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(Student produced study guide from Foss, Foss, and Trapp ) characterized by the use of the scientific method and based on the presumption that we (people) can know objectively and comprehend the objects around us. (146) forms of understanding from which reality is to be deduced. (146) refers to the philosophical movement and is not based on the problem of existence, but deals with the problem of words, and the ways of rhetorically thinking and speaking that were perfected as a way of philosophizing in the 15th Century. (147) deals with scientific objectivity, universality, and rational deduction over other ways of knowing the world. (148) Cogito ergo sum: "I think; therefore I am." This is a self- evident axiom and is based on the human power to apprehend reality by means of reason. (146) what in essence, separates the human being from the animal. (149) ability to make adjustments in nature simply because we are humans. (149) the basic process by which humans gain control over nature; refers to a basic capacity to grasp what is common or similar in ideas or experiences. (151) "It leads to light because it stems from the need to see: that which is not obvious...is to be transferred," (154) and provides the connection between rhetorical and rational speech. (158) fundamental or original principle upon which philosophical arguments are based. (155) illuminates historical fact, making a situation concrete, relevant and understandable using metaphor and imagery. (157) deductive in nature and achieving its effect through logical demonstration. (157) a "system" of signs whose elements receive meaning through and within this system. Morse code is an example. (159) superficial and mistaken definition of rhetoric, as a technical art of persuasion, that acts on emotions to form beliefs. (159) practice, or doing. Reality is manifested in concrete situations. coming to terms with things by studying words individually. choosing what perspective to take in a situation; the unveiling of an essential meaning. approaches in research which are concerned with human's role in constructing rhetorical knowledge rather than with the possibility of objective knowledge (165) A. Grassi's education was the product of two opposing philosophic traditions: German Idealism and Italian Humanism. 1. Grassi's background of Italian Humanism was challenged at the University of Freiburg, where German philosophy dominated. 2. The dissonance of the two views led Grassi to examine his own beliefs more carefully, from which he determined that rhetoric constitutes the foundation of human thought. B. Two people were especially influential in differentiating the two philosophies for Grassi. 1. Bertando Spaventa's (Italian philosopher of the late nineteenth century), following statement left an impression on Grassi. "The development of German thought is natural, free, and independent, in a word, it is critical. The development of Italian thought is unsteady, hindered, and dogmatic. This is the great difference." (p.145) 2. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher who worked with Grassi for ten years in Freiburg, held a strongly negative attitude towards Italian philosophy. Heidegger's attitude was influential in causing Grassi to seriously consider the value of both German philosophy and Italian philosophy. A. In order to understand Grassi's approach to rhetoric, more precise definitions are needed for the Scientific Tradition and Italian Humanism. 1. Scientific Tradition is based on objective knowledge. a. Rational deduction is at the core of the scientific method and involves starting from the premises and deriving the inferences already inherent in them. b. Grassi lists three limitations of this scientific paradigm, which he believes constrain what is studied as philosophy. i. The scientific method examines first principles, but not their sources. ii. The scientific method focuses on quantification. iii Scientific thought is concerned only with universals. 2. Grassi's Italian Humanism refers to a philosophical movement. a. Grassi's Humanism is Platonic and Aristotelian in orientation. b. Grassi's Humanism is concerned with "the problem of words, metaphorical thought, and rhetorical thinking." c. Grassi's Humanists sought to understand ways in which humans respond to a set of demands from the world and, by their linguistic choices, reveal the way they view this world around them. B. The Scientific Approach was in direct opposition to Grassi's Humanist Approach. (p.147) 1. The Scientific approach deals with objectivity while the Humanist approach deals with distinctions and contextual variations. 2. The Scientific Approach came to dominate philosophy, while the Humanists were seen as searching for and moving toward this position. 3. Grassi believed that the Scientific Method was one tool for understanding, while Humanism dealt with broader areas and combined the areas of rhetoric and philosophy. A. Grassi believed Vico represents the thought of Italian Humanism most fully. 1. Vico considered the rise of human history to be the basic problem of philosophy. 2. History is what differentiates humans from animals. B. Grassi's support for Humanist thought is based in Vico's conception of the humanization of nature. (p.150) 1. Grassi has a term called "meeting the claims or demands of life." a. All living beings experience the world using their senses, and inherently organize their environment to meet their basic needs. b. Animals rely on instinct to function. 2. The human process is very complex. a. Humans can choose and aren't limited to actions of instinct. b. Humans can define images through language and therefore can interpret the world in different ways. 3. Humanization or historication of nature occurs when: a. Humans become aware of these capabilities. b. They begin to make adjustments in nature, or "direct their own destinies." 4. Humans must take sensory level meanings and translate them into an intellectual level. 5. The clearing of forests and the cultivating of land is the first unfolding of human consciousness. (p.151) 6. This feeling of control over nature wasn't a sudden change: there were three developing stages. a. In the Cultural Age, humans felt they were a part of the cultural world. b. In the Age of Heros, combination of heros and gods (superhuman benefactors) were seen as helping humans by introducing social institutions and laws. c. In the Age of Humanity, humans realized that they could control nature. C. Humans gain control over nature using the Ingenium, which is the process of humanization. (p.151) 1. Ingenium transfers meaning from the sensory world to a higher human one. 2. Ingenium frees humans by allowing them to see relationships and making connections in experience which are needed to think new thoughts. D. There are three basic ways in which Ingenium is manifest to create the humans world. (p.152) 1. Imagination functions to grasp control of reality into two ways. a. Imagination allows humans to realize that they are not bound to nature in the same way that animals are bound. (152) b. Imagination allows humans to explain the world around them. It allows us to select certain interpretations of what we sense and allows us to define and order. 2. Work allows us to make and interpret connections of the sensory phenomena. Work allows us to act upon those interpretations made by our imagination. (p.153) 3. Language allows us to name and assign meanings to things in the world. By naming something we create a reality apart from the world. E. Humanists sought to understand things in the context of practical human action. 1. Praxis is action: the application of abstract philosophical concepts into concrete situations. (p.153) 2. Grammarians examine words and interpret the abstract human condition in combination with individual action. (p.154) A. Grassi refers to Aristotle and Cicero to define the metaphor. 1. Aristotle: "[The metaphor allows us] to see the similarity between what is actually the most widely separated." 2. Cicero's definition of metaphor said it was like a "light" which gives insight into a "relationship." B. Metaphor transfers insight on several levels. (p.154) 1. At the most basic level, the metaphor allows us to grasp similarities between two unrelated things. a. The metaphor operationalizes ingenium by allowing the human to connect himself/herself to the world of senses. b. We relate to nature in human terms. 2. Language works metaphorically, transferring insight. a. Language is symbolic because it helps us relate two dissimilar things. b. Language helps us interpret and connect to our world and experiences. 3. The process of philosophizing is metaphoric. a. A philosophical argument cannot be made without understanding the first principle. b. First principles are nonrational and "experienced" as an "urge." c. Philosophical systems are constructed with a first principle as the base. d. The similarities we make between "urges" to understand philosophical problem and the actual logical arguments we use are metaphorical. A. Grassi discusses the superiority of rhetorical language over rational speech. 1. Rhetorical language adapts various uses of imagery to illuminate historical fact and make it concrete, while rational speech is deductive and achieves effect through logical demonstration. 2. Rhetorical language deals with concrete particulars of life, while rational speech is universal and abstract. 3. Rhetorical language is like dialogue because it takes the world into account, while rational speech is monologic and has no need to interact. 4. Rhetorical language concentrates in images, symbols and metaphors, while rational speech is grounded in logical events and chronology. 5. Rhetorical language goes beyond a formal system, while rational speech is set in a "code" and can only move through the use of metaphor, which is indicative of rhetorical speech. B. A third form of speech identified by Grassi is "external rhetorical speech." 1. This is the superficial and mistaken definition of rhetoric as a technical art of persuasion. 2. This is "false speech" because images do not stem directly from metaphors or nature, but a limited understanding of nature and its images. A. Many feel that rhetoric is only the form of a message, while philosophy supplies factual content. B. Humanists see rhetoric in a positive light, as a way to make logical reasoning palatable to an audience. C. Grassi sees no separation of passion from logic. 1. The power of a message derives from its starting point in images that inspire wonder, admiration, engagement and passion. 2. Rhetoric, rather than logical deduction, is the true philosophy since it undertakes questions about the process by which "humans know, interpret, and create their world." D. The emphasis on science in the Western world has resulted in this separation of content from form, and contrasts with the World View of the humanists. (p.161) 1. Without scientific proof, an idea will not be believed. 2. We have forgotten that we need to study the insights upon which these calculations are based. E. There are many consequences for society that over-values the rational paradigm. 1. Those who believe in the "primacy of logic" and the ability for technology to deal with all problems tend to have an attitude of superiority. a. Humans see their rationality as giving them a dominance over all things. b. This actually limits humans' capability to fully interpret all things. 2. This affects our relationships with other cultures who do not share this attitude. a. We see these cultures as being underdeveloped. b. This view makes it impossible to fully understand them and constricts our interactions with them. 3. Logical thought has become synonymous with the domination of humans. (p.162) 4. The dawning of the atomic age is the ultimate example of humans' need to dominate nature. F. The rational approach which has dominated Western culture has been detrimental to philosophy. A. Renaissance Humanism defined folly as speaking irrationally without reason. B. Grassi studied literature for examples of folly, defining it instead as the ability, using language, to choose the perspective to take on a situation to unveil something's essence. (p.163) 1. Folly is an engagement of ingenium 2. Folly is the fundamental process by which humans move from the nonhuman to the human realm. 3. Folly, as an extension of ingenium, allows humans to imagine themselves in new situation and to deal with these situations effectively. A. Grassi's ideas of rhetoric are not well known among communication scholars. 1. Grassi has published in English only in Philosophy and Rhetoric and there are few essays or discussions on his work. 2. Grassi asserts the contributions of Italian Humanism to rhetoric and philosophy rather than with fully developing the contemporary implications of the philosophic perspective. B. Grassi made several important contributions to rhetoric from the Humanistic perspective. 1. Grassi asserts that rhetoric and philosophy are necessarily connected, since rhetoric is the starting point of philosophy. 2. Grassi preference of thought, speech, and action made from connections with nature (ingenium) rather than from logical reasoning is similar to the "new paradigm." 3. Grassi's notion of folly allows humans choices in how they perceive the world they live in. 4. Grassi's work generated renewed interest in Renaissance Humanism. 5. Grassi gives new significance to rhetorical speech and asks us to reconceptualize our definition of rhetoric. Grassi, Ernesto "Italian Humanism and Heidegger's Thesis of the End of Philosophy," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 13 (Spring 1980), 83. In this article, Grassi points to the parallelism between Heidegger's German Idealistic thought and the Italian Humanist tradition in order to create a historical framework in which to make evident the problems of Humanism in relation to present day. This article, separated into ten major ideas, begins with the End of Metaphysics and ends with Heidegger's Theory of the Brutality of the Being. In between these two major points, as Grassi explains Heidegger's Twofold thesis, the Traditional Model of Scientific Thought, the basic problem of Italian Humanism, The Question of the Veil of the Poetic Word, and the "clearing" of the Primordial Forest. Grassi, Ernesto Die Macht des Bildes, 221, cited in Walter Veit, "The Potency of Imagery - the Impotence of Rational Language: Ernesto Grassi's Contribution to Modern Epistemology," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 17 (1984), 235. Veit gives analysis to some of Grassi's theories in this article. Grassi once again confronts the separation of logical reasoning and rhetoric. Many of Grassi's ideas have literally reconstructed the philosophical dimension of rhetoric in the eyes of contemporary Italian Humanists. Much of this article is similar to the subjects covered in FFT, and it even helps in the understanding since it gives different explanations and examples to similar material. Emphasis is placed on some of the ideals of eighteenth century philosopher Giambattista Vico, who Grassi found as a source for some of his rhetorical ideas. Once again, it is stated that Grassi believed that the philosophical revolution began with the Italian Humanists, who showed that philosophy gains insight into the principles "through the creativity of the image." Grassi, Ernesto "Humanistic Rhetorical Philosophizing: Giovanni Pontano's Theory of the Unity of Poetry, Rhetoric, and History," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 17 (1984), 146. This article is simply Grassi's analysis and reaction to Potano's theories. It gives the reader some idea of the process of critical thinking that Grassi goes through in regards to the ideas of others. It is standard to differentiate between logic and rhetoric. The premises resulting from a rational process as exemplified by traditional metaphysics are necessary and universally valued. Rhetoric is bound by time and place, and it must use metaphor and images in order to be effective. In order for metaphor to be effective, there must be a common viewpoint shared between source and receiver which permits the audience to see the relationship of the metaphor. The unity of poetry, rhetoric, and history has a philosophical significance. All three are rooted in directive language. Potano's ideas are that the traditional thoughts need to be revised. A new kind of philosophy starts with the Humanists and the turn to rhetoric, away from rational argument. Grassi, Ernesto "Remarks on German Idealism, Humanism and the Philosophical Function of Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 19 (1986), 125. Grassi discusses his blending of Vico's Italian Humanism and German Idealism. The entire system of thoughts is summarized as follows: "The faculty that is crucial to the making of metaphors is ingenium, which allows us to see the world. The power of language is beyond logic and rational thinking. To think rationally involves assuming some presuppositions and drawing inferences from them." This text is simply and expansion of the work in Foss, et al. and provides a historical context for Grassi's work. Grassi, Ernesto "The Ordinary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 20 (1987), 248. This article is divided into three sections. The first section concentrates on making clear the philosophical function of poetical and rhetorical language, by looking at statements of philosopher Martin Heidegger and of two poets Ungaretti and Neruda. The poetic world, according to Heidegger, receives not only priority over the rational world, but also has a philosophical function comparing it to the ideas of philosopher Giambattista Vico. Second, it deals with the idea that reality cannot be revealed through a rational process. Next it deals with the philosophical function of poetry, showing that every beginning of a historical era is announced with a poetic expression, showing connection of poetry, rhetoric and history. Imagery is poetry. The third part shows what can happen when rational word becomes superior to rhetorical word, using the stories of Prometheus and Ulyssses. The fire Prometheus brought is considered metaphoric, but the fact that his liver is being destroyed keeps him historical and not eternal. Dante condemns Ulysses when he wishes to go beyond Hercules' pillars. Grassi, Ernesto "Why Rhetoric is Philosophy," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 20 (1987), 75. Traditional philosophy arrives at an important admission: rational language cannot reach "passions." What is "true" language? The model provided by German romantic thought recognizes an essentially literary character. In Monologne, Noralis, language is a game; language does not occur for the determination of beings. Tongue speaks for itself alone. An object has its own destiny and at the same time it doesn't in that each appears in its merry through the code which is revealed in the history. Rhetorical, historical language is shown to be the true philosophical language because it is by means of it that we "uncover" the various world by "playing" with our "orders" at stake. Verene, Donald Phillip, rev. of Die Macht der Phantasie and Rhetoric as Philosophy, by Ernesto Grassi, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 13 (Fall 1980), 281. This article summarizes Grassi's ideas in Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition and in Die Macht der Phantasie. Zur Geschitchte abenlandischen Denkens. According to Verene, these books are "treasure houses of an understanding of the nature of rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy that is absent in contemporary thought." Grassi's thesis is that rhetoric is at the basis of philosophy. Considering this relationship, Grassi asks his readers to understand the power of language by choosing Humanism over science. Verene, Donald Phillip, "Response to Grassi," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 19 (1986), 135. Verene is delighted to be discussing Grassi's work. He admits skepticism to the blending of Italian Humanism and German Idealism. The most important element of Grassi's thought is the metaphor because metaphors embody the starting pints for thought. It is essentially a recovery of ancient ideas that Verene feels is long overdue. back to lecture note index

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Combating AIDS Around the Globe Lead story from the February Centerpoint In November 2004, just prior to World AIDS Day, the Woodrow Wilson Center and UNAIDS, the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, held two high-level briefings as part of a three-part series to expand awareness of the global AIDS agenda outside of the health community, particularly within foreign policy and development circles. World AIDS Day became an annual event in 1988 when some 5 million people were living with the disease. Since then, AIDS has killed more than 20 million people around the world and, this year, 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than 25 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. In the Caribbean, the region second-hardest hit by the disease, at least 1 in 50 adults across five nations already are infected. A November 10 seminar featuring Dr. Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of UNAIDS, and Ambassador George Moose, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, shed light on the disproportionate impact HIV/AIDS has had on women in developed and developing countries. The second briefing on November 30— featuring UNAIDS Executive Director Dr. Peter Piot and U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Randall Tobias—explored the aggressive U.S. emergency plan to combat AIDS and the dangerously fast spread of HIV/AIDS in East Europe and East Asia. A third upcoming seminar will delve into the effects of AIDS on security. Every day around the world, 8,000 people die from AIDS, many of them young people in their productive years, many of them mothers and caretakers. It is a humanitarian crisis that poses serious social, economic, and security threats—one that requires a sustained, collective effort to overcome. The Emerging Pandemic: East Europe, Asia UNAIDS reported at the end of 2004 that nearly a half-million people died from AIDS in South and Southeast Asia and more than 7 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, while in East Asia more than 1 million people are HIV-positive. In addition, nearly 1 million Russians are living with HIV/AIDS, about triple the official statistics, according to Wilson Center Senior Scholar Murray Feshbach and Research Associate Cristina Galvin in a recently released report underwritten by the U.S. Agency for International Development. "The situation we face in China, India, and Russia bears alarming similarities to the situation we faced 20 years ago in Africa," said Dr. Piot in his November 30 address. Piot said these countries are nearing "a tipping point," much like Africa had experienced. In South Africa, he explained, prevalence rates rose from .5 to 1 percent in five years but then in seven years, the rate leapt from 1 to 20 percent. Piot said, "I am calling for intensified attention on these next wave countries-not at the expense of Africa, but also on behalf of Africa." If the epidemic spreads, he said, global resources for Africa could decrease or disappear. "If we don't prevent this breakout, and full-blown epidemics take hold in these large, populous states, there will be dire consequences not only for these countries, but for each of our own." Well over half the world's population resides in Asian-Pacific countries, where HIV/AIDS-related income losses totaled more than $7 billion in 2001 alone. India and China, two of the world's most populous countries, have rapidly growing economies which would be devastated by the stunted growth that AIDS has caused elsewhere as would their global trading partners. AIDS threatens a nation's security and stability, and national defense can be compromised by the growing rates of AIDS in military ranks. In Russia, incidents of HIV among potential military conscripts are estimated to be 25 times the level of five years earlier, according to the Feshbach/Galvin report. The report also noted that while HIV is on the rise, testing has dropped dramatically, in a society that stigmatizes those with the virus. In Asia, increasing populations help offset the AIDS mortality levels, but Russia has a declining population. Furthermore, the report noted, AIDS disproportionately impacts Russia's young people; more than 80 percent of HIV-positive Russians are under 30 years old. "We can pay now for prevention," said Piot, "we can wait a bit longer and pay for treatment; or we can wait even longer and pay the price of losing tens of hundreds of millions of productive citizens. Early investment is everything...the price rises every minute we wait." Women and AIDS World AIDS Day, commemorated on December 1, focused special attention this year on the growing AIDS epidemic among women and girls. In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of all HIV-positive people and 75 percent of infected young people, 15 to 24 years old, are female. Some of the steepest increases are occurring in East Asia, East Europe, and Central Asia. In Russia, the Russian Federal AIDS Center reported in 2003 that 38 percent of people living with HIV were women, compared with 24 percent in 2001. In Brazil, new AIDS cases among women increased by 75 percent in the late 1990s, compared to just 10 percent among men. And, in the United States, AIDS is the leading cause of death among African American women, ages 35-44. "The disproportionate infection of millions of poor women isn't merely an injustice; it's a socioeconomic disaster," said Dr. Cravero, at the November 10 seminar, "Confronting the Crisis: Women and AIDS." Cravero said AIDS among women is on the rise in these countries because "women lack control over their bodies and their daily lives, and the tools, resources and support needed to change their situation." Ambassador Moose discussed the debate within the U.S. government. He said while the U.S. government has recognized the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS threat and has made advances developing affordable antiretroviral treatments for developing nations, it has yet to address the challenge of women and AIDS. "It's one thing to bring policymakers and politicians to an acceptance that HIV/AIDS represents a threat to national and international security interests," he said, "but it's quite another, I would argue, to convince them that the place where that battle will have to be fought and won is in the bedrooms and bordellos of every society around the world." Piot also discussed the rise of AIDS among women and said that solely insisting on abstinence is unrealistic. "The scientists, the doctors, the activists, the churches, and all of us should come together and agree on a broad philosophy of prevention that takes cultural and religious differences into account, but embraces a common principle-that the highest moral ideal is to save lives." Piot said developing countries must encourage educational and economic opportunities for women, pass and enforce laws that deter domestic violence, and promote access to the female condom and microbicides that women can use to protect themselves. Said Cravero, "For women who can't choose when and with whom to have sex, for women whose partners will not use condoms or be faithful, and for women who are too beaten up or beaten down to ask, methods that they control...will make all the difference." The U.S. Relief Plan On November 30, Ambassador Randall Tobias presented the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which commits $15 billion over a five-year period toward combating the disease in more than 100 countries. The plan, which promotes integrated prevention, treatment, and care, is the largest commitment ever by a single nation toward an international health initiative. With special emphasis on 15 focus nations in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, where half the world's infections occur, this plan aims to treat 2 million HIV-infected people, prevent 7 million new infections, and care for 10 million people, including orphans and vulnerable children. The emergency plan "strives to bring donors, stakeholders on the ground, and national leadership onto the same page," said Tobias, adding that emphasis will be placed on monitoring and evaluating results. "If this HIV/AIDS challenge is to be met, we in the developed world will have to meet it. If we fail to rise to the occasion, there's really no Plan B." He underscored the importance of such organizations as UNAIDS remaining engaged in the fight. Such groups, he said, "offer other donors a vehicle to sharply increase their commitment, as America has done."

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The continuing Texas drought has taken an enormous and growing toll on trees, killing as many as half a billion – 10 percent of the state’s 4.9 billion trees – this year alone, the Texas Forest Service estimates. That calculation did not include trees claimed by this year’s deadly and extensive wildfires, even if they were drought-related, Burl Carraway, who heads the agency’s Sustainable Forestry Department, told Texas Climate News. (Previously, the Forest Service estimated that about 1.5 million trees were lost on 34,000 charred acres in the Bastrop County fire, most destructive in Texas history. In another damage assessment, the agency said more than 2,000 fires in East Texas had charred more than 200,000 acres. Texas has about 63 million acres of forestlands.) The estimate that up to half a billion trees have been lost to drought in 2011 was issued Monday by the Forest Service. It was based on statistics tabulated by agency foresters after they canvassed local forestry professionals in their regions, developed estimated percentages of drought-killed trees, and applied them to regional tree inventories. The resulting estimate was that 100 million to 500 million trees with a diameter of at least five inches had perished because of the drought – two to 10 percent of the nearly five billion trees of that size in the state. In 2011, Texas experienced an exceptional drought, prolonged high winds and record-setting temperatures. Together, those conditions took a severe toll on trees across the state. Large numbers of trees in both urban communities and rural forests have died or are struggling to survive. The impacts are numerous and widespread. The agency found that trees in three areas appeared to be hurt the most by the drought: - An area in West Texas including Sutton, Crockett, western Kimble and eastern Pecos counties, with extensive death of Ashe junipers. - An area in Southeast Texas including Harris, Montgomery, Grimes, Madison and Leon counties, where many loblolly pines succumbed. - An area southeast of Austin, including western Bastrop and eastern Caldwell counties as well as neighboring areas, which had widespread mortality among cedars and post oaks. Also, the agency said, “localized pockets of heavy mortality were reported for many other areas. The Forest Service plans to use aerial imagery in a more detailed analysis next spring, when trees that entered early dormancy because of the drought may start to recover. In addition, the agency said, “a more scientific, long-term study” of tree losses will be carried out through its Forest Inventory and Analysis program’s census of the state’s trees. Carraway said Forest Service officials “fully expect mortality percentages to increase if the drought continues.” Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon has said that a second year of drought in 2012 is “likely,” perhaps with more dry conditions following that. Nielsen-Gammon has estimated that about a tenth of the excess heat this past summer was attributable to manmade climate change. He and other climate experts have said hotter, drier conditions are expected to increase in Texas in decades ahead as concentrations of human-created greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. What the warming average temperature of the planet could mean for forests and other ecosystems was the focus of research findings announced last week by NASA. The study, carried out by researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, used a computer model that projected massive changes in plant communities across nearly half of the earth’s land surface, with “the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type – such as forest, grassland or tundra – toward another.” The NASA announcement added: The model projections paint a portrait of increasing ecological change and stress in Earth’s biosphere, with many plant and animal species facing increasing competition for survival, as well as significant species turnover, as some species invade areas occupied by other species. Most of Earth’s land that is not covered by ice or desert is projected to undergo at least a 30 percent change in plant cover – changes that will require humans and animals to adapt and often relocate. In addition to altering plant communities, the study predicts climate change will disrupt the ecological balance between interdependent and often endangered plant and animal species, reduce biodiversity and adversely affect Earth’s water, energy, carbon and other element cycles. “For more than 25 years, scientists have warned of the dangers of human-induced climate change,” said Jon Bergengren, a scientist who led the study while a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. “Our study introduces a new view of climate change, exploring the ecological implications of a few degrees of global warming. While warnings of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and other environmental changes are illustrative and important, ultimately, it’s the ecological consequences that matter most.” When faced with climate change, plant species often must “migrate” over multiple generations, as they can only survive, compete and reproduce within the range of climates to which they are evolutionarily and physiologically adapted. While Earth’s plants and animals have evolved to migrate in response to seasonal environmental changes and to even larger transitions, such as the end of the last ice age, they often are not equipped to keep up with the rapidity of modern climate changes that are currently taking place. Human activities, such as agriculture and urbanization, are increasingly destroying Earth’s natural habitats, and frequently block plants and animals from successfully migrating. – Bill Dawson Image credits: Photos – Texas Forest Service; Map – NASA

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Commercially-pressed CD's and CD-R or CD-RW disks are fundamentally different technologies, which is why a commercial CD will continue to be readable long after a CD-R has become unusable. A CD drive uses a focused laser beam that is reflected from the media surface in the CD disc. The beam is reflected onto a sensor that detects changes in the amount of energy that is reflected. The original (commercial) process used perforated aluminum as the media surface. When you use the term "pressed" you are using an old vinyl record term, but the production process is pretty much the same. There is a "master" disk that is put into a press which is filled with polycarbonate. The master disk has little pins sticking up everywhere there is to be a hole in the aluminum. The disk is cooled, and liquid aluminum is spun onto it. This results in an aluminum layer with holes in it. When the disc is played, the laser reflects strongly from the shiny aluminum or less strongly (or not at all) from the holes. The reflection/non-reflection is translated into the ones and zeros of the binary data stored on the disk. Over time the aluminum can oxidize or there can be other changes in the plastic and other materials that make the disc unusable. These are long term effects and the ultimate statistical life of a commercial CD is often debated, without conclusion, by the experts. The CD-R and CD-RW do not use an aluminum media surface. Instead, they use a dye. When the disc is written, a high-powered laser causes spots on the disk to turn dark (hence the term "burning"). When played back, the sensor in the player sees the difference in reflectivity of the dark and not-so-dark spots as the binary data. Unfortunately, because the dye is a light-sensitive chemical, over time it will fade. This can happen from the heat of the reading laser, from ambient light, and from chemical degradation in the dye and support media. CD-R/RW media is safe for backup, and for creating alternate media (copying music files to play in your car so that if they are damaged from heat or wear out you can make another one, and preserve your originals elsewhere), and similar purposes. However, they are not safe for archival storage because they are not stable enough for that purpose. Side note: when burning CD's for use in a car, for best results get "music CD's" which are designed for that application, or slow your burning speed down to 12x or 16x to get a darker spot from your high speed burner. The car will read the disc more reliably. Insofar as tape storage is concerned, tape is also not a good archival choice of media. It's generally better than CD-R, although I haven't seen any comparative studies. Major data centers who use tape storage refresh the storage periodically. Their Tape Management System (TMS) remembers the date the tape was recorded, and will call it up to be copied periodically. The old tape is then erased and reused until it reaches end of life (sometimes a fixed usage or time interval, sometimes when the number of recoverable errors reaches a threshold) at which time it is scrapped. The whole issue of long term archive is complex, and goes beyond media. For media, if a data center stored its files on a 9 track magnetic tape twenty years ago, how would it retrieve that data today (you cannot find working 9 track drives). What if it had used an early Magneto-Optical (MO) drive? Small businesses have trouble when their tape drive fails, and they can't buy another drive in that old format. File formats are another problem. I have word processing documents that deceased family members created years ago. I no longer have word processing software that will import some of those formats. I can (sometimes) extract the raw text and then try to reformat it in a current program, but if I don't have a printed original I don't know how it was intended to be formatted. The only archival format that has stood the test of time is paper. Submitted by: Kevin G. of Dallas, TX Well, Carl, that so-called expert sure has stirred the waters and a LOT of people are wondering about the same question. However, your friendly Federal Government has studied the problem even longer. To be specific, the National Archives and Records Administration, in charge of all of the record archiving of the government, has no standard on media storage, and requested NIST, that's National Institute of Standards and Technology, to write a new standard on media durability. If you never heard of NIST, you're not alone, as NIST is more of a background organization, but suffice to say, they're the ones who creates the standards, references, and accuracy tests for all industries, from DNA to Time accuracy (in fact, if NIST operates one of the Internet "clocks" you can calibrate your PC to). NIST DNA reference material improves forensic DNA test accuracy. NIST also invented closed captioning and many other technology, but enough about NIST. A gentleman by the name of Fred Byers spent a whole year testing various media, and wrote a guide for NIST to librarians who need to archive information on how to care for optical media such as CD-R and DVD-R's and such. In the guide, he basically stated that with proper handling (store in low humidity, no scratching, stored vertically, etc.) a DVD-R should last 30 years with no fear of losing any information. However, that is NOT an absolute number as it is dependent on a LARGE NUMBER OF FACTORS, some of which in your control, and some not: Factors that affect disc life expectancy include the following: type -- as recordable media is more durable than rewritable media manufacturing quality -- you get what you pay for condition of the disc before recording -- obvious quality of the disc recording -- garbage in, garbage out handling and maintenance -- scratches are bad for any discs environmental conditions -- humidity and temperature can warp disc, ruining the reflective layer in the media. light, esp. UV light can destroy the dye used in recordable media, etc. Let us discuss each factor in a bit more detail All types of media can be damaged through warpage (disc bending), scratches, and reflective layer breakdown due to oxygen leakage. Recordable media, in addition, is susceptible to UV rays, which affects the dye used in the process. Rewritable media, with phase-change recording, is even more susceptible to UV ray and temperature. It is generally acknowledged that certain brands of media are better than others, and often the stuff on sale is not the stuff you may want to buy and keep around. What you may not know is that there are only like 16 media manufacturers in the world. They make the media for all the brands that you see in the market, and some brands / factories are known to make high grade media (i.e. they tested best for maintaining data integrity, even when the media was subject to aging tests). While few independent labs did comprehensives tests, a test in Europe a while back for CD-R's revealed that Taiyo Yuden (Verbatim), Kodak (Kodak), and TDK (TDK) kept the most data intact. Condition of the disc before recording A disc should be brand new when used. While shelf live of a media is up to 5 years, why take chances? Buy them as you need tem. Handling and maintenance Scratches are bad for any discs, as it breaks open the substrate layer and allows air to tarnish the inside silver reflective layer inside. Scratches also can make information on the media unreadable by interrupting the laser's path. Environmental conditions -- humidity and temperature can warp the media, and exposure to UV light can destroy the dye used in CD-R's and DVD-R's. Hope that answers your questions. Submitted by: Kasey C. of San Francisco, CA In the '80's, the CD was introduced in the market and portrayed as "THE" solution to the vinyl records. The CD could be thrown in a mud pool, step on it, scratch it, nothing would harm he CD. Now we all know that CD's has a lower lifetime as their vinyl counterparts and are more susceptible to errors than them. This is also true for the CD as a media to record software. The early CD's, were recorded at maximum 640 MB. Mostly not even 640 MB but something like 528 MB. This made them less susceptible to scratches. But as the CD technology was in a constant evolution, overburning a CD to 800 MB and more became common use. Also the DVD was introduced, offering 4/9GB on a wafer of the size of a CD. It is obvious the the tracks are becoming so small that the finest scratch, the smallest fault, can ruin the CD/DVD forever. Answering your question, there is no miracle solution to keep CD/DVD from deterioration trough age. But with a little bit of care, you can have many years of pleasure of your recordings. 1. Buy only CD/DVD from a good brand. Buying low priced CD/DVD will mostly result in very disappointing experiences. 2. Dont overburn a CD/DVD. While the overburn technique is now widely accepted by most software, it is still not fully reliable and mostly dont approved by the CD manufacturers. 3. Put every CD back in the jewel case after use, clean them as prescribed by the manufacturer, and avoid as much as possible touching the reading surface of the CD. As a final remark, CD/DVD are nowadays not expensive and if you can make a backup of them, make a backup and store it in a safe place. I use an external harddisk of 250GB (<300 CD's) to store a backup of the CD's/DVD's I have. Price of the harddisk is about 100$. I have been able many times to rescue recordings which were otherwise lost forever by this harddisk. Hope this helps, Submitted by: Carlos You have just discovered what most people don't discover until they actually lose data: commercial CDs and home-burned CDs are not the same. While a commercial premade CD will last a very long time if it is cared for properly, a home-burned CD will begin to deteriorate. The reason is that the home-burned version uses dyes to accomplish what the premade CD does by having it built into the disk. This is, of course, an oversimplified explanation, but it will suffice. There are a few ways to maximize the amount of time a CD will last. First of all, buy good quality CDs to begin with. Stick with brand names that you are familiar with and have used successfully in the past. Do not assume that just because a blank CD is made by a well-known company that it will be high quality. Test them out by actually using them. One of the best ways to do this is to use them for your regular system backups. Be sure to actually restore from those backups periodically (easier if you have another computer handy that you can wipe out data on) or else use a backup program that allows you to mount the backup as a "virtual drive" and retrieve data from it. This lets you know if there is a problem with a brand deteriorating unusually fast. Second, never use labels on CDs. I found this out the hard way. Labels cause the CD to deteriorate much more rapidly than it otherwise would. Certain inks used in pens have been reported to do the same, but I have never encountered this problem, so it shouldn't be too severe. Do be certain, however, that you are gentle when marking CDs. Use a felt tip and do not press hard. Third, put a note somewhere on the CD that tells you when you made it. This lets you monitor how long it has been since the CD was burned. If the data is irreplaceable, burn it to a new CD every 2 years. As for the recommendation to use magnetic tapes, that has its own set of problems. Magnetic tapes also deteriorate, and they are subject to some damage that CDs are immune to, notably damage from electrical or magnetic fields. In short, CDs are good for long term storage-- but don't assume that "long term" means forever. Check them regularly and burn them to new media when problems develop or even before if you can't replace what's on them. As for storage, that is pretty much common sense. Keep the CDs in a case or an envelope if they are not actually being used. Avoid temperature extremes and handle gently. I also recommend making two copies of every important CD. This practice just saved my data when I discovered that the labels on my CDs had wiped out some irreplaceable family photos. It costs twice as much, but if the data is important to you then it isn't really very expensive, is it? Submitted by: Denise R. of Lebanon, Missouri Hi Carl N, Your question has been set by a lot of people over the last 10 years. I've burned CD in 100s over the years and only found 2 discs with missing information. Lifetime of CDs is not limited due to one parameters only, more issues are setting the limit of lifetime. One is related conditions of storage and how you handle the discs. In other word, how careless or careful you are as the user. Then the material used in the CDs - how cheap a blank CD did you buy. And lastly your burning equipment, that is the laser diode. When pressed CDs were introduced in beginning of the 80s lovers of vinyl records claimed, that CDs would last for 2 years only. But as you have experienced CDs from this period can still be played. I remember one report from about 1990, which claimed a lifetime of only 3-4 years. Looking into the report, it turned out that the condition of storage was -30C (some -25F) and reading/playing equipment had a worn laser diode. Most of us can only say: I don't store my CDs in the freezer and todays laser diodes doesn't wear out as they used to. Turning towards recordable CDs, the whole issue is a matter of having a whole bunch of clear holes placed in circles in a foil. Readability of these holes are depending on a number of issues. How clear are the holes? Is edge of the hole clear? Is the reflectivity of the materials sufficient? Is the laser still as effective as it was? or has the surface become matte? For the early CD-burners this was jeopardized by increasing burning speed and some blank CD had doubtful foil material. Adding, to this some CD-burners were even sold with writing speeds beyond its capability. Many blank CDs were rejected in this period due to bad burners rather than bad discs. It is my conclusion, that this interim period has given us some doubtful discs. You have to be careful with your CDs and also a little bit extra careful with your own. They don't like heat, bright light, bending, and writing with aggressive writing pens is also nasty. Especially pens with unknown chemicals may etch the CDs, it is just like burning, but this time controlled by the chemicals. In case you wanna increase the lifetime of your recordings, you may buy CDs which is claimed to 300+ years lifetime. These CDs are referred to as GOLD-CD. These CDs has a special layer which include some 24ct gold. The advantages of these CDs are the ability to create clear holes into it with reduced oxidation or corrosion over time. Amazing almost also unbelievable 300 year. Just 100 years could be great for me. In 10-20 years everything would be transferred to new media type anyway. I saw a report on the 300 years at Price of these GOLD CDs is 10-20x times the usual ones. You have been suggested to use magnetic tape. Nor tapes does not last forever. As matter of fact the sound quality decays over time; frequency range is decreased by each use. This loss you can not be restored as with a digital media. Only digital storage keeps its audio frequency range over time and use. Like R&R;DIGITAL media is here to stay. You may call it CD, DVD, MPx, Blu-ray or whatever, but it's digital. I believe that todays discs and equipment can provide a disc with sufficient lifetime for most of us and may even restore your more doubtful discs from the early burning time with success. Even discs which are registered as 'No disc' may be restored by copying it today. In case you wanna assure yourselves; let the PC verify the burned disc, this option is normally disabled by default. What shall I do with my precious discs from the early days? My best recommendation would be to make a new copy, while the old is still readable. This is easy and cheap to most of us today as having two drives in your PC is not uncommon. Lastly, the quality and lifetime of recorded discs is today likely to most depended on your own care. Submitted by: Leif M. of Helsingor, Denmark Regarding problems developing over time with recordable CD-R media, I've run into some of this myself, but I also have quite a few discs that were made back when the very first 1x CD burners were made available to the public, and they still read just fine for me. I suspect that there are several factors involved here. 1. I'm certain there's a difference in quality between brands of CD-R media. A number of my really old CD-Rs that still read flawlessly today were Kodak branded, and were considered expensive "premium quality" discs at the time. They're even physically a little bit thicker than most other media I've handled. By contrast, some of the generic media I purchased because of the low price on 100-pack spindles has actually developed "bubbles" where you can see the dye that's sandwiched between the layers of plastic is disintegrating. (Of course it won't read if small spots are completely gone!) There were/are several different types of dye used for CD-R media, as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's turning out that some types have better longevity than others. For example, Verbatim was known for using their trademark blue-tinted dye, while others were shades of green or gold. 2. From what I've read and observed, handling makes a big difference too. Leaving your CD-R's exposed to sunlight (as folks tend to do with music CDs used in their cars or trucks) probably shaves years off of their lifespan. Putting them in some type of jewel-case or sleeve when not in use is a very good idea. Boxes of empty jewel-cases can be purchased fairly inexpensively at most office supply and electronics chain stores. 3. A CD-R holding computer data is inherently more "fragile" and subject to data loss than a CD-R recorded as an audio disc. The standard used for recording audio CDs incorporates quite a bit of error correction information to handle small scuffs and scratches on the media, but besides that, audio data is spread out over a much larger portion of the CD-R. If you have a .ZIP file stored on a CD-R, for example, a pinhole-sized mark someplace on the disc where that .ZIP file is stored can easily be enough to prevent the whole archive from extracting properly. By contrast, the same sized mark might only cause a very brief "stutter" at one point of a song on a music disc (or not pose a discernable problem at all, due to the error correction). If your audio discs are already deteriorating to the point where players are rejecting them as "unreadable" or they're skipping badly, it sounds to me like things have gotten pretty bad. The only recommendation I'd have is to re-record your music to fresh, good-quality CD-R media and throw out the old ones - and in the future, make a habit of transferring your music to fresh discs every few years or so. Luckily, in the case of computer software backups, they tend to become so outdated, you no longer really need to keep them by the time the media they're recorded on starts failing. But for those trying to preserve digital photos and the like, I'd recommend this same procedure. Make a fresh set of backups every so often and discard the old media - before it fails on you and you lose something priceless! Submitted by: Tom W. CD burned media fails after time. I am a practicing technician and this is not a new complaint. It is my firm belief that most consumers burn their media at the fastest speed possible for both their software and the media they use. This is fine but there may well be a trade-off in doing this. What most consumers do not perhaps understand is that commercially produced CD's have actual pits pressed into them that represent the digital data of the original sound data. A burned CD on the other hand is made by fabricating a photo sensitive layer to mimic the pits found in pressed media. I have found three major causes for this consumers problem they are as 1. A slower burn makes a stronger image representation in the photo sensitive layer of a burned CD. A faster burn while successful may not impress the photo sensitive layer as effectively as a slow burn. Over time the burn fails as the photo sensitive layer deteriorates. 2. Sunlight and other forms of intense light can effect a burned CD because it can cause a distortion in the burned media's photo sensitive layer. 3. Scratches by far are more evident on burned media and more easily caused than on pressed media. Most consumers seem to ignore the manufactures warning and suggestions. Handling of the disc in a careful manner as advised by the manufacturer is the best policy here. I use a camera lens cloth to clean surface of all my media. A camera lens cloth will not scratch the disc surface. Paper and regular household cloths will cause scratches. Observe the above and I do believe you will have better results. One more thing always use the media recommended by the burner manufacturer. It is endorsed and guaranteed to work, many of the cheap non name discs out there are just not up to par. Its just like the old cassette tape days. Most audiophiles went for tapes like Maxell, JVC, Sony etc. but as everyone knows there were a lot of bogus brands out there for the un-informed to purchase. Submitted by: Peter K. > I recently read an article by a data storage expert who claimed that > burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs can be expected to last only two to five years > and not a whole lot more. I personally have commercially pressed CDs > from the 1980s that still play fine, but I have begun to notice that > some of my burned CD-Rs are beginning to skip you mention that there are basically two types of CDs: Those that are created with all information in place and those you can buy and write on. The first type is quite robust as the information has been "engraved" into the surface just below the reflector. The most critical part of such a CD is the reflector, most often a very thin layer of aluminum. The second type of CD works a bit differently: There is a dye layer below the reflector and the information is written onto the CD-R(W) by "burning" and thereby locally changing the optical properties of the dye. The most critical part is the dye, besides the reflector as above. If the dye degrades the CD easily gets unreadable. The dye of CD-RW is even more critical as it must be "resetable" - another constraint. > The expert suggests that for secure long-term storage, high -quality > magnetic tape is the way to go. This solution is quite expensive as you need a tape drive and enough tape cartridges, but has the advantage of a much larger storage capacity. If the manufacturers say their tape cartridges are reliable for a very long time they have one advantage above CD-R: This type of storage device has been around long enough to prove it. CD-R has been on the market for no more than 10 years. The best strategy for the private user is: Have a good archive strategy, save often and store the media carefully in a dry, dark, cool place. If you store every file more than once you have a better chance to retrieve it. There is no real alternatives to CD-R. Use high-quality ones. Do not use any DVD variety as their reliability is much less. DVD may be used for an image backup of your boot drive so you can restore your present configuration for the months to come. Submitted by: Alexander V. Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD. There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more. The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam. Many of the cheap burnable CDs available at discount stores have a life span of around two years, In fact, there are some of the better-quality discs offer a longer life span, of a maximum of five years. Distinguishing high-quality burnable CDs from low-quality discs is difficult, I think because few vendors use life span as a selling point. I've had good luck with Verbatim media, and bad results with TDK. Playback with the TDK discs I used degraded steadily over time, in spite of very little use, and not much in the way of scratches or other blemishes on the disc. On the other hand, the Verbatim discs I've used have held up well over time, and under more use than the TDK ones I used. Opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs. I have my own view: To overcome the preservation limitations of burnable CDs, Im suggesting using magnetic tapes, which, as I read, can have a life span of 30 years to 100 years, depending on their quality. Even if magnetic tapes are also subject to degradation, they're still the superior storage media. But I want to point out that no storage medium lasts forever and, consequently, consumers and business alike need to have a migration plan to new storage technologies. A Good Question to get in this subject is Does Burning Speed makes difference in quality of CDs? Someone told me that the burning speed makes a difference in the quality of the records. The lower it is, the deeper it burns and therefore the better the quality is. I heard that there are some audio technicians decide to burn masters at 2x and copies at 4x due to getting digital noise from higher burn rates. Might just depend on the burner quality and the burning program... Hoping you get the Point of my explanation. Submitted by: Sameer T. Everyone who owns a business is always trying to be enticed by the security and the longevity of magnetic tape. And although I'm apt to agree with them on its durability, I don't use it to back up important data in my business. I have two problems with magnetic tape vs. CD or DVD. The first problem is hardware. Data backed up on a CD or DVD can be loaded into any computer with a drive capable of handling the media. The same can be said about tape backup, however you are more likely to find a computer off the shelf with a compatible CD or DVD drive vs a magnetic tape drive. The other problem is the need for long term storage. As a business owner, I'm backing up my important data every one to three days. I've been using CD-RW media to do this for years. If a disk gets corrupt, you can reformat it using your burning software, then use it again. If you are concerned about your CD becoming corrupt, simply burn two or three. The cost of three CD or even DVD media is much more reasonable than the cost of one of those tapes. And if my server dies, I can buy any computer at any store, and load the data onto the new computer right away and I'm back in the game. I have several people trying to convince me of the benefit of a paper backup system. I find it easier (and cheaper) to have multiple electronic backups. My business server has a RAID 1 card and two hard drives which mirror each other. I have the CD backup, and I then take this data and save it to a secure partition on another machine in a separate location. The likelihood of all of these systems failing at one time is highly unlikely. And if it does, I'm taking the day off, because that's just real bad luck. As far as long term storage (like music), I've noticed that CD-RW can lose the data in the long haul, but haven't had any problems with CD-R media. I have some that skip, but not for a reason I didn't know about. I buy the large spools of CD-R which don't come with jewel cases. So these disks get abused. If you know you are going to keep something for a really long time, I would make sure the disks you buy have jewel cases. And you can apply the multiple disk system with this as well. The media is easy on the wallet, and the more backups you have, the lower the risk you will actually lose the data. I don't think I answered all the questions, but that's my take. Submitted by: Dave K.

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Charlotte Planners: John Nolen Excerpted from Neighborhoods: Charlotte's Neighborhood Planning Tradition by Dr. Thomas W. Hanchett Photo from Mary Norton Kratt and Thomas W. Hanchett, Legacy: The Myers Park Story (Myers Park Foundation, 1986). Three of the most important city planning firms in the United States helped shape Charlotte. They were the Olmsted Brothers, John Nolen, and Earle Draper. All worked in the city during the boom years of the 1910s and 1920s. They gave the city new ideals in urban design which are still followed today. In addition, Nolen and Draper took lessons learned in Charlotte's neighborhoods and applied them in hundreds of cities throughout the nation, giving Charlotte's early planning efforts special importance. When Charlotte's original hundred acre tract was laid off in house lots in the 1770s the city fathers chose a gridiron street pattern. A surveyor, either hired by the village or supplied by the colonial government, laid out the streets at right angles to each other. Many cities of the era were not planned at all, with streets growing up from trails and cowpaths running in every direction. The grid was the most popular alternative because it was orderly and easy to understand, and its straight lines meant that it could be created quickly and broken up into lots easily. Charlotte's reliance on the grid continued throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1910s Charlotte's New South leaders, as part of their drive to make Charlotte a modern city, hired John Nolen, the Olmsted Brothers, and Earle Sumner Draper who turned the city forever from the grid pattern. The very idea of having a landscape architect/city planner design streets was unusual. In progressive Dilworth, Latta had hired Joseph Forsyth Johnston, a landscape architect from New York City, to create Latta Park and evidently also asked him for suggestions on the surrounding street pattern. Most areas, though, were laid out methodically by surveyors or civil engineers. Nolen, the Olmsteds, and Draper were part of a generation with a strong appreciation for nature. America's first National Parks were established in the era and the conservation movement blossomed, extending even to President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09). Landscape architects sought to bring this consciousness to city planning. John Nolen's first job in Charlotte was the design of Independence Park in June of 1905. 7 Independence was the city's first public park, and it was also Nolen's first public commission after his graduation from Harvard University's School of Landscape Architecture. Nolen went on to become one of the nation's top city planners, designing more than 400 projects across the nation and helping to found the first city planning professional organization. 1 Nolen was part of a movement in the decades around the turn of the century that sought social reform in America's cities, a movement that included such well-known figures as social worker Jane Addams and muckraker Lincoln Steffens. Born in lower-middle-class circumstances in Philadelphia in 1869, Nolen graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School majoring in economics and public administration. 2 He spent ten years as executive secretary of the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching, a "people's university" which brought college-level night classes to the urban working class. By 1903, after visits to Europe's "Garden City" experiments, he became convinced that the new profession of city planning was more effective way for him to improve urban conditions. 3 The Garden City idea, begun in England in the 1890s, proposed medium-sized new towns surrounded by greenbelts. The new communities were to be carefully planned by professional designers to include the best features of both city and country, and to be self-sustaining with commercial and industrial areas as well as residences. No university in the United States yet offered a city planning degree, so Nolen enrolled in Harvard's School of Landscape Architecture and graduated in 1905 at age thirty-six. 4 It is not known how Nolen came to be engaged by the Charlotte Park and Tree Commission to design Independence Park. The job proved quite fortuitous to Nolen's career. While he was in town a young real estate developer named George Stephens commissioned him to design the grounds of Stephens' own residence. 5 Evidently the result greatly impressed Stephens, and he became Nolen's patron for a substantial number of projects all over North Carolina. 6 In 1909 Nolen drew plans for Stephens' Kanuga Lake resort colony Hendersonville, North Carolina, now a religious retreat for the Episcopal Church. 7 In the early teens, possibly as a result of Stephens' influence, he planned Greensboro's country-club suburb of Irving Park in Guilford County near where Stephens had been born. 8 Nolen did the 1918 plan for the expansion of the campus of Stephens' alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill. 9 In the 1920s he prepared a city plan for Stephens' adoptive home town of Asheville, North Carolina, a document that received national attention as one of the first thorough small city plans in the Southeast. 10 Later projects included a new town development called Penderlea in Pender County, North Carolina, for the U. S. Farm Service Administration, and a western North Carolina regional plan undertaken in connection with Stephens' advocacy of the proposed Blue Ridge Parkway. 11 At the same time, John Nolen continued his activities in Charlotte. Between 1905 and 1907 he designed grounds for private residences of Stephens' partner F. C. Abbott, Chamber of Commerce leader Wade Harris, E. R. Russell, P. M. Brown, A. J. Crowell, W.B. Rodman. L.A. Dodsworth, R.A.Dunn, F.O. Hawley, and O. A. Robbins. 12 In April 1907 Nolen visited the city and gave a slide lecture on "Parks and Playgrounds" illustrated with stereoptican slides. 13 That June, the Park and Tree Commission hired him once again, to provide designs for the area around the city Post Office, known as Vance Square, and for the old cemetery behind First Presbyterian Church, then known as Cemetery Square and now called Settlers Cemetery. 14 In 1911 John Nolen returned to Charlotte at George Stephens' behest, to work on his greatest project in the city, the suburb of Myers Park. 15 Stephens spared little expense, and gave Nolen free rein to plan a state-of-the-art "unified suburban design." Myers Park gave the city curving tree-lined avenues, grand boulevards with landscaped medians, and the beginnings of a system of greenway parks along creek banks. The results will be discussed in a later section of this report, but suffice it to say here that Myers Park has proved to be Charlotte's most lastingly successful suburb, and a model for similar developments across the South. Nolen's final job in Charlotte was preparation of preliminary studies for what would have been the city's first master plan. The Charlotte Chamber of Commerce hired him in 1917 to gather and map data on existing land use, population densities, racial patterns, industrial location, transportation corridors, land values, water and sewer lines, and parks. 16 The resulting Civic Survey is an extremely comprehensive and meticulous picture of this Southern city at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Civic Survey was intended to lead to preparation of a full scale plan. Such a plan was vital to Charlotte's orderly growth; Charlotteans had given up the old grid city with its easy understandability and it was necessary now that some other form or organization be developed to tie together all the new suburbs. At the end of the Civic Survey field supervisor Earle Draper sketched an indication of what the plan might look like. He extended Nolen's Independence Park and Edgehill Road Park into a city-wide network of greenways along stream beds. Boulevards radiated from the center of the city to carry commuters, and a belt road ringed the old urban core to provide easy cross-town travel. The Chamber never appropriated the money to allow Nolen to turn his data into a master plan. Nolen watched sadly as potential greenways were cut up into residential backyards, and as expanding development made the possibility of new radial and belt roads more and more expensive. He wrote Chamber official Clarence Quester in 1924, "I think Charlotte is slipping so far as city planning goes. There are examples in the city of errors that are costly and more or less irremediable. Other errors will follow without a city plan." 16 Charlotte remained without a coherent development scheme throughout its early twentieth century boom years. No comprehensive plan was adopted until 1960. 18 Ironically, its proposals were very similar to Nolen and Draper's in concept. During the 1970s the city finally completed a belt road, dubbed "Charlotte 4", and in the 1980s is struggling to buy up floodplain greenways. John Nolen's work in Charlotte and North Carolina in the 1900s through 1920s was only part of his growing national practice. From his start in Independence Park, Nolen went on to be one of the nation's busiest planners, with projects ranging from private estates to some of America's first regional plans. By the time he began Myers Park he had already had private commissions all over the East Coast from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Havana, Cuba. 19 In the teens and twenties he became sought after by municipalities. He delighted in drawing city plans to guide small Charlotte-sized places with great growth potential. His designs for such places as Wisconsin's capital city of Madison, and California's capital of Sacramento and port of San Diego, among many others, are important factors in the shape those cities retain to this day. In addition to his planning work, Nolen was a major leader in the creation of a network of professional planning organizations. In 1917, just as he was completing Charlotte's Civic Survey, he helped found the American Institute of City Planners (later the American Institute of Planners). 20 He also participated in creation of the American Society of Planning Officials and the National Housing Association, and was the first American president of the International Federation of Housing and Town Planning. 21 The honors underscored the fact that Nolen was considered a leader of his profession. When he died in 1937 the New York Times praised him as an "internationally known architect and pioneer in modern city and regional planning." 22 Along with the Olmsted Brothers and a handful of other early twentieth century practitioners, John Nolen helped transform American city planning. 23 Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., had developed the principles of sensitive urban design in the nineteenth century, but it was Nolen's generation that created "city planning" as a full-fledged profession to carry out those principles, with its own educational background and professional organizations. John Nolen helped set up planning schools at major universities including Harvard and M.I.T. and his six books, dozens of articles, and thousands of speeches aided in "spreading the gospel" of city planning. By the end of his life, cities no longer saw planning as a rich man's luxury, but as an integral part of municipal growth, and many large places had their own planning departments. John Nolen's far-ranging impact as a city planning pioneer makes his early Charlotte work of special interest to students of urban development. 1 John L. Hancock, John Nolen: a Bibliographical Record of Achievement (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, Program in Urban and Regional Studies, 1976), pp. 13-17. See also Scott, p. 738. 2 Hancock, John Nolen: a Bibliographical Record. . ., pp. 15-16. John L. Hancock, "John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement: A History of Cultural Change and Community Response, 1900-1940" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1964), pp. 1-20. 3. Hancock, John Nolen: a Bibliographical Record. . ., p. 16. Hancock, "John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement. . .", pp. 21-37. 4 Hancock, John Nolen: a Bibliographical Record..., p. 16. 5 "Draft of Preliminary Finding Guide: Papers of John Nolen, Sr., 1869-1937," collection 2903, Cornell University Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Ithaca, New York. The "Finding Guide" includes a copy of Nolen's "job book" listing all his projects chronologically. 6 Hancock, "John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement. . .," p. 42. 7Charlotte Observer, December 15, 1943. 8 Stephens' connection with the Greensboro project needs to be explored. Plans for the street layout and gates are in the Nolen collection at Cornell. It has not been possible to determine exactly when Nolen created the streetplan. A draft essay by Ray Manieri of Greensboro, "From City Beautiful to City Useful: the Development of Civic Improvement Activities in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1900-1923," April, 1982, places the design in 1911, based on an undated promotional booklet. One large scale street plan in the Nolen papers is undated, but the rest of the documents were produced in 1915 and 1916. 9 Hancock, John Nolen: a Bibliographical Record. . ., p. 20. 10 Ibid., pp. 26, 30, 64. 11 Ibid., pp. 14, 66. 12 "Draft of Preliminary Finding Guide. . .," job list. 13 Charlotte Daily Observer, April 20, 1907. 14 "Draft of Preliminary Finding Guide. . .," job list. According to Kathleen Jacklin at the Cornell archives, Nolen's office discarded all material from these earliest designs. 16 John Nolen, "Civic Survey, Charlotte, North Carolina: Report to the Chamber of Commerce" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: typescript, 1917). The only known surviving copy of this document is in John Nolen's papers at Cornell. 17 John Nolen, letter to Clarence Kuester, March, 1924, in Nolen collection at Cornell. 18 Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission, "The Charlotte Mecklenburg Comprehensive Plan (draft)" (Charlotte: Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission, 1973), p. 4. 19 "Draft of Preliminary Finding Guide. . ," job list. 20 Scott, p. 164. 21 Hancock, John Nolen: a Bibliographical Record. . ., p. 16. 22 New York Times, February 19, 1937. For more information... Neighborhoods: Charlotte's Neighborhood Planning Tradition

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009 rothbard on the utility of quantitative easing Economist Murray Rothbard ("America‟s Great Depression", Ludwig von Mises Institute 2000) made extensive analysis of why the inflationary policies of the US Federal Reserve failed during the Great Depression. Those policies proved to be counterproductive:“American citizens lost confidence in the banks and demanded cash.. for their deposits.. while foreigners lost confidence in the dollar and demanded gold.. The more that.. the Fed tried to inflate, the more worried the.. public became about the dollar, the more gold flowed out of the banks, and the more deposits were redeemed for cash.. The Fed purchase of government securities was a purely artificial attempt to dope the inflation horse..” this has to be a core concern of every briton at the moment, with the bank of england having entered the gilt market to monetize government debt. the grand experiment intends to goose economic activity at the expense of the real value of the already-slashed pound, with some sincerely icelandic tail risk. in normal conditions, a devalued currency could be expected to assist exporters as well. as mentioned by the financial times, there is considerable doubt as to the efficacy of that pathway amid a global demand collapse. so the primary intention is to increase the currency in circulation in the hopes that more on hand will mean more spending and (critically) more borrowing. this clearly did not work well in the 1930s to the extent it was undertaken as banks chose to hoard cash (much as today). of course, the united states also experienced a series of devastating bank runs which reinforced that tendency. today, with the FDIC, bank runs are a much smaller problem. aren't they? the hard answer is that "it depends". much of the catastrophe of 2008 can be seen as a run on the shadow banking system -- that is, the uninsured and off-balance-sheet extensions of the financial system. the contraction of that massive credit generator is analogous in its effect to a systemic bank run that has resulted in failed "banks", boggling capital losses and widespread (and justifiable) paranoia. that run has at times extended to more visible elements of the banking system, forcing insurance to be put into place on an ad hoc basis -- such as the commercial paper and money market fund backstops put in place following the collapse of lehman brothers, which were hoped to be able to forstall a systemic run on those markets which was actually underway. beyond that there is the question of the fate of crossborder deposits -- international depositors in american banks have heretofore been well treated by the FDIC, but their accounts are not legally protected. these accounts are a massive part of the deposits in money-center banks such as C or JPM. crossborder runs have already become a reality in some parts of the world during this crisis. and there is finally the question of the FDIC itself. michael panzner forecast in his sometimes-eerily-prescient "financial armageddon" (and has repeated elsewhere) that eventually deposit insurance (along with many overpromised government-backed obligations) will likely have to be diluted or perhaps even eliminated in the crisis now underway as the fiscal position of government may not allow it to backstop all failed banks as the debt unwind progresses and the losses being assumed by the government through the FDIC and other pathways become overwhelming. the mere anticipation of that development could reintroduce the bank run to american society after a long absence, which is probably why sheila bair recently approached congress for a $500bn line to the treasury, a move many see as preparatory of the resolution of a money-center bank. this comes on top of a draconian assessment levied across all banks, leaving many smaller community bankers incensed at what some term "confiscating the capital of the industry" on the part of the government in service of the majors. and this is not to mention hoarding in anticipation of runs on other elements of the financial system -- most notably of late the insurance sector, which rolfe winkler delves into today. beyond simply engendering some healthy skepticism of the value of government insurance in a real crisis, the two-pronged point here is - that quantitative easing may not work to promote economic activity through increased lending in part because the value of assurances against losses are, even and perpahs particularly where comprehensive, questionable; - that quantitative easing, or rather monetization, may be the only resort to which government could really appeal in the case of multiple large-scale bank resolutions. it is impossible to know how this would work out in detail -- but should we witness a real spate of dollar weakness in forex markets as things go along, government may be faced with some very stark choices about what it can really afford to backstop.

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Autoimmune hemolytic anemia, or immune-mediated hemolytic anemia (IMHA), is a complex disease in which hemolysis occurs because of antierythrocyte antibody production. This article explores the pathophysiology of primary and secondary IMHA and diagnostic and treatment options, as well as prognosis in dogs and cats. Our review of the recent literature regarding IMHA in veterinary patients reveals a focus on individual cases and a lack of controlled clinical studies, which makes a detailed review of IMHA triggers and treatment options difficult. HEMOLYTIC ANEMIA VS. IMHA Many causes of anemia exist in dogs and cats, so a clear distinction should be drawn between hemolytic anemia and IMHA. Hemolytic anemias are conditions in which red blood cells (RBCs) are destroyed at an accelerated rate and a normal regenerative response is seen in the bone marrow. In these non-immune-mediated conditions, RBCs can be destroyed as a result of inherited membrane and enzyme defects, increased fragility from oxidative damage, or metabolic causes such as hypophosphatemia or water intoxication.1 Traditional immune-mediated mechanisms (immunoglobulins, complement) do not mediate lysis in hemolytic anemia. Instead, destruction occurs because of factors such as increased osmotic fragility, decreased RBC function in an alkalemic environment, or increased clearance from oxidative damage.1 Unlike the treatment of immune-mediated anemia, immunosuppression is generally not used to treat hemolytic anemias. Thus, it is imperative to investigate whether an anemia has an underlying cause before assuming it is immune-mediated. Below we discuss some of the common causes of hemolytic anemia. A more exhaustive list can be found in Table 1. Table 1: Selected Causes of Canine and Feline Non-immune-mediated Hemolytic Anemia Zinc and copper toxicosis. One of the most common causes of hemolytic anemia in dogs is zinc toxicosis from the ingestion of zinc-containing objects. High zinc concentrations can be found in pennies minted since 1983, board game pieces, zippers, zinc oxide ointment, and various other sources. Zinc toxicosis can cause a severe intravascular hemolysis that is associated with small amounts of Heinz body and spherocyte formation. Hemolysis from zinc toxicosis can be easily mistaken for IMHA if a survey abdominal radiographic examination is not performed. Treatment consists of removing the foreign object and providing supportive care. Copper toxicosis can also result in a marked intravascular hemolysis and methemoglobinemia.1 Heinz body anemia. Heinz bodies are dark-staining refractile material that indicate irreversibly denatured and precipitated hemoglobin in RBCs and can occur from oxidative damage in animals that have ingested onions or received drugs such as methylene blue, dl-methionine, or vitamin K3.1 In some cases of hemolytic anemia, eccentrocytes—cells in which the damaged hemoglobin is clustered together and shifted to one side of the RBC membrane, leaving a clear crescent-shaped region—are also present. Eccentrocytes and cells containing Heinz bodies have less deformability and more rigidity, making them more likely to be lysed or removed from the circulation by the spleen. Feline RBCs are especially sensitive to oxidative damage because of a high number of sulfhydryl groups in their hemogloblin. In addition, feline spleens, because of their nonsinusal conformation, are less effective at removing Heinz bodies than are canine sinusal spleens. Thus, Heinz body anemia is more commonly seen in cats and can be present during toxicosis as well as in a variety of other diseases such as hyperthyroidism, diabetes mellitus, and lymphoma.1 Hypophosphatemia. Hypophosphatemia can also cause hemolytic anemia in patients being treated for diabetes mellitus, hepatic lipidosis, starvation, and other conditions.1 In these cases, it is thought that an abrupt drop in plasma phosphate concentrations can cause a concurrent depletion of RBC adenosine triphosphate, diphosphoglycerate, and reduced glutathione. These depletions lead to less deformability, more osmotic fragility, and more susceptibility to oxidative injury in erythrocytes. A rapid drop in packed cell volume and a mild Heinz body anemia can be seen in animals with hypophosphatemia. Treatment consists of phosphate supplementation (intravenous in cases of severe depletion, oral in mild cases).1

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'Old Earth Scientists'... I've never heard that before ... You aren't suggesting that there are 'new earth scientists' are you ? Well sort of, there are commonly two types of scientists - old earth (who believe that the earth is billions of years old) and then young earth who believe that the earth is around 6,000 years old.As far as Science is concerned the big bang occured between approx 14 - 18 billion years ago As stated above, there are both old earth scientists and young earth scientists. Old earth scientists believe in the big bang theory and that the age of the earth is in the order of billions of years. Having said that perhaps the above statement should read "As far as old earth scientists believe, the big bang occurred between approx 14 - 18 billion years ago." Furthermore, when you say "concerned" it makes the assumption that the big bang actually did happen. The big bang is a theory and unless scientists can replicate it, it will forever remain a theory.thats not a theory formed by 'old earth scientists' that is calculated using every method we have at our disposal Unfortunately your statement falls short from the beginning - remember, the big bang theory is just that, a theory.measuring the expansion rate of the universe, measuring light from distant stars etc..there are too many to mention. The Bible also confirms that the universe is expanding. Isaiah 40:22 teaches that God “stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” This verse was written thousands of years before secular scientists accepted an expanding universe. It was until more recently that scientists changed their mind from the universe being constant to actually expanding. There are a few theories floating around with respect to the apparent red shift of stellar objects. old earth scientists believe it to be a result of bodies moving away from earth. As such, they have suggested that there should be no fully formed stellar bodies further away than about 8 billion light years. Astronomers have pointed telescopes into supposed redshift deserts (I.E. locations in space where there should be no fully formed bodies) and they found a sky full of fully formed galaxies. Measuring light from distant stars relies on the assumption that light has always moved at a constant rate, which unfortunately has not been proven.1. The moon moves away from the earth at around 4cm per year. If the earth was billions of years old, the moon could not be as close to the earth as it is. That suggests that the moon has always been in orbit around the earth for the 4.5 billion years...it hasn't Unfortunately this is not what old earth scientists believe. They believe that the earth and moon have been around for over 4 billion years.2. Oil deposits in the earth are under extreme pressure. If the earth was billions of years old this pressure would have caused the oil to have seeped through the rock layers and eventually the pressure would all be gone - I.E. there would be no oil under pressure today The oil deposits aren't 4.5 billion years old either... they are from rotting animal/vegetable sources from much later .. millions of years not billions I should have written this statement differently I.E. millions of years. The problem still stands however that if oil has was around millions of years ago, then it could not be under pressure today.3. The sun is shrinking at a rate of five feet per hour. this means that the sun would have been touching the earth a mere 11million years ago (let alone billions of years ago) No, that asssumes a constant state universe...the universe is very far from constant...its expanding and has been since the beginning. Nobody has ever suggested that the earth - moon - sun position has been in existance let alone constant since the big bang. Don't old earth scientists make assumptions also? If you look above, old earth scientists make the assumption that the speed of light is constant. Furthermore they still hold to the assumption that the earth, moon and sun have been around for over 4 billion years.4. Helium is added to the atmosphere everyday. Basically there is not enough helium in the atmosphere to support billions of years. Helium hasn't been added for 4.5 billion years ... again the earth wouldn't have had an atmosphere until recently ( recent related to its 4.5 billion age ) According to old earth scientists. The oxygen enriched atmosphere (basically as we know it today) was formed around 2.7 billion years ago. The amount of helium contained within our atmosphere today is only enough to support thousands of years, certainly not billions.5. Comets lose mass over time, there would be no comets left if the universe was billions of years old. (because comets were apparently a by product of the big bang) Thats misleading. The origin and time of origin of comets is not claimed to be the big bang. Thats a straw man. (I am guessing that a straw is another way of saying clutching at straws?) Again with this one I should not have just skimmed over it but should have elaborated. Comets have long been a good evidence due to their fragile nature and life expectancy. Comets are commonly huge chunks of ice traveling at tremendous speeds through space, when they come close to a star, they begin to melt and so form a trail of moisture. This can't last forever and it will eventually disintegrate. Here in-lies a problem for old earth scientists because there should be no comets left - they should all have been disintegrated by now (giving the billions of years). And if we are talking about clutching at straws - here's a good one for you. Old earth scientists have come up with another theory to try and explain why we still have comets today. So in comes the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical spherical cloud of comets which may lie roughly 1 light year away from our sun. Apparently, these comets become dislodged from the Oort Cloud by the gravitational pull of passing stars and the milky way itself (due to it apparently being at the outer edges of our milky way) These comets are then free to move about and disintegrate (which is how we see comets today) Now this Oort Cloud has not been detected or seen it is another theory - it is just a hypothetical cloud to try and fit in with the mold of an old universe.6. The earths magnetic field decays by approximately 5% every century, this means that a mere 10,000 years ago, the earths magnetic field would have been so strong that the heat it would have produced would have made life on earth impossible. No doubt taken from Barnes's magnetic field argument 1973. The decay rate he stated has been debunked and stated as flawed. How has it been debunked?7. fossilized dinosaur bones - these bones have been found and it is impossible for them to have lasted for millions of years. Why not ? They have The evidence available suggests an asteroid hit the earth approx 65 million years ago leading to a catastrpohic global event. There is a layer of iridium in the earths stratography that supports this theory. Speaking of clutching at straws - "Why not? they have" This goes against what old earth scientists have been telling us for years! Blood cells decay at a much faster rate than the rate at which bones can fossilize. How then can you have a fossilized dinosaur bone which contain blood cells? If we are talking about debunking theories or practices - radio carbon dating techniques have terrible flaws and rely on many assumptions. Therefor how can you be sure that your 65 million years is accurate?8. Salt is added everyday to the dead sea by inflows. Since it has no outlet - the salt content continues to grow. The amount of salt contained within it is not enough to support billions of years. The dead Sea didn't spring into existance billions of years ago. Its a result of millions of years of constant change on the earth by volcanic, tectonic, atmospheric activity. The dead sea is a baby compared the age of the earth I would have thought that you would line up the forming of the seas as we know them now with the catastrophic global event that wiped out the dinosaurs. If not that, then what are you basing your idea that the dead sea is a baby compared to the age of the earth? are we talking thousands of years, hundreds of thousands, millions or perhaps billions?9. The earths population doubles every 50 years (approx) it would take around about 4,000 years to reach the number of people that are on earth today (Lines up nicely with the world wide flood of Noah's day) if we use this figure for millions of years - the earth could not contain the amount of people. Also that matches for the evolution model. The expansion in the earths population is also linked to the expansion of civilisation .. .not just the existance of humans and their descendants. Could you expand on which evolution model you're referring to?10. Spiral galaxies appear this way due to their 'rotation' this rotation would eventually cause them to straighten out I.E. lose their spiral. There should be no spiral galaxies if the universe was actually billions of years old. That again is a straw man. The big bang theory doesn't suggest spiral galaxies popping into existance at the moment of the big bang. They are formed over many millions of years Why not? The big bang suggests that everything else popped into existence at the moment of the big bang. If this is not the case - then how did they form?The earth, the universe and everything in it was brought about in creation week. It was a divine event brought about by a supernatural creator. No it wasn't ( that which can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence ) We have just been discussing a page full of evidences!And faith ..... Would you build an electronic project based on faith ? would you cross the road by faith ? But you yourself are obviously a man of great faith. You believe that the universe and all it contains was brought about by a supposed big bang. To put it lightly - 'Nothing became something and the something exploded' Where did this matter come from in the first place? doesn't the big bang go against the law of conservation of mass and energy? If you are dismissing faith, then you must have proof of the big bang. You obviously weren't there when the supposed big bang took place so therefor it would stand to reason that you can replicate the big bang - after all, we are dismissing faith here.If I am sick I see a Doctor, If I have trouble seeing I go to an optician etc etc. Faith would not heal me or make me see. Rather countless selfless individuals who over thousands of years have devoted their lives to bettering mankind. Yes indeed! Isn't it interesting how even though we apparently all stemmed from a common singularity we are all unique and have our own special gifts and talents? If we look to God's word though, we find that we all have been given these unique gifts and talents - some to be doctors, some to be opticians, some to make super pong tables and some to be astronauts! But back on topic, isn't there an underlying reason that you go to a doctor? You go specifically to a doctor because you have faith in him. If you didn't have faith in him and all his years of training then you would just go to anyone wouldn't you?Its just not the case at all. For a start evolution doesn't need a set of ready to be assembled parts lying around. Its a process beginning with the smallest building blocks at chemical level and taking millions and millions of years to progress. Fair enough, Let's walk though this one step at a time starting from the beginning - how did the very first building block get here? Also a 747 ( or an LED pong table ) isn't carrying about obselete parts of earlier less successful aircraft in its frame like we are. Could you list these supposed obsolete parts and explain why they are not required (I think you'll find that every part of our body plays it's own important role) You say that you have faith in fellow humans. Why is that? If we are just a result of random chemical reactions then why do you trust in them? On that note, why does anyone have morals? why do we have laws and rules? if we are the by product of natural selection in that it is survival of the fittest, who is to say that I can't go out and kill someone - after all this is how we supposedly came to be! Do you feel sorrow when a family member or close friend dies? I am guessing that you would, but hold on a second - why on earth would you get sad if this is simply what you are arguing for in motion? To expand, If we are brought about by the strongest cells living on and the weaker ones dying off, isn't it good that your family member or friend has died because it means that the strong have survived and the weak are now dead? you should be sitting there giving hi five's to everyone shouting "Way to go natural selection!" And finally, Why on earth would scientists use evidence from the past to predict the future? If the universe came about by disorder and random chemical reactions then how on earth could we use this information to reliably predict the future. Uniformity does not make any sense in a universe created by random chance and disorder. Of course this is not the case, we find that the universes history is very much ordered because God designed it that way.

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Object-oriented editing means the ability to edit and/or process individual objects, such as a MIDI or audio clip — whether they last the entire length of a song or only a few milliseconds. This is a different way of thinking than linear-style track editing, where you (for example) insert a plug-in into a virtual mixer that processes a track, or apply an automation curve to control a parameter for the duration of a track. The word 'object' is essentially interchangeable with 'clip', but for clarity when working with Sonar, we'll define an object as a 'sub-set' of a clip with its own characteristics. Amongst other advantages, object-oriented editing can simplify the automation process compared to drawing track envelopes, and make it easier to do 'microsurgery'-type editing. At first glance it might seem that this adds another level of tedium to the editing process, as working with little pieces of audio seems more involved than working with tracks. But that's not always the case; for some applications, object-oriented editing can be far more efficient. As one example, consider plug-ins. If you load a plug-in into a track insert, it's active for the entire length of the song — and drawing CPU power. But if the effect is needed in only a few places, you can create individual objects that are processed with that effect. The effect only draws power from the CPU when these particular objects are being processed. Of all current DAW programs, I feel that Samplitude has taken object-oriented editing the furthest, as the program allows you to open up a clip and access a huge number of clip-related parameters. Sonar, on the other hand, was not designed with object-oriented editing in mind, and takes a bit more of an ad hoc approach, so you'll find different object-editing options in different places. This is a bit less convenient, but you can still get the benefits of object-oriented editing. This is perhaps the most important use of object-oriented editing. Sonar can apply MIDI effects (MFX) to MIDI objects, and audio processing plug-ins to audio objects. For example, suppose you want to add delay to the last word of a vocal, so that the word trails off into silence. Here's how you'd do it: 1. Do a track split at the beginning and end of the word, to isolate it as a separate object. The easiest way to do this is to click at the beginning of the word and type 'S', then click at the end of the word and type 'S'. 2. Right-click on this object and select Open Clip Effects Bin (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+B). 3. An effects bin opens up that's a miniature version of the track effects bin you'll see in the Track view of the Console window. 4. Right-click on a blank part of the effects bin and select the desired audio effect from the pop-up menu. 5. The effect will now appear in the bin. As in the standard effects bin, there's a small tick-box to the left of the effect name; when this is green, the effect is enabled. When it's grey, the effect is disabled. 6. You can insert more effects, if desired. As soon as you click anywhere other than the effects bin, the object's effects bin shrinks to a small box marked 'FX'. This lets you know that there's an effects bin in the object. To open an effects bin again, just click on that box. One very significant aspect of inserting an effect into an object is that any effect comes to a complete halt at the end of the object. In other words, if there's a reverb tail or delay decay caused by feedback, it will not extend past the object. Fortunately, there's a workaround. 1. Place the Now time just past the end of the object. 2. Put the track containing the object into record mode, but turn down the level of any signal feeding into the track, so you can record silence. 3. Click on the transport Record button. 4. To make sure this clip is truly silent, click on it and go Process / Audio / Gain. Set all Gain levels to minimum, then click on OK. 5. Click on the object you're processing, then Control-click on the clip containing silence, so that they're both selected. 6. Go Edit / Bounce to Clip(s). 7. The object will now be extended by the amount of silence you added, and any delay or reverb can spill over into it. Note that the process of bouncing clips removes any effects bins inserted in those clips. So in this example you would need to re-insert delay, reverb or whatever into the new, longer clip. Now that we know how to add effects to objects, here are some ideas on how to use this editing option. Emphasise a guitar solo. In a guitar track, split the guitar solo into a separate object, and add slight EQ boost around 2-3.5kHz. This will make the guitar more prominent. Avoid 'stepping on' vocals with a background instrument part. Suppose you have piano as a prominent track behind a singer. Split the piano track wherever the vocal occurs and scoop out some of the mid-range (whatever falls in the same range as the vocalist). If used subtly, this can give a better effect than simply lowering the volume. What's more, you could automate just that section, as we'll describe shortly. Compress particular sections of a track. Bearing in mind the growing backlash against excessive use of compression, one good application of object-oriented editing is to compress the lead vocalist when singing solo, but if background vocalists are present, remove compression from the lead to allow more dynamics and interplay with the background singers. Distort individual drum hits. Do you ever find you want the snare drum to really crack when it hits on the fourth beat of a measure just before the transition to a new chorus or verse? Raising level might not be enough, so separate that hit into a separate object and add a hint of distortion! If you've been using Sonar for a while, you probably know that you can right-click on a clip, select Envelopes, choose Create Clip Envelope and add either a Gain or Pan envelope to the clip. However, if there's an effect inserted in the object effects bin, you can also create envelopes within the object itself for the effects. To do this, proceed as you normally would to select a Gain or Pan envelope and you'll see automatable effect(s) listed below the Pan Envelope option. This allows an exceptional amount of control within very short audio events, if desired. Furthermore, you can insert track effects that kind of act as 'master' effects. One example would be to add a fairly standard delay (such as a quarter-note or half-note) to a track, then add delay with a dotted value (for example, a dotted half-note) within individual objects. You can't drag the effects bin itself from one object to another. However, you can drag an effect, whether from another object's effects bin or from the track effects bin, into an object's effects bin. Here are the rules for dragging effects: Control-drag an effect from a standard track effects bin or an open object effects bin into an object: this creates an object effects bin and inserts a copy of the effect you dragged. The effect that was copied remains in its original location as well. Drag an effect from a standard track effects bin or an open object effects bin into an object: this creates an effects bin, inserts the effect you dragged, and removes the effect from the track effects bin. Control-Drag an effect from a standard track effects bin or an open object effects bin into a closed object effects bin: this inserts a copy of the effect you dragged. If there's already an effect in the bin, the effect you dragged in will be added at the end of the list of effects. The effect you copied remains in its original location. Drag an effect from a standard track effects bin or an open object effects bin into a closed object effects bin. The effect you dragged is removed from its original location and placed in the object effects bin. Note that the same rules apply when going in the other direction — ie. dragging from an object effects bin into a track effects bin or another object effects bin. Here's a shortcut you can use if you need the same effect (or a variation on a particular effect) in several small, sequential objects. For example, suppose you want to apply a rhythmic 'sample and hold' filter effect to a sustained guitar power chord, where the filter's cutoff frequency changes every eighth note: 1. Split the power chord off as a separate object. 2. Open an object effects bin in this object, then insert a filter. 3. Adjust the filter as desired for the first step. Typically, you'd set a relatively high resonance. 4. Split the power chord at every eighth note. The filter will appear in each split of the object. 5. Set the filter in each split to the desired cutoff frequency. You can open an object's effects bin when it's just a small square marked 'FX' by right-clicking on it and choosing Open Clip Effects Bin (for which the keyboard shortcut is Control + B). Once it's open, you can bypass the bin and all its effects by clicking anywhere within the bin and selecting Bypass Bin; rearrange the order of effects within the bin by clicking and dragging, just as you would with the standard tracks effects bin; and delete an effect by either clicking on it and hitting the Delete key, or right-clicking on the effect or its enable box and selecting Delete from the pop-up menu. MIDI Effects & Groove Clips The instructions regarding applying effects to audio objects also apply to MIDI effects and MIDI tracks: they're inserted in the same way, and they follow the same rules when copying and moving. Groove clips follow the same rules as well. If you roll out a groove clip (MIDI or audio), the effects bin will remain in the original part of the object. If you then split the object, the effects bin will be copied to the split(s). One other object-oriented editing window continues to evolve (if Cakewalk ever decide to consolidate everything in Sonar that's related to clips/objects in one window, this would be the one): the window that appears when you right-click on an object and select Clip Properties. The General tab shows the name of the clip, its start time and its length (in Measures:Beats:Ticks; Samples; Hours:Minutes:Seconds:Frames; and Seconds). You can edit all of these parameters. Time base lets you select musical or absolute time for the clip, which affects where the clip starts if you change tempo. With a musical time base, the Measures:Beats:Ticks position remains the same, but the absolute (SMPTE) time changes. With SMPTE as a time base, the reverse occurs. However, you can also mute the clip, and 'lock' it from this window (both options are also available if you right-click on the object). Lock is crucial for audio-for-video work, as it lets you tie samples to a specific SMPTE time. For example, suppose you build a sound effect that coincides with a particular visual cue into a soundtrack, but the producer decides you need to speed up the music just a bit. Locking the clip to SMPTE ensures it will always hit on the visual cue that happens at a specific SMPTE time, regardless of how the tempo changes. Note that locking can involve the position only, the data only, or both; when locked, a small padlock appears on the clip (yellow for position only, blue for data only, and white for both). While it may seem that the option to set a 'snap offset' (in samples) for audio clips is useful, the function can only shift the clip late compared to a snap point. So if you have something like a pad sound with a long attack time that needs to start early in order to build over the right amount of time, using snap offset can't help you. However, if you find just the right amount of delay for a snare-drum hit, for example, you can copy or change the object's position while being sure that the amount of offset will be preserved. Finally, there's also a Clip Effects display. Although you can't drag effects into or out of this display, you can delete effects, change their order, instantiate new effects and bypass the clip's effects bin. We'll ignore the Audio Stretching tab for now, as that opens up a whole other world of options. Object-based editing may not be a particularly sexy topic, but anything that saves time or makes your life easier is worth investigating. Although I still use track processors a lot, being able to create effects in different bits of audio can simplify the process of making complex edits, as well as opening up a lot of creative possibilities.

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Biology 107 Lab Exam Review Science B01 with Magor at University of Alberta About this deck Size: 132 flashcards Sign up (free) to study this. When is a plant cell plasmolyzed? What is a hypertonic solution? A hypertonic solution is a solution that has a higher concentration of solutes than found inside the cell What are some of the functions of cell membranes? Separation of cell contents from external environment Organization of chemicals and reactions into specific organelles within the cell Regulation of the transport of certain molecules into and out of the cell and its organelles Beet cells red pigment, located in the cell's large central vacuole and surrounded by the tonoplast membrane Molecule or part of a molecule that absorbs radiant energy (light) Graph that shows the amount of light absorbed at a number of wavelengths Four parts of a spectrophotometer Device that isolates a photoelectric tube Standard curve limitations Standard curve is specific to the pigment and its buffer Standard curve cannot be used for absorbances beyond the range of the standard curve Cu = Cd/D Deposits single bacterial cells from a liquid culture over the surface of an agar medium Prevents bacteria in the environment from contaminating work, and prevents bacteria in work from contaminating the environment Aspetic techniques that can be used Sterilize surfaces and working surfaces Washing hand before and after Flaming inoculating loop and lip of culture tubes Reduce time sterile medium, cultures, or bacteria are exposed to air Work in area with low resident population of bacteria What does the blank used with a spectrophotometer consist of? How is a spectrophotometer zeroed? Define each term in the "fluid mosaic model" Fluid: membranes are able to move, things may pass through them (selective permeability) Mosaic: membranes are composed of a variety of different things - phospholipid bilayer, enzymes, proteins that act as channels Explain phospholipid bilayers Fatty acid bilayers, where the hydrophobic ends of the fatty acids attract each other to the inside of the layer and the hydrophilic ends are on the outside of the membrane in the water, creating a double layer of fatty acids How are bacterial species identified? Cell and colony morphology, chemical composition of cell walls, biochemical activities, and nutritional requirements What is the best way to isolate individual cells? Streaking them onto an agar plate, so that each individual cell will produce a colony Cell wall is composed of a thick layer of peptidoglycan surrounding the cell membrane Differential stain to divide bacteria into Gram-positive and Gram-negatie Steps of a gram stain A basic dye (crystal violet) is used to stain the peptidoglycan in both cells, then iodine is used to increase affinity of the dye to peptidoglycan. Ethanol is then used to dissolve lipids in outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, allowing iodine dye complex to leave cells (peptidoglycan layer too thin to retain dye), while Gram-positive cells retain the dyed due to the thick layer of peptidoglycan - a counterstain is then applied that dies the Gram-negative cells pink Commonly reocognized cell morphologies Cocci: spherical shape Bacilli: shaped like rods or cylinders (long and slender, or so short they resemble cocci) Spirilla: resemble a corkscrew What are three other ways to identify bacteria besides morphology? Presence of flagella (motility) Formation of endospores How is motility in bacteria tested? Bacteria are injected into a tube containing a dye that turns red when oxidized by growing bacteria- distribution of red dye indicates swimming ability How is formation of endospores determined in bacteria? Sample can withstand extreme conditions (high temperatures) and will grow at optimal conditions What are the different enzymatic activities in bacteria that can be tested? How can resolution be decreased (improved)? Using an illumination source with a smaller wavelength Increasing the numerical aperture of the objective lens, as well as using immersion oil with the 100x objective lens How is the resolution value calculated? Why do Gram-positive bacteria stain purple? They contain a thick layer of peptidoglycan which retains the iodine-crystal violet complex CV-I, causing cells to hold the dye and thus retain the purple colour even after the ethanol wash Why do Gram-negative bacteria stain pink? Gram negative cells have only a thin layer of peptidoglycan, so the CV-I complex easily washes out, and thus the cells are able to be counterstained pink because they no longer contain any crystal violet dye What is the effect of high temperatures on bacteria that do not form endospores? High temperatures will kill cells that do not produce endospores as it can damage cell membranes and denature proteins, resulting in cells that are unable to function Microtubules, microfilaments, and intermediate filaments which function in cell structure, cell motility (flagella and cilia - microtubules as part of their ultrastructure), and various biological processes Mitochondria, chloroplasts, Golgi apparatus, endoplasmic reticulum, nucleus, and vacuoles/vesicles Function in cell motility (flagella and cilia) and one organism also uses cilia to propel food towards its oral groove Used in amoeboid movement and organelle movement (intermediate filaments give nucleus its shape - nuclear lamina) How do microfilaments act in amoeboid movement? Phase contrast microscope Phase contrast microscope Cells and medium have different refractive index, and therefore light traveling through a material with different refractive indexes show a change in phase of light waves, which the microscope then translates to a change in light intensity (areas of higher refractive index appear darker) Some cell structures contain autofluoresce, some require staining - by exposing cells to several stains at once, different structures will fluoresce different colours How can contrast be improved? Staining compounds (vital stain - living cells/tissue, or dead cells and tissues), using special types of microscopes to manipulate light, and by reducing the amount of light What effect would cytochalasin (inhibits microtubules) and cholchicine (inhibits microfilaments) have on Pelomyxa? Cytochalasin would cause amoeba to become sessile, as the microfilaments are responsible for the movement of amoebas - cholchicine would have no effect What effect would cytochalasin (inhibits microtubules) and cholchicine (inhibits microfilaments) have on Euglena? What effect would cytochalasin (inhibits microtubules) and cholchicine (inhibits microfilaments) have on motile prokaryotes? What is phagocytosis, and how does it differ from receptor-mediated endocytosis? Phagocytosis is the process that Paramecium use to take in food. It differs from receptor-mediated endocytosis in that receptor-mediated endocytosis is very specific and allows the cell to acquire bulk quantities of specific substances, whereas phagocytosis is more general and can take in different substances Organelles (enzymes) that digest or break down waste materials and cellular debris, such as worn out organelles, food particles, and engulfed bacteria and viruses Contains cell's genetic information, and is surrounded by the nuclear lamina (made up of intermediate filaments) to protect the DNA Engulfs food via phagocytosis and uses lysosomes to break the food down Organelles found in plant cells that are used in photosynthesis - they capture light and convert it to usable energy Proteins that catalyze metabolic reactions without being consumed or destroyed by the molecule - lower a reaction's activation energy (substrate specific) Molecule to be reacted, that fits into a uniquely shaped pocket of the enzyme called the active site and binds with the enzyme as it is converted into the end product Allows plants to use starch it has stored after photosynthesis - takes amylose and breaks it down into smaller molecules by hydrolysis (glucose molecules, maltose, and shorter chains of amylose) Polymeric macromolecule composed of glucose monomers that is too large to pass through a cell membrane What are enzymes made up of? Enzymes are proteins, which are made up of amino acids What is an active site? An active site is a site that uniquely fits the substrate specific to the enzyme, and will activate the enzyme once the substrate binds to the site Energy transfer from light to chemical bonds through series of light reactions What series of reactions occurs in photosynthesis? Light energy from sun strikes pigments in thylakoid membrane of chloroplast, which is transformed into excited electrons (electrical energy), then into chemical energy in the form of bonds in ATP and NADPH molecules, and the ATP and NADH molecules are then used to power the fixation of carbon dioxide into sugar molecules (Calvin cycle, occurring in stroma) Determines which wavelengths of light the chloroplasts maximally absorb (these wavelengths also produce the highest rates of photosynthetic activity) Chloroplast suspension is mixed with indicator dye DCPIP - as DCPIP accepts electrons from the electron transport chain of Photosystem II it becomes reduced and therefore colourless, allowing absorptions to be measured to determine concentrations What were the controls in the photosynthesis in spinach chloroplasts experiment? Controls must show that DCPIP is stable and there is no other source of electrons to reduce DCPIP (colour does not change spontaneously) and that the colour of chloroplast suspension is stable and does not change colour spontaneously What are the independent and dependent variables for the absorbance spectrum of photosynthesis in spinach chloroplasts? The independent variable is the wavelength of light, and the dependent variable is the absorbance of the chloroplast suspension at varying wavelengths of light What are the independent and dependent variables for the action spectrum of photosynthesis in spinach chloroplasts? The independent variable is the colour of light, and the dependent variable is the absorbance of the solution Why are spinach leaves green? Spinach leaves are green because they maximally absorb blue and red wavelengths, and green wavelengths are absorbed the least and are therefore reflected back the most, resulting in the green colour At what wavelength is the action spectrum measured at? The wavelength that photosynthesis occurs at maximally Where do light reactions take place in the chloroplast? Reactions of the Calvin cycle? Light reactions take place in the stroma of the chloroplast, and reactions of the Calvin cycle take place in the stroma Measuring oxygen levels, sugar produced, or carbon dioxide levels How is ATP produced? Through the catabolism of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats Glycolysis in eukaryotes Cytosolic reactions to convert glucose to pyruvate (one molecule of glucose results in the net production of 2 molecules of ATP via substrate level phosphorylation After glycolysis, what occurs in the presence of oxygen? Eukaryotes convert pyruvate into acetyl CoA, which is transported to Kreb's cycle in mitochondria (produces 2 more molecules of ATP) and then oxidative phosphorylation (the transfer of electrons from food to oxygen) produces the rest of the ATP molecules (carbon dioxide is also formed as a by-product) After glycolysis, what occurs in the absence of oxygen? Pyruvate is degraded via a series of cytostolic pathways - lactic acid fermentation and alcohol fermentation (produces ethanol and carbon dioxide, regenerates NAD+ - required for glycolytic pathway) What sort of feedback system occurs in alcohol fermentation? Fermentation of glucose produces ethanol, but high concentrations of ethanol are toxic to yeast Physiological response curve Why is fermentation necessary? Why was the yeast flask swirled prior to adding yeast to each tube? To re-suspend the yeast and therefore the ensure that similar concentrations of yeast were present in each tube (constant) What would happen if the metabolism in yeast experiment were done without the 10 minute pre-incubation period? The lag phase of the physiological response curve would be significantly longer as the pre-incubation period brings the tube to a temperature at which yeast metabolizes glucose most effectively, and therefore without the incubation period the yeast would not metabolize glucose as well What process are the yeast in the Durham tube undergoing? The yeast are undergoing fermentation - other eukaryotes undergo aerobic respiration, and only prokaryotes undergo anaerobic respiration What metabolic processes occur in the cytoplasm? Alcohol fermentation, ATP production, glycolysis, and NADH production What metabolic processes occur in the mitochondria? ATP production, Krebs cycle, electron transport chain, and NADH production Bacterial genomic DNA Consists of a double stranded DNA helix arranged in a circle that is anchored to the bacterial plasma membrane - 4000 genes that encode all the functions of the bacterial cell Bacterial plasmid DNA Floats freely in cytoplasm of bacterial cell Circular and can assume supercoiled conformation in which circular double helix molecule twists on itself Much smaller than genomic DNA (2- 25 genes) Can sometimes conform extra properties to the cell that allow the cell to survive in conditions that it could not survive without the plasmid DNA (only when there is selective pressure) Arranged in linear strands (chromosomes - 23 pairs) in nucleus of cell (30 000 - 35 000 genes - high molecular weight DNA) Can be used to analyze small amount of plasmid DNA - DNA is not very pure and maxi prep must be used for further analysis as it is a larger quantity of very pure DNA - separates plasmid DNA from bacterial genomic DNA based on size and conformation How can high molecular weight (HMW) DNA be extracted? High affinity for glass - buffer solution must contain Tris and EDTA as it binds magnesium ions which are required for DNAse, preventing DNAse from functioning and degrading the DNA into nucleotides What does centrifuging do? Creates a centrifugal force that causes bacterial cells to collect in a pellet at the bottom of the tube - liquid above is referred to as the supernatant What does vortexing do? Vortexing disrupts the pellet of cells so that they may be re-suspended Why is STE added to the DNA treatment? Washes the medium away from the cells What is Solution I in the DNA treatment? A buffered, isotonic solution that is used to re-suspend bacterial cells What is Solution II in the DNA treatment? Contains sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS) and sodium hydroxide (an alkali) - SDS denatures proteins and disrupts the plasma membrane, causing the cell to lyse and releasing cell components into the solution, and NaOH raises the pH of the lysate to denature the hydrogen bonds between the base pairs of DNA, separating the helix What is Solution III in the DNA treatment? Acidic potassium acetate solution that neutralizes the pH in the lysate so that some hydrogen bonds in the DNA will re-form in random base pairs, resulting in a tangled, insoluble mass of DNA - hydrogen bonds in the plasmid DNA reform between the original complementary base pairs (when solution is placed on ice potassium forms white, insoluble mass with SDS that precipitates out along with many of the proteins, cell wall, debris, and genomic DNA) What does centrifuging do to the genomic DNA-potassium-SDS-protein-cell wall complex? Causes the complex to pellet in the bottom of the tube and the plasmid to remain in the supernatant solution What does the 95% ethanol wash do in the DNA treatment? Removes water molecules from macromolecules by decreasing hydrogen bonding between water molecules and macromolecules (plasmid DNA and RNA come out of solution and precipitate, so that they may be centrifuged into a pellet) What does the 70% ethanol wash do in the DNA treatment? Removes the salts which were not removed with the 95% ethanol, and hydrates the pellets slightly so that it may dissolve in the aqueous solution Why is the 30 minute incubation period necessary in the DNA extraction? Why is sodium acetate used to precipitate HMW DNA? The salt ions compete with macromolecules (DNA) for the water molecules What are the 2 properties of DNA that allow you to separate genomic DNA from plasmid DNA Size - big genomic DNA precipitates faster with centrifugation Conformation (shape of molecule) - supercoiled plasmid DNA maintains its shape even when hydrogen bonds in backbone are broken How can HMW DNA be extracted from solution? Its affinity for glass and the fact that it forms very long "threads" of DNA What would happen if the tube were vortexed after the addition of Solution II? Genomic DNA would break and would not all be centrifuged out, therefore contaminating plasmid DNA What is the difference between genomic DNA, plasmid DNA, and eukaryotic DNA? Genomic DNA contains the majority of genes needed for the bacterial cell to function Plasmid DNA is a small, circular structure of DNA in the cell cytoplasm that contains genes that can allow the bacteria to survive in conditions where it could otherwise not survive Eukaryotic DNA is much larger and is contained within the nucleus, in 23 pairs of chromosomes, encoding all the genes necessary for the survival of the eukaryote What is the purpose of the 95% ethanol and 70% ethanol wash? 95% ethanol dehydrates the cell 70% ethanol treatment removes the salts and rehydrates the plasmid DNA, allowing it to dissolve faster Why must plasmid DNA be kept on ice following incubation? DNAse will break down DNA at room temperature - T solution has EDTA to inactivate DNAse What was the experiment performed by Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty? Tested various cellular macromolecules for their ability to transform non-virulent Streptococcus pneumoniae into virulent bacteria - discovered DNA was the only macromolecule capable of transforming non-virulent bacteria into virulent bacteria How did the experiment performed in Biol 107 differ from Avery et al? Escherichia coli was used E. coli was examined for transformation by a gene on the plasmid DNA instead of the genomic DNA E. coli cells needed to be made competent to uptake DNA using a calcium chloride solution Mice were not used (medium containing kanamycin was used instead) Only DNA was focused on (as opposed to various parts of the cell) How were kanamycin sensitive E. coli cells made proficient to take up DNA? A calcium chloride solution was made, which created holes in the cellular membranes (competent cells) How is a competent cell transformed? If plasmid DNA entering competent cells is capable of replicating, the competent cells will be genetically altered or transformed (kanamycin resistant) - all descendants of transformed cells should be genetically altered What is kanamycin? Antibiotic belonging to the family of antibiotics characterized by their ability to inhibit protein synthesis in prokaryotic cells - they are transported into the cell by oxygen dependent active transport system and irreversibly inhibit protein synthesis by binding to a small subunit of ribosomes in bacterial cell, so cells are unable to synthesize proteins - cell death What occurs in kanamycin resistant cells? Phosphotransferase enzyme is encoded and expressed in the presence of kanamycin, which phosphorylates (adds a phosphorous group) to kanamycin and renders the antibiotic inactve Use of a DNA template to synthesize RNA Reading of mRNA to produce protein Plate Count Method Viable cell count (living cells only) in which original cell suspension is diluted into suspensions of decreasing cell concentration, which are spread onto the surface of an agar medium and allowed to incubate so that single cells may grow into a colony - following incubation colonies may be counted, and each is representative of a single cell originally deposited on the plate Petroff-Hausser Counting Chamber Total cell count (living and dead) using a specially designed microscope slide with a depressed surface and etched grid, where a thin layer of cell suspension of known volume is spread and the number of cells in the volume is directly counted with the aid of a microscope Optical Density (OD) Indirect method of total cell count, measuring turbidity (cloudiness of a solution due to the presence of particles such as cells), measured using a spectrophotometer, and developing a standard curve Why is Solution T (Tris) buffer used in the Transformation of Bacterial Cells lab? Maintains the pH at 8.0 and is the solvent for plasmid DNA Solution B is the solution used to dissolve DNAse but does not contain DNAse What occurs during the first incubation period of the Transfomation of Bacterial Cells lab? What occurs during the heat shock incubation period in the Transformation of Bacterial Cells lab? Helps the plasmid DNA enter the competent cells and induces the expression of survival genes necessary to repair damage to the plasma membrane What does the third incubation period in the Transformation of Bacterial Cells lab do? Allows time for kanamycin resistance gene to be expressed - must be transcribed into mRNA, then mRNA must translate it into a polypeptide chain (phosphotransferase) The plate which does not contain plasmid DNA, and instead contains solution B, Tris buffer, and competent cells The plate that contains plasmid DNA that has been broken down into nucleotides by DNAse, as well as solution B and competent cells There would be colony growth on plate 5+K, as the DNAse cannot enter the competent cells and the plasmid DNA would not have been broken down - the kanamycin resistant gene would have been expressed in the competent cells What would occur if the environment in which the E. coli was grown was anaerobic? The kanamycin would not affect the growth of the cells, as kanamycin enters the cell in an oxygen dependent manner About this deck Size: 132 flashcards

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Racism uber alles 0 Auschwitz looms as a testament to the rabid quest for 'racial purity' undertaken by Hitler and the Nazis. But rather than a product of the Left or the Right, writes Queen's professor Timothy Smith, Nazism was 'tyranny with an unabashedly brutal face.' Was Hitler a socialist? Certainly he had nothing in common with the strain of Social Democracy that emerged during the 1930s in Scandinavia and survives there and in Germany. This variant of socialism respects the rule of law and private property; it is not under examination in this article. But was Nazism related to Soviet-style socialism? Hitler’s party was, after all, named the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). Early on, the party’s message was peppered with anti-big-business and anti-labor-union rhetoric alike. Some of the early leaders of the party (Hitler did not take full control for several years after joining it) were anti-capitalist, and Hitler’s early speeches can indeed be mined for denunciations of high finance and monopoly capitalism, which Hitler equated with the Jews. These criticisms are largely rooted in Hitler’s anti-Semitism and his contempt for the profiteering of large firms during the war—they don’t stem from a sympathetic reading of Marx. In power, the Nazi party expanded the welfare state, just as Mussolini had done in Italy, and just as conservative governments did in France. Hitler subsidized leisure programs and he increased the value of family allowances (for those deemed racially “fit”). But this does not make him a socialist. The Nazis were obsessed with the class conflict in general, and they strove to “solve” it—on their authoritarian terms. But the pursuit of racial “purity” was Hitler’s revolutionary principle. His social policy was always subordinated to his racial policy. Hitler’s world-view revolved around biological determinism; the Soviets’ world-view centred on the inevitability of the class conflict. Under Hitler, rampant individualism would be replaced by a martial devotion to the racially pure Nation. The Nazis were suspicious of many traditional institutions. Hitler was no conservative, even if he needed, and got in 1933, the reluctant support of conservative leaders naive in the belief that they could control him. Hitler displayed no ideological commitment to curtailing the rights of private property. He mobilized a war economy, and like the democracies during both World Wars, he requisitioned factories, but he accepted the basic contours of capitalism. There was no plan to collectivize German farms, nor were businesses and bank accounts taken over for the sake of taking them over. Jews and political enemies were robbed of their property and eventually their lives. The Nazis’ willingness to violate property rights stemmed entirely from their racism and militarism; the state did not direct the production of basic consumer goods, as it did in the USSR. One cannot understand Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the USSR without reference to his ideology of “Jewish Bolshevism.” Describing his own political awakening in Vienna, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “in this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had previously scarcely known the names ... Marxism and Jewry.” Addressing the judge at the trial of the Beer Hall Putsch conspirators, a failed coup d’état Hitler launched in 1923, he said: “I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism.” Shortly after becoming Chancellor, Hitler imprisoned Socialist and Communist leaders on trumped-up charges. Next he murdered several of them and demolished their unions and political parties. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler had contempt for individual political rights, that quaint bourgeois notion. Like the Soviets, Hitler crushed civil society, politicizing everyday life, from the composition of city councils to the boards of directors of charities and athletic clubs. Soviet-style Socialism was tyranny with a supposedly humane goal—the abolition of poverty, the dawning of equality, and the liberation of the individual from the alienation of modern industrial life and the backwardness of quasi-serfdom in the countryside. Hitler had no such concerns. Nazism was tyranny with an unabashedly brutal face. The end goal was certainly European domination (some historians believe world domination), the elimination of the Jews and the Marxists, and the enslavement of Eastern Europeans. Communism and fascism treated individuals as mere abstractions, to be murdered or imprisoned if need be. But the end goals were profoundly different. Hitler did not seek to overthrow capitalism. If he threw “socialistic” crumbs of comfort to the workers who toiled in his war machine it was not out of ideological commitment. His concern was to prop up his regime and to ensure “racial fitness.” Like the men who ruled the USSR, Hitler was, in politics, a collectivist - but he was no socialist. The difference is more than semantic. Hitler was first and foremost a racist whose associated military goals required a form of intervention in the economy that should not be confused with socialism. Timothy Smith is a history professor at Queen's University and an expert in modern European history.

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“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” — Jules Renard “ideas to get your student’s pencils moving” Writing is and isn’t an easy thing to do in the classroom. Especially nowadays when students don’t have long attention spans and are more and more “digital” and visual learners. However, it is a vital skill that opens up a world of possibilities for any student. Written communication in whatever language, even with the advent of the internet, is still a necessity. Writing allows communication, controlled and deliberate – POWERFUL, communication. So we have to get our students writing more and better. How? Below, find a rundown of what I consider the “standard” writing activities for any age group. Just change the topic/theme. Most are for any classroom, EFL / ESL or the regular classroom. My belief is that writing in English is writing in English. Whether it be a second language or first makes no difference because the “eating” is all the same. I’ve divided the activities into different categories. These are just for the sake of having some kind of organization. I’ve also labeled them WUP – for a warm up writing activity and something to do quickly. CP – Controlled practice. Writing activities that help the beginning writer and offer support, repetition and guidance. F – Free writing activities which activate student learning and allow them to practice what they already know and “test the waters” so to speak. Where appropriate, I’ve linked to some resources that compliment the writing activity as described. Listen — Write There are many ways to “spice” up the standard dictation. The simplest is to have the students fold a blank piece of paper “hamburger” style (Up/down) 4 times. Unfold and they have a nice 8 line piece of paper. Speak 8 sentences , repeating each several times as the students write. Get the students to record their answers on the board and correct. Collect and keep in a portfolio! There are many online sites where students can do the same but in a computer lab or at home. Or the teacher can even try in the classroom. http://www.listen-and-write.com/audio – for older students http://www.learner.org/interactives/spelling/ – for young learners 2. Story Rewriting The teacher reads a story or the class listens to an audio story. After, students make a story board (just fold a blank page so you have 8 squares) and draw pictures. Then, they write the story based on those pictures. Very simple and powerful! – F The students close their eyes and the teacher describes a scene. Play some nice background music. The students then write and describe the scene they imagined, sharing their scene afterwards with the class or a classmate. 4. Pop Song Rewrite Play a familiar pop song. One with a “catchy” chorus. Afterwards, write out the chorus on the board with some of the words missing. Students can then rewrite the chorus and sing their own version. Higher level students can simply write their own version without help. Here’s a very simple example – He’s got the whole world in his hands He’s got ___________ and ___________ In his hands. (3x) He’s got the whole world in his hands Watch —– Write Students watch a TV Commercial. Then, they write their own script based on that commercial but focused on a different product. Afterwards, they can perform. F 2. Short videos. Just like a story but this time students watch. Then, they can rewrite / respond / reflect. Students can choose to reflect on one standard Reading Response question or as part of a daily journal. Ex. The best part was ….. / If I had made the video, I would have …… Short videos are powerful and if well chosen can really get students writing in a reflective manner. CP / F How to Videos Students can watch a short “How to” video that describes a process. There are some excellent sites with User Generated Content. Expert Village and eHow are recommended. After the students watch the video several times, they can write out the steps using transitions which the teacher lists on the board. [First, first off, To begin, then, after that, next, most importantly, finally, last but not least, to finish ] CP / F 3. Newscasts / Weather reports Watch the daily news or weather report. Students write in groups or individually, their own version of the news for that week/day. Then perform for the class like a real news report! F 4. Travel Videos Watch a few travel videos (there are many nice, short travel “postcard” videos online). Groups of students select a place and write up a report or a poster outlining why others should visit their city/country. Alternately, give students a postcard and have them write to another student in the classroom as if they were in that city/country. For lower leveled students, provide them with a template and they just fill in the details. Ex. I’m sitting in a ………… drinking a …………… I’ve been in ……. for ………. days now. The weather has been ……………. Yesterday I visited the ………….. and I saw …………….. Today, I’m going to ………………. I highly recommend ……………….. See you when I get home ………………… CP / F Look —– Write 1. Pictures / Slideshows Visuals are a powerful way to provide context and background for any writing. Make sure to use attractive, stimulating and if possible “real” photos to prompt student writing. Students can describe a scene or they can describe a series of pictures from a slideshow. An excellent activity is to show a nice photo and get students to “guess” and write their guess in the form of the 5Ws. They answer all the 5w questions and then share their thoughts with the class. Show a picture and get students to write a story or use it as background for a writing prompt. For example, Show a picture of a happy lottery winner. Ask students to write in their journal – If I won a million dollars I would …… This is a much better way to “prompt” writing than simple script! – CP Show students a selection of fairly similar pictures. The students describe in writing one of the pictures (faces work really well). They read and the other students listen and “guess” which picture is being described. Similar to this listening activity. CP Provide students with a series of pictures which describe a story. I often use Action Pictures. Students write about each picture, numbering each piece of writing for each picture. The teacher can guide lower level students like this Mr. X’s Amazing Day example. After editing, the students cut up the pictures and make a storybook. Gluing in the pictures, coloring, decorating and adding their own story text. Afterwards read to the whole class or share among the class. CP / F Provide students with a sequence of pictures which are scrambled. The students must order the pictures and then write out the process. Ex. Making scrambled eggs. F Read —- Write 1. Reading Journal / Reading Response The students read a story and then respond by making a reflective journal entry. Alternatively, the students can respond to a reading response question like, “Which character did you like best? Why?” F Read a short story and then give students a copy of the story with some text missing. The students can fill it in with the correct version OR fill it in and make the story their own. These are stories where words are replaced with icons/pictures. Students can read the story and then write out the whole story, replacing the pictures with the correct text. Here are some nice examples. – CP 3. Opinion / Essay Select an article or OP Ed piece that students would find interesting or controversial. After reading and discussing, students can respond with a formal essay or piece of writing reflecting their opinion. Read them anonymously afterwards and get the class to guess who wrote it! F 4. Giving Advice Students read a problem provided by the teacher (even better, get students to provide the problem by having them write down what they need advice on). This can often be an Ann Landers style request for advice from a newspaper. Students write their own response, giving advice. F 5. Running dictation This is a lot of fun but quite noisy. Put students into groups of 3 or 4. For each group, post on the wall around the classroom, a piece of writing (maybe a selection of text you will be reading in your lesson). One student is appointed as the secretary. The other students must “run” to where their piece of writing is on the wall and read it. Then run back and dictate it to the secretary who records it. Continue until one group is finished (but check that they got it right!). CP Think —- Write 1. Graphic Organizers These you can make on your own by having students draw and fold blank sheets of paper or by giving them a pre-designed one. Students write out their thoughts on a topic using the organizer. An alphabet organizer is also an excellent activity in writing for lower level students. Graphic organizers and mind maps are an excellent way “first step” to a longer writing piece and are an important pre-writing activity. WUP 2. Prompts / Sentence Starters Students are prompted to finish sentences that are half started. They can write X number of sentences using the sentence starter. Many starters can be found online. Prompts are also an excellent way to get students thinking and writing. Every day, students can “free write” a passage using the daily prompt (ex. What I did this morning etc… ) Creative writing of this sort really motivates students to write. There are many lists online you can use. 3. Thinking Games Using a worksheet, students play the game while writing down their responses in grammatical sentences. What the Wordle / Not Like the Other and Top 5 are some games I’ve made and which help students begin to write. Each has a worksheet which students fill out. CP 4. Decoding / Translating Translating a passage into English can be a good writing activity for higher level students. Students love their cell phones and Transl8it.com is a handy way to get students interested in writing. Simply put in English text and Transl8it.com will output “text messaging”. Give this to students to decode into standard English and then check against the original. Lots of fun! See the games I’ve designed (Pop Song / Dialogues ) using this principle of decoding text messaging. CP 5. Forms / Applications Students need to practice writing that will be of use to them directly in the wider world. Forms and filling in applications are a valuable way to do this. Fill in one together as a class and then get students to do this same for themselves individually. – CP 6. Journals / Reflection / Diaries This type of free writing activity should be done on a regular basis if used in class. Use a timer and for X minutes, students can write upon a topic that is important to them, that day. Alternatively, students can write at the end of the day and record their thoughts about the lesson or their own learning. These are all excellent ways for the teacher to get to know their students. One caution – don’t correct student writing here! Comment positively on the student’s writing – the goal is to get them feeling good about writing and “into” it. – F 7. Tag Stories / Writing Students love this creative exercise. Fold a blank piece of paper vertically (Hamburger style) 4 times. You’ll have 8 lines. On the first line, students all write the same sentence starter. Ex. A man walked into a bank and …….. Next, students finish the sentence and then pass their paper to the student on their left/right. That student reads the sentence and continues the story on the next line. Continue until all 8 lines are completed. Read the stories as a class – many will be hilarious! I often do this with a “gossip” variation. I write some gossip “chunks” on the board like; “I heard that..” , “I was told…” “The word on the street is…” “Don’t pass it around but…”. Students choose one and write some juicy gossip about the student to their right. They then pass their paper to the left with everyone adding onto the gossip. Students really get into this! CP / F 8. Describe and guess Students think of a person / a place or a thing. They write a description of them / it and they are read out and others students guess. Jokes and riddles are also effective for this. Students write out a joke or riddle they know and then they are read and other students try to guess the punchline. – F TEXT —– Write 1. Sentence Chains The teacher writes a word on the board and then students shout out words that follow using the last letter(s). The more last letters they use, the more points they get. The teacher keeps writing as quick as possible as the students offer up more correct words. Ex. Smilengthosentencementality….. Give students a blank piece of paper and in pairs with one student being the secretary, they play! This is a great game for simple spelling practice and also to get students noticing language and how words end/begin. They can also play for points. Compound words and phrases are acceptable! – WUP 2. Guided Writing This is a mainstay of the writing teacher’s toolkit. Students are either given a “bank” of words or can write/guess on their own. They fill in the missing words of a text to complete the text. Take up together and let students read their variations. A nice adaptation to guided writing for lower level students is for them to personalize the writing by getting them to draw a picture for the writing passage to illustrate and fortify the meaning. Here’s a nice example. CP Use a time line to describe any event. Brainstorm as a class. Then students use the key words written on the board, to write out the time line as a narrative. Really effective and you can teach history like this too! Biographies of individuals or even the students themselves are a powerful writing activity and timelines are a great way to get them started. – F Students are given notes (the classic example is a shopping list but it might be a list of zoo animals / household items etc…) and then asked to write something using all the noted words. This usually focuses on sequence (transitions) or location (prepositions). F 5. Grammar Poems Grammar poems are short poems about a topic that students complete using various grammar prompts. This form of guided writing is very effective and helps students notice various syntactical elements of the language. Put the grammar poem on the board with blanks. Here are some examples but it could be on any topic (country, famous person, my home, this school, etc..). Fill out as a class with one student filling it in. Then, students copy the poem and complete with their own ideas. Change as needed to stress different grammatical elements. And of course, afterwards SHARE. Present some to the class and display on a bulletin board. Your students will be proud of them! SPEAK — Write 1. Surveys / Reports Students have a survey question or a questionnaire. They walk around the class recording information. After, instead of reporting to the class orally, they can write up the report about their findings. This can also be used with FSW (Find Someone Who) games. Students use a picture bingo card to walk around the classroom and ask students yes/no questions. They write the answers with a check or X and the student’s name in the box with the picture. After, they write up a report about which student ……. / didn’t …… certain things. CP 2. Reported Speech Do any speaking activity or set of conversation questions. Afterwards, students report back by writing using reported speech, “ Susan told me that she ………..” and “ Brad said that ………..” etc….. CP 3. Introducing each other Students can interview another classmate using a series of questions / key words given by the teacher. After the interview of each other is over, students can write out a biography of their partner and others can read them in a class booklet. – F 4. In class letter writing Writing for a purpose is so important and nothing makes this happen better than in class letter writing. Appoint a postman and have each student make a post office box (it could just be a small bag hanging from their desk). The students can write each other (best to assign certain students first) and then respond to their letter. Once it gets started, it just keeps going and going… – F 4. Email / messaging / chat / social networking This is an excellent way to get students speaking by writing. Set up a social networking system or a messaging / emailing system for the students. They can communicate and chat there using an “English only” policy. Use videos / pictures like in class – to promote student discussion and communication. Projects online foster this kind of written communication and using an CMS (Content Management System) like moodle or atutor or ning can really help students write more. – F 5. Class / School English newspaper or magazine Students can gain valuable skills by meeting and designing a school English newsletter. Give each student a role (photographer, gossip / news / sports / editor in chief / copy editor etc…) and see what they can do. You’ll be surprised! – F WRITE —— Do Students can write dialogues for many every day situations and then act them out for the class. The teacher can model the language on the board and then erase words so students can complete by themselves and in their own words. Here’s a neat example using a commercial as a dialogue. – CP Students draw a picture and then write a description of the picture. They hand their description to another student who must read it and then draw the picture as they see it. Finally, both students compare pictures! – F 3. Tableaus / Drama Students write texts of any sort. Then the texts are read and other students must make a tableau of the description or act out the text in some manner. For example – students can write about their weekend. After writing, the student reads their text and other students act it out or perform a tableau. F 4. Don’t speak / Write! I once experimented with a class that wouldn’t speak much by putting a gag on myself and only writing out my instructions. It worked and this technique could be used in a writing class. Students can’t speak and are “gagged”. Give them post it notes by which to communicate with others. Instruct using the board. There are many creative ways to use this technique! – F RECOMMENDED BOOKS 4 TEACHERS I highly recommend the following two books for ideas and some general theory on how to teach writing. Purchase them for reference. 1. HOW TO TEACH WRITING – Jeremy Harmer Very insightful and cleanly, simply written. The author explores through example and description, all the facets and theory behind that “looking glass” which we call teaching. I use this as a course text for my methodology class for in-service teachers. 2. Oxford Basics: Simple Writing Activites - Jill and Charles Hadfield This book (and series) is a gem! Jill Hadfield knows what working EFL / ESL teachers need and in this book there are 30 simple writing activities which teachers can use with a wide variety of levels and with only a chalkboard and a piece of chalk / paper. See my Blog post and download the list of my TOP 10 WRITING WEBSITES FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

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A long time ago I wrote the article The Dull Case of Emissivity and Average Temperatures and expected that would be the end of the interest in emissivity. But it is a gift that keeps on giving, with various people concerned that no one has really been interested in measuring surface emissivity properly. All solid and liquid surfaces emit thermal radiation according to the Stefan-Boltzmann formula: E = εσT4 where ε=emissivity, a material property; σ = 5.67×10-8 ; T = temperature in Kelvin (absolute temperature) and E is the flux in W/m² More about this formula and background on the material properties in Planck, Stefan-Boltzmann, Kirchhoff and LTE. The parameter called emissivity is the focus of this article. It is of special interest because to calculate the radiation from the earth’s surface we need to know only temperature and emissivity. Emissivity is a value between 0 and 1. And is also depends on the wavelength of radiation (and in some surfaces like metals, also the direction). Because the wavelengths of radiation depend on temperature, emissivity also depends on temperature. When emissivity = 1, the body is called a “blackbody”. It’s just the theoretical maximum that can be radiated. Some surfaces are very close to a blackbody and others are a long way off. Note: I have seen many articles by keen budding science writers who have some strange ideas about “blackbodies”. The only difference between a blackbody and a non-blackbody is that the emissivity of a blackbody = 1, and the emissivity of a non-blackbody is less than 1. That’s it. Nothing else. The wavelength dependence of emissivity is very important. If we take snow for example, it is highly reflective to solar (shortwave) radiation with as much as 80% of solar radiation being reflected. Solar radiation is centered around a wavelength of 0.5μm. Yet snow is highly absorbing to terrestrial (longwave) radiation, which is centered around a wavelength of 10μm. The absorptivity and emissivity around freezing point is 0.99 – meaning that only 1% of incident longwave radiation would be reflected. Let’s take a look at the Planck curve – the blackbody radiation curve – for surfaces at a few slightly different temperatures: The emissivity (as a function of wavelength) simply modifies these curves. Suppose, for example, that the emissivity of a surface was 0.99 across this entire wavelength range. In that case, a surface at 30°C would radiate like the light blue curve but at 99% of the values shown. If the emissivity varies across the wavelength range then you simply multiply the emissivity by the intensity at each wavelength to get the expected radiation. Sometimes emissivity is quoted as an average for a given temperature – this takes into account the shape of the Planck curve shown in the graphs above. Often, when emissivity is quoted as an overall value, the total flux has been measured for a given temperature and the emissivity is simply: ε = actual radiation measured / blackbody theoretical radiation at that temperature [Fixed, thanks to DeWitt Payne for pointing out the mistake] In practice the calculation is slightly more involved, see note 1. It turns out that the emissivity of water and of the ocean surface is an involved subject. And because of the importance of calculating the sea surface temperature from satellite measurements, the emissivity of the ocean in the “atmospheric window” (8-14 μm) has been the subject of many 100′s of papers (perhaps 1000′s). These somewhat overwhelm the papers on the less important subject of “general ocean emissivity”. Aside from climate, water itself is an obvious subject of study for spectroscopy. For example, 29 years ago Miriam Sidran writing Broadband reflectance and emissivity of specular and rough water surfaces, begins: The optical constants of water have been extensively studied because of their importance in science and technology. Applications include a) remote sensing of natural water surfaces, b) radiant energy transfer by atmospheric water droplets, and c) optical properties of diverse materials containing water, such as soils, leaves and aqueous solutions. In this study, values of the complex index of refraction from six recent articles were averaged by visual inspection of the graphs, and the most representative values in the wavelength range of 0.200 μm to 5 cm were determined. These were used to find the directional polarized reflectance and emissivity of a specular surface and the Brewster or pseudo-Brewster angle as functions of wavelength. The directional polarized reflectance and emissivity of wind-generated water waves were studied using the facet slope distribution function for a rough sea due to Cox and Munk . Applications to remote sensing of sea surface temperature and wave state are discussed, including effects of salinity. Emphasis added. She also comments in her paper: For any wavelength, the total emissivity, ε, is constant for all θ [angles] < 45° [from vertical]; this follows from Fig. 8 and Eq. (6a). It is important in remote sensing of thermal radiation from space, as discussed later.. The polarized emissivities are independent of surface roughness for θ < 25°, while for θ > 25°, the thermal radiation is partly depolarized by the roughness. This means that when you look at the emission radiation from directly above (and close to directly above) the sea surface roughness doesn’t have an effect. I thought some other comments might also be interesting: The 8-14-μm spectral band is chosen for discussion here because (a) it is used in remote sensing and (b) the atmospheric transmittance, τ, in this band is a fairly well-known function of atmospheric moisture content. Water vapor is the chief radiation absorber in this band. In Eqs. (2)-(4), n and k (and therefore A and B) are functions of salinity. However, the emissivity value, ε, computed for pure water differs from that of seawater by <0.5%. When used in Eqs. (10), it causes an error of <0.20°C in retrieved Ts [surface temperature]. Since ε in this band lies between 0.96 and 0.995, approximation ε= 1 is routinely used in sea surface temperature retrieval. However, this has been shown to cause an error of -0.5 to -1.0°C for very dry atmospheres. For very moist atmospheres, the error is only ≈0.2°C. One of the important graphs from her paper: Click to view a larger image Emissivity = 1 – Reflectance. The graph shows Reflectance vs Wavelength vs Angle of measurement. I took the graph (coarse as it is) and extracted the emissivity vs wavelength function (using numerical techniques). I then calculated the blackbody radiation for a 15°C surface and the radiation from a water surface using the emissivity from the graph above for the same 15°C surface. Both were calculated from 1 μm to 100 μm: The “unofficial” result, calculating the average emissivity from the ratio: ε = 0.96. This result is valid for 0-30°C. But I suspect the actual value will be modified slightly by the solid angle calculations. That is, the total flux from the surface (the Stefan-Boltzmann equation) is the spectral intensity integrated over all wavelengths, and integrated over all solid angles. So the reduced emissivity closer to the horizon will affect this measurement. Niclòs et al – 2005 One of the most interesting recent papers is In situ angular measurements of thermal infrared sea surface emissivity—validation of models, Niclòs et al (2005). Here is the abstract: In this paper, sea surface emissivity (SSE) measurements obtained from thermal infrared radiance data are presented. These measurements were carried out from a fixed oilrig under open sea conditions in the Mediterranean Sea during the WInd and Salinity Experiment 2000 (WISE 2000). The SSE retrieval methodology uses quasi-simultaneous measurements of the radiance coming from the sea surface and the downwelling sky radiance, in addition to the sea surface temperature (SST). The radiometric data were acquired by a CIMEL ELECTRONIQUE CE 312 radiometer, with four channels placed in the 8–14 μm region. The sea temperature was measured with high-precision thermal probes located on oceanographic buoys, which is not exactly equal to the required SST. A study of the skin effect during the radiometric measurements used in this work showed that a constant bulk–skin temperature difference of 0.05±0.06 K was present for wind speeds larger than 5 m/s. Our study is limited to these conditions. Thus, SST used as a reference for SSE retrieval was obtained as the temperature measured by the contact thermometers placed on the buoys at 20-cm depth minus this bulk–skin temperature difference. SSE was obtained under several observation angles and surface wind speed conditions, allowing us to study both the angular and the sea surface roughness dependence. Our results were compared with SSE models.. The introduction explains why specifically they are studying the dependence of emissivity on the angle of measurement – for reasons of accurate calculation of sea surface temperature: The requirement of a maximum uncertainty of ±0.3 K in sea surface temperature (SST) as input to climate models and the use of high observation angles in the current space missions, such as the 55° for the forward view of the Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) (Llewellyn-Jones et al., 2001) on board ENVISAT, need a precise and reliable determination of sea surface emissivity (SSE) in the thermal infrared region (TIR), as well as analyses of its angular and spectral dependences. The emission of a rough sea surface has been studied over the last years due to the importance of the SSE for accurate SST retrieval. A reference work for many subsequent studies has been the paper written by Cox and Munk (1954).. The experimental setup: From Niclos (2004) The results (compared with one important model from Masuda et al 1988): From Niclos (2004) Click on the image for a larger graphic This paper also goes on to compare the results with the model of Wu & Smith (1997) and indicates the Wu & Smith’s model is a little better. The tabulated results, note that you can avoid the “eye chart effect” by clicking on the table: Click on the image for a larger view Note that the emissivities are in the 8-14μm range. You can see that the emissivity when measured from close to vertical is 0.98 – 0.99 at two different wind speeds. Konda et al – 1994 A slightly older paper which is not concerned with angular dependence of sea surface emissivity is by Konda, Imasato, Nishi and Toda (1994). They comment on a few older papers: Buettner and Kern (1965) estimated the sea surface emissivity to be 0.993 from an experiment using an emissivity box, but they disregarded the temperature difference across the cool skin. Saunders (1967b, 1968) observed the plane sea surface irradiance from an airplane and determined the reflectance. By determining the reflectance as the ratio of the differences in energy between the clear and the cloudy sky at different places, he calculated the emissivity to be 0.986. The process of separating the reflection from the surface irradiance, however, is not precise. Mikhaylov and Zolotarev (1970) calculated the emissivity from the optical constant of the water and found the average in the infrared region was 0.9875. The observation of Davies et al. (1971) was performed on Lake Ontario with a wave height less than 25 cm. They measured the surface emission isolated from sky radiation by an aluminum cone, and estimated the emissivity to be 0.972. The aluminum was assumed to act as a mirror in infrared region. In fact,aluminum does not work as a perfect mirror. Masuda et al. (1988) computed the surface emissivity as a function of the zenith angle of observed radiation and wind speed. They computed the emissivity from the reflectance of a model sea surface consisting of many facets, and changed their slopes according to Gaussian distribution with respect to surface wind. The computed emissivity in 11 μm was 0.992 under no wind. Each of these studies in trying to determine the value of emissivity, failed to distinguish surface emission from reflection and to evaluate the temperature difference across the cool skin. The summary of these studies are tabulated in Table 1. The table summarizing some earlier work: Konda and his co-workers took measurements over a one year period from a tower in Tanabe Bay, Japan. They calculated from their results that the ocean emissivity was 0.984±0.004. One of the challenges for Konda’s research and for Niclòs is the issue of sea surface temperature measurement itself. Here is a temperature profile which was shown in the comments of Does Back Radiation “Heat” the Ocean? – Part Three: Kawai & Wada (2007) The point is the actual surface from which the radiation is emitted will usually be at a slightly different temperature from the bulk temperature (note the logarithmic scale of depth). This is the “cool skin” effect. This surface temperature effect is also moderated by winds and is very difficult to measure accurately in field conditions. Smith et al – 1996 Another excellent paper which measured the emissivity of the ocean is by Smith et al (1996): An important objective in satellite remote sensing is the global determination of sea surface temperature (SST). For such measurements to be useful to global climate research, an accuracy of ±0.3K or better over a length of 100km and a timescale of days to weeks must be attained. This criterion is determined by the size of the SST anomalies (≈1K) that can cause significant disturbance to the global atmospheric circulation patterns and the anticipated size of SST perturbations resulting from global climate change. This level of uncertainty is close to the theoretical limits of the atmospheric corrections.. It is also a challenge to demonstrate that such accuracies are being achieved, and conventional approaches, which compare the SST derived from drifting or moored buoys, generally produce results with a scatter of ±0.5 to 0.7K. This scatter cannot be explained solely by uncertainties in the buoy thermometers or the noise equivalent temperature difference of the AVHRR, as these are both on the order of 0.2K or less but are likely to be surface emissivity/reflectivity uncertainties, residual atmospheric effects, or result from the methods of comparison Note that the primary focus of this research was to have accurate SST measurements from satellites. From Smith et al (1996) The experimental work on the research vessel Pelican included a high spectral resolution Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) which was configured to make spectral observations of the sea surface radiance at several view angles. Any measurement from the surface of course, is the sum of the emitted radiance from the surface as well as the reflected sky radiance. - ocean salinity - intake water temperature - surface air temperature - wind velocity - SST within the top 15cm of depth There was also independent measurement of the radiative temperature of the sea surface at 10μm with a Heimann broadband radiation thermometer “window” radiometer. And radiosondes were launched from the ship roughly every 3 hours. Additionally, various other instruments took measurements from a flight altitude of 20km. Satellite readings were also compared. The AERI measured the spectral distribution of radiance from 3.3μm to 20μm at 4 angles. Upwards at 11.5° from zenith, and downwards at 36.5°, 56.5° and 73.5°. There’s a lot of interesting discussion of the calculations in their paper. Remember that the primary aim is to enable satellite measurements to have the most accurate measurements of SST and satellites can only really “see” the surface through the “atmospheric window” from 8-12μm. Here are the wavelength dependent emissivity results shown for the 3 viewing angles. You can see that at the lowest viewing angle of 36.5° the emissivity is 0.98 – 0.99 in the 8-12μm range. From Smith et al (1996) Note that the wind speed doesn’t have any effect on emissivity at the more direct angle, but as the viewing angle moves to 73.5° the emissivity has dropped and high wind speeds change the emissivity considerably. Henderson et al – 2003 Henderson et al (2003) is one of the many papers which consider the theoretical basis of how viewing angles change the emissivity and derive a model. Just as an introduction, here is the theoretical variation in emissivity with measurement angle, versus “refractive index” as computed by the Fresnel equations: The legend is refractive index from 1.20 to 1.35. Water, at visible wavelengths, has a refractive index of 1.33. This shows how the emissivity reduces once the viewing angle increases above 50° from the vertical. The essence of the problem of sea surface roughness for large viewing angles is shown in the diagram below, where multiple reflections take place: Henderson and his co-workers compare their results with the measured results of Smith et al (1996) and also comment that at zenith viewing angles the emissivity does not depend on the wind speed, but at larger angles from vertical it does. A quick summary of their model: We have developed a Monte Carlo ray-tracing model to compute the emissivity of computer-rendered, wind-roughened sea surfaces. The use of a ray-tracing method allows us to include both the reflected emission and shadowing and, furthermore, permits us to examine more closely how these processes control the radiative properties of the surface. The intensity of the radiation along a given ray path is quantified using Stokes vectors, and thus, polarization is explicitly included in the calculations as well. Their model results compare well with the experimental results. Note that the approach of generating a mathematical model to calculate how emissivity changes with wind speed and, therefore, wave shape is not at all new. Water retains its inherent properties of emissivity regardless of how it is moving or what shape it is. The theoretical challenge is handling the multiple reflections, absorptions, re-emissions that take place when the radiance from the water is measured at some angle from the vertical. The best up to date measurements of ocean emissivity in the 8-14 μm range are 0.98 – 0.99. The 8-14 μm range is well-known because of the intense focus on sea surface temperature measurements from satellite. From quite ancient data, the average emissivity of water across a very wide broadband range (1-100 μm) is 0.96 for water temperatures from 0-30°C. The values from the ocean when measured close to the vertical are independent of wind speed and sea surface roughness. As the angle of measurement moves from the vertical around to the horizon the measured emissivity drops and the wind speed affects the measurement significantly. These values have been extensively researched because the calculation of sea surface temperature from satellite measurements in the 8-14μm “atmospheric window” relies on the accurate knowledge of emissivity and any factors which affect it. For climate models – I haven’t checked what values they use. I assume they use the best experimental values from the field. That’s an assumption. I’ve already read enough on ocean emissivity. For energy balance models, like the Trenberth and Kiehl update, an emissivity of 1 doesn’t really affect their calculations. The reason, stated simply, is that the upwards surface radiation and the downward atmospheric radiation are quite close in magnitude. For example, the globally annually averaged values of both are 396 W/m² (upward surface) vs 340 W/m² (downward atmospheric). Suppose the emissivity drops from 0.98 to 0.97 – what is the effect on upwards radiation through the atmosphere? The upwards radiation has dropped by 4W/m², but the reflected atmospheric radiation has increased by 3.4W/m². The net upwards radiation through the atmosphere has reduced by only 0.6 W/m². One of our commenters asked what value the IPCC uses. The answer is they don’t use a value at all because they summarize research from papers in the field. Whether they do it well or badly is a subject of much controversy, but what is most important to understand is that the IPCC does not write papers, or perform GCM model runs, or do experiments – and that is why you see almost no equations in their many 1000′s of pages of discussion on climate science. For those who don’t believe the “greenhouse” effect exists, take a look at Understanding Atmospheric Radiation and the “Greenhouse” Effect – Part One in the light of all the measured results for ocean emissivity. On Another Note It’s common to find claims on various blogs and in comments on blogs that climate science doesn’t do much actual research. I haven’t found that to be true. I have found the opposite. Whenever I have gone digging for a particular subject, whether it is the diurnal temperature variation in the sea surface, diapycnal & isopycnal eddy diffusivity, ocean emissivity, or the possible direction and magnitude of water vapor feedback, I have found a huge swathe of original research, of research building on other research, of research challenging other research, and detailed accounts of experimental methods, results and comparison with theory and models. Just as an example, in the case of emissivity of sea surface, at the end of the article you can see the first 30 or so results pulled up from one journal – Remote Sensing of the Environment for the search phrase “emissivity sea surface”. The journal search engine found 348 articles (of course, not every one of them is actually about ocean emissivity measurements). Perhaps it might turn out to be the best journal for this subject, but it’s still just one journal. Broadband reflectance and emissivity of specular and rough water surfaces, Sidran, Applied Optics (1981) In situ angular measurements of thermal infrared sea surface emissivity—validation of models, Niclòs, Valor, Caselles, Coll & Sànchez, Remote Sensing of Environment (2005) Measurement of the Sea Surface Emissivity, Konda, Imasato, Nishi and Toda, Journal of Oceanography (1994) Observations of the Infrared Radiative Properties of the Ocean—Implications for the Measurement of Sea Surface Temperature via Satellite Remote Sensing, Smith, Knuteson, Revercomb, Feltz, Nalli, Howell, Menzel, Brown, Brown, Minnett & McKeown, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (1996) The polarized emissivity of a wind-roughened sea surface: A Monte Carlo model, Henderson, Theiler & Villeneuve, Remote Sensing of Environment (2003) Note 1: The upward radiation from the surface is the sum of three contributions: (i) direct emission of the sea surface, which is attenuated by the absorption of the atmospheric layer between the sea surface and the instrument; (ii) reflection of the downwelling sky radiance on the sea, attenuated by the atmosphere; and (iii) the upwelling atmospheric radiance emitted in the observing direction. So the measured radiance can be expressed as: where the three terms on the right are each of the three contributions noted in the same order. Note 2: 1/10th of the search results returned from one journal for the search term “emissivity sea surface”: Remote Sensing of Environment - search results Read Full Post »

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The Bruce-Benedicks Saga and the Birth of the AGH While living in Paris in the 1880's, the budding young Canadian artist, William Blair Bruce , met the aristocratic Swedish sculptress, Caroline Benedicks . They fell in love, married, and eventually established themselves in a permanent year-round residence, Brucebo , on the western seashore of Gotland Island in Sweden. From their artistic union two significant institutions in the world of fine art were to evolve – the birth of the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Canada and the creation of the Brucebo Fine Art Scholarship Foundation in Sweden. The saga of William and Caroline’s life-story spans one of the most exciting phases in European contemporary history, including its fine art development. It comprises the last quarter of the 19th century and the decades leading up to World War II. The era is characterized by dramatic transformations in not just technological and industrial developments, but also in social and cultural institutions, including the world of art in its various forms. was born in 1856 into a wealthy industrialist family in Stockholm. Caroline had finished her studies in Sweden in the early 1880's, before moving South, to Paris, and settling in the village of Grez-sur-Long in 1884, where she stood out from the majority of artists living there. First, she was a single young female in a society that basically frowned upon such status. Second, she was financially independent, and third, she had received a typical "proper" education as behooved a young woman of wealthy family circumstances. Finally, she was a family girl whose keen interest in the fine arts had landed her in a sea of male artists. Another factor that made her quite atypical was her chosen field of art specialization in sculpture rather than the standard popular domain of painting. William Blair Bruce’s formative years could not have been more different from Caroline’s. William was born in 1859 into a comfortable middle-class here a continent away in Canada, on Hamilton’s “mountain”. He received his early training from his father who was also an amateur painter. In 1877, William studied at the local Mechanics Institute (Hamilton Art School), and from 1878 until 1880 was employed as a draftsman for a local architectural firm. In the autumn of 1881, at age 22, William sailed to France, settling in Paris and enrolling in classes at the Académie Julien. William wanted to soak up the Parisian atmosphere, discover new inspirational approaches in painting by rubbing shoulders with contemporaries, and to meet the new generation of avant-guard painters. Above all, he wanted to pit his artistic skills and talent in the open competition at the annual Grand Salon, and at various exhibition galleries, against other talented painters who tried to achieve fame in the art world “mecca”, Paris. William’s behavior in this world was typical. He first rented a studio apartment on Rive Gauche with all the other aspiring artists. However, in 1882, he leased a cottage in the village of Barbizon, on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau. This became his permanent pied-a-terre during his years in Paris.Meanwhile, Caroline was mixing with the Swedish crowd that tended to center upon the village of Grez-sur-Long, where the young, up-and-coming generation of Swedish painters were developing their talents. The 1880's were an exciting time for any young artist to reside in France. Toward the latter part of the 19th century, the art world in general had broken with the previous romantic/realism styles that had typified the (landscape) painting schools, both on the Continent and in England during earlier decades. New fine art waves were washing away the traditional studio-based approach to painting, and the innovations in France at the time fostered the first generation of impressionistic painters. This powerful wave of avant-garde art as represented by the impressionists had a major impact throughout European and international art communities. The standard bearers, such as Corot, Monet, Pissaro, and Sisley, were all well-established, and frequently organized private exhibitions outside the annual Paris Salon. They, and others in a widening flock, served as beacons for the younger generation of artists that came to France. William and Caroline included. The first couple of meetings of Caroline and William must have occurred in this context - accidental and informal encounters in popular places of residence typical of the artistic community at large. By this time, Caroline was an active and respected member of the Swedish art circles, first at Grez and later Paris. Indeed, before she came to Paris, she had been admitted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Art, a measure of her professional calibre. How a " colonial nobody " such as William, straight out of the British North America Dominion of Canada, could fit into her busy social and professional calendar is hard to imagine. Perhaps it can be best explained through the "Parisian way of life " - the great ease by which people in the art community socialized. Also, both William and Caroline belonged to the younger "talent pool" of the foreign art colony, which also raised their public profile. Hence, given the artist's small world, it was only matter of time before they bumped into each other sometime in the spring of 1885. William’s letters home suggested that he possessed both a strong personal determination and a great belief in his own artistic talent. William’s talents were not generally being recognized in France at the time, but what surely must have added a certain personal fame was his ill-fated trip home to Canada in the Fall of 1885, during which the steamship, Brooklyn , sank in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with his whole portfolio of five years hard work in Paris – some 200 paintings. Such an event must have been much talked about, and seen as a catastrophic, almost monumental personal tragedy - a drama literally handmade for the bistro and cafe gossip-mills. Shortly thereafter, a surprise transatlantic voyage brought Caroline and her chaperone uncle to New York and to Canada. After considerable discussion the young couple decided to return to Paris, where William would start resurrecting his shattered career and Caroline continue hers. Caroline and her understanding uncle must have been quite persuasive in the discussions, but more important was the fact that the pair wanted more than anything else to be together, preferably in Paris, where their love affair had begun. So, they crossed the Atlantic again in 1887, she getting closer to her twin "home-bases" of Paris and Stockholm, he subconsciously casting loose his moorings from his Canadian home-base. Although Caroline and William were engaged in the fall of 1886, their subsequent marriage did not materialize until 1888. One can only conclude that there existed a certain amount of concern, even resistance, to the young couple's marriage on the part of the Benedicks family. The fact that the newly-weds almost immediately after the wedding returned to Paris is perhaps indicative of their preference of having the Benedicks clan at some distance rather than just round the corner in Stockholm. After the wedding, which saw an impressive gathering of Stockholm high society and cultural elite, Caroline and William literally fled southward to Paris, where they remained for another couple of years practicing a typical bohemian, but fashionable, vagabond lifestyle. They freely traveled to places that caught their fancy and inspired their creativity. They also took up the habit of spending summers in the North, where at an early stage they became enamored with the Island of Gotland. The Gotland connection is something of an enigma in the Bruce - Benedicks saga. There were no family links with Gotland among the Benedicks, nor any business. The couple seemed to have fallen in love with the island, its serene landscape and leisurely summer ambiance. Gotland Island possessed an open, expansive, almost prairie-flat, pastoral landscape dotted with Viking rune stones, burial sites, rich archeological digs, and 14th century churches in classical "Gotland Gothic style". Gotland was romantic, historical, aesthetically pleasing, and highly inspirational - well worth the young artists’ gaze. William quickly succumbed. As an aspiring impressionist, he was fascinated by the “Gotland light” and shoreline/seascape interface, both of which figured prominently in his painting from that time on. And, in winter, the island atmosphere was hauntingly dark, with the afternoon's magical l'heure bleue reflected across the frozen beaches and snow-covered meadowlands. In 1899, the Bruces' settled at Brucebo . The site of their home was located a few kilometers up the coast from Visby, at Skalso - a fishing village on a limestone terrace offering a beautiful westward view toward the low-lying shore, with the light blue sea and sky serving as an immense backdrop. The air was clear, salubrious, and healthy, combining its tonic quality with a scent of fresh pine and the sound of the wind through the forest. At Brucebo they experienced spectacular and ever-changing scenery and the rhythmic sounds of wave and wind mixed with the cries of terns and seagulls. The summer climate was dry, sunny and warm – the very best Sweden could offer, especially for William who was sensitive to damp and raw weather. The Bruces loved their Brucebo homestead. Caroline did sculpture, etchings, and watercolors, while William captured seascapes on canvas. They had only seven years on Gotland before William’s untimely death on November 17, 1906 at the age of 47. Caroline was then 50 years old, and would survive her husband by 29 more years. She settled for good at Brucebo and continued to work as a painter and sculptress. She also took an active interest in a number of contemporary political causes - especially the women's emancipation movement in the years prior to World War I. Strangely perhaps, she also became active in Gotland's voluntary military organization, and over the years established herself as a great nationalist-patriot with strong sympathies for the British- French Grande Entente. Indeed, Caroline's life remained full to the very end. When Caroline passed away, World War II was only four years away, the famous impressionists were all long-gone, 20th century modernistic fine art styles were in full bloom, and social democracy was about to become the political standard in Sweden. After the death of Caroline in 1935 at the age of 70, a grant endowment was established. However, it was only in 1972 that the formula and institutional arrangement for her wish that a stipend be made available to a promising Canadian painter to spend some summer weeks at Brucebo on the island of Gotland, became reality. Thus, through the Gotland Fine Art Museum, and the Brucebo Fine Art Scholarship Foundation, the Brucebo Fine Arts Summer Scholarship and in recent years, the William Blair Bruce Fine Arts European Travel Scholarship have been offered in a tangible and lasting manner to talented Canadian artists, in commemoration of William Blair Bruce of Hamilton Ontario, and Caroline Benedicks of Stockholm Sweden, and of their transatlantic saga of love and art. But there was also another more immediate legacy of this saga. Upon the death of William, his father in Hamilton and his widow in Gotland offered the City of Hamilton twenty-nine of William’s works, on the understanding that a permanent municipal gallery would be established to house them. However, Hamilton lacked a municipal art gallery at the time, and six years were to pass before the City acquired a space to house the Blair Bruce Collection In 1913 the first Hamilton Public Library vacated their building, built on Main Street West near James in 1890, and moved across the street into the new Carnegie Library. Finally, on November 27, 1913 the City finally designated the second floor and attic of the old Public Library Building as space for the first municipal art gallery, named the Hamilton Municipal Gallery Without the Blair Bruce bequest, it would likely have been many years before Hamilton could ever boast a municipal art gallery – perhaps never. Today, that modest gallery with its Blair Bruce Collection has grown and matured to become the Art Gallery of Hamilton For AGH's chronology from 1886 to 2005, click here.

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Nov. 30, 2006 -- Do the sounds of our native languages affect how we hear music and other non-language sounds" A team of American and Japanese researchers has found evidence that native languages influence the way people group non-language sounds into rhythms. People in different cultures perceive different rhythms in identical sequences of sound, according to Drs. John R. Iversen and Aniruddh D. Patel of The Neuroscience Institute in San Diego and Dr. Kengo Ohgushi of the Kyoto City University of Arts in Kyoto, Japan. This provides evidence that exposure to certain patterns of speech can influence one's perceptions of musical rhythms. In future work, they believe they may even be able to predict how people will hear rhythms based on the structures of their own languages. The researchers will present their findings Nov. 30 at the Fourth Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ), which will be held at the Sheraton Waikiki and Royal Hawaiian Hotels in Honolulu, Hawaii. The meeting will run from Nov. 28 through Dec. 2, and more than 1600 papers will be presented. Researchers have traditionally tested how individuals group rhythms by playing simple sequences of tones. For example, listeners are presented with tones that alternate in loudness (...loud-soft-loud-soft...) or duration (...long-short-long-short...) and are asked to indicate their perceived grouping. Two principles established a century ago, and confirmed in numerous studies since, are widely accepted: a louder sound tends to mark the beginning of a group, and a lengthened sound tends to mark the end of a group. These principles have come to be viewed as universal laws of perception, underlying the rhythms of both speech and music. However, the cross-cultural data have come from a limited range of cultures, such as American, Dutch and French. This new study suggests one of those so-called "universal" principles, perceiving a longer sound at the end of a group, may be merely a byproduct of English and other Western languages. In the experiments Iversen, Patel and Ohgushi performed, native speakers of Japanese and native speakers of American English agreed with the principle that they heard repeating "loud-soft" groups. However, the listeners showed a sharp difference when it came to the duration principle. English-speaking listeners most often grouped perceived alternating short and long tones as "short-long." Japanese-speaking listeners, albeit with more variability, were more likely to perceive the tones as "long-short." Since this finding was surprising and contradicted a common belief of perception, the researchers replicated and confirmed it with listeners from different parts of Japan. To uncover why these differences exist, one clue may come from understanding how musical rhythms begin in the two cultures. For example, if most phrases in American music start with a short-long pattern, and most phrases in Japanese music start with a long-short pattern, then listeners might learn to use these patterns as cues for how to group them. To test this idea, the researchers examined phrases in American and Japanese children's songs. They examined 50 songs per culture, and for each beginning phrase they computed the duration ratio of the first note to the second note and counted how often phrases started with a short-long pattern versus other possible patterns such as long-short, or equal duration. They found American songs show no bias to start phrases with a short-long pattern. But Japanese songs show a bias to start phrases with a long-short pattern, consistent with their perceptual findings. One basic difference between English and Japanese is word order. In English, short grammatical, or "function," words such as "the," "a," and "to," come at the beginning of phrases and combine with longer meaningful, or "content," words such as a nouns or verbs. Function words are typically reduced in speech, having short duration and low stress. This creates frequent linguistic chunks that start with a short element and end with a long one, such as "to eat," and "a big desk." This fact about English has long been exploited by poets in creating the English language's most common verse form, iambic pentameter. Japanese, in contrast, places function words at the ends of phrases. Common function words in Japanese include "case markers," or short sounds which can indicate whether a noun is a subject, direct object, indirect object, etc. For example, in the sentence "John-san-ga Mari-san-ni hon-wo agemashita," ("John gave a book to Mari") the suffixes "ga," "ni" and "wo" are case markers indicating that John is the subject, Mari is the indirect object and "hon" (book) is the direct object. Placing function words at the ends of phrases creates frequent chunks that start with a long element and end with a short one, which is just the opposite of the rhythm of short phrases in English. In addition to potentially uncovering a new link between language and music, the researchers' work demonstrates there is a need for cross-cultural research when it comes to testing general principles of auditory perception. AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

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Today is Sunday, Feb. 3, the 34th day of 2013. There are 331 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Feb. 3, 1913, the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing for a federal income tax, was ratified. On this date: In 1783, Spain formally recognized American independence. In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens held a shipboard peace conference off the Virginia coast; the talks deadlocked over the issue of Southern autonomy. In 1924, the 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, died in Washington, D.C., at age 67. In 1930, the chief justice of the United States, William Howard Taft, resigned for health reasons. (He died just over a month later.) In 1943, during World War II, the U.S. transport ship Dorchester, which was carrying troops to Greenland, sank after being hit by a German torpedo; of the more than 900 men aboard, only some 230 survived. In 1953, the Batepa Massacre took place in Sao Tome as Portuguese troops killed some 1,000 striking plantation workers. In 1959, rock-and-roll stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson died in a small plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. An American Airlines Lockheed Electra crashed into New York's East River, killing 65 of the 73 people on board. In 1966, the Soviet probe Luna 9 became the first manmade object to make a soft landing on the moon. In 1971, New York City police officer Frank Serpico, who had charged there was widespread corruption in the NYPD, was shot and seriously wounded during a drug bust in Brooklyn. In 1972, the XI Olympic Winter Games opened in Sapporo, Japan. In 1991, the rate for a first-class postage stamp rose to 29 cents. In 1998, Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker, 38, for the pickax killings of two people in 1983; she was the first woman executed in the United States since 1984. A U.S. Marine plane sliced through the cable of a ski gondola in Italy, sending the car plunging hundreds of feet, killing all 20 people inside. Ten years ago: President George W. Bush sent lawmakers a $2.23 trillion budget for 2004. Abandoning a two-month-long general strike that failed to oust President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's workers returned to work in all sectors but the vital oil industry. Legendary record producer Phil Spector was arrested in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson at his mansion in Alhambra, Calif. (Spector's first trial ended in a jury deadlock; he was convicted of second-degree murder in a retrial and sentenced to 19 years to life in prison.) Five years ago: The New York Giants scored a late touchdown to win Super Bowl XLII, 17-14, ending the New England Patriots' run at a perfect season. One year ago: Susan G. Komen for the Cure abandoned plans to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, following a three-day furor that resounded across the Internet, in Congress and among Komen affiliates. Federal prosecutors dropped their investigation of Lance Armstrong, ending a nearly two-year effort aimed at determining whether the seven-time Tour de France winner and his teammates had participated in a doping program. (In January 2013, Armstrong publicly admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs.) Actor Ben Gazzara, 81, died in New York. Actor-filmmaker Zalman King, 70, died in Santa, Monica, Calif. Today's Birthdays: Comedian Shelley Berman is 88. Former Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., is 80. Football Hall-of-Famer Fran Tarkenton is 73. Actress Bridget Hanley is 72. Actress Blythe Danner is 70. Singer Dennis Edwards is 70. Football Hall-of-Famer Bob Griese is 68. Singer-guitarist Dave Davies (The Kinks) is 66. Singer Melanie is 66. Actress Morgan Fairchild is 63. Actress Pamela Franklin is 63. Actor Nathan Lane is 57. Rock musician Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) is 57. Actor Thomas Calabro is 54. Actor-director Keith Gordon is 52. Actress Michele Greene is 51. Country singer Matraca Berg is 49. Actress Maura Tierney is 48. Actor Warwick Davis is 43. Actress Elisa Donovan is 42. Reggaeton singer Daddy Yankee is 37. Musician Grant Barry is 36. Singer-songwriter Jessica Harp is 31. Actor Matthew Moy is 29. Rapper Sean Kingston is 23. Thought for Today: "When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income." — Plato, Greek philosopher.

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Growing Political Turmoil After the conservatives came to power in Spain in November 1933, the CNT planned a national uprising for December 8. Despite a spectacular Barcelona jail break by CNT prisoners, the insurrection was a failure; indeed, it was used to legitimate government censorship, union repression, and the arrest of labor leaders. When, in October 1934, the Catholic conservative party won three cabinet positions, Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists were galvanized to take action against what they feared would be a right-wing coup, whether in fact or in name. Within a few days, the CNT and the Socialist General Confederation of Workers (UGT), which since December 1933 had been discussing some kind of working-class alliance, planned a national general strike. It began on October 4, with coal miners in Asturias in northern Spain leading the struggle. If there had been any doubts about the ruthlessness of the new republican government, they were laid to rest by its treatment of the workers. Utterly unsympathetic to the gruesome conditions under which the coal miners worked and without concern for their fears, it called in Colonel Francisco Franco. As commander of the crack Moroccan troops and Foreign Legion mercenaries, Franco showed no mercy as his soldiers quashed the miners and their supporters. From October 10 to October 18, Moroccan troops and Legionnaires were permitted to rape and pillage in the mining towns of Asturias. The maneuver resulted in about one thousand dead and thirty to forty thousand jailed throughout Spain. The day after the nationwide general strike was called on October 4, 1934, Lluís Companys, now president of the Generalitat, proclaimed the "Republic of Catalunya within the Federal Republic of Spain"—an act that was regarded as treason, since there was no federalist state at the time. Companys was arrested and held for sixteen months, and the Statute of Autonomy was abrogated. After the strike, forces from among Spain's landowners, its army, and its fascist Falange political party had begun to negotiate with Mussolini and Hitler, from whom they obtained financial commitments and promises of military support for a rebellion to overthrow the legally elected Second Republic. The republicans and the left, increasingly aware of the growing fascist menace throughout Europe and mindful that in 1933 divisions among republicans, Socialists, and leftists had permitted conservatives to come to power in Spain, decided to run a unified slate for the parliamentary elections of February 16, 1936. Their coalition, like other such slates elsewhere in Europe, was known as the Popular Front. Meanwhile, during the summer of 1935, Jaume Sabartés, a poet turned journalist who had been a close friend of Picasso's some three decades earlier in Barcelona, received a summons from the painter. Now that Picasso had left his wife Olga Koklova, with whom he had been fighting for years, he needed a secretary. He hoped that Sabartés, who had recently returned to the city after twenty years as a journalist in Latin America, would accept this position. Although Sabartés had been the butt of Picasso's jokes in their youth, he was happy to serve. Persuading his own wife to join him, Sabartés headed for Paris, where, from November 1935 to the winter of 1937, he practically lived with Picasso as his secretary and companion. Presumably, he filled Picasso in on recent events in Barcelona. In the midst of the Popular Front election campaign, Picasso was contacted by the Catalan Friends of the New Arts (Amics de l'Art Nou, or ADLAN), who wanted to open an exhibit of his work on February 18, 1936, two days after the election was scheduled to take place. Even though Picasso was a celebrity, few in Barcelona were familiar with his art, which had not been seen since he and Ramón Casas exhibited jointly in Barcelona in 1932. Picasso agreed to the retrospective but refused to attend. His mother, María Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí talked on the radio in his place to publicize the show. Picasso's friend, the surrealist poet Paul Éluard, traveled down to Barcelona from Paris for the exhibit and delivered a lecture at the opening. Éluard, standing in for Picasso, received the hearty support of students who chanted, "Picasso, the Marxist," confirming that they saw Picasso as a radical. (In fact, although Picasso did later, in 1944, join the Communist party of France, Éluard, like most of the other surrealists, had become a member in 1926.) When the Popular Front won the elections in February, the left was jubilant, and the right intensified their plotting. With the support of Catholic landowners and fascists, five generals, including Francisco Franco, organized a barracks uprising for July 18, 1936, that was designed to overthrow the freely elected government and impose one more congenial to themselves. The plotters, however, had not counted on the loyalty of certain officers who supported the Popular Front. Nor did they count on the quick action of the people in cities like Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville, where civilians—many of them acting through their unions—rose up to defend the Republic. Only about half of Spain went over to the rebels. And thus the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 began. On the day of the attempted coup in Barcelona, the CNT marched on the army barracks, disarmed the soldiers, and seized their weapons to arm themselves. Having chafed at the bit under nearly five years of republican rule, the CNT now attempted to carry out a social revolution by collectivizing all local economic and social resources. George Orwell, who was in Barcelona shortly afterward, talked about how it felt to be in a city in which the people ruled: It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; . . . almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-workers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said "Señor" or "Don" or even "Usted"; everyone called everyone else "Comrade" and "Thou. " . . . The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. . . . Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. The Spanish Republican government continued to carry on its work while it attempted to defend itself against its enemies. The right-wing rebels, among whom General Francisco Franco had become preeminent by November 1936, were willing to empower Hitler and Mussolini to test new military strategies on Spain in their behalf. On October 23, 1936, three months after the Civil War had begun, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Madrid. Over five thousand people were killed in a single night, in the first time systematic bombing was used specifically to terrorize and crush the will of a civilian population. Like later similar attempts, however, this first instance only enhanced the resolve of the people, both in Madrid and in the Spanish nation as a whole. It was at this time that Dolores Ibarruri, a Communist leader known as "La Pasionaria," coined the slogan "No pasarán" (They shall not pass), which became a watchword for democratic forces throughout the world.

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King of clocks King bong visited As the UK Parliament prepares to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its world-famous clock, E&T examines the history of Big Ben. With a few seconds to go to midday, I am told to put my fingers firmly in my ears. Even then, when the four quarters are struck, the noise is phenomenal, but nothing compared to the striking of the hour bell, Big Ben. The belfry reverberates with the sound which they say could be heard all over London when the 300kg clapper was first triggered on 11 July 1859. Nowadays, of course, amid the roar of London's traffic, it is not so noticeable away from the immediate vicinity of the Palace of Westminster, but for many people all around the world its instantly recognisable sound is familiar from the radio and television, especially on New Year's Eve. Though over time the clock tower has become known as Big Ben, it is in fact only the hour bell that has that nickname. The mechanism for powering the hands on the four dials and operating the quarter bells and the hour bell is correctly known as the Great Clock of Westminster. Showing me around the tower are Paul Roberson and Ian Westworth, who are responsible (together with Huw Smith) for the maintenance of the Great Clock and the other 2,000 clocks in the Palace of Westminster, of which 450 are mechanical or antique. Roberson has been an horologist all his life, taking an apprenticeship in watch and clockmaking straight from school. An obvious clock enthusiast, he says: "It gets under your skin. I am interested in anything mechanical." Westworth worked as a turret clock restorer before becoming a Place of Westminster clockmaker four years ago. Both are proud of the Great Clock as, Westworth says, "it still does exactly what it was designed to do 150 years ago". After the destruction of both houses of parliament by fire in 1834, it was decided that the new buildings should have a grand tower housing "a noble clock, indeed a king of clocks, the biggest the world has ever seen within sight and sound of the throbbing heart of London". In his specification, the Astronomer Royal, George Airy, wrote: "The striking machinery is to be so arranged that the first blow for each hour shall be accurate to the second of time." No clockmaker thought it remotely possible to construct a mechanism of the required size that, in addition to sounding five bells and powering hands of four dials, would keep such accurate time. But an appeal by the Worshipful Company of Clock-makers for a less onerous specification was turned down and three horologists were invited to tender. Edmund Becket Denison If Edmund Becket Denison had not been invited to join George Airy as a second referee, it is unlikely that such an accurate clock would have been built. Though a barrister by profession, Denison was a gifted amateur horologist, the author of articles and the designer of some fine clocks. He favoured the submission of EJ Dent & Company, to whom he suggested many improvements that amounted to a redesign, and it was to that firm that the contract was awarded in 1852. Within three years the clock was complete, but neither the bells nor the tower in which it would be installed had been finished. However, the delay was fortuitous as it gave Denison the time to design a mechanism that would ensure the clock's accuracy. The problem with turret clocks had always been how to prevent the external forces on the hands being reflected back to the pendulum thus affecting the clock's accuracy. This is achieved with an escapement, a device that transfers the power of the descending weight to the hands by hitting (impulsing) the pendulum. It was Denison who came up with the double three-legged gravity escapement, an ingenious yet simple device, which, as Roberson says, was "a massive advancement, without which the clock would not be here now". It was successfully tried out in the harshest of conditions in a clock built by Dent for Fredericton Cathedral in New Brunswick, Canada and thereafter became widely used in turret clocks. While Denison carried out further trials, the great bell had been completed at a foundry in Stockton-on-Tees in northern England and was transported by water arriving in London on 21 October 1856. Trial and error With the clocktower still incomplete, it was set up on a specially built gallows near the foot of the tower, where for almost a year it was struck regularly until, on 17 October 1857, a 1.2m crack appeared. The only solution was to break it up and, in April 1858, a new, lighter, bell, which would become Big Ben, was cast at the Whitechapel Foundry in London's East End. In the meantime, the tower designed by Charles Barry, with the decoration and beautiful dials by Augustus Pugin, was completed. In the summer of 1858, the bells were hand-winched up the shaft, the hoisting of Big Ben taking teams of men working in relays some days to complete. With the installation of the operating mechanism below the Belfry, all was ready by spring 1859. However, each time the minute hands approached the hour, they stopped. The construction of lighter minute hands of hollow copper and hour hands of copper-backed hollow gunmetal allowed it to operate successfully. As far as is known, the clock started officially on 31 May 1859, with Big Ben first sounding the hour on 11 July and the quarter bells chiming from 7 September. The public appreciated the sound but, perhaps predictably, the Members of Parliament complained that it was too loud. The trouble with the clock hands had brought Denison to near despair, so it is not difficult to imagine how he felt when told, less than a month later, that a 30cm-long crack had appeared in Big Ben. There were recriminations all round: Denison accused the Whitechapel Foundry of poor workmanship while the foundry put the damage down to Denison's continued use of a 300kg hammer. Two ensuing libel actions both found in favour of the foundry over Denison. To dismantle the clock, lower the bell and recast it was not considered possible. So, as the crack was neither as deep nor as long as that in the first bell, a slot was cut out to prevent it spreading, a 200kg hammer installed, and the bell turned through about 90°, where it has remained ever since without further problems. Of course, there have inevitably been a few problems with the clock mechanism, but normally these are discovered and put right before they become severe. Though it has been given a thorough overhaul for its 150th anniversary, Roberson says: "There isn't a servicing schedule like a car. We are up here three times a week and can see any fault developing." With the last chime of Big Ben, we remove our fingers from our ears, but the resonance seems to go on and on - "for 30 seconds", I am told by Roberson. From the belfry we make our way down to see the dials. Now each illuminated by 28 long-life bulbs of 85W, they were originally lit by gas jets and looked after by a gas man who was required to stay in the tower all night. As we make our way down the remainder of the 334 steps, it is clear that this is more than just a job for those who work with Big Ben. As Westworth says: "Working on the Great Clock of Westminster is one of the things most horologists want to do because it is probably the most prestigious clock in the world." Roberson adds: "I have been involved in clocks all my life but this is the most famous clock in the world and we are the ones responsible for looking after it." Behind the scenes The clock is divided into three sections or trains. In the centre is the going train, which has three functions. First, it is connected to a single shaft that transfers the motion of the pendulum through a nest of bevel gears to the hands on the four clock faces. Its second function is to trigger the chiming train to the right that, via a series of shafts rising up to a linkage room and from there to the belfry, operates the five hammers on the four quarter bells every 15 minutes. Finally, the going train also triggers the strike of the hour train situated on the left which, via a steel wire, raises the hammer on the hour bell (Big Ben). The whole mechanism is powered by gravity, with the descending weight unwinding the wire wrapped round a large barrel on each train thus rotating it, so that it can operate the train via a series of gears. The escapement controls the rate of descent of the weight in the going train, while on the other two it is controlled by a fly fan or air break. While the weight on the going train is wound up regularly by hand, those on the other two, which are much heavier, are wound up by an electric motor, though this is not automatic and has to be switched on. To ensure that the pendulum is protected from vibration and other external forces, a large part of it swings in a 3m-deep pit, made of cast iron. The pendulum is made of a zinc rod in an iron tube to compensate for temperature changes. The clock's accuracy is maintained by altering its mass. This is done extremely simply by adding or removing an old imperial penny or halfpenny from a shelf, specially constructed near the top of the pendulum. Adding one penny speeds up the clock by two-fifths of a second over 24 hours. Bells still ringing in Whitechapel It's a short walk from the City of London's glittering palaces of financial innovation to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where tradition, rather than innovation, holds sway. It's here, in listed premises just along from the site of St Mary's, the original 'white chapel', that skilled craftspeople still make bells in much the same way as they have for more than half a millennium. Officially Britain's oldest manufacturing company, the foundry has been in business since 1570 producing some of the world's best-known bells. If you visit the foundry shop, you'll pass under a profile of Big Ben. The foundry also made the Liberty Bell for the Philadelphia State House in 1752, produced a Bicentennial Bell to go with it in 1976, and a replica of the Liberty Bell in 2001. It has also made bells for Westminster Abbey, for Washington DC's National Cathedral in 1964 and for a host of more modest churches scattered across the furthest reaches of what was the Empire. In a nod to old-fashioned customer service, passers-by can sometimes see crates arriving from far-flung churches, bringing back bells that have been in use for decades to be repaired, retuned or even recast. It's not all about the past though. Last year the foundry cast a new peal of 12 bells for the church of St Magnus the Martyr at London Bridge. It does a steady trade in sets of hand bells, tuned for change ringing. And, in a nod to the modern age, it has a website listing its products with prices and delivery. If you want a standard bell tuned to C, with a diameter at its lip of 60in and a weight of 2,032kg, it will cost £39,481 plus delivery. Since they're not in stock at the moment, you might even be able to watch it being cast... |To start a discussion topic about this article, please log in or register.| "Is augmented reality the next big thing or a marketing gimmick? Is it fundamental to the future or a fashion faux pas?" - The Energy Bill and What is an Investment Contract [05:54 pm 21/05/13] - The Energy Bill and What is a Contract for Difference? [05:15 pm 21/05/13] - Advanced data communications and networking [03:47 pm 21/05/13] - Define Energy. [11:36 am 21/05/13] - Tap Off Unit for riser cabling system [11:27 am 21/05/13] Tune into our latest podcast

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|• Total||10.56 km2 (4.08 sq mi)| |Elevation||396.4 m (1,300.5 ft)| Lipica (Italian: Lipizza) is a village in the Municipality of Sežana in the Littoral region of Slovenia, close to the border with Italy. Lipica is one of the main tourist centers of Slovenia's Karst region and it is known for the Lipica Stud Farm. The name of the settlement is derived from the Slovenian word lipa 'linden tree'. The species is common in the area and is a national symbol of Slovenia. The staff at the Lipica Stud Farm plant a new linden tree for every foal born. From the 14th century until 1947, Lipica was part of the municipality of Trieste. When Charles II, Archduke of Inner Austria (son of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor) decided to establish a new stud farm in the 16th century, the Spanish horse was considered the ideal horse breed. Because the soil and climate in the Karst region is similar to that of Spain, Lipica was chosen as the perfect spot for the new farm. The Lipica stud farm was established in 1580 and the first horses were bought from Spain in 1581 (24 broodmares and 6 stallions). The farmers living in the area at the time were evicted and resettled in Laže. A coal mine operated east of the settlement from 1778 to 1817. Coal mining was attempted at the site again in 1857 and at sporadic later dates, but was deemed uneconomical because it is deposited only in lenses. Coal from the mine was once used at the sugar refinery in Rijeka. In 1947, Lipica was annexed to Yugoslavia and incorporated into Slovenia as a constituent republic. Mass grave Lipica is the site of a mass grave associated with the Second World War. The Lipica Shaft Mass Grave (Slovene: Grobišče Lipiško brezno) is located about 500 m southwest of the tree-lined boulevard by the stud farm. It contains an undetermined number of human remains. Lipica Stud Farm Lipica is the origin of the Lipizzan horse. The Lipizzan breed as known today was fully developed in the time of Maria Theresa of Austria, whose husband was greatly interested in horse-breeding. During the Napoleonic wars, the stud farm was relocated to Székesfehérvár. In 1802, an earthquake struck Lipica, killing large numbers of horses. The stud farm was relocated to Đakovo in 1805, to Pecica (near Mezőhegyes) in 1809, to Laxenburg during the First World War, and then to Kladruby nad Labem. After the First World War, when Lipica was awarded to Italy, most of the horses were returned to Lipica. On 16 October 1943, the stud farm and 178 horses were relocated to Hostouň. After the Second World War, the farm had only 11 horses; all of the others had been confiscated by the Germans during the war. In the 1960s, Lipica was opened to tourists and new development began. In 1996, Lipica became a public institution that is owned by the Republic of Slovenia and has made significant progress since then. Queen Elizabeth II visited Lipica and its stud farm on 22 October 2008 and was presented with a Lipizzan horse as a gift from the Slovenian people. Today the Lipica Stud Farm is fully functional and breeds the finest horses for haute-école riding. The stud farm now also includes a hotel and leisure complex, a modern adjunct to a historical setting. The Lipica Open The Lipica Open is an international orienteering competition that is held every year at the beginning of March. It is the biggest orienteering competition in Slovenia and was held for the first time in 1992. Other places of interest Other places of interest in and near Lipica include: - The Avgust Černigoj gallery - The Škocjan Caves system (Škocjanske jame/Grotte di San Canziano), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. - Vilenica Cave, the oldest show cave in Europe (with guided tours since 1633) - The Valley of Our Lady of Lourdes (Slovene: Dolina Lurške Matere Božje): an outdoor church and a local pilgrimage destination Notable people Notable people that were born or lived in Lipica include: - Ivan Slavec (1859–1940), co-founder of the newspaper Primorski list and the last Slovene-speaking priest at the Trieste cathedral - Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia - Sežana Municipality site - Snoj, Marko. 2009. Etimološki slovar slovenskih zemljepisnih imen. Ljubljana: Modrijan and Založba ZRC, pp. 234–235. - Savnik, Roman, ed. 1968. Krajevni leksikon Slovenije, vol. 1. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, pp. 319–320. - Lipica Shaft Mass Grave on Geopedia (Slovene) - BBC News 22 October 2008 - Lipica Stud Farm site

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Moore's Law Is Alive And Well, And Intel Will Prove It Today Intel, the world’s biggest manufacturer of computer chips, and by far the one with the most advanced manufacturing capabilities, is holding a big event in San Francisco which it described in an invitation to reporters as its “most significant technology announcement of the year.” It provided no further details. This appears to be the announcement that CEO Paul Otellini alluded to during Intel’s quarterly earnings conference call last month. Intel has kept a pretty tight lid on the details, but I’ve talked to enough people who say this is one of those times when Intel will “open the kimono” on what will be going on inside its chip factories–or fabs–later this year. The big news will revolve around Intel’s disclosure of its 22-nanometer manufacturing process. It’s the sort of thing that gets people who know chips kind of excited and leaves others kind of cold. But in fact, everyone should be kind of excited about this. Perhaps you’ve heard of Moore’s Law. This was the observation in 1965 by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (pictured at the Intel Museum in 2005) that the number of transistors that could be crammed onto a chip doubles–and the size of those chips tended to shrink–as manufacturing technology improved on a fairly regular basis: About every 18 to 24 months. That shrinking meant two things. Chipmakers could make a chip with the same computing power as the previous generation more cheaply, or they could make a more powerful one with more transistors for about the same cost. It all comes down to how many transistors you can cram onto a chip, and how many useful chips you can get from a single silicon wafer. In both cases, more is better. Moore’s observation–which was first published 46 years ago this month–has held up remarkably well and has proven one of the most important engines of growth in the technology industry. All the computing oomph you take for granted in your notebook, your smart phone, in the cloud, and all around you happens in part because the chips inside the hardware have gotten smaller and yet ever more powerful every two years or so. So back to today’s announcement. As I mentioned, it’s going to revolve around its 22-nanometer manufacturing process. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and its current factory processors turn out chips with transistors that are somewhat bigger–32 nanometers. Intel executives often refer to a process they call “tick-tock.” Today constitutes a tick, when in odd-numbered years, a new manufacturing process comes online and the previous generation chips are shifted to being built with the smaller transistors. A “tock” occurs in even-numbered years when Intel engineers come up with new chip designs that really show what the new factory processes are capable of. The implication is that it’s so regular you can almost set your watch by it. Intel’s long-term strategy can be summed up like so: Tick, tock, repeat. On top of that there are likely to be disclosures about some of the advances in physics that Intel has had to make in order to get chips with transistors so small to work properly. When you’re dealing with things that small, the individual electrons flowing on the chip sometimes don’t behave as they should. For example, in 2007 Intel had to add the element Hafnium to its chip-making process in order to stop individual transistors from wasting electricity. (It was more complicated than that, but that in a nutshell was the problem.) Billions upon billions of transistors in billions of computers around the world wasting electricity is a bad thing, both financially–power is expensive–and environmentally. What’s funny is that for years people have been saying that Intel–and indeed the entire chip industry–can’t continue on the Moore’s Law trajectory. At some point things get so small that you’re dealing with individual atoms and you can’t get any smaller than that. However, every time people have predicted its end, something happens to keep it going. A lot of companies have come up with some important advances that have kept it going. In the 1990s and early 2000s, IBM came up with some important advances that kept Moore’s Law on track. But more often that not it has been Intel that has kicked down the door when the experts said it was locked. Today it will probably kick down another. This older video was created around the time that Intel unveiled its 45-nanometer process with Hafnium–kicking down one of those earlier doors. Perhaps there will be another today. Check in later as I cover the announcement.

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Make your own D-net. The net is named for the "D" shape of its frame. It is used to collect stream insects from the bottom of a stream. You can make one at home (but make sure an adult is around to help!). Materials you will need x 14" piece of screen • 42" x 2" piece of canvas or heavy cloth Thread and needle • Wire coat hanger • Drill with 1/8" and 1/4" bits Wooden broom handle Building a D-net 1. Fold the screen in half (21" x 14") and cut screen (as shown). 2. Sew the two pieces of screen together along the cut edge. 3. Fold the canvas in half along the open edge of the net. 4. Untwist the wire hanger and cut off the top (as shown). 5. Bend the smaller cut piece into a U-shape. 6. Drill a 1/4" hole in the flat end of the broom stick. 7. Drill two shallow 1/8" holes on the sides of the broomstick, positioned so you can fit U-shaped wire over the flat end and into the holes. 8. Slip large wire into the folded canvas slot of the net and twist the 9. Cut the twisted wire to no longer than 2" in length and insert into hole at flat end of the broomstick. 10. Secure the net to the pole using the U-shaped wire and duct tape (as Volunteer Water Quality Monitoring Non-profit Stream Monitoring County Stream Monitoring Groups Maryland DNR's Teaching Environmental Awareness in Maryland (TEAM) program offers students a two-part stream investigation in a local freshwater stream of their choice. At this streamside setting, trained volunteers guide them as they learn about water quality, stream habitats and the community of organisms that inhabit the stream. Using the information they collect, the students will then formulate conclusions about the health of the stream they have investigated. If you are interested in becoming a TEAM volunteer and helping educate Marylanders about our natural resources, visit our website at www.dnr.maryland.gov/education/teamdnr and fill out an application. It's a known fact kids are drawn to streams and waterways. Some visit them to fish, hike, canoe and kayak or just enjoy nature; others want to learn more about them and how people affect their overall health. Streams offer students a unique outdoor field experience and a window to understanding their local environment and the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland's 8,800 miles of streams form the life support system for the Chesapeake Bay watershed by providing important habitats for many aquatic and terrestrial organisms. Each stream plays a vital role in linking the Chesapeake Bay to its surrounding Many kids think of a stream in terms of the trout they caught while fishing or the crayfish they found while exploring its banks. These are some of the more visible examples but they are only a fraction of the diversity contained within Maryland's streams. Upon closer examination you can find fish, amphibians and insects that are invisible to the casual observer. More important, many of these organisms are biological indicators of stream health, especially the insects or macroinvertebrates. An Outdoor Classroom Realized year thousands of students experience Maryland's streams through programs offered by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) outdoor education centers, and summer camps. However, students, parents or teachers can organize their own stream investigations. Using a stream as an outdoor classroom offers kids an incomparable hands-on learning experience that leads them to a greater understanding and appreciation of their natural environment. Getting to Know Macroinvertebrates Prior to going out and doing an actual field investigation, students should learn how to identify some of the basic types of stream insects and stream habitats they might encounter, either through classroom exercises or home study. Stream insects are one of the most important indicators of the long-term health of a stream. Many are long-lived and spend most of their lives within the stream. Some, like stoneflies, are highly sensitive to pollution while others such as blackfly larvae are very tolerant. During a field investigation, many of these insects may be seen; however without some initial preparation, students will not have the proper knowledge and skills to conduct a meaningful investigation of a stream. In the Field After completing the classroom or home study of stream insects and their habitats, it's time to consider a field investigation. The best time to conduct one is typically in spring or late fall when weather conditions are most favorable for being outside. First and foremost, the stream must be accessible to the students. Those on the school grounds are ideal but streams on other public lands are also Prior to going out to the stream, students will also need to have some sampling equipment. A net, preferably a D-net, is used to sample for macroinvertebrates. However you can also just use your hands and look under rocks to get a sample. It's also helpful to have a bucket to put your sample in, a magnifier, tweezers and a tray with a white background. The white background provides good contrast for seeing the darker macroinvertebrates. Once at the stream, look for riffles or woody debris to sample. A stream riffle is a shallow area where rocks break up the flow of water. This area is highly enriched in oxygen and has lots of small spaces for macroinvertebrates to hide in. Woody debris found in the water -- leaves, sticks and tree roots -- is another important habitat as these materials provide an important food source for stream In addition to looking at the macroinvertebrate community within the stream, you may also decide to sample for dissolved oxygen levels, pH, depth, water flow and turbidity. All provide important information on the physical and biological conditions of the stream. You should end the investigation by making some basic conclusions about the health of the stream. By using streams as outdoor classrooms, students are making an important and meaningful connection to the Chesapeake Bay watershed; they learn monitoring techniques and problem- solving skills that will benefit them for a lifetime. Maryland DNR currently offers opportunities for middle school students to conduct a stream investigation. Those interested in learning more about DNR's student streams investigations should visit or contact Matthew Chasse at 410-260-8828, or our website for more information at is an Education Specialist for DNR's Conservation Education Division, the TEAM Program Coordinator, and serves on the Education Matrix Team.

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- THE MAGAZINE - INFO FOR... - ASI Store - ASI Top 25 - Product & Literature Showcases - Services Marketplace - List Rental - Market Research - Custom Content & Marketing Services You may already know something about the benefits of plasma treatment, such as higher treatment (dyne) levels, extended life of treatment over time, the lack of surface morphology degradation, and the elimination of pinholing and backside treatment. Until recently, low-pressure vacuum plasmas have been used to treat two- and three-dimensional plastic objects and polymer films. The recent introduction of high-density atmospheric plasma for film, foil, paper, foam, nonwoven and woven substrate applications has had a significant impact on the surfaces of these materials at considerably lower capitalization costs. High-density atmospheric plasma represents a new generation of surface-treatment technology. It allows plasmas to be sustained at atmospheric pressure in a way that permits the surface treatment of polymers and other substrates. It can be configured to work with a variety of feeding systems, including continuous web. How does Plasma Compare to Corona?Corona treatment is an electrical process that uses ionized air to increase the surface tension of non-porous substrates. Normally, corona-treating systems operate at an electrical voltage of approximately 10 kV. Like corona, plasma is the electrical ionization of a gas. The plasma (glow) discharge creates a smooth, undifferentiated cloud of ionized gas with no visible electrical filaments. However, unlike corona, plasma is created at much lower voltage levels and temperatures. Plasma Effects on Substrate SurfacesCorona converts the substrate surface from a non-polar state to a polar state. Oxygen molecules from the corona discharge area are then free to bond to the ends of the molecules in the substrate being treated, resulting in an increase in surface tension. The same description holds true for atmospheric plasma, with a few exceptions. The rate at which electron bombardment occurs within a high-density atmospheric plasma is up to 100 times greater. This increased electron activity forces greater ion bombardment to the substrate surface. This results in increased etching, chain scission and crosslinking on the substrate's surface, which influences stronger bonding attributes across the surface of the web. Specifically, mechanical interlocking is enhanced, bonding materials together by allowing the adhesive or sealant to take advantage of the microscopic roughness etched to the surface by atmospheric plasma, locking them together. In addition, covalent chemical bonding is promoted, using mutually reactive chemical groups newly resident at the substrate surface (delivered by atmospheric plasma treatment) and the adhesive to form the strongest, most durable bond. Summarizing the treatment process, high-density atmospheric plasma employs chemical gases that produce controlled chemical reactions on the surface. Chemistry molecules that are introduced are propelled to the material surface. Low-molecular-weight material is cleaned from the surface and specific gas molecules covalently bond to the surface. This is how adhesion can be boosted between the adhesive and the material surface. Atmospheric plasma technology also eliminates the possibility of backside treatment. The high-speed photos capture the optical differences between corona and atmospheric plasma treatment. The corona image shows the expected "filaments," while the plasma treatment generates a smooth treat pattern. Benefits of Atmospheric Plasma for Adhesive AdhesionPlasma treatment offers three key benefits that adhesive manufacturers can use to their advantage. 1. Longer life treatments. Substrates that have been atmospheric plasma-treated hold their treatment levels longer than corona-treated surfaces. Longer treatment life allows product converters to take advantage of economies of scale during production, increase inventory life and provide enhanced manufacturing flexibility. 2. Higher treat levels allow for treatment of difficult-to-treat surfaces. Atmospheric plasma treatment is a viable alternative for substrates for which corona treating is ineffective. For example, difficult-to-treat fluoropolymer-based materials like Teflon® do not respond to the corona process but do respond to atmospheric plasma treatment. 3. Treatment of thicker substrates. While substrates that are thicker than 0.125" usually do not respond well to the corona process, they can be treated by atmospheric plasma. Films, metallized films, foils, foams, wovens and nonwovens are all candidates for atmospheric plasma surface treatment. An atmospheric plasma treatment system called Plasma3™ that can operate at low temperature to provide the advantages plasma technology has over existing surface-treatment technologies has been developed by Enercon Industries. The surface energies of materials treated by this system have been shown to increase substantially, thereby significantly enhancing the wettability, printability and adhesive/ink/coating adhesion properties of these materials. Web-Based Atmospheric Plasma Market ApplicationsWater- and solventborne, alcohol-based, and cold-seal adhesives are used for a variety of laminating applications. They are used by contract laminators and consumer products companies to bond multiple combinations of film, fiberglass, foam, fabric, paper, nonwovens, and rubber. The laminates are used to produce a range of products, including the following. - Packaging applications - sealing tapes, weather-strip, labels - Automotive applications - seals, gaskets, headliners, trim - Textile applications - protective apparel, outerwear - Medical applications - medical drapes and garments, bandages, electrodes, labeling, lidding, covers - Electronic applications - Bonding/assembly and thermal management tapes The system also has the flexibility to be operated with variable chemistries and without the generation of ozone, pin-holing, and backside treatment. For more information, contact Rory Wolf at email@example.com .

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There's No Such Thing as Ethical Oil (or Nuclear Power) Canada is digging itself a dirty energy destiny in the Athabasca oil sands. By Evan O'Neil | March 22, 2011 After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and now the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima reactors in Japan, it should be clear that oil and nuclear power are not benign forces in our world. Both are toxic, dirty, and insecure forms of energy. It is thus astonishing that the Canadian energy industry proposes combining the two. The boreal forest of northern Alberta sits atop one of the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world: the Athabasca bituminous sands. Energy insiders call it oil sands, while environmentalists prefer tar sands—each side seeing what it wants. At room temperature, raw bitumen has the consistency of asphalt and won't flow through a pipeline without being diluted or upgraded into synthetic crude oil. Underground, the bitumen exists in a mixture with sand and clay, and there are two techniques for extracting it. Surface mines have been the predominant method since commercial production began in the 1960s. At the Suncor Energy mine, for example, the native forests, topsoil, and muskeg bog were cleared, and 50 meters of "overburden" earth was removed to expose a tar sand deposit itself about 50 meters thick. The bitumen is mined 24 hours per day with massive electric shovels that fill dump trucks three stories tall. The dump trucks haul the tar sands out of the mine to a separation unit where it is mixed with hot water. The bitumen floats to the top and is skimmed off, while the wastewater slurry—containing sand, clay, salts, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, arsenic, naphthenic acid, and other substances—is pumped into large, open-air tailings ponds where it is left to evaporate. The problem with tailings ponds has been that the finest clay particles take decades to settle into sediment. To accelerate reclamation of the land, some companies are now experimenting with adding polyacrylamide flocculant, in a process similar to municipal waste treatment, to help separate the solids from the water. Mining for deeper deposits is uneconomical, so the industry also employs in situ drilling. In a typical setup, two horizontal wells are drilled, one above the other. The top well injects steam into the sands, melting out the bitumen, which is then pumped out through the lower well in a process called Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage, or SAGD. The well pads of these SAGD installations dot the remote boreal landscape in a network of roads, pipelines, and seismic cutlines. Mining and in situ operations both consume a lot of energy. The advantage of in situ is that the land is much less disturbed, making it easier to return it to a natural state. SAGD also separates the sand and bitumen below the surface, requiring significantly less infrastructure. Of the total Athabasca deposit, 80 percent is thought to be recoverable through in situ and 20 percent through mining. SAGD requires a lot of natural gas to make steam. The ratio of steam injected to oil extracted is what determines a project's carbon emissions as well as its profitability. Mining and SAGD together consume hundreds of billions of cubic feet of natural gas per year, a substantial fraction of Canada's entire demand. That's where nuclear power enters the picture. As bitumen production in Alberta is slated to expand over the next several decades, gas production will be in decline. This means that eventually producers will have to either burn part of their bitumen, thus eating into their profits, or find new power sources to generate heat and electricity. Nuclear power has been mooted to fill this gap. Japan, of course, turned to nuclear power during the 1970s oil shocks to offset its dependence on foreign oil. Now, in an ironic twist, Canada is considering nuclear power so that it can expand its oil exports. Most of the tar sands oil is sold south of the border through a pipeline network to meet American demand, while Canada still imports foreign oil to its eastern provinces. One has to wonder why Canada would burn so much of its natural gas, a relatively clean fossil fuel, to extract an even dirtier energy. The answer is, of course, to make money. Most of the world's oil is controlled by national oil companies, making Canada one of the only remaining patches where the energy industry can really play in the sandbox. And the Athabasca deposit is a big sandbox. The area is roughly the size of New York State. It contains an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen, of which about 170 billion barrels are extractable with current technologies. Multiply by $100 per barrel and pretty soon we're talking real money. But it is capital intensive to slurp these heavy, unconventional dregs of the global oil barrel. Hundreds of billions of dollars have already been invested in the Alberta tar sands, where it takes an oil price of $65 to 85 per barrel to recuperate costs. As recently as 2009, oil was back down in the $40 range, slowing or canceling many projects. So is tar sands oil dirty oil? Of course it is. All oil is dirty. But is it dirtier than other sources? On average, yes. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, oil from Alberta tends to be about 5 to 15 percent more polluting than the average oil consumed in the United States when compared on a well-to-wheels basis. Twenty-five percent of oil's emissions occur during the production phase, while 75 percent comes from combustion in a vehicle. Industry insiders often repeat the following argument: It's the consumer's fault, whether they mean car owners or America in general. "If you would stop driving so much, we would stop digging up all this oil and pumping it in your direction," goes the typical line. Then whenever the United States wavers in its affection for Canadian energy, the argument becomes a threat: "We'll just sell it to the Chinese instead." This argument is nonsense on the individual level. American consumers aren't presented with a significant choice at the pump. They get to decide between three octane ratings with maybe a dash of dubiously efficient ethanol in the blend. The only real power a person has to reduce oil consumption is in deciding where to live. Ditching the car and moving to a dense, pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly community with access to mass transit is the most effective solution. For those who cannot or do not wish to move, the alternative is to work through the local political process to redesign your community. Most families haven't made the carless choice yet. Instead the typical response is to buy a bigger car when gasoline is cheap and a more efficient one when the price goes back up. Without a price floor of some sort, America will never break its addiction to oil, foreign or domestic. A strong gasoline tax could serve as a de facto price floor if it were set high enough. Unfortunately the United States has chosen to set the bar very low: Gas tax is a pittance relative to the price of gasoline, and it isn't indexed to inflation, meaning the value has actually declined over the last several decades. It is an abdication of political responsibility to argue that an unorganized and reactionary collective such as consumers is at fault for oil consumption. The essence of ethics is whether our political institutions can make choices that are in the interest of all affected stakeholders, local and global, regardless of the political cost. Seen in this light, can the Canadian and Albertan governments be trusted not to morph into petrostates? It is an abdication of political responsibility to argue that an unorganized and reactionary collective such as consumers is at fault for oil consumption.Sadly the outlook is bleak. The federal environment minister recently declared that Canadian oil is "ethical oil." This concept is drawn straight from the title of a book by conservative political activist Ezra Levant, in which he argues that Canada's oil is morally superior to oil from countries with poor human rights records. Even if Canada and the United States were to boycott imports from all countries they consider problematic, an option neither is willing to consider, oil would still remain a globally priced and traded commodity and the benefits of its consumption would continue to flow to unsavory dictators. On the provincial level, the Alberta government is of the opinion that the tar sands "should" be developed further, despite the fact that a panel recently found that water and environmental monitoring program has been inadequate. Alberta's Energy Resources Conservation Board, its regulatory agency for energy development, has one of the more Orwellian names one can imagine. Bullish development of the oil sands has also contributed to Canada's violation of its Kyoto Protocol commitments. The goal was to decrease emissions 6 percent below 1990 levels. Instead, Canadian emissions have increased by a whopping 24 percent, in great measure due to tar sands expansion. Tar sands emissions now account for about 5 percent of Canada's total. Alberta did manage to enact one innovative policy that few other jurisdictions will even consider: a carbon tax of $15 per ton. This move should be applauded, but it is unfortunately accompanied by billion-dollar investments in the unproven technologies of carbon capture and sequestration—an expensive crutch to help the fossil fuel industry limp into the future—with minimal focus on renewable energy research, development, and deployment. Another concern for Canada's energy future is that the royalty regime [PDF] for tar sands leases is too weak. The rate is set at 1 percent until a project becomes profitable, and then it jumps to 25 percent, which is still low compared to some countries. Alberta risks squandering an opportunity to build its Heritage sovereign wealth fund while the people's resources disappear into private pockets, leaving the province without financial means to transition to a cleaner economy. Is America being a good neighbor in this transaction, or merely abetting a fellow oil junkie? The proposed Keystone XL extension of the pipeline network that carries Albertan oil to the United States is currently under consideration, and final approval falls to the U.S. Department of State because of the international border crossing. It was announced on March 15 that a supplemental environmental impact statement will be issued, followed by a new public comment period, to determine whether the project is "in the U.S. national interest." Buying more energy from a friendly neighbor appears like a good idea on the surface. But while energy security has the ring of a robust and consistent concept, it is actually a relative one. It wears a false halo of military necessity even during peacetime. Supplier countries want security of demand, and consumer countries want security of supply. What the oil industry really worries about is running out of business. "Producers who seek to maximize long-term revenue will want to maintain oil prices stable at the highest price that does not induce substantial investment in substitutes," writes technology and innovation expert Philip Auerswald. Should we be worried about today's high prices? Auerswald doesn't think so. High prices merely hasten the inevitable transition to a post-oil economy. Estimations vary on the timing of peak oil, but the finitude of the resource is undisputed and so is its eventual depletion to a level where the cost of extraction will equal the value of the product. Saying that America should be open to more tar sands oil is basically just another version of the "drill here, drill now" argument for tapping the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska. The Obama administration, it should be noted, has been a booster of domestic production, and production has gone up in the last five years. Canadian production has also increased significantly in the last decade, mostly from growth in the tar sands. But after two major oil price spikes during the same period, in 2008 and again now, it should be crystal clear that domestic and Canadian production growth doesn't control the global price, and that a much better strategy lies in finding replacement technologies and actively reducing demand. But this is a tough sell when you think of things like how many Caterpillar 797B dump trucks are needed to mine the tar sands, and how the parts are manufactured all over the United States, by quite a few workers in quite a few Congressional districts. Add to that the public's resistance to raising gasoline taxes, and it becomes quite easy to see why it's politically difficult to enact bold and necessary energy policy. The hundreds of millions of lobbying dollars the oil industry spends certainly don't help our Senators see things clearly. American politicians have been saying we need to get off foreign oil for half a century. Canadian energy executives and politicians bristle when they hear things like that. They feel that somehow Canadian oil shouldn't be considered foreign because it comes from North America. But the ethical thing is for both countries to pursue energy independence based on clean, renewable sources that don't pollute the environment, harm human health, and risk massive destabilization of the global climate. As it stands, Canada has become a climate change ostrich with its head in the oil sands. A version of this article first appeared in the Carnegie Ethics Online column. Read More: Business, Conservation, Democracy, Development, Diplomacy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Ethics, Jobs, Security, Sustainability, Technology, Trade, Transportation, Canada, United States, Americas, Global, Middle Eastblog comments powered by Disqus

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Although often used interchangeably, the words "fate" and "destiny" have distinct connotations. - Traditional usage defines fate as a power or agency that predetermines and orders the course of events. Fate defines events as ordered or "inevitable" and unavoidable. Classical and European mythology features three goddesses dispensing fate, known as Moirai in Greek mythology, as Parcae in Roman mythology, and as Norns in Norse mythology. They determine the events of the world through the mystic spinning of threads that represent individual human fates. - Destiny is used with regard to the finality of events as they have worked themselves out; and to that same sense of "destination", projected into the future to become the flow of events as they will work themselves out. In other words, "fate" relates to events of the future and present of an individual and in cases in literature unalterable, whereas "destiny" relates to the probable future. Fate implies no choice, but with destiny the entity participates in achieving an outcome that is directly related to itself. Participation happens willfully. In Hellenistic civilization, the chaotic and unforeseeable turns of chance gave increasing prominence to a previously less notable goddess, Tyche, who embodied the good fortune of a city and all whose lives depended on its security and prosperity, two good qualities of life that appeared to be out of human reach. The Roman image of Fortuna, with the wheel she blindly turned, was retained by Christian writers, revived strongly in the Renaissance and survives in some forms today. In daily language, "destiny" and "fate" are synonymous, but with regard to 19th century philosophy, the words gained inherently different meanings. For Arthur Schopenhauer, destiny was just a manifestation of the Will to Live, which can be at the same time living fate and choice of overrunning the fate same, by means of the Art, of the Morality and of the Ascesis. For Nietzsche, destiny keeps the form of Amor fati (Love of Fate) through the important element of Nietzsche's philosophy, the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), the basis of human behavior, influenced by the Will to Live of Schopenhauer. But this concept may have even other senses, although he, in various places, saw the will to power as a strong element for adaptation or survival in a better way. Nietzsche eventually transformed the idea of matter as centers of force into matter as centers of will to power as mankind’s destiny to face with amor fati. The expression Amor fati is used repeatedly by Nietzsche as acceptation-choice of the fate, but in such way it becomes even another thing, precisely a "choice" destiny. Many Greek legends and tales teach the futility of trying to outmaneuver an inexorable fate that has been correctly predicted. This form of irony is important in Greek tragedy, as it is in Oedipus Rex and in the Duque de Rivas' play that Verdi transformed into La Forza del Destino ("The Force of Destiny") or Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or in Macbeth's uncannily-derived knowledge of his own destiny, which in spite of all his actions does not preclude a horrible fate. Other notable examples include Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in which Tess is destined to the miserable death that she is confronted with at the end of the novel; Samuel Beckett's Endgame; the popular short story "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs. Destiny is a recurring theme in the literature of Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), including Siddharta (1922) and his magnum opus, Das Glasperlenspiel, also published as The Glass Bead Game (1943). The common theme of these works involves a protagonist who cannot escape a destiny if their fate has been sealed, however hard they try. Destiny is also an important plot point in the hit TV shows Lost, Heroes and Supernatural, as well a common theme in the Roswell TV series. Destiny is a recurring theme in the video-game franchise Kingdom Hearts, with Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep having its story based around the concept of Destiny, and the tagline for the game stating "Destiny is never left to chance." Destiny is also a prominent theme in the anime Mawaru Penguindrum, which focuses on the concept that humans cannot escape from their own fate. See also |Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Destiny| - Divine Providence - Lazy argument - Qadr, destiny in Islam - Russian avos' - Psychology of human destiny - "The Wheel of Fortune" remains an emblem of the chance element in fate(destiny). - Beyond Good & Evil 13, Gay Science 349 & Genealogy of Morality II:12 - Cornelius, Geoffrey, C. (1994). "The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination", Penguin Group, part of Arkana Contemporary Astrology series.

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Race for survival On the brink of extinction, Honu'ea struggle to the sea October 23, 2008A full moon floods the wide swath of sand that conceals Orion's nest. Big Beach is lit up so bright we can see where the first ones emerged, the football-sized divot on a small mound of sand cordoned of with yellow caution tape. This is the third and final full moon to hit the still-gravid mound. Sheryl King, a biologist with the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, sits at the head of a circle consisting of a dozen or so of us. She explains what we are to do should more baby honu'ea—hawksbill turtles—dig their way out on one of our shifts: make sure they head in the right direction—toward the sea. Keep cats, mongooses, and crabs away. If one flips over in a footprint, push up sand beneath it so it can right itself, but don't ever touch a hatchling. We determine who stakes out when, then hit the hay, or rather the sand. Hawksbill nests typically gestate for around 60 days, King said, but she adjusts a nest's "due date" according to various factors, among them temperature and shade. King spotted Orion, the mother, depositing this particular clutch around 64 days prior to the first hatchlings' emergence. She was watching for nesting hawksbills as part of the dawn patrol, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service effort to spot nesting females as part of the Honu'ea Recovery Project. She estimated the nest would begin to hatch on October 11. She was only 2 days off. The project takes place with help from several entities, including FWS, the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The aim is to get the honu'ea population up to more stable number. Orion herself likely hatched very close to the spot where she dropped off her most recent batch. "They tend to return to their natal beach," said HWF co-founder Hannah Bernard. "We don't really understand how they find their way." Yet Orion doesn't stick around for very long after nesting. According to King, she spends most of her days off the coast of Oahu and comes to the vicinity of Big Beach every three to four years just to nest. "I first tracked her, and named her, in 2001," King said. "We've tracked her with satellite transmitters so we have a good handle on her movements." This is Orion's third or fourth nest this season. Two other nests were laid on island this year by an as yet unidentified female, which Bernard says is a good thing—one more nesting female adding to the species' extremely small gene pool. This is one of only ten or so nesting areas archipelago-wide. There are three on Maui. Other sites include Kameahame Beach on the Big Island and a black sand beach at the mouth of Moloka'i's Halawa River. Ninety percent of honu'ea nesting occurs on the Ka'u Coast of the Big Island. Nests contain an average of 140 eggs. But while a single hawksbill may lay nearly a thousand eggs in a given year, Hawaii's honu'ea aren't exactly thriving. King said that they have a one in 10,000 chance of making it to adulthood. Volunteers stake out the nest for 24 hours a day as the due date approaches to help ensure the hatchlings' instinctual seaward striving goes without predatory incident. HWF volunteer coordinator Angie Hofmann compares the hatching of a sea turtle nest to childbirth. Everyone was antsy in the days leading up to the hatching. A handful of volunteers parked nest-side in beach chairs day and night, eyes locked on the mound for even the tiniest movement. One volunteer called it a "watched pot." Only this one boils. The first batch emerged at around 5am on Monday, October 13. Forty-eight hatchlings made their way to the water that morning, but Orion's nest was still far from empty. Glimpsing these tiny hatchlings, bellies full of yolk, as they march toward the sea is an extraordinary sight on its own, but there is a particular sense of urgency for the little ones whose prolific mama chose to deposit them in the shade of a keawe tree at Big Beach. Honu'ea are not the enormous green guys that bob up beside you when you're snorkeling at Black Rock or Molokini. Honu'ea are smaller—they grow to be up to 270 pounds, whereas the greens round out at 400. Honu'ea have a beak rather than a rounded snout—hence the Anglo name, hawksbill. Most importantly, honu'ea are endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and most people you ask will say they're critically endangered; greens are not. Though their plight is severe and stemming from the same source, green sea turtles are listed as threatened, which means that their numbers are much higher than those of the honu'ea. Statewide, according to King and Bernard, there are fewer than 100 nesting female honu'ea. Fewer than ten of these will nest throughout the isles in any given year. Only five or six total dig their nests on Maui's coastline. "That's critically low," Bernard said, adding that the entire Hawaii hawksbill population is extremely vulnerable. "The greater your numbers, the greater your resilience." They cite anthropogenic—human—causes for the species' alarmingly low numbers: runoff, traffic, lights that disorient nesting turtles, introduced predators, habitat loss and more. Hawksbills across the globe were once plundered for their shells, which were made into combs, jewelry and even guitar picks. In Japan, according to the 1999 Jay April documentary Red Turtle Rising, they were seen as a sign of longevity, and thus stuffed and hung on the walls in many homes. In Hawaii their shells were used to make dinnerware, jewelry and medicine, though a kapu (taboo) barred honu'ea meat from being consumed (they dine primarily on poisonous sponges, which makes their meat toxic). The tortoiseshell pattern that may or may not constitute your sunglass frames was inspired by the hawksbill. In 1973 real tortoiseshell was banned worldwide under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). |Researchers have tracked Orion's (the mama turtle) route and found she likes to hang out on Oahu, but comes to Maui to nest.| It may be illegal to mess with them these days, but they're not exactly bouncing back. That's why the 140 or so hatchlings here at Big Beach, barely larger than your big toe, need to make it the ocean. So far the turnout has been outstanding. The first night saw 48 turtles scamper into the tide. The next night more than 100 came out. Tonight we'll see the stragglers to the shore, if there are any. The next day King will excavate the nest carefully with her hands for any that didn't make it out, dead or alive. Live hatchlings will be placed in the water after dusk. Eggshells will be counted and unhatched eggs will be sent to a NOAA lab in Honolulu for DNA testing. My one to 2am shift comes and goes without a peep. I've been instructed to shine a red flashlight on the nest every few minutes, but the mound is frozen. I fall asleep after my shift with few expectations. At some bleary hour a voice startles me awake. "There's a turtle!" King says as she passes my tent. "A turtle just hatched!" It's barely a quarter past five in the morning. Volunteers climb out of sleeping bags and tents and flood the area around the nest. One hatchling moves slowly toward the sea in the moonlight, almost a silhouette at this dark hour. Its tracks look like tire tread from a mountain bike. We inch along behind it, awestruck. After 20 minutes the turtle is at the edge of the sea. Although its flippers have just had a killer workout, the hatchling takes to the waves effortlessly after the lapping water swallows it whole. Any number of things could have thrown off the hatchling and its siblings. Had this been a beach up the road they may have gone toward bright lights. They may have gone toward South Kihei Road and gotten smashed, which has happened before with nesting mothers; once in 1993 and once in 1996, thanks to speeding motorists. A feral cat (of which there are many) could have gotten to them. King says that even ghost crabs prey on sea-bound hatchlings, gouging out their eyes in a horrific display King herself has witnessed in the northwest Hawaiian Isles. Hofmann said her major concern is the long-term impact of development on nesting. While Big Beach is a state park and thus can't be built upon, two proposed developments—Wailea 670 and the expansion of Makena Resort—could increase the volume of beachgoers that may, inadvertently or otherwise, disturb the nests. "If they both get their way there'd be another city down here," she said. The proposed development sites may be pretty far mauka of where the turtles nest, but storm runoff has an obvious impact on their ability to successfully hatch and make it to the sea, as does lighting. Hofmann said that, given how close honu'ea are to extinction, developers should reconsider how they determine appropriateness when choosing a building site. "The turtles have chosen this as their nesting place," she said. While there are several well-documented hawksbill nesting sites statewide, there is no bureaucratic mechanism that can designate them as a critical habitat. Bernard said that the only defense for sites with impending developments so far has been a lighting ordinance that the county adopted in 2007, which she said was watered-down. "It's not the bill that we hoped for," she said, "but it's a start." Just after six in the morning the camp gets jostled awake once again. Three more babies have come out, a volunteer says. I hop to my feet. The last ones to emerge on their own are making it to sea in the new daylight, each on a separate trajectory, seemingly unaware of one another but probably very aware of us. We scare away the looming ghost crabs. We clear the path of debris, as the turtles' tiny flippers hoist them along the final stretch of sand. It takes one honu'ea a few tries to take to the water; the oncoming surf pushes it off course. The other two swim off almost instantly. Nobody knows where they're headed. They return to near shore areas after about five to 10 years, but the time in between is known as the lost years. One theory is that they attach themselves to little clumps of seaweed, floating wherever the current takes them. Those ready to nest, of course, eventually make it back to the beach of their birth using some mysterious sense that we don't yet understand. The hope is they'll stick around long enough for us to find out. MTW For more information on how you can help hawksbills visit wildhawaii.org. To find out more about the role of honu'ea in Hawaiian history and culture check out the award-winning 1999 documentary Red Turtle Rising, directed by Jay April. The film is available for free on the Web at filmmaui.com and through the World Turtle Trust. |Entertainment and lifestyle news for Maui, Hawaii and the surrounding Islands. Maui Time Weekly is Mauis only independent and locally owned newspaper. Mail this link to a friend|

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The government's human rights record remained poor. Although there were no reports that the government or its agents committed politically motivated killings, security forces committed extrajudicial killings and acted with impunity. There was little political will to address the failure by government authorities to adhere to the rule of law. Detainees were abused, often to extract confessions, and prison conditions were harsh. Human rights monitors reported arbitrary arrests and prolonged pretrial detention, underscoring a weak judiciary and denial of the right to a fair trial. Land disputes and forced evictions, often accompanied by violence, were a continuing problem. The government restricted freedom of speech and the press through the use of defamation and disinformation suits, controlled or influenced the content of television and radio broadcasts, and at times interfered with freedom of assembly. Corruption was endemic and extended throughout all segments of society, including the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Domestic violence and child abuse occurred, education of children was inadequate, and trafficking in women and children persisted. The government offered little assistance to persons with disabilities. Antiunion activity by employers and weak enforcement of labor laws continued, and child labor remained a problem. In a positive turn, on June 12, the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts in Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea adopted its internal rules to begin prosecuting senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime and those most responsible for committing serious crimes. On July 31, the ECCC charged Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, with crimes against humanity and subsequently charged four other senior officials; at year's end all were in detention awaiting trial. In addition, on December 10, the government permitted a Human Rights Day march of 500 human rights activists, monks, and other persons and rally of an estimated 2,500 persons in Phnom Penh. RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS Section 1 Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom From: a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life There were no reports that the government or its agents committed politically motivated killings. However, human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reported that extrajudicial killings continued to occur. The Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC) recorded 53 cases of extrajudicial killings, 14 of which were committed by police, nine by soldiers, six by fishery officials, and the remaining 24 by unidentified government forces. Police arrested perpetrators in four cases. Political activists continued to be the victims of killings. On February 27, Eang Sok Thoeurn, a Khmer Kampuchea Krom monk, was found dead with his throat cut in the Tronum Chhroeung Monastery in Kandal Province. The deceased monk was discovered the morning after he participated in a demonstration in front of the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh for the rights of Khmer Kampuchea Krom persons living in Vietnam. Police quickly declared the death a suicide and disposed of the body without further investigation. NGOs and Khmer Kampuchea Krom groups suspected the killing was politically motivated. Active members of political parties were killed during the year, but NGOs and police could not confirm their deaths were politically motivated. On February 14, three unidentified persons killed Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) activist Chea Sovin, spouse of an SRP candidate for the April commune council elections in Battambang Province. On July 27, three unidentified persons shot and killed Kleb Un, SRP commune‑level vice party chairperson in Banteay Meanchey Province. A local police chief reported that the perpetrators fled without robbing the victim or taking anything from the scene. Police arrested one suspect in the case but released him after questioning. In both killings, police stated that investigations continued. On April 4, police officer Siv Soeun allegedly shot and killed a person he claimed was illegally fishing on private property in the Kompong Siem District of Kampong Cham Province. The victim's family filed a complaint against the police officer but later withdrew the complaint after Siv Soeun allegedly paid the family $3,000 (12 million riel) in compensation. At year's end Siv Soeun had not been charged or arrested. On November 15, during the eviction of squatters from state land in Choam Ksan commune, Preah Vihear Province, unidentified government forces killed two villagers who protested the eviction. Approximately 150 police, military police, and soldiers evicted 317 families. There was no official investigation into the killings. Police arrested 18 of the squatters, including a deputy governor, on charges of encroachment on state land. The 18 villagers were imprisoned and awaited trial at year's end. In June the Prey Veng Provincial Court sentenced one suspect in the November 2006 killing of SRP activist Man Meth to 10 years in prison and two others to six months in prison for conspiring in the killing. On July 18, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court sentenced Heng Pov, former Phnom Penh police commissioner and under secretary of state of the Ministry of Interior (MOI), to an additional 22.5 years in prison for the 2005 illegal detention of a person, use of illegal weapons, and possession of counterfeit currency. Heng Pov was already serving an 18‑year sentence for the 2003 murder of Judge Sok Sethamony, multiple counts of premeditated killings, and involvement in illegal arrests and detentions. During his July trial, Heng Pov stated that Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun, the two suspects he ordered arrested in 2005 and who later were convicted for the killing of union activist Chea Vichea, were innocent of the crime. On April 12, the appeals court had upheld 20‑year sentences each for Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun. Their lawyers submitted grievances to the Supreme Court, and at year's end they awaited Supreme Court action. There were no developments in the 2006 cases of SRP activists Koent Chhuon and Thoeung Thear, killed in Preah Vihear and Kampong Cham provinces, respectively. Likewise, there were no developments in the cases of Pao Rum and Khat Thoeun, who died in police custody in Kandal Province in 2006, or the 2006 cases of attempted prison breaks in Kampong Thom and Battambang that left 10 inmates dead. In the case of Nong Sam, who reportedly died June 2006 in a Siem Reap hospital from head injuries received during a beating by police officers, a provincial court prosecutor closed the case, declaring Nong Sam's death a suicide. There were no developments in the 2005 killings of five SRP activists or in the 2005 case of an attempted escape from Trapoeung Phlong Prison in which 19 prisoners and the prison director were killed. The appeals court took no action in the 2005 deaths of five villagers and injuries to others by government security forces during a mass eviction from disputed land in the village of Kbal Spean in Banteay Meanchey Province. On February 8, in Prey Veng Province, district‑ and commune‑level deputy police chiefs Bun Samphea, Suos Bunthat, and Hay Chivon, charged in a 2000 killing, failed to appear for their provincial court trial, reportedly stating they were too busy. The court rescheduled the trial to June but postponed it again after the officers said they were too busy to come to the June trial. A new trial date was not set. Mines dating from the Indochina conflict and Khmer Rouge period continued to cause casualties. According to the Cambodia Mine/UXO Victim Information System, during the year mines and unexploded ordnance caused 63 deaths, 56 amputations, and 222 other injuries. Vigilante justice and mob killings persisted. ADHOC reported that mobs killed five persons during the year. Few suspects were arrested. In some instances authorities could not protect suspects from angry mobs. NGOs noted that a majority of mob killings were related to thefts, robberies, or suspected witchcraft. On June 9, Yos Chor villagers in Kampong Speu Province killed a person for stealing a neighbor's chickens. On June 21, a mob killed a traditional healer in the Boribo District of Kampong Chhnang Province because they suspected him of witchcraft. Police made no arrests in either case. On June 27, the Kratie Provincial Court sentenced six persons to sentences ranging from seven to 10 months in prison for the 2006 vigilante justice killing of Sam Roeun. The court convicted them on charges of causing injury, reduced from investigation findings of murder. There were no developments in the February 2006 case of a person beaten and killed for allegedly practicing witchcraft. On June 30, Khmer Kampuchea Krom monk Tim Sakhorn, head of a pagoda in the Kirivong District of Takeo Province for more than 10 years, disappeared. Previously, on orders of the country's top Buddhist leader, Great Supreme Patriarch Tep Vong, monks from Phnom Penh had defrocked Tim Sakhorn, after which unidentified persons believed to be attached to the MOI pushed him into a vehicle and drove away. The defrocking order stated Tim Sakhorn "broke the solidarity" between Cambodia and Vietnam by using pagodas to spread propaganda that affects the dignity of Buddhism. The monk was known locally for providing food and shelter to Khmer Kampuchea Krom coming from Vietnam. The MOI stated that Tim Sakhorn volunteered to go to Vietnam after he was defrocked, and ministry officials produced a document stating this intent. While signed by Tim Sakhorn, the handwritten document appeared not to be in his writing. On August 2, Tim Sakhorn reappeared in court custody in Vietnam, held on charges of destroying political solidarity. In September the Information Ministry stated that the Cambodian consulate in Ho Chi Minh City was investigating Tim Sakhorn's condition in detention. On November 8, a Vietnamese newspaper reported that a court in Vietnam convicted Tim Sakhorn of undermining solidarity between Cambodia and Vietnam and sentenced him to one year in prison. On August 10, Land Border Protection Unit 504 soldier Im Bun Ny disappeared in Pailin. According to witnesses, that night four soldiers from his unit invited him to a rubber plantation owned by their unit commander, Brigadier General Pol Sinuon. After Im Bun Ny arrived, the four soldiers beat him and accused him of stealing a gun. Unconfirmed witness reports said Im Bun Ny died from the beating and the soldiers buried his body. At year's end Im Bun Ny was still missing. According to a human rights NGO, local police completed an investigation and submitted findings to the court. The court took no action, and the four soldiers remained at large. c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment The constitution such practices; however, beatings and other forms of physical mistreatment of police detainees and prison inmates continued to be a serious problem. There were credible reports that military and civilian police officials used physical and psychological torture and severely beat criminal detainees, particularly during interrogation. Based on interviews with 1,293 detainees from 18 of the country's 26 prisons, the Cambodian League for the Prevention and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) reported that during the year authorities tortured 155 prisoners, of whom 125 were tortured in police custody and 30 in prisons. Kicking, punching, and pistol whipping were the most common methods of physical abuse, but techniques also included electric shocks, suffocation, caning, and whipping with wire. NGOs reported that it was not uncommon for police to torture detained suspects until they confessed to a crime. Courts used forced confessions as legal evidence during trial despite admissibility prohibitions under the law. NGOs noted that during the year there were 180 cases of physical assaults by local authorities, government agents, or private bodyguards, compared with 164 cases in 2006 and 154 cases in 2005. On May 27, military police officer Prak Vutha of Phnom Sruoch District, Kampong Speu Province, reportedly arrested Sok Soeun after a small scuffle at a restaurant, kept him in military detention overnight without a warrant, and beat him unconscious. According to ADHOC, Sok Soeun's family gave Prak Vutha two cases of beer in return for Sok Soeun's release. Sok Soeun later filed a complaint with local police that the police did not accept. There was no investigation into the case or legal action against Prak Vutha. No legal action was taken against two policemen from Border Protection Unit 701 implicated in a February 2006 beating of a 13‑year‑old boy. Likewise, there was no action against officials and no progress in the police investigation of an April 2006 case involving Police Commissioner Team Sangkriem in Preah Vihear Province and three other police agents who detained Kong Salath without a warrant and beat him. No disciplinary or legal action was taken against abusive officers in the April 2006 beating of a motorist by Battambang military police. Regarding the December 2006 case of Tous Sdoeung, whom two military police officers allegedly tortured to death while in detention, early in the year a provincial court prosecutor completed an investigation and forwarded it to an investigating judge. The court investigation continued. The two alleged perpetrators continued to work in their positions as military police officers. Prison and Detention Center Conditions Prison conditions did not meet international standards. Conditions remained harsh and at times were life threatening. Government efforts to improve them continued to be hampered by a lack of funds and weak enforcement. Human rights organizations cited a number of serious problems, including overcrowding, medical and sanitation problems, food and water shortages, malnutrition, and poor security. According to LICADHO, the 18 prisons they monitored had a designed capacity of approximately 6,440 inmates but held a total 9,582 inmates. There were reports at some prisons that cells of 40 by 20 feet held up to 110 prisoners. At CC1 prison, cells of 26 by 26 feet held an average of 50 prisoners. In some prisons authorities used shackles and held prisoners in small, dark cells as a form of harsher punishment. LICADHO reported that 56 prisoners in 18 of the country's prisons died during the year. Government ration allowances for purchasing prisoners' food routinely were misappropriated and remained inadequate, exacerbating malnutrition and disease. One NGO claimed that in some cases prison authorities sold the NGO's donations of supplemental food intended for prisoners. According to rights organizations, families had to bribe prison officials in order to visit prisoners or provide them food and other necessities. NGOs reported that prisoners whose families bribed prison authorities received preferential treatment including access to visitors, transfer to better cells, and the opportunity to leave cells during the day. There were reports that officials demanded bribes before allowing prisoners to attend trials or appeal hearings and before releasing inmates who had served full jail terms. In most prisons there was no separation of adult and juvenile prisoners, of male and female prisoners, or of persons convicted of serious crimes and persons detained for minor offenses. Pretrial detainees were routinely held together with convicted prisoners. LICADHO reported that there were 622 incarcerated minors ages 13 to 17, many of whom were held in prisons that did not have facilities to separate minors from adult prisoners. The government generally continued to allow international and domestic human rights groups, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, to visit prisons and provide human rights training to prison guards. However, NGOs reported that at times cooperation from local authorities was limited. Authorities curtailed access to pretrial detainees, in particular. The MOI continued to require that lawyers, human rights monitors, and other visitors obtain permission prior to visiting prisoners. The MOI withheld such permission in some politically sensitive cases. NGOs were not allowed to interview prisoners in private. d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention The law prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention; however, at times the government did not respect these prohibitions. On June 7, the National Assembly passed a criminal procedures code, and in August the king signed the law into effect. The new code went allows for pretrial detention of up to six months for misdemeanors and 18 months for felonies. Prior to enactment of this code, the maximum length of pretrial detention for an adult person was six months under the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) code, although the government sometimes held pretrial detainees for longer periods. ADHOC reported that at least 100 persons were illegally arrested and detained during the year. ADHOC stated that 32 of those illegally detained were subsequently freed following detainee complaints, interventions by human rights NGOs, or payment of bribes. ADHOC believed that the actual number of arbitrary arrests and detentions was somewhat higher, because some victims in rural areas did not file complaints due to difficulty in traveling to the NGO's offices or out of fear for their family's security. According to ADHOC, no legal or disciplinary actions were taken against the persons responsible for the illegal actions. Role of the Police and Security Apparatus The General Commissariat of the National Police, which is under the supervision of the MOI, manages all civilian police units. The police forces are divided into those who have the authority to make arrests, those without such authority, and the judicial police. Military police are permitted to arrest civilians on military property or when authorized by local governments. Police officers acted with impunity, and in most cases the government took little or no action. There were reports that police, prosecutors, investigating judges, and presiding judges received bribes from owners of illegal businesses. The law requires police, prosecutors, and judges to investigate all complaints, including those of police abuses; however, in practice judges and prosecutors rarely conducted an independent investigation prior to a public trial. Presiding judges passed down verdicts based only on written reports from police and witness testimonies. In general police received little professional training. Police who failed to prevent or respond to societal violence were rarely disciplined. There were no developments in the April 2006 case of an antidrug department and military police officer who shot and injured a well‑known singer, Sovansocheata. No legal action was taken in the April 2006 case of two Brigade 70 military unit officers who shot and injured a person in Phnom Penh. There were no developments in the June 2006 case in which a military officer shot and injured a garment factory worker. In February an investigating judge in Siem Reap Province issued a warrant for the arrest of three police officers who allegedly raped a 12‑year‑old girl in November 2006; however, the suspects remained at large. There were no developments in the pending appeal of the April 2006 acquittal of three judges, two deputy prosecutors, and two court clerks originally convicted, then retried after appeal on finding of a mistrial, on charges of corruption and corruption‑related conspiracy. Arrest and Detention The law requires police to obtain a warrant from an investigating judge prior to making an arrest, but police may arrest without a warrant anyone caught in the act of committing a crime. The law allows police to take a person into custody and conduct an investigation for 48 hours, excluding weekends and government holidays, before charges must be filed. In felony cases of exceptional circumstances prescribed by law, police may detain a suspect for an additional 24 hours with the approval of a prosecutor. However, authorities routinely held persons for extended periods before charging them. Many prisoners, particularly those without legal representation, had no opportunity to seek release on bail. Under the new criminal procedures code, accused persons may be arrested and detained for up to 24 hours before meeting with a lawyer, but prisoners routinely were held for several days before gaining access to a lawyer or family members. According to government officials, such prolonged detention largely was a result of the limited capacity of the court system. LICADHO reported that as of midyear at least 101 pretrial detainees had been detained longer than the six‑month limit. Under the allowable pretrial detainee periods stipulated by the new code, at year's end there were at least 34 such prisoners. On May 19, two military police officers in Banteay Meanchey Province detained Kim Heang for three days after Kim Heang had a dispute with his neighbor, a regional military official. The two officers made the arrest without a warrant. After an NGO intervened, the officers' commander ordered Kim Heang released. No administrative or legal action was taken against the officers. On May 25, the Ratanakiri Provincial Court sentenced a 13‑year‑old Jarai ethnic minority youth to eight months and 10 days in prison for stealing brass gongs. The youth was 12 years old when arrested, under the minimum age for imprisonment, but spent more than eight months in pretrial detention. According to ADHOC, on May 25, a prosecutor filed a suit with the appeals court, but at year's end the youth remained in jail. On August 9, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court convicted six persons and acquitted two charged with planning bombings at the November 2006 Water Festival. Two of the convicted were sentenced in absentia to 12 years in prison. The remaining four received six‑year sentences. Lawyers and NGOs maintained the police did not serve arrest warrants or tell the suspects the charges against them. e. Denial of Fair Public Trial The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, but the government did not respect judicial independence. The courts were subject to influence and interference by the executive branch, and there was widespread corruption among judges, prosecutors, and court officials. The court system consists of lower courts, an appeals court, and the Supreme Court. The constitution also mandates a constitutional council, which is empowered to review the constitutionality of laws, and a supreme council of the magistracy, which appoints, oversees, and disciplines judges. The composition of both councils heavily favored the CPP. There is a separate military court system, which suffered from deficiencies similar to those of the civilian court system. While civilians may fall under military court jurisdiction in some cases, the legal distinction between the military and civil courts sometimes was ignored in practice. Civilians have been called for interrogation by military courts with no apparent jurisdiction in their cases. On June 12, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) adopted its internal rules to begin prosecuting egregious crimes of the 1975‑79 Khmer Rouge regime. On July 31, the ECCC coinvestigating judges charged Kaing Guek Eav (alias Duch), former Khmer Rouge director of the S‑21 torture prison, or Tuol Sleng, for crimes against humanity and placed him in an ECCC provisional detention center. The ECCC later arrested and detained four more Khmer Rouge leaders and charged them with crimes against humanity and war crimes: Nuon Chea (also known as "Brother Number 2"), Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Ieng Thirith, who was charged only with crimes against humanity. In August Duch's lawyers filed an appeal against his provisional detention. On December 3, the ECCC pretrial chamber decided unanimously to affirm the detention order and dismiss the appeal. Trials are public. Juries are not used; the presiding judge possesses the authority to pass a verdict. Defendants have the right to be present and consult with an attorney, confront and question witnesses against them, and present witnesses and evidence on their own behalf. If a defendant cannot afford an attorney, the court is required to provide the defendant with free legal representation; however, the judiciary lacked the resources to provide legal counsel, and most defendants sought assistance from NGOs or went without legal representation. Trials typically were perfunctory, and extensive cross‑examination usually did not take place. Defendants and their attorneys have the right to examine government‑held evidence relevant to their cases; however, at times it was difficult for them to obtain such access, especially if the case was political or involved a high‑ranking government official or well‑connected member of the elite. Defendants are entitled by law to the presumption of innocence and the right of appeal, but due to pervasive corruption, defendants often were expected to bribe judges to secure a verdict. A citizen's right to appeal sometimes was limited by difficulty in transferring prisoners from provincial prisons to the appeals court in Phnom Penh. Many appeals thus were heard in the absence of the defendant. A lack of resources, low salaries, and poor training contributed to a high level of corruption and inefficiency in the judicial branch, and the government did not ensure due process. From January through September, the Center for Social Development monitored 1,420 felony and misdemeanor hearings with 2,437 defendants and found trial procedure abuses in the Supreme Court, appeals court, and four lower courts. In a report of trials observed from January to March, the center stated that courts tried 34 percent of 740 defendants in absentia. At the appeals level, defendants were not present during trial in 69 percent of cases. Of defendants charged with felonies, 37 percent had legal representation, compared with 7 percent of those charged with misdemeanors. Officials reported many suits were pending due to a shortage of judges and courtrooms. NGOs blamed the slow process on court officials who focused on cases from which they could gain financial benefits. There remained a critical shortage of trained lawyers, particularly outside Phnom Penh. Persons without means to secure counsel often were effectively denied the right to a fair trial. According to the Bar Association, approximately 30 percent of the country's 573 lawyers provided legal counsel to poor persons, although this was inadequate to cover the basic legal rights of all of the country's poor. Sworn written statements from witnesses and the accused usually constituted the only evidence presented at trials. The accused person's statements sometimes were coerced through beatings or threats, and illiterate defendants often were not informed of the content of written confessions that they were forced to sign. In cases involving military personnel, military officers often exerted pressure on judges of civilian criminal courts to have the defendants released without trial. Court delays or corrupt practices often allowed accused persons to escape prosecution. Government officials or members of their families who committed crimes often enjoyed impunity. Although the courts prosecuted some members of the security forces for human rights abuses, impunity for most of those who committed abuses remained a problem. In many criminal cases, rich or powerful accused individuals usually paid money to victims and authorities to drop the criminal charges against them. Authorities were known to urge victims or their families to accept financial restitution in exchange for dropping criminal charges. Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun remained in prison for the murder of Chea Vichea. On April 12, an appeals court hearing upheld the Phnom Penh Municipal Court decision sentencing them to 20 years each in prison, despite new exculpatory evidence. On June 7, lawyers filed grievances with the Supreme Court and at year's end were awaiting action. On June 7, the National Assembly passed a criminal procedures code, and in August the king signed the law into effect. As a cornerstone of national law also to be employed at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, the new code was based on wide international consultation and was viewed as meeting an international standard suitable for the tribunal's trial judges. Political Prisoners and Detainees There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees. Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies The country has a judiciary in civil matters, and citizens are entitled to bring lawsuits seeking damages for human rights violations. Generally, there are both administrative and judicial remedies. However, the judiciary was generally viewed as corrupt, politically biased, and weak, and persons seldom filed complaints because they did not trust the judicial system. The public appeared especially distrusting of the judiciary to act in a transparent manner when a case was in conflict with the government. Enforcing a court order for a civil or criminal case was often problematic. Persons occasionally turned to vigilante justice. f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence The law provides for the privacy of residence and correspondence and prohibits illegal searches; however, police routinely conducted searches and seizures without warrants. There continued to be reports of authorities entering private properties without proper judicial authorization. Due to the forced collectivization during Khmer Rouge rule and the return of thousands of refugees, land ownership often was unclear, and most landowners lacked adequate formal documentation of ownership. The 2001 land law states that any person who peacefully possessed private property without contention for five years prior to the 2001 promulgation of the law has the right to a definitive title to that property. Widespread land speculation fueled disputes and increased tensions between poor rural communities and speculators. The Cadastral Commission, which settles disputes over land that was not registered or where an owner was not given a land certificate, continued to perform its functions slowly. The courts remained responsible for resolving disputes in cases where land was registered or disputants were given land titles. The National Authority for Resolving Land Disputes, established in 2006 to adjudicate land cases, was ineffective. Problems of inhabitants being forced to relocate continued to occur when officials or businesspersons colluded with local authorities. Some persons also used the court system to intimidate the poor and vulnerable into exchanging their land for compensation below market value. ADHOC reported receiving 382 land‑related cases affecting 19,329 families during the year. During the same period, LICADHO received 98 land‑related cases in Phnom Penh and 13 other provinces affecting a total of 6,048 persons. The poor often had no legal documents to support their land claims and lacked faith in the judicial system. Some of those expelled successfully contested these actions in court, but the majority lost their cases. On January 23, 200 ethnic Jarai villagers in Ratanakiri Province filed a complaint with the provincial court and a criminal complaint with the provincial prosecutor against Keat Kolney, a well‑connected individual, for confiscation of 1,112 acres of their land in 2004. Many villagers rejected Keat Kolney's settlement offers. On June 19, Keat Kolney sent a letter to the Cambodian Bar Association alleging the legal aid NGO lawyers who represented the villagers trained the villagers to say false things to the media and asked the association to investigate the lawyers. On June 21, Keat Kolney filed criminal complaints accusing the villagers of fraud and the lawyers of inciting villagers to commit fraud. In late July 42 of the 200 villagers retracted earlier statements and said they willingly sold the land to Keat Kolney. At year's end a provincial court investigation continued. On April 20, approximately 150 military police and police officers armed with guns, electric batons, and tear gas forcibly evicted 117 families from the Mittapheap District in Sihanoukville. Several villagers were injured, and their houses were demolished. On May 4, 30 L'vea Em District villagers of Kandal Province approached the National Assembly to intervene in an economic land concession. Community families had been farming and inhabiting the disputed 1,730 acres when, on April 25, a Chinese company began digging up the land, acting on a 2006 government concession for development. The company reportedly suspended operations due to villagers' protests. On May 29, 40 soldiers from ACO Tank Command Headquarters in Kampong Speu Province used an armored vehicle to destroy crops and fences on 60 acres of land occupied by 25 Phnom Srouch District families. Military officials stated the land was part of a shooting range and the villagers had illegally occupied the land. In 2002 the villagers had sought title to their land with the Cadastral Commission, and in 2006 they complained to the National Authority to Resolve Land Disputes, stating they had lived on the land since 1979. At year's end these requests had not resulted in any action. Eviction notices were served without proper judicial authorization. On July 31, Sihanoukville City Hall issued an eviction notice ordering more than 100 families out of the city's Mittapheap District. Responding to villagers' plea for intervention, the prime minister ordered the Sihanoukville governor to reexamine the case. On May 8, representatives of 146 families of the Phnom Penh Tonle Bassac Group 78 (G78) area made public their own neighborhood development plan. The plan was in response to a June 2006 municipality eviction notice stating the land would be developed for beautification purposes. Many of the families had lived on the land since the 1980s and claimed ownership under the 2001 land law. G78 community members stated that the municipality offered compensation that was approximately equal to 2 percent of the independently assessed market value, plus one plot in a Phnom Penh eviction resettlement site per family. At year's end there were no decisions on these evictions. On March 3, the CPP Central Committee granted the prime minister sole power to resolve land disputes involving CPP officials. The prime minister then announced a war against illegal land grabbers, warning CPP officials to surrender illegally obtained land or face removal from their positions. As a result, the government claimed that the director general of the military's technical and materials department, Chao Phirun, handed over 495 acres of land and an anonymous CPP official withdrew from a Kandal Province land dispute. Neither official faced reprimand. On March 10, authorities arrested CPP member and military Colonel Te Haing over a 2,500‑acre land dispute in Banteay Meanchey Province. At year's end Te Haing was awaiting trial. In November Tan Seng Hak, a former advisor to CPP Chairperson Chea Sim, was convicted for falsifying documents and giving false testimony in connection with his alleged efforts to take over 740 acres in Phnom Penh. He was sentenced to a total of five years and eight months in prison. There were no developments on the prime minister's May 2006 plan to redistribute 494,210 acres of land to 50,000 farmers in Sihanoukville. Living conditions worsened at two of the resettlement sites for former residents of the two Phnom Penh communities of Tonle Bassac Sambok Chab and Preah Monivong Hospital areas, whose 1,200 and 168 families, respectively, were evicted in 2006, reportedly through a nontransparent process that may not have included proper judicial authorization. Authorities offered evicted residents relocation site plots, but plots at two of the sites were widely considered to be inadequate compensation. The sites lacked sufficient sanitation facilities, electricity, clean water, health facilities, schools, and central markets and were far from Phnom Penh's commercial center, where residents could earn an adequate income. The appeals court took no action on a February 2006 complaint by SRP parliamentarian Son Chhay, who was directed by the Siem Reap Provincial Court to sell 7.8 acres of his land to a government agency for an amount below the market price. The appeals court took no action in the 2006 case of 12 persons convicted in connection with a Kampot Province confrontation between 2,000 squatters and local police over the squatters' rights to live on government land. In a 2006 eviction case in Peam Chor District, Prey Veng Province, that left one person dead and four others injured, police who were implicated in the killing accused some of the villagers of robbery, in what NGOs said was an attempt to intimidate the villagers. On November 1, the provincial court questioned seven of the villagers on the robbery charges, and the court investigation continued at year's end. However, there were no new developments in the investigation of the eviction killings and injuries. There were no new developments in the August 2006 Koh Kong Province land dispute in which the Ministry of Agriculture provided two adjacent land concessions to businessperson and CPP senator Ly Yong Phat in contravention of known legal standards. There were no developments in a 2005 land dispute involving indigenous Phnong hill tribe members and a Chinese company in Mondulkiri Province. Section 2 Respect for Civil Liberties, Including: a. Freedom of Speech and Press The constitution provides for freedom of speech and of the press; however, these rights were not always respected in practice. The constitution implicitly limits free speech by requiring that it not adversely affect public security. The constitution also declares that the king is "inviolable." In December the Ministry of Information issued a directive that reiterates these limits and prohibits publishers and editors from running stories that insult or defame government leaders and institutions. The 1995 press law prohibits prepublication censorship or imprisonment for expressing opinions. However, the government continued to use the older UNTAC law to prosecute journalists and others on defamation and disinformation charges. In 2006 the National Assembly amended the UNTAC law, eliminating imprisonment for defamation but not for spreading disinformation, which carries prison sentences of up to three years. In both types of cases, judges can order fines, which may lead to jail time if not paid. The government and influential individuals used the weak and often politically biased judiciary to file defamation and disinformation suits, both civil and criminal, in an effort to silence critics. In February the Phnom Penh Municipal Court charged Sralanh Khmer of disinformation and insulting the court's director, Chiv Keng. Also in February Sihanoukville Municipal Governor Say Hak filed a defamation suit against pro‑Norodom Ranariddh Party (NRP) newspaper Samleng Yuveachun Khmer (Voice of Khmer Youth) over an article linking him to land grabbing. In July NRP Vice Secretary General Sao Rany filed a defamation suit against Sralahn Khmer for printing a report claiming his daughter had an affair with Prince Ranariddh. In November General Un Den lodged a defamation and disinformation lawsuit against Thach Keth, the publisher of Sralanh Khmer, for printing an article that accused the general of smuggling vehicles across the border from Thailand. At year's end there were no formal decisions in these cases. In July Phnom Penh Municipality Governor Kep Chuktema filed a disinformation suit against the editor of Samleng Yuveachun Khmer for an article alleging the governor sold City Hall to a private developer. In November the editor paid bail of $500 (two million riel), and at year's end the case was pending with the court. The constitution states that the country shall not invade any country nor interfere in any other country's internal affairs, directly or indirectly. Making a statement in contravention of this constitutional provision is considered a crime. In the case of at least one Khmer Kampuchea Krom activist, an arrest warrant was outstanding due to his statements about what the government considers to be sovereign Vietnamese territory. Many interpreted a law passed in 2006 as limiting the right of members of Parliament (MPs) to speak freely. The law declares that MPs may not use their parliamentary immunity to abuse national security, social customs, or an individual's honor. In addition, the law allows an MP to be arrested, charged, and detained prior to the lifting of parliamentary immunity. At year's end no MP had been charged under this law. All major political parties had reasonable and regular access to the print media. Although the press law does not specifically permit newspapers to receive financial support from political parties, all major Khmer‑language newspapers received such support and were politically aligned. There were an estimated 20 Khmer‑language newspapers published regularly; more than half were considered pro‑CPP, and at least two newspapers were considered to support each of the other main political parties--FUNCINPEC, the SRP, and the NRP. Although the three largest circulation newspapers were considered pro‑CPP, most newspapers criticized the government, particularly on corruption and land grabbing. The prime minister, NRP president Prince Norodom Ranariddh, FUNCINPEC party leaders, and opposition party leader Sam Rainsy frequently came under attack. The government, military forces, and ruling political party continued to dominate the broadcast media and influence the content of broadcasts. There were approximately 50 radio stations and seven television stations. Most were controlled or strongly influenced by the CPP, although a few were independent or aligned with other parties. In August the Ministry of Information issued a broadcast license to a CPP government official to open a Phnom Penh radio station after denying similar requests since 2003 from the SRP and independent human rights advocacy organizations. In September the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) Voice of Democracy (VOD) again requested a license, but the ministry denied the application, restating previous claims that the media market was saturated. In February the Information Ministry ordered all television and radio stations not to transfer or sell licenses if unable to continue operating and to return the license to the ministry. Despite being unable to obtain a broadcast license, the VOD radio program, which included independent and often antigovernment views, remained popular and continued broadcasting its program on several radio stations, including the SRP‑aligned radio station FM 93.5. In July CCHR announced that it had transferred management of VOD to the newly established Cambodian Center of Independent Media. Taped programming from Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) Khmer‑language service was also regularly broadcast on Beehive/FM 105, the Women's Media Center FM 102, and Rota Angkor FM 95.5 (Siem Reap) radio stations. Four political parties were each broadcasting daily one‑hour shows on FM 105. Journalists, publishers, and distributors were also subject to other forms of harassment and intimidation, including death threats. In June the Ministry of Information ordered the confiscation of printed copies of a report by the international NGO Global Witness accusing the prime minister and close relatives and associates of involvement in illegal logging. The report was freely available via the Internet, and local media made references to the report. A June 8 letter signed by Information Minister Khieu Kanharith to Sralanh Khmer demanded the newspaper immediately stop publishing a serialized version of the report or face legal action; the newspaper complied. In the same period, French‑language newspaper Cambodge Soir closed down, reportedly due to bankruptcy. A few days prior, according to media reports, employees declared a strike because a reporter was dismissed for publishing a story about the Global Witness report. After a closure of several months, the newspaper resumed as a weekly publication. In October Radio Beehive Director Mam Sonando suspended the NRP's radio show "Royalist Voices" for several days after the program criticized the prime minister. An RFA journalist fled the country reportedly after receiving death threats for his coverage of illegal logging in Kampong Thom Province. The reporter returned several weeks later and resumed work unharmed. In February the Ministry of Information threatened to close pro‑NRP newspaper Khmer Amatak (Permanent Khmer) for printing an article alleged to have incited tension between the country's two main Buddhist sects, and in October the ministry suspended the newspaper for one month for failing to publish a "correction" the ministry requested regarding a September article involving two senior FUNCINPEC officials. In early November authorities seized copies of the premier issue of foreign‑funded Free Press Magazine for criticizing retired king Norodom Sihanouk, the prime minister, and other government officials. In May the prime minister publicly criticized an RFA reporter as "insolent" and "rude" for asking questions about the coalition between the CPP and FUNCINPEC. Purportedly fearing for his personal safety, the reporter went into hiding outside the country. He returned to work a few weeks later without incident. In June three reporters from the newspapers Sarpotamean Ekkereach Kampuchea (Cambodian Independence News) and Sarpotamean Tasanak Khmer (Khmer Vision News) in Pursat Province alleged that provincial court official bodyguards beat them at gunpoint for trying to take photographs of a truck carrying illegal timber. On August 4, Oeun Vannak, deputy commander of the Pursat Province military police, allegedly physically attacked journalist Heng Veasna over the journalist's investigation into claims of illegal use of firearms by two military police officers. Heng Veasna filed a complaint with the provincial prosecutor, but at year's end the court had not taken action in the case, and Oeun Vannak continued his military police duty. In August the home of a Chhbas Ka (Accurate News) newspaper reporter was set on fire twice. The journalist claimed the first fire was set the day after he received a threatening telephone call over his report on illegal logging in Pursat Province. A few days later, provincial authorities charged two suspects with arson. The cases were pending before the court at year's end. In November a man accused three journalists from the newspaper Samleng Santepheap (Voice of Peace) in Kampong Thom of stealing $1,050 (4.2 million riel) when the reporters visited his home to investigate allegations that he was illegally raising snakehead fish. Police arrested and questioned the reporters but eventually released them after the intervention of a senior official from the Ministry of Information. In December a VOD reporter investigating the removal of a statue from a pagoda claimed to have been detained by military and police officers, who deleted photographs from his camera before releasing him. Most reporters and editors privately admitted to some self‑censorship due to fear of government reprisals. In February two major daily Khmer newspapers refused to print advertisements demanding justice for the two men imprisoned for the killing of union leader Chea Vichea. Reporters for VOA, RFA, and some opposition newspapers worked from unmarked offices and reported stories using pseudonyms. The government‑controlled national television and radio stations broadcast live or taped sessions of National Assembly debates; however, in several instances these broadcasts were censored. National radio and television stations broadcast some human rights, social action, public health, education, and civil society programming produced by domestic NGOs. The government occasionally restricted media access to some government facilities. The constitution mandates media access to National Assembly sessions, and the National Assembly allowed reporters to enter its grounds upon clearance by its security office. In 2005 the Phnom Penh Municipal Court chief ordered that reporters must have written permission to bring recording devices into the courtroom and to interview court officials. Such permission rarely was sought, and there were no reports of the court denying permission. A July 2006 Council of Ministers directive prohibiting government officials and employees from speaking to the media or the public about government corruption remained in effect. In August government authorities confiscated digital video discs with images of bodies in an airplane crash in Kampot Province, stating that the images would create fear among tourists. The video discs remained readily available in Phnom Penh and other areas of the country. There were no government restrictions on access to the Internet or reports that the government monitored e‑mail or Internet chat rooms. Individuals and groups could engage in the peaceful expression of views via the Internet, including by e‑mail. Although the International Telecommunication Union estimated the country's Internet penetration was 0.3 percent in 2006, in urban areas Internet access was widely available through Internet cafes and home subscriptions. Academic Freedom and Cultural Events In general there were no legal impediments to academic freedom. However, scholars tended to be careful when teaching politically related subjects for fear of offending politicians. In February the Phnom Penh Municipal Court sentenced Tieng Narith, a former professor at the Buddhist University of the Royal Academy of Preah Sihanouk Reach, to two and a half years in prison for teaching from a self‑published text containing antigovernment material. The verdict also ordered a fine of $1,250 (5.25 million riels) or two additional years in prison. Tieng Narith's family claimed that he was mentally ill, and during the trial the court ordered a psychiatric examination, the results of which were kept confidential. It was unclear how the medical exam results affected the case, if at all. At year's end the case was under appeal. There were no government restrictions on cultural events. b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association Freedom of Assembly The constitution provides for freedom of peaceful assembly, but at times the government did not respect this right in practice. The government required that a permit be obtained in advance of a march or demonstration. The government routinely did not issue permits to groups critical of the ruling party or of nations with which the government had friendly relations. Authorities cited the need for stability and public security as reasons for denying permits. Police forcibly dispersed groups that assembled without a permit, often resulting in minor injuries to some demonstrators. ADHOC reported that out of 98 protests--55 of which were related to land and 26 to labor disputes--police and military police dispersed 17 protests, three of which were by labor protesters, 10 by land rights protesters, and four by Khmer Kampuchea Krom monks. However, the government permitted some human rights‑related marches and demonstrations. On December 10, the government permitted a Human Rights Day march of 500 human rights activists, monks, and other persons and a rally of an estimated 2,500 persons in Phnom Penh. In the previous two years, such rallies without marches occurred in an enclosed space. On February 27, police and military police dispersed 60 Khmer Kampuchea Krom Buddhist monks demonstrating at the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh during a state visit by the Vietnamese president. Demonstrators assembled to support Khmer Kampuchea Krom monks in Vietnam who had been defrocked and arrested, urging their release and reinstatement as monks. The next morning one monk protester was found dead with his throat cut. On March 16, police and local authorities in Kandal Province prevented the deceased monk's Khmer Kampuchea Krom community members and monks from holding his funeral. On April 20, police and municipal authorities dispersed 80 Khmer Kampuchea Krom monks assembled at the Vietnamese embassy trying to deliver a petition in protest of alleged Vietnamese government rights abuses of Khmer Kampuchea Krom living in Vietnam. The protesters decided to go to another embassy to present the petition. On the way a group of unidentified, non‑Khmer Kampuchea Krom monks and laypersons aggressively intercepted the demonstrators and attempted to disperse them. In the ensuing scuffle, one of the Khmer Kampuchea Krom monks was injured. Authorities did not intervene in the confrontation and did not conduct an investigation. On December 17, 40 monks sought again to deliver a petition to Vietnamese embassy officials for the release of Tim Sakhorn and other Khmer Kampuchea Krom monks imprisoned in Vietnam, and also for the return of land that they claimed the Vietnamese government seized from Khmer Kampuchea Krom persons in southern Vietnam. Police attempted to disperse the crowd, but the monks refused to disband, and violence broke out on part of both the police and the monks. A local NGO reported that six monks were injured; police stated that some of the police sustained minor injuries. On November 26, Ratanakiri provincial police blocked the CCHR from holding a public forum in Kong Yu Village, where community members were embroiled in a land dispute with Keat Kolney. Police gave conflicting reasons for preventing the forum from taking place (see section 1.f.). On June 8, Supreme Patriarch Non Ngeth and Minister of Cults and Religious Affairs Khun Haing signed a directive prohibiting monks from participating in protests, strikes, riots, or marches. According to media reports, a constitutional council member stated the ban violated the constitution. Freedom of Association The constitution provides for freedom of association, and the government generally respected this right in practice; however, the government did not effectively enforce the freedom of association provisions of the labor law. Membership in the Khmer Rouge, which ruled the country from 1975 to 1979 and after its overthrow conducted an armed insurgency against the government, is illegal, as is membership in an armed group. c. Freedom of Religion The constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respected this right in practice. The constitution also prohibits discrimination based on religion, and minority religions experienced little or no official discrimination. Buddhism is the state religion, and more than 93 percent of the population is Buddhist. Ethnic Cham Muslims constitute most of the remaining population. The law requires all religious groups, including Buddhists, to submit applications to the Ministry of Cults and Religious Affairs to construct places of worship and conduct religious activities. However, there is no penalty for failing to register. In July the Ministry of Cults and Religious Affairs issued a directive restating a 2003 order prohibiting public proselytizing, which continued to be loosely enforced. On August 10, authorities in Phnom Penh dispersed a gathering of approximately 3,000 Christians, stating that organizers did not have proper permits. Prior to the gathering, organizers obtained a permit from the MOI but had not received a response on a request pending with the Ministry of Cults and Religious Affairs. Societal Abuses and Discrimination Minority religions experienced little or no societal discrimination. There was no known Jewish community in the country, and there were no reports of anti‑Semitic acts. For a more detailed discussion, see the 2007 International Religious Freedom Report. d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons The law provides for freedom of movement within the country, foreign travel, emigration, and repatriation, and the government generally respected these rights in practice. The constitution prohibits forced exile, and the government did not employ it. Protection of Refugees The laws provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status in accordance with the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 protocol, and the government has established a system for providing protection to refugees. The convention and its protocol have had the full force of the law in the country since accession in 1992. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the government abides by the convention and international customary law on refugees. The government allows the UNHCR to process asylum seekers and assist refugees while they are in the country. A memorandum of understanding that the government signed in 2005 with the UNHCR and the government of Vietnam to resolve the situation of Montagnards under UNHCR protection remained in effect. Asylum seekers who reached the UNHCR Phnom Penh office were processed with government cooperation. During the year there were 449 new arrivals seeking asylum with the UNHCR. According to the UNHCR, 97 Montagnard and 20 non‑Montagnard refugees departed for a third country, while authorities deported 30 rejected Montagnard asylum seekers to Vietnam, and 33 Montagnards voluntarily returned to their country of origin. At year's end there were 467 Montagnards in UNHCR protection sites in Phnom Penh, which included 101 Montagnards who arrived in previous years. According to the UNHCR, during the year no refugees requested local integration. In practice the government provided some protection against refoulement, the return of persons to a country where there is reason to believe they feared persecution. Through the assistance of the UNHCR, during the year the government provided temporary protection to individuals who may not qualify as refugees under the 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol, affording such protection to approximately 150 persons. However, an NGO based in Ratanakiri Province reported that local police unofficially returned 59 asylum-seeking Montagnards to Vietnam without UNHCR review. On April 20, Ratanakiri provincial police arrested two persons on charges of human trafficking for their roles assisting Montagnards. NGOs claimed the suspects provided asylum seekers food, shelter, and transportation to the UNHCR office in Phnom Penh once they had crossed the border from Vietnam. At year's end the suspects had been released with charges against them dropped. An NGO claimed that local authorities at the border with Vietnam continued searches for Montagnards when they received information about new arrivals of Montagnards. There were unconfirmed reports that Vietnamese authorities offered incentive awards to Cambodian border police who returned Vietnamese refugees to Vietnam and that Vietnamese secret police covertly conducted searches for Vietnamese refugees on the Cambodian side of the border. The country had habitual residents who were de facto stateless, and the government had not effectively implemented laws or policies to provide such persons the opportunity to gain nationality. Under the nationality law, citizenship is derived by birth from a foreign mother and father who were born and living legally in the country, or from a mother or father who has Cambodian citizenship. A study commissioned by the UNHCR estimated that several thousand potentially stateless persons lived in the country. However, the study's estimated number of such persons came from anecdotal evidence of NGOs that provided services to disenfranchised communities, including persons with no proof of nationality, and not from a survey of stateless persons; therefore, local UNHCR representatives did not consider the figure conclusive. The UNHCR stated that the country's potentially stateless population included mostly ethnic Vietnamese. According to an NGO that worked with ethnic Vietnamese, individuals without proof of nationality often did not have access to formal employment, education, marriage registration, the courts, and land ownership. The most common reason for statelessness was lack of proper documents from the country of origin. Section 3 Respect for Political Rights: The Right of Citizens to Change Their Government The constitution provides citizens the right to change their government peacefully, and citizens generally exercised this right in practice through periodic elections on the basis of universal suffrage. Suffrage is voluntary for all citizens age 18 years and older. Elections and Political Participation On April 1, the country held elections for 11,353 chiefs, first deputies, second deputies, and councilors for 1,621 commune councils. The CPP won 70.4 percent of the positions, the SRP 23.4 percent, NRP 3.7 percent, and FUNCINPEC 2.4 percent. Most observers agreed the commune council elections were the least violent and best organized elections ever held in the country. While there were problems at some polling stations, NGOs, opposition parties, monitors, and others disagreed as to how and whether the problems affected the overall outcome of the elections. Three NGOs reported that election officials did not allow some registered voters to vote because of voter registration list discrepancies such as mistyped and misspelled names or absence of names from the voter list, often due to names transferred to different polling stations without informing the voter. Additionally, NGOs and opposition parties complained that the CPP started advertising weeks or months in advance through the mostly CPP‑dominated media without reprisal. NGOs reported that on election day, some ruling party incumbents illegally issued voter registration documents, stood watch in some polling station areas where local authorities were prohibited, and provided assistance to voters in these prohibited areas. Parties and individuals were free to be candidates without restrictions. On March 13, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court sentenced NRP president Prince Norodom Ranariddh in absentia to 18 months in prison and a $150,000 (600 million riel) fine on charges of breach of trust. The prince chose self‑exile during the election campaign and on election day rather than face the charges. On October 3, the appeals court rejected his appeal of the Phnom Penh court's decision. Plans to appeal this decision had not been realized by year's end. Some NGOs and political parties alleged that membership in the dominant CPP party provided advantages, such as gifts or access to government emergency aid. Traditional culture limited the role of women in government; however, women took an active part in the 2003 national elections. The number of women increased in the National Assembly, Senate, and senior government positions. There were 22 women in the 123‑seat National Assembly, nine women in the 61‑seat Senate, and 24 women working as ministers, secretaries of state, undersecretaries of state, and National Election Commission officials. Women also served as advisors, and there were 13 female judges in the municipal and provincial courts, appeals court, and Supreme Court. In the April commune council elections, 14.6 percent of the elected councillors were women, of whom 67 were elected as chiefs. This was an increase from the 2002 commune council elections, when women won 9 percent of the total positions. There were four members of minorities--two Cham and two other ethnic minorities--in the National Assembly. There also were six members of minorities in the Senate. At least eight officials in senior positions in the government were from minority groups. Government Corruption and Transparency There is no anticorruption law, and only a few provisions of other laws provide criminal penalties for official corruption. Officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. The World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators reflected that corruption was a severe problem. In 2005 the prime minister instructed the Ministry of National Assembly‑Senate Relations and Inspection to prepare a draft anticorruption law. As of year's end, observers had not seen a revised draft since September 2006, and the issue was pending with the Council of Ministers. Corruption was considered endemic and extended throughout all segments of society, including the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Public perception of corruption was widespread. A 2006 Economic Institute of Cambodia assessment found that the private sector perceived the judiciary to be the most corrupt institution in the country, followed by the tax and customs services, public health care, and police. Meager salaries contributed to "survival corruption" among low‑level public servants, while a culture of impunity enabled corruption to flourish among senior officials. The Economic Institute's 2006 assessment of corruption in the private sector estimated that in 2005 private sector unofficial payments to public officials totaled $330 million riels. The assessment also found that the larger the private firm, the larger the payments required by government officials. The same study found that approximately 25 percent of potential taxes were collected from the private sector in 2005, representing a loss to the government of approximately $400 million riels. In June Global Witness published a report charging high‑level government officials with corruption related to illegal logging. Some observers and many government officials criticized the report as noncredible based on its heavy reliance on anonymous sources. The National Archives Law allows unlimited access to informational documents in the public archive. However, the law grants access to other unspecified government documents only after 20 years, and documents affecting national security and preservation of personal lives would be released after 40 and 120 years, respectively. In practice the government occasionally denied access to information, citing reasons of confidentiality or national security. Section 4 Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights A variety of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials often cooperated with human rights workers in performing their investigations; however, there were numerous reports of lack of cooperation or even intimidation by local authorities throughout the country. There were approximately 40 human rights NGOs in the country, but only a small portion of them were actively involved in organizing training programs or investigating abuses. Domestic and international human rights organizations faced threats and harassment from local officials. These took the form of restrictions on and disruptions during gatherings sponsored by NGOs, verbal intimidation, threats of legal action, and bureaucratic obstruction. On May 15, a CCHR coordinator went into hiding claiming that Sihanoukville authorities threatened to arrest him on charges of forming an illegal armed force for his role organizing a resistance effort to a forced eviction in Sihanoukville's Mittapheap District. He returned to work a few weeks later without incident. There were no developments in the May 2006 case of an ADHOC activist temporarily detained in Koh Kong Province for photographing a confrontation between villagers and officials. In January the UN Special Representative of the Secretary‑General for human rights in Cambodia, Yash Ghai, submitted to the UN Human Rights Council a report on his March 2006 visit expressing concerns about land grabbing and government land concessions. Afterward the prime minister publicly called the special representative derogatory names, refusing to meet with him ever again. In December Yash Ghai made a 10‑day assessment visit to the country during which the prime minister reiterated his opinions and no government official granted him a meeting. The Cambodian National Human Rights Commission remained largely inactive. The committee did not have regular meetings or a transparent operating process. Section 5 Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons The constitution prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, color, or language; however, the government did not generally protect these rights. The law prohibits rape and assault; nevertheless, local and international NGOs reported that violence against women, including domestic violence and rape, was common. Rape is a criminal offense and punishable by a prison sentence of between five and 10 years, according to the UNTAC law. Spousal rape and domestic abuse are not recognized as separate crimes. A case of spousal rape could be prosecuted as "rape," "causing injury," or "indecent assault," but such charges were rare. The domestic violence law criminalizes domestic violence but does not specifically set out penalties. However, the UNTAC law on battery and injury can be used to penalize domestic violence offenses, with penalties ranging from two months to five years' imprisonment. According to one NGO, there were 1,025 cases of domestic violence and 221 cases of rape reported in three provinces. Of these cases, courts tried 104 and 28, respectively, resulting in successful conviction in five cases of domestic violence and 20 cases of rape. LICADHO documented 209 cases of domestic violence affecting 213 victims in 12 provinces during the same time period. The MOI's antitrafficking department investigated 529 cases of violence against women and children, resulting in the arrest of 582 perpetrators and rescue of 771 victims. Of the 582 arrests, 458 were for rape and attempted rape. Twelve cases of rape resulted in the death of the victims. A legal advocacy NGO reported receiving 84 cases of domestic violence, 34 of which went to trial during the year. The number of cases likely underreported the scope of the problem, due to ineffective enforcement and the fact that women were afraid to make complaints against perpetrators. NGOs reported that enforcement of the domestic violence law was weak, authorities continued to avoid involvement in domestic disputes, and victims frequently were reluctant to pursue formal complaints. The government supported NGOs that provided training for poor women vulnerable to spousal abuse, prostitution, and trafficking. A local media center, an NGO, and the Ministry of Women's Affairs produced programming on women's issues. NGOs provided shelters for women in crisis. The constitution prohibits prostitution; however, there is no specific legislation against working as a prostitute. Trafficking in women for the purpose of prostitution was a serious problem, despite laws against procuring and kidnapping for purposes of sexual exploitation. There were reports that police abused prostitutes. Despite sporadic crackdowns on brothel operators in Phnom Penh, prostitution and related trafficking persisted. Estimates of the number of working prostitutes ranged from 14,725 to 18,250. Sex tourism was a problem, fueled by pervasive poverty and the perception of impunity. The labor law has provisions against sexual harassment in the workplace but does not specify penalties. The International Labor Organization (ILO) reported that sexual harassment in the industrial sector was rare. The constitution contains explicit language providing for equal rights for women, equal pay for equal work, and equal status in marriage. In practice women had equal property rights, the same legal status to bring divorce proceedings, and equal access to education and some jobs; however, cultural traditions continued to limit the ability of women to reach senior positions in business and other areas. Women often were concentrated in low‑paying jobs and largely were excluded from management positions. Men made up the vast majority of the military, police, and civil service. The Ministry of Women's Affairs, mandated to protect the rights of women and promote gender equality in society, continued its Neary Ratanak (Women as Precious Gems) program. The program aimed to improve the image of women through gender mainstreaming, enhanced participation of women in economic and political life, and protection of women's rights. The constitution provides for children's rights, and the government made the welfare of children a specific goal. The government relied on international aid to fund most child social welfare programs, resulting in only modest funds for problems that affect children. In 2002 the government instituted a modernized birth registration system administered by the MOI, which reported the program successfully registered 91 percent of births in 2006. The system did not include special outreach to minority communities. The government failed to register all births, resulting in discrimination, including the denial of public services. A study commissioned by the UNHCR on statelessness in the country stated that the birth registration process often excludes children of ethnic minorities and stateless persons. NGOs that provided services to disenfranchised communities reported that children without birth registration were often denied access to education and healthcare. They stated that later in life the same individuals may be unable to access employment, own property, vote, and use the legal system. Children were affected adversely by an inadequate educational system. Education was free, but not compulsory, through grade nine. Many children left school to help their families in subsistence agriculture, began school at a late age, or did not attend school at all. In 2005 the Ministry of Education reported that 91 percent of eligible children were enrolled in primary school, but this number did not reflect attendance. After primary school, 26 percent of eligible students attended junior high and 9 percent attended high school. Despite a school construction program, schools were overcrowded and lacked sufficient equipment. In rural areas schools often provided only a few years of education. According to ministry data, 46 percent of schools lacked drinking water and 37 percent had no toilets. Teacher salaries were irregularly paid and inadequate to support a decent standard of living, leading to demands for unofficial payments from parents, which poor families could not afford. The government did not deny girls equal access to education; however, families with limited resources often gave priority to boys. In many areas schools were remote and transportation was a problem. This especially affected girls due to safety concerns in traveling between their homes and schools. Boys and girls had equal access to state‑provided medical care. Child abuse was believed to be common, although statistics were not available. Child rape remained a serious problem; a local NGO reported 199 cases of rape and attempted rape committed on persons under age 18, two of which resulted in death. Twenty‑nine of the cases involved children below age five. Sexual intercourse with a person under age 15 is illegal; however, child prostitution and trafficking in children occurred. During the year raids on brothels rescued underage girls trafficked for prostitution. The MOI reported arrests of seven foreign pedophiles. Some children were engaged in prostitution for survival, without third‑party involvement. A domestic NGO estimated that more than 1,200 street children in Phnom Penh had no relationship with their families and more than 10,000 children worked on the streets but returned to families in the evenings. An estimated 500 to 1,500 children lived with their families on the streets in provincial towns. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Youth Rehabilitations provided lower statistics, reporting 3,084 street children nationwide in 2005. A study conducted by a local NGO stated that in September 2006 there were 37 children under the age of six living with their mothers in prison, and those children were subjected to mistreatment by prison guards and faced physical dangers from adult criminal cellmates. The children generally lacked proper nutrition and education. Child labor was a problem in the informal sector of the economy. Trafficking in Persons The law prohibits trafficking in persons; however, the country was a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for sexual exploitation and labor. A 2003 study estimated the number of trafficking victims in the sex industry to be 2,000, approximately 80 percent of whom were ethnic Vietnamese women and girls. Children were trafficked domestically for sexual exploitation and labor. Some Vietnamese women and girls were trafficked through the country for exploitation in the commercial sex trade in other Asian countries. Children were trafficked to Thailand and Vietnam for begging, soliciting, street vending, and flower selling. The children frequently were placed into debt bondage to beg or sell, or they formed part of organized begging rings even when there was no debt or economic hardship involved. Women as well as children were trafficked to Malaysia and Thailand for sexual exploitation and forced labor in factories or as domestic servants, while men were trafficked for forced labor in the agriculture, fishing, and construction sectors. Trafficking victims, especially those trafficked for sexual exploitation, faced the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. In some cases victims were detained and physically and mentally abused by traffickers, brothel owners, and clients. Local traffickers covered specific small geographic areas and acted as middlemen for larger trafficking networks. Organized crime groups, employment agencies, and marriage brokers were believed to have some degree of involvement. Traffickers used a variety of methods to acquire victims. In many cases victims were lured by promises of legitimate employment or travel documents. In other cases acquaintances, friends, and family members sold the victims or received payment for helping deceive them. Young children, the majority of them girls, were often "pledged" as collateral for loans by desperately poor parents; the children were responsible for repaying the loan and the accumulating interest. A September report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) stated that child domestic workers, particularly those used as collateral or placed into debt bondage, were more likely to be trafficked and to enter commercial sexually exploitive activities. The law establishes a prison sentence of 15 to 20 years for a person convicted of trafficking in persons under 15 years of age; the penalty is 10 to 15 years for trafficking persons age 15 or older. According to the MOI, police investigated 529 cases of violence against women and children, including child sexual exploitation, rape, debauchery, and human trafficking. The investigations resulted in the arrest of 582 offenders, of whom 46 were arrested for cross border and domestic trafficking. However, NGOs continued to report the general failure of law enforcement and other government officials to act on tip‑offs. The Ministries of Interior, Women's Affairs, and Justice had primary responsibility to combat trafficking in persons. In April the government established a National Task Force to serve as an interministerial antitrafficking coordination body. The task force included an oversight body involving the top government officials. There was a Department of Anti‑Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection, and the MOI operated specialized antitrafficking divisions in all provinces and municipalities. While the government arrested and prosecuted traffickers and continued its support for prevention and protection programs through collaboration with foreign and domestic NGOs and international organizations, its antitrafficking efforts continued to be hampered by corruption and a weak judicial system. It was widely believed that some law enforcement and other government officials received bribes that facilitated the sex trade and trafficking in persons. On March 16, the Sihanoukville Municipal Court acquitted the owner of O Pi Guesthouse and an employee of all charges and convicted another employee of a lesser charge of pimping, sentencing her to a two‑year imprisonment plus a three‑year suspended sentence. Erratic official behavior during the trial and the light penalty raised concerns that there was an exchange of bribes in return for light treatment of the case. On March 21, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court acquitted Meng Say, former chief of the Phnom Penh antitrafficking unit, who was suspended in 2006 for extorting money from South Korean nationals. One police officer remained in jail in connection with the 2006 Phnom Penh Municipal Court case of three police officers sentenced to five to seven years in prison for trafficking‑related corruption. Two of the officers appealed their cases; there was no court action on the appeal, and the two officers had not started serving their sentences. On August 1, the Sihanoukville Municipal Court tried a pimping case but acquitted the suspect, citing lack of evidence. Observers reported irregularities in the case hearing, and the case was under appeal at year's end. On August 9, a royal decree directed the Supreme Council of the Magistracy to dismiss Appeals Court President Ly Vouch Leng. The directive was issued for her alleged acceptance of bribes in exchange for the release of human traffickers who were running the Chhay Hour II brothel in Phnom Penh. Three Supreme Council of Magistracy officials were also removed in connection with the case, and three appeals court judges and one deputy prosecutor received official letters of reprimand. Ly Vouch Leng was transferred to an unknown position in the Ministry of Justice; no charges were brought against her. The Ministries of Interior and Justice reported their investigations continued. A legal advocacy NGO reported that five trafficking cases went to trial during the year, resulting in two convictions. For the same period, the MOI reported five convictions on human trafficking charges with sentences ranging from four to 15 years in prison. The Phnom Penh Municipal Court reported 49 convictions of human trafficking offenders from January to October. Police, court officials, and judges often did not separate victims from perpetrators during raids, arrests, and trials. In some cases officials spoke and acted as though victims were perpetrators. During a March 9 Sihanoukville trafficking trial, the presiding judge spoke harshly to underage trafficking victims in the courtroom and acquitted two of the alleged perpetrators. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Youth Rehabilitations (MOSAVY) referred trafficking victims to NGOs, which provided most assistance to victims. The government participated as a partner in a number of these efforts; however, its contributions were severely hampered by limited resources. NGOs provided intake screening services to identify trafficking victims. Some victims were encouraged by NGOs and the MOI to file complaints against perpetrators; however, in the general climate of impunity, victim protection was problematic, and victims were known to be intimidated into abandoning their cases. Social stigma against women who were prostitutes, victims of sexual assault, or victims of sex trafficking made it difficult for victims to reintegrate into families, communities, and society. The trafficking law contains no provisions to protect foreign victims from being charged under immigration laws, but during the year there were no reported cases of trafficking victims being treated as illegal immigrants. The MOSAVY worked with the IOM to repatriate trafficked victims from Thailand and Vietnam to Cambodia, and from Cambodia to Vietnam. However, repatriation to Vietnam continued to be a long and arduous process. The MOSAVY repatriated from Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia 845 child and adult victims, as well as others vulnerable to becoming victims, and reintegrated them with their families. With financial and technical support from the IOM, the MOSAVY repatriated eight trafficked Vietnamese girls to Vietnam. Both the government and international donors had programs to prevent child labor or remove children from labor. The country is a signatory to the Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative against Trafficking, whose activities include ensuring the legal, social, and community protection of victims of trafficking; strengthening law enforcement capacity to combat trafficking; and building a comprehensive response involving all relevant ministries. Several ministries--including the Ministry of Women's Affairs and the Ministry of Tourism--had antitrafficking initiatives to reduce child labor. Donors supported programs to combat child labor implemented by the ILO and World Education, among others. The MOSAVY worked with the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and local NGOs to manage community‑based networks aimed at preventing trafficking. Persons with Disabilities There is no law explicitly prohibiting discrimination against persons with disabilities. The government does not require that buildings or government services be accessible to persons with disabilities. The government prohibits persons with disabilities from being teachers in public schools. On October 1, the government signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Programs administered by various NGOs brought about substantial improvements in the treatment and rehabilitation of persons who had lost limbs, but they faced considerable societal discrimination, especially in obtaining skilled employment. There are no legal limitations on the rights of persons with disabilities to vote or participate in civic affairs, but the government did not make any concerted effort to assist them in becoming more civically engaged. The MOSAVY is responsible for making policy to protect the rights of persons with disabilities and for rehabilitation and vocational skill training for persons with disabilities. The rights of minorities under the 1996 nationality law are not explicit; constitutional protections are extended only to "Khmer people." Citizens of Chinese and Vietnamese ethnicity constituted the largest ethnic minorities. Ethnic Chinese citizens were accepted in society, but animosity continued toward ethnic Vietnamese, who were seen as a threat to the nation and culture. Some groups continued to make strong anti‑Vietnamese statements. They complained of political control of the CPP by the Vietnamese government, border encroachment, and other problems for which they held ethnic Vietnamese at least partially responsible. The government often ignored efforts by indigenous communities to protect their ancestral lands and natural resources. In spite of the 2001 land law, which calls for the registration of communal lands of indigenous people, little was done to implement communal land titling. NGOs called for a moratorium on land sales and land concessions affecting indigenous communities. International and local NGOs were active in educating the indigenous communities about their land rights and providing legal representation in disputes. On March 9, more than 200 indigenous villagers in Stung Treng Province protested the clearing of community forest land by four companies to which the government allegedly illegitimately granted timber concessions. The land had long been used by indigenous villagers for subsistence farming, hunting, and resin production. In May provincial authorities created a special committee to resolve the problem, but the committee did not take any action. On March 15, more than 500 Jarai indigenous families in Ratanakiri Province demanded the removal of local officials who they alleged were involved in the fraudulent sale of more than 3,000 acres of their communal land. In September 2006 the villagers learned their land had been sold when they saw workers demarcating it as private property. The villagers submitted a complaint to provincial authorities, but authorities did not respond to the complaint. In early August a Ratanakiri provincial official prevented Tampoun indigenous villagers from burying their dead on land that had served as their traditional burial ground since 1979. The provincial court stated it would arrest anyone who tried to bury bodies there, claiming the land belonged to the provincial finance department director. Authorities sanctioned a new burial ground approximately 500 yards from the traditional plot. The villagers enlisted the help of an NGO and planned to file a suit with the provincial court. During the August 9 commemoration of the International Day for Indigenous Peoples, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted the government's failure to protect and implement the rights of indigenous people to their lands, territories, and natural resources. The UN commissioner called for swift action to halt land grabbing in tribal areas, particularly the growing number of economic land concessions and mining licenses granted without community consultation. Other Societal Abuses and Discrimination Societal discrimination against those infected with HIV/AIDS remained a problem in rural areas; however, discrimination was moderated by HIV/AIDS awareness programs. There was no official discrimination against those infected with HIV/AIDS. There were no reported cases of sexual orientation discrimination in employment, housing, statelessness, or access to education or health care. However, homosexuality was typically treated with fear and suspicion, and there were few support groups based on sexual orientation where such cases could have been reported. Section 6 Worker Rights a. The Right of Association The labor law provides private-sector workers in the formal economy the right to join the trade union of their choice without prior authorization. However, the government's enforcement of this right was selective. Membership in trade unions or employee associations is not compulsory, and workers are free to withdraw from such organizations, although a few unions attempted to intimidate workers who wanted to withdraw. Unions may affiliate freely, but the law does not address explicitly their right to affiliate internationally. While the law applies to foreign workers, it does not apply to civil servants, including teachers, judges, and military personnel, or to workers in the informal sector. Personnel in the air and maritime transportation industries are not entitled to the full protections of the law but are free to form unions. The vast majority of the country worked in the informal sector, primarily as subsistence rice farmers, vendors, or skilled or unskilled laborers. Only a small fraction, estimated at less than 1 percent, of the labor force was unionized. Unions were concentrated in the garment and footwear industries, where approximately 40 to 50 percent of the 350,000 workers were union members. The Cambodian Tourism and Service Workers Federation represented 4,000 hotel, casino, and airport workers. Of the 31 national labor federations and confederations, 26 were allied with the government, four were independent, and one had pro‑opposition leanings. The Cambodia Independent Teachers Association (CITA), registered as an "association" due to prohibitions on public sector unions, represented 8,150 of the country's 89,000 teachers. CITA marches and other protests were often forbidden, although the union reported no direct government interference in day‑to‑day activities. Some members feared that CITA affiliation could hamper their chance of career advancement, according to union officials. Another public sector association, the Cambodian Independent Civil Servants' Association (CICA), represented approximately 500 officials from ministries, provincial departments, and commune councils, out of approximately 100,000 civil servants nationwide. CICA leaders alleged that fears of harassment or demotion prevented other civil servants from joining. Some independent and pro‑opposition unions and federations complained of unnecessary delays and costs in registering with the government. Unions were generally seen as slowly gaining strength, but many were not able to adequately represent member interests due to insufficient resources, training, and experience. In addition, corruption plagued unions, employers, and government officials, hampering legitimate industrial relations. Violence, harassment, and intimidation between rival unions were common. On February 24, two unidentified men shot and killed local union leader Hy Vuthy as he left the Suntex garment factory after completing his night shift. Since 2005 Suntex and Bright Sky factories, which share a compound, have been the scene of fierce interunion rivalry and violence. Hy Vuthy was a member of the country's largest union, the Free Trade Union of Workers in the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC), which alleged that he might have been killed because of his labor work. No suspects were arrested. Two other FTUWKC leaders--national FTUWKC president Chea Vichea and local union leader Ros Sovannareth--were killed in 2004. In some factories persons employed in management appeared to have established their own unions, supported promanagement unions, or compromised union leaders. Union leaders from across the political spectrum complained that the Khmer Youth Federation of Trade Unions habitually threatened strikes to extort money from management and threatened and harassed workers from other unions. Independent union leaders complained that the progovernment Cambodian Coalition of Trade Unions frequently intervened in the affairs of other unions, extorted money from management in exchange for discouraging workers from conducting legal strikes and demonstrations, and threatened rival union leaders. Enforcement of the right of association and freedom from antiunion discrimination was poor. Government enforcement was hampered by a lack of political will and by confused financial and political relationships with employers and union leaders. The government also suffered from a lack of resources, including trained, experienced labor inspectors, in part because it did not pay staff adequate salaries. The Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training (MOLVT) often decided in favor of employees but rarely used its legal authority to penalize employers who defied its orders, instead referring many cases to an arbitration council. There were credible reports of antiunion harassment by employers, including the dismissal of union leaders, in garment factories and other enterprises. Employers sometimes used the courts to dismiss or punish union leaders. In two cases union leaders were charged with inciting workers to strike, destroying private property, and attempting to incite workers to commit assault. At year's end the cases were pending. On several occasions dismissed union leaders accepted cash settlements after unsuccessfully appealing to the government to enforce laws requiring their reinstatement. At other times the government upheld labor rights. For example, the MOLVT formally warned 1,032 companies of legal violations, fined 10 companies, and charged five companies with violation of the labor law and regulations. The MOLVT sent 83 cases of unresolved labor disputes to the Arbitration Council. b. The Right to Organize and Bargain Collectively The law provides for the right to organize and bargain collectively, but the government's enforcement of these rights was inconsistent. Wages were generally set by market forces, except in the case of civil servants, whose wages were set by the government. Garment-sector workers were guaranteed a minimum wage of $50 per month (210,000 riels). During the year there were 19 collective bargaining agreements registered with the MOLVT. Most were conciliation agreements that did not meet international collective bargaining standards. Only six genuine collective bargaining agreements existed within the garment industry, 10 at hotels, and one covering contract workers at the two international airports. A 2001 regulation establishes procedures to allow unions to demonstrate that they represent workers for purposes of collective bargaining. The regulation also establishes requirements for employers and unions regarding collective bargaining and provides union leaders with additional protection from dismissal. The Bureau of Labor Relations is responsible for facilitating the process of union registration and certification of "most representative status" for unions, which entitles a union representing an absolute majority of workers in a given enterprise to represent all of the workers in that establishment. However, the "most representative" registration process was considered cumbersome, and international observers reported that government lists of "most representative unions" included management‑controlled unions and unions whose "most representative" status should have expired years before. The government began reexamining its "most representative" certification process with support from international organizations and a diplomatic mission. The law provides for the right to strike and protects strikers from reprisal. The law stipulates that strikes can be held only after several requirements have been met, including the failure of other methods of dispute resolution (such as negotiation, conciliation, and arbitration), a secret-ballot vote of union membership, and a seven‑day advance notice to the employer and the MOLVT. The MOLVT reported that 82 strikes occurred during the year. International observers, employers, and many union leaders agreed that almost no strikes fulfilled all prestrike legal requirements. Other unions complained that a severe lack of MOLVT involvement led to industrial strikes. The government allowed most strikes held at factories but denied worker requests to hold protest marches outside of the factory district. Police intervention in strikes generally was minimal and restrained, even in those cases where property damage occurred. Police presence at the few marches that occurred tended to be excessive and often included a specialized police intervention unit. On May 4, four workers and five security guards were injured when security guards inside the L.A. garment factory tried to prevent workers from leaving the factory to strike. The strike, which involved 4,000 workers, began two days earlier when workers demanded that a manager be dismissed for insulting and mistreating them. On May 21, more than 100 provincial police officers violently dispersed approximately 200 striking workers at the River Rich garment factory in Kandal Province. Workers said police beat several protesters, but police denied causing any injuries. The strike began when management reneged on a promise to rehire 10 union activists whose contracts had not been renewed. Following the strike, management threatened to sue three union representatives for inciting workers to hold an illegal strike and for discrimination but later dropped the case. On November 29, approximately 200 police officers violently dispersed a strike by more than 2,000 Fortune garment factory workers who protested reductions in bonuses and short‑term contracts. Police accused the strikers of blocking a road, creating disorder, throwing stones, and injuring police officers. Workers said their strike was peaceful and that violent police repression--including firing guns into the air and using tear gas--resulted in three injured workers. Police detained four workers, releasing them later the same day. There were no developments in the August 2006 case of three factory‑level union leaders affiliated with the FTUWKC convicted of charges of illegal human confinement. After spending one month and four days in jail in 2006, the workers were released. In spite of legal provisions protecting strikers from reprisals, there were credible reports that workers were dismissed on spurious grounds after organizing or participating in strikes. While most strikes were illegal, participating in an illegal strike was not by itself a legally acceptable reason for dismissal. In some cases strikers were pressured by employers to accept compensation and leave their employment. There are potential remedies for such dismissals, although none was particularly effective. The MOLVT can issue reinstatement orders, but these often provoked management efforts to pressure workers into resigning in exchange for a settlement. Collective disputes, such as when multiple employees are dismissed, can be brought before the Arbitration Council for a nonbinding decision. Individual disputes can be bought before the courts, although the judicial system was neither impartial nor transparent. Some unions urged the government to expand the role of the Arbitration Council to include individual and collective interest disputes and to make its decisions binding. There continued to be confusion about the overlapping roles of labor unions and elected shop stewards. According to regulation, trade union leaders have roles comparable to those of shop stewards, and certain union officers have protection from dismissal within an enterprise. However, employers did not always respect these protections. There were no special laws or exemptions from regular labor laws in export processing zones (known as special economic zones). c. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor The law prohibits forced or compulsory labor, including by children, but there were reports that such practices occurred, almost exclusively in the informal sector. There were reports of isolated cases of forced labor by domestic servants. Forced child labor was a serious problem in the commercial sex industry. Involuntary overtime remained widespread. Under the law, legal overtime work cannot exceed two hours daily and must be voluntary; however, in practice overtime was often extended beyond the legal limit, and employers used coercion to force employees to work. Workers often faced fines, dismissal, or loss of premium pay if they refused to work overtime. d. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment The government has adopted laws to protect children from exploitation in the workplace; however, enforcement was often weak. The law establishes 15 years as the minimum age for employment and 18 years as the minimum age for hazardous work. The law permits children between 12 and 15 to engage in "light work" that is not hazardous to their health and does not affect school attendance. A 2006 study by the World Bank, the ILO, and UNICEF estimated that there were 1.5 million children engaged in illegal labor, including 750,000 children younger than 12 years, 500,000 children ages 12 to 14 engaged in "nonlight" economic activity, and more than 250,000 children ages 15 to 17 working in prohibited hazardous sectors or working more than 43 hours per week. No aspect of the law prohibiting child labor was adequately enforced in the formal employment sector. No employer was prosecuted for violating laws against child labor. The MOLVT has responsibility for child labor issues in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, but its labor inspectors played no role in the informal sector or in enforcing the law in illegal industries. Within the formal sector, labor inspectors conducted routine inspections of some industries, such as garment manufacturing (where the incidence of child labor is negligible), but in some industries with the highest child labor risk, labor inspections were entirely complaint driven. The constitution prohibits forced or bonded child labor; however, forced child labor was a serious problem in the commercial sex industry. Law enforcement agencies failed to combat child prostitution in a sustained, consistent manner. Widespread corruption, lack of transparency, inadequate resources, and staffing shortages remained the most challenging obstacles. e. Acceptable Conditions of Work The law requires the MOLVT to establish a garment‑sector minimum wage based on recommendations from the Labor Advisory Committee. There was no minimum wage for any other industry. The minimum wage for the sector was $45 to $50 (189,000 to 210,000 riels) per month. Garment-sector employers almost universally paid regular workers at least the minimum wage, although casual workers were often paid less. Garment workers earned an average wage of $70 to $80 (294,000 to 336,000 riels) per month, including overtime and bonuses. Prevailing monthly wages in the garment sector and many other professions were insufficient to provide a worker and family with a decent standard of living, although garment-sector wages were generally higher than wages in the informal economy. Civil service salaries also were insufficient to provide a decent standard of living, requiring government officials to secure outside sources of income, in many cases by obtaining second jobs or accepting bribes. On June 8, despite strong protests from some unions, the National Assembly amended the labor law to establish a nightshift rate of 130 percent of daytime wages. Before this amendment, customary practice was to pay nightshift workers 200 percent of daytime wages, and few factories operated night shifts due to the high salary cost. The law provides for a standard legal workweek of 48 hours, not to exceed eight hours per day. The law stipulates time‑and‑a‑half for overtime and double time if overtime occurs at night, on Sunday, or on a holiday. Employees are allowed to work up to two hours of overtime each day. However, the government did not enforce these standards effectively. Workers reported that overtime was frequently excessive and sometimes mandatory. Similarly, outside the garment industry, regulations on working hours were rarely enforced. The law states that the workplace should have health and safety standards adequate to ensure workers' well‑being. The government enforced existing standards selectively, in part because it lacked trained staff and equipment. Work‑related injuries and health problems were common. Most large garment factories producing for markets in developed countries met relatively high health and safety standards as conditions of their contracts with buyers. Working conditions in some small‑scale factories and cottage industries were poor and often did not meet international standards. Penalties are specified in the law, but there are no specific provisions to protect workers who complain about unsafe or unhealthy conditions. Workers who removed themselves from unsafe working conditions risked loss of employment.

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General best practices for performance You must plan for every feature in your app, and the same is true for performance. Planning for performance consists of determining what your performance-critical scenarios will be, defining what good performance means, and measuring early enough in the development process to ensure that you can be confident in your ability to hit your goals. You don't need to completely understand the platform to reason about where you might need to improve performance. By knowing what parts of your code execute most frequently, you can determine the best places to optimize your app. The users' experience is a basic way to define good performance. For example, an app's startup time can influence a user's perception of its performance. A user might consider the performance of an app's launch time of less than one second to be excellent, less than 5 seconds to be good, and greater than 5 seconds to be poor. Sometimes you also have to consider other metrics that don't have a direct impact on the user experience. An example of this is memory consumption. When an app uses large amounts of memory, it takes it from the rest of the system, causing the system as a whole to appear sluggish to the user. It is difficult to have a goal on overall sluggishness of the system, so having a goal on memory consumption is reasonable. When defining your performance goals, take into consideration the perceived size of your app. Users’ expectations for the performance of your app may be influenced by their qualitative perception of how big your app is, and you should take into account whether your users will consider your app to be small, medium, or large. As an example, you might want a small app that doesn't use a lot of media to consume less than 100MB of memory. As part of your plan, you define all of the points during development where you will measure performance. Measuring performance serve different purposes depending on whether measure during the prototyping, development, or deployment phase of your project. In all cases, measure on a representative device so that you get accurate info. For more info about how to measure your app’s performance in Visual Studio, see Analyzing the performance of Windows Windows Store apps. Measuring your app’s performance during the early stages of prototyping can add tremendous value to your project. We recommend that you measure performance as soon as you have code that does meaningful work. Early measurements give you a good idea of where the important costs are in your app, and inform design decisions. This results in high performing apps that scale well. It can be very costly to change design decisions later on in the project. Measuring performance too late in the product cycle can result in last minute hacks and poor performance. Measuring your app’s performance during development time helps you: - Determine if you are on track to meet your goals. - If you are not on track, find out early if you need to make structural changes, such as data representation, in order to get back on track. You don't need to optimize every part of your app, and performance improvements to the majority of your code usually don't result in a material difference to the user. Measure your app's performance to identify the high traffic areas in your code, and focus on getting good performance in only those areas. Often, there is a trade-off between creating software that follows good design practices and writing code that performs at the highest optimization. It is generally better to prioritize developer productivity and good software design in areas where performance is not a concern. Windows 8 can run on many devices under a variety of circumstances and it is impossible for you to simulate all the conditions in which your app will run. Collecting telemetry about your app's performance on user machines can help you understand what your end-users are experiencing. This can be accomplished by adding instrumentation to various parts of your application and occasionally uploading the data to a web service. From this info, you can determine what the average user sees and what the worst and best case performance of your app is. This will help you decide which aspects of performance to focus on for the next version of your app. Let's look at a few key performance best practices that are specific to Windows Store apps. When you create an app, be aware that the type of computer that your users have might have significantly less power than your development environment. Windows 8 was designed with low power devices, such as tablets, in mind. Also, Windows RT uses these same design principles to take advantage of the low power consumption characteristics of ARM-based platforms. Windows Store apps need to do their part to ensure that they perform well on these devices. Operations that seem to run fast on your development machine can have a big impact to the user-experience on a low power device. As a heuristic, expect that a low power device is about 4 times slower than a desktop computer and set your goals accordingly. Testing your app early and often on the type of computer that you expect the user to have allows you to form a realistic understanding of how your users will experience your app. Most of the performance work you do naturally reduces the amount of power your app consumes. The CPU is a major consumer of battery power on devices, even at low utilization. Windows 8 tries to keep the CPU in a low power state when it is idle, but activates it every time you schedule work. You can further reduce your app's consumption of battery power by ensuring that your app doesn't have timers unnecessarily schedule work on the CPU when it is idle. For example, an app might poll for data from web services and sensors (such as the GPS). Consider battery consumption when deciding how often you poll for data. This is also an important consideration for animations that require constant updates to the screen and keep the CPU and graphics pipeline active. Animations can be an effective in delivering a great user experience, but make a conscious choice about when you use them. This is particularly important for data-driven apps where the user may be looking at your app but not interacting with it. For example, a user may spend a while looking at content in a news reader or photo viewer without interacting with the app. It can also be wasteful to use animations in snap mode because the user is not giving the app their full attention. Many apps connect to web services to get new info for the user. Reducing the frequency at which you poll for new info can improve your battery consumption. Reducing memory helps avoid sluggishness and is even more important for Windows Store apps because of the Process Lifetime Management (PLM) system. The PLM system determines which apps to terminate, in part, by the app's memory footprint. By keeping your app's memory footprint low, you reduce the chance of it getting terminated when it is not being used. For example, you can reduce your app’s memory footprint by releasing unnecessary resources such as images on suspend. The PLM system may also choose to swap out your app to disk, and swap it back into memory the next time it is switched to. If you lower the memory footprint of your app it will resume faster. The related topics contain more in-depth performance best-practices for developing Windows Store apps. These best practices cover topics that are likely to be the source of performance issues in your app. But these best practices will only make a difference if they are on performance critical paths of your app. We recommend that you follow the principles on this page and determine if applying these best practices will help you achieve your performance goals. Build date: 11/29/2012

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A new smartphone app aims to provide a cheaper alternative to ultrasound in Africa by bringing an old technique into the 21st century. "We couldn't hear anything,” says Aaron Tushabe, recounting a trip with two friends to the maternity ward of the main hospital in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. The student had been handed an ear-trumpet-like device called a Pinard horn, used to listen for the vital signs of a baby in a mother’s abdomen. Despite straining to hear against the murmur of the ward, Tushabe couldn’t hear any signs. Luckily, the problem was not with the baby, but the combination of what he calls a “rather primitive device”, and his lack of training. In fact, the Pinard horn, named after the French doctor who invented it back in the 19th Century, can be very effective in the right hands. It can determine the age, position and heart rate of the foetus, along with an indication of its overall health. But to do this consistently can take many years of practice. Meanwhile, in developing countries, “a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute”, according to the UN, while every year “eight million babies die before or during delivery or in the first week of life”. The key to saving those lives, the UN says, is “access to skilled care during pregnancy, childbirth and the first month after delivery”. These kinds of statistics, along with their experience of using the Pinard horn, got the three computer science students thinking about whether they could improve the design. “We saw that technology gap and started thinking about how we might bridge it.” In developed countries, ultrasound is the answer. But these machines – responsible for those fuzzy black and white pictures that are liberally posted on Facebook, brought out at parties, and waived at co-workers when someone becomes pregnant – are expensive. Even if a hospital could afford one, few expectant mothers can afford the $10 scan in countries where many live below the poverty line. And so, a new project called WinSenga was born to build what Joshua Okello, one of the other students who visited the hospital, calls "an enhancement" to the Pinard horn. The new device still consists of a plastic trumpet, but with a highly sensitive microphone inside. The souped-up device, which is placed on a women's abdomen just like a regular horn, connects to a Windows-based phone running an app that, as Okello says, "plays the part of the midwife's ear." The system picks up the foetal heart rate, transmits it to the phone, and then the phone runs an analysis. The app, developed in conjunction with medics for the UN agency Unicef then recommends a course of action, if any, for the mother and her unborn child. "When I first heard the idea, I thought it was brilliant," says Davis Musinguzi, a medic and Unicef advisor. "But being software developers, they needed guidance on the medical component of the application." The doctor says he advised on the medical parameters, procedures and standards that needed to be part of the software. He also says he tried to ensure that the new device wouldn't disrupt the normal workflow of an antenatal visit, but rather help eliminate the bottlenecks. The value of going mobile is pretty clear, allowing carers to visit mothers wherever they are. "We envision a midwife being able to travel to rural areas on specific days, and then mothers could gather in, for example, a local church,” Tushabe says. “Then, the midwife could administer the antenatal diagnosis to all the mothers." Okello, Tushabe and their partner Josiah Kuvuma presented their idea earlier this year at an event sponsored by Microsoft called the Imagine Cup, which aims to solve pressing problems, particularly in the developing world. The event partly inspired the name. The “Win” part comes from the software giant’s own products, Okello tells me, while "Senga" refers to the local name for the aunt who used to help village mothers-to-be with their antenatal care and their births. The team went on to win the regional competition before losing out in the finals held at Sydney. However, the loss has not held them back. The team says they have since been approached for potential partnerships and are currently looking for funding to launch a six-month field trial of their system. If that's successful, then WinSenga could launch as a product. The team says its too early to talk about pricing, but they are heartened by the fact that the cost of smartphone handsets is rapidly dropping across Africa, making their system much more attractive to potential clients. While they wait for funding, the WinSenga team is far from idle. Despite the fact that all three team members still have busy university schedules, they have already launched an expanded version of the software designed to assist healthcare workers and mothers during labour. The group's website also promises a version called "WinSenga Plus", which would assist with postnatal care as well. And as if that isn't enough, WinSenga say they are almost ready to launch an Android version of their application, and will then start work on a version for iOS. The apps are all part of a new movement, says Dr Musinguzi, which is gathering momentum. "The use of mobile technology is a relatively new intervention to improving health services," he says. WinSenga and other devices and apps that are coming on to the market, he says, will have to prove themselves to healthcare professionals by "reducing the burden of doing what they have always done." It will take training and investment, he says, but it "will pay off in the long run”. It is a sentiment that Okello agrees with. "Communities that have healthy mothers are generally much more productive. It's all tied in."

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Written By Dan Suthers based on explanations by Scott Ferguson, June Firing, Kyle Hogrefe, and Danny Merritt. Physical Oceanography studies the movement of ocean water (ranging from small scale oscillations to basin-wide flows) and the physical and chemical characteristics of that water (e.g., temperature and salinity). Most research on currents and water characteristics has focused on large scale patterns, such as gyres that flow around ocean basins . Water of different densities does not mix easily. Density depends on temperature and salinity. Therefore, if you measure the temperature and salinity of water at different depths you can track the same body of water as it moves around an ocean basin (e.g., the North Pacific) and even around the globe. In this research, measurements are often taken on a large scale. For example, during a transect a ship might make measurements of water temperature and salinity at different depths, but do so only at every degree of longitude or latitude: about every 60 miles. One square kilometer is a standard resolution for satellites that calculate sea surface temperature. This research helps us understand major influences on reef life, such as transport of warm or cold water, nutrients, and possibly organisms from one region to another. However, the data gathered for oceanography at this scale is not detailed enough to understand how water characteristics influence life at a local level. Reef-specific oceanography studies the currents and water characteristics on a local scale. The topography of a reef--where it's shallow and deep; how it's situated relative to ocean currents and prevailing winds--can influence water temperature and the distribution of nutrients beyond what can be predicted by looking only at large scale currents in the region of the reef. Marine biologists such as those on this expedition study the distribution of marine life on a local scale, comparing for example life at different depths and within and outside an atoll, as well comparing reefs at different locations in the island chain. In order to understand the distribution of life they are seeing, they need reef-specific oceanographic data. Data for reef-specific oceanography is being gathered by taking direct measurements while we are up here, by leaving sensors in place that send their data back by satellite or are retrieved later, and by satellite imagery. The first two forms of data, measured directly on site, help scientists to "ground truth" satellite data: observations in the field are compared to what the satellite sees so that we know how to interpret the images. Reef Oceanography data is being gathered on this expedition by two teams: Night Operations (Scott Ferguson, assisted by Drew Rapp), who operate off the Hi`ialakai; and the Mooring Team (Elizabeth Keenan, Danny Merritt, Stephani Holzwarth, and team leader Kyle Hogrefe), who operate off of the jet boat HI-2. The instruments they use and what they measure are described below. As we consider this diverse collection of instruments we should keep in mind that they are all contributing to the same objective: to have an empirically based model of how ocean water characteristics are distributed across space and time. The most important water characteristic studied from the point of view of reef health is temperature. See our article on coral bleaching for a discussion of how temperature can affect the symbiotic relationship between coral and algae. Reef life is also strongly affected by the availability of nutrients. Both temperature and nutrients, in turn, are affected by the movement of water, so some of the measurements made are intended to give a profile of the bodies of water surrounding reefs. Yearly Water Column Measurements Some measurements are only taken about once a year, when researchers can come up to the locations where the measurements are made. Ship-based CTDs. The Night Operations team conduct Conductivity, Temperature and Depth or "CTD" measurements at several locations around the reef. (They also make observations with a Towed Optical Assessment Device, but this is for unrelated purposes: see the September 18th journal for a brief description.) The CTD deployed by Night Operations is a large device that can reach 500 meters in depth, taking up to five water samples at different depths, and making other measurements on a continuous basis on the the way down and up. Temperature and pressure are measured directly. Salinity is measured indirectly by measuring the conductivity of water to electricity. Chlorophyll is measured indirectly by a fluorometer that emits purple light ("black light") and measures fluorescence in response to that light. These measurements are made continuously, providing a profile of temperature, salinity, and chlorophyll as a function of depth. The photograph shows the dta from a test run of the CTD, including temperature (blue), salinity (red) and density (green). Analysis of the water samples will tell scientists how much chlorophyll is actually in the water. This information can then be compared to the measurements of the flurometer to see how well it predicts levels of chlorophyll. The presence of chlorophyll is a good sign of producivity: the food chain is built on phytoplankton (microscopic plants) that produce food energy from light energy. They are eaten by microscopic zooplankton (floating animals), which in turn are eaten by larger animals, and so on. Shipboard CTD measurements are typically taken at three locations around a given island or atoll: the windward and leeward sides, and at a standard oceanographic "station" assigned to each island or atoll that is being surveyed over a long period of time. There is one such station per each major island or atoll in the NWHI: Nihoa, Necker, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner, Maro Reef, Laysan, Lisanski, Pearl and Hermes, Midway, and Kure. Shallow water CTDs. In order to understand the local reef ecosystem, we need measurements at more locations than just three, and we need to sample in shallower water than the ship can operate in. For these reasons, the oceanographers aboard make other measurements from the HI-2 jetboat. These measurements are taken every mile or two around the island/atoll between the 80 and 120 foot isobath and inside the atolls in a few places as well, providing greater resolution. A handheld CTD device is pictured. Like its big brother, it includes a temperature sensor, a depth sensor, and a conductivity sensor (for salinity). The handheld device also has transmissometer that measures the level of particulate matter in the water (a proxy for turbidity). It does so by shining a light at a sensor and seeing how much of that light gets through the water. These measurements are also made continuously as the device descends and ascends. Unlike the larger version, the small boat CTD does not take water samples and does not have a fluormeter. Separate devices are used for these purposes. Water samples are taken by a handheld device consisting of a tube with spring loaded caps at both ends. The caps are set in the open position so water can flow through the tube as it descends. A weight is then slid down the supporting rope to hit a trigger and close the caps. The sampler is then taken to the surface, where the water is used to first rinse out a sample bottle (to avoid contamination from other water), and then the sample bottle is filled. The bottle is opaque to prevent further modification of the chlorophyll content by light. (Water from the large CTD is also stored in these same bottles.) Water samples are typically taken at three depths, 5, 30 and 60 feet, measured out by marks on the rope holding the sampling device. A radiometer on the small boat plays the role of the fluorometer, and also gives important information about available solar radiation. Two radiometers are coupled together to take readings above and below water. A instrument on the boat reads the amount of light arriving at the ocean surface. Another instrument is put in the water to read the light reflected back from the water. This is compared to the former surface measurement for reference. These measurements are made at light frequencies relevant to photosynthesis. By reading reflected light at certain wavelenghths, scientists can tell how much chlorophyll is in the water. Time Series Measurements The measurements just described provide a lot of detail about the water at a given location and different depths, but only at one or a few points in time: when the scientists can come up here. To fully understand an ecosystem, we need to monitor it over many years. The instruments described in this section record a series of measurements of water characteristics over time. They include CREWS buoys, SST buoys, and SST "pipe bombs." CREWS Buoys. These are large buoys (pictured) that are anchored at a specific location and can send data back daily to scientists via satellite. CREWS stands for Coral Reef Early Warning System, reflecting a major function of these buoys: to warn scientists as soon as possible of an unusual change taking place in the environment of a coral reef ecosystem. These buoys have sensors both in and above the water that measure water and air temperature, water salinity (via conductivity), wind speed, and barometric pressure. A few of them also have radiometers, but these can only be located where staff can get to them every few weeks to clean the sensors. There is one at French Frigate Shoals, serviced by USGS staff on Tern Island. SST Buoys and Pipes. CREWS buoys are large and expensive, so other instruments are also used that measure fewer parameters but can be deployed in more locations. Sea Surface Temperature (SST) buoys are round floating buoys that are anchored in a specific location. They measure water temperature and send this data back at regular intervals via satellite. The "pipe bombs of science" are strapped to the reef at different depths and locations around an atoll. These are set to measure temperature every half an hour, and record it on a data chip. Scientists must come up to the NWHI and retrieve these devices in order to obtain the data. Tracking Water Movement Currents, tides and waves also affect reef life. The mooring team installs two further kinds of instruments to track these parameters. Now we can appreciate why they are always so busy! Wave and Tide Recorders (WTDs), record water pressure with high sensitivity, providing information about waves and tides. (When a wave passes over, or when the tide comes in, there is more water over the instrument and hence more pressure on it.) This instrument measures the tide 48 times a day, and records wave height 8 times a day in the process. Each measurement involves recording the pressure for 18 minutes, and then estimating wave and tide values based on changes in the pressure. They are deployed at 50 to 100 feet. The Ocean Data Platform (ODP) contains temperature and salinity sensors, as well as an Acoustic Doppler Profiler (ADP). The ADP can measure current speed and direction in multiple directions and at different depths. These are placed at 60-100 feet, "hopefully deeper than the wave energy you are trying to study," as Kyle put it after a day of trying to extract an ODP that had somehow flipped and gotten wedged in the rocks! Other instruments used by reef oceanographers are not described here because we don't have them on this expedition. Drifting buoys that follow water at 15 meters depth, measuring GPS position and water temperature over time, were not delivered to Honolulu in time for the expedition due to the hurricanes in Florida. Two other sensors will be installed on the Hi`ialakai later this year: an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler that measures current velocity using the Doppler effect, and a sonar that measures biomass in the water column. Putting It All Together into a Model of the NWHI Visualize, if you will, a three dimensional model of the Northwestern Hawaiian Island chain. Imagine that we have represented this model in a computer such that we can attach the data gathered by the various devices just discussed to the corresponding location in the model. Now imagine that we can move a slider or use a play/fast forward/rewind control like on a video recorder to move this model through time, so we can store data taken at different times as well as different places. In other words, we have organized all the data collected in a four dimensional "space," where the first three dimensions are for the location of the various sensors discussed above (latitude, longitude, and depth) and the fourth dimension is for time. In some places in this model, we will have detailed information such as temperature, salinity, chlorophyll and light levels, etc., measured continuously over a number of years. In other places we will have only temperature, and in some places we have measurements only once a year. Finally, in most places we have no measurements at all! But we have taken our measurements at enough locations that we can "interpolate" or predict mathematically the values the measures would be at the points in between those we actually took. In some places and times we have different measures of the same thing. For example, we have the actual chlorophyll content of water and the estimate of that content taken by a radiometer or fluorometer; or we have the actual temperature and the estimated temperature taken by satellite. We can see how close these measurements are to each other, to better understand how we can use less expensive measures (such as a satellite) to estimate parameters that otherwise would require more expensive measures (sending people to the actual locations). All of this data organized in space and time provides a physical model of the ocean environment of reef ecosystems. Marine biologists can use this model to understand what is affecting the prevalence and health of the various organisms of the reef. We will see how marine biologists find out what organisms are present in another article. Garrison (2002)

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The unity between a man and a woman in marriage is an expression of the spiritual relationship that God desires His creation to realize with Him. The first marriage occurred nearly 6,000 years ago in the Garden of Eden, in the area of the world that we now know as the Middle East. The first couple was Adam and Eve, and the Lord Jesus specified that it was male and female that God joined together in marriage for life. (Matthew 19:4-6) Marriage has been practised as such in most cultures across geography and time. Marriage is a life-long commitment, and typically this involves a public ceremony (a wedding) in which vows are exchanged by the parties and before God. Approximately half of all traditional marriages in America end in divorce, many due to Facebook and other liberal activities. Dinesh D'Souza wrote: - Marriage requires a) two people who are b) of legal age and c) not closely related to each other who are d) one male and one female. Note that this definition excludes people who want to marry children, or guys who want to marry their sisters, or Muslims who want to take four wives, or that strange guy who wants to marry his dog. Bill Bennett wrote: - Based as it is on the principle of complementarity, marriage is also about a great deal more than love. That "great deal" encompasses, above all, procreation. The timeless function of marriage is childbearing and child-rearing, and the best arrangement ever developed to that end is the marital union between one man and one woman ... What Bennett's words ultimately imply is that, in terms of the value of marriage to anything which stands outside of it, marriage is most principally for the production of additional marriages, and, thus, is a progressive type of scale-invariance such as the Mandelbrot fractal. So, marriage is the most glorious kind of relation between human individuals because it alone is what most essentially defines humanity. The good of humanity is defined as an integration of all naturally enduring mutual benefits between all free individuals. But, all those benefits are created-and-sustained by the existence of marriage as that one relation for the preservation of which is invoked the most special legal recognition, because... ...Marriage not only historically is the very first form of human society, it is logically the most beautiful, perfect, simple, and potentially productive human institution possible. Biblical marriage advice 1 Corinthians 7:1-16: |“||Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband. The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. But this I say by way of concession, not of command. Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that. But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband (but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife. But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her. And a woman who has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave; the brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us to peace. For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife?||”| Modern marriage licenses In the present-day United States, "getting married" typically involves a marriage license issued by the state government or a subdivision thereof (e.g., a county). However, marriage licenses are nowhere mentioned in Scripture; in fact, they are a relatively recent innovation and originally applied only to marriages that were otherwise forbidden. Definition of marriage For Christians, marriage has traditionally been seen as "a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life." As such, marriage is the one and only form of companionship from which all other forms spring: it is the single irreducible core of society. Modern history of marriage law - 1724 - blacks, with permission of their slave owner, given the right to marry (formerly, under British law, only whites could legally marry) - 1769 - women no longer considered property of their husbands - 1899 - polygamy outlawed in the US - 1967 - interracial marriage legalized in all states - 1981 - rise of community property laws as men no longer seen as the sole owner of all marital assets Attacks on the institution of marriage Any society which has lessened the sanctity of marriage has perished, whereas those that have upheld the sanctity of marriage have endured. It has been argued that Ancient Rome's decline and its eventual fall in A.D. 476 were due in no small part to a growing tolerance of extramarital sex, particularly of homosexual acts, beginning in the Late Republic period ending in 27 B.C. Since the middle of the 20th century, Liberalism has sought to dismantle the societal pressures that dissuade people from engaging in extramarital and premarital sex. Removing the stigma from these behaviors, creating no-fault divorce laws, exalting adultery as liberating, rejuvenating, and "stimulating", and especially the de-stigmatizing of homosexuality all weaken the institution of marriage. A recent Newsweek article complained that Biblical figures have not provided good historical examples of marriage, noting that Abraham begat Ishmael by a maidservant and Jacob had two wives and had sons with both of their servants. The article also criticizes Jesus and St. Paul for remaining single. - ↑ Marriage between the sexes is a covenant, not a contract. Since time immemorial, some men disposed of a wife (woman) after her childbearing years to pursue a younger female consort. God, being a defender of women, ordained marriage by his perfect will to protect women's rights and not allow a man (male) to abandon them to homelessness and poverty with no marketable job skills other than homemaking or child rearing. This however, is not the only reason the covenant of marriage evolved between the sexes. - ↑ See also Perfect will of God vs Permissive will of God. - ↑ Article 7, "The sacrament of matrimony" - ↑ "Basic Beliefs," Southern Baptist Convention - ↑ "Marriage" - ↑ Albert Barnes, Matthew 19 - ↑ Matthew Henry, Matthew 19 - ↑ "Because there is a natural complementarity between men and women - sexual, emotional, temperamental, spiritual - marriage allows for a wholeness and a completeness that cannot be won in any other way. (Bill Bennett, The Broken Hearth, Page 197) - ↑ Divorce is within the permissive will of God, Deut. 22:13; divorce however, is due to sin entering the world, which God is willing to redeem. God himself in fact is divorced from Israel (Jer. 3:8-14; see also Is. 54:5), or for that matter, all unredeemed sinners. - ↑ Gay Rights vs. Democracy - ↑ The Broken Hearth, Page 197) - ↑ Scale-invariance as a unifying psychological principle; 1999 - ↑ Information on marriage licenses from Mercy Seat Christian Church - ↑ Gay Marriage, Democracy, and the Courts - ↑ Is there anyone left to defend traditional marriage? - ↑ http://www.newsweek.com/id/172653/page/1 - Form of Solemnization of Matrimony, an example of a traditional marriage service - Civil marriage - Marriage in the Unification Church - Essay: The Irreducible Core of Politics

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Hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) is an uncommon condition characterized by frequent, persistent, and severe vomiting and nausea during pregnancy. As a result, you may be unable to take in a sufficient amount of food and fluids. It can cause a weight loss of more than 5% of your pre-pregnancy body weight. This can also cause dehydration and vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Treatment may require hospitalization. HG is a more severe form of nausea and vomiting of pregnancy (NVP), also called morning sickness. Morning sickness affects anywhere between 50% to 90% of pregnant women. HG is estimated to occur in 0.5%-2% of pregnancies. There are many theories about the causes of HG, but none have been confirmed. HG is a complex disease that is likely caused by many factors. Some of these include: The Brain May Be Cause of Nausea Copyright © Nucleus Medical Media, Inc. Some researchers have found that the following factors increase your chance of developing HG. If you have any of these risk factors, tell your doctor: The following list of symptoms are general and may be caused by other, less serious health conditions. However, if you experience any one of them, call your physician to discuss your condition. Symptoms may include: Your doctor will ask about your symptoms and medical history. A physical exam will be done. Tests may include the following: Treating HG symptoms early in pregnancy can make you less sick in the long run and can decrease recovery time. Because HG is caused by many factors that vary among women, it is difficult to find a treatment that works for everyone. Talk with your doctor about the best treatment plan for you. Treatment options include the following: Try to eat frequent, small meals, bland or dry foods, high-protein choices. Reducing nausea, and thus allowing eating and drinking, will hasten recovery. Due to the risk of stating that a drug is safe for use during pregnancy, very few pharmaceutical manufacturers will say that their drugs are intended for a pregnancy condition like HG (examples: promethazine or prochlorperazine). However, doctors often recommend that women with HG take certain anti-nausea medicines, balancing the potential benefits and risks. Talk to your doctor about the right medicines for you. A common and safe remedy is to take supplemental vitamin B6 (pyridoxine), to a maximum of 100 mg/day. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that first-line treatment of nausea and vomiting of pregnancy should start with pyridoxine with or without doxylamine. Pyridoxine has been found to be effective in significantly reducing severe vomiting. In urgent visit situations, HG can be managed by IV fluids and vitamins. This can sometimes be done without hospitalization. Very rarely, some people require IV fluids throughout the entire pregnancy. If you are unable to tolerate food by mouth, you may need to receive nutrition by vein. This is called parenteral nutrition. A special kind of catheter is placed in a large vein and liquid nutrition is given. This can sometimes be done without hospitalization. In extreme cases, induced abortion may be considered. If you are diagnosed with HG, follow your doctor's instructions. Many of the conditions that lead to HG are not preventable. It is unknown why some women without those conditions develop HG. You can try to reduce your nausea during pregnancy by: The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation National Organization for Rare Diseases The Canadian Women's Health Network The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) ACOG issues guidance on the treatment of morning sickness during pregnancy. American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology website. Available at: http://www.acog.org/About_ACOG/News_Room/News_Releases/2004/ACOG_Issues_Guidance_on_Treatment_of_Morning_Sickness_During_Pregnancy. Accessed August 20, 2011. Acupuncture. EBSCO Natural and Alternative Treatments website. Available at: http://www.ebscohost.com/healthLibrary. Updated January 2009. Accessed January 19, 2009. Beers MH, Berkow R, eds. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. 17th ed. Whitehouse Station, NJ: Merck Research Laboratories; 1999. Burrow GN, Duffy TP, eds. Medical Complications During Pregnancy. 5th ed. Philadelphia, PA: WB Saunders Company; 1999. Cunningham FG, Gilstrap LC, Gant NF, Hauth JC, Leveno KJ, Wenstrom KD, eds. Williams Obstetrics. 21st ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; 2001. Ferri, Fred, ed. Ferri’s Clinical Advisor 2010. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Mosby Elsevier, 2009. Gabbe SG, Niebyl JR, Simpson JL. Obstetrics: Normal and Problem Pregnancies. 5th ed. United Kingdom: Churchill Livingstone; 2007. Gastroenterology Clinics of North America. Philadelphia, PA: WB Saunders. Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation website. Available at: http://www.helpher.org. Kasper DL, Braunwald E, Fauci AS, Hauser SL, Longo DL, Jameson JL, eds. Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. 16th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc; 2005. Mahan LK, Escott-Stump S, eds. Krause’s Food, Nutrition, and Diet Therapy. 10th ed. Philadelphia, PA: WB Saunders Company; 2000. Marx J, et al. Rosen's Emergency Medicine. 7th ed. St. Louis, MO: Mosby, Inc., 2009. National Organization for Rare Diseases website. Available at: http://www.rarediseases.org Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy. EBSCO DynaMed website. Available at: https://dynamed.ebscohost.com. Updated October 2010. Accessed October 25, 2010. Quinlan JD, Hill DA. Nausea and vomiting of pregnancy. Am Fam Physician. 2003;68:121-128. American Family Physician website. Available at: http://www.aafp.org/afp/20030701/121.html. Accessed August 12, 2005. Sadock BJ, Sadock VA, eds. Kaplan and Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry. 9th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins; 2003. Wise MG, Rundell JR, eds. The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry: Psychiatry in the Medically Ill. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.; 2002. Last reviewed September 2012 by Andrea Chisholm Please be aware that this information is provided to supplement the care provided by your physician. It is neither intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. CALL YOUR HEALTHCARE PROVIDER IMMEDIATELY IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider prior to starting any new treatment or with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing All rights reserved. What can we help you find?close ×

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by Frederick B. Reitz, Ph.C. University of Washington Seattle, Washington Illustrations by Marian Parry I report here the first evidence that domestic cats exhibit quantum tunneling. Subatomic particles can make seemingly impossible, instantaneous "jumps" from one place to another. This has been known in theory for well over half a century. Numerous examples of it have been observed and meticulously documented. Known as "quantum tunneling," this strange phenomenon had previously been thought to occur only on very small scales. In this paper I report instances of the spontaneous relocation of entire cats. Though cats are arguably quantal to the extent that they tend to exist as discrete entities, the appreciable magnitude of some of the cats in question constitutes a novel aspect of the tunneling phenomenon. The physical literature contains many reports of electrons and similar particles spontaneously jumping or "tunneling" from one place to another via so-called "forbidden" routes. This phenomenon has enjoyed much attention since the advent of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). In all reports to date, the particles in question have ranged in size from extremely small to very, very small, with rare cases involving particles that are merely quite small. House pets have also frequently been observed to exhibit unusual behavior. Dogs circle many times before sitting down. Cats forget to retract their tongues after bathing, and hamsters sleep in their food dishes. Non-Newtonian House Pets Pets are rarely attributed with exotic, non-Newtonian physical behavior. However, cats and dogs that are especially long-haired can exhibit a wavelike appearance. Furthermore, animals clearly interfere with each other, sometimes destructively (as with cats and dogs, or with cats and humans that are attempting to read a newspaper), sometimes constructively (as with rabbits and rabbits). Erwin Schr?dinger alluded, in a famous thought experiment, to the general question of the quantum behavior of cats. However, I believe that my report presents the first documented instances of the spontaneous tunneling of cats, and also the first documented reports of related quasi-electromagnetic cat phenomena. Cat Tunneling: Case 1 In my own residence, I and several other party guests personally observed the case of Chloe, a large black Himalayan. Though the extent of the cat's fur decreased the certainty with which one could specify the cat's position and momentum (c.f., the Himalyan Uncertainty Principle), and our garage door is only a few inches thick, the tunneling event was no less remarkable in light of her prodigious girth (she weighed 15 pounds, frequently intimidating our German Shepherd into sharing his dinner). The cat was initially observed sleeping in the driveway. When next observed several minutes later, the cat was nowhere to be seen. We opened the garage door, at which point Chloe left the garage, obviously having tunneled through the closed door. We marveled at this phenomenon, and, as we closed the side door to the garage, discussed plans for further study. Cat Tunneling: Case 2 The next such instance brought to my attention was one Snuggles Jr. of Lansing, Michigan, who was found on June 10, 1995, at 10:31 AM resting comfortably amidst a fresh batch of clothing, inside an automatic clothes dryer. As the dryer door was closed, and the owners did not remember having let the cat in, the transition was judged to be spontaneous. Discussion with the owners, regarding house policies pertaining to where the cat was and was not allowed to go, established the forbidden nature of this transition. Given that the cat was not even allowed in the laundry room, the span of the forbidden transition of the 6 pound cat was at least than 7 linear feet-clearly this constitutes tunneling on an unprecedented scale. Cat Tunneling: Case 3 Finally, there is the case of "Giggles," a largish calico of uncertain dimensions who was remarkable for his repeated and unsuccessful attempts to violate the Pauli Exclusion Principle with the neighbor's tabby (who in turn might have been more cooperative had she not been spayed). Though arguably the tunneling that Giggles did to get under the fence between his yard and the neighbor's was of a conventional sort, his consistent failure to include any other similar cat in his proximity and same state of excitation is compellingly consistent with previous results found on smaller scales. Given these data, I am led to the following conclusions: - Cats do exhibit the sort of tunneling behavior previously attributed only to subatomic particles, car keys, and socks; - Despite the finite probability of a cat tunneling spontaneously through a door, the probability of this event is low enough that leaving the cat closed in one's bedroom for a prolonged period of time is inadvisable; and - One's cat should indeed be blamed for the majority of stools found in inappropriate locations. Copyright © 1998 The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). All rights reserved. _____________________This article is republished with permission from the March-April 1998 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift! Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

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American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition - n. The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events; fortune: They met one day out of pure luck. - n. Good fortune or prosperity; success: We wish you luck. - n. One's personal fate or lot: It was just my luck to win a trip I couldn't take. - v. Informal To gain success or something desirable by chance: lucked into a good apartment; lucked out in finding that rare book. - idiom. as luck would have it As it turned out; as it happened: As luck would have it, it rained the day of the picnic. - idiom. in luck Enjoying success; fortunate. - idiom. out of luck Lacking good fortune. - idiom. press To risk one's good fortune, often by acting overconfidently. - idiom. try (one's) luck To attempt something without knowing if one will be successful. Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia - n. Fortune; hap; that which happens to a person by chance, conceived as having a real tendency to be favorable or unfavorable, or as if there were an inward connection between a succes sion of fortuitous occurrences having the same character as favorable or unfavorable. Thus, gamesters say that one ought to continue to play while the luck is in one's favor and leave off when the luck turns against one. - n. Good fortune; favorable hap; a supposed something, pertaining to a person, at least for a time, giving to fortuitous events a favorable character; also, in a weakened sense, a fortuitous combination of favorable occurrences. - n. An object with which good fortune is thought to be connected; especially, a vessel for holding liquid, as a drinking-cup. There are several such vessels surviving in England, as the Luck of Edenhall, preserved in a manor-house in the county of Cumberland. - n. Synonyms See happy. - To be lucky. - To make lucky. - n. A lock of wool twisted on the finger of a spinner. - n. Something that happens to someone by chance, a chance occurrence. - n. A superstitious feeling that brings fortune or success. - n. success - v. intransitive To succeed by chance. - v. intransitive To rely on luck. - v. transitive To carry out relying on luck. GNU Webster's 1913 - n. That which happens to a person; an event, good or ill, affecting one's interests or happiness, and which is deemed casual; a course or series of such events regarded as occurring by chance; chance; hap; fate; fortune; often, one's habitual or characteristic fortune. Luckis often used by itself to mean good luck. - n. your overall circumstances or condition in life (including everything that happens to you) - n. an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that causes an event to result one way rather than another - n. an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that leads to a favorable outcome - From Middle English luk, lukke, related to Old Frisian luk ("luck"), West Frisian gelok ("luck"), Dutch geluk ("luck"), Low German luk ("luck"), German Glück ("luck, good fortune, happiness"), Danish lykke ("luck"), Swedish lycka ("luck"), Icelandic lukka ("luck"). (Wiktionary) - Middle English lucke, from Middle Dutch luc, short for gheluc. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition) “While the romantic side of me would like to believe in "luck" - the karmic, cosmic smiling-upon-me type of luck, the scientific side of me completely agrees with Lena West.” “And then, turning to leave him, 'An' will ye say a mass if the luck is against me? ” “Well, your luck is about to change with a little assistance from Lavish Lifestyles, LLC.” “MAATHAI: They say that what we call luck is opportunity that meets preparedness.” “I sometimes wonder if what we call luck is merely the will of God, " Otero observed sadly, -and that therefore Cochrane has been sent to scourge Spain for a reason.” “Whenever you hear any one expatiating upon what he calls the luck of some one else, you may be sure that he is a person entirely deficient in those qualities which could attract what he calls luck, but what is really, in the majority of cases, merely the result of hard work based upon a reasoned poise.” “Well, this is what I call luck!" exclaimed Ferd Stowing.” “Well, this is what I call luck -- pure, unadulterated luck, with sugar on it," drawled Ham as he surveyed the house.” “Ephraim, my son!" said the old gambler, with a cunning smile, "I'll tell you something -- There are persons whose whole powers are devoted to one object -- how to win a fortune; in the same way as there are some who study to become doctors, and the like, so these study what we call luck ... and from them I've learned it.” “This is certainly what I call luck," cried Allen excitedly, as he gazed at the scrap of paper Levine had passed over.” These user-created lists contain the word ‘luck’. all sorts of ... Very basic words for ESL students. short, sweet, epic, catchy, sassy, sexy & sizzling. ( personal list, randomness ) Much of my life has had healthy doses of this, so I pay homage. Looking for tweets for luck.

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One of the most frequently asked questions here at Jacob Lake Inn is, “Where is the lake?” Many people who visit this area from wetter climates may not consider our lake to be a lake, but this small accumulation of water, supplied by rain and snow melt, is one of the only permanent water sources on top of the Kaibab Plateau. Known as the “waterless mountain”, meaning there are no streams or running water, the Kaibab Plateau contains several small lakes comparable to Jacob Lake. Many of these lakes are formed in the beds of sink holes, plugged up by organic material, and filled with rain and melted snow. These lakes, and in particular, Jacob Lake, as small as it may be, were often the difference between life and death for Native, immigrant and traveler. The Piute Indians who inhabited the Kaibab Plateau told Jacob Hamblin, Mormon pioneer and explorer, about this little known water supply, and he in turn told other pioneers traveling through the area. The Honeymoon Trail, a route traveled by settlers and couples from settlements in southern Arizona on their way to the Mormon temple in St. George, snaked around the base of the plateau. The new route over the plateau, with the stop at Jacob Lake, cut off a significant portion of their journey, thus establishing the trail and Jacob Lake as a valuable resource. The Piutes held Jacob Hamblin in high regard, due to his honest trading practices and peacemaking abilities with the local tribes and white pioneers, and named the lake after him. The concept of land ownership was absent from the Piute culture. They did not give Hamblin the lake, but rather they honored him by giving this priceless body of water his name. The size of Jacob Lake has changed over the years. In the past, especially in a wet year it could nearly reach the fence that surrounds it, but due to recent droughts and mild winters the lake has decreased in size. Jacob Lake stands as an example of the value placed on water in this dry region and though this water source no longer supplies water to thirsty travelers; it does provide wildlife with a dependable water supply throughout the year. When Harold and Nina N. Bowman established Jacob Lake Inn in 1923, their families had been involved in the exploration and settling of much of southern Utah and the Arizona Strip. Nina's grandfather, Franklin B. Woolley, wrote the 1866 cavalry exploration report of the territory from St. George to the Kaibab Plateau to the mouth of the Green River. The report included the first official descriptions and map of the area. Harold's father, Henry E. Bowman, engineered and supplied the cable tram that crossed the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Henry also built (with a lot of help from the people of Kanab, Glendale, and Orderville) the first road from Kanab, Utah to Mt. Carmel. This made the area more accessible to travelers and tourists. Franklin B.'s brother, Edwin D. Woolley Jr was one of the first white men to see the Grand Canyon from the North Rim. Upon seeing it he almost fell off his horse and exclaimed "This is one of the wonders of the world! People will come from all corners of the globe and pay large sums of money to gaze at what we now behold." As a local community leader and a man of wonderful vision, Woolley saw the importance of tourism in the growth of Southern Utah and the Grand Canyon area. Due to the lack of water for large scale agriculture, this region had limited economic potential. Edwin D. continually sought to plan and develop ways to open Southern Utah and the North Rim area to people from around the world. He organized many expeditions to the North Rim, bring- ing groups of dignitaries, important businessmen and important politicians to the area. Some of his more illustrious guests included Buffalo Bill Cody and Zane Grey. In 1890 Edwin D. convinced a group of English noblemen accompanied by Buffalo Bill to invest in developing this prime hunting ground. However, the lack of adequate roads spoiled the deal. After riding in an automobile for the first time in 1908, Edwin D. planned and guided the first automobile trip in 1913 to the North Rim. This incredible feat was accomplished by building the road as they went. This also required gas to be shipped 320 miles from the closest gas station which was in Salt Lake City. President Teddy Roosevelt also frequented the Kaibab. In 1903, Roosevelt, with his two older sons and nephew, made an expedition from the South Rim to the North Rim. Roosevelt's impressions of the Grand Canyon, together with his hunting experiences on the Kaibab, led him to push for a change in the status of the Grand Canyon. In 1908 this national forest and game reserve became a national monument, which led to its eventual designation as a National Park in 1919. In 1923, Harold and Nina Bowman, realizing the improved mobility the automobile afforded travelers, started a business selling gas from a fifty-gallon barrel in the back of a truck. This venture, originally located on the "shores" of Jacob Lake, began a short two years after their marriage. They each had a heritage of pioneering men and women and neither was daunted by this enterprise. The first lodge was built a year later on the ridge above the lake (across from what is now the Kaibab Kamper Village) at the head of Jacob Canyon. As Harold stated in his personal history "Jacob Lake Inn was quite an experiment at first. We built a two room cabin, and Nina moved out there and just used quilts for doors. She took care of the place and her brother Ezra Nixon ran the service station. If we could sell a barrel of gas in one day, we thought we had had good business." As described before, the first lodge had two rooms, a main room in which root beer and Native American crafts were sold and a kitchen where meals were prepared for visitors, family and staff. This lodge remained by Jacob Lake unti11929 when the highway, which had come up through the narrow Jacob Canyon, was moved. This old road was an enlargement of the original trail used by Jacob Hamblin and the Piutes as they trekked the shortest distance to water at Jacob Lake. With the increase in travel, thanks to the automobile, a highway was engineered and constructed to allow safe travel up the spine of the mountain. With this new highway changing the route of travel, the Bowmans built the new Jacob Lake Inn at its present location, what is now the junction of Highway 89a and Highway 67. When Harold learned that the location of the new highway junction was positioned at the base of a large hill, and that it would be an inconvenient location for travelers headed to the Grand Canyon, Harold borrowed a BPR grader and built a better road. This shifted the junction of the road from the base of the hill to the flatter land right in front of the Jacob Lake Inn. Harold's road became the more traveled route, and when the highway was paved In the mid thirties, it became the official highway. Effie Dean Bowman (Rich) was born in 1923, the same year as Jacob Lake Inn, so to speak. Harold Jr. was born in 1927. In 1929, Effie Dean and Harold began the lifestyle of spending summers at Jacob Lake and winters in Salt Lake City when Effie Dean entered the first grade. On the Kaibab they had dogs, squirrels and porcupines for pets and each other for friends as they watched their parents work hard. Nina would start the day doing laundry, then move to baking and cooking, then working in the gift shop. Harold Sr. was always building onto the lodge, greeting customers (if a car stopped out in the road, he would go out and give directions and invite the guests in), and helped to keep things running smoothly. Effie Dean and Harold Jr. started working at a young age. Effie Dean, at age seven, started the very important job of emptying slop jars in the rooms. Harold Jr. started at age four taking firewood to all the cabins. They washed dishes, cleaned rooms, emptied slop jars, gathered firewood, and moved on to other jobs. Effie Dean began waitressing at thirteen, and Harold started in the service station at eight. As more people traveled to see the Grand Canyon North Rim, Jacob Lake Inn's reputation for hospitality and good food began to grow. The Prince of Siam and his entourage stopped on their way to the Canyon and even though he was a reluctant subject, Nina captured his likeness for posterity. The lodge also expanded with the growing number of tourists, adding a dining room, new motel units, and even relocating the gas station twice. The staff kept growing too, and soon it grew beyond the scope of family and friends. Annual pilgrimages to regional colleges and universities or any place they could find good employees began bringing bright, friendly young people to the Inn to help care for their children and serve their guests. Effie Dean and Harold Jr. continued working with the family after pursuing an education, military service, and their respective marriages (Effie Dean married John P. Rich and Harold married Afton Kunz). Soon the third generation began. John Jr. and Bonnie, Nina, Steve, Harold III, Chris, Kent, Kim, Genene, Mary Lynne, and Matt all helped keep the business going. They started out by showing guests to their cabins, washing headlights (they couldn't reach the windshields), bussing tables, crushing and bagging ice, slicing bread, washing dishes, hauling trash, chopping wood, herding cattle, fixing fences, and any number of jobs that needed doing. During these summers they worked alongside the young people, explored the Kaibab Forest roads on their days off, and traveled back home to Salt Lake for the fall and winter to attend school. Harold Jr. once stated he was neither a country hick nor a city slicker, he had the best of both, and now the fourth generation of the Bowman family has experienced this fortunate life as well. As time went on, Harold Jr.'s wife and children pursued other interests and professions, while Effie Dean, her children, their spouses, and grandchildren, continue the seasonal trek to the Kaibab.They manage the lodge, hire personnel, and perform the tasks regular employees won't do. As Jacob Lake's founding generations pass on, (Nina N. in 1959, Harold Jr. in 1961, Harold Sr. in 1974, and John Rich Sr. in 1995), those that remain acknowledge the heritage that their pioneering ancestors set forth. This legacy of hard work, friendly knowledgeable service, excellent products, and a love for the Kaibab, the Grand Canyon, and the red rock deserts they call home.

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OAKLAND OUTDOORS: Oakland County residents can visit the ‘Arctic Circle’ right in Royal Oak The date of the winter solstice on Dec. 21 draws near. What better time than now to plan an adventuresome trek into the Arctic — a journey to the cryosphere, a land of ice, snow and frozen sea water. The Arctic is a landscape of mountains, fjords, tundra and beautiful glaciers that spawn crystal-colored icebergs. It is the land of Inuit hunters, polar bears and seals and is rich with mysteries that science is still working to unravel. Those wishing to reach the Arctic must travel north of the Arctic Circle. And just where is the Arctic Circle? The climatologists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center define the Arctic Circle as the imaginary line that marks the latitude at which the sun does not set on the day of the summer solstice and fails to rise on the day of the winter solstice, a day that is just around the corner. Arctic researchers describe the circle as the northern limit of tree growth. The circle is also defined as the 10 Degree Celsius Isotherm, the zone at which the average daily summer temperature fails to rise above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Polar bears are hungry in this foreboding landscape where the mercury can plunge quickly to 60 degrees below zero and winds are ferocious. Perhaps it is time to stop reading my words, bundle up the kids and hike into the Arctic. Why not today! Children will almost certainly see seals just yards away and, if the timing is right, go nose to nose with a mighty polar bear that may swim their way and give a glance that could be interpreted as a one-word question: “Tasty?” And here is the rest of the story, a special trail tale that takes visitors to a one-of-a-kind place. I am amazed at how many residents of Oakland County have yet to hike through an acrylic tunnel known as the Polar Passage — a public portal to the watery world beneath the land above the Arctic Circle. The 70-foot long tunnel is the highlight of a 4.2-acre living exhibit at the Detroit Zoo, the Arctic Ring of Life. And a hike through that exhibit and underwater viewing tunnel brings encounters with three polar bears, a gray seal, two harbor seals, one harp seal and three arctic fox. A visit to the Arctic Ring of Life is more than a fun hike. It opens our eyes to the life of the Inuit people and introduces visitors to a fragile world in danger from events that can no longer be denied — climate change, global warming and rising sea waters. Continued... Upon entering the park, check a map for the location. It’s easy to find and is rich with historical, cultural and natural information of the Inuit, the Arctic people. Before Europeans arrived, they had never even heard the word, “Eskimo.” The arrival of Europeans in the early 1800s was not good news for the pale-skinned strangers. They carried foreign diseases, and missionaries followed that sadly enticed the trusting Intuits to give up their own religion and become Christians. The native people were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to abandon their traditional lifestyles and live in the village. The jury may still be out, but some historians claimed that the Inuit were eager to embrace the new ways to forgo the harsh reality of nomadic life. Today, the Arctic Ring of Life’s Nunavut Gallery gives visitors a glimpse of a disappearing culture torn between the old and the new, but still rich with tradition, folk art, spirituality and creativity. The Inuit once existed almost exclusively on meat and fat with only limited availability of seasonal plants. The Inuits hunted for survival and considered it disrespectful to hunt for sport. And as I dug deeper into their history to prepare for my tunnel trek, I discovered that metal for their early tools were chipped flake by flake from large meteorites and then pounded into tools like harpoon points. The fascinating relationship between the Inuit, their environment and creatures that dwell above the Arctic Circle is more deeply understood when visitors trek through the highlight of the exhibit, the polar passage tunnel. A polar bear on a tundra hill, built high to afford the bears a wide range of smells, may be sniffing the air for zoo visitors. The tunnel has acrylic walls four inches thick, is 12 feet wide, eight feet high and offers great views when a seal or polar bear swims. About 294,000 gallons of saltwater surround visitors. Some wonder why the polar bears do not eat the seals. They can’t. A Lexan wall separates the species. Be sure to take the time to explore the Exploration Station of the Arctic Ring of Life. It contains many of the accoutrements of a working research station complete with telemetry equipment, computers and displays of snowshoes and parkas from the arctic. Portholes provide views of the seals and bears. Visitors may want to do what I did — enter through the tunnel a second time and then read all the well placed interpretive signs above ground. Stories of the hunters and the hunted await and include myth-busting facts on mass suicides of lemmings that have been alleged to jump off cliffs into the sea. And be sure to let a child put his or her foot in the imprint of the polar bear track on the pathway. And, of course, save time to hike the rest of the zoo. Cold weather is a perfect time to explore minus the summer crowds. Jonathan Schechter’s column appears on Sundays. Look for his Earth’s Almanac blog at www.earthsalmanac.blogspot.com Twitter: OaklandNature E-mail:email@example.com. For more information about the Detroit Zoo’s hours, exhibits and special events, visit detroitzoo.org. The zoo is located at 8450 West 10 Mile Road in Royal Oak. No additional fee to visit Arctic Ring of Life. See wrong or incorrect information in a story. Tell us here Location, ST | website.com National Life Videos - Fire destroys home, damages business in Waterford (1825) - Long lines to see Stan Lee, Norman Reedus plague Motor City Comic Con on Saturday WITH VIDEO (1063) - PAT CAPUTO: Detroit Red Wings show why they are Stanley Cup contenders (805) - Nearby neighbors concerned after man convicted of murder paroled, moves to Pontiac group home (788) - PAT CAPUTO: Detroit Red Wings show why Stanley Cup dream not far fetched (785) - Pontiac council votes against Schimmel’s plan to eliminate health care for retirees (686) - Fall Out Boy wants to "Save Rock and Roll" with new CD (4) - New backcourt leads Lathrup over Dragons (4) - Oakland County Sheriff’s Office veteran — Michigan's first black police captain — honored in retirement WITH VIDEO (3) - Fire destroys home, damages business in Waterford (3) - Despite Angelina Jolie, breast cancer treatment has a long way to go - COLUMN (2) - PITTS: Woman ran to Key West, where else? (2) - Bloomfield Hills mother graduates college with daughter, stepson (2) Recent Activity on Facebook Caren Gittleman likes talking cats. She'll discuss everything about them, from acquiring a cat, differences in breeds, behaviors, health concerns, inside versus outside lifestyles, toys, food, accessories, and sharing cat stories. Share your stories and ask her questions about your favorite feline. Roger Beukema shares news from Lansing that impacts sportsmen (this means ladies as well) and talks about things he finds when he goes overseas to visit my children, and adding your comments into the mix. Join Jonathan Schechter as he shares thoughts on our natural world in Oakland County and beyond.

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Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are a group of diseases marked by abnormal production of blood cells by the bone marrow. Healthy bone marrow produces immature blood cells—called blasts—that then develop into red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. MDS disrupts this normal process so that the bone marrow is overactive, producing many immature cells. These blasts, however, do not fully develop into mature blood cells. As a result, patients with MDS have fewer mature blood cells, and those they do have may be abnormal and not function properly. Any or all blood cell types may be affected by MDS, which is different from leukemia in which only white blood cells are overproduced. The direct effects of MDS may include: - Anemia and fatigue if red blood cells counts are low - Increased risk of infection if white blood cell counts are low - Compromised ability to control bleeding if platelets counts are low Failure of the bone marrow to produce normal cells is a gradual process. As such, MDS is primarily a disease of the aging and most patients are over 65 years of age. Some patients may survive with MDS while approximately one-third will have their disease progress to acute myeloid leukemia (AML). AML that develops from MDS is a difficult disease to treat. The possible treatments for MDS, which may be used alone or in combination, include the following: - Supportive care through administration of growth factors to stimulate immature cells to development into mature blood cells - Destruction of abnormal cells through administration of chemotherapy, at either low, conventional, or high doses, depending on the condition of the patient and the aggressiveness of their disease - Replacement of damaged bone marrow with healthy cells that develop into blood cells, a procedure called stem cell transplantation Targeted therapy that may include the new drug Revlimid® (lenalidomide), which is thought to work by regulating the immune system About this MDS Treatment Information The information contained on this site is a general overview of treatment for MDS. Treatment may consist of growth factors, chemotherapy with or without stem cell transplantation, targeted therapy, or a combination of these treatment techniques. Multi-modality treatment, which utilizes two or more treatment techniques, is increasingly recognized as an important approach for improving a patient’s chance of cure or prolonging survival. In some cases, participation in a clinical trial utilizing new, innovative therapies may provide the most promising treatment. Information about treatments for MDS that are being evaluated in clinical trials is discussed under Strategies to Improve Treatment. Circumstances unique to each patient’s situation may influence how these general treatment principles are applied. The potential benefits of multi-modality care, participation in a clinical trial, or standard treatment must be carefully balanced with the potential risks. The information on this website is intended to help educate patients about their treatment options and to facilitate a mutual or shared decision-making process with their treating cancer physician. MDS Treatment Sections: Background: Normal Blood Cell Production In order to better understand MDS and its treatment, a basic understanding of normal blood cell production is useful. Normal blood is made up of fluid called plasma and three main types of blood cells–white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. Each type of blood cell has a specific function: - White blood cells, also called leukocytes, help the body fight infections and other diseases. - Red blood cells, also called erythrocytes, make up half of the blood’s total volume and are filled with hemoglobin, which picks up oxygen from the lungs and carries it to the body’s organs. - Platelets, or thrombocytes, help form blood clots to control bleeding. Blood cells are produced inside the bones in a spongy space called the bone marrow. The process of blood cell formation is called hematopoiesis. All blood cells develop from one common cell type, called a stem cell. Stem cells become mature blood cells by a process called differentiation. Immature blood cells are called blasts. Blasts grow or differentiate into mature red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Once they are fully developed, these cells are released into the blood where they circulate throughout the body and perform their respective functions. In healthy individuals, there are adequate stem cells to continuously produce new blood cells and mature blood cells are produced in a continuous and orderly fashion. MDS disrupts this normal process resulting in many blasts and few mature, healthy blood cells. In order to diagnose MDS and plan treatment, a physician must evaluate the patient’s bone marrow cells to determine the specific type of MDS. The cells are removed through a technique called a bone marrow biopsy, which uses a large needle to withdraw cells directly from the bone marrow. A special laboratory test is conducted on the sample cells, called a cytogenetic analysis. The purpose of this test is to determine whether there are abnormalities in the DNA of the blood cells. DNA contains the genetic code for the cell, which can be thought of as the instructions for what the cell looks like, what it does, and how it grows. Most forms of MDS and leukemias are characterized by specific abnormalities. Identifying these provides useful information about the patient’s prognosis, or duration of survival. Types of MDS There are several different types of MDS, which are classified by how the abnormal cells that were removed from the bone marrow appear under the microscope and how many blasts can be identified. At the time of bone marrow evaluation, cells are also removed for cytogenetic analysis. MDS is classified into five different diseases characterized by ineffective blood cell production in the bone marrow and varying rates of progression to acute leukemia. Following is a description of the five classifications: Refractory Anemia (RA): Patients have low blood counts, bone marrow blasts are less than 5%, and sideroblasts (iron containing cells) are less than 15%. The average survival is approximately 43 months, but can be influenced by specific chromosomal abnormalities. Refractory Anemia with Ringed Sideroblasts (RARS): Patients have low blood counts, bone marrow blasts are less than 5%, and sideroblasts are greater than 15%. The average survival is 55 months, but can be influenced by specific chromosomal abnormalities. Refractory Anemia with Excess Blasts (RAEB): Patients have low blood counts, 1-5% blasts in the blood, and bone marrow blasts between 5 and 20%. The average survival is 12 months, but can be influenced by specific chromosomal abnormalities. Refractory Anemia with Excess Blasts in Transition (RAEBt): Patients have low blood counts, over 5% blasts in the blood or cells in the blood containing an abnormality referred to as Auer rods, and bone marrow blasts between 20 and 30%. The average survival is 5 months, but can be influenced by specific chromosomal abnormalities. Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML): Blood cells called monocytes make up more than 1,000 ml in the blood and patients have less than 5% blasts. Bone marrow blasts are less than 20% and the average survival is 30 months, but can be influenced by specific chromosomal abnormalities. Planning Treatment for MDS Since a stem cell transplant utilizing cells from a donor—called an allogeneic stem cell transplant—holds the most hope for cure, a major decision faced by patients with MDS is not whether to undergo transplantation, but when. Patients with MDS that is likely to progress to leukemia early—which results in shorter survival—may be willing to accept higher risks of treatment and proceed quickly to a stem cell transplant. Patients with MDS that progresses more slowly are likely to live longer and may wish to pursue a more conservative treatment approach, opting to use supportive care and wait a longer period before undergoing a stem cell transplant. However, patients who choose conservative treatment approaches should always be prepared to receive more aggressive treatment in case their disease progresses more rapidly than anticipated. To prepare for a possible stem cell transplant, patients should consider arranging for a stem cell donor and/or having their own stem cells collected and stored shortly after diagnosis. This is important because as MDS progresses and treatment is initiated, it becomes increasingly difficult to collect stem cells. In order to better plan treatment, doctors try to identify how quickly patients are likely to progress to acute myeloid leukemia (AML). A score is assigned that reflects this tendency to progress, and is based on a system called the International Prognostic Scoring System (IPSS). A higher score is associated with a type of MDS that is likely to progress to leukemia more quickly. The IPSS score takes into account three important factors in MDS: - The percent of bone marrow blasts—more blasts contributes to a higher score - Genetic abnormalities—more abnormalities contribute to a higher score - Severity of low white blood cell counts—lower counts of white blood cells, platelets, and red blood cells contribute to a higher score Relationship between a patient’s risk of progressing to leukemia and timing of stem cell transplant: Research shows that knowing a patient’s risk of progressing to leukemia is important for determining optimal timing of stem cell transplantation. Based on information about 1,000 patients who had been diagnosed with MDS, researchers from several U.S. cancer centers have determined that patients with a low or low-intermediate risk of progression to leukemia have better outcomes if their transplant was not performed at the time of diagnosis, but was delayed. Patients with a high or high-intermediate risk experienced optimal survival if they underwent an allogeneic transplant at the time of diagnosis, without delay. Furthermore, the patients with lower risk achieved optimal outcomes if their transplant was administered prior to progression of their disease to acute myeloid leukemia compared to after progression. Overview of Treatment of MDS The objective of treatment is to control the growth of the abnormal cells so that more normal cells can grow and improve blood cell production. Some treatments are designed to manage the complications associated with ineffective blood cell production, while others extend survival or even cure the disease. Treatment of MDS is individualized and depends on two main factors: - The severity of low blood counts - The risk of progression to acute myeloid leukemia Other factors that influence treatment decisions include patient’s age, other medical conditions, and the severity of the myelodysplastic syndrome. The potential treatment options for MDS include the following: Currently, only stem cell transplant utilizing cells from a donor—called an allogeneic transplant—can consistently cure patients with MDS. Other therapies are directed at prolonging survival and decreasing the symptoms from these diseases. Cutler C, Lee S, Greenberg P, et al. A decision analysis of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation for the myelodysplastic syndromes: delayed transplantation for low-risk myelodysplasia is associated with improved outcome. Blood. 2004;104:579-585. Copyright © 2013 Omni Health Media Myelodysplastic Syndrome Information Center. All Rights Reserved.

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Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas A Spanish historian; born at Cuellar, in the province of Segovia, in 1559; died at Madrid, 27 March, 1625. He was a great-grandson of the Tordesillas who was put to death by the Comuneros at Seville. He studied in Spain and Italy, and became secretary to Vespasiano Gonzaga, a brother of the Duke of Mantua, who was afterwards Viceroy of Navarre and Valencia, and who recommended him to Philip II in the last year of that monarch's reign. Philip appointed him grand historiographer ( cronista mayor ) of America and Castile, and he filled that office during part of his royal patron's reign, the whole reign of Philip III, and the beginning of that of Philip IV. At his death his body was conveyed to Cuellar, and interred in the church of Santa Marina, where his tomb is still to be seen. His most famous work is the "Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Océano" (General History of the deeds of the Castilians on the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea), divided into eight periods of ten years each, and comprising all the years from 1472 to 1554. This work was printed at Madrid in 1601; reprinted by Juan de la Cuesta in 1615; revised and augmented by Andrés González and published at Madrid by Nicolas Rodríguez in 1726, and at Antwerp, by Juan Bautista Verdussen, in 1728. Worthy of note is the "Description of the West Indies", in the first volume of his work, which was translated into Latin and published at Amsterdam, by Gaspar Barleo, in 1622, a French version being published at Paris in the same year. In 1660 there appeared a French translation of the first three decades of his "Historia" by Nicolás de la Corte. In writing his great work Tordesillas made use of all the public archives, having access to documents of every kind. It is evident in his writings that he had to deal with a large number of historical manuscripts, and contented himself with relating events as he found them recorded. A great part of his work is more or less a transcript of the History of the Indies left by the famous Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas , though expurgated of wellnigh everything unfavourable to the settlers. A painstaking and conscientious investigator for the most part, his style does not correspond to his other admirable qualifications. He was a learned and judicious man, though, particularly in the later decades, somewhat prone to overpraise the conquerors and their exploits. In addition to that already mentioned, his most important works are: "A General History of the World during the time of Philip II from the year 1559 to the King's death"; "Events in Scotland and England during the forty-four years of the lifetime of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland" (Historia de lo sucedido en Escocia é Inglaterra en los cuarenta y cuatro años que vivió Maria Estuardo Reina de Escocia); Five books of the history of Portugal and the conquests of the Azores in the years 1582, 1583; "History of events in France from 1585 to 1594" (a work published in Madrid in 1598, but suppressed by command of the king); "A Treatise, Relation, and Historical Discourse on the Disturbances in Aragon in the years 1591 and 1592" (Tratado, relación y discurso histórico de los movimientos en Aragon en los años de 1591 y 1592); "Commentary on the deeds of the Spaniards, French, and Venetians in Italy, and of other Republics, Potentates, famous Italian Princes and Captains, from 1281 to 1559"; "Chronicle of the Turks, following chiefly that written by Juan Maria Vicentino, chronicler to Mahomet, Bajazet, and Suleiman, their lords" (unpublished); various works translated from the French and Italian, preserved in the National Library at Madrid. More Catholic Encyclopedia Browse Encyclopedia by Alphabet The Catholic Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive resource on Catholic teaching, history, and information ever gathered in all of human history. This easy-to-search online version was originally printed in fifteen hardcopy volumes. Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the Encyclopedia contains not only precise statements of what the Church has defined, but also an impartial record of different views of acknowledged authority on all disputed questions, national, political or factional. In the determination of the truth the most recent and acknowledged scientific methods are employed, and the results of the latest research in theology, philosophy, history, apologetics, archaeology, and other sciences are given careful consideration. No one who is interested in human history, past and present, can ignore the Catholic Church, either as an institution which has been the central figure in the civilized world for nearly two thousand years, decisively affecting its destinies, religious, literary, scientific, social and political, or as an existing power whose influence and activity extend to every part of the globe. In the past century the Church has grown both extensively and intensively among English-speaking peoples. Their living interests demand that they should have the means of informing themselves about this vast institution, which, whether they are Catholics or not, affects their fortunes and their destiny. Browse the Catholic Encyclopedia by Topic Copyright © Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company New York, NY. Volume 1: 1907; Volume 2: 1907; Volume 3: 1908; Volume 4: 1908; Volume 5: 1909; Volume 6: 1909; Volume 7: 1910; Volume 8: 1910; Volume 9: 1910; Volume 10: 1911; Volume 11: - 1911; Volume 12: - 1911; Volume 13: - 1912; Volume 14: 1912; Volume 15: 1912 Catholic Online Catholic Encyclopedia Digital version Compiled and Copyright © Catholic Online

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Are Black & White Colors? Is Black a Color? Is White a Color? The answer to the question - "Are black and white colors?" - is one of the most debated issues about color. Ask a scientist and you'll get a reply based on physics: “Black is not a color, white is a color.” Ask an artist or a child with crayons and you'll get another: “Black is a color, white is not a color.” (Maybe!) There are four sections on this page that present the best answers. # 1 - The First Answer: Color Theory #1 - Color as Light Black is not a color. White is a color. # 2 - The Second Answer: Color Theory #2 - Color as Pigment or Molecular Coloring Agents Black is a color. White is not a color Comments from color pros: More about black & white How Colors Exist A basic understanding of how colors are created is the first step in providing correct answers. Here are two examples: The color of a tangible object is the result of pigments or molecular coloring agents. For example, the color of a red apple (in the illustration at the left) is the result of molecular coloring agents on the surface of the apple. Also, a painting of a red apple is the result of red pigments used to create the image. The colors of objects viewed on a television set or on a computer monitor are the result of colored light (in the illustration at the right). If you're not familiar with how colors are created by light, look at your monitor or television screen close up. Put your eye right up against the screen. A small magnifying glass might help. This is what you will see: A simplified way to explain it is that the color of a red apple on a computer or television is created by photons of red light that are transmitted within the electronic system. It's also important to understand the concept of "primary" colors. The fundamental rule is that there are three colors that cannot be made by mixing other colors together. These three, red, blue, and yellow, are known as the primary colors. Now that we've described two different categories of colors (pigment and light-generated) and have a definition of primary colors, the answer to whether black and white are colors can be answered. (Additive Color Theory) Red, Green, and Blue (The primary colors of light) Are black and white colors when generated as light? Black and white cats generated on a television. These colors are created by light. 1. Black is the absence of color (and is therefore not a color) When there is no light, everything is black. Test this out by going into a photographic dark room. There are no photons of light. In other words, there are no photons of colors. 2. White is the blending of all colors and is a color. Light appears colorless or white. Sunlight is white light that is composed of all the colors of the spectrum. A rainbow is proof. You can't see the colors of sunlight except when atmospheric conditions bend the light rays and create a rainbow. You can also use a prism to demonstrate this. Fact: The sum of all the colors of light add up to white. This is additive color theory. When you're finished with black & white, explore some real colors at Color Matters: The Meanings of Color Color Theory 2 - Color as Pigment or Molecular Coloring Agents (Subtractive Color Theory) |Red, Yellow, and Blue| (The primary colors of pigments in the art world) |Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow| (The primary colors of inks in the printing industry) * Are black and white colors when they exist as pigments or as molecular coloring agents? Black and white cats created by colored crayons. This is color generated by pigments. Black and white cats. The colors of the fur is the result of molecules. 1. Black is a color. (Chemists will confirm this!) Here's a simple way to show how black is made: Combine all three primary colors (red yellow and blue) using a liquid paint or you even food coloring. You won't get a jet black, but the point will be clear. The history of black pigments includes charcoal, iron metals, and other chemicals as the source of black paints. Resource: History of Pigments Therefore, if someone argues that black is the absence of color, you can reply, “What is in a tube of black paint?” However, you must add the fact that black is a color when you are referring to the color of pigments and the coloring agents of tangible objects. 2. White is not a color. ... but .... in some cases you could say that white is a color. The grey area: However, when you examine the pigment chemistry of white, ground-up substances (such as chalk and bone) or chemicals (such as titanium and zinc) are used to create the many nuances of white in paint, chalk, crayons - and even products such as Noxema. It's worth noting that white paper is made by bleaching tree bark (paper pulp). Therefore, you could say that white is a color in the context of pigment chemistry. More Information about CMYK primary colors: In theory, mixing equal amounts of three primary colors should produce shades of grey or black when all three are fully saturated. In the print industry, cyan, magenta and yellow tend to produce muddy brown colors. For this reason, a fourth "primary" pigment, black, is often used in addition to the cyan, magenta, and yellow colors. There's more to color than black and white! When you're finished with this article, discover the 3 most important things about color at Color Matters. See Basic Color Theory Vision and Reflection The final answer to whether black and white are colors takes other factors into consideration. Colors exist in the larger context of human vision. Consider the fact that there are three parts to the process of the perception of color. 1. The medium - The color as it exists as a pigment/colorant (such as the color of a tangible object) or as light (such as the color of an image on a television screen). 2. The sender - How the color is transmitted. 3. The receiver - How humans see color. In other words, how we receive information about color. (If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around does it make a sound? Does a color exist if there is no one to see it?) Are black and white colors? The best answer combines both of the theories described in Part 1 and Part 2. Pigments and coloring agents (as described in Part 1) are only half of the answer. Here's how we see color: The color of a tangible object originates as a molecular coloring agent on the surface of the apple. We see the color of an object because that object reflects “a color” to the eye. Every color is the effect of a specific wavelength. Link to ElecroMagnetic Color at Color Matters. In the case of the apple, we see the color red because the red apple reflects the specific wavelength of red (640nm is red). The same theory applies to black and white. Are black and white colors? 1. Black is not a color; a black object absorbs all the colors of the visible spectrum and reflects none of them to the eyes. The grey area about black: - A black object may look black, but, technically, it may still be reflecting some light. For example, a black pigment results from a combination of several pigments that collectively absorb most colors. If appropriate proportions of three primary pigments are mixed, the result reflects so little light as to be called "black." In reality, what appears to be black may be reflecting some light. - In physics, a black body is a perfect absorber of light. 2. White is a color. White reflects all the colors of the visible light spectrum to the eyes. Explore some real colors at Color Matters: The Meanings of Color The colors we see are simply a degree of how much of this color present in light is reflected. To be completely accurate, a color reflects the wavelengths in the NM range that our retinal cones respond to. The medium is the process of reflection of the wavelength of the color. The receiver is our eyes which receive the wavelength of the color. Comments from colors pros: More about black & white More about color vision: How the Eye Sees Color

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Carbon Monoxide Detector Placement - Carbon Monoxide - Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Proper placement of a carbon monoxide (CO) detector is important. If you are installing only one carbon monoxide detector, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recommends it be located near the sleeping area, where it can wake you if you are asleep. Additional detectors on every level and in every bedroom of a home provides extra protection against carbon monoxide poisoning. Homeowners should remember not to install carbon monoxide detectors directly above or beside fuel-burning appliances, as appliances may emit a small amount of carbon monoxide upon start-up. A detector should not be placed within fifteen feet of heating or cooking appliances or in or near very humid areas such as bathrooms. When considering where to place a carbon monoxide detector, keep in mind that although carbon monoxide is roughly the same weight as air (carbon monoxide's specific gravity is 0.9657, as stated by the EPA; the National Resource Council lists the specific gravity of air as one), it may be contained in warm air coming from combustion appliances such as home heating equipment. If this is the case, carbon monoxide will rise with the warmer air. Installation locations vary by manufacturer. Manufacturers' recommendations differ to a certain degree based on research conducted with each one's specific detector. Therefore, make sure to read the provided installation manual for each detector before installing. CO detectors do not serve as smoke detectors and vice versa. However, dual smoke/CO detectors are also sold. Smoke detectors detect the smoke generated by flaming or smoldering fires, whereas CO detectors can alarm people about faulty fuel burning devices to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide is produced from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. In the home CO can be formed, for example, by open flames, space heaters, water heaters, blocked chimneys or running a car inside a garage. Since CO is colorless, tasteless and odorless (unlike smoke from a fire), detection and prevention of carbon monoxide poisoning in a home environment is impossible without such a warning device. In North America, some state, provincial and municipal governments require installation of CO detectors in new units - among them, the U.S. states of Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Vermont, the Canadian province of Ontario, and New York City. According to the 2005 edition of the carbon monoxide guidelines, NFPA 720, published by the National Fire Protection Association, sections 184.108.40.206 and 220.127.116.11, all CO detectors 'shall be centrally located outside of each separate sleeping area in the immediate vicinity of the bedrooms,' and each detector 'shall be located on the wall, ceiling or other location as specified in the installation instructions that accompany the unit.' When carbon monoxide detectors were introduced into the market, they had a limited lifespan of 2 years. However technology developments have increased this and many now advertise 5 or even 6 years. Newer models are designed to signal a need to be replaced after that timespan although there are many instances of detectors operating far beyond this point. Although all home detectors use an audible alarm signal as the primary indicator, some versions also offer a digital readout of the CO concentration [see side-bar], in parts per million. Typically, they can display both the current reading and a peak reading from memory of the highest level measured over a period of time. The digital models offer the advantage of being able to observe levels that are below the alarm threshold, learn about levels that may have occurred during an absence, and assess the degree of hazard if the alarm sounds. They may also aid emergency responders in evaluating the level of past or ongoing exposure or danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. Battery-only carbon monoxide detectors tend to go thru batteries more frequently than expected. Plug-in detectors with a battery backup (for use if the power is interrupted) provide less battery-changing maintenance. Some CO detectors are available as system-connected, monitored devices. System-connected detectors, which can be wired to either a security or fire panel, are monitored by a central station. In case the residence is empty, the residents are sleeping or occupants are already suffering from the effects of CO, the central station can be alerted to the high concentrations of CO gas and can send the proper authorities to investigate possible carbon monoxide poisoning. Page 1 of 3: Next Page » Carbon Monoxide Detectors w/ PPM Displays and Battery Backup Although all home carbon monoxide detectors use an audible alarm signal as the primary indicator, some versions also offer a digital readout of the CO concentration, in parts per million. Typically, they can display both the current reading and a peak reading from memory of the highest level measured over a period of time. The digital models offer the advantage of being able to observe levels that are below the alarm threshold, learn about levels that may have occurred during an absence, and assess the degree of hazard if the alarm sounds. They may also aid emergency responders in evaluating the level of past or ongoing exposure or danger.

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Joined: 16 Mar 2004 |Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 12:50 pm Post subject: New Holographic Method for Lab-on-a-Chip Technologies These images were taken from a video illustrating a new technique that uses a laser and holograms to precisely position clusters of numerous tiny particles within seconds, representing a potential new tool to analyze biological samples or create devices using "nanoassembly." The red dots are individual particles. (Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University) Researchers at Purdue University have developed a technique that uses a laser and holograms to precisely position numerous tiny particles within seconds, representing a potential new tool to analyze biological samples or create devices using nanoassembly. The technique, called rapid electrokinetic patterning, is a potential alternative to existing technologies because the patterns can be more quickly and easily changed, said mechanical engineering doctoral student Stuart J. Williams. "It's potentially a very versatile tool," said Williams, who is working with doctoral student Aloke Kumar and Steven T. Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. The research is based at the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Purdue's Discovery Park . The students won a research award for their work in October during the 12th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences in San Diego . Four young researcher poster awards were selected out of more than 220 posters judged in the contest. Findings also have been recently published in two peer-reviewed journals, Lab on a Chip and Microfluidics and Nanofluidics. The experimental device consists of two parallel electrodes made of indium tin oxide, a transparent and electrically conductive material. The parallel plates were spaced 50 micrometers, or millionths of a meter, apart, equivalent to two-thousandths of an inch or about the diameter of a human hair. A liquid sample containing fluorescent beads was injected between the two electrodes, a laser in the near infrared range of the spectrum was shined through one of the transparent electrodes and a small electrical voltage was applied between the two electrodes. "We send holograms of various patterns through this and, because they are holograms, we can create different shapes, such as straight lines or L patterns," Kumar said. The particles in the liquid sample automatically move to the location of the light and assume the shape of the hologram, meaning the method could be used to not only move particles and molecules to specific locations but also to create tiny electronic or mechanical features. "It's a very dynamic system, so we can change this pattern quickly," Kumar said. The light heats up the liquid sample slightly, changing its density and electrical properties. The electric field applied to the plates acts on these altered properties, causing the heated sample to circulate, much like heated air causes convection currents in the atmosphere, producing a donut-shaped "microfluidic vortex" of circulating liquid between the two plates. This vortex enables the researchers to position the particles in the circulating liquid by moving the laser light. "You could take one particle, a hundred particles or a thousand particles and move them anywhere you want in any shape that you want," Williams said. "If you have particles of two different types, you can sort one group out and keep the other behind. It's a versatile tool." Separating particles is important for analyzing medical and environmental samples. The system could allow researchers to design sensor technologies that move particles to specific regions on an electronic chip for detection or analysis. The technique overcomes limitations inherent in two existing methods for manipulating particles measured on the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a meter. One of those techniques, called optical trapping, uses a highly focused beam of light to capture and precisely position particles. That technique, however, is able to move only a small number of particles at a time. The other technique, known as dielectrophoresis, uses electric fields generated from metallic circuits to move many particles at a time. Those circuit patterns, however, cannot be changed once they are created. The new method is able to simultaneously position numerous particles and be changed at a moment's notice simply by changing the shape of the hologram or the position of the light. "If you want to pattern individual particles on a massive scale using electrokinetic methods as precisely as we are doing it, it could take hours to days, where we are doing it in seconds," Williams said. The method offers promise for future "lab-on-a-chip" technology, or using electronic chips to analyze biological samples for medical and environmental applications. Researchers are trying to develop such chips that have a "high throughput," or the ability to quickly detect numerous particles or molecules, such as proteins, using the smallest sample possible. "For example, a single drop of blood contains millions of red blood cells and countless molecules," Williams said. "You always want to have the smallest sample possible so you don't generate waste and you don't have to use as many chemicals for processing the sample. You want to have a very efficient high throughput type of device." So-called "optical tweezers" use light to position objects such as cells or molecules. "You can't use mechanical tweezers to move things like molecules because they are too delicate and will be damaged by conventional tweezers," Kumar said. "That is why techniques like optical tweezing and dielectrophoresis are very popular." The students also have designed an experiment containing one indium tin oxide plate and one gold plate, an important development because gold is often used in biomedical applications. "It's a technique that you would likely use in sensors, but we also see definite potential ways in which you could use it to manufacture devices with nanoassembly," Wereley said. "But it's really too soon to talk about scaling this up in a manufacturing setting. We're just beginning to develop this technique." The researchers recorded videos of the circulating particles to document the effect. A video showing the effect was selected as an outstanding entry during a meeting of the American Physical Society in November. The video can be accessed at http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/11399 . "This technique has not been done before," Williams said. "We can pattern light, we can pattern particles, we can pattern the vortex. No other tool can do all of these." The researchers demonstrated how the method could be used to cause particles to stick permanently to a surface in a single crystalline layer, a structure that could be used in manufacturing. They used their technique to move fluorescent-dyed beads of polystyrene, latex and glass in sizes ranging from 50 nanometers to 3 micrometers. Future work may involve using a less expensive light source, such as a common laser pointer, which could not be used to create intricate patterns but might be practical for manufacturing. Source: Emil Venere http://www.purdue.edu/dp/Nanotechnology/news.php

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Molecular Imaging: Seeing Cancer in Action Inside the Body Oct. 8, 2009 – Molecular imaging can reveal how cancer cells communicate, how they move, what they need to survive and where they are vulnerable to attack. In this edition of Breakthroughs in Cancer Research, David Piwnica-Worms, MD, PhD, professor of developmental biology and radiology at Washington University School of Medicine, explains how molecular imaging is different from more traditional radiology techniques and discusses new discoveries coming out of the medical school’s Molecular Imaging Center. Other Siteman web resources. TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE On this edition of Breakthroughs in Cancer Research, we’ll talk about how scientists are making it possible to see cancer in action inside the body. That’s providing new information on how to destroy cancer cells. Host: Thanks for downloading this podcast from the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. I’m Gwen Ericson. With techniques collectively called molecular imaging, scientists are finding new ways to detect cancer early, monitor cancer treatment and develop better cancer drugs. Molecular imaging can reveal cancer’s secrets, showing how cancer cells communicate, how they move, what they need to survive and where they are vulnerable to attack. To tell us more is David Piwnica-Worms. He is director of the Molecular Imaging Center at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology and the Siteman Cancer Center. Dr. Piwnica-Worms, thank you for joining us. Piwnica-Worms: Well thank you, Gwen. I’m happy to talk with you today. Host: Most of us have had experience with traditional kinds of medical imaging – things like X-rays, PET scans and ultrasound scans. But we’ve probably never encountered molecular imaging. Tell us about the distinction between traditional medical imaging and molecular imaging. Piwnica-Worms: In most of the traditional medical imaging that we may have experienced as patients or with family members, the focus of the imaging is on the anatomy and, in the context of cancer, on the mass or the size of the mass. But in molecular imaging, we’re actually interested in the details of the molecules that are inside the cancer. That is the biology or the biochemistry or metabolism of the cancer. We’re actually trying to image changes in those molecules and biochemistry that may even precede changes in the anatomy. Host: Give me an example of a molecular imaging technique. Piwnica-Worms: One strategy is in the general area that we call genetically encoded reporters. And that means we may take some genetic material from one organism and transfer it into another that may have favorable imaging properties. One such example that we make common use of is firefly luciferase. That is the same firefly that we see flying around in our backyards on a July day in St Louis. And the gene that actually makes the fireflies glow is called luciferase. We can actually use standard molecular biology and cloning techniques to transfer that luciferase gene from fireflies into a cancer cell, and we can watch the cancer glow and move around the body. Or it may tell us how it glows in response to different genes being expressed, or maybe how a protein, one of the building blocks, is processed. And those signals can tell us something about the metabolism and the gene expression inside those cancer cells using noninvasive imaging cameras. Host: Tell me more about what techniques like that reveal about cancer. Piwnica-Worms: One way to think of this is that cancer is like a baseball game where we don’t understand the rules. And you can imagine if you were taking a snapshot of Pujols at bat in the first inning, and then sometime later in the third inning you had a snapshot of Holliday running around a base path. And then at some other time, you had a snapshot of Ankiel making a long throw to third base from the outfield. What are the underlying rules that allow that to happen? If you knew nothing about the game of baseball and you had to try to put these together, dynamic views, continuous videos and movie loops would allow you to begin understanding those rules of why sequential events occur in a more dynamic and easy way than a series of random snapshots. And we hope that analogy sort of lets you know how we can look dynamically, continuously, over time with these noninvasive molecular imaging strategies at the baseball game of cancer that’s going on inside the cells. Host: In medical terms, what can molecular imaging do for us? Piwnica-Worms: A lot of the activities do relate to preclinical and basic type of cancer biology work. These help us better understand the cancer pathways, the rules that guide the metabolism of the cancer cell. These represent the new targets of tomorrow, where new drugs and combinations of drugs can actually help patients. And in some special cases, maybe even in a human, we can tag the drug and understand, is it actually hitting the cancer? Is it binding to its molecular target? And we can image that noninvasively and repetitively over time. And in another area that relates more directly to patients, there are some techniques like fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET. And this is a special subset of molecular imaging that is available today that does look at sugar metabolism in cancer. It can help us detect cancer at early stages or help guide therapeutic choices. That’s one area of molecular imaging that’s actually in the clinics today. Host: What are some of the latest discoveries to come out of the Molecular Imaging Center? Piwnica-Worms: We have a lot of activities going on both within our core groups and collaborators. Two areas of interest that have recently been published and explored involve one of these special pathways. It’s known scientifically as the beta-catenin pathway. It’s very, very important in colon cancer, and it also affects how cells grow and metastasize. And by using one of these luciferase strategies, we can now follow the time course of the regulation of the beta-catenin protein inside colon cancer cells. Another area that’s been very interesting for us is we developed a new optical technique to look directly at inflammation in living animals. In inflammation that occurs around cancer, there is an enzyme known as myeloperoxidase. And it ends up that a small molecule that many people are familiar with known as luminal – which is the same small molecule that you see on CSI Miami that’s sprayed on blood – has a very highly sensitive response to the enzyme myeloperoxidase, which is one of the key enzymes in inflammation. We’ve developed some techniques now using that luminal where we can now look at this myeloperoxidase-mediated inflammation in mouse models, and maybe someday we might be able to look at that in humans and help us follow inflammatory processes related to cancer. Host: Tell me about what the Molecular Imaging Center itself is like. Piwnica-Worms: Well, the Molecular Imaging Center itself is really two main components – a physical center, if you will, and a virtual center. The physical center is the founding faculty investigators who are physically in our laboratory space, all interacting on a daily basis with our laboratories, ourselves and the imaging cores that are in my lab and the investigators’ labs around. And then in addition, we’re tied together by a National Institutes of Health Molecular Imaging Center grant that helps support the cores and the broad array of investigators. We have projects that are ongoing with collaborators in cancer biology and immunology and pharmacology and biochemistry – all interested in studying biology noninvasively through these molecular imaging strategies so that we can try to pry basic biology done with traditional reductionist approaches together with these new dynamic strategies in living cells and live animals and ultimately patients. Host: Dr. Piwnica-Worms, thank you for joining us. Piwnica-Worms: You’re welcome. Host: If you are interested in learning more about the Molecular Imaging Center, please visit its Web site at mic.wustl.edu.

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BSA Supply No. 35940 If you have ever wanted to go back in time or wished you could visit the future, if you are curious about the world, or if you are interested in how things work or like to learn new things, these are all reasons why you should want to read. Reading is fascinating. It's full of surprises. And it will take you places you can't get to in any other way. - Do EACH of the following: - Learn how to search your library's card catalog or computerized catalog by author, title, and subject. - With the assistance of your merit badge counselor or a librarian, select six books of four different types (such as poetry, drama/plays, fiction, nonfiction, biographies, etc.). Ask your librarian or counselor about award-winning books that are recommended for readers your age and include at least one of those titles. - Find the books in the library catalog. With your counselor's or a librarian's assistance, locate the books on the shelves. - Read each book. Keep a log of your reading that includes the title of the book, the pages or chapters read, the date you completed them, and your thoughts about what you have read so far. Discuss your reading with your counselor. Using your log as a reference, explain why you chose each book and tell whether you enjoyed it and what it meant to you. - Read about the world around you from any two sources--books, magazines, newspapers, the Internet (with your parent's permission), field manuals, etc. Topics may include sports, environmental problems, politics, social issues, current events, nature, religion, etc. Discuss what you have learned with your counselor. - Do ONE of the following: - From a catalog of your choice, fill out an order form for merchandise as if you intended to place an order. Share the completed form with your counselor and discuss - With your parent's permission, locate at least five Web sites that are helpful for your Scouting or other activities. Write the Internet addresses of these sites in your log. Talk with your counselor or a librarian about safety rules for using the - With your counselor's and your parent's permission, choose ONE of the following activities and devote at least four hours of service to that activity. Discuss your participation with your counselor. - Read to a sick, blind, or homebound person in a hospital or in an extended-care - Perform volunteer work at your school library or a public library. - Read stories to younger children, in a group or individually. - Best Books for Young Adults - http://www.ala.org/ yalsa/booklists/bbya - BookSpot: Young Adult Books - http://www.bookspot.com/ youngadult.htm - Choices Booklists - http://www.reading.org/ choices - National Book Awards for Young People's Literature - http://www.literature-awards. com/national_book_awards.html - Newbery Medal Winners and Honor Books - http://www.ala.org/alsc/ newbpast.html - 100 Best Books for Children - http://www.teachersfirst.com/ 100books.htm - Summer Reading Lists - http://www.educationworld. com/summer_reading - Teenreads.com - http://www.teenreads.com - U.S. Children's Book Awards - http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/ usawards.html - The Online Books Page - http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books - Project Gutenberg - http://gutenberg.net P.O. Box 152350 Irving, TX 75015-2350 Web site: http://www.boyslife.org 30 Grove St., Suite C Peterborough, NH 03458 Toll-free telephone: 800-821-0115 Web site: http://www.cobblestonepub. com/pages/callmain.htm Cicada and Cricket P.O. Box 7434 Red Oak, IA 51591-0433 Toll-free telephone: 800-821-0115 Web site: http://www.cricketmag.com 149 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10010 Web site: http://www.kidsdiscover.com SAS Campus Drive Cary, NC 27513 Web site: http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink National Geographic Kids P.O. Box 63002 Tampa, FL 33663-3002 Toll-free telephone: 800-647-5463 Web site: http://www.nationalgeographic. com/ngkids P.O. Box 3939 Eugene, OR 97403 Web site: http://www.skippingstones.org Sports Illustrated for Kids P.O. Box 60001 Tampa, FL 33660-0001 Toll-free telephone: 800-992-0196 Web site: http://www.sikids.com P.O. Box 83 Santa Cruz, CA 95063 Toll-free telephone: 800-447-4569 Web site: http://www.stonesoup.com - Internet Public Library - http://www.ipl.org/div/news - Refdesk.com - http://www.refdesk.com/paper.html - Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. Barron's Educational Series, annual. - Books in Print. Bowker, annual. - Contemporary Authors. Gale, annual. - Current Biography. H. W. Wilson, annual. - Guinness World Records. Bantam Books, annual. - Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. H. W. Wilson, annual. - Subject Guide to Books in Print. Bowker, annual. - Subject Guide to Children's Books in Print. Bowker, annual. Web Directories, Search Engines, and Web Guides - The Alphabet Superhighway - http://www.ash.udel.edu/ash - Cool Sites for Kids - http://www.ala.org/alsc/children_links.html - Internet Search Engines for Kids - http://www.ivyjoy.com/rayne/kidssearch.html - Kids and Teens: Directories - http://dmoz.org/Kids_and_ Teens/Directories - Kids Pick - http://www.ala.org/kidspick - KidSpace - http://www.ipl.org/div/ kidspace - Great Web Sites for Kids - http://www.ala.org/parentspage/greatsites/amazing.html - Teen Hoopla- http://www.ala.org/ teenhoopla/sitemap.html - TeenSpace - http://www.ipl.org/div/teen America's Literacy Directory Web site: http://www.literacydirectory.org American Federation for the Blind 11 Penn Plaza, Suite 300 New York, NY 10001 Toll-free telephone: 800-232-5463 Web site: http://www.afb.org The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy 1201 15th St. NW, Suite 420 Washington, DC 20005 Web site: http://www.barbarabushfoundation.com National Literacy Hotline Toll-free telephone: 800-228-8813 Read Across America National Education Association 1201 16th St., NW Washington, DC 20036 Web site: http://www.nea.org/readacross Reading Is Fundamental Inc. 1825 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 400 Washington, DC 20009 Toll-free telephone: 877-RIF-READ Web site: http://www.rif.org

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Green buildings are designed, constructed and operated for the purpose of providing the occupants with a space that is both healthy and productive, while also being energy efficient and sustainable. Unfortunately, current approaches to green building design and construction don’t always meet occupants’ indoor environmental quality (IEQ) needs for “acoustic comfort.” Acoustic comfort refers to an indoor environment that is conducive to providing speech intelligibility, speech privacy, low distractions and annoyance, and sound quality. And, according to ongoing research at the Center for the Built Environment (CBE), it is the lowest performing IEQ factor in green buildings. Moreover, in all buildings surveyed, the level of acoustic satisfaction was rated as the lowest performance IEQ factor, and the only negative (dissatisfaction) factor overall. There is no need, however, to sacrifice good acoustics when selecting products for green buildings. Architects and interior designers do not have to choose between sustainability, design and acoustic needs—they can have all three. Outlined below are a number of acoustic considerations for green buildings in three market segments: healthcare facilities, commercial offices and educational facilities. Acoustics are a key element in the IEQ of healthcare facilities because they play an important role in supporting the safety, health and well-being of patients and staff alike. In general, ambient noise levels in hospitals are high, and have been shown to be a source of annoyance and stress to both patients and staff. They can also interfere with the staff’s ability to work effectively. Because of this, both the FGI 2010 Guidelines and LEED for Healthcare address the issue. One reason healthcare facilities are so noisy is the predominance of hard, sound-reflecting surfaces that cause speech and activity sounds to persist much too long. When acoustic conditions are characterized by long reverberation, spoken words are perceived to overlap, resulting in reduced speech intelligibility. To reduce reverberation and noise levels, acoustical ceiling panels should have a noise reduction coefficient (NRC) of 0.70 or greater. (The NRC indicates the average percentage of sound a material absorbs; an NRC of 0.70 means the material absorbs about 70 percent of the sound that strikes it.) They should also meet healthcare standards for washability, mold and microbial resistance, and fire safety. Ceiling panels with these characteristics are ideal for patient rooms, treatment rooms and other spaces that require a balance of cleanliness and quiet. Ceiling panels with a NRC of 0.95 are recommended for areas that require even higher levels of sound absorption to ensure patient privacy and meet HIPAA regulations. These include open plan spaces such as waiting areas, pharmacies, nurses’ stations and closed plan spaces where walls extend up to the deck above. Whether for a space with cubicles and teaming areas or private offices and conference rooms, there are acoustic options that also address sustainable needs. For example, a wide range of continuous and wall-to-wall acoustical ceilings are available that not only enhance the acoustic environment, but also contain high recycled content and can be recycled at the end of their service life. There are also a variety of “free-floating” ceiling treatments including acoustical clouds, canopies and baffles that are ideal for open plenum or exposed structure spaces—a design trend in green buildings that continues to grow. Unfortunately, this “warehouse look” can often cause acoustical problems due to sound reflecting off the deck, resulting in excessive reverberation. Any large space of this type will usually need some sound-absorbing elements to help control noise and reverberation within it. In addition, if the exposed deck is less than 15 feet high, reflections between open plan cubicles can cause distractions for nearby occupants. Designed for use in either new construction or retrofit applications, acoustical clouds, canopies and baffles can add sound absorption in open spaces, provide visual interest and make a design statement, all without sacrificing that exposed look. Available in a myriad of shapes, acoustical ceiling clouds suspended above work areas provide a type of interrupted ceiling plane. As such, they help control both distant reverberations and reflections, reducing occupant annoyance and distractions. Acoustical clouds actually provide greater sound absorption than a continuous ceiling of the same surface area because they absorb sound on both their front and back surfaces. In fact, reverberation time can be reduced nearly 50 percent with only 20 percent coverage. Acoustical canopies also help reduce reverberation in the space below them, but are much different in size and look compared to acoustical clouds. For example, cloud systems are available in standard sizes up to 14 by 14 feet, while canopies are usually 3 by 3 or 4 by 6 feet in size. Visually, acoustical clouds are flat, while canopies are curved and can be installed as hills or valleys. Currently, there is no standard credit in the IEQ section of LEED for acoustic performance. However, an innovation credit can be applied for by demonstrating that the acoustics of a building are superior to what would normally be considered typical, thereby improving the quality of the indoor environment. The LEED v4 proposal (in a fifth public comment at the time of this writing) does, however, include a requirement for acoustic performance as part of the IEQ section. Considering that the primary mode of teaching involves speech and listening, the quality of the acoustic environment in a classroom is crucial. LEED for Schools recognized the unique nature of the design and use of K-12 schools, and was the first of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) rating systems to include acoustics as an integral and important element of IEQ. To provide classrooms that enhance learning, LEED for Schools includes a minimum acoustical performance prerequisite. To meet it, two requirements must be achieved: - Classrooms and other core learning spaces must include sufficient sound-absorptive finishes to comply with a maximum reverberation time of 0.60 seconds (classrooms less than 20,000 cubic feet). - Classrooms and other core learning spaces must meet a maximum background noise level from HVAC systems of 45 decibels A-weighted (dBA). Compliance with the first requirement is accomplished in one of two ways: - By confirming that 100 percent of all ceiling areas (excluding lights, diffusers and grilles) are finished with a material that has a NRC of 0.70 or higher. - By confirming that the total area of acoustical wall panels, ceiling finishes and other sound-absorbent finishes equals or exceeds the total ceiling area of the room (excluding lights, diffusers and grilles). All materials in the calculation must have an NRC of 0.70 or higher. The proper use of sound-absorbing materials will significantly reduce reverberation, however, the location of acoustic treatments is a vital consideration. In classrooms where there is no fixed position for the teacher and ceiling heights are about 10 feet, the best and most cost-effective option is to place most, if not all, of the sound-absorbing material on the ceiling, in the form of a suspended acoustical ceiling. If ceiling heights are greater than 12 feet, an increasing amount of sound-absorbing material should be placed on the walls. If there is no possibility for wall treatment, consider placing three-dimensional furnishings such as bookshelves along the walls to ensure sound waves are scattered, thereby reducing the possibility of distant echoes. Kenneth P. Roy, Ph.D., FASA, is a senior principal research scientist for acoustic technologies for Armstrong Building Products in Lancaster, Pa. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.

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Behaviour-driven development is an “outside-in” methodology. It starts at the outside by identifying business outcomes, and then drills down into the feature set that will achieve those outcomes. Each feature is captured as a “story”, which defines the scope of the feature along with its acceptance criteria. This article introduces the BDD approach to defining and identifying stories and their acceptance criteria. Software delivery is about writing software to achieve business outcomes. It sounds obvious, but often political or environmental factors distract us from remembering this. Sometimes software delivery can appear to be about producing optimistic reports to keep senior management happy, or just creating “busy work” to keep people in paid employment, but that’s a topic for another day. Usually, the business outcomes are too coarse-grained to be used to directly write software (where do you start coding when the outcome is “save 5% of my operating costs”?) so we need to define requirements at some intermediate level in order to get work done. Behaviour-driven development (BDD) takes the position that you can turn an idea for a requirement into implemented, tested, production-ready code simply and effectively, as long as the requirement is specific enough that everyone knows what’s going on. To do this, we need a way to describe the requirement such that everyone – the business folks, the analyst, the developer and the tester – have a common understanding of the scope of the work. From this they can agree a common definiton of “done”, and we escape the dual gumption traps of “that’s not what I asked for” or “I forgot to tell you about this other thing”. This, then, is the role of a Story. It has to be a description of a requirement and its business benefit, and a set of criteria by which we all agree that it is “done”. This is a more rigorous definition than in other agile methodologies, where it is variously described as a “promise of a conversation” or a “description of a feature”. (A BDD story can just as easily describe a non-functional requirement, as long as the work can be scoped, estimated and agreed on.) The structure of a story BDD provides a structure for a story. This is not mandatory – you can use a different story format and still be doing BDD – but I am presenting it here because it has been proven to work on many projects of all shapes and sizes. At the very least, your story should contain all of the elements described in the template. The story template looks like this: Title (one line describing the story) Narrative: As a [role] I want [feature] So that [benefit] Acceptance Criteria: (presented as Scenarios) Scenario 1: Title Given [context] And [some more context]... When [event] Then [outcome] And [another outcome]... Scenario 2: ... Telling the story A story should be the product of a conversation involving several people. A business analyst talks to a business stakeholder1 about the feature or requirement, and helps them to frame it as a story narrative. Then a tester helps define the scope of the story – in the form of acceptance criteria – by determining which scenarios matter and which are less useful. A technical representitive will provide a ballpark estimate of the amount of work involved in the story, and to propose alternative approaches. Many great ideas for systems come from the people developing them as well as the people who asked for them in the first place. This will likely be an iterative process. The stakeholder will have an idea of what they want but will usually not know how much work will be involved, or how that work will be allocated. With the help of the technical and testing experts, they will understand the cost/benefit trade-off of each scenario and can make a judgement about whether they want it. Of course this is also balanced up against the other requirements: is it better to cover more edge cases in this story, or to move on to another story? Sometimes the development team will simply not know enough to be able to make even a ballpark estimate. In this case they may choose to carry out some investigative work, known as a “spike”, in order to understand more about the requirement. (I will cover planning in more detail in a future article.) The characteristics of a good story Using the example from the article Introducing BDD, let’s look at the requirements for withdrawing cash from an ATM: Story: Account Holder withdraws cash As an Account Holder I want to withdraw cash from an ATM So that I can get money when the bank is closed Scenario 1: Account has sufficient funds Given the account balance is \$100 And the card is valid And the machine contains enough money When the Account Holder requests \$20 Then the ATM should dispense \$20 And the account balance should be \$80 And the card should be returned Scenario 2: Account has insufficient funds Given the account balance is \$10 And the card is valid And the machine contains enough money When the Account Holder requests \$20 Then the ATM should not dispense any money And the ATM should say there are insufficient funds And the account balance should be \$20 And the card should be returned Scenario 3: Card has been disabled Given the card is disabled When the Account Holder requests \$20 Then the ATM should retain the card And the ATM should say the card has been retained Scenario 4: The ATM has insufficient funds ... As you can see, there are a number of scenarios to consider, some related to the account balance, others about the card and yet others about the ATM itself. Let’s dissect the story to determine whether it is any good. The title should describe an activity The title of the story, “Account Holder withdraws cash”, describes an activity that the account holder wants to carry out. Until we implement this feature, the account holder won’t be able to withdraw money from the ATM. Once we have delivered it, they will. That gives us an obvious starting point for determining what “done” looks like. If we had a title like “Account management” or “ATM behaviour”, we would have to look harder to understand when we were finished, and the edges would be a lot more fuzzy. For instance, “account management” might incorporate applying for a loan, and “ATM behaviour” might encompass changing the PIN number on my cash card. The story title should always describe actual behaviour by a user of the system. The narrative should include a role, a feature and a benefit The template “As a [role] I want [feature] so that [benefit]“ has a number of advantages. By specifying the role within the narrative, you know who to talk to about the feature. By specifying the benefit, you cause the story writer to consider why they want a feature. It gets interesting if you find the feature won’t actually deliver the benefit attributed to it. This usually means you have a missing story. There is one story with the current feature, which delivers a different benefit (and is therefore still useful), and a hidden story whereby you will need a different feature to deliver the benefit described. The example story tells us there is an Account Holder who cares about the feature being delivered, so we know where to start exploring what it should do. The scenario title should say what’s different You should be able to line up the scenarios side by side, and describe how they differ using only the title. In our example, we can see that the scenario descriptions say only what’s different between each scenario. You don’t need to say “an account holder withdraws money from an account with insufficient funds and is told they are unable to fulfull the transaction”. It’s obvious from the title whether this is the scenario you care about, compared to the others. The scenario should be described in terms of Givens, Events and Outcomes This is the single most powerful behavioural shift I have seen in teams adopting BDD. Simply by getting the business users, the analysts, the testers and the developers to adopt this vocabulary of “given/when/then”, they discover that a world of ambiguity falls away. Not all scenarios are this simple. Some are best represented as a sequence of events, described as: given [some context] when [I do something] then [this happens] when [I do another thing] then [this new thing happens] and so on. An example is a wizard-style website, where you step through a sequence of screens to build up a complex data model. It is perfectly appropriate to intermingle sequences of events and outcomes, as long as you get into the habit of thinking in these terms. One interesting emergent behaviour is that the quality of the conversation changes. You will quickly discover that you have missed out an assumed given (“well of course the account is overdrawn”), or forgotten to verify an outcome (“well naturally the account holder gets their card back”). I observed this on one particular project where the lead developer told me he could sense the analysts and developers were talking at cross purposes, but couldn’t see a way to demonstrate this to them. Within a few days of introducing the given/when/then vocabulary, he could see a dramatic improvement in the quality of their interactions. The givens should define all of, and no more than, the required context Any additional givens are distracting, which makes it hard for someone looking at the story for the first time – whether from the technical or business side – to understand what they need to know. Similarly any missing givens are really assumptions. If you can get a different outcome from the givens provided, then there must be something missing. In the example, the first scenario says something about the account balance, the card and the ATM itself. All of these are required to fully define the scenario. In the third scenario, we don’t say anything about the account balance or whether the ATM has any money. This implies that the machine will retain the card whatever the account balance, and whatever the state of the ATM. The event should describe the feature The event itself should be very simple, typically only a single call into the production code. As discussed above, some scenarios are more complicated than this, but mostly the scenarios for a story will revolve around a single event. They will differ only in the context (the givens) and the corresponding expected outcomes. The story should be small enough to fit in an iteration There are no hard and fast rules about how you do this, as long as you break it down into demonstrable chunks. In general if there are more than about five or six scenarios, a story can probably be broken down by grouping similar scenarios together. We can’t tell from the ATM example how many more scenarios there are for this story, but I am suspicious that there may be several more. Essentially we have three “moving parts” in this story, namely the account balance, the status of the cash card and the state of the ATM. We could get into more detail with the cash card: what if it is out of date, so I can’t use it to withdraw cash but the ATM still returns it to me? What if the ATM breaks partway through the transaction? What if my account has an overdraft facility? It might be better to break the story out into several smaller stories: - Account Holder withdraws cash (assumptions: ATM is working and card is valid) - Account Holder withdraws cash with invalid card (assumptions: ATM is working) - Account Holder withdraws cash from flaky ATM (assumptions: card is valid) Although this may seem artificial, it allows you to demonstrate progress in business terms and gives you more data points to track with. The important thing is always to break the story out along business lines by scenarios (and making the assumptions explicit) rather than along technical lines (e.g. doing the database stuff in this iteration and the GUI stuff in the next iteration). This is so the business can see demonstrable progress on their own terms rather than just taking your word for it. So how is this different from Use Cases? There are use cases and there are use cases. I’m a huge fan of the way Alistair Cockburn describes use cases (as opposed to the over-engineered versions I have encountered on RUP-as-waterfall projects). Given that I don’t have much experience on use case-driven projects, I’ll leave it to others to draw the comparisons. Certainly I agree with his process of starting at the lower precision (of an outcome, or goal) and working towards higher precisions, taking in more exception scenarios as you go. In BDD, this means starting with the business outcome, and working through high level functional areas to drill into specific stories with acceptance criteria. In reality, it doesn’t matter what your process is to identify and elaborate requirements. It’s fine for you to write requirements documents if that helps you organise your thoughts. It’s not fine, however, to pass those documents along as if they actually encapsulated all your thoughts, because they don’t. Instead, you should put the requirements document, or stack of use cases, to one side and start over defining stories from business outcomes, safe in the knowledge that your hard work has meant that you have all the answers in your head – or at least a good enough understanding to outline the work as you currently see it. Behaviour-driven development uses a story as the basic unit of functionality, and therefore of delivery. The acceptance criteria are an intrinsic part of the story – in effect they define the scope of its behaviour, and give us a shared definition of “done”. They are also used as the basis for estimation when we come to do our planning. Most importantly, the stories are the result of conversations between the project stakeholders, business analysts, testers and developers. BDD is as much about the interactions between the various people in the project as it is about the outputs of the development process. 1. Actually it should be the person who actually cares about the feature, so it may equally be an operational, legal or security person depending on the story.

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Battle of Caporetto The Battle of Caporetto (also known as the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo or the Battle of Karfreit as it was known by the Central Powers), took place from 24 October to 19 November 1917, near the town of Kobarid (now in Slovenia), on the Austro-Italian front of World War I. The battle was named after the Italian name of the town of Kobarid (known as Karfreit in German). Austro-Hungarian forces, reinforced by German units, were able to break into the Italian front line and rout the Italian army, which had practically no mobile reserves. The battle was a demonstration of the effectiveness of the use of stormtroopers and the infiltration tactics developed in part by Oskar von Hutier. The use of poison gas by the Germans played a key role in the collapse of the Italian Second Army. ||This section needs additional citations for verification. (October 2012)| The Austrian offensive began at approximately 02:00 on 24 October 1917. Due to the inclement weather that morning, particularly the mist, the Italians were caught by complete surprise. The battle opened with a German artillery barrage, poison gas, and smoke, and was followed by an all-out assault against the Italian lines. The Italians had outdated gas masks, gave no counter fire and had given the Germans all the weather information they needed over their radio. The defensive line of the Italian Second Army was breached between the IV and XXVII Corps almost immediately. The German forces made extensive use of flamethrowers and hand grenades as a part of their infiltration tactics, and were able to tear gaping holes in the Italian line, especially in the Italian strongholds on Mount Matajur and the Kolovrat Range. By the end of the first night, von Below's men had advanced a remarkable 25 km (16 mi). German and Austro-Hungarian attacks from either side of von Below's central column were less effective, however. The Italian Army had been able to repel the majority of these attacks, but the success of von Below's central thrust threw the entire Italian Army into disarray. Forces had to be moved along the Italian front in an attempt to stem von Below's breakout, but this only weakened other points along the line and invited further attacks. At this point, the entire Italian position on the Tagliamento River was under threat. 2nd army commander Luigi Capello was Italy's best general but was bedridden with fever while still retaining command. Realizing his forces were ill-prepared for this attack and were being routed, Capello requested permission to withdraw back to the Tagliamento. He was overruled by Cadorna, however, who believed that the Italian force could regroup and hold out against the attackers. Finally, on 30 October, Cadorna ordered the majority of the Italian force to retreat to the other side of the river. It took the Italians four full days to cross the river, and by this time the German and Austro-Hungarian armies were on their heels. By 2 November, a German division had established a bridgehead on the Tagliamento. About this time, however, the rapid success of the attack caught up with them. The German and Austro-Hungarian supply lines were stretched to breaking point, and as a result, they were not able to launch another concerted attack. Cadorna took advantage of this to retreat further, and by 10 November had established a position on the Piave River. Failures of German Logistics Even before the battle, Germany was struggling to feed and supply its armies in the field. Erwin Rommel, who, as a junior officer, won the Pour le Mérite for his exploits in the battle, often bemoaned the demands placed upon his "poorly fed troops". The Allied blockade of the German Empire, which the Kaiserliche Marine had been unable to break, was responsible for food shortages and widespread malnutrition in Germany and the Central Powers in general. When inadequate provisioning was combined with the gruelling night marches preceding the battle of Caporetto (Kobarid), a heavy toll was extracted from the German and Austro-Hungarian forces. Despite these logistical problems, the initial assault was extremely successful. However, as the area controlled by the combined Central Powers forces expanded, an already limited logistical capacity was overstrained. By the time the attack reached the Piave, the soldiers of the Central Powers were running low on supplies and were feeling the physical effects of exhaustion. As the Italians began to counter the pressure put on them by the Central Powers, the German forces lost all momentum and were once again caught up in another round of attrition warfare. Italian losses were enormous: 10,000 were killed, 30,000 wounded and 265,000 were taken prisoner – morale was so low among the Italian troops, mainly due to Cadorna's harsh disciplinary regime, that most of these surrendered willingly. Furthermore, roughly 3,000 guns, 3,000 machine guns and 2,000 mortars were captured, along with an untold amount of stores and equipment. Rommel, then an Oberleutnant, captured 1,500 men and 43 officers with just 3 riflemen and 2 officers to help. Austro-Hungarian and German forces advanced more than 100 km (62 mi) in the direction of Venice, but they were not able to cross the Piave River. Although to this point the Italians had been left to fight on their own, after Kobarid (Caporetto) they were reinforced by six French infantry divisions and five British infantry divisions as well as sizeable air contingents. However, these troops played no role in stemming the advancing Germans and Austro-Hungarians, because they were deployed on the Mincio River, some 60 miles behind the Piave, as the British and French strategists did not believe the Piave line could be held. The Piave served as a natural barrier where the Italians could establish a new defensive line, which was held during the subsequent Battle of the Piave River and later served as springboard for the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, where the Austro-Hungarian army was finally defeated after four days of stiff resistance. Luigi Cadorna was forced to resign after the defeat. The defeat alone was not the sole cause, but rather the breaking point for an accumulation of failures, as perceived by the Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. Throughout much of his command, including at Kobarid (Caporetto), Cadorna was known to have maintained poor relations with the other generals on his staff. By the start of the battle he had sacked 217 generals, 255 colonels and 355 battalion commanders. In addition, he was detested by his troops as being too harsh. He was replaced by Armando Diaz and Pietro Badoglio. He had already been directing the battle 20 miles behind before fleeing another 100 miles to Padua. This led governments to the realization that fear alone could not adequately motivate a modern army. After the defeat at Caporetto, Italian propaganda offices were established, promising land and social justice to soldiers. Italy also accepted a more cautious military strategy from this point on. General Diaz concentrated his efforts on rebuilding his shattered forces while taking advantage of the national rejuvenation that had been spurred by invasion and defeat. After this battle, the term "Caporetto" gained a particular resonance in Italy. It is used to denote a terrible defeat – the failed General Strike of 1922 by the socialists was referred to by Mussolini as the "Caporetto of Italian Socialism". Many years after the war, Caporetto was still being used to destroy the credibility of the liberal state. Popular culture The Battle of Caporetto has been the subject of a number of books. The Swedish author F.J. Nordstedt (i.e. Christian Braw) wrote about the battle in his novel Caporetto. The bloody aftermath of Caporetto was vividly described by Ernest Hemingway in his novel A Farewell to Arms. Curzio Malaparte wrote an excoriation of the battle in his first book, Viva Caporetto, published in 1921. It was censored by the state and suppressed; it was finally published in 1980. - Tucker, Spencer C. (11 November 2010). Battles That Changed History: An Encyclopedia of World Conflict. United States: ABC-CLIO. p. 430. ISBN 978-1-59884-429-0. Retrieved 16 September 2012. - Tucker, Spencer C.; Roberts, Priscilla Mary (25 October 2005). World War I: A Student Encyclopedia. United States: ABC-CLIO. p. 431. ISBN 1-85109-879-8. Retrieved 5 August 2012. "By 10 November Italian losses were 10,000 dead, 30,000 wounded, and 265,000 prisoners (about 350,000 stragglers from the Second Army did manage to reach the Piave line). The army had also lost 3,152 artillery pieces of a preoffensive total of 6,918. An additional 1,712 heavy trench mortars and 3,000 machine guns had been captured or abandoned in the retreat, along with vast amounts of other military equipment, especially as the rapid withdrawal had prevented the removal of heavy weapons and equipment across the Isonzo River. In contrast, the attackers had sustained about 70,000 casualties." - Seth, Ronald (1965). Caporetto: The Scapegoat Battle. Macdonald. p. 147 - Stearns, Peter; Langer, William (2001). The Encyclopedia of World History (6th ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 669. ISBN 0-395-65237-5. - Dupuy & Dupuy (1970), p. 971 - Geoffrey Regan, More Military Blunders, page 161 - Macksey, Kenneth (1997). Rommel: Battles and Campaigns. Da Capo Press. p. 224. ISBN 0-306-80786-6. - Simkins, Peter; Jukes, Geoffrey; Hickey, Michael (2003). The First World War. Osprey Publishing. p. 352. ISBN 1-84176-738-7. - Townley, Edward (2002). Collier, Martin, ed. Mussolini and Italy. Heinemann. p. 16. ISBN 0-435-32725-9. - Geoffrey Regan, More Military Blunders, page 160 - Morselli, Mario (2001). Caporetto, 1917: Victory Or Defeat?. Routledge. p. 133. ISBN 0-7146-5073-0. Further reading - Connelly, O. On War and Leadership: The Words of Combat Commanders from Frederick the Great to Norman Schwarzkopf, 2002 ISBN 0-691-03186-X - Dupuy R. E., &, Dupuy, T. N., The Encyclopedia of Military History, (revised edition), Jane's Publishing Company, 1970, SBN 356 02998 0 - Morselli, M. Caporetto 1917: Victory or Defeat?, 2001 ISBN 0-7146-5073-0 - Reuth, R. G. Rommel: The End of a Legend, 2005 ISBN 1-904950-20-5 - Seth, Ronald: Caporetto: The Scapegoat Battle. Macdonald, 1965 - Cavallaro, G. V. Futility Ending in Disaster. Xlibris, 2009 |Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Battle of Caporetto| - Walks of Peace in the Soea Region Foundation: The Battles of the Isonzo, 1915–17 - Pro Hereditate: The Isonzo Front - (Italian) La Grande Guerra: Novant'anni fa la Battaglia di Caporetto - The Battle of Caporetto, 1917

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Name ID 1199 The first professional hunters came in 1913. They found the wildlife plentiful, especially the lions, but saw no elephants. Seven years later, an American arrived in a strange new contraption known as a Ford motor-car and news of the wonders of the Serengeti had reached the outside world. Because the Hunting of lions made them so scarse (they were considered 'vermin'), it was decided to make a partial Game Reserve in the area in 1921 and a full one in 1929. With the growing awareness of the need for conservation, it was expanded and upgraded to a National Park in 1951. Eight years later the Ngorongoro Conservation Area was established in the south-east as a separate unit. Arusha: A Brochure of the Northern Province and its Capital Town Page Number: 13-15-17 Extract Date: 1929 It is safe to say that Tanganyika holds a front place among our East African Colonies for the number and variety of its game animals. The belt from Tanga through to Lake Victoria is where game is most numerous. There is an abundance of the commoner antelope, and in certain parts the rarer species such as the Greater and Lesser Kudu, Gerenuk, etc., are still fairly plentiful. Big game like the Elephant, Rhinocerous, Lion and Buffalo, all of which hold for the hunter a new thrill and experience, are to be found in this area in such a variety of country and cover that the Hunting of no two animals is ever alike. Here the hunter passes through most interesting country; Kilimanjaro with its snow-capped dome, running streams and dense forests, across the plains to the Natron Lakes and the Great Rift Wall with its volcanic formation and on to the great Crater, Ngorongoro. In his travels he will come into contact with some of the most interesting and picturesque tribes that inhabit Africa such as the Masai, Wambulu, etc., each with their own quaint customs and histories. The Ngorongoro Crater, the greatest crater in the world, measuring approximately 12 miles in diameter, seen from the Mbulu side, is a delight to the eye with its teeming herds of game ; Wildebeest alone running into tens of thousands. This scene conveys to one the idea of a great National Park. Nature has provided the crater with a precipitous rock fence for tns most part and with lakes and streams to slake the thirst of the great game herds which inhabit it. The unalienated part of the crater is now a complete game reserve in which a great variety of game is to be found such as Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Lion, and all the smaller fry. The Elephant although not in the crater is to be found in the forests nearby. The Serengetti Plains lying away to the northwest of the crater holds its full share of animal life and here the sportsman has the widest possible choice of trophies. The Lion in this area holds full sway and is still to be seen in troops of from ten to twenty. Recently, Serengetti and Lion pictures have become synonymous. The commoner species of game are here in abundance and the plains are second only to the crater for game concentration. The country lying between the Grumeti River - Orangi River and the Mbalangeti from Lake Victoria to the Mou-Kilimafetha Road has recently been declared a game reserve. Game animals that inhabit the northern area are well protected an'd their existence is assured to posterity by the great game sanctuaries and regulations which govern the Hunting or photographing of game. In the Northern area there are six complete reserves and two closed areas. These are as follows: (2) Mount Meru. (3) Lake Natron (4) Northern Railway. The closed areas are : Pienaar's Heights, near Babati and Sangessa Steppe in the Kondoa district. The boundaries for these are laid down in the Game Preservation Ordinance No. 41 of 1921. There are, however, vast areas open to the hunter and the abovementioned sanctuaries do not in any way detract from the available sport which the Northern Tanganyika has to offer. The following game licences are now in force (Shillings) :Visitor's Full Licence - 1500 Visitor's Temporary Licence (14 days) - 200 Resident's Full Licence - 300 Resident's Temporary Licence (14 days) - 60 Resident's Minor Licence - 80 Giraffe Licence - 150 Elephant Licence 1st. - 400 2nd. - 600 To hunt the Black Rhinoceros in the Northern Province it is now necessary to hold a Governor's Licence, the fee for which is 150/-. This entitles the holder to hunt one male Rhinoceros. Elephant, Giraffe, and Rhinoceros Licences may only be issued to holders of full game licences. Now that the Railway is through to Arusha it is not too much to hope that with the assistance of a healthy public opinion the Sanya Plains may become restocked with game which would be a great source of interest and an attraction to the traveller visiting these parts. Extract Date: 1931 Herne, Brian White Hunters: The golden age of African Safaris Page Number: 375 Extract Date: 1965 Safari Hunting in East Africa was forever changed by the masterly blueprint of Brian Nicholson, a former white hunter turned game warden. The disciple and successor of C.I. P. Ionides, the "Father of the Selous game reserve," Nicholson conceived a plan for administering Tanzania's expansive wildlife regions. In 1965 he changed most of the vast former controlled Hunting areas, or CHAs, into Hunting concessions that could be leased by outfitters from the government for two or more years at a time. Nicholson also demarcated the Selous game reserve's 20,000 square miles of uninhabited country into 47 separate concessions. Concessions were given a limited quota of each game species, and outfitters were expected to utilize quotas as fully as possible, but not exceed them. Nicholson's plan gave outfitters exclusive rights over Hunting lands, providing powerful incentives for concession holders to police their areas, develop tracks, airfields, and camps, and, most importantly, preserve the wild game. When the system was put into effect, it was the larger outfitting organizations - safari outfitters who could muster the resources to bid and who had a clientele sufficient to fulfill the trophy quotas Nicholson had set (done in order to provide government revenue by way of fees for anti-poaching operations, development, and research) - that moved quickly to buy up the leases on the most desirable blocks of land. Smaller safari companies who could not compete on their own banded together and formed alliances so that they, too, could obtain Hunting territories. Herne, Brian White Hunters: The golden age of African Safaris Page Number: 389 Extract Date: 1973 Sep 7 By the end of 1973 Kenya was the sole remaining tourist destination in East Africa. While the neighboring country of Uganda was still in the throes of military anarchy, Tanzania surprised the world on September 7 by issuing an overnight ban on all Hunting and photographic safaris within its territory. Government authorities moved quickly to seize and impound foreign-registered Land Cruisers, supply trucks, minibuses, aircraft, and equipment. The stunned collection of safari clients as well as sundry mountain climbers, bird-watchers, and beachcombers who had been visiting the country at the time of the inexplicable edict were summarily escorted to Kilimanjaro airport outside of Arusha to await deportation. The residue of tourists stranded without flights were trucked to the northern town of Namanga where they were left on the dusty roadside to cross into Kenya on foot. All tourist businesses, including the government-owned Tanzania Wildlife Safaris, were closed down. No government refunds were ever made to tourists or to foreign or local safari outfitters Africa News Online Extract Date: 2000 June 5 Panafrican News Agency Frequent acrimony, currently depicting the relationship between game Hunting companies and rural communities in Tanzania, will be a thing of the past after the government adopts a new wildlife policy. Designated as wildlife management areas, the communities will benefit from the spoils of game Hunting, presently paid to local authorities by companies operating in those areas. The proposed policy seeks to amend Tanzania's obsolete Wildlife Act of 1975, and, according to the natural resources and tourism minister, Zakia Meghji, 'it is of utmost priority and should be tabled before parliament for debate soon'. She said the government would repossess all Hunting blocks allocated to professional hunters and hand them over to respective local authorities. In turn local governments, together with the communities, would be empowered to allocate the Hunting blocks to whichever company they prefer to do business with. 'Guidelines of the policy are ready and are just being fine-tuned,' she said. Communities set to benefit from this policy are chiefly those bordering rich game controlled areas and parks. They include the Maasai, Ndorobo, Hadzabe, Bahi, Sianzu and Kimbu in northeastern Tanzania. Members of these communities are often arrested by game wardens and fined for trespassing on game conservation areas. As a result, they have been extremely bitter about being denied access to wildlife resources, which they believe, naturally, belong to them. Under the new policy, Meghji said, the government will ensure that people undertake increased wildlife management responsibilities and get benefits to motivate them in the conservation of wildlife resources. The East African Extract Author: John Mbaria Extract Date: February 4, 2002 KENYA COULD end up losing 80 per cent of its wildlife species in protected areas bordering Tanzania to hunters licensed by the Tanzanian government. The hunters have been operating for about a decade in a section of the migratory route south from Kenya to Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. They shoot large numbers of animals as they move into the park during the big zebra and wildebeest migration between July and December. There are fears that the Maasai Mara National Park and most of Kenya's wildlife areas bordering Tanzania could lose much of their wildlife population, threatening the country's Ksh20 billion ($256 million) a year tourism industry. Kenya banned Hunting in 1977 but the sport is legal in Tanzania, where it is sold as "Safari Hunting." "The product sold is really the experience of tracking and killing animals, the services that go with this and the prestige of taking home the trophies," says a policy document from the Tanzania Wildlife Corporation (Tawico). Tanzania wildlife officials said wild animals that cross over from Kenya are hunted along their migratory routes in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area in Ngorongoro district of Arusha region, 400 km northwest of Arusha. The area was designated by the British colonial power as a sports Hunting region for European royalty. The officials said the area is now utilised by a top defence official from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), trading as Ortelo Business Company (OBC), through a licence issued in 1992 by former Tanzania President Ali Hassan Mwinyi. The permit allows the company to hunt wild game and trap and take some live animals back to the UAE. Safari Hunting earns big money for the Tanzanian government, which charges each hunter $1,600 a day to enter the controlled area. A hunter is also required to pay fees for each kill, with an elephant costing $4,000, a lion and a leopard $2,000 each and a buffalo $600. The document has no quotation for rhinos. The sport is organised in expeditions lasting between one and three weeks in the five Hunting blocks of Lake Natron Game Controlled Area, Rungwa Game Reserve, Selous Mai, Selous U3 and Selous LU4. For the period the hunters stay in each of the Hunting blocks, they pay between $7,270 and $13,170 each. Part of this money is shared out among the many Ujamaa villages, the local district councils and the central government. Although Tawico restricts the number of animals to be culled by species, poor monitoring of the activities has meant indiscriminate killing of game. "Some of the animals are snared and either exported alive or as meat and skins to the United Arab Emirates and other destinations," local community members told The EastAfrican during a recent trip to the area. They claimed the hunters were provided with "blank Hunting permits," giving them discretion over the number of animals to be hunted down. Kenya wildlife conservation bodies are concerned that big game Hunting in the Ngorongoro area is depleting the wildlife that crosses the border from Kenya. "Kenya is losing much of its wildlife to hunters licensed by the Tanzanian government," the chairman of the Maasai Environmental and Resource Coalition (MERC), Mr Andrew ole Nainguran, said. MERC was set up in 1999 to sensitise members of the Maasai community in Kenya and Tanzania to the benefits of wildlife conservation. Kenya and Tanzania wildlife authorities have regularly discussed the problem of security and poaching in Arusha. However, the KWS acting director, Mr Joe Kioko, said legalised Hunting has never been discussed in any of the meetings. The hunters are said to fly directly from the UAE to the area using huge cargo and passenger planes which land on an all-weather airstrip inside the OBC camp. The planes are loaded with sophisticated Hunting equipment, including four-wheel drive vehicles, weapons and communication gadgets. On their way back, the planes carry a variety of live animals, game trophies and meat. Employees at the camp said the hunters are sometimes accompanied by young Pakistani and Filipino women. The International Fund for Animal Welfare regional director, Mr Michael Wamithi, said Kenya and Tanzania should discuss the negative impact of the sport Hunting on Kenya's conservation efforts. "The two neighbours have a Cross-Border Law Enforcement Memorandum of Understanding where such issues could be dealt with." Kenya seems to be alone in adhering to strict protection of wildlife, a policy famously demonstrated by President Daniel arap Moi's torching of ivory worth $760,000 in 1989. Although the country has made significant progress in securing parks from poachers, it is yet to embrace a policy on "consumptive utilisation" of animals advocated by Kenyan game ranchers and Zimbabwe, which wants the international trade ban on ivory lifted. The animals in the Hunting block have been reduced to such an extent that the OBC camp management has been spreading salt and pumping water at strategic places to attract animals from Serengeti and the outlying areas. "We will not have any animals left in the vicinity unless the Hunting is checked," a local community leader, Mr Oloomo Samantai ole Nairoti, said, arguing that the area's tourism economy was being jeopardised. Mysterious fires in the area to the south of Serengeti have also forced animals to seek refuge in the Hunting blocks. Locals said the camp is exclusively patronised by Arab visitors. The camp is usually under tight security by Tanzanian police. The permit granted by Mr Mwinyi has raised controversy in Tanzania and was at one stage the subject of a parliamentary probe committee because members of UAE's royal family were not entitled to the Hunting rights in the country. "Only presidents or monarchs are entitled to hunt in the area," an official said, adding that the UAE royal family had abused their permit by killing animals outside their given quotas or specified species. The government revoked the licence in 1999 after realising that OBC was airlifting many wild animals to the Middle East, only to renew the permit in 2000. The current permit runs until 2005. The withdrawal of the permit followed the recommendations of a 1994 parliamentary probe commission set up to "investigate the Hunting behaviour" of the UAE company. Sources said permanent Hunting is prohibited in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area for fear of depleting animals from the four parks, which host the bulk of the region's tourist resorts. The area is in a natural corridor where wild animals cross while roaming between the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and Maasai Mara Game Reserve and Amboseli National Park in Kenya. The late founding president of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, took to himself the powers to issue Hunting permits for Loliondo when Tanzania became independent in 1961, but he never granted any. After obtaining the permit, the UAE hunters created Hunting blocks in the area covering over 4,000 sq km. No other Hunting companies have been granted permits, the source said. The UAE royal family has donated passenger aircraft to the Tanzania army and a number of vehicles to the Wildlife Division. The 1974 Wildlife Act set up five categories of wildlife conservation areas. These are national parks, game reserves, partial game reserve, open areas and Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Hunting is prohibited in the national parks and Ngorongoro Conservation Area, but allowed in other areas during the seasonal Hunting period from July to December. Additional reporting by Apolinari Tairo in Dar es Salaam Tomlinson, Chris Big game hunting threatening Africa Extract Author: Chris Tomlinson Extract Date: 2002 03 20 Loliondo GAME CONTROL AREA, Tanzania - At a dirt airstrip in rural Tanzania, a desert camouflaged cargo plane from the United Arab Emirates air force taxis up to pallets stacked with large coolers full of game meat, the harvest of a successful Hunting season. As Tanzanian immigration and customs officials fill out documents under a thatched shelter, brand-new, four-wheel-drive trucks and dune buggies drive to and from a nearby luxury campsite, the base for one of Tanzania's most expensive - and secretive - game Hunting operations, Otterlo Business Corp. Hundreds of members of Arab royalty and high-flying businessmen spend weeks in the Loliondo Game Control Area each year Hunting antelope, lion, leopard and other wild animals. The area is leased under the Otterlo name by a member of an emirate royal family who is a senior officer in the UAE defense ministry. While neighboring Kenya outlawed big game Hunting in 1978, the Tanzanian government says Hunting is the best use of the land and wildlife. But villagers and herders say big money has led government officials to break all the Hunting rules, resulting in the destruction of most of the area's non-migratory animals and putting East Africa's most famous national parks under threat. Loliondo is on the main migratory route for wildlife north of Ngorongoro Crater, east of Serengeti National Park and south of Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve. The summer Hunting season coincides with the migration of wildebeest and zebra through the area, where they eventually cross into the Serengeti and the Masai Mara. Predatory animals follow the migration. During the colonial era, Loliondo was set aside for European royalty as a Hunting area. Since independence, Loliondo has remained a Hunting reserve, but it is supposed to be managed by area residents for their benefit. Local leaders, who refuse to speak publicly because they fear retribution, say they have not been consulted about the lease that was granted in 1995 by national officials in Tanzania's political capital, Dodoma. They say government officials have tried to silence criticism. "The lease was given by the government and the Maasai landowners were not involved," said one Maasai leader. "All the resident animals have been killed ... (now) they carry out Hunting raids in the Serengeti National Park, but the government closes its eyes." Maasai warriors told The Associated Press that hunters give cash to anyone who can lead them to big game, especially leopards. They also said that Otterlo officials have begun pumping water into some areas to attract more animals and that what the warriors call suspicious fires in the Serengeti have caused animals to move into Loliondo. An Otterlo manager, who gave his name only as Khamis, initially agreed to an interview with AP but later did not return repeated phone calls. In an interview with the newspaper, The East African, Otterlo managing director Juma Akida Zodikheri said his company adheres to Tanzanian law, and he denied hunters killed animals indiscriminately. He said the owner of the company is Maj. Gen. Mohammed Abdulrahim al Ali, deputy defense minister of the UAE. While Tanzania has strict rules on game Hunting, Maasai who have worked at the lodge say guests are never told of the limits and hunt as much as they want. Tanzanian officials deny that. Col. A.G.N. Msangi, district commissioner for Ngorongoro District, said all applicable rules are enforced. He accused the Maasai of rumor-mongering in an effort to discredit Otterlo. The company "is following the system the government wants," Msangi said. "OBC has invested more money here than any other company in the district." Msangi said Hunting companies request permission to kill a certain number of animals. Once the request is approved by wildlife experts at the Ministry of the Environment, the company pays a fee based on that number whether they actually kill the animals or not, he said. "We have police and ministry people making sure they don't exceed what they have paid for," Msangi said. The tourists are also required to employ professional hunters to ensure no female or young animals are killed, he added. Compared to the numbers in Serengeti National Park, very few large animals were seen during a three-hour drive through Loliondo. But without any independent survey of the animal population, it is impossible to know whether Msangi's conservation efforts are working. Msangi described his main duty as balancing the needs of people, animals and conservation. He said not only does Hunting revenue finance wildlife conservation, but Otterlo, like most tourism companies, also makes charitable donations to help pay for schools and development projects and it provides badly need jobs. Also appeared in http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020801-22110374.htm 1 Aug 2002 Internet Web Pages Extract Author: Lifer Extract Date: April 16 2002 Posted - April 16 2002 : 20:53:22 The East African Newspaper of 4-10 February 2002 carried an article titled "Game Carnage in Tanzania Alarms Kenya", written by John Mbaria with supplement information from Apolinari Tairo of Dar es Salaam. The article was on The Ortello Business Hunting Company, which started to hunt in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area in 1992. The following are issues raised in the article: a) Hunting activities carried out in Liliondo Game Controlled Area near the Tanzania / Kenyan border causes loses of 80% of the Kenyan wildlife. b) Hunting is conducted in the migratory route in the south between Kenya and Serengeti National Park. The animals are hunted during the migratory period as they move to Kenya and on their way back to Tanzania in July to December. c) Hunting is threatening the Kenyan tourism industry, which earns the country USD 256.0 annually. d) The Hunting kills animals haphazardly, without proper guidance and monitoring of actual number of animals killed and exported outside the country. e) Airplanes belonging to Ortello Business Corporation (OBC) carry unspecified type of live animals and birds from Loliondo on their way back to UAE. Further more, the air planes fly directly in and out of Loliondo without stopping at Kilimanjaro International Airport (KIA). The following are responses to the issues raised: 2.0 Conservation of wildlife in Tanzania Tanzania is among the top ten countries in the world rich in biodiversity. Tanzania is also leading in wildlife conservation in Africa. It has 12 National Parks, including the famous Serengeti National Park, 34 Game Reserves and 38 Game Controlled Areas. The wildlife –protected areas cover 28% of the land surface area of Tanzania. In recognition of the good conservation works, Tanzania was awarded a conservation medal in 1995 by the Safari Club International whose headquarters is in the United States of America. Tanzania has a number of important endangered animal species in the world. Such animal species are: Black Rhino, Wild Dog, Chimpanzee, Elephant and Crocodile (Slender Snorted Crocodile). In 1998, the Government of Tanzania adopted a Wildlife Policy, which gives direction on conservation and advocate sustainable use of wildlife resources for the benefit of the present and future generations. 3.0 Tourist Hunting Regulated tourist Hunting or any other type of Hunting that observes conservation ethics does not negatively affect wild animal populations. This is because Hunting ethics is based on selective Hunting and not random shooting of animals. Hunting was banned in Tanzania from 1972 to 1978. The resultant effect was increased poaching and reduced government revenue from wildlife conservation. Low revenue caused low budgetary allocations to wildlife conservation activities and the lack of working gear and equipment. When the tourist Hunting resumed Elephant population increased from 44,000 (in 1989) to 45,000 (in 1994). Elephant is a keystone species in the Hunting industry and is a good indicator in showing population status of other animal species in their habitat. In 1989 to 1993 the government revenue from the Hunting industry increased from USD 2,422,500.00 to USD 7,377,430.00. The government earned a total of USD 9.3 Million from tourist Hunting in the year 2002. Increased revenue and keystone species such as Elephant are the results of efficient implementation of good plans and policies in conservation and sustainable use of wildlife resources. 4.0 Response to the issues raised in the article 4.1 Hunting against the law by OBC OBC is one of the 40 Hunting companies operating in Tanzania. The Company belongs to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Different from other Hunting companies, OBC does not conduct tourist Hunting business. The Kingdom of UAE has been the client Hunting in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area since 1992. In conducting Hunting in Loliondo Game Controlled Area, the Company adhere to the law and regulations governing the tourist Hunting industry, namely: 4.1.1 Payment of concession fee amounting to USD 7,500.00 per Hunting block per year. 4.1.2 Requesting for a Hunting quota from the Director of Wildlife, before issuance of Hunting permit. 4.1.3 Payment of game fees as stipulated by the Government. 4.1.4 Hunting only those animals shown in the Hunting permit. 4.1.5 Contributing to the development of the Hunting block, local communities’ development projects and anti-poaching activities. The following is what OBC has done so far: · Contribution towards the development of the Ngorongoro District of USD 46,000.00 · Construction of Waso Primary and Secondary Schools, six bore holes and cattle dips and has purchased two buses to enhance/local transportation. Furthermore, OBC contributed TSh. 30.0M to six villages in the Hunting area, for providing secondary school education to 21 children. · Purchased a generator and water pump worth TSh. 11.0M for provision of water to six villages. It has also constructed all weather roads and an airstrip within Loliondo area. 4.1.6. Different from the rest of the Hunting companies OBC Hunting period is very short. Normally the Hunting season lasts for six months, but OBC hunts for a maximum of four months. Few animals are shot from the Hunting permit. 4.2 Animals hunted in migratory routes. The Government of Tanzania has permitted Hunting in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area and not in the migratory route between Masai Mara and Serengeti National Park. The Loliondo Game Controlled Area is a plain bordering the Serengeti National Park to the east. 4.3 The right for Tanzania to use wildlife in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area The wildlife found in Tanzania is the property of the Government of Tanzania. The notion that these animals belong to Kenya is not correct. The wild animals in Loliondo Game Controlled Area do not have dual citizenship . Since some animal species move back and forth between Tanzania and Kenya it is better understood that these animals would be recognised to belong to either party during the time they are in that particular country. Animals in Masai Mara, Serengeti, Loliondo and Ngorongoro belong to one ecosystem namely, Serengeti ecosystem. However, Tanzania being a sovereign State with her own policies has the right by law to implement them. The same applies to Kenya, which has the right to implement its no-Hunting policy basing on the administration of her laws. Tanzania has therefore, not done anything wrong to undertake Hunting on her territory. 4.4 Hunting is threatening Kenyan tourism Migratory animals move into Kenya during the rainy season. After the rainy season they move back to Tanzania. Animals that are hunted in Liliondo Game Controlled Area during this time of the year are very few. In the year 2000, only 150 animals were hunted, and in the year 2001 only 139 animals were hunted. It is therefore, not true that 80% of the animals in the border area were hunted. Based on this argument, it is also not true that Hunting conducted by OBC is threatening the Kenyan tourism industry. Tanzania does not allow Hunting of elephants 10 kilometres from the Tanzania/Kenya international boundary. (CITES meeting held at the Secretariat Offices in Geneva in 1993). This is an example of the measures taken to control what was erroneously referred to by the East African Paper as “haphazard Hunting of animals of Kenya”. Furthermore, it is not true that the Wildlife Division does not know the number of animals that are killed. Control of Hunting is done by the Wildlife Division, District Council and other Law Enforcement agencies. The OBC does not capture and export live animals since it does not possess valid licence to do so. 4.5 OBC airplances export assorted number of live animals from Loliondo to UAE Capture and export of live animals and birds is conducted in accordance with the Wildlife Conservation Act No. 12 of 1974 and resolutions of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The live animal trade is also conducted in accordance with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) regulations, with regard to the size of the boxes/containers allowed to transport specific animal species in order to avoid injuries or death of the same. The principle behind the live animal trade is sustainability. CITES may prohibit exportation of animals whose trade is not sustainable. On these grounds it is obvious that CITES and therefore, its 150 members recognise that the Tanzanian live animal trade is sustainable. Live animal traders who exports animals, birds and other live specimens are obliged to adhere to the following procedure: i) Must hold valid licence to trade on live animals. ii) Must hold a capture permit and thereafter an ownership permit./certificate. The number of animals possessed and the number of animals listed on the ownership permit must be consistent with the number of animals that were listed in the capture permit and actually captured and certified. iii) Must obtain an export permit for animals listed on the ownership permit/certificate. iv) The Officer at the point of exit must certify that the animals exported are those listed on the certificate of export. The number of animals to be exported must tally with the number listed on the certificate of export. Verification of exported animals is conducted in collaboration with the police and customs officials. v) The plane that will carry live animals is inspected by the Dar es Salaam and Kilimanjaro Handling Companies’ Officials. vi) For animals listed under CITES, appropriate export and import certificates are used to export the said specimens. If there is any anomaly in exporting CITES species, the importing country notifies CITES Secretariat, which in turn notifies the exporting country, and the animals in question are immediately returned to the country of export. 4.6 Other specific isues 4.6.1 Hunters are given blank permits Companies are issued Hunting quotas before they commence Hunting activities. Each hunter is given a permit, which shows the animals that he/she is allowed to hunt depending on the quota issued and the type of safari. There are four types of safari Hunting as follows: 7, 14, 16 and 21 days safari. Each Hunting safari indicates species and numbers of animals to be hunted. When an animal is killed or wounded the officer in-charge overseeing Hunting activities signs to certify that the respective animal has been killed. If the animal has been wounded, the animal is tracked down and killed to ensure that no other animal is killed to replace the wounded animal at large. This procedure is a measure of monitoring of animals killed by hunters. 4.6.2 Good Neighbourhood Meetings between Tanzania and Kenya There are three platforms on which Tanzania and Kenya meet to discuss conservation issues as follows: a) The Environment and Tourism Committee of the EAC. b) The Lusaka Agreement. In the Lusaka Agreement Meeting conservation and anti-poaching matters amongst member countries are discussed. The HQ of the Lusaka Agreement is in Nairobi. c) Neighbourhood meeting. Experts in the contiguous conservation areas meet to discuss areas of cooperation between them, for example, in joint anti-poaching operations. Based on the regulations that govern the Hunting industry animals are not threatened by extinction since the animals that are hunted are old males for the purpose of obtaining good trophies. Trophies are attractions in this Hunting business. It is on this basis that tourist Hunting is not discussed in the said meetings, because is not an issue for both countries. 4.6.3 OBC airplanes flies directly to and from Loliondo without passing through KIA The Tanzania Air Traffic Law requires that all airplanes land at KIA before they depart to protected areas. When the airplanes are at KIA and DIA the respective authorities conduct their duties according. The same applies when airplanes fly to UAE. They are required to land at KIA in order to go through immigration and customs checks. The allegation that OBC airplane does not land in KIA is therefore false. Furthermore, Tanzania Air Traffic Control regulates all airplanes includingly, OBC airplane at entry points. 4.6.4 OBC sprays salt in some parts of the Loliondo Game Controlled Area in order to attract animals from Serengeti National Park. These allegations are baseless since the Tourist Hunting Regulations (2000) prohibit distribution of water and salt at the Hunting site in order to attract animals for Hunting. Besides the Game Scouts who supervise Hunting had never reported this episode. Furthermore, there are no reports that OBC is responsible for wild fires that gutters the south of the Serengeti National Park. 4.6.5 Cancellation of OBC block permit in 1999 since it was involved in the exportation of live animals. This allegation is not true. The truth is that Hunting blocks are allocated to Hunting companies after every five years. The allocation that was done in 1995 expired in 1999. The next allocation was done in year 2000 and the companies will use the allocated blocks until 2004. 4.6.6 The UAE Royal Family contributions to the Wildlife Division This is true. The Wildlife Division had received support from the UAE including: vehicles, transceivers and field gear in 1996. This was part of the fulfilment of the obligation by all Hunting companies to contribute towards conservation and anti-poaching activities. Records in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism show that there is no other District in Tanzania with Hunting area, other than Ngorongoro District, that receives enormous funds from Hunting business for community development. OBC contributes up to TSh. 354,967,000.00 annually for community development in Loliondo. The Government of Tanzania has no reasons to stop the Hunting activities in Loliondo Game Controlled Area. The government sees that local communities and the Ngorongoro District Council benefit from the Hunting industry. Edited by - lifer on 04/16/2002 20:57:41 Extract Author: Yannick Ndoinyo Extract Date: 17 august 2002 ISSN 0856-9135; No. 00233 A rejoinder to the Ministry’s press release on Loliondo and OBC We are replying in a critical analysis to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism Press Release in the East African paper of April 1-7 2002 regarding the "Game Carnage in Tanzania Alarms Kenya" in the same paper (East Africa February 4-10 2002). Special reference was given to Hunting activities by OBC and our analysis base to same Company. As it appears in the Press Release, OBC is the property of the UAE, but in reality some top influential people in Tanzania have some shares in the company. The OBC has been in Loliondo since 1992, even though ever since the whole local community in Loliondo refused to accept its presence and goes to the present day. OBC, to us, is not a normal Hunting company. It seems as if the Company has the right of ownership over land and other natural resources like water and wildlife. OBC has constructed expensive and luxurious houses, airstrip and big godowns on water source without the local people’s authority while they depend on such water for dry season grazing. Our surprise is that the government has always denied this fact and defended the Company. Why? The Company may be adhering to regulations and laws governing the tourist Hunting business in the books only and not practically. There are no monitoring schemes to make sure that the Company adheres to the said regulations. It is true that OBC contributes 30 million to six villages, which is 5 million per village, and it was initially 2.5 million per village. The amount was raised two years ago. The issue here is that the amount was determined by OBC alone and therefore paid when they feel like doing, no binding mechanisms to endure payment on regular basis. The former OBC director was once quoted as saying, "I am paying this money as this money as a goodwill only because the government does not wish me to do so". The amount however does not compensate or match the resources extracted from the land of six villages. The implication is that OBC has entered into agreement with the government only and not with the villages. The provision of education to 21 children as indicated the Press release, is basically not true or correct. The 30 million is the annual goodwill contribution from OBC to the six villages and not purposely meant for education only. The plan to utilize this money is upon the villages themselves. It is also true that OBC has constructed Wasso secondary school but not Wasso primary school. The secondary school, which was built for the six villages in which OBC operated and the whole of Ngorongoro district has been taken by the government thus limiting the number of children hailing from these villages and Ngorongoro district an opportunity to obtain education from the same school. In regard to bore holes, there are only four known boreholes and all these are built in Wasso and Loliondo townships. There are no any boreholes existing in any of the six villages, except only that a water pump machine, which currently does not work, was purchased for Mondorosi hamlet (Kitongoji) of Soit-Sambu village. Again, there is no virtually any cattle dip that OBC did dig or rehabilitated in six villages as mentioned in the Press Release from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism. The information that OBC purchased a generator and water pump worth 11million is to six villages for water provision is false and misleading. Most villages in Loliondo have water problems and it is impossible for a generator to sustain a single village leave alone six villages. No single village has received such service from OBC. In regard to transport, the two buses were either bought or just brought as second hand vehicles. These buses are expensive to run and spares are not easily obtained. At present they are just grounded at Ngorongoro district workshop/garage. There was a time the councilors debated whether or not to sell because of difficult management. At present the people of Loliondo use an extremely old SM bus for transport. Again in the aspect of transport, there are no all weather roads in Loliondo that OBC constructed as it was said the Press release. Roads in most parts of Loliondo are murramed roads and mostly were constructed by Ngongoro district council using money from TANROADS and not OBC. It is indeed true that OBC Hunting period is very short. There is a lot that can happen in short period especially if the team of hunters is composed of professional hunters. Our concern here is the interference and interruptions that OBC causes to the life systems of the people in Loliondo. The Maasai cannot resume their grazing patterns and often are forced to move by OBC. Where should we graze our cattle while our grazing land is occupied and by the Hunting company and protected by the gun? In six villages of Loliondo, five operate non-consumptive tourism that gives them more earnings except one which is dominated by OBC. The villages can now send children to school, construct basic infrastructure like health centers, classrooms, teacher houses water supply and food security ultimately eradicating poverty. This is all done using the money from the non-consumptive tourism. The OBC constantly interrupts this system and agreement between in the villages saying that the villages have no right to operate such tourism on ‘his land’. Is it his or our land? The other major problem besides the Arabs is the constant reprimand from the government, as it discourages this kind of tourism business that benefits the local people in the villages more. We favour this kind of tourism because it does not disturb our normal pattern of life system. At the same time it does not kill wild animals, they just camp and go to the Serengeti Park. The allegations that OBC airplanes fly directly from Loliondo to UAE without passing KIA and whether it exports live animals have existed and many people have spoken and written about it. However, we cannot confirm anything about without much scrutiny. We do not know much now. Also in the Press Release the spray of salt to attract animals was referred to. The distribution of water in a certain site to attract animals was applied sometime ago. We are sure of this as it happened some years ago. What we are not exact is whether the practice continues to the present day. In the Press Release, the records in the Ministry show that OBC pays annually 354,967,000/= for community development in Loliondo? We have some reservations in regard to such records. First of all they are just records and anything can be written. Secondly, how is it that the Ministry has such records while we in Loliondo, the base of OBC operation, do not have? Thirdly, where is the provision in the agreement that forces OBC to annually pay to the district such amount of money? It may be that the amount is used to be paid annually but to individuals only and not to the district as it said. In its conclusion the Ministry sees no reason to stop Hunting activities in Loliondo simply because the local community and Ngorongoro district council benefit from the Hunting business. We strongly feel that there is every reason to stop the Hunting activities in Loliondo for several reasons. First, the local community did not consent to the granting of their land to the Hunting company to the present day. Secondly, the local community and Ngorongoro district council do not benefit in a way it should be from this Hunting business in Loliondo. Thirdly, the presence of OBC has interrupted and interfered with our life systems including grazing, culture and other alternative means of business to the local community. In our conclusion we feel that even though the government operates under the law set in Dar es Salaam and Dodoma without the involvement of the local people, it is very important to respect the localpeople. Someone in the ministry who has never been to Loliondo, we firmly conclude, either wrote the Press Release, or the story was made. We suggest that the villagers or OBC people be contacted for more definite facts. Please feel free to contact us for any queries you might have regarding this article. Tel: 0744 390 626 Extract Author: Arusha times Reporters Extract Date: Aug 17 2002 ISSN 0856-9135; No. 00233 The Hunting plot controversy reigning within the Longido Game Controlled Area in Monduli district two weeks ago threatened the life of the American ambassador to Tanzania, Robert Royall who was Hunting in the block . Riding in a Toyota Land Cruiser Station Wagon with registration numbers TZP 9016, owned by Bush Buck Safaris Limited, Ambassador Royall found himself being confronted by 16 armed men. The incident took place on Saturday the 27th of July this year, at about 13.00 hours, in the Hunting block which is under the authority of Northern Hunting Enterprises Limited. It is reported that, while Royall and his family were driving in the area, another vehicle, Land Cruiser with registration numbers TZP 3867, drove toward them and blocked them off. Sixteen men, armed with traditional weapons including spears, machetes, doubled edged swords (simis) and clubs jumped out, ready for an attack. However, both the ambassador, his team and driver Carlous Chalamila happened to be fully equipped and likewise drew their weapons. Seeing modern weapons, the mob got frightened and decided to flee. But the ambassador’s driver, Chalamila followed them to find out what they wanted. Contacts were subsequently made with the wildlife department of the Ministry of Tourism and Natural Resources. Some wildlife officers were dispatched to the scene from Arusha and when they arrived, they found the attackers already gone. Regional Police Commander for Arusha, James Kombe admitted that the incident did take place but declined comments on the issue. However, already five people have been arrested in connection with the incident, these are: Omar Mussa, David Bernard, Salimba Lekasaine, Kiruriti Ndaga and the only lady in the team, Nuria Panito Kennedy. This week, Arusha Times learned that, the five suspects are out on bail. Speaking by phone from Monduli, the Monduli District Commissioner (DC), Anthony Malle said there was indeed some controversy regarding the Hunting bloc of Longido Game Controlled Area (LGCA) in which two Hunting companies of Kibo Safaris and Northern Hunting Enterprises (T) Limited, were at logger heads. Captain Malle added that, even the residents of the Singa village in the area, have been divided into two groups each supporting either companies. The District Commissioner however, pointed out that only the Ministry will decide which of the two parties have the right to the 1,500 square kilometre Hunting bloc. DC Malle also said that he and other district officials have already held various meetings to address the issue and together have signed an official letter which was sent to the Principal Secretary of the Ministry of Tourism and Natural Resources in order for the office to settle the matter once and for all. Efforts to contact both Kibo Safaris and Northern Hunting Enterprises ended in vain. The East African Extract Author: John Mbaria Extract Date: December 2, 2002 The East African (Nairobi) Posted to the web December 4, 2002 .. .. .. Unlike in Kenya, the law in Tanzania promotes commercial wildlife utilisation activities such as safari Hunting and actually prohibits photographic tourism in areas declared as Hunting zones. Under the WCA of 1974, the wildlife division can only regulate the capture, Hunting and commercial photography of wildlife. The report adds that the director of wildlife can issue Hunting licences on village land, but he "does not have the power to give a hunter or Hunting company authority to hunt on village land without the permission of the village government." On their part, the licensed persons are expected to seek the permission of the village government before engaging in any Hunting. However, reports indicate that the practice of safari Hunting has so far ignored this law. The report says that most Hunting companies put up facilities on village lands without the permission of the village government and the respective village assemblies. The report gives the example of the Loliondo GCA, in Loliondo division of Ngorongoro district, where a Hunting company associated with a United Arab Emirates minister, "has built an airstrip and several large houses without the permission of the relevant village governments." "Such actions are contrary to the VLA which, under section 17, requires any non-village organisation that intends to use any portion of the village land to apply for that land to the village council, which will then forward that application and its recommendation for approval or rejection to the Commissioner for Land." In January, The EastAfrican published an exclusive story on the manner with which the Hunting company conducts Hunting activities in Loliondo. .. .. .. Extract Author: Indigenous Rights for Survival International Page Number: b Extract Date: 2/1/03 [click on the link to see the original MS Word document] Indigenous Rights for Survival International P.O. Box 13357 Dar Es Salaam. Alternative E-mail: email@example.com The United Republic of Tanzania P.O. Box 9120 Dar Es Salaam. If it pleases the Honourable President Benjamin Mkapa Re: Stop the killing fields of Loliondo I am a Tanzanian citizen, a strong believer in social justice. Under the same spirit I am the Co-coordinator of an informal group called Indigenous Rights for Survival International (IRSI). IRSI is a loose network of young people with an interest in public policy issues in Africa. We mainly discuss policy issues through emails communications and ultimately write articles in the press. IRSI as an entity takes no position on any of the discussed issues instead it simply stimulates, steers, and co-ordinates discussions and debates on public policy issues of members’ interest. Mr. President, I have all along believed that you can stop the crime against humanity being inflicted upon the people of Loliondo, Ngorongoro District of Arusha Region by a no less authority than the Government of Tanzania. Mr. President, Loliondo Division is located in Maasai ancestral lands in the northern part of Tanzania along the common border with Kenya. It borders the Ngorongoro highlands to the south, Serengeti National Park to the west, and the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya to the north. The Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LCGA) encompasses an estimated 4,000 sq km. There is no physical barrier separating the LGCA from other protected areas. It is a continuous ecosystem. LGCA was initially established in 1959 as a Game Reserve by the British colonialists under the then Fauna Conservation Ordinance, Section 302, a legal instrument the colonial authorities used to set aside portions of land for wildlife conservation. The legal status of the reserve was later changed to that of a Game Controlled Area to allow for commercial Hunting, a status that defines LGCA today and haunts its wildlife. Mr. President, Loliondo forms an important part of the semi-annual migratory route of millions of wildebeests and other ungulates northward into the Maasai Mara Game Reserve and Amboseli National Park in Kenya between April and June, and returning southward later in the year. The survival of the Ngorongoro-Serengeti-Maasai Mara ecosystem and the wildlife it supports is linked to the existence of Loliondo and other surrounding communal Maasai lands in Tanzania and Kenya. Similarly, the survival of the Maasai people is dependent entirely upon the protection of their ancestral land for economic viability and cultural reproduction. Land to the Maasai is the foundation for their spirituality and the base for identity. Mr. President, the people of Ngorongoro District in general and Loliondo Division in particular have suffered for a long time various established pains such as irrational grabbing of their ancestral land for “development”, tourism (consumptive and non-consumptive) and cultivation. While the people of Loliondo have lost much of their ancestral land to cultivation, the Government is evidently supporting private investors to further put Maasai pastoralists of Loliondo at a very awkward corner. In 1992, the administration of the former president Ali Hassan Mwinyi granted the entire Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LGCA) as a Hunting concession to the Otterlo Business Corporation Ltd (OBC), a game-Hunting firm based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Government issued a 10-year Hunting permit, under the controversial agreement, to the Brigadier Mohammed Abdulrahim Al-Ali, believed to be a member of the royal family of the UAE, of Abu Dhabi in the UAE who owns (OBC). The grabbed land is a birthright land of thousands of villagers of Arash, Soitsambu, Oloipiri, Ololosokwan, Loosoito and Oloirien villages of Loliondo. Mr. President, a Parliamentary Committee was formed to probe the Loliondo Gate saga. It revoked the dirty agreement. Strangely, a similar agreement was established. In January 2000, OBC was granted another 5-year Hunting permit in the said area. As usual, without the villagers’ consent. OBC constructed an airstrip. The villagers have been witnessing live animals being exported through the airstrip. OBC constructed structures near water sources. Hearing of the new permit, the Maasai sent a 13-men protest delegation to Dar Es Salaam in April 2000. The intention was to sort out the matter with you Mr. President. Unfortunately, they did not see you. However, the delegation managed to hold a press conference at MAELEZO, National Information Corporation Centre. The Maasai contemplated a number of actions to be taken against both your Government and the Arab in connection with the plunder of the resources. The Maasai said that before a mass exodus of the Maasai to Kenya the first thing was to eliminate wild animals. Thereafter, the delegation retreated to Loliondo, as gravely frustrated as before. The general election was scheduled for 2000, so the saga had to be explained away. The official statement was that power hungry opposition politicians were pushing the elders and that all the claims by the Maasai were “unfounded” and “baseless.” To its credit, The Guardian went to Loliondo. It reported the following: Maasai elders in Loliondo, Arusha Region, who recently declared a land dispute against OBC Ltd, a foreign game-Hunting firm, have accused some top Government officials of corrupt practices, saying the conflict is not political. The Arusha Regional Commissioner, Daniel ole Njoolay, recently described the simmering land dispute between the Maasai pastoralists and OBC, as a political issue. Francis Shomet [the former Chairman for Ngorongoro District Council] claimed that Njoolay had misled Tanzanians to believe that the allegations recently raised by Maasai elders were unfounded and baseless. Fidelis Kashe, Ngorongoro District Council Chairman maintained, “We cannot stand idle to see our land being taken away by Arabs. We will kill all the animals in the area as these are the ones attracting the Arabs into our land” (The Guardian May 30, 2000). The next morning Government officials were reported to have said the following: The Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism, Zakia Meghji, yesterday assured Ngorongoro residents that no land has been sold or grabbed by Arabs in Loliondo. Flanked by the Arusha Regional Commissioner, Daniel ole Njoolay and the Director of Wildlife, Emanuel Severre, Meghji commented, “There is no clause on the sale of land in the contract signed between OBC and the six villages of Ololosokwan, Arash, Maaloni, Oloirien, Oloipiri and Soitsambu.” However an inquiry conducted by The Guardian in Loliondo last week established that the Maasai elders were not involved in the re-lease of the Hunting block to the company. According to Megji, her probe established that the building has been constructed about 400 metres from the water source, 200 metres more than the distance recommended by law. But The Guardian investigation shows that the structures are less than 50 metres from a spring. And another spring has dried up (The Guardian May 31, 2000). Mr. President, underline two points. First, the Minister said the building has been constructed 400 metres from the water source. Second, “The Guardian investigation shows that the structures are less than 50 metres from a spring.” Now unless one’s mathematics teacher at school was daft, there is a huge different between 50 and 400! When did 50 metric metres turn to mean 400 metric metres? Can it be claimed that the Maasai were party to this so-called agreement? I am at a loss why this-well known-Minister has not been made to face the full force of the law. In the proposal, Brigadier Al Ali outlined the benefits of his operations in Loliondo to the Government, local communities, and wildlife conservation in the Serengeti-Maasai Mara-Ngorongoro ecosystem. Among its important objectives were: • To conserve an area contiguous to the Serengeti National Park, which is essential to the long-term survival of the ecosystem and its migration. • To develop a new role and image for the Arab world as regards wildlife conservation, management, and human development. • To improve locals’ revenue, development facilities, and create employment. • To generate revenues for the Central and District Governments. The OBC now stands accused of self-contradiction and violation of legal and moral obligations in virtually all the above areas, resulting instead in environmental destruction; unfulfilled promises and exploitation of the local communities; and direct undermining of the stability of the region’s wildlife and natural habitats. It has become evident that OBC had a long-term agenda for exploiting the high concentration of wildlife in Loliondo. Its Hunting operations are guaranteed by the continuous flow of wildlife from the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Maasai Mara, and other areas. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, OBC "was taking advantage of migratory patterns of wildlife coming out of Serengeti." Mr. President, be informed that the villages in and adjacent to protected areas in Tanzania have no Government-supported infrastructures. Take Ngorongoro District for instance. There is no Government hospital in Ngorongoro. It may take a week to travel from Arusha to Loliondo, just less than 400 km, depending on weather, for there is no road. There is no even a single Government advanced level secondary education school in six (repeat six) Districts in the Greater Serengeti Region. This situation brings to question the legitimacy of wildlife conservation vis-à-vis the right of rural people to lead a decent life given nature endowment in their localities. Mr. President, the Maasai of Loliondo have for a long time accused OBC of grave human rights abuses. They have described acts of intimidation, harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention, and even torture by OBC staff, Tanzanian police and military in the name of OBC; brazen violations of grazing and land rights; and wanton environmental destruction and imminent extermination of wildlife. They have seen leaders who once opposed OBC’s practices corrupted and bought-off. The OBC operates like a separate arm of the Government. Many people in Loliondo believe that OBC is even more powerful than the Government. The Maa word for "the Arab", Olarrabui, is often used to refer Brigadier Al Ali, and by extension OBC. The word Olarrabui has become synonymous with power, authority, brutality, fear, and entities larger than life. Mr. President, you do not need to be a rocket scientist to comprehend that this is the clearest case of abuse of office. It is suggested, for those willing to avert disaster, the Tanzania Government included, that immediate steps be taken to put to an end the violation of fundamental human rights in Ngorongoro. As to lands lost in Loliondo, the Government is advised to return this to its owners. Land should not be grabbed senselessly. The Government, should at once, re-look into the whole matter. Navaya ole Ndaskoi. - The International Court of Justice - The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights - The United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations - Human Rights Groups around the World - Faculty of Law of the University of Dar Es Salaam - Local and International Conservation Agencies - Ministry of Tourism and Natural Resources - The Attorney General - The Chief Justice - The Speaker of the United Republic of Tanzania Parliament - The Press, print and electronic - Political parties in Tanzania - Tanganyika Law Society - Other interested parties. Navaya ole Ndaskoi see also Extract 3734 The Maasai protest delegation holding a press conference in Dar Es Salaam in 2000

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Journal Issue: Juvenile Justice Volume 18 Number 2 Fall 2008 The Prevalence of Mental Disorders among Adolescent Offenders Two kinds of studies address questions about the social consequences of the links between mental disorders and delinquency. One type examines the degree of "overlap" between a community's population of youth with mental disorders and its population of youthful offenders. Knowing this overlap gives some notion of the risk of official delinquency for youth with mental disorders and the degree to which mental disorders of youth contribute to a community's overall delinquency. The second type of study examines the proportion of youth with mental disorders within juvenile justice facilities or programs. These studies provide information with which to formulate policy about treating and managing youth with mental disorders in juvenile justice custody. It is important to recognize that these two types of research begin with very different populations, even though they both address the relation between mental disorder and delinquency. The first typically focuses on all delinquent youth in the community, while the second examines only delinquent youth placed in juvenile pretrial detention centers when they are arrested or in juvenile correctional facilities when they are adjudicated. This distinction is further complicated, as discussed later, by the fact that not all youth in juvenile justice facilities are necessarily delinquent. Epidemiologic Studies of Mental Disorder and Delinquency Some studies have identified a significant overlap between the populations of youth served by community mental health agencies and youth in contact with the community's juvenile court.23 These studies are few in number, but they have found that the risk of juvenile court involvement among a community's young mental health clients is substantial. For example, a study in one city found that adolescents in contact with the community's mental health system during a nine-month period were two to three times more likely to have a referral to the juvenile justice system during that period than were youth in the city's general population.24 Youth in contact with a mental health system's services, however, are not the sum of a community's youth with mental health needs because many receive no services. The results of the study above probably represent the proportion of more seriously disturbed youth who have juvenile justice contact. Even so, merely knowing that youth "have contact" with the juvenile justice system tells us little about their offenses or even whether they offended at all. Very few studies have used samples that make it possible to identify both the proportion of delinquent youth in a community who have mental disorders and the proportion of youth with mental disorders who have been delinquent. The few that have, however, are large studies with careful designs. One examined a community population (drawn from several cities) that identified youth with persistent serious delinquency (repeat offending) and youth with persistent mental health problems (manifested multiple times).25 About 30 percent of youth with persistent mental health problems were persistently delinquent. But among all persistently delinquent youth, only about 15 percent had persistent mental health problems. Another recent study examined the relation between mental disorders during adolescence and criminal behavior when those youth became adults.26 Delinquencies and adult criminal arrests were recorded for a sample of youth in a large geographic region aged nine through twenty-one. The youth were also assessed for mental disorders three times between the ages of nine and sixteen. A diagnosis at any one of these three points identified the youth as having a mental disorder "sometime during childhood or adolescence." In this study, youth who were arrested between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one included a considerably greater share of youth who had had mental disorders in adolescence than those who were not arrested—for males, 51 percent as against 33 percent. This finding does not mean that 51 percent of the arrested group had mental disorders at the time of their arrest, but that they had had a mental disorder sometime in adolescence. It also does not mean that the majority of youth who had mental disorders in adolescence were arrested in adulthood. A different statistical procedure in this study, called "population attributable risk," addressed that question. It showed that the risk of adult arrest among individuals who had mental disorders at some time during adolescence was about 21 percent for women and 15 percent for men. These few studies suggest the following conclusions, all of which need further confirmation. First, consistent with the clinical research reviewed earlier, youth who have mental disorders are at greater risk of engaging in offenses than youth without mental disorders. It is possible that treating their disorders would reduce that risk. But most youth with mental disorders do not engage in offenses that involve them in juvenile or criminal justice systems. Second, youth with mental disorders represent only a minority of all youth who engage in delinquent behavior, although the share is somewhat disproportionately greater than their prevalence in the general community. If those youth received treatment that reduced their delinquency, it is possible that overall rates of delinquency in the community would fall somewhat, but the majority of delinquencies are not related to mental disorders. Third, rates of delinquency are higher among youth with certain types of emotional disorders— for example, depression or anxiety co-morbid with substance use disorders— and among youth with chronic and multiple disorders (seriously emotionally disturbed youth). Finally, a few studies have suggested that youth with mental disorders make up a somewhat greater proportion (although still a minority) of youth who were arrested for more serious and violent delinquencies or crimes.27 Mental Disorder in Juvenile Justice Settings Research on the subset of delinquent youth who enter juvenile pretrial detention centers and correctional programs cannot tell us the relation between mental disorder and delinquency, because most youth who engage in delinquencies are not placed in secure juvenile justice programs. Such studies, however, are extremely important for public policy, because they identify the scope and nature of mental disorder among youth for whom the juvenile justice system has custodial responsibility. Until recently the precise prevalence of mental disorders among youth in juvenile justice custody was unknown. Estimates varied widely from study to study, largely because of inadequate research methods or differences from one study site to another.28 In the past decade, however, well-designed studies executed in a variety of sites have provided a reliable and consistent picture. Those studies have found that among youth in various types of juvenile justice settings—for example, pretrial detention centers where youth are taken soon after arrest—about one-half to two-thirds meet criteria for one or more mental disorders.29 The prevalence of mental disorders is much higher in juvenile justice settings than it is among youth in the U.S. general population, which is about 15 to 25 percent.30 Across these studies, the rate is higher for girls than for boys.31 The overall prevalence rate does not vary greatly between younger and older adolescents or for youth with various ethnic and racial characteristics, although age and race differences are sometimes found for specific types of disorders and symptoms.32 As described in the earlier clinical review, about two-thirds of youth in juvenile justice custody who meet criteria for a mental disorder (that is, about one-third to one-half of youth in custody) meet criteria for more than one disorder.33 I will focus later on the implications of these statistics for the juvenile justice system's best response to mental disorders among youth in its custody. The high prevalence of mental disorder in juvenile justice facilities does not necessarily define the need for treatment. Some youth who meet criteria for mental disorders are experiencing their disorders temporarily and need only emergency services, while a smaller share—about one in ten—represents a core group of youth with chronic mental illness who can be expected to continue to need clinical services into adulthood.34 Some are functioning fairly well despite their symptoms, while others are barely able to function at all. And some have mental health needs, such as learning disabilities, that were not even included in the recent studies of prevalence among youth in juvenile justice settings. Reasons for the High Prevalence of Mental Disorders in Juvenile Justice Programs Why are mental disorders so prevalent among adolescent offenders in juvenile justice settings? Three perspectives—clinical, socio-legal, and inter-systemic—help to explain. They are not competing explanations. All probably play a role, and no evidence suggests that one is more important than the others. From a clinical perspective, it is likely that the same symptoms of mental disorder that increase the risk of aggression also increase the likelihood that youth will be placed in secure juvenile justice facilities for any significant period of time. When police officers arrest youth, usually those youth are not placed in pretrial detention. Nor is detention reserved for the most serious offenders—in fact, youth arrested for very violent offenses typically do not make up the majority of youth in detention. Those youth who are detained more than a few hours are those who have been more unruly or unmanageable at the time of their arrest, which satisfies detention criteria regarding a risk that they will be endangered, or might endanger others, if not detained. Youth with mental disorders frequently have symptoms involving impulsiveness, anger, and cognitive confusion that can make them less manageable and a greater risk to themselves or others, especially under the stress associated with their offense and arrest. Thus, among youth who are detained, a significant share is likely to have mental disorders that create unmanageable behavior—more so than for youth without mental disorders and more so than their peers with less severe mental disorders. This likelihood makes it no surprise that youth with mental disorders contribute disproportionately to detention populations. From a socio-legal perspective, recent changes in laws applied to youths' delinquencies may have increased the likelihood that youth with mental disorders will enter the juvenile justice system. Before the 1990s, law enforcement officers, juvenile probation departments, prosecutors, and judges typically had some discretion regarding whether they would arrest or prosecute youth with mental disorders when they engaged in illegal behaviors, especially if those behaviors involved minor offenses committed by younger adolescents without offense histories. But a wave of serious juvenile violence during the late 1980s caused virtually all states to revise their juvenile justice statutes during the 1990s to rein in this discretion.35 Under the new laws, certain charges or offenses required legal responses based on the nature of the offense alone, not the characteristics or needs of the individual youth. Penalties more often involved custody in secure juvenile facilities, thus reducing the likelihood that youth could receive mental health services in the community after their adjudication. An unintended consequence of these changes in law, therefore, was an increase in the share of youth with mental disorders coming into the system rather than being diverted on the basis of the juvenile court's discretion. A final, inter-systemic, explanation involves the dynamic relation between systems that serve youth. During the 1990s, most states saw a reduction in the availability of public mental health services for children, especially inpatient services.36 It is possible that less adequate treatment contributed to increased delinquencies among youth with mental disorders. But it is certain that many communities began using the juvenile justice system to try to fill the gap caused by decreased availability of mental health services. This phenomenon was documented in media articles, the observations of juvenile justice personnel, and government reports beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing into the early 2000s.37 Some parents of children with serious mental disorders began urging police to arrest their children, knowing that courts could "order" mental health services that were becoming nearly impossible for parents to get on their own. Soon the local juvenile pretrial detention center was becoming the community's de facto mental health center that provided emergency mental health services or simply acted as a holding place for seriously disturbed youth who had nowhere to go. In summary, these three factors—clinical, socio-legal, and inter-systemic—may together produce a prevalence of mental disorder in juvenile justice settings that does not represent the actual relation between adolescent mental disorder and delinquency. That high prevalence does, however, represent a demand on the juvenile justice system to respond to youth in custody who have mental disorders, and the demand is almost overwhelming. Some of those youth are in secure custody because they have committed serious crimes, others because the legal system has widened the door to juvenile justice processing, and many because their symptoms make them difficult to handle and they have no place else to go. The problem requires a solution, and the multiple causes of the problem as well as the various types of youth involved suggest that the solution will be complex. What have clinicians and researchers learned that can help us determine the appropriate response?38

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Note: This lesson was originally published on an older version of The Learning Network; the link to the related Times article will take you to a page on the old site. Teaching ideas based on New York Times content. Overview of Lesson Plan: In this lesson, students evaluate current search procedures implemented to fight terrorism and examine constitutional rights to privacy. They then share and defend their opinions about domestic security and civil liberties in an age of terrorism. Kristen Tepfenhardt, The New York Times Learning Network Yasmin Chin Eisenhauer, The Bank Street College of Education in New York City Suggested Time Allowance: 1 hour 1. Participate in a “random search” simulation; evaluate current search procedures implemented to fight terrorism. 2. Consider the New York area mass transit’s response to the terror attacks in London by reading and discussing the article “In New York, It’s Open Bag or Find Exits.” 3. Discuss constitutional amendments that relate to rights to privacy. 4. Share individual opinions on domestic security and civil liberties in an age of terrorism. 5. Justify their stances on this topic in letters to state legislators. Resources / Materials: -five index cards with instructions, as described in Warm-Up activity -copies of the article “In New York, It’s Open Bag or Find Exits,” found online at http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20050725monday.html (one per student) -four large pieces of paper or poster board, each with one of the following statements written in large letters: “Strongly Agree,” “Agree Somewhat,” “Disagree Somewhat,” “Strongly Disagree” Activities / Procedures: 1. WARM-UP/DO-NOW: Prior to class, write the words Security Check on the classroom board, place a desk underneath it, and write the following five instructions each on its own index card: -Please proceed to the Security Check area and list all of the items in your possession on the back of this card. -Please proceed to the Security Check area, list all of the items in your possession on the back of this card, and take out proper photo identification. -Please proceed to the Security Check area, remove your shoes and empty all of your pockets on the desk. -Please proceed to the Security Check area and write your social security number, full name, home address and phone number on the back of this card, and await a search of your personal belongings. -Please proceed to the Security Check area and await the K-9 Dog Unit, which will search your belongings. As students enter the classroom, randomly hand an index card to students until all five index cards are distributed. (Based on your class size, you might want to give a card to every fourth or fifth student.) Each student who receives a card reports to the front of the room to the Safety Check area and follows the instructions as indicated on his or her index card. After a few minutes, ask each student to read his or her card aloud, and have each student share his or her thoughts about being selected for this process. Did all students fully comply with the security check? Why or why not? Did they feel that their privacy was being invaded in any way? Now, facilitate a class discussion: How do other students in the class feel about these types of security checks? Would they feel comfortable with this search procedure if it were applied to them in school? On public transportation? In an airport? While entering a mall? Do students think this type of search procedure is effective in stopping potential terrorists? Do students feel that these types of procedures are a violation of their privacy? 2. As a class, read and discuss “In New York, It’s Open Bag or Find Exits” (found online at http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20050725monday.html), focusing on the following questions: a. What “new era” has entered New York City’s subways? b. What new element was added to subway riders’ commuting routines, and why? c. Where did the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey state it would conduct its searches? d. Where did the Metropolitan Transportation state its searches were conducted? e. Who is Michael Chertoff, and according to him, how long will the nation’s mass transit agencies remain on high alert? f. What did the New York Police Department refuse to disclose after its first day of searches? g. According to officials, how will the searches be conducted on the weekends? h. How many subway stations were involved in the initial searches? i. What was the consequence for commuters who did not agree to inspection? j. During what hours are the searches focused, and why? k. How were officers ordered by commanders to stop riders for searches? l. What did Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg acknowledge on the morning that the searches were announced? m. What does Mayor Bloomberg hope he has established, as he indicated on his weekly program on WABC-AM? n. What did Mayor Bloomberg pledge? o. What has Mayor Bloomberg learned? p. What has the New York Civil Liberties Union called the searches? q. What did Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly indicate for officers in the guideline issued on July 21, 2005, to top police commanders? r. What different types of packages were searched? s. According to Shauna Murray, how long did the search process take at Woodlawn-Jerome Avenue in the Bronx? t. When did the “every fifth person” search break down? u. In addition to searching bags, what steps were taken at Sutphin Boulevard-Archer Avenue by officers? v. What was the search procedure at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan? w. By what were selected riders met at Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn? x. What was Amy Lisogorsky’s reaction the second time she was searched? y. How did the search situation in the suburbs compare to that in the city? z. What is James Murphy’s view regarding the searches’ ability to prevent a bombing? aa. According to the Port Authority’s chairman, Anthony R. Coscia, what did the announcement of these searches prompt him to do? 3. Refer back to the statement in the article made by Acting New Jersey Gov. Richard J. Codey: “The two bomb attacks this month on subways and buses in London made it ‘necessary to bring a new level of vigilance to our mass transit system.’” Then, explain to students that privacy is not mentioned specifically in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has ruled that several amendments do establish our constitutional right to privacy. Review and discuss the following amendments, focusing on how they relate to privacy: -First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” -Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” 4. Explain to students that they will be expressing their views on different statements that you will be reading to them regarding domestic security and civil liberties in an age of terrorism. Hang the four “statement” posters in different corners of the room. Because students will be moving around to stand beneath the statements with which they most agree for different questions related to democracy, be sure that students have clear paths in the room to reach the four corners. For each of the statements below, read the statement aloud and allow students to move to the corners of the room that best express their views on the statement. As students take their places, write the statement on the board. Then, ask at least one student in each group to share his or her choice. Encourage students to support their opinions with reasons, facts, and examples, and allow students to challenge one another’s ideas. -Sometimes personal rights must be given up in order to protect people from those who could be a danger to all of us. -Searches should be conducted at the discretion of police officers based only if they have probable cause to suspect someone of a crime. -The phrase “it is better to be safe than sorry” applies when it comes to fighting terrorism. -The American government should have the right to investigate to the fullest extent of the law any suspicious person and his or her activities. -Civil liberties have been granted in the United States Constitution and should be preserved at all costs. 5. WRAP-UP/HOMEWORK: Students respond to the following prompt, written on the board for students to copy prior to leaving the classroom: “As quoted in the article read in class, Port Authority’s chairman Anthony R. Coscia stated that ‘people are willing to endure some level of inconvenience to have a higher level of safety.’ Considering the content of the article and today’s class discussions, write a letter to a senator or representative from our state. What balance can be struck between providing domestic security against terrorism and preserving the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution? What potential terror targets exist in your state, how are they protected in this age of terrorism, and how successful do you think those measures are?” Students can peer-edit their letters and send them to your state legislators. (You can find the addresses of your legislators at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/.) Further Questions for Discussion: -Public mass transit systems are currently using a random search method. What other systems might also be subject to searches? -If current search methods begin to produce fear in the American people and deter them from using mass transit, how can the government restore faith in this system? -Is it fair to compare mass transit search procedures to those used in airports if these modes of transportation do not follow the same protocol? Is one method more effective than the other? Evaluation / Assessment: Students will be evaluated based on participation in class discussions and clear presentation and defense of opinions, in both spoken and written forms. widespread, yielding, random, conduct, endure, networks, vigilance, alertness, disclose, intrusive, violating, turnstile, profiling, unconstitutional, precedents, checkpoints, intoxication, guideline, retained, probable cause, diverse, notation, detained, emigrated, overzealous, substantial, submitted, optimistic 1. Examine other times in history when the United States government has implemented policies that some would consider to be invasions of privacy or threats to individuals’ civil liberties. Create a political cartoon for your school newspaper comparing that historic situation to the current situation discussed in the article read in class. 2. Research the United States Homeland Security Advisory System. Why was it developed? When and how was it developed? How does it work? What do different people think of this system’s effectiveness? Write a newspaper article sharing your findings, or an editorial piece offering your views. 3. What is the American Civil Liberties Union? What is their mission? What are their goals? What have they done to attain these goals? In what recent situations were they involved, and to what extent did their involvement impact the outcome? Create an informational poster or illustrated timeline with your findings. Economics/Mathematics- How much has the United States spent on homeland security since September 11, 2001? Create a series of graphs illustrating various angles of answers to this question (e.g., one graph focusing only on New York, another focusing on airline security, another on costs incurred in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, etc.) Then, write an evaluative piece reflecting on your findings. Media Studies- Identify an issue of privacy related to the news media. Prepare a chart that lists the consequences of maintaining privacy in the situation, and identify these consequences as benefits or costs. Be prepared to explain the issue to your class. Is there a need for legislation related to this issue? What laws currently exist? Teaching with The Times- Search for headlines in The New York Times that discuss to the London bombings and terrorism in general. What anti-terrorism methods are other countries taking in response to the London attacks? Then, create a chart to compare and contrast methods being used abroad with those being implemented in the United States. To order The New York Times for your classroom, click here. Other Information on the Web: The American Civil Liberties Union, or A.C.L.U. (http://www.aclu.org), is an advocate of individual rights. Center for Civic Education (http://www.civiced.org) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan corporation which provides K-12 programs and curriculum which foster the development of informed, responsible participation in civic life. Justice Learning: Civic Education in the Real World (http://www.justicelearning.org) is a collaboration between NPR’s Justice Talking and The New York Times Learning Network, with features on various constitutional issues affecting the world today. Academic Content Standards: Civics Standard 18- Understands the role and importance of law in the American constitutional system and issues regarding the judicial protection of individual rights. Benchmarks: Understands the importance of the rule of law in establishing limits on both those who govern and the governed, protecting individual rights, and promoting the common good; Knows historical and contemporary examples of the rule of law; Understands criteria for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a rule or law by determining if it is understandable, possible to follow, fair, well designed to achieve its purposes, and designed to protect individual rights and to promote the common good; Understands the basic concept of due process of law; Understands the importance to individuals and to society of major due process protections; Understands why due process rights in administrative and legislative procedures are essential for the protection of individual rights and the maintenance of limited government; Understands current issues regarding judicial protection of the rights of individuals Civics Standard 26- Understands issues regarding the proper scope and limits of rights and the relationships among personal, political, and economic rights. Benchmarks: Understands what is meant by the “scope and limits” of a right; Understands different positions on a contemporary conflict between rights; Understands different positions on a contemporary conflict between rights and other social values and interests Civics Standard 29- Understands the importance of political leadership, public service, and a knowledgeable citizenry in American constitutional democracy. Benchmarks: Understands why becoming knowledgeable about public affairs and the values and principles of American constitutional democracy and communicating that knowledge to others is an important form of participation, and understands the argument that constitutional democracy requires the participation of an attentive, knowledgeable, and competent citizenry; Understands how awareness of the nature of American constitutional change gives citizens the ability to reaffirm or change fundamental constitutional values Language Arts Standard 7- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of informational texts. Benchmarks: Applies reading skills and strategies to a variety of informational texts; Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of informational texts; Uses new information to adjust and extend personal knowledge base; Identifies techniques used to convey viewpoint; Draws conclusions and makes inferences based on explicit and implicit information in texts; Differentiates between fact and opinion in informational texts Language Arts Standard 8- Demonstrates competence in speaking and listening as tools for learning. Benchmarks: Plays a variety of roles in group discussions; conveys a clear main point when speaking to others and stays on the topic being discussed Civics Standard 18- Understands the role and importance of law in the American constitutional system and issues regarding the judicial protection of individual rights. Benchmarks: Understands how the rule of law makes possible a system of ordered liberty that protects the basic rights of citizens; Knows historical and contemporary practices that illustrate the central place of the rule of law; Knows historical and contemporary instances in which judicial protections have not been extended to all persons and instances in which judicial protections have been extended to those deprived of them in the past; Understands why due process rights in administrative and legislative procedures are essential for protecting individual rights and maintaining limited government Civics Standard 26- Understands issues regarding the proper scope and limits of rights and the relationships among personal, political, and economic rights. Benchmarks: Knows how to distinguish among personal, political, and economic rights; Understands different positions on a contemporary conflict between rights such as one person’s right to free speech versus another person’s right to be heard Civics Standard 29- Understands the importance of political leadership, public service, and a knowledgeable citizenry in American constitutional democracy. Benchmarks: Understands why becoming knowledgeable about public affairs and the values and principles of American constitutional democracy, and communicating that knowledge to others are important forms of participation, and understands the argument that constitutional democracy requires the participation of an attentive, knowledgeable, and competent citizenry; Understands how awareness of the nature of American constitutional change gives citizens the ability to reaffirm or change fundamental constitutional values Language Arts Standard 7- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of informational texts. Benchmarks: Applies reading skills and strategies to a variety of informational texts; Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of informational texts; Determines the effectiveness of techniques used to convey viewpoint Language Arts Standard 8- Demonstrates competence in speaking and listening as tools for learning. Benchmarks: Asks questions as a way to broaden and enrich classroom discussions

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Deep in a desiccated, Utah desert, surrounded by mountains and fringed with scorched sage and saltbush, stand the surreal remains of German Village. Out of bounds, out of place, out of time and 90 miles from Salt Lake City, it is surely the most bizarre feature of Dugway Proving Ground, a test site created by the Allied military during the second world war to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets in Germany and Japan. All that survives of German Village is a single block of high-gabled, prewar Berlin working-class housing. It is accurate in every respect. And it should be: commissioned by the chemical warfare corps of the US army, it was designed by Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953), the German architect who settled in the US in 1941 after a spell in England. I was alerted to the story of German Village by Mike Davis, who features it in his provocative book Dead Cities: A Natural History, a study of the vulnerability of modern cities from New York to Tokyo to destruction by man and nature. Mendelsohn's involvement in this deathly project, seemed, at first, bizarre. A Jew from Allenstein in East Prussia (today, Olsztyn in Poland), Mendelsohn settled in Berlin, where he trained as an architect after studying economics in Munich. From the trenches of the great war he sent home visionary sketches of extraordinary streamlined, or expressionist, buildings. In 1919, during the great flu epidemic, he began work on the Einstein Tower, an astrophysics laboratory for the German mathematician and scientist, at Potsdam on the edge of Berlin. Over the next 10 or 12 years, Mendelsohn developed beautiful, sweeping, clean-lined, light-filled architecture - much of it in Berlin - that appeared to catch the spirit of the old German Enlightenment and represent it afresh in the uncertain days of the Weimar Republic. These included the Metal Workers Union building, the Universum Cinema on Kurfürstendamm, the Columbushaus (Galeries Lafayette) and several villas, including his own. Outside Berlin, the streamlined department stores he built for Schocken at Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Chemnitz were hugely influential worldwide. Mendelsohn left for England when Hitler was voted into power in 1933. Here, with the Russian-born dandy Serge Chermayeff, he built, among a number of fine houses, the De la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. How can this Erich Mendelsohn be the architect of the dark and deathly German Village in the Utah desert? Mendelsohn left no correspondence or notebooks relating to the Dugway Proving Ground project, where napalm and poison gases were developed and tested. He had been under gas attack in the trenches, yet it is hard not to think that his primary motivation in the desert of Utah was revenge on the Nazis. If this seems fair enough, what remains disturbing is the fact that this work was expressly designed to destroy working-class districts of Berlin, including Wedding and Pankow. These had been communist strongholds, virulently anti-Hitler, before the Gestapo and SS all but destroyed opposition to the Nazi regime. A concerted Allied attack, by the British and US air force on working-class districts of German and Japanese cities had, however, become more or less official policy by 1943. Churchill wanted to gas them. Killed and mutilated in sufficient numbers, the German working class would, he argued, rise up against Hitler and bring a quick end to the war. "It is absurd to consider morality on this topic," he told RAF planners when the first German V1 rockets fell on London. "I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people, and not by psalm-singing uniformed defeatists." Sensible people included the prime minister's favourite scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), who insisted that "the bombing must be directed essentially against working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space around them, and so are bound to waste bombs." Psalm-singing uniformed defeatists included the US's air force's celebrated commander Jimmy Doolittle, who took against Churchill's proposed Operation Thunderclap that aimed to kill 275,000 Berliners in a single 2,000-plane raid scheduled for August 1944. It did not take place. Washington's war secretary Henry Stimson said he did not want "the United States to get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities". His less diplomatic deputy, Robert Lovett, pleading the case for adopting anti-personnel bombs loaded with napalm and white phosphorous, said: "If we are going to have a total war, we might as well make it as horrible as possible." Churchill trumped Lovett by calling on US president Franklin D Roosevelt to speed up production of a promised 500,000 top-secret "N-bombs" - filled with anthrax, developed at Dugway - to be dropped on Berlin and five other German cities. As the debate raged in political and military circles, Mendelsohn, with scientists from Standard Oil and German-emigre set designers from Hollywood's RKO studio, set to work on German Village. RKO expertise contributed the design of proletarian Berlin interiors down to the last detail. Using forced labour (inmates from Utah state prison), German Village and its six "mietskasernen" (rent barracks) apartment blocks were completed in 44 days, in time for experiments scheduled from May 1943. Mendelsohn and his team had done a good job. Their designs were far superior to the German housing built in England for test destruction by the RAF at Harmondsworth, near Heathrow airport. Assaulted by napalm, gas, anthrax and incendiary bombs, German Village was rebuilt several times during 1943. Nearby, the Japanese Village (long since vanished), designed by the Czech-educated architect Antonin Raymond (1888-1976), paved the way for incendiary attacks on working-class districts of Tokyo. On March 9 1945, 334 US air force B-29 superfortress bombers dropped 2,000 tons of napalm and magnesium incendiaries on the timber and paper houses of Asakusa. Officially, 83,793 Japanese were killed, 40,918 injured and 265,171 buildings destroyed. The same month, German Village aided the fire raids on Dresden. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, US and British raids had destroyed 45% of German housing. And, as Davis wryly observes: "Allied bombers pounded into rubble more 1920s socialist and modernist utopias than Nazi villas."Mendelsohn was the architect of some of the very best of these white, concrete dreams. Dugway, Davis argues, "led the way to the deaths of, say, two million Axis civilians", and German Village remains "a monument to the self-righteousness of punishing 'bad places' by bombing them". There is no doubt that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to be defeated; but did the Allies really need German Village, Japanese Village and the refined architectural efforts of Mendelsohn and Raymond? At the fiery dawn of the 20th century, beneath the civilised, enlightened facades of Britain and the US, as well as Germany and Japan, was a desire for expansion, destruction and terrible revenge. Sitting on the sun-deck of Mendelsohn's pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, this axis of modern evil seems so very far removed, as far away, in fact, as the sole surviving "rent barrack" of German Village, Utah. · Dead Cities: A Natural History by Mike Davis, The New Press, £16.95.

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(CNN) — For parents in Somalia, giving their children immunizations is not a choice. In a country enduring more than 20 years of conflict, Somalia is home to one of the highest child mortality rates in the world, with one in five Somali children dying before their 5th birthday, aid agencies say — in many instances, from diseases that could be prevented by vaccines. Yet for some equally loving parents in the developed world, the messages surrounding childhood vaccination have become muddied. Some communities in areas previously considered disease-free are now falling below the levels of “herd immunity” required to protect against diseases such as measles, whooping cough and mumps. This week, in Swansea, Wales, the local public health agency announced that 886 people have been diagnosed with measles in an epidemic that started in November. The outbreak has been attributed to low measles, mumps and rubella immunization rates. One man’s death has been linked to the measles virus, while 80 people have been hospitalized. In 2011, six people in France died as a result of a measles epidemic that neared 15,000 confirmed cases, according to the World Health Organization. Teens not getting vaccinated PFCs’ impact on vaccine effectiveness Study: 10% of kids improperly vaccinated Vaccine schedules for children In 2010, a whooping cough outbreak, resulting from pockets of under-vaccinated people in California, resulted in 10 deaths, according to the California Department of Public Health. Nine of these were infants were too young to be vaccinated. “We are extremely concerned about what’s happening in some parts of the developed world,” said Jos Vandelaer, chief of immunization at UNICEF, one of the groups helping vaccination efforts in Somalia. “In the developing world, many people don’t even get the chance to be immunized. Health systems are not strong enough to take the vaccine to every child despite the fact that their parents want it.” Parents with real fears Measles, whooping cough and Hib (haemophilus influenzae type B), along with many other childhood diseases, can be deadly, but they are vaccine-preventable. Measles alone killed more than 150,000 people globally in 2011, according to WHO. Measles is also highly infectious, with one carrier likely to pass on the virus to between 14 and 18 other susceptible people, said Dr. Matthew Snape of the Oxford Vaccine Group in the pediatrics department at the University of Oxford, England. Despite the severity of these diseases, some parents in the developed world choose not to immunize their children and accept the risks. “Studies show that it is the upper middle class, well-educated Caucasian parents who are shunning vaccines,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “They have generally gone to graduate school, are in positions of management and are used to being in control.” A study released this month by the National Health Performance Authority in Australia reflected this trend. A number of affluent Sydney suburbs were identified as regions where low levels of immunity have put entire communities at risk from these diseases. The reasons behind parents’ decisions are complex. Part of the problem is lingering doubts around vaccine safety that were compounded by a retracted 1998 study linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism. Although declared an “elaborate fraud” by the British Medical Journal, it raised questions about the safety of immunization in the minds of many parents. These doubts then were spread worldwide on the Internet and in the media by anti-vaccination groups and some celebrities. “If you want to scare yourself about vaccines, it’s not that hard,” Offit said. “Just turn on your computer.” For such parents, the perceived risks of vaccination outweigh the risks they associate with disease. In Australia, where vaccination is not mandatory, the anti-vaccination Australian Vaccination Network website says parents need to make an informed choice. The site offers links to articles and parental accounts of the potential side effects of many vaccines. A UNICEF working paper released this week to coincide with World Vaccination Week has tracked the rise of anti-vaccination sentiment in Eastern and Central Europe and concludes that poorly managed immunization campaigns in some countries have also contributed to the problem. Concerned parents in the affected countries are taking to blogs and Facebook, discussing their mistrust of vaccines and government programs, questioning the involvement of pharmaceutical companies and often recommending alternative medicine. A March survey conducted by the U.S. organization Public Policy Polling showed that 20% of Americans believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, and a further 34% were not sure. Diseases long forgotten in the developed world While there are some risks associated with vaccines, they are mostly minor, such as pain at the vaccine site or low-grade fever, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A serious allergic reaction is rare and usually reported in less than one out of 1 million doses, the agency reported. “Hundreds of millions of children every year are vaccinated, and the number of side effects we see is minimal,” UNICEF’s Vandelaer said. “The anti-vaccine groups focus on the potential side effects, not on the real side effects.” On the question of autism, numerous studies conducted over the past decade have all demonstrated there is no scientific link between vaccines and autism. With so much conflicting information readily available to parents, Dr. Dina Pfeifer, program manager for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization for WHO’s Europe office, said she believes the decision of whether to immunize children has become so fraught that many parents choose to do nothing at all. “They have a difficulty dealing with the amount of information for and against (vaccination) on the Internet, and out of this confusion they are failing to recognize the risks of the disease,” she said. Another factor driving parents’ decision not to vaccinate is the security that comes with herd vaccination, as rates of immunization for many diseases remain above 92% for the population. But Europe’s recent battle with measles demonstrates the problems under-vaccinated populations can pose, especially with older children. “Europe had 100,000 cases of measles from 2009 to 2012, and that shows how prevalent the pockets of un-immunized populations are in that area,” Pfeifer said. “Almost 50% of those cases were older than 10 years of age, and the older you are when you contract measles, the more severe the course of the disease.” Another factor of these pockets is their affluence; these parents tend to be the ones able to afford overseas travel. In 2008, a 7-year-old U.S. boy whose parents chose not to immunize him against measles traveled with his family to Switzerland. He caught the virus and returned to San Diego, unknowingly exposing 839 people to the disease and infecting 11 unvaccinated children, according to the journal Pediatrics. In Europe and the United States, parents and most people under 45 have never seen the effects of diseases such as measles, diphtheria or polio. “The fear factor (among parents in the developed world) is missing now — the knowledge of what’s on the other side if you don’t have vaccinations,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, known as GAVI Alliance. The lack of knowledge of these diseases is also a problem among younger doctors and pediatricians, who may not be able to identify the signs, resulting in misdiagnoses. “There is a lot of value in case-based learning, but it is difficult to learn how to recognize these diseases if you haven’t seen them before,” said WHO’s Pfeifer. In contrast, most parents in the developing world, in places such as Somalia, have seen family members suffer, be maimed or die from such diseases, health advocates said. Education and motivation To address the problem, Berkley prescribes localized programs in countries to supplement the already high overall levels of immunization. Other physicians are supporters of parental education and want to ensure parents feel free to ask as many questions of their doctors and health care workers. Dr. Steve Hambleton of the Australian Medical Association said further motivation may be necessary. “When you incentivize the parents in a meaningful way, whether it be financial or with other incentives, you can make an enormous difference in vaccination uptake,” he said. Berkley, a doctor who specializes in epidemiology and global health, said he has seen the devastating effects of vaccine-preventable diseases in war-torn countries and refugee camps. Berkley said he wished he could take some parents in the developed world “on a tour, show them how horrible it is. Show them the illness that occurs out of these viruses.” “We’ve brought down child mortality dramatically with these vaccination campaigns and we are making dramatic progress, but the challenge is getting people to understand what the world was like before this.”

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Moderating your food consumption is the most important component of a healthy, balanced diet. Incorporating concepts such as food combining and food rotation can also be beneficial when addressing poor digestion or food allergies. Following these simple guidelines below will help support your digestion and a strong immune system. Eat Whole Natural Foods: Whole natural foods that come direct from gardens, farms and orchards are the best choices for optimal nutrients, energy and vitality. Fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains and legumes should ideally constitute 60-70% of your diet. Although processed food has an undeniable convenience factor and longer shelf life, they typically contain unnecessary additives and chemicals that can be detrimental to your health in the long run. While not always the budget-friendly option, there are many benefits to eating organic whenever possible. Many believe that organically grown foods have a higher nutrient value than commercially grown produce, while others disagree. There are many studies to prove either side. What cannot be disputed is the undeniable benefit associated with the minimization of chemicals sprayed on organically grown produce, and therefore the reduced toxic load our bodies have to deal with. Eat Naturally-Raised Meats (Fish, Seafood, Poultry, Beef, Lamb and Eggs): Protein is an important component in diets, as it is the building block of all of our cells – and therefore our muscles, tissues and organs. And it is a tremendous source of vitamin B12 and iron. Due to its high fat content, it is important to consider only lean sources of protein. And to minimize our chemical and hormone exposure, look for naturally raised sources of protein. Eat Raw or Lightly Steamed Vegetables: Fruits and vegetables are best eaten as fresh as possible, though many can be stored well for several weeks. To maximize the nutrient value of fruits and vegetables, it’s best to eat them raw or lightly steamed. When cooked, many of the vitamins, some minerals and certainly the enzymes in fruits and vegetables are lost, thereby reducing their nutrient value. Eat in Moderation: As a general guideline, every meal and snack should have 40% lean protein, 20% fat and 40% complex carbohydrates for optimum nutrition and satisfaction. One of the best things you can do is to always eat a healthy balanced breakfast, setting up your metabolism properly for the day. If you have time constraints, consider options such as protein smoothies, healthy muffins, hardboiled eggs or granola with fruit, nuts and seeds. Eliminate or Minimize Caffeine: Caffeine is a stimulant that helps us feel temporarily energized, but it has many negative effects to the body. It has a laxative effect that may cover up sluggish bowels; it’s also a diuretic that causes frequent urination and dehydration, which can lead to many physical symptoms if taken in excess, including insomnia, high blood pressure and headaches. Use Natural Sweeteners in Moderation: Generally, it’s best to minimize sugar due to its well-documented impact on health, including hypoglycemia, weight gain, cravings, high cholesterol and dental cavities to name a few. When a sweetener is required, consider natural sources such as raw honey and maple syrup instead. Eliminate or Limit Alcohol: The negative effects of excessive alcohol use are well documented. Even in moderate amounts, alcohol is a diuretic and also uses up B vitamins as it is processed from the body, so it’s best to eliminate or strictly limit consumption. Get Plenty of Sleep: The importance of sleep is often overlooked. During sleep, our muscles and tissues are repaired and revitalized, and our minds process experiences and things we have learned during the day. Although we all have different sleep patterns and needs, the average person requires a minimum of seven to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep per night. To achieve optimal sleep, avoid consumption of caffeine, heavy meals, exercise or alcohol within a few hours before bed. Before bed, consider reading, journaling or meditation to relax, as the day’s anxieties and an overactive mind can also impact your ability to sleep. And finally, ensure that your sleeping environment is set up for the best quality of sleep – minimize noise and keep the bedroom as dark as possible. Exercise – Move your Body!: Many feel that exercise only includes weekly classes, trips to the gym or running. The reality is that any form of exercise is beneficial, including morning or evening walks, or even taking the stairs whenever possible. Ideally, find an activity you enjoy doing and do it as frequently as possible. If finding the time becomes a challenge, use simple methods such as parking your car farther away from your destination and even taking business meetings outdoors and making them “walking meetings”. The key is to find every opportunity in a day to get your body moving.

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Project management typically has five stages. Some project managers make mistakes during one or more of those stages, which can sabotage the chance of a successful outcome and have disastrous results for everyone involved. Here are two of the most common mistakes — and ways to avoid them — during each of the five stages. Which ones have you made? Stage #1: Initiating: 1. Mistake: The project manager “assumes” he knows what the project sponsor (the high-level person who wants the project done and will support the project) considers to be an acceptable project outcome. How to Avoid the Mistake: You must have a detailed conversation with the project sponsor that establishes specific and realistic measurable objectives for the project. This includes the outcome (expected objectives), a defined timeline (when does it start and when is it supposed to end?) and the cost of the project (how much money, labor, and stuff is required and where the resources will come from?) 2. Mistake: The project manager fails to identify all the stakeholders (those people who will benefit from or be affected by the project and those people who need to be involved in the project at some time during the project). How to Avoid the Mistake: Ask the project sponsor to identify the primary and secondary stakeholders. Who will be directly and indirectly affected by the project’s outcome? Which stakeholders’ support will be needed to provide the required resources for the project? Include additional stakeholders as the progression of the project reveals them. Stage #2- Planning: 1. Mistake: The project manager fails to include the team when planning how the outcome is going to be achieved. How to Avoid the Mistake: It is essential to get the team’s ownership of the project and their commitment to produce agreed-upon results on time and within budget. Let the team help create a written project action plan by involving them in: - Deciding roles and responsibilities of team members - Creating a project schedule - Determining the resources needed (personnel, time, material, other resources, etc.) - Creating a communication plan for the project (see Planning - Mistake #2) - Identifying the risks to the completion of the project, and creating a risk response plan if necessary 2. Mistake: The project manager fails to keep everyone informed. How to Avoid the Mistake: You and the team should create a communication plan that addresses how and when the team will communicate with each other, with the sponsor, with each stakeholder, and with each team member who is not actively involved in the project. This is often done with status reports (where the project is now), progress reports (how it got there) and change reports (major changes and how they affect the project). Stage #3- Executing: 1. Mistake: The project manager does not hold enough team meetings. How to Avoid the Mistake: Start every large project with a kickoff meeting to review the project action plan with the team and generate excitement, and then hold weekly team meetings to discuss progress. Were all activities completed on time and within budget? Did the team exceed, miss or meet targets for the week? Use this time to discuss and reconcile problems, conflicts, disputes and potential issues. 2. Mistake: The project manager does not celebrate success with the team. How to Avoid the Mistake: Celebration provides momentum for the team, so don’t wait until you achieve the “overall” success identified in the project action plan. Celebrate small milestones, perhaps on a weekly basis, by recognizing team and individual achievements. Stage #4- Monitoring: 1. Mistake: The project manager is not constantly looking for trouble. How to Avoid the Mistake: This fix is easy: constantly look for trouble! This means being aware of and managing any issue that might affect the outcome, time frame, or cost of the project. Examples include time slippage (keeping the project on schedule by tracking project activities), scope creep (prohibiting others from enlarging the project by saying “no”) and project changes (knowing how every change may impact — or jeopardize — the project’s success). 2. Mistake: The project manager loses track of the project’s outcome, time frame and cost by not using an appropriate tracking system. How to Avoid the Mistake: Use tracking systems (i.e.,Microsoft Project, QuickBooks, Excel) that will reveal any issues or problems so timely corrective action can be taken. Stage #5- Completing: 1. Mistake: The project manager attempts to complete or “hand off” the project without tying up all the loose ends. How to Avoid the Mistake: When 90 percent of the project has been completed, meet with the sponsor and primary stakeholders and develop a closing checklist and punch list to identify any remaining uncompleted tasks. Those items must be done before handing the project off or declaring the project completed. 2. Mistake: The project manager fails to debrief and, if warranted, celebrate with the team. How to Avoid the Mistake: Upon completion, a critical step is to hold a debriefing session about the project with the team using an after action review to share lessons learned, mistakes made and overcome, and successes achieved. You and the team can discuss what went right and what went wrong, and evaluate individual and team performance. If the project’s objectives were met, celebrate and recognize the individual and team efforts and accomplishments. While project management is replete with the opportunity to make mistakes, avoid the common ones during each phase, and virtually all of your projects will end in success.

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web page http://www.amperefitz.com Ampere's 1824 Laws Theserelative motion laws greatly simply all of science: These laws are essentially Ampere's simple 1824 long wire laws with a frequency modification. .These are universal laws that unify all the forces by seeing all forces as space-time creations similar to the way it's done in general relativity. . These laws, though, visualize different space-time intervals (different gauges) being created at various different spin/orbit frequencies. Despite the fact that quantum theory does not see our type of spin causing angular momentum in the microcosm, these laws show it is there nevertheless but at a different space-time interval (different gauge - - different spin/orbit frequency level). The "A" Laws [The reason these "A" Laws work relates to the superposition principle that there is no repulsive force with in phase waves but a repulsive force (space) is always generated by out of phase waves]. You must also understand Dr. Milo Wolff's concept that particles (andtime) are manufactured by Spinning, Scalar, Standing Wave, Resonances with an immense, finite number of similar surrounding SSSWRs (Mach's principle). Force (space) exists not DIRECTLY via scalar resonances but because of individual vector spin and orbital resonances between two similar Spinning, Scalar Standing Wave Resonances. Remember, these"A" Laws (Ampere or Aufbau) have unified ALL the forces so these are now the NEW laws for everything, from the smallest spinning particle to the largest spinning super cluster of galaxies even where high relativistic speeds and mass are encountered. For simplicity, we must return to the Bohr concept of the electron. I have shown why in numerous other papers. *The 1st. "A" Law shows us where all SSSWRs in relative motion produce the least space-time between themselves: The space time interval is created theleast between any two SSSWRs, the closest sides of which "see" themselves spinning or moving on parallel paths in the same direction at the same frequency (like gears meshing) or a close harmonic thereof. You can also say these two objects will attract each other. *The 2nd. "A" Law shows us where all SSSWRs in relative motion produce the most space-time between themselves: Both space and time are created themost between any two SSSWRs, the closest sides of which "see" themselves spinning or moving on parallel paths in opposite directions at the same frequency (like gears clashing) or a close harmonic thereof. You can also say these two objects will repel each other. I use the quoted word "see" to emphasize the particular spacetime realm in which these entities actually find themselves although this will NOT be the way it is seen from our particular spacetime reference frame realm. Of great importance, in the two preceding laws, is that these laws arefrequency laws and they work separately for each separate spin/orbit frequency level which means these individual wave-particles must "see" themselves doing these things from their viewpoint in their local gauge environment. It does not matter how some other spin/orbit frequency level views these things because space and time and indeed the average space time interval is entirely different for each different spin/orbit frequency level (gauge). These two laws look equal and opposite but they are not: The 1st"A" law "locks on" while its opposite 2nd sister law never does. This is because the total force is generally centralized and you can feel this 1st "A" law "lock on" when two magnets come together. These two laws result in limits of aggregation being established all throughout this universe: This is why there are limits to the size of atoms and limits to the size of stars as well. *The Aufbau or Ampere Corollary The aforementioned forces, or space-time intervals, between two SSSWRs will vary proportionally with the cosine of the angle of their paths. And they will have a torque that will tend to make the paths parallel and to become oriented so that SSSWRs on both paths will be traveling in the same direction. All SSSWRs that "see" themselves traveling in the same direction on parallel paths at the same frequency will attract and/or space and time, at that frequency, between them is created the least. All SSSWRs that "see" themselves traveling in opposite directions on parallel paths at the same frequency will repel and/or space and time between them, at that frequency, increases or is created the most. And please don't forget this: Why electrons, stars & galaxies repel each other Remember, we have completely chucked out all those invisible forces you are familiar with and all we have now are these two"A" Laws. Please remember, in thisnew "big picture" of everything, ALL FORCES ARE NOW UNIFIED so there are no such things as gravity, magnetic lines of force or plus and minus charges or for that matter even the strong force. Pleasepay particular attention to the following. Electrons can exhibit either an attraction or repulsion when they are "locked" spin up or spin down on orbitals such as like or unlike charges; like or unlike poles OR they may even display a gyroscopic type repulsive behavior when they are "free". Our"A" Laws show us why this is so and in the next 6 paragraphs you have the best explanation of why electrons and even stars & galaxies repel each other. Lets look at these free electrons first: They spin and hence they have inertial qualities and this includes gyroscopic inertia which always provides this force 90 degrees to any external force acting on such a spinning item. Completely forget about charge now and only look at our new"A" Laws and what they say. The 1st "A" Law tells us that there is a possibility that two free electrons can attract each other providing that any portion of their closest sides are spinning in the same direction at the same frequency. This means either their sides can be spinning in the same directions or they can be lined up so that both of their poles can be spinning in the same directions: Any such two electrons will attract each other (magnetism also sigma and pi bonding). Then we see that there is something else: This torque twisting force - on BOTH free items - depends on the cosine of the angle of their respective spin planes. As this force begins to act, it in turn causes this 90-degree gyroscopic torque to twist both of those totally free electrons away from this initial attracting position, doesn't it? So because of this gyro torque, two free electrons can never remain in a full attracting position and they will therefore be forced to stay more in arepelling position. Therefore free electrons will always end up repelling each other and this repelling is not explained by using this thing called charge: it is explained only by simply using global inertial qualities and our new global "A" Laws. The above6 paragraphs explain not only why electrons repel each other but they also explain why any two perfectly free similar spinning SSSWRs of the same size must repel each other. So now you know why both electrons and galaxies stay well away from each other. Thisis Einstein's cosmological constant. Something somewhere has to be"locked" in place and synchronized in frequency (such as the electron's spin with another electron's spin) or a close subharmonic to get any kind of attracting force: Yes, the proton attracts an electron but instead of charge please see it this way: When two up quarks combine with one down quark to form a proton then the two up quarks are able to synchronize in with the electron's spin frequency and This is why aggregations come together(gravity) and larger aggregations come together and accumulate because as these things grow in size there are more things "locked" in place strengthening the attractive force of the 1st "A" Law. Once we knew about quarks then we should have realized how those two 'up quarks' in the proton are set up spin up-spin down (The 'up quark' does not signify orientation). Those two spin up--spin down 'up quarks' are spinning - in the same equatorial plane - at a higher frequency but all 'up quarks' spin at a harmonic of the electron's spin frequency allowing a spin up and spin down electron to be attracted to them in the same equatorial plane. We will soon know even more about theattractive quark strong force binding functions. Attraction is always a synchronized frequency attraction and it is not simply the old idea of plus and minus charges. Allattractions in this theory must be synchronized frequency attractions. Both light and inertial mass are caused by these synchronized frequency attractions. As quantum theory shows us, the orbital of an electron on a distant star goes down a certain amount while the orbital of the electron receiving this quantum of energy---in your eye---goes up the exact same amount. But what quantum mechanics does not tell you is that these two energy-exchanging orbitals must be in the same exact plane. Not only that but each orbital must be a mirror image of the other with the electrons in each rotating and revolving in the exact opposite directions so that at the time the energy exchange takes place the closest sides of both electrons are going in the same direction. You can see from this that this energy change is merely a MOMENTARY DIRECT PULL from the electron, on the star, to the electron in your eye. These electrons will make many revolutions, rotations and wobbling oscillations during each change of those orbitals giving you the light that you see. If two distant quarks are lined up so that their closest sides are in the same directions as the two aforementioned electrons then they too will momentarily bind with each other---even from a vast distance---and cause what we see as inertial mass. But since the quarks in the proton and neutron tri-quark entities do not oscillate and wobble quite like the electron then this pull of the two quarks is a steady momentary binding pull where BOTH quarks are pulled away from the other two quarks but NO PERMANENTEnergy CHANGE is made in either tri-quark entity (neutron or proton). When you spin a flywheel and notice the gyroscopic inertia, you should also notice that the gyroscopic torque that is always 90 degrees to the axis of rotationcan also be seen as a linkage with the rim of the rapidly spinning flywheel to a path projected in the sky (macrocosm surroundings). The rim tries to stay in this path. This is showing you that you do have an absolute reference frame, which is Mach's principle. Billions of quarks in BOTH the flywheel and in the macrocosm are both being momentarily extended more than normal thus giving you this added gyroscopic inertia. You might have to read the long TOE athttp://www.rbduncan.com/TOEbyFitzpatrick.htm to get the full picture of what happens when you crank up a gyroscope or a flywheel or ride a bicycle and produce gyroscopic inertia. It's similar to the reason you need cyclic pitch on a helicopter. When a helicopter moves forward then the blades on one side travel through the air faster than the blades on the other side and this tries to tip the helicopter over. (Igor Sikorsky had to invent cyclic pitch to prevent this). The same thing happens to certain quarks whose rims line up with the rim of the gyroscope, flywheel or bicycle wheels. The speed that these items are turning---in respect to the macrocosm---now adds to portions of the quark rim speed which before was close to the speed of light and now gets even closer to the speed of light (becoming more massive hence at a higher frequency). So you are moving up an asymptotic curve close to that unsurpassable speed of c. And this---even with a miniscule number of quarks involved---gives us this gyroscopic inertia. It does this because the mass of these few quarks increase tremendously as portions of their rim speed approach the speed of light. As Einstein has shown us, mass increases with speed and especially increases when on that asymptotic portion of the curve. Of available electrons, only the smallest fraction link with others a distance away to transfer light and heat. The same with the spinning quark that causes gyroscopic inertia. All spinning quarks link to cause inertial mass. All these binding linkages are momentary with the electron's oscillations causing a permanent transfer of energy and the various momentary quark bindings causing inertial mass. This could be seen---in gyroscopic inertia---as only a temporary transfer of inertial mass. But if you could increase our surroundings---as will be the case when our Milky Way galaxy finally collides with the Andromeda galaxy---then anyone here on earth will find both inertial mass, gyroscopic inertia and centrifugal force have all become stronger with the more crowded surroundings. Now let's go to the stars and you will see the same"A" Laws apply there as well and, as you can see, these too will always have to remain in a repelling position with each other. Recently Perlmutter discovered this acceleration and showed we must have Einstein'scosmological constant---a repulsive force---between all the stars and galaxies. Scientists have been recently wracking their brains to figure out why we have Perlmutter's acceleration because nothing in our present science has even predicted such a thing. But read those preceding blue sentences again! Now I hope you can finally see that our "A" Laws tell you exactly why we have Einstein's "cosmological constant" not only in the sky but in the microcosm as well. And they tell you why we have gravity too. Your present science doesn't even do this. The reason these "A" Laws work is that this universe is built on an extraordinarily simple principle via an endless supply of vector wave resonances producing lower frequency spherical standing wave, scalar wave resonances that, in turn, produce space-time by spinning, orbiting and precessing. Aminimum of space (at that particular frequency) is produced between the closest sides of spinning entities that are in the same scalar phase. Scalar phaseis more like a movie frame than voltage phase, which pertains to a waveform. These "A" Laws show us the production of the most important vector forces between the closest sides of such spinning spherical resonances and in the direction of the axis of each spin. There are also vector forces via orbits and spin and orbital and spin precessions. This universe equalizes the energy vector force input to vector force output of these scalar wave resonances by balancing them on specific spin and orbital geodesics. These vector forces, in turn, combine to produce lower frequency, hence lower energy, scalar resonances, which in turn, spin, precess and orbit producing still lower frequency space-time and its related vector forces and this goes on and on: Thus is our universe built from the microcosm to the macrocosm and may continue indefinitely because higher frequency waves would always be producing lower frequency, lower energy scalar wave resonances and they, in turn, would be producing even lower energy, lower frequency resonances. This seems to be an infinite frequency universe with each spin/orbit frequency having inertial and gyroscopic qualities but yet with each spin/orbit frequency having its own distinct symmetry laws. Daniel P. Fitzpatrick Jr. Over 4 Decades of Fitzpatrick's Books, Papers & Thoughts: And here's this page duplicated in Adobe.pdf: Over 4 Decades of Fitzpatrick's Books, Papers & Thoughts:http://www.amperefitz.com/4.decades.htm Fitzpatrick's website is athttp://www.amperefitz.com Another older website carrying Fitzpatrick's works FREE is:http://www.rbduncan.com Thank you, World Scientist Database - - Daniel P. Fitzpatrick Jr. Have a good day & visit my site at goodreads: Click ANY of these links to get what you want Read my latest book FREE:(these two links below) http://www.amperefitz.com/ua_20071020_ck_ds_jm_ds.pdf (This is the book in Adobe) http://www.amperefitz.com/unvasleep.htm (This book link opens faster if you have dial up.) While all the links on this page are OK and presently working, unfortunately only about two thirds(2/3) of the links I gave, years ago, as proof (click & see: http://www.amperefitz.com/presskit.html) for statements in this latest book, published in the year MMVl, are now still working BUT your search engine will probably take you to a similar area where you should be able to read similar proof material.

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Establishing awareness of intellectual property amongst staff of your company is essential for early maximizing the value of your intellectual property and the wealth of your business and reducing the possibilities of accidental non-confidential disclosures, that could prejudice successful patent applications and negatively affect the value of your intellectual property and ultimately the wealth of your business. Regular training sessions of staff on intellectual property are key and should include the following: how to identify and protect intellectual property; how to use patents to improvements of technology; understanding Patent Process; how to deal with confidential information (see some examples in the scenarios below); record keeping of intellectual property, including laboratory notebooks and policy on intellectual property; and who to contact in case of need. The record keeping procedures and manuals will address the following questions: has the inventor kept the idea confidential? is there a written description of the idea and has been kept safe and confidential? how the idea has been generated? If during a collaborative programme, then was it agreed beforehand who owns what? is the idea a new product, a new material, a new process for making something? If so, is it patentable or protectable in any other way? is the idea a variation in a product or material or process? If so, it is still likely to be patentable or protectable in any other way? who generated the idea? The answer to this question is very important in the event self-employed or other third party consultants are involved in any research and development or collaborative project. The main object of this record keeping is to track, protect and maintain all relevant intellectual property rights of the business so that intellectual property can be licensed, assigned or exploited to the fullest extent and benefit of the company. The record keeping procedures should also include a form upon which, potential inventions should be recorded identifying the following: Who: department and research area; Named individuals: inventors and authors; What: technical description; Why: perceived novelty; How to use the information: potential applications/markets; What else is needed: background or third party intellectual property and information. The correct use of laboratory notebooks by staff is also essential. In the event of a dispute laboratory notebooks may be required to be presented as legal evidence. It is therefore recommended that: permanent bindings are used on notebooks (loose leaf books should be avoided to prevent possible removal or substitution of pages); pages should be numbered and any additional drawings cards or computer printouts should be permanently attached to the notebook clearly identified and have reference made to them in the notebook; all projects related and other activities, such as breaks in research due to secondment or holiday should be recorded factually; and the notebook should be reviewed regularly by someone who understands the technology involved, each page should ideally be signed by a witness and again the choice of the witness is important and should not be someone who may be nominated as core inventor. The witness should also sign and date and graphs, chart, printouts, which are inserted into the laboratory notebook. In addition, to the use of appropriate record keeping procedures and notebooks, an evaluation of IPR policy should be adopted. Such an evaluation should include factors, such as potential market, market, impact, competitive products, timing, intellectual property protection available and experience in the field concerned. Finally, once relevant intellectual property rights have been identified, protected, exploited and enforced, it is advisable that, regular audit of such rights is undertaken to ensure that, the intellectual property rights reflect the current needs of the business and that expenditure is limited accordingly. How to take care of confidential information: Scenario 1 – Have you been asked to sign a confidentiality undertaking? If so, please check that it is only confidentiality restriction and not a transfer of intellectual rights. Obtain express confirmation from the discloser, that the information is not confidential, where possible, before disclosure. Make a written record of what was disclosed, by whom and when. Please remember that, an obligation, to keep information confidential, includes the obligation of not disclosure or not use of the information, without the permission of the person to whom the obligation is owned. Scenario 2 – Put in writing or some other permanent form. Mark any documents with appropriate confidentiality and IPR disclaimers. Keep a copy of what is disclosed and a record of when and to whom. If an oral disclosure is made in confidence, confirm in writing what was disclosed and what was given in confidence. Have the recipient sign a confidentiality undertaking of the disclosure. Scenario 3 – Consider whether anything in the paper describes a new device, chemical compound or manufacturing process or a significant improvement or modification to any such matters. Do not disclose anything, without first considering the possibility of the content of the papers being patentable in whole or in part. Consider whether there are any restrains, under any relevant agreements (including research and development or collaboration agreements). Keep an eye on any relevant timetable for confirming publication. Request that, the publisher confirms confidentiality on receipt of paper pending decision on publication. Please, always remember that, any document exchanged, should be clearly marked as being confidential. Scenario 4 – Consider what background IPR, if any, are free from obligations of confidentiality and may be introduced to the project. Prior to disclosing any information to third parties, have a confidentiality agreement signed. Such agreements, may take many forms and the terms should be adjusted in accordance with the particular circumstances. You should always include the following: - identification of parties; - what information is to be kept secret; and - for how long. If in any doubt, consult your legal adviser. The World Intellectual Property Rights Organization, WIPO has organized a three day workshop to educate the public on intellectual property rights. The initiative started today at the Coco palm hotel. The drive which is aimed at sensitizing St. Lucians to intellectual property rights issues will also include a public forum for persons interested in learning more about the issue. Video Rating: 0 / 5 The expression, ‘intellectual property’ has come to be internationally recognized as covering mainly two branches, namely; ‘industrial property’ and ‘copyright’. Patents, industrial designs and trade marks used to be considered as different kinds of industrial property. In Bangladesh (during the time of the then British regime), the first legislation of its kind, on copyright was introduced in 1914, which was mainly based on the British Copyright law of 1911. After the independence from Britain new law on copyright was promulgated in 1962. The Copyright Ordinance 1962 has been replaced by the new copyright act of 2000. Now in our country, Copyright law is regulated by the Copyright Act 2000. This is done because of the prevailing situation in Bangladesh and around the world. In case of patent and designs we have law which we inherited from our Colonial ruler. Patent rights are created by statute and governed by the Patent and Designs Act 1911. We have also law related to trademarks and it is regulated by the Trademarks Act 1940. Intellectual property has acquired an internationally recognized character. Now it is regarded as “one of the most important sectors” of international law, having its source in various international conventions. At present, each and every country is trying to shape or reshape their legislature, relating to intellectual property; in the light of those international conventions. The convention establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), concluded in Stockholm on July 14th, 1967, provides that, ‘intellectual property’ shall include rights relating to: 1. literary, artistic and scientific works, 2. performances of performing artists, phonograms and broadcasts, 3. inventions in all fields of human endeavor, 4. scientific discoveries, 5. industrial designs, 6. trade marks, service marks and commercial names and designations, 7. protection against unfair competition, And all other rights resulting from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary or artistic fields. (Article 2/VIII) 1 Intellectual property protects application of ideas and information that are of commercial value.2 By virtue of a number of international conventions such as the, Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, copyright acquired in one country extends to other countries which are member of these conventions. Other intellectual properties are beginning to acquire the same nature as well. The principles of intellectual property law are substantially the same in all countries with little variation to meet the national requirements of each of the countries. Bangladesh, as a least developed country, has also enacted intellectual property law in its national legislature. The Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property rights (TRIPs) were included as integral part of World Trade Organization (WTO) due to pressure and interest of basically transnational companies and developed countries to ensure maximum profit or interest out of intellectual property in international trade.3 The TRIPs Agreement has been called the most ambitious international intellectual property convention ever attempted. TRIPs agreement has established the protection of intellectual property as a major part of the multinational trading system embodied in the WTO. As one commentator observer, intellectual property is now a key component of this trading system, “the protection of intellectual property is one of the three pillars of the WTO”.4 Bangladesh is now enjoying the transitional period that has been fixed by WTO under the light of TRIPs. So, we do not have a clear idea about the relation between intellectual property rights and economical development. But, it is certain that after the expiration of transitional period, Bangladesh will have to face a serious and severe situation because of the weak legal framework relating to intellectual property. Now, in brief, the main features of intellectual property laws are given below: 1. The Patents and Designs Acts, 1911:- (Act no. 11 of 1911) The salient features of our existing Act are as follows; Part-1; of the Patents and Designs Act, 1911; is about of patent. This part starts from section-1 and extends to section-42. Section 2(8) contains the definition of invention; it proceeds as – invention means any manner of new manufacture and includes an improvement and all alleged invention. In sub-section (10) of the same section, provides the explanation of manufacture, “manufacture includes any art, process or manner or producing, preparing or making any article and also any article prepared or produced by manufacturer.” Section-3 of the Act provides about the manner and mode of an application for patent. According to section-3(1); a patent application can be made by any person, whether he is a citizen of Bangladesh or not. An application can be made, alone or jointly with any other person. According to section-4 of the Act; there are some provisions about specification. Wection-4(2) states that, a complete specification must particularly describe and ascertain the nature of the invention and the manner in which the invention is to be performed. Section-10 of the Act, discusses about the topic, “grant and sealing of patent”. According to section-10(1); if there is no opposition of the patent application or, in case of opposition, if the determination is in favor of the grant of a patent, a patent shall, on payment of the prescribed fee, be granted, subject to such conditions if any as the Government thinks expedient, to the applicant, or in the case of a joint application to the applicants jointly, and the Controller shall cause the patent to be sealed with the seal of the Patent Office. Term of patent, is laid down in section-14(1) of the Act. The duration of patent is sixteen years from its date. Section 15 of the Act; also provides rules regarding extension of the term of patent. If any patent has been ceased, owing to the failure of patentee to pay any prescribed fee within the prescribed time, the patentee may apply to the controller in the prescribed manner for an order for the restoration of the patent. Section-16 of the Act deals with the matter, restoration of lapsed patent. Section-22 of the Act contains provisions of “Compulsory Licenses and Revocation”. Both the Govt. and High Court Division are empowered to grant compulsory license or revocation of patent. Any person interested may present a petition to the Govt., alleging that the demand for a patented article in Bangladesh is not being met to an adequate extent and on reasonable terms and praying for the grant of a compulsory license, or in the alternative, for the revocation of the patent. According to section-25 of the Act, if any patented invention or the mode which it is exercised; is mischievous to the state or prejudicial to the public; Govt. can declare the patent, revoked, by notification in the official Gazette. Section-26 of the Act; provides the grounds, on which; a patent can be revoked by the High Court Division. Section-26(2) also provides, who can present a petition for revocation of a patent. Section-30 of the Act; declares that; an innocent infringer of a patent; is exempted from liability or damages for infringement. Part-II of the Act; describes all about ‘Designs’ or industrial designs. According to section-43(1); any person claiming to be the proprietor of any new or original design not previously published in Bangladesh, can apply to the Controller for the registration of that particular design. According to section-47(1); the proprietor of a registered design, shall subject to the provisions of this Act, have copyright in the design during five years from the date of registration. Section-51(A) of the Act; narrates that, any person interested may present a petition for the cancellation of the registration of a design. Such petition should be presented to the High Court Division. Part-III of the Act; is about, Patent Office and proceedings there at. According to section-59 of the Act; every register kept under this Act shall at any convenient times be open to the inspection of the public, subject to provisions of this Act. Section-65 of the Act; states that, in any proceeding under this Act, the Controller shall have the powers of a Civil Court for the purpose of receiving evidence, administrating oaths, enforcing the attendance of witness compelling the discovery and production of documents, issuing commissions, for the examining of witnesses and awarding costs and such award shall be executable in any Court having jurisdiction as if it were a decree of that Court.5 2. The Trade Marks Act; 1940: (Act No. V of 1940) The basic principles of the Trade marks Act are described below: Section-2 of the Trade marks Act contains definitions that are related to this Act. As to, section-2(k); trade mark means a mark used or proposed to be used in relation to goods for the purpose of indicating or so as to indicate a connection in the course of trade between the goods and some person having the right, either as proprietor or as registered user, to use the mark whether with or without any indication of that identity of that person. The establishment of Trade marks Registry at Dhaka, appointment of the Registrar and Deputy Registrar are laid down in section-4 of the Act. According to section-5 of the Act; the registration of a trade mark, requires distinctiveness. Purpose of such distinctiveness is to distinguish those particular goods from the others, which have similarity in nature. Any mark, containing scandalous design; or be likely to hurt the religious susceptibilities of any class of the citizens, or to be contrary to any law for the time being in force or morality is prohibited for registration of that mark. Section-8 of the Act, say so. Section-16 of the Act; provides that; when an application for registration of a trade mark has been accepted and either has not been opposed or having been opposed, has been decided in favor of the applicant, the Registrar shall, registers the said trade mark. Section-18 of the Act, says that; the registration of a trade mark shall be a period of seven years, and may be renewed from time to time in accordance with the provisions of this section. According to section-20 of the Act; no person shall be entitled to institute any proceedings to prevent, or recover damages for the infringement of an unregistered trade mark. According to section-46 of the Act; any person aggrieved can apply to the High Court Division or the Registrar, for the cancellation or verification of the registration of a trade mark on the ground of any contravention of, or failure to observe a condition entered on the register in relation there to. Chapter-IX of the Act; is specially written down for textile goods. Chapter-X of the Act, states the provisions regarding offences and restriction of use of Royal Arms and state emblems. According to section-73 of the Act, any suit for the infringement of a trade mark or otherwise relating to any right in the trade mark; shall be instituted to a District Court having jurisdiction to try the suit.6 3. THE COPYRIGHT ACT; 2000: (Act No. 28 of 2000) A short overview:- Section-2 of the Copyright Act; provides all the definitions related to copyright and so on. According to Chapter II; section -9, 10 and 11; Copyright Board will consist and the post of Register has made. The board is a quasi-judicial body; while working, it would be deemed as a Civil Court. Definition of copyright is laid down in Chapter III; section 14 of the Act. Section 14(2) includes, ‘computer programs’ as a subject to this Act. Chapter IV; deals with the ownership of copyright and the rights of the copyright owner. This Chapter starts from section-17; ends to section-23. Chapter V of the Act; describes all about the term of different types of copyright. Generally the term extends from the lifetime of the author until sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the author dies; is at section-22. The section also provides that, copyright shall subsist in any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work (other than a photograph). Section-25 to section-32 of the Act narrates the duration of copyright for different types. For instance, posthumous work, cinematograph films, sound recordings, photograph, anonymous and pseudonymous works, Govt. works, work of any local body, work of international organizations. Section-50 of the Act; deals with compulsory licenses in works withheld from public. Chapter X of the Act is about, registration of copyright. Chapter XII; section-71, describes about infringement of copyright and section-72 of the Act; provides acts not to be infringement of copyright. Chapter XIV; is about Civil remedies, that are available against infringement of copyright. Exclusively, section-76 of the Act; provides, remedies against such infringement. According to section-81 if the Act; the Court of District Judge, is the Court of first instance of such proceedings. Chapter XV of this Act; describes offences and punishment. According to section-82 of the Act; any person who knowingly infringes or abets the infringement of copyright; shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than six months. But, which may extend to four years and fine which shall not be less than fifty thousand taka but which may extend to Taka two lacks. But; where the infringement has not been made for gain in the course of trade or business; the Court may, adequate and special reasons to be mentioned in the judgment, impose a sentence of imprisonment for a term of less than six months or a fine of less than fifty thousand taka. According to section-95 of the Act; an order made by the Registrar is a subject to appeal to Copyright Board. According to section-96; against any order; made by the Board; any aggrieved person, within thirty days of such order can file a petition of appeal to the High Court Division.7 PROBLEMES AND INSUFFICIENCY OF THE EXISTING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWS: PATENTS AND DESIGNS ACT:- The defects are;- Like any other national patent system, novelty is an essential requirement of an invention to be patentable under the existing law of our country. But it is clear from the definition of ‘invention’ in section-2(8) of the 1911 Act; the invention to be patentable need not have a commercial pecuniary success. In other words, utility of an invention is not required by this definition. Although lack of utility is a ground for revocation of a patent under section-26(f) of the Act, till now this has not been included in the definition of invention. The 1911 Act makes no difference between patentable and non patentable inventions. Considering the public interest certain items should be kept outside the domain of patent protection. Since under the existing law no item has been excluded from the domain of patent protection, any type of new invention may obtain patent protection although it should not be patentable for the greater interest of the public at large. Under the existing law, the application for a patent must contain a declaration that the applicant is the true and first inventor or the assignor or legal representative of such inventor. But the term, “true and first inventor” is left undefined. Thus any person importing an invention for the first time into Bangladesh or any person to whom an invention is first communicated from outside Bangladesh can claim to be the “true and first inventor” of that invention and thus, can take the advantage of the vagueness of the term. Here; a fact should be added that, such practice already has begun. Some pharmaceutical companies don’t having any research and develop cell, importing some drugs, and by claiming patent, under the ambiguity of the Act, getting patent. A statistic says that, at the 1st and 2nd week of March, 2006; on an average, 40 patents were granted by the patent office, in each week. Thus, the local producers are forced to remain non productive on that particular patented items. The standard of examination varies from country to country. In some countries like Netherlands, Germany, U.S.A. and Japan it is rigorously involving an extensive search for both novelty and obviousness among documents published in many countries, over a period of many years. But according to our existing patent law; examination is less rigorous involving for novelty only, and the extent of search is restricted. Term of patent protection shall, as laid down in section-14, be sixteen years from its date. But the term is not sufficient enough for the exploitation of the patent right. What constitutes infringement of patent isn’t defined in the Patents and Designs Act, 1911. Section-29(1) of the Act only says that, the patentee has a right to sue against the infringer during the continuance of the patent acquired by him. Section-30 of the Act says that, a patentee shall not be entitled to damages against an innocent infringer. But, ignorance of law is no defense. The infringer should pay for the project as compensation of damages. Under the existing law any process or manner of producing, preparing or making an article in patentable as appears from section-2 (8) read with section-2(16). But, the 1911 Act does not confer upon the patentee the exclusive right to exercise the process. The 1911 Act contains provisions regarding compulsory licenses of patent rights but the terms and conditions of conditions of compulsory licenses are not detailed in the Act. TRADE MARKS ACT:- 1. Section-22(3) of Trade Marks Act defined infringement in a very narrow sense though the act has provisions against infringement. 2. Although Chapter X of the Act, describes about offences and restrictions of use of Royal Arms and state emblems but this chapter does not extends to the infringement of any registered trademark. Any deceptive use of any registered trademark; is not also included in this chapter. 3. There is no provision for protection of internationally recognized trademark in our existing Trademark Act 1940. Our existing copyright law has been enacted in line with the copyright law of India. It has been enacted to cope with the prevailing international set up of copyright system. So, preventive measures have been adopted to tackle the future complications in copyright sector. NECESSARY PROPOSAL FOR REFORMATIONS: The term ‘intellectual property’ is still at its nascent stage in our country and people are not aware of the concept and importance of intellectual property. But, in international arena, the concept and coverage of intellectual property is growing so fast than any other brunches of law. We have intellectual property laws but these laws are not sufficient to tackle the challenges that are imminent and threatening us. Keeping in mind the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement and other relevant conventions the following reformation proposals can be made: Reformations of the Patents and Designs act: ü The Patent and Designs Act, 1911 should be revised thoroughly. ü Essential requirements of patentable invention should be described clearly and there must be a clear distinction between patentable and non patentable inventions. ü The standard of examining a patent application should be made more effective. ü Term of patent protection shall, as laid down in section 14, be 16 years from its date. But the term should be extended to 20 years for patent and the term of a design, according to sec – 47(1) is 5 years from the date of registration, should be extended to 10 years. ü Existing Act does not have any definition of infringement, it should be included. ü The part of “designs;” have some confusing words, as in that part the term, “copyright” has frequently used. But it may create confusion. Such confusion should be effaced. ü The Act does not have anything to do about the protection “Geographical indication” which could result a huge loss of losing our culture & heritage. So, it should be included. ü Provisions relevant to PARIS convention should be incorporated. ü The administrative provisions and complications should be avoided. The complications should be made more subject to judicial decision. ü The provisions of offences and penalties should be revised and reformed with the need of the time. Proposal for reformations of The Trademarks Act: After studying present Trademark Act and different conventions, it is clear that our existing Trademarks Act 1940 should be amended as well. The following suggestions can be made: ü The reformed trademark law should have a wide view about the marks which can be registerable and which marks cannot be. ü Infringement of trademark should be defined more accurately. Besides, punishment for infringement should be made stricter. ü How will we protect our renowned trademarks in international market and reciprocally how other countries trade marks can enjoy protection in our local market, should be defined in our trademarks act, with an assertive view. ü Offences and penalties, in respect of violation of any provisions of this act, should be made more effective and harder. ü If any complication or confusion arises in practicing of the act, the judicial body should be involved with more vigilance. Proposed reformations to the copyright law: The Copyright Act 2000 has been enacted to cover the rules and to cope with the international copyright system. Our existing copyright law has been enacted in line with the copyright law of India. It has been enacted to cope with the prevailing international set up of copyright system. So, preventive measures have been adopted to tackle the future complications in copyright sector. From the face of the Copyright Act 2000, it seems that our copyright law has fulfilled the need of the time. Though computer programs, tables complications including data base are recognized to have the copyright protection, there is no legal recognition for transaction carried out by means of electronic data or other means ‘e-commerce’ which involves the use of alternativeness to paper based method of communication and storage of information to facilitate filing of documents with government agencies . The growing global importance of the cyber law is posing new challenges and in view of the peculiarity involved in the fields, the understanding between the nations of the world by treaties or covenants, may be of considerable importance in the absence of which the implementation of the legislation would be near to impossibility. Our present act should be amended to fulfill the shortage. Finally we can hope that a stronger protection system of the intellectual property rights, a qualified commission to observe the protection and thus policy making options to bring civil remedies for the violation of the rights and finally a complete law regulation in all sectors of intellectual property rights will surely lead us to a better future. Notes and References: Background reading materials on intellectual property: WIPO (Pp-3, 4). P.Narayanan.(pp-1). TRIPs agreement. John Madely hungry for trudeyzed books UK (2000) pp-96-97. The Patents and Designs Act 1911 The Trade Marks Act 1940 The Copyright Act 2000 Most people are attentive of the numerous benefits of owning a trademark registration. Trademark registration in India becoming familiar with complete customer satisfaction. Trademark registration is the protection agreed by the government to the business entities as to reduce the possibility of getting the advantage of the business by others by the way of misuse and to raise the opportunities keeping the mark exclusive under the eye of law. Generally, brand registration refers to the trade mark used to discriminate the goods or services among the consumers. The business group sells their services or goods under the precise name or brand that is called trade mark. Therefore, the brand is registered in order to evade the repetition or use the same mark by others. In vision of this, the brand registration referred to as trademark registration. Trademark brand was initially developed as a name, term, design, and symbol. Powerful brand can bring success in bloodthirsty and financial markets and thus become the markets worthless assets. Trademark brand equity dealings the value of brand to the trademark owner. The brand name is used interchangeably with brand to designate written or spoken linguistic rudiments of the brand. Brand name is a form of trademark which identifies the brand owner as the money-making source of products or services. The brand owner may ask for to protect the proprietary rights in relation to a brand name during . Trademark brand is a appliance to create monopoly so that the brand owner can obtain some of the reimbursement to those related to decline price competition. There is legal magnitude as it is essential that the brand names and trademarks are protected by all means. An existing brand name can be used as a vehicle for new and modified products. Individual brand names allow greater suppleness by permitting different products to be sold without puzzling the consumer. The trademark is registered for the business name, brand name and logo as to discriminate, popularize, create the goodwill and put aside the mark from competitors and fraudulent. The trademark office is an organization to provide protection to the inventors and dealing for their inventions and trademark registration in India provide protection and intellectual property recognition. In addition, if some business entity desires to extend its dealing in more than one or several countries, it can ensue with International Trade mark registration. The titled name International Brand Registration is the usual form of the International Trade mark registration. It is meant, when the registration is done through any International pact, that gives the protection in all the countries allied with the treaty. The is an agency, which provides protection to the inventors and business for their inventions and trademark registration for the product and intellectual property identification. The office is provided with funds by the fees, which are charged for processing the patents and trademark. The applications to trademark registration are examined by the trademark office. Master sf Business Administratration Banking and Finance (MBF): Integrative Courses: MS-94 Technology Mangement Video Rating: 0 / 5 - the various types of merchandising rights including intellectual property rights and monopoly in commonplace articles - use of well-know images and features in advertising and unfair competition - use of registered trade marks and service marks - use of copyright and design law - the civil remedies available - international framework for the protection of merchandising rights Find More Intellectual Property Rights Products The service industry is a tricky landscape, due to the fact that, often times, no tangible property is transferred back and forth. Sure, you may purchase a software program that comes on a disk, but in reality, you are merely purchasing the right to use that program, not the rights to the program itself. The service industry is a world dominated by intellectual property, and protecting yours should be your utmost goal. First you must define if intellectual property is yours or not. Let’s say you hire an employee to create a software program for you. He creates it, puts his name on it, and hands it over to you. If left unchecked, both of you could walk away thinking that you own the rights to the software, but in reality, only the employer does. Other items may fall under the umbrella of “intellectual property” including trade secrets, client information, and more. Your employees might have access to that information, but in order to legally prevent them from using that information to their own benefit, you must first get them to sign an employment contract informing them that they are not allowed to distribute any information gathered while under your employ. As an employer, you should take pride in the knowledge, contacts, and experience you have accumulated over your years of doing business. Don’t risk letting that information out by avoiding employment contracts or other intellectual property agreements. Furthermore, don’t let subcontractors walk away with information you paid for, just because they created it. Understanding your rights as an employer is the first step towards protecting them. The final step is having the foresight to create contracts which will legally protect you should the situation ever call for it. As part of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation’s video project, we sponsored a contest for students at the University of South Florida. The winning entry discusses the role of intellectual property rights. Video Rating: 2 / 5 The relevant legal norms from the above point of view, although they involved Intellectual property rights The exercise of acts done some direct or indirect restrictions, but these provisions are very fragmented, incomplete, unclear, not specifically from the perspective of preventing the abuse of intellectual property rights to make rules; the majority of existing legal norms applicable to the foreign economic Trading Activities, and not generally applicable to the Chinese market, the exercise of acts of intellectual property, so its very limited scope; from the content point of view, it also needs to be common practice in the world at present updated and perfect. Present, China has no clear regulation of the exercise of acts of intellectual property ” Antitrust Law “, Also led to the present does not exist in China, the corresponding administrative law enforcement and judicial practice, similar Microsoft , Cisco And DVD Alliance patentee of intellectual property rights abuse in China still can not be effective monopoly regulation. Order to achieve Competition Request on behalf of the wider interests of society more important, China has continued to strengthen intellectual property protection, but also abuse of intellectual property should be to rule them. But now, people are more concerned about the previous problems, while the latter issue also seriously enough. Based on this, the urgent need to promptly establish and improve regulation of intellectual property rights abuse in China antitrust law system, give full play to intellectual property rights in the legal system to encourage innovation and promote scientific and technological progress of the positive role of the city and to prevent the abuse of intellectual property rights to maintain a free and fair economic competition order. The “anti-monopoly law,” the exercise of intellectual property regulation act to protect the interests of Chinese enterprises is significant. Trend of economic globalization is bound to be more Chinese enterprises to the market, they may encounter in the domestic market monopoly of multinational enterprises do nothing, and their behavior in foreign markets are subject to strict Competition Law problems. For example, earlier this year, some U.S. Pharmacy Enterprises in China 4 pharmaceutical companies in the United States filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the Chinese companies in the U.S. market on price cartel. Can be expected, as more and more Chinese enterprises enter the international market, Chinese enterprises in foreign countries have been accused of anti-monopoly situation will be more. Therefore, whether for the maintenance of domestic order, or free and fair competition in international economic exchanges in safeguarding their own interests, China should be established as soon as possible “anti-monopoly law.” The core is to balance and handle competition in intellectual property protection and maintenance of the conflict between the ultimate goal of full respect for and protection of intellectual property rights, encourage innovation and play Excitation The role of competition, but also effectively prevent illegal monopoly by improper use (ie abuse), so on behalf of the interests of society as a whole will not be free and fair competition order of destruction; both the full protection of market competition, but also realistic and reasonable for the time being take care to limit competition business needs, a reasonable balance of intellectual property transactions, the parties (developers, producers, consumers, etc.) interests, in order to promote China’s scientific and cultural innovation and the parallel development of economic competition. Specialized intellectual property law in the regulation of intellectual property rights abuse in the sound system, to further clarify, refine the terms of the abuse of intellectual property, which makes the related intellectual property rights infringement proceedings for the alleged infringer to provide a clear defense based on, or to the right people can be counter-claim, or even be prosecuted separately. This also requires our country, “Patent Law,” “Trademark Law”, “Copyright Law” and other specialized intellectual property law further modified, or other supporting measures. For example, should further improve our procedures for intellectual property litigation related to the legal system, clear that abuse complaint against compensation; in intellectual property cases should be taken provisional measures before litigation, scrutiny, careful decisions; improve the institute confirmed that the provisions of such non-infringement lawsuit . In addition, to effectively safeguard the authority of our laws, to be taken seriously TNC Intellectual property dispute resolution and political trend. As intellectual property rights are private rights, in essence, is a civil right, then the intellectual property dispute resolution, like other civil rights, are primarily to the court through the trial process carried out. Related Intellectual Property Rights in China Laws and regulations After recent amendments, has been full compliance with WTO rules, the minimum requirements, in some ways even more than that can provide effective intellectual property legal relief channel. However, some multinational companies and Chinese enterprises in intellectual property disputes occur, often by virtue of its strong bargaining power directly to the Chinese government or by their home governments to pressure the Chinese government to meet their special benefit The purpose of treatment, so that would could also go through legal channels, in accordance with strict legal procedures to resolve political. The Chinese Government has always considered positive for a variety of administrative resources to address the use of foreign-related intellectual property disputes. Tasted the sweetness of the multinational corporations, the more value this way, and attract more multinational companies to make the same choice. Moreover, under WTO rules, the MFN principle, a country our government to give preferential treatment for enterprises in this regard should also be automatically and unconditionally to other WTO Organization Members of the business. This is both an expression of some multinational companies in China to protect intellectual property rights and the rule of law framework for the establishment of disrespect and distrust, often the interests of the enterprises in China causing undue damage. Is therefore recommended that our government should be treated with a number of multinational corporations will solve the political disputes of intellectual property rights of the tendency to be guided in accordance with our existing law, to follow strict legal procedures to solve problems, in particular, be careful not to as being a political Pressure The expense of the legitimate interests of Chinese enterprises. Access to the judicial process for foreign-related intellectual property disputes, our courts must strictly in accordance with Chinese laws and relevant international rules, rule out all kinds of interference imposed by foreign parties, according to a just ruling, effectively protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises. Which claims the rights for the source of the right to conduct a strict review of the situation, to prevent the use of intellectual property claims on behalf of persons engaged in unfair competition.

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The intent of this work is five fold: 1) To spatially characterize and monitor the distribution, abundance, and size of both reef fishes and macro-invertebrates (conch, lobster, Diadema); 2) To relate this information to in-situ data collected on associated benthic composition parameters; 3) To use this information to establish the knowledge base necessary for enacting management decisions in a spatial setting; 4) To establish the efficacy of those management decisions; and 5) To work with the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program to develop data collection standards and easily implemented methodologies for transference to other agencies and to work toward standardizing data collection throughout the US states and territories. Toward this end, the Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biogeography Branch (BB) has been conducting research in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands since 2000 and 2001, respectively. It is critical, with recent changes in management at both locations (e.g. implementation of MPAs) as well as proposed changes (e.g. zoning to manage multiple human uses) that action is taken now to accurately describe and characterize the fish/macro-invertebrate populations in these areas. It is also important that BB work closely with the individuals responsible for recommending and implementing these management strategies. Recognizing this, BB has been collaborating with partners at the University of Puerto Rico, National Park Service, US Geological Survey and the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources. To quantify patterns of spatial distribution and make meaningful interpretations, we must first have knowledge of the underlying variables determining species distribution. The basis for this work therefore, is the nearshore benthic habitats maps (less than 100 ft depth) created by NOAA's Biogeography Program in 2001 and NOS' bathymetry models. Using ArcView GIS software, the digitized habitat maps are stratified to select sampling stations. Sites are randomly selected within these strata to ensure coverage of the entire study region and not just a particular reef or seagrass area. At each site, fish, macro-invertebrates, and benthic composition information is then quantified following standardized protocols. By relating the data collected in the field back to the habitat maps and bathymetric models, BB is able to model and map species level and community level information. These protocols are standardized throughout the US Caribbean to enable quantification and comparison of reef fish abundance and distribution trends between locations. Armed with the knowledge of where "hot spots" of species richness and diversity are likely to occur in the seascape, the BB is in a unique position to answer questions about the efficacy of marine zoning strategies (e.g. placement of no fishing, anchoring, or snorkeling locations), and what locations are most suitable for establishing MPAs. Knowledge of the current status of fish/macro-invertebrate communities coupled with longer term monitoring will enable evaluation of management efficacy, thus it is essential to future management actions. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA)/National Ocean Service (NOS)/National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS)/Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment (CCMA)/Biogeography Branch, 20101216, St. Croix, USVI Habitat Assessment and Monitoring Data (2001 - Present): NOAA's Ocean Service, National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS), Silver Spring, MD. Horizontal positions are specified in geographic coordinates, that is, latitude and longitude. Latitudes are given to the nearest 0.00001. Longitudes are given to the nearest 0.00001. Latitude and longitude values are specified in Decimal Degrees. This is a cooperative effort between NOAA's Biogeography Branch, the National Park Service and the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources. 1) To spatially characterize and monitor the distribution, abundance, and size of both reef fishes and macro-invertebrates (conch, lobster, Diadema); 2) To relate this information to in-situ data collected on associated benthic composition parameters; 3) To use this information to establish the knowledge base necessary for enacting management decisions in a spatial setting; 4) To establish the efficacy of those management decisions; and 5) To work with the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program to develop data collection standards and easily implemented methodologies for transference to other agencies and to work toward standardizing data collection throughout the US states and territories. Data are collected on the following: 1) Logistic information - diver name, dive buddy, date, time of survey, site code, and meter numbers at which the quadrat is placed. 2) Habitat structure - to characterize the benthic habitats of the dive site, the habitat diver first categorizes the habitat structure of the site: hard, soft or mangrove. 3) Proximity of structure - on seagrass and sand sites, the habitat diver records the absence or presence of reef or hard structure within 3m of the belt transect. A score of zero (0) indicates that no reef or other hard structure is present; one (1) indicates that a reef or hard structure smaller than 4m2 is present; and (2) indicates that a reef or hard structure larger than 4m2 is present within 3m of the diver. The point-count diver also uses this scoring system to record the absence, presence, and proximity of reef or hard structures within their cylinder. 4) Transect depth profile - the depth at each quadrat position. Depth is measured with a digital depth gauge to the nearest 1ft. 5) Abiotic footprint - defined as the percent cover (to the nearest 1 percent) of sand, rubble, hard bottom, and fine sediments within each quadrat position. Rubble refers to rocks and coral fragments that are moveable; immovable rocks are considered hard bottom. The percent cover given as a part of the abiotic footprint should total 100 percent. In a seagrass area for example, despite the fact that seagrass may provide 50 percent cover, the underlying substrate is 100 percent sand so this is what is recorded. To estimate percent cover, the habitat diver first positions the quadrat at the chosen meter mark along the transect tape. If the meter mark is an odd number, then the quadrat is placed on the left side of the tape; if even, it is placed on the right. Next, the habitat diver lays the quadrat along the substrate (regardless of the slope) and estimates percent cover based on a two-dimensional (planar) view (e.g. if bottom is sloping, the quadrat is not held horizontally). Also, the diver should try to use the same planar view for all estimates of percent cover. The habitat diver then estimates, for each quadrat, the height (in cm) of the hardbottom from the substrate to get a sense of bottom relief. Note: Height is collected for all hardbottom substrates, excluding rubble; height is not collected for softbottom substrate. 6) Biotic footprint - defined as the percent cover (to the nearest 0.1 percent) of algae, seagrass, live corals, sponges, gorgonians, and other biota (tunicates, anemones, zooanthids, and hydroids) within each quadrat position. The remaining cover is recorded as bare substrate to bring the total to 100 percent. Again, the diver must use a planar view to estimate percent cover of the biota. Seagrasses and gorgonians should not be stacked upright. For example, if a single seagrass blade crosses 10 squares, then total seagrass coverage should be the sum of the area taken up by that blade in all 10 squares instead of the area covered if the blade was held upright. Species covering less than 0.1 percent of the area are not recorded. Taxa are identified to the following levels: stony coral-species, algae-morphological group (macro, turf, crustose, rhodolith, filamentous, cyanobacteria), sponge-morphological group, and gorgonians-morphological group. When estimating percent cover, it is important to realize there is a balance between precision and time. For stony corals, the approximate area covered by living coral tissue is recorded. Coral skeleton (without living tissue) is usually categorized as turf algae or uncolonized substrate. Data on the condition of coral colonies are also recorded. When coral is noticeably bleached, the entire colony is considered affected and is recorded to the nearest 0.1 percent. Coral colonies are reported as entirely bleached if they contain any portion of white, blotchy, mottled, or pale tissue. This protocol assumes stress throughout the colony and estimates maximum bleaching impact. Diseased/dead coral refers to coral skeleton that has recently lost living tissue because of disease or damage that is still visible, and has not yet been colonized by turf algae. Turf algae include a mix of short (less than 1cm high) algae that colonize dead coral substrate. 7) Maximum canopy height - for each soft biota type (e.g., gorgonians, seagrass, algae), structure is recorded to the nearest 1cm at the quadrat level. 8) Number of individuals - for sponges, gorgonians and "other" biota type (non-encrusting anemones and non-encrusting hydroids) the number of individuals at the quadrat level is recorded. 9) Rugosity - measured by placing a 6-m chain at two randomly selected positions along the 25m belt transect. The chain is placed such that it follows the substrate's relief along the centerline of the belt transect. Two divers measure the straight-line horizontal distance covered by the chain. The chain is placed on top of any hard substrate encountered, but not on top of soft corals or sponges since we are measuring hard bottom rugosity. Data on rugosity are collected for reef sites only. Rugosity measurements typically are made by the point-count and belt-transect divers while awaiting the completion of other benthic habitat measurements by the habitat diver. Upon completion of the dive, the rugosity data are transferred from the fish data sheet to the habitat data sheet by the habitat diver. 10) Abundance and maturity of queen conchs (Strombus gigas) - a count of the total number of conch encountered within the 25 x 4m belt transect are enumerated. The maturity of each conch is determined by the presence or absence of a flared lip and labeled mature or immature, respectively. If conch abundance is counted by a fish diver, the data are then reported to the habitat diver. The decision of who will collect conch data should be made prior to entering the water. 11) Abundance of spiny lobsters (Panilaurus argus) - a count of the total number of lobsters encountered within the 25 x 4m belt transect. No measurements are taken. If lobster abundance is counted by a fish diver, the data are then reported to the habitat diver. The decision of who will collect lobster data should be made prior to entering the water. 12) Abundance of long-spined urchin (Diadema antillarum) - a count of the total number of urchins encountered within the 25 x 4m belt transect. No measurements are taken. If urchin abundance is counted by a fish diver, the data are then reported to the habitat diver. The decision of who will collect urchin data should be made prior to entering the water. NOTE: If rugosity, conch, lobster or urchin data are collected by a fish diver, data must be transferred to the habitat data sheet. The habitat diver is responsible for transferring the data to their data sheet; however, the fish diver should assist the habitat diver with this task by reporting the data once the dive concludes. 13) Marine debris - type of marine debris within the transect is noted. The size of the marine debris and the area of affected habitat is also recorded along with a note identifying any flora or fauna that has colonized the debris. 14) Photography - the point count or habitat diver will take at least two photos in different directions at each site to maintain an anecdotal and permanent visual description of the sites that were sampled. Proper care and maintenance is necessary for all camera and camera housings. It is important to maintain the cameras and housings before, after and in between dives. Data Caveats: Overtime, some changes were made to the stratified random site selection process as follows: 1) Habitat strata initially consisted of hard bottom, sand, and seagrass. Sand and seagrass strata were subsequently combined into one soft bottom strata at all three locations (Puerto Rico, St. Croix, and St. John). This action was taken after the February 2002 mission to Puerto Rico. 2) A small subset of sites were resampled during each mission through June 2002 in Puerto Rico and October 2002 in St. Croix. These station names contain the letter 'P' indicating they are permanent stations. 3) The sample area in St. Croix has increased over time. Initially, samples were collected within historic Buck Island National Monument boundaries as well as outside up to a distance of 0.5 km from those boundaries. In February 2002 the sampling effort was increased to include the entire expanded monument boundaries. Finally in April 2003 the effort was increased again to include areas outside of the Monument for control sites. This area is now almost entirely enclosed within the East End Marine Park of St. Croix. 4) The habitat map utilized to stratify the samples in St. Croix was changed from the original habitat map created with a 1 acre minimum mapping unit to one with a 100m2 minimum mapping unit beginning with the April 2003 mission. 5) In 2007, algae data collection changed from identification of each alga to the genus level to grouping algae into six morphological groups: macro, turf, crustose, filamentous, rhodolith, and cyanobacteria for more efficient data collection. 6) Shelter characteristics ceased being recorded at the end of 2006. 7) Marine debris data collection began in 2007. 8) The spring St. Croix mission was cancelled in 2007, therefore only one mission was conducted that year. 9) Beginning in 2010, missions to St. Croix was reduced from twice per year (March/April and October) to once per year (October only). Although the 1m-square-quadrat remained the basic method of choice for habitat data collection, overtime, changes in data collection methods were made for some habitat variables and several additional variables were added. These changes were deemed necessary to capture more precise information and as many variables as possible to explain better the observed variability in reef fish assemblage metrics. Detailed information on all changes to the protocols for collecting habitat data in St. Croix can be found at: <http://ccma.nos.noaa.gov/ecosystems/corealreef/reef_fish/protocols.html> Process Date: 200102 - Present These data consists of multiple fish community surveys across all nearshore marine habitats around St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. Sites were randomly selected and stratified across by habitat types using NOAA's benthic habitat maps of St. Croix, USVI. Are there legal restrictions on access or use of the data? - Access_Constraints: None - Please reference NOAA/NOS/NCCOS/CCMA/Biogeography Branch when utilizing these data in a report or peer reviewed publication. Additionally, knowledge of how this dataset has been of use and which organizations are utilizing it is of great benefit for ensuring this information continues to meet the needs of the management and research communities. Therefore, it is requested but not mandatory, that any user of this data supply this information to the Program Manager: Kimberly Roberson (email: Kimberly.email@example.com). These data were prepared by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, make any warranty, expressed or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference therein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. Any views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof. Although all data have been used by NOAA, no warranty, expressed or implied, is made by NOAA as to the accuracy of the data and/or related materials. The act of distribution shall not constitute any such warranty, and no responsibility is assumed by NOAA in the use of these data or related materials. |Data format:||tab delimited text file|

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Publisher Council on Foreign Relations Release Date Last Updated: May 21, 2013 Scope of the Challenge Oceans are the source of life on earth. They shape the climate, feed the world, and cleanse the air we breathe. They are vital to our economic well being, ferrying roughly 90 percent of global commerce, housing submarine cables, and providing one-third of traditional hydrocarbon resources (as well as new forms of energy such as wave, wind, and tidal power). But the oceans are increasingly threatened by a dizzying array of dangers, from piracy to climate change. To be good stewards of the oceans, nations around the world need to embrace more effective multilateral governance in the economic, security, and environmental realms. The world's seas have always been farmed from top to bottom. New technologies, however, are making old practices unsustainable. When commercial trawlers scrape the sea floor, they bulldoze entire ecosystems. Commercial ships keep to the surface but produce carbon-based emissions. And recent developments like offshore drilling and deep seabed mining are helping humans extract resources from unprecedented depths, albeit with questionable environmental impact. And as new transit routes open in the melting Arctic, this once-forgotten pole is emerging as a promising frontier for entrepreneurial businesses and governments. But oceans are more than just sources of profit—they also serve as settings for transnational crime. Piracy, drug smuggling, and illegal immigration all occur in waters around the world. Even the most sophisticated ports struggle to screen cargo, containers, and crews without creating regulatory friction or choking legitimate commerce. In recent history, the United States has policed the global commons, but growing Indian and Chinese blue-water navies raise new questions about how an established security guarantor should accommodate rising—and increasingly assertive—naval powers. And the oceans themselves are in danger of environmental catastrophe. They have become the world's garbage dump—if you travel to the heart of the Pacific Ocean, you'll find the North Pacific Gyre, where particles of plastic outweigh plankton six to one. Eighty percent of the world's fish stocks are depleted or on the verge of extinction, and when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, much of it is absorbed by the world's oceans. The water, in response, warms and acidifies, destroying habitats like wetlands and coral reefs. Glacial melting in the polar regions raises global sea levels, which threatens not only marine ecosystems but also humans who live on or near a coast. Meanwhile, port-based megacities dump pollution in the ocean, exacerbating the degradation of the marine environment and the effects of climate change. Threats to the ocean are inherently transnational, touching the shores of every part of the world. So far, the most comprehensive attempt to govern international waters produced the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). But U.S. refusal to join the convention, despite widespread bipartisan support, continues to limit its strength, creating a leadership vacuum in the maritime regime. Other states that have joined the treaty often ignore its guidelines or fail to coordinate policies across sovereign jurisdictions. Even if it were perfectly implemented, UNCLOS is now thirty years old and increasingly outdated. Important initiatives—such as local fishery arrangements and the United Nations Environment Program Regional Seas Program—form a disjointed landscape that lacks legally-binding instruments to legitimize or enforce their work. The recent UN Conference on Sustainable Development ("Rio+20") in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, convened over one hundred heads of state to assess progress and outline goals for a more sustainable "blue-green economy." However, the opportunity to set actionable targets to improve oceans security and biodiversity produced few concrete outcomes. As threats to the oceans become more pressing, nations around the world need to rally to create and implement an updated form of oceans governance. Oceans Governance: Strengths and Weaknesses Overall assessment: A fragmented system In 1982, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) established the fundamental legal principles for ocean governance. This convention, arguably the largest and most complex treaty ever negotiated, entered into force in 1994. Enshrined as a widely accepted corpus of international common law, UNCLOS clearly enumerates the rights, responsibilities, and jurisdictions of states in their use and management of the world's oceans. The treaty defines "exclusive economic zones" (EEZs), which is the coastal water and seabed—extending two hundred nautical miles from shore—over which a state has special rights over the use of marine resources; establishes the limits of a country's "territorial sea," or the sovereign territory of a state that extends twelve nautical miles from shore; and clarifies rules for transit through "international straits." It also addresses—with varying degrees of effectiveness—resource division, maritime traffic, and pollution regulation, as well as serves as the principal forum for dispute resolution on ocean-related issues. To date, 162 countries and the European Union have ratified UNCLOS. UNCLOS is a remarkable achievement, but its resulting oceans governance regime suffers several serious limitations. First, the world's leading naval power, the United States, is not party to the convention, which presents obvious challenges to its effectiveness—as well as undermines U.S. sovereignty, national interests, and ability to exercise leadership over resource management and dispute resolution. Despite the myriad military, economic, and political benefits offered by UNCLOS, a small but vocal minority in the United States continues to block congressional ratification. Second, UNCLOS is now thirty years old and, as a result, does not adequately address a number of emerging and increasingly important international issues, such as fishing on the high seas—a classic case of the tragedy of the commons—widespread maritime pollution, and transnational crime committed at sea. Third, both UNCLOS and subsequent multilateral measures have weak surveillance, capacity-building, and enforcement mechanisms. Although various UN bodies support the instruments created by UNCLOS, they have no direct role in their implementation. Individual states are responsible for ensuring that the convention's rules are enforced, which presents obvious challenges in areas of overlapping or contested sovereignty, or effectively stateless parts of the world. The UN General Assembly plays a role in advancing the oceans agenda at the international level, but its recommendations are weak and further constrained by its lack of enforcement capability. Organizations that operate in conjunction with UNCLOS—such as the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), and the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—play an important role to protect the oceans and strengthen oceans governance. The IMO has helped reduce ship pollution to historically low levels, although it can be slow to enact new policy on issues such as invasive species, which are dispersed around the world in ballast water. Furthermore, ITLOS only functions if member states are willing to submit their differences to its judgment, while the ISA labors in relative obscurity and operates under intense pressure from massive commercial entities. Fourth, coastal states struggle to craft domestic policies that incorporate the many interconnected challenges faced by oceans, from transnational drug smuggling to protecting ravaged fish stocks to establishing proper regulatory measures for offshore oil and gas drilling. UNCLOS forms a solid platform on which to build additional policy architecture, but requires coastal states to first make comprehensive oceans strategy a priority—a goal that has remained elusive thus far. Fifth, the system is horizontally fragmented and fails to harmonize domestic, regional, and international policies. Domestically, local, state, and federal maritime actors rarely coordinate their agendas and priorities. Among the handful of countries and regional organizations that have comprehensive ocean policies—including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, the European Union, and most recently the United States—few synchronize their activities with other countries. The international community, however, is attempting to organize the cluttered oceans governance landscape. The UN Environmental Programme Regional Seas Program works to promote interstate cooperation for marine and coastal management, albeit with varying degrees of success and formal codification. Likewise, in 2007 the European Union instituted a regional Integrated Maritime Policy (IMP) that addresses a range of environmental, social, and economic issues related to oceans, as well as promotes surveillance and information sharing. The IMP also works with neighboring partners to create an integrated oceans policy in places such as the Arctic, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean. Lastly, there is no global evaluation framework to assess progress. No single institution is charged with monitoring and collecting national, regional, and global data on the full range of oceans-related issues, particularly on cross-cutting efforts. Periodic data collecting does take place in specific sectors, such as biodiversity conservation, fisheries issues, and marine pollution, but critical gaps remain. The Global Ocean Observing System is a promising portal for tracking marine and ocean developments, but it is significantly underfunded. Without concrete and reliable data, it is difficult to craft effective policies that address and mitigate emerging threats. Despite efforts, oceans continue to deteriorate and a global leadership vacuum persists. Much work remains to modernize existing institutions and conventions to respond effectively to emerging threats, as well as to coordinate national actions within and across regions. The June 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development , also known as Rio+20, identified oceans (or the "blue economy") as one of the seven priority areas for sustainable development. Although experts and activists hoped for a new agreement to strengthen the sustainable management and protection of oceans and address modern maritime challenges such as conflicting sovereignty claims, international trade, and access to resources, Rio+20 produced few concrete results. Maintaining freedom of the seas: Guaranteed by U.S. power, increasingly contested by emerging states The United States polices every ocean throughout the world. The U.S. navy is unmatched in its ability to provide strategic stability on, under, and above the world's waters. With almost three hundred active naval ships and almost four thousand aircraft, its battle fleet tonnage is greater than the next thirteen largest navies combined. Despite recently proposed budget cuts to aircraft carriers, U.S. naval power continues to reign supreme. The United States leverages its naval capabilities to ensure peace, stability, and freedom of access. As Great Britain ensured a Pax Britannicain the nineteenth century, the United States presides over relatively tranquil seas where global commerce is allowed to thrive. In 2007, the U.S. Navy released a strategy report that called for "cooperative relationships with more international partners" to promote "greater collective security, stability, and trust." The United States pursues this strategy because it has not faced a credible competitor since the end of the Cold War. And, thus far, emerging powers have largely supported the U.S. armada to ensure that the oceans remain open to commerce. However, emerging powers with blue-water aspirations raise questions about how U.S. naval hegemony will accommodate new and assertive fleets in the coming decades. China, for instance, has been steadily building up its naval capabilities over the past decade as part of its "far sea defense" strategy. It unveiled its first aircraft carrier in 2010, and is investing heavily in submarines outfitted with ballistic missiles. At the same time, India has scaled up its military budget by 64 percent since 2001, and plans to spend nearly $45 billion over the next twenty years on its navy. Even tensions among rising powers could prove problematic. For example, a two-month standoff between China and the Philippines over a disputed region of the South China Sea ended with both parties committing to a "peaceful resolution."China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines have competing territorial and jurisdictional claims to the South China Sea, particularly over rights to exploit its potentially vast oil and gas reserves. Control over strategic shipping lanes and freedom of navigation are also increasingly contested, especially between the United States and China. Combating illicit trafficking: Porous, patchy enforcement In addition to being a highway for legal commerce, oceans facilitate the trafficking of drugs, weapons, and humans, which are often masked by the flow of licit goods. Individual states are responsible for guarding their own coastlines, but often lack the will or capacity to do so. Developing countries, in particular, struggle to coordinate across jurisdictions and interdict. But developed states also face border security challenges. Despite its commitment to interdiction, the United States seizes less than 20 percent of the drugs that enter the country by maritime transport. The United Nations attempts to combat the trafficking of drugs, weapons, and humans at sea. Through the Container Control Program (PDF), the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) assists domestic law enforcement in five developing countries to establish effective container controls to prevent maritime drug smuggling. The UNODC also oversees UN activity on human trafficking, guided by two protocols to the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime. Although UN activity provides important groundwork for preventing illicit maritime trafficking, it lacks monitoring and enforcement mechanisms and thus has a limited impact on the flow of illegal cargo into international ports. Greater political will, state capacity, and multilateral coordination will be required to curb illicit maritime trafficking. New ad hoc multilateral arrangements are a promising model for antitrafficking initiatives. The International Ship and Port Facility Security Code, for instance, provides a uniform set of measures to enhance the security of ships and ports. The code helps member states control their ports and monitor both the people and cargo that travel through them. In addition, the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative facilitates international cooperation to interdict ships on the high seas that may be carrying illicit weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles, and related technology. Finally, the Container Security Initiative (CSI), also spearheaded by the United States, attempts to prescreen all containers destined for U.S. ports and identify high-risk cargo (for more information, see section on commercial shipping). One way to combat illicit trafficking is through enhanced regional arrangements, such as the Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control. This agreement provides a model for an effective regional inspections regime, examining at least 25 percent of ships that enter members' ports for violations of conventions on maritime safety. Vessels that violate conventions can be detained and repeat offenders can be banned from the memorandum's area. Although the agreement does not permit searching for illegal cargo, it does show how a regional inspections regime could be effective at stemming illegal trafficking. Securing commercial shipping: Global supply chains at risk Global shipping is incredibly lucrative, but its sheer scope and breadth presents an array of security and safety challenges. The collective fleet consists of approximately 50,000 ships registered in more than 150 nations. With more than one million employees, this armada transports over eight billion tons (PDF) of goods per year—roughly 90 percent of global trade. And the melting Arctic is opening previously impassable trade routes; in 2009, two German merchant vessels traversed the Northeast Passage successfully for the first time in recent history. But despite impressive innovations in the shipping industry, maritime accidents and attacks on ships still occur frequently, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars of cargo. Ensuring the safety and security of the global shipping fleet is essential to the stability of the world economy. Internationally, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) provides security guidelines for ships through the Convention on the Safety of Life at Sea, which governs everything from construction to the number of fire extinguishers on board. The IMO also aims to prevent maritime accidents through international standards for navigation and navigation equipment, including satellite communications and locating devices. Although compliance with these conventions has been uneven, regional initiatives such as the Paris Memorandum of Understanding have helped ensure the safety of international shipping. In addition, numerous IMO conventions govern the safety of container shipping, including the International Convention on Safe Containers, which creates uniform regulations for shipping containers, and the International Convention on Load Lines, which determines the volume of containers a ship can safely hold. However, these conventions do not provide comprehensive security solutions for maritime containers, and illegal cargo could be slipped into shipping containers during transit. Since 1992, the IMO has tried to prevent attacks on commercial shipping through the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, which provides a legal framework for interdicting, detaining, and prosecuting terrorists, pirates, and other criminals on the high seas. In reality, most enforcement efforts since the 9/11 attacks have focused on securing ports to prevent the use of a ship to attack, rather than to prevent attacks on the ships themselves. Reflecting this imperative, the IMO, with U.S. leadership, implemented the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS) in 2004. This code helped set international standards for ship security, requiring ships to have security plans and officers. However, as with port security, the code is not obligatory and no clear process to audit or certify ISPS compliance has been established. Overall, a comprehensive regime for overseeing the safety of international shipping has not been created. The United States attempts to address this vulnerability through the Container Security Initiative (CSI), which aims to prescreen all containers destined for the United States, and to isolate those that pose a high-security risk before they are in transit. The initiative, which operates in fifty-eight foreign ports, covers more than 86 percent of container cargo en route to the United States. Several international partners and organizations, including the European Union, the Group of Eight, and the World Customs Organization, have expressed interest in modeling security measures for containerized cargo based on the CSI model. Despite these efforts, experts estimate that only 2 percent of containers destined for U.S. ports are actually inspected. Confronting piracy: Resurgent scourge, collective response After the number of attacks reached a record high in 2011, incidences of piracy dropped 28 percent in the first three months of 2012. Overall, the number of worldwide attacks decreased from 142 to 102 cases, primarily due to international mobilization and enhanced naval patrols off the coast of Somalia. However, attacks intensified near Nigeria and Indonesia as pirates shifted routes in response to increased policing, raising fresh concerns over the shifting and expanding threat of piracy. In addition to the human toll, piracy has significant economic ramifications. According to a report by the nonprofit organization Oceans Beyond Piracy, Somali piracy cost the global economy nearly $7 billion in 2011. Sustained international coordination and cooperation is essential to preventing and prosecuting piracy. Recognizing this imperative, countries from around the world have shown unprecedented cooperation to combat piracy, particularly near the Gulf of Aden. In August 2009, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commenced Operation Ocean Shield in the horn of Africa, where piracy increased close to 200 percent between 2007 and 2009. This effort built upon Operation Allied Protector and consisted of two standing maritime groups with contributions from allied nations. Although the efforts concentrate on protecting ships passing through the Gulf of Aden, they also renewed focus on helping countries, specifically Somalia, prevent piracy and secure their ports. Meanwhile, the United States helped establish Combined Task Force 151 to coordinate the various maritime patrols in East Africa. Other countries including Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and South Korea, have also sent naval vessels to the region. At the same time, regional organizations have also stepped up antipiracy efforts. The Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia was the first such initiatives, and has been largely successful in facilitating information-sharing, cooperation between governments, and interdiction efforts. And in May 2012, the European Union naval force launched its first air attack against Somali pirates' land bases, the first strike of its kind by outside actors to date. Like individual countries, international institutions have condemned piracy and legitimized the use of force against pirates. In June 2008, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1816, encouraging greater cooperation in deterring piracy and asking countries to provide assistance to Somalia to help ensure coastal security. This was followed by Resolution 1846, which allowed states to use "all necessary means" to fight piracy off the coast of Somalia. In Resolution 1851, the UN Security Council legitimized the use of force on land as well as at sea to the same end. Outside the UN, watchdogs such as the International Maritime Bureau, which collects information on pirate attacks and provides reports on the safety of shipping routes, have proven successful in increasing awareness, disseminating information, and facilitating antipiracy cooperation. However, such cooperative efforts face several legal challenges. The United States has not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which governs crimes, including piracy, in international waters. More broadly, the international legal regime continues to rely on individual countries to prosecute pirates, and governments have been reluctant to take on this burden. Accordingly, many pirates are apprehended, only to be quickly released. In addition, many large commercial vessels rely on private armed guards to prevent pirate attacks, but the legal foundations governing such a force are shaky at best. National governments have redoubled efforts to bring pirates to justice as well. In 2010, the United States held its first piracy trial since its civil war, soon followed by Germany's first trial in over four hundred years. Other agreements have been established to try pirates in nearby countries like Kenya, such as the UNODC Trust Fund to Support the Initiatives of States to Counter Piracy of the Coast of Somalia, established in January 2010. Under the mandate of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia, the fund aims to defray the financial capital required from countries like Kenya, Seychelles, and Somalia to prosecute pirates, as well as to increase awareness within Somali society of the risk associated with piracy and criminal activity. Future efforts to combat piracy should continue to focus on enhancing regional cooperation and agreements, strengthening the international and domestic legal instruments necessary to prosecute pirates, and addressing the root causes of piracy. Reducing marine pollution and climate change: Mixed progress Pollution has degraded environments and ravaged biodiversity in every ocean. Much contamination stems from land-based pollutants, particularly along heavily developed coastal areas. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) Regional Seas Program has sponsored several initiatives to control pollution, modeled on a relatively successful program in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1995, states established the Global Program of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-Based Activities, which identifies sources of land-based pollution and helps states establish priorities for action. It has been successful in raising awareness about land-based pollution and offering technical assistance to regional implementing bodies, which are so often starved for resources. More recently, 193 UN member states approved the Nagoya Protocol on biodiversity, which aims to halve the marine extinction rate by 2020 and extend protection to 10 percent of the world's oceans. Shipping vessels are also a major source of marine pollution. Shipping is the most environmentally friendly way to transport bulk cargoes, but regulating maritime pollution remains complicated because of its inherently transnational nature. Shipping is generally governed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which regulates maritime pollution through the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). States are responsible for implementing and enforcing MARPOL among their own fleets to curb the most pernicious forms of maritime pollution, including oil spills, particulate matter such as sulfur oxide (SOx) and nitrous oxide (NOx), and greenhouse gas emissions. Port cities bear the brunt of air pollution, which devastates local air quality because most ships burn bunker fuel (the dirtiest form of crude oil). The IMO's Marine Environmental Protection Committee has also taken important steps to reduce SOx and NOx emissions by amending the MARPOL guidelines to reduce particulate matter from ships. Despite such efforts, a 2010 study (PDF) from the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation found that international shipping still accounts for nearly 3 percent of all greenhouse gasses. The IMO has achieved noteworthy success in reducing oil spilled into the marine environment. Despite a global shipping boom, oil spills are at an all-time low. The achievements of the IMO have been further strengthened by commitments by the Group of Eight to cooperate on oil pollution through an action plan that specifically targets pollution prevention for tankers. The IMO should strive to replicate this success in its efforts to reduce shipping emissions. Climate change is also exacerbating environmental damage. In June 2009, global oceans reached their highest recordedaverage temperature: 17 degrees Celsius. As the world warms, oceans absorb increased levels of carbon dioxide, which acidifies the water and destroys wetlands, mangroves, and coral reefs—ecosystems that support millions of species of plants and animals. According to recent studies, ocean acidity could increase by more than 150 percent by 2050 if counteracting measures are not taken immediately. Moreover, melting ice raises sea levels, eroding beaches, flooding communities, and increasing the salinity of freshwater bodies. And the tiny island nation of the Maldives, the lowest country in the world, could be completely flooded if sea levels continue to rise at the same rate. Individual states are responsible for managing changes in their own marine climates, but multilateral efforts to mitigate the effect of climate change on the oceans have picked up pace. In particular, the UNEP Regional Seas Program encourages countries sharing common bodies of water to coordinate and implement sound environmental policies, and promotes a regional approach to address climate change. Sustainable fisheries policies on the high seas: An ecological disaster States have the legal right to regulate fishing in their exclusive economic zones (EEZs), which extend two hundred nautical miles from shore—and sometimes beyond, in the case of extended continental shelves. But outside the EEZs are the high seas, which do not fall under any one country's jurisdiction. Freedom of the high seas is critical to the free flow of global commerce, but spells disaster for international fisheries in a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons. For years, large-scale fishing vessels harvested fish as fast as possible with little regard for the environmental costs, destroying 90 percent of the ocean's biomass in less than a century. Overall, fisheries suffer from two sets of challenges: ineffective enforcement capacity and lack of market-based governance solutions to remedy perverse incentives to overfish. Although there are numerous international and multilateral mechanisms for fisheries management, the system is marred by critical gaps and weaknesses exploited by illegal fishing vessels. Articles 117 and 118 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) enumerate the specific fisheries responsibilities of state parties, placing the onus on national governments to form policies and regional agreements that ensure responsible management and conservation of fish stocks in their respective areas. UNCLOS was further strengthened by the UN Fish Stocks Agreement (FSA), which called for a precautionary approach toward highly migratory and straddling fish stocks that move freely in and out of the high seas. Seventy-eight countries have joined the FSA thus far, and a review conference in May 2010 was hailed as a success due to the passage of Port State Measures (PSMs) to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Yet fish stocks have continued to stagnate or decline to dangerously low levels, and the PSMs have largely failed to prevent IUU operations. Regional fishery bodies (RFBs) are charged with implementation and monitoring. The RFBs provide guidelines and advice on a variety of issues related to fishing, including total allowable catch, by-catch, vessel monitoring systems, areas or seasons closed for fishing, and recording and reporting fishery statistics. However, only a portion of these bodies oversee the management of their recommendations, and some RFBs allow members to unilaterally dismiss unfavorable decisions. Additionally, RFBs are not comprehensive in their membership and, for the most part, their rules do not apply to vessels belonging to a state outside the body. Even when regional bodies make a binding decision on a high-seas case, implementation hinges on state will and capacity. In 2003, the UN General Assembly established a fund to assist developing countries with their obligations to implement the Fish Stocks Agreement through RFBs. The overall value of the fund remains small, however, and countries' compliance is often constrained by resource scarcity. This results in spotty enforcement, which allows vessels to violate international standards with impunity, particularly off the coasts of weak states. Migratory species like blue fin tuna are especially vulnerable because they are not confined by jurisdictional boundaries and have high commercial value. Some of the RFBs with management oversight, such as the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources and the South East Atlantic Fisheries Organization, have been relatively effective in curbing overfishing. They have developed oversight systems and specific measures to target deep-water trawl fishing and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the high seas. Many regional cooperative arrangements, however, continue to suffer from weak regulatory authority. At the same time, some regions like the central and southwest Atlantic Ocean lack RFBs. Some have suggested filling the void with market-based solutions like catch shares, which could theoretically alter the incentives toward stewardship. Catch shares (also known as limited access privilege programs) reward innovation and help fisheries maximize efficiency by dedicating a stock of fish to an individual fisherman, community, fishery association, or an individual state. Each year before the beginning of fishing season, commercial fishermen would know how much fish they are allowed to catch. They would then be allowed to buy and sell shares to maximize profit. By incorporating free-market principles, fisheries could reach a natural equilibrium at a sustainable level. According to research, more sustainable catch shares policies could increase the value of the fishing industry by more than $36 billion. Although allocating the shares at the domestic—much less international—level remains problematic, the idea reflects of the kind of policy work required to better manage the global commons. Managing the Arctic: At a crossroads Arctic ice is melting at unprecedented rates. At this pace, experts estimate that the Arctic could be seasonally ice free by 2040, and possibly much earlier. As the ice recedes and exposes valuable new resources, multilateral coordination will become even more important among states (and indigenous groups) jockeying for position in the region. The melting ice is opening up potentially lucrative new sea routes and stores of natural resources. Since September 2009, cargo ships have been able to traverse the fabled Northwest and Northeast Passages, which are significantly shorter than traditional routes around the capes or through the canals. Widening sea routes also means that fishing fleets can travel north in search of virgin fishing stock, and that cruise ships can carry tourists chasing a last glimpse of the disappearing ice. At the same time, untapped resources such as oil, natural gas, rare earth minerals, and massive renewable wind, tidal, and geothermal energy hold enormous potential. In a preliminary estimate, the U.S. Geographic Society said that the Arctic could hold 22 percent of the world's hydrocarbon resources, including 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Beyond oil and gas, the Arctic has valuable mineral commodities such as zinc, nickel, and coal. But new opportunities in the Arctic also portend new competition among states. In August 2007, Russia symbolically planted a flag on the Arctic floor, staking a claim to large chunks of Arctic land. Other Arctic powers including the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark have also laid geographical claims. The European Union crafted a new Arctic policy, and China sent an icebreaker on three separate Arctic expeditions. Each country stands poised to grab new treasure in this increasingly important geostrategic region. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is a solid foundation on which to build and coordinate national Arctic policies, especially articles 76 and 234, which govern the limits of the outer continental shelf (OCS) and regulate activities in ice-covered waters, respectively. However, there remains a formidable list of nagging sovereignty disputes that will require creative bilateral and multilateral resolutions. The Arctic Council, a multilateral forum comprising eight Arctic nations, has recently grown in international prominence, signing a legally binding treaty on search and rescue missions in May 2011 and drawing high-level policymakers to its meetings. While these are significant first steps, the forum has yet to address other issues such as overlapping OCS claims, contested maritime boundaries, and the legal status of the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route. U.S. Ocean Governance Issues The United States championed many of the most important international maritime organizations over the past fifty years. It helped shape the decades-long process of negotiating the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and has played a leading role in many UNCLOS-related bodies, including the International Maritime Organization. It has also served as a driving force behind regional fisheries organizations and Coast Guard forums. Domestically, the United States has intermittently been at the vanguard of ocean policy, such as the 1969 Stratton Commission report, multiple conservation acts in the 1970s, the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, and, most recently, catch limits on all federally-managed fish species. The U.S.-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Monterrey Bay Research Institute have long been leaders in marine science worldwide. And from a geopolitical perspective, the U.S. Navy secures the world's oceans and fosters an environment where global commerce can thrive. Yet the United States lags behind on important issues, most notably regarding its reluctance to ratify UNCLOS. And until recently, the United States did not have a coherent national oceans policy. To address this gap, U.S. president Barack Obama created the Ocean Policy Task Force in 2009 to coordinate maritime issues across local, state, and federal levels, and to provide a strategic vision for how oceans should be managed in the United States. The task force led to the creation of a National Ocean Council, which is responsible for "developing strategic action plans to achieve nine priority objectives that address some of the most pressing challenges facing the ocean, our coasts, and Great Lakes." Although it has yet to make serious gains (PDF), this comprehensive oceans policy framework could help clear the way for the spadework of coordinating U.S. ocean governance and harmonizing international efforts. Should the United States ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea? Yes: The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which created the governance framework that manages nearly three-quarters of the earth's surface, has been signed and ratified by 162 countries and the European Union. But the United States remains among only a handful of countries to have signed but not yet ratified the treaty—even though it already treats many of the provisions as customary international law. Leaders on both sides of the political aisle as well as environmental, conservation, business, industry, and security groups have endorsed ratification in order to preserve national security interests and reap its myriad benefits, such as securing rights for U.S. commercial and naval ships and boosting the competitiveness of U.S. companies in seafaring activities. Notably, all of the uniformed services—and especially the U.S. Navy—strongly support UNCLOS because its provisions would only serve to strengthen U.S. military efforts. By remaining a nonparty, the United States lacks the credibility to promote its own interests in critical decision-making forums as well as bring complaints to an international dispute resolution body. No: Opponents argue that ratifying the treaty would cede sovereignty to an ineffective United Nations and constrain U.S. military and commercial activities. In particular, critics object to specific provisions including taxes on activities on outer continental shelves; binding dispute settlements; judicial activism by the Law of the Sea Tribunal, especially with regard to land-based sources of pollution; and the perceived ability of UNCLOS to curtail U.S. intelligence-gathering activities. Lastly, critics argue that because UNCLOS is already treated as customary international law, the United States has little to gain from formal accession. Should the United States lead an initiative to expand the Container Security Initiative globally? Yes: Some experts say the only way to secure a global economic system is to implement a global security solution. The U.S.-led Container Security Initiative (CSI) helps ensure that high-risk containers are identified and isolated before they reach their destination. Fifty-eight countries are already on board with the initiative, and many others have expressed interest in modeling their own security measures on the CSI. The World Customs Organization called on its members to develop programs based on the CSI, and the European Union agreed to expand the initiative across its territory. With its robust operational experience, the United States is well positioned to provide the technical expertise to ensure the integrity of the container system. No: Opponents maintain that the United States can hardly commit its tax dollars abroad for a global security system when it has failed to secure its own imports. To date, more than $800 million and considerable diplomatic energy has been invested in CSI to expand the program to fifty-eight international ports, where agents are stationed to screen high-risk containers. Given the scale of world trade, the United States imports more than 10 million containers annually, and only a handful of high-risk boxes can be targeted for inspection. After huge expenditures and years of hard work to expand this program after September 11, 2001, only about 86 percent of the cargo that enters the United States transits through foreign ports covered under CSI, and of that, only about 1 percent is actually inspected (at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer of more than $1,000 per container). Despite congressional mandates to screen all incoming containers, critics say that costs make implementing this mandate virtually impossible. The limited resources the United States has available, they argue, should be invested in protecting imports bound specifically for its shores. Should the United States be doing more to address the drastic decline in the world's fisheries? Yes: Advocates say that the further demise of global fish stocks, beyond being a moral burden, undermines the commercial and national security interests of the United States. Depleting fish stocks are driven in large part by the prevalence of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and the overcapitalization of the global commercial fishing fleet from domestic subsidies. To protect domestic commercial fisheries and the competitiveness of U.S. exports in the international seafood market, the United States should enhance efforts by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to manage, enforce, and coordinate technical assistance for nations engaging in IUU fishing. Domestically, the United States has taken important steps to address the critical gaps in fisheries management. In 2012, it became the first country to impose catch limits on all federally-managed fish species. Some species like the mahi mahi will be restricted for the first time in history. Many environmental experts hailed the move as a potential model for broader regional and international sustainable fisheries policy. To capitalize on such gains, the United States should aggressively work to reduce fishing subsidies in areas such as Europe that promote overcapitalization and thus global depletion of fish stocks. The United States could also promote market-based mechanisms, like catch shares and limited access privilege programs, to help fishermen and their communities curb overfishing and raise the value of global fisheries by up to $36 billion. No: Critics argue that fisheries management is by and large a domestic issue, and that the United States has little right to tell other nations how to manage their own resources, particularly when such measures could harm local economies. They contend that the science behind overfishing is exaggerated, as are the warnings about the consequences of an anticipated fisheries collapse. Existing conventions like the 1995 Fish Stock Agreement already go far enough in addressing this issue. Any additional efforts, they contend, would be a diplomatic overreach, as well as an excessive burden on a struggling commercial fishing industry. Critics also question how market-based mechanisms, such as catch-shares, would be distributed, traded, and enforced, warning that they would lead to speculative bubbles. Should the United States push for a more defined multilateral strategy to cope with the melting Arctic? Yes: The melting Arctic holds important untapped political, strategic, and economic potential for the U.S. government, military, and businesses. This emerging frontier could potentially support a variety of economic activities, including energy exploration, marine commerce, and sustainable development of new fisheries. Countries such as Russia, Canada, Norway, and China have already made claims to the region, yet the United States remains on the sideline without a comprehensive Arctic strategy. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) remains the premier forum of negotiating and arbitrating disputes over contested territory. As a nonparty, however, the United States loses invaluable leverage and position. In addition, the U.S. military does not have a single icebreaker, whereas Russia operates over thirty. Experts argue that the U.S. government should also adopt the recently proposed Polar Code, which is a voluntary agreement that "sets structural classifications and standards for ships operating in the Arctic as well as specific navigation and emergency training for those operating in or around ice-covered waters." No: Opponents argue that Arctic Council activities and the 2009 National Security Presidential Directive, which updated U.S. Arctic polices, are sufficient. Any collaboration with Canada to resolve disputes over the Northwest Passage might undermine freedom of navigation for U.S. naval assets elsewhere, especially in the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Straits, and this national security concern trumps any advantages from collaborating on security, economic, or environmental issues in the Arctic. Last, given the dominant Russian and Canadian Arctic coastlines, future Arctic diplomacy might best be handled bilaterally rather than through broader multilateral initiatives. April 2013: Japan included in Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations Japan agreed to join negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious free trade agreement between counties along the Pacific rim. Since the broad outline of the agreement was introduced in November 2011, sixteen rounds of negotiations have thus far brought eleven countries together to discuss the TPP. The addition of Japan, a major economic force in the region, as the twelfth participant comes as an important step in creating a robust agreement. Already, the South China Sea is the second-busiest shipping lane in the world, and should the TTP become a reality, transpacific shipping would dramatically increase. The seventeenth round of negotiations will take place in May and the current goal for agreement is October 2013. March 2013: IMO pledges to support implementation of new code of conduct on piracy At a ministerial meeting in Cotonou, Benin, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) pledged to support the implementation of a new code of conduct on piracy and other illicit maritime activity. The Gulf of Guinea Code of Conduct, drafted by the Economic Community of Central African States and the Economic Community of West African States, in partnership with the IMO, contains provisions for interdicting sea- and land-based vehicles engaged in illegal activities at sea, prosecuting suspected criminals, and sharing information between state parties. The code builds on several existing frameworks to create a sub-regional coast guard. The agreement is set to open for signature in May 2013. March 2013: New fishing restrictions on sharks and rays Delegates attending the annual meeting on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) voted to place robust export restrictions on five species of sharks and two species of manta rays. Over the past fifty years, the three shark species—the oceanic whitetip, hammerhead, and porbeagle—have declined by more than 70 percent. Although experts cautioned that the new rules would be difficult to enforce in practice, the decision marked an important victory over economic interests, particularly of China and Japan. January 2013: Philippines to challenge China's maritime claims in South China Sea The Philippine government announced its intention to take China to an international arbitration tribunal based on claims that China violated the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The dispute dates back to mid-2012, when tensions flared over the Scarborough shoal, which is claimed by both countries. China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines have competing territorial and jurisdictional claims to the South China Sea, particularly over rights to exploit its potentially vast oil and gas reserves. Control over strategic shipping lanes and freedom of navigation are also increasingly contested, especially between the United States and China. September 2012: Arctic ice reaches record low In September 2012, ice in the Arctic Ocean reached an all-time low of 24 percent, shattering the previous record of 29 percent from 2007. The finding not only has implications for climate change and environmental stability, but also for heightened competition among states jockeying for access to critical resources in the region. For the first time, the melting Arctic has exposed troves of natural resources including oil, gas, and minerals, as well as newly accessible shipping routes. The United States, Russia, and several European states already control parts of the Arctic, and China is also an increasing presence. September 2012: Tensions flare in the East China Sea In September 2012, Japan purchased three islands in the East China Sea that form part of the Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyu Islands to the Chinese. The islands, claimed by both countries, have been controlled by Japan since 1895, but sovereignty remains hotly contested. Following Japan's announcement, protests broke out across China, and Chinese leaders accused Japan of "severely infringing" upon their sovereignty. In a move to affirm its claim to the islands, China announced its intention to submit their objections to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf under the UNCLOS, and dispatched patrol ships to monitor the islands. In December 2012, tensions flared after a Chinese small aircraft flew into airspace over the islands, and both countries sent naval vessels to patrol nearby waters. Both sides remain adamant that there is no room for negotiations over their control of the islands, which are in close proximity to strategic shipping routes, fishing grounds, and potentially lucrative oil reserves. Options for Strengthening Global Ocean Governance There are a series of measures, both formal and informal, that can be taken to strengthen U.S. and global ocean governance. First, the United States must begin by finally ratifying the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. On this foundation, the United States should then tap hitherto underused regimes, update twentieth-century agreements to reflect modern ocean challenges, and, in some cases, serve as the diplomatic lead in pioneering new institutions and regimes. These recommendations reflect the views of Stewart M. Patrick, senior fellow and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program, and Scott G. Borgerson, former visiting fellow for ocean governance. In the near term, the United States and its international partners should consider the following steps: - Ratify UNCLOS The United States should finally join the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an action that would give it further credibility and make the United States a full partner in global ocean governance. This carefully negotiated agreement has been signed and ratified by 162 countries and the European Union. Yet despite playing a central role shaping UNCLOS's content, the United States has conspicuously failed to join. It remains among only a handful of countries with a coastline, including Syria, North Korea, and Iran, not to have done so. Emerging issues such as the melting Arctic lend increased urgency to U.S. ratification. By rejecting UNCLOS, the United States is freezing itself out of important international policymaking bodies, forfeiting a seat at decision-making forums critical to economic growth and national security interests. One important forum where the United States has no say is the commission vested with the authority to validate countries' claims to extend their exclusive economic zones, a process that is arguably the last great partitioning of sovereign space on earth. As a nonparty to the treaty, the United States is forgoing an opportunity to extend its national jurisdiction over a vast ocean area on its Arctic, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts—equal to almost half the size of the Louisiana Purchase—and abdicating an opportunity to have a say in deliberations over other nations' claims elsewhere. Furthermore, the convention allows for an expansion of U.S. sovereignty by extending U.S. sea borders, guaranteeing the freedom of ship and air traffic, and enhancing the legal tools available to combat piracy and illicit trafficking. Potential participants in U.S.-organized flotillas and coalitions rightly question why they should assist the United States in enforcing the rule of law when the United States refuses to recognize the convention that guides the actions of virtually every other nation. - Coordinate national ocean policies for coastal states The creation of a comprehensive and integrated U.S. oceans policy should be immediately followed by similar efforts in developing maritime countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) . These so-called BRIC nations will be critical players in crafting domestic ocean policies that together form a coherent tapestry of global governance. Ideally, such emerging powers would designate a senior government official, and in some cases the head of state, to liaison with other coastal states and regional bodies to coordinate ocean governance policies and respond to new threats. Consistent with the Regional Seas Program, the ripest opportunity for these efforts is at the regional level. With UN assistance, successful regional initiatives could then be harmonized and expanded globally. - Place a moratorium on critically endangered commercial fisheries Commercial fishing, a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States, is in grave danger. The oceans have been overfished, and it is feared that many fish stocks may not rebound. In the last fifty years, fish that were previously considered inexhaustible have been reduced to alarmingly low levels. Up to 90 percent of large predatory fish are now gone. Nearly half of fish stocks in the world have been fully exploited and roughly one-third have been overexploited. The recent imposition of catch limits on all federally-managed fish species is an important and long overdue first step, which should be expanded and strengthened to a moratorium on the most endangered commercial fisheries, such as the Atlantic blue fin tuna. But tuna is hardly alone in this predicament, and numerous other species are facing the same fate. Policymakers should stand up to intense political pressure and place fishing moratoriums on the most threatened fisheries to give them a chance to rebound. Doing so would be a courageous act that would help rescue collapsing fish while creating a commercially sustainable resource. In the longer term, the United States and its international partners should consider the following steps: - Strengthen and update UNCLOS The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and related agreements serve as the bedrock of international ocean policy. However, UNCLOS is thirty years old. If it is to remain relevant and effective, it must be strengthened and updated to respond to emerging threats such as transnational crime and marine pollution, as well as employing market-based principles of catch shares to commercial fisheries, especially in the high seas. Lastly, UNCLOS Article 234, which applies to ice-covered areas, should be expanded to better manage the opening Arctic, which will be an area of increasing focus and international tension over the coming years. The international community should also counter the pressure of coastal states that unilaterally seek to push maritime borders seaward, as illustrated by China's claim to all of the South China Sea. Additionally, states should focus on using UNCLOS mechanisms to resolve nagging maritime conflicts, such as overlapping exclusive economic zones from extended continental shelf claims, and sovereignty disputes, such as that of the Spratly and Hans Islands. - Bolster enforcement capacity Many ocean-related governance issues have shortcomings not because rules for better management do not exist, but because weak states cannot enforce them. A failure in the oversight of sovereign waters inevitably leads to environmental degradation and, in cases like Somalia, can morph into problems with global implications, such as piracy. Accordingly, the international community should help less developed coastal states build the capacity to enforce (1) fisheries rules fleets; (2) International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution From Ships regulations to reduce ocean dumping and pollution; (3) other shipping regulations in states with open registries such as Liberia, Panama, Malta, and the Marshall Islands; (4) and existing mandates created to stop illicit trafficking. Developed countries should also help less developed areas monitor environmental variables such as acidification, coral reefs, and fisheries.

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A grooved pulley wheel like that used for ropes is called a sheave. A single sheave mounted in a block and fixed in place simply changes the direction of force exerted on the rope passing over it. If the end of the rope that ordinarily would attach to the load is passed around a second, unfixed pulley and back to the fixed pulley, a load attached to the free pulley can be raised with half the effort, or with a mechanical advantage of 2. Thus arranged, the device is called a block and tackle. The number of pulley wheels mounted in the fixed and free blocks can be increased indefinitely to get a higher and higher mechanical advantage, the mechanical advantage equaling the number of strands running to the free pulley. Therefore if the rope is run over the first fixed pulley wheel, around the free pulley, over a second pulley wheel in the fixed block, and back to the free block, the mechanical advantage is 3. A 300-lb load can be raised by a pull of 100 lb on the free end of the rope. To raise the load 10 ft, however, the free end of the rope must be pulled 30 ft. Disregarding friction, work output will always equal work input. If the action is reversed by attaching the load to the free end of the rope and pulling on the free block, the mechanical advantage becomes a mechanical disadvantage, but a speed advantage. A rope block and tackle is usually for hand operation. To lift larger loads by hand, a chain is substituted for the rope and the pulleys have grooves for gripping the links. A differential pulley consists of two pulleys of different radii connected and rotating as one on a common axle. The pulleys have their circumferences grooved and spiked so that a chain will run in them without slipping. Over the pulleys an endless chain is run, forming two hanging loops. In one loop is placed a movable block, whose pulley is shaped to take the chain. The load is attached to the movable block and is raised by pulling on the other loop of the chain. Power-operated machinery usually has cables, as in vertical-lift drawbridges, power shovels, and cranes. Before the extensive use of electric motors, steam engines or water turbines often supplied the power for factory machinery. One engine or turbine might run a whole factory through a complicated system of shafts, pulleys, and belts. Pulleys for flat belts are crowned to keep the belt centered. Raised flanges will serve the same purpose, but they wear the edges of the belt. Drive pulleys for conveyor belts often have a covering, called lagging, to provide better grip. Individual electric motors usually provide drive by means of V belts, the pulleys having raised flanges to form slots that match the trapezoidal cross sections of the belts. Cone pulleys consist of a number of pulleys of varying diameters massed in the shape of a cone. They are used with belt drives for machines (e.g., lathes) requiring a variety of speeds. In mechanics, a wheel that carries a flexible rope, cord, cable, chain, or belt on its rim. Pulleys are used singly or in combination to transmit energy and motion. In belt drives, pulleys are attached to shafts at their axes, and power is transmitted between the shafts by means of endless belts running over the pulleys. One or more independently rotating pulleys can be used to gain mechanical advantage, especially for lifting weights. The shafts around which the pulleys turn may attach them to frames or blocks, and a combination of pulleys, blocks, and rope is called a block and tackle. The pulley is considered one of the five simple machines. Learn more about pulley with a free trial on Britannica.com. A pulley (also called a sheave or block) is a wheel with a groove between two flanges around its circumference. A rope, cable or belt usually runs inside the groove. Pulleys are used to change the direction of an applied force, transmit rotational motion, or realize a mechanical advantage in either a linear or rotational system of motion. A belt and pulley system is characterized by two or more pulleys in common to a belt. This allows for mechanical power, torque, and speed to be transmitted across axes and, if the pulleys are of differing diameters, a mechanical advantage to be realized. A belt drive is analogous to that of a chain drive, however a belt sheave may be smooth (devoid of discrete interlocking members as would be found on a chain sprocket, spur gear, or timing belt) so that the mechanical advantage is given by the ratio of the pitch diameter of the sheaves only (one is not able to count 'teeth' to determine gear ratio). Belt and pulley systems can be very efficient, with stated efficiencies up to 98%. In a system of a single rope and pulleys, when friction is neglected, the mechanical advantage gained can be calculated by counting the number of rope lengths exerting force on the load. Since the tension in each rope length is equal to the force exerted on the free end of the rope, the mechanical advantage is simply equal to the number of ropes pulling on the load. For example, in Diagram 3 below, there is one rope attached to the load, and 2 rope lengths extending from the pulley attached to the load, for a total of 3 ropes supporting it. If the force applied to the free end of the rope is 10 lb, each of these rope lengths will exert a force of 10 lb. on the load, for a total of 30 lb. So the mechanical advantage is 3. The force on the load is increased by the mechanical advantage; however the distance the load moves, compared to the length the free end of the rope moves, is decreased in the same proportion. Since a slender cable is more easily managed than a fat one (albeit shorter and stronger), pulley systems are often the preferred method of applying mechanical advantage to the pulling force of a winch (as can be found in a lift crane). Pulley systems are the only simple machines in which the possible values of mechanical advantage are limited to whole numbers. In practice, the more pulleys there are, the less efficient a system is. This is due to sliding friction in the system where cable meets pulley and in the rotational mechanism of each pulley. It is not recorded when or by whom the pulley was first developed. It is believed however that Archimedes developed the first documented block and tackle pulley system, as recorded by Plutarch. Plutarch reported that Archimedes moved an entire warship, laden with men, using compound pulleys and his own strength. These are different types of pulley systems: The simplest theory of operation for a pulley system assumes that the pulleys and lines are weightless, and that there is no energy loss due to friction. It is also assumed that the lines do not stretch. In equilibrium, the total force on the pulley must be zero. This means that the force on the axle of the pulley is shared equally by the two lines looping through the pulley. The situation is schematically illustrated in diagram 1. For the case where the lines are not parallel, the tensions in each line are still equal, but now the vector sum of all forces is zero. A second basic equation for the pulley follows from the conservation of energy: The product of the weight lifted times the distance it is moved is equal to the product of the lifting force (the tension in the lifting line) times the distance the lifting line is moved. The weight lifted divided by the lifting force is defined as the advantage of the pulley system. It is important to notice that a system of pulleys does not change the amount of work done. The work is given by the force times the distance moved. The pulley simply allows trading force for distance: you pull with less force, but over a longer distance. In diagram 2, a single movable pulley allows weight W to be lifted with only half the force needed to lift the weight without assistance. The total force needed is divided between the lifting force (red arrow) and the "ceiling" which is some immovable object (such as the earth). In this simple system, the lifting force is directed in the same direction as the movement of the weight. The advantage of this system is 2. Although the force needed to lift the weight is only W/2, we will need to draw a length of rope that is twice the distance that the weight is lifted, so that the total amount of work done (Force x distance) remains the same. A second pulley may be added as in diagram 2a, which simply serves to redirect the lifting force downward, it does not change the advantage of the system. The addition of a fixed pulley to the single pulley system can yield an increase of advantage. In diagram 3, the addition of a fixed pulley yields a lifting advantage of 3. The tension in each line is W/3, and the force on the axles of each pulley is 2W/3. As in the case of diagram 2a, another pulley may be added to reverse the direction of the lifting force, but with no increase in advantage. This situation is shown in diagram 3a. This process can be continued indefinitely for ideal pulleys with each additional pulley yielding a unit increase in advantage. For real pulleys friction among rope and pulleys will increase as more pulleys are added to the point that no advantage is possible. It puts a limit for the number of pulleys usable in practice. The above pulley systems are known collectively as block and tackle pulley systems. In diagram 4a, a block and tackle system with advantage 4 is shown. A practical implementation in which the connection to the ceiling is combined and the fixed and movable pulleys are encased in single housings is shown in figure 4b. Other pulley systems are possible, and some can deliver an increased advantage with fewer pulleys than the block and tackle system. The advantage of the block and tackle system is that each pulley and line is subjected to equal tensions and forces. Efficient design dictates that each line and pulley be capable of handling its load, and no more. Other pulley designs will require different strengths of line and pulleys depending on their position in the system, but a block and tackle system can use the same line size throughout, and can mount the fixed and movable pulleys on a common axle. Shape up your pulleys: minimize costly downtime and extend conveyor belt life by keeping wing pulleys free of entrapped material.(SPECIAL SECTION: CONVEYING & MATERIAL HANDLING) Aug 01, 2009; Consider the frequent task of dislodging material from the standard wing pulley. It's necessary yet annoying and time...

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On the Lap of the Mighty Sagarmatha - Solu Khumbu or Everest region The major mountains are the Mt.Everest, Mt.Lhotse, Cho Oyu, Nuptse, Pumori, Ama Dablam, Thamserku, Kantega, Mera Peak and Island Peak. Mt. Everest, which is part of the Himalaya range, is located on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Rising to a height of 8848m, the world’s highest mountain was named in 1865 after Sir George Everest. The mountain got its Nepali name Sagarmatha during the 1960s, when the Government of Nepal gave the mountain the official Nepali name. In sanskrit Sagarmatha means "mother of the universe”. The Tibetan name for Mount Everest is Chomolungma or Qomolangma, which means “Goddess Mother of the Snows". Climbers wishing to scale the peak have to obtain an expensive permit from the Nepal Government, often costing more than $25,000 (USD) per person. Base Camp, which serves as a resting area and base of operations for climbers organizing their attempts for the summit, is located on the Khumbu glacier at an elevation of 5300 m (17,400 ft); it receives an average of 450 mm (18 in) of precipitation a year. The climate of Mount Everest is extreme In July, the warmest month, the average summit temperature is -19° C (-2° F). When George Mallory, the British climber was asked why he wanted to climb Everest he replied ‘Because it is there’. After two unsuccessful attempts, in 1924 he again tried to climb the peak with Andrew Irvine. They started on June 8, 1924 to scale the summit via the north col route and never returned. Their bodies were later discovered by the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition near the old Chinese camp in 1999. Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay from Nepal were the first two climbers to set foot on the summit of Mt.Everest. They reached the summit at 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953 by climbing through the South Col Route. More than 300 climbers have scaled the highest mountain since then. Also there have been more than 100 deaths on the mountain where conditions are so difficult that most corpses have been left where they fell, some of them visible from standard climbing routes. Mt. Lhotse (8516m) is the fourth highest mountain in the world. It lies south of Mt. Everest. It was first climbed by two Swiss climbers F. Luchsinger and E. Reiss in 1956 from the West face. The Czech scaled it via the South face in 1984. An impressive ring of three peaks makes up the Lhotse massif: Lhotse East or Middle, Lhotse and Lhotse Shar. The South Face of Lhotse is one of the largest mountain faces in the world. Cho Oyu, (8201m) the sixth highest mountain in the world, has gained popularity among climbers just recently. The mountain sits on both sides of the border of Nepal and Tibet, about 30 km. west of Mount Everest. Cho Oyu in Tibetan means "the turquoise goddess ." The south face of Cho Oyu, facing Nepal, is quite steep and difficult, and is rarely climbed. The north side, accessed from Tibet, is more moderate, and there is a relatively safe route to the summit. In the autumn of 1954, an Austrian team made the first ascent via this route. Ama Dablam (6856m) which means ‘mother’s jewellery box’, in sherpa language is considered to be one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Seen from below, the mountain looks like a woman with outstretched arms or a woman wearing a long necklace. Ama Dablam lies alongside Everest in the heart of the Khumbu valley. Mt Lhotse, Mt. Makalu, Mt. Cho Oyu and Mt. Everest can be seen at close quarters from Ama dablam. Nuptse (7,855m.) lies south west of Mt Everest. It is situated in the Khumbu Himal. From the Thyangboche Monastery Nuptse appears as a massive wall guarding the approach to Everest. The name Nup-tse in Tibetan means west-peak. The main ridge, which is separated from Lhotse by a 7556m high saddle, is crowned by seven peaks and goes west-northwest until its steep west-face drops down more than 2300m to the Khumbu-glacier. Nuptse I was first summited by a British expedition on May 16, 1961 Pumori peak at 7145m is just 8 km away from the world’s highest peak Mt.Everest. The ascent to this peak is described as a classic climb in the 7000m peak category. In Tibetan, ‘Pumo’ means girl and ‘Ri’, mountain. The peak was named by George Mallory, the famous English climber who lost his life trying to ascend Everest in 1924. The German climber Gerhard Lenser was the first to reach the summit of Pumori peak in 1962. Pumori is a popular climbing peak and the easiest. The best season to climb this peak is during autumn and spring. Mera Peak (6,475m) is the highest of Nepal's trekking peaks. By its standard route, it is also the highest peak in Nepal that can be climbed without prior mountaineering experience. It was first climbed on 20 May 1953, by J.O.M. Roberts and Sen Tenzing, from the standard route at Mera La. The mountain lies to the south of Everest, dominating the watershed between the wild and beautiful valleys of the Hinku and Hongu. Island Peak also known as Imja Tse at 6160m was named by Erick Shipton's group in 1953.It was so named as the peak resembles an island in a sea of ice when observed from Dingboche. The peak was first climbed in 1953 by a British group as preparation for climbing Mt. Everest. Among them one of the climbers was Mr. Tenzing Norgay. The peak is part of the south ridge of Lhotse Shar and the main land forms a semicircle of cliffs that rise to the north of the summits of Nuptse, Lhotse, Middle Peak and Lhotse Shar. Cho Oyu and Makalu lie to the east of the Island Peak. Baruntse, Amphu and Ama Dablam lie to the south. Lobuche(6,119m) is known as Lhauche among the Locals. It rises above the town of Lhauche which is just a few kilometer from Mt. Everest. The first ascent on this peak was done by Laurice Nielson and Ang Gyalzen Sherpa on 25 April 1984. Kalapattar is a small mountain 5,545 m (18,500 ft) high on the southern flank of Pumori (7,145 m). It is a trekking peak and every year tourists climb this peak to enjoy the fantastic panoramic views it offers of the Khumbu glacier, the Everest and nearby peaks like Lhotse and Nuptse. To the east, Makalu, Amadablam, Pumori, and Cho Oyu are visible. Climate, Flora & Fauna The climate in the Everest region can be divided into four climate zones owing to the gradual rise in altitude. The climatic zones include a forested lower zone, a zone of alpine scrub, the upper alpine zone which includes upper limit of vegetation growth, and the Arctic zone where no plants can grow. The types of plants and animals that are found depend on the altitude. In the lower forested zone, birch, juniper, blue pines, firs, bamboo and rhododendron grow. All vegetation that is found above this zone is shrubs. As the altitude increases, plant life is restricted to lichens and mosses. At an elevation of 5,750m begins the permanent snow line in the Himalayas. From this point there is no sign of greenery or vegetation. A common animal sighted in the higher reaches is the hairy animal yak. Dzopkyo a sterile male crossbreed between a yak and a cow is used to move goods along the trail. Red panda, snow leopard, musk deer, wild yak, and Himalayan black bear are some of the more exotic animals that are found in this region. A variety of birds can be sighted in the lower regions. Sagarmata (Mt. Everest) National Park The Sagarmatha National Park is the highest national park in the world. It was formally opened to public in July 19, 1976. The park covers an area of 1,148 sq km. It rises from its lowest point of 2,845 m (9,335 ft) at Jorsale to 8,850 m (29,035 ft) up to the summit of Everest. The park’s area is very rugged and steep, with its terrain cut by deep rivers and glaciers. It includes three peaks higher than 8,000 m, including Mt Everest. In 1979 the park was inscribed as a Natural World Heritage Site. The park's visitor centre is located at a hill in Namche Bazaar, where a company of the Nepal Royal Army is stationed for protecting the park. The park's southern entrance is a few hundred meters north of Monjo at 2,835 m. Trekking and climbing groups must bring their own fuel to the park (usually butane and kerosene), and the cutting of wood is prohibited. The Sagarmatha Pollution Control, funded by the World Wildlife Fund and the Himalayan Trust, was established in 1991 to help preserve Everest's environment. About a humdred species of birds and more than twenty species of butterflies have made this park their home. Musk deer, wild yak, red panda, snow leopard, Himalayan black bear, Himalayan thars, deer, langur monkeys, hares, mountain foxes, martens, and Himalayan wolves are found in the park Early expeditions to climb Everest from the Nepalese side started from Jiri. Before the airstrip at Lukla came into existence all the trekking and climbing expeditions to the Everest region started from Jiri. Starting from Jiri, the route passes through the Sherpa villages of the Solu Khumbu, many of them having beautiful Buddhist monasteries. Lukla, a village in Khumbu boast of the region’s sole airport.Lying at a height of 9000ft, most travelers to this region usually begin and end their adventure in Lukla. The airport was built in 1964 by Sir Edmund Hillary as part of his project in Khumbu region during the early 60s to transport the supplies for the Himalayan Trust projects in the Khumbu region. Today, somewhere between 90-95% of the foreign nationals who reach Lukla, arrive by a half hour flight from Kathmandu. Namche Bazar is known as the sherpa capital. Namche is actually a village lying at the junction of the Dudh Koshi and a valley that leads to the frontier pass of Nangpa La . It is tucked away in a niche at a height of 7,845 ft. W. H. Tilman and C. Houston were the first westerners to enter it in 1950 and many more have come since then. Facilities like a bank, a post office, hotels and shops where one can purchase climbing equipment as well as tinned food have sprung up over the years. Namche Bazar is the major regional trading center. Its Saturday market or haat is the place where most of the trading takes place. The headquarters of the Sagarmatha National Park is located in Namche. Thyangboche is famous for the Thyangboche gompa. It is one of the most important centers of Buddhism in the region. The gompa is the largest in the Khumbu region. It was first built in 1923. Destroyed by a fire in 1989, it was rebuilt later on partly with foreign aid. From Thyangboche, one gets a panoramic view of Kwangde, Tawache, Everest, Nuptse, Lhotse, Amadablam, Kangtenga, and Thamserku. Buddhism is believed to have been introduced in the Khumbu region towards the end of the 17th century by Lama Sange Dorjee. According to the legend, he flew over the Himalayas and landed on a rock at Pangboche and Thyangboche, leaving his footprints embedded on the stone. He is believed to have been responsible for the founding of the first gompas in the Khumbu region, at Pangboche and Thami. Pangboche is the highest year-round settlement in the valley. The Imja Khola, coming from the right, joins the Dudh Koshi River a little above the village. The gompa (monastery) in Phyangboche is thought to be one of the oldest in the Khumbu region. Khumjung , a village lying west of Thyangboche, is famous for the gompa where the skull of a supposed Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, is preserved under the supervision of the head Lama. The skull seems more like the outer skin of Himalayan Brown Bear, and this is proved by the report of a scientific exploratory expedition conducted by Sir Edmund Hillary, a copy of which is kept in the gompa. Pheriche is located at an altitude of 13,845 ft. It lies on a level patch. Apart from the basic facilities available here, there is a medical-aid post maintained by the Himalayan Rescue Association of the Tokyo Medical College with Japanese doctors in attendance. Among other facilities, there is an air compression chamber installed for assisting victims of high altitude sickness The scenic village of Gokyo lies below the hilly Gokyo Ri(5483m). The village is a cluster of stone houses and walled pastures.One has to pass by the holy Gokyo lakes on the way to the village. The Ngozumpa Glacier Nepal’s longest glacier at 25 miles has to be traversed enroute to this remote village. Gokyo Ri looms above the village on the northern edge of the lake. The summits of Everest, Lhotse and Makalu are visible from the summit of Gokyo Ri. Thami at 3750m is in a large valley. The village has a police checkpost and a few lodges and tea shops. A little above the village is the Thami gompa, which is the site of the annual Mani Rimdu festival. Sherpas live in the upper regions of Solu Khumbu. They emigrated from Tibet about 600 years ago. In the past they were traders and porters, carrying butter, meat, rice, sugar, and dye from India, and, wool, jewelry, salt Chinese silk and porcelain from Tibet and beyond. The closure of the border between India and China undermined their economy. Fortunately, with the mountaineering expeditions and trekkers, the Sherpa's found their load carrying skills, both on normal treks and high altitudes in great demand. The Khumbu region has provided a strong group of able bodied, hardy and fearless Sherpa porters and guides. The sherpas are Buddhists. At the lower elevations lives the Kiranti Rai. The villages of Jubing, Kharikhola, Okhaldhunga, are inhabited by the Rais. Of mongoloid stock they speak their own dialect. Reference is made of their fighting spirit in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. The people from this group have supplied recruits to Gurkha regiments both in the British as well as Indian armies. The Rais follow a religion that is partly animistic with a strong Hindu influence. They revere their ancestors by observing Kul or Pitri puja every year. The Jirels live in the area around Jiri. They are mongoloid and follow Buddhism. Losar is celebrated in the month of February by the Sherpas. ‘Losar’ means New Year in Tibetan. Apart from the Sherpas and Tibetans, the Gurungs and Tamangs also celebrate Losar. Buddhist monks offer prayers for good health and prosperity at monasteries. People exchange various goods and gifts among them. Families organize feasts and perform dances. Dumje is celebrated to mark the birthday of Guru Rimpoche (Padmasambhava).The celebration takes place in June and lasts for six days. It is celebrated in a big way in the villages of Namche, Thame and Khumjung. Mani Rimdu is a festival that celebrates the victory of Buddhism over the ancient animistic religion of Bon. This festival is celebrated in the monasteries of Thyangboche, Chiwang and Thami. At Thangboche the celebration takes place during the November- December full moon. At Thami the Mani rimdu is festival is celebrated during the full moon in May.Chiwang Gompa generally celebrate this festival during autumn. The lamas wear elaborate brocade gowns and papier-mâché masks while performing. Through the dances, symbolic demons are conquered, dispelled, or converted to Dharma Protectors as positive forces clash with those of chaos. The dances convey Buddhist teaching on many levels from the simplest to the most profound, for those who do not have the opportunity to study and meditate extensively. It gives an opportunity to the Sherpas to gather and celebrate together with the monks. Sakela (Chandi Dance) is a harvest festival celebrated by the Rai community. The harvest ceremony involves the worship of mother earth, called ‘Bhumi-Puja’. The festival is celebrated twice a year, once in spring before planting begins and once during autumn before harvesting. Ubhauli is celebrated during the spring season on Baishakh Purnima. In the autumn season on Mangsir Purnima, Udhauli is celebrated. The spring worship is done to propitiate mother earth for a good harvest and the rain god to bless the earth with enough rain. The festival is celebrated with more fervor in the remote hills. The Rai villagers celebrate it with priests (dhami) who perform rituals to worship their ancestors. The elders of the community begin the dance with a puja. Later on everybody participate in the dance forming a circle by holding each other’s hands. With drumbeats, they begin dancing at a slow pace but moves faster later with the drumbeats. The dance steps and hand gestures imitate the sowing and harvesting of crops .The festival also provides an opportunity for the Rai people to socialise. The Classic Everest Base Camp Trek Mt Everest Base Camp is the most popular destination for trekkers in Nepal. Its popularity has grown since the first expedition to the Nepalese side of Everest in the 1950s.One can do this trek the old way, by beginning the trek from Jiri. From Jiri it takes around nine days to reach Namche. On the way you will come across Rai settlements. The other (quicker) alternative is to take a flight to Lukla and to begin the trek from there. The trek follows the Dudh Kosi valley route with an ascent up to the Sherpa capital of Namche Bazaar. From Namche, you traverse along a high path from where you have the first good view of Everest. You head towards Thyangboche Monastery located on top of a mountain ridge and then descend the Imja Khola and continue to the villages of Pangboche and Pheriche. After that you arrive at the Khumbu Glacier. The trek through the glacier takes you first to Lobuche and then to Gorak Shep. From Gorak Shep you can climb up to Kala Pattar for even more spectacular views of the surrounding mountains, including Everest's south west face. Yhou then reach your destination, the Everest Base Camp at the foot of the Khumbu ice fall.

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New York Manumission Society The New York Manumission Society was an early American organization founded in 1785 to promote the abolition of the slavery of African descendants within the state of New York. The organization was made up entirely of white men, most of whom were wealthy and held influential positions in society. Throughout its 71-year history, which ended in 1849, the society battled against the slave trade and for the eventual emancipation of all the slaves in the state; it founded the African Free School for the poor and orphaned children of slaves and free people of color. John Jay John Jay had been a prominent leader in the antislavery cause since 1777, when he drafted a state law to abolish slavery. The draft failed, as did a second attempt in 1785. In 1785, all state legislators except one voted for some form of gradual emancipation. However, they did not agree on what civil rights would be given to the slaves once they were freed. In 1799, an emancipation bill passed by not mentioning the subject of civil rights for freed slaves at all. Jay brought in prominent political leaders such as Alexander Hamilton. He also worked closely with Aaron Burr, later head of the Democratic-Republicans in New York. The Society started a petition against slavery, which was signed by almost all the politically prominent men in New York, of all parties and led to a bill for gradual emancipation. Burr, in addition to supporting the bill, made an amendment for immediate abolition, which was voted down. Jay founded the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May be Liberated or the New York Manumission Society, and became its first president in 1785. The organization was originally composed of Jay and a few dozen close friends, many of whom were slave-owners at the time. The first meeting was on January 25, 1785, at the home of John Simmons - who had space for the nineteen men in attendance since he kept an inn. Robert Troup and Melancton Smith were appointed to draw up rules; Jay was elected President. There were 31 members at the second meeting on February 4, including Alexander Hamilton. Several of the members were Quakers. The Society formed a ways-and-means committee to deal with the difficulty that more than half of the members, including Troup and Jay, owned slaves (mostly a few domestic servants per household). The committee reported a plan for gradual emancipation: members would free slaves then younger than 28 when they reached the age of 35, slaves between 28 and 38 in seven years' time, and slaves over 45 immediately. This was voted down; and the committee dissolved. This society was instrumental in having a state law passed in 1785 prohibiting the sale of slaves imported into the state, and making it easy for slaveholders to manumit slaves either by a registered certificate or by will. In 1788 the purchase of slaves for removal to another state was forbidden; they were allowed trial by jury "in all capital cases," and the earlier laws about slaves were simplified and restated. The emancipation of slaves by the Quakers was legalized in 1798. At that date, there were still about 33,000 slaves statewide. Lobbying and boycotts The Society organized boycotts against New York merchants and newspaper owners involved in the slave trade. The Society had a special committee of militants who visited newspaper offices to warn publishers against accepting advertisements for the purchase or sale of slaves. Another committee kept a list of people who were involved in the slave trade, and urged members to boycott anyone listed. As historian Roger Kennedy reports, "Those [blacks] who remained in New York soon discovered that until the Manumission Society was organized, things had gotten worse, not better, for blacks. Despite the efforts of Burr, Hamilton, and Jay, the slave importers were busy. There was a 23 percent increase in slaves and a 33 percent increase in slaveholders in New York City in the 1790s." Beginning in 1785, the Society lobbied for a state law to abolish slavery in New York, as all the other northern states (except New Jersey) had done. Considerable opposition came from the Dutch areas upstate (where slavery was still popular), as well as from the many businessmen in New York who profited from the slave trade. The two houses passed different emancipation bills and could not reconcile them. Every member of the New York legislature, but one, voted for some form of gradual emancipation, but no agreement could be reached on the civil rights of freedmen afterwards. Success finally came in 1799, when the Society supported a bill which said nothing about such rights. Jay signed this statement into law as governor. The Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery 1799 declared that, from July 4 of that year, all children born to slave parents would be free. It also outlawed the exportation of current slaves. However, the Act held the caveat that the children would be subject to apprenticeship. These same children would be required to serve their mother’s owner until age twenty-eight for males, and age twenty-five for females. The law defined the children of slaves as a type of indentured servant, while scheduling them for eventual freedom. The last slaves were emancipated by July 4, 1827; the process was the largest emancipation in North America before 1861. Thousands of freedmen celebrated with a parade in New York. Other anti-slavery societies directed their attention to slavery as a national issue. The Quakers of New York petitioned the First Congress (under the Constitution) for the abolition of the slave trade. In addition, Benjamin Franklin and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society petitioned for the abolition of slavery in the new nation; but the NYMS did not act. (Hamilton and others felt that Federal action on slavery would endanger the compromise worked out at the Constitutional Convention, and so the new United States.) African Free School See also - Berlin, Ira and Leslie Harris, eds.. Slavery in New York. New Press, 2005. ISBN 1-56584-997-3. - Gellman, David N. Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery And Freedom, 1777-1827 Louisiana State Univ Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8071-3174-1. - Gellman, David N. "Pirates, Sugar, Debtors, and Slaves: Political Economy and the Case for Gradual Abolition in New York." Slavery & Abolition (2001) 22(2): 51-68. Issn: 0144-039x - Gellman, David N. "Race, the Public Sphere, and Abolition in Late Eighteenth-century New York." Journal of the Early Republic (2000) 20(4): 607-636. Issn: 0275-1275 Fulltext: online in Jstor - Leslie M. Harris. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (2003), - Horton, James Oliver. "Alexander Hamilton: Slavery and Race in a Revolutionary Generation" New-York Journal of American History 2004 65(3): 16-24. ISSN 1551-5486 - Roger G. Kennedy, Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character (2000) - Littlefield, Daniel C. "John Jay, the Revolutionary Generation, and Slavery." New York History 2000 81(1): 91-132. Issn: 0146-437x - Edgar J. McManus, History of Negro Slavery in New York (1968) - Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8078-2671-5. - Schaetzke, E. Anne. "Slavery in the Genesee Country (Also Known as Ontario County) 1789 to 1827." Afro-Americans in New York Life and History (1998) 22(1): 7-40. Issn: 0364-2437 - Jake Sudderth," John Jay and Slavery" (2002) at - "African-Americans in New York City, 1626-1863". Emory University Deptartment of History. Retrieved 2006-12-11. - "Race and Antebellum New York City - New York Manumission Society". New-York Historical Society. Retrieved 2006-12-12. - Davis, New York’s Manumission (Free the Slaves!)Society & Its African Free School 1785-1849, as cited. - John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay, Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay (2005) pp 297-99; online at - Edgar McManus, History of Negro Slavery in New York, Syracuse University Press, 1966 - Davis, op. cit.; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton p.214 - Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 215 - Peter Nelson. The American Revolution in New York: Its Political, Social and Economic Significance. (1926). p, 237. - Roger G. Kennedy, Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character (2000) p. 92 - Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht, Aaron Burr (1967) p. 76 - Edgar J. McManus, History of Negro Slavery in New York - Edgar J. McManus, History of Negro Slavery in New York - Jake Sudderth," John Jay and Slavery" (2002) at - Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, a Biography(1982) p. 177

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- OurWorld 2.0 - http://ourworld.unu.edu/en - What does Cancún offer the climate generation? Posted By Huw Oliphant On December 8, 2010 @ 8:30 pm In General | 4 Comments Across the globe, young people are paying attention to what is happening at the COP16 climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico. They are the “climate generation” — the ones who are going to have to live with our climate legacy, our tendency to prevaricate and our collective global failure to act sooner. The hope is that we will see substantive progress in Cancun towards an internationally binding agreement. This hope was echoed by a group of 30 young climate champions (from Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and Vietnam) who met in Vietnam on 22-26 November 2010 and who called on the leaders of the world to stop talking and take action on climate change. They were brought together by the British Council Climate Generation Project in a workshop that focused on green business and entrepreneurship, aimed to help participants develop their green projects through project management and leadership skills training, as well as interaction with experts in the field. What can the climate generation do? To begin with, business as usual is not an option. These young people are green entrepreneurs and they are all developing “cool” projects aimed at addressing climate and sustainability issues in their community. These young people are green entrepreneurs and they are all developing cool projects aimed at addressing climate and sustainability issues in their community. For instance, Syuichi Ishibashi from Japan has developed an impressive energy literacy project to help monitor on-line energy use at home. Other projects include a factory making furniture from recycled materials in Thailand; a community based conservation project (link in Indonesian) near Lake Buret in Tulungagung, East Java; a green fashion show in Korea; and a project aimed at developing smart grid systems in Vietnam. Young leaders can make a difference Siti Nur Alliah, a British Council Climate Champion from Indonesia, is tackling a burning issue in the heart of Indonesia’s countryside in a quest to reverse climate change and lift a community out of poverty. As a community organiser, Alliah was keenly aware that farmers in Sekonyer village, central Borneo, remained poor no matter how much they burned surrounding forest to expand their farmland. “Tragically, no matter how many resources are exploited, they are still considered as a community living under the poverty line,” she said. So Alliah decided to see if there were more environmentally friendly agriculture methods that would have the added benefits of raising the quality and quantity of farm yields. The result was the Forest Farming project, which works with villagers in Sekonyer to expand their knowledge of agriculture to find better ways of managing their land. Alliah says the project depended on cultivating local knowledge, encouraging the community to take action and fostering commitment in the village to sustained involvement. She says the great willingness of the indigenous people to work with her and her team to change their farming practices is a real sign that they are making a difference. Climate Champion Hiroki Fukushima is part of a network of Japanese students who have issued the Climate Campus Challenge to educational institutions throughout the country. To help cut the education sector’s emissions of greenhouse gas, the students encourage universities to use renewable energy sources, retrofit campus buildings and buy green products. They then rank the colleges according to their success. “We made an environmental survey of 334 universities and assessed them according to criteria, such as energy consumption per student, reduction in energy consumption, climate change policies, climate education for students and unique initiatives,” Hiroki said. “We published an Eco University Ranking and awarded certificates to universities with good environmental policies and activities, and organised a seminar to promote universities with good practice.” Hiroki says the number of Japanese students participating in environmental activities has been on the rise since the 1990s but few of the activities were aimed at tackling climate change on campus. To remedy the situation, the core group studied projects overseas and thought how the activities could be best adapted to implement the campus challenge. They then enlisted students at various universities and established a network to realise the project. Thai Climate Champion Panita Topathomwong is driving home her environmental message through her Cool Bus Cool Smile project. Panita is encouraging residents to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by leaving the car in the garage and hopping on public transport. She says that transport is one of the big sources of carbon dioxide emissions in urban centres and cutting back on car use would help lower the sector’s environmental impact and have the added benefit of easing gridlock. So, with the support of the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority (BMTA) and the Ministry of Transport, Panita and her team organised a design competition to decorate three city buses and take the message to the road. The decorated buses toured Bangkok streets for three months after a high-profile launch in April 2009 attended by the Vice Minister of Transport, the Director of the BMTA, a representative from the British Embassy Bangkok and various media. Climate Champions are young green entrepreneurs who are developing innovative projects aimed at addressing climate and sustainability issues in their community. “We believe that by redecorating the buses with great images we conveyed the message about climate change to wider audiences in Bangkok. The buses were like mobile billboards which convinced everybody to be concerned about climate change,” Panita said. It is cool to be a Climate Champion Since 2008, the British Council Climate Generation has worked with over 120,000 young people from across the world interested in tackling climate change. Through the Climate Generation project, young people have the chance to come up with grassroots projects to combat and offset the effects of climate change. The participants are given the training and resources they need to realise their proposals and spread the word about the issue in their communities. Climate Generation encourages young people interested in tackling climate change to connect with each other, come up with local solutions and reach out to local, national and international decision-makers. As Climate Champions, programme participants have access to the training and information they need to ignite discussion in their communities and devise projects that will help people adapt to and mitigate climate change. The result is a global network of enthusiastic young people with the knowledge, contacts and on-the-ground resources to take action on climate change and make positive contributions to people’s lives. Climate Champions have come from a wide variety of backgrounds including government, business, entrepreneurship, NGOs, education and media. Through training in communication and negotiation, they can learn how to put their plans into practice and give voice to the concerns of their generation. Clearly, the Climate Champions are acting in advance of the outcomes at COP16 and “doing it themselves” but hope that real progress can be made at Cancun. • ♦ • For more information on the programme, please contact Huw Oliphant . Article printed from OurWorld 2.0: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en URL to article: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/what-does-cancun-offer-for-the-climate-generation/ URLs in this post: stop talking and take action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8APNC8R57w Climate Generation Project: http://climatecoolnetwork.ning.com/ energy literacy project: http://e-idea2010.climate-change.jp/en/ishibashi.php factory: http://www.kokoboard.com community based conservation project: http://www.pplhmangkubumi.or.id/ Huw Oliphant: mailto:email@example.com Copyright © 2008 OurWorld 2.0. All rights reserved.

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The Durban climate change negotiations are about three gaps. The first is scientific and has to do with the amount of Greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere, and the levels we need to reduce to in order to prevent irreversible changes to the climate system. The second is political and affects the course of the negotiations. The third is the gap between public perception of climate change and the reality of the change that has already begun. All of these gaps are interrelated. In 2009 countries made pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to keep global average temperature from increases below 2 degrees Celsius. Last week the United Nations Environment Programme issued “The Emissions Gap Report: Are the Copenhagen Accord Pledges Sufficient to Limit Global Warming to 2oC or 1.5oC?” Following the conclusion of the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) in Copenhagen, 42 industrialized countries submitted “economy-wide” emissions targets for 2020. Another 43 developing countries also submitted “nationally appropriate mitigation actions.” While the Copenhagen negotiations failed to produce an expected new climate change treaty, these pledges have become the basis for “analyzing the extent to which the global community is on track to meet long-term temperature goals” (for details, see the Emissions Gap Report). They are also the source of much of the wrangling that continues in the Durban negotiations. The 2020 date is significant because that’s the date by which the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that emissions cuts need to start being made if the global average temperature increases are to be kept below 2oC. The report states that while it is possible to reach the required level of reductions by 2020, the current reduction pledges “are not adequate to reduce emissions to a level consistent with the 2°C target, and therefore lead to a gap.” Research tells us that annual emissions need to be around 44 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 equivalent by 2020 to have a likely chance of holding global average temperatures to 2°C or less. (A gigatonne is equal to 1 billion tonnes of carbon. According to the International Energy Agency, the world emitted a record 30.6 tonnes of CO2 in 2010 - a 5% increase over the previous record level in 2008. The report states that if the “highest ambitions” of all the countries that signed the Copenhagen Accord are implemented, annual emissions of greenhouse gases would be cut by around 7 (Gt) of CO2 equivalent by 2020. This represents a cut in annual emissions to around 49 Gt of CO2 equivalent, which would still leave a gap of around 5 Gt compared with where we need to be—”a gap equal to the total emissions of the world’s cars, buses and trucks in 2005.” However, if only the lowest ambition pledges are implemented, and if no clear rules are set in the negotiations, emissions could be around 53 Gt of CO2 equivalent in 2020 – “not that different from business-as-usual so the rules set in the negotiations clearly matter.” If it’s “business as usual” emissions could rise to 56 Gt by the same date. This points to the second gap -- in political will. The differences between those who are feeling the brunt of rapid climate change right now -- primarily many of the Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries -- and the major emitters, is growing. The Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiated nearly 20 years ago in Rio de Janeiro, calls on all nations to cooperate “...in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions.” This has been traditionally interpreted to mean that the industrialized nations of Europe and North America bear a large portion of the responsibility for dealing with the problem since they are primarily responsible for the vast majority of historical emissions. Indeed, the United States was only recently surpassed by China as the largest GHG emitter. However, the US, Canada and others have higher per capita emissions levels. Nevertheless, Canada has led the charge of developed nations that now say that it is “unfair” for developed countries to cut total emissions while developing nations such as China, India and Brazil are not bound to reduce in the same way. Canada has become the first nation in the world to say it will not abide by the Kyoto Protocol, nor will it agree to a second commitment period. This approach has widened the gap between those that support a renewed Kyoto Protocol -- most of the developing world and the European Union (subject to developing nations such as China getting onboard) -- and those that say they don’t want a second commitment period. This group is led by Canada, Russia and Japan but others have now joined, so many that there is little chance that the Kyoto Protocol, which lapses next year, will be renewed in Durban. Such positioning and politicking is widening the gap between developed and developing countries. For some, like the Small Island Developing States, there is a sense of being abandoned to their fates. Delay does not bode well for the Arctic either. People from both regions need immediate and sustained emissions reductions. The third gap is between what we think or believe is (or is not) happening and what the facts are telling us. The latter are based on observation and a growing body of scientific knowledge. There are literally thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers that demonstrate that the climate is changing and we are primarily responsible. The public in developed countries -- and many developing nations -- still has not embraced this reality. While millions of people are mobilized and calling for action, there is still a strong predilection to ignore the signals that are all around us, or to use the current economic downturn as an excuse for inaction. Both lead to the same end -- they are further narrowing the window in which we have time to act. And they are passing the problem of adaptation on to future generations, when the price will be much higher.

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William Gilly has seen a Kraken. The mythical squid beast with ship-dooming tentacles surely exists, Gilly says, because he's seen a baby one. "It was this big around," he says, making a circle as big as a tire with his arms, a proud, boyish smile on his face. Fishermen spotted the carcass of the 2.4-metre-long, 181-kilogram baby giant squid in Monterey Bay three years ago, according to "If you're an assistant professor proposing to study it, I don't think you'd get tenure," he says. "But one has to exist." laboratory at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove brims with squid décor: stuffed animals, preserved specimens, glass figurines, drawings, photographs, plastic toys, and piñatas. He has studied these denizens of the sea for almost four decades, and he's handled countless numbers of the fabled Kraken's smaller cousins, the very real jumbo Humboldt squid. Like their giant counterparts, Humboldt squid are enigmatic. No one has seen them mate or lay eggs. No one has watched them develop from egg to adult. No one knows how many exist. These tentacled titans have now ensnared marine biologists with another riddle: they have left their normal gathering grounds in the Sea of Cortez in Baja California, Mexico. Fishermen worry that a critical part of their livelihood may be gone. Many families have depended on Humboldt squid since the slippery creatures moved in droves into the Gulf of California's Guaymas Basin in the "We have a huge problem on our hands," says coordinator Juan Pedro Vela Arreola of the Alianza de Ribereños y Armadores, an association of fishermen and producers in Mexico. "Fishermen are desperate." Gilly blames the most recent El Niño in the Pacific Ocean for forcing some Humboldt squid to migrate away. Others have physically shrunk -- just one bizarre adaptation among their many strange body-shifting traits. Leaders of Mexican fisheries and scientists are banding together to figure out whether the diablos rojos (red devils) will come back, and how to cope in the "You have to learn to live in a very unpredictable way," says Unai Markaida of El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Campeche, Mexico. "You live like a squid, and you adapt to the life it leads." "They're very mysterious," says marine biologist Danna Staaf, stressing very in a slightly higher pitch. "And Staaf, a self-described "cephalopodiatrist," completed her PhD with Gilly's team. She studied Humboldt squid on two summer research cruises in the Gulf of California before the latest El Niño drove them away. She and her crewmates pulled up to 15 squid out of the water every night, when they would come up to the surface from depths of more than 975 metres to feed. Many of the 9-kilogram cephalopods she caught were about 1.2 metres long. Most were a year old. Scientists can tell their age by looking at the number of rings on tiny crystals located near their brain called statoliths, like botanists can age a tree by counting its rings. These stones help a squid detect gravity and maintain their balance and sense of space. The scientists stored some of the catch in their "squid condo," an oversize cooler with continuously flowing water and six clear, plastic tubes. They housed squid in separate tubes to keep them from attacking one another. Over the next few days, they studied the squids' behaviours and neurophysiology. For instance, altering the temperature and oxygen content of the water could trigger or change their escape response -- the way squid dart away when startled by a predator. Staaf dissected other squid to study their development, the focus of her dissertation. She used their eggs and sperm to make squid babies. She wanted to discover the temperature range at which their eggs could hatch and develop. At the time, Humboldt squid had spread to waters off the coast of Monterey. Marine scientists thought the squid might establish new colonies there, but Staaf wanted to know whether it was even possible for the animals to grow in the much cooler waters of California's Pacific coast. In the lab, she found, their eggs can grow between temperatures of 15 and 25 degrees Celsius, suggesting it is possible they could set up a breeding population. Whether squid babies have the same preferences in the wild is still unknown, Staaf says. Other team members studied squid chromatophores, structures in their muscles that allow them to change colour. Humboldts sometimes flash from red to white as they propel themselves through dark waters. Scientists don't know how they control these colour shifts, whether it's the brain or local nerve cells that set off the flickering. They also don't fully understand why they suddenly change colours, but some speculate it's a form of When they're not in direct contact with other squid, their flesh flickers from red to white in a random, mosaic-like pattern. Gilly compares this to visual white noise. But as they interact with their species, the irregular colour waves become more organised, like a cephalopod Morse code, Gilly says. They can change the intensity of the flashing, as well as the rhythm and frequency. Squid might use these "calls," together with arm posturing, to attract mates or to establish hierarchies, for example. Gilly and his team have seen some of these behaviours through underwater "Crittercams," about the size of 340-gram drink bottle, attached to a squid's back. "Ideally, we'd also like to see what they eat," Gilly says, because that might help his team study these animals. Scientists can't get Humboldts to eat in the lab, so squid last only a few days in Indeed, squid dislike being trapped, strongly. Sometimes they get so anxious, they ram themselves against the tank. "They've never seen the bottom. They've certainly never seen the wall of a tank," Gilly says. "They're intelligent organisms. And when you put one in an abnormal situation, they get totally freaked out. They don't do their flickering in the lab," he notes. Scientists do know that during the day, Humboldt squid forage for silvery lanternfish and other small animals in the oxygen minimum zone, a dark, cold netherworld more than 900 metres deep. Here, oxygen is scarce, and while few animals can withstand its hostile environment, Humboldts seem to thrive. "Living in low oxygen -- that's surprising, especially for an animal that's an athlete," Markaida says. How they move and how their nervous system functions under these conditions is still a mystery. Widespread changes in the temperatures of Earth's oceans have compelled many creatures, including the powerful Humboldt squid, to seek new climes. Their dominion usually stretches from Argentina to California, but more recently they've been spotted in Canada and Alaska. Scientists don't yet understand how the squid are settling into their new hangouts. This month, a few Humboldts stranded themselves on the beaches of Pacific Grove, Calif, while whale-watching boats have spotted them near Point Pinos. These sightings might be a sign they are returning, Gilly says.

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How can we create more effective education systems that provide access and highquality education for all students; capitalizing on emerging technologies for learning anywhere, anytime; and responsive to the 21st century context of an interconnected global economy and rapidly emerging global society? That was an organizing question for more than a thousand people who gathered in Doha, Qatar, for the inaugural World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) last November. Organized by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, the summit brought together key individuals from more than 120 countries on every contintent. The summit’s goal was to examine the key challenges facing education around the globe and to promote visionary thinking about new education models. The summit was opened by Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser al-Missned, chair of the foundation, who said, “Today, we place great faith in the power of education to prepare world citizens for a peaceful and cooperative future and to prepare citizens of our individual nations for the cultural transformations that result from globalization.” The WISE Summit was designed to be a multidisciplinary platform to promote international dialogue about best practices, to recognize exceptional impact through an annual WISE awards program, and to promote innovation and educational engagement on a global scale. The summit builds on and extends the Qatar Foundation’s domestic efforts to modernize Qatar’s own education system, including its flagship Education City, where more than eight top-flight American universities offer degree courses to students from a host of countries. This article cannot deal with every issue on the summit agenda. What follows are a few examples of the challenges and innovations under discussion. Access to Education At the most fundamental level, the world has still not achieved the commitment made by the world’s governments to provide basic education for all children. While there has been remarkable progress worldwide in giving millions of children, including girls, access to primary education, 75 million children never receive any schooling, primarily girls and children in conflict zones. Governments usually provide basic education, but since many of these children are in “weak states,” much of the discussion focused on the role of nongovernmental schools and organizations in reaching the hardest to reach and on the need for schools to be declared “protected zones” in times of conflict. Quality of Education Although the size of education systems has increased enormously in recent decades, the quality has not. Therefore, in higher education, summit participants addressed the role of accreditation systems in improving quality in higher education, making education more relevant in the dynamic global knowledge economy, and moving from measuring inputs to outputs. In elementary and secondary education, the growth of international assessments has increasingly led countries to compare themselves to emerging global standards of excellence and to examine how their education systems can emulate the effectiveness of the highest performing education systems. In keeping with the summit’s emphasis on innovation, central themes included using technology to increase access, improve performance, and promote a new conceptualization of education. For example, in Brazil, a distance learning initiative transmits live classes via videoconference to 25,000 students in 700 secondary school classrooms throughout the remote reaches of the Amazon forest. In sub-Saharan Africa, a consortium of 15 universities in nine countries delivers open educational resources to almost one quarter million teachers, many of whom are not formally trained. And in India, the provocative “hole in the wall” experiments, in which computers are installed in walls in slum areas and left for children to use unsupervised, show just how much children can learn on their own, without teachers, in “self-organized learning environments.” There was also lively debate about the potential educational uses of Twitter, videogames, and, especially, mobile phones, which now have four billion customers around the world (compared with 1.5 billion e-mail accounts). Given this huge penetration of mobile phones, could strong educational applications be developed so that poorer countries can leapfrog the lack of Internet access? Finally, there was widespread recognition that the content of education itself needs to change--that a global world requires a global education. Echoing Confucius’ sentiment that “It is better to take a journey of 10,000 li than to read 10,000 books,” there was agreement that more students need to study outside their own countries. Currently, only about 2% of higher education students do so. Migration and increasing diversity within countries also require that schools, from kindergarten on, teach tolerance and respect for other cultures and faiths. And the rapid pace of globalization is causing countries everywhere to recognize that their young people need to be more globally minded and to ask: What should all education systems teach their young people about other cultures, languages, and global challenges? How can education bring the world to students and students to the world? Overall, the summit made a convincing case that significant rethinking of education is needed. All nations share an interest in creating more effective education systems that provide access and high-quality education for all students, that capitalize on emerging technologies for learning anywhere and anytime, and that are responsive to the 21st-century context of an interconnected global economy and rapidly emerging global society. The WISE Initiative and annual summit were attempts to provoke some answers to the questions that concern all nations. Author: Vivien Stewart Originally published on pdkintl.org.

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On Cancer’s Trail by Florence Williams Stefanie Raymond-Whish was 9 years old when her grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. A traditional Navajo who raised 15 children after her husband died in a car wreck, Raymond-Whish's ama' sa' ni seldom spoke about her illness. Even after her surgery, when she lived with the grandchildren and their mother, she always acted strong around the kids. It became a pattern: When Raymond-Whish was 13, her 38-year-old mother, Nellie Sandoval, was also diagnosed with breast cancer. And Sandoval was equally reserved on the subject. "My mother was really good about not appearing sick in front of us," says Raymond-Whish, now 32. "As a little girl, I knew about cancer, but didn't understand the impact of it at the time." She understood it better by the time she was in college, in Flagstaff, Ariz., when a new tumor appeared in her mother's other breast. "When my mom had her recurrence, that's when it really hit me ... it was really upsetting. I went home to Farmington for her lumpectomy." Sandoval survived the disease, but not without a long struggle that included chemotherapy, radiation, and finally a double mastectomy. "My breasts were pretty mangled," says Sandoval, now 58. "So I said, 'Just get rid of them.' " Both Sandoval and her daughter have made breast cancer and its impact on Navajos the focus of their lives. Sandoval became an activist and filmmaker, working out of her papaya-colored home in Farmington, N.M. Raymond-Whish has taken her mission a step further: She works as a molecular biologist at the University of Northern Arizona, searching for breast cancer's root causes. "Is there any difference in how breast cancer develops in Native Americans and non-Native Americans?" she asks. One possible - and provocative - answer is emerging from her lab at the university: uranium. Scientists have long known that uranium damages human cells. But in over six decades of atomic health testing, no one had ever noticed that uranium, at low doses, can act like an estrogen. No one, that is, until recently, when Raymond-Whish and her coworkers observed some unusual effects in lab animals. Uranium can be found in several of the Jurassic sandstones that lie beneath the Four Corners region like a wrecked layered pastry. The target of frenzied mining throughout the Cold War, uranium ore has been wrenched from the ground, pulverized, milled and tossed in tailings across the Navajo Reservation. Low-level radioactive waste has dissolved into groundwater, escaped onto dust particles and blown off thousands of passing trucks to settle uneasily on surface soils. Over 1,000 abandoned uranium mines pockmark Navajo lands, but only half of them have been reclaimed. Exposure to uranium and its daughter elements has been linked to lung cancer, kidney damage and bone disease in Navajos, and it is the suspected culprit in numerous other medical conditions, from degenerative nerve disease and birth defects to a variety of other cancers. Raymond-Whish's research lab is tucked inside a neo-Grecian edifice on the Northern Arizona University campus. With her gloved hands in a ventilated booth, the white-coated scientist carefully measures out uranium in solution into small test tubes. The solution will be injected into dishes of cultivated human breast cells, donated by a nun who died of breast cancer in 1979. The MCF-7 cells, as they are known, have been kept alive by the Michigan Cancer Fund through 178 generations of cell division. They are famous among researchers for the properties they exhibit in lab experiments. For example, estrogen causes them to proliferate rapidly - exactly as it does in real-life breast tissue, which is why many women diagnosed with breast cancer have their estrogen-producing ovaries removed. Raymond-Whish wants to see if the cells react in the same way to uranium. "What I'm really interested in is the development of the mammary gland," says Raymond-Whish, who at this point is just weeks away from finishing her doctoral dissertation. A former teen rodeo star in barrel racing, she once wanted to be a veterinarian. But NAU didn't have a vet school, so she majored in zoology. That eventually landed her in the Discovery Research lab, where she studied the effects of pollution on tadpoles. She found she loved research. "It's like being a detective," she says. The lab's discoveries have already demolished the conventional wisdom on the properties of uranium. Not only does the heavy metal appear to alter mammary cells at very low doses, but it also seems to interfere with normal hormonal signals. Sometimes the uranium follows the same pathways as estrogen, but sometimes it doesn't, which means it's triggering other endocrine responses as well. "We don't yet know the mechanism of how uranium is affecting these cells," Raymond-Whish says, "but we do know an estrogen receptor is involved. We see it in both animals and MCF-7 cells." Although the work in Raymond-Whish's lab is considered pure research science, it is impossible to sift it from the real-world context of her family, her culture and her beliefs. Breast, uterine and ovarian cancers have risen steeply in Indian country since the advent of uranium mining. Having watched her grandmother and mother suffer, and now with two kids of her own, 14 and 4 years old, Raymond-Whish can't help but wonder if she's next in line. But while Raymond-Whish's intimate acquaintance with cancer may harm her credibility as a dispassionate scientist, it may also propel her to help make startling discoveries where no one else has thought to look. The lab's investigation started several years ago, when Northern Arizona University became part of a team that received a five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute. The project is designed to address community health care, so the local Navajo elders had a few suggestions. They told the scientists they wanted to know more about the health effects of uranium pollution. "So I started adding uranium to the drinking water of my lab animals," recalls physiologist Cheryl Dyer, who was Raymond-Whish's faculty advisor at the time. "And because I'm an ovarian physiologist, I wanted to see what happened in the ovary." Uranium has long been known to be radioactive and toxic, but no one had ever looked at its effects on follicle counts, or the number of "pre" eggs - eggs in the ovary that have not yet been released for fertilization. Dyer and Raymond-Whish found that the number of pre-eggs declined with low exposure to uranium, and that the mice developed heavier-than-normal uteruses. Normally, a toxic chemical will cause an organ such as a kidney to shrink, not expand. "I said, 'Whoa, what is going on here?' " says Dyer. "I started to wonder if there were other heavy metals that cause these changes, and it turns out cadmium does the same thing. That's when a light bulb went off in my head. Cadmium is an estrogen mimic." All those decades of lab work with atomic elements, and "they had completely missed the boat on estrogen mimicry." Raymond-Whish was the lead author of a paper showing the unexpected effects of uranium on mouse follicle counts, uterine weights and accelerated puberty. "Drinking Water with Uranium below U.S. EPA Water Standard Causes Estrogen Receptor Dependent Responses in Female Mice" was published in December in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal put out by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. Raymond-Whish concluded that uranium acts as an estrogen, and she recommended that Navajo girls and women be followed closely for reproductive cancers. In conversation, Dyer makes her opinion clear: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should lower its drinking water standard for uranium from 30 micrograms per liter to 20 micrograms, the Canadian standard. But Dyer and Raymond-Whish are tip-toeing out on a treacherous scientific limb by suggesting policy changes that are based on controversial data. Raymond-Whish's work and its results have landed her in the middle of a scientific and regulatory quagmire. It's one thing to regulate a chemical known to be toxic at high doses; it's entirely another to suggest regulating minute levels of a substance that is readily found across a large swath of the American West. Many communities, not just those on the reservation, are affected by uranium. Recent tests in Colorado, for example, revealed that 37 cities and towns in the state depend on drinking water that exceeds federal levels for uranium and its daughter nuclides. Uranium is not just an emotional issue for Raymond-Whish, but for the tribe as a whole. The legacy of mining the element on the 27,000-square-mile reservation is so deeply and collectively felt that the Navajo Nation banned it altogether in 2005 in the face of globally rising ore prices. During the '40s and the Cold War period, the U.S. government used yellow cake - or milled and concentrated uranium ore - to build nuclear weapons. The government stopped buying the ore for weapons in 1971, but the commercial nuclear energy market picked up the slack until the early 1980s. Only about a quarter of all U.S. uranium miners were Native American - Laguna, Hopi, Zuni and Ute as well as Navajo. But Native Americans have been disproportionately affected: Their tribal lands are still contaminated, and former miners suffer illnesses and deaths for which many families are still awaiting compensation. Despite the tribal ban, at least five companies are seeking state permits in New Mexico to mine lands just off the reservation, including on tribal allotment land. In Arizona, 700 individual mining claims were filed in 2005. The prehistoric sea and river beds that run underground from Naturita, Colo., to Grants, N.M., and across to Moab, Utah, still hold an estimated 600 million pounds of low-grade ore. But for every 4 pounds of uranium extracted, 996 pounds of slightly radioactive waste is left over, in piles, in pits and eventually in the soil, arroyos and underground aquifers. Some Western tailings piles, like those outside of Monticello, Utah, or Grand Junction, Colo., have been cleaned up. But those on tribal lands have fallen through yawning bureaucratic and regulatory gaps. It's estimated that up to 25 percent of unregulated water sources on the Navajo Reservation exceed federal drinking water standards for uranium. And many families still haul water from these wells, despite warnings by health providers and advocacy groups. In her lab experiments, Raymond-Whish applies concentrations of uranium that match those of water supplies in parts of the Four Corners, at or slightly above the current EPA standard. She will treat the mammary cells - which come bathed in a red wash of nutrients that resembles weak Kool-Aid - twice in nine days with differing doses. She will then collect the breast cells, extract their protein signatures, and use a tedious process to examine differences in the number of their estrogen receptors. She will also feed rats different mixtures of uranium-tainted water and examine their mammary glands for altered development. She will compare those results to rats fed a well-known synthetic estrogen, diethylstilbestrol, or DES, and to rats that have drunk plain tap water. She'll look for changes to the mammary glands' terminal end buds, lobules and milk ducts, changes that may make them more prone to breast cancer. The work is controversial, and its implications, both for the science of breast cancer and for the treatment of past and future mining pollution, could be profound. Like Marie Curie over a century before, Raymond-Whish is both repelled and fascinated by the heavy element's mysterious abilities to alter living cells. In some respects, Raymond-Whish and Curie are not dissimilar. Curie, a Polish Jew working in anti-Semitic France, was the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. As the first Navajo to be awarded a Ph.D. in the Biology Department of NAU, Raymond-Whish displays a confident ease in navigating a different dominant culture. Like Curie, she is driven by an unrelenting curiosity. If it was a difficult journey from being Rookie of the Year in barrel racing to creating stunning presentations on heavy metals, Raymond-Whish doesn't show it. She moves through the fluorescent-lit lab in a quiet, deliberate fashion, her long, shiny hair neatly in place. "I like it that you're working on something no one knows the answers to and you're finding the answers," says Raymond-Whish. She grew up in Colorado and New Mexico with her siblings, stepfather and mother, who was a high school guidance counselor before becoming a breast-cancer activist. Forty-four percent of Navajos do not graduate from high school, but Raymond-Whish's mother made sure that she did. "Everybody's saying it's a big deal for me to get a Ph.D. For me, nothing less was expected than, 'You're going to college.' " The lab work is routine - even tedious - but it's also demanding and consuming. She is tired. With her oral defense looming before a committee of distinguished faculty, she doesn't slow down. In the mornings, she drops her two kids at school. Her husband, Bryan, a Wichita Indian, works nearby in the university's admissions office. She shuttles from the tissue culture room down a long linoleum-floored corridor to the animal histology lab with its wide-screened computer that magnifies mouse ovary sections 40 times over. Scrolling across the screen to count the follicles is her least favorite job. "I get motion sick," she says. The ovaries dominate the screen like giant pink potato chips, lightly salted. The science of endocrine disruptors, which studies chemicals that mimic hormones, is a little over 10 years old and still rife with skeptics. It has only been in recent years that very low doses of chemicals - in the parts-per-billion range - have been measurable. (A part per billion is the equivalent of one kernel of corn in a corn-filled silo 45 feet tall.) But natural hormones do their work at these very low levels in the human body. One theory holds that certain environmental chemicals, both natural and man-made, can bind to and deceive the hormone receptors. These receptors are the signal towers that trigger - or prevent - cellular responses that govern everything from metabolism to sex. Artificial chemicals scramble the signals. They appear to be interfering with normal cellular communication and altering how and when the cells, glands and organs develop. Endocrine disruptors have been implicated in obesity, infertility and the timing of puberty as well as in cancer. When many older women stopped taking synthetic estrogen a few years ago, breast cancer rates in this country dropped for the first time in 40 years. DES, the control substance used by Raymond-Whish, was given to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages up until 1971. Their daughters, who were exposed to it in the womb, have been stricken with unusual reproductive cancers, and recent studies have shown an increased risk of breast cancer as well. Typical carcinogens cause a cell's DNA to mutate, eventually leading to cancer. Radiation causes the fragile chains of DNA to break, also leading to errors and mutations. Scientists know a lot about these two types of cancer-causing agents. But endocrine disruption is far more mysterious. Which is why scientists like Raymond-Whish find themselves at a unique moment in science, just as the traditional models of understanding disease are shifting. The field of breast cancer research in particular is driving the debate. Chemicals such as atrazine and DDT (an herbicide and a pesticide, respectively), plastics - such as the bisphenol A compound found in Nalgene that was banned from baby bottles this spring in Canada - and now uranium, are challenging and confounding scientists seeking to understand the actions of chemicals in the human body. In the dynamic field of environmental health, toxicologists - who study traditional dose-response curves of carcinogens - and endocrinologists - who study extremely low levels of chemicals that do not always follow expected linear curves - frequently disagree. Because it is not yet known exactly how chemicals like uranium act upon cells, some scientists flatly dispute Raymond-Whish's findings. "Uranium is not plausibly linked as an endocrine disruptor," says toxicologist Margaret Ruttenber, director of the environmental health studies program of the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment. "There is an absence of a known mechanism." Louise Canfield, director of the Native American Cancer Research Partnership at the University of Arizona, says: "My personal opinion is that obesity and other lifestyle factors are key risks (for breast cancer), along with access to care. Uranium in drinking water is a health hazard for sure, but I'm not sure it's a primary cause of cancer." But others consider the work groundbreaking. "This is a science of subtlety," explains Andrea Gore, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and former advisor to the National Science Foundation. "(Dyer's and Raymond-Whish's) work is consistent with other good labs. People criticize the field of endocrine disruption because we don't always understand the mechanisms, but the effects are still real. This is why animal studies are so important. The responses we see in lab animals can happen in humans, because we share the exact same hormones. The estrogen receptor is similar." Still, more evidence is needed before scientists concede a link between uranium and breast cancer in humans. "You can make a very strong case with animal studies, but it will never be definitive," says cancer expert Joaquin Espinosa, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "You hope that nature would have done the experiment for you out there at some point. You need to show that real people are affected." But epidemiological data on the reservation is hard to come by. For one thing, it's difficult to sort out reliable cancer statistics and their changes over time. Some Navajo elders consult only medicine men, so some cancers go unreported. Cancer itself is translated in Navajo as Lood doo nadziihii, "the sore that does not heal." Some patients do not seek treatment, nor do they even speak of the disease for fear of wishing it upon their families, according to Fran Robinson, a nurse oncologist at San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington. Until recently, the Indian Health Services kept haphazard records in which diagnoses went unconfirmed and doctors came and went. For a variety of reasons, including instances of abuse of trust by researchers, the Navajo Nation guards its own data as closely as any member of the former Soviet bloc. The New Mexico State Tumor Registry keeps statistics on cancers by county, including those on the New Mexico portion of the reservation, which is also where many uranium mines were located. In her published paper, Raymond-Whish cites registry data from the late 1970s showing a 17-fold increase in childhood reproductive cancers there compared to the U.S. as a whole. These are extremely rare cancers that are related to hormone systems. Another study looking at registry data from 1970-1982 showed a 2.5-fold increase in these cancers among all Native Americans in New Mexico. (Although these statistics are not broken down by tribe, most of the Native Americans in the state are Navajo.) A 1981 paper showed a possible link between incidents of birth defects in families and the proximity of those families to uranium mine tailings. The sample sizes of the first two studies were too small to draw solid conclusions, and the birth defects study was flawed, cautions Charles Wiggins, director of the Tumor Registry. He plans to re-examine childhood cancer statistics this fall, using new data gathered since 1982. Overall, Native Americans in New Mexico actually suffer less cancer than the rest of the country, including about half the rate of breast cancer. But even as breast cancer rates in the U.S. have leveled or dropped slightly in recent years, they continue to grow among Native Americans, and the rate has increased more steeply over the past three decades. Breast cancer is the number-two killer (after heart disease) of Navajo women and the most common cancer found in Navajos. (In the U.S. as a whole, lung cancer is the most common cancer.) Navajos with cancer also suffer higher mortality rates due to poor access to medical care. One study found that between one-third and one-fifth of Navajo breast cancer patients receive substandard care. Relatively more young Navajo women get breast cancer, although much of this can be explained by demographics: Navajos have a younger population than other groups. To the doctors working on the reservation, the anecdotal evidence is disturbing. "When we see women in their 30s with breast cancer, it really knocks everyone for a loop," says physician Tom Drouhard, who has been practicing in Tuba City, Ariz., for 30 years. "Our ladies come in with later stages and higher death rates. It's hard to say what the trends are. All of these tumors are multi-factorial, and uranium could be another thing thrown at it. We are very paranoid about the situation with uranium. We had uncovered tailings five miles from Tuba City for 20 years. It's a reasonable concern." Two other hormonally active cancers, uterine and ovarian cancers, have doubled or tripled in New Mexico Indians since 1970 while remaining essentially the same for Anglos and Hispanics. But although lung cancer in the Navajo population has been authoritatively linked to uranium exposure, it's harder to make the case for other cancers. "It's a tough nut to crack," says Wiggins. "The rise in breast cancer everywhere almost certainly has to do with hormones more than anything else. Is something going on with hormones and hormone receptors? Our data is not going to make or break any one hypothesis, because there are a zillion factors going up or down. But you have to take seriously any proposition anyone comes out with, because we just don't have answers yet." It's difficult to trace a disease to an environmental exposure that may have occurred years earlier. And so far, cancer cases have not been mapped in concert with drinking water sources. "Is there more breast and reproductive cancer here?" asks Dyer. "Yes, but you can't localize it geographically. It would be nice to establish a connection between where people are getting sick and where they drink their water. It's hard to get the data. It's frustrating." One major effort is currently under way to do just that, but the sickness in question is kidney disease, not cancer. This five-year, $2.5 million study, a collaboration between the University of New Mexico Community Environmental Health Program, the Eastern Navajo Health Board and the Dine Network for Environmental Health, is being funded by U.S. Health and Human Services. The team is compiling illness data from 1,300 Navajos, backed up by urine and blood samples, and then overlaying the results on a map of 160 drinking wells that have been studied for uranium, arsenic and other contaminants. Preliminary data from 550 residents and 100 wells have already shown that living within .8 kilometer of an abandoned mine is a significant predictor of kidney disease and diabetes. Although the science linking uranium with kidney disease is solid, it's never before been demonstrated on a real-life map showing proximity to mines, says Chris Shuey, an environmental scientist at the Southwest Research and Information Center. Once the kidney data are in, the researchers might look at cancer next, he says. Of course, Navajos are not the only population exposed to uranium. What about breast cancer rates in other areas with better data? Susan Pinney is an epidemiologist at the University of Cincinnati. She and her colleagues looked at the population surrounding a nuclear processing facility in Fernald, Ohio, which operated between 1952 and 1989. The facility, which made fuel rods for nuclear power plants, was the site of numerous accidental releases of uranium into the surrounding air and water. As a result of a $73 million class action lawsuit in 1990 against National Lead of Ohio and the U.S. Department of Energy, the Fernald Medical Monitoring Project has accumulated 17 years worth of data on illnesses and exposures. Pinney examined the medical records of 8,770 people, including nearly 5,000 women, for a variety of cancers, and was able to model the exposure level of each individual. Her work is still being prepared for publication, and she declined to discuss it. However, a presentation of her preliminary, statistically significant findings last November to the annual conference of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Centers is now available on-line. Its provocative conclusion: "For women living within five miles of a uranium processing plant, degree of exposure to uranium particulates was related to risk of incident breast cancer." A few months ago, Raymond-Whish held a traditional Kinaalda ceremony for her daughter, Darby, to mark her passage into puberty. One of the most important Navajo rituals, it celebrates fertility, the natural order and harmony with the earth through song and prayer. Raymond-Whish's mother was there along with dozens of other relatives, and Dyer from the biology department at NAU also attended. For Raymond-Whish, it was a happy, soulful event, but shadowed by the uncomfortable realities of her career in cancer research. From now until late middle age, Darby will produce the large pulses of estrogen that have been linked to breast and other cancers in so many women. And natural harmony, as her mother knows, is not what it used to be, especially now that pollutants are acting like even more estrogen in our bodies. Raymond-Whish can only hope that Darby's cells have the normal number of receptors, and that her genes and her environment haven't somehow conspired to reprogram her development. "What does artificial estrogen do to the breast?" she asks. "It depends on the time of exposure. If you look at cells of a younger individual who's not yet through puberty, and you expose them to uranium, then that could promote earlier onset of puberty, earlier breast budding. And if they're exposed in the womb, you could be changing the way the receptors are expressed through life." In breast cancer research in general, there is a fundamental shift from large epidemiological studies that look at women's current lifestyles and exposures to an examination of what the women were exposed to as children. "Most epidemiology starts with the moment a tumor is diagnosed," said Irma Russo, a molecular biologist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. "We need to look at when normal cells may have transformed many years earlier." Suzanne Fenton, a research biologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, agrees. "We think one of the main drivers of breast cancer is what changes occurred in very early life to alter breast development. It's a fairly radical re-thinking." Among other experiments, Raymond-Whish is exposing pregnant rats to uranium in order to track what happens in their offspring. When she tried this earlier with mice, the female pups exposed in the womb entered puberty approximately two days earlier, just as they did when exposed to DES. It's a subtle difference, but when combined with other real-life exposures, it may add up. Explains Fenton: "It's important to remember that breast cancer risk is likely determined by a number of compounds interweaving with genetic factors and not just any one exposure." Certainly, lifestyles on the reservation have changed in many ways over the past 50 years. "Once upon a time there was no diabetes here, no diverticulitis, no colon cancer," says physician Drouhard. "We are now exposed to the same things you are: plastics, fast food, obesity. Now everybody I know eats at Kentucky Fried Chicken." One way to learn more is by working with all those nose-twitching rodents in the lab. In the coming months, Raymond-Whish will repeat her experiments, prepare to publish again, and spend more time staring at the nauseating giant ovaries on the computer screen. The rats are euthanized before they actually get sick. Still, she says, they do have to offer up their organs to science. It's not easy for her to kill the animals. "Culturally, it's an issue," she says. "But I'm searching for something that's going to help somebody or even lots of people. I always say, 'Thank you for your life.' " Florence Williams is a 2007-2008 Scripps Fellow at the University of Colorado, where she is researching endocrine disruption and cancer. A former HCN staffer, she currently serves on the HCN board. This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation. Kathleen Tsosie, who has devoted her life to helping others, now faces the frightening possibility that her breast cancer has returned. Glenda Rangel and her family grew up drinking from and swimming in water tanks dangerously polluted with uranium. Nellie Sandoval, the mother of scientist Stefanie Raymond-Whish, has become an outspoken activist as a result of her own struggle with breast cancer.© High Country News

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Columbia Disaster: What Happened, What NASA Learned On Feb. 1, 2003, space shuttle Columbia broke up as it returned to Earth, killing the seven astronauts on board. NASA suspended space shuttle flights for more than two years as it investigated the disaster. An investigation board determined that a large piece of foam fell from the shuttle's external tank and fatally breached the spacecraft wing. This problem with foam had been known for years, and NASA came under intense scrutiny in Congress and in the media for allowing the situation to continue. A fatal strike Columbia, on mission STS-107, left Earth for the last time on Jan. 16, 2003. At the time, the shuttle program was focused on building the International Space Station. However, STS-107 stood apart as it emphasized pure research. The seven-member crew — Rick Husband, commander; Michael Anderson, payload commander; David Brown, mission specialist; Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Laurel Clark, mission specialist; William McCool, pilot; Ilan Ramon, payload specialist from the Israeli Space Agency — spent 24 hours a day doing science experiments in two shifts. They performed around 80 experiments in life sciences, material sciences, fluid physics and other matters. During the crew's 16 days in space, NASA was investigating a foam strike during launch. About 82 seconds after Columbia left the ground, a piece of foam fell from a "bipod ramp" that was part of a structure that attached the external tank to the shuttle. Video from the launch appeared to show the foam striking Columbia's left wing. Several people within NASA pushed to get pictures of the breached wing in orbit. The Department of Defense was reportedly prepared to use its orbital spy cameras to get a closer look. However, NASA officials in charge declined the offer, according to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) and "Comm Check," a book about the disaster. On Feb. 1, 2003, the shuttle made its usual landing approach to the Kennedy Space Center. Just before 9 a.m. EST, however, abnormal readings showed up at Mission Control. They lost temperature readings from sensors located on the left wing. Then, tire pressure readings from the left side also vanished. The Capcom, or spacecraft communicator, called up to Columbia to discuss the tire pressure readings. At 8:59:32 a.m., Husband called back from Columbia: "Roger," followed by a word that was cut off in mid-sentence. At that point, Columbia was near Dallas, travelling 18 times the speed of sound and still 200,700 feet (61,170 meters) above the ground. Mission Control made several attempts to get in touch with the astronauts, with no success. It was later found that a hole on the left wing allowed atmospheric gases to bleed into the shuttle as it went through its fiery re-entry, leading to the loss of the sensors and eventually, Columbia itself. Searching for debris Twelve minutes later, when Columbia should have been making its final approach to the runway, a mission controller received a phone call. The caller said a television network was showing video of the shuttle breaking up in the sky. Shortly afterward, NASA declared a space shuttle "contingency" and sent search and rescue teams to the suspected debris sites in Texas and later, Louisiana. Later that day, NASA declared the astronauts lost. “This is indeed a tragic day for the NASA family, for the families of the astronauts who flew on STS-107, and likewise is tragic for the nation,” stated NASA's administrator at the time, Sean O’Keefe. The search for debris took weeks, as it was shed over a field of some 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) in east Texas alone. NASA eventually recovered 84,000 pieces, representing nearly 40 percent of Columbia. Among them were the crew remains, which were identified with DNA. Much later, in 2008, NASA released a crew survival report detailing the Columbia crew's last few minutes. The astronauts probably survived the initial breakup of Columbia, but lost consciousness in seconds after the cabin lost pressure and then died as it disintegrated. Report calls for more funding, emphasis on safety In the weeks after the disaster, a dozen officials began sifting through the Columbia disaster, led by Harold W. Gehman Jr., former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Joint Forces Command. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, or CAIB, as it was later known, later released a multi-volume report on how the shuttle was destroyed, and what led to it. Besides the physical cause – the foam – CAIB had a damning assessment about the culture at NASA that led to the foam problem and other safety issues being minimized over the years. "Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop," the board wrote, citing "reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices" and "organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information" among the problems found. CAIB recommended NASA ruthlessly seek and eliminate safety problems, such as the foam, to help astronaut safety in future missions. It also called for more predictable funding and political support for the agency, and added that the shuttle must be replaced with a new transportation system. "The shuttle is now an aging system but still developmental in character. It is in the nation's interest to replace the shuttle as soon as possible," the report stated. Returning to flight The shuttle's external tank was redesigned, and other safety measures implemented. In July 2005, STS-114 lifted off and tested a suite of new procedures, including one where astronauts used cameras and a robotic arm to scan the shuttle's belly for broken tiles. NASA also put more camera views on the shuttle during liftoff to better monitor foam shedding. Due to more foam loss than expected, the next shuttle flight did not take place until July 2006. After STS-121's safe conclusion, NASA deemed the program ready to move forward and shuttles resumed flying several times a year. "We're still going to watch and we're still going to pay attention," STS-121 commander Steve Lindsey said at the time. "We're never ever going to let our guard down." Columbia's loss – as well as the loss of several other space-bound crews – receives a public tribute every year at NASA's Day of Remembrance. That date is marked in late January or early February because, coincidentally, the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia crews were all lost in that calendar week. The crew has received several tributes to their memory over the years. On Mars, the rover Spirit's landing site was ceremonially named Columbia Memorial Station. Also, seven asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter now bear the crew's names. — Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com Contributor

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|Huang Ti about 1000 BC| That left as the oldest known medical book through most of history as Nei Ching written by Huang Ti about 2,697 BC. The work basically consists of conversations between the emperor and his physician Ch'i Pai. Parts of the dialog are recorded medical descriptions of asthma-like symptoms and possible remedies. Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wen was known as the Yellow Emperor who reined over Ancient China from approximately 2697-2598 B.C. He is known as the Father of Chinese Medicine. (1) He is believed to have ruled China as the third of China's first five rulers from 2696-2598 B.C. There is an ongoing debate as to whether he actually existed or was the work of legends. There's also an ongoing debate as to whether he actually wrote the Nei Ching Su Wen or whether it was actually written about 1000 B.C and antedated "as to enhance it's value," according to one historian. Veith quotes one historian who questioned that Ti could possibly rule a nation and still have plenty of time for dialog with his physician ch'i Pai and also time to write it all down. (2) Of significance in the Nei Ching is the relevance of Yang, Yin and Tao. Ilza Veith, in her 2002 book, "The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine," described that in the beginning there was chaos between the three primary substances -- force, form and substance. This ultimately results in a light substance rising to form heaven, and a heavy substance sinking to form the earth. |The Nei Chung| This whole concept was similar to other civilizations, such as in the West the belief was that disease was the result of an imbalance of the four humours. In China disease was believed to be caused by too much of the essence yang and/ or too little yin. So in order to maintain health one would have to maintain a balance of Yang and Yin, which was ultimately accomplished by good behaviours towards Tao, which refers to "the way." Veith explains that man must completely adjust to the "flow" of the Universe, which was the responsibility of Tao. For example, the earth was dependent on the heavens, such as rain was needed to end drought, sun was needed to melt snow, etc. In this way the yearly cycle of life flowed smoothly and was completed in a year. This was Tao, or the way. Essentially, there was "the Tao of Heaven, the Tao of the Earth, and the Tao of Man, one fitting into the other as an indivisible entity." The first paragraphs of the first chapter of the Nei Ching has the emperor asking his physician, Ch'i Po, why it is that ancient people used to live to be 100 years old and now people only live half that long. The physician answered: "In ancient times those people who understood Tao (the way of self cultivation) patterned themselves upon the Yin and the Yang (the two principles of nature) and they lived in harmony with the arts of divination.... There was temperance in eating and drinking. Their hours of rising and retiring were regular and not disorderly and wild. By these means the ancients kept their bodies united with their souls, so as to fulfill their allotted span completely, measuring unto a hundred years before they passed away.... nowadays people are not like this; they use wine as beverage and they adopt recklessness as usual behavior. They enter the chamber (of love) in an intoxicated condition; their passions exhaust their vital forces; their cravings dissipate their true (essence); they do not know how to find contentment within themselves; they're not skilled in the control of their spirits. They devote all their attention to the amusement of their minds, thus cutting themselves off from the joys of long (life). Their risings and retiring is without regularity. For these reasons they reach only one half of the hundred years and then they degenerate." (3) It is this "degeneration" then that causes diseases which plague a person in life, and many of which cause an early death. People that lived to be 100 are "in harmony with Tao, the Right Way." Health, or longevity, was completely dependent on a person's "behavior towards Tao, Veith explained. "Thus, man saw the universe endowed with a spirit that was indomitable in its strength and unforgiving toward disobedience." Longevity, thus, was a "token of sainthood." (4) So asthma-like symptoms were believed to be caused by an imbalance of Yin and Yang. The lungs were believed to be responsible for metabolism and flow of fluids through the body, and an imbalance of Yang and Yin in the lungs will cause too much phlegm, edema, sweat and cause diseases such as breathing disorders. (5) This ultimately obstructs Qi (also referred to as Chi). Imbalances of Yang and Yin are believed to be caused by obstruction of Qi, which may be described as the energy or life force that keeps the humors in balance and the body functioning properly. The force of Qi was the essential force of keeping the body healthy, and it was inhaled with each breath after birth. Once inhaled it was up to each healthy organ to transfer both Qi and nutrients throughout the body. In order for the organs of the body to function properly, Qi must continue to flow properly throughout the body. So dysfunction of the lung will result in failure of respiration, "leading to failure of fresh air to be inhaled and the turbid Qi of the body to be exhaled, with the resultant inadequate formation of Qi." (6) Likewise, the lungs were associated with mucus. Yang was heat and Yin was cold. Cold was believed to diminish Yin in the lungs, and this resulted in an imbalance of Qi in the lungs, which resulted in an increase in mucus, which ultimately resulted in difficulty in breathing, or asthma-like symptoms. It should be noted here that unlike Western medical doctrines such as the Hippocratic Corpus, the Nei Ching failed to specifically define any diseases. So terms equivalent to asthma and dyspnea were not used. Instead, diseases were referred to as "'injuries of the heart,' 'injuries of the lungs,' etc." (7) The Nei Ching basically called for diagnosing diseases by measuring the pulse, and treating diseases by remedies that reset Yang and Yin, which mainly involved mental balance, herbal medicine, diet, massage, acupuncture (inserting needle into certain regions of the body) or moxibustion (placing cones of powdered leaves on various regions of the body and burning them until blisters form). Since diseases of the lungs were caused by an imbalance of Yin caused by cold, asthma remedies were believed to warm the lungs, balance Yin, decrease mucus, and make breathing easier. Another neat similarity between the Nei Ching and the later written document the Hippocratic Corpus (such as the Hippocratic Oath) is that both writings mention the use of careful technique and responsibility by the physician. The Nei Ching notes that "The most important requirement of the art of healing is that no mistake or neglect occur... poor medical workmanship is neglectful and careless and must therefore be combated, because a disease that is not completely cured can easily breed new disease or there can be a recurrence of the old disease... illness is comparable to the root; good medical work is comparable to the topmost branch; if the root is not reached, the evil influences cannot be subjugated... The superior physician helps before the early budding of the disease. The inferior physician begins to help when the disease has already developed; he helps when destruction has already set in. And since his help comes when the disease has already developed, it is said of him that he is ignorant. " (8) While Nei Ching is the oldest known recorded Chinese medical treaties, Shen Nung, who lived from 2838-2698 is often considered as the founder of Chinese Medicine as well as the "Fire Emporor." (9) |Shen Nung (2838-2698)| The leaves and/ or stems of the Ma Huang plant were dried prepared in such a way that it was served as a drink, often as a bitter tasting tea. Nung believed Ma Huang worked by reversing the flow of Qi. One of the truly interesting things about ancient Chinese asthma treatment is the use of Ma Huang to treat asthma-like symptoms. The modern world refers to this plant as ephedra, and from it was derived the bronchodilator ephedrine in 1901 Leaves of the plant were crushed and served in a bitter tasting yellow tea. This may actually have provided relief from an asthma attack. While Veith describes that Western medicine reached China early in the 17th century, (10) it would be another 300 years before ephedrine would play a significant role in the treatment of asthma in the U.S. and Europe, as I describe in this post. So while Ancient Chinese asthmatics may have been able to obtain asthma relief by using ephedra, the rest of the world (except for maybe Japan and Korea) would have to wait. Click here for more asthma history. - Saunders, M, J.B. Dec, "Huang Ti Nei Ching Su Wen -- The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Mediciner," Calif Med. 1967 July; 107(1): 125–126 - Veith, Ilza, author /translator, "The Yellow emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine," 2002, Los Angeles, pages 4-6 - Ibid, page 97-8 - Ibid, pages pages 98 and 10-14 - "Qi Theory, damo-qigong.net, http://damo-qigong.net/qi-theory1.htm - Ibid, http://damo-qigong.net/qi-theory.htm - Veith, op cit, pages 49 and 50 - Veith, op cit, pages 57-8, also see chapter 26 beginning on page 217 - Navara, Tova, "The Encyclopedia of Asthma and Respiratory Disorders," 2003, New York, page 177 - Veith, op cit, page 1

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The Flat Rocks fossil site at Inverloch is located approximately 150 km south-east of Melbourne, on the south coast of Victoria. The area has special significance to Australia’s fossil history as the discovery of Australia’s first dinosaur bone, the Cape Paterson Claw, was found at a nearby site in 1903 by William Ferguson. The currently active site was discovered in 1991 when a group of researchers from Monash University and Museum Victoria were prospecting that part of the coastline for suitable locations for potential fossil dig sites. The Cape Paterson claw, found by William Ferguson in 1903 at Eagle’s Nest, was Australia’s first dinosaur bone. Source: Museum Victoria. The first formal dig at Inverloch was in 1992 when researchers spent two weeks testing the productivity of the site. In this time more than 300 fossil bones buried below the surface of the shore platform were recovered. The site proved so productive that organised annual summer digs called ‘Dinosaur Dreaming’ commenced in 1994 and have collected an average of 700 fossil bones and teeth from each field season. The fossil layer at the Flat Rocks site is still producing as many fossil bones and teeth as when digging first started. The Dinosaur Dreaming dig will continue for as long as financial support continues to fund the dig. The sedimentary rocks along the Strzelecki coastline were laid down approximately 120 to 115 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period. The rocks have been dated using both Fission Track Dating (based on radioactive content) and Palynology (based on the fossil pollen in the rock). Both methods of dating correlate the age of the rocks to about 120 million years plus or minus five million years. The fossil bones of many different animals have been found at the Flat Rocks site. There is evidence of at least five different types of dinosaur as well as the fossil bones of other reptiles, birds, mammals and fish. The fossil bones found at the site are the remains of animals that lived in an ancient river and the surrounding valley. The bones were washed into the river during flooding events and concentrated in the river bed. The Dinosaur Dreaming field dig at Inverloch. Photographer/Source: Lesley Kool The most commonly found dinosaur at Flat Rocks is a small plant eater belonging to the Hypsilophodont family. This dinosaur was the size of a small wallaby and ran on its hind legs. Qantassaurus intrepidus is the latest hypsilophodontid dinosaur to be named from the site, however there are at least two other members of the hypsilophodontidae family represented. Evidence of tiny dinosaur bones at the site suggests that the area may have been a nesting ground for part of the year. There is also evidence of other dinosaurs including ankylosaurs and theropod dinosaurs at Flat Rocks and surrounding areas. Flying reptiles (pterosaurs) are sometimes mistakenly called dinosaurs, but belong to a different group of reptiles. A number of unusual teeth found at the Flat Rocks site have been assigned to pterosaurs, as well as some limb bones. The turtles of Flat Rocks appear to have been rather primitive. They had short necks, unlike most of Australia’s modern turtles. A number of isolated teeth have been identified as belonging to small fresh-water plesiosaurs. In 1997, a fossil jaw only 17mm long with four teeth was found. The jaw belonged to an insectivorous mammal no bigger than a mouse and was named Ausktribosphenous nyktos. The teeth resembled those of a placental mammal. However, because all previous fossil evidence supported the idea that marsupials arrived in Australia long before placental mammals, the description of this discovery as a placental mammal was not accepted by many researchers. There has been much debate since the discovery of this jaw, and there is still no agreement as to which group of mammals it belongs to. Since 1997 a further 36 mammal jaws have been found at the site, some of which belong to a new group of monotremes (Teinolophos trusleri) and represent the world’s oldest and smallest monotremes. In 2004 a single tooth in a jaw fragment was found that may represent evidence in Australia of a group of extinct mammals called Multituberculates. The fossilised remains of fish are very common at the Flat Rocks site. Before 1997 the only evidence of Early Cretaceous birds in Victoria came from Koonwarra, 40 km north of the Flat Rocks site. In 1997 the first definitive bird bone was found at Flat Rocks. A number of other possible bird bones have since turned up at the site and are currently being studied. Please note: the Dinosaur Dreaming dig project is not currently accepting volunteers. Vickers-Rich, P., Monaghan, J. M., Baird, R. F. and Rich, T. H. 1991. Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia. Pioneer Design Studio, Novacek. Vickers-Rich, P. and Rich, T. H. 1993. Australia’s polar dinosaurs. Scientific American, July 1993: 50–55. Vickers-Rich, P., and Rich, T., 2000. Dinosaurs of Darkness. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest. Interesting point, John. While projects like these may appear to have an eerie side, it's also true that almost everything we know about prehistoric life depends on palaeontology projects like this one. Hi Justin, thanks for the enquiry. You are welcome to visit the beach at Inverloch and search for your own fossils, just as you can go and have a look at the Dinosaur Dreaming site. You will find the many links on this and the other Museum Victoria dinosaur information sheets useful in identifying fossils. Hi Bob, the Discovery Centre has a free identification service. If you think you may have found a fossil, you can take advantage of this service. You can read all about the details and guidelines for identifications here Hi Michael – If you contact the Queensland Museum through their Inquiry Centre they may also be able to provide you with advice about fossil hunting in the Ipswich region. Have fun! Hi Alexander - sorry to say, but unfortunately you need to be over 18 to be involved in the the digging at Dinosaur Dreaming. However, on Sunday February 13 there will be a ‘Friends of Dinosaur Dreaming’ day onsite, where visitors are welcome to come and watch the dig in process, talk to the volunteers and see a selection of some of the fossils found there. If you are interested in going and seeing this, you can visit the site on Feb 13 from late morning. Access to the dig is from ‘The Caves’ carpark on the Inverloch-Cape Paterson road; a few km outside Inverloch, take the steps down to the beach access and look for the Dinosaur Dreaming flags at the site not far from the base of the steps. Hi Alexander's mum, thank you for checking in and doing the right thing. As the area is a reserve any fossicking/digging on the beach at Dinosaur Dreaming can only be undertaken by Dinosaur Dreaming workers and volunteers who have the required permission to dig in the Bunurong Marine Park from Parks Victoria. Thank you for the feedback Christopher, however it's not clear to us which of the comments above this relates to; we think it is important that enquirers, regardless of their age, are given accurate information on the legal and safety issues associated with collecting fossils. This isn't intended as a 'brush off', more as responsible advice from our perspective at Museum Victoria. Feel free to contact us via the 'Contact Us' link at the bottom of this page if you wish to discuss this further. Hi Jacqui - there are a few legal issues about excavating fossils, and there is no single permit that is available which allows you to fossick - you would need to get the appropriate permission from the landholder of your fossicking locality; be they private land owners, or government bodies responsible for parks, reserves, council and crown land. Please also be aware of some of the safety precaustions when fossicking, there is some helpful information on this on our Information Sheet at http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/infosheets/fossil-collecting---methods/ Hope this helps Hello Brett; the Friends day for 2012 has not yet been scheduled, but once it is it will be posted here or you can simply call us in the Discovery Centre in early January 2012, and we will hopefully have clearer details by that date. Hi Naomi and Josh; we'd be most happy to meet you on the 'Friends Day' onsite at Inverloch and show you some of the fossils and the work that is being done, but I'm sorry to say that all active participants in the dig must be 18 years or older for health and safety reasons. The date and details of the 2012 Friends Day will be published on this page soon, stay tuned for an update... Hi Belinda; unfortunately applications for prospective volunteers closed on September 30th, and the selection process for new volunteers based on these applications is now well underway. As a result, I am sorry to say we can’t assist you with becoming involved in the 2012 dig. Should you be interested in participating in the 2013 dig, we recommend you contact the Discovery Centre via the "Contact us" link at the bottom of this page around August 2012; by this time we hope to commence the recruitment of new volunteers for the 2013 dig. Hi Jamie - as excavation only occurs for less than two months every year, there really isn't much opportunity for public engagement beyond the 'Friends' day; you may wish to contact the Bunurong Environment Centre at Inverloch, who occasionally run school holiday activities that might be of interest. Hi Jenni & Jim - unfortunately we're not able to involve you in this year's dig; applications for becoming a volunteer usually open in August or September in the preceeding year, and involves a selection process followed by specialised training for selected applicants. If you wish to be involved in next years dig, we reccommend you contact the Discovery Centre (via "Contact Us" at the bottom of this page) in August 2012 for details on applying for the 2013 dig. We love receiving comments, but can’t always respond. Hi Donna - the Dinosaur Dreaming dig may be of interest, but participants in the actuall digging are all over 18 for safety reasons; one option worth considering might be to come to the annual "Friends of Dinosaur Dreaming Day", which is usally in late February onsite at Inverloch; you may wish to check back on this page around the Christmas Holidays to see when this is scheduled for 2013. Hi Paula - as the dig is on a public beach, you are free to come and look at any time, digging will be occurring on the beach every day for the next few weeks at low tide. However, there will be a special "Friends Day" on February 17 on site, where the diggers will be set up to show visitors examples of the fossils being found, and can answer questions from the public. If you were interested, you could also sign up to become a "Friend of Dinosaur Dreaming" on the day. I know it's a long time since your request, but did you have any success with your search. I'm in the same position regarding August 1966 sailing and w... To read the latest tweets from @museumvictoria Follow Museum Victoria on

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Simple stain- single human cheek cell with bacteria covering its surface (approx. X 100). Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively in MicrobeWorld. Read More Photo of Hut Cave taken by mountaineer Nick Giguere during the 2008 expedition Exploring the Rock Bottom of the Food Chain in McMurdo's Extreme Environments led by Dr. Laurie Connell and Dr. Hubert Staudigel. For more pictures go to their website: http://earthref.org/ERESE/projects/GOLF439/... Read More An electron photomicrograph of two spiral-shaped Treponema pallidum bacteria. Here we see two Treponema pallidum bacteria scanned by an electron microscope, magnified 36,000X. T. pallidum is the causative agent of syphilis. It contains one of the smallest prokaryotic genomes consisting of abo... Read More A press release via EurekAlert issued by Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers are reporting the first detailed molecular snapshots of a deadly gastrointestinal virus as it is caught in the grasp of an immune system molecule with the capacity to destroy ... Read More The USA300 strain of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, colorized in gold, shown outside a white blood cell. Staphylococcus aureus: USA:300 is a strain of gram-positive coccus bacteria responsible for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), or Staph infection in humans. This strain ... Read More This is a live image of the of Diatom Arachnoidiscus under 40x magnification. The picture shows the diatom's silicified cell wall, which forms a pillbox-like shell (frustule) composed of overlapping halves that contain intricate and delicate markings. The picture was obtained with new video enha... Read More Application of the mycopathogen, Beauveria Bassina, that make spores to introduce a fungus on tarnished plant bugs as an alternative to chemical control. Research and develop microbial control strategies for tarnished plant bugs on alternate hosts using entomopathogenic fungi. (http://www.ars... Read More This image of laboratory-grown cells was taken with the help of a scanning electron microscope, which yields detailed images of cell surfaces. Tina Carvalho, University of Hawaii at Manoa. - NIGMS Image Gallery Read More Photomicrograph of Chlamydia grown in culture. The sample was taken from rhesus monkey kidney cells and stained with giemsa. The cell nuclei appear red and the infective 'elementary bodies' of the Chlamydia, which develop in 'blisters' in the cells, fluoresce green. Chlamydia is a very common se... Read More Cultures of a destructive mold called Phomopsis strains that infect both crop and noncrop plants. One of the species of this genus, Phomopsis viticola, cause a plant disease called phomopsis or dead-arm. Usually, infections begin during early growth stages in spring. This affects leaves, fruit, ... Read More Under a moderately-high magnification of 2500X, this digitally-colorized scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of an untreated water specimen extracted from a wild stream mainly used to control flooding during inclement weather, revealed the presence of unidentified organisms, which included bacter... Read More Chlamydia psittaci. Infected baby hamster kidney cell cultures, direct FA stain Read More Microscopic view of the green algae Spirogyra filament and a number of primitive worms known as rotifers. (approx. 100X). Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More fluorescent antibody staining of wall deficient mycobacterium tuberculosis var. hominis Read More Stan Maloy of the American Society for Microbiology participates in the first episode of This Week in Microbiology live from the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C. This Week in Microbiology will officially launch next week. Other guests for the fir... Read More The cyanobacterial mat is on the shores of Lake Fryxell in Taylor Valley- the McMurdo Dry Valley region of Antarctica. These organisms actively grow only a few weeks a year during December and January. Photo taken by Scott Craig and contributed by Dr. Laurie Connell. Read More Safranin stained rods. (approx. 1000 X). taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More This is a great visual resource for learning and teaching microbiology lab techniques. You have to join Flickr.com and then sign up to access the groups contents. Read More An Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever has killed three people in western India and dozens of doctors will screen a community of about 16,000 people in efforts to contain the disease, a state health minister said this past Wednesday. India's National Institute of Virology later confirmed that the th... Read More

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Subsequent Nuremberg Trials The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials formally the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals were a series of twelve U.S. military tribunals for war crimes against surviving members of the leadership of Nazi Germany, held in the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, after World War II from 1946 to 1949 following the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Although it had been initially planned to hold more than just one international trial at the IMT, the growing differences between the victorious allies (the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Soviet Union) made this impossible. However, the Control Council Law No. 10, which the Allied Control Council had issued on December 20, 1945, empowered any of the occupying authorities to try suspected war criminals in their respective occupation zones. Based on this law, the U.S. authorities proceeded after the end of the initial Nuremberg Trial against the major war criminals to hold another twelve trials in Nuremberg. The judges in all these trials were American, and so were the prosecutors; the Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Brigadier General Telford Taylor. In the other occupation zones similar trials took place. The twelve U.S. trials before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT) took place from December 9, 1946 to April 13, 1949. The trials were: - The Doctors' Trial (9 December 1946 - 20 August 1947) - The Milch Trial (2 January - 14 April 1947) - The Judges' Trial (5 March - 4 December 1947) - The Pohl Trial (8 April - 3 November 1947) - The Flick Trial (19 April - 22 December 1947) - The IG Farben Trial (27 August 1947 - 30 July 1948) - The Hostages Trial (8 July 1947 – 19 February 1948) - The RuSHA Trial (20 October 1947 - 10 March 1948) - The Einsatzgruppen Trial (29 September 1947 - 10 April 1948) - The Krupp Trial (8 December 1947 - 31 July 1948) - The Ministries Trial (6 January 1948 - 13 April 1949) - The High Command Trial (30 December 1947 - 28 October 1948) In total, 142 of the 185 defendants were found guilty of at least one of the charges. 24 persons received death sentences, of which 11 were subsequently converted into life sentences; 20 were sentenced to life imprisonment, 98 were handed down sentences of varying lengths, and 35 were acquitted. Four defendants had to be removed from trials due to illness, and four more committed suicide during the trials. Many of the longer prison sentences were reduced substantially by decree of high commissioner John J. McCloy in 1951, and 10 outstanding death sentences from the Einsatzgruppen Trial were converted to prison terms. The same year, an amnesty released many of those who had received prison sentences. Some of the NMTs have been criticised for their misguided conclusion that "morale bombing" of civilians, including its nuclear variety, was legal, and for their judgement that, in certain situations, executing civilians in reprisal was permissible. Conduct of the prosecution In a 2005 interview for the Washington Post, Benjamin B. Ferencz, Chief Prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, revealed some of his activities during his period in Germany: - "I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?" In the interview, Ferencz also pointed out that the military legal norms at the time permitted actions that would not be possible today. - "You know how I got witness statements? I'd go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I'd say, 'Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.' It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid." See also - Auschwitz Trial held in Kraków, Poland in 1947 against 40 SS-staff of the Auschwitz concentration camp death factory - Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, 1963–65 - Majdanek Trials, the longest Nazi war crimes trial in history, spanning over 30 years - Chełmno Trials of the Chełmno extermination camp personel, held in Poland and in Germany. The cases were decided almost twenty years apart - Sobibor Trial held in Hagen, Germany in 1965, concerning the Sobibor extermination camp - Belzec Trial before the 1st Munich District Court in the mid-1960s, eight SS-men of the Belzec extermination camp - Belsen Trial in Lüneburg, 1945 - Command responsibility doctrine of hierarchical accountability - Dachau Trials held within the walls of the former Dachau concentration camp, 1945–1948 - Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials, 1946–47 - Ravensbrück Trial - Research Materials: Max Planck Society Archive Further reading

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(455) At Coalface of Heating In February 2003, a small factory closed down in Seoul; the demand for its product had dropped below the level which made production economically viable. Stories like this are common in Korea and they are seldom seen as newsworthy. But the closure of the Samchully factory attracted the attention of the major media. The reason was simple: the factory was the last in Seoul to produce coal briquettes, known as yeontan. For decades, these briquettes kept Korean houses warm in winter. They were seen as a valuable commodity and, at some point, an embodiment of technical progress. Heating has always been a major problem in Korea. In the cold winters one had to keep the house warm. Since times immemorial Koreans used a very efficient system of heated floors, known as ondol, but the ondol hearth had to be fed with fuel. For centuries, it was firewood, but by the early 1900s the use of firewood was increasingly inconvenient. This was due to two major problems. First of all, population growth meant that most mountains around towns were virtually stripped barren (this is still the case in North Korea). Firewood was in short supply, and expensive. Second, the available low-quality firewood was a capricious fuel. It was very time-consuming to feed the hearth. Thus, Korean housewives welcomed the arrival of yeontan with great relief. What does a yeontan look like? I am pretty sure that many readers have seen these briquettes somewhere on Seoul’s streets. They are cylindrical and about the size of a paint can, with a number of drilled holes _ the standard yeontan had 22 holes. The holes are necessary to make it burn steadily and efficiently. The standard briquette weighs 3.5 kg. Yeontan were produced from a mixture of coal dust and a special gluing agent which kept the dust particles together. It was the standard weight and size that made yeontan so hugely popular. Unlike ``natural’’ coal and firewood, yeontan came in a predictable shape. One could easily stack a few briquettes on top of each other in a stove and leave them burning slowly for hours. In addition, the technology of their composition made it possible to utilize low-quality coal and coal dust. When did the history of yeontan begin? Despite my labors, I could not find a definite answer. These briquettes are not unique to Korea and their close cousins are widely used in China and Japan as well. This makes me suspect that the yeontan was invented in the early 1900s, but where and by whom I know not. The first yeontan were introduced to Korea by the Japanese in the late 1920s, but for a long time these briquettes remained an expensive luxury. The spread of yeontan began only after the 1950-53 Korean War when the price went down just as firewood became prohibitively expensive. Korean households enthusiastically took up the new fuel which _ as they soon discovered _ was so much more convenient than firewood. In a poll conducted in 1970, Koreans even chose yeontan as ``the most important product of our time’’ (in a 2000 poll, the same significance was ascribed to the mobile phone). The government also supported the switch to yeontan _ it helped to protect the then dwindling forests. However, yeontan was not without its dangers. The most serious one was the ever-present danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. This odorless and colorless gas could filter through the cracks of a damaged ondol floor and suffocate the victims while they were sleeping. Strict precautions were always taken, but gas poisoning remained a major case of death in Korea until quite recently. In 1988, 77.8 percent of all Korean households used yeontan briquettes for heating and/or cooking. By 1993, that percentage had dropped to 32.8 percent. The 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and high oil prices of the late 1990s briefly reversed the trend, but soon the retreat of the venerable coal briquettes continued. In 2001 a mere 1.5 percent of families were still using yeontan. People were switching to oil and gas boilers, generally more expensive but also more convenient and safe (no danger of gas poisoning: the floor was heated not by fumes, but by hot water). Thus, the good old yeontan is going to soon become extinct. New, automated and computerized heating systems are replacing the coal briquettes. The introduction of these systems has greatly changed the daily lives of Koreans. Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.

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Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are an ancient group of molecules that are expressed in many species ranging from bacteria to humans. At least 1200 naturally-occurring AMPs have been identified which display considerable diversity in their primary sequences, lengths, structures, and biological activities (Wang et al., 2009). Generally speaking, these peptides have been studied due to their ability to directly kill medically important-microbes. Indeed, the increased demand for novel anti-infective therapies (due to the spread of drug-resistant bacteria) has likely contributed to the expansion of this field of research. However, there has been a definite change of focus in AMP research in light of the recent recognition of the regulatory functions of these molecules in the innate immune system. This has opened up the exciting possibility of developing novel antimicrobial therapies that centre on boosting host immunity rather than direct microbial killing (Zhang and Falla, 2010). In this volume, with emphasis on emerging technologies, mechanism of action studies and roles in disease, we aim to consolidate some of these developments and stimulate discussion on the therapeutic potential of these important molecules. The first three articles demonstrate how knowledge of AMP structure and amino acid composition is guiding rational peptide design strategies aimed at improving the therapeutic potential of these molecules. Mishra and Wang describe the development of a comprehensive AMP database that is enabling us to link amino acid composition with specific peptide activities (e.g., antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, antiparasital, insecticidal, spermicidal, anticancer, etc.). The article suggests how this information may be used to develop novel peptides with a desired activity. Next, Scorciapino and Rinaldi discuss how knowledge of the amino acid sequence of naturally-occurring AMPs can be used to dictate the design of antimicrobial peptidomimetics. The authors note that by retaining the biological activity of natural AMPs and improving their pharmacokinetic properties, these novel molecules may allow systemic use of AMPs to treat microbial infections. The third article by Devocelle describes how conjugation of AMPs to targeting moieties can improve delivery to their desired site of action and reduce potential off-target effects. It is clear that the complementary approaches described in these three articles will play an important part in making therapeutic AMPs a reality. The next two articles describe different, but equally powerful, approaches that may be used to probe the biological functions of AMPs. The development of various “–omics” (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and others) technologies has truly revolutionised biological research. In this regard, Plichta et al. discuss how the integration of various—omics datasets can help us to understand the role of AMPs in varied contexts from resolution of infections, improvement of prognosis for cancer patients to early detection of transplant rejection. The fifth article by Munoz and Read highlights the use of live cell imaging to study AMP function. With emphasis on the various approaches that may be used to label AMPs, this article demonstrates the central role live cell imaging continues to play in the elucidation of AMP function. The next six articles in this research topic cover recent advances in our understanding of the biological role of AMPs and their mechanism(s) of action. Brender et al. examine the role of cholesterol in dictating the selectivity of AMPs for microbial membranes. Defining the role of cholesterol in AMP-mediated cytotoxicity is important, especially if AMPs are to be used therapeutically. Melo and Castanho discuss the various experimental approaches that may be used to answer this very question. By comparing the use of bacterial membranes with model liposomal membranes, they illustrate the importance of physiological relevance in experimental design. The next two articles in this series illustrate how helminths express AMP homologues that are functionally adapted to either a free-living or parasitic lifestyle. For example, Pujol et al. describe the array of AMPs expressed by the model nematode Caenorhabditis elelgans and how they serve to protect the worm against attack by fungi in the free-living environment. Next, Cotton et al. probe the role of AMP homologues that are secreted by medically-important parasitic worms. This interesting family of molecules may hold the key to the evolution of immunomodulatory function in AMPs. In the following two articles, Ulm et al. and Choi and Mookherjee discuss advances in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which members of these major AMP families influence immune cell function. The final two articles in the volume cover the role of AMPs in disease resolution and the outlook for their therapeutic use in humans. The article by David describes how AMPs may fill a gap in our existing therapeutic repertoire. David builds the case for the use of polymyxins to treat Gram-negative sepsis, a condition for which there is currently no single effective therapeutic approach. The article by Berditsch et al. concludes the volume and describes how, perhaps surprisingly, AMPs can stimulate bacterial survival mechanisms leading to persistent infections. This article highlights the importance of understanding how microbial populations respond to exposure to AMPs before they can be used in the clinic. In summary, by inviting opinion articles from leading AMP researchers, the aim of this volume was to highlight recent advances in our understanding of the roles of these important molecules. We also hope that the articles compiled will stimulate discussion and further research in this area so that the therapeutic potential of AMPs may be realised. Citation: Robinson MW, Hutchinson AT and Donnelly S (2012) Antimicrobial peptides: utility players in innate immunity. Front. Immun. 3:325. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2012.00325 Received: 05 October 2012; Accepted: 08 October 2012; Published online: 25 October 2012. Copyright © 2012 Robinson, Hutchinson and Donnelly. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.

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en

Life of St. King Stephen of Decani King Stephen of Decani is one of the best known Saints of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Through his holy and incorruptible relics God has performed numerous miracles. as the Serbian people suffer through another turbulent chapter in their history, they would do well to bring to mind the exemplary character of their martyred King Stephen Uros III (Decanski). He was born the eldest son of the saintly King Milutin (Stephen Uros II) and his wife Elizabeth, a Hungarian princess. Living at the court of his parents, the heir-apparent received a good education, his mind exercised by study of the language and writings of his people, and his heart strengthened by study of the Holy Scripture and the teachings of the Orthodox Faith. The good fruit of his upbringing proved itself when King Milutin was forced to send him as hostage to the Tartar chief Nogyi. In spite of the potential dangers, Stephen was obedient to his father's will and did not resist, trusting his life to the Lord. And his hope was not in vain. He eventually made friends with one of the Tartar nobles, who succeeded in assisting his safe return home. When Stephen came of age, his parents arranged that he marry the daughter of the Bulgarian King Smilatz, and the young couple were given the land of Zeta, where they settled until such a time as Stephen would be called to succeed his father to the throne. Meanwhile, King Milutin had remarried, and his second wife, Simonide, plotted in order that their son Constantine inherit the throne. She convinced Milutin that Stephen wanted to seize the throne prematurely, and the deceived Milutin ordered that his son be captured, that he be blinded to ensure that he never again entertain such treachery, and that he be sent as a prisoner to Constantinople. The coffin of St. King Stephan of Decani, 14th century The prince was taken together with his children, Dusan and Dusica, and when they were passing through Ovcepole (Sheep's Field), the guards took red hot pokers and blinded him. That night St. Nicholas appeared to Stephen in a dream: "Be not afraid," he said, "your eyes are in my hands." Comforted not a little by this vision, the sightless Stephen arrived in Constantinople. The Emperor Andronicus pitied the young exile, and received him graciously. He was soon settled in the monastery of Pantocrator, where he impressed the monks by his meekness and his longsuffering acceptance of the bitter trial that had come to him through his own father. years passed. King Milutin was growing old. Hearing good reports about his son, his heart softened, and he called Stephen home to Serbia. Before leaving Constantinople, Stephen had a dream in which St. Nicholas appeared to him a second time, holding in his hand a pair of eyes. When he awoke, his sight was restored. Three years later, his father died, and Stephen, always popular with the people, was crowned King of Serbia by the holy Archbishop Nikodim in the church at Pec. His halfbrother, Constantine, resented this turn of events, and raised an army in order to wrest the throne away from Stephen. Desiring to avoid bloodshed, King Stephen addressed a letter "Put far from thee thy desire to come with a foreign people to make war on shine own countrymen; but let us meet one another, and thou shalt be second in my kingdom, for the land is great enough for me and thee to live. I am not Cain who slew his brother, but Joseph who loved him, and in his words I speak to thee. Fear not, for I am from the Lord. You prepared evil for me, but the Lord has given me good, as you now was unmoved and gave orders to attack. In the ensuing battle, his army was defeated and he himself was slain. For the next ten years, King Stephen ruled in relative peace, and the Serbian land prospered. His son Dusan proved to be an able military leader and was successful in battles with the Bulgarians and the Greeks, who were envious of the now powerful Serbian state and rose up against it. Grateful to the Lord for these victories, King Stephen set about with Archbishop Daniel, Nikodim,s successor, to find a place to build a church. They settled upon a place called Decani, and there, in 1327, King Stephen himself laid the cornerstone for what was to become one of the most magnificent and enduring specimens of Serbian church architecture. Inside it was graced by splendid icons, to which more were added in the sixteenth century by the hand of the celebrated Slav iconographer, Longinos. St. King Stefan of Decani, fresco Decani Monastery, 14th click for a larger size image Saint Stephen gave generously to the needy. He also made liberal donations to churches and monasteries on the Holy Mountain, in Jerusalem, Alexandria, and to the monastery of Pantocrator in Constantinople. Nor did he forget his debt to the wonderworker Nicholas: he commissioned a silver altar and sent it together with some icons to the church in Bari, Italy, where the Saint's holy relics are located. St. King Stefan - a woodcarving (miniature) Having in a true Christian manner endured the grievous trials and afflictions which he met through the years, the good king deserved to live out the rest of his life in peace. But it was only fitting that he who suffered as a martyr in life should be granted an opportunity to receive in death a martyr's crown. His final trial was the most agonizing. Dusan's successes on the field of battle had given him an appetite for power and glory, and, encouraged by his entourage of nobles, he decided to hasten his father's death. In 1331, St. Stephen was taken prisoner to a fortress in the town of Zvecan and cruelly murdered (by some accounts he was hung, according to another he was strangled). Almost immediately Dusan was struck by remorse. He earnestly and tearfully repented of his treachery, and the next year, on the feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, he had his father's remains transferred from Zvecan to Decani, where they were placed in a marble tomb. In 1339 the tomb was opened, and his body was found to be incorrupt. That same day saw many miracles of healing. Especially did the holy king prove to heal diseases of the eyes, and at his relics blind people received their Fr. Kozma Vasilopoulos The Orthodox Monastery of St Michael, Sidney relics of St. King Stephen of Decani Signature of St. King Stefan in his Decani Monastery Foundation Charter, 14c. TO DECANI MONASTERY PAGE

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US 6543011 B1 A method for recording events in Java. According to a preferred embodiment, an automator is attached to a Java applet. Responsive to selection by a user, listeners are added for each event type produced in the Java applet. Each time a specified event occurs, that event is captured and saved to a data structure. The recording of events is performed until the user stops the process. 1. A data processor implemented method of recording events, the steps comprising: loading an application; adding listeners for each event type produced in the application; capturing user generated events; recording the user generated events to a data structure; and replaying the user generated events. 2. The method as recited in 3. The method as recited in 4. The method as recited in 5. The method as recited in 6. The method as recited in 7. The method of 8. The method of 9. A computer program product in computer readable media for use in a data processing system for recording events, the computer program product comprising: first instructions for loading an application; second instructions for adding listeners for each event type produced in the application; third instructions for capturing user generated events; fourth instructions for recording the user generated events to a data structure; and fifth instructions for replaying the user generated events. 10. The computer program product as recited in 11. The computer program product as recited in 12. The computer program product as recited in 13. The computer program product as recited in 14. The computer program product as recited in 15. The computer program product of 16. The computer program product of 17. A system for recording events, comprising: means for loading an application; means for adding listeners for each event type produced in the application; and means for capturing user generated events; means for recording the user generated events to a data structure; and means for replaying the user generated events. 18. The system as recited in 19. The system as recited in 20. The system as recited in 21. The system as recited in 22. The system as recited in 23. The system of 24. The system of 25. A method of recording events, the steps comprising: loading an application; adding a listener for an event type; capturing an event; recording the event; and replaying the event. 26. The method as recited in 27. The method as recited in 28. The method as recited in 29. The method of 30. The method of 31. A system for recording events generated by an application, comprising: a listener; and a file; wherein the automator is attached to an application and adds the listener to a component of an application; and the listener monitors events of the event type received from a system queue within the application and posts received events to the file. 1. Technical Field The present invention relates generally to computer software and, more specifically, to methods of recording events in Java. 2. Description of Related Art The evolution of programming languages has, to a great extent, been driven by changes in the hardware being programmed. As hardware has grown faster, cheaper, and more powerful, software has become larger and more complex. The migration from assembly languages to procedural languages, such as C, and to object-oriented languages, such as C++ and Java, was largely driven by a need to manage ever greater complexity—complexity made possible by increasingly powerful hardware. Today, the progression toward cheaper, faster, and more powerful hardware continues, as does the need for managing increasing software complexity. Building on C and C++, Java helps programmers deal with complexity by rendering impossible certain kinds of bugs that frequently plague C and C++ programmers. In addition to the increasing capabilities of hardware, there is another fundamental shift taking place that impacts upon software programming, that is the network. As networks interconnect more and more computers and devices, new demands are being placed on software. One of these demands is platform independence. Java supports platform independence primarily through the creation of the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Virtual Machine is an abstract computer, and its specification defines certain features every Java Virtual Machine must have. However, the specification for the Java Virtual Machine is flexible, enabling it to be implemented on a wide variety of computers, devices, and operating systems. One of the main tasks performed by a Java Virtual Machine is to load class files and execute the bytecodes they contain. One type of program executed by a Java Virtual Machine is an applet. An applet is a Java program that has a set of standard properties that are defined by the applet class. This class was developed by Sun Microsystems and is included in the standard Java Software Development Kit (Java SDK). Although, theoretically, a program written in Java for one platform should perform on any Java enabled platform, given the allowable differences among Java platform implementations and other factors, a Java program or applet should be tested on all platforms on which it is anticipated to perform. Since user actions in Java are handled by events, and since it can sometimes take many hours or days for a problem to manifest itself, testing of the entire Java Virtual Machine on a platform can be very tedious. Therefore, it is desirable to provide methods of automating the functional testing of the Java platform on various systems. However, current methods of automating testing of the Java platform on various systems requires a specialized execution environment, as well as compilation of a separate program. Furthermore, current methods require that the applet or application must be exited before any automation can take place, and they require a significant amount of system resources. Therefore, there is a need for a simpler method of testing the Java platform, that does not require recompilation of code, that does not require the applet or application to be exited before automation, and that uses fewer system resources. The present invention provides a data processor implemented method for recording events in Java. According to a preferred embodiment, an automator is attached to a Java applet. Responsive to selection by a user, listeners are added for each event type produced in the Java applet. Each time a specified event occurs, that event is captured and saved to a data structure. The recording of events is performed until the user stops the process. The novel features believed characteristic of the invention are set forth in the appended claims. The invention itself, however, as well as a preferred mode of use, further objectives and advantages thereof, will best be understood by reference to the following detailed description of an illustrative embodiment when read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, wherein: FIG. 1 is a pictorial representation of a distributed data processing system; FIG. 2 is a block diagram of a data processing system that may be implemented as a server; FIG. 3 is a block diagram of a data processing system; FIG. 4 is a block diagram of a Java virtual machine (JVM); FIG. 5 depicts a sample user interface to an applet recorder; FIG. 6 is a block diagram illustrating how events are currently handled within Java applets; FIG. 7 is a block diagram illustrating how events are handled when an automator is attached to a Java applet; FIG. 8 is a flowchart illustrating how the applet recorder functions; FIG. 9 is a flowchart illustrating the function performed by an automator listener; and FIG. 10 is a block diagram illustrating the three main parts of an object created by an automator listener. With reference now to the figures, and in particular with reference to FIG. 1, a pictorial representation of a distributed data processing system is depicted in which the present invention may be implemented. Distributed data processing system 100 is a network of computers in which the present invention may be implemented. Distributed data processing system 100 contains network 102, which is the medium used to provide communications links between various devices and computers connected within distributed data processing system 100. Network 102 may include permanent connections, such as wire or fiber optic cables, or temporary connections made through telephone connections. In the depicted example, server 104 is connected to network 102, along with storage unit 106. In addition, clients 108, 110 and 112 are also connected to network 102. These clients, 108, 110 and 112, may be, for example, personal computers or network computers. For purposes of this application, a network computer is any computer coupled to a network, which receives a program or other application from another computer coupled to the network. In the depicted example, server 104 provides data, such as boot files, operating system images and applications, to clients 108-112. Clients 108, 110 and 112 are clients to server 104. Distributed data processing system 100 may include additional servers, clients, and other devices not shown. In the depicted example, distributed data processing system 100 is the Internet, with network 102 representing a worldwide collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite of protocols to communicate with one another. At the heart of the Internet is a backbone of high-speed data communication lines between major nodes or host computers consisting of thousands of commercial, government, education, and other computer systems that route data and messages. Of course, distributed data processing system 100 also may be implemented as a number of different types of networks such as, for example, an intranet or a local area network. FIG. 1 is intended as an example and not as an architectural limitation for the processes of the present invention. Referring to FIG. 2, a block diagram of a data processing system which may be implemented as a server, such as server 104 in FIG. 1, is depicted in accordance with the present invention. Data processing system 200 may be a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) system including a plurality of processors 202 and 204 connected to system bus 206. Alternatively, a single processor system may be employed. Also connected to system bus 206 is memory controller/cache 208, which provides an interface to local memory 209. I/O bus bridge 210 is connected to system bus 206 and provides an interface to I/O bus 212. Memory controller/cache 208 and I/O bus bridge 210 may be integrated as depicted. Peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus bridge 214 connected to I/O bus 212 provides an interface to PCI local bus 216. A number of modems 218-220 may be connected to PCI bus 216. Typical PCI bus implementations will support four PCI expansion slots or add-in connectors. Communications links to network computers 108-112 in FIG. 1 may be provided through modem 218 and network adapter 220 connected to PCI local bus 216 through add-in boards. Additional PCI bus bridges 222 and 224 provide interfaces for additional PCI buses 226 and 228, from which additional modems or network adapters may be supported. In this manner, server 200 allows connections to multiple network computers. A memory mapped graphics adapter 230 and hard disk 232 may also be connected to I/O bus 212 as depicted, either directly or indirectly. Those of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that the hardware depicted in FIG. 2 may vary. For example, other peripheral devices, such as optical disk drives and the like, also may be used in addition to or in place of the hardware depicted. The depicted example is not meant to imply architectural limitations with respect to the present invention. The data processing system depicted in FIG. 2 may be, for example, an IBM RISC/System 6000, a product of International Business Machines Corporation in Armonk, N.Y., running the Advanced Interactive Executive (AIX) operating system. With reference now to FIG. 3, a block diagram of a data processing system in which the present invention may be implemented is illustrated. Data processing system 300 is an example of a client computer. Data processing system 300 employs a peripheral component interconnect (PCI) local bus architecture. Although the depicted example employs a PCI bus, other bus architectures, such as Micro Channel and ISA, may be used. Processor 302 and main memory 304 are connected to PCI local bus 306 through PCI bridge 308. PCI bridge 308 may also include an integrated memory controller and cache memory for processor 302. Additional connections to PCI local bus 306 may be made through direct component interconnection or through add-in boards. In the depicted example, local area network (LAN) adapter 310, SCSI host bus adapter 312, and expansion bus interface 314 are connected to PCI local bus 306 by direct component connection. In contrast, audio adapter 316, graphics adapter 318, and audio/video adapter (A/V) 319 are connected to PCI local bus 306 by add-in boards inserted into expansion slots. Expansion bus interface 314 provides a connection for a keyboard and mouse adapter 320, modem 322, and additional memory 324. In the depicted example, SCSI host bus adapter 312 provides a connection for hard disk drive 326, tape drive 328, CD-ROM drive 330, and digital versatile disc read only memory drive (DVD-ROM) 332. Typical PCI local bus implementations will support three or four PCI expansion slots or add-in connectors. An operating system runs on processor 302 and is used to coordinate and provide control of various components within data processing system 300 in FIG. 3. The operating system may be a commercially available operating system, such as OS/2, which is available from International Business Machines Corporation. “OS/2” is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. An object oriented programming system, such as Java, may run in conjunction with the operating system, providing calls to the operating system from Java programs or applications executing on data processing system 300. Instructions for the operating system, the object-oriented operating system, and applications or programs are located on a storage device, such as hard disk drive 326, and may be loaded into main memory 304 for execution by processor 302. Those of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that the hardware in FIG. 3 may vary depending on the implementation. For example, other peripheral devices, If; such as optical disk drives and the like, may be used in addition to or in place of the hardware depicted in FIG. 3. The depicted example is not meant to imply architectural limitations with respect to the present invention. For example, the processes of the present invention may be applied to multiprocessor data processing systems. With reference now to FIG. 4, a block diagram of a Java virtual machine (JVM) is depicted in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention. JVM 400 includes a class loader subsystem 402, which is a mechanism for loading types, such as classes and interfaces, given fully qualified names. JVM 400 also contains runtime data areas 404, execution engine 406, native method interface 408, and memory management 424. Execution engine 406 is a mechanism for executing instructions contained in the methods of classes loaded by class loader subsystem 402. Execution engine 406 may be, for example, Java interpreter 412 or just-in-time compiler 410. Native method interface 408 allows access to resources in the underlying operating system. Native method interface 408 may be, for example, a Java native interface. Runtime data areas 404 contain native method stacks 414, Java stacks 416, PC registers 418, method area 420, and heap 422. These different data areas represent the organization of memory needed by JVM 400 to execute a program. Java stacks 416 are used to store the state of Java method invocations. When a new thread is launched, the JVM creates a new Java stack for the thread. The JVM performs only two operations directly on Java stacks; it pushes and pops frames. A thread's Java stack stores the state of Java method invocations for the thread. The state of a Java method invocation includes its local variables, the parameters with which it was invoked, its return value, if any, and intermediate calculations. Java stacks are composed of stack frames. A stack frame contains the state of a single Java method invocation. When a thread invokes a method, the JVM pushes a new frame onto the Java stack of the thread. When the method completes, the JVM pops the frame for that method and discards it. A JVM does not have any registers for holding intermediate values; any Java instruction that requires or produces an intermediate value uses the stack for holding the intermediate values. In this manner, the Java instruction set is well defined for a variety of platform architectures. PC registers 418 are used to indicate the next instruction to be executed. Each instantiated thread gets its own PC register (program counter) and Java stack. If the thread is executing a JVM method, the value of the PC register indicates the next instruction to execute. If the thread is executing a native method, then the contents of the PC register are undefined. Native method stacks 414 store the state of invocations of native methods. The state of native method invocations is stored in an implementation-dependent way in native method stacks, registers, or other implementation-dependent memory areas. In some JVM implementations, native method stacks 414 and Java stacks 416 are combined. Method area 420 contains class data, while heap 422 contains all instantiated objects. The JVM specification strictly defines data types and operations. Most JVM implementations choose to have one method area and one heap, each of which is shared by all threads running inside the JVM. When the JVM loads a class file, it parses information about a type from the binary data contained in the class file. It places this type information into the method area. Each time a class instance or array is created, the memory for the new object is allocated from heap 422. JVM 400 includes an instruction that allocates memory space within the memory for heap 422 but includes no instruction for freeing that space within the memory. In the depicted example, memory management 424 manages memory space within the memory allocated to heap 422. Memory management 424 may include a garbage collector that automatically reclaims memory used by objects that are no longer referenced by an application. Additionally, a garbage collector also may move objects to reduce heap fragmentation. Turning now to FIG. 5, there is depicted a screen image of user interface 500 for an applet recorder in accordance with the present invention, which may run on top of a JVM such as JVM 400. User interface 500 contains a start record button 510 to start recording events, and a stop record button 520 to stop recording events. User interface 500 also contains a close button 530 to close the applet recorder. The applet is viewed in area 550 on the left side of user interface 500. The applet is loaded and started prior to receiving a request to record events. Thus, in the embodiment illustrated in FIG. 5, the applet has been loaded and started. Start record button 510 is enabled because recording has not commenced. Stop record button 520 is not enabled, for the same reason. Turning now to FIG. 6, there is shown a block diagram illustrating normal Java applet operation that runs on top of a JVM such as JVM 400 and may be implemented in a data processing system such as data processing system 300. An applet 620 must be loaded into an applet viewer, such as the applet viewers within Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Applet 620 contains all of the user-accessible components. Once applet 620 is loaded, it creates a standard Java class of event listeners (shown in FIG. 6 as applet listeners 640) that are attached to these components and system queue 650. It should be noted that several applet listeners may be (and usually will be) used. Applet listeners 640 are event listeners. An event listener is any object that implements one or more listener interfaces. There are different listeners for each category of event in Java. For instance, the MouseListener interface defines methods such as MouseClicked, MousePressed, and MouseReleased. In order to receive events from a component, an object adds itself as a listener for that component's events. If an object implements the MouseListener interface, it listens for a component's mouse events by calling addMouseListener on that component. This allows a component's events to be handled without having to create a subclass of the component, and without handling the events in the parent container. In response to user input 610 on a component in applet 620, such as moving a mouse, a keystroke, or a drag operation, an event 630 is constructed and posted on system queue 650. System queue 650 then dispatches this event to any applet listeners 640 on that component. The component's applet listeners 640 execute tasks according to the properties of event 630. Examples of tasks performed by applet listeners 640 include loading or saving information to a file when a button is depressed, playing a sound or displaying an image when the mouse cursor is moved over a specific area, and closing a program when a specific combination of keys is pressed. Turning now to FIG. 7, there is a block diagram illustrating an applet recorder 700 in accordance with the present invention. Applet recorder 700 runs on top of a JVM, such as JVM 400, and may be implemented in a data processing system, such as data processing system 600. Applet recorder 700 consists of automator 760, which loads an applet 620 from a database located either on the local data processing system or on a network computer, such as server 104, for viewing. Automator 760 references applet 620 and adds automator listeners 770 to each of the applet 620 components. In response to user input 610 to a component of applet 620, an event 630 is constructed and posted on system queue 650, as is done with normal applet operation as discussed above. However, system queue 650 not only dispatches event 630 to applet listeners 640, but also it dispatches event 630 to automator listeners 770 on that component. Automator listeners 770 receive an event 630 and store event 630 information to automator queue 780. When the recording session is complete, automator queue 780 contains all of the events that have occurred on applet 620 components. These events can then be played back by being posted to system queue 650 in the same order in which they were recorded. Automator listeners 770 are similar to applet listeners 640, and are created by the automator and attached to each component of the applet 620. However, rather than perform a specified task to implement applet 620 as applet listeners 640 are programmed to do, automator listeners 770 capture events 630 and record them to automator queue 780, thereby recording the events such that they may be played back at a later time. By having these events stored, testing of a Java Virtual Machine, such as JVM 400, on a particular platform may be automated by having applet recorder 700 replay the user-generated events, thus freeing a person from this tedious task. These events may be required to be played back several times over a period of hours or days. Turning now to FIG. 8, there is shown a flowchart illustrating a preferred method for recording events with applet recorder 700. After the applet recorder is started, it waits in idle mode (step 805) until it receives an indication from a user to start recording events 630 from an applet 620 (step 810). Once the indication to start recording is received from the user, an applet 620 is loaded into applet recorder 700 (step 815). The applet recorder then adds automator listeners 770 to each component of the applet (step 820), and then waits for user input (step 825). If user input is received (step 830), then an event is constructed and posted to system queue 650. The system queue dispatches event 630 to automator listeners 770, which capture event 630 (step 835) and record event 630 to automator queue 780 (step 840) for later playback. Applet recorder 700 then continues to wait for user input (step 825). If no user input is received (step 830), then the applet recorder determines if a stop recording command has been received from the user (step 845). If no stop recording command has been received (step 845), then applet recorder 700 continues to wait for user input (step 825). The recording of events generated by the user through applet 620 thus continues until a stop recording command is received (step 845). When a stop recording command is received, automator listeners 770 are removed, and applet recorder 700 ceases to record events generated by applet 620 (step 850). Applet recorder 700 then idles (step 805), waiting for a command to start recording anew (step 810). With reference now to FIG. 9, there is shown a flowchart illustrating the function performed by an automator listener 770. Automator listener 770 idles (step 910) until an event occurs (step 920). Once an event, such as MOUSE_CLICKED, occurs, the event information is saved to an object (step 930). The object is then added to the automator queue 780 (step 940) and the automator listener continues to idle (step 910), waiting for the occurrence of another event (step 920). A block diagram illustrating the three main parts of an object created by an automator listener 770 is depicted in FIG. 10. The object consists of event ID 1010, component field 1020, and event information 1030. Event ID 1010 indicates the type of event that occurred, such as MOUSE_CLICKED, ITEM_STATE_CHANGED, etc. Component field 1020 references the component on which this event occurred, such as a button, list, text area, etc. Finally, each object contains specific event information 1030, which includes several event-specific things. As an example of the functioning of an automator listener 770 and the creation of an object, suppose applet 620 button is clicked by a user. The automator listener 770 for that component would create an object with MOUSE_CLICKED as event ID 1010. A reference to the button component would be placed in component field 1020. Event information 1030 would contain all other information about the event, such as the x-y coordinate position, modifiers, click count (double or single click), etc. It is important to note that, while the present invention has been described in terms of recording events generated by Java applets, it is also applicable to applications as well. Furthermore, while described principally with respect to Java, the present invention may be applied to other event-driven object oriented programming languages following a similar “listener interface” model. It is also important to note that, while the present invention has been described in the context of a fully functioning data processing system, those of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that the processes of the present invention are capable of being distributed in the form of a computer readable medium of instructions and a variety of forms, and that the present invention applies equally regardless of the particular type of signal bearing media actually used to carry out the distribution. Examples of computer readable media include recordable-type media, such floppy discs, hard disk drives, RAM, and CD-ROMs and transmission-type media, such as digital and analog communications links. The description of the present invention has been presented for purposes of illustration and description but is not intended to be exhaustive or limited to the invention in the form disclosed. Many modifications and variations will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art. The embodiment was chosen and described in order to best explain the principles of the invention and the practical application, and to enable others of ordinary skill in the art to understand the invention for various embodiments with various modifications as are suited to the particular use contemplated. Citations de brevets Citations hors brevets

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It is interesting to see how much we learn in our life time. Our learning process starts with very first day of our life; and ends with our life only. Even when we are not consciously learning anything; our subconscious mind keep grasping things. Scientists have proved that humans, as well as animals, learn many things before birth also; process may start as early as ‘Right after conception.’ It is also scientifically proved that leaning between conception and actual birth stays and sticks long. That includes preferences in food, color, general nature /behavior etc What comes our way naturally; we learn faster. For example;’Mother Tongue / Language’, our own culture, our daily routine etc. We also learn faster; what we like or prefer. This is especially true; in case of education and sports. I have seen many students grow from mediocrity or misery to very top; once they have gone from ‘All subjects’ to ‘Choice subject’ only classes. As they have to focus only on subjects, they actually love; they start getting more interested in studies, excelling or doing much better than before, in process. Many governments and social organisations are now trying to change their education system to find out early; about different preferences of subjects in different students. Same is the case of sports; you learn faster and do better a sport you actually love. That includes playing that sport or have knowledge about that. We know stories of great sportsmen; who started their career or training, in a different sports altogether, changing in between to achieve greatness. Same is case of many movie stars. Some start their ‘Movie Life’ as a singer or dancer; but later excel as an Actor / Actress / Director, and Vice Versa. We have many cases to prove this theory. Learning is not easy to everyone of us. It also differs from person to person or from thing to thing. One person may learn something faster than others; where as same person may not be able to learn other things, as fast as others. That explains; why some students excel in mathematics, some in science, some in languages, some in dramatics, some in art, some in sports etc. Learning also is a process; which we can improve, with certain set or unset rules. In our life; from a small student to a working person, learning has lot to do with quality of our performances on all levels. Besides, a natural learner; people who are open to learning / new experiences, also learn better than others. This is especially true about new languages and culture. Language learning is all about practice. More you practice; better you get. In our careers also learning process has a special meaning; whatever we learn gets accumulated as experience. Now this experience can be both; good or bad. If you think; learning is difficult; you should try Unlearning , which is way more difficult. Whenever we start anew or we change our careers / companies / business / location / partner etc; this unlearning becomes necessary. No two companies, businesses, locations or persons are same; different may have different requirements, rules, laws, standards, needs, styles etc. As learning is important and constant part of our life; we must also learn to UNLEARN. A same set of rules or standard or behavior may not apply or recommended to different careers / companies / business / location / partner etc. Unlearning thus is much more difficult (But Important) than learning; you have to remove from your mind / system, which may be there for years or whole your life. When I first went to learn ‘Horse Riding’; coach asked me if I already know any. I said ‘ I am afraid, not. I know nothing about this.’ I could see big relief on his face; he told me that he prefers to teach ‘Raw students’, to avoid any clash of new and old learning. ‘ It is always better and easier to write on a clean slate than wring on already occupied slate’ He said. Someone told me that new languages comes faster and easier to students from 8 Years old to 12 years old than to students older in age. As their minds are less occupied or corrupt with other things. In general saying their ‘Mind Slate’ is cleaner to write new things on. We sometimes wonder why things are not working with your same routine; which were earlier working fine. With changing time / environment / location etc; we must change our self, and learn to unlearn our now not working experience. Process of unlearning also help us adapt different situations; in a better, easier and faster way. People, who are too rigid to change or unlearn; may find it difficult to fit in to new environments. In case of relationships; it is very important to UNLEARN. No two persons are same; they may have different values, needs, moods, strengths or weaknesses. Actually; to achieve success and peace in life; we must keep a balance between ‘Learning’ and ‘Unlearning’.

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[A rough transcript of my keynote at the Victorians Institute Conference, held at the University of Virginia on October 1-3, 2010. The conference had the theme "By the Numbers." Attended by "analog" Victorianists as well as some budding digital humanists, I was delighted by the incredibly energetic reaction to this talk—many terrific questions and ideas for doing scholarly text mining from those who may have never considered it before. The talk incorporates work on historical text mining under an NEH grant, as well as the first results of a grant that Fred Gibbs and I were awarded from Google to mine their vast collection of books.] Why did the Victorians look to mathematics to achieve certainty, and how we might understand the Victorians better with the mathematical methods they bequeathed to us? I want to relate the Victorian debate about the foundations of our knowledge to a debate that we are likely to have in the coming decade, a debate about how we know the past and how we look at the written record that I suspect will be of interest to literary scholars and historians alike. It is a philosophical debate about idealism, empiricism, induction, and deduction, but also a practical discussion about the methodologies we have used for generations in the academy. Victorians and the Search for Truth Let me start, however, with the Heavens. This is Neptune. It was seen for the first time through a telescope in 1846. At the time, the discovery was hailed as a feat of pure mathematics, since two mathematicians, one from France, Urbain Le Verrier, and one from England, John Couch Adams, had independently calculated Neptune’s position using mathematical formulas. There were dozens of poems written about the discovery, hailing the way these mathematicians had, like “magicians” or “prophets,” divined the Truth (often written with a capital T) about Neptune. But in the less-triumphal aftermath of the discovery, it could also be seen as a case of the impact of cold calculation and the power of a good data set. Although pure mathematics, to be sure, were involved—the equations of geometry and gravity—the necessary inputs were countless observations of other heavenly bodies, especially precise observations of perturbations in the orbit of Uranus caused by Neptune. It was intellectual work, but intellectual work informed by a significant amount of data. The Victorian era saw tremendous advances in both pure and applied mathematics. Both were involved in the discovery of Neptune: the pure mathematics of the ellipse and of gravitational pull; the computational modes of plugging observed coordinates into algebraic and geometrical formulas. Although often grouped together under the banner of “mathematics,” the techniques and attitudes of pure and applied forms diverged significantly in the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, pure mathematics and its associated realm of symbolic logic had become so abstract and removed from what the general public saw as math—that is, numbers and geometric shapes—that Bertrand Russell could famously conclude in 1901 (in a Seinfeldian moment) that mathematics was a science about nothing. It was a set of signs and operations completely divorced from the real world. Meanwhile, the early calculating machines that would lead to modern computers were proliferating, prodded by the rise of modern bureaucracy and capitalism. Modern statistics arrived, with its very unpure notions of good-enough averages and confidence levels. The Victorians thus experienced the very modern tension between pure and applied knowledge, art and craft. They were incredibly self-reflective about the foundations of their knowledge. Victorian mathematicians were often philosophers of mathematics as much as practitioners of it. They repeatedly asked themselves: How could they know truth through mathematics? Similarly, as Meegan Kennedy has shown, in putting patient data into tabular form for the first time—thus enabling the discernment of patterns in treatment—Victorian doctors began wrestling with whether their discipline should be data-driven or should remain subject to the “genius” of the individual doctor. Two mathematicians I studied for Equations from God used their work in mathematical logic to assail the human propensity to come to conclusions using faulty reasoning or a small number of examples, or by an appeal to interpretive genius. George Boole (1815-1864), the humble father of the logic that is at the heart of our computers, was the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork. He had the misfortune of arriving in Cork (from Lincoln, England) on the eve of the famine and increasing sectarian conflict and nationalism. Boole spend the rest of his life trying to find a way to rise above the conflict he saw all around him. He saw his revolutionary mathematical logic as a way to dispassionately analyze arguments and evidence. His seminal work, The Laws of Thought, is as much a work of literary criticism as it is of mathematics. In it, Boole deconstructs texts to find the truth using symbolical modes. The stained-glass window in Lincoln Cathedral honoring Boole includes the biblical story of Samuel, which the mathematician enjoyed. It’s a telling expression of Boole’s worry about how we come to know Truth. Samuel hears the voice of God three times, but each time cannot definitively understand what he is hearing. In his humility, he wishes not to jump to divine conclusions. Not jumping to conclusions based on limited experience was also a strong theme in the work of Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871). De Morgan, co-discoverer of symbolic logic and the first professor of mathematics at University College London, had a similar outlook to Boole’s, but a much more abrasive personality. He rather enjoyed proving people wrong, and also loved to talk about how quickly human beings leap to opinions. De Morgan would give this hypothetical: “Put it to the first comer, what he thinks on the question whether there be volcanoes on the unseen side of the moon larger than those on our side. The odds are, that though he has never thought of the question, he has a pretty stiff opinion in three seconds.” Human nature, De Morgan thought, was too inclined to make mountains out of molehills, conclusions from scant or no evidence. He put everyone on notice that their deeply held opinions or interpretations were subject to verification by the power of logic and mathematics. As Walter Houghton highlighted in his reading of the Victorian canon, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870, the Victorians were truth-seekers and skeptics. They asked how they could know better, and challenged their own assumptions. Foundations of Our Own Knowledge This attitude seems healthy to me as we present-day scholars add digital methods of research to our purely analog ones. Many humanities scholars have been satisfied, perhaps unconsciously, with the use of a limited number of cases or examples to prove a thesis. Shouldn’t we ask, like the Victorians, what can we do to be most certain about a theory or interpretation? If we use intuition based on close reading, for instance, is that enough? Should we be worrying that our scholarship might be anecdotally correct but comprehensively wrong? Is 1 or 10 or 100 or 1000 books an adequate sample to know the Victorians? What we might do with all of Victorian literature—not a sample, or a few canonical texts, as in Houghton’s work, but all of it. These questions were foremost in my mind as Fred Gibbs and I began work on our Google digital humanities grant that is attempting to apply text mining to our understanding of the Victorian age. If Boole and De Morgan were here today, how acceptable would our normal modes of literary and historical interpretation be to them? As Victorianists, we are rapidly approaching the time when we have access—including, perhaps, computational access—to the full texts not of thousands of Victorian books, or hundreds of thousands, but virtually all books published in the Victorian age. Projects like Google Books, the Internet Archive’s OpenLibrary, and HathiTrust will become increasingly important to our work. If we were to look at all of these books using the computational methods that originated in the Victorian age, what would they tell us? And would that analysis be somehow more “true” than looking at a small subset of literature, the books we all have read that have often been used as representative of the Victorian whole, or, if not entirely representative, at least indicative of some deeper Truth? Fred and I have received back from Google a first batch of data. This first run is limited just to words in the titles of books, but even so is rather suggestive of the work that can now be done. This data covers the 1,681,161 books that were published in English in the UK in the long nineteenth century, 1789-1914. We have normalized the data in many ways, and for the most part the charts I’m about to show you graph the data from zero to one percent of all books published in a year so that they are on the same scale and can be visually compared. Multiple printings of a book in a single year have been collapsed into one “expression.” (For the library nerds in the audience, the data has been partially FRBRized. One could argue that we should have accepted the accentuation of popular titles that went through many printings in a single year, but editions and printings in subsequent years do count as separate expressions. We did not go up to the level of “work” in the FRBR scale, which would have collapsed all expressions of a book into one data point.) We plan to do much more; in the pipeline are analyses of the use of words in the full texts (not just titles) of those 1.7 million books, a comprehensive exploration of the use of the Bible throughout the nineteenth century, and more. And more could be be done to further normalize the data, such as accounting for the changing meaning of words over time. So what does the data look like even at this early stage? And does it seem valid? That is where we began our analysis, with graphs of the percent of all books published with certain words in the titles (y-axis) on a year by year basis (x-axis). Victorian intellectual life as it is portrayed in this data set is in many respects consistent with what we already know. The frequency chart of books with the word in “revolution” in the title, for example, shows spikes where it should, around the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. (Keen-eyed observers will also note spikes for a minor, failed revolt in England in 1817 and the successful 1830 revolution in France.) Books about science increase as they should, though with some interesting leveling off in the late Victorian period. (We are aware that the word “science” changes over this period, becoming more associated with natural science rather than generalized knowledge.) The rise of factories… and the concurrent Victorian nostalgia for the more sedate and communal Middle Ages… …and the sense of modernity, a new phase beyond the medieval organization of society and knowledge that many Britons still felt in the eighteenth century. The Victorian Crisis of Faith, and Secularization Even more validation comes from some basic checks of key Victorian themes such as the crisis of faith. These charts are as striking as any portrayal of the secularization that took place in Great Britain in the nineteenth century. Correlation Is (not) Truth So it looks fairly good for this methodology. Except, of course, for some obvious pitfalls. Looking at the charts of a hundred words, Fred noticed a striking correlation between the publication of books on “belief,” “atheism,” and…”Aristotle”? Obviously, we cannot simply take the data at face value. As I have called this on my blog, we have to be on guard for oversimplifications that are the equivalent of saying that War and Peace is about Russia. We have to marry these attempts at what Franco Moretti has called “distant reading” with more traditional close reading to find rigorous interpretations behind the overall trends. In Search of New Interpretations Nevertheless, even at this early stage of the Google grant, there are numerous charts that are suggestive of new research that can be done, or that expand on existing research. Correlation can, if we go from the macro level to the micro level, help us to illustrate some key features of the Victorian age better. For instance, the themes of Jeffrey von Arx’s Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics and History in Late Nineteenth Century Britain, in which he notes the undercurrent of depression in the second half of the century, are strongly supported and enhanced by the data. And given the following charts, we can imagine writing much more about the decline of certainty in the Victorian age. “Universal” is probably the most striking graph of our first data set, but they all show telling slides toward relativism that begin before most interpretations in the secondary literature. Rather than looking for what we expect to find, perhaps we can have the computer show us tens, hundreds, or even thousands of these graphs. Many will confirm what we already know, but some will be strikingly new and unexpected. Many of those may show false correlations or have other problems (such as the changing or multiple meaning of words), but some significant minority of them will reveal to us new patterns, and perhaps be the basis of new interpretations of the Victorian age. What if I were to give you Victorianists hundreds of these charts? I believe it is important to keep our eyes open about the power of this technique. At the very least, it can tell us—as Augustus De Morgan would—when we have made mountains out of a molehills. If we do explore this new methodology, we might be able to find some charts that pique our curiosity as knowledgeable readers of the Victorians. We’re the ones that can accurately interpret the computational results. We can see the rise of the modern work lifestyle… …or explore the interaction between love and marriage, an important theme in the recent literature. We can look back at the classics of secondary literature, such as Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind, and ask whether those works hold up to the larger scrutiny of virtually all Victorian books, rather than just the limited set of books those authors used. For instance, while in general our initial study supports Houghton’s interpretations, it also shows relatively few books on heroism, a theme Houghton adopts from Thomas Carlyle. And where is the supposed Victorian obsession with theodicy in this chart on books about “evil”? Even more suggestive are the contrasts and anomalies. For instance, publications on “Jesus” are relatively static compared to those on “Christ,” which drop from nearly 1 in 60 books in 1843 to less than 1 in 300 books 70 years later. The impact of the ancient world on the Victorians can be contrasted (albeit with a problematic dual modern/ancient meaning for Rome)… …as can the Victorians’ varying interest in the afterlife. I hope that these charts have prodded you to consider the anecdotal versus the comprehensive, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. It is time we had a more serious debate—not just in the digital humanities but in the humanities more generally—about measurement and interpretation that the Victorians had. Can we be so confident in our methods of extrapolating from some literary examples to the universal whole? This is a debate that we should have in the present, aided by our knowledge of what the Victorians struggled with in the past. [Image credits (other than graphs): Wikimedia Commons]

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QUASAR’S BELCH SOLVES LONGSTANDING MYSTERY February 23, 2011 Artist’s conceptualization of the environment around the supermassive black hole at the center of Mrk 231. The broad outflow seen in the Gemini data is shown as the fan-shaped wedge at the top of the accretion disk around the black hole. This side-view is not what is seen from the Earth where we see it ‘looking down the throat’ of the outflow. A similar outflow is probably present under the disk as well and is hinted at in this illustration. The total amount of material entrained in the broad flow is at least 400 times the mass of the Sun per year. Note that a more localized, narrower jet is shown, this jet was known prior to the Gemini discovery of the broader outflow featured here. Gemini Observatory Press Release For Immediate Release – February 23, 2011 When two galaxies merge to form a giant, the central supermassive black hole in the new galaxy develops an insatiable appetite. However, this ferocious appetite is unsustainable. The growth of supermassive black holes, which are found in the centers of all normal galaxies (including our Milky Way), is fundamentally linked to the stars in galaxies. Black holes grow and stars form over time, resulting in a tight connection between the mass of the central black hole and the mass in stars of the host galaxy. Since most galaxies in the local universe do not currently have actively growing black holes at their centers, some process must eventually emerge to shut down this growth and development. Theoretical modeling specifically points to quasar outflows as the culprit. In this negative feedback loop, while the black hole is actively acquiring mass as a quasar, the outflows carry away energy and material, suppressing further growth. Small-scale outflows had been observed before, but none sufficiently powerful to account for this predicted and fundamental aspect of galaxy evolution. The Gemini observations provide the first clear evidence for outflows powerful enough to support the process necessary to starve the galactic black hole and quench star formation. This extraction from the data cube shows the large-scale, fast outflow of neutral sodium at the center of the quasar Markarian 231. We are looking down onto the material that moves toward us relative to the galaxy, so the measured velocities are negative. The large black circle marks the location of the black hole, and red lines show the location of a radio jet. In addition to the quasar outflow, the jet pushes the material at the top right, resulting in even greater speeds. Part of the starburst is located at the position of the box at the lower left, and it is likely responsible for the gas motion in this region. For the first time, observations with the Gemini Observatory clearly reveal an extreme, large-scale galactic outflow that brings the cosmic dinner to a halt. The outflow is effectively blowing the galaxy apart in a negative feedback loop, depriving the galaxy’s monstrous black hole of the gas and dust it needs to sustain its frenetic growth. It also limits the material available for the galaxy to make new generations of stars. The groundbreaking work is a collaboration between David Rupke of Rhodes College in Tennessee and the University of Maryland’s Sylvain Veilleux. The results are to be published in the March 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters and were completed with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation. According to Veilleux, Markarian 231 (Mrk 231), the galaxy observed with Gemini, is an ideal laboratory for studying outflows caused by feedback from supermassive black holes. “This object is arguably the closest and best example that we know of a big galaxy in the final stages of a violent merger and in the process of shedding its cocoon and revealing a very energetic central quasar. This is really a last gasp of this galaxy; the black hole is belching its next meals into oblivion!” As extreme as Mrk 231’s eating habits appear, Veilleux adds that they are probably not unique, “When we look deep into space and back in time, quasars like this one are seen in large numbers and all of them may have gone through shedding events like the one we are witnessing in Mrk 231.” Although Mrk 231 is extremely well studied, and known for its collimated jets, the Gemini observations exposed a broad outflow extending in all directions for at least 8,000 light years around the galaxy’s core. The resulting data reveal gas (characterized by sodium, which absorbs yellow light) streaming away from the galaxy center at speeds of over 1,000 kilometers per second. At this speed, the gas could go from New York to Los Angeles in about 4 seconds. This outflow is removing gas from the nucleus at a prodigious rate – more than 2.5 times the star formation rate. The speeds observed eliminate stars as the possible “engine” fueling the outflow. This leaves the black hole itself as the most likely culprit, and it can easily account for the tremendous energy required. The energy involved is sufficient to sweep away matter from the galaxy. However, "when we say the galaxy is being blown apart, we are only referring to the gas and dust in the galaxy,” notes Rupke. “The galaxy is mostly stars at this stage in its life, and the outflow has no effect on them. The crucial thing is that the fireworks of new star formation and black hole feeding are coming to an end, most likely as a result of this outflow.” The environment around such a black hole is commonly known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), and the extreme influx of material into these black holes is the power source for quasi-stellar objects or quasars. Merging galaxies help to feed the central black hole and also shroud it in gas. Mrk 231 is in transition, now clearing its surroundings. Eventually, running out of fuel, the AGN will become extinct. Without gas to form new stars, the host galaxy also starves to death, turning into a collection of old aging stars with few young stars to regenerate the stellar population. Ultimately, these old stars will make the galaxy appear redder giving these galaxies the moniker “red and dead.” Numerical astrophysicist Philip Hopkins, a Miller Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, explains that many physical processes unique to rapidly growing black holes are likely to play a role in propelling the winds observed by Gemini. “At its peak, the quasar shines with such intensity that the light itself is ‘trapped’ by a cocoon of gas and dust pushing on material with a force that can easily overcome the gravitational pull of the black hole.” Hopkins adds that the bath of X-rays and gamma rays known to be generated by quasars could also heat up the gas in the galaxy’s center until it reaches a temperature where it "boils over" and causes a bomb-like explosion. “But until now, we haven’t been able to catch a system ‘in the act.’” Part of the problem, according to Hopkins, has been that the most visible outflows are those ‘collimated jets’ already known in Mrk 231. These jets are trapped (probably by magnetic fields) in an extremely narrow beam, whereas material is falling into the black hole from all directions. The previously known jets therefore only cause very localized damage – drilling a tiny hole in the cocoon, rather than sweeping it away more broadly as seen in these new, more all-encompassing, outflows. The observations for this study were obtained with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini North, on Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i. The study used a powerful technique known as integral field spectroscopy. The integral field unit (IFU) in GMOS obtains a spectrum at several hundred points around the galaxy’s core. Each spectrum is then, in turn, used to determine the velocity of the gas at that point and represents the third dimension in what is called a data cube. Markarian 231 is located about 600 million light years away in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major. Although its mass is uncertain, some estimates indicate that Mrk 231 has a mass in stars about three times that of our Milky Way galaxy and its central black hole is estimated to have a mass of at least ten million solar masses or also about three times that of the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way. Movie showing the gas in a galaxy merger with a quasar-driven “blowout”: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~phopkins/Site/Movies_files/collision_BH_run4.avi

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Conflict and Solidarity in Mudejar Society The activity of the industrious Mudejar at practically all levels of the economy, and the quotidian mingling of Muslim and Christian in field, workshop, and marketplace provided the foundation of—and the most effective adhesive reinforcing—the structure of Valencia's plural society. A common preoccupation with cultivation and harvest, manufacture and profit fostered among Muslims and Christians a certain homogeneity in outlook and understanding and opened the door to more meaningful social interaction, however hesitant and limited. It is, nevertheless, clear that Valencia's plural social structure was imperfectly articulated and fragile, and that the cement of economic relations was ultimately an unequal match to the solvent of overt religious antagonism. Thus, in 1502 when the Mudejars were faced with the threat of forced conversion in Valencia, many chose flight to the Maghrib with its detrimental material consequences, and a century later, after the abject failure of a policy meant to persuade the Moriscos to become true Christians, the Crown decided that the economic repercussions of the Moriscos' expulsion could be more easily endured than the risks of Morisco dissidence. Both episodes are indicative of the tenacious adherence of Valencia's Muslims to Islam, and this adherence reflects a religious and social reality far more compelling than the material life they shared with Christians. The aim of this chapter will be to provide some understanding of that reality and to explain how the Mudejars maintained both their identity as Muslims and a group cohesiveness while living in a Christian world. It will be suggested that Mudejar self-perception and group-perception were founded not only on religious belief per se, but also on the perpetuation of a social world the organization and mores of which were distinct from those of Valencian Christians. Indeed, it is perhaps more accurate to view the Mudejars as forming a distinct subsociety separated from the larger Christian society by patterns of intragroup social and cultural behavior, but intersecting with that Christian society in a number of ways not without telling acculturative impact. The Acculturative Challenge However durable Mudejar society might have been, it had nevertheless experienced considerable acculturative change. Prior to analyzing late-fifteenth-century Mudejar society, it will be useful to outline briefly some of the more significant of these changes, brought about both subtly by the Muslims' informal interaction with the Christian populace, and forcefully by the formal imposition of Christian authority on an Islamic society. Valencia's Muslims underwent their most radical cultural adjustment in the half-century immediately following the Christian conquest. During that time the Islamic society was essentially decapitated, losing its political and cultural elites to emigration and in failed rebellions. Islamic government and the public application of the Shariah were rudely shunted aside by a Christian colonial administration with its own body of law, the Furs . Even the autonomous and corporate aljama, vouchsafed to the Muslims by their Christian overlord, had no Islamic antecedent, compelling the Muslim adelantats to administer their communities in a foreign manner analogous to that of the Christian jurates in their corporate universitas . As has been indicated, the Christian bureaucracy, particularly when functioning as a tax-collecting mechanism, intruded on most areas of Mudejar life, so that in even so intimate a family affair as inheritance strict observance of the Shariah had to be modified in compliance with the king's demands. Furthermore, the Muslim by necessity had to learn to function in a Christian as well as Islamic legal system. Although this was to be expected for cases involving both Christian and Muslim parties, the fact that some Muslim litigants pursued civil suits with coreligionists in Christian courts is indicative of an acculturative process potentially damaging to the internal harmony of Mudejar communities. Also important were the more gradual processes of Christian urbanization and seigneurialization, which, coupled with the decreasing size of the Muslim population (from an overwhelming majority in the thirteenth century to 30 percent of the kingdom's total by the midfifteenth century), altered the very appearance of the kingdom, as churches re- placed mosques and Muslims retreated from the urban centers to the countryside. Although the rhythms of agricultural and pastoral life remained largely unchanged, Christian control of the economy, especially of the larger domestic and international markets, meant that Muslim farmers, artisans, and retail merchants were dependent on Christians for marketing their produce, selling their manufactured goods, and purchasing raw materials and bulk goods. Mudejar dependence was further manifested in their vassalage to Christian lords and their loss of ultimate control over their land. Outside of the walls of his own home or mosque, the Mudejar could hardly avoid coming to grips with the Christian presence, and having to do so on Christian terms. The greatest threat to the integrity of the Mudejars' Islamic culture and Muslim identity lay in the cities and towns, where the populations were overwhelmingly Christian. There the expressions of Christian religiosity were most pervasive and most aggressive, while conversely the public observance of Islam was all the more restricted. The best example of this tendency is the anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish preaching of the Inquisitors from the pulpits of Valencia and Cartagena. Another urban danger, particularly in the capital, was the volatility of the Christian mob. Although the evocation of despair fed on fear might have been an efficacious proselytizing tool with some Muslims, it is arguable that the demagoguery of Inquisitors and like-minded clerics and Christian mob violence would have been more likely to repel Muslims from Christianity and to inspire among them a reactionary zeal in their commitment to Islam. The cities posed another threat perhaps more serious than Christian aggression, namely, the possibility of friendly and leisurely contact with Christians and their religion. Adherents of both faiths congregated in city taverns and fonduks, passing their leisure time gambling together, drinking together, and sleeping together. For the Muslim such activities meant a violation of the precepts of his own faith, and signaled his entry into a gray area of cultural amorphousness, where, if his Muslim identity was not overtly challenged, there nevertheless resulted a weakening of his own sense of distinctiveness. That Mudejars flocked to Valencia to enjoy with their Christian friends the spectacle of the Corpus Christi Day processions has a similar significance: it does not mean that these Muslims were on the road to baptism; rather, it indicates that they had acquired non-Islamic cultural accoutrements and forms of behavior born of a long-term exposure to Christian society. A useful index of acculturation is the extent of Mudejar bilingualism. Burns, in unison with Fuster and Barceló Torres, concludes that in the thirteenth century the Muslim masses were unilingual Arabic-speakers. For midfourteenth-century Valencia Boswell points to only a minimal change in this pattern: "the vast majority of the Mudéjares did not speak the language of the dominant culture." This was in contrast to the kingdom of Aragon, where the Mudejars spoke Romance but had for the most part lost the ability to function in Arabic. It is thought that throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this state of affairs remained more or less unchanged. In support of this view historians note the Moriscos' obdurate use of Arabic as their language of daily parlance and the systematic effort of the Christian authorities (from 1565) to discourage the teaching and use of Arabic. Of particular significance is the agreement reached between the Moriscos and Carlos I in 1526, in which the Moriscos maintained that "the greater part of the Moorish men and almost all of the women do not know how to speak aljamia (Romance)." Moreover, the Moriscos stated that they would need forty years in which to learn Romance (Carlos I allowed them only ten). The evidence is impressive, and that both the Mudejars and the Moriscos spoke and read Arabic seems indisputable (see below); however, their avowed unilingualism is open to debate. I would argue for a more extensive Mudejar bilingualism, although with Romance spoken with an imperfect accent and syntax. Given the Moriscos' insincere conversion and their anxiety to forestall thorough catechization in the Catholic faith and Inquisitorial inquiries, their presentation of their linguistic status in the negotiations with Carlos I might have been somewhat disingenuous, a device meant to discourage zealous Romance-speaking clergymen. Clearly, in asking for a forty-year period of grace the Moriscos were playing for time. In the years between 1526 and 1609 there very well might have ensued a decreasing bilingualism. As the Moriscos further withdrew from the cities, their contact with the Christian world would have decreased, while, in a reactionary manner, their desire to avoid Christian culture and to cultivate their own cultural distinctiveness—in effect, to freeze the acculturative process—would have intensified. Just as the Christian authorities realized that the Arabic language had to be removed as an impediment to the effective "Christianization" of the Moriscos, it is equally possible the Moriscos understood that by inculcating their children in the Arabic language, the sacred language of the Qur'an[*] , and by forbidding them any education in Romance they were strengthening their fidelity to Islam. In sum, the Moriscos' linguistic status is not necessarily an accurate indicator of that of their Mudejar predecessors. The records of cases tried in the court of the bailiff general, in which Muslims appear as litigants and witnesses, are suggestive of a significant Mudejar bilingualism. Normally, if a Muslim witness was in need of an interpreter, a role usually fulfilled by the royal qadi[*] , the latter's participation in the case was explicitly indicated. For instance, Nuzeya, a Muslim prostitute from Oliva, confessed with "Ali Bellvis, qadi , intervening." More explicitly, one defendant, Ubaydal Allepus of Bétera, is described as "mal algemiat (i.e., he speaks Romance poorly) ... he does not understand algemia," but his interpreter, the amin[*] Açen Amet, was a "Moor molt algemiat and a person who understands la algemia very well." Yet it is striking that the large majority of the Mudejars appearing in these trial records did not require an interpreter. While it is not surprising that the Muslims of urban morerías spoke Romance, given their constant mixing with the Christian populace, or that the amin of a rural aljama had mastered enough Romance to act as intermediary between the aljama and its lord, it is impressive that many Mudejars from rural areas could testify in Romance. Some examples are Açen Muça of Serra, Homar b. Perellos of Benaguacil, Ubaydal Suleymen of Mirambell, Maymo ben Çabit of Manises, and Abdulcarim of Oliva, among others. Equally significant are the testimonies of Christians about their seemingly routine verbal exchanges with Muslims. Ursula, the daughter of the innkeeper Joan Jeroni, testified how Alasdrach and Abdalla Sinube of Buñol, and Ali Alcayet of Chiva, "were speaking Arabic (alguaravia ) with the said captive Moor," whom they had allegedly helped to escape, and how later, after returning from a meeting with the lord of Carlet, "they requested [from her] a good room for sleeping." Miguel de la Serra, a tailor of Valencia, remembered that on Corpus Christi Day Muslim youths from Chiva had come to his house, eaten there, and then invited him and others to accompany them to the festivities. The odyssey of Angela de Vanya, a prostitute from Cuenca plying her trade in Onda, is revealing. She was first approached by Hadal, a Muslim from Benigazlo (Vall de Uxó), but did not know he was a Muslim, because he spoke "in the Valencian tongue and very suavely and not showing any sign of knowing the Moorish tongue." Hadal compelled Angela to go with him to Tales, a Muslim village (loch de moros ), and brought her to the house of Mahomat Cotalla. There, as the frightened Angela sat weeping in the Cotallas' kitchen, Mahomat and his wife assured her that she would not be harmed. Although these trial records afford only a glimpse at a small cross section of Mudejar life, they do show an erosion of linguistic barriers since the fourteenth century. The increasing size of the Christian population and the variety and frequency of its economic dealings with the Mudejars must have necessitated the latter's acquisition of at least enough Romance to carry on day-to-day affairs. It is unrealistic to assume that Muslim and Christian artisans, farmers, and merchants all had interpreters at their disposal for conducting their mundane but essential business. The documentation does not indicate that this was so. If the Mudejars assiduously cultivated an Arabic culture, there is still no reason to assume that at this point in time, before the mass conversions, they had any reason for a self-conscious refusal to communicate in Romance. Demography and economy advised otherwise, and linguistic adaptation proceeded apace. It should not be thought that such acculturation of the Mudejars to Romance-Christian culture as did take place was necessarily a negative or a degenerative process, or a process the flow of which was only unidirectional, although it is likely that the recessive but resilient culture of the Mudejar minority had experienced greater modification from its continual contact with a dynamic and expanding Christian majority. Rather, such acculturation was inevitable, an evolutionary process of adaptation necessary for the social and economic viability of a society that juxtaposed the proponents of mutually hostile ideologies. Even if the behavior of some Mudejars seemed almost to flout Islamic convention, this did not signal a reorientation of their fundamental religious beliefs. (If anything, it attests to a kind of secularization, in which beliefs were not so much altered as ignored.) In a medieval plural society, where identity was finally defined by religious affiliation, cultural erosion and unorthodox conduct were not evidence of Mudejar assimilation into Christian society. Such assimilation—the lessening of social distance, as opposed to acculturation, the lessening of cultural distance —could be achieved only through religious conversion, that is, through a fundamental change of identity. Therefore, in order to grasp the degree to which Mudejar society was truly threatened by absorption into the Christian body, one must broach the question of the extent of Mudejar conversion to Christianity. Unlike the thirteenth century, with its mendicant preachers, schools of Arabic, and refined techniques of polemic, the result of which had been the conversion of a considerable number of Muslims, the Valencia of the Catholic Monarchs saw no organized ecclesiastical campaign of proselytizing. After recovering from the trauma of the conquest, a factor that probably accounted for much of the Dominicans' early success, the Mudejars had regrouped, and so effectively that the Valencian Church seems to have made little or no further headway in the fourteenth century. This caused the Dominican preacher Vicent Ferrer to lament the inactivity of the clergy in missionary work (1413). The stimulus of Ferrer's zeal led to the establishment of an Arabic school in Valencia during the reign of Alfonso V (ca. 1424), but it seems to have quickly faded into oblivion. As we have seen in chapters 1 and 2, although King Fernando cautiously welcomed the baptism of individual Mudejars, he did not promote conversion on a mass scale. The lords of the kingdom, both ecclesiastical and secular, staunchly opposed any attempts to proselytize their vassals, since they could not wring as much rent out of Christian vassals. There were compelling social reasons for not converting. The convert, it seems, entered a sort of "no-man's land," being a full member of neither Christian nor Muslim society. If anything, owing to the strong ties of blood uniting Mudejar families (see below), converts tended to associate more with their Muslim relatives than with Christians. The convert Miguel Crestia was implicated along with his Muslim brother Ubaydal Allepus in the murder of another Muslim. A tornadizo of Cocentaina came to the aid of a Muslim relative, a runaway slave from Córdoba. Of course, Mudejars did not regard the conversion of their fellows favorably. Thus, the Inquisition arrested two Muslims who boldly and vociferously attempted to dissuade some Muslims from receiving baptism. Moreover, the convert put in jeopardy whatever inheritances he hoped to receive from Muslim relations. However, it seems that the Crown was no longer confiscating the estates of deceased converts, as had once been the case. Therefore, the potential convert was not burdened by the fear of depriving his descendants of their inheritances. Even so, Christian society did not welcome the convert with open arms. In previous centuries Christians had insulted converts by calling them "dogs," "renegades," and the like. Given the lukewarm reception of the judeo-conversos by Old Christians and the beginning of an obsession with the purity of Christian blood, it is highly unlikely that the situation would have improved. The murder of Mudejar converts by Old Christians supports this supposition. Nevertheless, a small number of Muslims chose to convert. The large majority of the proselytes were slaves who had the most to gain from conversion. Slaves with Jewish or Muslim masters had to be manumitted after their baptism, for infidels could not own Christian slaves. One Muslim woman preferred conversion to four years of servitude to a Jew. For slaves with Christian masters, the situation was less clear-cut. The law provided that the slave should be freed only if he converted with the consent of his master. Therefore, the decision to manumit the baptized slave was solely the master's. Some masters granted their Christian slaves freedom, but most did not. Business sense usually prevailed over religious scruples. Runaway slaves sometimes converted so as to conceal their fugitive status. When the Muslim slave Fatima fled from Valencia into Aragon, she became Elinor de Vellasquo. From there she journeyed to Barcelona and to Mallorca, where she was apprehended. There were some sincere free converts. The best known of these was the son of a faqih[*] of Játiva, who received baptism in 1487, became a priest, and preached to the Muslims of Granada and Aragon. Under the name of "Juan Andres" he translated into Aragonese the Qur'an[*] and the "seven books of the Sunnah ." Of the few other Valencian converts who appear in the documentation, we know nothing more than their name or place of residence, or sometimes both. Conversion among the Aragonese and Catalan Mudejars seems to have been equally infrequent. In an extremely bizarre incident, a Muslim woman of Albarracín converted just fifteen days after her wedding and then endeavored to retrieve her bridewealth from her Muslim husband. Perhaps conversion was a way of escaping an unhappy arranged marriage, although divorce might have been easier. Mudejar conversion, then, was not unknown, but it amounted to, at best, a few drops in the font. The large majority had no intention of abandoning Islam. Mudejar Feuding and Social Structure A discussion of Mudejar acculturation and religious conversion has served to clarify certain aspects of Muslim-Christian interaction and its impact on the minority culture. It has, however, revealed little about the Mudejar subsociety itself when it did not somehow mesh with the public life of the Christian kingdom. Posing a dichotomy between Valencia's Muslim and Christian societies may appear somewhat artificial, since both groups, after all, lived and labored together in the same kingdom. But occupying the same physical space does not necessitate the rigid conformity of all inhabitants to one all-encompassing social system with its prescribed modes of behavior. Even when dwelling in urban morerías amid large concentrations of Christian population, the Mudejars were enmeshed in distinct networks of social relations articulated in accordance with the moral and material demands of their families. As to the precise nature of Mudejar social structure, the documentation affords us only precious glimpses. Of course, the Christian bureaucrats had little intrinsic interest in the internal life of the king's Muslim communities. What they have left are details that for them were incidental to their fiscal and administrative concerns, bits and pieces that in the aggregate form a coherent, albeit by no means complete, picture. An exploration of the royal records for patterns of Mudejar behavior and the social structures underlying them reveals a high incidence of intracommunal violence, greatly exceeding the occurrence of violent conflict between Muslims and Christians (although probably not that between Christians). The discovery of 120 Crown-sponsored truces between antagonistic Mudejar families, not to mention the large number of assaults and murders, suggests that the family feud occupied a central place in Mudejar social life. The Mudejars' internecine violence indi- cates that their subsociety was still vital, and represents their channeling of energy inward into prescribed forms of behavior and association that had social meaning for them alone. In order to comprehend the origins of such feuding and the historical significance of this phenomenon, it will be necessary first to discuss the Berber and Arab settlement of the Valencian region and its structural implications, and then to describe the structure of the Arabo-Berber family, particularly its Mudejar variant. Historians differ as to the precise chronology and nature of the Muslim settlement of the Valencian region (Sharq al-Andalus ). Guichard argues in favor of an early (eighth through ninth century) Berberization of the area, but noting that from the eleventh century onward the Berbers were so Arabized that they pretended an affiliation to prestigious Arab tribes, conveniently forgetting their Berber origins. Barceló Torres disputes Guichard's use of toponyms as evidence for early Berber settlement, suggesting that these Berber place names originated in later waves of Berber immigration under al-Hakam[*] II (961–976) and al-Mansur[*] (978–1002), or perhaps during the conquests of the Almoravids and the Almohads. Míkel de Epalza has made important contributions regarding the religious status of Valencia's indigenous population following the Muslim conquest. Taking account of new evidence showing only a limited Christianization of pre-Islamic Valencia, he proposes a rapid mass conversion to Islam (in contrast to Bulliet's model of a more gradual conversion), a trend that was intensified in the tenth and eleventh centuries with a Cordoban-controlled campaign of politicoreligious indoctrination intended to stave off a Fatimid Shic i[*] threat to Sunni[*] al-Andalus. The result was that the Sharq al-Andalus became perhaps the most highly Islamized and Arabized region in the peninsula. From the above it may be said that on the eve of the Christian conquest the Valencian region was Islamized and Arabized with a greater or lesser portion of the population being possessed of Berber roots. Moreover, it is likely that the region was settled on a tribal pattern, in which individual villages were peopled by particular clans. For our purposes, whether these clans were Berber, Arab, or Arabized Berber is not important, inasmuch as Arabs and Berbers had and, indeed, still have, very similar forms of social organization. The social and political consequences of Arab and Berber settlement, and of Islamization and Arabization have been set forth by Guichard. He convincingly repudiates the views of Sánchez Albornoz and like-minded historians who argue in favor of the assimilation of the Muslim conquerors to the social norms of the indigenous population. According to Guichard, not only did the religion and literate culture of the conquerors become predominant in al-Andalus, but Arabo-Berber tribal structures prevailed as well. In terms of social organization, this meant that the Arabs and Berbers were members of agnatic, patrilineal groups in which endogamous marriage was preferred so as to maintain the cohesion, wealth, and power of the lineage. These agnatic groups were embedded in a segmentary social system characterized by the balanced opposition between the increasingly inclusive segments of elementary family, lineage, clan, and tribe. This system allowed for both atomization, when segments of equal size competed within the tribe or clan, and amalgamation, when the various segments of a tribe formed a unified front in opposition to an enemy tribe. Thus, tribal in-fighting, most notably between the confederations of Mudari[*] and Yemeni[*] Arabs, marked the political history of al-Andalus well into the tenth century. The intermarriage of Arabs and Berbers with women of the native population—the offspring would have been Muslims and full members of their father's lineage—and the clientage of muwalladun[*] , the descendants of converts to Islam, to particular tribes allowed for the retention of tribal structures. By the eleventh century tribalism had played itself out as the dominant factor in the political life of al-Andalus. In addition to the political centralization and pacification achieved by c Abd al-Rahman[*] III, Guichard emphasizes the processes of sedentarization and urbanization, which hindered segmentation, the dynamic of tribal organization. David Wasserstein argues that an "Andalusian identity" had supplanted tribalism, any politically significant elements of which were destroyed by the military reforms of al-Mansur[*] , which had dissolved the tribally based jund units. Glick suggests an additional factor—the explosion of conversion to Islam in the midtenth century (according to the Bulliet model) saw the Arabs and Berbers being numerically swamped by neo-Muslims for whom tribal issues were not a major concern. However, if Epalza's thesis of an earlier and more intense Islamization of the Valencian region is correct, it may be that Arabo-Berber structures had taken deeper roots there. This may explain the particular vitality of Arabo-Berber social structures among Valencia's Mudejars. In any case, the decline of tribalism as a political force, or the dissolution of the tribal unit as a form of social organization, need not have resulted in the lapse of the more elementary segments of agnatic family and lineage as significant structures. In fact, among the Muslims of Nasrid Granada, and even among the Moriscos of postconquest Granada, agnatic solidarity (c asabiyah[*] ) continued to be a potent social force. It is one thing to remark on the survival of agnatic solidarity in an Islamic polity, or in a recently conquered one like Granada; it is quite another matter to assert that Arabo-Berber social attitudes and structures, at the level of family and lineage, remained largely intact in Valencia some 250 years after the submission of that region to western Christian domination. The defeat and emigration of Muslim military elites in the thirteenth century had eliminated whatever political significance still remained to either the tribe or clan. Since the government was Christian and denied Muslims access to political power, it is difficult to see what sociopolitical role and aims even the smaller solidarities of family and lineage would have had. Furthermore, progressive Mudejar emigration to Granada or the Maghrib, coupled with the internal migration and fragmentation brought about by seigneurial alteration of rural settlement patterns, must have severely strained or severed the ties binding some Muslim lineages together, in effect, fostering a more radical segmentation. Still, at the same time, the conquerors' granting of communal and legal autonomy to the Mudejars was probably conducive to the retention of preconquest structures, or at least to the alleviation of the pressures for fragmentation. As will be seen below, the various official posts of the corporate aljama, however much they were distortions of their Islamic antecedents, became sources of prestige and power within the Mudejar community, prizes over which rival families deemed it worthwhile to feud. Also, Maliki[*] law, according to which the Mudejars regulated their daily lives, seemed to justify the perpetuation of feuding relations by its provision for either retaliation or the payment of blood money (diyah ) in cases of homicide and assault. Aside from the persisting legal and institutional supports for traditional patterns of social relations, it is important to emphasize the peculiar resilience and structural coherence of medieval Islamic society at its lower levels, despite the frequent and sometimes traumatic political upheavals in its upper reaches. In the Valencian case, this resilience derived from the ability of the larger solidarities of an Arabo-Berber society to segment without disturbing the primary social structures. Thus, if a family were broken up—say, through the emigration of one of two brothers to the Maghrib—the sons of the remaining brother could create a new agnatic solidarity composed of themselves, their father, and their own male children, even though their position would be weakened through the loss of their paternal uncle's support. In other words, so long as traditional attitudes were not eroded, preconquest structures could be perpetuated merely through biological reproduction. If 250 years seems an incredibly long time for such structures to have endured, it was also more than enough time for them to have reemerged and solidified. Since Mudejar political life was reduced to the confines of the local morería or village there was no impetus for the amalgamation of clans or tribes; family and lineage, however, remained important. That lineage long continued to be a special concern of Valencian Muslims is evinced in the claims of a Morisco family in 1567 to have descended from al-Mansur[*] and Valencia's Muslim rulers.c Asabiyah[*] in Valencia was buttressed through the practice of endogamy, that is, through parallel cousin marriage with the daughter of the paternal uncle (bint al-c amm). The negotiations of the newly converted Moriscos with Carlos I in 1526 leave little doubt that this type of marriage had been the preferred one among the Mudejars: inasmuch as among the Moors today there are many marriages concluded between close relations in a degree prohibited by the Christian law and permitted by the Moorish law, which law permits marriage to the degree of that between cousins-germane—the children of two brothers inclusive—should the said marriages begin to be disturbed, and to prohibit those marriages which could be made from today henceforth, would result in the greatest damage and disturbance among the said Moors. The Moriscos then requested that Carlos intercede with the papal legate and persuade him to grant a dispensation for the endogamous marriages consummated before the mass conversions. Our documentation is less useful on this matter. Normally, only the name (ism ) of the wife is given—as Fatima, wife of so and so—without ascription to her lineage (nisbah ). This was in keeping with the far greater importance given to patrilineal descent, whereby the offspring of the marriage pertained to the lineage of the father. Of course, in the instance of marriage with the bint al- c amm, the husband and wife would have the same nisbah . In a few rare cases the documentation shows unequivocally the marriage of parallel cousins. In Alcira, Fotoix bint (daughter of) Mahomat Xativi was the betrothed of Ali ibn (son of) Abrahim Xativi. Two cases from Aragon (where the practice of endogamy is all the more impressive, given the greater acculturation of Aragonese Mudejars) suggest that although the right of the male cousin to the hand of the bint al-c amm was recognized, the prospective brides were sometimes less than enthusiastic about their fate. For five years there was pending in the courts of the kingdom a decision on the litigation between a reluctant bride, Fatima bint Mahomat Margnan of Huesca, and her cousin, Ybraym ibn Mofferiz Margnan, concerning the marriage that Ybraym and his father "were claiming" to contract with her. Fatima bint Jayel de Gali of Zaragoza asked for a divorce from her cousin, Faraig ibn Juçe de Gali, on the grounds that he had maltreated her. Faraig maintained that his mother-in-law had put Fatima up to it and pleaded before the king that his wife be restored to him. Questions of marital harmony aside, there were compelling reasons for the practice of endogamy. The marriage of paternal cousins en- hanced the solidarity of the lineage by linking the interests of brothers and their children, and giving the bride's kin more control over the bridegroom. They could then present a more powerful front to rival lineages. Moreover, the reproductive power of the daughter was retained within the lineage; more children, particularly more sons, increased prestige, power, and economic potential. The economic angle was crucial. Since among the Mudejars daughters were able to inherit from their fathers, the exogamous marriage of a daughter implied the loss of property by her lineage. True, the groom had to render a specified bridewealth (sadaq[ *] , Catalan accidach ) to his intended, but, because that was paid to and retained by the bride, her family did not profit from it. In some instances wives left their husbands and took their bridewealth home with them, or when couples separated the wives demanded their bridewealth, but it is highly unlikely that families planned for such eventualities. While endogamy was preferred, exogamous marriage was not at all unusual. Demography militated against every person being able to wed his or her cousin. More important, exogamy served to define relationships between various lineages. Marriage ties created a community of interest, mitigated conflict between families, and stabilized community life. That Mudejars regarded such affinal connections as determinants of conduct is demonstrated in the judicial appeal of Çaat Siquuti. The lieutenant bailiff of Játiva, with the counsel of the local qadi[*], Yuçeff Alçamba, had passed sentence against Çaat, which sentence was then upheld by the bailiff general, with the counsel of Mahomat Bellvis, the qadi general. Çaat complained that the final ruling had gone against him because the two qadi s "are joined by a certain affinity, that the son of the said qadi Bellvis had married the niece of the aforesaid Yuçeff Alçamba, daughter of Yahye Alçamba his brother." In another case, Mahomat Perpir, when he fled to the Maghrib in 1501, was recorded as having Abdalla Murçi and Yuçeff Zignell as brothers-in-law. In 1499 he had reached a truce with Azmet Murçi, a relation of Abdalla, and in 1500 had done the same with Yuçeff Zignell. It may be that affinal ties had helped to close the rift separating the Perpirs from the Murçis and the Zignells, or perhaps in the end they proved insufficient and Mahomat had reasons other than the fear of forced baptism for taking refuge in the Maghrib. Since endogamous marriage was practiced, and the bonds between agnates thereby strengthened, it should follow that agnates acted jointly in the conduct of feuding relations. This is precisely the state of affairs encountered in the documentation. In a number of cases the perpetrators of violence were two or more agnates. Homaymat and Çuleymen Montani of Alacuás, with accomplices, shot and killed with a crossbow another Muslim vassal of the seigneury. Ali Orfayçi and his brother Mahomat Çaffahi of Alcira burst into the house of Pedro Delgado and wounded Juçeff Bolaix with two lacerations. On different occasions Muslims of Valldigna were wounded by Mahomat and Abdalla Giber, and by Çat and Ali Bolarif. Mahomat Malich had the misfortune somehow to incur the wrath of Ali and Mahomat Guayna of Artesa. Clearly casabiyah[*] was crucial for providing the strength in numbers that allowed for such aggression. At the same time, the readiness to resort to violence, combined with the support of sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins, tended to discourage the violent initiatives or retaliation of rivals. The threat posed by the enemy's group solidarity determined the very nature of much of the violence that occurred. Assault and murder were often committed under the cover of night; ambushes were laid and enemies attacked at unexpected moments; and victims were often alone and outnumbered by their assailants who struck in tandem with agnates or other—perhaps affinal—accomplices. We have mentioned elsewhere Juçeff Cabot of Játiva who returned to Valldigna, where, one evening, with henchmen, he did away with an enemy in his own home. Abdalla Çentido and Fuçey Ylel dispatched Azmet Gradano with a dagger-thrust to the throat as he was leaving his father's house in Mirambell. Mahomat Flori of Játiva was fined 110s, in lieu of eighty lashes, "because he had hidden in his house certain Moors [relatives] from Gandía and from the Vall d'Alfandech [Valldigna] for the purpose of killing Gabix, Moor of the said morería ." Mahomat Chiquet of Alcira even resorted to arson, attempting to burn down the house of the Arrayço family. Only rarely were attempts made on the lives of more than one member of a family at the same time, and in such cases the elements of surprise, darkness of night, and superiority in arms are apparent. The brothers Çahat and Amet Pachando were the victims of a ferocious nocturnal assault in Liria by Caet Natjar and Abraym Rabaça of Bétera. Natjar practically cut off Çahat's head with his sword, while Rabaça seriously wounded Amet with a poisoned crossbow dart. As casabiyah[*] was predicated on the responsibility of each agnate to uphold the honor of his family, an attack on one member of the group demanded of the others reprisal against the offender or his agnates. Failure to fulfill this responsibility resulted in the family's loss of honor and in a decrease in its prestige and power in the community. Thus violence elicited a violent response, setting in motion a potentially endless sequence of aggressive acts characteristic of the feud. The understanding of family members involved in feuds that violence would inevitably ensue and vengeance be exacted prompted Muslims of Oliva, Carlet, Játiva, the Vall de Uxó, and Valencia to apply for licenses to bear arms for the purpose of self-defense against their "enemies." Yuçeff Albanne's application hinged on the presumption that because Abrahim Corumbell had already wounded his brother he was next in line. A consideration of the feud between the Murçi and the Torralbi families of the morería of Valencia demonstrates the centrality of agnatic solidarity in the prosecution of a feud. We first encounter the brothers Azmet and Çahat Torralbi receiving from the bailiff general arms-bearing licenses (20 March 1503). Because Çahat had denounced Azmet Murçi before the bailiff's court (for a reason unknown to us), he believed he needed to be armed so that he would not be "damaged by the said Azmet Murçi or by another relative of his " (italics mine). Azmet Torralbi, sharing responsibility for his brother's legal actions, whether he liked it or not, felt equally threatened. Such was the expectation of Murçi vengeance that the Torralbis were licensed to bear arms not only for self-defense but also for the defense of "one other companion who will go in your company." Clearly, it was inadvisable for a man embroiled in a Mudejar feud to walk alone. Less than three months later the Torralbis took the offensive and, putting his licensed arms to good use, Azmet Torralbi severely wounded Abrahim Murçi. The precise relation of Abrahim to Azmet Murçi is unknown, although it seems most likely that they were brothers. In any case, they had the same enemies. Both Abrahim and Azmet had concluded truces with Mahomat Perpir and Ali Perpir, and both had fallen out with even the same agnate, Ubaydal Murçi, perhaps their cousin. Abrahim had also made Azmet's dispute with the Torralbis his own. Nusa, Abrahim's wife, maintained that Azmet and Çahat Torralbi, and their father Abdalla, all bore a grudge against her husband for no reason, and that Çahat and Abdalla prompted Azmet and planned with him the attack on Abrahim. She also asserted that as early as the previous January (1503) Çahat Torralbi had shown much bravado toward her husband and an intention to kill him. The testimonies of other witnesses contradicted some of Nusa's charges. First, it seems that Abrahim Murçi was not entirely blameless. Abrahim was said to have a "foul mouth," and many thought that "because of his tongue the said Azmet Torralbi has wounded him." Abrahim had indeed gone about stating that Azmet was a fool and deserved to be treated as such. Second, it seems that Çahat and Abdalla Torralbi had not urged on Azmet or planned the crime with him; rather, the attack was more of a spontaneous act on Azmet's part. In fact, Abdalla Torralbi had attempted to mollify his son's animosity toward Abrahim, urging Azmet to make peace with him. On the very day of the assault, Abdalla confronted Abrahim, demanding to know why he was deliberately antagonizing his son. Abrahim retorted that he did not have to answer to Abdalla, then wheeled and strode off. Abrahim's inability to hold his tongue proved calamitous, for when Azmet vented his wrath against him, he showed little mercy. Azmet slashed Abrahim about the head and arms with his sword, and, when Abrahim fled into the home of Gil Sanchiz, he followed him there and cut off his right foot. According to the painter Gabriel Gosalbo, it was his own intervention that prevented the affair from escalating into a bloodbath. With a lance he barred the way into Abdalla Torralbi's house against those (Abrahim's relatives, perhaps) who spoke of entering to slit the throats of Abdalla's daughters. Later, he met Çahat Torralbi and advised him to avoid the area of his father's house, lest he fall victim to Murçi revenge. In another case, the brothers Ali and Azmet Thorruc of Millena killed Azmet Araye of Benilloba on account of some disagreement. Consequently, Azmet's brothers, Mahomat and Çahat Araye—their father was an eighty-year-old invalid—recruited some neighbors in Benilloba and proceeded to Millena, where they took their revenge, slaying Azmet Thorruc. Açen Muça of Serra was similarly motivated by a desire to vindicate the murder of his half-brother Azmet Gradano ("jermans de mare," a blood tie not as strong as that between sons of the same father) by Abdalla Çentido. For four years he had restrained himself, but on Corpus Christi Day, 1491, he stabbed Abdalla to death as he sat watching the processions in Valencia. Earlier that day, Yuçeff Ada had asked Abdalla about the state of his relations with Açen Muça, and, upon learning that the two were still feuding, admonished Abdalla to be careful. The feud, then, seems to have been a matter of (Mudejar) public knowledge. This makes perfect sense, for the honor and status of a family rested on public evaluation and approval. This approval could best be attained through the display of solidarity and the willingness of the agnates to fulfill their responsibilities to the group, that is, through the family conducting itself properly in a feud. A number of victimized Mudejar families, either too weak in numbers or too law-abiding to retaliate against their enemies in kind, or perhaps exceedingly confident in the efficacy of royal and seigneurial justice, beseeched their Christian overlords to mete out the punishment due for assault or homicide. The parents of the murdered Azmet Zichnel of Valldigna, "although they have the ability and it would be permitted to them to kill with impunity Juçef Cuyta, the killer," turned first to the criminal justice of Valldigna, a seigneury, and then, once Juçef had fled the valley, to the Crown "to have him fittingly punished and chastized through the measures and means of that [justice]." It is due to this type of legal recourse to the Christian authorities that much of the information concerning Mudejar violence turns up in the documentation. The records of the kingdom's fiscal auditor (Maestre Racional ) indicate that royal officials, and probably their seigneurial counterparts as well, acted as mediators between feuding Mudejar families. The result of a bailiff's intervention in a dispute appears in the records as the payment of a monetary settlement (composicio ) by the offending Muslim or his family to the bailiff. Of course, payment to the Christian official provided little compensation for the victim and his family. It is probably safe to assert, therefore, that either the bailiff and the victim divided the settlement or the victim received a separate settlement equal to that received by the bailiff, who, in either case, would have presided over the entire transaction. This conjecture is substantiated in some cases by scribal notations that state that the victim "admitted" or agreed to the settlement. In the eyes of the victim and his family, the settlement would have appeared a form of blood money releasing them from the obligation, although not necessarily from the desire, to retaliate violently. A more effective means of maintaining the public peace was in the hands of the bailiff general, namely, the official "peace and truce," supposed to last for 101 years, or its permanent variant, the "final peace." Although many of these officially sponsored truces involved Muslims of the morería of Valencia, for keeping order was most difficult in the capital, many others bound Muslims from all over the kingdom. The truces highlight the importance of agnatic solidarity by emphasizing that each party swearing to abide by the truce was representing himself and his "relatives, friends, and defenders." In some cases entire families were present at the conclusion of the truce. Unfortunately, only in rare instances do the documents state the causes for the mutual hostility necessitating a formal truce. When given, the causes usually are acts of violence. The texts of the truces are written according to standard format, in which steep monetary fines are emphasized as the deterrent to any resumption of the feud. For example, in a truce dated 31 March 1489 we find various members of the Capo family of Alcira, standing "for themselves, friends, relations, and defenders," and Abdalla Pollet, his son Mahomat, Azmet Biari, Çahat Biari and his son Caleth, and Çapdon Eça, all of the same morería, pledging "a good peace and truce between them, to last for 101 years, concerning whatever debates, quarrels, rumors, ill-will, and wounds that might have existed between them until the present day." By virtue of an oath sworn "with hands and with mouth" in the presence of Joan Aduart, royal constable and vicar of the bailiff general, "'to our Lord God and to the qiblah of Muhammad' the face turned toward midday, according to the Sunnah and the Shariah of the Sarracens," both parties promised that "there will not be done nor caused to be done nor arranged nor attempted, neither openly nor secretly, neither directly nor indirectly, any evil or damage on the persons or goods of them [the other party]." For any violation of the truce, the Crown would penalize the offending family with a fine of 500 florins—100 florins to the injured party and 400 florins to the royal treasury. It is not difficult to understand why the royal authorities expended such effort to curb the Mudejars' feuding propensities. The death of vassals, the destruction of property, and the disruption of economic activity, all of which resulted from feuding, had the most negative implications for the state of the royal treasury. Moreover, the control of social violence and the efficient administration of justice were essential components of the effective exercise of royal authority. Stated more simply, public order had to be maintained. Feuds not only affected individual families but also at times threatened to engulf entire morerías in tumultuous and bloody disorder. Three royal aljamas were seen to be tottering on the edge of such calamity. In Valencia, the feud between the Roget and the Bizquey families had become so serious that they and "their fathers and mothers" had to be banished from the morería . In Alcira, the bailiff believed the aforementioned truce between the Capo and Biari families to be necessary in order to "pacify the said morería and to put the [morería ] in repose." The bailiff general urged the bailiff of Castellón de la Plana to do something to resolve the conflict between the Bocayos and their rivals "for the benefit and repose of that morería, which today ... is on the road to destruction." While official intervention prevented the growth of widespread violence within morerías, it is less certain that the truces between families always had their intended durability. Social anthropologies have observed in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies where the feud is a central element in social relations the ultimate inefficacy of truces and various forms of compensation as means of permanently extinguishing a feud. Rather, despite the fact that hostilities cease for varying lengths of time, feuds tend to be perpetual in nature. The Valencian evidence does not contradict these conclusions. Azmet Coxet of Paterna was to be apprehended "for breaking the peace and truce." Although Azmet Aixbir and Çaat Borrabe had concluded a truce, Azmet later seized the opportunity to attack Çaat. One also encounters the repetition of truces between the same families, such as the Murçis and the Perpirs, or the Bizqueys and the Rogets. Even if different members or combinations of members of the families appear in successive truces, this hardly masks the fact of the continuing and potentially explosive state of animosity existing between them. It should not be thought, however, that without the intervention of royal and seigneurial officials Mudejar society would have destroyed itself through unabated internecine violence. The Mudejars had their own mechanisms for achieving a cessation of hostilities, a state of affairs necessary if routine social and economic life were to continue. A settlement arrived at through the efforts of Muslim jurists preceded some of the truces established through the office of the bailiff general. When the powerful Paziar family of Alcira and the Getdi family of Picasent concluded an official "peace and truce" after the killing of Abdalla Getdi, the Paziars came with a "carta morischa (Arabic letter) received from Ali Bellvis, son of Mahomat Bellvis, qadi[ *] of the lord king," while the Getdis had an Arabic letter from their local faqih[*] . In other cases Muslims abandoned legal initiatives against enemies, having come to an understanding with them by their own methods and for their own reasons. In the feud between the Araye and Thorruc families, rather than pursuing the prosecution of Mahomat and Çahat Araye in the governor's court, the Thorrucs dropped the charges against them, after having "established peace with all [their] adversaries." It may be inferred that the Thorrucs realized that the capital punishment of the Araye brothers, even if executed through proper legal procedure, would have served only to provoke the perpetration of retaliatory violence by the Araye and their friends in Benilloba. Each family had already lost a son; with the score even, an uneasy truce seemed wiser than more killing and the disruption of the activities of those still alive. When the wife of the murdered Ali Dabbau, his sister, and the guardian of his children, Azmet Pulpul (apparently not an agnate of Ali), dropped charges against the killer, Çaat Melich, the reasons for their doing so were even more pressing than those motivating the Thorrucs. Here, the surviving members of the victim's family, two women and young children, were incapable of either exacting revenge themselves or defending themselves against later retaliation should they press prosecution through the bailiff's court. This evidence suggests that what moved Mudejars to accept compensation or blood money instead of physical retribution, or to make peace with the enemy, however temporary that peace might be, was not so much the threat of censure by the Christian authorities as the fear of triggering further violence, of reactivating the feud in its most destructive form. In other words, the most effective deterrent to feuding was the feud itself. Rival families eyed each other warily and exercised restraint, committing violent acts sporadically in an often calculated manner. It was to no one's interest to give violence free rein. The plethora of official truces between rival Mudejar families, the numerous acts of violence in which agnates were implicated, and the importance of vengeance as a motive for such violence all indicate that the feud was so pervasive as to constitute a primary determinant of Mudejar social relations. Jacob Black-Michaud, whose conclusions are based on the studies of various Mediterranean and Middle Eastern feuding societies, goes so far as to state that "feud can be regarded as a social system per se." While it is not our intention to discuss the validity of this conclusion, nor, for that matter, to attempt to fit Mudejar feuding within the framework of an anthropological model, it is crucial to emphasize a viewpoint on which most observers of feuding societies would seem to agree, namely, that feuding is better viewed as a social process than as a social aberration. If this is the case, then there must have been something other than the necessity to respond to a previous act of violence behind much of the Mudejar violence we have observed, a stake, or stakes, worth the risk of initiating a feud. These stakes were wealth and power. Among Mudejar farmers and artisans wealth was attained through the acquisition of land and through the control of a limited market for manufactured goods. Power, or local influence, rested on the prestige and status afforded by the possession of wealth and by the defeat of rivals in the competition for it. The agnates who constituted the feuding group also functioned as an economic unit, holding land jointly and practicing the same crafts, so that mutual material concerns strengthened agnatic solidarity. Mudejar feuding, then, may be interpreted as a consequence of the competition for material wealth and local status, and as a process determining the allocation of these scarce commodities, thereby stratifying individual communities. The official truces, which sometimes indicate the professions of the subscribing parties, strongly suggest that economic competition was at the root of much Mudejar discord. In a number of cases both of the feuding parties were practitioners of the same craft, producing for the same limited market. Conflict occurred between Muslim blacksmiths, shieldmakers, and shoemakers in Valencia, between Muslim fishermen in Oliva, and between hemp sandalmakers in the Vall de Uxó. The competition seems to have been most intense among Valencia's Mudejar shoemakers. The feuding Bizquey and Roget families, whom the authorities had to expel from the morería, both practiced shoemaking. The Bizqueys also concluded truces with other enemy shoemakers, namely, Çatdon Caeli, the brothers Abrahim and Çalema Cabero, Çilim Maymo, and Çahat Perpir with his nephews Ali and Mahomat Perpir. The Perpirs themselves clashed with shoemakers other than the Bizqueys: Çahat Carcaix, Azmet Murçi, Ali Maguarell, and Çaat Abducarim. In the feud which resulted in the wounding of Abrahim Murci, a shieldmaker, by Azmet Torralbi, a shoemaker, it is interesting that the Torralbis seem to have first come into conflict, not with Abrahim, but with Azmet Murçi, a shoemaker (see above). However, in many other feuds the parties were not of the same profession, in which cases one cannot delineate so precisely the clash of competing economic interests. The ties and common interests created through exogamous marriage or simple friendship complicated intracommunal relations considerably, so that families came into conflict who, had they been guided by economic concerns alone, otherwise might not have. Thus, one encounters truces like the one concluded between the shoemakers Ali Perpir of Valencia and Azmet Naixe of Mislata, on one side, and Ali Maguarell and Çaat Abducarim, shoemakers, and Azmet Claret, a linen salesman, all of Valencia, on the other side. The documentation does not reveal what, other than shoemaking, brought together Perpir and Naixe, Muslims from different families and locales, or why a linen salesman was involved in the feud at all. The frequent and varied business transactions between Mudejars of all walks of life, and matters associated with the complex pattern of land tenure, in which Muslim artisans also were concerned, provided ample opportunity for the sparking of controversy and mutual hostility. For instance, Çale Magarell had Çaat Feçi imprisoned for money Çaat owed him for the purchase of a donkey. In Játiva, Yuçeff Redona complained that Azmet Beniale had planted mulberry trees on his land and demanded that they be uprooted. Muslims of Valldigna went to court over the alleged sale of cloth, while Muslims of Alcira disputed the ownership of goats. Material interests fueled the fires of dissension even within families. For instance, Ali Gehini, a wealthy amin[*] of la Foyeta, was so afraid of being robbed by his own sons, disreputable characters who frequented taverns, that he hid his money in the walls of his house. Mahomat Negral had the justice of Valldigna sell his brother Abducalem's mule for debts Abducalem owed him on account of the justice's earlier sale of Mahomat's field for debts that had really been Abducalem's. Unfortunately, because most Mudejar civil litigation was handled in Islamic courts, the records of which do not survive, our information on Mudejar disputes over land or other commodities is extremely limited. Consequently, direct correlations cannot be made between such disputes and the occurrence of violence and feuding. Considering the extent of feuding between Muslims of the same profession reflected in the truces and the few instances of Mudejar property litigation encountered, it can be cautiously postulated that much of Mudejar feuding had its roots in conflicting economic interests. The feuding that threatened to destroy the morería of Castellón de la Plana was the violent manifestation of a struggle for political power. The struggle centered on the control of the two posts of adelantat and pitted Abdulazis and his son Yuçeff Bocayo against a faction headed by Çale Arroçen and Ubequer Faraig, which also included Caet Fando, Yuçeff Salio, Ali Gordo, and Ali Gerret. Shortly before 19 April 1487 the Bocayos informed the bailiff general of a fight that had broken out between Yuçeff Bocayo and Ali Gerret. Within weeks matters took a more serious turn: two Christians and some unidentified Muslims entered the Bocayos' home and wounded Yuçeff in the arm and hand, cutting off his finger. Investigation revealed that this was not random violence, but that the two Christian assailants had been hired by Çale Arroçen and Ubequer Faraig to do the dirty work. At this point the bailiff general had Ali Bellvis, the qadi[*] general, intervene. Bellvis managed to persuade the Bocayos and their rivals to agree to a power-sharing arrangement. According to this arrangement, the ten councillors of the aljama, among whom were members of both feuding factions, and the adelantats from the previous year would elect the amin[*] and the two adelantats . Most important, it was stipulated that "in any year either Ubequer Faraig or Çale Arroçen is elected as jurate [adelantat ] that in such case let there be elected as jurate one of the said Bocayos, either the father or the son." That the two posts of adelantat were so hotly contested was probably due to the adelantats ' function as advisors to the amin in the apportionment and collection of taxes. This is suggested by the fact that Ali Bellvis also inspected the aljama's account books to ensure that the amin had justly confiscated certain goods of the Bocayos and Yuçeff Pollina, presumably for reason of unpaid taxes. The Bocayos, then, had a clear material interest in being elected as one of the adelantats . Eventually (August 1488), the authorities established a formal truce between the two factions; however, by 1492 Yuçeff Bocayo was again complaining about wounds inflicted by his former antagonists (it is not clear that these were new wounds). There is no further evidence indicating that the feuds in other Mudejar communities were similarly motivated, and the aljama of Castellón, in which the office of amin changed hands annually, may well have been more politically unstable. Still, given that all the communities had more or less the same political structure with officials executing the same functions, it may not be too far-fetched to infer a more general phenomenon of feuding as being in part a contest for local political power, the exercise of which could influence individual rates of taxation. Even families secure in their possession of official posts, like the Paziars, the amin s of Alcira, were involved in feuding, which suggests that the holding of office was not the sole basis of power among the Mudejars. Intimately linked to the competition for economic and political power as a source of feuding was a punctilious concern for honor. The Mudejar conception of honor differed somewhat from that of western Christians. For the latter, honor was attached to social rank and varied according to the possession of wealth and title. For the Mudejars, honor had the same significance at all socioeconomic levels and was the possession of the family, to be augmented or lost. This may help to explain the apparently unusual phenomenon of Mudejar shoemakers and the like fighting over points of honor. As suggested above, family honor could be maintained and increased only through the agnates' fulfillment of their responsibilities to each other. Inasmuch as the family constituted an economic unit jockeying for its share of wealth and influence in the community, its performance in that contest reflected on its honor. However, a family without honor was by virtue of its loss of face excluded from participation in that same contest. Honor, then, was a prerequisite for the attainment of status and power in the community. Because in economic terms Mudejar society was relatively homogenous, being composed largely of small farmers and artisans and lacking an established aristocracy, the possession of honor, achieved through a family's action in accordance with the dictates of agnatic solidarity, was probably as great a determinant of local status as real wealth. This helps to explain why so much of the violence committed by Mudejars seems to have been in defense of family or personal honor. Although economic competition might have inspired the incidents leading families or individuals to believe that their honor had been somehow sullied, it was not considered to have been in itself a sufficient cause for violence. Questions of purely economic concern were settled licitly in court; questions of honor were settled extralegally in the forum of the community. Of course, the settlement of a question of honor through violence to some extent also resolved the economic question, inasmuch as the competition was then either temporarily or permanently eliminated. Thus, in the feud between the Torralbis and the Murçis, which seems to have originated in the clash between shoemakers—Azmet Murçi against Azmet and Çahat Torralbi—Azmet Torralbi inflicted violence on Abrahim Murqi, a shieldmaker, because Abrahim had ridiculed him and thereby stained his honor. It is worth recalling that many in the morería recognized that Abrahim had incurred Azmet's wrath because of his loose tongue. Another incident involving Muslims of Bétera shows the Mudejars' extreme sensitivity where their honor was concerned. Ubaydal Allepus and his convert brother Miguel Crestia went to a hamlet near Bétera where they intended to mow grass with a sickle that a Christian hosteler had given them. There, a Muslim named Raboça accused the two brothers of having stolen the sickle from him. Apparently, Ubaydal and Miguel felt they had been defamed and their honor challenged, for they immediately tried to strike Raboça. Raboça then called for his brother-in-law, Amet Biari, at which point a brawl ensued that resulted in Amet's death. Although Ubaydal denied any previous acquaintance with Amet Biari, the latter's widow claimed that Ubaydal had harbored ill will against her husband. Perhaps Ubaydal's spontaneous violence in defense of his honor was the culmination of a long-standing controversy with Biari's family. Because honor was essentially a social value, the possession of which depended on the community's evaluation of the conduct of an individual and his family, acts that entailed a challenge to or a defense of honor had a meaning recognized and understood by the entire community. Violence begot violence because social norms demanded that vengeance be exacted if honor was to be maintained. Thus, in the aforementioned stabbing of Abdalla Çentido by Açen Muça, Abdalla's friends expected that Açen would be seeking revenge. Açen, it seems, was a somewhat reluctant avenger, but he felt compelled to act when Abdalla passed by him in the street three times making insulting gestures and faces calculated to shame him publicly. If the childrearing methods of Axa, the wife of Abdalla Murçi, are any indication of a widespread phenomenon, then Mudejar children were from an early age socialized in the ways of violent initiative and riposte in the pursuit of honor. When her nine-year-old son came home weeping after having been hit by the son of Alfona, Axa deemed that he had been shamed. She upbraided the boy for not striking back, and she demanded retaliation: "Look, when he [the son of Alfona] passes, hit him with a rock." If this were not enough, she even nagged at her husband and servant: "If you do not strike either the husband or the wife [the Alfonas] I will not consider you men. If you do not do it, go to the devil!" A consideration of the position of women in Mudejar society confirms the continued importance of Arabo-Berber attitudes and social structures. To some extent women were pawns manipulated by their male relatives in the politics of marital alliance. Ideally, a woman was kept within the lineage through endogamous marriage, so that her lineage benefited from her reproductive power. However, if exogamous marriage were unavoidable, it was better and more honorable to receive than to give a woman in marriage. Families that had to give away their daughters in marriage did so to those families with whom alliance would prove most useful in the local scheme of feuding relations. Although the woman in an exogamous marriage lived with her husband's lineage, she still maintained important connections with her father's family. In fact, her behavior, particularly her sexual conduct, affected the honor of her father's family, not that of her husband. This ambivalent position of the woman, bearing children for her husband's family while being responsible for the honor of her father's family, is reflected in a number of ways in the documentation. First, because the children of a marriage belonged to the husband's family, Mudejar widows lost custody of their children, who were given into the hands of male guardians, presumably the agnates of the deceased husbands. The strategy here was to ensure that the children, along with the inheritances their fathers had bequeathed to them, continued to adhere to the father's family when their mother remarried. This explains why Fotayma resided in Sot with her new husband, Amet Albaytar, while her daughter Axa lived with two guardians in Cuart, the home of her deceased husband. Apparently, the only way a widow could continue to play a significant role in the lives of her children was either not to remarry, or to do so only to a man of the same town. The wife's continued close ties with her father's family divided her allegiance and seem to have contributed to the instability of some exogamous marriages. This is indicated by the fact that when a Mudejar wife separated from her husband she usually returned to the home of her father. When Suçey, the wife of Abrahim Çuleymen of the morería of Valencia, went to her father's home in Petrés to attend her brother's wedding, she never returned, "her father, mother, and brother detaining her and not allowing her to come in the power of her husband." Çoltana departed with her father from the seigneury of Castell de Castells without license of the lord, even though her husband was still living there. When Ali Mançor changed vassalage from Benimuslem to Castellón de Játiva, his wife refused to accompany him and demanded the payment of her bridewealth. The bailiff of Játiva did not quite comprehend what was happening and asserted, as a Christian might, "the wife has to follow the husband wherever he would wish to go ... and to live." Probably her confidence in and attachment to her agnates allowed this woman such freedom of choice. Although the father's household offered a haven to a woman in case of an unhappy marriage, it also harbored the harshest judges of her sexual misbehavior. An adulterous woman's shameful behavior affected mainly the honor of her father's lineage; that of the husband's remained largely unstained. Therefore, it was the responsibility of the woman's agnates to punish her. In some traditional Arabo-Berber societies the agnates were expected to kill her, and Islamic law required that adul- terers be stoned to death. The Valencian documentation records a surprisingly large number of cases of Mudejar adultery, in which the Islamic death penalty was normally commuted by the Christian authorities to enslavement to the king. This indicates not that Muslims involved themselves in adulterous affairs any more than did Christians, but that because the honor of the father's lineage was involved in the case of an adulterous wife—and those prosecuted were almost all women—her agnates were themselves especially eager to prosecute her so as to erase their own shame. Since royal law would not permit the agnates to dispose of the woman themselves, they had to go through the proper legal channels. Unfortunately, the documents do not reveal who brought the adulteresses before the qadi 's[*] court (the criminal penalty itself had to be executed by the local Christian authority), but, all else being consistent, the agnates, not the husbands, seem the most likely candidates. The social origins of Mudejar prostitutes further substantiate the importance of the woman's relation to her agnatic group, for the position of such women seems to have derived precisely from their having lacked the support of their agnates. Fotayma was an orphaned maidservant maltreated by her Muslim master. She ran off with a male servant who subsequently became her procurer. Mariem had left her husband, but, because her mother was forcing her to return to him, she departed from Alacuás for the brothel of Valencia. Nuzeya of Oliva had also separated from her husband, and since her parents were dead she, too, was compelled to earn a living in the brothel. Xuxa left her husband in Villamarchante for a lover who later became her procurer. Having committed adultery, she could not hope for forgiveness from her father's family. Adulterous women and prostitutes were the outcasts of Mudejar society. If fathers were preoccupied with the sexual conduct of their married daughters, so much more were they anxious to defend the chastity of their unmarried ones. The violation of a daughter's chastity, committed with the consent of the daughter or not, constituted an assault on the family's honor. Daughters could not bring honor to a family; they could only bring shame through sexual impropriety. Thus, Aragonese Mudejars conducting business in Zaragoza brought their daughters with them and kept them secluded in the fonduk so that they would not be "maltreated" or spoiled for marriage. The Mudejars' concern to guard their daughters' chastity in defense of family honor may be explained as a reaction to an unusual phenomenon encountered in the documentation, namely, the abduction of women. In pre-Islamic Arab society, and also to some extent among Arabs in Islamic times, women were abducted in order to shame the victimized family. The honor of the abductor's family was at the same time increased. Mudejars in royal and seigneurial morerías also seem to have employed abduction as a tactic to disgrace their enemies. Although in some cases abduction might have been, in fact, only an elopement, which still would have shamed the father who could not control his daughter, in other cases the participation of more than one man in the abduction indicates a deliberate intention to dishonor the woman's family. Mahomat and Omeymet Maixquarn of Valldigna paid a 340s settlement to the bailiff of Játiva "for having kidnapped Çayma, Mooress, daughter of the amin[ *] of the place of Manuel." The knight Miguel Çetina was sent to the Vall de Villalonga to search for the daughter ("mora donzella") of a Muslim of Millena who had been abducted by Muslims of Cocentaina. The fate of the abducted women is unknown, but it is likely that abduction lessened their prospects for a good marriage. The passive role of women (outside of the home at least) in the maintenance or loss of family honor was linked to the economic and local political considerations underlying much of Mudejar feuding. The primary factor at stake was the woman's reproductive power. Children, particularly sons, increased a family's economic potential, and the family with many sons and strong casabiyah[*] was a force to be reckoned with in the community. Thus endogamous marriage was preferred to keep offspring within the lineage, while if exogamous marriage was necessary, it was preferable to receive the woman of another family. The widow lost control of her own children to her late husband's family for the same reasons. Adulterous unions were frowned upon because the bastard offspring did not belong to any lineage and were of no help to anyone. Prostitutes, bereft of honor and family ties, existed on the margin of Mudejar feuding society. Above the level of family or lineage the most important solidarity among the Mudejars was that formed by the rural village or urban morería . During the era of Islamic rule such solidarity had greater force owing to the settlement of particular localities by individual clans (thus the prevalence of "Beni" in Valencian toponyms). The dissipation of larger tribe or clan solidarities and the post-Christian conquest seigneurialization of the countryside significantly modified the basis of local identity. The Mudejar no longer identified himself as the member of a particular clan, but as the vassal of a particular lord. Seigneurial control of a rural community meant that the lord's interests largely determined those of his vassals. So long as Muslim vassals stayed put, their lords tended to defend them, but not without a large degree of self-interest (see chaps. 1 and 2). The vassals themselves acted as a unit, and appear in the documentation as the aljama of a particular place of which a particular nobleman is lord. The community of interest between vassals, and between vassals and their lords, was necessitated by economic pragmatism and a scarcity of resources. Labor, water, arable land, and livestock were all in short supply. Efficient exploitation of available resources demanded communal cooperation, and retention of these resources required collective action for purposes of communal defense. Endogamous marriage, creating large extended families, and exogamous marriage, binding different families together, both would have served to reinforce the community's unity of purpose. One manifestation of the ability of Mudejar communities to overcome their internal differences and present a united front to their antagonists was their aggressive and joint defiance of the authorities, particularly of those sent to their villages to make arrests or to confiscate goods. When a royal constable and other officials arrived in Callosa, where they were to collect 19,666s 8d from the Muslims for pensions owed, they discovered that the Muslims had hidden their goods in places nearby. As they were returning with the goods from one of these places, the Muslims ambushed them with a barrage of stones. Officials sent to Matet to arrest two Muslims, fugitive vassals from Gaibiel, had even less luck: "there was made a great resistance by the Moors of the said place, not only breaking open the prisons where the said constable had put one arrested Moor and carrying him away, moreover, they inflicted on the said constable many blows with swords on the staff and one on the arm by which they wounded him." Three years later the amin[*] and adelantats of Matet were still refusing to cooperate in the matter. Muslim vassals of Alcocer possessing lands in the huerta of Castellón de Játiva together cleverly constructed hidden threshing floors near the river, so that they could quickly send threshed wheat downstream without paying their agricultural taxes. When the tax collector later confiscated a horse as a pledge for the unpaid taxes, two Muslims with a lance convinced him to let the horse go. More numerous than the instances of resistance to royal officials were the clashes between vassals of various seigneuries. Neighboring villages were frequently at odds over boundaries, possession of land, distribution of irrigation water, and other such matters that affected the livelihood of their residents. Conflict of interests issued in the courts as litigation, but not infrequently took on the more sinister aspects of theft and violence. Animosity between lords also soured relations between their vassals. It is often unclear whether the actions of vassals against communities nearby were perpetrated with the consent and direction of their lord or whether the vassals took action of their own accord. For the most part one can probably presume a concurrence between lords and vassals in such affairs, inasmuch as any gains or losses sustained by the vassals were also felt by the lord. A brief description of the difficulties and hostility faced by the vassals of some seigneuries should provide some sense of the necessity for communal cooperation and a minimal degree of cohesion. The Muslims of Llombay's marketing of their wheat in Alcira seems to have threatened the interests of some Muslims of the town's morería . Litigation ensued between them, and the bailiff of Alcira confiscated the wheat and pack animals of Yuçeff Carroff of Llombay. A decade later eight Muslims of Llombay murdered a rival of Alcira just outside the walls of the town, which suggests a long-term dispute. Llombay's bailiff and Muslims also rustled livestock from the pastures of neighboring Carlet, for which crime the residents of Carlet planned to enter Llombay and take action. The vassals of Carlet had already been involved in a more serious dispute with Alcudia, which had resulted from the feud between their respective lords, Gaspar de Castellvi and Pere de Montagut. The latter and two henchmen killed Silim Bono of Carlet and wounded his son. Muslims and Christians of Carlet retaliated by wounding a Christian miller and killing a farmer in Alcudia. The feud was finally resolved when Montagut married Castellvi's daughter. Some conflicts were more one-sided. The attack of the brothers Ferrer with their squires and Muslim vassals so terrorized the Muslim residents of Faldeta that they deserted the place. Perhaps the most frequent cause of strife was a community's misappropriation of irrigation water, which placed in jeopardy the crops of other communities in the vicinity. The lord of Alginet complained that his village was "perishing" because the officials, including the amin s[*] , of the Foya de Llombay were not allowing the water to flow as accustomed. The consequences of such disputes could prove dire, such as the one between Antella and Sumacárcel over "a bridge or a duct of an irrigation canal," which provoked Muslim and Christian vassals of Antella to kill Çahat Torraboni of the rival village. At the local level Mudejar society displays two conflicting tendencies: on one hand, fragmentation, as manifested in the feuding relations between rival family or lineage groups; and, on the other hand, a reflexive solidarity necessitated by the struggle between communities over the possession of scarce natural resources. The former tendency was rooted in traditional Arabo-Berber modes of social organization. The sources of the latter tendency are more complex, for the importance of seigneurial rivalry and the role of Christian vassals in the strife between communities disallows a description of local solidarity as a purely Mudejar phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is evident that the Muslims inhabiting individual villages were able to unite when the livelihood of the entire community was threatened, even if at the behest of their lord and in conjunction with their Christian neighbors. That such was the case perhaps can be explained in part by the ability of Arabo-Berber segmentary societies to amalgamate when necessary, as well as to atomize. Considerable space has been devoted to a discussion of Mudejar social structure and to an analysis of Mudejar feuding relations not only to provide some insight into life within the morería below the surface of the Muslim-Christian interface but also to make a point crucial to the understanding of the remarkable tenacity with which the Mudejars and, later, the Moriscos adhered to Islam despite considerable pressures, both informal and formal, to the contrary. The point is that for the Mudejars religious conversion involved much more than a change in their religious beliefs, a change radical enough in itself; it demanded a fundamental alteration of their social attitudes and social organization. The Mudejars were shielded from the allure of Christianity not only by their profession of a faith as exclusive as Christianity but also by the vitality and structure of their subsociety, which was founded on social practices and assumptions distinct from those of their Christian neighbors. While Mudejar feuding in its outward bloody manifestations did not differ from Christian feuding, the social significance Muslims ascribed to it and the family structures and system of values on which it was based were distinct. The feud as a process of status determination was group-specific, functioning in its very intensity to reinforce traditional attitudes and structures. Moreover, religious belief and social practice were largely coterminous, so that the Mudejars' distinct social customs were as much a sign of their "Moorishness" as was their belief in the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad. For instance, conversion to Christianity would have meant a prohibition of the practice of endogamous marriage (between first cousins), a custom sanctioned by the Prophet and essential for the maintenance of their Arabo-Berber social structures. The frequent and often friendly meeting of Muslim and Christian on the neutral ground of marketplace or tavern no more resulted in a merging of their different forms of social organization than it did in religious syncretism. Indeed, Mudejar social behavior, particularly the marked propensity for feuding—or at least the style and dynamic of that feuding—was sufficiently different so as to evoke comment from among the Christians. Francesch Centelles, a shoemaker well acquainted with the Muslims of Valencia's morería , when asked to testify in court about the character of Abrahim Murçi, responded in a manner that suggests that the feuding Mudejar had become a stereotype: "he is a man who seeks fights and quarrels, like any other Moor." It seems clear that the Mudejars' distinctively Arabo-Berber mode of social organization helped to shore up their cultural boundaries against the acculturative attrition of an overwhelming Christian presence. These boundaries preserved the essential element of their ethnic identity, the profession of Islam. Although social mores and behavior were intimately bound up with and were to a large extent the product of religious belief, nevertheless, they in themselves were insufficient to perpetuate the religious faith of the social group. The decision of Mudejars to flee the kingdom in 1502–1503 instead of abandoning Islam was the expression of an intensity of faith that transcended the more amorphous "Moorish" cultural identity engendered by repetitive social practice. It is necessary, therefore, to comprehend how the Mudejars actively instilled and fostered their Islamic faith and identity. An essential element buttressing the faith of individual Muslims was the sense of belonging to a larger community of believers, the ummah . Whatever the situation of the ummah 's individual component polities, even those long since subjugated to Christian powers, membership in the ummah served to distinguish them from all non-Muslims. Unfortunately, the Muslims' adherence to a common faith did not preclude divisiveness within the ummah . Since the fall of the Umayyads in the eighth century the Islamic world had been rent by factionalism, and, as has been seen, this was no less true of the Mudejars. However, making allowances for human imperfection and the not unusual inconsistency between religious precept and social practice, that the Mudejars frequently embroiled themselves in feuds, despite the fact that Muhammad had inveighed against such fratricidal strife among Muslims, does not mean that they had lost their sense of Muslim identity, particularly their collective identity vis-à-vis the Christian world. On the contrary, there were a number of instances in which the Mudejars appear to have acted as a collectivity or were perceived by the Christian authorities to have been such. Let us recall how the nobility advised Fernando against the forced conversion of Valencia's Muslims (1502), noting that "they have their communications with each other," and that any untoward royal initiatives would provoke a violent mass Mudejar reaction. The Mudejars also seem to have been united in a common concern for the embattled sultan of Granada, as was manifested in their taking up collections on his behalf, praying in their mosques for his victory, and negotiating with the Ottoman Turks to come to his rescue. Likewise, the aid provided to runaway slaves by the Mudejars—not just by one community but by any number of morerías in which the fugitives hid on their way to freedom—demonstrates their ability to act together as Muslims for the benefit of other Muslims. Mudejar group-consciousness may be seen as the sum of each Muslim's perception of the fundamental difference between himself and his Christian neighbor, and of each Muslim's participation in the life of an autonomous community juridically framed by the Shariah, a corpus of law at once religious and secular. This aggregate awareness of individual Mudejars, however, seems in itself insufficient to have counterbalanced the animosity between feuding families and competing communities, or to have allowed for the Mudejars' alleged network of "communications" and their ability to act as almost a single political entity. One must seek a more concrete pattern of relations transversing the cleavages between agnatic lineages and rival neighboring communities. The role of exogamous marriage in binding families together and the factor of intercommunal strife in promoting solidarity among the inhabitants of any one village has been discussed. The apparent impediment of intercommunal conflict to a larger, kingdom-wide Muslim solidarity presents a greater problem. Mudejar economic activity, establishing contacts between Muslims of all walks of life from a variety of localities, would have been a key factor in circumventing, or at least lessening, the rivalry between communities. It must be emphasized that while the Mudejars were vassals of particular royal or seigneurial morerías , their economic activities were not circumscribed by the boundaries of any one place. This was especially true of itinerant retail merchants, whose vending took them from the northern to the southern reaches of the kingdom. Since by the nature of their work they were more or less unattached to any particular local interest, these merchants would have served as an appropriate medium for relaying information from one community to another, tying together the separate worlds of distinct aljamas. Another group whose activities were equally unhampered by specifically local concerns were the licensed mendicants, who traveled throughout the kingdom begging alms from their Muslim brethren. Since charity was one of the Five Pillars of Islam, these itinerant mendicants provided an opportunity for pious Muslims to express their religiosity in a manner unrelated to the secular aims of the family and community. Both the giver and the receiver of alms participated in a transaction that emphasized exclusively their obligations as members of an Islamic community, not those stemming from kinship or from residence in a particular place. The economic interplay between town and countryside made the kingdom's urban centers sites for the meeting and mingling of Muslims from various rural villages. Mudejars traveled to town to market pro- duce, to purchase the manufactures of local artisans, or to pass their leisure time in the taverns or fonduk. The large Christian populations of the towns would have induced Muslims from out-of-town to congregate with their coreligionists before turning to Christians for comradeship. If towns like Játiva, Alcira, Castellón de la Plana, and Villarreal attracted Muslims from surrounding hamlets, the capital city gathered in Muslims from all over the kingdom—indeed, from all over the peninsula. Valencia, a veritable teeming metropolis, served as a "melting-pot" for the kingdom's Mudejars. This is indicated in the documentation by the frequent appearance of non-local Muslims working, purchasing, and pursuing litigation in the capital. Furthermore, new vassals in Valencia's morería originated from seigneuries of a wide geographic range, whereas those swearing vassalage to the king in towns such as Játiva or Alcira came from seigneuries nearby. Change of vassalage in itself accentuated two other trends that created links between Muslims of different communities. First, many Muslims who changed vassalage still continued to hold and cultivate land in their former seigneuries, either themselves or through local sharecroppers. This further complicated the already complex Valencian pattern of land tenure, which saw farmers and artisans renting small parcels of land in a variety of places, not just in their place of residence. Mudejars with economic interests in diverse localities likely would have had friends and contacts of equally diverse origins. Thus land tenure itself sometimes cut across the lines of economic competition contingent upon strictly local affiliations. Second, change of vassalage caused the fragmentation of local lineage groups as nuclear families left their agnates behind when they settled elsewhere. Given the importance of c asabiyah[*] in Mudejar society, agnates living in different places were probably still bound by kinship. In addition to these intercommunal agnatic links, there also occurred exogamous marriages between families of different towns, such as the one uniting the niece of Játiva's qadi[*] to the son of Valencia's qadi . Therefore, kinship, both agnatic and affinal, created a network of interests that would have mitigated the intensity of the rivalry between communities for economic reasons alone. The individual Mudejar's sense of belonging to a kingdom-wide Muslim community and the ritual expression of his commitment to Islam coalesced in the act of pilgrimage to the mosque of Atzeneta in the Vail de Guadalest. This mosque housed the sepulcher of the Sufi mystic Abu[*] Ahmad[*] Jac far b. Sid-bono[*] al-Khuzac i[*] (d. 1227). From the thirteenth century until 1570, when King Felipe II had the mosque of Atzeneta destroyed, the tomb of this saint attracted Muslim pilgrims from all over the kingdom of Valencia, and sometimes from Aragon, Catalonia, Granada, and the Maghrib as well. Ecclesiastical views, expressed at the Council of Vienne in 1311, that such Muslim pilgrimages were an affront to the Christian community, combined with royal misgivings about large numbers of Muslims of diverse origins gathering each year at the shrine of Atzeneta by 1379 resulted in Crown attempts to prohibit this pilgrimage. The royal authorities, however, were unsuccessful, for throughout the fifteenth century and much of the sixteenth century Valencian Muslims continued in "semiclandestine" fashion to journey to the tomb of Sid-bono[*] . This annual act of Islamic devotion thus became for the individual Mudejar a statement of resistance to Christian authority, a politically dangerous affirmation of identity with the other participants in the pilgrimage. As evinced by the Mudejars' awareness of the events occurring in the wider Islamic world, especially in Granada and the Maghrib, and by their political activities in conjunction with Granadan, Maghriban, and Ottoman Turkish Muslims, their understanding of what constituted the community of believers extended far beyond the borders of the kingdom. Recognition of this much larger community alleviated their sense of isolation and hopelessness, and strengthened their own Muslim identity, particularly when the large majority of that community was governed by Muslim rulers, some of whom, like the Ottoman sultan, were extremely powerful. As was pointed out in chapter 2, concrete family and commercial connections underlay the Mudejars' politicoreligious identification with the dar[*] al-Islam[*] . As a consequence of previous Mudejar emigration to Granada and the Maghrib, Valencian Muslims had family branches in Islamic lands. On account of these kinship ties, Mudejars traveled to Almería, Tunis, and Oran for the purpose of collecting the inheritances left them by deceased relatives, or, like Ali Fotoffa of Bétera, in order to visit those still alive. A Muslim family of Cocentaina journeyed to Granada to attend a family wedding, while a widow of the morería of Valencia married a Granadan Muslim and then departed with him to North Africa. Like this marriage, there were other instances of recent emigration that forged new links of kinship between Valencia and the Maghrib. The sub-qadi[*] of Játiva decided to spend his retirement in the Maghrib, while his son stayed behind in Játiva and succeeded him in office. Yahye Bellvis, the brother of the qadi general, moved to Tunis and continued to benefit from his commercial connections in Valencia. It was precisely such ties of kinship that facilitated Fernando's settlement of Granadan Muslims in Valencia after the conquest. Thus, Mahomat Fuçey of Bellreguart was licensed to travel to Almería "in order to fetch some relations that he has in the city." Reciprocal commercial interests strengthened Mudejar affinity for Granada and the Maghrib. Mudejars journeyed to Almería and Tunis to sell their merchandise, while Maghriban mer- chants came to Valencia on business. The royal licenses that permitted these merchants to reside in the kingdom for a year or more created ample opportunity for contact with Mudejars. Religion, kinship, and commerce all bound the Mudejar inextricably to the dar[*]al-Islam[*] . It is doubtful that the Mudejars' Muslim identity and group consciousness would have fared as well had they been isolated. Relative isolation of a different sort actually abetted the Mudejars in their preservation of an Islamic culture. Historians have puzzled over the fact that despite royal efforts to attract Muslims to urban royal morerías , where the tax burden was lighter, the large majority nevertheless preferred to remain on seigneurial lands. The Mudejars' choice of residence is best interpreted as having had a religiocultural foundation, rather than an economic one. Life in the largely Christian cities posed obvious threats to the integrity of Mudejar Islamic culture. Either militant Catholics were endeavoring to eradicate all signs of Islam—calling for the destruction of minarets, prohibiting the call to prayer, and the like—or the pleasantries of city life were insidiously weakening the Muslims' resolve to live in accordance with the Shariah. That pious Muslims were sensitive to the latter threat is evinced in the complaint of the aljama of Játiva regarding the nocturnal activities of Christian youths in the morería and the deleterious effect that the "dishonest dress" of the alfondeguer 's wife might be having on Muslim youths. In contrast, life in seigneurial villages afforded the Mudejars a refuge from an aggressive and expanding Christian presence. In these villages Muslims sometimes composed the majority of the population, and their freedom and comfort in religious observance were correspondingly greater. The lords seem to have had few qualms about the public manifestations of Islamic worship. For instance, they allowed their Muslim vassals to make the call to prayer with a horn and perhaps vocally, whereas it was prohibited in the cities. During the time of the Moriscos, the seigneurs were infamous for permitting their ostensibly Christian vassals to practice Islam and for protecting them from the Inquisition. The Mudejars also seem to have benefited from their lords' religious tolerance, even if at a price. For most Mudejars the religious freedom thus secured was sufficient compensation for the heavier burden of seigneurial dues. Not surprisingly, the centers of Islamic learning in Valencia, such as they existed, were for the most part located in rural villages, not in urban morerías . Of the twenty-five Mudejars who journeyed to Almería, Tunis, Oran, and Granada for the purpose of studying the Arabic language and Islamic law (see table 19), only five came from urban morerías —four from Játiva and one from Castellón. The others all came from seigneurial lands—Ondara, Cuartell, Artana, Mascarell, Valldig- na, Benilloba, the Vall de Uxó, and so on. Barceló Torres, intimating the cultural inferiority of the urban morerías , notes that of the 270 Mudejar and Morisco Arabic documents she has found, only nine were drawn up in the morería of Valencia. It is indicative of this state of affairs that Çahat Coret of the Foya de Buñol, who "applied himself diligently to Agarene letters," was appointed faqih[*] of Valencia, after the aljama had failed to find anyone in the morería sufficiently learned to fill the post. It appears, then, that the Mudejars' Muslim identity was nurtured both through the unobstructed public worship of Islam, a freedom they secured by their choice of residence, and through the maintenance of and participation in a literate Arabic culture. Clearly, the latter was needed to sustain the former. Even a minimal level of popular religious awareness necessitated the mediation of learned men (c ulama[*] ') who could read and interpret the Qur'an[*] for the faithful (the Arabic dialect spoken by Mudejars was different from the classical language of the Qur'an). Beyond that, men conversant in jurisprudence (fiqh ) and all that entailed—a knowledge of the Qur'an and of the customs of Muhammad and his companions (Sunnah ) as set down in the traditions (hadith[*] )—were needed to administer justice in the Islamic courts, either as qadi[*] or as faqih[*] , and to see to it that the community lived as much as possible within the framework of the Shariah. Taking into account the Mudejars' situation as a minority enclave composed primarily of farmers and artisans, the grooming of even a small group of culama[*] ' required a determined and sustained effort. Mudejar acquisition of the necessary cultic and legal knowledge was in itself a considerable achievement. The social and intellectual environment was unpropitious for the creation of original scholarly works. Arabic instruction given to Mudejar children in local schools perpetuated this rudimentary but essential Arabic culture. The thirteenth-century capitulations had granted the basic privilege of maintaining schools to the Mudejars. The Muslims inhabiting the new morería of Orihuela (formed in 1446, but lasting only until 1451) were allowed "to have a schoolmaster." The morería of Valencia also had a school, at least until 1455. Documentation from Fernando's reign contains references to schools operating in Ondara, Oliva, and Valldigna. Perhaps Çahat Coret of the Foya de Buñol began his studies of "Agarene letters" in his hometown. Since the Mudejars were able to give at least an elementary Arabic education to their children in Valencia, one may infer that the Mudejars who took the trouble to travel to Granada or North Africa for study did so not merely "to learn to read and write Moorish," as the travel licenses state, but to pursue more advanced studies, particularly in jurisprudence. Tunis and Almeria were both well equipped to meet the academic needs of the aspiring Mudejar faqih[*] . It is difficult to know whether there were schools for more advanced studies in Valencia, although it seems that the Mudejars possessed a sufficient amount of learned Arabic works to have allowed for at least the informal meeting of erudite culama[*] ' with students eager to learn. Juan Andres, the convert from Játiva, recounted that his father, a faqih[*] , had taught him jurisprudence. Barceló Torres's search for the bits of Arabic literature surviving in Valencia reveals that fifteenth-century Mudejars had access to Qur'ans, hadith literature, devotional works, and legal works. Also, in 1450 a faqih[*] of Paterna brought back from Cairo a treatise on trigonometry, in which the use of an astronomical instrument is explained. The most impressive information on Mudejar higher learning comes, surprisingly, from the kingdom of Aragon. The letter of a student to a faqih in Belchite reveals the existence of a madrasah (school) in Zaragoza as late as 1494. There the student in question studied theology, and medicine from the Qanun[*] of Ibn Sina[*] (Avicenna). Considering that such a school still functioned in Aragon, where the Muslims' fluency in Arabic was much less than that of their brethren in Valencia—although perhaps not as minimal as was once thought —it would seem that similar centers of advanced study must have existed in Valencia as well. It is doubtful that every Valencian faqih had the opportunity to travel to Islamic lands for study; some were probably purely local products. Moreover, there were Mudejar physicians and surgeons in Valencia, and these professions required a certain amount of learning, perhaps in the classical Arabic medical texts. Juçeff Alatar, a surgeon of Valencia, was granted a royal license to practice after administering to a Christian knight and passing the examination given by a Christian "master in medicine." The Mudejars frequently utilized their Arabic literacy in a far more mundane fashion in the writing of letters and contracts for official and private business. The extant Arabic documentation contains records of tax payment, and letters to and from local amin s[*] concerning the collection of taxes and debts from Muslim vassals or judicial procedure against them. Much of this correspondence was between amin s and royal bailiffs, which indicates the functioning and interpenetration of two levels of bureaucracy: the all-encompassing royal Romance-Latin administration and the local Mudejar Arabic administration manned by amin s, qadi s[*] , and faqih s. It has already been demonstrated how the two bureaucracies interrelated in the matter of the Crown's taxation of Mudejar inheritances (chap. 4). The Christian authorities' recognition of Arabic documents as valid evidence in litigation and as contractually binding in business transactions, even those between Muslims and Christians, gave Arabic an "official" status in the kingdom of Valencia. For instance, when passing sentence in favor of Fatima Bisquey, who claimed that she owned half of a house given to her as bridewealth (sadaq[*] ) by her husband, against the opposing claimant, the merchant Berthomeu Pinos, the bailiff general pointed out that the decisive evidence was "an act of acidach (sadaq[*] ) and/or marriage contract—exhibited in the trial on behalf of the said Fatima—received by the qadi[*] and/or faqih[*] Mahomat ben Abdulaziz Alcari on the date of 11 March 892 of the Moorish calendar." Muslims bound themselves to pay debts to Christian creditors by acknowledging their debts in Arabic documents. In an Arabic document written in his own hand, Ubaydal Donzell confessed, "I, Ubaydal Donzell, recognize that I owe to you, Manuel Bou, eighteen and one-half pounds, which are for spices and alum." The cultivation of Arabic for higher intellectual pursuits—Qur'anic[*] study, fiqh , medicine, and so on—for the drawing up of legal instruments of various sorts—marriage contracts, letters of debt, and tax records—and for daily parlance lent the Mudejars a common ethnic identity and group consciousness on the basis of language alone. Their knowledge of Arabic allowed them to participate in the intellectual life of the wider Islamic world, just as their understanding of Romance enabled them to function more efficiently in Valencia's Christian society. The Mudejars' use of Romance, however, was far more occasional, employed only when they desired or needed to communicate with Christians. Otherwise, Arabic was an effective social and intellectual barrier between Valencia's Muslim and Christian communities. Indeed, the Mudejars' use of Arabic sometimes aroused Christian suspicions. When Muslim slaves escaped from their masters, any Mudejar who had been seen speaking with the slave in Arabic was considered a prime suspect as an accessory to the crime. The Christians assumed that the Mudejars' choice of language defined their sympathies and guided their actions as persuasively as did their religious faith. There was much truth in this assumption. Since Arabic was the language of the Qur'an[*] , literally the word of God dictated to Muhammad, its use by the Mudejars had a special spiritual significance, and therefore contributed to their perception of themselves as Muslims. The veneration of the Arabic language itself explains the Aragonese and Castilian Mudejars' and Moriscos' writing of aljamiado literature (Romance written in Arabic script) as a means of strengthening their Muslim identity. It also explains why the Christian authorities decided to prohibit the Valencian Moriscos' teaching of Arabic to their children as a means of effecting their true conversion to Christianity. Social structure, language, communal and judicial autonomy, ties of kinship and commerce within Valencia and with their coreligionists in the dar[*]al-Islam[*] —all contributed to the Mudejars' distinct religioethnic identity and to their perception of themselves as a single body united in stark cultural opposition to Christian society. Still, the body required animation and direction, a sense of purpose particularly Islamic. This was provided by the faqih s[*] . They functioned in the Mudejar social body as spiritual cadres, infusing its individual communal cells with a commitment to Islam and, by virtue of their grounding in a common intellectual tradition and world view, binding those cells together in a unity of religious purpose. As the local fonts of religious and legal knowledge, the jurists were eminently suited for this task. By offering their legal opinions and resolving disputes on the basis of the Shariah, they ensured that it remained the lofty standard against which Mudejars evaluated their own conduct and by which they endeavored to regulate their lives. The plea of the newly converted Moriscos in their negotiations with Carlos I in 1526 reflects the great esteem in which the faqih s[*] were held by the kingdom's Muslim populace. The Moriscos informed the king that in the days before the conversions, "when the call to prayer was made in the mosques," the Muslims of the kingdom used the rents from those properties bequeathed by the pious to the mosques to pay the salary of the faqih s, "who have consumed their whole life in studying and knowing the Moorish law and have not been concerned with other offices." The Moriscos went on to request that a portion of the rents pertaining to the new Morisco churches, formerly mosques, continue to be reserved for the support of the baptized jurists. The Morisco faqihs —and they are still referred to as alfaqins in the sixteenth-century documentation—continued throughout the sixteenth century to form the core of Morisco resistance to the official Christian program of religious and social assimilation. The aforementioned Morisco request reveals important information about the Mudejar jurists. It is clear that they devoted their entire lives to the study of Islamic law and, presumably, of its foundations, the Qur'an[*] and the Sunnah . Because the study of the jurists ensured the continuity of Islam as a living religious and intellectual tradition, the Mudejars deemed it an essential activity, so essential that they used the pious endowments (waqf ) bequeathed by the faithful to the mosques to support the jurists. Furthermore, the jurists were supported in such a way that they would not need to bother themselves with any labor other than that properly religious and legal. It is important to note that in Islam there were neither priests nor an ecclesiastical hierarchy for whom financial support was institutionalized, as was the case with the Catholic Church. The Mudejars' support of the faqih s was made possible by the will of the community, a local adaptation to a situation in which Islam had long been deprived of public primacy. Despite the faqih 's key role in the life of the Mudejar community, the documentation provides, unfortunately, very little information about him. The reason for this is that the faqih 's sphere of activity—the mosque, the madrasah , the Islamic court—was very rarely impinged on by the Christian world. Matters concerning Muslims alone and not affecting the public life of the kingdom had no importance for the king and his officials. As a result, it is the amin[*] , the fiscal and juridical intermediary between Muslim and Christian worlds, who appears most often in the documentation. The activities of the faqih[*] held as little interest for the Christians as did the Muslims' theological views. The primary role of the faqih was that of jurisconsult, acting either as counsellor or as arbitrator in litigations between Muslims. Ageg b. Çaat Ageg of Alcira paid 10s to the faqih of Villalonga for having counseled him in his dispute with Abraym Xativi. A faqih of Ondara traveled to Ribarroja in order to "treat with and reconcile a Moor and a Mooress, husband and wife, who wanted to separate." The faqih also taught in the local school, a task for which his years of study had well prepared him. Also, as the Moriscos stated in 1526, the faqih s "were serving in the mosques," undoubtedly as preachers. Regarding the content of their sermons, the only information comes indirectly from the allusions made by the nobility when, in 1502, they beseeched Fernando not to convert their Muslim vassals. It seems reasonable to assert that the sermons of the jurists comprised primarily instruction in the basic tenets and precepts of Islam and positive exhortation to conduct oneself accordingly. As a consequence of their teaching, the lords stated, "among them [the Mudejars] each one defends the said sect [of Islam] and has worked and works [to the end] that the Moor may be a good Moor." More interesting is a type of sermon more negative in tone, which constituted a defense of Islam through a disparagement of Christianity. The nobles offered an illuminating explanation of why the Mudejars were "beside themselves" with fear that the Inquisition would proceed against them all: they [the Mudejars] say that ... none of them could be excused [from prosecution by the Inquisition] because publicly they have had and have in the present kingdom their mosques and their faqih s, who publicly admonish them that the sect of Mahomat is better than the law of the Christians and that all [Christians] end in this damnation. By emphasizing the threat of eternal damnation, the jurists hoped to discourage potential Muslim apostates who might be toying with the idea of baptism for worldly reasons. This kind of preaching may be interpreted as a reaction to the pressures exerted by an increasingly militant Spanish Church and to the threatening pervasiveness of Christian culture. The tragic end of the Spanish Jews and Conversos, and the incipient movements of the Inquisition against Islam, could hardly have failed to impress upon the faqih s the necessity of a defensive anti-Christian posture. The contemporary struggle between Christian and Islamic states did not fail to influence the direction of the faqih s[*] ' activism. The jurists understood what implications the conquest of Granada might have for the future of Islam in the Iberian peninsula, in terms of both the morale of the Mudejar populace and the Mudejars' treatment by the Catholic Monarchs. Consequently, the jurists' activity, particularly their preaching, took on a markedly political tone. It was they who collected in the morerías funds for the aid of the beleaguered Nasrid sultan. Moreover, the king was informed: the said Moors and the faqih s of the said morerías since the time of this enterprise [the war against Granada] have ordered a certain prayer and they make that [prayer] continually in their hours [of prayer], [the prayer] containing, in effect, that God should exalt the said king of Granada and that He should destroy us [King Fernando] and all our people. While the efforts of Mudejar jurists could hardly have altered the course of political events, they nevertheless succeeded admirably in strengthening the commitment of their congregations to Islam. This commitment is evinced in the very low rate of Mudejar apostasy. One document offers a rare glimpse of Mudejar sensitivity in matters of faith, an area of life where Christian interference was not easily endured. When royal officials made the mistake of entering a mosque in Ondara in order to apprehend a condemned Muslim criminal, the reaction of the congregation was one of violent indignation. "The Moors, amin s[*] , jurates [adelantats ], and all the people" hurled "stones and ... the tiles from the roofing, and with lances and crossbows wishing and working to damage you [the lieutenant governor] and your ministers, made a great resistance against you, perturbing you and preventing the capture of the one convicted." The success of the faqih s in overcoming intracommunal and intercommunal factionalism and imparting to each community a sense of commitment to the common cause of Islam was furthered by two factors: the communication between those possessed of religious and legal knowledge, and the foundation of the jurists' status on terms different from those which determined the prestige of other community members. Even though each faqih belonged to a particular community, the faqih s did not exist in a state of intellectual isolation, instructing their congregations and offering legal opinions without consideration of the opinions and perhaps greater knowledge of their learned fellows in other places. On the contrary, their role as the transmitters of a common tradition and their very similar intellectual formation—all having been educated in Granada, the Maghrib, and Valencia—facilitated consultation among the learned and, indeed, advised it, if they were to maintain a consistent orthodox standard. The activities of the faqih[*] Abdalla, originally a captive from Tripoli, suggest a network of communication and consultation among the Muslim judges and jurists of the kingdom. While in Valencia, Abdalla met the faqih of Manises, and they discussed Islamic law. The latter then invited him to dinner in Manises. He was also a friend of the qadi[*] of Benaguacil and lodged in his home. In Ribarroja Abdalla acted as marriage counselor to an unhappy couple. He taught school in Ondara, Oliva, and other places, and while in Oliva he conferred with the faqih and "read in the said morería ." More interesting still, he and the faqih of Paterna exchanged Arabic books. Abdalla's career was probably somewhat more peripatetic than that of most jurists, since he had to wander about collecting alms to repay the aljama of Ondara for having ransomed him. Nevertheless, Abdalla was able to "go among the faqih s of the present kingdom begging for the love of God," because there were established channels of communication among the learned, and because he himself was "a man of knowledge." The career of Abdalla also demonstrates that the Mudejars on the whole respected and heeded the opinions of learned and holy men. Abdalla was known by Muslims throughout the kingdom and was reputed to lead the life of a saint. The qadi of Játiva, the kingdom's largest morería , related why he and the aljama wished to make Abdalla their jurist. Abdalla, the qadi pointed out, "is a very good Moor and ... leader of prayers [oracioner ]," so much so that after the death of the former faqih of Játiva, Abdalla, owing to his "good fame, life, and knowledge," was the unanimous choice to succeed him. Clearly, the prestige of Abdalla, a foreigner and technically a slave, and of men like him in the eyes of the Mudejar community, rested neither on wealth nor on family backing; rather, their status and influence, both local and, in the case of Abdalla, kingdom-wide, derived from their knowledge of religious and legal tradition and from the holiness of their lives. This is suggested in two other cases mentioned above: the intervention of a faqih from Villalonga as legal counselor in a litigation between Muslims in distant Alcira, and the appointment of a Muslim of the Foya de Buñol as faqih of Valencia on the basis of his diligent studies alone. Put in another way, the jurists were able to rise above the petty feuding between Mudejar families and villages because their way of life, financially supported by the community, removed them from the competition for honor, wealth, and political power. Their opinion was heeded because they were nonpartisan and had no stakes in that competition. It is probable that the jurists were able to attenuate the intensity of local feuding by acting as legal counselors and arbitrators between disputants. Their preaching was persuasive because it was an expression of the knowledge and piety that so few possessed. The jurists were able to appeal to the Mudejars as Muslims on a level of consciousness unrelated to mundane local concerns. Because the jurists themselves had a scholarly network of sorts and a certain consensus of opinion regarding the Mudejar community's needs, they preached a similar message. Their message, that of Muslim resistance to Christian assimilative pressure, had efficacy and resonance because, on one hand, they themselves were dispersed throughout the kingdom's Muslim population, local products closely tied to their people, while on the other hand, they possessed vital knowledge that raised them above the mass of Mudejars in an overarching network of religious leadership. For reasons beyond the control of Valencia's faqih s[*] , the Muslims of the kingdom were to spend their final years in the peninsula as unwilling Christians. As has been seen, the chain of events that led to the Mudejars' conversion began with the fall of Granada. This signal and seemingly conclusive event in the long and bloody peninsular struggle between Islam and Christianity had an unforeseen and somewhat ironic consequence. For the Mudejars of Valencia it resulted in a cultural windfall that would help them in the difficult days ahead. When Fernando settled conquered Granadan Muslims in Valencia and promoted the sale of Maghriban and Granadan prisoners of war within the kingdom, he was not only helping himself by increasing royal revenues but also unconsciously contributing to the Mudejars' Muslim identity and group solidarity. The influx of numerous Muslim captives—hundreds from Málaga alone—elicited from the Mudejars considerable cooperative effort on behalf of their Muslim fellows. Mudejar communities collectively ransomed Muslims and, in a seemingly organized fashion, provided assistance to runaway slaves. More important still was the type of Muslim brought into the kingdom through Christian conquest and piracy. These Muslim captives and settlers, unaccustomed to Christian rule and little affected by the acculturative impact of long-term coexistence with Christians, were in all likelihood more steadfast in their commitment to their ancestral faith. Among the new arrivals were men of learning. There were physicians from Granada, jurists and readers of the Qur'an[*] from both Granada and the Maghrib, and a Sufi mystic from the Maghrib. True, it is not known what became of these men, although the career of the faqih Abdalla of Tripoli, a captive known throughout the kingdom for his learning and piety, is, if not typical, suggestive. In this regard, a puzzling but interesting comment was made by some Christians about Abdalla. When the Christian hostess of a hostel and some Muslims lodging there introduced Abdalla to some Christian guests as a faqih , the Christians remarked, apparently in jest, "he is black and he could be a faqih[*] ." Given the similarity between Iberian Muslims and Christians in terms of skin color, the reference to Abdalla's darker coloration as if it were part of a widespread stereotype of Valencia's faqih s hints at a perhaps more general phenomenon of Mudejar religious leaders with Maghriban origins. In any case, the social organization of Mudejar society would have facilitated the integration of Granadan and Maghriban Muslims, both erudite men and less extraordinary folk. Thus, Mudejar society was strangely reinvigorated as a result of the Monarchs' war against Islam. While the conquest of Granada ushered in the tragedy of the Moriscos, it also ensured that the Christian authorities of Valencia would have more formidable opponents in their struggle to eradicate Islam from the kingdom. Islam survived in Valencia not as a fossilized remnant of thirteenth-century Almohad glory, but as a resilient and adaptive society, steeled by its social structure and inspired by its faqih s.

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Easy Magic Tricks for Scouts > > > Triple Prizes < < < piece of paper - Write 1089 on the paper without showing anyone, fold it, and place it on the table in plain view. - Give someone a piece of paper and pencil. - Tell them to write down any 3 digit number that uses 3 different numerals in the middle of the paper. Not 111 or 202 or 330 where the same numeral is used more than once. - Tell him to reverse the number. If the number is larger, write it above the first one. If smaller, write it below. - Subtract the smaller from the larger. - If the resulting number has 2 digits, fill in ahead of it with a zero. - Reverse the number and write it below the bottom number. - Add the bottom two numbers. - Unfold your paper and ask if it matches their result - 1089! Guessing the Coins - Give the penny and nickel to a friend. - Turn your back and tell him to hold one coin in each hand. - Say that you want him to focus on the coins and mathematics is the best way to get his mind in gear. - Ask him to multiply the coin in the right hand by 2 and to say 'OK' when he has the answer. - Ask him to multiply the coin in the left hand by 17 and to say 'OK' when he has the answer. If it took about the same amount of time for each, then the nickel is in the right hand since 1x17 is easy to compute. If the 2nd one was much slower, then the nickel is in the left hand. The next time you do the trick, use different numbers like 13 or 19. - Give your friend these instructions: - Think of any number from one to 10. - Multiply it by 9. [Pause while they do this] - If it's a two-digit number, add them together. - Now, subtract 5 from the number in your head. [Pause again] - Now, think of the letter in the alphabet that corresponds with the number you are thinking about. For instance, if you are thinking of the number 1, it would be "A". Number 2 would be "B". 3 is "C", and so on. - Now, think of a country that starts with the letter you're thinking of. - Spell the country in your head. [Pause here] - Think about the second letter in that country's name. Now, quickly think of an animal who's name begins with that letter.[Pause here] - Now, think of the animal's color. - [Pause and concentrate] That's funny... this can't be right... there ARE no gray elephants in Denmark! Add to 15 paper and pencil - Write your answer (15) on a slip of paper, fold it, and lay it on the table. - Give your fiend the paper and pencil. - Ask him to draw a Tic-Tac-Toe board. - Ask him to write down the numerals 1 to 9 in order in the diagram. 1,2,3 on top. 4,5,6 middle. 7,8,9 on bottom. - Have him circle any numeral in the first row. - Have him circle any numberal in the second row that is not in the same column as the first one circled. - Have him circle the numeral in the bottom row that is in the column with no circled numerals. - Have him add up the circled numbers. - Have him unfold your answer - 15! Jump the Coin - Bet your friend that he will not be able to jump over this coin when you set it down. - Have him stand with his arms stright down at his sides and then place the coin on top of his head. - If he complains that you tricked him, then give him another chance - put the coin in the very corner of the room. Guess the Color 4 pieces of paper - 3 inch square red, blue, and green markers - Put a red spot on one piece of paper, blue on another, green the third. - On the back of the red paper, write in small neat printing - "YOU CHOSE RED" - On the envelope where the stamp would go, write "YOU CHOSE BLUE" - not too big so you can cover it with your thumb. - On the 4th piece of paper, write "YOU CHOSE GREEN", fold it, and put it in the envelope. - Put the 3 colored papers in the envelope and now the trick is ready. - Pull the envelope out of your bag covering the writing with your fingers and lay it front down on the table. - Slide the 3 colored papers out and lay them in a line on the table with the colors facing up. - Ask a friend to think of one of the colors. Really concentrate on it. - Say Kalamazoo and then ask him to tell you the color he chose. - If he says "BLUE", put the papers back into the envelope, fold the flap over to close it and then hold up the front and have your friend read what is written there. - If he says "RED", turn over the Green, then Blue, then Red papers and have him read what is written. - If he says "GREEN", pick up the envelop, and spread it open so he can see the paper inside. Ask him to take it and read what is on it as you pick up the papers and put them away. - Immediately retrieve the materials and put them away before they can be inspected. Do not do the same trick twice. Find the Card deck of cards - Separate the deck so all reds are together and all blacks are together. Place the reds on top of the blacks. - Fan out the deck face down on the table making just the bottom half of it spread out and the top half still piled. This will encourage the person to take a black card. - Tell him to look at his card and show it to his buddies. - While he is checking out his card, stack the deck back together. - When he is ready, fan the deck again, this time trying to keep the bottom half stacked and fanning the top half. - Have him slip his card into the deck wherever he wants. - Stack the deck and ask him to cut the deck once. - Stack the deck after the cut and ask someone else to cut it also. - You can have it cut quite a few times without much chance of it going wrong. - When ready, pick up the deck and look through it for a single card that is a different color from those around it. This is the card. The Best Card Trick Ever This is the card trick I learned in 6th grade and have used it ever since. It's easy but very entertaining for those that have never seen it before. And, it takes awhile to figure out. deck of cards - Count 21 cards off the top of the deck and give them to your friend. - Ask him to shuffle and cut them as much as he wants. Tell him this is his only chance to touch the cards so he needs to do a good job. - Have him give you the stack of cards face-down when he is finished. - Deal the cards face-up into 3 columns of 7 cards each with each card in a column overlapping the one under it so they are easy to scoop into a stack keeping the cards in order. Put the rest of the deck aside. - Point to each column telling everyone this is column 1, column 2, and column 3 from left to right. - Ask your friend to select in his mind one card. Have him tell a friend if he wants. - Have him tell you if the card is in column 1, 2, or 3. - Whichever column he chooses, stack up each column and put his chosen column between the other two to create one large stack. At this point, you know his card is between the 7th and 15th cards. - Now, lay the cards out in 3 columns again just like the start. The important thing to remember is to lay the cards out by row from left to right! This arranges them correctly. - Ask which column the card is in now and repeat the stacking and column creation. - Ask which column the card is in. At this point, you know the card is the middle card in the chosen column! Believe me. :-) - When you recreate the stack putting his column in the center, his card is now the 11th card. The next part is the fun part of the trick. - Deal out the cards into 4 card stars facedown. You will make 5 stars with 4 cards and the last one will have a 5th card in the center on top. As you deal out the cards, count them in your head so when you lay down card number 11, you know right where his card lays. - Ask him to point (do NOT touch or the magic will evaporate) to 2 piles of cards. If he points to the pile his card is in, then swipe away the other piles. Otherwise, swipe away the piles he pointed to. - Repeat asking him to point to 1 pile. Take away the pile or piles that do not contain his card. - You may have to do it a 3rd time until there is just one pile left. - Spread the cards apart a bit and have him point to 2 cards. Remove either the ones he pointed to or the others, leaving his chosen card behind. - Repeat until only his card is left. - Just sit there and wait for him to ask, or take all the other cards and shuffle them back into the deck and get up and go get a drink, or think of some other dramatic way to flip the card over. How Many Cards Moved? deck of cards - Retrieve these cards of any mixture of suits - A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack or Joker - Arrange the 11 cards on the top of the deck as 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, A, J, 10, 9, 8, 7 with the 6 on the very top. - Deal the top 11 cards from the prepared deck face-down into a row on the table going from left to right so the 6 is on the far left and the 7 is on the far right. - Explain that you want your friend to move as many cards as he wants from his left to right, one at a time, while you turn your back. - After he has moved the cards, turn back around and turn over the 7th card from your left. That number is the number of cards he moved! If it is the Jack, he tried to fool you by not moving any cards or by moving all of them. deck of cards - Separate a deck into two piles, those whose printed numeral has a ROUND top ( 2 6 8 9 10 Q ) and those whose printed numeral has a FLAT top ( 3 4 5 7 J K A ) - Put these two piles back together into one deck. It looks mixed up, but isn't really. It helps if you have the Ace of Spades as the bottom card for the Flat top group so it is easy to find in the middle of the deck. - Divide the deck in half, giving each half to a friend. (this is where having the Ace of Spades as the center card helps.) - Turn your back and ask them to each shuffle and cut their own decks as much as they like and let you know when they are finished. - When they are ready, tell them to fan out their decks and pull one card from the other person's deck. - Tell them to look at the card and then insert it anywhere into their own deck. - If they would like, shuffle and cut their own decks as much as they'd like and tell you when they are done. - When they are ready, turn around and have them give you their decks. Put the two decks together into one. - Fan out the cards in your hand looking for the ROUND top number in among the flat tops and the FLAT top number among the round tops. - Pull out the two cards and toss them on the table. deck of cards - Pull out all the Kings, Queens, and Jacks from the deck. - Arrange them into 2 piles - the KH, JC, KS, QD, QC, JD in one pile, the QH, KC, JH, QS, KD in the other, The JS is not needed. - Put the 5-card deck on your lap under the table and the 6-card deck on the table. - Deal the 6 cards face-up into a row on the table. - Have someone choose in their mind one of the cards and have him tell a friend. - Ask them to really concentrate on that card as you collect all the cards into a deck and bring it under the table. - While the cards are under the table, concentrate very hard, making mental contact with the two friends. - Switch decks with the 5-card deck and deal out all the cards, stating that their card has disappeared! - (of course ALL the cards have disappeared so it doesn't matter which card they chose. Don't do it twice!) deck of cards - Pull out all the Aces into a pile, all the Kings into another, and the Queens, and Jacks. Tell the audience that these are the King, Queen, Jack, and Ace patrols getting ready for a campout. - Flip the piles over and stack them one on top of the other into one deck. - Say that the patrols decided to mix it up and have one member of each patrol in a tent. Lay down (face-up) each Ace in a row. Then, on top of the Aces, flip the Kings, then the Queens, then the Jacks. Now, there are 4 piles with one of each card. - Flip the piles over and say the Scoutmaster called lights out and its time to sleep. - Pick up each pile, making a stack of the cards. - Cut the cards 3 or 4 times saying that during the night the scouts tossed and turned and had a terrible time sleeping. - Deal the cards one at a time into 4 piles (face-down) and say, "But morning finally came ..." - Flip the piles of cards over as you say, "and they all woke to find themselves back with their own patrol!" Finding the Aces deck of cards - Pull out all the Aces into a pile face-up. - Shuffle the remaining cards and deal the top 3 cards into a row face-down. - Deal out the remainder of the cards face-down onto these 3 cards until there are 14 on each. Then, put one more card each on the middle and right piles and put the remaining 4 cards face-down to the right as a 4th pile. - You have 4 piles and the 4 Aces. - Have a friend take the first pile and shuffle it all he wants, then put it back face-down. - Have him place the top Ace face-down on top of the first pile. - Have the friend shuffle the 2nd pile all he wants and then put it back. - Have him take any number of cards from the 2nd pile and place them on top of the 1st pile. - Have him place the 2nd Ace face-down on the 2nd pile. - Have him shuffle the third pile, replace it, and take any number of cards and put them on the 2nd pile. - Have him place the 3rd Ace face-down on the 3rd pile. - Have him shuffle the 4th pile and place it face-down on top of the 3rd pile. - When he is finished, place the 3rd pile on the 2nd, then the 2nd on the 1st. You still have the 4th Ace sitting aside. - Now announce that even though the Aces are well hidden throughout the deck, you will bring them to the top. - Deal 2 cards face-down next to each other. Continue dealing face-down alternating between the two piles until all cards are dealt. - Pick up the left-hand deck and deal the top card from it onto the remaining deck. Deal the next card down where the left-hand deck had been. Continue dealing out cards alternating between the two piles. - Repeat picking up the left-hand deck and dealing out the cards, first card on top of the remaining deck, until there are only 3 cards left. - Dramatically show that these are the 3 missing Aces! A Number from 1 to 9 deck of cards - Give the deck of cards to a friend and turn your back to him. - Let him shuffle the deck as much as he'd like. - Tell him to think of a number from 1 to 9 and then deal out that many cards face-down into a pile quietly so you can not hear them. - Tell him to now search through the rest of the deck for a card that matches the number he chose. So, if he chose 5, find the 5C or 5H or 5D or 5S. - Once he finds his card, tell him to put the deck face-down on the table and put his card face down on top of it. - Then, place his dealt out pile on top of the deck. - Now, have him deal off each card from the top of the deck face-up on the table and announce the name of each card as it is dealt. - Starting at zero, mentally count the cards he deals. When he calls a card that matches the number in your head, that is his card, so memorize it. If he calls 5 Spades when you are at '5', then that is his card. - Let him continue to deal out cards up to 10 and then ask him to stop. - Tell him his card was the 5 of Spades, or whichever matched. - Then, turn around for the applause. :-) More Cub Scout Information to Use: Cub Scouts - information about the cub scout program Bobcat Info - any grade Tiger Info - 1st grade Wolf Info - 2nd grade Bear Info - 3rd grade Webelos - 4th and 5th grade To help make your Cub Scouts of America program the best it can be, use these pages to find good stuff: Monthly Cub Scout Themes Activities - find age-appropriate, advancement-supporting activites for Cub Scouts Games - den or pack games just right for 1st through 3rd graders Projects - fun projects for cub scouts to use to do a good turn Recipes - easy recipes Cub Scout Skits - skits that Cub Scouts love Songs - songs to liven up a cub scout den or pack meeting Stories - choose stories that cub scouts will enjoy and understand Awards - see what awards are available to all cub scouts Cub Scout Academics & Sports - extra recognition opportunities Pinewood Derby - advice for the big race Yukon Jack on Starting post Yvonne N P on Outdoor Activity award New Advanc Chair on Merit Badges Mark Kirkendall on Project Search Tamara on Project Search Kim on Uniforms Dwight S on Outdoor Activity award Dawn on Webelos Super NOVA award Anna R. on Arrow of Light Contest - Ask a Question - Add Content - scout software This site is not officially associated with the Boy Scouts of America

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Alexander Todorov, an associate professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, has designed a new freshman seminar, "The Face: The Forces That Shape How We Perceive Others," to teach students about humans' specialized mechanisms for processing, recognizing and socially assessing faces — as well as the biases that lead to errors in perception. Photo by Denise Applewhite Academic journeys begin with freshman seminars Princeton's newest undergraduates are setting out on a path of inquiry and discovery this fall through the University's freshman seminar program. Freshman seminars enable students to build strong relationships with faculty members and classmates in a close-knit intellectual setting. Many students cite the freshman seminar as one of the highlights of their time at Princeton. Among other subjects, freshmen this fall are exploring forces that shape facial perception, issues related to global environmental change, experiences with sound and music, and notions of individuality. A total of 480 freshmen are enrolled this semester in 35 seminars, each of which is hosted by a residential college. Class discussions often continue in informal settings both on and off campus, through meals, guest lectures, field trips and other activities. This is part of a series of features highlighting freshman seminars offered at Princeton this semester. Other features: Exploring the science and nuance of facial perception Posted October 31, 2011; 12:00 p.m. Professor Alexander Todorov showed the students in his freshman seminar a series of images of the same blurry face — with the hint that it was a non-American political leader — as it would appear from 200, 100 and 50 meters. At 50 meters, only one student figured out who it was — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Todorov's next example illustrated how facial recognition can have serious consequences. He showed the students a photo of Darrell Edwards, a man who is currently fighting a 1999 murder conviction based in part on eyewitness testimony. Then Todorov demonstrated what Edwards would have looked like to the eyewitness who said she saw him the night of the murder from 271 feet (about 82 meters) away, without her prescription eyeglasses. The shocked students laughed at the blurry photograph. "The jurors didn't have that reaction. They thought it was actually possible from this distance to identify a person," Todorov said. "The fact of the matter is, from this distance, you can't identify a person. You might be able to identify somebody who's a highly familiar person based on their gait and other things, but in this case an unfamiliar person, the eyewitness, didn't know who Darrell is." In class, Todorov shows students photos of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from 200, 100 and 50 meters away to demonstrate how distance and familiarity influence facial recognition. (Images courtesy of Geoffrey Loftus) Todorov, an associate professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, uses a wide array of visual aids in his course "The Face: The Forces That Shape How We Perceive Others," which is being offered for the first time this fall. His 15 students are learning about humans' specialized mechanisms for processing, recognizing and socially assessing faces — as well as the biases that lead to errors in perception. "My ambition is to make them excited about psychology and cognitive science. It's a specialized topic but has something for everybody," Todorov said, with applications from eyewitness testimony to electoral outcomes to Hollywood casting of "attractive" performers. Freshman Miriam Pearsall had enjoyed her psychology class in high school and was drawn immediately to the seminar topic. "I was especially attracted to the fact that face perception has such great relevance in understanding society and the world as a whole," Pearsall said. "I love that this freshman seminar allows me to voluntarily delve in the topic. Then I can discuss what I've learned with people who are just as interested in the topic as I am." Todorov (left) incorporates material related to topics ranging from criminal justice to Hollywood casting to show students, such as Victor Hsiao (center) and David Dohan (right), the many applications of facial perception. (Photo by Denise Applewhite) Todorov began the course, which is designated as the Shelly and Michael Kassen '76 Freshman Seminar in the Life Sciences, by explaining how the brain develops facial representations. Students learned about unique ways the brain processes faces unlike other objects almost from birth; the fact that it takes less than 50 milliseconds of glimpsing a face to extract informatino about its familiarity, age, sex, race and attractiveness; and parts of the brain such as the fusiform face area dedicated to face processing. The class also visited the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lab in Green Hall on campus where Todorov, with the help of a graduate student, demonstrated how brain scans are done, and students received a primer on analyzing the scans. For Sarah Cuneo, the trip to the fMRI lab has been the highlight of the class up to this point. "It was amazing to be able to see for ourselves all the techniques and results that we had been reading about for weeks — there's definitely a huge difference between understanding something in theory and seeing it in practice," Cuneo said. The classroom discussions have also shed light on and enlivened some of the more technical material, she said. "The small size of our freshman seminar gives the class an incredibly collaborative feel; we get to really engage our classmates in discussion, which means that we legitimately learn from each other," Cuneo said. "A lot of what we do in class is discussion of scientific journal articles, and it's great to have an active debate about the results. Different people in the class will offer several perspectives on the significance of any given study, and that means we get to examine a hypothesis from a variety of angles." From left, freshmen Miriam Pearsall, Jacob Simon and Sarah Cuneo are among the 15 students who engage in lively discussions about the nuances of facial perception and recognition in Todorov's seminar. (Photo by Denise Applewhite) Todorov's lesson on eyewitnesses was meant to contrast sophisticated perception skills for familiar faces with the factors in play when observing unfamiliar faces. Scientists have not yet discovered why and how the processes for perceiving familiar and unfamiliar faces are so different. In the same class as the discussion on Edwards, students picked out Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton and Jay Leno in a slide of blurry faces. Yet earlier, students had performed poorly on a hypothetical lineup. When they were asked to match the photo of a suspect to one of 10 mug shots, the students came to a consensus on one man and were surprised when Todorov told them that none of the 10 was the suspect. "It makes sense that we would be less able to identify unfamiliar faces, but I didn't think we would be as bad as we were. We were really, really bad," Cuneo said. Students suggested many factors and biases that could lead to a misidentification — witnesses may be agitated or motivated to find a culprit, or they may compare the faces in the lineup to each other rather than their own memory, or expect some variation between their memory and the lineup, among other factors. "We can use these insights for better police procedures for not arresting innocent people," Todorov said, adding that New Jersey is one of the states that changed its lineup procedures to reflect research in this area and remove some sources of bias. "The point is not to dismiss this sort of evidence but to look at it with a critical eye." From left, students Abidjan Walker, Kelly Kremer and Tova Bergsten listen attentively as Todorov (right) explains how overconfidence plays a role in facial perception. (Photo by Denise Applewhite) In his own lab, Todorov studies the social perceptions of faces, and he will focus on related issues for the rest of the semester. Some discussion topics include how people perceive emotional expressions, how people form first impressions, how they assess personality traits such as trustworthiness, and what makes a face attractive. "It's great to explain the basic concepts, and I also learn from teaching them," Todorov said. "I don't really want the students to be face experts, but if they get excited about the right way to do an experiment, how to test a theory, how to rule out alternative explanations and get excited about psychology, that's great."

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Household Safety Checklist In order to protect you and your family, a thorough safety check of every room in your home should be conducted on a regular basis. Unintentional accidents, injuries, and nontraumatic emergencies may be prevented and your family will be healthier and safer when you practice a little prevention. The following checklist may be printed so it can be used for the inspection of your home. ___ Do not leave medications, toiletries, or other household products in drawers or on night stands. ___ To avoid accidental injuries or choking, keep penknives, nail files, scissors, and pocket change out of reach. ___ Install a smoke detector in the hallway outside of the bedrooms. Check and change the batteries regularly. ___ Make certain drapery cords and/or blind cords are well out of reach of children. ___ Make certain the crib mattress fits snugly. ___ Crib slats should be placed no wider than 2 and 3/8 inches apart. ___ Make certain the crib has been put together properly and is not missing screws or bolts to prevent it from collapsing. ___ Make certain there is a carpet or rug beneath the crib or changing table to soften the impact if an infant falls. ___ Make certain drapery cords and/or blind cords are well out of reach of children and cribs. ___ Remove all crib gyms, hanging toys, and decorations form a crib by the time a baby can raise up on hands and knees. ___ Make sure there is a safety belt on the infant changing table, and that it is used consistently and properly. ___ Make sure baby powder and lotions are out of a baby or child's reach. But, make sure the baby powder and lotions are within your reach, so you do not have to leave the infant to reach these items. ___ If your child can climb out of the crib, consider a youth bed with guard rails, or place the crib mattress on the floor. ___ Never leave small parts or pieces of a toy(s) in a child's room. ___ Make certain a night light is not near or touching drapes or the bedspread. ___ Never place a crib, playpen, or bed near a window. ___ Make certain window screens are securely in place, or that window guards are present to prevent a child from falling from a window. ___ Make certain there are plug protectors in the unused electrical outlets. ___ If there is a lid on the toy box, it should not be heavy, hinged, or lockable. Children may crawl inside and become trapped. ___ Put a nonskid bathmat on the floor and a nonskid mat or decals in the bathtub. ___ Protect all electrical outlets with ground fault circuit interrupters. ___ Store medicines, cosmetics, toiletries, and cleansers well out of reach of children. ___ When children are present, put child-resistant safety latches on all cabinets storing potentially harmful substances. ___ Store electrical appliances, such as hair dryers and curling irons, out of reach. ___ Always unplug such an appliance before leaving it unattended, no matter how briefly. ___ To avoid accidental scalding, make certain to set the water heater no higher than 120 degrees Fahreinheit (49 degrees Celsius). ___ Never leave a child or disabled person unattended in a bathtub, or in a bathroom where there is a tub, sink, or bucket containing water. ___ Keep toilet lids closed. ___ Do not store vitamins (or medications) on the kitchen table, counter top, or window sill. ___ Make certain knives, scissors, and other sharp utensils are out of reach. ___ Store dishwasher detergent and other cleaning supplies in their original containers and out of reach. ___ When children are present, install safety latches on cabinets and drawers within a child's reach. ___ Keep chairs and step stools away from counters and stoves. ___ Always turn pot handles inward when cooking on the stove. Use back burners whenever possible. ___ Keep the toaster out of the reach of toddlers. ___ Make certain appliance cords are not dangling, so they cannot be pulled from a counter. ___ Unplug appliance extension cords when not in use. ___ When children are present, use plug protectors for all unused wall outlets. ___ If a child is in a highchair, make sure it is sturdy and has a seat belt with a strap between the legs. ___ Keep a working fire extinguisher in your kitchen. ___ Keep houseplants out of reach of children. A number of plants are poisonous. ___ Make certain television sets and other heavy items are secure so they cannot be tipped over. ___ Remove unnecessary extension cords. ___ Put plug protectors in any unused electrical outlets when children are present. ___ Move tables and other objects with sharp edges away from the center of a room, especially if there are toddlers or disabled persons in the home. ___ Place protective material on sharp furniture edges. ___ Keep drapery and blind cords out of reach of children and/or disabled persons. ___ Secure area rugs to prevent falls and slips. ___ Keep stairs and walkways clear of snow, wet leaves, or other debris. ___ Repair cracks or chips in cement sidewalks and stairs. ___ Make certain railings, gates, and fences are secure and in good repair. ___ Keep garbage cans covered. ___ There should be a fence with a locked gate between the house and the backyard swimming pool. ___ Garden tools and lawn equipment should be securely stored. ___ Play equipment, such as swing sets and garden furniture, should be properly anchored and assembled. Check regularly for rust, splintered wood, or cracks. ___ If you have a fireplace, wood burning stove, or other heat source, place barriers around it to avoid accidental burns. ___ Inspect and clean chimneys and stovepipes regularly. ___ Make certain hazardous items, such as bug sprays, cleaners, auto care products, and weed killers, are secured and stored in their original containers in the garage, utility room, or basement. ___ Place "Mr. Yuk" stickers on all hazardous items. ___ The first action when a person has ingested a toxic substance is to consult with the local poison control center at the universal telephone number in the United States--800-222-1222. ___ Make certain plastic bags, broken pieces of toys, buttons, screws, and other choking or suffocation hazards are stored out of reach of children. ___ Post emergency telephone numbers near each telephone in your home. ___ When children are present, safety devices, such as gates, locks, and doorknob covers, should be in use at all stairways and exits in your home. ___ Make sure all indoor and outdoor stairways and entries are well-lighted and clear. ___ Make certain bathrooms and bedrooms can be unlocked from the outside. ___ Keep matches and lighters out of the reach of children and disabled persons. ___ A home should have two unobstructed exits, in case of fire or other emergency. ___ Check all electrical cords to make sure they are not cracked or frayed. ___ Make certain outlets or extension cords are not overloaded. ___ It is best not to use space heaters. If they are used, make sure they are in safe condition. Never plug them into an extension cord. Do not place them near drapes or furnishings. ___ Paint or wallpaper should not be chipping or peeling. ___ Keep purses, backpacks, and other portable storage bags out of a child's reach. They may contain medicines, penknives, hard candies, and other items that may harm children.

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All the evidence to date shows that value-added techniques are being employed responsibly In one suburban school district, teachers across the system were ranked and evaluated according to the contribution they had made to student learning–based on a value-added analysis of state test results. When they were ranked again the next year, the results were very similar except for one teacher who moved from a top rank to a very low rank. When the school superintendent looked at the results, he immediately identified the teacher–her husband had died during the second year of rankings. What does this anecdote illustrate? For starters, that value-added assessments can misidentify good and bad teachers–and that the discrepancies can be cleared up by local administrators. More important, however, was the fact that the findings were robust; teachers’ rankings were similar across three years of analysis. Moreover, these rankings were used to grant a standard reward to a top group of teachers, not to make fine distinctions in the amount of compensation that teachers received. In other words, the results of value-added analysis, when examined over a period of two or three years, were stable and were used in a way that respected the margin of error involved in using these statistical techniques. Critics of value-added assessment tend to embrace the concept but don’t want the results gleaned from such analysis to be used for accountability purposes–and especially don’t want to use the results to reward or sanction teachers. But teachers are the dominant school input, in terms of both spending and impact on student learning. Excluding them essentially leaves the education system without accountability. The main concern with value-added assessment is that the technique exacerbates the amount of random error involved in measuring student performance. The risk is that teachers and schools may be wrongfully rewarded or punished because value-added techniques either over- or underestimated their students’ learning gains. However, no intelligent users of standardized testing would make policy choices based on a single year’s result or small differences among schools and teachers. Texas, for example, rewards schools based on value-added achievement gains calculated using two-stage regression analysis. The state does not hand out awards based on decimal-point differences among schools; officials reward a previously set percentage of top-ranking schools. The point here is that most of the statistical objections to value-added measurements assume a misuse of the analysis. The statistical “noise” involved in measuring value-added should preclude decisions that are based on small, unreplicated analysis; it should not preclude decisions that are based on gross findings. Confidence in gross findings can be developed by replication, by averaging results over several time periods, and by using several measures of the development of human capital–not tests alone, but also attendance rates, dropout rates, and promotion rates (a very high-quality assessment will track indicators of human capital such as post-secondary school earnings and higher-education outcomes as well). The richer the measures used, the less weight there is on the psychometric concerns involving test scores. The alternative is to rest teacher compensation on factors that have little to do with student learning. It is now well established, for example, that the number of degrees teachers possess and the number of hours teachers spend in education courses are unrelated to student learning. Put another way, an important criterion in the determination of a teacher’s salary does not have any bearing on the ability of the teacher to develop human capital. We know that because it has been replicated in many studies in many school districts, even though salary schedules have yet to reflect this information. Critics often cite the difficulty of comparing the results of large and small schools and comparing one subject with another. It is essential in the debate over the usefulness of the value-added assessment approach that the unit of observation and the comparison group be specified. If, as has been the case in a number of places, the comparison group is all the teachers in a given grade in the school district–with, say, the top 15 percent of the 4th grade teachers receiving an award–what is the significance of a big or small school? The class is the unit, and class size tends to be uniform within a school district. At the high-school level, the comparison group is likely to be, for example, all history teachers or all science teachers across the district. The award-receiving group is a percentage of that comparison group, and it is not affected by the test scores in another subject. If multiple factors are used for assessment, efforts to check on robustness are made, only extreme performances are rewarded or sanctioned, and comparison groups are selected carefully, the technical psychometric points raised by critics should not swamp the incentive and information benefits of performance-based compensation plans for teachers. If we are ready to determine reading programs, language labs, class sizes, and the use of computerized learning on the basis of value-added assessments, we should be ready to reward teachers using the same techniques. There is already considerable evidence from several places–such as Tennessee and Florida, where value-added analysis has been used for accountability purposes–that low-achieving students are the main beneficiaries of the changes that occur when these techniques are implemented. When low-achieving students are taught the same body of knowledge over and over again, and when they are taught how to work under a time constraint, they benefit. Value-added assessment techniques reveal that information. The Illusion of Transparency Critics of value-added assessment say that it is just too complicated for teachers and the public to understand the results these systems will generate. In other words, the results will not be transparent. But if transparency is the criterion that trumps all other criteria, we would be compelled to use an assessment method that we know to be wrong. For example, there is no satisfactory way to make judgments about which method of teaching reading is superior–whole language or phonics–without factoring in the socioeconomic, school, and teacher characteristics of each of the groups of students in the experiment. Statistical controls must be used if the assessments of teachers, schools, or programs are to be accurate, even though very few educators understand the statistical principles and methods involved. I do not require a transparent understanding of the efficacy of the flu shot I take, nor do I require a transparent understanding of the operating characteristics of my car; I trust the experts on the techniques. So must it be in educational evaluation. The problems with the use of value-added assessments, even for teachers, are greatly exaggerated, and the alternatives are simply untenable. One proposed alternative is the use of one or more methods of subjective evaluation. Other teachers, students, and/or parents can be surveyed to make the judgments. Most of those surveys focus on whether respondents like the teacher, are happy in the classroom, or equally soft attributes. They do not really determine what kind of learning gains a certain teacher is eliciting relative to other teachers. Most people look back at their primary and secondary schooling and identify an extremely demanding teacher (whom they disliked at the time) as the one who made the biggest contribution to their educational development. A second possibility is to set up a standard–some threshold–of student achievement as an absolute hurdle to define adequate performance. The problems with this are legion. How should the threshold be determined? Those who want to be rewarded set lower thresholds than those who watch budgets. The threshold becomes a major bargaining tool, quite divorced from the informed decisionmaking objective. What incentives for improvement are there for those who crossed the threshold? Basically, subjective evaluation allows the information essential to the rational allocation of educational resources to be derived politically rather than scientifically. The state of American public education has been deplored by critics for many years. The notion that student learning has remained somewhat stagnant over the past century, though the country has spent steadily more real resources on education, is a matter of profound concern. This surely indicates that we do not know a lot about what works and what doesn’t. We need to know if we are to change the pattern. We must have calibrated results; we must use sophisticated statistical methods to interpret the data; we need to use multiple measures of performance; and we need to implement the analysis in ways that are appropriate to the quality of the information. And teachers, the most important school-controlled input into the educational process, cannot be exempt from this information-gathering activity. Our current unhappy results are consistent with the subjective and/or unsophisticated tools we use for assessing effectiveness and creating incentives. -Anita A. Summers is a professor emeritus of public policy and management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Sign Up To Receive Notification when the latest issue of Education Next is posted In the meantime check the site regularly for new articles, blog postings, and reader comments

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What Is a Virtual Tape Library Last Updated: 09-01-2010 , Posted: 06-16-2006 Virtual tape is a concept that has been in the data center for many years. Originally introduced for IBM mainframes, it is now exploding in the open systems arena. VTLs are logically just like physical tape libraries: They logically appear and operate as physical tape devices including virtual tape drives, data cartridges, tape slots, barcode labels and robotic arms. Traditional Tape SolutionsTraditional tape devices have a few problems: They are slow and the only way to solve that problem is to add more and more tape drives. Tape library robotics are prone to failure and the tape media itself is "delicate" and must be stored in a conditioned, secure environment. To increase backup performance, backups can be multiplexed across multiple drives and tapes. This increases the odds of a failed backup due to a bad tape, a faulty drive or malfunctioning robotics. Restores from tape are also time-consuming. Consider trying to recover a file that was part of a five-tape multiplexed backup. Each of the five tapes must be located in the library and loaded into tape drives. If the drives have tapes in them already, the tapes must be removed from the drives and moved to free slots before another tape may be loaded. Once the tapes are loaded, they must be advanced to where the file is and then, finally, the file can be read from tape. It can take many minutes just to start the recovery. If the tapes are not in the library, it can take many hours to recover a single file. On the plus side, tape-based solutions are usually considered to be relatively inexpensive. But when the tape media is considered, the cost can skyrocket. Some studies show that users will buy 30 times the amount of slots worth of tapes during the life of a library. For a medium-sized, 100-slot library, that's 3,000 tapes. LTO-3 tapes are currently in the $100 price range. Add the fact that extensive human intervention is required to manage and maintain a tape solution and they are not very inexpensive. It can cost a lot of money to be able to successfully backup your data 60 percent of the time. Comparing the problems associated with tape solutions with a virtual tape solution shows how a VTL can change how a data center can be run. A virtual tape library solution can perform 10-times tape speeds for backups. Speeding up the backups will greatly shrink the backup window, which allows servers to be backed up faster. With existing backups finishing quicker, second- and third-tier servers that have not been backed up in the past may now fit into the backup schedule. Recoveries are also significantly faster using a VTL (typically much faster than the backup). A single file can be recovered from a VTL faster than most tape libraries can find and load a tape into a drive. Full backups that span multiple tapes (as apposed to multiplexed) will also recover very slowly compared to a VTL since after the data is read from one tape the next tape must be located and loaded compared to a VTL that just keeps streaming data from disk. All virtual tape loads are immediate so there is virtually no delay when a new "tape" is "loaded." People who resort to multiplexing backups to increase the performance of the backup are usually shocked to discover that their recovery times will be about twice as long as the backup was. Most virtual tape library solutions also contain RAID-protected storage that has redundant, hot-swap components (drives, power, cooling). Backups that use a VTL rarely fail because of a VTL failure. Recoveries will never fail due to a bad or lost tape. VTLs are just not prone to the types of failures that a traditional tape library has. For example, a backup to disk will never fail because of a bad tape, broken tape drive or broken robotics. The initial cost of a tape library can be less than the cost of a VTL. But when a three- or five-year cost-of-ownership is considered (tape media, failed backups, lost data due to failed recoveries, management costs, and so on) a VTL will be less expensive. Also consider the lower cost of backup software. Some backup software is tiered based on the number of tape slots. By configuring a virtual library to have few slots, but very large "tapes," the software tier can be lowered. For backup software that is tiered on the number of tape drives, configure a virtual library with fewer "drives." Some backup software solutions are now adding a virtual tape library option that is priced based on the capacity of the library. Today's virtual tape libraries range from a customer-supplied server with VTL software and separate disk to a completely productized solution where the server, software and disk are all bundled. There are pros and cons for both extremes. With an unbundled solution, the user gets to purchase each piece separately. The pieces include the VTL software, server, disk and potentially the SAN infrastructure. Unfortunately, the user must also purchase separate support agreements for the VTL software, server, disk and SAN infrastructure and each piece must be managed and monitored by the IT staff. With a bundled solution, all the pieces are included, tightly integrated and guaranteed to work together. The solution is managed and monitored as one entity and support is covered by one contract. With current bundled VTL solutions expanding to a petabyte or more, scaling the solutions is not an issue. Adding an additional VTLs for each petabyte of backup is acceptable for most environments. The only negative with a bundled solution is that it is bundled. Some people just do not like that. When it comes to backup, it is best to keep things simple so a bundled VTL solution is probably the best bet (there are not very many home-made tape libraries in production so why make your own VTL solution?). Adding a virtual tape library into an existing tape environment will always improve the reliability of backups and recoveries. Even if a VTL is configured to backup only as fast as an existing library, the increase in performance for day-to-day data recovery makes the investment a no-brainer. Add the robust data processing capabilities not available in physical tape libraries (e.g., replication, single-instance data storage) and a VTL can open the door for tremendous advances in tape backup methodology and revolutionize traditional operations. Did You Know... |Key Terms To Understanding VTL: virtual tape library

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System designed for household and neighborhood power generation RICHLAND, Wash. – Individual homes and entire neighborhoods could be powered with a new, small-scale solid oxide fuel cell system that achieves up to 57 percent efficiency, significantly higher than the 30 to 50 percent efficiencies previously reported for other solid oxide fuel cell systems of its size, according to a study published in this month's issue of Journal of Power Sources. The smaller system, developed at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, uses methane, the primary component of natural gas, as its fuel. The entire system was streamlined to make it more efficient and scalable by using PNNL-developed microchannel technology in combination with processes called external steam reforming and fuel recycling. PNNL's system includes fuel cell stacks developed earlier with the support of DOE's Solid State Energy Conversion Alliance. "Solid oxide fuels cells are a promising technology for providing clean, efficient energy. But, until now, most people have focused on larger systems that produce 1 megawatt of power or more and can replace traditional power plants," said Vincent Sprenkle, a co-author on the paper and chief engineer of PNNL's solid oxide fuel cell development program. "However, this research shows that smaller solid oxide fuel cells that generate between 1 and 100 kilowatts of power are a viable option for highly efficient, localized power generation." Sprenkle and his co-authors had community-sized power generation in mind when they started working on their solid oxide fuel cell, also known as a SOFC. The pilot system they built generates about 2 kW of electricity, or how much power a typical American home consumes. The PNNL team designed its system so it can be scaled up to produce between 100 and 250 kW, which could provide power for about 50 to 100 American homes. Goal: Small and efficient Knowing the advantages of smaller SOFC systems (see the "What is an SOFC?" sidebar below for more information), the PNNL team wanted to design a small system that could be both more than 50 percent efficient and easily scaled up for distributed generation. To do this, the team first used a process called external steam reforming. In general, steam reforming mixes steam with the fuel, leading the two to react and create intermediate products. The intermediates, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, then react with oxygen at the fuel cell's anode. Just as described in the below sidebar, this reaction generates electricity, as well as the byproducts steam and carbon dioxide. Steam reforming has been used with fuel cells before, but the approach requires heat that, when directly exposed to the fuel cell, causes uneven temperatures on the ceramic layers that can potentially weaken and break the fuel cell. So the PNNL team opted for external steam reforming, which completes the initial reactions between steam and the fuel outside of the fuel cell. The external steam reforming process requires a device called a heat exchanger, where a wall made of a conductive material like metal separates two gases. On one side of the wall is the hot exhaust that is expelled as a byproduct of the reaction inside the fuel cell. On the other side is a cooler gas that is heading toward the fuel cell. Heat moves from the hot gas, through the wall and into the cool incoming gas, warming it to the temperatures needed for the reaction to take place inside the fuel cell. Efficiency with micro technology The key to the efficiency of this small SOFC system is the use of a PNNL-developed microchannel technology in the system's multiple heat exchangers. Instead of having just one wall that separates the two gases, PNNL's microchannel heat exchangers have multiple walls created by a series of tiny looping channels that are narrower than a paper clip. This increases the surface area, allowing more heat to be transferred and making the system more efficient. PNNL's microchannel heat exchanger was designed so that very little additional pressure is needed to move the gas through the turns and curves of the looping channels. The second unique aspect of the system is that it recycles. Specifically, the system uses the exhaust, made up of steam and heat byproducts, coming from the anode to maintain the steam reforming process. This recycling means the system doesn't need an electric device that heats water to create steam. Reusing the steam, which is mixed with fuel, also means the system is able to use up some of the leftover fuel it wasn't able to consume when the fuel first moved through the fuel cell. The combination of external steam reforming and steam recycling with the PNNL-developed microchannel heat exchangers made the team's small SOFC system extremely efficient. Together, these characteristics help the system use as little energy as possible and allows more net electricity to be produced in the end. Lab tests showed the system's net efficiency ranged from 48.2 percent at 2.2 kW to a high of 56.6 percent at 1.7 kW. The team calculates they could raise the system's efficiency to 60 percent with a few more adjustments. The PNNL team would like to see their research translated into an SOFC power system that's used by individual homeowners or utilities. "There still are significant efforts required to reduce the overall cost to a point where it is economical for distributed generation applications," Sprenkle explained. "However, this demonstration does provide an excellent blueprint on how to build a system that could increase electricity generation while reducing carbon emissions."

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Charles Robert Darwin (18091882). Origin of Species. The Harvard Classics. 190914. XI. On the Geological Succession of Organic Beings On the Forms of Life Changing Almost Simultaneously throughout the World SCARCELY any palæontological discovery is more striking than the fact that the forms of life change almost simultaneously throughout the world. Thus our European Chalk formation can be recognised in many distant regions, under the most different climates, where not a fragment of the mineral chalk itself can be found; namely in North America, in equatorial South America, in Tierra del Fuego, at the Cape of Good Hope, and in the peninsula of India. For at these distant points, the organic remains in certain beds present an unmistakable resemblance to those of the Chalk. It is not that the same species are met with; for in some cases not one species is identically the same, but they belong to the same families, genera, and sections of genera, and sometimes are similarly characterised in such trifling points as mere superficial sculpture. Moreover, other forms, which are not found in the Chalk of Europe, but which occur in the formations either above or below, occur in the same order at these distant points of the world. In the several successive palæozoic formations of Russia, Western Europe, and North America, a similar parallelism in the forms of life has been observed by several authors; so it is, according to Lyell, with the European and North American tertiary deposits. Even if the few fossil species which are common to the Old and New Worlds were kept wholly out of view, the general parallelism in the successive forms of life, in the palæozoic and tertiary stages, would still be manifest, and the several formations could be easily correlated. These observations, however, relate to the marine inhabitants of the world: we have not sufficient data to judge whether the productions of the land and of fresh water at distant points change in the same parallel manner. We may doubt whether they have thus changed: if the Megatherium, Mylodon, Macrauchenia, and Toxodon had been brought to Europe from La Plata, without any information in regard to their geological position, no one would have suspected that they had co-existed with seashells all still living; but as these anomalous monsters co-existed with the mastodon and horse, it might at least have been inferred that they had lived during one of the later tertiary stages. When the marine forms of life are spoken of as having changed simultaneously throughout the world, it must not be supposed that this expression relates to the same year, or to the same century, or even that it has a very strict geological sense; for if all the marine animals now living in Europe, and all those that lived in Europe during the pleistocene period (a very remote period as measured by years, including the whole glacial epoch) were compared with those now existing in South America or in Australia, the most skilful naturalist would hardly be able to say whether the present or the pleistocene inhabitants of Europe resembled most closely those of the southern hemisphere. So, again, several highly competent observers maintain that the existing productions of the United States are more closely related to those which lived in Europe during certain late tertiary stages, than to the present inhabitants of Europe; and if this be so, it is evident that fossiliferous beds now deposited on the shores of North America would hereafter be liable to be classed with somewhat older European beds. Nevertheless, looking to a remotely future epoch, there can be little doubt that all the more modern marine formations, namely, the upper pliocene, the pleistocene and strictly modern beds of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from containing fossil remains in some degree allied, and from not including those forms which are found only in the older underlying deposits, would be correctly ranked as simultaneous in a geological sense. The fact of the forms of life changing simultaneously, in the above large sense, at distant parts of the world, has greatly struck these admirable observers, MM. de Verneuil and dArchiac. After referring to the parallelism of the palæozoic forms of life in various parts of Europe, they add, If, struck by this strange sequence, we turn our attention to North America, and there discover a series of analogous phenomena, it will appear certain that all these modifications of species, their extinction, and the introduction of new ones, cannot be owing to mere changes in marine currents or other causes more or less local and temporary, but depend on general laws which govern the whole animal kingdom. M. Barrande has made forcible remarks to precisely the same effect. It is, indeed, quite futile to look to changes of currents, climate, or other physical conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the forms of life throughout the world, under the most different climates. We must, as Barrande has remarked, look to some special law. We shall see this more clearly when we treat of the present distribution of organic beings, and find how slight is the relation between the physical conditions of various countries and the nature of their inhabitants. This great fact of the parallel succession of the forms of life throughout the world, is explicable on the theory of natural selection. New species are formed by having some advantage over older forms; and the forms, which are already dominant, or have some advantage over the other forms in their own country, give birth to the greatest number of new varieties or incipient species. We have distinct evidence on this head, in the plants which are dominant, that is, which are commonest and most widely diffused, producing the greatest number of new varieties. It is also natural that the dominant, varying, and far-spreading species, which have already invaded to a certain extent the territories of other species, should be those which would have the best chance of spreading still further, and of giving rise in new countries to other new varieties and species. The process of diffusion would often be very slow, depending on climatal and geographical changes, on strange accidents, and on the gradual acclimatisation of new species to the various climates through which they might have to pass, but in the course of time the dominant forms would generally succeed in spreading and would ultimately prevail. The diffusion would, it is probable, be slower with the terrestrial inhabitants of distinct continents than with the marine inhabitants of the continuous sea. We might therefore expect to find, as we do find, a less strict degree of parallelism in the succession of the productions of the land than with those of the sea. Thus, as it seems to me, the parallel, and, taken in a large sense, simultaneous, succession of the same forms of life throughout the world, accords well with the principle of new species having been formed by dominant species spreading widely and varying; the new species thus produced being themselves dominant, owing to their having had some advantage over their already dominant parents, as well as over other species, and again spreading, varying, and producing new forms. The old forms which are beaten and which yield their places to the new and victorious forms, will generally be allied in groups, from inheriting some inferiority in common; and therefore, as new and improved groups spread throughout the world, old groups disappear from the world; and the succession of forms everywhere tends to correspond both in their first appearance and final disappearance. There is one other remark connected with this subject worth making. I have given my reasons for believing that most of our great formations, rich in fossils, were deposited during periods of subsidence; and that blank intervals of vast duration, as far as fossils are concerned, occurred during the periods when the bed of the sea was either stationary or rising, and likewise when sediment was not thrown down quickly enough to embed and preserve organic remains. During these long and blank intervals I suppose that the inhabitants of each region underwent a considerable amount of modification and extinction, and that there was much migration from other parts of the world. As we have reason to believe that large areas are affected by the same movement, it is probable that strictly contemporaneous formations have often been accumulated over very wide spaces in the same quarter of the world; but we are very far from having any right to conclude that this has invariably been the case, and that large areas have invariably been affected by the same movements. When two formations have been deposited in two regions during nearly, but not exactly, the same period, we should find in both, from the causes explained in the foregoing paragraphs, the same general succession in the forms of life; but the species would not exactly correspond; for there will have been a little more time in the one region than in the other for modification, extinction, and immigration. I suspect that cases of this nature occur in Europe. Mr. Prestwich, in his admirable Memoirs on the eocene deposits of England and France, is able to draw a close general parallelism between the successive stages in the two countries; but when he compares certain stages in England with those in France, although he finds in both a curious accordance in the numbers of the species belonging to the same genera, yet the species themselves differ in a very, difficult to account for, considering the proximity of the two areas,unless, indeed, it be assumed that an isthmus separated two seas inhabited by distinct, but contemporaneous, faunas. Lyell has made similar observations on some of the later tertiary formations. Barrande, also, shows that there is a striking general parallelism in the successive Silurian deposits of Bohemia and Scandinavia; nevertheless he finds a surprising amount of difference in the species. If the several formations in these regions have not been deposited during the same exact periods,a formation in one region often corresponding with a blank interval in the other,and if in both regions the species have gone on slowly changing during the accumulation of the several formations and during the long intervals of time between them; in this case the several formations in the two regions could be arranged in the same order, in accordance with the general succession of the forms of life, and the order would falsely appear to be strictly parallel; nevertheless the species would not be all the same in the apparently corresponding stages in the two regions.

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WebMD Medical News Brenda Goodman, MA Laura J. Martin, MD July 14, 2011 -- People who say they vigilantly apply sunscreen are more likely to experience painful, damaging sunburns, a new study shows. The study, the first to look at how people in the U.S. shield themselves from the sun and how well those different strategies work, analyzed information on more than 3,000 white adults that was collected through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Sunscreen was the most commonly used kind of protection, grabbing the top spot with 30% of people saying they regularly apply it when they’re outside for longer than an hour. The next most common skin-saving strategies were seeking shade (25% said they frequently stayed under cover when the sun was blazing), wearing a hat (16%), and donning long sleeves (6%). People who said they frequently used sunscreen, however, had 23% greater risk of multiple sunburns in the past year compared to people who said they seldom used the stuff. Those who frequently sought shade and pulled on long sleeves, however, had about a 30% lower sunburn risk compared to people who rarely used those measures. Those risks remained even after researchers corrected for factors known to influence burn risk, including the skin’s sensitivity to the sun, alcohol use, season, physical activity, age, gender, education, and income. “I really like this study,” says Ronald P. Rapini, MD, professor and chairman of the department of dermatology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “I’ve always felt the same way, and I tell my patients the same thing.” “Just last week, one of my melanoma patients came in with a sunburn all over their back, and I said, ‘What happened?’ and they said, ‘Well, I had sunscreen.’ But they missed an area on their back, which is what always happens. They think that they can stay out in the sun because they’re using sunscreen, and the truth is it doesn’t really cover stuff that well,” says Rapini, who was not involved in the research. “Myself, personally, I’m a dermatologist, and I don’t even wear sunscreen all that much. I stay in the shade,” he says. “I try to stay out of the sun.” The study is published in the journal Cancer Causes & Control. “I was quite surprised to find the associations that we’ve found with the different types of sun protection,” says study researcher Eleni Linos, MD, DrPH, MPH, a dermatologist at Stanford University. “What we saw was that wearing long-sleeved clothing, wearing a hat, and staying in the shade were associated with fewer sunburns,” she says. “However, wearing sunscreen was actually associated with more sunburns.” Linos is quick to point out that her results don’t mean that sunscreen doesn’t work or shouldn’t be used. The study was designed to look at patterns, not to prove cause and effect. It’s possible that people with the fairest, most easily burned skin are also simply the group most likely to use sunscreen. But if that were the case, Linos says, she would have expected to see the same phenomenon across all the different groups. That is, frequent shade seekers and long-sleeve wearers would also report having more burns compared to those who rarely reported those tactics. The more likely explanation, she thinks, is user error -- people simply aren’t applying as much sunscreen as often as they should. Numerous studies have shown that most people, even after they’re carefully schooled in proper sunscreen application, still don’t get enough on. One of the latest, from researchers in Brazil, asked study participants to cover both forearms with sunscreen, and 30 minutes later, to reapply the sunscreen to just one arm. Researchers used tape strips to measure how thickly the lotion went on. Sunscreen is tested to work at its SPF when it’s applied to a depth of at least 2 milligrams per square centimeter on the skin. After the first application, study participants got only a quarter of that amount on. For the arm that got the second application, the depth of the sunscreen eventually reached half of what it should have been, suggesting that even people who remember to reapply aren’t being fully protected. Another problem is that many people rely on sunscreen as their sole form of protection, when really, shade and protective clothing need to be part of a multi-pronged approach to avoiding sunburns, which increase the risk of skin cancer. “There’s still a lot of work that we as physicians, especially dermatologists, need to do to educate individuals about proper photoprotection,” says Henry W. Lim, MD, chair of the department of dermatology at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. He says this study is consistent with previous research. “It’s known that people use sunscreen, but they don’t use it at the appropriate amount and because of that, they have a false sense of a security,” says Lim, who was not involved in the research. That false sense of security can lead people to stay in the sun longer than they safely should, leading to an increased risk of sunburns and greater UV exposure, which can cause skin cancer. Sunscreen use has been shown to reduce some kinds of skin cancers, however, and earlier this year, a prospective study, the first of its kind, found that regular sunscreen use in a group of 1,621 Australian adults cut their risk of melanoma by 50%. Importantly, however, the study participants in that trial carefully and repeatedly applied sunscreen while also seeking shade and wearing protective clothing. “The best data that’s out there shows the combination of seeking shade, wearing protective clothing and wearing sunscreen, those three things together clearly lower your risk,” says Darrell S. Rigel, MD, a clinical professor of dermatology at New York University. Rigel says there is an important caveat about this study which should reassure people about their sunscreen. The latest data used in the study is now about five years old, and he says sunscreens have improved in a couple of key ways since then. “How long it lasts, 'substantivity' it’s called, has markedly improved, really with new formulations,” he says, and many of the newer formulations offer better broad-spectrum protections against both UVB, the burning rays, and UVA, the cancer-causing rays. New FDA rules for sunscreens, which will go into effect next year, should make it easier to pick a good product. That’s important, Rigel points out, because it’s not always possible to stay in the shade or wear longs sleeves. In those cases, it’s more important than ever to put sunscreen on correctly. Experts say the rule of thumb is a golf ball-sized blob for every exposed body part, applied at least 30 minutes before going outside, since sunscreen takes that long to absorb into the skin. That much sunscreen should be reapplied every two hours, and even more frequently, every 60 to 90 minutes, when swimming, sweating, or using a spray product, since those don’t last as long. SOURCES:Linos, E. Cancer Causes & Control, June 2011.De Villa, D. Photochemistry and Photobiology, March-April 2011.Kester, B. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, July 2010.Burnett, M. Photodermatology, Photoimmunology and Photomedicine, April 2011.Robinson J. Journal of the American Medical Association, June 28, 2011.Autier, P. Journal of Clinical Oncology, April 4, 2011.Ronald P. Rapini, MD, professor and chairman, department of dermatology, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston.Eleni Linos, MD, DrPH, MPH, Stanford University.Henry W. Lim, MD, chair, department of dermatology, Henry Ford Health System, Detroit.Darrell S. Rigel, MD, clinical professor of dermatology, New York University. Here are the most recent story comments.View All The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of KOKI FOX23 - Tulsa The Health News section does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. See additional information.

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You are here Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was 50 years old before he began what was to become his first symphony. It was not, strictly speaking, his first attempt at a symphony: he had actually composed a symphony modeled on Mozart as an exercise 30 years earlier (only one movement survives), and in 1898 took a stab at a programmatic symphony based on the life of the English military-imperial hero General Gordon, which, fortunately, did not get far. Any composer approaching the symphony after Beethoven might well have had some trepidation about it. Brahms’ difficulties with his first symphony were legend. By the early 20th century, there was the additional problem of whether the symphony’s day had passed. Though some composers of Elgar’s generation were moving away from the symphony, Elgar remained convinced that it was still viable. In a 1905 lecture at Birmingham University, he said “It seems to me that because the greatest genius of our days, Richard Strauss, recognizes the symphonic-poem as a fit vehicle for his splendid achievements, some writers are inclined to be positive that the symphony is dead… but when the looked-for genius comes, it may be absolutely revived.” A few years later, Elgar took it upon himself to be the “looked-for genius,” and the result was a staggering immediate success: the Symphony was performed about 100 times worldwide within a year after its premiere in December 1908. It has not done so well since, and is now only an occasional visitor to the standard repertory. The Symphony might be regarded as a battle, a study of opposites in conflict: the stately versus the agitated, the singable diatonic melody against the sinewy chromatic theme, the foreboding against the triumphant. At the very outset, Elgar pens one of his most stately melodies (he already had four of the five “Pomp and Circumstance” marches behind him). Elgar uses the unusual key of A-flat major for this introduction and “motto” theme, but does not stay there long. The tumultuous Allegro begins in D minor, a key as far as possible from A-flat (Elgar wrote to his friend August Jaeger that he had “thrown over all key relationships as formerly practiced” but that he “was not silly enough to think (or wish) that I have invented anything” in the process), with the motto inserting itself, and its mood, into the storm, and eventually establishing calm at the end. Throughout the symphony, Elgar uses a peculiar device to insinuate motifs such as the motto in an almost subliminal way: he writes them as “solos” for the players on the last stand of a string section. He commented: “I have employed the last desks of the strings to get a soft diffused sound: the listener need not be bothered to know where it comes from — the effect is of course different from that obtained from the first desk soli.” The second movement is another kind of battle. A turbulent main section, (in another distant key, F-sharp minor) features a driving perpetual motion figure and an ominous quick march. It modulates to B-flat major, where gossamer strings, flutes, and harp play an idyllic interlude that Elgar said should be played “like something we hear down by the river.” The perpetual motion figure reasserts itself, but gradually slows until, improbably, it becomes, note for note, the principal theme of the Adagio third movement. Both Hans Richter, who conducted the premiere, and August Jaeger, a longtime champion of Elgar’s music, compared this movement to the adagios of Beethoven, though to modern audiences it will more likely recall Mahler in its breadth, heart-on-sleeve passion, and richness (a richness which is due considerably to Elgar’s subdividing the strings into nine parts instead of the usual five). The finale begins with another slow introduction, in D minor, in which a foreboding opening gives way to a minor-key march figure in the low strings and bassoons, and then to the motto theme. Elgar gives the march figure a series of startling transformations, including thundering it out fortissimo and turning into a lush cantabile. At the end, the motto theme emerges triumphant over hammer blows from the brass and percussion, the battle clearly won. — Lawyer and lutenist Howard Posner has also annotated programs for the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra and the Coleman Chamber Concerts. His notes have appeared in the program of the Salzburg Festival. Length: 50 minutes Orchestration: piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, two harps, and strings First Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: July 29, 1926, Sir Henry Wood conducting

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Studies of Disorders With Increased Susceptibility to Fungal Infections - Researchers are interested in studying disorders that make individuals more susceptible to fungal infections, specifically infections with the Candida yeast. These disorders are often related to problems with the immune system and may have genetic factors, which suggests that researchers should study not only the individual with the disorder, but also his or her first- and second-degree relatives (such as parents, siblings, children, and first cousins). To provide material for future research, individuals with immune disorders and their first- and second-degree relatives will be asked to provide blood and other samples for testing and comparison with samples taken from healthy volunteers with no history of immune disorders. - To collect blood and other biological samples to study immune disorders that make individuals more susceptible to fungal infections. - Individuals of any age who have abnormal immune function characterized by recurrent or unusual fungal infections, recurrent or chronic inflammation, or other types of immune dysfunction. - First- or second-degree genetically related family members (limited to mother, father, siblings, grandparents, children, aunts, uncles, and first cousins). - Healthy volunteers at least 18 years of age (for comparison purposes). - Participants will provide blood samples and buccal (cells from the inside of the mouth near the cheek) samples. - Participants with immune disorders will also be asked to provide urine samples, saliva or mucosal samples, or skin tissue biopsies, and may also have imaging studies (such as x-rays) to collect information for research. - Samples may be collected at the National Institutes of Health or at other clinical locations for the samples to the sent to the National Institutes of Health. - No treatment will be provided as part of this protocol.... Primary Immune Deficiency Autoimmune Polyendocrinopathy Candidiasis Ectodermal Chronic Mucocutaneous Candidiasis (CMC) |Study Design:||Time Perspective: Prospective| |Official Title:||Studies of Disorders With Increased Susceptibility to Fungal Infections| |Study Start Date:||September 2010| This study is designed for the evaluation, diagnosis, and long-term follow up of selected patients with primary immune deficiencies and other conditions associated with fungal, and more specifically with Candida spp. infections. The primary immune deficiencies to be studied include, but are not limited to, autoimmune polyendocrinopathy candidiasis ectodermal dystrophy (APECED), chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis (CMC), myeloperoxidase deficiency (MPO), immune dysregulation polyendocrinopathy enteropathy X-linked (IPEX), Job's syndrome, chronic granulomatous disease (CGD), and biotinidase deficiency. Diabetic patients and infants also show increased susceptibility to such infections and might be studied. Patient participants (who we will refer to as patients in this study) will undergo evaluations that include history/physical, blood sampling, genetic testing, and possible tissue sampling. We may use some of the blood cells to investigate the utility of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) for immune cell derivation and targeted gene correction. First or second degree genetically related family members (limited to mother, father, siblings, grandparents, children, aunts, uncles, and first cousins of an affected patient and who we will refer to as relatives in this study) might also be screened for clinical, in vitro, and genetic correlates of immune abnormalities. Healthy volunteers will be enrolled as a source of control samples for research testing. Among the aims of this protocol are to better understand the genetic and pathophysiologic factors that lead to defects in host defense, and to use modern and evolving methods in molecular and cellular biology to elucidate the pathogenesis of this particular susceptibility. A better understanding of primary immunodeficiency could allow for the rational development of novel therapies for such diseases and to benefit future patients, but it might not benefit current patient participants directly. Routine follow-up may occur every 6 months -with evaluation and blood sampling. Under some circumstances, we may provide treatment that relates to the immune deficiency. These treatments will follow standard medical practice. |Contact: Sandra Maxwell, R.N.||(301) email@example.com| |Contact: Sergio D Rosenzweig, M.D.||(301) firstname.lastname@example.org| |United States, Maryland| |National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, 9000 Rockville Pike||Recruiting| |Bethesda, Maryland, United States, 20892| |Contact: For more information at the NIH Clinical Center contact Patient Recruitment and Public Liaison Office (PRPL) 800-411-1222 ext TTY8664111010 email@example.com| |Principal Investigator:||Sergio D Rosenzweig, M.D.||National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)|

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The 65 ft tall interactive sculpture was created from wood from the 165 ft long schooner Wawona, which sailed from 1897 to 1947. It is connected to the museum at its top and bottom. © John Grade The new sculpture at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle required a great deal of structural analysis to ensure it can withstand seismic forces—and curious visitors. January 29, 2013—It’s plain to see that turning the remains of a sailing schooner more than a century old into a 65 ft tall interactive sculpture for the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle, required a great deal of artistic vision. But what might not be as obvious is the amount of structural analysis required to ensure the sculpture maintains its structural integrity under seismic forces and human-induced loads. Dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of Seattle and the Puget Sound region, the MOHAI commissioned Seattle-based artist John Grade to create a sculpture for the museum’s new home: the renovated Naval Reserve Armory along the shore of Lake Union. Shortly after winning the commission, Grade was entrusted with the remains of the dismantled schooner Wawona. Built by influential shipbuilder Hans Ditlev Bendixsen, the 165 ft long schooner Wawona sailed from 1897 to 1947, carrying lumber and, later, fish through Puget Sound. After it was decommissioned, the ship was on display until 2009, when it was disassembled. A great deal of the vessel’s wood had rotted significantly by that time, but much of the planking was in good condition despite having been under water all those years. Leaching from the ship’s wrought iron and temporary copper cladding and staining from the oils of the fish it once carried brought out a variety of colors within the wood, making it perfect for the sculpture, Grade said in written responses to questions posed by Civil Engineering online. Named for the vessel from which the wood was derived, the 10,000 lb Wawona sculpture extends from the floor of the museum to its ceiling. Grade said the vertical orientation of the sculpture references the old-growth trees that once covered the landscape near the museum. Its tapered shape—roughly 10 ft in diameter at its base and approximately 4 ft in diameter at its top— recalls a ship’s hull, he said. To further connect it to the natural world, the sculpture penetrates the museum’s floor and ceiling, enabling visitors who walk within the hollow form to see the lake below and the sky above, Grade explained. Creating such a large sculpture required a great deal of engineering expertise. Grade worked with the Seattle office of Arup, an international engineering firm headquartered in London, to turn his vision into a reality. “Arup provided structural engineering services, starting at concepts ... on through artwork permitting, construction documents, and construction administration,” said Hans-Erik Blomgren, P.E., P.Eng., M.ASCE, the project manager for Arup, in written responses to questions from Civil Engineering online. “Interactive artwork of this scale, weight, and permanence requires it to be treated as an element and component of the building from a code standpoint.” Artist John Grade wanted visitors to be able to walk within the sculpture, to be able to view the lake below and the sky above, and to be able to touch and push on the sculpture without damaging it. © John Grade But before they began getting into the details of the structural design, Arup’s engineers suggested using digital technology to fabricate the components of the sculpture. As a result, Grade engaged the University of Washington College of the Built Environments to individually cut the sculpture’s more than 200 wooden pieces using computer numerical control (CNC) fabrication. The CNC technology was also used to fashion the steel hangers and rods that hold the sculpture’s wooden components together horizontally and vertically. The digital fabrication plans were developed parallel with the structural design. Arup had several performance objectives for the project, including ensuring that the sculpture could endure human-induced movement, resist metal fatigue under cyclic motion, and withstand seismic forces. The team also had to ensure that the wood was kiln dried to the correct moisture content and that the sculpture would hang vertically through its center of mass over the correct location on the museum’s floor, Blomgren said. To meet these objectives, Arup and the team from the college used Rhino 3D and a parametric plug-in tool known as Grasshopper (both produced by Seattle-based Robert McNeel & Associates) to model each of the sculpture’s steel and wooden components for fabrication and structural analysis. They then exported a wireframe model from the Rhino files into another program that enabled them to analyze the sculpture under its own weight, seismic forces, and human-induced loads, Blomgren said. For the seismic forces, the team treated the sculpture as an element and component as defined in ASCE Standard 7-05 (Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures, ASCE, Reston, Virginia, 2006.) “We then applied an equivalent static force in orthogonal directions,” Blomgren said. On the basis of the analysis, the team added rubber damper restraints at the base of the sculpture to provide lateral support under seismic loads and make the sculpture flexible between the floor and the ceiling, Blomgren said. Arup engineers used computer numerical control techniques to fabricate the more than 200 wooden pieces that form the sculpture as well as the steel hangers and rods that hold those wooden components together. © Arup The human-induced forces were studied as a 200 lb force at a height of roughly 4 ft from the sculpture’s base. “We wanted to be sure the wooden planks supporting this concentrated load were sufficient,” Blomgren explained. As a result of the analysis, the team included a steel rod that extends from the underside of the sculpture to approximately 10 in. below the floor. This rod is allowed to articulate but a viscoelastic polymer disk provides resistance to quickly dampen human-induced oscillation, Blomgren said. “It was important to me that people directly, physically interact with the sculpture,” Grade explained. “I wanted it to have enough flex that a small child could push the base of the sculpture into movement but that movement would stop quickly and not endanger other people simultaneously interacting with the sculpture.” Following 20 months of design, the Wawona sculpture was unveiled when the MOHAI opened at its new location on December 29, 2012. “The MOHAI is a fantastic and rich place full of cherished Seattle artifacts,” Blomgren said. “The Wawona sculpture, however, stands apart as something distinct because it is a new creation that employs state-of-the-art design but is richly and brilliantly tied to the Pacific Northwest’s history of shipbuilding, fishing, and old-growth forests.”

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I mentioned Wolbachia in my parthenogenesis post; here I will talk about it in more detail, because it’s a really cool parasite, as well as in the center of much research nowadays. Wolbachia are Gram-negative ⍺-Proteobacteria (order Rickettsiales, family Anaplasmataceae; Dumler et al.,2001), systematically split into 6 supergroups, lettered from A to F (Lo et al., 2002). Those in supergroups C and D have coevolved with their nematodan hosts and are mutualistic (Bandi et al., 1998). Those in supergroups A and B are parasites in arthropods. Morphologically, they come in two groups: ~1µm large rods, and ~0.5µm diameter coccoids. They can be found in a membrane-bound vacuole in the host cell’s cytoplasm (Yen & Barr, 1971); in arthropods, this will be in egg and ovarian cells (see diagram above, from Weiss et al. (2009)), although it has also been found in other tissues, including the Malpighian tubules, and muscle and nervous tissue (Stouthamer et al., 1999). When found in sperm cell cytoplasm, it disappears during spermatogenesis (Clark et al., 2002). Note that in this post and in the literature, what’s referred to as Wolbachia is Wolbachia pipientis. Before DNA sequencing, when bacteria were classified morphologically, W. persica and W. melaphagi were also thought to be related, but these have nothing to do with the famous Wolbachia (W. persica is a γ-proteobacterium, W. melaphagi is a rhizobacterium). Being present endosymbiotically in 20+% of all known insect species (Werren & Windsor, 2000), and given that some estimate that over half of all insect species are infected by it (Hilgenboecker et al., 2008), it’s obviously extremely successful, although it should be noted that the virulence of each Wolbachia strain is different (Min & Benzer, 1997), and each species is has a different susceptibility. In Australian and Panamanian fig wasps, Wolbachia has been found to infect over 70% of all species (Haine & Cook, 2005). A host database can be found here. The biggest reason for its success is its parasitic effect: it’s always transferred maternally in the cytoplasm of the eggs, and in order to ensure maximal transfer rates, it alters its host’s reproductive abilities to favour their own reproductive success (Charlat et al., 2003). It has four ways to do this, in contrast to the one or two ways present in other such parasites: - Inducing thelytokous parthenogenesis in haplodiploid organisms, e.g. hymenopterans, thus making sure that only female offspring are produced (e.g. Stouthamer et al., 1993). It occurs by forcing the fusion of the two nuclei of the first mitotic division (Huigens et al., 2000). - Feminizing males, i.e. males reproduce as females (Wilkinson, 1998). The mechanism for this varies; for example, in the pillbug, Wolbachia blocks the formation of the androgenic gland which produces the masculinising androgenic hormone (Martin et al., 1990). - Killing males, either in the embryonic stages or later (Hurst, 1991). The mechanisms of action are still largely unknown, although recent pioneering research by Riparbelli et al. (2012) shows that it happens due to Wolbachia (purposely?) messing around with male chromosomes at various stages in development, leading to defective embryos and death. - Inducing cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) between infected males and uninfected females (Hurst & Werren, 2001), causing sterility (Bordenstein & Werren, 2007) and eventually reproductive isolation within a species. The latter was the first of Wolbachia‘s effects to be discovered, by Yen & Barr (1971) in mosquitoes; Wolbachia itself was first spotted by Hertig & Wolbach (1924). What happens is that the sperm enters the cell as normal, but its chromosomes don’t decondense and fuse with maternal chromosomes due to a delay in the breakdown of the nuclear envelope in the male’s pronucleus (Tram & Sullivan (2002); see Landmann et al. (2009) for more molecular details), and so can’t enter the first mitosis, meaning they get discarded (Lassy & Karr, 1996). The embryo either becomes a haploid female (in haplodiploid organisms), or it dies. In evolutionary theory terms, in a population susceptible to Wolbachia-induced CI, uninfected females become more unfit, therefore giving a fitness advantage to infected females (Bourtzis et al., 2003), hence explaining how the phenotype persists. Which manipulation happens cannot be predicted even within the same species, as demonstrated by Hornett et al. (2008), who found that in their North American Hypolimnas bolina butterflies, Wolbachia was a male killer while in Southeast Asian ones, it was a CI-inducer. The difference came from a dominant allele in the SE Asian butterfly genome suppressing the male-killing. Charlat et al. (2007) showed that such a mutation can become fixed in a population in under 10 generations due to the extreme selection pressure to maintain a decent sex ratio, a testament to the ecological power of Wolbachia. However, in some cases, Wolbachia can be so prominent that the entire affected population gets a very female-biased sex ratio, which in the case of the butterfly Acarea encedon has led to females reversing their sexual roles and behaving like males (Jiggins et al., 2000). In other cases, Wolbachia is counteracted by other elements, for example the B chromosome in the parasitoid wasp Trichogramma kaykai which turns Wolbachia-feminised males back into regular males (Stouthamer et al., 2001). It must be mentioned that part of their success is their ability to be transmitted horizontally across different species (Raychoudhury et al., 2009) – they aren’t host-specific. This has been shown as happening through parasitoids (Heath et al., 1999) or through the environment (e.g. by sharing a common food source (Huigens et al., 2000)). This also means that a single individual may have multiple Wolbachia species (or, better said, strains) co-existing and mingling inside it; the largest number I know of is eight, in the fire ant Solenopsis daguerrei (Dedeine et al., 2005). Note that this ability only comes in the arthropod-associated Wolbachia, whose genomes are more plastic, with recombination and phage-derived elements (Wu et al., 2004), none of which are characteristics present in their nematodan counterparts (Foster et al., 2005). One study also reported the possibility of Wolbachia having transferred part or all of its genome to its hosts, albeit with only 2% of the genes able to be transcribed and none of them having any described effect (Hotopp et al., 2007). The negative effects of Wolbachia are obviously of great interest for biocontrol of pests and disease vectors. For example, Alam et al. (2011) discuss the possibility of using Wolbachia to control the tsetse fly, a vector of trypanosomiasis; Atyame et al. (2011) do the same for mosquitoes. Such biocontrol would work by allowing a chosen genotype to dominate the population by infecting the undesired genotype (e.g. Xi et al. (2005)), or by shortening lifespans to prevent sexual maturity (e.g. Moreira et al. (2009)). Wolbachia can also lead to population bottlenecks with very few individuals becoming able to reproduce (Nice et al., 2009), which is another way to control a pest population. In non-pest studies, Wolbachia leads to increased susceptibility to parasitoids in Drosophila (Fytrou et al., 2006). It also leads to a less effective immune system in the pillbug Armadillidum vulgare, as seen by a lower density of haemocytes and higher density of bacteria (Bracquart-Vanier et al., 2008). These would be other avenues for pest control if a similar effect is seen in pest groups. Positive Effects of Wolbachia Interestingly, the effects of Wolbachia aren’t all negative. In the Cimicidae (bed bugs), Wolbachia is a mutualist; getting rid of it with antibiotics reduces the amount of food the host gets (Hosokawa et al., 2010). In mosquitoes, Wolbachia was found to boost their immune system and cause resistance to dengue virus (Bian et al., 2010). Pinto et al. (2012) describe how this happens at the genetic level. This is another potential use of Wolbachia as a biocontrol agent for disease vectors. In Drosophila, Wolbachia has been shown to confer resistance to several RNA viruses (Teixeira et al., 2008). In a Drosophila lab culture, Weeks et al. (2007) showed that the Wolbachia went from being a parasite to being a mutualist within two decades. At the extreme end, nematode-infecting Wolbachia are needed for nematode development and fertility (Foster et al., 2005), so Wolbachia antibiotics could be used to control their populations (Taylor & Hoerauf, 1999). This is useful knowledge, given that some of the affected nematodes are vectors for very serious diseases like elephantiasis and onchocerciasis. It’s a similar story with the wasp Asobara tabida, wherein no ovocyte can even be produced when Wolbachia isn’t present (Dedeine et al., 2001) because its absence promotes excessive apoptosis in the ovarioles (Pannebakker et al., 2007). Other effects of Wolbachia on sexual physiology have been documented, for example an increase in sperm competition in Tribolium beetles (Wade & Chang, 1995), or changes to the spermathecal duct in female Allonemobius crickets (Marshall, 2007). An interesting point can be made about the process of molecular evolution in Wolbachia. As I said in the introductory paragraph, Wolbachia is a nematode mutualist and arthropod parasite (generally speaking). One of the Wolbachia genes involved in interaction with the host is wsp, which codes for cell membrane proteins. It was found to be undergoing divergent selection when it is in a parasitic relationship, but not when it’s in a mutualistic relationship (Jiggins et al., 2002). This is in line with what we expect: wsp being involved in host recognition means it theoretically should experience heightened evolutionary rates, and this is confirmed by the empirical data. Many, if not all, negative and positive effects of Wolbachia have evolved by natural selection in order to maximise the transmission of the strain, either by allowing the bacterium to survive in the host (depressed immune system), or reducing competition by blocking the transmission of other pathogens (as Teixeira et al. (2008) suggest for the viral resistance effect). By extension, this means that parthenogenic arthropods aren’t expected to be Wolbachia hosts, since the manipulations are useless there. In terms of evolutionary theory, they can be treated as nothing more than selfish genetic elements. When I first heard of Wolbachia, my intuition was that it played a sizeable role in speciation, since it promotes reproductive isolation, or by selecting for subdivided populations (Hatcher et al., 2000). Some analyses showed it not to be true (Rousset & Raymond, 1991), but more and more recent studies are supportive of the idea (Bordenstein, 2003), so it’s accepted as a cause of speciation. It definitely has been demonstrated (Thompson, 1987), and in some cases has also induced rapid speciation (Bordenstein et al., 2001). On a general evolutionary synthesis level, Wolbachia is pretty interesting as a very recognisable case of inheritable symbiosis, one of the few proper examples that lend credence to the view that symbioses are a driving force behind evolution. Milder effects of large-scale Wolbachia infection and sex ratio-skewing include altering dispersal ability – many insects have dispersing females and non-dispersing males, or vice versa. On a more influential level, there is also evidence that they can play a role in sexual selection (Jiggins et al., 2000), since sexual conflict gets reduced when levels of polyandry fall (Arnqvist & Rowe, 2005). Wolbachia can sometimes present a methodological stumbling block for molecular phylogenies based on mitochondrial DNA, since mtDNA will also hitchike maternally, favouring the maternal mtDNA haplotype, eventually leading to the entire dataset being worthless; see Ballard & Rand (2005) for more information. However, Arthofer et al. (2010) tested this idea using infected bark beetles and found no significant effect from Wolbachia, so it is still unsure just how significant this slight inaccuracy is. Where it is definitely a problem is in barcoding initiatives using mtDNA. For successful barcoding of a species, a stable molecular marker needs to be used that is guaranteed not to vary across individuals, populations, or ecomorphs. However, there are some studies that show that Wolbachia causes divergences in mtDNA sequences even among individuals of the same species, e.g. in the butterfly genus Hypolimnas (Galtier et al., 2009). The reason for this is that mitochondrial genes are transferred only maternally, so only the maternal set plays a role in evolution. Given the ubiquity of Wolbachia, this is definitely a large problem that should be studied carefully before proceeding with mtDNA barcoding. Wolbachia alone can’t be cultivated, but it is possible to keep a Wolbachia line using host cell lines (Noda et al., 2002), so experimental evolution studies are possible with them. For the entomologists among you, make sure to check any colonies for Wolbachia infections, as they could invalidate your results, especially if you’re doing population biology. They can be gotten rid of using any antibiotic. I hear that tetracycline is recommended; if that’s not possible, high heat is enough, since Wolbachia is sensitive to temperature. If you’re sequencing your insects as well, using DNA from the legs is probably the safest way to avoid getting contaminating Wolbachia DNA amplified (this is standard procedure anyway). 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Hilgenboecker K, Hammerstein P, Schlatmann P, Telschow A & Werren JH. 2008. How many species are infected with Wolbachia? – a statistical analysis of current data. FEMS Microbiology Letters 281, 215-220. Hornett EA, Duplouy AM, Davies N, Roderick GK, Wedell N, Hurst GDD & Charlat S. 2008. YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD PARASITE DOWN: EVOLUTION OF A MALE-KILLER SUPPRESSOR UNCOVERS CYTOPLASMIC INCOMPATIBILITY. Evolution 62, 1258-1263. Hosokawa T, Koga R, Kikuchi Y, Meng X-Y & Fukatsu T. 2010. Wolbachia as a bacteriocyte-associated nutritional mutualist. PNAS 107, 769-774. Hotopp JCD, Clark ME, Oliveira DCSG, Foster JM, Fischer P, Torres MCM, Giebel JD, Kumar N, Ishmael N, Wang S, Ingram J, Nene RV, Shepard J, Tomkins J, Richards S, Spiro DJ, Ghedin E, Slatko BE, Tettelin HE & Werren JH. 2007. Widespread Lateral Gene Transfer from Intracellular Bacteria to Multicellular Eukaryotes. Science 317, 1753-1756. Huigens ME, Luck RF, Klaassen RHG, Maas MFPM, Timmermans MJTM & Stouthamer R. 2000. Infectious parthenogenesis. Nature 405, 178-179. Hurst LD. 1991. The Incidences and Evolution of Cytoplasmic Male Killers. Proc. R. Soc. B 244, 91-99. Hurst GDD & Werren JH. 2001. The role of selfish genetic elements in eukaryotic evolution. Nature Reviews Genetics 2, 597-606. Jiggins FM, Hurst GDD & Majerus MEN. 2000. Sex-ratio-distorting Wolbachia causes sex-role reversal in its butterfly host. Proc. R. Soc. B 267, 69-73. Jiggins FM, Hurst GDD & Yang Z. 2002. Host-Symbiont Conflicts: Positive Selection on an Outer Membrane Protein of Parasitic but not Mutualistic Rickettsiaceae. Molecular Biology and Evolution 19, 1341-1349. Landmann F, Orsi GA, Loppin B & Sullivan W. 2009. Wolbachia-Mediated Cytoplasmic Incompatibility Is Associated with Impaired Histone Deposition in the Male Pronucleus. PLoS Pathogens 5, e1000343. Lassy CW & Karr TL. 1996. Cytological analysis of fertilization and early embryonic development in incompatible crosses of Drosophila simulans. 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A Wolbachia Symbiont in Aedes aegypti Limits Infection with Dengue, Chikungunya, and Plasmodium. Cell 139, 1268-1278. Nice CC, Gompert Z, Forister ML & Fordyce JA. 2009. An unseen foe in arthropod conservation efforts: the case of Wolbachia infections in the Karner blue butterfly. Biological Conservation 142, 3137-3146. Noda H, Miyoshi T & Koizumi Y. 2002. In vitro cultivation of Wolbachia in insect and mammalian cell lines. In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology – Animal 38, 423-427. Pannebakker BA, Loppin B, Elemans CPH, Humblot L & Vavre F. 2007. Parasitic inhibition of cell death facilitates symbiosis. PNAS 104, 213-215. Pinto SB, Mariconti M, Bazzocchi C, Bandi C & Sinkins SP. 2012. Wolbachia surface protein induces innate immune responses in mosquito cells. BMC Microbiology 12 (Suppl. 1), S11. Raychoudhury R, Baldo L, Oliveira DCSG & Werren JH. 2009. Modes of acquisition of Wolbachia: horizontal transfer, hybrid introgression, and codivergence in the Nasonia species complex. Evolution 63, 165-183. Riparbelli MG, Giordano R, Ueyama M & Callaini G. 2012. Wolbachia-Mediated Male Killing Is Associated with Defective Chromatin Remodeling. PLoS ONE 7, e30045. Rousset F & Raymond M. 1991. Cytoplasmic incompatibility in insects: Why sterilize females? TrEE 6, 54-57. Stouthamer R, Breeuwer JAJ, Luck RF & Werren JH. 1993. Molecular identification of microorganisms associated with parthenogenesis. Nature 361, 66-68. Stouthamer R, Breeuwer JAJ, Hurst GDD. 1999. WOLBACHIA PIPIENTIS: Microbial Manipulator of Arthropod Reproduction. Annual Review of Microbiology 53, 71-102. Stouthamer R, van Tilborg M, de Jong JH, Nunney L & Luck RF. 2001. Selfish element maintains sex in natural populations of a parasitoid wasp. Proc. R. Soc. B 268, 617-622. Taylor MJ & Hoerauf A. 1999. Wolbachia Bacteria of Filarial Nematodes. Parasitology Today 15, 437-442. Teixeira L, Ferreira Á & Ashburner M. 2008. The Bacterial Symbiont Wolbachia Induces Resistance to RNA Viral Infections in Drosophila melanogaster. PLoS Biology 6, e1000002. Thompson JN. 1987. Symbiont induced speciation. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 32, 385-393. Tram U & Sullivan W. 2002. Role of delayed nuclear envelope breakdown and mitosis in Wolbachia-induced cytoplasmic incompatibility. Science 296, 1124-1126. Wade MJ & Chang NW. 1995. Increased male fertility in Tribolium confusum beetles after infection with the intracellular parasite Wolbachia. Nature 373, 72-74. Weeks AR, Turelli M, Harcombe WR, Reynolds KT & Hoffmann AA. 2007. From Parasite to Mutualist: Rapid Evolution of Wolbachia in Natural Populations of Drosophila. PLoS Biology 5, e114. Weiss BL, Attardo GM & Aksoy S. 2009. Insect–Protozoa–Bacteria Associations: a Model System for Investigating Host–Parasite Interactions. In: Stock SP, Vandenberg J, Glazer I & Boemare N. Insect Pathogens: Molecular Approaches and Techniques, pp. 223-240. Werren JH & Windsor DM. 2000. Wolbachia infection frequencies in insects: evidence of a global equilibrium? Proc. R. Soc. B 267, 1277-1285. Wilkinson T. 1998. Wolbachia come of age. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 13, 213-214. Wu M, Sun LV, Vamathevan J, Riegler M, Deboy R, Brownile JC, McGraw EA, Martin W, Esser C, Ahmadinejad N, Wiegand C, Madupu R, Beanan MJ, Brinkac LM, Daugherty SC, Durkin AC, Kolonay JF, Nelson WC, Mohamoud Y, Lee P, Berry K, Young MB, Utterback T, Weidman J, Nierman WC, Paulsen IT, Nelson KE, Tettelin H, O’Neill SL & Eisen JA. 2004. Phylogenomics of the Reproductive Parasite Wolbachia pipientis wMel: A Streamlined Genome Overrun by Mobile Genetic Elements. PLoS Biology 2, e69. Xi Z, Dean JL, Khoo C & Dobson SL. 2005. Generation of a novel Wolbachia infection in Aedes albopictus (Asian tiger mosquito) via embryonic microinjection. Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 35, 903-910. Yen JH & Barr AR. 1971. New Hypothesis of the Cause of Cytoplasmic Incompatibility in Culex pipiens L. Nature 232, 657-658. Research Blogging necessities :) R. Stouthamer, J. A. J. Breeuwer, & G. D. D. Hurst (1999). WOLBACHIA PIPIENTIS: Microbial Manipulator of Arthropod Reproduction Annual Review of Microbiology DOI: 10.1146/annurev.micro.53.1.71

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86 is conjectured to be the largest power of 2 not containing a zero. This simply stated conjecture has proven itself to be proof-resistant. Let us see why. What is the probability that the nth power of two will not have any zeroes? The first and the last digits are non-zeroes; suppose that other digits become zeroes randomly and independently of each other. This supposition allows us to estimate the probability of 2n not having zeroes as (9/10)k-2, where k is the number of digits of 2n. The number of digits can be estimated as n log102. Thus, the probability is about cxn, where c = (10/9)2 ≈ 1.2 and x = (9/10)log102 ≈ 0.97. The expected number of powers of 2 without zeroes starting from the power N is cxN/(1-x) ≈ 40 ⋅ 0.97N. Let us look at A007377, the sequence of numbers such that their powers of 2 do not contain zeros: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 49, 51, 67, 72, 76, 77, 81, 86. Our estimates predicts 32 members of this sequence starting from 6. In fact, the sequence has 30 conjectured members. Similarly, our estimate predicts 2.5 members starting from 86. It is easy to check that the sequence doesn’t contain any more numbers below 200 and our estimate predicts 0.07 members after 200. As we continue checking larger numbers and see that they do not belong to the sequence, the probability that the sequence contains more elements vanishes. With time we check more numbers and become more convinced that the conjecture is true. Currently, it has been checked up to the power 4.6 ⋅ 107. The probability of finding something after that is about 1.764342396 ⋅10-633620. Let us try to approach the conjecture from another angle. Let us check the last K digits of powers of two. As the number of possibilities is finite, these last digits eventually will start cycling. If we can show that all the elements inside the period contain zeroes, then we need to check the finite number of powers of two until this period starts. If we can find such K, we can prove the conjecture. Let us look at the last two digits of powers of two. The sequence starts as: 01, 02, 04, 08, 16, 32, 64, 28, 56, 12, 24, 48, 96, 92, 84, 68, 36, 72, 44, 88, 76, 52, 04. As we would anticipate, it starts cycling. The cycle length is 20, and 90% of numbers in the cycle don’t have zeroes. Now let’s continue to the last three digits. The period length is 100, and 19 of them either start with zero or contain zero. The percentage of elements in the cycle that do not contain zero is 81%. The cycle length for the last n digits is known. It is 4 ⋅ 5n-1. In particular the cycle length grows by 5 every time. The number of zero-free elements in these cycles form a sequence A181610: 4, 18, 81, 364, 1638, 7371, 33170. If we continue with our supposition that the digits are random, and study the new digits that appear when we move from the cycle of the last n digits to the next cycle of the last n+1 digits, we can expect that 9/10 of those digits will be non-zero. Indeed, if we check the ratio of how many numbers do not contain zero in the next cycle compared to the previous cycle, we get: 4.5, 4.5, 4.49383, 4.5, 4.5, 4.50007. All of these numbers are quite close to our estimation of 4.5. If this trend continues the portion of the numbers in the cycle that don’t have zeroes tends to zero; however, the total of such numbers grows exponentially. We can even estimate that the expected growth is 4 ⋅ 4.5n-1. From this estimation, we can derive the conjecture: Conjecture. For any number N, there exists a power of two such that its last N digits are zero-free. Indeed, the last N digits of powers of two cycle, and there are an increasing number of members inside that cycle that do not contain zeroes. The corresponding powers of two don’t have zeroes among N rightmost digits. So, how do we combine the two results? First, the expected probability of finding the power of two larger than 86 that doesn’t contain zero is minuscule. And second, we most certainly can find a power of two that has as many zeroless digits at the end as we want. To combine the two results, let us look at the sequences A031140 and A031141. We can deduce from them that for the power 103233492954 the first zero from the right occupies the 250th spot. The total number of digits of that power is 31076377936. So 250 is a tiny portion of the digits. As time goes by we grow more and more convinced that 86 is the largest power of two without zeroes, but it is not at all clear how we can prove the conjecture or whether it can be proven at all. My son, Sergei, suggested that I claim that I have a proof of this conjecture, but do not have enough space in the margin to fit my proof in. The probability that I will ever be shamed and disproven is lower than the probability of me winning a billion dollars in the lottery. Though then, if I do win the big bucks, I will still care about being shamed and disproven.

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I have been trying to consolidate my beliefs and understandings about practice the last few weeks. As the mother of a hockey player and two dancers I am all too familiar with the idea of practice in sport. In their activities my children have the opportunity to work on isolated skills repeatedly until they become fluid, efficient and second nature. Their coaches are constantly giving them feedback, modelling and helping them get the “feel” for their sport. These practiced skills are constantly being put into use…be it a game or a dance. It is in those game situations where I really see my kids light up. They love to play, perform and just plain have FUN!! In those moments all of the practice becomes worth it and it is in those moments they become reenergize for and reinvested in further practice. It is with this notion of practice in my head that I began to explore what practice is in education. How it is like practice in sport? I do believe that practice is important in both sport and students learning, but I also believe that not all practice is created equal. Some practice can support learning, consolidate understanding and build confidence for students while other practice can frustrate, confuse and create a barrier for learning. Practice can make “perfect” or at least better but it can also make permanent…and if the practice isn’t effective we run the risk of making permanent misconceptions. But what is “perfect” practice? Can “perfect” practice really exist? I do not think that “perfect” is an attainable goal but I do think that purposeful is. Purposeful practice implies that teachers and coaches have an aim…intent…goal…target for the practice they want students to engage in. They identify a student/player need, envision what success would look like and with those things in mind create a plan to support the learning with practice. Purposeful practice takes careful thinking into the what, how and why of the practice with the goal of furthering individual students’ learning in ways that are the most meaningful. It is more than just practice for practice sake, more than a stack of worksheets for all students to complete…it is practice with purpose, practice that is deliberate, powerful and focused. The thing that I think we as teachers need to remember and that coaches do so well, is to put the practice into the game. After all it is in the game where the FUN is. As I continue to think about Purposeful Practice I am consolidating my beliefs into what it truly is in education. These beliefs are far from set in stone but are hopefully the start of a discussion. My Purposeful Practice Beliefs: - Students should practice what they understand. Practice without understanding can change the goal of the practice from fluidity of skills to simply getting to the end of the page to make the teacher happy. - Practice should focused on supporting individual student learning challenges and enhancing strengths. - Practice should be focused on progress and monitored constantly. If a student is not progressing then the practice needs to change. - Practice can be and should be messy…we need to see where errors are occurring so that we can help. - When students make mistakes (and they will) teachers need to be there to help them by offering support, feedback and additional instruction. We should use practice to inform instruction. - Practice should be sustained over time. It is not a one time thing. In order for practice to become permanent students will need to move the learning into their long-term memory - Students should be given opportunities to put their practice into authentic “game like” situation as often as possible. It is through the game that students can discover the purpose for the skills, transfer them to new situations and make connections. - Practice can be cooperative and noisy. Students can learn from each other. Once upon a time, in a land not so far away there lived a girl named Jennifer. Jennifer was a student and on this particular day she was sitting in her desk carefully writing her name on the back of a piece of white paper. When her teacher said GO and not a second before (it was strictly forbidden to peek) she turned over her paper to reveal a page full of math basic facts. As quickly as possible, she began computing math facts and writing the answers on the paper. The whole class was silent, the only exception was the quite sounds of pencils frantically scratching and the odd moan. The gauntlet had been thrown down and the race was on to conquer the sheet and then celebrate your triumph in front of your friends. After two minutes the class was told to stop..turn the page over and put their pencils down. Some students smiled with victory as the teacher walked between the rows collecting the sheets. Some students hung their heads defeated, deflated and quite frankly exhausted from the effort. Jennifer lived in both groups some days she felt the sweet sensation of victory, some days the sheer agony of defeat. On this day the sheet, only half completed had declared it’s victory over her. The teacher would return the worksheet the next day with X’s and checks marks on it, along with the final score out of 50. Students who did well were told to keep up the good work. Those who didn’t were told to try harder next week when Mad Minute day came. On this particular day Jennifer asked her teacher if they had to have Mad Minutes day every week. She was given this short, simple answer…”It will help you learn your basic facts”. Years later Jennifer was a teacher, with her own group of students sitting before her eagerly awaiting their signal to turn over the sheet of paper and begin. She had been given the most wonderful opportunity to teach students their basic math facts and was using the one tool she knew would ensure that students learned… The Mad Minute. After all, she had successfully learned her basic facts and had long since abandoned using her fingers and toes…well most of the time anyways. Some of her students experienced success, some struggled, some downright refused to start. Jennifer reflected on this fact with a colleague the next day. Why didn’t the kids get it?…she was doing all she could…she had even increased her Mad Minute time to twice a week…yet they refused to learn. Her colleague suggested sending the worksheets home for more practice. Maybe parents would have the time to help the students continue to learn those basic facts. After all they had now completed the unit on operations. As I reflect on this story I feel sad, for that young girl who felt defeated, that young teacher who knew very little about teaching mathematics, and for all of those students. I was that girl and knew how defeated the Mad Minute made me feel…yet I created that same experience for my students. I simply knew no other way. A few years later I heard a speaker say something that really struck home to me… “When teachers align what they teach… with what students learn…and with what they assess… they honour the learners in their classrooms. Mad Minutes, at least the way they had been modelled for me, were considered the one stop shop for teaching students to learn and assessing progress in basic facts. Knowing what I know now I understand that they are none of those things. They didn’t teach…they evaluated, they didn’t support learning…they evaluated, at best you could say they assessed and provided feedback for teacher planning and instructional decision-making (which they didn’t). At worst…they evaluated. They became an activity for survival of the fittest. The strong survived to basked in their success. The weak were defeated, crushed and left to feel like math failures. No one was honored. If you were one of those bright-eyed, trusting students in my classroom…I sincerely apologize. You deserved a teacher who would teach so that you could learn. A teacher who would assess and use those assessments for learning. A teacher who would not send home the very object of your frustration only to have you experience failure in a new environment. You deserved better! Knowing what I know now…I COULD do better. I now believe that: - Teaching mathematics is about developing student competence AND confidence - Teaching of basic facts should be done in a way that is strategic, and in attainable steps that can inspire confidence - Practice should be purposeful and targeted - Fluency is important and students should be given opportunities to develop fluency that is built on a foundation of conceptual knowledge - Monitoring of Progress is key and should inform instructional decisions - Assessments can be timed if necessary but students should be allowed to finish and only “compete” with themselves - Students should be given opportunities to see patterns within operations and connections between addition/subtraction and multiplication/division - Numbers are flexible and teaching/ learning about them should be as well My next few posts will continue to develop my thinking on purposeful practice and procedural fluency in a way that I hope honors our learners and inspires success. As always your comments and feedback are always welcome.

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With the exceptions of peas and broad beans, fruit vegetables are warm-season crops, and with the exception of sweet corn and peas, all are subject to chilling injury. Fruit vegetables are not generally adaptable to long-term storage. Exceptions are the hard rind (winter) squashes and pumpkin. A useful classification for postharvest discussion of the fruit vegetables is based on the stage of maturity at harvest. This presents an overview of the general postharvest requirements and handling systems for this group of commodities. Legumes: snap, lima, and other beans, snow pea, sugar snap and garden peas Cucurbits: cucumber, soft rind squashes, chayote, bitter melon, luffa Solanaceous vegetables: eggplant, peppers, tomatillo Others such as okra and sweet corn Cucurbits: cantaloupe, honeydew, and other muskmelons; watermelon, pumpkin, hard-rind squashes Solanaceous vegetables: mature green and vine-ripe tomatoes, ripe peppers The harvest index for most immature fruit vegetables is based principally on size and color. Immature soft-rind squashes, for example, may be harvested at several sizes or stages of development, depending upon market needs. Fruit that are too developed are of interior internal quality and show undesirable color change after harvest. This also applies to other immature fruit vegetables such as cucumber and bell peppers. The harvest index for mature fruit vegetables depends on several characteristics, and proper harvest maturity is the key to adequate shelf life and good quality of the ripened fruit. For cantaloupe, the principal harvest indices are surface color and the development of the abscission zone. Most fruit vegetables are harvested by hand. Some harvest aids may be used, including pickup machines and conveyors for melons. Cantaloupe is also harvested with "sack" crews who empty the melons into bulk trailers. Crenshaw and other specialty melons are easily damaged and require special care in handling and transport to the packing area. Mature green tomatoes are usually hand harvested into buckets and emptied into field bins or gondolas. Almost all fresh market tomatoes grown in California are bush type, and the plants are typically harvested only once or twice. At the time of harvest, 5 to 10 percent of the tomatoes have pink and yellow color and are separated out later on the packing line as vine-ripest Immature fruit vegetables generally have very tender skins that are easily damaged in harvest and handling. Special care must be taken in all handling operations to prevent product damage and subsequent decay. Sweet corn, snap beans, and peas may be harvested mechanically or by hand. Many of the mature fruit vegetables are hauled to packinghouses, storage, or loading facilities in bulk bins (hard rind squashes, peppers, pink tomatoes), gondolas (mature green tomatoes and peppers), or bulk field trailers or trucks (muskmelons, hard rind squashes). Harvesting at night, when products are the coolest, is common for sweet corn and is gaining in use for cantaloupe. Products reach their lowest temperature near daybreak. Night harvest may reduce the time and costs of cooling products, may result in better and more uniform cooling, and helps maintain product quality. Fluorescent lights attached to mobile packing units have permitted successful night harvesting of cantaloupe in California. The trend is increasing toward field packing of fruit vegetables. Grading, sorting, sizing, packing, and palletizing are carried out in the field. The products are then transported to a central cooling facility. Mobile packing facilities are commonly towed through the fields for cantaloupe, honeydew melon, eggplant, cucumber, summer squashes, and peppers. Field-pack operations entail much less handling of products than in packinghouses. This reduces product damage and, therefore, increases packout yield of products. In melons, for example, field packing means less rolling, dumping, and dropping and thus helps reduce the "shaker" problem, in which the seed cavity loosens from the pericarp wall. It also reduces scuffing of the net which reduces subsequent water loss. Handling costs are also reduced in field pack operations. One difficulty with field packing, however, is the need for increased supervision to maintain consistent quality in the packed product. Field packing is not used for commodities that require classification for both color and size, such as tomato. Loaded field vehicles should be parked in shade to prevent product warming and sunburning. Products may be unloaded by hand (soft rind squashes, eggplant, some muskmelons, cucumber, watermelon), dry-dumped onto sloping, padded ramps (cantaloupe, honeydew melon, sweet peppers) or onto moving conveyor belts (tomatoes), or wet-dumped into tanks of moving water to reduce physical injury (honeydew melon, tomatoes, and peppers). Considerable mechanical damage occurs in dry-dumping operations; bruising, scratching, abrading and splitting are common examples. The water temperature in wet-dump tanks for tomatoes should be slightly warmer than the product temperature to prevent uptake of water and decay-causing organisms into the fruits. The dump tank water needs to be chlorinated. An operation may have two tanks separated by a clean water spray to improve overall handling sanitation. Presizing. For many commodities, fruit below a certain size are eliminated manually or mechanically by a presizing belt or chain. Undersize fruit are diverted to a cull conveyor or used for processing. Sorting or selection. The sorting process eliminates cull, overripe, misshapen, and otherwise defective fruit and separates products by color, maturity, and ripeness classes (e.g. tomato and muskmelons). Electronic color sorters are used in some tomato operations. Grading. Fruit are sorted by quality into two or more grades according to U.S. standards, California grade standards, or a shipper's own Trade standards. Waxing. Food grade waxes are commonly applied to cucumber, eggplant, sweet peppers, cantaloupe, and tomato, and occasionally to some summer squashes. The purpose is to replace some of the natural waxes removed in the washing and cleaning operations, to reduce water loss, and to improve appearance. Waxing may be done before or after sizing, and fungicides may be added to the wax. Application of wax and postharvest fungicides must be indicated on each shipping container. Waxing and fungicides are used only in packinghouse handling of fruit vegetables. European cucumbers are frequently shrink-wrapped rather than waxed. Sizing. After sorting for defects and color differences, the fruit vegetables are segregated into several size categories. Sizing is done manually for many of the fruit vegetables, including the legumes, soft and hard rind squashes, cucumber, eggplant, chili peppers, okra, pumpkin, rnuskmelons, and watermelon. Cantaloupes may be sized by volumetric weights, or diverging roll sizers, sweet peppers are sized commonly by diverging bar sizers, and tomatoes are sized by diameter with belt sizers or by weight. Packing. Mature green and pink tomatoes, sweet and chili peppers, okra, cucumber, and legumes are commonly weight- or volume-filled into shipping containers. All other fruit type vegetables and many of the above are place-packed into shipping containers by count, bulk bins (hard rind squashes. pumpkin, muskmelons, and watermelon) or bulk trucks (watermelon). Fruit type vegetables that are place-packed are often sized during the same operation. Palletizing. Packed shipping containers of most fruit vegetables in large-volume operations are palletized for shipment. This is a common practice with cantaloupe, muskmelons, sweet peppers, and tomato. Except for sweet corn, the immature fruit vegetables are often handled in low volume operations, where palletizing is not common because of lack of forklifts. In these cases, the products are palletized at a centralized cooling facility or as they are loaded for transport. Palletizing is usually done after hydrocooling or package-ice cooling, but before forced-air cooling. In field-pack operations, palletizing is generally done in the field. Various methods are used for cooling fruit vegetables. The most common methods are discussed here. Forced-air cooling is used for beans, cantaloupe, cucumbers, muskmelons, peas, peppers, soft rind squashes, and tomato. Forced-air evaporative cooling is used to a limited extent on chilling-sensitive commodities such as squashes, peppers, eggplant, and cherry tomato. Hydrocooling is used before grading, sizing, and packing of beans, cantaloupe, sweet corn, and okra. Sorting of defective products is done both before and after cooling. Hydrocooling cycles are rarely long enough during hot weather. The need to maintain a continuous, adequate supply of cantaloupes to the packers often results in the melons being incompletely cooled. This can be remedied if, after packing and palletizing, enough time is allowed in the cold room to cool the product to recommended temperatures before loading for transport to markets. Package icing and liquid-icing are used to a limited extent for cooling cantaloupe and routinely as a supplement to hydrocooling for sweet corn. Temporary cold storage. In large-volume operations, most fruit vegetables are placed in cold storage rooms after cooling and before shipment. Cold rooms are less used in small farm operations; the products are often transported to central cooperatively owned or distributor-owned facilities for cooling and short-term storage. Loading for transport. Some tomatoes, cantaloupe, and other muskmelons are shipped in refrigerated railcars, but most fruit vegetables are shipped in refrigerated trucks or container vans. Except for the major volume products such as cantaloupe and tomato, most are shipped in mixed loads, sometimes with ethylene-sensitive commodities. Among the immature fruit type vegetables, products such as cucumber, legumes, bitter melon, and eggplant are sensitive to ethylene exposure. Among the mature fruit types, watermelon is detrimentally affected by ethylene, resulting in softening of the whole fruit, flesh mealiness, and rind separation. For uniform and controlled ripening, ethylene is often applied to mature green tomatoes and sometimes to honeydew, casaba, and Crenshaw melons. Ethylene treatments may be done at the shipping point or the destination, although final fruit quality is generally considered best if the treatment is applied at the shipping point soon after harvest. Satisfactory ripening occurs at 12.5° to 25°C (55° to 77°F), the higher the temperature, the faster the ripening (table 29.3). Above 30°C (86°F), red color development of tomato is inhibited. An ethylene concentration of about 100 ppm is commonly used. Honeydew melons (usually class 12 melons) are sometimes held in ethylene up to 24 hours; tomatoes are usually held at 20°C (68°F) and treated for up to 3 days. Tomatoes may be ethylene-treated before or after packing, but most are treated after packing. An advantage of treating before packing is that the warmer conditions favor development of any decay-causing pathogens on the fruit, so infected fruit can be eliminated before final packout. Packing after ethylene treatment also permits a more uniform packout. Because most of the mature green tomatoes produced in California are packed and then treated with ethylene, "checkerboarding" may still occur and make a repack operation necessary. Modified atmospheres are seldom used commercially for these commodities, although shipments of melons and tomato under modified atmospheres are being tested for long-distance markets. Consumer packaging of vine-ripe tomatoes may also involve the use of modified atmospheres. For tomatoes held at recommended temperatures, oxygen levels of 3 to 5 percent slow ripening, with carbon dioxide levels held below 5 percent to avoid injury. Muskmelons have been less studied, but recommended atmospheres under normal storage conditions are 3 to 5 percent oxygen and 10 to 20 percent carbon dioxide. Recommended storage/transit conditions For mature fruit type vegetables temperature can effectively control the rate of ripening. Most mature-harvested fruit vegetables are sensitive to chilling injury when held below the recommended storage temperature. Chilling injury is cumulative, and its severity depends on the temperature and the duration of exposure. In the case of tomato, exposure to chilling temperatures below 10°C (50° F) results in lack of color development decreased flavor, and increased decay The optimum temperatures for short-term storage and transport are: Mature green tomatoes, pumpkin, and hard rind squashes: 12.5° to 15° C (55° to 60° F) Partially to fully ripe tomatoes, muskmelons (except cantaloupe): 10° to 12.5° C (50° to 55° F). Honeydew melons that are ripening naturally or have been induced with ethylene are best held at 5° to 7.5° C (41° to 45° F). Watermelon: 7° to 10° C (45° to 50° F) Cantaloupe: 2.5° to 5° C (36° to 41° F) The optimum relative humidity range is 85 to 90 percent for tomato and muskmelons (except cantaloupe), 90 to 95 percent for cantaloupe, and 60 to 70 percent for pumpkin and hard rind squashes. Immature fruit vegetables All fruit vegetables harvested immature are sensitive to chilling injury. Exceptions are the peas and sweet corn, which are stored best at 0° C (32° F) and 95 percent RH. The optimum product temperatures with RH at 90 to 95 percent for short-term storage and transport are as follows: Eggplant, cucumber, soft rind squashes, okra: 10° to 12.5° C (50° to 55° F) Peppers: 5° to 7° C (41° to 45° F) Lima beans, snap beans: 5° to 8° C (41° to 46° F) Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of California. All contents copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved. Development funding from the University of California and USDA, CSREES. Please e-mail your comments to: email@example.com Last updated: February 15, 2012 | Website design by Lauri Brandeberry

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51°15' / 22°34' Translation of "Lublin" chapter from Pinkas Hakehillot Polin Published by Yad Vashem Published in Jerusalem Project Coordinator and Translator Morris Gradel z"l Our sincere appreciation to Yad Vashem for permission to put this material on the JewishGen web site. This is a translation from: Pinkas Hakehillot: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, Poland, Volume VII, pages 13 - 38, published by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem JewishGen is not responsible for inaccuracies or omissions in the original work and cannot rewrite or edit the text to correct inaccuracies and/or omissions. Our mission is to produce a translation of the original work and we cannot verify the accuracy of statements or alter facts cited. Lublin (hereafter L), the largest town in Eastern Poland, is the main town of the region and province. It stands on the banks of the River Bystrzyca. In the 12th century it was a fortified settlement on the trade route leading to Ruthenia. In the 13th century it was destroyed several times during invasions by the Tatars, Ruthenians and Jadvingians (a Lithuanian tribe). For some time the settlement was under the ægis of the Princes of Halicz. In 1317 L was granted the Magdeburgian privileges of a town by King Wladislaw Lokietek. His son, Casimir the Great, erected a wall around the town. It was granted the privilege in 1385 of free trade with the Lithuanian Principality and in 1392 the right to store in the town goods in transit - and these advantages contributed to its rapid development. In 1474 L was the seat of the king's representative (the Woiwoda). It reached the zenith of its prosperity in the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, when its markets attracted merchants from the whole of Poland and even beyond. The same period also saw the expansion of various trades. In the 16th century L was also a political centre, where the nobility held its meetings; in 1578 it became the seat of the Crown Court and the Appeal Court of "Lesser Poland", and in 1569 there convened in L the Sejm that united Poland and Lithuania under one crown (this was the celebrated Polish-Lithuanian "Unia"). Resident in the town were writers and poets renowned at the time (Kochanowski, Rej and others), and a printing works and paper factory were established. In the 16th and 17th century the population of L was more than 10,000, and embraced some suburbs. In the period of the "deluge" (the wars in the middle of the 17th century waged in Poland by the Cossacks, the Swedes and the Muscovites) L suffered heavy damage to life and property. Repairs were not undertaken for some time, and only in 1780 did work on reconstruction begin. In 1795 L passed under the sovereignty of Austria, in 1809 it formed part of the "Principality of Warsaw", and from 1815 until the rise of independent Poland in 1918 it was included in Congress Poland. In the course of the 19th century L developed into the metropolis of the eastern part of the Polish Kingdom. Its population increased from 7,000 at the beginning of the century (during the Napoleonic Wars) to 56,000 at its conclusion. During the century it was under the "Jurisdiction of Wieniawa" (a suburban noble estate with autonomous legal status). Only late in the century did L start to develop a modern economy. After being linked to the rail network in 1877 existing industries developed and new ones were established. Concomitant with this there was cultural development and cultural and educational institutions were founded. L contained some well-known Polish writers, such as Kraszewski, Vincenty Paul and Boleslaw Prus, and many figures of the Polish national underground movement chose to settle there. The 20th century saw no radical changes in L's economic structure, and the town remained the centre of an agricultural area. World War I had a considerable stagnating effect on local industry, and its recovery between the two world wars was protracted. In the 20s and 30s new plants connected with the aviation industry were established, as were factories for pipes, screws, tobacco and chicory (coffee substitute). The town's public services (sewage, waterworks, electric power, slaughterhouse and the like) were also developed. Nevertheless, during the whole inter-war period L was in economic decline, or at best stagnant. The number of unemployed went on increasing and with it the number of demonstrations and strikes. The process of impoverishment affected broad spectra of the population. The situation was particularly bad during the crisis of 1929-33, and even in 1933 the number of unemployed (12,000) surpassed the number in employment. There was virtually no natural increase of population in the years preceding the Second World War. During the 19th and 20th centuries L was the scene of activity by political movements and youth organisations, both open and clandestine. In 1918, after Poland gained its independence, a council of Polish representatives assumed political control of the town and its environs. On the very first day of World War II L suffered heavy bombardment. During the German occupation the leading Polish intellectuals were liquidated. Many people were imprisoned in the town's fortress on political grounds. In 1941 the first batch of 160 prisoners was despatched to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. In 1941 too, an extermination camp was established at Majdanek, near L. It served at first as a camp for 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war. In Majdanek some 360,000 beings met their death, most of them Jews from Poland, but also from other parts of occupied Europe. During the German occupation whole quarters of the town were destroyed, as was most of the infrastructure (such as roads and bridges). L became an important centre of the Polish Resistance. On July 24th, 1944, L was liberated by the Red Army, and for seven months was the capital of the new Poland. The process of recovery was rapid: ruined factories were restored and new ones built, and L again became an important cultural centre. New institutions of higher education were set up, including the University of Marie Sklodowska Curie, as were various categories of secondary schools. The Theatre and the Philharmonic Orchestra resumed their activities. The Lupaczinski Library was expanded to contain 200,000 volumes. However, in the 60s stagnation and even recession set in, as was the case in the rest of "Socialist Poland". The crisis reached its peak in the late 80s, and even continued into the beginning of the new Polish Republic that came into being in 1990-91, following the collapse of the "Polish People's Republic". The first Jews in L are mentioned in documents from the 15th century, though there may possibly have been some there earlier. A few Jews lived in the town itself, with the consent of the authorities, despite the royal edict of 1535 that forbad Jews to live in L. In the 15th and 16th centuries many Jews settled in the town and established a Jewish quarter to the north and north-east of the palace and the fortress. For the privilege of living there the Jews were obliged to pay a tax to the fortress administrators. In 1555 the boundaries of the Jewish quarter were extended; the Governor of Lublin, Stanislaw Winczinski, with the approval of the King of Poland, Sigismund August, granted the Jewish community three large plots of land, One of these was to contain the slaughterhouse and butcher shops; the second, on the palace hill near the old cemetery, was to serve as an additional burial-ground; and the third, on the slopes of the palace hill, was set aside for religious purposes. In return for these plots the community agreed to pay an annual tax of 12 marks and an annual sum for candle grease. In 1557 Governor Winczinski presented Dr. Yitzhak Maj, a well-known doctor in L, a large plot (which also had a pool) and permitted him to build on it. In 1566 a synagogue was erected there in the name of the Maharashal (Rabbi Shlomo Luria), and the following year other buildings were added, in one of which a yeshiva was opened. In 1603 the merchant Yaakov ben Aharon received from Governor Firlay a plot on which to erect buildings and shops. The Jewish quarter continued to grow, from 24 houses in 1550 to 100 at the end of the century. The main street was Sieroca Street, where the activities of the community were concentrated. In addition to the Maharashal Synagogue and the Bet Midrash, there was another prayer-house, in the name of Avraham ben Chaim, one of the leaders of the Council of the Four Lands*, and the study house of the "Seer of Lublin". A third synagogue was built in Podzamcze Street - the "Leifer", associated with the name of Shaul Wahl, of whom it was said that he ruled Poland for one day, but gave up power in favour of a Pole. In 1638 Tsvi Hirsch, an agent of the royal court and a leader of the Council of the Four Lands, built a synagogue in the name of his father, Moshe Doctor ("Doctor-Shul"), this too in Sieroca Street. In time the Jewish quarter became too restricted and some of its inhabitants tried to circumvent the rule of "de non tolerandis judais" (not to tolerate Jews within the confines of the city) implemented by watchful citizens, with a view to moving to other parts of the town. Few, however, were permitted to do so, and these only for a limited period. In 1655 a fire broke out in the Jewish quarter and most of the houses went up in flames. Reconstruction took many years. As mentioned above, after the "deluge" (the wars of 1648-60) L lost its privileged status. The Council of the Four Lands, which until then usually met in L, moved in 1680 to Jaroslaw, which was developing at the time and was an important centre of trade and markets. In the 18th and the second half of the 19th century also, the Jews continued their attempts to be allowed to live outside the Jewish quarter, but generally without success. In 1761 Jews who were there without authorisation were expelled from the centre of town and, with a few fortunate exceptions, were compelled to return to the crowded conditions of the quarter. This state of affairs continued until the Tsar's edict of 1862 annulling the restrictions on Jewish dwellings in the Kingdom of Congress Poland. Thanks to its status as an important commercial centre as early as the 15th century and its position at the crossroads of the trade route from Western Poland to the North and South-East of the country, the markets of L attracted large numbers of Jewish merchants from all corners of Poland and beyond. The Jews traded in almost all the wares bought and sold on these occasions. In 1530/31 Jewish merchants transported through the auspices of the Chamber of Commerce in L 136 barrels of wine, 503 oxen, 15,000 ells of cloth, 47 rolls of silk, 38,297 furs and hides, 5 wagons of iron, 82 stone of steel, 22,170 ells of fabrics, and other wares. In 1584 Jewish merchants from Krakow brought to the market in L 185 wagons loaded with goods. The communities of Poznan and Krakow even had in L brokers, whose task was to settle differences between the merchants during the markets. For their part, the merchants of L maintained contact with important merchants outside Poland. At the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th the name of the merchant Yoska Szachnowicz of L (the father of Rabbi Shalom Shachna Hacohen) was well-known for his trading and leasing activities. Yoska was the King's excise officer and in charge of customs in Reisen and Podolia. The markets of L, where Jewish notables from all over Poland gathered, became in time the core around which the Council of the Four Lands grew. However, before they achieved commercial status the Jews of L had to overcome many difficulties. In 1518 King Sigismund I acquiesced in the request of the citizens and town council, and ordered his representative in L, Jan of Filicia, to curtail the trading rights of the local Jews. In 1521 the king issued an edict forbidding Jewish pedlars to purchase produce brought into town by the local farmers. Two years later another order was published with a view to placing the trading rights of the L Jews on an equal footing with those of Lwow, Poznan and Krakow. This order contained a set of restrictions, mainly a ban on retail trading by Jews and a curb on their wholesale activities. The Jews of L were also forbidden to have shops, and were only allowed to set up temporary booths in their own quarter. Christians were forbidden to lease shops or stalls to Jews, infringements being punishable by fines. In spite of this, the Jews managed to rent stalls and shops during the annual markets. In 1531 there was an action brought by the Municipality of L against the Jews concerning payment of tax on imports of woven goods. The king ruled that the Jews had to pay this tax, despite the fact that non-Jewish citizens were exempt. Contrariwise, there were instances where the Jews were freed of various taxes by royal order; for example, in 1530 the Jews were exempted from paying road tax. Generally speaking, the Jews strove to arrive at a compromise with their non-Jewish townsmen. The Christians in the Podzamsze quarter held a monopoly on the right to produce and market wines, beer and mead; and in 1590 the king forbad the Jews to engage in these activities. They, however, managed to circumvent this ban through an arrangement whereby, cash in advance, they could sell spirits purchased from the Christians. In return for this favour, the Jews agreed to make an annual gift of 35 ells of finest quality cloth to each member of the town council, and twice a year a pound of pepper to the town clerk and the seven members of the council. The Jews were forbidden to sell bread and flour to non-Jews. This agreement was renewed by the two parties every few years, with the approval of the king. From time to time new edicts and restrictions were imposed on the Jews. In 1650, as a result of Jesuit pressure, Jewish apothecaries were forbidden to prepare or sell medicine. And four years later, in 1654, Jewish musicians were banned from appearing in public without special permission from the town authorities. In their battle against Jewish trade the other citizens employed not only legal means, but also violence. Now and then they would burst into the Jewish quarter and kill, and loot property and wares. Such an incident occurred in 1623. There was also violence for its own sake. In 1646 pupils of the ecclesiastical "colleges" (also known as "Dzakim") fell upon the Jewish quarter. In the course of this disturbance eight Jews were killed, many injured, and 20 houses emptied of their contents. In 1598 a rumour of blood libel spread through the town; three Jews of L were accused of murdering a Christian child for ritual purposes, and the mob tried them and slaughtered them brutally. Members of the Jesuit Order in L set up a printing press and distributed leaflets with virulent accusations against the Jews. Jewish artisans too were forced to wage a hard battle against their non-Jewish competitors for the right to engage in their trade. Even before the "deluge" the Christian artisan guilds enjoyed privileges that entailed bans or restrictions on Jewish business. In 1535, for example, the Christian tailors' guild obtained from the king an order banning Jewish tailors from engaging in their trade, and in 1595 the bakers' guild obtained a similar decree from King Sigismund III forbidding Jews to bake bread or trade in flour. This devout king also granted privileges to the guilds of carpenters, glaziers and ropemakers, according to which the guilds were excluded from accepting as members unbelievers, heretics and Jews. The municipality, the official patron of the arts, also approved many measures directed against Jewish artisans. In the 17th and 18th centuries Christian artisans, with the approval of the municipality, adopted regulations designed to forbid the Jews to engage in various trades, or to restrict them to marginal activities. The Christian artisans also obtained from the authorities a ban on Jewish merchants supplying various trades with raw materials. However, in not a few cases the Christian organisations waived some of the prohibitions and restrictions in return for money; a typical example of this was the agreement of 1689 with the guild of weavers of gold and silver threads, by which three Jewish weavers were permitted to work in eight workshops, and 13 Jewish brokers and suppliers in the branch were allowed to buy and sell raw materials - apart from Christian ritual articles - exclusively to non-Jewish artisans. In return the Jews consented to pay to the guild 100 guilders four times a year and to accept supervision of their workshops by the guild. Clearly the Jewish artisans could not put up with these numerous restrictions and endeavoured to circumvent them by all means possible, both legal and illegal. In 1600 a group of Christian tailors seceded from their guild and started a separate guild in Podzamcze (a residential area open to Jews). The new guild accepted 24 Jewish tailors on payment of an annual fee. Since, however, the number of active Jewish tailors far exceeded those accepted by the guild, and since this majority also had to earn a living, many of them plied their trade illegally. This led to friction and violence. In 1781 a new agreement was signed by which the number of Jewish tailors permitted to work was increased to 42; but this new arrangement also included the old restrictions and obligations incumbent upon the Jews. In 1792 the parties concerned drew up yet another agreement, but neither did this put an end to dissension. The Christian guild continued to complain that the Jews were in arrear of payments and that they employed Jewish tailors from other towns. In 1805 the two tailoring guilds of the town amalgamated, and 15 years later the number of Jewish members had surpassed that of the Christian. One restriction though still remained: Jews were not eligible for election to the guild council. But in 1832 this disability was also removed, and two Jews were elected to this body. Similar struggles were waged by other Jewish artisans. For example, in 1595 the Christian bakers were granted by the king's representative the privilege of trading in flour and baking products - this was denied to the Jews. This right was renewed in 1611 by Sigismund III, and again several times by successive Polish kings. Yet after a difficult struggle by the Jewish bakers a breach was made; it transpired that the Jews were allowed to bake products for their own use, and they also exploited this paragraph with extra-legal activity. The attitude of the royal authorities in the town to Jewish artisanship was far more obdurate than towards Jewish trade. The reason for this was mainly fiscal: Jewish trade constituted an important source of revenue for the king and the town, and the authorities were therefore prepared to compromise and allow Jewish trade, albeit with various restrictions. Despite such difficulties and curbs, however, Jewish workshops in L increased their activity and extended into more and more branches. According to the Census of 1764/5 there were 38 artisan workshops in all, nine of which were unspecified. Over 20 years later, in 1786, there were 30 tailor-shops (only nine were Christian); 30 shoemakers (masters only, excluding journeymen and apprentices); 30 glaziers (only one Christian); an unspecified number of jewellers (nearly all Jews - only two non-Jews are mentioned); and furriers, where Jews outnumbered non-Jews by four to one. The tinsmiths and coppersmiths were all Jews, as were the bookbinders and coopers. In addition to trade and artisanship the Jews engaged in credit transactions and leased the right to collect national and municipal monies (taxes and public revenue). Some of the tax and rent collectors and lessees prospered greatly and accumulated much capital. Joska Szachnowicz, who lived at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, and was the main lessee of royal revenue in "Lesser Poland" and in Reisen, has already been mentioned. After his death in 1507 his wife Golda took over his business, and she was followed by her son, Pesach Joskowicz (his younger brother, Szachna, was known as the greatest of L's rabbis). Much business in credits was carried out in the 16th century by the doctor Yitzhak Maj and his brothers Moshe and Joel. The sum of these transactions amounted to 5,000 guilders, an enormous figure for those times. In 1604 Moshe Doktorowicz (son of a doctor), a leader of the community, leased tax collection of the Jews in 20 towns in the districts of Belz and Chelm. The struggle of the Jews to earn a living was especially difficult because of the heavy tax burden. These included royal taxes, municipal taxes, and other duties and payments, both regular and extraordinary - property taxes to estate owners (juridically included in L), and the constant need to give presents to the royal functionaries, to the artisan guilds, to priests, to the Jesuit schools, and so on and so forth. In addition to a poll-tax (one guilder for every Jew over the age of one - this was raised to three guilders in the 18th century) the Jews of L in 1640 paid to the royal treasury (via the Starustra) 700 guilders a year. To this sum was added an annual tax to the Woiwoda (300 guilders), payments for maintenance of the royal court and entourage whenever they passed through L, and a tax called "royal szos" on houses and land. The Jews of L contributed "voluntarily" to the liquidation of the kingdom's public debts - their share sometimes amounted to as much as 60,000 guilders. The Jews of L paid a whole series of direct and indirect taxes to the municipality and to the council of Podzamce, where the Jewish quarter lay. The shopkeepers, artisans, and house owners paid duties on goods, funeral tax, tax on drinks, market tax, import tax, and so forth. In addition to all these, the Jews also paid taxes to the community - a direct tax ("sum") and indirect taxes ("maintenance", "clientele", etc.). The burden of payments on each Jewish head of family was very heavy, and many could not meet the demand. In times of war taxes and duties on the Jews were doubled and redoubled. The Jews paid most of the enemy's impositions on a town under siege and the conqueror's ransom money, amounting to thousands and tens of thousands of guilders. In 1676 the Jews were required to pay 8,000 guilders for military expenses. In 1698 they contributed 4,000 guilders towards renovation of the town hall. Large sums were also demanded to finance the town's water supply and other services. Contemporary documents naturally make no mention of the sums paid to officials, to merchant guilds or to artisan guilds. The municipal taxes had no foundation in law, since the Jews were not considered citizens of the town - but the municipality and the Christian organisations took no account of this. Nor did the appeals of the Jews to the royal court help. Thus, Jewish debt grew and grew, and for many years (until the beginning of the 19th century, after the division of Poland) not only was the community unable to repay the principal - it could not even pay the interest and compound interest to be paid to its creditors (the nobility, the church, and the non-Jewish citizens). The community of L was considered the most important in Poland, by virtue of its reputation as a centre of Jewish Law and Culture. Almost all the celebrated rabbis of the time officiated for shorter or longer periods as rabbis of L. In 1475 R. Yaakov Matrident (died 1541) arrived in L, and his presence there brought added renown to the community. The most eminent rabbis of Poland throughout time graced the rabbinical chair in L. First there was R. Yaakov Halevi (died 1541). His successor, R. Shalom Shachna Hacohen, who had lived in L since 1520, was not only L's spiritual Jewish head, but also a man of wealth and responsible to the State for the public finances of the community. Nearly all the renowned authorities on Halacha (Jewish Law) in Poland in the 16th century studied at the yeshiva he established - among them the Rem”a (R. Moshe Isserles). In 1541 he was appointed by the king Chief Rabbi of all "Lesser Poland". His gravestone in L has remained untouched. After his death in 1559 he was succeeded by his son, Israel, who set up another Yeshiva, headed by R. Shlomo ben Yechiel Luria (the Maharashal). R. Luria's books "Yam shel Shlomo" (Solomon's Sea) and "Chochmat Shlomo" (The Wisdom of Solomon) are cornerstones of Talmud and Halacha. Rabbis Isserles and Luria were considered the leading exegists of their time. R. Luria was one of the founders of "Nusach Polin" (the Polish Version) of Judaism. After his death in 1574, the post of Chief Rabbi went to his son-in-law, the Principal of the Yeshiva, R. Shimon Wolf Auerbach, son of R. David Teyvele - he too renowned in his time. R. Auerbach officiated as Rabbi of Prague towards the end of his life, and died there in 1632. His successor in L was R. Mordechai Jaffe, author of the Levushim, a popular exposition of Jewish Law; he too was a renowned scholar and also the founder of the Council of the Four Lands. He died in 1612. At the turn of the century until his death in 1623 the L rabbinate was occupied by R. Yitzhak ben Nute Hacohen. Also Chief Rabbi of L was R. Yehoshua Falk, a pupil of the Maharashal. Another renowned rabbi was the Maharam of L, Meir ben Gedalia, who served as Principal of the Yeshiva and Rabbi of the town (died in 1616). Other Rabbis of L in the 17th century worthy of note are Shmuel Eliezer ben Yehuda Eidles, the Maharasha (1614-25); Yoel Jaffe Sirkes; Naftali ben Yitzhak Hacohen; Efraim Zalman Shor the Elder, author of "Tvuot Shor" (Shor's Harvest) (died 1634); Avraham Halevi Epstein (1638); and Yaakov ben Efraim Naftali Hirsh. In the second half of the 17th century too there were many eminent rabbis, amongst them: Naftali ben Yitzhak Katz, son-in-law of the Maharal of Prague (died 1650); Heshel ( son of the former Rabbi Yaakov), whose name was a symbol of Jewish wisdom and perspicacity, and who was popularly known simply as Rabbi Heshel (died 1652); Aharon Shimon Szapira (died 1680); Moshe, son-in-law of the Maharasha and author of "Mahadura Batra" (The Last Edition), and his son Israel Isser (died 1692); Tsvi Hirsh ben Zecharia Mendel (died 1690); and Mordechai Ziskind, author of "Shu"t Hamaram Ziskind" (Responsa of R. Mordechai Ziskind). The voices of the Rabbis of Lublin within Jewish Law and Tradition echoed throughout Poland and beyond. In 1587, by special permission of King Sigismund August, there were established in L a Yeshiva and a Bet Midrash. Their first principal was R. Yitzhak Maj, who was not subject to the authority of the town rabbinate. In all matters relating to the internal affairs of the community its leaders and rabbis followed Hebrew Law. In 1631 the Woiwoida, Petro Tarlo, confirmed the right of the Jews of L to manage their affairs on the basis of their religious laws, and to try cases involving Jews only in a Jewish court. Only in cases needing clarification, or those where one of the participants was a non-Jew, was judgment made in the court of the Woiwoida (Governor) or the king. L plays an important role in the annals of the Hebrew press in Poland. As early as 1547 sacred Hebrew books were printed there at the works founded by the Shachor family. The first printer in the town, Josef, bequeathed his printing works to his daughter Chana and her husband Yitzhak. In 1559 these two were granted the royal privilege of a monopoly on the publishing and distribution of Hebrew books. Despite this privilege, however, another press was set up near L, in Konskowola. Neither of these two printers survived long. In 1566 two Jews, Eliezer ben Yitzhak and Josef, were in turn given the royal privilege of starting a printing press, but this too had a brief life. In 1578 Klonimus Jaffe, son of R. Mordechai Jaffe, obtained permission from King Stefan Batory to set up a printing press. This works was passed on by Klonimus Jaffe to his descendants, and, with short intervals, was still operating at the beginning of the 19th century. Between 1550 and 1690 it published no less than 103 books. The presence of many printing works in L is evidence of the community's status as an important Jewish cultural centre in Poland. L was the home of doctors renowned in Poland and beyond. At the beginning of the 16th century there was a Jewish doctor there called Yechezkiel who, in return for his services, was exempted by King Alexander Jagiello from all taxes. Another Jewish doctor, Yitzhak Maj, occupied a prominent position in the community. As mentioned above, in 1557 he was granted a plot of land on which to build a house of prayer and a yeshiva. One of his contemporaries in L was Dr. Moshe Doktor. His son, Tsvi Hirsz was a leader of the community and an agent at the courts of the kings Sigismund III and Wladislaw IV. At the end of the 16th century there lived in L the doctors Shlomo Luria (a relative of the Maharashal), author of the medical book "Luach Chaim" (Table of Life); Shmuel ben Matatyahu; and Moshe Montalto, the descendant of a well-known Marrano family from Portugal, bearer of the title "Medical Adviser to the King of France". He died in 1637, and his gravestone still stands in L. His father, Eliezer, returned to Judaism and served as doctor to the French kings Henri IV and Louis XIII. In the 17th century the doctor Chaim (Felix) Vitalis was renowned in L. He had studied In Padua and served as doctor to the court of King Mikael Wisnowiecki. This king invested him with the authority to test all the Jewish doctors. In the second half of the 17th century some of the members of the Jewish community of L went to study medicine in Padua. The best-known of these were Avraham Szapira and Moshe Izrael Polak ben Yitzhak. Within the community there arose organisations and commitees concerned with welfare and mutual help, as well as with education and culture. In L, as in the other Jewish communities in Poland, the foremost among these was the Chevra Kadisha. This was a closed and privileged body, not open to everybody. In its hands, and through it the community, lay the authority to impose on the Jews discipline and moral precepts. It was enough for the Chevra to threaten an offender to be placed on its black list (i.e., when his time came they would not arrange his burial) for him to repent. The offences recorded in this connection were slander, infringement of the rights of possession, contact with non-Jewish legal instances, etc. Among its other tasks the Chevra took upon itself reception of the emissaries, expounders of the Torah, preachers, writers and contractual experts from many countries who came to the community in L; and it also administered the Hospice for the Needy. In the period 1690 to 1760 the records of the Chevra name guests from Italy, Turkey, Prague, Moravia (Mahren), Belgrade and Budapest, in addition to those who came from all parts of Poland. As well as the Chevra Kadisha, documents of the 18th century mention the institutions "Ner Tamid" (Eternal Light), "Bikur Cholim" (Visiting the Sick), "Rodfei Tsedaka" (Seekers of Charity), and " 7 Kruim (The 7 Guests)". Ner Tamid was to be found in every prayer-house. The Jewish children were taught in the Cheder by private teachers. There was a Yeshiva in L, headed by the town rabbi and supported by the community council. The Yeshiva students, some of whom were not from L but who came from all parts of Poland, were supported by the "houseowners", lived in their houses, and ate daily at their tables - each day in a different house. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Council of the Four Lands convened in L, but moved in 1680 to Jaroslaw. The Rabbi of L, Yehoshua Falk-Cohen, was the leader of the Council and the author of its set of rules. L was also the seat of the Jewish Rabbinical High Court in Poland, among whose duties was granting permission for the publication of Hebrew books. One of the latter was the edition of the Babylonian Talmud (1559-80), that was published to meet the needs of the Torah schools and other Jewish schools (cheders and yeshivas) in Poland. In 1655 Lublin was attacked by the Cossack hetman, Zoltarnko, and the Muscovite Voivoda, Piotr Ivanovitch. The town was occupied after a long siege. The conquerors imposed a tribute of 10,000 guilders on the town, in return for which they promised not to inconvenience the citizens. They did not, however, honour this pledge. First of all, they burst into the Jewish quarter and slaughtered some 10,000 Jews, among them refugees from the surrounding area who had sought refuge in the fortified city, and plundered whatever they could find. A group of Jews wrapped themselves in their prayer-shawls and asked their tormentors to bury them alive in the Jewish cemetery (so that they would be sure to be interred in Jewish soil); the butchers acceded to this request. The names of the victims are engraved on the wall surrounding the cemetery. A description of these events is given in the book "Hesed Shmuel" (The Mercy of Samuel - Amsterdam 1699), written by Szmuel ben Dawid. The massacre took place during the Feast of Succot, and for many years it was the custom in L to mourn in this period. The damage wrought on L by the Cossacks was not repaired for some time, and only at the beginning of the 19th century did the population return to its former level, before the "deluge", i.e. 4,000 souls. The economic derpression that followed in the wake of the Cossack aggression continued till the middle of the 19th century, when the town began to recuperate. On the conclusion of the bloodbath, as was the custom of the times, the king promulgated a number of orders designed to alleviate the plight of the victims, and the Jews were included in these. A decree of 1669 allowed them to trade inside and outside the walls. Permission was likewise given for the Jews to acquire houses and building plots. In 1679 King Jan Sobieski replaced this decree with one that still allowed the Jews to do business within the walls, except on Christian Holydays. In 1675 the Satrusta Danilowicz issued a decree placing the Jews of L and the "little they possessed" under his protection. In 1696 the king renewed the right of the Jews to trade within the walls, like the Christian merchants. However, these days of clemency did not last. During the "Catholic Reaction" in the first half of the 18th century, the non-Jewish citizens renewed their efforts to eject the Jews from business activity, and even to expel them from the town. There were again calls for rigorous measures against them. In 1720 King August II issued an ordinance accusing the Jews for economic and religious reasons, as it were, of mocking the Christian religion, and forbad them completely to engage in commerce; he further ordered them to leave the dwellings they had rented "by guile" from the Christians of the town. The last king of the Kingdom of Poland, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, confirmed, however, in 1769, the "privileges" granted to the Jews of L in the past - only in 1780 to issue a decree forbidding them permanently to live or engage in trade in L and its suburbs. This situation prevailed until the town was occupied by the Austrians in 1795. The period under review was also marked by a decline in the internal affairs of the Jewish community in L, which was enmeshed in debts and unable to pay the interest and compound interest on the loans taken, and certainly unable to repay the principal. The status of the community declined drastically, and individuals and groups began to act with an irresponsibility that bordered on anarchy. Many stopped paying their taxes to the community and avoided payment of sums the community had undertaken to pay to the authorities. Nor did they honour the code of conduct in business and crafts, with the result that unrestrained competition was rampant, and this seriously affected the livelihood of many of their fellows. These miscreants placed their trust in the hands of the estate owners near the town, on whose land they settled. The Community Council complained to King August III about this situation; and he empowered it to exercise force and even to impound possessions in order to collect the outstanding taxes. The Chevra Kadisha issued a proclamation warning the Jews of L that it would use all its power to combat disturbers of the peace, slanderers, and Jews having recourse to non-Jewish instances. Here too, as in the past, the Chevra threatened to blacklist their names: they would not be given a Jewish burial, and the protection of the nobility would not help them. The second half of the 18th century heralded the spread of Chassidism. At its beginning the rabbis who officiated in L were "mitnagdim", like Yaakov Chaim (died in 1769), son of the great mentor R. Avraham ben Chaim, who was the leader of the Council of the Four Lands, and examined the learning abilities of the Baal Shem Tov. After R. Yaakov came R. Shaul Margules (died 1788), who was not a Chassid himself, but whose father, R. Meir Margules, belonged to the circle of the Baal Shem Tov. There is no doubt that only in the time of the latter was R. Yitzhak Horowitz, the "Seer of Lublin", able to fix his place of residence in L and to make it the "Jerusalem of Chassidism". Large numbers converged on hsi Bet-Midrash, and the whole following generation of holy men in Poland were his students. The "Seer" taught and inspired many renowned "Admorim" (Chassidic Rabbis) and Heads of Chassidic dynasties throughout Poland, among them the Heads of the Dinover dynasty, R. Tsvi Elimelech Szapira, and his son, R. David; R. Shalom Rokeach, Head of the Admorim of Belz; and many others. Opposed to the Chassidim was the Rabbi of the Community, R. Azriel Horowicz, known as “der ayzerner kop" (died in 1819). The struggle between Mitnagdim and Chassidim weakened the community. With the death of the "Seer" the position of L as a centre of Chassidism declined. In the period under review many different rulers held sway over the area which included L; but the legal and civil status of the Jews hardly changed. Neither the Austrians nor the authorities of the "Principality of Warsaw", which spoke in its constitution of equality for all its subjects, granted equal status to the Jews, or alleviated their restrictions. The period of a "decade", during which equal rights for the Jews were postponed "until they mended their ways", lasted till 1862. The regime of Congress Poland that followed made no changes in the legal status of the Jews in that kingdom, including the Jews of L. The so-called privileges granted by August II (in 1720) and Stanislaw August Poniatowski (in 1780), according to which the Jews were permitted to live permanently in the "Jewish town" of Podzamsze and in other quarters separated from the Christian sections of the city, remained in force until all restrictions on Jewish residence in Poland were annulled by the Tsarist Decree of June 1862. During the Polish uprising of 1863 Jewish inhabitants of the town sided with the insurgents. From 1765 until the 50s of the 19th century the Jewish population of L increased fivefold or more. Most of this was due to natural increase, though part was also explained by Jewish migration - legal and illegal - from nearby provincial towns. From the annulment decree of 1862 to the end of the 19th century the number of Jews in L grew from 8,747 (1857 figure) to 23,586 in 1897. An additional increase took place in the first two decades of the 20th century, numbering in 1921 37,337, or more than a third of the total population. In the second half of the 19th century the Jews of L began to settle in the "old town" within the walls. In the course of time, as the Poles preferred to move outside the walls, the Jews formed a majority and the "old town" thus became a new ghetto. During this period the Jews of L earned their living mainly by petty trade and artisanship. There were times when the number engaged in the latter surpassed that of those engaged in the former. The area around L was agricultural. Until 1864 most of the villagers were poor serfs tied to the soil, and their purchasing power was thus very limited. Most of them lived off their own produce and had little need to buy goods. One of the branches that depended on the peasants of the area was the production and sale of strong drinks, and here there was competition between the Jewish lessees and the declining nobility. The few implements needed by the peasants, mainly of iron, were not enough to warrant the establishment of industry or the development of trade. The main agricultural product was corn, and trade in it gave a living to many Jews. They bought the produce at markets, or through the middlemen and distributors of the estate owners, and sold it in Warsaw, or shipped it on rafts to the port of Danzig (Gdansk), with a view to export abroad. Other important products traded in were hides, pig bristles (for brush-making), and wood felled in the surrounding forests. These goods too were sold in Warsaw or exported abroad. The majority of Jewish merchants, however, were merely small shopkeepers or pedlars who wandered round the villages with their merchandise (haberdashery, i.e. needles, buttons, and the like, cheap cloth, etc.). In return they bought in the villages eggs, poultry, feathers, etc. The impoverished rural surroundings were the deciding factor in the miserable situation of the Jewish merchant in L and the extent of his business. No significant change took place in this situation after the emancipation of the serfs. The tiny plots of land given to the latter were insufficient to produce an agricultural surplus for sale. Under these conditions no real industry developed in L, and the share of the Jews in what little manufacture there was remained small: of the 27 larger industrial plants only three were in Jewish hands. Most of these local industries were engaged in processing the agricultural produce. In contrast, the number of Jewish artisans in L increased. Proof of this was the continued existence of craft branches begun in the preceding centuries.The most prominent, as far as numbers and organisation were concerned, were the tailors and furriers. Towards the end of the 19th century the salesmen were almost as numerous. There was considerable Jewish representation in all artisan branches; and in general non-Jews were in a minority in them. In the last two decades of the 19th century three provident funds were established in L. In 1906 they embraced 1,200 members (artisans and small traders) and their equity capital amounted to 91,000 roubles. The clerks and petty traders set up a similar organisation, called "Igud Le'ezra Hadadit shel Pekidim Usocharim Zeirim Bnei Dat Moshe" ( The Mutual Aid Society of Clerks and Small Traders of the Mosaic Faith). As stated, in the second half of the 18th century the situation of the Jewish Community Council in L deteriorated as a result of growing debt, and thus led to growing dependence on the local authorities, who were also the main creditors of the community. The interference of the Woiwoda and the Starusta in its activities was a frequent occurrence. The collection of community taxes was subject to the approval of the Woiwoda. Within the community itself conflicts erupted that often involved non-Jewish mediation. There was constant friction between the affluent merchants (who were dominant in the council) and the lesser merchants and artisans. Even the Rabbinate, which, as mentioned, was one of the most important in Poland, was not spared the animosity of these conflicts, and its incumbents were the subject of quarrels without end. The diagreements that arose out of the difficult financial situation grew even worse with the advent of Chassidism. The propagator of Chassidism in L was, as stated, the Seer of Lublin, R. Yaakov Yitzhak Horowicz. During his tenure the community split into two: to begin with the Mitnagdim were in the ascendant, under the leadership of R. Azriel Horowicz, (der ayzerner kop) (died in 1819); but after his death the Chassidim grew stronger, and they determined the choice of the Chassid R. Yehoshua Heshel, Head of the Rabbinical Court at Tarnopol, as Rabbi of L. He was not, however, well received by the Jews of the town: three brothers, prominent members of the community, and Mitnagdim, instituted a campaign against him, and in 1826 he was forced to resign. From that year until his death in 1843 the Rabbi of L was Meshulam Zalman Ashkenazi, who was a Mitnaged, but conciliatory towards the Chassidim. On his death the struggle for the rabbinate was renewed - and this time too the mitnagdim carried the day. The new Rabbi chosen was Dov Berish Ashkenazi from the faction "Noda Beshearim" (Known in the Gates). He followed in his predecessor's path, and enjoyed general support in the town. During his term of office the new "Parnas" Bet Midrash was built and its activities recorded. Upon his death in 1852, his son, Yaakov Heshel Ashkenazi was chosen as Rabbi, and he fought a bitter war against Chassidism, which had once more established itself in L with the arrival of R. Yehuda Leib Eiger, who established a new dynasty in the town. This dynasty continued until the Holocaust through his son, R. Avraham Eiger, and his grandsons, R. Azriel Meir and R. Shlomo. The last two perished under the German occupation, the former in 1940 and the latter in 1941. In 1868 the Chassidic Rabbi, Shneur Zalman Ladjer, author of "Torat Chesed" (Torah of Mercy), was appointed Rabbi of L. In 1892 he left for Palestine, and was replaced by a Mitnaged - R. Hillel Aryeh Lifszyc, who maintained good relations with the Chassidim. Two Chassidic candidates stood against him - R. Gershon Chanoch of Radzin and R. Meir Yechiel of Ostrowiec, but R. Lifszyc won; he was also a man with a more liberal educational background. During this period several Admorim settled in L, among them R. Tsadok Hacohen, who inherited some of the disciples of R. Yehuda Leib Eiger and was renowned as a great Jewish thinker; R. Moshe Mordechai Twerski, author of "Maamar Mordechai" (The Sayings of Mordechai); and many others. In 1910 R. Eliahu Klackin (the father of Professor Yaakov Klackin) was chosen Chief Rabbi. He emigrated to Palestine in 1925 and settled in Jerusalem, where he died in 1932. He wrote several important books, that are mentioned in his last work, "Dvarim Achadim" (A Few Things"). In addition to the community institutions, organisations and synagogues mentioned above, note should also be made of other institutions that arose and operated in the 19th century. In 1886 a Jewish hospital was opened, and at the end of the century it contained 90 beds. The community also had an Old Age Home and an Orphanage, and in almost every Jewish quarter there were various charitable organisations alongside the local prayer-houses. Towards the end of the century the children of the community - 800 boys and 100 girls - were studying in 43 private cheders. The community also ran a Talmud-Torah for children of the poor. During this period non-Jewish private schools also sprang up in the town, first for girls and afterwards for boys. Their language of instruction was Russian or Polish. They also had Jewish pupils. In the 1890s a government school for Jewish children was established in the Catholic Cathedral building, and the language used here was Russian. At one time it had some 300 pupils; but it closed when the Russians withdrew from the town in 1915. In 1897/8 two elementary schools were opened, with Hebrew as the language of instruction, based on the system "Hebrew through Hebrew". One of them, the Pines School, functioned until 1907; the other until the First World War. 1913 also saw the establishment of the "Yavneh" school, which closed in 1927 for lack of money, and after the headmaster, Szmuel Rotensztajn, had emigrated to Palestine. In addition to the above there were also government elementary schools for Jewish children, beginning with the Austrian occupation and continuing into the 1930s. They were closed on Sabbaths and Holydays, and were therefore known as "Szabsuvka". An important many-sided cultural institution was "Hazamir" (The Nightingale), established in 1908 with the aim of fostering a love of Hebrew songs and literature among the young. Hazamir also possessed a library of Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Polish books - the first modern Jewish public library in L; and it also boasted an orchestra, and a drama group, that gave performances of Jewish classical plays in L and the nearby provincial towns. The rooms of Hazamir were also the setting for lectures on current and Jewish subjects, with some speakers coming from as far away as Warsaw. In 1910 the organisation "Chovevei Sfat Aver" (Lovers of the Hebrew Tongue) was founded; it held Hebrew courses and published Hebrew books. During the First World War, however, this organisation folded, and its assets, including the library, passed into the hands of the "Bund". At the end of the 19th century the first groups of "Chovevei Zion" (Lovers of Zion) appeared; to begin with their activities were more social than political. At the beginning of the 20th century small groups of the "Bund" appeared on the L scene; in 1903 its first pamphlets were distributed; and in the following year a branch was officially established. In 1905, the year of revolution, the Bund attracted many members, who organized demonstrations and strikes. Activity also increased of the Jewish groups affiliated to the PPS, the Polish Socialist Party. Folders and booklets in Yiddish were distributed in the streets. A small group of Jewish anarchists also came on the scene. The activities of the Bund resulted in some of its members being exiled to Siberia. A Jewish police agent was murdered, and during his funeral disturbances ensued and the Cossacks were called upon to restore order. The outbreak of the First World War brought with it clear signs of antisemitism by the Russian rulers, who accused the Jews of treachery and aiding the enemy.The Cossacks of the garrison were permitted to plunder Jewish property and to forego payment for goods acquired from Jewish merchants. Some of the town's Jews were exiled to the depths of Russia. Another affliction that affected many Jewish families was forced military conscription. Many young Jews were mobilized, and soon messages began to arrive of their dear ones being killed or wounded in battle. As the front drew near many refugees streamed to L, the economy of the town stagnated, and many Jews were left without work or livelihood. In July 1915 the Russians withdrew from the town and gave way to the Austrians. Before the retreat the Russian commander summoned the engineer Tomorowicz, one of the leading citizens, and ordered him to organize a militia to guarantee order in the town. Tomorowicz was a known liberal, and he also saw to it that a militia was formed in the Jewish quarter ("the Sixth Commissariat"). The head of this militia was Bernard Glowinski. It numbered some 200 men aged 18 and above, and who had an unblemished record. Its members were armed with revolvers. A tribunal was also set up with judges from among reputable Jewish lawyers in the town. This militia, which consisted only of volunteers, carried out its duties impeccably and to the satisfaction of the citizens. At the end of November 1915, however, it was disbanded and replaced by professionals, but many of the Jewish militiamen joined the new body. During the Austrian occupation the existing Jewish political organisations increased their activities, and new ones were founded, including youth movements and groups. The Jewish community and the various organisations of the time opened public soup kitchens that provided warm meals and food to the needy, and especially to children. With the cessation of hostilities and the proclamation of the independent state of Poland in November 1918, the Jews of L, and Poland in general, hoped for a better future in the new nation. They set about repairing the ravages of war and looked forward to a normalisation of economic, political and social life. However, as early as 1919 events took place in the town that cast a shadow over the community. On a Thursday, which was the market day, Polish army recruits ran amok, attacked Jewish passers-by, destroyed and even looted Jewish shops. Jewish youngsters organised self-defence, and to begin with even managed to repulse the rioters; but in the afternoon there burst onto the scene in Lubartowska Street gangs of butchers and simple trouble-makers, with butchers' knives, iron bars, and other weapons, and began a pogrom that went on until evening. The police did not interfere. The leaders of the Jewish community met with the Mayor, and only then were the police ordered to stop the pogrom. The results of these disturbances were 60 injured Jews, of whom three died, and widespread damage to shops and houses. Thus was Jewish L included in the many Jewish communities in Poland that were victims of the riots of 1918-19, after Poland's resurgence. When the disturbances were over the Jews began to reconstruct their businesses and the institutions of the community. Their first concern was the wretched economic situation following the war. In 1921, after two years of rehabilitation, there was still no renewal of activity in 57 of the 1,714 Jewish-owned workshops and businesses, some of which did not employ hired labour. The units that did begin to operate, 1,657 in number, were mostly small businesses that all in all employed 4,871 persons, half of whom (2,366 - or 48.5%) were the owners and their families. The remainder were employees (2,068 Jews and 437 non-Jews). Most of these businesses made clothing (made -to-measure and ready-made), and hats (to order and for shops); there were also furriers, shoemakers, and leather workshops. Together these employed 2,444 persons, of whom 1,031 were workshop owners, 394 were members of their families, and 997 Jews and a mere 22 non-Jews were hired workers. The next largest group were 139 food businesses, employing 804 persons, more than half of them (424 Jews and 129 non-Jews) employees. The remaining plants and workshops were engaged in a variety of manufactures - timber, building, etc., with a small number of participants compared to the leading segments of clothing and food. Most of the workers in production, particularly the hired ones, were men; a few of the hired workers were children (116 Jews and 34 non-Jews). Most businesses were only active part of the year (construction work lay dormant in the winter, and the manufacture of clothing was also seasonal). In the "dead" periods the unemployed and their would-be employers waited for "better times". In the larger plants there were few Jews employed, partly because they were not welcome, and partly because the Jews themselves did not want to work in them (since work continued on the Sabbath and Jewish Holydays). Jews were not employed in government offices or the municipality, in public transport, or even in cleaning the streets. The most important sphere after crafts and minor industry were the various forms of trading - wholesale, retail, peddling, and market stallholding. Most of those involved were petty traders, who set up market stalls or peddled their wares in the streets of the town or in the surrounding villages. Their volume of goods and of course their turnover were limited. Their customers were the Polish peasants or the labourers, who were economically poorly off and also subject to unemployment. Most of the peasants had smallholdings that supplied nearly all their needs, though there were articles they had to buy outside, such as tobacco, salt, spirits and matches, all of which were state monopolies. Government policy was to squeeze Jewish traders out of this monopoly sector. One branch was a kind of Jewish monopoly: the leather industry. In the years preceding the Second World War some 95% of production and tanning of hides was in Jewish hands. In 1939 150 workers, 75 of them Jews, were employed in the large tanning plant in the town. The annual turnover of this branch amounted to 20 million zloty (about 4 million dollars). Under Jewish ownership were also a brandy distillery, a brewery, brickworks, flour mills, and a cigarette and tobacco factory, established in 1860 and at its peak employing 400 workers, all of them Jews. After the war, however, this factory was taken over by the State Monopoly and its Jewish workers dismissed. Branches employing a majority of Jews were the ones to suffer most in times of crisis. Usually it was not only Jewish apprentices and salesmen who became unemployed, but also the workshop owners, most of whom were self-employed. These latter were not entitled to unemployment benefits, nor were they registered in a sick fund, and they and their families were thus unable to receive medical treatment. In the early years of the 20s the Jews of L, as in other places, set about restoring the mutual aid societies that had existed before the war, and establishing new ones. In the inter-war period there were in L ten provident funds affiliated to the prayer-houses and the political organisations and trade unions. The largest of them was set up immediately after the war by the "Va'ad Hahatsala" (Rescue Committee), and its equity capital amounted in the 30s to 140,000 zloty, and its annual turnover to more than 11 million zloty. This fund gave loans at a low rate of interest, and sometimes at no rate of interest, mainly to workshop owners and petty merchants. These loans were often the only way in which shopkeepers and pedlars could replenish their stocks or replace workshop equipment. In this period too ten Jewish banks were established, the first of them, "Kupat Halvaa Uchisachon" (Loan and Savings Bank) at the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century. Later there appeared "Chevra Le'ezra Hadadit Lefkidei Mischar Usocharim Ze'irim Bnei Dat Moshe" (Mutual Aid Society of Trading Clerks and Small Traders of the Mosaic Faith); "Habank Harishon Levaalei Mlacha" (First Bank for Artisans); "Bank Hasocharim" (Merchants' Bank); "Bank Baalei Batim" (Householders' Bank); and "Bank Shitufi" (Cooperative Bank). The employees too established their own mutual aid societies in conjunction with the trade unions. Other bodies were set up at the beginning of the 20th century within the framework of existing organisations. In the 20s there was widespread organized professional activity, embracing most of the Jewish workers. One of the most prominent organisations, in terms of number of members and level of activity was the Union, or Guild, of Needleworkers, founded as early as 1915. Other unions of considerable size followed, such as those of the cobblers, printing workers, tanners, carpenters, butchers, porters, and bakery workers. The largest of them, "Haigud Hameuchad shel Poalei O'r" (The United Guild of Leather Workers) counted some 500 members; while the Textile Workers' Guild numbered some 200 members. The community of L was blessed with many institutions of welfare, charity and aid. Especially renowned was the society "Achiezer" (Brotherly Aid), which on the threshold of Sabbaths and Festivals distributed food to hundreds of the needy. Money for its activities came from contributions from members of the community (at Purim, on the Eve of Yom Kippur and at weddings). The institution also ran a kitchen for the poor. The organisation "Linat Tsedek" (Hospice for the Poor) provided the sick and destitute with medical care and drugs free of charge, and its members helped their families stand watch by the bedside of the ill. In 1919 the organisation "Zichron Nes" ( Token of Miracle) was inaugurated with the aim of helping war invalids, bereaved parents, and orphans. It was financed from the sale of the privilege of being called to the Torah ("Kearot Nedava" - Collections of Charity) on the occasion of weddings etc. Members of the "Shabta Tava" (Good Sabbath) society were wont to walk through the streets on a Friday to collect chalot (Sabbath bread) for the needy. The society "Hachnasat Orchim" (Hospice) opened a lodging for indigent travellers: each night tens of them were accommodated. In addition to all these bodies other groups of community volunteers were active, for example, in visiting the vick, supporting the poor, collecting a dowry for penniless brides, and other causes. In 1923 a branch of "TOZ" (Polish initials for the Jewish Health Organisation of Poland) was established in L. Its activities were many and varied: in its clinics there were 22 doctors and X-ray and radiography facilities. TOZ ran an advice service for women and a child care centre, and even supported Jewish sports organisations and provided them with training areas. Each summer TOZ organised camps for school pupils. In 1924, the first year these took place, 300 children participated; in 1939 this number reached 1,200. Another institution the community boasted was the Jewish Hospital, opened, as stated, in 1886, but not allowed to function during the Great War. Afterwards, however, it quickly resumed and expanded its activity, with the support of former residents of L in the USA. It contained 30 beds for men and 26 for women, and had an X-ray department, a bacteriological laboratory, and a clinic for quartz radiation. In the late 30s a children's department was opened, and became known for its high professional standard; and an Institute for Hydrotherapy was also inaugurated. Every week the hospital held lectures and symposia, with the participation of doctors from L and the vicinity. The inter-war years saw increased activity by the Jewish political parties and youth movements. Prominent among the parties were the various Zionist factions. Zionist activities in L began, as stated, with the groups of "Chovevei Zion" that sprang up at the end of the preceding century. The Zionist Federation crystallised in L during the Austrian occupation (1915-18), and its activity increased following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. When the Mandate for Palestine was decided upon there was much celebration in the community, and all the Jewish shops were closed. At the same time the young people set up "Tseirei Zion" (Youth of Zion), which existed until it split into "Socialist Zionist Youth" and "Poalei Zion Smol" (Leftist Workers of Zion). In 1920 a branch of "Hechalutz" (The Pioneer) was set up. In the Zionist Federation building in L lectures and evening classes were held. The Zionists in L were active in all speheres of the political and social life, took part in elections to the Polish parliament, were represented on the Town Council, and of course in the Community Council. 1924 saw the establishment of "Haliga Lema'an Eretz-Izrael Haovedet" (The League for Labour Israel), with the participation of Socialist Poalei Zion, Hashomer Hatsair, Hechalutz Hatsair, Dror (Freedom), and Hapoel. In 1929 the organisation "Haoved" (The Worker) was launched in L, consisting of the workshop owners, and particularly those who intended to emigrate to Palestine. After the schism in "Poalei Zion" in 1921 the majority of the members of the L branch remained loyal to the left wing of the party. This party exercised much influence among students and pupils; its youth movement, "Jugent", had some 140 members in L. In the late 30s, when the atmosphere in the whole of Poland was permeated with national-fascist ideas, the party was persecuted by the authorities, who regarded members of Left Poalei Zion as clandestine communits, and in 1936-37 some of them were even arrested. Prominent among the Zionist youth movements was "Hashomer Hatsair" (The Young Watchman). The L cell was set up in 1916, and between the two world wars its membership and activity increased, and a kibbutz training farm was even established. There was also in L a large branch of "Hanoar Hazioni", the youth movement of the General Zionists. In 1927 was founded the children's organisation in the name of Borochov, called "Jungbor", which was active in the fields of education, information and scouting. The L branch of "Hamizrachi" was founded in 1903, and was reorganized at the end of the Great War. Its activities were centred on the Mizrachi Synagogue in Novorowna Street, while for its lectures and discussions it rented the "Hazamir" hall once a week. Its members opened the "Yavneh School" in L, which turned out several graduation classes. Hamizrachi's youth movement (Tseirei Mizrachi) established several training centres outside the town. In the early 20s branches of "Hapoel Hamizrachi" and "Hechalutz Hamizrachi" were also set up. The Revisionist Movement was active in L from 1925 on. The first branch to be set up was "Hashachar" (The Dawn), and a year later saw the arrival of the youth movement "Beitar" (Covenant of Josef Trumpeldor). The Revisionist movement in L and district expanded, and in 1934 had some 50 branches. In the same period one of its important fractions, called "Brit Hachayil" (Covenant of Strength), also developed. Beitar ran several amateur groups - drama, literature, etc., as well as a brass band. Each year it organised summer camps, where the young boys and girls received instruction with regard to emigrating to Palestine. To the congresses of the L branch of the Revisionists there came speakers from the national Polish and the world organisation (including Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin) and their meetings attracted a large audience. Nevertheless, not all the Jews of L belonged to the Zionist camp. Up to 1914 the "Bund" operated clandestinely, but renewed its public activities during the Austrian occupation of 1915-18. During the war there was a shortage of food bordering on famine, and the members of the Bund therefore opened a kitchen and set up cooperatives of consumers and a bakery, which employed ten workers. Bund members were also active in the field of culture, and among other things established a library (in the name of Groser), a choir, and a drama group. In 1917 was held the L Congress, where it was decided to sever all connection with the Bund of the Russian Empire and to maintain an independent Polish section. In November 1917, after the October Revolution in Russia, a Workers' Council was set up in L, also with the participation of the Bund. At this time there were attacks on the Jews in L, and to counter them a militia of Polish and Jewish members of the Polish Socialist Party was formed. In 1920 during the Polish-Soviet War the Polish authorities arrested some of the active leaders of the Bund in L. After the war the Bund played an influential role in the Central Committee of the Jewish trade unions in L, with five representatives; and in most of the individual unions it formed a majority, while Poalei Zion and the communists usually had only one representative. The youth and children's movements of the Bund in L - "Zukunft" (The Future) and "Sakif" ( Threshold ?? ) - had large and active branches. Some L Jews were members of the Communist Party, which operated several illegal cells in the town. These members often infiltrated the other Jewish workers' parties (Poalei Zion and Bund). They were mainly active in organising strikes and demonstration and in spreading propaganda. During the 30s some active Jewish communists were arrested and imprisoned; and the threat of imprisonment impelled others to flee abroad, particularly to France, where they continued to maintain contact and help one another. Also present in L were "Agudat Israel", its labour faction "Poalei Agudat Israel", and its youth movement "Tseirei Agudat Israel". Most members of Aguda were to be found among the various Chassidic groups; and their field of action was within the Community Council and in religious education. Up to 1932 the majority in the community council were religious representatives, and only a few came from among the "Neurim" (The Enlightened or Illuminati), as secular Jews were then called. The council consisted of the general body, or council, and the executive committee. In the inter-war period elections to the council were only partly democratic; women were not eligible to vote, and there were also restrictions with regard to age and economic status. From 1932 on the elections were held on the basis of party lists, and in that year all the parties that had branches in L participated, with the exception of the Bund, which boycotted the elections. Five representatives of Agudat Israel and the Chassidim were elected, together with two from the Artisan List, and one each from the General Zionists, Socialist Poalei Zion, Left Poalei Zion, Mizrachi, the "People's Party", and the "Assimilationists". At first the Chairman chosen was the lawyer M. Alten, but the Polish authorities withheld their approval, and his place was taken by Y. Zilber. As Chairman of the executive committee, the "assimilationist", the lawyer A. Levinsohn, was chosen. He held this post for only a year, when he resigned, and his place was taken by S, Halberstadt from Agudat Israel. In 1930 R. Meir Shapira (1886-1933), one of the leaders of Agudat Israel, was elected Chief Rabbi of L. He established the largest Yeshiva in Poland, "Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin" (The Yeshiva of the Wise Men of L). R. Shapira was a brilliant speaker, and was a member of the Polish parliament (Sejm). He initiated learning of the ”Daf Hayomi" (The Daily Page) throughout the Diaspora. On his death there were no more chief rabbis in L, and the community contented itself with dayanim (judges). The closing years of the 20s and the beginning of the 30s found the community in grave circumstances. It was weighed down with heavy debts, and its income, mainly accruing from schechita (ritual slaughtering), payment for burial plots, and direct taxes, did not cover expenditure, viz., wages in the religious sector (in the Rabbinate there were a rabbi, five dayanim, and a number of "minor" rabbis in the suburbs); allocations to various religious institutions and a Talmud-Torah, to the Yeshivat Chochmei Lublin, to the orphanage, to schools where the language was Yiddish; and so forth. Due to the economic problems these allocations were not made on time. and the institutions of the community therefore operated at a low level. The orphanage, for example, was almost without supervision, the children were neglected, and some of them became subject to bad influences, The cemetery too was neglected, and sometimes waterlogged, and there was no vacant ground for new burials. In 1932, following election to the new council, its members set about a thorough reorganisation. Hours of work and reception times for the public were scheduled; the collection of taxes came under strict control; renovations were carried out on the synagogues, especially that of the Maharashal; and the amount and times of payment for allocations to the various institutions were laid down. In the elections of 1939 members of the Bund were also represented. The community faced a crisis, when the authorities insisted on the shochtim (ritual slaughterers) being given functionary status. These schochtim exploited the situation by refusing to pay slaughtering fees to the community, and this seriously undermined its finances. One of the last decisions of the community before the Holocaust was that of August 7th, 1939 - to grant the Jewish Hospital an allocation of 6,000 zloty, and to issue bonds to the samount of 30,000 zloty to ensure normal operation of the council and its subsidised institutions. The Jews of L were represented in the town council via the party lists. In the elections of 1927 16 Jews (most of them from the Bund) were elected to the council, i.e. a third of all its members. At its meetings they put forward the claims of the Jewish institutions and of the Jews of L in general, and protested against all forms of discrimination. From earliest times there were in L cheders, where Chumesh, Mishna and Talmud were studied. Poor children went to the Talmud Torah, subsidized by the community. Older boys studied at Batei Midrash; and in the evenings, by candlelight, lessons were held in Gemara, Mishna, or the weekly passage of the Torah for adults and married men - and there were among these some veritable scholars. In the inter-war period L, as in other parts of Poland, possessed some state elementary schools for Jewish children - the Szabasuvka. After Polish independence three additional schools of this type were opened. * For explanations of these and other organisations and movements mentioned in this survey readers are kindly referred to more detailed reference works. Back Yizkor Book Project JewishGen Home Page Copyright © 1999-2013 by JewishGen, Inc. Updated 10 Apr 2004 by LA

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Lycopene Is a Rising Star of Health BenefitsLycopene Protects Skin, Heart, and More f you plan to spend much time outdoors this summer, you might want to make sure that tomatoes figure prominently in your diet. So look forward to eating plenty of tomatoes and dishes made with tomato sauce, drinking some tomato juice, having a bowl of steaming hot tomato soup (better for you than the delicious cold tomato soup gazpacho), and topping it all off with a big wedge of watermelon. Why should you eat these specific foods? Well, for starters, they are loaded with lycopene. You already knew that lycopene is good for prostate health, but now there's a new and unexpected angle: according to a recent report by European researchers, lycopene protects your skin from damage caused by solar ultraviolet radiation. LYCOPENE IS A POWERFUL ANTIOXIDANT Lycopene is a natural carotenoid that has received much attention lately because of its potent antioxidant activity. Carotenoids are common in the plant world and are responsible for giving many vegetables and fruits, such as carrots and tomatoes, their characteristic colors. (You knew that a carrot is a vegetable, but did you know that a tomato is technically a fruit?) These plant compounds are important for much more than just pretty colors, however. Antioxidants such as lycopene (as well as vitamin E, vitamin C, and beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A) help to neutralize rogue molecules called free radicals. Free radicals can greatly damage our bodies' tissues and have been implicated in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cataracts, Alzheimer's disease, and others. They also figure prominently in the aging process. These pesky little molecules are hard to escape, as they are all around us and are especially prominent in cigarette smoke and air pollution. To make matters worse, we produce them in our own bodies as natural metabolic byproducts. In addition, the UV rays in sunlight can induce the formation of free radicals in the cells of our skin to generate further oxidative stress. For many years now, we have understood the dangers of excessive sun exposure. And while it looks nice to have a good tan, exposure to solar UV that results in sunburn dramatically increases the risk of skin cancer. Fortunately, many people now routinely use sunscreen to protect themselves from the sun's harmful rays. Over your lifetime, however, much of the UV exposure you experience is likely to occur when your skin is not protected on the outside.1 For this reason, you should take proactive measures to ensure that your skin is protected from the inside. A good way to do that, it seems, is with lycopene. TOMATOES PROTECT SKIN FROM UV DAMAGE German and Dutch researchers have found that diets rich in tomato paste dramatically reduce UV-induced skin damage.1 In a study recently published in the Journal of Nutrition, nine volunteers consumed a diet supplemented with 40 grams (about 1.4 oz, or 3 tablespoons) of tomato paste mixed with olive oil, while ten control subjects received just olive oil (in addition to their normal diet) for ten weeks. The amount of lycopene in the tomato paste was about 16 mg. At the beginning of the study, and again four weeks and ten weeks later, all the subjects were exposed to UV radiation to induce mild erythema (or sunburn, if you prefer a less clinical term) on their shoulders. The participants, aged 26-67 years, were homogeneous in their coloring. They all had lightly pigmented skin, light-colored hair, and blue eyes, and had experienced minimal tanning. The degree of skin damage (called the a-value) caused by the repeated UV exposures was measured in both groups at the three stages of the study. After the first exposure, both groups had similar a-values (6.0 for controls and 5.6 for those consuming tomato paste), as would be expected for a random sample of individuals. Four weeks later, the a-values caused by UV exposure were slightly lower (5.4 for controls, 5.1 for the test group) but were still not significantly different. At the tenth week, however, UV exposure caused a much lower a-value (3.8) in the tomato-paste eaters than in the controls (6.3). To put this another way, those who ate 3 tablespoons of tomato paste daily for ten weeks had 40% less UV-induced skin damage than those who did not. LYCOPENE IS THE PROTECTIVE AGENT One way to explain the results of the erythema study is to look at the level of lycopene in the two groups. By the tenth week, the control group showed an 8% decrease in lycopene levels in their blood, and a whopping 51% decrease in total carotenoids in their skin. Conversely, those who consumed the tomato paste increased their blood lycopene levels by 95% and their skin carotenoid content by 15%. It is likely that the increased levels of lycopene and other carotenoids in their skin cells offered a protective benefit against the UV radiation to minimize skin damage. Additional experiments support this idea. A separate study at Tufts University revealed that lycopene levels are depleted much more than those of other carotenoids (beta-carotene, for example) in UV-damaged skin when compared to adjacent undamaged skin.2 The researchers concluded from this that lycopene is preferentially sacrificed to protect the skin when UV radiation creates free radicals in the skin cells. DO I HAVE TO EAT MY TOMATOES? Just about everyone loves tomatoes, but they were regarded with great suspicion in Europe when Spanish explorers first brought them back from their native South America. They were thought to be poisonous, in fact, because they were recognized as belonging to the Nightshade family of plants, many of which are deadly. But fear soon gave way to enthusiasm for the delectable red fruit, which came to be known as the "love apple" because of its supposed aphrodisiac properties. It was the Italians, God bless 'em, who took the tomato to its greatest culinary heights, without even knowing about the benefits of lycopene. Mangia! Lycopene intake is most strongly associated with reducing the risk of prostate, stomach, breast, and lung cancer. Based on a 1999 Canadian study of dietary habits, the average daily intake of lycopene is 25 mg, an amount that falls well short of the recommended intake of 35 mg/day.3 Individuals with a tomato-poor diet are especially susceptible to lycopene deficiency, as 80-85% of dietary lycopene is typically supplied by tomatoes. We could all eat a lot more tomatoes, but not everyone wants to do that, especially not every day. An easier and more reliable way to make up the deficit is through supplementation. But we'll still eat some tomatoes, of course, and Table 1 demonstrates that cooked, processed tomatoes are the best source of lycopene, because they have significantly higher levels than raw tomatoes. In addition, oils or fatty foods, such as cheese, eaten together with tomato products increase the amount of lycopene released into your bloodstream, making that much more of it available to the cells that need it most. Pizza, it turns out,is especially good in this regard - but don't use that as an excuse to become a pizza pig, or you'll probably die young. LYCOPENE MAY ALSO PROTECT AGAINST CANCER AND HEART DISEASE We've already seen that lycopene is a potent antioxidant. Thus it is surprising to find that the amount of lycopene in a particular food does not directly correlate to the antioxidizing power of that food. When the foods listed in Table 1 were analyzed for total antioxidant capacity, it was found, e.g., that tomato soup has at least twice as much antioxidant capacity as any of the other foods.4 This can be explained by considering that tomatoes contain multiple antioxidants in addition to lycopene, such as vitamin C, lutein, beta-cryptoxanthin, alpha-carotene, and beta-carotene (and possibly many more).7 These antioxidants likely tolerate the processing procedures differently, and consequently the foods in Table 1 have different antioxidant capacities than would be predicted based solely on lycopene content. While it is true that lycopene is an important antioxidant, it may have a host of other beneficial effects on the body as well. For example, it has been proposed that lycopene may participate in improving hormonal, immune, and metabolic processes in our bodies to improve our health and reduce the risk of certain diseases.8 Several studies indicate that tomato-enriched diets promote improved health by reducing the risk of various cancers and heart disease. For example, when the dietary habits of 1271 elderly individuals in Massachusetts were examined, it was found that a tomato-rich diet reduced the cancer death rate by 50%, whereas a diet rich in carrots or beta-carotene had no protective effect.9 Additional studies support these results and indicate that lycopene intake is most strongly associated with reducing the risk of prostate, stomach, breast, and lung cancer.10 Men with the highest concentrations of lycopene had a 48% lower risk for heart attack than those with the lowest There are also numerous studies indicating that a high intake of tomatoes reduces the risk of certain types of cardiovascular disease.11 But is it tomatoes in general, or lycopene in particular, that reduces the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease? STUDIES LARGE AND SMALL POINT TO LYCOPENE A number of studies have recently been initiated in an effort to ascertain whether lycopene, and not some other compound in tomatoes, is responsible for improved health benefits in people who consume a tomato-rich diet. Many of these studies have not yet been completed, because it takes a long time, especially with diseases such as cancer and heart disease, to establish a link between a specific compound and a reduced risk of disease. However, the results of a few studies indicate that lycopene is the specific ingredient in tomatoes that provides improved health benefits. One study showed that high lycopene intake reduced the risk of prostate cancer by 21%, whereas other antioxidants found in tomatoes, including beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, lutein, and beta-cryptoxanthin, had no beneficial effect with respect to this cancer.12 Importantly, this study involved 47,894 male health professionals and is the largest study of its kind completed to date. Separate studies have been conducted to investigate the role of lycopene in cardiovascular diseases. One important study examined a group of men under the age of 70, recruited from ten European countries, who had experienced an acute myocardial infarction (death of heart cells due to lack of oxygen in the heart tissue) and compared them to an appropriate control group.13 The results indicated that men with the highest concentrations of lycopene in their adipose (fat) tissue had a 48% lower risk for myocardial infarction than those with the lowest lycopene concentrations. A small pilot study (employing only 19 healthy adults) showed that dietary supplementation with lycopene (40-75 mg/day) at least doubled the amount of lycopene in the blood and decreased the amount of lipid peroxidation, a damaging oxidative degradation of fatty molecules or molecular complexes, such as LDL.14 Reducing lipid peroxidation is important because oxidized LDL leads to the formation of artery-clogging plaque and increases the risk of heart disease. It turns out that lycopene is carried in the blood by LDL and may help to protect it from oxidation. Thus, lycopene may help reduce the risk of heart disease. It sounds like lycopene is a good deal all around. Whatever route you take, make sure you arm yourself with the natural substances that will ensure your general good health during your active, sun-drenched summer. - Stahl W, Heinrich U, Wiseman, et al. Dietary tomato past protects against ultraviolet light-induced erythema in humans. J Nutr 2001;131:1449-51. - Ribaya-Mercado JD, Garmyn M, Gilchrest BA, Russell RM. Skin lycopene is destroyed preferentially over beta-carotene during ultraviolet irradiation in humans. J Nutr 1995;125:1854-9. - Rao AV, Waseem Z, Agarwal S. Lycopene contents of tomatoes and tomato products and their contribution to dietary lycopene. Food Res Intl 1999;31:737-41. - Djuric Z, Powell LC. Antioxidant capacity of lycopene-containing foods. Intl J Food Sci Nutr 2001;52:143-9. - Agricultural Research Service. USDA-NCC Carotenoid Database for US Foods - 1998. Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, Beltsville, MD, 1998. - Clinton SK. Lycopene: chemistry, biology and implications for human health and disease. Nutr Rev 1998;56:35-51. - Duke JA. Handbook of Phytochemical Constituents of GRAS Herbs and Other Economic Plants. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 1992, pp 345-9. - Rao AV, Agarwal S. Role of antioxidant lycopene in cancer and heart disease. J Am Coll Nutr 2000;19:563-9. - Colditz GA, Branch LG, Lipnic RJ. Increased green and yellow vegetable intake and lowered cancer death in an elderly population. Am J Clin Nutr 1985;41:32-6. - Giovannucci E. Tomatoes, tomato-based products, lycopene, and cancer: review of the epidemiologic literature. J Natl Can Inst 1999;91:317-31. - Arab L, Steck S. Lycopene and cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr 2000;71(Suppl):1691-5S. - Giovanucci EL, Ascherio A, Rimm EB, Stampfer MG, Colditz GA, Willett WC. Intake of carotenoids and retinol in relationship to risk of prostate cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst 1995;87:1767-76. - Kohlmeier L, Kark JD, Gomez-Garcia E, et al. Lycopene and myocardial infarction risk in the EURAMIC study. Am J Epidemiol 1997;146:618-26. - Agarwal S, Rao V. Tomato lycopene and low-density lipoprotein oxidation: a human dietary intervention study. Lipids 1998;33:981-4.

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Biology exquisitely creates hierarchical structures, where initiated at nano scales, are exhibited in macro or physiological multifunctional materials to provide structural support, force generation, catalytic properties or energy conversion1 (see Figure 1). This is exemplified in a wide range of biological materials such as hair, skin, bone, spider silk or cells, which play important roles in providing key functions to biological systems2. Our research focuses on studying the mechanisms of deformation and failure of biological materials by utilizing a computational materials science approach. Our goal is to elucidate nature's design principles that facilitates the formation of materials with exceptional material properties1,3, despite typically inferior building blocks4,5. |Figure 1. Three example biological protein materials (A, intermediate filaments, B, collagenous tissues, C, amyloid proteins), revealing their hierarchical makeup. Our research focuses on the development of multiscale material models, specifically focused on their mechanical behavior at deformation and failure (figure taken from Ref. #3). These efforts are part of a broader field of investigation referred to as materiomics. Materiomics is defined as the study of the material properties of natural and synthetic materials by examining fundamental links between processes, structures and properties at multiple scales, from nano to macro, by using systematic experimental, theoretical or computational methods6,7. In order to provide a bottom-up description of materials behavior, our interdisciplinary team of undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs applies an experimentally validated atomistic based multi-scale simulation approach that considers the structure-process-property paradigm of materials science and the architecture of proteins from the atomistic level up to the overall structure. This novel viewpoint links chemistry and genetics to resulting functional material properties, and provides us with a powerful foundation to ask fundamental questions about the behavior of biological materials. Moreover, the development of multi-scale, hierarchical models to explain the deformation and failure mechanisms of biological materials provides critical insight into how biological materials are made and how they derive their unique properties. This learning-from-failure-approach has already proven to be useful for engineered materials, and its application to biological materials holds the promise to transform our understanding of key material design principles that have evolved in nature8. In the following sections we review two case studies that demonstrate the application of materiomics. Hierarchical Structures are Crucial to Provide Multiple, Disparate Properties in a Single Material Our work has contributed to explain some of the most remarkable properties of biological materials, specifically their ability to provide multiple functions despite severe limitations in the quality of available building blocks, and the ability to adapt to different environmental conditions (for a review, see Ref. #3). For example, strength, robustness and adaptability are properties of fundamental importance to biological materials and structures, and are crucial to providing functional properties to living systems. Strength is defined as the maximum force (or pressure) a material can withstand before breaking. Robustness is defined as the ability of a material to tolerate flaws and defects in its structural makeup while maintaining its ability to provide functionality. Adaptability refers to the ability of a material to cope with changing environmental conditions. These properties are crucial for materials in biology (such as skin, bone, spider silk, or cells), which either provide structural support themselves (such as the skeleton formed by bone), or need to withstand mechanical deformation under normal physiologic conditions (such as cells and tissue associated with blood vessels that are exposed to the pressure of the blood). In engineering, strength and robustness are disparate properties (see Figure 2), and it remains challenging to create materials that combine these two features. Glass or ceramics, for example, are typically very strong materials. However, they are not very robust: Even a small crack in a glass, or an attempt to deform glass considerably will lead to catastrophic failure. |Figure 2. Schematic of the robustness-strength domain, comparing engineered materials and biological materials. The squares represent different hierarchical structures, designed based on more than 16,000 alpha-helical protein filaments. The analysis shows that most random arrangements (98.13%) fall on the so-called banana curve, while fewer, specifically designed structures (1.98%) fall on the inverse banana curve (figure taken from Ref. #3). In contrast, metals such as copper are very robust; however, they do typically not resist large forces. Yet, these materials allow for large deformation, and even the existence of cracks in the material does not lead to a sudden breakdown. Yet, many biological materials (such as cellular protein filaments, blood vessels, collagenous tissues such as tendon, spider silk, bone, tendon, skin) are capable of providing both properties - strength and robustness, very effectively, and are also combined with the ability to adapt to changes in the environment1,3. The key to understand these remarkable properties is the particular structural makeup of biological materials, consisting of few distinct elements (such as alpha-helices or beta-sheet protein domains), but a great diversity in structural arrangement of these elements at multiple material levels, from nano to macro1,3. Most fibers, tissues, organs and organisms found in nature show a highly hierarchical and organized structure, where features are found at all scales, ranging from protein molecules (≈50 Å), protein assemblies (≈1 to 10 nm), fibrils and fibers (≈10 to 100 µm), to cells (≈50 µm), and to tissues and organs (≈1000s and more µm). Most early studies have focused on investigations at single scales, or treated tissues or the cellular microenvironment as a continuum medium without heterogeneous structures (e.g. studies that examine isolated effects of material stiffness or the role of chemical cues alone on cell behavior). However, the cause and effect of biological material mechanics is more complex than a singular input at a specific scale, and thus, the examination of how a range of material scales and hierarchies contribute to certain biological function and dysfunction has emerged as a critical aspect in advancing our understanding of the role of materials in biology in both a physiological and pathological context. Specifically, the origin of how naturally occurring biological protein materials are capable of unifying disparate mechanical properties such as strength, robustness and adaptability is of significant interest for both biological and engineering science, and has attracted significant attention. Through the development of multiscale computational models that provide a representation of multiple material hierarchy levels in a single model, we have elucidated the key role that multiscale mechanics plays in defining a material's ultimate response at failure, and how nature's structural design principles define the hierarchical makeup of biological materials9,10. This process, likely evolutionarily driven, enables biological materials to combine disparate properties such as strength, robustness and adaptability, and may explain the existence of universal structural features observed in a variety of biological materials, across species (Figure 2)11. Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Brittle Bone Disease Materiomics can also be applied to study the catastrophic breakdown of biological materials under disease conditions. Osteogenesis imperfecta is a genetic disorder in collagen characterized by mechanically weakened tendon, fragile bones, skeletal deformities and in severe cases prenatal death12. Our work has shown that osteogenesis imperfecta mutations severely compromise the mechanical properties of collagenous tissues at multiple scales, from single molecules to collagen fibrils13,14. Mutations that lead to the most severe osteogenesis imperfecta phenotype correlate with the strongest effects, leading to weakened intermolecular adhesion, increased intermolecular spacing, reduced stiffness, as well as a reduced failure strength of collagen fibrils that compromises the ability of collagen to provide strength and toughness to connective tissue. Our work has shown that the reason for this is a change in the stress distribution inside collagen fibrils, and is due to the formation of nano-cracks where stress concentrations at the corners develop (Figure 3). |Figure 3. Effect of osteogenesis imperfecta on the stress distribution inside collagen fibrils (left), and resulting change in the stress-strain response (right)14. The formation of nanocracks at the location of mutations result in local stress concentrations (marked with red color), which reduces the overall strength of the fibril as it induces intermolecular shear at moderate applied loads. Our findings provide insight into the multi-scale mechanisms of this disease, and lead to explanations of characteristic osteogenesis imperfecta tissue features such as reduced mechanical strength, lower cross-link density and changes in the way mineral platelets are distributed. Our results for the first time explain how single point mutations at the nanoscale can lead to catastrophic tissue failure at much larger length-scales. The key to understand this dramatic change in material behavior is that failure must be understood as a multi-scale phenomenon, where the interplay of mechanisms at multiple scales defines the ultimate material response. Conventional models of failure and disease that consider only one level of the material's structure, do not capture the full range of relevant structures and mechanisms and as such remain limited in their ability to describe their behavior of intervene in material breakdown processes associated with disease. The understanding of failure in the context of defects and mutations could fundamentally change the way diseases are modeled and potentially treated. Outlook to Future Research Materiomics is a powerful tool to enhance the understanding of materials in biology, at multiple scales and in a variety of functional contexts. The long-term goal of our research is to develop a new engineering paradigm that encompasses the analysis and design of structures and materials, starting from the molecular level, in order to create new materials that mimic and exceed the properties of biological ones by utilizing material concepts discovered in biological materials. We envision that our work can lead to the development of a new set of tools that can be applied, together with synthetic biological and self-assembly methods, to select, design, and produce a new class of materials, similar to the approaches used today in computer aided design of buildings, cars and machines. The availability of multifunctional and changeable materials reduces the necessity for the use of different materials to achieve different properties, and as such, may provide significant savings in weight and cost. The utilization of abundant natural building blocks such as organic (e.g. peptides or proteins) or inorganic (e.g. minerals) constituents, combined with novel synthesis techniques based on self-assembly, could lead to new lightweight materials for structural applications in cars, airplanes, and buildings that could reduce the overall energy consumption and ecological footprint of materials. 1. Buehler, M.J. and Y.C. Yung, Deformation and failure of protein materials in physiologically extreme conditions and disease. Nature Materials, 2009. 8(3): p. 175-188. 2. Fratzl, P. and R. Weinkamer, Nature's hierarchical materials. Progress in Materials Science, 2007. 52: p. 1263-1334. 3. Buehler, M.J. and Y.C. Yung, How protein materials balance strength, robustness and adaptability. HFSP Journal, 2010: p. doi:10.2976/1.3267779. 4. Keten, S. and M.J. Buehler, Geometric Confinement Governs the Rupture Strength of H-bond Assemblies at a Critical Length Scale. Nano Letters, 2008. 8(2): p. 743 - 748. 5. Keten, S., Z. Xu, B. Ihle, and M.J. Buehler, Nanoconfinement controls stiffness, strength and mechanical toughness of beta-sheet crystals in silk. 2010. 6. Espinosa, H.D., J.E. Rim, F. Barthelat, and M.J. Buehler, Merger of structure and material in nacre and bone - Perspectives on de novo biomimetic materials. Progress in Materials Science, 2009. 54(8): p. 1059-1100 7. Buehler, M.J., S. Keten, and T. Ackbarow, Theoretical and computational hierarchical nanomechanics of protein materials: Deformation and fracture. Progress in Materials Science, 2008 53: p. 1101-1241. 8. Buchanan, M., Learning from failure. Nature Physics, 2009. 5(10): p. 705. 9. Qin, Z., L. Kreplak, and M.J. Buehler, Hierarchical structure controls nanomechanical properties of vimentin intermediate filaments. PLoS ONE, 2009. 4(10): p. e7294. 10. Ackbarow, T., D. Sen, C. Thaulow, and M.J. Buehler, Alpha-Helical Protein Networks are Self Protective and Flaw Tolerant. PLoS ONE, 2009. 4(6): p. e6015. 11. Buehler, M.J. and S. Keten, Failure of molecules, bones, and the earth itself. Rev. Mod. Phys., 2010. in press. 12. Rauch, F. and F.H. Glorieux, Osteogenesis imperfecta. Lancet, 2004. 363(9418): p. 1377-1385. 13. Gautieri, A., S. Vesentini, A. Redaelli, and M.J. Buehler, Single molecule effects of osteogenesis imperfecta mutations in tropocollagen protein domains. Protein Sci, 2009. 18(1): p. 161-8. 14. Gautieri, A., S. Uzel, S. Vesentini, A. Redaelli, and M.J. Buehler, Molecular and mesoscale mechanisms of osteogenesis imperfecta disease in collagen fibrils. Biophys J, 2009. 97(3): p. 857-65. Copyright AZoM.com, Professor Markus J. Buehler (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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Early in the 14th century the Turkish tribal chieftain Othman (Osman) founded an empire in western Anatolia (Asia Minor) that was to endure for almost six centuries. As this empire grew by conquering lands of the Byzantine Empire and beyond, it came to include at the height of its power all of Asia Minor; the countries of the Balkan Peninsula; the islands of the eastern Mediterranean; parts of Hungary and Russia; Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus, Palestine, and Egypt; part of Arabia; and all of North Africa through Algeria. The Early Empire, 1300-1481 The dynasty that Othman (1258-1326) founded was called Osmanli, meaning "sons of Osman." The name evolved in English into Ottoman. The Ottoman Empire was Islamic in religion. During the 11th century bands of nomadic Turks emerged from their home in Central Asia to raid lands to the west. The strongest of the Turkish tribes was the Seljuks. In time they established themselves in Asia Minor along with other groups of Turks. Following the defeat of the Seljuks by the Mongols in 1293, Othman emerged as the leader of local Turks in the fight against the tottering Byzantine Empire. The final conquest of the Byzantines was not achieved until 1453 with the fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul), but by that date all the surrounding territory was in Ottoman hands. The initial areas of expansion under Othman I and his successors Orkhan (ruled 1326-59) and Murad I (ruled 1359-89) were western Asia Minor and southeastern Europe, primarily the Balkan Peninsula. During Orkhan's reign the practice began of exacting a tribute in children from Christian subjects. The boys were trained to become soldiers and administrators. As soldiers they filled the ranks of the infantry, called the Janizaries (also spelled Janissaries), the most fearsome military force in Europe for centuries. Murad I conquered Thrace, to the northwest of Constantinople, in 1361. He moved his capital to Adrionople (now Edirne), Thrace's capital and the second city of the Byzantine Empire. This conquest effectively cut off Constantinople from the outside world, and allowed Murad to control the principal invasion route through the Balkan Mountains, giving the Ottomans access to further expansion to the north. During Murad I last victorious battle against Balkan allies, he was killed. His successor, Beyazid I (ruled 1389-1402), was unable to make further European conquests. He was forced to devote his attention to eastern Asia Minor to deal with a growing Turkish principality, Karaman. He attacked and defeated Karaman in 1391, put down a revolt of his Balkan subjects, and returned to consolidate his gains in Asia Minor. His successes attracted the attention of Timur Lenk (Tamerlane). Encouraged by Turkish princes who had fled to his court from Beyazid I's incursions, attacked and overwhelmed him in 1402. Taken captive by Timur Lenk, Beyazid died within a year. Timur Lenk soon retired from Asia Minor, leaving Beyazid's sons to take up where their father had failed. The four sons fought for control until one of them, Mohammed I, killed the other three and took control. He reigned from 1413 to 1421 and his successor Murad II, from 1421 to 1451. Murad II suppressed Balkan resistance and eliminated all but two of the Turkish principalities in Asia Minor. The task of finishing the Balkan conquests and seizing all of Asia Minor fell to Murad II's successor, Mohammed II (ruled 1451-81). It was he who completed the siege of Constantinople in 1453 and made it the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The whole Balkan Peninsula south of Hungary was incorporated as well as the Crimea on the north coast of the Black Sea. Asia Minor was completely subdued. In addition to conquering a large empire, Mohammed II worked strenuously for consolidation and an adequate administrative and tax system. He was assisted by the fact that the whole Byzantine bureaucratic structure fell into his hands. Although Islamic, Ottoman sultans were not averse to using whatever talent they could attract or sometimes, capture. The Golden Age, 1481-1566 Three sultans ruled the empire at its height: Beyazid II (1481-1512), Selim I (1512-20), and Suleyman I the Magnificent (1520-66). Beyazid extended the empire in Europe, added outposts along the Black Sea, and put down revolts in Asia Minor. He also turned the Ottoman fleet into a major Mediterranean naval power. Late in life he became a religious mystic and was displaced on the throne by his more militant son, Selim I. Selim I's first task was to eliminate all competition for his position. He had his brothers, their sons, and all but one of his own sons killed. He thereby established control over the army, which had wanted to raise its own candidate to power. During his short reign the Ottomans moved south-and eastward into Syria, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Arabia, and Egypt. At Mecca, the chief shrine of Islam, he took the title of caliph, ruler of all Muslims. The Ottoman sultans were thereafter the spiritual heads of Islam thereby displacing the centuries-old caliphate of Baghdad. By acquiring the holy places of Islam, Selim I's cemented his position as the religion's most powerful ruler. This gave the Ottomans direct access to the rich cultural heritage of the Arab world. Leading Muslim intellectuals, artists, artisans, and administrators came to Constantinople from all parts of the Arab world. They made the empire much more of a traditional Islamic state than it had been. An added benefit of Selim I's efforts was control of all Middle Eastern trade routes between Europe and the Far East. The growth of the empire had for some time been an impediment to European trade. In time this led European states to seek routes around Africa to China and India. It also impelled them to face westward and led directly to the discovery of the Americas. Selim I's's surviving son, Suleyman, came to the throne in an enviable situation. New revenues from the expanded empire left him with wealth and power unparalleled in Ottoman history. In his early campaigns he captured Belgrade (1521) and Rhodes (1522) and broke the military power of Hungary. In 1529 he laid siege to Vienna, Austria, but was forced to withdraw for lack of supplies. He also waged three campaigns against Persia. Algiers in North Africa fell to his navy in 1529 and Tripoli (now Libya) in 1551. In more peaceful pursuits he adorned the chief cities of Islam with mosques, aqueducts, bridges, and other public works. In Constantinople he had several mosques built, among them the magnificent Suleymaniye Cami named for him. Imperial Decline, 1566-1807 During Suleyman's long reign the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its political power and close to its maximum geographical extent. The seeds of decline, however, were already planted. As Suleyman grew tired of campaigns and retired to his harem, his viziers, or prime ministers, took more authority. After his death the army gained control of the sultanate and was able to use it for its own benefit. Few sultans after Suleyman had the ability to exercise real power when the need arose. This weakness at home was countered by a growing power in the west. The nation-states of Europe were emerging from the Middle Ages under strong monarchies. They were building armies and navies that were powerful enough to attack a decaying Ottoman military might. In 1571 the combined fleets of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States of Italy defeated the Turks in the great naval Battle Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. This defeat, which dispelled the myth of the invincible Turk, took place during the reign of Selim II (ruled 1566-74). But the empire rebuilt its navy and continued to control the eastern Mediterranean for another century. As the central government became weaker, large parts of the empire began to act independently, retaining only nominal loyalty to the sultan. The army was still strong enough, however, to prevent provincial rebels from asserting complete control. Under Murad III (ruled 1574-95) new campaigns were undertaken. The Caucasus was conquered, and Azerbaijan was seized. This brought the empire to the peak of its territorial extent. Reform efforts undertaken by 17th-century sultans did little to deter the onset of decay. The Ottomans were driven out of the Caucasus and Azerbaijan in 1603 and out of Iraq in 1604. Iraq was retaken by Murad IV (ruled 1623-40) in 1638, but Iran remained a persistent military threat in the east. A war with Venice (1645-69) exposed Constantinople to an attack by the Venetian navy. In 1683 the last attempt to conquer Vienna failed. Russia and Austria fought the empire by direct military attack and by fomenting revolt by non-Muslim subjects of the sultan. Beginning in 1683, with the attack on Vienna, the Ottomans were at war with European enemies for 41 years. As a result, the empire lost much of its Balkan territory and all the possessions on the shores of the Black Sea. In addition, the Austrians and Russians were allowed to intervene in the empire's affairs on behalf of the sultan's Christian subjects. The weakness of the central government, as manifested by its military decline, also showed itself in a gradual loss of control over most of the provinces. Local rulers, called notables, carved for themselves permanent regions in which they ruled directly, regardless of the wishes of the sultan in Constantinople. The notables were able to build their power bases because they knew of the sultan's military weakness and because local populations preferred their rule to the corrupt administration of the faraway capital. The notables formed their own armies and collected their own taxes, sending only nominal contributions to the imperial treasury. Selim III (ruled 1789-1807) attempted to reform the empire and its army. He failed and was overthrown. When Mahmud II (ruled 1808-39) came to the throne, the empire was in desperate straits. Control of North Africa had passed to local notables. In Egypt Muhammad Ali was laying the foundation of an independent kingdom. Had the European nations cooperated, they could have destroyed the Ottoman Empire. In 1826, five years after Greece began its fight for independence, the Janizaries revolted to stop reforms. Warfare between the Turks and Greeks was fierce, and eventually a new military system in the style of European armies. He also reformed the administration and gained control over some of the provincial notables, with the exception of Egypt. By the time of Mahmud's death the empire was more consolidated and powerful, but it was still subject to European interference. Mahmud's sons, Abdulmecid I (ruled 1839-61) and Abdulaziz (ruled 1861-76) carried out further reforms, especially in education and law. Nevertheless, by mid-century it was evident that the Ottoman cause was hopeless. Czar Nicholas I of Russia commented on the Ottoman Empire in 1853: "We have on our hands a sick man, a very sick man." The "Sick Man of Europe" 1850-1922 The conflicting interests of European states propped up the Ottoman Empire until after World War I. Great Britain especially was determined to keep Russia from gaining direct access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea. Britain, France, and Sardinia helped the Ottomans during the Crimean War (1854-56) to block the Russians. The Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 brought Russia almost to Constantinople. The Ottomans were forced to sign the Treaty of San Stefano, which would have ended their rule in Europe except that the European states called the Congress of Berlin. It succeeded in propping up the old empire for a few decades more. Abdulhamid II (ruled 1876-1909) developed strong ties with Germany, and the Ottomans fought on Germany's side in World War I. Russia hoped to use the war as an excuse to gain access to the Mediterranean and perhaps capture Constantinople. This aim was frustrated by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and withdrawal from the war. Ottoman defeat in war inspired an already fervent Turkish nationalism. The postwar settlement outraged the nationalists. A new government under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk (father of the Turks), emerged at Ankara. The last sultan, Mohammed VI, fled in 1922 after the sultanate had been abolished. All members of the Ottoman Dynasty were expelled from the country two years later. Turkey was proclaimed a republic, with Ataturk as its first president.

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CONTRIBUTION OF MUSLIMS SCIENTIST IN THE FIELD OF MEDICINE AND PHARMACY In the Modern Muslim world is seen as many things , but rarely is it viewed as a source of inspiration and enlightenment . Though it is a force of enlightenment and it is not only verses of the Quran that testy to that fact, but also the great body scholarship produced during the Middle Ages. While Europe was in the midst of darkness, it was the Muslims spurred on the light of their news who picked up the torch of scholarship and science .It was the Muslims who preserved the knowledge of old days , elaborate upon it and passed it to Europe . Islamic scientist in Medicine and Pharmacy was not known for many age due to many factors including a) Colonialism and lack of knowledge among Muslims generation in this modern world, other factors is b) lack of institution based facts how and when Islamic Scientists what contribution was . Although every people earn what they do pass on it generation after generation. So we the Islam of today learners should make important to look back over and make research topic selected on this issue and gain knowledge of, respected and Prized the contribution Islamic Civilization by early Muslim scholars The first Muslim physician is believed to have been Muhammad himself, as a significant number of hadiths concerning medicine are attributed to him. Several Sahaba are said to have been successfully treated of certain diseases by following the medical advice of Muhammad. The three methods of healing known to have been mentioned by him were Honey, Cupping, and Cauterization, though he was generally opposed to the use of cauterization unless it “suits the ailment.” According to Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Muhammad disliked this method due to it causing “pain and menace to a patient” since there was no anesthesia in his time. Muhammad also appears to have been the first to suggest the contagious nature of leprosy, mange and sexually transmitted disease; and that there is always a cause and a cure for every disease, according to several hadiths in the Sahih al-Bukhari, Sunan Abi Dawood and Al-Muwatta attributed to Muhammad, such as: “There is no disease that Allah has created, except that He also has created its treatment. “Make use of medical treatment, for Allah has not made a disease without appointing a remedy for it, with the exception of one disease, namely old age. “Allah has sent down both the disease and the cure, and He has appointed a cure for every disease, so treat you medically. “The one who sent down the disease sent down the remedy. The belief that there is a cure for every disease encouraged early Muslims to engage in biomedical research and seek out a cure for every disease known to them. Many early authors of Islamic medicine, however, were usually clerics rather than physicians, and were known to have advocated the traditional medical practices of prophet Muhammad’s time, such as those mentioned in the Qur’a n and Hadith. For instance, therapy did not require a patient to undergo any surgical procedures at the time. From the 9th century, Hunayn ibn Ishaq translated a number of Galen‘s works into the Arabic language, followed by translations of the Sushruta Samhita, Charaka Samhita and Middle Persian works from Gundishapur. Muslim physicians soon began making many of their own significant advances and contributions to medicine, including the fields of ALLERGOLOGY, ANATOMY, BACTERIOLOGY, BOTANY, DENTISTRY, EMBRYOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTALISM, ETIOLOGY, IMMUNOLOGY, MICROBIOLOGY, OBSTETRICS, OPHTHALMOLOGY, PATHOLOGY, PEDIATRICS, PERINATOLOGY, PHYSIOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY, PSYCHOLOGY, PULSOLOGY AND SPHYGMOLOGY, SURGERY, THERAPY, UROLOGY, ZOOLOGY, AND THE PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES SUCH AS PHARMACY AND PHARMACOLOGY, AMONG OTHERS. Medicine was a central part of medieval Islamic culture. Responding to circumstances of time and place, Islamic physicians and scholars developed a large and complex medical literature exploring and synthesizing the theory and practice of medicine Islamic medicine was initially built on tradition, chiefly the theoretical and practical knowledge developed in Arabia, Persia, Greece, Rome, and India. Galen and Hippocrates were pre-eminent authorities, as well as the Indian physicians Sushruta and Charaka, and the Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria. Islamic scholars translated their voluminous writings from Greek and Sanskrit into Arabic and then produced new medical knowledge based on those texts. In order to make the Greek and Indian traditions more accessible, understandable, and teachable, Islamic scholars ordered and made more systematic the vast and sometimes inconsistent Greco-Roman and Indian medical knowledge by writing encyclopedias and summaries. It was through Arabic translations that the West learned of Hellenic medicine, including the works of Galen and Hippocrates. Of equal if not of greater influence in Western Europe were systematic and comprehensive works such as Avicenna‘s The Canon of Medicine, which were translated into Latin and then disseminated in manuscript and printed form throughout Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alone, The Canon of Medicine was published more than thirty-five times. Muslim physicians set up the earliest dedicated hospitals in the modern sense, known as Bimaristans, which were establishments where the ill were welcomed and cared for by qualified staff, and which were clearly distinguished from the ancient healing temples, sleep temples, hospices, assylums, lazarets and leper-houses which were more concerned with isolating the sick and the mad from society “rather than to offer them any way to a true cure. The Bimaristan hospitals later functioned as the first public hospitals, psychiatric hospitals and diploma-granting medical universities. In the medieval Islamic world, hospitals were built in all major cities; in Cairo for example, the Qalawun Hospital could care for 8,000 patients, and a staff that included physicians, pharmacists, and nurses. One could also access a dispensary, and research facility that led to advances, which included the discovery of the contagious nature of diseases, and research into optics and the mechanisms of the eye. Muslim doctors were removing cataracts with hollow needles over 1000 years before Western physicians dared attempt such a task. Hospitals were built not only for the physically sick, but for the mentally sick also. One of the first ever psychiatric hospitals that cared for the mentally ill was built in Cairo. Hospitals later spread to Europe during the Crusades, inspired by the hospitals in the Middle East. The first hospital in Paris, Les Quinze-vingts, was founded by Louis IX after his return from the Crusade between 1254-1260. Hospitals in the Islamic world featured competency tests for doctors, drug purity regulations, nurses and interns, and advanced surgical procedures. Hospitals were also created with separate wards for specific illnesses, so that people with contagious diseases could be kept away from other patients. One of the features in medieval Muslim hospitals that distinguished them from their contemporaries and predecessors was their significantly higher standards of medical ethics. Hospitals in the Islamic world treated patients of all religions, ethnicities, and backgrounds, while the hospitals themselves often employed staff from Christian, Jewish and other minority backgrounds. Muslim doctors and physicians were expected to have obligations towards their patients, regardless of their wealth or backgrounds. The ethical standards of Muslim physicians was first laid down in the 9th century by Ishaq bin Ali Rahawi, who wrote the Adab al-Tabib (Conduct of a Physician), the first treatise dedicated to medical ethics. He regarded physicians as “guardians of souls and bodies”, and wrote twenty chapters on various topics related to medical ethics. Another unique feature of medieval Muslim hospitals was the role of female staff, who were rarely employed in ancient and medieval healing temples elsewhere in the world. Medieval Muslim hospitals commonly employed female nurses, including nurses from as far as Sudan, a sign of great breakthrough. Muslim hospitals were also the first to employ female physicians, the most famous being two female physicians from the Banu Zuhr family who served the Almohad ruler Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al-Mansur in the 12th century. Later in the 15th century, female surgeons were illustrated for the first time in Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu‘s Cerrahiyyetu’l-Haniyye (Imperial Surgery) The first encyclopedia of medicine in Arabic was Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari‘s Firdous al-Hikmah (“Paradise of Wisdom”), written in seven parts, c. 860. It was the first to deal with pediatrics and child development, as well as psychology and psychotherapy. In the fields of medicine and psychotherapy, the work was primarily influenced by Islamic thought and ancient Indian physicians such as Sushruta and Charaka. Unlike earlier physicians, however, al-Tabari emphasized strong ties between psychology and medicine, and the need of psychotherapy and counseling in the therapeutic treatment of patients Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes) wrote the Comprehensive Book of Medicine in the 9th century. The Large Comprehensive was the most sought after of all his compositions, in which Rhazes recorded clinical cases of his own experience and provided very useful recordings of various diseases. The Comprehensive Book of Medicine, with its introduction of measles and smallpox, was very influential in Europe. (HALY ABBAS)’S KITAB KAMIL AS-SINA’A AT-TIBBIYYA (“Complete Book of the Medical Art“), c. 980, became better known as the Kitab al-Maliki (“Royal Book“, Latin: Liber regalis) in honour of its royal patron ‘Adud al-Dawla. In twenty sections, ten of theory and ten of practice, it was more systematic and concise than Razi’s Hawi, but more practical than Avicenna’s Canon, by which it was superseded. With many interpolations and substitutions, it served as the basis for the Pantegni (c. 1087) of Constantinus Africanus, the founding text of the Schola Medica Salernitana in Salerno (Abulcasis), regarded as the father of modern surgery contributed greatly to the discipline of medical surgery with his Kitab al-Tasrif (“Book of Concessions“), a 30-volume medical encyclopedia published in 1000, which was later translated to Latin and used in European medical schools for centuries. He invented numerous surgical instruments and described them in his al-Tasrif. Avicenna (Ibn Sina), a Hanbali and Mu’tazili philosopher and doctor in the early 11th century, was another influential figure. He is regarded as the father of modern medicine, and one of the greatest thinkers and medical scholars in history. His medical encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine (c. 1020), remained a standard textbook in Europe for centuries, up until the renewal of the Muslim tradition of scientific medicine. He also wrote The Book of Healing (actually a more general encyclopedia of science and philosophy), which became another popular textbook in Europe. Among other things, Avicenna’s contributions to medicine include the introduction of systematic experimentation and quantification into the study of physiology,the discovery of the contagious nature of infectious diseases, the introduction of quarantine to limit the spread of contagious diseases, the introduction of experimental medicine, evidence-based medicine, clinical trials,randomized controlled trialsefficacy tests, clinical pharmacology, risk factor analysis, and the idea of a syndrome in the diagnosis of specific diseases,the first descriptions on bacterial and viral organisms, the distinction of mediastinitis from pleurisy, the contagious nature of phthisis and tuberculosis, the distribution of diseases by water and soil, and the first careful descriptions of skin troubles, sexually transmitted diseases, perversions, and nervous ailments, as well the use of ice to treat fevers, and the separation of medicine from pharmacology, which was important to the development of the pharmaceutical sciences. Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288) wrote Al-Shamil fi al-Tibb (The Comprehensive Book on Medicine), a voluminous medical encyclopedia that was originally planned to comprise 300 volumes, but he was only able to complete 80 volumes as a result of his death in 1288. However, even in its incomplete state, the book is one of the largest known medical encyclopedias in history, though only a small portion of The Comprehensive Book on Medicine has survived. During his lifetime, The Comprehensive Book on Medicine had eventually replaced Ibn Sina’s The Canon of Medicine as a medical authority in the medieval Islamic world. Arabic biographers from the 13th onwards considered Ibn al-Nafis the greatest physician in history, some referring to him as “the second Ibn Sina”, and others considering him even greater than Ibn Sina In the 9th century AL-KINDI (ALKINDUS), IN DE GRADIBUS Demonstrated the application of mathematics and quantification to medicine, particularly in the field of pharmacology. This includes the development of a mathematical scale to quantify the strength of drugs, and a system that would allow a doctor to determine in advance the most critical days of a patient’s illness, based on the phases of the Moon. In the 10th century, RAZI (RHAZES) Introduced controlled experiment and clinical observation into the field of medicine, and rejected several Galenic medical theories unverified by experimentation.The earliest known medical experiment was carried out by Razi in order to find the most hygienic place to build a hospital. He hung pieces of meat in places throughout 10th century Baghdad and observed where the meat decomposed least quickly, and that was where he built the hospital. In his Comprehensive Book of Medicine, Razi recorded clinical cases of his own experience and provided very useful recordings of various diseases. In his Doubts about Galen, Razi was also the first to prove both Galen‘s theory of humorism and Aristotle‘s theory of classical elements false using experimentation He also introduced urinalysis and stool tests AVICENNA (IBN SINA) Is considered the father of modern medicine,for his introduction of systematic experimentation and quantification into the study of physiology, the introduction of experimental medicine, clinical trials, risk factor analysis, and the idea of a syndrome in the diagnosis of specific diseases, in his medical encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine (c. 1020), which was also the first book dealing with evidence-based medicine, randomized controlled trials,and efficacy tests. According to Toby Huff and A. C. Crombie, the Canon contained “a set of rules that laid down the conditions for the experimental use and testing of drugs” which were “a precise guide for practical experimentation” in the process of “discovering and proving the effectiveness of medical substances. The Canon laid out the following rules and principles for testing the effectiveness of new drugs and medications, which still form the basis of clinical pharmacologyand modern clinical trials: - “The drug must be free from any extraneous accidental quality.” - “It must be used on a simple, not a composite, disease.” - “The drug must be tested with two contrary types of diseases, because sometimes a drug cures one disease by Its essential qualities and another by its accidental ones.” - “The quality of the drug must correspond to the strength of the disease. For example, there are some drugs whose heat is less than the coldness of certain diseases, so that they would have no effect on them.” - “The time of action must be observed, so that essence and accident are not confused.” - “The effect of the drug must be seen to occur constantly or in many cases, for if this did not happen, it was an accidental effect.” - “The experimentation must be done with the human body, for testing a drug on a lion or a horse might not prove anything about its effect on man.” IBN ZUHR (AVENZOAR) Who introduced the experimental method into surgery, for which he is considered the father of experimental surgery.Other early supporters of human dissection and autopsy include Ibn Tufail,Saladin‘s physician Ibn Jumay, Abd-el-latif,and Ibn al-Nafis The experimental method was introduced into botany, materia medica and the agricultural sciences in the 13th century by the Andalusian-Arab botanist Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, the teacher of Ibn al-Baitar. Al-Nabati introduced empirical techniques in the testing, description and identification of numerous material medica, and he separated unverified reports from those supported by actual tests and observations. ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY: In anatomy and physiology, the first physician to refute Galen‘s theory of humorism was MUHAMMAD IBN ZAKARĪYA RĀZI (RHAZES) In his Doubts about Galen in the 10th century. He criticized Galen’s theory that the body possessed four separate “humors” (liquid substances), whose balance are the key to health and a natural body-temperature. Razi was the first to prove this theory wrong using an experiment. He carried out an experiment which would upset this system by inserting a liquid with a different temperature into the body resulting in an increase or decrease of bodily heat, which resembled the temperature of that particular fluid. Razi noted particularly that a warm drink would heat up the body to a degree much higher than its own natural temperature, thus the drink would trigger a response from the body, rather than transferring only its own warmth or coldness to it. This line of criticism was the first comprehensive experimental refutation of Galen’s theory of humours and Aristotle‘s theory of the four classical elements on which it was grounded. Razi’s own chemical experiments suggested other qualities of matter, such as “oiliness” and “sulfurousness“, or inflammability and salinity, which were not readily explained by the traditional fire, water, earth and air division of elements. EXPERIMENTAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY The contributions of Avicenna to physiology include the introduction of systematic experimentation and quantification into the study of physiology in The Canon of Medicine (c. 1020). The contributions of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) to anatomy and physiology include his correct explanation of the process of sight and visual perception for the first time in his Book of Optics, Other innovations introduced by Muslim physicians to the field of physiology by this time include the use of animal testing. Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar) (1091-1161) was the first physician known to have carried out human dissections and postmortem autopsy. He proved that the skin disease scabies was caused by a parasite, a discovery which upset the theory of humorism supported by Hippocrates and Galen. The removal of the parasite from the patient’s body did not involve purging, bleeding, or any other traditional treatments associated with the four humours. In the 12th century, Saladin‘s physician Ibn Jumay was also one the first to undertake human dissections, and he made an explicit appeal for other physicians to do so as well. During a famine in Egypt in 1200, Abd-el-latif observed and examined a large number of skeletons, and he discovered that Galen was incorrect regarding the formation of the bones of the lower jaw and sacrum. Circulatory anatomy and physiology: IBN AL-NAFIS The father of circulatory physiology was another early proponent of human dissection In 1242, he was the first to describe the pulmonary circulation, coronary circulation and capillary circulation, which form the basis of the circulatory system, for which he is considered the one of the greatest physiologists in history The first European descriptions of the pulmonary circulation came several centuries later, by Michael Servetus in 1553 and William Harvey in 1628. Ibn al-Nafis also described the earliest concept of metabolism, and developed new Nafisian systems of anatomy, physiology and psychology to replace the Avicennian and Galenic doctrines, while discrediting many of their erroneous theories on the four humours, pulsation, bones, muscles, intestines, sensory organs, bilious canals, esophagus, stomach, and the anatomy of almost every other part of the human body. The Arab physician Ibn al-Lubudi (1210-1267), also from Damascus, wrote the Collection of discussions relative to fifty psychological and medical questions, in which he rejects the theory of four humours supported by Galen and Hippocrates, discovers that the body and its preservation depend exclusively upon blood, rejects Galen’s idea that women can produce sperm, and discovers that the movement of arteries are not dependant upon the movement of the heart, that the heart is the first organ to form in a fetus‘ body (rather than the brain as claimed by Hippocrates), and that the bones forming the skull can grow into tumors. He also advises that in cases of extreme fever, a patient should not be released from hospital. PULSOLOGY AND SPHYGMOLOGY: Muslim physicians were pioneers in pulsology and sphygmology. In ancient times, Galen as well as Chinese physicians erroneously believed that there was a unique type of pulse for every organ of the body and for every disease. Galen also erroneously believed that “every part of an artery pulsates simultaneously” and that the motion of the pulse was due to natural motions (the arteries expanding and contracting naturally) as opposed to foced motions (the heart causing the arteries to either expand or contract). The first correct explanations of pulsation were given by Muslim physicians. “Every beat of the pulse comprises two movements and two pauses. Thus, expansion: pause: contraction: pause. The pulse is a movement in the heart and arteries … which takes the form of alternate expansion and contraction.” Avicenna also pioneered the modern approach of examining the pulse through the examination of the wrist, which is still practiced in modern times. His reasons for choosing the wrist as the ideal location is due to it being easily available and the patient not needing to be distressed at the exposure of his/her body. The Latin translation of his Canon also laid the foundations for the later invention of the sphygmograph. Ibn al-Nafis, in his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna’s Canon, completely rejected the Galenic theory of pulsation after his discovery of the pulmonary circulation. He developed his own Nafisian theory of pulsation after discovering that pulsation is a result of both natural and forced motions, and that the “forced motion must be the contraction of the arteries caused by the expansion of the heart, and the natural motion must be the expansion of the arteries.” He notes that the “arteries and the heart do not expand and contract at the same time, but rather the one contracts while the other expands” and vice versa. He also recognized that the purpose of the pulse is to help disperse the blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Ibn al-Nafis briefly summarizes his new theory of pulsation: “The primary purpose of the expansion and contraction of the heart is to absorb the cool air and expel the wastes of the spirit and the warm air; however, the ventricle of the heart is wide. Moreover, when it expands it is not possible for it to absorb air until it is full, for that would then ruin the temperament of the spirit, its substance and texture, as well as the temperament of the heart. Thus, the heart is necessarily forced to complete its fill by absorbing the spirit.” EPIDEMIOLOGY, ETIOLOGY, PATHOLOGY: In etiology and epidemiology, Muslim physicians were responsible for the discovery of infectious disease and the immune system, advances in pathology, and early hypotheses related to bacteriology and microbiology. Their discovery of contagious disease in particular is considered revolutionary and is one of the most important discoveries in medicine. The earliest ideas on contagion can be traced back to several hadiths attributed to Muhammad in the 7th century, who is said to have understood the contagious nature of leprosy, mange, and sexually transmitted disease. These early ideas on contagion arose from the generally sympathetic attitude of Muslim physicians towards lepers (who were often seen in a negative light in other ancient and medieval societies) which can be traced back through hadiths attributed to Muhammad and to the following advice given in the Qur’an “There is no fault in the blind, and there is no fault in the lame, and there is no fault in the sick.” This eventually led to the theory of contagious disease, which was fully understood by Avicenna in the 11th century. By then, the pathology of contagion had been fully understood, and as a result, hospitals were created with separate wards for specific illnesses, so that people with contagious diseases could be kept away from other patients who do not have any contagious diseases. In The Canon of Medicine (1020), Avicenna discovered the contagious nature of infectious diseases such as phthisis and tuberculosis, the distribution of diseases by water and soil, and fully understood the contagious nature of sexually transmitted diseases. In epidemiology, he introduced the method of quarantine as a means of limiting the spread of contagious diseases, and introduced the method of risk factor analysis and the idea of a syndrome in the diagnosis of specific diseases. In order to find the most hygienic place to build a hospital, Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes) carried out an experiment where he hung pieces of meat in places throughout 10th century Baghdad and observed where the meat decomposed least quickly. Razi also wrote the Comprehensive Book of Medicine in the 9th century. The Large Comprehensive was the most sought after of all his compositions, in which Razi recorded clinical cases of his own experience and provided very useful recordings of various diseases, as well as the discovery of measles and smallpox. The Large Comprehensive also criticized the views of Galen, after Razi had observed many clinical cases which did not follow Galen’s descriptions of fevers. For example, he stated that Galen’s descriptions of urinary ailments were inaccurate as he had only seen three cases, while Razi had studied hundreds of such cases in hospitals of Baghdad and Rayy.The Comprehensive Book of Medicine, especially with its introduction of measles and smallpox, was very influential in Europe. IBN ZUHR (AVENZOAR Was the first physician to provide a real scientific etiology for the inflammatory diseases of the ear, and the first to clearly discuss the causes of stridor. Through his dissections, he was also able to prove that the skin disease scabies was caused by a parasite, a discovery which upset the theory of humorism supported by Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna. He also gave the first accurate descriptions on neurological diseases, including meningitis, intracranial thrombophlebitis, and mediastinal germ cell tumors. Averroes suggested the existence of Parkinson’s disease and attributed photoreceptor properties to the retina. Maimonides wrote about neuropsychiatric disorders and described rabies and belladonna intoxication. ALLERGOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY: The study of allergology and immunology originate from the Islamic world. MUHAMMAD IBN ZAKARĪYA RĀZI (RHAZES) Was responsible for discovering “allergic asthma“, and was the first physician known to have written articles on allergy and the immune system. In the Sense of Smelling, he explains the occurrence of rhinitis after smelling a rose during the Spring. In the Article on the Reason Why Abou Zayd Balkhi Suffers from Rhinitis When Smelling Roses in Spring, he dicusses seasonal rhinitis, which is the same as allergic asthma or hay fever. Al-Razi was the first to realize that fever is a natural defense mechanism, the body’s way of fighting disease. The distinction between smallpox and measles also dates back to al-Razi. The medical procedure of inoculation was practiced in the medieval Islamic world in order to treat smallpox. This was later followed by the first smallpox vaccine in the form of cowpox, invented in Turkey in the early 18th century. DR. ABDIRIZAK HAJI MOHAMED Pharm-D University of Karachi-Pakistan Contribution of Muslim scientist is far-reaching topic So part two will be publish soon, please your comments and any suggestions send to firstname.lastname@example.org

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May 16, 2002 A region in the western tropical Pacific Ocean may help scientists understand how Venus lost all of its water and became a 900-degree inferno. The study of this local phenomenon by NASA scientists also should help researchers understand what conditions on Earth might lead to a similar fate here. The phenomenon, called the ‘runaway greenhouse’ effect, occurs when a planet absorbs more energy from the sun than it can radiate back to space. Under these circumstances, the hotter the surface temperature gets, the faster it warms up. Scientists detect the signature of a runaway greenhouse when planetary heat loss begins to drop as surface temperature rises. Only one area on Earth – the western Pacific ‘warm pool’ just northeast of Australia – exhibits this signature. Because the warm pool covers only a small fraction of the Earth’s surface, the Earth as a whole never actually ‘runs away.’ However, scientists believe Venus did experience a global runaway greenhouse effect about 3 billion to 4 billion years ago. "Soon after the planets were formed 4.5 billion years ago, Earth, Venus and Mars probably all had water. How did Earth manage to hold onto all of its water, while Venus apparently lost all of its water?" asked Maura Rabbette, Earth and planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. "We have extensive earth science data to help address that question." Rabbette and her co-investigators from NASA Ames, Christopher McKay, Peter Pilewskie and Richard Young, used atmospheric conditions above the Pacific Ocean, including data recorded by NASA’s Earth Observing System of satellites, to create a computer model of the runaway greenhouse effect. They determined that water vapor high in the atmosphere produced the local signature of a runaway greenhouse. At sea surface temperatures above 80 F (27 C), evaporation loads the atmosphere with a critical amount of water vapor, one of the most efficient greenhouse gases. Water vapor allows solar radiation from the sun to pass through, but it absorbs a large portion of the infrared radiation coming from the Earth. If enough water vapor enters the troposphere, the weather layer of the atmosphere, it will trap thermal energy coming from the Earth, increasing the sea surface temperature even further. The effect should result in a chain reaction loop where sea surface temperature increases, leading to increased atmospheric water vapor that leads to more trapped thermal energy. This would cause the temperature increase to ‘run away,’ causing more and more water loss through evaporation from the ocean. Luckily for Earth, sea surface temperatures never reach more than about 87 F (30.5 C), and so the runaway phenomenon does not occur. "It’s very intriguing. What is limiting this effect over the warm pool of the Pacific?" asked Young, a planetary scientist. He suggests that cloud cover may affect how much energy reaches or escapes Earth, or that the ocean and atmosphere may transport trapped energy away from the local hotspot. "If we can model the outgoing energy flux, then maybe we can begin to understand what limits sea surface temperature on Earth," he said. The Ames researchers are not the first to study the phenomenon, but no consensus has been reached regarding the energy turnover or the limitation of sea surface temperature. Rabbette analyzed clear-sky data above the tropical Pacific from March 2000 to July 2001. She determined that water vapor above 5 kilometers (3 miles) altitude in the atmosphere contributes significantly to the runaway greenhouse signature. She found that at 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) above the Pacific warm pool, the relative humidity in the atmosphere can be greater than 70 percent - more than three times the normal range. In nearby regions of the Pacific where the sea surface temperature is just a few degrees cooler, the atmospheric relative humidity is only 20 percent. These drier regions of the neighboring atmosphere may contribute to stabilizing the local runaway greenhouse effect, Rabbette said. It is important to note that the Ames team uses real climate information such as relative humidity and temperature–not hypothetical numbers–in the Moderate Resolution Atmospheric Radiative Transfer, or MODTRAN, modeling program. The program calculates how much energy escapes back to space from the top of Earth’s atmosphere. The researchers plan to experiment with the model to test the runaway greenhouse signature’s sensitivity to climate conditions. By varying the abundance of other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and by adding clouds in the model, they will see the overall effect on the outgoing energy. The model may help researchers uncover why Venus experienced a complete runaway greenhouse and lost its water over a period of several hundred million to a billion years. The research may also help determine which planets in the so-called ‘habitable zone’ of a solar system might lack water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it. Other social bookmarking and sharing tools: Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above. Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

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This is the second part of two posts examining how North Korea fell behind South Korea. The previous part can be found here. As the previous post found, for several decades North Korea kept up with South Korea. Then, during the mid-1970s, the country started falling behind. Ever since then the gap between the two countries has widened. This post will explore several factors behind what caused North Korea to fall behind. There seem to be three main causes: the failed ideology of juche (self-reliance), the end of Soviet aid, and Kim Jong-Il’s incompetent rule. If one looks at Gapminder’s graphic, North Korea and South Korea are neck-and-neck until the mid-1970s: Then North Korea falls behind: What caused this? Well, in 1972 North Korea adopted the ideology of juche into the constitution. Juche stands for self-reliance. There’s a lot of fancy Marxist philosophical complexity behind the idea, but in its essence it seems to be basically a fancy form of protectionism. Juche was very harmful to the North Korean economy. Here is North Korea before the official adaptation of juche: As is evident, North Korea was progressing during this period. This is not to say that juche wasn’t part of the state’s ideology in these years. Rather, it seems to have played less of a role. A description on this website provides a good description of the progress during this time: The 1954-56 three year plan repaired the massive damage caused by the war and brought industrial production back to prewar levels. This was followed by the five- year plan of 1957-61 and the seven year plan of 1961-67. These plans brought about further growth in industrial production and substantial development of state infrastructure. By the 1960s North Korea was the second most industrialized nation in East Asia, trailing only Japan. While a number of internal limitations appeared, such as in the production of consumer goods, the national standard of living was considered by many third-world nations as an alternative to the capitalist model of development sponsored by the United States. Building upon the ruins left by the Korean War, the North Korean economy by the late 1960s provided its people with medical care, universal education, adequate caloric intake, and livable housing. Here is what happens after the official adoption of juche: The website continues with a description of North Korea’s economic decline. I will quote the discussion in full because it’s quite comprehensive: In the 1970s the expansion of North Korea’s economy, with the accompanying rise in living standards, came to an end and a few decades later went into reverse. A huge increase in the price of oil following the oil shock of 1974 hurt the economies of countries throughout the world, North Korea among them. North Korea has no oil of its own, and it had few export commodities of interest to the west. Compounding this was a decision to borrow foreign capital and invest simultaneously in the military and mining industries. North Korea’s desire to gain as much independence as it could from China and Russia prompted the expansion of its military power. They believed such expenditures could be covered by foreign borrowing and increased sales of its minerals in the international market. North Korea invested heavily in its mining industries and purchased a large quantity of extractive machinery and tools from abroad. However, soon after making these investments, the international prices of for many of these minerals fell, leaving North Korea with large debts and an inability to pay off the debts and provide a high level of social welfare to its people. Adding to the above, the centrally planned economy, which emphasized heavy industry, had reached the limits of its productive potential in North Korea. Juche repeated demands that North Koreans learn to build and innovate domestically had run its course as had the ability of North Koreans to keep technological pace with other industrialized nations. By the mid to late-1970s some parts of the capitalist world, including South Korea, were advancing into new phases of technology and economic development and phasing out the coal-and-steel-based economies of the earlier period. Kim ll-sung, trapped in an ideology that had once been highly successful, was unable to respond effectively to the challenge of an increasingly prosperous and well-armed South Korea, which undermined the legitimacy of his own regime. Having failed at their earlier attempt to turn to the market and conduct market-economy reforms such as those carried out in China by Deng Xiaoping, Kim opted for continued ideological purity. The DPRK by 1980 was faced with the choice of either repaying its international loans, or continuing its support of social welfare for its people. Given the ideals of Juche, North Korea chose to default on its loans, and by late 1980s its industrial output was declining. One should note that the images above are models of North Korea’s economic path rather than based on North Korean statistics. Since North Korea doesn’t reveal its GDP, people have to make educated guesses. The people on Gapminder put North Korea as slightly wealthier than South Korea in 1944 and then modeled equal economic growth rates until the mid-1970s. At that point they put 0% GDP per capital growth to model North Korea’s stagnation during that period. Finally, they use slightly more accurate estimates after the fall of the Soviet Union to model North Korea’s famine and its most recent years. Nevertheless, these models are based off what happened in real life. It’s undeniable that North Korea was stagnating during the late ’70s and ’80s. It’s also undeniable that there was a famine during the late ’90s. So while the graphic isn’t perfect, it’s a decent representation of reality. The End of Soviet Aid Juche seems to have been the main turning point in North Korean economic history. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that there are in fact two “parts” of North Korean economic decline. The first part, during the late ’70s and 80s, is stagnation – when North Korea doesn’t go forward but doesn’t go backwards. The second part starts in the ’90s, when North Korea actually starts going backwards. What caused this? Well, for all of its economic history North Korea depended extensively on communist aid. The Soviets were determined to prove that their system was superior and, like the Americans, gave lots of aid to their allies. Eventually it turned out that their system was in fact not superior, and by the end the Soviet Union couldn’t really afford to give out that aid. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and all Soviet aid withdrew. This hit North Korea hard: In fact, it eventually created a famine. This graphic shows North Korea after the fall of the Soviet Union. This is the second part of the country’s economic decline, when it actually starts going backwards. Soviet aid was particularly important because the Soviet Union sold North Korea oil at low prices. North Korea’s inefficient economy and agricultural system depended badly on petroleum, but it couldn’t afford to buy petroleum at market prices. When the Soviets stopped giving North Korea oil, North Korea collapsed. Here’s a comparison with South Korea: Kim Jong-Il’s rule was incompetent and terrible for North Korea. Let’s take a look at North Korea under his father Kim Il-sung, until his death in 1994. We see progress throughout most of Kim Il-sung’s rule. During his final years, however, stagnation and finally decline sets in. Nevertheless, one could say that Kim Il-sung did good for North Korea. What happens under Kim Jong-Il? Decline. Indeed, there’s a startling coincidence between Kim Jong-Il’s path to power and North Korea’s economic decline. Kim Jong-Il began taking power during the 1980s. During that time North Korea is well into stagnation. He takes over the armed forces in 1991. North Korea then begins going backwards. His father dies in 1994, leaving him in absolute control. North Korea then suffers a famine from 1994 to 1998. Here’s North Korea and South Korea during Kim Jong-Il’s rule: It seems that there were three main events that caused North Korea’s economic decline: juche, the end of Soviet aid, and the incompetence of Kim Jong-Il. Juche turned economic growth into stagnation. The end of Soviet aid turned stagnation into absolute decline. This backwards path gained momentum as Kim Jong-Il gained power and ruled incompetently. North Korea’s tale is fairly unique. It’s the story of a country which achieved a decent standard of living and high industrialization under communism. Then the strains of the system became apparent, such as the overreliance on petroleum, and it eventually collapsed. This is why one hears of a lot of North Korean factories that used to work but now don’t. One hopes that the new leader Kim Jong-un will turn things around for his people.

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The mendelschen laws became in the 60's 19. Century of the scientifically interested Augustinermönch Gregor Mendel by crossing attempts at Erbsenpflanzen determines and ina first little considered publication formulated. Only over 1900 was confirmed these innovative realizations, brought with the Chromosomentheorie the transmission in connection and to the common property of the classical genetic science. Table of contents the mendelschen the laws or rules the discoveries Mendels is based on statisticValues. Therefore they are called frequently also rules, with the reason that laws - differently than rules - would apply without reservation. Nevertheless they are well-known in the vernacular also as “Mendel pea equation”. 1. mendelsches law (uniformity law and/or.Reciprocity) if two individuals of a kind (“parents “or Parentalgeneration P called) to be crossed with one another, in a characteristic, for which it pure-bend (homozygot) are, differ, then are the descendants of the first generation (“children” or first branch generation F1called) uniformly, i.e. both genotypisch and related to the phenotype directly. It is irrelevant, which represents the two individuals nut/mother or father. (Exception: The characteristic is on a Geschlechtschromosom (Gonosom). Then it can be that thoseF1 is not really uniform!) 2. mendelsches law (splitting law) is crossed if the first descendant generation among themselves, then the individuals of the second generation (“grandchild “or second branch generation, F2) are no longer uniform, but point again thoseCharacteristics of the parents generation in certain numerical ratios up. There the uniformity is lost - concerns it thereby dominance rezessive transmission, then three quarters form the dominant factor and a quarter the rezessive variant out (relationship of 3:1). - of the 1 points second ) generation with intermediate transmission per a quarter of the descendants one of the two pure-curved variants and half of the individuals. Generation on (relationship by 1:2: 1). 3. mendelsches law (independence law/new combination law) of two characteristics is separately from each other left, whereby starting from the 2. Generation (“grandchild”) new, pure-bends combinations to arise can. This law applies however then only if forthe characteristics responsible persons of genes on different Chromosomen sit (polyhybride hereditary courses). If the genes lie on the same Chromosomen, they are left in groups of couplings. Mendel could do neither the term of the genes nor that of the Chromosomen. The actual nature of the hereditary factors was thus not well-known it. Only 1904 became by Suez clay/tone andBoveri the Chromosomentheorie of the transmission justifies. With the help of this theory the Mendelregeln can be explained without contradiction. The Chromosomen are the units on those the hereditary factors (genes) to be passed on. (This explains the groups of couplings.) in the body cells the Chromosomen arise in pairs.Thus humans possess 23 Chromosomenpaare thus 46 Chromosomen. One speaks of a double Chromosomensatz. The Chromosomen are present in pairs in the body cell, because a Chromosom from the father and one from the nut/mother come. These two Chromosomen become also ashomologous Chromosomen designates. In a body cell the hereditary factors per characteristic are thus always doubly present. With the formation of the sex cells the homologous Chromosomenpaare is separated. In an egg and/or one Spermium is thus only the simple Chromosomensatz. In a sex cellthe hereditary factors per characteristic are thus always once present. (The splitting rule becomes so understandable.) with fertilization thus the fusion of egg and Spermium to bring both sex cells in each case a hereditary factor per characteristic also. The body cell resulting from this fusion has thusagain the double Chromosomensatz. The hereditary factors can so again be combined. (Independence rule, free combination of the genes) With large homogeneity of the genes of respective parents: If A is dominance, each combination, which at least one A contains, has the appropriate characteristicthe parents AA. If AA stands for example for red blooms, and BB for blue blooms, and the gene for red blooms dominance is, have all “children” from AA and BB red blooms, but a quarter of the “grandchildren” again blue blooms.If none of the genes dominates, also mixtures develop - in this case possibly for lila blooms with the combination OFF. If several genes on different Chromosomen result in together a characteristic, also completely new results can develop - for z. B. yellow blooms.The same applies to mutations. The use of this recombination - thus the sexual Vermehrung - lies in the fact that more different gene combinations contribute to the evolution. Without sexual Vermehrung there would be only to a large extent identical copies from each organism. With sexual Vermehrung it givesa high range at descendants, and thus at survival strategies and - possibilities. To it comes that errors or weaknesses in hereditary property with sexual Vermehrung very much uneven on descendants distributed are - so that some descendants of clearly fewer problems have than their parents,and thus a reconciliation for errors when copying the heiress formations is created. Finally the sexual Vermehrung makes possible the assumption of the best characteristics of two occasionally separate populations into a common population and concomitantly a faster appropriation of abilities, those elsewherebefore already developed. the mendelschen laws are used in particular in the animal and plant breeding, e.g. with the breed of hybrids. They can be used also for descending appraisals, e.g. in order to prove that did not determine humansas parents of a certain child are applicable. DNA. which by Mendels theory not be explained could, became only understandably because of the Chromosomentheorie of the transmission. The genes for for example the stature height and fruit form of the tomatoes(A/a and/or. B/b) lie on the same Chromosom and therefore coupled to the germ cells are passed on. The germ cells can contain then only the combination OFF or off, not however off or off. 3. mendelsche rule must be limited therefore: Alleles are freely combinable, if the genes lie on different Chromosomen. - H. Frederik Nijhout: The context macht's! Spektrum der Wissenschaft, April 2005, S. 70 - 77 (2005), ISSN 1702971 - biology book six-form high school Baden-Wuerttemberg class 9-10. thus “everything” is written. (above in the text with reference)

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