Spring is rapidly proceeding across the country, with high temperatures still breaking records in much of the northern US. Here in the Rockies plants are blooming an average of 2-4 weeks earlier than normal. The dry La Nina winter has been warm and dry in the Colorado Front Range, leading to a series of fires this last week and early but not lush vegetation growth. Black bears are already coming out of hibernation! Just this last week tulips, grape hyacinths and other garden bulbs have started flowering, green ashes are in bloom now and crabapples and plums are covered with white or pinkish blooms. Forsythia is in full bloom now. All are about 3 weeks early this year. We are having day after day of temperatures in the 70's or even 80's, whereas normal is closer to 50-60 degrees.
Cherry Blossom Blitz: Reports are beginning to trickle in of chokecherries, sweet cherries, and Japanese cherries beginning to bud out or to bloom, first in the south, but more in northern areas as well. In my yard the sweet cherries and the chokecherries have swelling buds this week. Every day new plants become active -- its the best time of the year to be watching plants!
Phenology in the Garden
This time of the year, as garden soils are thawing out, and budding plants are everywhere it's a good time to consider another value to knowing when plants start budding out or sending out their first flowers. Phenology is an ancient science, and was practiced long before there was much scientific understanding of what clues plants use to determine when to start their spring growth. For early agriculturists it was a matter of survival. Phenology was used to determine when to plant crops, and to time other activities on farms or ranches.
For gardeners and homeowners today phenology can be used to determine when to start various treatments in lawns or gardens, and are much more accurate than using some general date on the calendar. For example when Forsythia is in bloom is often used to indicate when to start worrying about treating weed seeds in lawns. Soils need to reach about 35 degrees before seeds of lettuce and onion may be expected to germinate. This temperature can be determined by which species of wildflower are active. Flowering of dandelions can be used to estimate this time period. Some other examples of how phenology can be used in the garden:
plant potatoes when dandelions are in bloom
transplant melons and peppers when irises are in bloom
plant tomatoes when lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis) is in full bloom.
Of course like a lot of hints provided to complex phenomena in nature the devil is in the details. These rules of thumb vary depending on where you live, and the specifics of your home or garden. But you can see that if you keep careful records on the phenology of your garden as well as wilder places around you, you can develop your own rules for when to do various tasks in the yard or garden. As our weather and climate continues to gyrate wildly from year to year these clues may become a lot more useful than the typical generic guidelines you see in gardening publications.
Project Budburst is all about becoming closely connected with and in touch with your local environment. This knowledge can have practical advantages too!
More examples of garden phenology


Ps Kul Bal illustrates humorously some of the characteristics of faithful people on the example of Peter and John, healing the lame man, in Acts chapter 3.
Text: Acts 3: 1-10 "One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon.Now a man who was lame from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts.When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money.Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, “Look at us!”So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them.Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”Taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong.He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God.When all the people saw him walking and praising God,they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at the temple gate called Beautiful, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.


Eighty percent of the tea drunk in the U.S. is bottled tea, meant to be served cold.
Who invented iced tea?
It’s possible that centuries ago, some wealthy* person (or servant) in the tea-growing nations of Ceylon, China, India or Japan may have taken some ice from the ice-house to cool down a cup of hot tea.
If it ever happened, the practice didn’t take hold, and no old recipes exist for it.
Iced Tea Enters The Recipe Books
We don’t know who made the first iced tea, but we can approximate when it happened.
The oldest known recipe for “sweet ice tea” (with lots of sugar) was published in 1879, in a community cookbook called “Housekeeping in Old Virginia” by Marion Cabell Tyree.
The recipe calls for green tea, which was popular in the Colonies (Benjamin Franklin mentions it in his autobiography) before falling out of favor—likely because milk and sugar, the popular accompaniments, taste better in black tea.
There’s also a newspaper clipping recounting the menu served at the 1890 Missouri State Reunion of Ex-Confederate Veterans, which included iced tea.
What you’ll most likely find in books and online is that iced tea was inadvertently “invented” in St. Louis at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (often called the 1904 World’s Fair, but that term was not yet in use).
As the story goes, Richard Blechynden, a tea merchant, was having limited success getting people to taste his hot tea in the intense summer heat and humidity of St. Louis. He had the idea to add ice into the tea, thus creating a refreshing, cool drink.
Blechynden is sometimes referred to as a tea plantation owner, but in fact, he was an Englishman employed as the India Tea Commissioner. He headed an initiative, begun in 1896, to publicize the black teas of India and Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) to Americans.
According to TeaUSA.org, Blechynden and his tea samples were in the elaborately designed India pavilion. When he realized that it was too hot to get the crowds to taste free samples of his hot tea, Blechynden and his team did something ingenious.
They didn’t toss ice into the tea, as is commonly written. Instead, they created a cooling apparatus, filling several large bottles with brewed tea and placing the bottles upside-down on a stand that allowed the tea to flow through iced lead pipes, emerging chilled.
The “iced” tea was a hit at the fair, and a real boon to India tea awareness. After the fair, Blechynden took the lead pipe apparatus to New York City, offering free iced tea to shoppers at Bloomingdale Brothers’ department store.
Green Tea Fades Away…For 80 Years
Word spread, and iced black tea became a popular summertime drink. It led to recipes for tea punch, which included simple syrup, fruit juices (cherry, grape, lemon, orange and/or pineapple), lemon and/or orange slices, maraschino cherries, fresh mint and canned or preserved fruits.
Blechynden’s efforts also raised the popularity of black tea as a hot drink. Interest in green tea faded—except to those who visited Japanese restaurants beginning around 1970—until the health-conscious 1990s.
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Beardsley (1872 – 1898) was an English artist and illustrator of the Aesthetics movement, the British equivalent of the European Decadent movement, and was one of the artists whose work went on to inspire the art nouveau movement.
"I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing."
Aubrey Beardsley died very young at the age of 26 from tuberculosis, and was only artistically active for a period of around 6 years, though was very prolific during that time.
Aubrey Beardsley's distinctive style is characterized by its simple graceful lines in black ink and with high contrasts. Large areas of Beardsley's drawings would be blacked out where others would be left a blank white. Though not only did Beardsley contrast light and dark but also high detail and stark bareness. His female figures were normally tall graceful and powerful woman, whereas his rarer male figures were comparatively diminutive and grotesque.
Beardsley's emphasis on erotic art is present in many of his later drawings, but most famous were his illustrations for Lysistrata and Oscar Wilde's Salome. Beardsley's style is often compared to Japanese Shunga which no doubt inspired him. Though the story of Lysistrata does include the theme of grossly engorged genitals, the enormous genitals in his ink drawings for Lysistrata were a common theme in Shunga art.
Lysistrata was a Greek comedy written in 411BC by Aristophanes. The story line revolves around the women of Greece attempting to bring a peaceful end to the Peloponnesian War by depriving their partners of sex until they agreed to end the war peacefully. Beardsely's drawings show men of the war with enormously engorged penises due to their wives' chastity.
These erotic drawings, among many others, were considered too obscene for polite society, which even Aubrey Beardsley himself accepted in the end. One of his last acts after converting to Catholicism was to plead with his publisher to "destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings...by all that is holy all obscene drawings." His publisher, Leonard Smithers, not only ignored Beardsley wishes, but continued to sell reproductions and outright forgeries of Beardsley's work.


He Had A Hunch Something Was Hidden, So He Takes Out Metal Detector, Finds Rare Black Box
Wouldn't it be cool to be an archeologist? If you have ever found yourself dreaming of finding treasures in the Earth, you can live vicariously through Dr. Tones in Dirt Fishin’ America. He had a hunch something was hidden, so he took out his metal detector and finds a rare black box. In the short video featured on All Tips Ideas, we see the people in Dirt Fishin' America pull several interesting artifacts out of the ground. With metal detectors and digging tools in hand, they head off to ghost towns and surrounding areas where camps were set up to find items that may have been left behind. Sometimes they find something quite big like the black box from Boise, Idaho. These black boxes were given to people by banks who wanted their business. People would store their money in the locked black box and then take it to the bank to deposit it. The black box was found by one of the guys in Dirt Fishin' America and it was a nice piece of history for them to find. They were also able to find an old Chinese coin and a weight for a scale, perhaps to weigh out the gold that had been found in the area.
When it comes to waste and recycling, junk metal can stay in the ground for decades, if not centuries. It takes a very long time for metal to decay, and so it would be better off recycled into something else so it can be used. There are many ways to recycle metals. You can take them into a metal worker who could possibly use it for a project, or, you could perhaps use it for a project yourself. For items like the ones that they are finding, you could try bringing them into local antique collectors or museums to display for others to look at and potentially purchase. Often antique dealers will pay for the treasures that are found, but it's more often a donation when dealing with a museum. You can always keep your own personal collection to enjoy as well. Waste and recycling methods will usually take waste materials and melt them down into their original form and then add it to other similar metals to make new items. Copper, silver and gold are the most sought after metals and some people specifically only search for precious metals or scrap metals to sell them for a profit.
If you would like to try your hand at Dirt Fishin' you could pick up your very own metal detector and get to work, just like Dr. Tones and his crew. It could be one of the new, fun activities to do in your area and find out about your local history in a hands-on way. Other activities to do could be to mine for crystals and semiprecious stones like quartz or amethyst. Sometimes there is a little mine that is open to the public where people can dig for the crystals and then pay for them after. Some people just find out where there could be deposits of stones or artifacts and head out with their tools to find some treasure. The equipment isn't too expensive to purchase either, so if you want to pick up a new hobby, this could be it. Plus, you get to enjoy lots of time outdoors enjoying the sights and sounds of nature. Enjoy watching the video form Dr. Tones YouTube channel and watch some of their other videos if you're interested. Check out other great news stories as well as diy ideas and much more on All Tips Ideas.***
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Born on December 10th, 1830, Emily Dickinson was a prolific and reclusive poet whose writing ranged from descriptive and observational to introspective and theoretical and touched on themes of flowers, death, and religion. Though very few of her works circulated during her life, over 1,800 poems hand-bound into “fascicles” were discovered in her room after her death. These pieces had unique punctuation and were unbound and arranged chronologically for their first publication, with standardized punctuation added to replace the dashes Dickinson frequently used. However, several researchers have worked to reconstruct the original fascicles and republish Dickinson’s poems with the original punctuation. Dickinson had a profound influence on poetry through her work and is considered alongside Walt Whitman as the founder of “a uniquely American poetic voice.”
This image come from A Pocket Book of Modern Verse in Gwendolyn Brooks’ personal library. Brooks, herself an influential and acclaimed poet, made extensive annotations in most books that she read. This was especially true for works of poetry, in which Brooks would go so far as to rewrite lines in her own and other writers’ poems in the margins. Dickinson, however, seems to have held a special place in her eyes, and her annotations are highly complementary, even going so far as to call A Bird Came Down the Walk a “perfect poem.”
 “Emily Dickinson,” Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/emily-dickinson.


Lecture date: 20 Sep 2011
De Waal argues that morality is older than religion. All religion did was appropriate innate human nature. Among people who do not believe in evolution, many contest this view. In the US, where De Waal now lives, Creationists believe that God created man, and that we only have morality because of God. Even some American scientists claim that Moral Law cannot be explained and will never be explained by evolutionary biology.
This does not prevent Social Darwinists from applying so-called Darwinist ideas (survival of the fittest) to society: “if you can’t afford it, tough.” But De Waal argues that the approach of these Social Darwinists is incorrect: it does not correctly reflect either what Darwin proved or our true nature as humans. If our ancestors had not cooperated millions of years ago, we would not be where we are today.
Since Darwin, the morality debate has divided the world of biology into two camps: cooperation – the outcome of natural selection – is seen as a result either of being nasty by nature or of being innately social. The Veneer Theory (the accepted Darwinist view from the 1970s until 2000) argues that morality is a departure from nature, uniquely human and calculated. Humans are fundamentally nasty at the core with a moral veneer. Morality is all about the pay-off, altruism is hypocritical and the key question is “What’s in it for me?”
De Waal used a Monty Python sketch from the 1970s to illustrate this view, which he considers narrow and outdated. For example, science now proves (through brain scans) that humans derive pleasure from merely anticipating helping others. This would appear to suggest that we are somehow pre-programmed to reach out to others, which leads us to the second theory: Evolved Morality. Darwin and De Waal believe that morality is a product of evolution, continuous with other animals and emotionally based. Humans are fundamentally social animals with innate morality. Since 2000, Darwinists view humans as super-cooperators.
To illustrate his findings, De Waal shared some findings of his research, starting with the position of humans in the evolutionary chain. Humans descend from a long line of group-living primates. DNA now proves we are more closely related to chimpanzees than gorillas. However, most scientists still prefer to believe otherwise. Is it because they are uncomfortable about the aggressive side of chimpanzees? This is also portrayed in popular culture – take the recent blockbuster Planet of the Apes. De Waal points out that although chimps do fight and kill each other, they also reconcile (and need eye contact during reconciliation just like humans); they care for each other in social groups; they laugh and use facial expressions (the subject of De Waal’s first book in 1982, Chimpanzee Politics) in much the same way that we do; and like humans and other apes, they commonly show empathy.
Empathy starts with synchronisation, which is ancient and exists throughout nature: fish do it, birds do it and humans do it. We are the most synchronised beings on earth – dancing, walking, even following our leaders. Yawn contagion exists in humans and chimps, and yawning is related to empathy. Psychology (one of the subjects De Waal teaches) tends to view empathy one-sidedl, while De Waal sees empathy as the synchronisation of two channels: the primary/emotional channel (we mirror another’s physical behavior, sad/sad, happy/happy, cry/cry – human babies do this from birth) and the cognitive channel (perspective taking, self/other distinction, and the ability to offer consolation).
Like humans, chimps recognise themselves in a mirror. But is this true of other empathic animals? Elephants display strong prosocial behavior, as a film of adult elephants rescuing a stranded baby elephant proved. So De Waal introduced an elephant to an appropriately elephant-size mirror and proved that elephants recognise themselves too. What does this tell us? that empathy and self-recognition go together and result in smart responses: doing the right thing in the right circumstances.
Another experiment with elephants showed that they work together and freeload, again similar to humans. Research conducted 10 years ago with Capuchin monkeys revealed that they are sensitive to fairness. If a pair of monkeys working on the same task were rewarded differently, they protested. Inequity aversion (an irrational/emotional reaction once believed unique to humans) is sensitivity to effort. Through his research, de Waal has proved that morality (reconciliation, empathy and consolation, self-awareness, altruism, cooperation and reciprocity, and fairness) comes naturally to a great variety of animals, including humans.
His conclusion: Darwin was right. Morality is deeply seated in primates. It is emotionally driven, involving ancient brain areas and gut feeling. Fairness and justice are innate to humans, and we developed morality as a means of survival.
Download the interview (mp3)
About the speaker
Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal is a Dutch/American biologist and primatologist known for his work on the behavior and social intelligence of primates. His first book, Chimpanzee Politics (1982), compared the schmoozing and scheming of chimpanzees involved in power struggles with that of human politicians. His scientific work has been published in hundreds of technical articles in journals such as Science, Nature, Scientific American, and onther publications specialised in animal behaviour.
His popular books — translated into many languages — have made him one of the world’s most visible primatologists. His latest books are Our Inner Ape (2005, Riverhead) and The Age of Empathy (2009, Harmony). De Waal is C. H. Candler Professor in the Psychology Department of Emory University and Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Center, in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (US), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. In 2007, he was selected by Time as one of The Worlds’ 100 Most Influential People Today, and in 2011 by Discover as among 47 (all time) Great Minds of Science.


Gung Hay Fat Choy or best wishes for a prosperous new year! Chinese New Year is one of the most important holidays for the Chinese people and it is marked with many traditions. I learned a great deal about these traditions and the festivities surrounding the holiday while living and teaching in Singapore. The island was transformed during the holiday with many festivals, food stalls and lion dancing performances.
In 2017, Chinese New Year begins on January 28th and it is the year of the rooster. The holiday begins on the first day of the first month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar and lasts for 15 days ending with a Lantern Festival. Chinese New Year signals the end of winter and the start of the spring season. Lion dancing is a traditional part of the New Year festivities and is believed to bring happiness and luck. I learned from my colleagues at Singapore American School how to incorporate the rich tradition of lion dancing into my music classroom and I have always found that children embrace the music and dancing of this wonderful celebration.
A few years ago I wrote an article for Virginia Music Educators magazine regarding the holiday celebration as well as a very detailed lesson plan. Click here and scroll to p. 51 to download a pdf of the lesson!.
Enjoy this very special Lion Dance.


Reading this, I’m fascinated by the use of a cloud chamber as a conceptual analogy for Abstract
Expressionism. I am also interested in the idea of a scientific demonstration to illustrate the work of an artist.
‘In discussing the action paintings of Jackson Pollock, Brad (a student) set up a visual and conceptual analogy through performance art. Constructing a cloud chamber as it is used in a physics laboratory to track the movement of sub-atomic particles being released from small amounts of radioactive material, he placed an isotope (radium) upon the head of a pin. Imbedded in a cork, the pin was suspended in the cloud chamber below a small piece of alcohol-soaked cloth. Brad sealed the cloud chamber onto a metal plate, which was then placed on a block of dry ice. Next, the intensified light of a slide projector was projected though the chamber. The alcohol condensed and formed a cloud layer over the cold metal plate. As subatomic particles dispersed from the isotope and passed through the cloud, they created additional condensation through their paths, thus making their movement visible. Brad’s non-art gesture in the art history class provided a metaphor by which to understand Pollock’s dynamic movement and drips of paint as an entropic process where matter is continually dispersed in nature.’
‘Brad’s use of a cloud chamber from the physics laboratory to reveal particle dispersion as a metaphor of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings… represent examples of live conundrums…‘
The word entropy and it’s usage here is the most interesting to me. The word itself can have many meanings. I would say the meaning here is:
(A British Dictionary definition) A lack of pattern or organization; disorder
- (on a macroscopic scale) a function of thermodynamic variables, as temperature, pressure, or composition, that is a measure of the energy that is not available for work during a thermodynamic process. A closed system evolves toward a state of maximum entropy.
- (in statistical mechanics) a measure of the randomness of the microscopic constituents of a thermodynamic system. Symbol: S.
(in data transmission and information theory) a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message.
(in cosmology) a hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity in which all matter is at a uniform temperature (heat death)
a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.
Since Pollock learnt to ‘curveball his drips’ – he had a control over his paintings – they were visually chaotic to the untrained eye, but, I assume, to him, he could describe every choice and mark he made. This, again, reminds me of Joyce describing ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ – Despite Joyce’s revolutionary techniques, the author repeatedly emphasized that the book was neither random nor meaningless; with Ellmann quoting the author as having stated: “I can justify every line of my book.”
Then, we see this quote from Pollock himself:
With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don’t use – I don’t use the accident – ’cause I deny the accident.. ..it’s quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I’m about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it’s direct.
“William Rubin: ‘Actually, Pollock’s work was incredibly, highly controlled. And it took him years to perfect the technique’…’People might say: ‘Anyone can pour paint,’ well that might be true. But, anyone can go up to a piano and push the note ‘c,’ and your ‘c’ will be as good as Rubinstein’s or Horowitz’s. And by the same token, if you spill a little paint, that’s going to be as good as Pollock’s for just that little spill. What makes Horowitz, or Rubinstein is the succession of accents, and the control and and interrelations of these accents as they come one after another. That is what we call the ‘touch’ of the pianist. But the (single) ‘tone’ is the same for you and for Pollock’…”
I’m interested about this. All I would say is a pianist has to learn to sight read, and play something that is already set accurately. I could write a piece, and hear someone play it to me, and know when a wrong note has been played. It wouldn’t just be me who could distinguish that a ‘wrong note’ had been played – it would be most musicians with well-trained ears.
Could we have put Pollock to the test to see if his drips were really incredibly ‘controlled?’ If he, indeed, could ‘flick paint with the accuracy of a cowboy with a lasso’ – we could have him set the positions on a large canvas and ask him to drop the paint in these small places. Pollock would ‘pre-set’ these positions, then paint them in order. I feel like I’d be doing a sort of James Randi test on Pollock!
This would be a move towards a truer equivalence between sight reading and Abstract Expressionism.
Is it a false equivocation? You could say one is particularly disciplined, with each note being played back perfectly – modern art is a relaxation of the idea that you need to ‘learn a craft with vigorous discipline over decades’… Hmm……
Perhaps I’m wrong! I’m just thinking about it…


Before I did this weeks readings for ECI831, I knew of such a thing as copyright laws, but I never fully understood the way they were. After hearing about copyright laws and seeing how Girl Talks’ experiences with fighting them, I really began thinking. My first thought was really….is this actually a super big deal if they want to share ideas and mash up. It seems so creative to me. My thought was as long as they give credit to the past, is it a big deal? Then the fact was brought up about money and intellectual property. How people want others to pay for the use of their “original” idea. Are the precious songs or material actually original or were they inspired by something else in the past? I can see both sides of the argument. Many people work very hard to produce their own materials and do not see any profit from their work. While the other side of Aaron Schult’s argument is we should share and connect to help grow our world.
So what does this mean for me as a teacher? Have I broken some copyright rules without even knowing? Then I wanted to do a bit of research to see. I came across this website on the Councils of Ministers of Education Canada. It has a couple brief slides discussing copyright and teachers. It gives a nice overview on what teachers can do.
After reading about Creative Commons, I thought how cool. I love how a person can customize their copyright licence and share their materials the way they want. I had no idea that creative commons did anything like that. I think introducing these things to students is a great plan to explain to them about plagiarism and giving credit where it is due.


Here’s a slightly more impressive math card trick than yesterday. Start with a full deck of 52 cards [or, rather, start with any 52 cards -- it's not a problem if they come from a mixture of decks]. Give the deck to a Volunteer to shuffle, and afterwards have the Volunteer take the top 12 cards and give you the rest. Sometime during the next step you should sneak a peek at what the bottom card is in the rest-of-the deck. This can best be done by holding your hand casually so the bottom card is face-up enough for you to see, but it looks like you’re just holding them up before placing them down at the end of the next step.
The Volunteer should then look at their 12 cards, not showing them to you, and pick any four of them. [This is a good time to be glancing at the bottom card in the pile you hold in your hand!] Those four get laid face-up in four separate piles on the table, and the poor unchosen eight get put face down in another pile. You put the rest of the deck on top of that pile.
Now think a moment, perhaps idly shuffling the top bunch of cards in the pile [just not the bottom 9], and say that you are going to have the Volunteer lay out some cards and you will predict the last one. Concentrate, and then write the name of the bottom card that you so sneakily looked at before on a slip of paper, fold it before the Volunteer can read it, and give it to the Volunteer for safekeeping. Also give the Volunteer the remaining pile of 48 cards.
Now the Volunteer should look at each of the face-up cards, start with that number, and place cards face-down on each while counting up to 10. For example, if one of the cards is a 7 then the Volunteer would place 3 cards face-down on top, counting “8, 9, 10″. Picture cards count as 10 already, so no cards would be placed on top of those. Be sure that you can still see the original face-up cards.
When all four face-up cards have piles on them, have the Volunteer add the values of the face-up cards. For example, if the cards were a 7, a King, an ace, and a 4 then the total would be 7+10+1+4=22. The Volunteer should count off that many cards face-down from the top of the remaining deck, and then turn over the very last card (the 22nd card, in the case above). Have the Volunteer then look at the folded paper that you wrote on earlier, and Lo and Behold you’ve predicted that very card! Woo hoo!
Like yesterday’s trick, this one is a variation from card-trick.com. Thanks site!


Weight Loss and Nutrition
Morbid obesity is the most dangerous form of obesity. In addition to being life threatening and causing possible invalidity these sufferers also have to deal with the social aspect. A majority of cases are due to social behaviour and a lack of education on alimentation.
Most cases are due to the ingestion of ´fast food´, high in calories and salt.
Lack of exercise is also a key factor in morbid obesity. Hormonal imbalance also plays its part, particularly thyroid problems.


Depending upon cause and pattern in which the bone breaks, fractures have been classified into different categories. Not only this helps physicians to communicate better but also to plan the treatment and gauge the prognosis. Today we would discuss open and closed fractures.
Fractures could be either closed fractures or open fractures. These were previously called simple or compound fractures.
A simple fracture by definition, is the one where the fracture hematoma does not communicate with the surroundings.
What does that mean?
It means that the blood that is collected after the fracture is collected in the closed space formed by tissues around the bone and is not communicating with external environment. But if the same fracture is accompanied by a external wound which is continuous with the fracture hematoma (means the fracture hematoma is no more closed, it can communicate to exterior now because the tissues surrounding have also been injured and allow a passage to be formed where blood can trickle to outside.
A mere presence of a wound does not make a fracture an open fracture. There should be some continuity between this wound and fracture inside. However, that needs a trained eye to differentiate between the two.
For all practical purposes, all fractures with a wound over the skin should be treated as open fractures, unless proved otherwise.
In a similar fashion, a fracture may also communicate with the internal cavity, such as abdomen. These are also called open fractures. It commonly happens in fracture of pelvic bones.
There are two ways in which a fracture might become open fracture. Either the trauma, usually high velocity may damage the external tissue that surrounds the bone and lay a path for communication. This commonly happens in missile injuries or high velocity trauma.
In other case, the spikes of broken bone may pierce the skin and other tissues from inside and lay a communication path.
A open fracture may have a wound size ranging from a pin prick to complete baring of the bone. Open injuries have been further classified according to their severity and helps the treating doctor to plan the treatment and measure the prognosis.
Do not get deceived by the size of the wound accompanying the fracture. All open injuries, whether a prick or bigger wound, by all means are surgical emergencies in contrast to closed where only a few are surgical emergencies and can be managed for sometime just by splinting.After providing primary splintage, these patients should be rushed to nearby trauma center/ hospital where proper management can be done.
Remember! Earlier you take these patients to the hospital, better it would be for them.
Until there is a severe soft tissue loss, most of the open fractures have a fate that is almost equivalent to their closed counterparts. But because it is open, there would be increased chances of contamination and infection.
That is why they are the surgical emergencies.
Terms open and closed are also used in dislocations of the joint and impart similar meaning like open fractures and closed fractures.
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What is PBIS?Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS) is a systems approach to enhancing the capacity of schools to support and educate ALL STUDENTS. It is a proactive approach to school-wide discipline that is based on three levels of prevention/intervention to address the needs of all students. PBIS is not a curriculum, intervention, or practice, but rather a framework or approach for assisting school personnel in adopting and organizing evidence-based behavioral interventions into an integrated continuum that enhances academic and social behavior outcomes for all students.
Mission:The mission of the Dunleith PBIS team is to foster and promote a safe and positive school environment that enhances student learning through teaching and recognizing positive behavior.
- The staff of Dunleith Elementary School believes that students learn best in a structured, orderly environment.
We further believe that the education of the child is the responsibility of the school with the support of the parents.
Therefore, students are expected to conduct themselves in a manner which is conducive to learning and in a manner that does not interfere with the teacher's right to teach or other students' right to learn.
We believe, through self-discipline, students learn to accept responsibility for their decisions and the resulting consequences.
OverviewPositive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is an evidence-based, data-driven framework proven to reduce disciplinary incidents, increase a school’s sense of safety and support improved academic outcomes. More than 19,000 U.S. schools are implementing PBIS and saving countless instructional hours otherwise lost to discipline.The premise of PBIS is that continual teaching, combined with acknowledgement or feedback of positive student behavior will reduce unnecessary discipline and promote a climate of greater productivity, safety and learning. PBIS schools apply a multi-tiered approach to prevention, using disciplinary data and principles of behavior analysis to develop school-wide, targeted and individualized interventions and supports to improve school climate for all students. (OSEP Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports, 2009)


We Are Here
Over the past 500 years, the U.S. and other colonial powers committed genocide in an attempt to steal Indigenous lands and resources.
However, Indigenous people triumphed over this unimaginable violence. Today, 18 tribes reside in North and South Carolina. North Carolina has the most Indigenous people east of the Mississippi River. We honor and respect the diverse Indigenous peoples who had intimate and respectful relationships with the lands on which we gather.
Indigenous Land Relationships in the Carolinas
An Interactive Audio Tour created by Quinn Smith through the Equity Through Stories Program
This tour features short audio recordings of Indigenous people telling their own stories connected to their relationship with the land.
Jump to another point in the tour:
- A Living Land Acknowledgement
- Common Misconceptions
- What is Nature?
- The Meherrin’s Medicines
- The Four Sacred Herbs
- Indigenous Medicinal Plants
- Pine Needle Art: Vickie’s Story
- Who Owns Seeds?
- Listen to the World Speak
- Indigenous Fire Practices
- How to Support Indigenous Peoples
- The Story of the White Corn
- Why the Leaves Change Color
- The Story of the Three Sisters
- Growing up in Hillsborough, 1940s
- Rethinking Traditional Plants
About Quinn Smith, Jr.
Quinn is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, majoring in public policy with a documentary studies certificate. As a documentarian, Quinn strives to challenge our misconceptions of Indigenous people by documenting a long-silenced, shared humanity.
What drew Quinn to the Equity through Stories Program was the ability to uplift Indigenous truths and to forge reciprocal relationships with Indigenous people throughout the Carolinas. Quinn does this by interviewing Indigenous people about their relationships with the land and weaving their stories into audio documentaries to be exhibited at the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants. He also initiates seed-sharing and other reciprocal ventures between Indigenous peoples and Blomquist Gardens. Quinn hopes that his work will help to re-educate Duke Garden’s 500,000+ annual visitors and to create a healing space for Indigenous people.


RELATED TERMS: Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet)
“the world has always been in the middle of things in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives.” (Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters)
Meir Sternberg (1992) counts Aristotle as taking the earliest and least explicit, but possibly the least unreasonable, anti-chronological position on narrative. This is due to his subordination of events to effects. Aristotle’s Poetics views the arrangement of events in functional terms, as a means to an end, or, more properly, in teleological terms: poetic ends determine or explain means, so as to inform their form. This teleo-logic runs all the way through from Aristotle’s universals of art to his plot rules and variables, silently incorporating temporal (dis)order.
Thus, at the most general level of teleology, the definition of art as mimesis finds its rationale for Aristotle in the universal pleasure felt in things imitated. As Aristotle’s argument descends from art through literary narrative or fiction to tragedy, it progressively refers specific forms and options of mimesis to their specific informing pleasurable effects, kinds of structure to kinds of pleasure, such as unity, surprise, catharsis.
Two of those steps, which concern the relation between chronology and teleology, bear further examination. The first lies within the arrangement of the “whole” (holos); and the second lies within the disarrangements open to “plot” (mythos).
The analysis of action outlined in the Poetics, starts by deriving the need for events to form a “whole”, which is marked by its beginning-to-middle-to-end (chrono-)logical concatenation, from the law of poetic unity. The whole will then cohere as a necessary or probable sequence between well-defined poles of human fortune and experience.
Aristotle’s “wholeness” opposes poetic structure to the mere alignment of events in history writing (chronicle, biography), with its allegedly misguided equivalents in history-like epic, because they abandon the chrono-logic of action for the chronology of an era, a life, or some other time-span covered in serial fashion to yield a “sum” or “total” of episodes.
For Aristotle, then, the opposition of integrative “whole” to additive “sum” in event linkage is all the more principled and value-laden because it ranges from the shape of chronology (tight versus loose) to its intelligibility (universal versus particular), from formal and perceptual aesthetics to ontological sense and coherence.
The next step advances from “whole” toward “plot,” no longer uniform but multiform in sequence and, ideally, even disordered for a time out of wholeness, again on poetic grounds.
Chrono-logic bends, temporarily at least, in response to a stronger, more determinate teleo-logic. Since tragedy and high epic aim for pity and fear, such effects are best produced when the events come on the reader/audience by surprise. Given this demand for surprise, the “whole” action needs to be “complicated”, i.e. in effect dechronologised, into “plot”, by way of discovery and/or reversal (Sternberg, 1992: 476).
The “complex” plot outranks the “simple” plot for Aristotle not because it breaks or deforms the natural temporality that the other preserves, but because its broken temporality best serves, indeed maximizes, the effect common to both types as tragic plots: catharsis.
Like the fiat of chrono-logising the action, the recommended dechrono-logising of the actual dramatic or epic presentation serves a purpose beyond itself: the teleology remains in control across forms and levels of sequence.
To become viable, indeed a virtue or a clear gain, disordering in these mimetic genres must involve the twisting of the “whole” into complex “plot” movement in the service of determinate and determinative tragic ends: catharsis, above all.
While the Aristotelian argument for the complex plot may well be found wanting, its logic may not. The positive thrust of this (teleo)logic culminates in the recommendation of deformed-and-reformed sequence for intensity. Given the first premise, all the rest follows by a long chain of reasoning from desired poetic end to necessary or contributory means: from pity and fear to surprise effect; from there to discovery (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia); and from there to the twisting or “complication” of the chrono-logical “whole” (holos) into (de-chrono-logised) optimal “plot” (mythos).
Thus, as Meir Sternberg (1992: 479) explains the matter, the key antithesis for Aristotle’s conception of narrative is that between the chrono-logical “whole” (holos) and the optimal “plot” (mythos), the former twisted or “complicated” into the latter to form a complex plot, which is Aristotle’s preference because it better delivers, through plot surprise, the required effect upon the audience, ultimately catharsis.
Sternberg (1992: 481) notes that it is Aristotelian wholes that “begin at the beginning,” not plots. Plots may begin anywhere. Indeed, plots should preferably begin at a point later than the chronological beginning. This assists in developing both complexity and compactness. Furthermore, Sternberg continues, Horace’s in medias res originally urges the epic poet to select a coherent action, for example, that of The Iliad, from a loose extra-literary chronicle, for example, the Trojan War. The Horatian advice, then, bears on the ordering of the whole into unity, not on its disordering into late-before-early plot. It therefore derives, rather than diverges, from Aristotle.
Sternberg, M. (1992). Telling in time (II): chronology, teleology, narrativity. Poetics Today, 13 (3), 463–541. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772872 [Accessed 24 June 2016].


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Convert from/to decimal, hexadecimal, octal and binary. Binary Number conversion. Here is the answer to the question: Convert binary number. This is the C Program I have written to convert a Decimal number to it's equivalent Binary. Decimal To Binary conversion using. should I be now offered option. Nov 29, 2017. Knowledge Base.
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With more and more of us using our mobiles, tablets and computers on a daily basis, it also seems that vision-related problems are on the rise. Although researchers suggest that staring at screens won’t cause permanent damage, frequent use can exacerbate problems with eyesight, from eye strain to more severe conditions such as presbyopia.
What is presbyopia?
Presbyopia is an age-related long-sightedness caused by the thickening and loss of elasticity of the lens of the eye. The onset of presbyopia normally comes from around 40 years of age and unlike environmental-related conditions, it cannot be prevented.
It’s believed that presbyopia is caused by the proteins in our lens breaking down through age, hardening the lens and reducing elasticity. These problems extend to the surrounding muscle tissues, which makes it harder for the eye to focus close up.
As we are more heavily reliant on screens for general reading and day to day tasks, it could be that conditions such as presbyopia are being exacerbated. Worldwide, around 1 billion people suffer from presbyopia, however research from the World Health Organization has predicted that 1.4 billion people worldwide suffering from presbyopia by 2020, to 1.8 billion people by 2050.
How presbyopia affects everyday life
For those of us who frequently use screens, symptoms may include:
- Eye discomfort or strain (ESI)
- Itchy eyes
- Dry or watering eyes
- Burning sensations
- Changes in colour perception
- Blurred vision
- Difficulty focusing
These symptoms are similar to those of presbyopia – people may develop eye strain, headaches, feel fatigued or unable to focus when performing close up work. Those who don’t get the suitable treatment for presbyopia and continue to frequently use screens, could be increasing their impaired vision.
Vision correction for presbyopia
Uncorrected presbyopia can greatly affect the quality of an individual’s everyday life. However your optician will be able to provide the required eye examination and treatment, to allow you to clearly see close up items and carry out normal activities without causing further damage.
Glasses with bifocal or progressive addition lenses (PALs) are the most commonly used solution. Bifocal glasses provide prescriptions for both near and distance vision. The main part of the lens aids distance vision, and the lower part of the lens allows for close focus. PALs also offer two points of focus but provide a more gradual visual transition between the two, with no visible line between them. Another option for presbyopia is reading glasses, which will simply be worn when performing near work.
Getting routine eye examinations and the appropriate treatment from your optician is essential to reduce the effects of visual impairment caused by presbyopia. If you’d like to book an eye examination with Tunnell Vision, or if you are experiencing any problems with your eyesight, please contact us on 01905 613020 or use our general enquiries form today.


Examines the theory and applications of conflict resolution and alternative dispute resolution. Students will be required to demonstrate a thorough understanding of the major theories and approaches to mediation, conflict, negotiation, resolution and reconciliation.
Unit Learning Outcomes express learning achievement in terms of what a student should know, understand and be able to do on completion of a unit. These outcomes are aligned with the graduate attributes. The unit learning outcomes and graduate attributes are also the basis of evaluating prior learning.
Learning outcomes and graduate attributes
|On completion of this unit, students should be able to:||GA1||GA2||GA3||GA4||GA5||GA6||GA7|
|1||outline the major approaches to conflict resolution;||Knowledge of a discipline|
|2||determine which method of dispute resolution is appropriate to selected types of conflict situations;||Creativity||Knowledge of a discipline|
|3||recognise and apply a number of strategies for overcoming negotiation barriers;||Creativity||Knowledge of a discipline|
|4||demonstrate the basic skills of a mediator;||Knowledge of a discipline|
|5||demonstrate the ethical and legal requirements of a mediator.||Ethical practice||Knowledge of a discipline|
- Boulle, L, 2011, Mediation: Principles, Process, Practice, 3rd edn, LexisNexis Butterworths, Sydney.
Teaching and assessment
Commonwealth Supported courses
For information regarding Student Contribution Amounts please visit the Student Contribution Amounts.
Commencing 2015 Commonwealth Supported only. Student contribution band: 1
Please check the international course and fee list to determine the relevant fees.


Cooperation = working together independently.
Collaboration = working together dependently.
Researchers such as Dillenbourg et al. (1996) and Roschelle and Teasley (1995) agree that it is important to make a distinction between cooperation and collaboration. While cooperative learning can be defined as “working together to accomplish shared goals” (Smith 1995), collaborative learning is “a method that implies working in a group of two or more to achieve a common goal, while respecting each individual’s contribution to the whole” (McInnerney and Robert 2004, 205). Roschelle and Teasley (1995) describe cooperative work as a task that is accomplished by dividing it among participants, where “each person is responsible for a portion of the problem solving,” and they see collaborative work as “the mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem together."
The key difference between these approaches to group work is that cooperation is more focused on working together to create an end product, while successful collaboration requires participants to share in the process of knowledge creation (Dillenbourg et al. 1996; Roschelle and Teasley 1995). In other words, cooperation can be achieved if all participants do their assigned parts separately and bring their results to the table; collaboration, in contrast, implies direct interaction among individuals to produce a product and involves negotiations, discussions, and accommodating others’ perspectives. According to Nelson (2008), cooperation is “a protocol that allows you not to get in each other’s way” as you work. He uses the example of an assembly line and reaches the conclusion that “a cooperative enterprise could in some way be done, as long as you had enough time or other resources, by a single person.”


A picturesque line of thunderstorms and numerous circular cloud patterns filled the view as the International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 20 crew members looked out at the limb (blue line on the horizon) of the Earth. The region shown in the astronaut photograph (top image) includes an unstable, active atmosphere forming a large area of cumulonimbus clouds in various stages of development. The crew was looking west-southwest from the Amazon Basin, along the Rio Madeira toward Bolivia when the image was taken.
The semi-circular cloud patterns near the center of the astronaut photograph may be detected in a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) infrared satellite image of the region (bottom image, yellow rectangle) acquired about 20 minutes earlier than the astronaut photograph. The distinctive circular patterns of the clouds in the astronaut photograph are likely caused by the aging of thunderstorms. Such ring structures often form during the final stages of storms’ development as their centers collapse.
Sunglint—the mirror-like reflection of sunlight off a water surface directly back to the camera onboard the ISS—is visible on the waters of the Rio Madeira and Lago Acara in the Amazon Basin. Widespread haze over the basin gives the reflected light an orange hue. The Rio Madeira flows northward and joins the Amazon River on its path to the Atlantic Ocean. A large smoke plume near the bottom center of the image may be one source of the haze.
Astronaut photograph ISS020-E-47807 was acquired on October 6, 2009, with a Nikon D2Xs digital camera using an effective 48mm lens (28-70 mm zoom lens), and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The astronaut photograph was taken by the Expedition 20 crew. GOES image courtesy NASA GOES Project Science and NOAA Comprehensive Large Array-Data Stewardship System. The photograph in this article has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast. Lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Susan K. Runco, NASA-JSC.
- ISS - Digital Camera


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The History of the Smithsonian Bibliography contains 1400 annotated bibliographic citations to published and unpublished materials (books, journal and newspaper articles, dissertations, audiovisual materials, reports, lectures, and correspondence) about the history of the Smithsonian Institution. Entries contain citations to the major publications and documents on the history of the Smithsonian; however, the bibliography is not (yet) comprehensive and includes mostly English language materials. Citations in this bibliography are not necessarily located in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries or Smithsonian Institution Archives. Therefore, call numbers have not been provided. Contact your local library to obtain a copy. Each entry consists of a title, author/editor, publication information and index terms; some entries contain abstracts of and/or explanatory notes about the publication. To search the bibliography only, select the combined keyword search screen and limit your search to the History of the Smithsonian Bibliography. You may also limit your search to a specific publication date range or sort by author, date, title, etc. To limit or sort your search using the browse indexes, select the browse search screen and use the limits or sort functions on the results screen.
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Learn more about our impactLearn more about our impact
WWF works to sustain the natural world for the benefit of people and wildlife, collaborating with partners from local to global levels in nearly 100 countries.
California is a global winemaking powerhouse. But extreme weather—from droughts to floods, all driven by climate change—could threaten that productivity. With properly timed precipitation key to a great vintage, “good wine years” may grow increasingly uncertain.
Wine grapes aren’t a water-greedy crop. But as the state’s wine industry began booming in the 1980s, vineyards started using irrigation to boost productivity, squeezing as many grapes as possible from each acre. Now, most California vineyards rely on some form of irrigation.
Number of Californians employed directly and indirectly by California wineries and vineyards in 2015.
In 2015, California pumped out 638 million gallons—85% of all wine produced in the US. In the global market, the state might as well be a country: Only France, Italy, and Spain produce more wine.
Climate scientists predict more major droughts, higher temperatures, and erratic weather patterns in California in the years to come. The state’s wine industry is currently stable, and some vineyards are actually flourishing in response to higher temperatures. But if current trends continue, California’s vineyards could become more heavily dependent on water from irrigation, putting increased pressure on precious water supplies.
Estimated amount of water needed to produce a gallon of California wine.
Grapes are now the state’s third-biggest cash crop, second only to milk and almonds. In 2015, California’s grapes were valued at $4.95 billion.
WWF is a member of the California Water Action Collaborative, a coalition working to improve water security in the state. Current projects include replenishing depleted groundwater reserves to restore the function of long-drained wetlands, and building support for California’s Water Action Plan, a road map toward sustainable water management.


Abraham Lincoln could not vote for his own reelection in 1864. His home state of Illinois required all voters to physically present themselves at the polling station in order to exercise their franchise. In the midst of a national emergency—the Civil War—the president of the United States could not leave the capital and thus was effectively disenfranchised.
Voting rules denied the leader of the nation his right to vote. Voting rules should not similarly disenfranchise Americans during the COVID-19 emergency.
Along with Illinois, the states of Indiana, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon limited the right to vote in the election of 1864 only to those who physically went to the polls. This meant that many of the soldiers fighting to preserve the union were disenfranchised just like their commander in chief. Seventeen states, however, changed their voting rules to permit one form or another of the “soldier vote” from the field.
Now is the time to consider if and how we change our rules so that COVID-19 does not disenfranchise Americans. Two facts are undeniable: we are in the midst of a national crisis of indeterminate length, and every American has the right and responsibility to cast their vote. Now is the time to start preparing for COVID-19’s impact on the November 3, 2020 election.
In the current emergency, there is a national policy against large gatherings. If you do go out, six feet of social distancing is recommended. Queuing in long lines at polling stations in order to enter a small enclosure just vacated by someone of unknown health is not in keeping with prevailing medical advice.
Hopefully, the COVID-19 crisis will have run its course by November—although increasingly we are being warned to expect its return in the fall even if it does lessen in the summer. Our government was apparently unprepared for the novel coronavirus despite warnings; let us not repeat that again when it comes to the election. With election day eight months away, what are we doing now to prepare to protect our citizens’ right to vote (and the health and safety of poll workers)?
Two days after the November 1864 election, Lincoln reflected that “until now it has not been known to the world that this [election] was a possibility.” As if speaking to us today, he said, “We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly have claimed to have already conquered and ruined us.”
Our test is similar: could COVID-19 “conquer and ruin” our defense of the most basic democratic right? Will the world’s bedrock of democracy protect the key to democracy? Thus far this year, multiple states have delayed their primary elections. There is much less flexibility insofar as the national election. Congress in 1845 established the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the date of the general election. The 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guiding off that schedule, mandated that the new Congress convene on January 3 and the President be inaugurated on January 20.
The message here is simple: we have an eight-month head start. Let’s not treat protecting the exercise of the democratic franchise as something that sneaks up on us. Denying the potential problem or waiting to see whether COVID-19 reappears in the fall before we act is not a solution. While some complain voting by mail and other solutions will cause confusion and the potential for fraud, one sure way to assure problems is to ignore until too late the reality we can now readily identify.
Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), along with 24 other senators have indicated they intend to introduce the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020 to allow for national vote-by-mail as well as the expansion of early voting. That all the sponsors are Democrats illustrates how the issue has often been perceived as partisan. Yet 33 states currently give their citizens the right to vote-by-mail without any extenuating excuse. Colorado, Washington State, and Oregon have all-mail elections.
The effect of opening the franchise to soldiers in the field was partisan in 1864 as well. The Democrats felt they would benefit from the soldier vote. After all, their candidate was former Union commander General George B. McClellan and surely his former troops would stand with him. “We are as certain of two-thirds of that vote for General McClellan as the sun shines,” one Democratic newspaper publisher predicted.[i] Lincoln expected to lose. He even had his cabinet sign a pledge to continue to work to preserve the union in the period after his defeat but before the inauguration. In the end, however, it was the Republican Lincoln who won 55 percent of the popular vote, including 75 percent of the soldier vote.
Lincoln’s concern that the national crisis “could force us to forego or postpone” the election made him stand firm to protect it. He—and the Republican Congress—could have, but did not, change the date of the election. [ii]
Ultimately, the democratic right to vote was protected in 17 states because leaders stepped up and made the statutory changes necessary to assure citizens their franchise. Now is the time to anticipate the challenge that will confront us in only a few months and act once again to preserve the franchise.
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today,” Lincoln once observed. Today is our moment of responsibility.
[i] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, Simon & Schuster, 2005, p. 663
[ii] The Senate had a Republican majority, the House a Republican plurality


Relying on asthma medication in public can stigmatize an adolescent within their peer group and create an even deeper awkwardness and a belief they ‘cannot’ participate in life fully.
As a starting point, a teenagers parents can;
- Test the teen for food allergies and improve the diet at home
• This may create a large challenge for the family due to poor eating habits (timing of meals and quantity of fats and sugars for example) of the family themselves
• Due to the fact that asthma is linked to family habits at home the resolution of adolescent asthma becomes a whole-family project as each person becomes more aware of the asthma triggers that they themselves may have been responsible for
- Use products or include foods that clear the nose, encouraging nasal breathing
- Lead as examples and improve their own breathing habits that may have at times lead to a stressful situation for their children, thereby bringing on an asthma attack
- Become aware of the hormonal cycles and activities that may lead to stress and hyperventilation
• For example, a young man suffering from acne brought on by a food allergy may find themselves craving sugar after sports. Eating sweetened dairy and gluten products may provoke both the allergy and asthma so a possible method is to have a natural protein and unrefined sugar food ready – this takes planning on the family’s behalf
Danielle (not her real name) is a friendly young lady of 12 years old who began the 82 Asthma program after her mother had good success treating her own asthma with the 82 Asthma program. Similar to her mother’s asthma story, Danielle’s asthma had begun to make its presence felt during the onset of adolescence – she had had an asthma attack at night and found it understandingly very difficult to come to terms with the loneliness of being held in the grip of an asthma attack.
Her prescribed treatment is ventolin, and the use of this is recommended for when she needs it.
The first thing evident with Danielle was her evident jaw overbite and the difficulty she found keeping her mouth closed leading to mouth-breathing during the day and night. Her mother had noted her mouth-breathing during the night. She had also stopped exercising and participating in sport due to the onset of wheezing and a tight chest.
Her main goal was to attend a school camp, something she was hesitant to do because of her fear of an asthma attack and the notion that she would forget her ventolin.
As a young lady who spends large amounts of time socially with her friends, asthma was impacting on her life to a large level.
As part of her program Danielle’s exercises consisted of practising Key Exercises 1, 2 and 3 daily until her EBC and EBS improved to a point where she was capable of seeing a trend of improvement herself. She became able to judge the onset of an asthma attack by assessing the length of her EBC times and EBS each day. If she found she was susceptible Danielle was able to take preventative measures by adding in an extra reduced breathing session or steps if necessary. I am in regular contact with the family and She has been able to manage her asthma independently since her program finished.
Danielle’s family had to implement large changes in the family, and due to her mothers enthusiasm and determination mealtimes have become earlier and previous foods and drink that caused blocked noses and mouth-breathing have been replaced with natural ingredients.


In January through April 2005 the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia hosted a set of eight lectures exploring the issues of land claims in BC and associated governance issues. British Columbia is unusual in Canada in having very few historical treaties. Canadian courts at the close of the 20th century have recognized what First Nations have long known–that, in the absence of treaties, land was never surrendered. In this evolving circumstance, First Nations, governments, and other entities have engaged in several kinds of processes to negotiate differences over land–treaty processes, court cases, and other forms of negotiated settlements. While several excellent academic books address aspects of these situations, this series brings forward the perspectives and expertise of community leaders, lawyers, and others who have been actively involved in crucial aspects of these situations.
You can begin exploring this archive through one of the sample topics noted below, or by opening the IVT viewer, clicking on the Session Menu button for short descriptions of the sessions, and exploring the session of your choice (if the IVT does not seem to work properly, see IVT Browser and Troubleshooting Information for help).
Session 3, which focuses on the court cases that have shaped the legal landscape for land claims in British Columbia, from two lawyers central to them (Land Claims 3,2).
A snapshot of modern treaties: in 2005 the Nisga’a treaty had been concluded and implementation was underway, and the Tsawassen Treaty, since concluded, was still in progress. Former Nisga’a Lisims CEO Edward Allen and Tsawassen Chief Kim Baird speak (Land Claims 4,2).
Some good stories: listen to Delbert Guerin explain the rocky road to "the honour of the Crown" (Land Claims 3,56), or Satsan (Herb George) tell a fantastic story about community values and outside experts (Land Claims 6,40).
At the time of the last session in this series, Tahltan elders opposing Shell Oil’s plans to begin drilling in the Sacred Headwaters area in northern British Columbia. Our final session, on political action utside of organizations, presents speakers for both the elders and the Chief and Council they opposed (Land Claims 8,4).
Finally, you might like to view the presentations of two monumental Aboriginal leaders who have both passed away since these lectures. George Watts led major initiatives for Nuu-chah-nulth communities for many years, including the Maa-nulth treaty that occupied the years before his death (Land Claims 2,53). Patricia Monture was a lawyer and professor who was a leader and mentor for many within the Aboriginal academic community and beyond (Land Claims 6,3).
If you would simply like to explore the archive on your own, (click here)


First published in 1936 this book must be one of the most beloved children’s books ever. Ferdinand is a bull who has no interest in doing bullish things. He prefers to sit under his favorite tree and smell the flowers. And then one day he gets stung by a bee and finds himself at a bullfight in Madrid.
My kids respond immediately to this character that doesn’t mind doing his own thing. And they also think it’s wonderful to see and read a few bits about Spanish bull-fighting. This is an especially good book read aloud.
Apparently it’s been banned from time to time because of it’s overtly pacifist message, so you can feel a tiny bit rebellious by putting it on your bookshelf.
Written by Munro Leaf. Illustrated by Robert Lawson. Of course, it’s available here.


What is an EPR, and Does it Even Work?
by Theresa Christine Johnson on 02/17/2020 | 4 Minute Read
Chances are, you already know what an EPR is—at least, you’ve likely encountered it before whether you realized it or not. Short for “extended producer responsibility,” you’ve seen it and used it with products like car batteries or old television sets. Manufacturers or producers of a particular product get tasked with managing the end of the life cycle for these items. This means they must handle the treatment or disposal of post-consumer products, and with that added responsibility, the overall hope is that they’ll put more consideration into reducing waste from the very beginning by designing a product and packaging with eco-friendliness in mind.
“Basically, it transfers the cost from either the city, town, or individual themselves who contract to have their waste or recycling picked up to the brand owner who actually puts the product on the market,” explained Victor Bell, US Managing Director of Environmental Packaging International/Lorax Compliance.
EPRs started in Europe—Sweden, to be exact, in 1990—and today they are mandatory in many countries there, as well as the Middle East. Places like Brazil and Colombia are starting to put EPRs into place, and China and India will have them in 2022. Our northern neighbor, Canada, has heaps of them (reports say at least 200 programs), but it just hasn’t quite caught on here in the good ol’ U. S. of A.
“One of the difficult things with the United States is it would have to be passed on a state-by-state basis,” Victor said. “There’s also been very strong lobbying against it in the past, but we’re seeing a big change now.”
As consumers became more eco-minded than ever before in recent years, big brands decided to make some big promises. By 2025, McDonald’s wants all its packaging to come from renewable, recycled, or certifiable sources. Starbucks has targets for 2030, including shifting to reusable packaging and cutting emissions. Other brands like Unilever, Aldi, and The Estée Lauder Companies have made similar promises—and as those dates close in, brands are trying to find ways to achieve their goals.
“The only way these major companies can make these commitments is if the infrastructure gets updated, as well as the cost of using it,” Victor stated. That’s where an EPR comes in.
An EPR can take many forms, from recycling to a buyback program, but one of the most significant movements in the world of ERP is called eco-modulation. Brands face higher fees on products that are more difficult to recycle or not as good for the environment, whether it be the material or the emissions needed to transport it.
For instance, in France—a country Victor called “the king of eco-modulation”—fees are in place for materials like PET packaging using mineral opacifiers, glass with a non-magnetic steel closing system, or reinforced cardboard. At the same time, there are discounts for packaging made from at least 50% recycled material, or switching to mono-materials which make recycling significantly easier.
“Even if you do advertising or put a certain recycling logo on it,” added Victor. “If you have an ad that includes ‘please recycle,’ then the brand can get another bonus.”
You can find a prime example of EPRs at work in Canada, particularly British Columbia, where the EPR only costs $14.55 US dollars per capita. “What they’ve done is they’ve taken over the recycling programs from cities and towns,” Victor explained. “All of the cost of collecting and managing that material is paid for by the fees, which is a pretty low per capita cost. They’ve, in turn, combined material processing facilities and infrastructure to make it more efficient.”
Over 1,300 companies, from Apple Canada to Procter & Gamble, joined forces to create Recycle BC to carry out residential recycling. At their plants, brands can even test for new materials—such was the case with Keurig when it wanted to switch to a recyclable material for its pods, allowing them to be recycled across the province.
Victor confessed it took British Columbia a while to reach this point, starting the EPR journey back in 2014. But according to the CSSA Report to Stewards 2019, the material recovery rate is 78.1% in British Columbia. It is the highest recycling rate in the country.
Will we see mandatory EPRs in place in the United States soon? In January 2020, the California Senate voted against an EPR for beverage companies, but Victor said interest is still growing there, as well as in places like Maine and New York. “We’re already seeing a number of the retailers and brand owners who were leery of EPR, and now they’re more open to embracing it,” he said. I think we're going to see brands leading this effort to move this forward because of their problem.”
“They know that unless something like this happens, they are not going to be able to meet their goals,” he added.


By now, you've probably heard the news that fermented foods are great for us, and we should all be eating more of them. But why, exactly?
Shredded cabbage, water, salt. That’s it. You throw them together in a glass jar, and then you add the final ingredient: time. Once the mixture has settled for a while, you might see tiny bubbles beginning to form along the sides of the jar if you look closely enough. If you had a microscope, you’d even see the friendly bacteria latching onto the plant material.
If you studied the jar for long enough, you’d see that waves of different bacteria proliferate in the jar over time, releasing byproducts that change the acidity and enzymes inside. And you’d end up with a mixture of your shredded cabbage with lactic acid, some acetic and propionic acid, a cocktail of gases (mainly carbon dioxide), a trace amount of alcohol and aromatic esters. In other words, a fantastic batch of fermented sauerkraut.
What the heck is fermentation?
Fermentation is the process by which carbohydrates, like those in plant material, are converted to acids, gases and/or alcohol. In the case of sauerkraut, the micro-organisms responsible for kicking off the process are lactic acid bacteria (LAB)—a diverse group of bacterial species (mainly Lactobacillus, Leuconostoc and Pediococcus) found naturally on the surface of plants, which produce lactic acid as their main metabolic end product.
Yogurt and some other fermented foods on store shelves are produced in highly controlled environments, so scientists know exactly which strains of bacteria they proffer. But in home fermentation, friendly microbes from the vegetables, the air and the hands of the maker all combine to produce a microbially different batch every time. Although most fermented foods contain strains of bacteria that are potentially beneficial, these live cultures do not fit the accepted definition of a probiotic, since they are simply a random, unnamed mix.
Fermentation is considered very safe, since LAB naturally produce substances that inhibit the growth of food-spoiling bacteria. If you try fermenting at home, however, it’s smart to learn how to tell the difference between benign kahm yeast (a harmless fermentation byproduct) and potentially harmful mold.
Healthy fermented foods have been eaten for millennia. In the beginning, fermentation was a way to preserve. Human groups throughout history then discovered that certain ways of storing food came with an added bonus: changing the food’s flavor and texture.
Only later with advances in microbiology did we come to understand how the bacteria were doing their work in favorite fermented foods like kimchi.
So why are fermented foods healthy?
Since the mix of bacteria in each batch is individual and complex, fermented foods are a difficult subject of controlled laboratory study. What scientists know for sure, however, is that the live cultures in fermented foods are key to their health benefits.
Certain bacterial strains, which are present to a greater or lesser extent in a serving of fermented food, have distinct health benefits when tested in isolation. In healthy adults, these bacteria can help prevent acute upper respiratory tract infections, as well as urinary tract infections and allergies, and they can lower cardiovascular disease risk.
Yet a fermented food is more than just the sum of its micro-organisms. Some evidence suggests the food matrix may help boost the beneficial health effects. And when it comes to fermented veggies, the fiber they contain could act as a prebiotic and magnify the effects of the good bacteria, helping them proliferate and produce health-boosting short-chain fatty acids.
Studies have even linked fermented food consumption to mental well-being, with outcomes including lower social anxiety and decreased reactions to negative events, though more comprehensive studies are needed to verify these effects in humans.
What about fermented supplements?
Fermented foods aren’t the only way we can ingest beneficial bacteria. In fact, some research shows that you’d need to eat a whole lot of fermented foods in order to get the dose of bacteria shown to produce health benefits in clinical trials.
Probiotic supplements offer an easy way to consume well-researched, precise bacteria strains in large quantities. For example, the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, which is commonly found in supplement form, can help with intestinal issues and stimulate immune responses in many people.
Fermented supplements, like fermented vegan proteins and fermented mushrooms, are a bit different. When it comes to making fermented supplements, bacteria can degrade substances like oxalate, phytate and tannins, making some of the nutrients more available. These supplements don’t contain live micro-organisms when you take them.
What are true fermented foods?
Not all fermented foods contain live organisms when you consume them. In some cases (as in transforming cocoa beans into chocolate), live bacteria are eliminated by the time the food is eaten. In other cases (as in kombucha), the bacteria are alive at the time of consumption. The term “fermented foods” generally refers to those that contain live micro-organisms upon ingestion.
True fermented foods are not shelf-stable, so when you’re buying them from a grocery or health food store, look for them in the refrigerator section. Live cultures should be listed on the label, and the food should have an expiration date clearly marked.
Fermented foods have a long history of use, and they offer so many benefits—for both your health and your taste buds. They represent not just the preservation of a food, but also a moment in time: a microbial snapshot. So what are you waiting for? Dig into that delicious kraut.


What You Need to Know About Colon Cancer
Among cancers that affect both men and women, colorectal cancer (cancer of the colon or rectum) is the third leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Every year, about 140,000 Americans are diagnosed with colorectal cancer, and more than 50,000 people die from it. The overall lifetime risk for developing colon cancer is 1 in 20. But the good news is that this disease is highly preventable with proactive screening and management of risk factors.
What are the risk factors?
Your risk for colorectal cancer may be higher than average if:
- You or a close relative have had colorectal polyps or colorectal cancer.
- You have inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, or ulcerative colitis.
- You have a genetic syndrome such as familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) or hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer.
Speak with your doctor about when to start screening and how often you should be tested if you think you’re at high risk for colorectal cancer.
What are the symptoms of colorectal cancer?
- People who have polyps or colorectal cancer don’t always have symptoms, especially at first. Someone could have polyps or colorectal cancer and not know it. If there are symptoms, they may include:
- Blood in or on your stool (bowel movement).
- Change in caliber of stool, more narrow stool or constipation.
- Pains, aches, or cramps in your stomach that don’t go away.
- Losing weight and you don’t know why.
If you have any of these symptoms, talk to your doctor. They may be caused by something other than cancer. However, the only way to know what is causing them is to see your doctor.
How can you screen for colorectal cancer?
Screening tests help prevent colorectal cancer by finding precancerous polyps (abnormal growths) so they can be removed. Screening also finds this cancer early, when treatment can be most effective.
How often you need to get screened depends on your risk for colorectal cancer. It also depends on which kind of screening you get. There is more than one kind of screening test for colorectal cancer. Some involve analyzing stool for blood, while other procedures, such as the colonoscopy, provide a detailed look at the interior of the colon. Talk with your doctor about which test is right for you.
What does a colonoscopy entail?
A colonoscopy entails using a scope to examine the inside of your colon. A colonoscopy uses a long, flexible and slender tube attached to a video camera to monitor to view your entire colon and rectum. If any suspicious areas are found, your doctor can pass surgical tools through the tube to remove polyps.
Colonoscopies are essentially painless. Patients are sedated for comfort while blood pressure, heart rhythm, and oxygen level are closely monitored by an anesthesiologist. Medication may be adjusted throughout the procedure to ensure adequate sedation.
What should I discuss with my doctor?
Visiting the doctor can be stressful. It helps to have questions written down ahead of time. You may also want to ask a family member or close friend to go with you to take notes.
Below are some helpful questions to discuss with you doctor:
- What is my risk for colorectal cancer?
- When do you recommend that I start getting tested?
- How often do I need to get tested?
- What are the different types of screening tests for colorectal cancer?
- Which screening test do you recommend? Why?
- What happens during the screening? How do I prepare?
- Are there any dangers or side effects of screening?
- How long will it take to get the results?
- What can I do to reduce my risk of colorectal cancer?
Starling’s Department of Gastroenterology is here to address your questions and concerns. To schedule an appointment or screening, please contact us at (860) 224-6249 . Your primary care provider can also be a valuable resource to discuss risk factors and screening options.