December 1958. Elected 262nd Pope in 1963. As Pope, Paul continued the reforms of John XXIII. He re-convened the Second Vatican Council, and supervised implementations of many of its reforms, such as the vernacularization and reform of the liturgy. He instituted an international synod of bishops; bishops were instructed to set up councils of priests in their own dioceses. Powers of dispensation devolved from the Roman Curia onto the bishops, rules on fasting and abstinence were relaxed, and some restrictions on inter-marriage were lifted. A commission to revise canon law revision was established. In 1964, Paul made a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, becoming the first pope in over 150 years to leave Italy. That was followed by trips to India in 1964, the United States in 1965, where he addressed the United Nations, Africa in 1969, and Southeast Asia in 1970. Relations between the Vatican and the Communists improved, and Communist leaders visited the Vatican for the first time. Paul met with leaders of other churches, and in 1969 addressed the World Council of Churches, and limited doctrinal agreements were reached with the Anglicans and Lutherans. Paul issued frequent reassertions of papal primacy in the face of growing dissent within the Roman Catholic Church itself. He enlarged the college of cardinals, and added cardinals from third world countries. In the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Paul reaffirmed the church’s ban on contraception, a disappointment to many liberals. It led to protests, and many national hierarchies openly modified the statement. Liberals raised questions about priestly celibacy, divorce, and the role of women in the church, but Paul held to traditional Church positions. - if you have information relevant to the beatication of Pope Paul, contact Rev. Antonio Marrazzo, CSSR Associazione Paolo VI Via Trieste, 13 25121 Brescia, ITALY - “Venerable Pope Paul VI“. Saints.SQPN.com. 6 February 2013. Web. 21 May 2013. <>

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By Tom Baxter A few years ago, Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum hosted a fascinating exhibit based on the papyrus legal records of a family which lived in Egypt in the 5th Century BC. As a testament to the lasting lessons such archaeological treasures can transmit, it came to mind last week when Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to endorse same-sex marriage. The papyri were the legal documents of a couple, Ananiah, a Jewish temple official, and his wife Tamut, an Egyptian woman who’d been sold into slavery as a child. They lived on the island of Elephantine in the Nile, in a time when Egypt was part of the Persian Empire and Jewish mercenaries guarded its southern border. As it is today, relationships could be complicated back then. When she married Ananiah on July 3, 449 BC, Tamut was owned by another man, Meshullam, who didn’t free her or her daughter for another 22 years. Things worked out, though. Later papyri record Ananiah giving Tamut part ownership of their house, selling a house to his son-in-law and making payments on a wedding gift for their daughter. The records are a striking contrast of the bizarre with the familiar. The conventions of legalese have changed so little over the millenia that a modern-day lawyer would feel completely at home with these contracts. But the concept of marriage around which these legal proceedings revolve appears to have been radically different from ours today. The contract between Ananiah and Tamut is so detailed that it specifies on which side of the stairs each is to walk up and down. But as far as the state was concerned, marriage contracts like theirs – the notarized enumeration of what one party could take the other to court for, if things didn’t work out – was all the marriage was. Since Ananiah was a religious leader, there may have been a ceremony to sanctify the marriage within the Jewish community on the island, but over the whole of Egyptian society, the state’s involvement in defining, protecting and preserving marriage was quite limited and specific to each coupling. If government has developed a better way to deal with this complex aspect of human society, it was not in evidence last week, when North Carolina voters overwhelmingly declared their support for an amendment defining marriage solely as the union between a man and a woman, and Obama declared the next day that he’d decided his “evolving” views on the subject and supports the right of people of the same sex to marry. By comparison with other historic stands taken by presidents, Obama’s carried remarkably little weight. The states decide this issue, and one just had. Obama’s statement on a morning news show the following day was couched more as something which had been forced by Vice President Joe Biden’s unguarded comments on the subject rather than the embarrassment of a big vote in the state where the Democrats will hold their convention this summer. This sounds progressively more fishy the longer you think about it, particularly when you hear how angry the Obama staffers sounded about Biden’s goofiness, according to the reporters who repeated on-the-record what the staffers told them off-the-record. Yet symbolically, Obama’s statement was rightly looked on as an historic event. The North Carolina vote, which put into the state constitution what was already on the books as state law, was also largely symbolic. And lemme tell you – as former Gov. Roy Barnes might have said after his bitter experience with changing the state flag – symbolism is the rat poison of good government. Should government get more involved in marriage, as those on both sides of the current controversy would have it, or less? At present the states and the federal government find themselves in a cycle of ineffectiveness. Washington has no power over what the states define marriage to be, but because of the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Clinton, which prohibits same-sex couples from the rights and protections of marriage in more than a thousand federal laws, it really doesn’t matter what the states do either. Because our modern concept of marriage — unlike the Egyptians — involves a certain fusion, long since blurred, between the provinces of religion and the state, we appear bound to debate state by state an issue which in some respects can only be settled congregation by congregation. Nor does government at the federal or the state level have the ability to stop the steady decline in heterosexual marriage, as attested by a voluminous array of statistics on divorce, unwed mothers and single-parent households. In terms of the work hours it has to invest, government’s biggest involvement with marriage today is the administration of breakups and the management of the carnage that often comes with them. Administratively, things were much easier for Ananiah and Tamut, which makes it impossible to replicate the arrangements of their day. But their preserved family records challenge us to think about whether we’ve really figured out what aspects of marriage government should involve itself in, and what it shouldn’t.

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Whenever citing a reference in the text source, it is made with its author’s surname and the year of publication is to be inserted in the text. Choose from the listed below to see examples: • Citing the author in the • Using direct quotes • Citing works by more than • Citing works by three or more authors • Citing a chapter of section • Citing an organization • Citing works by the same author written in the same year • Citing secondary sources Citing the Author in the Text Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated (Sheldrake, 1999). If the author’s name occurs naturally in the sentence the year is given in brackets. Sheldrake (1999) asserted that dogs were the first animals to be domesticated. Using Direct Quotes If you quote directly from a source, you must insert the author’s name, date of publication and the page number of the quotation. The domestication of dogs, long predated the domestication of other animals (Sheldrake, 1999). Citing works by more than one Author If your source has two authors, you should include both names in the text. Anderson and Poole (1998) note that a “narrow line often separates plagiarism from good scholarship.” Citing works by three or more Authors If there are three or more authors, you should include the first named author and then add ‘et al.’ in italics followed by a full stop. This is an abbreviation of ‘et alia’ which means ‘and others’ In the United States, revenue from computer games now exceeds that of movies (Kline et al., 2003). Citing Chapter or Section When referring to a chapter or section which is part of a larger work, you should cite the author of the chapter not the editor of the whole work. The sea level has risen by approximately 10cm in the last 100 years (Mason, Citing an Organization If an organization or company (e.g., Department of Health, Arcadia Group Limited) is named as the author of a work rather than a person, you should cite their names. Make sure that you use the same version of the organizations name in both the Text and List of references (e.g., always use ‘Department of Health’, don’t abbreviate to ‘DoH’). Spain became a member of the United Nations in 1955 (United Nations, 2000). Citing Secondary Sources When citing secondary sources (i.e., an author refers to a work which you have not read) cite the secondary source, but include the name of the author and date of publication of the original source in the text. Only the secondary source should be listed in your List of references. You should only cite secondary sources if you are unable to read the original Sheff (1993) notes that Nintendo invested heavily in advertising (cited in Kline et al., 2003, p. 118).

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Introduction to How Colorblindness Works Roses are red, violets are blue -- well, bluish. The sky is blue, too. Grass is green. These are things that most of us know for a fact and don't question. But what if you were colorblind? What would you see? Is life one long black-and-white movie? In "The Wizard of Oz," Dorothy Gale steps out of her black-and-white Kansas farmhouse and into the color-saturated Land of Oz. She moves from a humdrum existence of chores and troubles to an intense fantasyland peopled with curious creatures, trading in a clapboard house for yellow brick roads, red ruby slippers and a brilliant green city of emeralds. What would her transformation have been without this rainbow of colors? Color isn't just a component of vision. We associate color with beauty, like in a gorgeous sunset. Some colors have meaning in and of themselves -- purple is for royals, red signifies passion. Colors seep into our expressions -- If we're depressed, we say we're feeling blue. We're also "green with envy," we "see red" and we might go "white with fear." Colors even have practical meaning -- red means stop, green means go. Certain colors are said to help you sleep, while others make you hungry. And never underestimate the effect of a bright red dress. Color is important. In this article, we're going to learn what the world looks like for someone who's colorblind.

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You have to break a few (hundred) eggs to make a good crystal Space Science News home You have to break a few (hundred) eggs to make a good crystal Bell curve shape to crystal quality may point to best candidates for flight Sept. 20, 1999: Did you ever ask the teacher to grade a tough test "on the curve"? What you were asking was that the grades be adjusted so that a "C" fell under the part of the curve where most of your classmates had scored. A few were to the left and got a D or F; and few were to the right and got a B or an A. Right: To the crystallographer, this may not be a diamond but it's just as priceless. A lysozyme crystal grown in orbit looks great under a microscope, but the real test is X-ray crystallography. The colors are caused by polarizing filters. Links to 549x379-pixel, 69KB JPG. Credit: NASA/Marshall. That's basically how the bell curve works. In nature, objects and events quite often can be grouped along a bell curve. In a population of adult animals, most will be around the same size. A few will be larger and a few will be smaller. "If you talk to statisticians," noted Dr. Russell Judge of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, "variations within populations in nature can be described in terms of distributions." December 3: Mars Polar Lander nears touchdown December 2: What next, Leonids? November 30: Polar Lander Mission Overview November 30: Learning how to make a clean sweep in space The question now is whether scientists can use the microgravity of space to shift the curve to the right to grow the large, nearly perfect crystals they need for molecular lock-picking, the first step in designing drugs that can treat a broad range of diseases and disorders. "We want to determine how the growth of crystals effect their quality," Judge said in May when NASA selected his investigation for development, "and then take that into space to see how microgravity is enhancing the growth characteristics that lead to good crystals. From this we want to develop techniques, so that by observing crystal growth on the ground, we can predict which proteins are likely to benefit the most from microgravity crystallization." Sign up for our EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery These functions are a result not just of a chemical formula, but of structure which can be quite large (on the atomic scale) and fragile. If the shape isn't right, the protein cannot match up with other proteins or chemicals to do its job, just as the wrong key won't unlock a door. Sickle cell anemia, for example, results from structural differences in the hemoglobin that carries oxygen in red blood cells. Designing new treatments means designing altered proteins or other chemicals that act as a skeleton key or as a sophisticated lock pick. Proteins can form crystals, generated by rows and columns of molecules that form up like soldiers on a parade ground. Shining X-rays through a crystal will produce a pattern of dots that can be decoded to reveal the arrangement of the atoms in the molecules making up the crystal. Like the troops in formation, uniformity and order are everything in X-ray crystallography. X-rays have much sorter wavelengths than visible light, so the best looking crystals under the microscope won't necessarily pass muster under X-rays. Left: Judge (left) and Dr. Edward Snell, a National Research Council fellow working at NASA/Marshall, inspect the sample holder in the X-ray crystallography unit. Links to 600x616-pixel, 188KB JPG, or click here for a 1207x1240-pixel, 543KB JPG. Credit: NASA/Marshall. This has become an invaluable tool for understanding the structure and the function of dozens of proteins. But many proteins remain shrouded in mystery because on Earth crystal imperfections are introduced by fluid flows and the settling of the crystals to the bottom of the container. This leaves internal defects that distort or blur the view of the structure. "In order to have crystals to use for X-ray diffraction studies," Judge said, "you need them to be fairly large and well ordered." Scientists also need lots of crystals since exposure to air, the process of X-raying them, and other factors destroy the crystals. Getting just one perfect specimen isn't enough. Dozens may be needed, and the quality might not be known until well into the analysis. Research has Heavy Implications. July 1998. Crystal-clear view of insulin should lead to improved therapies for diabetics Growing protein crystals in the microgravity of space has yielded striking results, such as determining to a fine resolution how certain molecules of insulin join so scientists can improve injectable insulin needed by diabetics. There have also been disappointments when crystals in other experiments did not grow as expected. Since the 1970s, scientists have used a variety of approaches in trying to determine what leads to the growth of a large, perfect crystal. Judge tried a different approach that built on results noted by researchers dating as far back as 1946. He and his team looked at the effects of concentration, temperature, and pH (acid vs. base) on the growth of lysozyme, a common protein in chicken egg white. Lysozyme's structure is well known and it has become a standard in many crystallization studies on Earth and in space. Although lysozyme has an atomic mass of 14,300 Daltons - almost 92 times that of the ordinary sugar that many of us crystallized in elementary school science - it's a relative lightweight in the protein world. To exclude impurities often found in commercial lysozyme preparations, Judge and his team purified lysozyme extracted from eggs obtained from a local egg farm. While one experiment run required only five dozen eggs, the full series of experiment consumed about 200 eggs. Judge and his team grew the crystals in trays with small plastic wells filled with solutions containing a trace of salt to help stimulate crystal growth. Temperatures ranged from 4 to 18 deg C (39-64 deg F) and pH from 4.0 to 5.2 (slightly acidic; pure water theoretically has a pH of 7). Judge also varied the driving force behind the crystal growth process, called supersaturation, by varying the initial concentration of protein. Protein concentration must be set above a critical limit, the solubility, in order to form crystals (below this concentrations the protein stays dissolved and never forms crystals) Left: A bell curve for lysozyme crystals produced in Judge's experiments, and a possible shift in the curve that microgravity experiments might produce. Links to 660x440-pixel, 39KB JPG. Credit: NASA/Marshall. The tough part was examining each of the over 2000 wells and counting the crystals. It turned out that the solution pH had the largest effect on the growth of the crystals, possibly due to changes in charges on the surface of the molecules. When solution conditions had been optimized to give a small number of large crystals, a sample of 50 crystals was withdrawn for X-ray diffraction analysis. Judge hoped that when the ideal conditions were found and then applied to subsequent batches, he would be able to grow consistently large, high quality crystals of lysozyme. The expectation was that with ideal conditions, quality crystals could be cranked out as if in a factory. Instead, nature put him on the curve. "Some variation is occurring there," Judge said, "but we haven't quite pinpointed the cause." Judge got a bell curve when he measured the X-ray clarity, properly called the signal-to-noise ratio (a radio with static has a low signal-to-noise ratio). A graph of the number of crystals versus the signal-to-noise ratio forms a bell curve, albeit slightly skewed to one side. Right: Distribution of diffraction characteristics - essentially a measure of quality - for a batch of crystals approximates a bell curve. Links to 875x637-pixel, 66KB JPG. Credit: NASA/Marshall. "The distribution is saying a very few crystals form perfectly in solution," he continued, "and a small number are really poor. The majority of crystals are in-between." It's doubly puzzling because the crystals were grown from the same batch of lysozyme that was poured into 120 wells in the experiment tray and crystallized under the same conditions. "We have some ideas," Judge said, "but we haven't tested them yet, so we're hesitant to say it might be this or that." The research will continue with insulin, the crucial protein that conveys sugar from the blood stream into a body's cells, and with glucose isomerase, a larger (46,000 Daltons) protein used in industrial processes to convert glucose to a sweeter sugar called fructose. Left: Crystals of insulin grown in space let scientists determine the vital enzyme's structure and linkages with much higher resolution that Earth-grown crystals had allowed. Links to 640x448-pixel, 104KB JPG. Larger format versions of these and related images are available from the NASA Image Exchange and using the keyword "insulin." Credit: NASA/Marshall. "In all of the proteins we're using the structure is pretty well known," Judge added. In addition to ground-based experiments, Judge hopes to conduct flight experiments in the next year or so. He would use the Vapor Diffusion Apparatus, a device developed by the University of Alabama in Birmingham and well-proven in a number of Space Shuttle flights. "Most researchers say that crystals grown in microgravity will be better than those on the ground," Judge said. And a number of experiments bear out that belief. "Somehow, microgravity pushes up the end of the distribution curve." Right: Crystals of glucose isomerase, a larger molecular weight protein, will be grown to see if they, too, are graded "on the curve." Links to 1018x749-pixel, 365KB JPG. Credit: NASA/Marshall. With expected flight experiments on lysozyme, insulin and glucose isomerase, Judge will have crystals grown in conditions as close as possible to the ideal conditions he had determined so far. At the same time, he will grow crystals on Earth from the same mix as the flight batch and using identical hardware and conditions so that microgravity is the only variable. Eventually, he hopes that his studies will lead to a tool for screening candidate proteins for flight. The Effect of Temperature and Solution pH on the Nucleation of Tetragonal Lysozyme Crystals. Biophysics Journal, September 1999, p. 1585-1593, Vol. 77, No. 3 Russell A. Judge,*Randolph S. Jacobs,#Tyralynn Frazier, §Edward H. Snell, and ¶Marc L. Pusey *Alliance for Microgravity Material Science and Applications, NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama 35812; #Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama 35899; § Biochemistry Department, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48825; and ¶Biophysics SD48, NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama 35812 USA Part of the challenge of macromolecular crystal growth for structure determination is obtaining crystals with a volume suitable for x-ray analysis. In this respect an understanding of the effect of solution conditions on macromolecule nucleation rates is advantageous. This study investigated the effects of supersaturation, temperature, and pH on the nucleation rate of tetragonal lysozyme crystals. Batch crystallization plates were prepared at given solution concentrations and incubated at set temperatures over 1 week. The number of crystals per well with their size and axial ratios were recorded and correlated with solution conditions. Crystal numbers were found to increase with increasing supersaturation and temperature. The most significant variable, however, was pH; crystal numbers changed by two orders of magnitude over the pH range 4.0-5.2. Crystal size also varied with solution conditions, with the largest crystals obtained at pH 5.2. Having optimized the crystallization conditions, we prepared a batch of crystals under the same initial conditions, and 50 of these crystals were analyzed by x-ray diffraction techniques. The results indicate that even under the same crystallization conditions, a marked variation in crystal properties exists. More Space Science Headlines - NASA research on the web Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications information from NASA HQ on science in space Microgravity Research Programs Office headquartered at Marshall Space Flight Center Microgravity News online version of NASA's latest in Microgravity advancements, published quarterly. Join our growing list of subscribers - sign up for our express news delivery and you will receive a mail message every time we post a new story!!! For more information, please contact:| Dr. John M. Horack , Director of Science Communications Curator: Linda Porter NASA Official: M. Frank Rose

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Technology Review has a writeup on the latest advance in the lab towards an invisibility cloak made of metamaterials, described this week in Science. We've been following this technology since the beginning. The breakthrough is software that lets researchers design materials that are both low-loss and wideband. "The cloak that the researchers built works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz — a swath as broad as the visible spectrum. No one has yet made a cloaking device that works in the visible spectrum, and those metamaterials that have been fabricated tend to work only with narrow bands of light. But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use. Similarly, a cloaking device can't afford to be lossy: if it lets just a little bit of light reflect off the object it's supposed to cloak, it's no longer effective. The cloak that Smith built is very low loss, successfully rerouting almost all the light that hits it."

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Freshwater Drum - (Aplodinotus grunniens) Length: up to about 14 inches, although it may become quite large in rivers Weight: 5-15 pounds, world record is 54 1/2 pounds Coloring: Gray or silvery in turbid waters, bronze-colored in clearer waters. The head is somewhat darker than the rest of the body; the ventral portion of the fish is white. The pectoral and pelvic fins are white, but the rest of the fins are dusky. Common Names: sheepshead, croaker, thunder pumper, lake drum, grunt, bubbler, grinder Found in Lakes: all Great Lakes The freshwater drum is the only member of its family that lives entirely in freshwater habitats, and it has the largest native range of any sport fish in the region. Drum are an important commercial crop on the Mississippi River but constitute only a small portion of the commercial perch catch in Lake Michigan. The drum earned part of its Latin name, "grunniens" (meaning "grunting"), by its odd grunting noises, which are produced by a special set of muscles located in the body cavity that vibrates against the swim bladder. The purpose of the noise is unknown, but only mature males develop the structure (by the time they reach three years of age), suggesting that it is most likely related to spawning. Drums also may croak like bullfrogs when removed from the water, and scientists still don't know if the croaking noise is generated in the same way. Identification of this fish is fairly easy. Drum have two dorsal fins that are joined by a narrow membrane. The anterior fin is spiny, and the posterior fin has soft rays. The are the only fish found in Wisconsin with a lateral line that extends through the caudal fin. The drum's otoliths are exceptionally large and look a great deal like ivory. In times past they have been worn as protective amulets, made into jewelry, and traded into areas far from the fish's native range (such as Utah and California). Drum are a bottom-dwelling species found in lakes and rivers; they tolerate both clear and turbid conditions. Their diet consists mainly of immature insects, crayfish, and minnows, although they may also feed on mollusks. The white, flaky flesh of the drum is tasty and has a low oil content. (nutritional information) When cooking, be sure that the fish doesn't dry out and become hard. The low oil content means that fillets dry out much more quickly than other, more oily, fish. Recommended cooking methods include pan frying (in batter) or deep fat frying. Smoking also works well, as long as you're careful not to heat them for too long. Freshwater drum are good fighters and will take bait such as crayfish, minnows, and worms. In warm weather they move in schools to shallow waters to feed and possibly spawn (spawning has not been witnessed by scientists). By winter their activity levels and feeding activity are sharply reduced. copyright 2001 University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute This page is Bobby Approved.

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Assessing Students' Understanding of Complex Systems Assessing student understanding of complex thinking is quite challenging. As with assessing student learning on any topic, the first step is to identify your learning goals for your students. Once you have identified learning goals, it becomes easier to choose one or more assessment tools appropriate to the task. Here is a list of possible learning objectives related to students' thinking about complex systems (i.e., skills expected from students who exhibit complex systems thinking). While this is in no way intended to be a comprehensive list of possible learning goals, it may help you to articulate your own list. A student who demonstrates complex systems thinking can: - Identify and explain the characteristics of a complex system - Describe and/or model a process where there is a feedback mechanism at work - Build a model that mimics the expected behavior of the target system - Identify stocks/reservoirs and flows - Correctly identify positive/negative feedbacks - Test a model through trial and error and comparison to real-world data - Explore the possible outcomes of a system under different parameters - Bridge across scales: student explanations of processes show fidelity across scales (e.g., a student applies the concept of homeostasis at multiple levels) - Create and interpret graphical information - Predict attributes of system behavior based on specific inputs or components of the system - Understand that a complex system is irreducible, unpredictable, historical, nonlinear, and has emergent properties, and be able to describe what these terms mean A number of assessment tools can be used to assess students' understanding (or progress toward understanding) of complex systems. A few of these tools are listed below. A concept map is a diagram with hierarchical nodes, labeled with concepts. The nodes are linked together with directional lines and are arranged from general to specific. By developing concept maps, students literally illustrate their understanding of a complex system. This method can be used for summative or formative assessment, and has the benefit of highlighting any misconceptions. Students can develop and run physical or computer models to gain an understanding of how a system works. The choices a student makes in developing a model (what components of the system to include, how they are linked, and so on), along with how the student explains his or her choices, illustrate that student's understanding of the system in question. Their ability to explain the behavior of the model (describe the outcomes given different inputs, find patterns in the output, etc.) offers further opportunity for assessment. This method can be employed for summative or formative assessment (or both). An understanding of graphical representations of data is an essential component of data analysis. Students can demonstrate their understanding of complex systems by interpreting graphical data illustrating the relationships between system variables. This method can be employed for summative or formative assessment (or both). For more information about using graphs in the classroom, see the Starting Point web pages on describing and analyzing graphs. Assessing Students' Thinking Processes Much frustration can be avoided by engaging in formative assessment: assessing student learning during the learning process. One way to do this is to incorporate several "checkpoints" in each teaching activity or assignment where you ask students to articulate what the results are and how they got there. This serves two functions: 1) it exposes misconceptions or misapplications at an early stage, and 2) it requires students to think about what they are doing and why -- and whether their progress makes sense in the context of what they know or expect. This opens up the realm of metacognition, wherein students think specifically about their own learning and engage in self-monitoring and self-regulatory behavior. Research demonstrates that metacognition improves learning (Lovett, 2008 ).

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The Modern Olympics 1932 -- Los Angeles, The United States of America 1,408 athletes, 37 nations Despite the stock market crash of 1929, Los Angeles put on a impressive show for 1932 Games and still ended up with a million-dollar surplus. Attendance was low because many other countries did not even have the money to participate in the Games. The American Team dominated the competition. for Olympic posters Many new innovations were showcased at the Games. The first Olympic village was built and every athlete was housed, fed and transported for less than $2 a day. The village included a hospital, library, post office, barber shop, cinema, and dining rooms. Since Los Angeles athlete villages have been the norm at the Olympic Games. Electric-photo timing, the victory stand, and the playing of the national anthems were also introduced in Los Angeles. Duncan McNaughton won a gold medal in the high jump and Horace "Lefty" Gwynne placed first in bantamweight boxing. Canada's other medals came from track and field, wrestling, rowing and yachting events. Canadians were disappointed when their female athletes were outclassed and did not repeat the success they had in Amsterdam. Hilda Strike of Montreal won two silver medals in track after coming second to Stella Walsh from Poland. When Walsh was shot and killed years later an autopsy showed "she" was actually a man. If a sex-test had been used in 1932 Strike would have won gold. A sex-test was not introduced at the Olympics until 1968. Before the 1968 Games several world-class athletes suddenly retired indicating that Walsh was probably not the only man who ever tried to pass as a female athlete. Gold 2, Silver 5, Bronze 8 PREVIOUS OLYMPICS - 1908-1952 PHOTOS

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12 Feb 13 Biodiversity is a recent word. It was used for the first time in Washington in 1986 by an entomologist (Edward O. Wilson) and can be a misunderstood topic. In actual fact it should be a simple concept, because at its essence, it signifies nature, life itself, and the diversity of life on many levels - from the smallest and most basic (genes - the building blocks of life) to animal and plant species, up to the most complex levels (ecosystems). All these levels intersect and influence each other and each other’s evolution. Studies from the University of Stanford have compared the species and varieties of an ecosystem to rivets that hold an airplane together. If we remove the rivets, for a while nothing will happen and the airplane will continue to operate. But little by little the structure will weaken and, at a certain point, just removing one rivet will cause the plane to crash. In the history of the planet, everything has a beginning and an end, and in every era, many species have become extinct. But never at the horrifying rate of recent years, one that is a thousand times greater than previous eras. This summer after a thorough study of many years, the prestigious University of Exeter in England declared that the earth is undergoing its sixth mass extinction (with the fifth, 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs disappeared). Yet there is a substantial difference between this and the extinctions of the past: the cause. For the first time man is responsible. Man continues to destroy rainforests, cement the land, pollute waters and grounds with chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and accumulate plastic in the oceans. And he insists on excluding the earth’s last custodians: those small-scale farmers, shepherds and fishers that know and respect the fragile equilibrium of nature. Slow Food started its work with biodiversity in 1997 and our foot in the door - that since the beginning has given us a unique perspective - was food. If biodiversity disappears what will happen to our food? Together with the plants and wild animals, the plants domesticated by man, breeds selected (for milk or meat) will also disappear. According to the FAO, 75% of plant varieties have been irreversibly lost. In the USA the figure is 95%. Today 60% of the world’s food is based on three cereals: wheat, rice and corn. Not on the thousands of rice varieties selected by farmers that once were cultivated in India and China, or on the thousands of varieties of corn that were grown in Mexico, but on the few hybrid varieties selected and sold to farmers by a handful of multinationals. Slow Food’s first intuition was this: look after domestic biodiversity. Meaning not just the panda or the seal, but also the Gascon chicken and the Alpago lamb; not just the edelweiss, but also the violet asparagus from Albenga. But not just this. We became interested in taste and the knowledge connected to it, and traditional techniques of breeding, growing, and processing. And this led us to our second intuition: on our Ark of Taste – a catalogue of products to save – we have also included transformed foods: breads, cheese, cured meats, sweets. Because this is also biodiversity. Once we had identified our field of action, how did we work? We linked diverse worlds that normally didn’t interact: farmers, cooks, veterinarians, journalists… In order to achieve two objectives: 1 – Help small-scale farmers: To save a breed, we didn’t start from genetic selection; to save an apple variety, we didn’t start from a collection of varieties. Instead, we began by seeking out the shepherds that bred that certain breed, the farmers that still cultivated that apple, and we went and spoke to them. With this crucial step, the Presidia project was launched, that today is supporting producers in every corner of the world. 2 – Raise awareness about biodiversity: We need to work with producers and experts, but also with schools, journalists, restaurant and so on. We need to write and tell these stories of producers with every tool at our disposal, because these themes transcend university lecture halls and scientific institutions, and become the heritage of us all. Biodiversity can’t be saved by scientists alone, nor by the powerful of the world, because it is of no interest to the market. And it’s probable that Noah won’t be arriving with his Ark. This battle, therefore, is one that needs to be taken up by us, together with all the people we manage to involve, on our lands, every day - with our Ark of Taste, Presidia, Earth Markets, community and school gardens, and the thousands of other ideas still to come. Because the battle to save biodiversity isn’t like any other battle. It’s the battle for the life of our planet. Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity General Secretary Search the Slow Stories archive Latest Slow Stories Italy | 20/05/2013 | Buzzword, fad or innovative philosophy? A UNISG Master’s student sheds some light on the natural wine... Mexico | 17/05/2013 | A massive wind farm development threatens the environment and livelihood of indigenous fishers and farmers in... United States | 16/05/2013 | Slow Food USA reconnects around local food at their 2013 National Leadership Conference from today in New... Italy | 15/05/2013 | FAO and Slow Food agree today to a three-year plan to develop joint actions to improve biodiversity and the... Italy | 14/05/2013 | The problems and possible solutions to the massive overfishing of small fish for use as animal feed around...

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Giant chipmaker Intel has a new baby born from the One Laptop Per Child project called the Studybook, a rugged tablet PC meant for use by students of all ages in developing countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Scientific American Wednesday reported that computer makers in participating countries will make the Intel Studybook, and students at the nearest schools will use the tablets, a manufacturing system that will dramatically reduce the cost per unit. The Studybook will have a 17.8-centimeter multi-touch LCD screen about the size of an Amazon Kindle Fire. It has basic front and rear cameras with 0.3- and 2-megapixel capacities, a microphone, one gigabyte of memory, and 22 gigabytes of storage. The Intel tablet—its low cost notwithstanding—will also be equipped with an accelerometer and light sensor. And since the Studybook is primarily meant for use by students in all conceivable environments, one of its best features is its sturdiness. Made from a single piece of plastic, the Studybook frame contains a rubber gasket seat for its screen, making the tablet waterproof. The sturdy plastic construction allows the Studybook to absorb a 70-centimeter or 2-foot drop without breaking. Intel’s Wayne Grant, director for research and planning for the chipmaker’s Education Market Platforms group, said the tablet can also connect to networks via Wi-Fi, 3G or Bluetooth, and current models now run on Windows 7 OS. Grant said in a few months, versions that run on Google’s Android operating system would be available, depending on schedules announced by the various participating manufacturers. The tablet will likely cost around $200 – $300 each, a clear third of the price of other tablets in the market today.

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The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family (also known as the nightshades). The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. Potatoes were first introduced outside the Andes region four centuries ago, and have become an integral part of much of the world’s cuisine. It is the world’s fourth-largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and maize. Long-term storage of potatoes requires specialised care in cold warehouses. Wild potato species occur throughout the Americas, from the United States to Uruguay. The potato was originally believed to have been domesticated independently in multiple locations, but later genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species proved a single origin for potatoes in the area of present-day southern Peru (from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex), where they were domesticated 7,000–10,000 years ago. Following centuries of selective breeding, there are now over a thousand different types of potatoes. Of these subspecies, a variety that at one point grew in theChiloé Archipelago (the potato’s south-central Chilean sub-center of origin) left its germplasm on over 99% of the cultivated potatoes worldwide. Following the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spanish introduced the potato to Europe in the second half of the 16th century. The staple was subsequently conveyed by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. The potato was slow to be adopted by distrustful European farmers, but soon enough it became an important food staple and field crop that played a major role in the European 19th century population boom. However, lack of genetic diversity, due to the very limited number of varieties initially introduced, left the crop vulnerable to disease. In 1845, a plant disease known as late blight, caused by the fungus-like oomycete Phytophthora infestans, spread rapidly through the poorer communities of western Ireland, resulting in the crop failures that led to the Great Irish Famine. Nonetheless, thousands of varieties persist in the Andes, where over 100 cultivars might be found in a single valley, and a dozen or more might be maintained by a single agricultural household. The annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the 21st century included about 33 kg (73 lb) of potato. However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. It remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. China is now the world’s largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world’s potatoes are harvested in China and India. The English word potato comes from Spanish patata (the name used in Spain). The Spanish Royal Academy says the Spanish word is a compound of the Taino batata (sweet potato) and the Quechua papa (potato). The name potato originally referred to a type of sweet potato rather than the other way around, although there is actually no close relationship between the two plants. The English confused the two plants one for the other. In many of the chronicles detailing agriculture and plants, no distinction is made between the two. The 16th-century English herbalist John Gerard used the terms “bastard potatoes” and “Virginia potatoes” for this species, and referred to sweet potatoes as “common potatoes”. Potatoes are occasionally referred to as “Irish potatoes” or “white potatoes” in the United States, to distinguish them from sweet potatoes. The name spud for a small potato comes from the digging of soil (or a hole) prior to the planting of potatoes. The word has an unknown origin and was originally (c. 1440) used as a term for a short knife or dagger, probably related to Dutch spyd and/or the Latin “spad-” root meaning “sword”; cf. Spanish “espada”, English “spade” and “spadroon”. The word spud traces back to the 16th century. It subsequently transferred over to a variety of digging tools. Around 1845 it transferred over to the tuber itself. The origin of “spud” has erroneously been attributed to a 19th century activist group dedicated to keeping the potato out of Britain, calling itself The Society for the Prevention of an Unwholesome Diet. It was Mario Pei’s 1949 The Story of Language that can be blamed for the false origin. Pei writes, “the potato, for its part, was in disrepute some centuries ago. Some Englishmen who did not fancy potatoes formed a Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet. The initials of the main words in this title gave rise to spud.” Like most other pre-20th century acronymic origins, this one is false. There are about five thousand potato varieties worldwide. Three thousand of them are found in the Andes alone, mainly in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and Colombia. They belong to eight or nine species, depending on the taxonomic school. Apart from the five thousand cultivated varieties, there are about 200 wild species and subspecies, many of which can be cross-bred with cultivated varieties, which has been done repeatedly to transfer resistances to certain pests and diseases from the gene pool of wild species to the gene pool of cultivated potato species. Genetically modified varieties have met public resistance in the United States and in the European Union. The major species grown worldwide is Solanum tuberosum (a tetraploid with 48 chromosomes), and modern varieties of this species are the most widely cultivated. There are also four diploid species (with 24 chromosomes): S. stenotomum, S. phureja, S. goniocalyx, and S. ajanhuiri. There are two triploid species (with 36 chromosomes): S. chaucha and S. juzepczukii. There is one pentaploid cultivated species (with 60 chromosomes): S. curtilobum. There are two major subspecies of Solanum tuberosum: andigena, or Andean; and tuberosum, or Chilean. The Andean potato is adapted to the short-day conditions prevalent in the mountainous equatorial and tropical regions where it originated. The Chilean potato, native to the Chiloé Archipelago, is adapted to the long-day conditions prevalent in the higher latitude region of southern Chile. The International Potato Center, based in Lima, Peru, holds an ISO-accredited collection of potato germplasm. The international Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium announced in 2009 that they had achieved a draft sequence of the potato genome. The potato genome contains 12 chromosomes and 860 million base pairs making it a medium-sized plant genome. Above 99 percent of all current varietiesof potatoes currently grown are direct descendants of a subspecies that once grew in the lowlands of south-central Chile. Nonetheless, genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species affirms that all potato subspecies derive from a single origin in the area of present-day southern Peru (from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex) Most modern potatoes grown in North America arrived through European settlement and not independently from the South American sources. However, at least one wild potato species, Solanum fendleri, is found as far north as Texas and used in breeding for resistance to a nematode species that attacks cultivated potatoes. A secondary center of genetic variability of the potato is Mexico, where important wild species that have been used extensively in modern breeding are found, such as the hexaploid Solanum demissum, as a source of resistance to the devastating late blight disease. Another relative native to this region, Solanum bulbocastanum, has been used to genetically engineer the potato to resist potato blight. Potatoes yield abundantly with little effort, and adapt readily to diverse climates as long as the climate is cool and moist enough for the plants to gather sufficient water from the soil to form the starchy tubers. Potatoes do not keep very well in storage and are vulnerable to molds that feed on the stored tubers, quickly turning them rotten. By contrast, grain can be stored for several years without much risk of rotting. If you require a high quality printout of this article, just click on the printer symbol next to ’Share and enjoy’, and we will do the rest. This site is hosted by (click on the graphic for more information) Return from potato to Home Page If you want to increase your site popularity and gain thousands of visitors – check out these sites THEY ARE FREE. Spanishchef more than doubled its ‘New Visitors’ last month simply by signing up to these sites:

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According to news reports, the recent heat wave in California resulted in about 150 deaths. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that global warming will exacerbate the problem dramatically, doubling or tripling the number of heat-related fatalities in North American cities in the next decade. The UN is dead wrong, because it assumes what climate researchers call the “Stupid People Hypothesis”: that people will simply sit around and fry to death without doing anything to beat the heat. Global warming or not, our cities are warming, and will continue to do so. Sprawling masonry and blacktop retain heat, and the density of urban construction prevents wind from cooling it off. (Here in D.C., there’s an additional warming effect: waste heat from all the money changing hands.) But heat and heat-related deaths are not synonymous. In fact, in several refereed papers published in recent years, my Virginia colleague Robert Davis and I demonstrated that heat-related deaths have, in aggregate, declined significantly as our cities have warmed. In fact, in a statistical sense, we have completely engineered heat-related mortality out of several of our urban cores, particularly in eastern cities like Philadelphia. Considering every decade of mortality data at once is misleading; examining it decade-by-decade is more informative. When looked at sequentially, the data reveals a remarkable adaptation: as cities have warmed, the “threshold” temperatures at which mortality begins to increase have also risen — more than the temperatures of the cities. For example, in Philadelphia in the 1960s, mortality began to increase once the high temperature exceeded 83 degrees. In the 1970s, the mortality threshold rose to the low 90s. In the last decade, there has been little evidence for any threshold at which mortality increases. In other words, people have adapted to their changing climate. How? Instead of simmering, people buy air conditioning. Every level of government warns of the danger of excessive exposure to heat, and people seek out cooler places. Social adaptation can take place very quickly. In mid-July 1995, over 500 people died from an intense weekend heat wave in Chicago. Research by University of Illinois climatologist Michael Palecki, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2001, shows that a 1999 Chicago heat wave of comparable intensity resulted in only 15 percent as many deaths. This summer’s heat is a bit unusual. Usually, when it’s very hot in the eastern U.S., temperatures are normal or below average in the West, or vice-versa. This year it’s hot everywhere. Is history repeating itself, or is global warming at work? It’s hard to say. Several summers in the 1930s were known for intense heat across the nation. Nineteen-thirty was a scorcher: in rural Virginia, far from Washington’s sprawl, people suffered a total of 21 triple-digit days. Even with the excess heat contributed by the growth of the city, Washington currently averages only one 100 degree day per year. The fact is that we cannot completely discriminate between repetitive history and prospective warming when it comes to a single summer. The better place to look for warming is in the winter. Greenhouse-effect theory predicts that the coldest temperatures of winter will rise much more sharply than the hottest ones of summer. And indeed, for the last several decades, winter’s lows have warmed out of proportion to summer’s highs. All of which illustrates the complexity of global warming. Would people accept — even welcome? — climate change that greatly alleviated winter discomfort at the cost of slightly higher summer temperatures? Clearly, people have adapted to the heat. The evidence shows that, the warmer the city, the more quickly its residents adapt. Heat-related deaths are increasing in only one major American city: chilly Seattle. San Francisco and Los Angeles, two other cities that are relatively cool in the summer compared to those to their east, show no change in mortality. As the UN’s climatologists should recognize, heat waves are dangerous when they are rare and unexpected, because people are unfamiliar with them and slow to take appropriate actions to minimize their exposure. As heat waves become more common, we will simply be better prepared for them and incorporate them into our daily lives and routines — just as the people of Phoenix and Dallas and Houston and New Orleans do, every summer day. Because they’re not stupid.

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Britain has, at least going by ministerial statements, apparently grasped the difference between arranged marriages, which are part of the Indian cultural tradition, and forced marriages, unjustifiable from any standpoint. Yet it is a challenging task to tackle the problem of forced marriages. According to the British reckoning, the figures for this sordid practice are around 3,000 per year. Unofficial estimates suggest that the tally may be even higher. Most victims are known to be women aged between 15 and 24. Another 15-20 per cent of cases involve young men. About 65 per cent of known cases involve those of Pakistani origin, another 25 per cent are of Bangladeshi origin, and the rest are of Indian or various African and Eastern European origins. Individual stories are heart-rending, with many of the ‘husbands’ extraordinarily violent and abusive to the victims. The British government and Parliament have now begun taking this issue seriously. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has put up a website on this problem of forced marriages, giving links to groups and helplines run by people, including former victims, who have specific experience in the field. Annually, the FCO’s Forced Marriage Unit website receives about 5,000 inquiries and currently helps about 400 victims; some British diplomatic missions abroad have taken victims into safe custody for repatriation to the United Kingdom. Legislation raises awkward issues. Although forced marriage itself is not a British criminal offence, the violent actions that often ensue are criminal offences, and any non-consensual sex is of course rape. Many victims have pointed out that they would not have been forced into marriage by their parents had forcible marriage been made a criminal offence. Yet there is the concern that if the practice is made a criminal offence, it would not be eliminated but only go underground, preventing legal action against this abhorrent trend. Hence the British government has proceeded cautiously in this regard. The English Forced Marriages (Civil Protection) Act 2007 is only a civil measure. But the pressure to take firm action is building. Visa regulations for young married people from abroad joining British spouses have been tightened. The British Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee has suggested that the subjects of forced marriages and honour killings be made a compulsory part of the sex and relationships curriculum in schools. Other agencies in the U.K. are now becoming aware of this problem. But this awareness must translate into concerted efforts to stop forced marriages, which are nothing but the criminal abuse of hapless women. 6 months ago

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Tooth decay prevalent among Alaska native children Sep 23, 2011, 7:36 a.m. By Yereth Rosen ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Native Alaskan children living in remote villages have rates of tooth decay about four times the national average, a government study showed. Lack of fluoridated water and an abundance of sugary, carbonated soda pop were the major reasons cited in the research that tracked dental health of children in the mostly Yupik Eskimo region of southwestern Alaska. Dr. Brad Whistler, Alaska state oral health director and a co-author of the study, said children need major dental work. "When they smile, you see a lot of silver teeth," he said. Such severe decay sets up children to have serious dental problems as adults, Whistler said. One reason for the high level of tooth decay is poor water-system infrastructure in many Alaska Native villages, which prevents the fluoridation of drinking water that has helped lower rates of tooth decay. In some villages that were part of the study, residents must haul water home from central pumps, he said. Even those places with more sophisticated systems are likely to lack fluoride in drinking water, because few qualified technicians are available to work in such far-flung locations and install the necessary equipment. The other major problem is the erosion of the traditional Native diet with the introduction of food laden with sugar, Whistler said. The study, by the federal Centers for Disease Control and the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, analyzed 2008 dental records and habits of 348 children between the ages of four and 15. (Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Cynthia Johnston)

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How to do just that particularly in the Virgin Islands was on display Tuesday at Good Hope School as the St. Croix Environmental Association sponsored its second Environmental Science Career Expo in partnership with the V.I. Network of Environmental Educators. The goal of the event was to enable middle school and high school students to learn about the career path choices, work experience and skills required to attain jobs in science and technological fields with representatives from private enterprises, government and nonprofit agencies participated. “We want to get kids excited about science. We live on a small piece of land and are surrounded by the ocean and we have to take care of it,” said St. Croix Environmental Association spokeswoman Lynnea Roberts. “Beyond that, we want kids to be excited about college and going to study science,” she said. “There is a lot of science going on around the island that is sort of undercover and a lot of people don’t know about it.” Roberts said she hopes to put on two more of these career fairs later this year at both Central and Complex High Schools. Marcia Taylor of the University of the Virgin Islands’ Center for Marine and Environmental Studies said she was there to recruit the future. “We want more young people going into careers related to the marine environment,” Taylor said. “We want to get more local students trained so they can take the jobs here in their home.” “There are a lot of opportunities down here and it would be great if people that lived here could benefit from that,” Taylor said. She said graduates of the program, if they’ve wanted to stay and work in the territory, have had success in finding careers here. She also noted the same marine issues Roberts mentioned — overfishing and ocean acidification. She said future job prospects in these fields would be plentiful for those interested in learning how to manage those problems and mitigate the effects of them, especially as they pertain to the V.I. coral reef systems. “There are more federal dollars being spent down here because we realize we’re on the brink of losing an incredible resource. There’s more grants related to that, more people studying it and that’s an area where there’s more money being pumped in all the time.” As students wandered from booth to booth learning about the work of those participating organizations, some teachers were even collaborating with agency representatives in the hopes of doing hands on work inside the classroom at a later date. Leila Muller of the V.I. Energy Office and teacher Sarah Christiansen of AZ Academy were just one example as they were planning renewable energy demonstrations for Christiansen’s fifth- and eighth-grade science students. “This is the future, right here,” Christiansen said, pointing at some solar energy demonstrations. “Kids need to know what the future is going to be like and need to prepare for the future and what types of jobs and careers will be available.” Muller said, “We’re also going to be doing more sustainable buildings and green buildings,” adding that’s where the future is. “And we want the young minds to know what opportunities there are in the field of energy.” AZ Academy sophomores Conrad Yanez and Rick Beggs said they came away from the event with more environmental knowledge of how to protect St. Croix and with a possible goal to attain in the future. “I might be interested in the science part of it,” Beggs said. “Maybe one day I’ll come up with a new way to protect corals.” “I think I might be a marine biologist, maybe mangroves or something like that,” Yanez added. “I like working in places like Salt River. It’s pretty interesting.”

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Elements | Blogs Wednesday, September 7, 2011 Is There Oxygen in Space? Yes, this summer astronomers using the Herschel Telescope identified oxygen molecules in space. They found these molecules in the Orion nebula, 1,344 light years away. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe. Until now, scientists have only seen individual oxygen atoms in space. We do not breathe individual oxygen atoms, but rather oxygen molecules. (A molecule is a group of atoms banded together and it is the smallest unit of chemical compound that can take part in a chemical reaction.) Oxygen molecules make up 20% of the air we breathe. Scientists theorize that the oxygen molecules were locked up in water ice that... Thursday, March 10, 2011 I'm Atoms (Scientific Cover of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours) Here in Chicago it has been gray for the last three weeks – no sun, just melting snow and rain. This song made our day. It has sunshine, great music and atoms! The lyrics include fabulous lines such as: “Atoms bond together to form molecules Most of what’s surrounding me and you…” This science verse has been set to the music of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours”. This is a must watch! Saturday, February 26, 2011 The Deep Carbon Observatory Here at SuperSmart Carbon, we love learning about carbon. Apparently, we are not alone. There is a project being launched called the Deep Carbon Observatory that is being funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The purpose of this group is to study carbon deep inside the earth. Carbon makes up somewhere from 0.7% to 3.2% of the earth’s elements. We know that there is carbon trapped under the earth’s crust, but we don’t know how much. The Deep Carbon Observatory is going to study how much carbon there is in the earth and what happens to it. Another question is what form is the... Friday, February 25, 2011 Where does gas come from? Carbon! (We always love it when the answer is carbon.) The gas we use to power our cars comes from decomposing organic matter. What does that mean? All life has carbon in it -- this includes everything living from you and me to zebras, tapeworms, tulips and seaweed. Since all living things have carbon in them, they are referred to as organic matter. Non-organic matter includes things like rocks, water and metals. When something organic dies, it goes into the earth’s surface. For example, when a leaf falls off a tree, it settles on the ground. Over the next months, it slowly rots and... Friday, February 11, 2011 How to Name an Element After Yourself Here on the SuperSmart Carbon blog, I will talk about the elements a lot because "Carbon" is an element. SuperSmart Carbon is a blue guy with a green hat and in this blog, he looks like he is 1 1/2 inches high. He has two rings around him with six yellow spheres. Although cute, SuperSmart Carbon does not exactly look like elements in the real world. Elements are really, really, small. You cannot see them with the naked eye, or even with a microscope. Although you can't see elements, they are all around you. Everything is made up of elements: the computer you are reading this blog on, the table the computer sits on, the air you...

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Politically incorrect? What does this mean? Definitions can include something that is potentially offensive to a particular group of people or disregarding political correctness. Should elected officals be held to at least an equal if not higher standard? This is my story. It began in a crowded room at a political event this past week. It started as a civil conversation. I asked an elected offical, "What items can be voted on by paper ballot? It sure seems like that would not be a form of transparent, representative government." That discussion struck a nerve with the elected official. It seemed like hell unleashed its fury on me that night. "F" bombs spewed from the elected official's mouth like ash and flames spew from a volcano. Feeling offended, I asked the volcano to quit spewing its fury. Only after a second elected official enouraged the volcano to stop, did the "F" bombs cease. If my objective question illicits that type of response, it begs the larger question of this elected official's integrity and respect for common sense and decency.

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At NIDA's last Drug Facts Chat Day, Razorfang asked this question: "can you get viruses from drugs?" The answer to this might surprise you. Although you can't get viruses directly from drugs, using drugs can increase your chances of catching a virus like HIV (the virus that causes AIDS). In fact, behaviors associated with drug abuse are one of the biggest factors in the spread of HIV across the US. That's because drugs can mess up your judgment and lead to bad decisions—bad decisions like unsafe sex. And risky sex can lead to more than pregnancy. It can also lead to becoming infected with HIV or other sexually transmitted viruses.

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Tutorials - GRANTS WORKSHOP Resources for History & Social Studies Teachers Resources and Links compiled and annotated by SALEM in History staff. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institution Grants Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum The Roosevelt Presidential Library provides grants of up to $2500 for research in their archives on the Roosevelt Era. See website for application and deadlines. This page of the H-Net website includes a listing of upcoming grant deadlines. Grants for Individuals Michigan State University The MSU library website has a large list of grants available to individuals in a number of areas, including history and education. Kennedy Library Research Grants John F. Kennedy Presidential Library The JFK Library offers several grants for researchers utilizing the collections of the library. Although preference is given for PhD candidates, all proposals are welcome. Stipends range from $500 to $2500. See website for details. Local Cultural Council Program Massachusetts Cultural Council Through the MCC Local Cultural Council Program, cities and towns make grant money available for arts and education programs in their communities. The website has a list of contacts for local cultural councils. The Millipore Foundation funds programs including educational institutions and programs with an emphasis on grades K through 12 and culture. Presidential Libraries Grants National Archives & Records Administration Funding is available from private foundations for research in several presidential libraries, including the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in New York and the Herbert Hoover Library in Iowa. Grants range from $500 to $2500. Rogers Family Foundation The Rogers Family Foundation was funded by the owners of Eagle-Tribune Publishing Company. They fund programs in the area of historical preservation, education and youth development, among others. Save Our History Grants The History Channel offers grants up to $10,000 for schools to partner with local history organizations on projects that work to preserve local history. See website for application details and deadlines. Associated Grant Makers Associated Grant Makers is an organization connecting non-profit and philanthropic organizations. Their Boston office has a library of grant resources and offers classes on grant research and writing (some are free). There is also free public access to many of AGM’s resources at the Lowell Telecommunications Corporation at 246 Market Street, Lowell (http://www.ltc.org). Boston Public Library The Boston Public Library Social Sciences Department in Copley Square has a collection of material for grant researchers and writers, including grant directories and guides to proposal writing. The Foundation Center website has information on grant seeking and grant writing, and much of the material is free. Provides a free database of grants that can be searched by keyword and funding agency. Salem State College The Salem State College Grants Office provides grant research and writing support to SSC faculty, staff and students. The Grants Office website has a list of resources, grants databases, proposal writing guides and a glossary of grants terminology. The website also has a list of upcoming grants deadlines. “A Teacher’s Guide to Fellowships and Awards” Massachusetts Department of Education This is an online guide to fellowships and awards available to teachers in Massachusetts. Included is a section on history/social studies. Of particular interest: - Ellender Fellowships, for high school teachers to travel to Washington, D.C. with their students. - FASSE General Grant, for innovative projects in social studies education. - Geraldine R. Dodge Curriculum Design Award in History, for grade 7-12 innovative history curriculum design. - Outstanding Social Studies Teacher of the Year Awards. - Taft Seminars for Teachers, advanced courses in American constitutional government for teachers. - TORCH Programs, one week summer institutes for middle and high school teachers. Also on the DOE website is information on the following Educator Recognition Programs (http://www.doe.mass.edu/eq/recognition): - George Washington Teachers’ Institute, a one-week study program held at Mount Vernon. - Preserve American History Teacher of the Year. Christa McAuliffe Reach for the Stars Award National Council for the Social Studies Grants of up to $1,500 to assist social studies classroom teachers in developing and implementing imaginative, innovative, and illustrative social studies teaching strategies; and supporting student implementation of innovative social studies, citizenship projects, field experiences, and community connections. C-SPAN Teacher Fellowships The C-SPAN Teacher Fellowships bring middle and high school teachers who use material from the C-SPAN online archives in their classroom to Washington, D.C. to share their lessons with other educators. National Endowment for the Humanities The NEH offers fellowships for primary and secondary school teachers to conduct full-time advanced research in the humanities. See the website for instructions and deadlines. James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellowships James Madison Fellowships are granted to a select group of individuals desiring to become outstanding teachers of the American Constitution. The Boston Athenaeum offers up to eight month-long fellowships to conduct research in their collections. Research may be used to develop curriculum and programs, and secondary school teachers are invited to apply. Stipends of up to $1,500 are provided for selected applicants. See the website for details and restrictions. Massachusetts Historical Society The Massachusetts Historical Society offers two summer fellowships for K-12 teachers. They each provide a $4000 stipend for one month of research to prepare primary source-based curricula based on material in the MHS collections. The Adams Teacher Fellowship requires the use of the Adams Family Papers (http://www.masshist.org/adams). The Swensrud Teacher Fellowship is available for projects using any primary sources in the MHS collections. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SEMINARS & INSTITUTES Civil War Teachers Institute The Civil War Preservation Trust runs a free Civic War Teachers Institute for grade 4-12 teachers. Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of American History summer workshops for teachers are offered across the country during the summer. They are designed to facilitate learning about particular aspects of American history through the study of primary sources and the interpretation of historical sites. K-12 teachers are eligible to apply for workshops. If selected, applicants receive a stipend of $500 to help cover travel, living expenses and books. See the website for an updated list of summer workshops and application details. Summer Seminars for Teachers Gilder Lehrman Institute The Gilder Lehrman Institute (in NYC) runs week-long summer seminars for teachers of history. Seminars are taught by scholars from universities across the country. Tuition is free and accepted teachers receive books, housing and a $500 stipend. See website for upcoming topics, applications and deadlines. Supreme Court Institutes and Seminars Supreme Court Historical Society & Street Laws, Inc. “The Institutes and Seminars are designed to help teachers grow professionally by deepening their knowledge about the Supreme Court and learning innovative teaching methods to help students master standards-based content related to the Court and its cases.” Teacher Resource Center Organization of American Historians This website provides information about publications, resources and activities for history teachers. Includes links to the OAH Magazine of History, recommended reading, conferences and professional development opportunities.

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Painting, artists and art (technique, of all times) Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface. In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete. Paintings may be decorated with gold leaf, and some modern paintings incorporate other materials including sand, clay, and scraps of paper. What Is Painting? is the fourth in a series of installations drawn from the Museum's collection of contemporary art. It presents a selection of artworks made since approximately 1965, including a number of recent acquisitions and many works displayed for the first time since the Museum's reopening. A variety of responses to the question "What is painting?" are proposed in loose chronological sequence, ranging from ironic to sincere; from figurative to abstract; and from an embrace and creative reimagining of painting's possibilities to a critical engagement with its limits. The installation's title derives from John Baldessari's eponymous painting of 1966–68 (with the addition of a question mark), acknowledging the ongoing debates over the practice of painting and its place within contemporary art. Painting is a mode of expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, composition or abstraction and other aesthetics may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature...wikipedia

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September 3rd, 2012 03:56 PM ET The Empowered Patient is a regular feature from CNN Senior Medical News Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen that helps put you in the driver's seat when it comes to health care. While there's no ironclad way to keep hantavirus away, there are steps you can take to minimize the chances that it will hurt you or your family. The virus is relatively rare: Only 602 cases have been reported in the United States since 1993, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recently, six cases of hantavirus were reported among people who visited Yosemite National Park in California. Two of those infected people died. However, it's very deadly: About half of all people who get hantavirus die of it, according to the National Institutes of Health. Though some people do get it from camping, such as the recent Yosemite cases, many more people contract hantavirus in their own homes, according to the CDC. The virus is spread by rodent droppings and urine. Here are some tips from the CDC and NIH for keeping hantavirus at bay: 1. Seal holes inside and outside your home to keep rodents out. 2. Trap rodents around your home. 3. While camping, sleep on ground cover and a pad. 4. When opening an unused cabin, open all doors and windows. Leave for 30 minutes, and when you return, spray disinfectant and then leave for another 30 minutes. 5. Know the signs: Early symptoms include chills, fever and muscle aches. Within one or two days, it becomes hard to breathe. September 3rd, 2012 03:00 PM ET We all know stress is bad for you, but just how bad? It would be unethical to intentionally subject people to extreme psychological duress in the name of science. But ongoing military operations offer opportunities to see what happens to people exposed to stressful situations. Researchers in the Netherlands found the brains of soldiers who go into combat show impairment in function and structure upon returning, but that these effects largely go away over time. About this blog Get a behind-the-scenes look at the latest stories from CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and the CNN Medical Unit producers. They'll share news and views on health and medical trends - info that will help you take better care of yourself and the people you love.

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Turning Of The Tide At Tonle Sap Tonle Sap is an interesting body of fresh water. Certain times of the year, it is a lake and other times of the year it is a river. During the dry season (November-May) the water drains into the Mekong in Phnom Penh creating a river and when the monsoon season hits (June-October), the flow of water reverses back and forms a lake. The lake/river hybrid is also an important element of Cambodia because of the area’s rich diversity of ecological life and the water’s importance to the villagers in the area. Bon Om Thong or the Khmer Water Festival is celebrated during late October or early November’s full moon when the water reverses its flow. For three days, the towns and villages along the river, including Phnom Penh bursts into life with fleets of luminously decorated boats filling Tonle Sap. Celebrations also happen in Angkor Wat, although smaller in scale it is still impressive, with the temple serving as a scenic backdrop. The highlights of the festival are the boat races that draw huge crowds from all over and are contested by hundreds of boats comprising thousands of paddlers.The festival itself has ancient roots. Angkorian kings would hold competitions and see who the greatest warriors were. You can compare this competition to a joust in Europe as a means of training and a contest under the king’s watchful eye. Bon Om Thong also has spiritual significance. People would pray and thank the river for providing water, fertile land, and fish. Being around Tonle Sap around this time is an excellent time to discover Cambodia and join the locals in the biggest celebration of the year. * * * * * Published on 11/12/09

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Gallup has conducted an expansive survey in an attempt to determine how many people openly identify as a member of the LGBT community across the United States. While the difference between specific states was not particularly significant, research Gary Gates points out that the findings do show that states with more protections for LGBT people tend to have more out LGBT people: In general, states where residents express more liberal views are more accepting of LGBT individuals, while socially conservative areas are less accepting. Of the 10 states and D.C. where at least 4% of respondents identified as LGBT, seven are among the most liberal states in the country. Conversely, six of 10 states with the lowest percentage of LGBT-identified adults are among the top 10 conservative states in the country. The states with proportionally larger LGBT populations generally have supportive LGBT legal climates. With the exception of South Dakota, all of the states that have LGBT populations of at least 4% have laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and allow same-sex couples to marry, enter into a civil union, or register as domestic partners. Of the 10 states with the lowest percentage of LGBT adults, only Iowa has such laws. With demographics, it’s always important to keep in mind that the number represents something very specific: the number of people who are willing to disclose their identity to an anonymous pollster. It doesn’t represent the number of people who are actually gay but don’t want to tell a pollster, who don’t yet know that they’re gay, who deny that they’re gay, or who don’t identify as gay but do engage in same-sex behavior. Still, these numbers are telling. The health benefits of coming out are well documented, so in an indirect way, these results show that having laws that protect LGBT people not only protect them from discrimination, but support their mental health and well-being. Indeed, the value of such positive climates is arguably a more compelling conclusion from this study than the demographics themselves. Here’s how the states ranked in terms of how many people identified as LGBT:

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Factors affecting the development of food allergy Allergy to food is a common problem affecting up to 1 in 20 children and 1 in 30 adults. It causes a great deal of anxiety, and interference in daily activities especially shopping and mealtimes. This Chapter in the ‘Thought for Food’ book will address what food allergy is, which illnesse are caused by food allergy, whether food allergy is more commone than it used and why. It will also discuss how our body decides whether or not to make an allergic response to a food that we eat then? what sort of things might stop this from working properly? And what should I do to prevent my child from getting food allergy Author: Dr Robert Boyle, Clinical Senior Lecturer in Paediatric Allergy at Imperial College London

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|12/7/1941 - World War II: Attack On Pearl Harbor - The Imperial Japanese Navy attacks the US Pacific Fleet and its defending Army Air Forces and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Pearl Harbor was one of those watershed events in history that would make an impression on everyone whether they were there or not. The link is a page about Pearl Harbor presented by the Eye Witness to History site, where historical events are explored using interviews and reporting of statements from eyewitnesses. This site is always a good place to go to get a little more personal with your history. Attack At Pearl Harbor, 1941 World War Cycle - Depression / World War II Era - Fourth Turning, Crisis (1930-1944) b. 12/7/1873 - Willa Cather, American novelist (d. April 24, 1947) Last year (12/7/2005): Nobel Prize in Literature winner Harold Pinter accuses Britain and the United States of engaging in state terrorism in Iraq and demands the prosecution of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. This Week's News / Tomorrow's History (12/6/2006): The Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan group chartered by the United States Congress, states that the situation in Iraq is "grave and deteriorating" and calls for a change in strategy including the removal of most United States troops by early 2008. View prior History Today posts.

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An economist who put a premium on truth: Obituary of Leonid Hurwicz Financial Times comment, 19 July 2008 Leonid Hurwicz, the economist who last year became the oldest person ever to win a Nobel prize, helped transform economic thinking in the second half of the 20th century. For years economists had been passionately debating the rival merits of state planning versus free markets. In both systems, people had incentives to lie to bureaucratic planners or to employers about their interests, their skills or their circumstances. “Leo”, who has died at the age of 90, founded the field of “mechanism design”, a new way of thinking which focused on giving people incentives to tell the truth and to do so in a way that would benefit society as a whole. His mechanism design idea has applications in a range of practical areas, from the design of computer networks and voting systems to arbitration rules. The debate between state planning and free markets must have seemed far from academic to Hurwicz. His parents were Polish Jews who fled the Kaiser’s invading army, going to Moscow, where Hurwicz was born in 1917. They returned to Poland in a horse-drawn wagon to escape the Bolsheviks when he was two. He went to the University of Warsaw and took a degree in law, though he also studied piano at the conservatory. Throughout his life Hurwicz was a renaissance man whose interests included music, linguistics, maths, physics and meteorology. Yet as a student his interest was kindled in economics. He went to London to study and then, via Geneva, to the US, where he arrived in 1940. His parents and his brother joined him but only after fleeing another invading German army – this time the Nazis – and then spending time in Soviet labour camps. On his travels, Hurwicz had studied under both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who was at the London School of Economics as Hurwicz began his PhD studies there in 1938. Von Mises and Hayek argued that a centrally planned economy was doomed to collapse: because every individual knew his own needs and capabilities best, government planners could never hope to piece it all together and make sensible decisions. Other economists, such as Oskar Lange, disagreed. A burgeoning economic theory of competitive markets, and bitter experience of the failings of socialist economies, led many to conclude that von Mises and Hayek were right. Hurwicz was more interested in advancing the debate than declaring victory. “Panaceas are not to be found at either end of the spectrum,” he wrote in 1984. He agreed with Hayek and von Mises that a bureaucrat who simply demanded results would be met with slacking, budgetpadding and lies. But rather than giving up, Hurwicz attacked the problem directly. He asked what “mechanisms” an intelligent but ill-informed planner might use to extract information from others and then allocate resources fairly, efficiently or profitably. Such mechanisms are as old as trade itself, most obviously the auction, in which even an ignorant seller can expect a good price. But Hurwicz laid the foundations for thinking systematically about designing mechanisms, defining all the terms rigorously and showing what might be possible. Hurwicz described a mechanism as a kind of “message centre”, where market participants would submit information, true or false, and a pre-specified set of rules would adjudicate the result. That abstract description is a perfect account of an Ebay auction: a seller sets a minimum bid, a time limit and perhaps a reserve price, while bidders submit bids that may bear no resemblance to the true value they place on the prize. EBay is just one example of a message centre; Hurwicz showed that it was useful to think about many economic institutions in this way. Participants in a mechanism can always lie. A keen buyer can pretend to be an indifferent one; a brilliant worker can conceal his laziness. Hurwicz realised that in order to get a better bid from the keenest buyer, for example, the seller must give that buyer a reason to tell the truth. Similarly, an employer cannot persuade the ablest worker to work just as hard as the rest unless the extra effort brings extra rewards. The general problem of persuading the “best” agents to act differently from the rest is called the “incentive compatibility constraint”. One example would be an auction where the highest bidder wins but only has to pay the second highest bid. This strange-sounding rule is all it takes to persuade the keenest bidder to tell the truth about the real value he places on the prize. EBay uses a similar rule. Although Hurwicz studied with the greats of the field – including Nicholas Kaldor at the LSE, and Paul Samuelson – he never had an economics degree. “Whatever economics I learned, I learned by listening and learning,” he said, after winning the Nobel prize. A warm and charming man, he had an impish wit. Once, a seminar speaker wrote an equation on the board, declared that the proof was “obvious” and stared around, daring anyone to challenge him. “Is that proof by intimidation?” Hurwicz quipped. He joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1951 and stayed there all his working life, even as his reputation outstripped the department’s. “Self- promotion was completely alien to him,” said John Roberts, a professor at Stanford. “He could have moved and he chose not to.” He travelled widely, spending time as a visiting professor at many universities, including stints in Bangalore, Tokyo and Beijing. A long-time member of the Minnesota Democrats, he supported the anti-Vietnam war candidacy of Eugene McCarthy and sat as a delegate at the party’s national convention in 1968. He remained involved in the party up until his death. Some felt he should have won the Nobel prize sooner. He was not outwardly perturbed. “I never had the impression that the wait bothered him,” said Eric Maskin, who shared the prize with Hurwicz and Roger Myerson. He is survived by his wife, Evelyn Jensen – they married in 1944 – and their two sons and two daughters.

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Molybdenum is a trace element found in a wide variety of foods. Foods that grow above ground - such as peas, leafy vegetables (including broccoli and spinach) and cauliflower - tend to be higher in molybdenum than meat and foods that grow below the ground, such as potatoes. Foods particularly high in molybdenum include nuts, tinned vegetables, and cereals such as oats. How much do I need?You should be able to get all the molybdenum you need from your daily diet. What does it do?It helps make and activate some of the enzymes involved in repairing and making genetic material. What happens if I take too much?Some evidence suggests taking molybdenum supplements might cause joint pain. There isn't enough evidence to know what the effects might be of taking molybdenum supplements. What is FSA advice?You should be able to get all the molybdenum you need by eating a varied and balanced diet. The molybdenum we get from food isn't likely to be harmful.

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It's easy at first glance to envision the Caribbean islands as all being the same sunny, sandy vacation destinations, but they are different in as many ways as they are similar. Just as political and economic factors determine the personality of the islands, so do various landforms that may, or may not, be shared from island to island. The islands of the Caribbean, like all other islands, have water that surrounds them on every side. Individual islands and groups of islands belong to various nations. Puerto Rico and the American Virgin Islands belong to the United States. Among the territories of Britain are Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands. The islands range widely in size, with Cuba being the largest, followed by Hispaniola and Jamaica. Many of the smaller islands are uninhabited. Some of the uninhabited islands, such as the Isla de Ratones just off the shore of Puerto Rico, are available for day trips and are reached by ferries, boats or kayaks. The larger islands of the Caribbean have enough land space to support rivers. Hispaniola has four primary rivers: Yaque del Norte, Yuna River, Yaque del Sur and the Artibonite River. Cuba's important rivers are the Rio Cauto, which is the longest, Rio Almendares and Rio Yurimi. Smaller rivers contribute to these three main rivers. The Grande de Arecibo is Puerto Rico's longest river. This river, along with several others such as the Cibuco, Loiza and La Plata, run north. One river runs westward: the Grande de Añasco. The Bahamas have no rivers. Many of the Caribbean islands have mountainous areas. Most of Puerto Rico's mountains are located on the island's interior. Jamaica has mountains that cover almost all of its surface. The Dry Harbour Mountains run east-west along the northern part of the island, with the Blue Mountains on the east. Cuba is not a very mountainous country, but it has a few mountain ranges. The Sierra Maestra in Cuba are on the easternmost diagonal coastline, and the Cordillera de Guaniguanico is on the west coast. The Grupo Guamuhaya are in the center and south-center of the island. Because the Caribbean consists of islands, one of the prevalent landforms is the beach. Temperate weather and access to sand and surf have helped the Caribbean islands thrive as tourist destinations. The sand on the beaches of the Caribbean come in many different colors. Beaches in Bermuda and the Bahamas are known for their pink sands, formed by the shells of certain tiny sea creatures. Some Caribbean beaches are the result of volcanic matter breaking down. Black sand is not as smooth as typical white, tan or pink sand, and many black sand beaches are pebble beaches. These beaches are found on Montserrat, St. Kitts and Granada, among others. Salt flats form when salt water evaporates, leaving the salt behind on large, flat areas of land. The salt flats of Puerto Rico, located in the Cabo Rojo region in the southwest part of the island, are protected as a part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge. Another place in the Caribbean that has salt flats is the small island of Bonaire. The salt is harvested from the flats that lie on the southern tip of the island, but a portion of the salt flats of Bonaire is set aside as a sanctuary for flamingos. The central coastline is the tourist area of Bonaire which is a frequent port of call for Caribbean cruise ships. - World Atlas: Caribbean Landforms - Cabo Rojo Puerto Rico: Isla de Ratones - Hispaniola.com: Geography of the Dominican Republic - Havana-Guide.com: Major Rivers in Cuba - Welcome to Puerto Rico: Geography of Puerto Rico - The Bahamas Guide: Bahamas Geography and Geology - Sol Boricua: Geography of Puerto Rico - Geography and History of Jamaica: Physical Features - Hicuba.com: Geography of Cuba - Caribbean Magazine: Types of Caribbean Beaches--White, Pink and Black - DC Productions/Photodisc/Getty Images

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Teaching Strategies: Effective Discussion Leading While lecturing is a fast and direct way to communicate a body of knowledge, discussion encourages students to discover solutions for themselves and to develop their critical thinking abilities. They learn how to generate ideas, consider relevant issues, evaluate solutions, and consider the implications of these solutions. Thus, although discussion is not as efficient as lecture in conveying facts, it helps students learn how to think better and more clearly about the facts that they should learn from their reading and their lectures. Leading a discussion, however, offers its own set of challenges: participants can spend too much time exploring small, sometimes irrelevant issues, forget that they are progressing toward an identifiable goal, and become bored. The leader must guide the conversation carefully without stifling creativity and students' initiative and without surrendering to some students' desire for answers that they can write down and memorize. Here are four strategies that can help faculty and TAs encourage students explore issues themselves: We all know that creating a fine lecture requires research and planning; we sometimes forget that leading a good discussion requires the same research and planning and demands spontaneous responses in the classroom. The beauty of the extra demand is that developing the skills for intervening and directing discussions leads to exciting, productive exchanges that help students learn to think clearly and creatively, while simultaneously inspiring you to teach more thoroughly and carefully. "Discussions: Leading and Guiding, but Not Controlling," The Teaching Professor VI, 8 [October 1992].)

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February 11, 2011 > Low Fat Doesn't Have to Mean Low Flavor Low Fat Doesn't Have to Mean Low Flavor Lunch and Learn Cooking Demonstration Focuses on Heart Healthy Options In an ideal world, steamed broccoli and that slice of cheesecake in the refrigerator would have the same amount of calories and fat. Sadly, in the real world, that's just not the case. To stay healthy, we have to watch what we eat, and every day decisions we make regarding our diet can have an enormous impact-on a lot of things... The pounds on the scale, our waistline, how much energy we have, and our heart health. According to data published on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)'s Web site, the most common heart disease in the United States is coronary heart disease, which often appears as a heart attack. In 2010, an estimated 785,000 Americans had a new coronary attack, and about 470,000 had a recurrent attack. That means every 25 seconds, an American will have a coronary event, and about one every minute will die from one. Not surprisingly, heart disease represents the No. 1 cause of death in the United States. For both men and women. And although heart disease is sometimes thought of as a "man's disease," women account for nearly 50 percent of heart disease deaths, the CDC states. When it comes to risk factors for heart disease, there are some things we can't change, such as our gender, age and genetics. Other things we can. Making sustainable lifestyle changes, like eating a low fat diet, has been shown to help lower the risk of heart disease. But changing old habits isn't as easy as snapping our fingers, is it? Nutrition labels on our favorite foods can be hard to decode-and what about those recipes that call for things like butter, cream cheese and sour cream? Are they banished forever? On Wednesday, Feb. 16, Anna Mazzei, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator at Washington Hospital, will be whipping up a Low Fat Cooking Demonstration at the Washington Women's Center to help participants get an idea of how to modify their cooking and eating habits. "National Heart Month is recognized in February, and one of the things that people love are foods that are typically high in fat," Mazzei says. "The question is: how do we get the same satisfaction without as much fat?" During her demonstration, Mazzei says she won't be going for an all or nothing approach because, to be successful, it's more about being creative than cutting out anything and everything. "Now in the marketplace there are lighter products available," she says. "You don't have to go to nonfat, but probably to lighter products to help cut down some fat and calories." Items that are high in fat-like a slice of cheesecake-also pack in the calories with little nutritional reward in the form of essential vitamins and minerals. Whereas a serving of broccoli runs you about 25 calories, the same quantity of cheesecake is more like 250 calories. "I'm going to look at some of the highest fat items and how to scale them down," Mazzei explains. "We're going to do some taste testing and focus on how to take these things and make a satisfying, yet lighter version." Examples of items Mazzei is going to sample during the food demonstration include: * Fried chicken * Chicken nuggets * Recipes with butter and cream cheese Another great way to improve heart health-and something goes hand in hand with a low fat diet-is exercise. If you missed the evening Exercise for Your Health class at the Women's Center earlier this month, call to find out about the center's range of fitness classes, from gentle yoga to the official Arthritis Foundation's official exercise program. If you're interested in learning more about how to create a tasty, low-fat diet, join Mazzei for her Lunch and Learn cooking demonstration at the Washington Women's Center Conference Room on Wednesday, Feb. 16, from noon to 1 p.m.* The Washington Women's Center is located at 2500 Mowry Ave., Suite 150. *Space is limited to 20 participants. To register, (800) 963-7070 or go online at www.whhs.com/womenscenter For more information about exercise programs and other services at the Women's Center, call (510) 608-1301 or toll-free at (866) 608-1301. Learn More About Heart Health Washington Hospital physicians Dr. Jon-Cecil Walkes, cardiothoracic surgeon and Dr. Michael Parmley, internal medicine, will discuss prevention and treatment of coronary heart disease at a free seminar on Tuesday, February 15. The seminar will be held from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Conrad E. Anderson, M.D. Auditorium located at 2500 Mowry Avenue (Washington West) in Fremont. You can register online at www.whhs.com

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Here are the basics about the Boy Scouts of America: Boy Scouts of America or BSA Founded on 8 February 1910, in Washington, DC, by Chicago publisher William Boyce Chartered by the US Congress in 1916 (a few other youth programs have congressional charters, including the Civil Air Patrol , Girl Scouts of the USA , the Boys & Girls Clubs of America , Future Farmers of America [??], and 4-H [??]) Headquarters in Irving, Texas (near Dallas) The BSA is the USA's only Boy Scouting organization recognized by the World Organization of the Scout Movement (many countries have several Scouting programs). The BSA actually provides the Scouting program to three countries: the US plus the Pacific island nations of the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, which are served by Hawaii's Aloha Council. The BSA is divided into about 300 local Councils. The BSA and its local Councils employ about 4000 full-time professional staff. The BSA is the second largest Scouting organization in the world (the largest is Indonesia). Total membership (from a March 2011 Fact Sheet on the BSA website, although its information varies slightly from other numbers on the BSA website) (12/31/2010) was 3 630 779 (2 588 326 youth and 1 042 453 adults). This does not include membership in the school-based Learning for Life subsidiary of the BSA, but does count 666 Lone Scouts and 43 310 adult Council Scouters. The BSA has four program divisions, three traditional Scouting programs based on grade or age, plus a fourth classroom-based non-traditional subsidiary: Cub Scouting Division (boys, grades 1 through 5) Members in grade 1 are called Tiger Cubs. Members in grades 2 and 3 are called Cub Scouts, and work on Wolf rank (grade 2) or Bear rank (grade 3). Members in grades 4 and 5 are called Webelos Scouts, and work on the Webelos rank and the Arrow of Light rank. Webelos Scouts usually graduate into Boy Scouting in about February of grade 5. The overall Cub Scouting program is family-centered, adult-run, and offers very little camping or outdoor activities. Adult leaders can be male or female, over age 21 (age 18-20 for certain assistant positions). The leader of the pack is the Cubmaster, and each den is led by an adult Den Leader. The only boy leadership position is Denner, rotated monthly among the den members, which consists mostly of helping the Den Leader and making a den report at the monthly pack meeting. As of 12/31/2010, Cub Scout youth membership included 226 211 Tiger Cubs, 707 868 Cub Scouts, and 573 522 Webelos Scouts, for a total of 1 507 601, a one-year loss of 7.8%. There are 47 259 packs, with an average size of 32 youth members. And there are 421 405 adult Cub Scout leaders. Boy Scouting Division (boys, age about 10-1/2 until 18) Two programs—Boy Scouting and Varsity Scouting Boy Scouting is traditional Scouting for boys age approximately 10-1/2 until 18. In addition to the general camping program for all Scouts, older Scouts in a troop can form a Venture patrol to do high adventure activities. Note that the troop's Venture patrol and Venturing (see below) are completely separate and unrelated programs, despite the confusingly similar names. Boy Scouts work on 6 ranks: Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life, Eagle. Eagle Scouts can also earn Eagle Palms, but these are not ranks. The overall Boy Scouting program is mostly boy-run with adults providing guidance and training, and is strongly oriented toward a camping and outdoor program. At about age 14, a Boy Scout can choose to remain in the troop, or transfer to a Varsity team, or transfer to a Venturing crew. Adult troop leaders can be male or female, over age 21 (age 18-20 for Assistant Scoutmasters). The adult leader of the troop is the Scoutmaster. The boy leader of the troop is the elected Senior Patrol Leader, and each patrol is led by an elected boy Patrol Leader. As of 12/31/2010, Boy Scouting membership included 792 202 youth members and 493 852 adult leaders. There are 40 099 troops, with an average size of 20 youth members. Varsity Scouting is a separate, optional, non-coed, and little-used program for boys age 14 until 18 (mostly used by the LDS/Mormon church). Varsity Scouts wear the same uniform as Boy Scouts (with slightly different insignia), and work on the same ranks. Varsity Scouts typically camp like Boy Scouts, and often compete in team sports. Adult team leaders can be male or female, over age 21 (age 18-20 for Assistant Coaches). The adult leader of the team is the Coach. The boy leader of the team is the elected Team Captain, and each squad is led by an elected squad leader. As of 12/31/2010, Varsity Scouting membership included 59 863 youth members and 22 806 adult leaders. There are 8539 teams, with an average size of only 7 youth members. As of 12/31/2010, overall youth membership in the Boy Scouting Division (Boy Scouts + Varsity Scouts) totaled 852 065, a one-year loss of 5.1%. Sea Scouting (formerly Sea Exploring) is part of the Venturing program. The former career-awareness Exporing program is now part of Learning for Life. Male Venturers can work on the same ranks as Boy Scouts (technically, they must earn the ranks through First Class as a member of a Boy Scout troop). In addition, all Venturers have their own advancement system, culminating with the Venturing Silver Award. And Sea Scouts have an additional advancement program, culminating with the Quartermaster award. BSA's Venturing Division is unusual compared to the equivalent programs in most other countries because high-school-aged young men have the option of being a Venturer, or they can remain in a Scout troop or join a Varsity team. There is no BSA program equivalent to the Rover programs available in some countries (for those over age 21). Adult leaders can be male or female, over age 21 (age 18-20 for associate Advisors). The adult leader is called the Venturing Advisor. The key youth leader of a Venturing crew is the elected crew President. As of 12/31/2010, Venturing youth membership totaled 227 994, a one-year loss of 11.4%. There are 18 856 crews, with an average size of 12 youth members. Female youth membership is 31% of the total. And there are 61 080 adult Venturing leaders. Two programs—Learning for Life (school-based programs) and Exploring (work-site-based program) Learning for Life is a non-traditional, coed, classroom-based character education program, with programs set up by grade: Seekers (K-grade 2) Discoverers (grades 3 and 4) Challengers (grades 5 and 6) Champions (special needs) Builders (grades 7 and 8) Navigators (high school) LFL members are not required to adhere to the Scout Oath or Law, and membership is open to any youth subject to the age restrictions. Exploring is the branch of Learning for Life that focuses on workplace-based and career-oriented interests for high-school-aged youth. Note that what was for many years called "Exploring" is now generally covered in the Venturing program. Goal is to help young people develop skills, positive attitudes, values, and career awareness. Learning for Life apparently no longer reports its membership numbers. Provides special leadership and emphasis to urban and rural Scouting programs in the Cub Scouting, Boy Scouting, and Venturing divisions Major focus on minority involvement in Scouting, with specific focuses on African Americans, Hispanic Americans/Latinos, and Asian Americans Names and Numbers While the Girl Scouts of the USA call all their units troops, the BSA identifies its units by the program they conduct: Cub Scouts belong to a pack, which is divided into several dens (at least one Tiger den, Wolf den, Bear den, first-year Webelos den, and second-year Webelos den). Webelos dens may also choose to call themselves patrols and adopt a patrol name instead of a den number. Boy Scouts belong to a troop, which is divided into several patrols. Varsity Scouts belong to a team, which is divided into several squads. Venturers belong to a crew, and Sea Scouts belong to a ship. Learning for Life participants belong to a group. Unit identification (pack, troop, etc) is more confusing in the US than in most countries. Outside the US, units usually are part of a Scouting "group". Each group would include one or more program "sections" such as a pack, a troop, and a crew. The group would have a number associated with its town or area (such as the 2nd Brixton Scout Group), and often all group members wear a common neckerchief. In the US, which doesn't use the "group" concept, each pack, troop, etc, is separately numbered, and there is no link to the unit's location. For example, in our town, there is a Pack 97 and a Troop 97, which are unrelated and meet at separate locations. And, since unit numbers are repeated in each of the 300+ local Scout Councils, there could be 300 (or more) Troop 97's in the US. Actually, due to the many Scout Council mergers over the past 25 years (there used to be over 500 Councils), some Councils (like ours) could have two Troop 97's.

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Dr.Gerstenfeld held this lecture on the 8th of November in Helsinki Finland. The summary of the lecture is republished here with the author’s consent. THE ABUSE OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY 2011-2012 Summary of Lecture in Helsinki 8 November 2012 By Manfred Gerstenfeld The Holocaust has become a symbol of absolute evil in Western society. This happened gradually over the past decades. It was not the case in say, 1960. Yet one might have expected that with the Second World War more than 65 years behind us, the mention and memory of it would fade away. Indeed, there is in many circles what is termed “Holocaust fatigue.” These people do not want to hear anything anymore about the Holocaust. At the same time, many others increasingly mention and discuss the Holocaust. It took 60 years until in 2005 the United Nations General Assembly named 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day, every member state of the UN has an official obligation to honor the victims of the Nazi era and develop educational material about the Holocaust. This year the remembrance of the Holocaust is devoted to children.1 Why this Interest in the Holocaust? What are the main reasons for this increasing interest in the Holocaust? We can identify some but do not know their relative weight. Memorial celebrations take place every year in many places. There are also new monuments still going up and new memorial centers are being inaugurated. One was at Drancy the major transit camp in France. There 63,000 of the 76,000 deported Jews transited before almost all of them were sent to their deaths. Yet both memorial days pass and monuments disappear from the public eye most of the time. New historical research is being published about the Holocaust. Additional documents are also discovered. One example among many was that in October 2012, pictures taken by Hitler’s personal photographer Hugo Jaeger, of Polish Jews in the ghetto of Kutno between 1939 and 1940 were released. This was done to mark the official establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940.2 Such research and discoveries are mentioned in the media. Thus they also play a role in the increased interest. The increasing central place of the Holocaust in European societies is also due to a number of other important developments. One is that European societies have become increasingly secular, which means that their common norms and values have to a large extent broken down. In such an ideological and moral vacuum, one seeks out standards many people more or less agree upon. The Holocaust partly fills that function. It plays a role as a defining moment in European history. The Holocaust touches upon very basic questions which many Europeans do not like to ask themselves explicitly. What was it in European culture and in European societies that made the Holocaust possible? This leads to a taboo question. Have the elements which made the Holocaust possible disappeared, or are they to some extent still with us? The first nations which should ask these questions are Germany and Austria. Yet at present they do not seem inclined to do so. The present generation is not responsible for what their ancestors did. However, the Holocaust and Nazism can not be eliminated from German history. I would like to phrase the question somewhat differently. Many of the ancestors of contemporary Germans and Austrians were Nazi enthusiasts. Many other Germans and Austrians went along with the Nazis without hesitation. Is it at all imaginable that nothing of these attitudes has remained in these countries today? Another element of importance for the increasing interest in the Holocaust is the growing uncertainty in the world. That requires more and more points of reference for events which take place almost daily. One example which has to be analyzed is the emergence of parties in European countries with many neo-fascist and neo-Nazi characteristics. This becomes problematic in particular if these parties enter Parliament. While the interest in the Holocaust is growing there is simultaneously also a massive increase in the distortion of the history and the memory of the Holocaust. To understand the abuse of the Holocaust in our days, we have to start looking at it by category. In my book, “The Abuse of Holocaust Memory, Distortions and Responses” I have developed eight categories of distortion. These are: Holocaust Justification and Promotion, Holocaust Denial, Holocaust Deflection and Whitewashing, De-Judaization, Holocaust Equivalence,Holocaust Inversion, i.e the Portraying of Israel and Jews as Nazis, Holocaust Trivialization and Obliterating Holocaust Memory The massive ongoing abuse of the Holocaust brings us to the question, what can be done about it? There is no single way to fight against the abuse of the Holocaust. Education is very important. So are memorials, monuments etc. The crucial point however remains not to let abuse of the Holocaust enter further in the public debate. It is a task for everybody to react when Israel is called a Nazi state and to call on governments to bring the Iranian leaders Grand Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before an international court because of their Holocaust promotion and to do the same with Hamas. This could be the beginning of a much wider struggle against Holocaust distortion.

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Gluten Free Facts What is gluten? Gluten is the protein found in wheat, barley, rye and related wheat species such as spelt and kamut. It helps baked goods keep their form and chewy texture and is also added to other food items more and more, both for consistency and taste purposes. Helpful Hint: Buckwheat, contrary to its name, is not actually wheat and does not contain gluten. What foods contain gluten? The obvious foods that contain gluten include foods made from a flour base. Wheat, barley, and rye based breads, cookies, pastries, and bagels all contain gluten. However, hidden sources of gluten are abundant in many packaged goods from soy sauce to spice mixes, to breath mints. More and more companies are voluntarily labeling their products as gluten free and some even go through a gluten free certification process. Here is a short list of foods that can have hidden gluten: - Luncheon meat - Blue cheese - Gravy and gravy powder - Baked beans - Self basting turkeys - Seasoning Mixes - Instant coffee - Brown rice syrup - Potato chips - Soy sauce - Hot Chocolate - Salad dressings - Curry powder - White pepper - Malt vinegar - Breath mints - Oats (while naturally gluten free, there is a risk of contamination through harvesting, milling, and processing; Udi’s only uses certified gluten free oats) (1) (2) For a full list of unsafe ingredients, click here: Who should eat a gluten free diet? Some people must eat a gluten free diet because they’ve been diagnosed with Celiac Disease or Gluten Sensitivity, in which the only cure is a gluten free diet. Others eat gluten free because they suspect gluten is causing them undesirable symptoms that they wish to avoid. Still others have learned that gluten can cause inflammation and therefore they seek to eliminate it from their diet. No matter what your situation, a gluten free lifestyle may be of benefit to you. Who can get Celiac Disease or have a Gluten Sensitivity? The short answer is: anyone. Some are more predisposed to have this disease or intolerance than others, especially if a family member has been diagnosed. It has been noted that northern European countries, specifically Nordic countries, as well as Italy and Ireland have a higher rate of Celiac Disease, and approximately 1 out of every 133 Americans have Celiac Disease. (7) What is Celiac Disease? Celiac Disease is an autoimmune disorder where gluten triggers the immune system to attack the lining of the small intestine. Over time, Celiac Disease can cause malabsorption, leading to a wide range of health problems such as iron and mineral deficiencies, osteoporosis, liver disease, infertility, neurological disorders, and even some forms of cancer. (3, 4) For more information, click here: Celiac Disease and Diabetes About 1% of the total population has celiac disease. It is more common in people with type 1 diabetes. An estimated 10% of people with type 1 diabetes also have celiac disease. For more information, click here: What is Gluten Anyway and Where Is It? By Danna Korn, Living Gluten Free for Dummies, 2nd edition Gluten has a couple of definitions; one is technically correct but not commonly used, and the other is commonly used but not technically correct. Here’s the common definition: Gluten is a mixture of proteins in wheat, rye, and barley. Oats don’t have gluten, but may be contaminated, so they’re forbidden on a strict gluten-free diet, too. You can find lots of information about what you can and can’t eat on a gluten-free diet at www.celiac.com or other websites. But you need to have a general idea of what kinds of food have gluten in them so you know what to avoid. Foods with flour in them (white or wheat) are the most common culprits when you’re avoiding gluten. The following are obvious gluten-glomming foods: - Cookies, cakes, and most other baked goods But along with these culprits come not-so-obvious suspects too, like licorice, many (read ‘most’) cereals, and natural flavorings. When you’re gluten-free, you get used to reading labels, calling manufacturers, and digging a little deeper to know for sure what you can and can’t eat. You have to do without these foods, but you really don’t have to do without. There’s a subtle but encouraging difference. Food manufacturers make delicious gluten-free versions of just about every food imaginable these days.

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Breaking the cycle of poverty More than one-third of the 242 counties in the Southeastern persistent poverty region are located in Georgia. Spanning from Athens-Clarke county to Miller to Troup, these counties are defined by statistics that boggle the mind, especially against the backdrop of Georgia's economic strength over the past decade: - 20.9 percent of the total population and 27.4 percent of children live below poverty level (defined as an income of $17,650 for a family of four); - 29.5 percent of residents age 25 and above do not have a high school diploma; - the unemployment rate is 7.1 percent, 40 percent higher than other Georgia counties; - the rate of low birth-weight babies is 25 percent higher than the national rate. "The data confirmed what I already knew about the region, but it was still startling to see the unevenness of growth and development," said Art Dunning, vice president for public service and outreach at UGA. "This is an economic issue, pure and simple." "What was a complete surprise to me was the disparity between rural Georgia and metropolitan Georgia," said Jim Ledbetter, director of the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at UGA, which conducted the study. "These problems have persisted for decades. We need both a body of knowledge and a set of programs built over the years to address these issues." U.S. Senator Zell Miller secured $250,000 in federal funding to help start the data collection on poverty in Georgia and other Southern states. Macon businessman Benjy Griffith matched that with a $250,000 gift to the UGA Foundation in support of the study. The year-long study, completed in December 2002, paints a stark picture of a region not only separated from the economic boom that metro Atlanta has enjoyed, but of a region which also threatens to draw the rest of Georgia into the cycle of poverty. "I've seen this problem up close," said Griffith, whose timberland and real estate business stretches from Georgia to Texas. "I believe UGA research can help develop a plan to address poverty in this state. Somebody has to do something." "We need a population which can fully participate in the 21st century and a community infrastructure which supports that population," said Ledbetter, looking ahead to the next phase of the study. "Then we can craft a set of policies and programs to address these issues." "This is not an issue of historical or social justice," Dunning said. "Those discussions don't get us anywhere. We need to take a detailed look at where we are, and then work together to improve Georgia."

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Jean Ritchie, folk singer and UK graduate, being presented the school's first Founders Day award by President Donovan. According to the April 4, 1944 Board of Trustees Minutes President Donovan recommend that the University celebrate the day of its founding. "Some time ago I requested Professor E. L. Gillis, who is probably as familiar with the history of the University as any man connected with it, to study various dates that might be considered as an appropriate date on which to celebrate a Founders Day Program. After considerable research, Professor Gillis has suggested that February 22 would be a very appropriate time for such a celebration. It was on February 22, 1865, that the General Assembly of Kentucky approved a bill establishing an Agricultural and Mechanical College in connection with Kentucky University (now Transylvania). Therefore, February 22, 1865 is the date on which the University of Kentucky actually came into existence as a state institution."

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Elementary Matrices Generate the General Linear Group Okay, so we can use elementary row operations to put any matrix into its (unique) reduced row echelon form. As we stated last time, this consists of building up a basis for the image of the transformation the matrix describes by walking through a basis for the domain space and either adding a new, independent basis vector or writing the image of a domain basis vector in terms of the existing image basis vectors. So let’s say we’ve got a transformation in . Given a basis, we get an invertible matrix (which we’ll also call ). Then we can use elementary row operations to put this matrix into its reduced row echelon form. But now every basis vector gets sent to a vector that’s linearly independent of all the others, or else the transformation wouldn’t be invertible! That is, the reduced row echelon form of the matrix must be the identity matrix. But remember that every one of our elementary row operations is the result of multiplying on the left by an elementary matrix. So we can take the matrices corresponding to the list of all the elementary row operations and write which tells us that applying all these elementary row operations one after another leads us to the identity matrix. But this means that the product of all the elementary matrices on the right is . And since we can also apply this to the transformation , we can find a list of elementary matrices whose product is . That is, any invertible linear transformation can be written as the product of a finite list of elementary matrices, and thus the elementary matrices generate the general linear group.

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From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia Heliocentrism is a theory which has become an established dogma in 21st century privately-funded science, despite having been abandoned in the 20th century, according to Conservapedia. Heliocentrism is the concept that a giant magnet is located in the center of the Earth, and the planets and the universe revolve around it, attracted by the magnetic energy. Heliocentrism is criticized for ignoring the everyday observations of mountain climbers and airplane travellers. It has been characterized by Sarah Palin as "a lie perpetrated by scientists to diminish the glory of America" and pushed onto the good, God-fearing people by ignorant pagan-types suffering from Gross Moral Turpitude. edit Proponents of Heliocentrism The most ardent supporters of heliocentrism are found in US academia, despite or perhaps because of how the theory is being used to diminish the central role of the USA and its establishment at the center of the universe. Among those scientists that support it, the overwhelming majority also support the theories of evolution, climate change, nuclear fusion, ley line energy production, spacial time distortion, and extra-dimensional astral travel as well as using more tax dollars to fund their own research. Notable believers in heliocentrism include Charles Darwin, Lenin, Al Gore and Ellen DeGeneres. edit Evidence of Heliocentrism Heliocentrism is widely considered as being in accordance with the teaching of the holy book, which is commonly accepted as scientific evidence. Firm proofs of heliocentrism include: - He has fixed the earth firm, immovable. (1 Chronicles 16:30) - Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken. (Psalm 104:5) - who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast… (Isaiah 45:18) - The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. (Ecclesiastes 1:5) As a reliable scientific theory, heliocentrism has surprisingly been approved by school boards in Kansas.

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Coral reefs aren't just pretty, they're also vital to marine species and island communities. But they're also facing threats from warming seas. NBC's Anne Thompson reports. More than half of 82 species of coral being evaluated for inclusion under the Endangered Species Act "more likely than not" would go extinct by 2100 if climate policies and technologies remain the same, federal scientists concluded. The experts cited "anthropogenic," or manmade, releases of carbon dioxide as a key driver of warming seas and oceans absorbing more CO2, in turn making waters more acidic. "The combined direct and indirect effects of rising temperature, including increased incidence of disease and ocean acidification, both resulting primarily from anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2, are likely to represent the greatest risks of extinction to all or most of the candidate coral species over the next century," the experts concluded in a report released Friday by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The report was part of a process to determine which species, if any, merit protection. The Center for Biological Diversity in 2009 had petitioned for the review of 82 species it considered in jeopardy. Of the 82 species, all of which are in U.S. waters, 46 are "more likely than not" to face extinction by 2100, while 10 are "likely," the report stated. The authors did note that the limited science of corals meant that "the overall uncertainty was high." The fisheries service will next seek public comment as it considers the petition for listing. The Center for Biological Diversity, which in 2006 petitioned and got protection for staghorn and elkhorn corals, said conditions have only worsened for corals. "Coral reefs are home to 25 percent of marine life and play a vital function in ocean ecosystems," the center said in a statement. "Since the 1990s, coral growth has grown sluggish in some areas due to ocean acidification, and mass bleaching events are increasingly frequent." More content from msnbc.com and NBC News: - Baseball-sized hail, 40 tornadoes reported as dangerous storms slam Midwest - NRA official accuses media of sensationalizing Trayvon Martin story - Reports: Secret Service personnel accused of hiring prostitutes - American Nazi Party gets its first lobbyist - Judge in Zimmerman case cites possible conflict of interest

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Courtesy Iona Knapp Iona Knapp, right, has been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a potential precursor to Alzheimer's disease. Like 1 in 7 people with Alzheimer's or other dementias, the 65-year-old Lake Monticello, Va., woman lives alone. Her daughter, Sharon Mullen, lives 90 minutes away, in Manassas. Iona Knapp’s father died of Alzheimer’s disease and her late mother suffered from dementia. Now, the 65-year-old Lake Monticello, Va., woman has been diagnosed herself with mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, and she fears their fate soon may be her own. The trouble is, Knapp lives by herself, which would make her one of 5.4 million people in the U.S. living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias -- and one of 800,000 Americans doing it alone, according to a new report issued Thursday by the Alzheimer’s Association. The report, “2012 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures,” estimates that one in seven people with Alzheimer's or dementia lives alone, and that up to half of those people have no identifiable caregiver. Most are older women with milder impairment. “That’s a huge issue,” said Dr. Kenneth Langa, professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, and an expert on the economics and demographics of Alzheimer’s Disease. As the baby boom generation ages, more and more people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s will be living alone, sometimes because they choose to do so, but also because a spouse has died, or because they have few or no children living nearby, said Langa, who wasn’t involved in the new report. The analysis finds that Alzheimer’s costs the country about $200 billion per year in Medicare, Medicaid, and personal out-of-pocket expenses. As enormous as that cost is, it takes 15.2 million unpaid caregivers, usually family members, to keep it from rising even higher. The personal impact on living alone with Alzheimer’s, dementia, or even MCI like Knapp’s, can be dramatic compared to living with a caregiver. Patients who live alone have a much higher risk of wandering off, suffering bad falls, missing medication and doctor appointments, and exacerbating other medical conditions like heart disease or diabetes. Ultimately that’s not only harmful to those people, but it ratchets up costs, too. As Knapp herself discovered when she served as an unpaid caregiver to her mother, living alone has a host of practical costs and dangers. When she accompanied her mother to the bank one day, “the teller said, ‘Your mother is way overdrawn. She has no money,’” Knapp recalled. “I looked back over the past two years of records, and found my mother had bankrupted herself.” Now, she said, “I imagine my own future. I meet with my attorney on Friday. I want to talk to him about all kinds of things I can put in place so my older daughter can step in and take over financially.” Such advanced planning is critical for anybody with Alzheimer’s, but especially for those who live alone, said Angela Geiger, chief strategy officer for the Alzheimer’s Association. Legal and logistical considerations like advanced directives, power of attorney designations, and answers about who will be part of the care team must be addressed. None of these decisions is pleasant, Geiger explained, but they must be addressed. “You really want to say, ‘Here are the two or three triggers for me. I’d like to go to assisted living as soon as possible,’ or, ‘Do I want to stay in my house as long as possible?' 'Who pays my bills?’” While Knapp wrestles with those decisions, she’s trying to adapt so she can continue to live by herself, independently, for as long as possible. But it’s a challenge. She writes reminders on a white board. She programs appointments into her smart phone. Such tactics aren’t foolproof, though: This week, she missed a doctor’s appointment. Knapp is considering the purchase of an alarm button she can wear to alert emergency services in case she finds herself injured or lost. She’s also thinking of selling her house, and moving into senior housing close to her daughter, Sharon Mullen, whose family lives in Manassas, Va. Transportation will be available there, she hopes, because she’s already growing worried about her own driving. “There are times now, when I’ll be, like, ‘Where am I going?’” The Alzheimer’s Association has created an online social network called ALZ Connected, in an effort to provide support, especially for those who find it tough to get out for in-person group support meetings. According to Langa, barring some miracle of science -- and the science of Alzheimer’s and dementia has been frustrating so far -- the population of Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers is going to grow significantly over the next decade. And because of America’s changing demographics, more and more of those people will be living alone. “To me that is one of the key issues going forward, from a public policy standpoint,” he said. “What will the care-giving resources be?” Do you live alone? Do you worry about what you'll do if you have health issues? Tell us on Facebook. New Alzheimer's criteria would change diagnosis for millions Cancer drug reverses Alzheimer's in mice Obama increases Alzheimer's research funding

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With over 58% of the energy consumed in the home going to heating water and heating and cooling the rooms, you can make drastic changes in the amount of energy consumed and the money you pay for it just by making modifications to the way you control the temperature in your home. Solar Water Heaters: Your water heater is a constant energy waster and largely goes unnoticed when considering ways to conserve energy. Current energy tax credits and solar rebates make converting to a solar water heating system extremely affordable. Read More » Solar Electric: The heating and cooling system is by far the biggest user of energy in any home. Photovoltaic PV Systems not only can reduce or eliminate your energy costs, they can actually generate enough energy to sell back to the power grid through the utilities. Read More » The greatest user of energy in commercial buildings is heating and cooling the work spaces and the water. Computer facilities not only consume great amounts of energy, they also require a considerable expense in energy to keep cool. In the meantime, the sun is contributing to the consumption of energy instead of being used as solar energy to generate it. Commercial Solar Panels have the capacity to reduce energy consumption in commercial buildings to less than half, simply by changing the way we heat and cool the work spaces. That savings goes directly towards the bottom line — the company's profits. Read More » Commercial Solar Water Heating is the ideal compliment to solar electric systems. According to the US Dept. of Energy "the energy tied up in water heating can be a significant component of the building's total energy consumption. For example, in the lodging industry, 42 percent of energy use goes for water heating. Other commercial buildings with heavy hot water demand include restaurants, commercial laundries, buildings with industrial processes, dormitories or other high-density housing facilities." Read More » With the growth in government comes the growth in government buildings. Not only is government a large-scale consumer of energy in its administration, elements of government are also responsible for meeting all demand for energy, nationwide. What source we use to generate that electricity is of great concern to us all. In Utah, electrical rates have increased 11 times in the past 7 years. Add that to the growth within the state and we are rapidly growing toward the unaffordable consumption of power for us all. Electrical generation using fossil fuels have risen four-fold in the past 15 years, but has never dropped significantly. Much of our dependence on generating electricity in this way is on foreign oil. Clearly, dependence on energy from fossil fuels—especially foreign oil imports--is no longer an answer. The cost of solar energy resides solely in the infrastructure for generation and transmission.

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Best Known For: Catalan painter Joan Miró combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy to create his lithographs, murals, tapestries, and sculptures for public spaces. Born to the families of a goldsmith and a cabinet-maker, he grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighborhood of Barcelona. His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolores Ferrà. He began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion. In 1907 he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja, to the dismay of his father. He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and he had his first solo show in 1918 at the Dalmau Gallery, where his work was ridiculed and defaced. Inspired by Cubist and surrealist exhibitions from abroad, Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris, but continued to spend his summers in Catalonia. He said, “The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.” After overcoming a serious bout of typhoid fever in 1911, Miro decided to devote his life entirely to painting by attending the school of art taught by Francesc Galí. He studied at La Lonja School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and in 1918 set up his first individual exhibition in the Dalmau Galleries, in the same city. His works before 1920 (the date of his first trip to Paris) reflect the influence of different trends, like the pure and brilliant colors used in Fauvism, shapes taken from cubism, influences from folkloric Catalan art and Roman frescos from the churches. His trip to Paris introduced him to and developed his trend of surrealist painting. In 1921, he showed his first individual exhibition in Paris, at La Licorne Gallery. In 1928, he exhibited with a group of surrealists in the Pierre Gallery, also in Paris, although Miró was always to maintain his independent qualities with respect to groups and ideologies. From 1929-1930, Miró began to take interest in the object as such, in the form of collages. This was a practice which was to lead to his making of surrealist sculptures. His tormented monsters appeared during this decade, which gave way to the consolidation of his plastic vocabulary. He also experimented with many other artistic forms, such as engraving, lithography, water colors, pastels, and painting over copper. What is particularly highlighted from this period, are the two ceramic murals which he made for the UNESCO building in Paris (The Wall of the Moon and the Wall of the Sun, 1957-59). Joan Miro UNESCO Mural- “The Moon and The Sun” It was at the end of the 60´s when his final period was marked and which lasted until his death. During this time, he concentrated more and more on monumental and public works. He was characterized by the body language and freshness with which he carried out his canvasses, as well as the special attention he paid to material and the stamp he received from informalism. He concentrated his interest on the symbol, not giving too much importance to the representing theme, but to the way the symbol emerged as the piece of work. Miro had a very eccentric style that is the embodiment of his unique approach to his artwork. In 1976 the Joan Miró Foundation Centre of Contemporary Art Study was officially opened in the city of Barcelona and in 1979, four years before his death, he was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Barcelona. He said, “For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings. “

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Our Constitution offers us "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but we can't pursue anything if we are unhealthy. Yet, health disparities in the United States are a fact of life. African Americans have shorter lives than Whites for three reasons. One has to do with income and poverty. Poor people [27 percent of African Americans are poor, compared to about 10 percent of Whites] have less money and less access, often having to make a choice between medical treatment, food to eat, prescription drugs and rent. The second barrier to health equality is proximity and access. In other words, African Americans are more likely to be located a distance from hospitals. There are fewer hospitals and clinics in the 'hood than in wealthier areas. And some preventative clinics (such as a diabetes clinic in Harlem) have been eliminated because of money. Another barrier to health access is simply attitudes. Those health providers who have racial and other attitudes choose to treat patients differently. According to a study by the Institutes of Medicine (IOM), an African American or Latino man who goes to an emergency room with a broken bone is less likely to get painkillers than a White man. Part of this year's presidential debate revolves around the issue of health care. Mitt Romney, the architect of Massachusetts health care system that resembles the Obama health plan, is now jogging (at least that's healthy) away from himself, rejecting plans he once championed. Or is he? Recently, he said he would preserve some aspects of Obamacare, not others. I am sure you have been asked to name three people, living or dead you'd like to dine with. I'd like to dine with Mitt Romney and the truth – at the same time. Those who understand health care challenges understand that the world won't be the way it was and our health care system needs to be revised. President Obama, offering the first tweak in the social insurance contract in 80 years, has done so by passing health care legislation that pushes the envelope. It's not enough, but it is better than it has ever been. Still, the system will be strained by the aging baby boomers, and challenged by the need to offer patient education and preventative services to prevent costly interventions. The uncoupling of employment and health insurance allows more people the opportunity to deal with their health. Thus, the health care industry will be pushed to absorb people who are newly empowered to deal with their health. Too many folks ignore their health because they have few options. I spent last weekend in the Mississippi Delta: in Cleveland, Mound Bayou and Ruleville. I traveled there with members of the Sojourner Truth Statue Committee, under the direction of Pat Reid-Merritt, the Richard Stockton University Distinguished Professor who led the national committee. We had the pleasure of offering a statue of Fannie Lou Hamer to the Ruleville community in the peaceful garden where Fannie Lou Hamer and her husband "Pap" are buried. There are so many reasons that the moment was moving, especially the presence of hundreds of children who joined the celebration. Fannie Lou Hamer, an international treasure, a tribute to audacity, a woman who endured a brutal beating because she exercised her right to register and vote, died at 60 from untreated breast cancer. This woman climbed every mountain, cleared every hurdle, stood down the biggest and the baddest in the majority community and in her own. Still, she did not have access to the health care that might have saved her life. She could stare down the Democratic National Committee on national television, but she could not stare down the breast cancer that killed her because she neither had the dollars nor the access to treatment. Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977 at the age 60. Imagine what we might be as a community had she been able to live to 80, or to 90. She might have been able to shape and influence our movements, offer advice and influence, keep the Democratic Party accountable, and perhaps explore independent politics and the ways Republicans might be engaged in the struggle for freedom. We don't know what she would have done, but we know that she died too early. That's why I believe that health care is a civil right. If we have the right to a life with liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to be healthy enough to pursue happiness. The fight for the presidency is partly a fight for the pursuit of health and happiness. Which candidate supports the 47 percent in this fight? Julianne Malveaux is a Washington, D.C.-based economist and writer. She is President Emerita of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, N.C.

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“Eau Canada” brings together 28 of Canada’s top water experts to debate Canada’s most critical water issues, and to map out solutions.The diverse range of contributors – geographers, environmental lawyers, former government officials, aquatic scientists, economists, and political scientists – reflects the broad range of issues involved in water management debates. Contributors argue that weak governance is at the heart of Canada’s water problems. The first three sections of the book provide background on Canadian water uses (and abuses), identify key weaknesses in Canadian water governance, and explore controversial debates over jurisdiction, transboundary waters, water exports, and water privatization. Solutions for more sustainable water management are mapped out in the final sections of the book, including a cross-Canada consensus on water policy, water conservation and pricing, and an engagement with the implications of new legal frameworks on Indigenous People’s water rights. The book is targeted at a broad audience with the objective of promoting informed debate about some of the most controversial and pressing water issues facing Canadians. It will be of relevance to academics and students of geography, politics, economics, environmental studies, engineering, and Canadian studies. It will also be of particular interest to water supply managers, environmental and water policy analysts, government officials, community groups, and politicians from across Canada.

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As with other socially-responsible industries, the real estate industry must be a part of addressing issues relating to communities and the environment. Towns and cities, as well as recreational developments, have environmental impacts and, with growing awareness of land use issues and pollution, the public requires both the public and private-sectors to collaborate to address these problems. Home ownership is also considered by many in a democratic society to be a right but, for many of the poor and disadvantaged, this becomes an unrealizable dream. Real estate professionals are conscious of these issues, including urban sprawl, and are exploring ways to help governments and communities to address them. This section provides a brief introduction to some of these important issues facing the real estate industry.

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Air MassAn extensive body of the atmosphere whose physical properties, particularly temperature and humidity, exhibit only small and continuous differences in the horizontal. It may extend over an area of several million square kilometres and over a depth of several kilometres. Backing WindCounter-clockwise change of wind direction, in either hemisphere. Beaufort ScaleWind force scale, original based on the state of the sea, expressed in numbers from 0 to 12. FetchDistance along a large water surface trajectory over which a wind of almost uniform direction and speed blows. FogSuspension of very small, usually microscopic water droplets in the air, generally reducing the horizontal visibility at the Earth's surface to less than 1 km. FrontThe interface or transition zone between air masses of different densities (temperature and humidity). Gale Force WindWind with a speed between 34 and 47 knots. Beaufort scale wind force 8 or 9. GustSudden, brief increase of the wind speed over its mean value. HazeSuspension in the atmosphere of extremely small, dry particles which are invisible to the naked eye but numerous enough to give the sky an opalescent appearance. HighRegion of the atmosphere where the pressures are high relative to those in the surrounding region at the same level. HurricaneName given to a warm core tropical cyclone with maximum surface winds of 118 km/h (64 knots) or greater in the North Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and in the Eastern North Pacific Ocean. KnotUnit of speed equal to one nautical mile per hour. (1.852 km/h) Land BreezeWind of coastal regions, blowing at night from the land towards a large water surface as a result of the nocturnal cooling of the land surface. Line SquallSquall which occurs in a line. LowRegion of the atmosphere in which the pressures are lower then those of the surrounding regions at the same level. MistSuspension in the air of microscopic water droplets which reduce the visibility at the Earth's surface. PressureForce per unit area exerted by the atmosphere on any surface by virtue of its weight; it is equivalent to the weight of a vertical column of air extending above a surface of unit area to the outer limit of the atmosphere. RidgeRegion of the atmosphere in which the pressure is high relative to the surrounding region at the same level. Sea BreezeWind in coastal regions, blowing by day from a large water surface towards the land as a result of diurnal heating of the land surface. Sea FogFog which forms in the lower part of a moist air mass moving over a colder surface (water). Sea StateLocal state of agitation of the sea due to the combined effects of wind and swell. SquallAtmospheric phenomenon characterizes by an abrupt and large increase of wind speed with a duration of the order of minutes which diminishes suddenly. It is often accompanied by showers or thundershowers. Storm Force WindWind with a wind speed between 48 and 63 knots. Beaufort scale wind force 10 or 11. Storm SurgeThe difference between the actual water level under influence of a meteorological disturbance (storm tide) and the level which would have been attained in the absence of the meteorological disturbance (i.e. astronomical tide). SwellAny system of water waves which has left its generating area. ThunderstormSudden electrical discharge manifested by a flash of light and a sharp or rumbling sound. Thunderstorms are associated with convective clouds and are, more often, accompanied by precipitation in the form of rain showers, hail, occasionally snow, snow pellets, or ice pellets. Tropical CycloneGeneric term for a non-frontal synoptic scale cyclone originating over tropical or sub-tropical waters with organized convection and definite cyclonic surface wind circulation. Tropical DepressionWind speed up to 33 knots. Tropical DisturbanceLight surface winds with indications of cyclonic circulation. Tropical StormMaximum wind speed of 34 to 47 knots. TroughAn elongated area of relatively low atmospheric pressure. VeeringClockwise change of wind direction, in either hemisphere. VisibilityGreatest distance at which a black object of suitable dimensions can be seen and recognized against the horizon sky during daylight or could be seen and recognized during the night if the general illumination were raised to the normal daylight level. WaterspoutA phenomenon consisting of an often violent whirlwind revealed by the presence of a cloud column or inverted cloud cone (funnel cloud), protruding from the base of a cumulonimbus, and of a bush composed of water droplets raised from the surface of the sea. Its behaviour is characterized by a tendency to dissipate upon reaching shore. Wave HeightVertical distance between the trough and crest of a wave. Wave PeriodsTime between the passage of two successive wave crests past a fixed point.

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How Do Blind People Describe Different Colors? Having been blind since birth, Tommy Edison is used to fielding questions about how he perceives the concept color. He finally sets the record straight in his recent YouTube video, “Describing Colors To Blind People,” that’s been making the rounds on the Internet. “I’ve never seen color. I don’t have any concept of what it is,” Tommy says. “There’s this whole part of vocabulary – of language – that just doesn’t mean anything to me.” He faults sighted people on trying and not succeeding to explain color to him, finding that they often attempt to explain one sense with another sense. “That doesn’t make any bloody sense at all!” In his own words, Tommy tells us what the words “red,” “blue,” “orange,” “black,” and “white” mean to him, based solely on what he’s heard about them and how they’re used in everyday speech.

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Gospel of Mark The Gospel According to Mark, also known as The Gospel of Mark, is one of the four canonical Gospels. It was most likely the earliest of the four to be written. Scholars typically estimate it was written between 70CE and 90CE, by an unknown author. In Mark 9:1 , Jesus says to his followers: - "Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." 17 And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? 18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God. Significance of Mark Mark is quite significant in understanding the other gospels in the biblical corpus because it is said that Mark "strung the pearls" i.e. was the first to bring together sayings, teachings and stories of Jesus to create a Gospel. The significance of this is that Mark is thus extremely significant with regards to understanding Matthew, Luke and John. For example, Mark was written in 70 AD whereas Matthew was written in 80-85 AD. There are thus 2 prevalent theories for as to where the gospel story comes from in Matthew. First is the 2 source theory which states that the gospel of Matthew is derived from Mark and another source, Q. Second is the 4 source theory which states that the gospel of Matthew is derived from things unique to Matthew, things from the gospel of Luke, Mark, and this other source Q. In both of these suggestions the gospel of Mark is a predominant figure with regards to understanding Matthew. This holds true with the other two gospels, although John is a little more intricate (cf. the Perrin Suggestion). - R.H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993) - V. Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: Macmillan & Co., 1953) - D.M. Smith, John among the Gospels (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 1992)

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short-limbed toad with rough skin - covered with warts, prominent parallel parotid glands and (usually) a bright yellow stripe centrally down the back (B159, B160, B161). - Male: to about 2.5 inches; Female: slightly larger (B161). - Normally 7-8cm, occasionally to 10cm, females larger than males (B159). Head: Parallel parotid glands (B159). Eye: Greenish yellow (B160, B161); Legs: Relatively short, toes no more than half webbed (B159, B160). Skin: Warty (B159, B161). - Dorsal:: grey/olive green,/brownish with darker markings (brown/green/red warts) and yellowish stripe central from snout caudally to end of body. - Abdomen: whitish, with dark green spotting. - Bluish/mauve (B161). - Vocal sac under chin, inflated when calling (B161). - Three inner fingers of forelimbs have grasping pads (B161). - Paired tubercles under longest hind toe (B159). Tadpole: Similar to those of common toads, darker than those of frogs and smaller than similar-age frog tadpoles or common toad tadpoles (B161). Similar species: .Differentiated from Bufo bufo - Common toad by smaller size, parallel parotid glands and yellow stripe down centre of back (B159). |Range and Habitat and central Europe eastwards to western Russia.(B159). Britain: Scattered, local distribution, including south-west Ireland (B159, B161). - In north of range (including Britain) found in sandy areas. - In remainder of range, wider variety of habitats. - Up to 200m in Iberia. - Remain near pond. Much of time is spent in crannies, or in burrows in soft sand. - Active swimmers. - Walk on land, and run, are also able to hop. - Poor swimmer. - Burrow in soft soil/sand. - Mainly nocturnal. - In summer spend daytime in burrows, emerge at night to feed. - Head-down, hindquarters-up posture when alarmed. (B159, B160, B161). - Crows, magpies, herons - Rats, hedgehogs, stoats and weasels - Some Natrix natrix - Grass snake. Skin shedding: -- Longevity: More than 15 years (B160). Place: in shallow water, sometimes in puddles near a pond rather than in the pond itself (B160, B161 ). Timing: Late March to beginning of August but usually late April to June in Britain (B160); Mid-April to as late as July (B161) Courtship: Male clasps female, gripping axillae (B160). Eggs: 3,000 - 4,000 laid in strings; initially in two rows, later in a single row (B160, B161 ). Tadpole development: Rapid. Tadpole free of egg by about a week after spawning. Develop into toadlets by six to eight weeks. May leave water by early June (B160, B161) - Late October to late February or early March. - In burrows or under large stones B161 Adults: Beetles, other insects, worms, spiders, woodlice, small Tadpoles: initially algae on leaves and stems of plants, later animal food: dead fish, fledglings, tadpoles (B161). Feeding: Catch prey on the move (B160). Organisations (UK Contacts):

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| ||A Place Apart| MPBN: Home Series, Moving Image, 00:27:01 Maine is a place apart from the mainstream of American society. Beginning early in Maine’s history, settlers, merchants, visitors, artists, and writers brought images of Maine to the rest of the world that shaped the State's economy, identity, and heritage. The history behind the image of Maine remains a vital part of how we and those from away view Maine today. (Relevance: 1032)  Find Similar Resources History - Colonial Period

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so write it offline in an editor (e.g., Notepad) and paste it in your little post box, viz.: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the general notion of determinism in philosophy. For other uses, see Determinism (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Fatalism, Predeterminism, or Predictability. Determinism is a metaphysical philosophical position stating that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could happen. "There are many determinisms, depending upon what pre-conditions are considered to be determinative of an event." Determinism throughout the history of philosophy has sprung from diverse considerations, some of which overlap. Some forms of determinism can be tested empirically with ideas stemming from physics and the philosophy of physics. The opposite of determinism is some kind of indeterminism (otherwise called nondeterminism). Determinism is often contrasted with free will. Determinism often is taken to mean simply causal determinism, that is, basing determinism upon the idea of cause-and-effect. It is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states. This meaning can be distinguished from other varieties of determinism mentioned below. The introduction of "cause-and-effect" introduces unnecessary complications related to what is meant by a 'cause' and how the presence of a 'cause' might be established, the interpretation of which varies from one physical theory to another. These complications are avoided by a more general formulation based upon connections between 'events' supplied by a theory: "a theory is deterministic if, and only if, given its state variables for some initial period, the theory logically determines a unique set of values for those variables for any other period." —Ernest Nagel, Alternative descriptions of physical state p. 292 This quote replaces the idea of 'cause-and-effect' with that of 'logical implication' according to one or another theory that connects events. In addition, an 'event' is related by the theory itself to formalized states described using the parameters defined by that theory. Thus, the details of interpretation are placed where they belong, fitted to the context in which the chosen theory applies. Other debates often concern the scope of determined systems, with some maintaining that the entire universe (or multiverse) is a single determinate system and others identifying other more limited determinate systems. For example, using the definition of physical determinism above, the limitations of a theory to some particular domain of experience also limits the associated definition of 'determinism' to that same domain. There are numerous historical debates involving many philosophical positions and varieties of determinism. They include debates concerning determinism and free will, technically denoted as compatibilistic (allowing the two to coexist) and incompatibilistic (denying their coexistence is a possibility). Determinism should not be confused with self-determination of human actions by reasons, motives, and desires. Determinism rarely requires that perfect prediction be practically possible – merely predictable in theory. Many philosophical theories of determinism frame themselves with the idea that reality follows a sort of predetermined path Causal determinism is "the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature". However, causal determinism is a broad enough term to consider that "one's deliberations, choices, and actions will often be necessary links in the causal chain that brings something about. In other words, even though our deliberations, choices, and actions are themselves determined like everything else, it is still the case, according to causal determinism, that the occurrence or existence of yet other things depends upon our deliberating, choosing and acting in a certain way". Causal determinism proposes that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. The relation between events may not be specified, nor the origin of that universe. Causal determinists believe that there is nothing uncaused or self-caused. Historical determinism (a sort of path dependence) can also be synonymous with causal determinism. Nomological determinism (sometimes called 'scientific' determinism, although that is a misnomer) is the most common form of causal determinism. It is the notion that the past and the present dictate the future entirely and necessarily by rigid natural laws, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events. Quantum mechanics and various interpretations thereof pose a serious challenge to this view. Nomological determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Physical determinism holds holds that all physical events occur as described by physical laws. Depending upon definitions, there is some room here for the view that not everything in the universe must be tied to some physical state, but that view is not usually emphasized by adherents of physical determinism because of the widely accepted scientific view that the operation of all physical systems (often unnecessarily taken to mean everything) can be explained entirely in physical terms, the assumed causal closure of physics. Necessitarianism is very related to the causal determinism described above. It is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be. Leucippus claimed there were no uncaused events, and that everything occurs for a reason and by necessity. Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance. The concept of predeterminism is often argued by invoking causal determinism, implying that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. In the case of predeterminism, this chain of events has been pre-established, and human actions cannot interfere with the outcomes of this pre-established chain. Predeterminism can be used to mean such pre-established causal determinism, in which case it is categorised as a specific type of determinism. It can also be used interchangeably with causal determinism - in the context of its capacity to determine future events. Despite this, predeterminism is often considered as independent of causal determinism. The term predeterminism is also frequently used in the context of biology and hereditary, in which case it represents a form of biological determinism. Fatalism is normally distinguished from "determinism". Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no control over their future. Fate has arbitrary power, and need not follow any causal or otherwise deterministic laws. Types of Fatalism include hard theological determinism and the idea of predestination, where there is a God who determines all that humans will do. This may be accomplished either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience or by decreeing their actions in advance. Theological determinism is a form of determinism which states that all events that happen are pre-ordained, or predestined to happen, by a monotheistic deity, or that they are destined to occur given its omniscience. Two forms of theological determinism exist, here referenced as strong and weak theological determinism. The first one, strong theological determinism, is based on the concept of a creator deity dictating all events in history: "everything that happens has been predestined to happen by an omniscient, omnipotent divinity". The second form, weak theological determinism, is based on the concept of divine foreknowledge - "because God's omniscience is perfect, what God knows about the future will inevitably happen, which means, consequently, that the future is already fixed". There exist slight variations on the above categorisation. Some claim that theological determinism requires predestination of all events and outcomes by the divinity (i.e. they do not classify the weaker version as 'theological determinism' unless libertarian free will is assumed to be denied as a consequence), or that the weaker version does not constitute 'theological determinism' at all. With respect to free will, "theological determinism is the thesis that God exists and has infallible knowledge of all true propositions including propositions about our future actions", more minimal criteria designed to encapsulate all forms of theological determinism. Theological determinism can also be seen as a form of causal determinism, in which the antecedent conditions are the nature and will of God. Logical determinism or Determinateness is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present, or future, are either true or false. Note that one can support Causal Determinism without necessarily supporting Logical Determinism and vice versa (depending on one's views on the nature of time, but also randomness). The problem of free will is especially salient now with Logical Determinism: how can choices be free, given that propositions about the future already have a truth value in the present (i.e. it is already determined as either true or false)? This is referred to as the problem of future contingents. Adequate determinism focuses on the fact that, even without a full understanding of microscopic physics, we can predict the distribution of 1000 coin tosses Often synonymous with Logical Determinism are the ideas behind Spatio-temporal Determinism or Eternalism: the view of special relativity. J. J. C. Smart, a proponent of this view, uses the term "tenselessness" to describe the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future. In physics, the "block universe" of Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein assumes that time is a fourth dimension (like the three spatial dimensions). In other words, all the other parts of time are real, like the city blocks up and down a street, although the order in which they appear depends on the driver (see Rietdijk–Putnam argument). Adequate determinism is the idea that quantum indeterminacy can be ignored for most macroscopic events. This is because of quantum decoherence. Random quantum events "average out" in the limit of large numbers of particles (where the laws of quantum mechanics asymptotically approach the laws of classical mechanics). Stephen Hawking explains a similar idea: he says that the microscopic world of quantum mechanics is one of determined probabilities. That is, quantum effects rarely alter the predictions of classical mechanics, which are quite accurate (albeit still not perfectly certain) at larger scales. Something as large as an animal cell, then, would be "adequately determined" (even in light of quantum indeterminacy). Nature and nurture interact in humans. A scientist looking at a sculpture after some time does not ask whether we are seeing the effects of the starting materials OR environmental influences. Although some of the above forms of determinism concern human behaviors and cognition, others frame themselves as an answer to the Nature or Nurture debate. They will suggest that one factor will entirely determine behavior. As scientific understanding has grown, however, the strongest versions of these theories have been widely rejected as a single cause fallacy. In other words, the modern deterministic theories attempt to explain how the interaction of both nature and nurture is entirely predictable. The concept of heritability has been helpful to make this distinction. Biological determinism, sometimes called Genetic determinism, is the idea that each of our behaviors, beliefs, and desires are fixed by our genetic nature. Behaviorism is the idea that all behavior can be traced to specific causes—either environmental or reflexive. This Nurture-focused determinism was developed by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Cultural determinism or social determinism is the nurture-focused theory that it is the culture in which we are raised that determines who we are. Environmental determinism is also known as climatic or geographical determinism. It holds the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Supporters often also support Behavioral determinism. Key proponents of this notion have included Ellen Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, Thomas Griffith Taylor and possibly Jared Diamond, although his status as an environmental determinist is debated. A technological determinist might suggest that technology like the mobile phone is the greatest factor shaping human civilization. Other 'deterministic' theories actually seek only to highlight the importance of a particular factor in predicting the future. These theories often use the factor as a sort of guide or constraint on the future. They need not suppose that complete knowledge of that one factor would allow us to make perfect predictions. Psychological determinism can mean that humans must act according to reason, but it can also be synonymous with some sort of Psychological egoism. The latter is the view that humans will always act according to their perceived best interest. Linguistic determinism claims that our language determines (at least limits) the things we can think and say and thus know. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis argues that individuals experience the world based on the grammatical structures they habitually use. Economic determinism is the theory which attributes primacy to the economic structure over politics in the development of human history. It is associated with the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that presumes that a society's technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values. Media determinism, a subset of technological determinism, is a philosophical and sociological position which posits the power of the media to impact society. Two leading media determinists are the Canadian scholars Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

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- Date: January 25, 2011 - In This Story: Asian tiger reserves can support more than 10,000 wild tigers—three times the current estimate—if they are managed as large-scale landscapes that protect core breeding sites and benefit local communities, according to the world’s leading conservation scientists in a new study published on January 25. This positive news reveals that doubling the number of tigers in the wild is feasible. “In the midst of a crisis, it’s tempting to circle the wagons and only protect a limited number of core protected areas, but we can and should do better,” said Dr. Eric Dinerstein, Chief Scientist at WWF and co-author of the study. “We absolutely need to stop the bleeding, the poaching of tigers and their prey in core breeding areas, but we need to go much further and secure larger tiger landscapes before it is too late.” Wild tiger numbers have declined to as few as 3,200 today compared to 100,000 a century ago, due to poaching of tigers and their prey, habitat destruction and human-tiger conflict. “A Landscape-Based Conservation Strategy to Double the Wild Tiger Population” in the current issue of Conservation Letters provides the first assessment of the political commitment made by all 13 tiger range countries at November’s historic tiger summit to double the tiger population across Asia by 2022. The study found that the 20 priority tiger conservation landscapes with the highest probability of long-term tiger survival could support more than 10,500 tigers, including about 3,400 breeding females. “Tiger conservation is the face of biodiversity conservation and competent sustainable land-use management at the landscape level,” said study co-author Dr. John Seidensticker of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. “By saving the tiger we save all the plants and animals that live under the tiger’s umbrella.” The study also revealed that major infrastructure projects such dams, roads and mines will threaten tiger landscapes in the next decade. However, channeling revenues to communities from wildlife tourism, forest management in corridors and buffer zones, and earning carbon credits will provide new opportunities. Read the full study View a map of the 12 best places to double the number of tigers in the wild Learn more about wild tigers “Without strong countervailing pressures, short-term economic gains will inevitably trump protection of the critical ecosystems necessary for sustainable development,” said Keshav Varma, Program Director of the Global Tiger Initiative at the World Bank. The study calls for mainstreaming wildlife conservation to shift to well-funded efforts to protect core areas and larger landscapes, a challenging task that will require innovation through arrangements that benefit the rural communities living in these landscapes. Countries like Nepal are already looking closely at building alliances and partnerships for better landscape management that benefits both people and tigers. "Following the St. Petersburg Declaration, Nepal has committed to the goal of doubling wild tiger numbers across our country by 2022,” said Deepak Bohara, Nepal’s Minister for Forests and Soil Conservation. “This analysis shows that it can be done, not just in Nepal, but, if done right with careful study and planning, across the entire tiger range. It is also worth noting that the tiger conservation provides carbon credits, protects water resources, and complements community development efforts. Thus, it is important to promote regional cooperation to maintain a healthy tiger corridor between different reserves.”

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Are the cables in your living room creating a jungle? Don't worry – we'll help you untangle things so that Digital Television makes sense. Just pick the category that describes your problem, and we'll guide you through it – step-by-step. Last Updated: Thu, 09 Jun 2011 > Related Articles This article addresses FAQs about HDTV including: picture quality, picture display, and common terms. HDTV (high definition TV) is a TV display technology that provides a higher picture and sound quality than standard TV sets. Roughly half of prime time TV programs of the major networks are available in the HDTV format (16:9). The other half are available in the standard-definition format (4:3). The aspect ratio of the content is controlled by the content providers; example: HBO and Showtime. You can access the providers website to see which programming is released in the HDTV format (16:9). - When a standard-definition (4:3 aspect ratio) program is viewed on a HDTV (16:9 aspect ratio), the HDTV centers the image on the screen with black or gray bars on either side. - When HDTV (16:9 aspect ratio) content is displayed on a standard-definition TV (4:3 aspect ratio), black bars will appear at the top and bottom of the screen. Refer to your TV user guide for directions on removing the bars. If you have a Scientific Atlanta cable box, use the stretch and zoom HD settings to fill the TV screen area with the image. - A TV is considered to have burn-in when the HDTV colors are not evenly displayed across the screen. - To avoid burn-in, use the stretch and zoom HD settings to fill the TV screen area with the image. In some cases you can substitute gray bars for black bars to minimize burn in. You can also try turning your contrast down to 50 percent or lower. - Burn in is usually not covered under warranty, and ONLY affects the following TV displays: - Direct-view CRT - Plasma flat-panel - CRT-based rear projection The 4:3 aspect ratio is the shape of the standard TV monitor (square). The 16:9 aspect ratio is the shape of most HDTV monitors (rectangular). HDTVs have been manufactured in both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. Widescreen is a term used for the 16:9 aspect ratio which is larger than the standard definition TV screen. - 1080p is the shorthand identification for a category of HDTV video modes. The number 1080 represents 1,080 lines of vertical resolution (1,080 horizontal scan lines), while the letter p stands for progressive scan (meaning the image is not interlaced). The term usually assumes a widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9, implying a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels. - 1080i is a (HDTV) video mode. The term usually assumes a widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9, implying a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels and a frame resolution of 1920×1080 or about 2.07 million pixels. - 720p is the shorthand name for a category of HDTV video modes. The number 720 stands for the 720 horizontal scan lines of display resolution (also known as 720 pixels of vertical resolution), while the letter p stands for progressive scan or non-interlaced. - 720 or 1080 lines of resolution from both the channel broadcast and the HDTV monitor (Note: A 480i DVD is not high definition, even though the image quality is considerably higher than a standard definition TV broadcast on a standard definition TV.) - Ability to display 16x9 aspect ratio pictures - Y Pb Pr video component connections from the cable receiver to the HDTV - Audio in the Dolby Digital (AC-3) format to support "5.1" surround sound Most HDTV monitors can display an SDTV (480i) signal. If "sidebars" appear, you can press the SETTINGS button on the remote control twice to access the HDTV settings. Then select the 480i Stretch setting, which will stretch the 4:3 program to fill the entire screen area.

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A consistent CSG model is one which is made up of solid objects with no dangling surfaces. In rayshade, it is quite easy to construct inconsistent models, which will usually appear incorrect in the final images. In rayshade, CSG is implemented by maintaining the tree structure of the CSG operations. This tree is traversed, and the operators therein applied, on a per-ray basis. It is therefore difficult to verify the consistency of the model ``on the fly.'' One class of CSG problems occur when surfaces of objects being operated upon coincide. For example, when subtracting a box from another box to make a square cup, the result will be wrong if the tops of the two boxes coincide. To correct this, the inner box should be made slightly taller than the outer box. A related problem that must be avoided occurs when two coincident surfaces are assigned different surface properties. It may seem that the union operator is unnecessary, since listing two objects together in an aggregate results in an image that appears to be the same. While the result of such a short-cut may appear the same on the exterior, the interior of the resulting object will contain extraneous surfaces. The following example show this quite clearly. difference box -2 0 -3 2 3 3 union /* change to list; note bad internal surfaces */ sphere 2 1 0 0 sphere 2 -1 0 0 end end rotate 1 0 0 -40 rotate 0 0 1 50 The visual evidence of an inconsistent CSG object varies depending upon the operator being used. When subtracting a consistent object from and inconsistent one, the resulting object will appear to be the union of the two objects, but the shading will be incorrect. It will appear to be inside-out in places, while correct in other places. The inside-out sections indicate the areas where the problems occur. Such problems are often caused by polygons with incorrectly specified normals, or by surfaces that exactly coincide (which appear as partial ``Swiss cheese'' objects). The following example illustrates an attempt to subtract a sphere from a pyramid defined using an incorrectly facing triangle. Note that the resulting image obviously points to which triangle is reversed. name pyramid list triangle 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 triangle 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 triangle 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 triangle 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 /* wrong order */ end difference object pyramid scale 3 3 3 rotate 0 0 1 45 rotate 1 0 0 -30 translate 0 -3.5 0 sphere 2.4 0 0 0 end By default, cylinders and cones do not have end caps, and thus are not consistent primitives. One must usually add endcaps by listing the cylinder or cone with (correctly-oriented) endcap discs in an aggregate.

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To use kickstart mode, you must first create a kickstart file, and make it available to the Red Hat Linux installation program. Normally this is done by copying the kickstart file to the boot diskette, or making it available on the network. The network-based approach is most commonly used, as most kickstart installations tend to be performed on networked computers. This also makes it easier to install Red Hat Linux on many computers, as the kickstart files can be kept on single server system, and read by the individual computers during the installation. Let's take a more in-depth look at the locations where kickstart file may be placed. To perform a diskette-based kickstart installation, the kickstart file must be named ks.cfg, and reside in the boot diskette's top-level directory. Note that the Red Hat Linux boot diskettes are in MS-DOS format, making it easy to copy the kickstart file under Linux using the mcopy command (or, if you insist, you can also use Windows). Although there's no technological requirement for it, most diskette-based kickstart installations install Red Hat Linux from CD-ROM. Network installations using kickstart are quite common, because system administrators can easily automate the installation of many networked computers quickly and painlessly. In general, the approach most commonly used is for the administrator to have both a BOOTP/DHCP server and an NFS server on the local network. The BOOTP/DHCP server is used to give the client system its networking information, while the NFS server serves the actual files used during the installation. Often these two servers run on the same physical machine, but there is no requirement for this. To do a network-based kickstart installation, you must have a BOOTP/DHCP server on your network, and it must include configuration information for the machine you are attempting to install. The BOOTP/DHCP server will be used to give the client its networking information as well as the location of the kickstart file. If a kickstart file is specified by the BOOTP/DHCP server, the client system will attempt an NFS mount of the file's path, and will copy the specified file to the client, using it as the kickstart file. The exact settings required vary depending on the BOOTP/DHCP server you use. Here's an example for the DHCP server shipped with Red Hat Linux: filename "/usr/new-machine/kickstart/"; next-server blarg.redhat.com; Note that you should use filename for the kickstart file's name (or the directory in which the kicstart file resides), and next-server to set the NFS server name. If the filename returned by the BOOTP/DHCP server ends with a slash (``/''), then it is interpreted as a path only. In this case, the client system mounts that path using NFS, and searches for a specially-named file. The filename the client searches for is: The <ip-addr> section of the filename should be replaced with the client's IP address in dotted decimal notation. For example, the filename for a computer with an IP address of 10.10.0.1 would be 10.10.0.1-kickstart. Note that if you don't specify a server name, then the client system will attempt to use the server that answered the BOOTP/DHCP request as its NFS server. If you don't specify a path or filename, the client system will try to mount /kickstart from the BOOTP/DHCP server, and will try to find the kickstart file using the same <ip-addr>-kickstart filename as described above.

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Water creatures caught stealing DNA Tiny freshwater organisms that have a sex-free lifestyle, may have survived so well because they steal genes from other creatures, US scientists report. Researchers from the Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have found genes from bacteria, fungi and even plants incorporated into the DNA of bdelloid rotifers - minuscule animals that appear to have given up sex 40 million years ago. Their report appears in this week's edition of Science. Sex is used by most life forms as a way of coping with changing circumstances, by allowing organisms to develop useful new genes and ditch harmful, mutated ones. The resilience of bdelloid and their sex-free lifestyle has stumped scientists. The team, headed by Professor Matthew Meselson, looked at the DNA of bdelloid rotifers to see how they manage to survive and evolve. It appears they overcome this hurdle by stealing DNA from our organisms. "Our result shows that genes can enter the genomes of bdelloids in a manner fundamentally different from that which, in other animals, results from the mating of males and females," says Meselson. "We found many genes that appear to have originated in bacteria, fungi, and plants." The translucent, waterborne creatures, which range in size from 0.1 to 1 millimetres long, lay eggs, but all their offspring are female. The researchers believe that when bdelloids dry out, they fracture their genetic material and rupture cellular membranes. When they rehydrate, they rebuild their genomes and their membranes, incorporating shreds of genetic material from other bdelloids and unrelated species in their vicinity. "These fascinating animals not only have relaxed the barriers to incorporation of foreign genetic material, but, more surprisingly, they even managed to keep some of these alien genes functional," report co-author Dr Irina Arkhipova says. According to the researchers, the next step is to determine whether bdelloid genomes also contain homologous genes imported from other bdelloids. Meselson and his colleagues also hope to examine whether the animals actually use any of the hundreds of snippets of foreign DNA they appear to vacuum up. Understanding how the animals acquire and make use of these new genes could have implications for medicine. Genetic mutations, which occur constantly in any living organism, underlie cancer, heart disease and various other diseases.

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While any kind of dog can attack, some breeds are more prone to attacks than others. In fact, some dogs are more likely than others to kill humans. The Centers of Disease Control estimates that more than 4.7 million people are bitten by dogs every year. Of those, 20 percent require medical attention. In a 15-year study (1979-1994) a total of 239 deaths were reported as a result of injuries from dog attacks in the United States. Through its research, the CDC compiled a list of the dogs most responsible for human fatalities. They are as follows: The study found that most dog-bite-related deaths happened to children. But, according to the CDC there are steps children (and adults) can take cut down the risk of a dog attack from family pets as well as dogs they are not familiar with: -Don't approach an unfamiliar dog. -If an unfamiliar dog approaches you, stay motionless. -Don't run from a dog or scream. -If a dog knocks you down, roll into a ball and stay still. -Avoid looking directly into a dog's eyes. -Leave a dog alone that is sleeping, eating or taking care of puppies. -Let a dog see and sniff you before petting it. -Don't play with a dog unless there is an adult present. -If a dog bites you, tell an adult immediately. But, the CDC's report says most attacks are preventable in three ways: 1. "Owner and public education. Dog owners, through proper selection, socialization, training, care, and treatment of a dog, can reduce the likelihood of owning a dog that will eventually bite. Male and unspayed/unneutered dogs are more likely to bite than are female and spayed/neutered dogs." 2. "Animal control at the community level. Animal-control programs should be supported, and laws for regulating dangerous or vicious dogs should be promulgated and enforced vigorously. For example, in this report, 30% of dog-bite-related deaths resulted from groups of owned dogs that were free roaming off the owner's property." 3. "Bite reporting. Evaluation of prevention efforts requires improved surveillance for dog bites. Dog bites should be reported as required by local or state ordinances, and reports of such incidents should include information about the circumstances of the bite; ownership, breed, sex, age, spay/neuter status, and history of prior aggression of the animal; and the nature of restraint before the bite incident." CDC officials did make one important note about its list: The reporting of the breed was subjective. There is no way to determine if the identification of the breed was correct. Also, there is no way to verify if the dog was a purebred or a mixed breed. Copyright 2011 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Ask a question about 'Gypsy Breynton' Start a new discussion about 'Gypsy Breynton' Answer questions from other users is the heroine of an eponymous series of books written by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, born Mary Gray Phelps, was an American author and an early advocate of clothing reform for women, urging them to burn their corsets.- Biography :... . The books were written in 1866-7 for Sunday school Sunday school is the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays by various denominations.-England:The first Sunday school may have been opened in 1751 in St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. Another early start was made by Hannah Ball, a native of High Wycombe in... s and so are of an improving nature. Gypsy, as the name indicates, is an impetuous tomboy A tomboy is a girl who exhibits characteristics or behaviors considered typical of the gender role of a boy, including the wearing of typically masculine-oriented clothes and engaging in games and activities that are often physical in nature, and which are considered in many cultures to be the... who lives a chaotic life lacking a system. Her development and experiences provide the basis for the restrained moralising of the stories. The four books in the series are - Gypsy Breynton - Gypsy's Cousin Joy - Gypsy's Sowing and Reaping - Gypsy's Year at the Golden Crescent

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Italian Food & Cuisine History Despite the common American misconception, there is no typical approach when it comes to Italian cuisine. Instead, styles have developed over the centuries on the regional levels resulting in a multitude of customs and techniques. If there were to be a unifying theme in Italian cooking, however, it would have to be the utilization of fresh, seasonal ingredients. However, due to the diversity of climate and geography in Italy, even the available ingredients themselves are different from area to area. A good example of the regionalism of styles and ingredients can be found in the differences between northern and southern Italian cooking. Much of southern diet is influenced by its proximity to the Mediterranean Sea, resulting in its reliance on fresh fish such as tuna and swordfish. In addition, its abundance of seafood has caused the cooking style to be lighter and simpler, highlighting ingredients such as tomatoes and olive oil. This style has even been deemed by the Italian government as the “Mediterranean Cuisine”. The northern style however, replaces the southern reliance on fish with beef, pork, and dried beans which are more readily available in the region. In addition, the north uses butter and cream rather than olive oil as it’s dominating cooking fat. The result is a tradition that is heavier and heartier than the southern provinces. It is worth mentioning that many of the new trends in Italian cuisine seen in America are actually part of this approach. Risotto, a savory rice dish which relies on the breakdown of starches to produce its characteristic creaminess, and polenta, a side dish made from corn meal, have long been mainstays of the northern Italian diet. Despite the popularity of these broader dishes to this country’s restaurant scene, most Americans still associate Italian food with pasta and pizza. And while pasta does play an important role in Italian cuisine, it is much more versatile than just spaghetti and meatballs. Orzo, for example, is rice-shaped pasta that is seen often prepared as a side dish to beef or veal while gnocchi are potato dumplings often seen tossed in simple sauces that highlight their delicateness. Even heartier pastas are often paired with more than just marinara sauce. Examples of this are the northern-used Bolognese sauce, a meaty blend of tomatoes and cream, and the dramatically different pesto, a light blend of chopped basil, garlic, olive oil, and pine nuts. Finally, desserts play an important part of the Italian diet. Cannolis and tiramisu, both of which contain sweetened mascarpone fillings, are the most widely known in America though others have recently gained attention. For example, gelatos are similar to ice cream but differ in that they are served in a semi-frozen state which results in a creamier, smoother texture. For the more health-conscious, a granita might be preferred. Because of the absence of milk or cream, the final texture is coarser and more crystalline. On the other end of the dessert spectrum are those made with wine or alcohol. Zabaglione is an egg custard often times flavored with marsala or champagne which is often served with strawberries and zaletti, light cornmeal cookies. We hope this overview has helped you to better understand the diversity of Italian cuisine. Of course, the best learning is accomplished through experience so we encourage you to use our site and find the Italian restaurant that has been waiting for you. Buon appetito! Click Here to find Italian restaurants in Dallas, GA

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You had surgery to treat your gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). GERD is a condition that causes food or liquid to come up from your stomach into your esophagus (the tube that carries food from your mouth to your stomach). Your surgeon probably repaired a hiatal hernia with stitches. A hiatal hernia develops when the natural opening in your diaphragm is too large. Your diaphragm is the muscle layer between your chest and belly. Your stomach may bulge through this large hole into your chest. This bulging is called a hiatal hernia. It may make GERD symptoms worse. Your surgeon also wrapped the upper part of your stomach around the end of your esophagus to create pressure at the end of your esophagus. This pressure helps prevent stomach acid and food from flowing back up. Your surgery was done by making a large incision in your upper belly (open surgery) or with a laparoscope (a thin tube with a tiny camera on the end). What to Expect at Home Most patients go back to work 2 - 3 weeks after laparoscopic surgery and 4 - 6 weeks after open surgery. You may have a feeling of tightness when you swallow for 6 - 8 weeks. This is from the swelling inside your esophagus. You may also have some bloating. When you get back home, you will be drinking a clear liquid diet for 2 weeks. You will be on a full liquid diet for about 2 weeks after that, and then a soft-food diet after that. On the liquid diet: Start off with small amounts of liquid, about 1 cup at a time. Sip. Do NOT gulp. Drink liquids often during the day after surgery. Avoid cold liquids. Do not drink carbonated beverages. Do NOT drink through straws (they can bring air into your stomach). Crush pills, and take them with liquids for the first month after surgery. When you are eating solid foods again, chew well. Do not eat cold foods. Do not eat foods that clump together, such as rice or bread. Eat small amounts of food several times a day instead of 3 big meals. Your doctor will give you a prescription for pain medicine. Get it filled when you go home so you have it when you need it. Take your pain medicine before your pain becomes too severe. If you have gas pains, try walking around to ease them. Do NOT drive, operate any machinery, or drink alcohol when you are taking narcotic pain medicine. This medicine can make you very drowsy, and driving or using machinery is not safe. Walk several times a day. Do NOT lift anything heavier than 10 pounds (about the same as a gallon of milk). Do NOT do any pushing or pulling. Slowly increase how much you do around the house. Your doctor will tell you when you can increase your activity and return to work. Take care of your wound (incision): If sutures (stitches), staples, or glue were used to close your skin, you may remove the wound dressings (bandages) and take a shower the day after surgery. If tape strips (Steri-Strips) were used to close your skin, cover the wounds with plastic wrap before showering for the first week. Tape the edges of the plastic carefully to keep water out. Do NOT try to wash the Steri-Strips off. They will fall off on their own after about a week. Do not soak in a bathtub or hot tub, or go swimming, until your doctor tells you it is okay. When to Call the Doctor Call your doctor or nurse if: Your temperature is above 101 °F. Your incisions are bleeding, red, warm to the touch, or have a thick, yellow, green, or milky drainage. Your belly swells or hurts. You have nausea or vomiting for more than 24 hours. You have problems swallowing that keep you from eating. You have problems swallowing that do not go away after 2 or 3 weeks. You have pain that your pain medicine is not helping. You have trouble breathing. You have a cough that does not go away. You cannot drink or eat. Your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow. Peterson RP, Pelligrini CA, Oelschlager BK. Hiatal Hernia and Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. In: Townsend: Sabiston Textbook of Surgery, 19th ed. Philadelphia, PA:WB Saunders; 2011:chap 44. Kahrilas PJ, Shaheen NJ, Vaezi MF, Hiltz SW, Black E, Modlin IM. American Gastroenterological Association Medical Position Statement on the management of gastroesophageal reflux disease. Gastroenterology. 2008;135:1383-1391. Wilson JF. In The Clinic: Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. Ann Intern Med. 2008;149(3):ITC2-1-15. George F. Longstreth, MD, Department of Gastroenterology, Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, San Diego, California. Also reviewed by A.D.A.M. Health Solutions, Ebix, Inc., Editorial Team: David Zieve, MD, MHA, David R. Eltz, Stephanie Slon, and Nissi Wang.

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First Homer Encyclopedia Brings Epic Poetry and Ancient Greece to Life Tuesday, April 17, 2012 TAU researcher sheds light on Homer's reception in the Western, Jewish and Arabic worlds Homer, one of the most famous poets of all time, is firmly entrenched in the Western canon as a master of classical literature. His two most renowned works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are core texts for students and scholars alike. Now, Prof. Margalit Finkelberg of Tel Aviv University's Department of Classics has created an illuminating new tool, the world's first Homer Encyclopedia. Published in three volumes by Wiley-Blackwell last year and more recently in electronic form, the encyclopedia is an invaluable window into Homer's life and work, elucidating the characters and settings of his work from primary characters to the smallest village mentioned in passing. The volumes also examine the pre-history of Homer and the period in which he lived and wrote, and how the text has been received and transmitted by various cultures and societies throughout history to the present day. One of its groundbreaking areas of research is the reception of Homer in the Jewish and Arabic traditions, a subject that has rarely been explored. With contributions from 132 scholars worldwide, this three volume work is a universal exploration of all things Homer. "Through this encyclopedia, you can enter Homer's world and get lost in it," says Prof. Finkelberg, who was recently awarded the 2012 Rothschild Prize in the Humanities. "It is unique for its comprehensive view — the entire field is seen as vibrant, alive and contemporary. Homer's work is put in a modern living context, rather than approached as an impenetrable classic monument." An avatar of Greek culture One section of the encyclopedia examines "textual reception" over 2,000 years of history. Its purpose is to examine how Homeric texts were received from the view of different societies and cultures, e.g. Victorian England. Studying the history of the reception of a major text is an emerging field of study, Prof. Finkelberg explains — and profoundly important to the progress of the humanities. One of the most original features of this work is an in-depth study of Homer in the context of Jewish and Arabic traditions, conducted by leading specialists. Though Homer's work is foundational to the Western tradition, it has never been central to these Eastern traditions, which put more of an emphasis on "useful" texts, such as those regarding science, medicine, and philosophy. The findings, she says, are surprising. Because the Hellenic world is little-known in these cultures, Homer is seen as a symbol of Greek culture in its entirety. "Poetry was not translated in these cultures, and because of this, very little was known about the art of the Greeks beyond philosophers like Aristotle. For them, Homer represented everything to do with Greek culture, including paganism," explains Prof. Finkelberg. Anything "Greek" was essentially "Homeric" and vice versa. Prof. Finkelberg believes that the publication is a crucial addition to encyclopedias on the work of other poets such as Dante and Virgil. After all, Homer is not just any writer. In the absence of the sacred religious texts that are central to other traditions, such as the Bible to Judeo-Christian traditions, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the formative texts of Greek culture. Because of this, the fields of Homeric archaeology and Biblical archaeology rest on the same historical axis, suggests Prof. Finkelberg. Homer's use of history reflects real historical events and has inspired actual archaeological discovery. It was through Homer, for example, that German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was to search for the ruins of Troy, the site of the Trojan War in Homer's works. Previously, the city was believed to be a mere literary invention. Though Homer cannot be used as a historical text in the modern sense, Prof. Finkelberg says that his literary works are themselves not unlike an archaeological site, where different levels of history can be pieced together to reveal intriguing tale of a world long past. For more arts and culture news from Tel Aviv University, click here.

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Inspecting Heating Systems & Carbon Monoxide Carbon monoxide poisoning has been on the rise in recent years, and it stems in large part from the home’s heating system. At first glance, modern heating systems may seem the same as those that have been used safely for years. However, there are some key differences that make today’s homes more susceptible to carbon monoxide buildup. As a home inspector, it is important to understand heating systems, what causes toxic gases to be present in the home, and how to prevent it. In a nutshell, toxic gases in the home can be attributed to the following common situations: - Today’s houses are more air-tight. Homeowners are aware of the cost of heating drafty homes and take steps to seal up windows, doors and other areas of air-infiltration. Consequently, there is less fresh air coming into a home and not as many pathways for stale or polluted air to leave it. In addition, when furnaces and boilers are starved for of the oxygen needed to burn fuels completely, carbon monoxide is produced. - Manufacturers have designed new, high technology heating appliances with greater efficiency to help us save money, conserve natural resources and decrease environmental pollution. However, the new breed of high efficiency gas and oil furnaces- when vented into existing chimney flues- often do not perform at an optimum level. The difference in performance creates conditions that allow toxic gases to enter living spaces more easily. The above conditions point out a number of older, ongoing problems that still require detection by a professional home inspector as well as correction in order to prevent toxic gases from filtering into the house. These include damaged or deteriorating flue liners, soot build-up, debris clogging the passageway, and animal or bird nests obstructing chimney flues. What can you tell your home inspection clients about preventing these problems from arising? AHIT recommends that heating systems be tuned-up on an annual basis by a qualified HVAC contractor and that chimneys/flues be evaluated by a Certified Chimney Sweeper to ensure the entire system is operating properly and safely. Reference material provided by the CSIA. Back to Home Inspection Industry News >>

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A study released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may have the weary thinking about getting some rest before they get behind the wheel. The study found that one in 24 U.S. adults said they recently fell asleep while driving. The National Highway Safety Administration estimates 2.5 percent of fatal motor vehicle crashes (about 730 in 2009) and 2 percent of all crashes with non-fatal injuries (about 30,000 in 2009) involved drowsy driving, according to the CDC. “However, although data collection methods make it challenging to estimate the number of crashes that involve drowsy drivers, some modeling studies have estimated that 15 to 33 percent of fatal crashes might involve drowsy drivers,” the report stated. In the study, about 4 percent of U.S. adults said they nodded off or fell asleep at least once while driving in the previous month. The study surveyed 147,000 people in 19 states by telephone in 2009 and 2010. Researchers found that drowsy driving was more common among people ages 25 to 34, adults who reported usually sleeping six hours or less per day, snoring or unintentionally falling asleep during the day. Steve Deibel, owner and founder of Aiken Driving Academy, said that a section of his classes address fatigued driving. He shows students a video on a New Jersey law known as “Maggie’s Law.” The law was enacted following an accident in 1997, during which college student Maggie McDonnell was killed in a car accident when struck by a van driven by someone who had not slept for 30 hours and had also been using drugs. The driver fell asleep at the wheel when the accident occurred. After two trials, the driver of the van was given a $200 fine and a suspended jail sentence. The law defines fatigue as being without sleep for more than 24 consecutive hours and makes driving while fatigued a criminal offense. “We show that video and talk to our young people about fatigue,” Deibel said. “They’re tired because they stay up late. They get six or eight hours of sleep at night but need 10 to 12.” Deibel, a former law enforcement officer, said there have been fatalities in Aiken County related to fatigued driving. “It’s very overlooked, and it’s very serious,” he said. “You’ve got to have rest. You can’t be on the road when you’re tired or fatigued.” Deibel said the video also followed a news reporter that was kept awake for 30 hours as part of an experiment. He then was hooked up to monitoring machines and drove a car on a closed course. “What came of the study – you fall asleep but your eyes are open,” Deibel said. “Our bodies are built to shut down. If you have somebody that’s fatigued behind the wheel and they’re essentially asleep, you might as well just blindfold them.” Deibel said falling asleep at the wheel is as dangerous as driving 2.5 times the legal blood-alcohol limit. “I hate making those correlations, because impaired driving is extremely dangerous,” he said. “I think you have to lump fatigued driving into all the serious dangers of driving. You can’t look at it as, ‘I’m sleepy. I’ll just get some coffee.’” If you feel fatigued while driving, Deibel suggests pulling over, getting out of the vehicle and getting something to eat, especially if you find yourself rubbing your eyes, rolling down the window, turning on the air conditioner or doing other things to keep yourself awake. “If you start doing things to stay awake, you need to stop and look at your sleep cycle,” he said, adding that if the last time you slept was more than 18 to 20 hours, you don’t need to be driving. He added that fatigued driving, as opposed to “tired driving,” usually occurs after being awake for 18 hours or more. If you’ve been awake 18 hours or more, “you need to start looking very hard at where you’re driving, when you’re driving and if you need to be driving,” Deibel said. He added that caffeine is only a temporary fix in some cases. “How much caffeine does it take to keep somebody awake who’s been awake for 20-plus hours?” he said. “It eventually wouldn’t, because your body is just going to shut down.” Teddy Kulmala covers the crime beat for the Aiken Standard. He is a graduate of Clemson University and hails from Williston.

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The Savannah River Site is likely a prime contender for storing spent nuclear fuel for decades to come, according to a report released Thursday. The study by Robert Alvarez, a former senior adviser at the Department of Energy and professor at Johns Hopkins University, outlines the possible impact of making SRS an interim storage site for the country’s commercial nuclear power plant waste. Recently formed environmental group Don’t Waste Aiken commissioned Alvarez, an expert on nuclear waste with Washington, D.C., think tank The Policy Institute, to produce a study outlining the impact of storing spent nuclear fuel at SRS. Speaking at a press conference announcing his findings, Alvarez outlined the amount of radioactivity spent fuel could bring – more than double the radioactivity present at SRS currently in high-level waste could be delivered. High level liquid waste tanks at SRS have near 280 million curies of radioactivity. Spent fuel looking to be stored could bring 1 billion curies to the DOE-owned site. “This would be one of the largest concentrations of radioactivity in the United States in one place” Alvarez said. “I’m not questioning the ability of the people at Savannah River to handle this material. I’m really trying to give people an idea of what the implications are.” The report also said some 2,500 shipments of high-level waste initially could travel across the nation’s highways for storage at SRS if sent by truck; however, Alvarez noted that he thought a single repository was unlikely and impractical. Alvarez’ report will be officially released Thursday as discussion intensifies over how to deal with the nation’s growing amount of commercial power plant waste. The nation today has about 70,000 tons of spent fuel. The deadly material was originally scheduled to go to Yucca Mountain, Nev., for disposal, but President Obama canceled the project in 2010 after citing environmental concerns. Last month, the Department of Energy released a three-point plan for replacing Yucca Mountain. The plan calls for establishing an interim storage site by 2021 and a larger interim storage site by 2025. A permanent disposal ground would be available by 2048, according to the DOE. Although there is no official proposal to build an interim storage site at SRS, the Site’s history in dealing with waste, its workforce, community support and infrastructure make it an obvious contender. “I don’t know where there is a better site,” Alvarez said Thursday. “SRS is not the only option.” Overall, Alvarez said that wherever the waste is stored, the safest way to store it is in dry casks that are in a large enough structure to withstand a possible seismic event. He recommended changes in law that would allow DOE to assume title over spent fuel at private reactor sites and then construct dry storage facilities there.

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Science Fair Project Encyclopedia Battle of the Kentish Knock The Battle of the Kentish Knock (also known as the Battle of the Zealand Approaches) was a naval battle of the First Anglo-Dutch War fought on 8 October 1652 near the shoal called the Kentish Knock in the North Sea about 30 km from the mouth of the river Thames. Dutch Admiral Maarten Tromp had been suspended after his failure to bring the English to battle off the Shetland Islands in August, and replaced by Admiral Witte de With, who saw an opportunity to concentrate his forces and gain control of the seas. He set out to attack the English fleet at anchor at the Downs near Dover on 5 October 1652, but the wind was unfavourable. When the fleets finally met on 8 October, the United Provinces had 57 ships; the Commonwealth of England 68 ships under General at Sea Robert Blake. Action was joined at about 17:00. The English ships were larger and better armed than their opponents and by nightfall two Dutch ships had been captured and about twenty — mostly commanded by captains from Zeeland who resented the domination of Holland — had broken off the engagement. De With withdrew the rest of his force with many casualties. The Dutch recognized after their defeat that they needed larger ships to take on the English, and instituted a major building program that was to pay off in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details

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Science Fair Project Encyclopedia The sampling frequency or sampling rate defines the number of samples per second taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. The inverse of the sampling frequency is the sampling period or sampling time, which is the time between samples. The sampling frequency can only be applied to samplers in which each sample is periodically taken. There is no rule that limits a sampler from taking a sample at a non-periodic rate. If a signal has a bandwidth of 100 Hz then to avoid aliasing the sampling frequency must be greater than 200 Hz. In some cases, it is desirable to have a sampling frequency more than twice the bandwidth so that a digital filter can be used in exchange for a weaker analog anti-aliasing filter. This process is known as oversampling. In digital audio, common sampling rates are: - 8,000 Hz - telephone, adequate for human speech - 11,025 Hz - 22,050 Hz - radio - 44,100 Hz - compact disc - 48,000 Hz - digital sound used for films and professional audio - 96,000 or 192,400 Hz - DVD-Audio, some LPCM DVD audio tracks, BD-ROM (Blu-ray Disc) audio tracks, and HD-DVD (High-Definition DVD) audio tracks In digital video, which uses a CCD as the sensor, the sampling rate is defined the frame/field rate, rather than the notional pixel clock. All modern TV cameras use CCDs, and the image sampling frequency is the repetition rate of the CCD integration period. - 13.5 MHz - CCIR 601, D1 video - Continuous signal vs. Discrete signal - Digital control - Sample and hold - Sample (signal) - Sampling (information theory) - Signal (information theory) The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details

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The main objectives of the project are: to strengthen the indigenous organizations for the exercise of human rights and the promotion of the rights of the Declaration The desired results are the strengthening of indigenous organizations in relation with the Declaration of United Nations and their mechanisms of implementation, taking actions and preparing programs for the exercise of rights. The planned actions are: 1.1 The carrying out of training courses on the declaration and human rights for leaders in: - Ecuador through Tukui Shim and CONAIE. - Argentina through the Confederation and the Observatory. - Paraguay through CAPI and ACIDI. - Colombia in Caño Mochuelo. 1.2 Workshops to raise awareness and spread human rights and the declaration in the communities. 1.3 Publications on the implementation of rights since the implementation of the Declaration. - Publication in Ecuador (comparative report of the Constitution and the Declaration). - Publication on the exercise of the territorial rights in the Interamerican system. - Informative material on the Declaration. 2.1 Advice and definition of strategies to implement the rights in the international arena. 2. 2. The support and escort to the carrying out of defense actions and promotion of rights, including strategies of international action (the project would begin with the same organizations we will make the training courses). - Proposals of regulations and political negotiations. - Defence of rights in trials against indigenous organizations and people. - Lawsuit to implement rights. - International actions of condemnation and support. 2. 3. Support and escort for the consolidation of observatories on indigenous rights.

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In one form or another, the sustainment warfighting function described in Field Manual (FM) 3–0, Operations, has been an essential feature of the Army’s operational past since at least World War I. The sustainment concept was institutionalized in March 1942 as part of a massive Army reorganization that accompanied the entry of the United States into World War II. Driven by Chief of Staff of the Army General George C. Marshall, the reorganization aimed to reduce the number of officers and organizations that had immediate access to him. The resulting reorganization restructured the Army into three major commands: the Army Ground Forces (AGF), the Army Air Forces (AAF), and a command initially called the Services of Supply (SOS)—the Army’s sustainment command. Everything that did not fit clearly into the AGF or the AAF went to the SOS. Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell was selected to command the SOS organization. Army Service Forces In March 1943, the War Department staff renamed the SOS the “Army Service Forces” (ASF) because they thought the word “supply” did not accurately reflect the broad range of activities that had been assigned to the command. At the War Department level, the ASF was a consolidation of logistics, personnel, and administrative functions. Under ordinary circumstances, these functions were the responsibility of the War Department G–4 and G–1, who relied on the technical and operational support of the Finance, Judge Advocate General’s, and Adjutant General’s Departments; the Chaplain Corps; Inspector General; Provost Marshal General; and Chief, Special Services. Nothing about the ASF organization was simple or uncomplicated. As recorded in the Army’s official history of the organization, the ASF was without “direct precedent” and unusual “in the variety of tasks entrusted to it. . . . [I]t was a hodgepodge of agencies with many and varied functions.” From the beginning until it was disestablished in 1946, “the ASF struggled constantly to build a common unity of purpose and organization.” Lieutenant General Somervell, a career logistician, admitted never liking the part of the reorganization that gave him responsibility for personnel. He gave most of his attention to the monumental task of procurement and supply. However “hodgepodge” it may have been, the ASF survived the war, fulfilling its massive responsibility of supporting the millions of U.S. Soldiers located all over the globe in multiple theaters of operations. One unifying factor that kept Somervell on task and held the ASF together was the obligation to sustain warfighting commanders and the Soldiers who served them. If unity of purpose was lost to the ASF organization, the ASF gained from efficiencies resulting from the unified effort to sustain our Soldiers at war. Combat Service Support Group Following World War II, the Army began establishing combat development agencies as a way for each branch of the Army to integrate new technologies and tactical organizations into the combat Army. Ultimately, all combat development agencies were realigned under a unified Combat Developments Command (CDC) in 1962 as part of an extensive reorganization of the Army. The CDC established two combat development “integrating agencies” modeled after the mission and functions of the AGF and ASF of World War II. One agency integrated the development of combat and combat support functions, and the other, the Combat Service Support Group, acted as integrator for what we today would call the sustainment function. The combat development agencies of the Adjutant General’s, Finance, Judge Advocate General’s, and Chaplain branches were joined with the various logistics combat development agencies of the Quartermaster, Ordnance, and Transportation branches to form the Combat Service Support Group, headquartered at Fort Lee, Virginia. Corresponding with the larger Army reorganization, the Army Command and General Staff College adopted the concept of combat service support to identify the varied, yet related, functions that together defined the sustainment mission. In its essence, the Combat Service Support Group represented a reconstitution of the sustainment concept embedded in the ASF of World War II. The CDC managed the Army’s total combat development effort until the end of the Vietnam War. Personnel Issues During the Vietnam War Following the Vietnam War and the gut-wrenching realization that many of the Army’s most serious operational issues were related to the “personnel system,” senior leaders of the Army began to question the ASF model that had framed the sustainment concept since the beginning of World War II. Early in the Vietnam War, it had taken the wife of an Army battalion commander embroiled in the Battle of Ia Drang Valley to convince senior Pentagon officials that yellow-cab delivery of casualty notification telegrams to Soldiers’ next-of-kin was deeply insensitive and destructive of homefront morale. The draft, used to sustain manpower levels in the Vietnam War, had embittered many who objected to conscription on principle and others who believed it forced into service a disproportionate number of poor, working-class, and minority members of U.S. society. Racial problems in society at large had been magnified in the military by the collapsing public support for the war. Drug and alcohol abuse among military personnel was rampant. Replacement and rotation policies that caused constant personnel turbulence had undermined unit integrity and the commitment of Soldiers to one another and the mission. Perceived failings of command in Vietnam gave rise to the study of military leadership and the historical and ethical foundations of the military profession. Together with the dissolution of the draft, the advent of the all-volunteer Army, and the commitment to more thoroughly integrate women into the force, the personnel lessons of the Vietnam War created a highly charged environment conducive to a full-scale assault on the Army’s personnel system. Army Training and Doctrine Command Emerging from the many discussions concerning the personnel lessons learned from the Vietnam War were plans to establish a “clearing house” (an administrative center or school complex) that would form the center of gravity for an Army-wide personnel system. The opportunity to establish an agency of this kind came with Operation Steadfast, the 1973 reorganization of the Army that disestablished the Continental Army Command and the Combat Developments Command. From Operation Steadfast came two new commands, the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and the Army Forces Command. TRADOC, as the name implied, became responsible for Army training, doctrine, and combat developments. At the core of the new TRADOC organization were three mid-level “integrating centers” for combat developments: the Combined Arms Center (CAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; the Logistics Center (LOGC) at Fort Lee; and the Administration Center (ADMINCEN) at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. CAC and LOGC were essentially re-creations of former Combat Developments Command operating agencies; ADMINCEN was a new organization altogether. Based partly on lessons from the Vietnam experience, planners intended ADMINCEN to become the collection point for all matters related to the Army’s personnel system and the human dimension of military operations. It was a kind of doctrinal “think tank” and training ground that directly extended from the mission of the Army G–1 and its associated branches and specialties. Considerable resistance to ADMINCEN was voiced by members of the Operation Steadfast study group, who balked at the idea of elevating personnel doctrine, training, and combat developments to near-equal status with the combined arms and logistics missions. However, the Continental Army Command commander, General Ralph E. Haines, Jr., directed that ADMINCEN be included in the detailed plan of reorganization. The establishment of ADMINCEN reflected the view of General Haines and other senior military officials that a refashioned personnel system was critical to restoring public confidence in the Army, recovering from the war’s assault on Soldier morale and unit cohesion, and building an all-volunteer force. Chief of Staff of the Army General Creighton W. Abrams, Jr., testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee in March 1974, called the management of human resources the Army’s “single most important function. . . . Unless we run our people programs well, the Army itself will not be well.” Likewise, Lieutenant General Bernard W. Rogers, then the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, began to take a hard look at the way the Army managed its people. He said that the Army’s personnel system should “provide in the right place at the right time the required number of qualified, motivated people to accomplish the Army’s mission, and to provide for their maintenance and care as well as that of their dependents.” As the Army’s focal point for personnel and personnel systems, ADMINCEN became the proponent for a new category of military operations called personnel service support (PSS). In July 1973, the ADMINCEN was activated at Fort Benjamin Harrison. The Personnel and Administration Combat Development Activity, ADMINCEN’S combat development activity, assumed responsibility for integrating the doctrine, organization, and equipment developments of the Adjutant General’s, Finance, Chaplain, Judge Advocate General’s, Medical Service, and Women’s Army Corps. The Personnel and Administration Combat Development Activity’s integrating mission also included the Defense Information School (for public affairs) and the Army School of Music (for Army bands). The three-center model, which was the basis for TRADOC’s organization, constituted a restructuring of the sustainment model that had been in place since the Army reorganized for World War II. Instead of the one-piece model, Operation Steadfast institutionalized a two-piece model—one piece to address logistics functions and another for personnel and administration. Much like ASF of old, ADMINCEN became a magnet for every developmental mission and program that did not fit clearly into either combat and combat support (CAC’s focus) or logistics (LOGC’s focus) mission areas. Also like ASF, ADMINCEN struggled from the beginning to build a commonly held vision and understanding of purpose and mission. During the command’s 17-year history, it went through no less than 10 major reorganizations, each hoping to build a unity of purpose that had eluded it from the very beginning. In 1980, ADMINCEN reorganized into the Army Soldier Support Center as a result of the mandate to manage and develop programs related to the human dimension of military operations. Soldier Support Institute The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s brought immediate demands from Congress and the public at large to radically reduce the defense budget and take advantage of the “peace dividend.” Those demands essentially called for the demobilization of the Nation’s defense structure that had been built to deter Soviet and Communist aggression around the world. The war against Iraq in 1990 and 1991 interrupted the debate but did little to alter the political intent to reduce deficit spending and shift public funds formerly allocated for defense to other areas. TRADOC’s initial response to the reality of post-Cold War military budgets was to “reengineer” its combat development program. A significant piece of the plan called for eliminating the Army Soldier Support Center by consolidating it with LOGC at Fort Lee. The resulting organization, the Army Combined Arms Support Command (CASCOM), like the Combat Service Support Group before it, assumed responsibility for the combat, doctrine, and training developments of the Army’s logistics and personnel and administrative functional areas. The Soldier Support Center was reduced to a “schools” center, the Army Soldier Support Institute, which included the Adjutant General, Finance, and Recruiting and Retention Schools and a Noncommissioned Officer Academy. The May 1990 CASCOM organization plan went through four phases and took 4 years to complete. Under phase 1 of the plan, people and funds supporting the PSS integrating mission were transferred to CASCOM. The final phase of the project called for the transfer of combat and training development programs of the Ordnance Center and Schools at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, and the Transportation School at Fort Eustis, Virginia, to Fort Lee to be consolidated with like assets from the Quartermaster School. The Ordnance and Transportation Schools, however, continued to provide classroom instruction at their original locations. The consolidation marked the elevation of LOGC from an integrating center to an agency responsible also for capability and training developments for the logistics community (the Ordnance, Transportation, and Quartermaster Schools). Since the Soldier Support Institute was in the process of moving from Fort Benjamin Harrison to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, under a Defense Base Closure and Realignment (BRAC) Commission mandate, the combat and training development assets of the Soldier Support Institute were exempted from the move to Fort Lee. The people and programs that would have moved to Fort Lee were already committed to moving to Fort Jackson and the multimillion dollar facilities that were being constructed there to receive them. Problems With Integration Under CASCOM Senior leaders of the Army’s personnel and finance communities were also concerned that capability and training development support for the Adjutant General and Finance Schools would largely disappear in an organization committed largely to the Army’s logistics mission. Many of the Army-wide personnel programs formerly sponsored by the Soldier Support Center began to flounder with the transfer of the PSS integrating mission to CASCOM. At issue was the family of human resource programs belonging to no particular branch of the Army but closely connected to the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. The Soldier Support Center in the early 1980s, for instance, sponsored the development and integration of the Army’s new manning system and the follow-on regimental system intended to strengthen unit cohesion and the bonds of affiliation that tied Soldiers to particular units and Army branches. Much of the justification for the establishment of the Army Community and Family Support Center in 1984 resulted from the Soldier Support Center’s sponsorship of an expanded Army Community Services program and various studies and programs related to the impact of Soldiers’ service and sacrifice on Army families. Under the transfer of the integrating function, statutory responsibility for human resources had been vested with CASCOM, the responsible agent for integrating both logistics and personnel issues across the Army. However, one of the first issues to confront the commandant of the Adjutant General School in 1994 was whether the Army’s Adjutant General’s Corps ought to assume responsibility for equal opportunity (EO) and other related human resources programs. Knowing that the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel needed a TRADOC advocate for human resources, the Adjutant General School commandant absorbed the EO mission into the Adjutant General’s Corps’ doctrine, training, and combat developments program. In taking responsibility for other human resources programs, the Adjutant General’s Corps, as the technical proponent for the Army’s personnel system, had broadened its mission to include responsibility for “people” programs and other human-dimension programs that were formerly a part of the Soldier Support Center’s capabilities development integrating mission. |A Soldier with the 147th Adjutant General Postal Company from Kaiserslautern, Germany, inspects a box that a Soldier is sending home from Iraq. In 1993, TRADOC published its first attempt at post-Cold War operational doctrine: FM 100–5, Operations. The 1993 version of FM 100–5 listed six critical logistics functions that together constituted combat service support. Of the six, two addressed the former PSS functional area. The chapter titled “Manning the Force” described personnel readiness management, replacement management, and casualty management. The chapter titled “Sustaining Soldiers and their Systems” included health service support, personnel services, financial services, public affairs, and religious and legal support. For leaders and Soldiers belonging to the personnel and administrative areas of the Army mission, the interchangeable use of the terms “logistics” and “combat service support” validated previous predictions about CASCOM’s narrow focus on logistics. Sustainment functions falling within the combat service support functional area but outside the logistics domain had become afterthoughts. |A Soldier who serves as a debt management and special action noncommissioned officer for the 101st Finance Company, 10th Sustainment Brigade Troops Battalion, files his daily paperwork. The Sustainment Warfighting Function The most recent version of Army operational doctrine, FM 3–0, Operations, resolves previous exclusionary problems caused by definitions by rescinding the terms “combat arms,” “combat support,” and “combat service support,” which described the three functional areas represented in planning and conducting a military operation. In their place, the FM names eight elements of combat power: leadership, information, movement and maneuver, fires, intelligence, command and control, protection, and sustainment. These are believed to be a more accurate reflection of the contemporary, if not the past, operating environment. Together, the eight elements of combat power point to a new and broader understanding of combined arms operations. Instead of the narrow combination of weapon systems, the new definition applies leadership and information and selected warfighting functions in a “synchronized and simultaneous” fashion to achieve the “full destructive, disruptive, informational, and constructive potential” of combat power. Sustainment, one of the six warfighting functions, has replaced combat service support as the approved concept used to describe the collective tasks and related logistics, personnel services, and health services systems essential to support the operational Army in the fulfillment of a given mission. From a branch and specialty perspective, sustainment involves the combined functions and capabilities provided by the Adjutant General’s, Chaplain, Finance, Judge Advocate General’s, Medical Service, Ordnance, Quartermaster, and Transportation Corps. Based on recent experience, our new doctrine is a candid admission that successful military operations in the full-spectrum environment of the 21st century require a measured, combined, and focused application of the various elements of combat power. Regardless of size and scope, the sustainment community’s ability to provide commanders at the right time and place with all the logistics, personnel, and health services support necessary for mission accomplishment is essential to the success of any future operation. On 9 January 2009, officials at Fort Lee, Virginia, dedicated the new Sustainment Center of Excellence (SCoE). Established as the result of BRAC decisions, the SCoE represents a further consolidation of CASCOM, the Army Logistics University (formerly the Army Logistics Management College), and the Army Quartermaster, Transportation, and Ordnance Schools. As part of the BRAC plan, the students, faculty, and staff of the Ordnance Mechanical Maintenance School at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the Ordnance Munitions and Electronics Maintenance School at Redstone Arsenal, and the Transportation School at Fort Eustis will move to Fort Lee. The new organization represents a complete consolidation of the logistics community’s doctrine, training, and combat development programs. SCoE is indeed about the future of logistics and the logistics branches, but it is also about the other elements of the sustainment function—the branches and missions that make up the personnel services and health service support functions. Based on our new doctrine, SCoE also represents our best opportunity in years to unify the effort as well as create a common understanding of purpose that bridges the diverse programs and missions that make up the Army’s total sustainment community. Much of our success as a community will depend on ensuring the proper alignment and integration of non-logistics units and personnel that are currently being added to our theater and expeditionary sustainment commands and sustainment brigades. They, too, are critically necessary for freeing commanders for action, extending operational reach, and prolonging the endurance of our Soldiers, who respond to any and all threats that compromise the safety and well-being of the American people.

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The onset of the disease - Drinking alcohol - Public transport - Personal finances - Handling money - Going out alone It is best to consider as soon as possible how you are going to deal with certain matters relating to the person’s independence. Matters relating to their personal liberty such as whether it is safe for them to drive, go out alone, drink alcohol or smoke have to be dealt with. Financial matters also have to be considered, e.g. should they be able to write out cheques and make financial decisions? These and similar questions should be discussed with the person with dementia at an early stage when they are still able to play a role in decision making. When you are trying to decide how to handle the above-mentioned situations, you will probably find yourself split between trying to leave the person with dementia with as much independence as possible and at the same time trying to protect them from possible risks and dangers. The following guidelines may help you in making your decisions. In the early stages some people who have been diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease can still drive safely, but as the disease progresses the ability to drive will almost certainly deteriorate. The person may start to find it difficult to find familiar places, fail to observe road signs and respect rules of the road, drive too fast or too slow, have slow reactions and become confused, frustrated or angry while driving. However, people with dementia are often extremely reluctant to give up the right to drive, as it is one of the last signs of their independence and adulthood. It can therefore be difficult to convince them of the necessity to stop driving. But, it is too dangerous an issue not to be dealt with straight away. You should first try to discuss the issue of driving with the person with dementia, pointing out the possible dangers of driving, as well as the benefits of not having to. They may feel angry and depressed about the loss and need support during this awkward period. It might soften the blow if you were to arrange for other forms of transport or for other people to drive the person around. However, persuasion does not always work and some carers have tremendous difficulties trying to stop the person with dementia from driving. If this is the case, you might find that the person is more willing to listen to a doctor, the police or someone in authority. If this is also unsuccessful, you may have to try to prevent them from driving. You could, for example, hide the car keys, arrange for the car not to work (e.g. by removing the distributor cap) or park the car further down the street out of sight. If it is not needed, you could even sell the car and the money saved would help pay for other means of transport. One carer overcame this problem by leaving the car out ready to drive without the ignition key. Her husband sat in it and happily “drove” for hours changing gears and signalling without actually moving. Whatever you decide to do, you should inform the insurance company about the diagnosis of dementia. Care should be taken not to let the person with dementia smoke alone as it is a fire hazard. Also, some people with dementia might forget that they are holding a cigarette and it could burn their fingers. You should try to persuade the person to cut down on smoking and preferably stop. People with dementia often forget to smoke and then don’t miss cigarettes once the habit has been broken. However, if they continue smoking, there are a few useful precautions to take, e.g. put large ashtrays everywhere, replace wastepaper baskets with metal bins, buy flame resistant clothes and furniture, fit smoke alarms and keep matches out of reach. Smoking alone, particularly in bed, is the biggest risk. You might have more success persuading the person with dementia to restrict their smoking to times when there is company, rather than trying to prevent it altogether. It is important to pay particular attention not to let the person smoke if they are using nicotine patches as this greatly increases health risks. Alcoholic drinks may increase confusion in the person with dementia. Although the occasional social drink should not cause particular concern, it is best to ask your doctor’s advice about whether the person with dementia should have access to alcoholic drinks. This is particularly important if they are under medication. Even if the doctor agrees to the person having an occasional drink, you will still need to make sure that they do not have more. Loss of memory may result in the person with dementia forgetting that they have already had a few drinks. It is best to keep alcohol in a locked cupboard or hidden away. Early on in the disease, the person with dementia might be able to use public transport. But as the disease progresses they may start to have difficulties remembering where they are going, paying the fare, getting the right bus or train, getting out at the right place, etc. When this happens the person could feel embarrassed and afraid, particularly if they cannot remember where they are going or where they live. For this reason, in the later stages it would be preferable to try to arrange private transport. You could perhaps make a plan in advance of different people who are willing to drive the person around. Administrative formalities and personal finances The person with dementia might also have financial obligations or assets of little or considerable importance. It is necessary to discuss financial matters early on so that the person with dementia can make decisions while they are still able, appoint someone to handle their financial matters when they are no longer able and make a will. If you are handling the person’s finances, keep them separate from your own and keep a record of what you spend and receive in case you are asked to account for it at some stage. The person with dementia might forget what was decided however many times you might explain it. You might also find it necessary to help the person with dementia to deal with administrative formalities, e.g. collecting benefits, filling out forms, etc. There are a few possibilities for handling this such as an Enduring Power of Attorney. Your Alzheimer’s organisation will be able to give your more details. As the disease progresses the person with dementia will become less able to defend their own interests. It is possible to appoint a guardian to protect their interests and make decisions on their behalf (e.g. on where to live, health issues, etc.). This would help in situations where the person with dementia did not or was unable to take the decision at an earlier stage. People with dementia tend to experience difficulties handling money even fairly early on in the disease. Due to a loss of memory and understanding of the symbolic function of money, they may pay for something more than once, not pay at all, give money away or lose it. In this way problems can accumulate without you necessarily realising. In order to maintain their sense of wellbeing and self-esteem, you might be able to arrange for the person with dementia to carry on paying for goods and services (whilst ensuring that the risk of mistake or being taken advantage of is minimised) and ensure that they always have some money on them. Some carers have found that certain shopkeepers and hairdressers are willing to take cheques from the person with dementia, which are no longer valid, but which are then replaced by the carer. Sometimes, local shopkeepers who are understanding will let you pay later for articles which the person with dementia takes out of the shop without paying. Payment of regular accounts (e.g. electricity, gas telephone, etc.) can be settled by arranging direct debits with your bank. Going out alone You may be worried about the person with dementia going out alone for various reasons, e.g. traffic, the risk of getting lost or robbed etc. However, they might object to being accompanied everywhere, seeing this as an invasion of their privacy. You will therefore need to be extremely tactful in trying to keep an eye on their whereabouts. (Please see chapter on wandering). Last Updated: jeudi 06 août 2009

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Background information about dementia and home care services In Spain, the provision of home care services is in the stage of development with about 20% of communes offering such services. However, this is not sufficient to cover demand and it is estimated that only about 1% of the elderly receive home care services provided by the government. The main aim of social services network is to keep elderly people in their homes for as long as possible. The vast majority of elderly dependent people have to rely on services provided by informal carers. Care of elderly and dependent people tends to be seen as a family obligation. However, according to a survey carried out in 2001, only 24% of the population believe that children will continue to bear the responsibility for caring for their elderly parents in the future and the number of elderly people living alone is steadily increasing (Larizgoitia Jauregi, 2004) Legislation relating to the provision of home care services The Spanish constitution states that all citizens are entitled to “health protection”. The General Health Law of 1986, which saw the creation of the National Health System, also states that access to health services is a citizen’s right. In the Spanish Civil Code (Book 1), it is stated that the spouse and children of elderly dependent people are responsible for their maintenance and care which covers everything that is essential for sustenance, shelter, clothing and medical assistance. The extent of the maintenance to be provided depends on the means of the providers and the needs of the dependent person. The obligation to provide maintenance comes to an end when the provider dies or when their wealth has fallen to such a level that continuing to do so would mean having to neglect their own needs or those of their family. Brothers and sisters also have an obligation to provide maintenance but they come after spouses and descendants, but this obligation is limited to what is absolutely necessary Kerschen et al., 2005). Citizens’ do not have a legally established right to social services. The provision of such services is at the discretion of the Autonomous Administration. Access rights are governed by legislation at the level of the autonomous communities. The main criterion of the social service network is to keep the elderly in their own environment for as long as possible. The main social services are therefore aimed at maintenance in the home. There is also a residential type network. These services generally concentrate on attending the dependent elderly who live alone. The need is also recognised to help subjects with few resources. Organisation and financing of home care services Health care services are organised by the autonomous communities. Each community has a Health Service and draws up a Health Plan which outlines which activities are necessary in order to meet the objectives of its own Health Service. Amongst other services provided by the health services of the autonomous communities, there is primary care which includes health care in the home and care specifically for the elderly. Home care services are free for people who are on the minimum pension. People who have an income twice as high as the minimum pension must pay for the services whereas those on an intermediary income must pay a certain amount which is calculated on the basis of their income. Health care is funded exclusively through general taxation and not through social security contributions. Home social services are financed jointly by the Ministry of Social Affairs, the regional ministries of Social Welfare and the municipalities. Home visits by general practitioners and primary care nurses are funded through the Public Health Service. In addition to government provided services, voluntary associations and not-for-profit associations such as the Red Cross also provide social home care services (Carrillo, 2005). Kinds of home care services available Home care services include primary care social services, social work, assistance with household tasks, meals-on-wheels and tele-alarm services. However, these services are not available in all the autonomous communities. In practice, home care services are more or less limited to household tasks (which also includes laundry and shopping). This seems to be based on the choice of the elderly people many of whom think that personal care should be carried out by the family. This opinion seems to be shared by carers who often prefer to receive formal assistance with household tasks rather than personal care (Valderrama et al., 1997 in Larizgoitia Jauregi, 2004). Meals-on-wheels is a services that is only available in the cities of Malaga and Cordoba Andalusia) and in the city of Lerida (in Catalonia). Teleassistance and telealarm services are offered in at least 10 of the autonomous communities. In Andalusia, Castilla-Leon, Valencia, a service exists which consists of helping to adapt the home to the needs of the dependent person. (Imserso 2004 in Larizgoitia Jauregi, 2004). - Esteban Carrillo (2005), WHHO International Compendium of Home Health Care : http://www.nahc.org/WHHO/WHHOcomptext.html - Kerschen, N. et al. (2005), Long-term care for older persons. In Long-term care for Older People – conference organised by the Luxembourg Presidency with the Social Protection Committee of the European Union, Luxembourg, 12-13 May 2005 - Larizgoitia Jauregi, A. (2004), National Background Report for Spain , EUROFAMCARE: http://www.uke.uni-hamburg.de/extern/eurofamcare/documents/nabare_spain_rc1_a4.pdf - Ylieff, M. et al. (2005), Rapport international – les aides et les soins aux personnes dementes dans les pays de la communauté européenne, Qualidem, Universities of Liège and Leuven. Last Updated: mercredi 15 juillet 2009

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October 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 5 As America goes into its fifty-fifth presidential election, we should remember that there might have been only one—if we hadn’t had the only candidate on earth who could do the job Looking back over two hundred years of the American Presidency, it seems safe to say that no one entered the office with more personal prestige than Washington, and only two Presidents—Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt—faced comparable crises. The Civil War and the Great Depression, though now distant in time, remain more recent and raw in our collective memory than the American founding, so we find it easier to appreciate the achievements of Lincoln and Roosevelt. Washington’s achievement must be recovered before it can be appreciated, which means that we must recognize that there was no such thing as a viable American nation when he took office as President, that the opening words of the Constitution (“We the people of the United States”) expressed a fervent but fragile hope rather than a social reality. The roughly four million settlers spread along the coastline and streaming over the Alleghenies felt their primary allegiance—to the extent they felt any allegiance at all —to local, state, and regional authorities. No republican government had ever before exercised control over a population this diffuse or a land this large, and the prevailing assumption among the best-informed European observers was that, to paraphrase Lincoln’s later formulation, a nation so conceived and so dedicated could not endure. Not much happened at the Executive level during the first year of Washington’s Presidency, which was exactly the way he wanted it. His official correspondence was dominated by job applications from veterans of the war, former friends, and total strangers. They all received the same republican response—namely, that merit rather than favoritism must determine federal appointments. As for the President himself, it was not clear whether he was taking the helm or merely occupying the bridge. Rumors began to circulate that he regarded his role as primarily ceremonial and symbolic, that after a mere two years he intended to step down, having launched the American ship of state and contributed his personal prestige as ballast on its maiden voyage. As it turned out, even ceremonial occasions raised troubling questions because no one knew how the symbolic centerpiece of a republic should behave or even what to call him. Vice President John Adams, trying to be helpful, ignited a fiery debate in the Senate by suggesting such regal titles as “His Elective Majesty” and “His Mightiness,” which provoked a lethal combination of shock and laughter, as well as the observation that Adams himself should be called “His Rotundity.” Eventually the Senate resolved on the most innocuous option available: The President of the United States should be called exactly that. Matters of social etiquette—how the President should interact with the public, where he should be accessible and where insulated—prompted multiple memorandums on the importance of what Alexander Hamilton called “a pretty high tone” that stopped short of secluding the President entirely. The solution was a weekly open house called the levee, part imperial court ceremony with choreographed bows and curtsies, part drop-in parlor social. The levee struck the proper middle note between courtly formality and republican simplicity, though at the expense of becoming a notoriously boring and wholly scripted occasion. The very awkwardness of the levee fitted Washington’s temperament nicely since he possessed a nearly preternatural ability to remain silent while everyone around him was squirming under the pressure to fill that silence with conversation. (Adams later claimed that this “gift of silence” was Washington’s greatest political asset, which Adams deeply envied because he lacked it altogether.) The formal etiquette of the levee and Washington’s natural dignity (or was it aloofness?) combined to create a political atmosphere unimaginable in any modern-day national capital. In a year when the French Revolution broke out in violent spasms destined to reshape the entire political landscape of Europe, and the new Congress ratified a Bill of Rights that codified the most sweeping guarantee of individual freedoms ever enacted, no one at the levees expected Washington to comment on those events. Even matters of etiquette and symbolism, however, could have constitutional consequences, as Washington learned in August of 1789. The treaty-making power of the President required that he seek “the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” Washington initially interpreted the phrase to require his personal appearance in the Senate and the solicitation of senatorial opinion on specific treaty provisions in the mode of a large advisory council. But when he brought his proposals for treaties with several Southern Indian tribes to the Senate, the debate became a prolonged shouting match over questions of procedure. The longer the debate went on, the more irritated Washington became. Finally he declared, “This defeats every purpose of my coming here,” and abruptly stalked out. From that time on, the phrase advice and consent meant something less than direct Executive solicitation of senatorial opinion, and the role of the Senate as an equal partner in the Grafting of treaties came to be regarded as a violation of the separation-of-powers principle. Though he never revisited the Senate, Washington did honor his pledge to visit all the states in the Union. In the fall of 1789 he set off on a tour of New England that carried him through 60 towns and hamlets. Everywhere he went, the residents turned out in droves to glimpse America’s greatest hero parading past. And everywhere he went, New Englanders became Americans. Since Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution, he skipped it, then made a separate trip the following summer to welcome the proudly independent latecomer into the new nation. During a visit to the Jewish synagogue in Newport he published an address on religious freedom that turned out to be the most uncompromising endorsement of the principle he ever made. (One must say “made” rather than “wrote” because there is considerable evidence that Thomas Jefferson wrote it.) Whatever sectional suspicions New Englanders might harbor toward that faraway thing called the federal government, when it appeared in their neighborhoods in the form of George Washington, they saluted, cheered, toasted, and embraced it as their own. The Southern tour was a more grueling affair, covering nearly 2,000 miles during the spring of 1791. Instead of regarding it as a threat to his health, however, Washington described it as a tonic; the real risk, he believed, was the sedentary life of a deskbound President. The entourage of 11 horses included his white parade steed, Prescott, whom he mounted at the edge of each town in order to make an entrance that accorded with the heroic mythology already surrounding his military career. Prescott’s hooves were painted and polished before each appearance, and Washington usually brought along his favorite greyhound, mischievously named Cornwallis, to add to the dramatic effect. Like a modern political candidate on the campaign trail, Washington made speeches at each stop that repeated the same platitudinous themes, linking the glory of the War for Independence with the latent glory of the newly established United States. The ladies of Charleston fluttered alongside their fans when Washington took the dance floor; Prescott and the four carriage horses held up despite the nearly impassable or even nonexistent roads; Cornwallis, however, wore out and was buried on the banks of the Savannah River in a brick vault with a marble tombstone that local residents maintained for decades as a memorial to his master’s visit. In the end all the states south of the Potomac could say they had seen the palpable version of the flag, Washington himself. During the Southern tour one of the earliest editorial criticisms of Washington’s embodiment of authority appeared in the press. He was being treated at each stop like a canonized American saint, the editorial complained, or perhaps like a demigod “perfumed by the incense of addresses.” The complaint harked back to the primordial fear haunting all republics: “However highly we may consider the character of the Chief Magistrate of the Union, yet we cannot but think the fashionable mode of expressing our attachment... favors too much of Monarchy to be used by Republicans, or to be received with pleasure by the President of a Commonwealth.” Such doubts were rarely uttered publicly during the initial years of Washington’s Presidency. But they lurked in the background, exposing how double-edged the political imperatives of the American Revolution had become. To secure the revolutionary legacy on the national level required a person who embodied national authority more visibly than any collective body like Congress could convey. Washington had committed himself to playing that role by accepting the Presidency. But at the core of the Revolutionary legacy lay a deep suspicion of any potent projection of political power by a “singular figure.” And since the very idea of a republican Chief Executive was a novelty, there was no vocabulary for characterizing such a creature except the verbal tradition surrounding European courts and kings. By playing the part he believed history required, Washington made himself vulnerable to the most virulent apprehensions about monarchical power. He could credibly claim to be the only person who had earned the right to be trusted with power. He could also argue, as he did to several friends throughout his first term, that no man was more eager for retirement, that he sincerely resented the obligations of his office as it spread a lengthening shadow of public responsibility over his dwindling days on earth. If critics wished to whisper behind his back that he looked too regal riding a white stallion with a leopard-skin cloth and gold-rimmed saddle, so be it. He knew he would rather be at Mount Vernon. In the meantime he would play his assigned role as America’s presiding presence: as so many toasts in his honor put it, “the man who unites all hearts.” Exercising Executive authority called for completely different talents than symbolizing it. Washington’s administrative style had evolved through decades of experience as master of Mount Vernon and commander of the Continental Army. (In fact, he had fewer subordinates to supervise as President than he had had in those earlier jobs.) The Cabinet system he installed represented a civilian adaptation of his military staff, with Executive sessions of the Cabinet resembling the councils of war that had provided collective wisdom during crises. As Thomas Jefferson later described it, Washington made himself “the hub of the wheel,” with routine business delegated to the department heads at the rim. It was a system that maximized Executive control while also creating essential distance from details. Its successful operation depended upon two skills that Washington had developed over his lengthy career: first, identifying and recruiting talented and ambitious young men, usually possessing formal education superior to his own, then trusting them with considerable responsibility and treating them as surrogate sons in his official family; second, knowing when to remain the hedgehog who keeps his distance and when to become the fox who dives into the details. On the first score, as a judge of talent, Washington surrounded himself with the most intellectually sophisticated collection of statesmen in American history. His first recruit, James Madison, became his most trusted consultant on judicial and Executive appointments and his unofficial liaison with Congress. The precocious Virginian was then at the peak of his powers, having just completed a remarkable string of triumphs as the dominant force behind the nationalist agenda at the Constitutional Convention and the Virginia ratifying convention, as well as being co-author of The Federalist Papers . From his position in the House of Representatives he drafted the address welcoming Washington to the Presidency, then drafted Washington’s response to it, making him a one-man shadow government. Soon after the inaugural ceremony he showed Washington his draft of 12 amendments to the Constitution, subsequently reduced to 10 and immortalized as the Bill of Rights. Washington approved the historic proposal without changing a word and trusted Madison to usher it through Congress with his customary proficiency. One of Madison’s early assignments was to persuade his reluctant friend from Monticello to serve as Secretary of State. Thomas Jefferson combined nearly spotless Revolutionary credentials with five years of diplomatic experience in Paris, all buoyed by a lyrical way with words and ideas most famously displayed in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was the third member of this talented trinity and probably the brightest of the lot. While Madison and Jefferson had come up through the Virginia school of politics, which put a premium on an understated style that emphasized indirection and stealth, Hamilton had come out of nowhere (actually, impoverished origins in the Caribbean) to display a dashing, out-of-my-way style that imposed itself ostentatiously. As Washington’s aide-de-camp during the war, he had occasionally shown himself to be a headstrong surrogate son, always searching for an independent command beyond Washington’s shadow. But his loyalty to his mentor was unquestioned, and his affinity for the way he thought was unequaled. Moreover, throughout the 1780s Hamilton had been the chief advocate for fiscal reform as the essential prerequisite for an energetic national government, making him the obvious choice as Secretary of Treasury once Robert Morris had declined. The inner circle was rounded out by three appointments of slightly lesser luster. Gen. Henry Knox, appointed Secretary of War, had served alongside Washington from Boston to Yorktown and had long since learned to subsume his own personality so thoroughly within his chief’s that disagreements became virtually impossible. More than just a cipher, as some critics of Washington’s policies later claimed, Knox joined Vice President Adams as a seasoned New England voice within the councils of power. John Jay, the new Chief Justice, added New York’s most distinguished legal and political mind to the mix, and also extensive foreign policy experience. As the first Attorney General, Edmund Randolph lacked Jay’s gravitas and Knox’s experience, but his reputation for endless vacillation was offset by solid political connections within the Tidewater elite, reinforced by an impeccable bloodline. Washington’s judgment of the assembled team was unequivocal. “I feel myself supported by able co-adjutors,” he observed in June of 1790, “who harmonize extremely well together.” In three significant areas of domestic policy, each loaded with explosive political and constitutional implications, Washington chose to delegate nearly complete control to his “co-adjutors.” Although his reasons for maintaining a discreet distance differed in each case, they all reflected his recognition that Executive power still lived under a monarchical cloud of suspicion and could be exercised only selectively. Much like his Fabian role during the war, when he learned to avoid an all-or-nothing battle with the British, choosing when to avoid conflict struck him as the essence of effective Executive leadership. The first battle he evaded focused on the shape and powers of the federal courts. The Constitution offered even less guidance on the judiciary than it did on the Executive branch. Once again the studied ambiguity reflected apprehension about any projection of federal power that upset the compromise between state and federal sovereignty. Washington personally preferred a unified body of national law, regarding it as a crucial step in creating what the Constitution called “a more perfect union.” In nominating Jay to head the Supreme Court, he argued that the federal judiciary “must be considered as the Key-Stone of our political fabric” since a coherent court system that tied the states and regions together with the ligaments of law would achieve more in the way of national unity than any other possible reform. But that, of course, was also the reason it proved so controversial. The debate over the Judiciary Act of 1789 exposed the latent hostility toward any consolidated court system. The act created a six-member Supreme Court, 3 circuit courts, and 13 district courts but left questions of original or appellate jurisdiction intentionally blurred so as to conciliate the advocates of state sovereignty. Despite his private preferences, Washington deferred to the tradeoffs worked out in congressional committees, chiefly a committee chaired by Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, which designed a framework of overlapping authorities that was neither rational nor wholly national in scope. In subsequent decades John Marshall, Washington’s most loyal and influential disciple, would move this ambiguous arrangement toward a more coherent version of national law. But throughout Washington’s Presidency the one thing the Supreme Court could not be, or appear to be, was supreme, a political reality that Washington chose not to contest. A second occasion for calculated Executive reticence occurred in February of 1790 when the forbidden subject of slavery came before Congress. Two Quaker petitions, one arguing for an immediate end to the slave trade, the other advocating the gradual abolition of slavery itself, provoked a bitter debate in the House. The petitions would almost surely have been consigned to legislative oblivion except for the signature of Benjamin Franklin on the second one, which transformed a beyond-the-pale protest into an unavoidable challenge to debate the moral compatibility of slavery with America’s avowed Revolutionary principles. In what turned out to be his last public act, Franklin was investing his enormous prestige to force the first public discussion of the sectional differences over slavery at the national level. (The debates at the Constitutional Convention had occurred behind closed doors, and their records remained sealed.) If only in retrospect, the discussions in the House during the spring of 1790 represented the Revolutionary generation’s final opportunity to place slavery on the road to ultimate extinction. Washington shared Franklin’s view of slavery as a moral and political anachronism. On three occasions during the 1780s he let it be known that he favored adopting some kind of gradual emancipation scheme and would give his personal support to such a scheme whenever it materialized. Warner Mifflin, one of the Quaker petitioners who knew of Washington’s previous statements, obtained a private interview in order to plead that the President step forward in the manner of Franklin. As the only American with more prestige than Franklin, Washington could make the decisive difference in removing this one massive stain on the Revolutionary legacy, as well as on his own. We can never know what might have happened if Washington had taken this advice. He listened politely to Mifflin’s request but refused to commit himself, on the grounds that the matter was properly the province of Congress and “might come before me for official decision.” He struck a more cynical tone in letters to friends back in Virginia: ”. . . the introduction of the Quaker Memorial, rejecting slavery, was to be sure, not only an ill-judged piece of business, but occasioned a great waste of time.” He endorsed Madison’s deft management of the debate and behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the House, which voted to prohibit any further consideration of ending the slave trade until 1808, as the Constitution specified; more significantly, Madison managed to take slavery off the national agenda by making any legislation seeking to end it a state rather than federal prerogative. Washington expressed his satisfaction that the threatening subject “has at last been put to sleep, and will scarcely awake before the year 1808.” What strikes us as a poignant failure of moral leadership appeared to Washington as a prudent exercise of political judgment. There is no evidence that he struggled over the decision. Whatever his personal views on slavery may have been, his highest public priority was the creation of a unified American nation. The debates in the House only dramatized the intractable sectional differences he had witnessed from the chair at the Constitutional Convention. They reinforced his conviction that slavery was the one issue with the political potential to destroy the republican experiment in its infancy. Finally, in the most dramatic delegation of all, Washington gave total responsibility for rescuing the debt-burdened American economy to his charismatic Secretary of the Treasury. Before Hamilton was appointed, in September of 1789, Washington requested financial records from the old confederation government and quickly discovered that he had inherited a messy mass of state, domestic, and foreign debt. The records were bedeviled by floating bond rates, complicated currency conversion tables, and guesswork revenue projections that, taken together, were an accountant’s worst nightmare. After making a heroic effort of his own that merely confirmed his sense of futility, Washington handed the records and fiscal policy of the new nation to his former aide-de-camp, who turned out to be, among other things, a financial genius. Hamilton buried himself in the numbers for three months, then emerged with a 40,000-word document titled Report on Public Credit. His calculations revealed that the total debt of the United States had reached the daunting (for then) size of $77.1 million, which he divided into three separate ledgers: foreign debt ($11.7 million), federal debt ($40.4 million), and state debt ($25 million). Several generations of historians and economists have analyzed the intricacies of Hamilton’s Report and created a formidable body of scholarship on its technical complexities, but for our purposes it is sufficient to know that Hamilton’s calculations were accurate and his strategy simple: Consolidate the messy columns of foreign and domestic debt into one central pile. He proposed funding the federal debt at par, assuming all the state debts, then creating a national bank to manage all the investments and payments at the federal level. This made excellent economic sense, as the resultant improved credit rating of the United States in foreign banks and surging productivity in the commercial sector demonstrated. But it also proved to be a political bombshell that shook Congress for more than a year. For Hamilton had managed to create, almost single-handedly, an unambiguously national economic policy that presumed the sovereign power of the federal government. He had pursued a bolder course than the more cautious framers of the Judiciary Act had followed in designing the court system, leaving no doubt that control over fiscal policy would not be brokered to accommodate the states. All three ingredients in his plan—funding, assumption, and the bank—were vigorously contested in Congress, with Madison leading the opposition. The watchword of the critics was consolidation, an ideological cousin to monarchy. Washington did not respond. Indeed, he played no public role at all in defending Hamilton’s program during the fierce congressional debates. For his part, Hamilton never requested presidential advice or assistance, regarding control over his own bailiwick as his responsibility. A reader of their correspondence might plausibly conclude that the important topics of business were the staffing of lighthouses and the proper design of Coast Guard cutters to enforce customs collections. But no public statements were necessary, in part because Hamilton was a one-man army in defending his program, “a host unto himself,” as Jefferson later called him, and by February of 1791 the last piece of the Hamiltonian scheme, the bank, had been passed by Congress and now only required the presidential signature. But the bank proved to be the one controversial issue that Washington could not completely delegate to Hamilton. As a symbol it was every bit as threatening, as palpable an embodiment of federal power, as a sovereign Supreme Court. As part of a last-ditch campaign to scuttle the bank, the three Virginians within Washington’s official family mobilized to attack it on constitutional grounds. Jefferson, Madison, and Randolph submitted separate briefs, all arguing that the power to create a corporation was nowhere specified by the Constitution and that the Tenth Amendment clearly stated that powers not granted to the federal government were retained by the states. Before rendering his own verdict, Washington sent the three negative opinions to Hamilton for rebuttal. His response, which exceeded 13,000 words, became a landmark in American legal history, arguing that the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) granted implied powers to the federal government beyond the explicit powers specified in the document. Though there is some evidence that Washington was wavering before Hamilton delivered his opinion, it was not the brilliance of the opinion that persuaded him. Rather, it provided the legal rationale he needed to do what he had always wanted to do. For the truth was that Washington was just as much an economic nationalist as Hamilton, a fact that Hamilton’s virtuoso leadership throughout the yearlong debate had conveniently obscured. As both a symbolic political centerpiece and a deft delegator of responsibility, Washington managed to levitate above the political landscape. That was his preferred position, personally because it made his natural aloofness into an asset, politically because it removed the Presidency from the partisan battles on the ground. In three policy areas, however—the location of the national capital, foreign policy, and Indian affairs—he reverted to the kind of meticulous personal management he had pursued at Mount Vernon. What was called “the residence question” had its origins in a provision of the Constitution mandating Congress to establish a “seat of government” without specifying the location. By the spring of 1790 the debates in Congress had deteriorated into a comic parody on the gridlock theme. Sixteen different sites had been proposed, then rejected, as state and regional voting blocs mobilized against each alternative in order to preserve their own preferences. One frustrated congressman suggested that perhaps they should put the new capital on wheels and roll it from place to place. An equally frustrated newspaper editor observed that “since the usual custom is for the capital of new empires to be selected by the whim or caprice of a despot,” and since Washington “had never given bad advice to his country,” why not “let him point to a map and say ‘here’?” That is not quite how the Potomac site emerged victorious. Madison had been leading the fight in the House for a Potomac location, earning the nickname “Big Knife” for cutting deals to block the other alternatives. (One of Madison’s most inspired arguments was that the geographic midpoint of the nation on a north-south axis was not just the mouth of the Potomac, but Mount Vernon itself, a revelation of providential proportions.) Eventually a private bargain was struck over dinner at Jefferson’s apartment, subsequently enshrined in lore as the most consequential dinner party in American history, where Hamilton agreed to deliver sufficient votes from several Northern states to clinch the Potomac location in return for Madison’s pledge to permit passage of Hamilton’s assumption bill. Actually, there were multiple behind-the-scenes bargaining sessions going on at the same time, but the notion that an apparently intractable political controversy could be resolved by a friendly conversation over port and cigars has always possessed an irresistible narrative charm. The story also conjured up the attractive picture of brotherly cooperation within his official family that Washington liked to encourage. Soon after the Residence Act designating a Potomac location passed, in July of 1790, that newspaper editor’s suggestion (give the whole messy question to Washington) became fully operative. Jefferson feared that the Potomac site would be sabotaged if the endless management details for developing a city from scratch were left to Congress. So he proposed a thoroughly imperial solution: Bypass Congress altogether by making all subsequent decisions about architects, managers, and construction schedules an Executive responsibility, “subject to the President’s direction in every point.” And so they were. What became Washington, D.C., was aptly named, for while the project had many troops involved in its design and construction, it had only one supreme commander. He selected the specific site on the Potomac between Rock Creek and Goose Creek, while pretending to prefer a different location to hold down the purchase price for the lots. He appointed the commissioners, who reported directly to him rather than to Congress. He chose Pierre L’Enfant as chief architect, personally endorsing L’Enfant’s plan for a huge tract encompassing nine and a half square miles and thereby rejecting Jefferson’s preference for a small village that would gradually expand in favor of a massive area that would gradually fill up. When L’Enfant’s grandiose vision led to equivalently grandiose demands—he refused to take orders from the commissioners and responded to one stubborn owner of a key lot by blowing up his house—Washington fired him. He approved the sites for the presidential mansion and the Capitol as well as the architects who designed them. All in all, he treated the nascent national capital as a public version of his Mount Vernon plantation, right down to the supervision of the slave labor force that did much of the work. It helped that the construction site was located near Mount Vernon, so he could make regular visits to monitor progress on his trips home from the capital in Philadelphia. It also helped that Jefferson and Madison could confer with him at the site on their trips back to Monticello and Montpelier. At a time when both Virginians were leading the opposition to Hamilton’s financial program, their cooperation on this ongoing project served to bridge the widening chasm within the official family over the Hamiltonian vision of federal power. However therapeutic the cooperation, it belied a fundamental disagreement over the political implications of their mutual interests in the Federal City, as it was then called. For Jefferson and Madison regarded the Potomac location of the permanent capital as a guarantee of Virginia’s abiding hegemony within the Union, as a form of geographic assurance, if you will, that the government would always speak with a Southern accent. Washington thought more expansively, envisioning the capital as a focusing device for national energies that would overcome regional jealousies, performing the same unifying function geographically that he performed symbolically. His personal hobbyhorse became a national university within the capital, where the brightest young men from all regions could congregate and share a common experience as Americans that helped to “rub off” their sectional habits and accents. His hands-on approach toward foreign policy was only slightly less direct than his control of the Potomac project, and the basic principles underlying Washington’s view of the national interest were present from the start. Most elementally, he was a thoroughgoing realist. Though he embraced republican ideals, he believed that the behavior of nations was driven not by ideals but by interests. This put him at odds ideologically and temperamentally with his Secretary of State, since Jefferson was one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the belief that American ideals were American interests. Jefferson’s recent experience in Paris as a witness to the onset of the French Revolution had only confirmed his conviction that a global struggle on behalf of those ideals had just begun and that it had a moral claim on American support. Washington was pleased to receive the key to the Bastille from Lafavette; he also knew as well as or better than anyone else that the victory over Great Britain would have been impossible without French economic and military assistance. But he was determined to prevent his warm memories of Rochambeau’s soldiers and de Grasse’s ships at Yorktown from influencing his judgment about the long-term interests of the United States. Those interests, he was convinced, did not lie across the Atlantic but across the Alleghenies. The chief task, as Washington saw it, was to consolidate control of the North American continent east of the Mississippi. Although Jefferson had never been west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he shared Washington’s preference for Western vistas. (During his own Presidency Jefferson would do more than anyone to expand those vistas beyond the Mississippi to the Pacific.) Tight presidential control over foreign policy was unavoidable at the start because Jefferson did not come on board until March of 1790. Washington immediately delegated all routine business to him but preserved his own private lines of communication on French developments, describing reports of escalating bloodshed he received from Paris “as if they were the events of another planet.” His cautionary posture toward revolutionary France received reinforcement from Gouverneur Morris, a willfully eccentric and thoroughly irreverent American in Paris whom Washington cultivated as a correspondent. Morris described France’s revolutionary leaders as “a Fleet at Anchor in the fog,” and he dismissed as a hopelessly romantic illusion Jefferson’s view that a Gallic version of 1776 was under way. The American Revolution, Morris observed, had been guided by experience and light, while the French were obsessed with experiment and lightning. Washington’s supervisory style, as well as his realistic foreign-policy convictions, was put on display when a potential crisis surfaced in the summer of 1790. A minor incident involving Great Britain and Spain in Nootka Sound (near modern-day Vancouver) prompted a major appraisal of American national interests. The British appeared poised to use the incident to launch an invasion from Canada down the Mississippi, to displace Spain as the dominant European power in the American West. This threatened to change the entire strategic chemistry on the continent and raised the daunting prospect of another war with Great Britain. Washington convened his Cabinet in Executive session, thereby making clear for the first time that the Cabinet and not the more cumbersome Senate would be his advisory council on foreign policy. He solicited written opinions from all the major players, including Adams, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, and Knox. The crisis fizzled away when the British decided to back off, but during the deliberations two revealing facts became clearer, first that Washington was resolved to avoid war at any cost, convinced that the fragile American Republic was neither militarily nor economically capable of confronting the British leviathan at this time, and second that Hamilton’s strategic assessment, not Jefferson’s, was more closely aligned with his own, which turned out to be a preview of coming attractions. Strictly speaking, the federal government’s relations with the Native American tribes were also a foreign-policy matter. From the start, however, with Jefferson arriving late on the scene, Indian affairs came under the authority of the Secretary of War. As ominous as this might appear in retrospect, Knox took responsibility for negotiating the disputed terms of several treaties approved by the Confederation Congress. For both personal and policy reasons Washington wanted his own hand firmly on this particular tiller, and his intimate relationship with Knox assured a seamless coordination guided by his own judgment. He had been present at the start of the struggle for control of the American interior, and he regarded the final fate of the Indian inhabitants as an important piece of unfinished business that must not be allowed to end on a tragic note. At the policy level, if America’s future lay to the west, as Washington believed, it followed that the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi merited Executive attention more than the diplomatic doings in Europe. Knox estimated that about 76,000 Indians lived in the region, about 20,000 of them warriors, which meant that venerable tribal chiefs like Cornplanter and Joseph Brant deserved more cultivation as valuable allies than did heads of state across the Atlantic. At the personal level, Washington had experienced Indian power firsthand. As commander of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War, he saw Native Americans not as exotic savages but as familiar and formidable adversaries fighting for their own independence, behaving pretty much as he would do in their place. Moreover, the letters the new President received from several tribal chiefs provided poignant testimony that they now regarded him as their personal protector. “Brother,” wrote one Cherokee chief, “we give up to our white brothers all the land we could any how spare, and have but little left. . . and we hope you wont let any people take any more from us without our consent. We are neither Birds nor Fish; we can neither fly in the air nor live under water. . . .We are made by the same hand and in the same shape as yourselves.” Such pleas did not fall on deaf ears. Working closely with Knox, Washington devised a policy designed to create several sovereign Indian “homelands.” He concurred when Knox insisted that “the independent tribes of indians ought to be considered as foreign nations, not as the subjects of any particular State.” Treaties with these tribes ought to be regarded as binding contracts with the federal government, whose jurisdiction could not be compromised: “Indians being the prior occupants possess the right of the Soil. . . . To dispossess them . . . would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of Nature and of that distributive Justice which is the glory of a nation.” A more coercive policy of outright confiscation, Washington believed, would constitute a moral failure that “would stain the character of the nation.” He sought to avoid the outcome—Indian removal—that occurred more than 40 years later under Andrew Jackson. Instead, he envisioned multiple sanctuaries under tribal control that would be bypassed by the surging wave of white settlers and whose occupants would gradually, over the course of the next century, become assimilated as full-fledged American citizens. Attempting to make this vision a reality occupied more of Washington’s time and energy than any other foreign or domestic issue during his first term. Success depended on finding leaders willing to negotiate yet powerful enough to impose a settlement on other tribes. Knox and Washington found a charismatic Creek chief of mixed blood named Alexander McGillivray, a literate man whose diplomatic skills and survival instincts made him the Indian version of France’s Talleyrand, and in the summer of 1790 Washington hosted McGillivray and 26 chiefs for several weeks of official dinners, parades, and diplomatic ceremonies more lavish than any European delegation enjoyed. (McGillivray expected and received a personal bribe of $1,200 a year to offset the bribe the Spanish were already paying him not to negotiate with the Americans.) Washington and the chiefs locked arms in Indian style and invoked the Great Spirit, and then the chiefs made their marks on the Treaty of New York, redrawing the borders for a sovereign Creek Nation. Washington reinforced the terms of the treaty by issuing the Proclamation of 1790, an Executive Order forbidding private or state encroachments on all Indian lands guaranteed by treaty with the United States. But the President soon found that it was one thing to proclaim and quite another to sustain. The Georgia legislature defied the proclamation by making a thoroughly corrupt bargain to sell more than 15 million acres on its western border to speculators calling themselves the Yazoo Companies, thereby rendering the Treaty of New York a worthless piece of paper. In the northern district above the Ohio, no equivalent to McGillivray could be found, mostly because the Six Nations, which Washington could remember as a potent force in the region, had been virtually destroyed in the War for Independence and could no longer exercise hegemony over the Ohio Valley tribes. Washington was forced to approve a series of military expeditions into the Ohio Valley to put down uprisings by the Miamis, Wyandots, and Shawnees, even though he believed that the chief culprits were white vigilante groups determined to provoke hostilities. The Indian side of the story, he complained, would never make it into the history books: “They, poor wretches, have no press thro’ which their grievances are related; and it is well known, that when one side only of a Story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.” Worse still, the expedition commanded by Arthur St. Clair was virtually annihilated in the fall of 1791—reading St. Clair’s battle orders is like watching Custer prepare for the Little Bighorn—thereby creating white martyrs and provoking congressional cries for reprisals in what had become an escalating cycle of violence that defied Washington’s efforts at conciliation. Eventually the President was forced to acknowledge that his vision of secure Indian sanctuaries could not be enforced. “I believe scarcely any thing short of a Chinese wall,” he lamented, “will restrain Land jobbers and the encroachment of settlers upon the Indian country.” Knox concurred, estimating that federal control on the frontier would require an arc of forts from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico, garrisoned by no less than 50,000 troops. This was a logistical, economic, and political impossibility. Washington’s vision of peaceful coexistence also required that federal jurisdiction over the states as the ultimate guarantor of all treaties be recognized as supreme, which helps explain why he was so passionate about the issue, but also why it could never happen. If a just accommodation with the Native American populations was the major preoccupation of his first term, it was also the singular failure. By the spring of 1792, then, what Washington had imagined as a brief caretaker Presidency with mostly ceremonial functions had grown into a judicious but potent projection of Executive power. The Presidency so vaguely defined in the Constitution had congealed into a unique synthesis of symbolism and substance, its occupant the embodiment of that work in progress called the United States and the chief magistrate with supervisory responsibility for all domestic and foreign policy, in effect an elected king and prime minister rolled into one. There was a sense at the time, since confirmed by most historians of the Presidency, that no one else could have managed this political evolution so successfully, indeed that under anyone else the experiment with republican government would probably have failed at the start. Eventually the operation of the federal government under the Constitution would be described as “a machine that ran itself.” At the outset, however, the now venerable checks and balances of the Constitution required a trusted leader who had internalized checks and balances sufficiently to understand both the need for Executive power and the limitations of its effectiveness. He made the Presidency a projection of himself. Washington tried to step down after those first four years and, perhaps predictably, failed. His second term was increasingly full of rancor, with dramatic developments in Europe and mounting tensions between Jefferson and Hamilton within his Cabinet that together threatened to destroy all he had accomplished. But fierce though these conflicts were, they weren’t powerful enough to destroy the foundation that Washington had built, and they haven’t managed to yet.

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The life-giving ideas of chemistry are not reducible to physics. Or, if one tries to reduce them, they wilt at the edges, lose not only much of their meaning, but interest too. And, most importantly, they lose their chemical utility—their ability to relate seemingly disparate compounds to each other, their fecundity in inspiring new experiments. I'm thinking of concepts such as the chemical bond, a functional group and the logic of substitution, aromaticity, steric effects, acidity and basicity, electronegativity and oxidation-reduction. As well as some theoretical ideas I've been involved in personally—through-bond coupling, orbital symmetry control, the isolobal analogy. Consider the notion of oxidation state. If you had to choose two words to epitomize the same-and-not-the-same nature of chemistry, would you not pick ferrous and ferric? The concept evolved at the end of the 19th century (not without confusion with "valency"), when the reality of ions in solution was established. As did a multiplicity of notations—ferrous iron is iron in an oxidation state of +2 (or is it 2+?) or Fe(II). Schemes for assigning oxidation states (sometimes called oxidation numbers) adorn every introductory chemistry text. They begin with the indisputable: In compounds, the oxidation states of the most electronegative elements (those that hold on most tightly to their valence electrons), oxygen and fluorine for example, are –2 and –1, respectively. After that the rules grow ornate, desperately struggling to balance wide applicability with simplicity. The oxidation-state scheme had tremendous classificatory power (for inorganic compounds, not organic ones) from the beginning. Think of the sky blue color of chromium(II) versus the violet or green of chromium(III) salts, the four distinctly colored oxidation states of vanadium. Oliver Sacks writes beautifully of the attraction of these colors for a boy starting out in chemistry. And not only boys. But there was more to oxidation states than just describing color. Or balancing equations. Chemistry is transformation. The utility of oxidation states dovetailed with the logic of oxidizing and reducing agents—molecules and ions that with ease removed or added electrons to other molecules. Between electron transfer and proton transfer you have much of reaction chemistry. I want to tell you how this logic leads to quite incredible compounds, but first let's look for trouble. Not for molecules—only for the human beings thinking about them. Those Charges are Real, Aren't They? Iron is not only ferrous or ferric, but also comes in oxidation states ranging from +6 (in BaFeO4) to –2 (in Fe(CO)42–, a good organometallic reagent). Is there really a charge of +6 on the iron in the first compound and a –2 charge in the carbonylate? Of course not, as Linus Pauling told us in one of his many correct (among some incorrect) intuitions. Such large charge separation in a molecule is unnatural. Those iron ions aren't bare—the metal center is surrounded by more or less tightly bound "ligands" of other simple ions (Cl– for instance) or molecular groupings (CN–, H2O, PH3, CO). The surrounding ligands act as sources or sinks of electrons, partly neutralizing the formal charge of the central metal atom. At the end, the net charge on a metal ion, regardless of its oxidation state, rarely lies outside the limits of +1 to –1. Actually, my question should have been countered critically by another: How do you define the charge on an atom? A problem indeed. A Socratic dialogue on the concept would bring us to the unreality of dividing up electrons so they are all assigned to atoms and not partly to bonds. A kind of tortured pushing of quantum mechanical, delocalized reality into a classical, localized, electrostatic frame. In the course of that discussion it would become clear that the idea of a charge on an atom is a theoretical one, that it necessitates definition of regions of space and algorithms for divvying up electron density. And that discussion would devolve, no doubt acrimoniously, into a fight over the merits of uniquely defined but arbitrary protocols for assigning that density. People in the trade will recognize that I'm talking about "Mulliken population analysis" or "natural bond analysis" or Richard Bader's beautifully worked out scheme for dividing up space in a molecule. What about experiment? Is there an observable that might gauge a charge on an atom? I think photoelectron spectroscopies (ESCA or Auger) come the closest. Here one measures the energy necessary to promote an inner-core electron to a higher level or to ionize it. Atoms in different oxidation states do tend to group themselves at certain energies. But the theoretical framework that relates these spectra to charges depends on the same assumptions that bedevil the definition of a charge on an atom. An oxidation state bears little relation to the actual charge on the atom (except in the interior of the sun, where ligands are gone, there is plenty of energy, and you can have iron in oxidation states up to +26). This doesn't stop the occasional theoretician today from making a heap of a story when the copper in a formal Cu(III) complex comes out of a calculation bearing a charge of, say, +0.51. Nor does it stop oxidation states from being just plain useful. Many chemical reactions involve electron transfer, with an attendant complex of changes in chemical, physical and biological properties. Oxidation state, a formalism and not a representation of the actual electron density at a metal center, is a wonderful way to "bookkeep" electrons in the course of a reaction. Even if that electron, whether added or removed, spends a good part of its time on the ligands. But enough theory, or, as some of my colleagues would sigh, anthropomorphic platitudes. Let's look at some beautiful chemistry of extreme oxidation states. Incredible, But True Recently, a young Polish postdoctoral associate, Wojciech Grochala, led me to look with him at the chemical and theoretical design of novel high-temperature superconductors. We focused on silver (Ag) fluorides (F) with silver in oxidation states II and III. The reasoning that led us there is described in our forthcoming paper. For now let me tell you about some chemistry that I learned in the process. I can only characterize this chemistry as incredible but true. (Some will say that I should have known about it, since it was hardly hidden, but the fact is I didn't.) Here is what Ag(II), unique to fluorides, can do. In anhydrous HF solutions it oxidizes Xe to Xe(II), generates C6F6+ salts from perfluorobenzene, takes perfluoropropylene to perfluoropropane, and liberates IrF6 from its stable anion. These reactions may seem abstruse to a nonchemist, but believe me, it's not easy to find a reagent that would accomplish them. Ag(III) is an even stronger oxidizing agent. It oxidizes MF6– (where M=Pt or Ru) to MF6. Here is what Neil Bartlett at the University of California at Berkeley writes of one reaction: "Samples of AgF3 reacted incandescently with metal surfaces when frictional heat from scratching or grinding of the AgF3 occurred." Ag(II), Ag(III) and F are all about equally hungry for electrons. Throw them one, and it's not at all a sure thing that the electron will wind up on the fluorine to produce fluoride (F–). It may go to the silver instead, in which case you may get some F2 from the recombination of F atoms. Not that everyone can (or wants to) do chemistry in anhydrous HF, with F2 as a reagent or being produced as well. In a recent microreview, Thomas O'Donnell says (with some understatement), "... this solvent may seem to be an unlikely choice for a model solvent system, given its reactivity towards the usual materials of construction of scientific equipment." (And its reactivity with the "materials of construction" of human beings working with that equipment!) But, O'Donnell goes on to say, "... with the availability of spectroscopic and electrochemical equipment constructed from fluorocarbons such as Teflon and Kel-F, synthetic sapphire and platinum, manipulation of and physicochemical investigation of HF solutions in closed systems is now reasonably straightforward." For this we must thank the pioneers in the field—generations of fluorine chemists, but especially Bartlett and Boris Zemva of the University of Ljubljana. Bartlett reports the oxidation of AgF2 to AgF4– (as KAgF4) using photochemical irradiation of F2 in anhydrous HF (made less acidic by adding KF to the HF). And Zemva used Kr2+ (in KrF2) to react with AgF2 in anhydrous HF in the presence of XeF6 to make XeF5+AgF4–. What a startling list of reagents! To appreciate the difficulty and the inspiration of this chemistry, one must look at the original papers, or at the informal letters of the few who have tried it. You can find some of Neil Bartlett's commentary in the article that Wojciech and I wrote, and in an interview with him. Charge It, Please Chemists are always changing things. How to tune the propensity of a given oxidation state to oxidize or reduce? One way to do it is by changing the charge on the molecule that contains the oxidizing or reducing center. The syntheses of the silver fluorides cited above contain some splendid examples of this strategy. Let me use Bartlett's words again, just explaining that "electronegativity" gauges in some rough way the tendency of an atom to hold on to electrons. (High electronegativity means the electron is strongly held, low electronegativity that it is weakly held.) It's easy to make a high oxidation state in an anion because an anion is electron-rich. The electronegativity is lower for a given oxidation state in an anion than it is in a neutral molecule. That in turn, is lower than it is in a cation. If I take silver and I expose it to fluorine in the presence of fluoride ion, in HF, and expose it to light to break of F2 to atoms, I convert the silver to silver(III), AgF4-. This is easy because the AG(III) is in an anion. I can then pass in boron trifluoride and precipitate silver trifluoride, which is now a much more potent oxidizer than AgF4- because the electronegativity in the neutral AgF3 is much higher than it is in the anion. If I can now take away a fluoride ion, and make a cation, I drive the electronegativity even further up. With such a cation, for example, AgF2+, I can steal the electron from PtF6- and make PtF6.... This is an oxidation that even Kr(II) is unable to bring about. Simple, but powerful reasoning. And it works. A World Record? Finally, a recent oxidation-state curiosity: What is the highest oxidation state one could get in a neutral molecule? Pekka Pyykkö and coworkers suggest cautiously, but I think believably, that octahedral UO6, that is U(XII), may exist. There is evidence from other molecules that uranium 6p orbitals can get involved in bonding, which is what they would have to do in UO6. What wonderful chemistry has come—and still promises to come—from the imperfect logic of oxidation states! © Roald Hoffmann I am grateful to Wojciech Grochala, Robert Fay and Debra Rolison for corrections and comments. Thanks to Stan Marcus for suggesting the title of this column.

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Threatened birds of the world: the official source for birds on the IUCN Red List. Barcelona: Lynx Edicions, 2000. Quarto, laminated boards, 852 pp. colour illustrations, maps. This comprehensive volume documents globally threatened species whether extinct in the wild, critical, endangered or vulnerable and includes notes on identification, range and population, ecology, threats, conservation, targets and references. Also includes listing of lower risk species.

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Displaying 1 - 20 of 25 resources in Horses: 1. Animals recovered from horse rescue recovering Lin Beaune with Epona said three of the 41 animals didn't survive SOFE, due in large part to malnutrition, but of the remaining 38, all ... 2. Concern for Helping Animals in Israel (CHAI) Alexandria, VA, USA The mission of CHAI and Hakol Chai is to prevent and relieve animal suffering in Israel and to elevate consciousness about animals through education. We ... 3. Deputies find starving horses and squalid conditions in animal cruelty case Ribs and hip bones were visible under their skin, and nearby trees had been stripped of bark after the horses gnawed them clean. ... 4. Dozens of farm animals seized from rescue facility Authorities in western Ohio say they've removed more than 100 farm animals from a horse rescue facility as part of an animal cruelty investigation. ... 5. Early in Mayoral Battle, Carriage Horses Are Drawn Into Race New York's animals, from Central Park horses to rescue shelter dogs, have one of the city's most clamorous lobbying groups, with thousands of motivated supporters ... 6. Five horses die in animal cruelty case; 33 other animals rescued There were 23 other horses, nine goats and an alpaca that were rescued from the farm on Rockwell Road in Enterprise, Lt. Greg Scolapio said. ... 7. Freedom for Animals - Serbia Based in Belgrade, Freedom for Animals (Sloboda za životinje) focuses on vegetarianism and animal rights. Current campaigns include circus protests, anti-hunting demos, and the plight ... 8. From Carriage Horses To Chihuahas And Cockatiels, An Appeal For The Animal Lover Vote But only de Blasio supported NY CLASS's key goal of completely banning the horse-drawn carriages, while others talked about testing out alternatives or phasing them ... 9. Gonzalez entitled to return of animals, judge rules Two dogs and a horse confiscated when State Police obtained a search warrant on the complaint of Gonzalez' veterinarian must be returned, Lockport City Judge ... 10. Habitat for Horses Hithcock, TX, USA A non-profit organization established to provide information and enforcement of existing laws to protect abused, endangered, and neglected horses through a volunteer network. ... 11. Horse Behaviour and Psychology Kaikohe, New Zealand Comprehensive illustrated resource on the behaviour and psychology of equines from the White Horse Equine Ethology Project. ... Category: Educational Resources 12. Horse case puts spotlight on animal welfare in North Dakota A recent case of officials in Burleigh and Morton counties finding 99 dead horses in a man's custody and seizing an additional 157 live ones ... 13. Horse Meat In Human Food Chain Causes Health Concerns By one estimate, 160,000 American horses shared this fate last year, ending up in the human food chain. ... 14. Horse shooting highlights slaughter debate He strokes his nose and neck, swears at animal activitists, and then shoots it in the head. ... 15. International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants Cranberry Township, PA, USA IAABC members have diverse practices but believe that animals matter, and so do animal-owner relationships. They understand that animal behavior consultants can help manage and ... 16. Kefalonia Animal Trust (Greece) Argostoli , Greece Animal Welfare in Kefalonia is our primary concern. Kefalonia Animal Trust is a registered Greek animal charity, dedicated to caring for the welfare of the ... 17. Mercy For Animals Columbus, OH, USA Mercy For Animals (MFA) believes that non-human animals are irreplaceable individuals who have morally significant interests and hence rights, including the right to live and ... 18. More Canadians willing to try horse meat in wake of scandal Japan is the biggest importer of Alberta's horse meat, followed by France and Switzerland, she said. Canada exported about 13,500 metric tonnes of horse meat ... 19. More than 100 animals seized from Bellaire home It's heartbreaking to see such a large number of animals that are just desperate for your basic necessities, such as food and water," said Minton. ... 20. No Rodeo (Australia) Smithfield Plains, Australia No Rodeo has been lobbying the government since October 2004 to seek total prohibition of this cruel blood sport in South Australia. Much of No ... Displaying 1 - 20 of 25 | Next Page

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Cancer and dogs. Things you could try ..... When a dog is battling cancer his immune system needs to be focused on one thing - and that's the cancer itself. The dog doesn't have the strength to fight other battles e.g. chemicals that might attack his system. To help , try and find non toxic alternatives to all your chemical cleaners. Don't use pesticides in the garden. Feed with organic food. Frontline etc or vaccinations of any sort may be detrimental to your dog's fight. Most vets recommend that dogs fighting cancer get a diet that is high in protein (about 95%) and low in carbs (5%). Most dog foods are not helpful to the dogs fight against cancer. A raw meat diet gives the right protein/carb mix and supplies additional nutrients to promote maximum energy and immune system support. Natural holistic dog foods can be an alternative. There are also several feed supplements available to help. Some target the cancer cells - either destroying them or otherwise slowing their growth. Others 'starve' the cancer by depriving it of the elements it needs to grow. Others serve as an extra boost to strengthen the dogs own energy and immune system. Most of these supplements can work well together. Best to speak to a trained holistic expert or vet. If the vet says for example that your dog has 6 months to live - you start to worry. We wonder how long the dog has left with us, is he suffering , could I have done something earlier etc. Dogs can sense the worrying. They draw energy from us... our sadness...our fears...our concerns actually make them feel down. As we worry we take energy from them. You MUST try and stay positive and strong. Your dog will be helped by positive reinforcement to heal. Healing can help you both at this time. It is complementary to veterinary care.

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Found throughout tropical regions of Africa, the Emperor Scorpion is one of the largest in the scorpion family. A predatory carnivore their diet ranges from insects to small mammals. In captivity we feed them live crickets, meal worms or morio worms about once a week. - Live up to 8 years. - With an exoskeleton which they molt once a year to enable growth. - Adult scorpions can grow to 15 centimetres in across. - Habitat being rain forest floor. - Nocturnal arachnids. Although it may look very dangerous, generally speaking the larger scorpions tend to be less poisonous than the smaller ones. Although it would still be painful if we were to get stung, it would not be life threatening.

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What motivates young people to learn? Fun? Imagination? Fear of the future without a college education? If you ask them, they will tell you that you can teach them anything if you make it matter to them. The easiest way is to make it about them. Nearly 20 years ago, when I took over the History Department of a Nairobi School, the most successful thing I did was to introduce a family tree project. I had Kikuyu students in my classroom, and Luo and Kalenjin and several born in Britain as well as five or six born in Nairobi but with parents or grandparents born in the Indian Subcontinent. Computers barely existed, so all information was gathered by talking to family members, either in person or on the phone, waiting for visits or even writing letters. Everyone had to keep notes and start drawing their tree – and as they grew, the trees became collages, with stories and even artefacts stuck on: a coin, a bead, a piece of cloth, a photograph. My students held court, sharing their research and findings, feeling the thrill of an attentive audience. They were the experts on their own lives, and they loved it (a lot more than Napoleon, who they’d done the previous term). Of course you can’t design thirteen or fourteen years of curriculum around ‘Me’ – at least not without creating a generation of narcissistic monsters. But taking time to relate distant or abstract material to those in the room, and finding ways to engage heart and emotions as well as head, makes excellent educational sense. This is one area where education can learn from the non-profit sector which has long understood that you engage people by creating proximity. It’s hard to care about people of whom we know nothing in a faraway country; the trick is to tell stories to bring them closer, to show the similarities between their lives and ours, to help us understand how it might feel to be them. To make it more real. Carl Jung wrote that people cannot stand too much reality, but I disagree: in my experience, teenagers gobble it up. It brings out the best in them, differentiating them as individuals with both abilities and passions. 2 years ago Mayor of London Boris Johnson and I both hit on the idea of a London Curriculum (although I’m pretty sure I thought of it first.) I based mine on an experimental class I’d taught a few years before in the US that used our local city as a classroom. Part of my inspiration also came from CITYTerm, a brilliant programme run out of the Masters School, which uses New York City as a classroom and laboratory. In both cases the approach was project-based and relied on collaboration with experts from the city – architects, engineers, poets, social workers and entrepreneurs. It can come as something of a shock to learn what’s on your doorstep: the things that are closest to us exert huge influence, yet we seldom look at them carefully, let alone understand them. The nearly 4 million people who have seen Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk on the danger of a single story will also have heard her descriptions of growing up on a Nigerian university campus reading British and American children’s books. She loved those books, but because of them, the first stories she wrote featured characters with white skin and blue eyes, who played in the snow and ate apples. Only later did she realise that people who looked and thought like her could be in books too. In January I met Deborah Ahenkorah, Ghanaian Echoing Green Fellow and founder of the Golden Baobab Prize for African literature for children and young adults. She created the prize because “the tremendous lack of good quality African children’s literature dawned on me. A continent so large and richly diverse has tons of wonderful stories to share with young people everywhere: where were these stories?” Last year they had more than 400 entries from 25 African countries. They also run workshops for writers and illustrators, and have plans to establish distribution channels across the continent to ensure that African books reach African children in their schools and, at last, in their own homes. And it’s not just African children on the continent who need stories about themselves. There are millions of children of African heritage in the diaspora who never read stories that connect them with their own identities either. For stories cross continents too. Last month in Ghana I visited the slave castles of the Gold Coast and saw the door of no return through which millions of men, women and children left, many of whom ended their days in Jamaica. With over 200,000 Ghanaians and 250,000 Jamaicans in London, shouldn’t these stories be told in British schools too? Who else is in our classrooms? Are we telling their stories? Growing up is an identity project, and if we want to engage young people, we need to show them that school is the place to learn about the things they care about. We do that best by nurturing schools’ most valuable secret weapons – infectiously enthusiastic teachers. They are an endangered species now, killed by the growing exam culture and an obsession with cookie-cutter, lockstep learning, but they are still there. Let’s hope that those who have been taught by them will realise that it is loving learning that matters most, and the freedom to explore who you are and how you will take your place in the world.

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For many, 1066 is the date when the Middle Ages began. Centuries of castles, cathedrals and churches followed, busy with chivalry, the Crusades and crop-rotation, all ending some time around 1500. This, of course, is an over-simplification, just as the term Middle Ages itself is. For a long time, the civilisations of the Romans and the Renaissance were admired; everything in between – the ages in the middle - was regarded as inferior, a period of decline, disease and instability. Only with the Victorians was there some attempt to reconsider these centuries. They, like us, were transfixed by the imaginative leaps of medieval buildings and their intense spirituality. Certain themes dominate medieval architecture. First, the church was central to everyday life. Usually the most impressive building in the neighbourhood was the parish church, and the finest buildings created were the great stone cathedrals. Secondly, society was strictly ordered. For most of the Middle Ages, the hierarchy of the Feudal System dominated: the majority were poor peasants living in simple dwellings that have long disappeared. A few, the lords and clergy, were rich. Their castles, manor houses, monasteries and colleges by comparison were splendid constructions, and have survived in some form. Thirdly, although technology was limited, building methods and styles did evolve. Throughout the Gothic style dominated, but in a myriad of forms.

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Duke’s Charter, 1664 By this charter, King Charles II of England granted land that includes present-day New York, New Jersey, most of Maine, and parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania to his brother James, Duke of York (later James II, King of England). The charter, or royal patent, was awarded on March 12, 1664, and sets up a proprietary colony. It gives James authority to send an armed force to compel the Dutch surrender of the New Netherland province to the English, and allows him to delegate the administration of matters of law, trade, rebellion, and defense in the colony. New York State Archives [Series B1371, Charter of the proprietary colony from Charles II to the Duke of York, 1664]

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WORLD RELIGION RESOURCES The following sites have been awarded the ARIL Hot Site designation as offering among the best resources concerning world religion on the Internet. in World Religions Interesting format, numerous links, especially to Buddhist resources. These pages are put together by Deb Platt entirely out of her "household income." A wonderful example of how one person's intimate vision of the relationship between and among world religions can find creative expression on the Internet. The place to go for facts and figures about membership in most world religions - The GodWeb features an active blog, original articles and information on the relationship between Christianity and other world religions. Pluralism Project was developed by Diana L. Eck at Harvard University to study and document the growing religious diversity of the United States, with a special view to its new immigrant religious communities. The website includes a description of the CD-ROM and slide sets that give teachers and students of religion a remarkable multi-media resource to enhance their appreciation of religious diversity. Literature and Religion. The work of William S. Peterson, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, the main feature of this Web site is a large bibliographical database that lists and indexes writings by and about English figures of literary or spiritual importance, from the Middle Ages to the present. The database has been conceived on an ambitious scale, and anyone interested in the topic will want to visit this site frequently and watch it grow! University of Hong Kong: Research Institute for the Humanities Massive collection of philosophy and world religion resources; a well designed set of pages with links to study materials covering religion in particular and the humanities in general. Advanced HTML features. Research Tools, including classical and biblical as compiled by Jack Lynch, at Rutgers University. Well organized and well presented tools for the student of religion who is interested in the wider social and cultural context in which the great religious traditions exist and to which they contribute in sometimes surprising and refreshing ways. Society and Culture Dr. Hans Rollman of the Department of Religious Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland, has put together a visually appealing site combining serious scholarship with an obvious devotion to his subject. His pages covering nearly all aspects of the religious history and culture of Newfoundland are an example of how effective the Internet can be in communicating specialized knowledge to a wide audience that would not encounter it in any traditional medium. - The Secular Web Resources in service of the secular, but there is much discussion here of biblical and theological issues. Though the editors of these pages put themselves forward as atheists and infidels, we admire their humor, irony, and Úlan. Theology Library, Emory University Here, by contrast, are the resources of a major theological library bringing to the Internet serious research tools for students of religion. Consultants on Religious Tolerance A refreshing voice for inter-religious understanding within a sea of Internet intolerance. This site contains much useful information about world religions, religious hatred, and other related topics, including many interesting links and opportunities for dialogue across religious for the Study of Religion at UCLA. This web site includes information about the Center as well as current or recent conferences and other special events. While the website needs to be updated on a more regular basis, the information about UCLS's excellent interdisciplinary program is most welcome.

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Diagnosing Mesothelioma: MRIs Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of several imaging techniques that doctors use to detect, stage and evaluate the progression of mesothelioma. These non-invasive scans use magnets and radio waves to help doctors visualize a patient’s organs, tissues, bones and tumors. Many radiologists consider MRIs ideal for viewing the anatomical structures of the chest and abdomen – including the pleura and peritoneum, where mesothelioma tumors most commonly develop. The first commercial MRI units emerged in the 1980s. Since then, the technology has advanced considerably. Modern MRI units use superconductor magnets and coils to produce a constant magnetic field, as well as radiofrequency energy to measure signals from the nuclei of hydrogen atoms inside the body. Computers inside the scanner register these signals and turn them into images. Most modern units also include a shield, which prevents the scanner from picking up interference from outside signals sources like televisions and radio stations. MRIs work by aligning the water molecules in your body. Radio waves then cause these aligned particles to emit signals, which register on the scanner. The images reflect the amount of activity that is occurring in each internal structure. Each MRI-generated image shows a thin slice of the body. The MRI Process The entire MRI process takes about an hour or two to complete. The scan itself takes between 30 and 60 minutes, but the appointment also includes pre-scan positioning and other preparation activities. Once patients arrive at the MRI center and fill out their paperwork, they must remove all metal objects from their bodies. The strong magnets in an MRI scanner can attract zippered clothing, jewelry, watches, belts, keys and credit cards. Implanted medical devices that contain metal may also cause complications with the scan. Next, patients will put on a hospital gown and ear plugs. Fast FactSome MRI scans use a contrast dye to improve image detail. The most common dye is gadolinium, which is safe and effective for most patients with properly functioning kidneys. This magnetic metal ion can visually enhance lesions on MRI images, indicating growths that may be mesothelioma tumors. For contrast-enhanced MRIs, patients will receive an injection of a contrast dye. This makes certain areas show up more clearly on the test. After the injection, patients lie down on the imaging table. The technologist then arranges a coil around the part of the body that is being imaged. For pleural mesothelioma, this will be the chest. For peritoneal mesothelioma, it will be the abdomen. Once the technician positions the patient’s body correctly for the exam, the patient and table are slid into a tube-like opening in the MRI machine. During the scan, the machine makes repetitive knocking sounds as the magnetic field gradients turn on and off. The test itself is painless. Patients should try not to move during the scan, but they can communicate with their technician via microphone if they feel scared or claustrophobic. Patients can leave the MRI center immediately after the scan. A post-processing technologist will then highlight abnormal areas on the images. Once the final images are ready for review, a radiologist interprets the results and provides the patient’s primary doctor with a report. From there, the physician can examine the scan on a computer monitor, send them electronically to the rest of the treatment team or print them out for the patient’s medical records. MRI Side Effects Patients occasionally experience minor side effects after an MRI scan. |Magnetophosphenes (brief flashes of light across the retina)||Vertigo/Dizziness||Metallic taste in the mouth||Nausea||Physical burns or burning sensations (extremely rare)| MRIs do not place patients at risk for radiation-induced damage. Because MRIs do not use ionizing radiation, most doctors prefer MRIs for patients who need routine imaging scans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concludes that as long as the field strengths are kept below 2.0 Tesla, MRIs are safe for repeated use. MRIs for Diagnosing Mesothelioma Tumors Magnetic resonance imaging currently plays a limited role in diagnosing mesothelioma. When doctors do prescribe MRI scans to diagnose the disease, they often use them to complement CT scan results. MRI-generated images can help differentiate between normal tissue and tumor tissue, which cannot be determined with a CT scan alone. MRI scans produce a visual representation of differences is signal intensity between cancerous and noncancerous tissues. Because cancerous tissues emit more intense signals than surrounding healthy tissue, malignant mesothelioma tissues appear as white spots on the scan results with varying brightness. The difference between malignant and noncancerous tissue is even more pronounced in contrast-enhanced MRIs. To arrive at a mesothelioma diagnosis, radiologists usually inspect MRI-generated images for a mass on the pleura, which encases the lungs. These masses often emit signals of intermediate intensity. The fluid located between the lungs and pleura can also indicate mesothelioma, as areas of pleural fluid with very intense signals sometimes surround pleural masses. MRI scans are generally superior to CT scans for characterizing pleural fluid as benign or malignant. |Chest wall infiltration||Mediastinal pleural involvement||Circumferential pleural thickening||Nodularity||Other irregular changes in pleural tissue| Features such as bilateral pleural involvement, pleural shrinkage, pleural effusions and pleural calcifications may also show up on MRI-generated images. These features may suggest mesothelioma, but cannot be used to make a definitive diagnosis. MRIs for Staging Mesothelioma Tumors Most studies indicate that MRIs and CT scans are equally effective for accurately staging malignant mesothelioma tumors. While MRIs are less effective at detecting lymph node involvement, they are generally superior at detecting the extent of a tumor’s invasion of other local structures – one of the key steps in staging a mesothelioma tumor. When radiologists use MRIs to stage a mesothelioma tumor, they look for the following features: - Loss of normal fat planes - Extension into mediastinal fat - Tumor growth that encases more than half the circumference of an organ or mediastinal structure Radiologists can exclude patients as good surgical candidates if an MRI scan shows mediastinal or full-thickness pericardial involvement, diffuse or multifocal chest wall disease or involvement of the diaphragm or spine. By revealing the stage of a mesothelioma tumor, MRI images can help doctors determine whether or not the patient is a good candidate for invasive surgery. MRIs are especially useful for detecting two primary features of patients who are unlikely to benefit from an aggressive operation: chest wall invasion and involvement of the diaphragm. In one study, MRIs detected diaphragmatic spread with 82 percent accuracy, while CT scans detected the same condition with only 55 percent accuracy. MRIs are useful for staging mesothelioma with the TNM system. Some studies suggest that MRI scans can differentiate between T3 and T4 disease, but not earlier stages like T1 and T2. One study found that MRIs understaged half of the mesothelioma tumors by failing to detect pericardial invasion, which advances tumors from stage T2 to stage T3. However, the same MRIs were effective at detecting involvement of the internal pericardium, which also advances tumors from stage T3 to T4. The study correctly identified all of the tumors that were stage T3 or lower (while excluding the T4 tumors) with a positive predictive value of 100 percent. MRIs for Evaluating Response to Treatment Oncologists consider the MRI an accurate and reproducible technique for evaluating patient response to mesothelioma treatment. When evaluating the MRI scan results of mesothelioma patients undergoing treatment, radiologists often measure the tumor from several separate sites. This helps account for the rind-like growth pattern of the cancer. The primary measurement that the doctors look for is an increase or decrease in pleural thickness. Fast FactIn one study of 50 mesothelioma patients, MRI scans correctly categorized the tumor response in 92 percent of patients. If there is no visible disease on the post-treatment imaging scan, doctors call this complete response. If there is a 30 percent decrease in the sum of linear tumor measurements, they generally refer to that as a partial response to treatment. If the MRI indicates a size increase of at least 20 percent (or shows a newly developed lesion), the disease is considered progressive. Doctors may prescribe lung spirometry tests when using MRIs as another way to evaluate treatment response. Patients whose MRIs indicate a partial or complete response to mesothelioma treatment often display simultaneous improvements in lung function, which can be measured with a spirometer. When doctors study MRI results to determine treatment response, they can adjust their patient’s prognosis accordingly. In one study, patients whose MRIs indicated a response to therapy had a median survival of 15.1 months, while patients whose MRIs indicated no response had a median survival of only 8.9 months.

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Are omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids derived from food sources other than fish as effective as the ones that are derived from fish? In a recent review in the Journal of Lipid Research, researchers from Oregon State University set out to assess the scientific data we have available to answer that question. The review article by Donald B. Jump, Christopher M. Depner and Sasmita Tripathy was part of a thematic series geared toward identifying new lipid and lipoprotein targets for the treatment of cardiometabolic diseases. Interest in the health benefits of omega-3 PUFA stemmed from epidemiological studies on Greenland Inuits in the 1970s that linked reduced rates of myocardial infarction (compared with rates among Western populations) to a high dietary intake of fish-derived omega-3 PUFA. Those studies have spurred hundreds of others attempting to unravel the effects of omega-3 PUFA on cardiovascular disease and its risk factors. |The omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) conversion pathway. Omega-3 in the diet Fish-derived sources of omega-3 PUFA are eicosapentaenoic acid, docosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid. These fatty acids can be found in nutritional supplements and foods such as salmon, anchovies and sardines. Plant-derived sources of omega-3 PUFA are alpha-linolenic acid and stearidonic acid. Alpha-linolenic acid is an essential fatty acid. It cannot be synthesized in the body, so it is necessary to get it from dietary sources, such as flaxseed, walnuts, canola oil and chia seeds. The overall levels of fatty acids in the heart and blood are dependent on the metabolism of alpha-linolenic acid in addition to other dietary sources. The heart of the matter A study in 2007 established that dietary supplementation of alpha-linolenic acid had no effect on myocardial levels of eicosapentaenoic acid or docosahexaenoic acid, and it did not significantly increase their content in cardiac muscle (3). Furthermore, alpha-linolenic acid intake had no protective association with the incidence of coronary heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation or sudden cardiac death (4, 5, 6). In general, it did not significantly affect the omega-3 index, an indicator of cardioprotection (3). Why doesn’t supplementation of ALA affect the levels of fatty acids downstream in the biochemical pathway (see figure)? The data seem to point to the poor conversion of the precursor ALA to DHA, the end product of the omega-3 PUFA pathway. DHA is assimilated into cellular membrane phospholipids and is also converted to bioactive fatty acids that affect several signaling mechanisms that control cardiac and vascular function. According to Jump, “One of the issues with ALA is that it doesn’t get processed very well to DHA.” This is a metabolic problem that involves the initial desaturation step in the pathway, which is catalyzed by the fatty acid desaturase FADS2. Investigators have explored ways to overcome the metabolic bottleneck created by this rate-limiting step. One approach involves increasing stearidonic acid in the diet, Jump says, because FADS2 converts ALA to SDA. While studies have shown that increasing SDA results in significantly higher levels of downstream EPA and DPA in blood phospholipids, blood levels of DHA were not increased (7). FADS2 also is required for DHA synthesis at the other end of the pathway, where it helps produce a DHA precursor. Consumption of EPA and DHA from fish-derived oil has been reported to increase atrial and ventricular EPA and DHA in membrane phospholipids (3), and heart disease patients who consumed EPA and DHA supplements had a reduction in coronary artery disease and sudden cardiac death (8). “Based on the prospective cohort studies and the clinical studies,” Jump says, “ALA is not viewed as that cardioprotective.” He continues, “It is generally viewed that EPA and DHA confer cardioprotection. Consumption of EPA and DHA are recommended for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. The question then comes up from a metabolic perspective: Can these other sources of omega-3 PUFA, like ALA, be converted to DHA? Yes, they can, but they’re not as effective as taking an EPA- or DHA-containing supplement or eating fish containing EPA and DHA.” (Nonfish sources of EPA from yeast and DHA from algae are commercially available.) It’s important to note that omega-3 PUFAs are involved in a variety of biological processes, including cognitive function, visual acuity and cancer prevention. The molecular and biochemical bases for their effects on those systems are complex and not well understood. “These are very busy molecules; they do a lot,” Jump says. “They regulate many different pathways, and that is a problem in trying to sort out the diverse actions these fatty acids have on cells. Even the area of heart function is not fully resolved. While there is a reasonable understanding of the impact of these fatty acids on inflammation, how omega-3 fatty acids control cardiomyocyte contraction and energy metabolism is not well understood. As such, more research is needed.” Elucidating the role of omega-3s in the heart: the next step At the University of Maryland, Baltimore, a team led by William Stanley has made strides toward elucidating the role of PUFAs in heart failure. Stanley’s research group focuses on the role of substrate metabolism and diet in the pathophysiology of heart failure and recently identified the mitochondrial permeability transition pore as a target for omega-3 PUFA regulation (9). The group is very interested in using omega-3 PUFAs to treat heart failure patients who typically have a high inflammatory state and mitochondrial dysfunction in the heart. “It seems to be that DHA is really the one that is effective at generating resistance to stress-induced mitochondrial pore opening,” which is implicated in ischemic injury and heart failure (10), Stanley says. “It also seems to be that you’ve got to get the DHA in the membranes. You have to ingest it. That’s the bottom line.” Stanley points out that ingesting DHA in a capsule form makes major diet changes unnecessary: “You can just take three or four capsules a day, and it can have major effects on the composition of cardiac membranes and may improve pump function and ultimately quality of life in these people. The idea would be that they would live longer or just live better.” The impact and implications of omega-3 in the food industry The big interest in DHA over the past 30 years has come from the field of pediatrics. Algae-derived DHA often is incorporated into baby formula for breastfeeding mothers who do not eat fish or for those that do not breastfeed at all. “In clinical studies, you see that the visual acuity and mental alertness of the babies are better when they’re fed DHA-enriched formula over the standard formula,” says Stanley. Stanley continues: “The current evidence in terms of vegetable-derived omega-3s may be of particular value in developing countries where supplements for DHA (fish oil capsules) or access to high-quality fish may not be readily accessible.” Food manufacturers in developing countries are beginning to shift to plant-derived omega-3 PUFAs, which are relatively cheap and widely available. Despite those moves, the effects may be limited by the inefficient biochemical processing of the fatty acid — an issue that researchers have yet to resolve. - 1. Dyerberg, J. et al. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 28, 958 – 966 (1975). - 2. Dyerberg, J. et al. Lancet. 2, 117 – 119 (1978). - 3. Metcalf, R. G. et al. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 85, 1222 – 1228 (2007). - 4. de Goede, J. et al. PLoS ONE. 6, e17967 (2011). - 5. Zhao, G., et al. J. Nutr. 134, 2991 – 2997 (2004). - 6. Dewell, A. et al. J. Nutr. 141, 2166 – 2171 (2011). - 7. James, M. et al. J. Clin. Nutr. 77, 1140 – 1145 (2003). - 8. Dewell, A. et al. J. Nutr. 141, 2166 – 2171 (2011). - 9. GISSI-Prevenzione Investigators. Lancet. 354, 447 – 455 (1999). - 10. Khairallah, R. J. et al. Biochim. Biophys. Acta. 1797, 1555 – 1562 (2010). - 11. O’Shea, K. M. et al. J. Mol. Cell. Cardiol. 47, 819 – 827 (2010). Shannadora Hollis (email@example.com) received her B.S. in chemical engineering from North Carolina State University and is a Ph.D. student in the molecular medicine program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms that control salt balance and blood pressure in health and disease. She is a native of Washington, D.C., and in her spare time enjoys cooking, thrift-store shopping and painting.

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Courtroom atmospheres, deposition testimony, and cross-examinations have long-standing oral traditions and culture. How does an individual who does not speak participate in such traditions? Individuals who have severe communication impairments of speech and/or writing may accomplish their communication potential through the use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Communication through AAC techniques, symbols, and strategies, however, is not familiar to judges, attorneys, and court recorders within most courtrooms. How do speech-language pathologists adequately prepare persons with complex communication needs (PWCCN) to participate within a cultural environment that is entrenched and centered on the spoken word? What graphic symbols best represent legal concepts such as "oath," "testimony," "swearing in," and "legal capacity"? How do PWCCN achieve their right to access justice when their "voice" is communicated through a communication assistant and/or through assistive technology? How may SLPs facilitate modifications within the justice system that allow for an appropriate amount of time for persons with severe physical challenges to respond to a rapid series of questions from attorneys or police? At present, access to justice for persons with severe expressive disorders is difficult. The Legal Arena Suppose that an SLP is invited to serve as an expert witness in a case involving a PWCCN. The SLP will work with police, lawyers, and judges in connection with a client. It will be necessary to establish an assessment tool that describes the capacity of the client to testify in court. As an expert witness, the SLP will be challenged immediately by opposing counsel regarding the SLP's competence as an expert as well as his or her choice of assessment tool(s). SLPs also need to understand the key differences between the clinical and legal arenas. The justice system is centered on "winning" and "losing." Insurance companies participate in determining when to settle and "walk away" and end the case. Another difference is the process of evaluation of the client's communication skills. For example, sometimes a proposal for an evaluation must first be submitted to the court and both attorneys for approval before any contact with an individual is permitted. Thus, the SLP may prepare by reading hundreds of pages of clinical and educational reports regarding an individual with an expressive communication disability, and may then need to seek approval for each proposed diagnostic strategy before the actual evaluation. Modifications to the proposed plan may be suggested by either attorney or the judge. Experts in litigation today must be familiar with the origin and significance of the Daubert case (Bernstein & Hartsell, 2005). This 1993 landmark decision (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms. , 509 U.S. 579, 113 S. Ct. 2786, 125 L. Ed.2d 469) resulted in specific instructions for expert testimony introduced into the courtroom. Basically, Daubert's rule established requirements for admissibility of expert testimony, including whether or not the employed technique has been peer-reviewed and published, has a known error rate, can be tested, and is a generally accepted practice within the field. As expert witnesses, SLPs need to prepare for testimony with the understanding that their scientific knowledge will be tested by the opposing attorney, challenged regarding peer reviews and publications, and examined for potential errors and general acceptance by their own scholarly community. Every word and comma in their expert reports will be scrutinized. Although SLPs may feel confident in their professional knowledge base and clinical skills in AAC, writing and defending the expert report within the legal system is very different from preparing a clinical report for a public school or medical facility. To prepare a report for testimony, SLPs need to translate their clinical knowledge into a legally useful form without using jargon, and to follow the rules, roles, and procedures for written reports according to legal tradition. These evaluations and reports must be precise so as not to introduce any reasonable doubt. Failure to understand the purpose and use of a written report may result in a damaging cross-examination and may undermine the SLP's credibility. One example of potential difficulty is establishing a legal capacity for expressive communication when that expression is an alternative form to speech. As yet, there is no legal definition of "capacity" for testimony if not through speech. The definition of "capacity" is important—a client must be judged to have the "capacity" to participate, because a legal case may set a precedent. When assistive technologies, such as speech-generating devices (SGDs) or voice output communication aids (VOCAs), are introduced, the question arises: Does the legal capacity (or definition of expressive communication competence) shift when an SGD is used? In other words, if an individual communicates through technology, is the individual legally more capable as a witness than if he or she communicates without an SGD? Might SLPs need to perform two evaluations for the court? One evaluation might be conducted to determine "communication capacity" without technology and another evaluation might determine "communication capacity" with technology or AAC strategy. Courtrooms may not be accustomed to working with people who use AAC systems. During depositions and testimony, court recorders transcribe speech, but now they must transcribe the language of graphic symbols as reported through communication assistants or through synthetic or digitized speech available within the various technologies. Legal counsel typically examines and cross-examines clients on the witness stand in the courtroom. However, the witness stand may not accommodate a person with a disability seated in a power wheelchair and his or her communication partner; SLPs may need to suggest modifications to courtroom seating arrangements. Judges may not accept testimony by a communication assistant in lieu of actual testimony by the client. Training programs for judges and attorneys may be necessary for greater acceptance of communication through AAC systems and other strategies. Attorneys often challenge the origins of the communication messages; i.e., the "independence" of each communication message may be examined and cross-examined if programmed by the SLP. The "author" of each communication expression emerging from a synthesized or digitized SGD may be scrutinized. SLPs may be accused of speaking for individuals whom they are assisting. Such challenges can be addressed if the SLP orients attorneys and judges prior to the trial to the person's disabilities, use of AAC, types of vocabulary, and characteristics of appropriate questioning techniques for PWCCN. SLPs will need to understand that individuals are eligible for accommodations, and that they may be responsible for requesting accommodations on behalf of the individual and his or her assistants. Scope of Practice Issues Responsibilities for SLPs are expanding as public agencies are processing an increasing number of complaints on behalf of consumers. Cases of abuse, fraud, malpractice, and denial of basic services to PWCCN impact speech-language pathology practices because communication is often at the core of each case. In an administrative or court proceeding, SLPs may become involved in legal practices and procedures that extend beyond their education and training. SLPs need to acquire the knowledge and skills to assist individuals who use AAC in pursuing their basic human right to access justice (Huer et al., 2006). An SLP preparing to testify in these types of court cases should acquire knowledge and skills such as: - Becoming familiar with the legal process, including understanding the steps and procedures for pre-trial processes, discovery, and investigation - Learning the basic rules of law, including definitions such as legal "capacity" to testify, and consistency and reliability of testimony by PWCCN - Identifying the various challenges to testimony and to evaluation - Advocating for accommodations for PWCCN, when appropriate, throughout the legal process SLPs who enter the legal arena must coordinate their activities with the attorney with whom they are working. "Full disclosure by the attorney of the nature and characteristics of the proceedings, a thorough review of the SLP's testimony, and extensive rehearsal are the key elements of a successful relationship and the necessary ingredients to maximize the potential for a positive outcome for the client," according to Lew Golinker, an attorney with the Assistive Technology Law Center in Ithaca, NY. SLPs need to know the procedures involved in the filing of charges and questioning of clients. When a client who does not use speech for expressive communication is questioned, new challenges emerge. Procedural rules create the need for new or different types of practices or procedures in AAC. The conversations between the SLP and the client, the programming of AAC device, and the rules for conversations during court proceedings must be understood in advance; if not, the case may be thrown out or introduce "reasonable doubt," possibly affecting the outcome of the case. In addition, procedural rules for legal proceedings demand that testimony during depositions and during a trial be the same. The person with a disability as well as SLPs need to understand the necessity for consistency and reliability of response every time the same question is asked and answered. Further, when communicating through alternative forms for expressive communication, it may be difficult to convey to a PWCCN—especially one with intellectual disability—the meaning of "testifying under oath." If the communication is through graphic symbols, what does the symbol for "oath" look like? (See page 7 for a photo that has been used to communicate this concept.) The person with a disability should understand what to expect and what is expected prior to testifying in court. The SLP should realize, and explain to the client, that testimony during a police investigation is different from testifying in court, especially during cross-examination. Often, contact with police in filing a complaint is brief, and courtroom procedures often occur long after the initial complaint. This time lapse may prove challenging for a witness who has difficulty with long-term memory, and the SLP may need to find ways to remind the client about past events without leading the person to the "correct" answer. Litigation consultation is a relatively new arena for SLPs. Legal advocacy for PWCCN is a complex process that is only beginning to be identified and understood by professionals in the field of AAC. While involvement in legal issues is an exciting extension of practice, SLPs should pursue additional education before entering into the legal arena (see sidebar for resources). During courtroom cross-examination, the written reports and professional credibility of the SLP are as much in question as the capacities of the person with a disability. With appropriate knowledge and skills, advocating for justice for people who use AAC is an important responsibility for SLPs.

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ASIA NEWS NETWORK WE KNOW ASIA BETTER Publication Date : 04-09-2012 With health and wellness gaining prominence in people’s wish lists, there is now a growing awareness of healthier choices. Here are more answers for your myriad of options. Pick a wellness plan that will suit you best. Please explain—what’s all the fuss over over nitrates and nitrites? Multiple choice: Which meal would you consider supportive of brain health? a) Scrambled eggs cooked in butter plus a generous topping of cheese and sour cream b) Green salad with lean chicken or turkey ham topped with low-fat Caesar salad dressing. A is the healthier meal. For one, eggs are nutritious and are considered brain food. Vegetables are very good for you; however, we do not know about the toppings. Perhaps the ham is laced with preservatives and additives, including aspartame and nitrite. By itself, nitrite isn’t so bad. But when it is eaten, it can transform into nitrosamine compounds, considered potent cancer-causing chemicals. This occurs when a chemical reaction happens between nitrate (added to food) and amines (found in protein that is present in the body). Added to processed foods, this chemical, also known as sodium nitrite or potassium nitrite, prevents the contamination of foods by controlling the toxin production of clostridium botulinum (which causes botulism). In the US, these chemicals are allowed to be used, setting the limit to one part nitrite to 120 parts per million. Nitrates for fertilisers are suspected to enter the food and water supply. And this is why proper farming is a big issue. Nitrite and nitrosamine are linked with increased cancer of the colon, lung, pancreas, liver, etc. How to neutralise nitrite poisoning? Take megadoses of vitamin C and E, beta-carotene and flavonoids. Visit your dentist How do I cure bad breath? Would you believe that billions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites live in our mouths? It’s true. There are over 600 species of bacteria that claim our mouths as their home. An overgrowth of bacteria leads to tooth decay and gum disease. It could, one day, lead to tooth loss. If you are brushing, flossing and gargling regularly, then you shouldn’t have a real problem. But if you don’t, then it’s time to visit your dentist. Dental plaque, a sticky, grainy film that grows on teeth due to the mixture of bacteria with the sugars and starches from the food you eat, causes bad breath. Tartar is the hardened plaque build-up after so much dental neglect. Brush or floss twice daily, thrice if you can. Do not sleep without doing your cleansing ritual. Eradicate parasites from your tummy. Looking at yourself in the mirror and then smiling is a practice that can get you started on better dental health. Run your tongue over your teeth. If it feels grainy, then it’s time for your dental check-up and cleaning. Make it a habit to take two acidophilus (good bacteria) capsules daily. Consider digestive enzymes, one to three tablets daily or eat fresh, raw (uncooked) fruits and vegetables. Juice fresh veggies/fruits as your morning starter, tonic and cleanser. Chlorophyll tablets could be taken. Steep parsley leaves in hot water and sip as a tea. Rule out parasites. See your doctor. Alternation to steroids Are there any legal and natural supplements as an alternative to steroids? I am a professional athlete. Yes there are. Called branched chain amino acids (BCAA’s), these are compound of leucine, valine and isoleucine. Considered natural anabolic muscle-building supplements, they are a principal source of calories for the human muscle, especially effective during an intense workout. BCAAs can also reduce the appetite while producing glycogen which balances insulin secretion. More importantly, it promotes lean muscle mass and distribution. Supplements should be taken 30 minutes before a workout.

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Smoke signals, drum telegraphs, and the marathon runner are all examples of man’s effort to conquer the tyranny of distance. However, the first truly successful solution to the problem of rapidly transmitting language across space was the Frenchman Claude Chappe’s optical telegraph. Chappe's chain of stone towers, topped by 10-ft. poles and 14-ft. pivoting cross members, and spaced as far apart as the eye could see, was first demonstrated to the public in March of 1791 on the Champs Elysees. Chappe created a language of 9,999 words, each represented by a different position of the swinging arms. When operated by well-trained optical telegraphers, the system was extraordinarily quick. Messages could be transmitted up to 150 miles in two minutes. Eventually the French military saw the value of Chappe’s invention, and lines of his towers were built out from Paris to Dunkirk and Strasbourg. Within a decade, a network of optical telegraph lines crisscrossed the nation. When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he used the optical telegraph to dispatch the message, “Paris is quiet and the good citizens are content.” Renovated in 1998, the optical telegraph next to the Rohan Castle in Saverne functioned as part of the Strasbourg line from 1798 until 1852. It is one of several remaining relay points in the system that can still be visited today.

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|Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot - ca. 1090 - 1153 St. Bernard established the Cistercian order as a model for monastic reform throughout Europe and wrote influential commentaries on the Song of Songs and other topics. He is portrayed in the white habit of the order, often accompanied by a devil on a chain, which might refer to the temptations he overcame or possibly the exorcisms attributed to him in the Golden Legend. Another attribute is a white dog (example), referring to a dream his mother had when she was carrying him. Feast day: August 20 At left, a Lippi painting of St. Bernard A 1486 Filippino Lippi painting A 1710 painting

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Taking a sample is just the beginning and preserving and processing specimens requires more than just the e-word. Having completed eight dives, at least sixteen shore excursions, one nightlighting session, six trips to the fish markets, several roadside purchases and a surprise swim up to a fishing boat, the scientists have well and truly justified that purchase of 90 litres of ethanol on Day 1. On each trip the preserving began in the field and continued back at our accommodation. The specimens will soon be shipped to the Museum where a thorough analysis can be performed, possibly including SEM photography and DNA sequencing. After that, identifications can be confirmed if necessary and scientific papers can be published. So how did the scientists start to process their samples here in Timor? I spoke with about half the team to find out (because talking to all of them would've made this post longer than a Dead Sea scroll). Lauren studies amphipods, an order of crustaceans, and was picking samples from dive sites (and one nightlighting session) with these small (usually less then 10mm) creatures in mind. She uses the freshwater dip method which means placing her substrate samples in a bucket of tap water as it encourages saltwater animals to release from their holds. Lauren then elutriated (swirled) the bucket, causing the heavier sediment to fall to the bottom and the lighter amphipods to rise to the top. The swirling water was slowly tipped out into a sieve. What was filtered out was then placed in a tray and examined for animals, which were picked up with forceps or pipettes and placed into jars of ethanol. After that, the habitat samples that remained in the bucket were also placed in the tray and similarly examined for fauna. We had a team of five fish scientists (dubbed ‘the fishos’) on this trip who worked together to process their samples and make strange, bawdy jokes whenever possible. While they did collect samples at the fish markets, the vast majority of their specimens were taken on dives and kept in plastic bags of seawater (in eskies) until they returned to camp. Hijacking the dinner table for hours at a time, their processing often looked and sounded like question time at Parliament, but on closer examination was actually a highly organised and efficient affair. Their processing started with placing the fishes into trays and tubs of ice, dividing the day’s catch roughly by type. From there the team began to identify the fishes, with each member focussing on those species they specialise in: Barry covered the wrasses, for example, and Jeff the cardinal fishes. They would often check with each other, however, and consult the stack of reference books they brought with them. Once a fish was named it would go to Mark for photographing, sometimes having their fins pinned out if they had distinctive colours. Sally was the chief scribe during all of this, recording names, sizes and number of specimens, as well as writing small labels for Mark to photograph with the fishes. If a fish was identified as one that hadn't been previously collected on the trip, then it would go to Amanda who would extract a small piece of muscle tissue with a scalpel and place it into a vial of DMSO solution (which is conducive to DNA analysis). The rest of the fish would be placed in formalin. Penny came on this trip to collect crustaceans and fishes and was involved in the processing of invertebrate samples. Like Lauren, Penny did most of her sorting in a tray, but her samples remained in saltwater until they were picked out and placed in jars of ethanol. From experience she was able to remove large pieces of reef rock from the tray that were unlikely to contain animals (those that shake ‘clean’ in the water for example) and make use of chisels to break down the likely ones (those with cracks and crevices). Nerida and Greg frequently collected sediment from the ocean floor, elutriating at the back of the boat and transferring the filtered portion to plastic bags. Back at their makeshift lab they would examine this remainder in dishes under the microscope, looking for sea slugs and similar animals not much bigger than the grains of sediment they move between. The process involved multiple dishes and frequent changing and cleaning of the seawater to make it easier to observe these microscopic animals. At the end of the process they would have a collection of specimens and would decide then which ones to process further. These would be photographed while still alive and depending on their size, have either a subsample taken for DNA analysis (and placed in a vial of ethanol) or be placed whole in ethanol or formalin. Rosemary searched for tiny sea snails in mangrove and intertidal zones in Timor, collecting samples of mud, leaf matter and debris which she would ‘coarsely wash’ in the field using a very fine sieve. Keeping these samples cool in a bucket, she would return to the lab and use a spoon to scoop this ‘washed off’ matter into a petri dish. The contents of the dish were swirled around so that it would settle into one layer, making it easier to see crawling animals or shapes that she recognises. She placed her specimens in ethanol for photographing and DNA sequencing back at the Museum. Mandy surveyed the dive sites, markets and random fishing boats for cephalopods (octopuses, squid and cuttlefish). Back at the hotel, she would photograph each specimen and take two tissue samples: one muscle and one from the gills. These samples would be placed in separate vials of ethanol. Later, the ethanol will be poured off and the samples added to our frozen tissue collection at the Museum and made available for DNA analysis. The remainder of the specimens she acquired were fixed in formalin, with the beaks and radulas of the squid and the cuttlebones of the cuttlefish being detached beforehand (yes, squid have beaks). These will eventually be transferred to 70% ethanol, given a number in our database and added to our collection for long term storage.

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logging in or signing up An Introduction to Greek Mythology jhurley Download Post to : URL : Related Presentations : Share Add to Flag Embed Email Send to Blogs and Networks Add to Channel Uploaded from authorPOINT lite Insert YouTube videos in PowerPont slides with aS Desktop Copy embed code: Embed: Flash iPad Copy Does not support media & animations WordPress Embed Customize Embed URL: Copy Thumbnail: Copy The presentation is successfully added In Your Favorites. Views: 2428 Category: Education License: All Rights Reserved Like it (0) Dislike it (0) Added: July 19, 2012 This Presentation is Public Favorites: 2 Presentation Description Why study Greek myths? Comments Posting comment... Premium member Presentation Transcript PowerPoint Presentation: An Introduction Greek Mythology Greek MythologyPowerPoint Presentation: Essential Questions: Why do myths endure? How is Greek mythology evident in our world today? What allusions are there to these stories? What is the origin of Greek mythology?PowerPoint Presentation: What is a myth? A myth is a story, created collectively by a whole people or society over a period of time once believed to be true, that embodies some of the wisdom and truth valued by that society. These stories may help to explain why the world works the way it does, to provide a rationale for customs and observances, to establish set rituals for ceremonies, and to predict what happens to individuals after death. Alert: On the Test!PowerPoint Presentation: Types of myths Cosmic myths Concern creation and the end of the world. Theistic myths Concern gods such as Zeus or Athena. Hero myths Concern individuals such as Heracles, Perseus, and Achilles. Place/Object myths Concern items or places such as the golden fleece; the Trojan warPowerPoint Presentation: Who created myths? Ancient Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, ancient Egyptians, Norse Vikings, North American Indians, Chinese, inhabitants of India—every ancient civilization—developed a system of mythology to explain their world. Many answer questions such as: Who am I? What is this world around me? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life?PowerPoint Presentation: Purposes of Mythology Myths grant continuity and stability to a culture. Myths present guidelines for living. Myths justify a culture’s activities. Myths give meaning to life. Myths explain the unexplainable. Myths offer role models. Alert: On the Test!PowerPoint Presentation: Legacy of the ancient Greeks Greek empire 2500 years ago Science and mathematics: Aristotle, Archimedes System of medicine Philosophy shaped western civilization and thought Arts, drama, poetry, sculpture, literature, architecture Law, government, democracy developed in Athens Military tacticsPowerPoint Presentation: Map of ancient Greece Important Cities Mt. Olympus Troy Delphi Thebes Athens Sparta CretePowerPoint Presentation: Influence of the Romans In the last century before the birth of Christ, the Roman empire expanded and became more powerful than Greece. The Romans were greatly influenced by the Greeks and linked the Greek stories to their own gods until both mythologies were almost the same. Therefore, there are both Latin and Greek names for the gods. For example: Zeus (Greek) is also Jupiter (Roman/Latin).PowerPoint Presentation: The ancient soap opera Storytellers would tell these stories in the theater. This story telling is an example of “oral tradition.” Each time a story was retold, new details would be added. Stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey , both epics of adventure and war, took 24 hours to read. People would bring food and drink and stay for entire performances.PowerPoint Presentation: Why study mythology? Read very interesting, fun, and engaging stories See how less sophisticated people attempted to deal with questions and problems of their world Detect allusions to Greek mythology in writers such as Shakespeare to the present Identify allusions to Greek myths in modern products, vocabulary, and businesses Recognize common archetypes in literature ? You do not have the permission to view this presentation. In order to view it, please contact the author of the presentation.

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