E. P. Thompson
|Born||Edward Palmer Thompson
3 February 1924
Oxford, United Kingdom
|Died|| (aged 69)
Worcester, United Kingdom
|Alma mater||Corpus Christi College, Cambridge|
|Occupation||Historian, writer, socialist, campaign|
|Spouse(s)||Dorothy Thompson (1948–1993; his death)|
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993), usually cited as E. P. Thompson, was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.
Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a "historian in the Marxist tradition", calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives". Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
- 1 Early life
- 2 Career
- 3 Personal life
- 4 Criticism
- 5 Key works
- 6 See also
- 7 References
- 8 Further reading
- 9 External links
E.P. Thompson was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents: His father, Edward John Thompson (1886–1946) was a poet and admirer of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Tagore. His older brother was William Frank Thompson (1919–1944), a British officer in World War II, who was captured and shot aiding the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans.
Thompson attended two independent schools, The Dragon School in Oxford and Kingswood School in Bath. Like many he left school in 1941 to fight in World War II. He served in a tank unit in the Italian campaign, including at the last battle of Cassino.
After his military service, he studied at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1946, E.P. Thompson formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr and others. In 1952 they launched the influential journal Past and Present.
Thompson's first major work of scholarship was his biography of William Morris, written while he was a member of the Communist Party. Subtitled From Romantic to Revolutionary, it was part of an effort by the Communist Party Historians' Group, inspired by Torr, to emphasise the domestic roots of Marxism in Britain at a time when the Communist Party was under attack for always following the Moscow line. It was also an attempt to take Morris back from the critics who for more than 50 years had emphasised his art and downplayed his politics.
Although Morris's political work is well to the fore, Thompson also used his literary talents to comment on aspects of Morris's work, such as his early Romantic poetry, which had previously received relatively little consideration. As Thompson noted in his preface to the second edition (1976), the first edition (1955) appears to have received relatively little attention from the literary establishment because of its then-unfashionable Marxist point of view. However, the somewhat rewritten second edition was much better received.
The first New Left
After Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which revealed that the Soviet party leadership had long been aware of Stalin's crimes, Thompson (with John Saville and others) started a dissident publication inside the CP, called The Reasoner. Six months later, he and most of his comrades left the party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
But Thompson remained what he called a "socialist humanist". With Saville and others, he set up the New Reasoner, a journal that sought to develop a democratic socialist alternative to what its editors considered the ossified official Marxism of the Communist and Trotskyist parties and the managerialist cold war social democracy of the Labour Party and its international allies. The New Reasoner was the most important organ of what became known as the "New Left", an informal movement of dissident leftists closely associated with the nascent movement for nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The New Reasoner combined with the Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review in 1960, though Thompson and others fell out with the group around Perry Anderson who took over the journal in 1962. The fashion ever since has been to describe the Thompson et al. New Left as "the first New Left" and the Anderson et al. group, which by 1968 had embraced Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists, as the second.
Thompson subsequently allied himself with the annual Socialist Register publication. With Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, he was one of the editors of the 1967 May Day Manifesto, one of the key left-wing challenges to the 1964–70 Labour government of Harold Wilson.
The Making of the English Working Class
Thompson's most influential work was and remains The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 while he was working at the University of Leeds. The massive book, over 800 pages, was a watershed in the foundation of the field of social history. By exploring the ordinary cultures of working people through their previously ignored documentary remains, Thompson told the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Reflecting on the importance of the book for its 50th anniversary, Emma Griffin explained that Thompson "uncovered details about workshop customs and rituals, failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular songs, and union club cards. He took what others had regarded as scraps from the archive and interrogated them for what they told us about the beliefs and aims of those who were not on the winning side. Here, then, was a book that rambled over aspects of human experience that had never before had their historian.
The Making of the English Working Class had a profound effect on the shape of British historiography, and still endures as a staple on university reading lists more than 50 years after its first publication in 1963. Writing for the Times Higher Education in 2013, Robert Colls recalled the power of Thompson's book for his generation of young British leftists:
I bought my first copy in 1968 – a small, fat bundle of Pelican with a picture of a Yorkshire miner on the front – and I still have it, bandaged up and exhausted by the years of labour. From the first of its 900-odd pages, I knew, and my friends at the University of Sussex knew, that this was something else. We talked about it in the bar and on the bus and in the refectory queue. Imagine that: young male students more interested in a book than in gooseberry tart and custard.
In his preface to this book, E.P. Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
Thompson's thought was also original and significant because of the way he defined "class." To Thompson, class was not a structure, but a relationship:
And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.
By re-defining class as a relationship that changed over time, Thompson proceeded to demonstrate how class was worthy of historical investigation. He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes.
A major work of research and synthesis, the book was also important in historiographical terms: with it, Thompson demonstrated the power of a historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers. Thompson wrote the book while living in Siddal, Halifax, West Yorkshire and based some of the work on his experiences with the local Halifax population.
Thompson left the University of Warwick in protest at the commercialisation of the academy, documented in the book Warwick University Limited (1971). He continued to teach and lecture as a visiting professor, particularly in the United States. However, he increasingly worked as a freelance writer, contributing many essays to New Society, Socialist Register and historical journals. In 1978 he published The Poverty of Theory which attacked the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in Britain on New Left Review (famously saying: "...all of them are Geschichtenscheissenschlopff, unhistorical shit"). The title echoes that of Karl Marx's 1847 polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy and that of philosopher Karl Popper's 1936 book The Poverty of Historicism. Thompson's polemic provoked a book-length response from Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism.
During the late 1970s Thompson acquired a large public audience as a critic of the then Labour government's disregard of civil liberties; his writings from this time are collected in Writing By Candlelight (1980).
Voice of the peace movement
From 1980, Thompson was the most prominent intellectual of the revived movement for nuclear disarmament, revered by activists throughout the world. In Britain, his pamphlet Protest and Survive, a parody on the government leaflet Protect and Survive, played a major role in the revived strength of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Just as important, Thompson was, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of European Nuclear Disarmament. Confusingly, END was both a Europe-wide campaign that comprised a series of large public conferences (the END Conventions), and a small British pressure group.
Thompson played a key role in both END and CND throughout the 1980s, speaking at many public meetings, corresponding with hundreds of fellow activists and sympathetic intellectuals, and doing more than his fair share of committee work. He had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities.
He wrote dozens of polemical articles and essays during this period, which are collected in the books Zero Option (1982) and The Heavy Dancers (1985). He also wrote an extended essay attacking the ideologists on both sides of the cold war, Double Exposure (1985) and edited a collection of essays opposing Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars (1985).
An excerpt from a speech given by Thompson featured in the computer game Deus Ex Machina (1984). Thompson's own haunting recitation of his 1950 poem of "apocalyptic expectation, "The Place Called Choice," appeared on the 1984 vinyl recording "The Apocalypso", by Canadian pop group Singing Fools, released by A&M Records.
The last book Thompson finished was Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993). The product of years of research and published shortly after his death, it shows how far Blake was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English civil war.
In 1948 Thompson married Dorothy Towers, whom he met at Cambridge. A fellow left-wing historian, she wrote studies on women in the Chartist movement, and the biography Queen Victoria: Gender and Power; she was Professor of History at the University of Birmingham. The Thompsons had three children, the youngest of whom is the award-winning children's writer, Kate Thompson.
Thompson was a user of marijuana, although he never made his habit public during his lifetime.
William Frank Thompson
Thompson's older brother William Frank Thompson (1920–1944), was also a member of the British Communist Party during World War II. A gifted linguist, Frank Thompson parachuted into fascist-occupied Bulgaria as part of a "Phantom Brigade" during Operation Mulligatawny. There, he supported the resistance as a liaison officer. Frank Thompson was captured and on 10 June 1944 he was executed. His body was buried in the War Cemetery of Sofia. After the war, the Bulgarians erected a statue in his honour. The nearby villages of Livage, Lipata, Tsarevi Stragi, Malak Babul, Babul and Zavoya were merged and renamed to Thompson in the British officer's honour.
E. P. Thompson and his mother wrote There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson (1947). Frank Thompson was also a friend and confidant of Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist. E. P. Thompson wrote another book about his brother, published in 1996.
Although Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain, but remained committed to Marxist ideals, Leszek Kołakowski wrote a very harsh criticism of Thompson in his 1974 essay "My Correct Views on Everything." Tony Judt considered this rejoinder so authoritative that he claimed that "no one who reads it will ever take E.P. Thompson seriously again". Kolakowski's portrait of Thompson elicited some protests from readers, and other left-wing journals came to Thompson's defence. On the 50th anniversary of the landmark publication of The Making of the English Working Class, journalists celebrated E.P. Thompson as one of the preeminent historians of his day.
- William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955.
- "Socialist Humanism," The New Reasoner, vol. 1, no. 1 (Summer 1957), pp. 105–143.
- "The New Left," The New Reasoner, whole no. 9 (Summer 1959), pp. 1–17.
- The Making of the English Working Class London: Victor Gollancz (1963); 2nd edition with new postscript, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, third edition with new preface 1980.
- Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Past & Present, vol 38, no. 1 (1967), pp. 56–97.
- The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, vol. 50, no. 1 (1971), pp. 76–136.
- Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, London: Allen Lane, 1975.
- Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England. (Editor.) London: Allen Lane, 1975.
- The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin Press, 1978.
- Writing by Candlelight, London: Merlin Press, 1980.
- Zero Option, London: Merlin Press, 1982.
- Double Exposure, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
- The Heavy Dancers, London: Merlin Press, 1985.
- The Sykaos Papers, London: Bloomsbury, 1988.
- Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, London: Merlin Press, 1991.
- Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Making History: Writings on History and Culture, New York: New Press, 1994.
- Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, Rendlesham: Merlin, 1997.
- The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1997.
- Collected Poems, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999.
- Colls, Robert (21 November 2013). "Still relevant: The Making of the English Working Class". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 16 May 2016.
- Programme on the Study of Capitalism, Harvard, http://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu/thompson-conference "The Global E.P. Thompson," 3–5 October 2013
- "Reasoning rebellion: E. P. Thompson, British Marxist Historians, and the making of dissident political mobilization". 22 September 2002. Goliath ECNext. Retrieved 9 March 2009.
- Griffin, Emma (6 March 2013). "EP Thompson: the unconventional historian". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 May 2016.
- Ghodsee, Kristen (16 October 2013). "Who was Frank Thompson?". Vagabond - Bulgaria's English Monthly. Retrieved 16 May 2016.
- "The Iskar Gorge and the Bulgarian Partisans", monkeytravel.org, 21 July 2010.
- Desert Island Discs, speaking to Sue Lawley, 3 November 1991
- Christos Efstathiou, E.P. Thompson: A Twentieth Century Romantic, London: Merlin Press, 2015
- Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012
- Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (Eds.) E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014
- Palmer, Bryan (1994). E. P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions. New York: Verso.
- Richard Webster, "E.P. Thompson and the Althusserian locusts: an exercise in practical criticism".
- E. P. Thompson, Protest and Survive, 1980.
- E. P. Thompson, "Notes on Exterminism", in M. Evangelista (ed.), Peace Studies: Critical Concepts in Political Science, Vol. 4, London: Routledge, 2004.
- Andrew Milner, "E. P. Thompson 1924–1993", Labour History, No. 65 (November 1993), pp. 216–218.
- Sheila Rowbotham, "Dorothy Thompson obituary – Innovative historian who focused on the Chartist movement", The Guardian, 6 February 2011.
- "The music of time – Julia Eccleshare talks to Kate Thompson, winner of the 2005 Guardian Children's Fiction prize", The Guardian, 1 October 2005.
- Johnson, T. "Taylor, AJP." in Historians and Academics of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 420.
- Mary Kaldor, "Obituary: E. P. Thompson", The Independent, 30 August 1993.
- Conradi, Peter J. (2012). A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Kristen Ghodsee, The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe, Duke University Press, 2015
- Conradi, Peter J (25 January 2010). "Iris Murdochs letters war writing and sex". The Times (London). Retrieved 1 May 2010.
- Rattenbury, A., 1997. Convenient Death of a Hero. Review of Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 by Thompson, E. P. London Review of Books [Online] vol. 19 no. 9 pp. 12–13. Available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n09/arnold-rattenbury/convenient-death-of-a-hero [Accessed 2 March 2011].
- E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, Merlin/Stanford, 120 pp, December 1996, ISBN 0-85036-457-4
- Brisby, Liliana (29 Mar 1997). "The ups and downs of Major Thompson". The Spectator.
- "The Case of E.P. Thompson" – Edward Countryman, reply by Tony Judt (in response to "Goodbye to All That?" 21 September 2006), The New York Review of Books, 15 February 2007.
- Nikil Saval On Tony Judt, n+1, 9 August 2010.
- Jeffery Webber, "E.P. Thompson's Romantic Marxism," Jacobin, July 24, 2015. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/making-english-working-class-luddites-romanticism/
- Anderson, Perry (1980). Arguments within English Marxism (2nd ed.). London: Verso. ISBN 9780860917274.
- Blackburn, Robin (September–October 1993). "Edward Thompson and the New Left". New Left Review, special issue: Edward Thompson and the New Left (New Left Review) I (201): 3–25.
- Hobsbawm, Eric (Winter 1994). "E. P. Thompson". Radical History Review (Duke University Press) 1994 (58): 157–159. doi:10.1215/01636545-1994-58-157.
- Johnson, Richard (Autumn 1978). "Edward Thompson, Eugence Genovese and Socialist-humanist History". History Workshop Journal (Oxford Journals) 6 (1): 79–100. doi:10.1093/hwj/6.1.79.
- Kaye, Harvey J. (1984). The British Marxist Historians. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9780333662434.
- Kaye, Harvey J.; McClelland, Keith, eds. (1990). E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives. London: Polity Press. ISBN 9780745602387.
- Lynd, Staughton (2014). Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below. Chicago: Haymarket Books. ISBN 9781608463886.
- Merrill, Michael (1984) , "Interview with E. P. Thompson", in Abelove, H., Visions of History, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, pp. 5–25, ISBN 9780394722009.
- Merrill, Michael (Winter 1994). "E. P. Thompson: In Solidarity". Radical History Review (Duke University Press) 1994 (58): 152–156. doi:10.1215/01636545-1994-58-153.
- Kołakowski, Leszek (1974). "My correct views on everything: A rejoinder to Edward Thompson's 'Open letter to Leszek Kołakowski'". Socialist Register (Monthly Review Press) 11.
- Palmer, Bryan D. (1981). The Making of E. P. Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History. Toronto, Canada: New Hogtown Press. ISBN 9780919940178.
- Palmer, Bryan D. (1994). E. P. Thompson Objections and Oppositions. London: Verso. ISBN 9781859840702.
- Webb, W. L. (Winter 1994). "A Thoroughly English Dissident". Radical History Review (Duke University Press) 1994 (58): 160–164. doi:10.1215/01636545-1994-58-160.
- Christos Efstathiou, E.P. Thompson: A Twentieth Century Romantic, London: Merlin Press, 2015
- Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (Eds.) E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014


Lawsonite eclogite is a rare rock type that has been described from only five natural occurrences. In contrast, laboratory experiments and thermal models predict that lawsonite eclogite should be widespread in subducted oceanic crust deeper than 1.5 GPa. Here we report a new lawsonite eclogite find from the Dominican Republic that provides constraints on the conditions of subducted crust and on its return to the surface. In this sample, lawsonite coexisting with omphacite occurs as both inclusions in garnet and as porphyroblasts, the latter being partly replaced at their margins by epidote and zoisite. Peak pressure conditions estimated from lawsonite-phengite-omphacite-garnet assemblages were ca 1.6 GPa at a temperature of 360°C, implying formation under a geotherm of ca. 8°C/km. Peak temperature conditions of 410–450°C were in the zoisite eclogite field, suggesting that the sample crossed from the stability field of lawsonite eclogite into that of zoisite eclogite as a result of increasing temperature. A comparison with other reported occurrences indicates that most lawsonite eclogite exhumed at the Earth's surface formed in accretionary wedges. The rarity of lawsonite eclogite at the Earth's surface may be principally due to two factors: (i) that in ‘normal’ subduction settings lawsonite eclogite enters the subduction factory and hence is usually not exhumed; and (ii) that in accretionary wedge settings, where the PT path leaves the stability field of lawsonite eclogite due to heating, lawsonite eclogite is only preserved if the exhumation path is constrained to a narrow window where the terminal stability of lawsonite is not crossed.


About Herniated Disc
What is a Herniated Disc?
In the spinal column, there are intervertebral discs sandwiched in between many vertebrae. An intervertebral disc is made up of a fibro-cartilaginous round outer casing called annulus fibrosus. Within the annulus fibrosus is a gel like substance called the nucleus pulposus. The nucleus pulposus acts as a shock absorber for the spinal column, brain, and nerves.
When a bulge or herniation is in a spinal column disc, the bulge or herniation will pinch nearby nerves; this is called a herniated disc
Types of Herniated Discs
A herniated disc can also be known as a bulging disc, a ruptured disc, or a prolapsed disc.
Through the foramina of the vertebrae, the spinal cord travels down to the sacrum. At the sacrum, spinal nerve levels with sensory nerves exit laterally out of the spinal column, form bulbous dorsal root ganglia, and, once again, move laterally. When a disc becomes herniated, the outer wall of the annulus fibrosus starts to give way; this forms a “bulge” as the nucleus pulposus moves to the outer edge, thus, creating a bulging disc.
Ruptured and Prolapsed Disc
After this happens, the bulge will pinch nearby nerves and cause pain. If a tear occurs, the gel-like substance, called the nucleus pulposus, ruptures through the annulus fibrosus and falls below onto the dorsal root ganglia causing severe pain in the neck or back. This creates a ruptured disc or prolapsed disc.
Symptoms and Causes
The following symptoms are dependant on the location of the herniated disc.
- Back pain may pass through the leg(s)
- Neck pain may pass through the arm(s)
- Leg pain, numbness, and/or weakness
- Foot pain, numbness, and/or weakness
- Arm pain, numbness, and/or weakness
- Hand pain, numbness, and/or weakness
- Difficulty walking
A herniated disc can cause you pain in the area of the herniation. If it is in the cervical region, there may be some referred pain to your shoulders, arms, and hands. If it is in the lumbar region, there may be some referred pain to your buttocks, thighs, legs, and feet; the pain usually follows down the sciatic nerve. Because of this, it may be difficult to do any strenuous or physical activities. These include work, house, or sports related activities.
Treatment for a Herniated Disc
- Back stretching and strengthening exercises
- Non Steroidal Anti Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs)
- Strong medications
- Muscle relaxants
- Epidural injections in herniated disc
If the above is not a solution to the pain and discomfort, surgery may be required. In order to provide pain relief, the surgeon may remove part of the disc or bone (lamina). Vertebrae bones may also be fused to alleviate pain.
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What is SAS? What does SAS stands for?
SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software package used for business analytics, business intelligence, predictive analysis, and data management. It helps the organizations to handle their datasets and take well-informed data-driven decisions with the help of visual reports.
What are some important features of SAS?
The most important features of SAS are:
- It has data analysis capabilities starting from simple statistics to advanced level analytics.
- It has the ability to read any file or data format.
- The syntax is easy and has the support of many libraries.
- It has a feature called the SAS environment manager that is used for monitoring and managing the analytics environment.
- It is highly secure and maintains the security of the SAS data through the SAS/SECURE.
Explain the basics structure of SAS program?
The SAS has the following program structure:
- The Data step – In this step, a data set is created that works as the source of data analysis.
- The PROC step – Here, data from the above data set is analyzed.
- The Output step – Here, the result of the data analysis done in the previous step is shown as output.
How many data type present in SAS?
SAS has the following data types namely numeric, character and date.
Explain the difference between If and Where in SAS?
The rules of the Where statement are verified when the DATA step gets compiled. When the DATA step runs, the records are filtered that matches the Where condition. So, only these data records get loaded into the program data vector. If the statement is analyzed at runtime, on variables that are already in the PDV.
What is PDV in SAS?
PDV (Program Data Vector) is the memory space that is created during the processing of a data step. It contains two variables permanent and temporary. SAS reads one observation into the PDV and writes that observation into the target dataset.
What is clinical SAS?
SAS clinical is an application used in the clinical domain for conducting research and experimentation by pharmaceutical companies. Clinicians and doctors use SAS programming to collect and examine clinical data.
What is the base SAS?
Base SAS is the foundation for all SAS software that has a flexible programming language. It has a web-based interface used for data manipulation, data storage, and retrieval and analyzing any data. It can be combined with Hadoop and MapReduce programs to work and manage large datasets.
How to create a permanent library in SAS?
Steps to create a permanent library in SAS are as follows:
- For a new library, the read/write/execute permissions are required. As rights to the server are needed, it is advisable that the administrator creates the library.
- A permanent library is created in the SAS management console., where the metadata is stored.
- In the stored process or program the meta-library has to be referenced by the statement
LIBNAME LocalLib METALIBRARY='lib_name'; where lib_name is the library created in the SAS management console.
What is SAS Model?
The SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software model that is used for business analytics, business intelligence, predictive analysis, and data management. The SAS software suite has a Model that is used for managing analytical models through a web interfaced repository. Candidate models are also developed and validated through SAS Model manager.
How to import xlsx file in SAS?
The excel files having an extension of flux can be converted into SAS using the PROC Import and the SAS Studio point and click method.
How to find missing values in SAS?
The missing values in SAS can be found out by the following steps:
- Specify such a format for the variables so that the missing variables have a single value and the now missing value have a different value.
- In the Tables statement, mention the Missing and Misprint
- In the Tables statement, use the _char_ and _numeric_ keywords for mentioning that the FREQ procedure analyses the statistics for all numeric and character values.
What is the data step in SAS?
A group of SAS language statements that start with a DATA statement is called a data step. It is the basic step of creating a data set with Base SAS software. It contains other statements that are used to manipulate the SAS datasets and develop new data sets from raw data files. A data step can be used for evaluating variable values, obtaining information, managing files, writing files, etc.
What is SAS grid?
The SAS grid is an environment where the tasks are distributed among multiple systems on a network, which is managed by the SAS Grid Manager. The workload is distributed across the system grid that helps in job scheduling, load balancing of the work and acceleration of the processing.
Difference between nodupkey and nodup options in SAS?
In SAS, the Nodup option in Proc sort is used to remove the duplicate records that are contiguous, before sorting the data on variables that are listed in the Proc sort statement. The Nodupkey is used to remove the duplicate observations in the data according to the variables listed in the BY statement in Proc sort.
How to comment in SAS?
Steps to comment code in SAS are as follows:
- Highlight the several lines of code using the cursor.
- Press Ctrl + / to comment out the lines of code.
- To uncomment press Ctrl + Shift+ /.
How to convert character to numeric in SAS?
In SAS, the INPUT and PUT functions are used to convert values present inside a character variable to numeric values. A new variable is created when these functions are used that have converted values. The following code has to be used:
new_converted_variable = input (original_variable, informat.);
Here the informat instructs SAS to interpret the value in the original variable.
How to rename variables in SAS?
The README function is used to rename a variable into another new name. To alter the name of the variable in a SAS dataset, the following code has to be used:
RENAME = (old_name=new_name old_name2=new_name2 .... oldk=newk);
Here old_name is the name of the original variable and new_name is the new variable name that has to be altered. If the RENAME=option is in the SET statement, the alteration of the variable name takes place when the program vector is created.
How to import SAS dataset into SAS?
A SAS dataset is placed inside a library where the libname statement connects the library name to a directory. The datasets are read through the PROC SQL or Merge statements in the data steps.
Explain Input and Put functions in SAS.
- The INPUT function is used to convert the value of a variable into another value according to a specified format. They are used to change a character value to a numeric value.
- The PUT function is also used to change a numeric value to a character value. The function has no effects on the formats specified in the PUT statement.
SAS Developer Interview Questions and Answer
Please consider the following question very seriously because I have given plenty of Interview for SAS Developer and often interviewer asked me these following question.
1) What are the SAS functions you have used?
2) In which case you go for libname and in which case you go for proc SQL pass-through facilit diff?
3) Suppose I have a dataset with variables empid and doj then how to calculate retirement age?
4) Difference between proc sql merge and join?
5) Difference between where and if statement in SAS?
6) What data step statements you have used in your project?
7) How many tiers in SAS architecture?
8) If I have a million observations, I want to read 1 and last observation, how can we do?
9) What is %sysfunc?
10) How many ways to create a macro?
11) What macro functions you have used?
12) Difference between %str and %nrstr? In how many ways you can schedule a job?
13) How many methods are available in SAS to eliminate duplicates?
14) I have 2 datsets:ds 1 ds2
I want inner join how many records using match-merge and SQL join will be there in resultant data set?
15) How many ways to import text file into SAS using data step?
16) Why call symput?
17) What are the formats we have?


When the mariner was about twelve, he was reading one of his father’s textbooks that had a chapter on Thomas Malthus, a British economist who, in 1798, said that population growth would be destructive and would be the end of the human species. Being impressionable at that age, the mariner never forgot that warning. He has not thought about Malthus for a while but has always been aware of the impact of overcrowding on the earth in general and on the human race in particular.
Malthus based his prediction on the fact that population was a geometric growth pattern (1,2,4,8,16..…) and food sources grew arithmetically (1,2,3,4,5…..). Eventually, he reasoned, people would die of starvation. Among several opinions about how to control human population, the most memorable was to increase the death rate. Little did he know that science would not shorten lives but would extend them; now, on the horizon, people will live greatly prolonged lives. Further, science would boost food production to keep up with population growth.
All this came back to mind when Elizabeth Kolbert was interviewed on television. She is the author of a new book titled The Sixth Extinction, An Unnatural History. (Henry Holt & Company). Readers may be able to watch the interview on Jon Stuart’s webpage, http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos
The title derives from the fact that five great extinctions have occurred in the history of living things on Planet Earth. Most know about a meteorite that hit Earth in Mexico and ended the era of dinosaurs. Check Wikipedia or search “five great extinctions” for more information. Kolbert portends that humans are the cause of the sixth great extinction.
The book is drawn from scientific research and trips around the world with experts on climate, oceanography, ecology, animal and plant specialists and others who study living things and their habitats.
To make a detailed analysis brief, Kolbert’s point is that our species once existed only on the plains of Africa and now has spread to every spot on Earth, that is, every habitat of every plant, animal, fish, invertebrate, bacteria, and has altered every single ecosystem. The result of this overpopulation, especially by a species that is extremely high maintenance in its use of food, space, materials and energy, is that tens of thousands of species are falling into extinction on a continuous basis.
Not only are there so many humans that other species are crowded out (cities and sensitive estuaries filled in for the benefit of real estate development to name two), humans are a dirty and careless bunch. Humans are the cause of innumerable destructions of habitat by deliberately invading them (farming and river dams to name just two). Humans carry diseases that kill not only humans but other plant and animal life as well, spew chemical damage into every habitat on Earth, and alter climates to such a massive degree that animals from whales and polar bears to tiny fish, bees, coral species and plant life over the entire Earth are dying or being deliberately killed.
We are an uncaring lot. However, what goes around comes around. No longer can our profit be measured solely by spreadsheets and bottom line profit and loss. We are undermining ourselves day by day, even as the riverbank slowly gives way to its river. Is life in the matrix* our future, where robotic life forms are the only survivors?
Malthus would be horrified.
*reference to movie The Matrix, where humans live unknowingly in a matrix of coffin-like life support units and are used as batteries to generate electric power for a lifeless robot reality.


We all know about Simple interest. You loan an amount of money. The moneylender applies an annual interest on it and when you pay the money back, you have to pay back the principal and the interest on it accumulated during that period. Simple as that.
However, Compound Interest is a bit trickier. By definition, it is an “interest on interest to the principal sum of a loan or deposit.” It basically means that when you loan an amount of money and the lender applies compound interest on that, you have to pay an interest on the principal plus the accumulated interest over the years or months. In other words, the interest is added back to the principal amount and then calculated for further interest. You can say that the interest is added exponentially rather than linearly as in simple interest. Let us see how that works.
Suppose you have taken a loan of Rs. 10000 from a bank and the bank is charging a compound interest of 10% per annum. The table given below shows how your interest will accumulate over a period of 3 years.
|YEAR||INITIAL AMOUNT||INTEREST (10%)||FINAL AMOUNT|
|1||10000||10000 x 10%= 1000||11000|
|2||11000||11000 x 10%= 1100||12100|
|3||12100||12100 x 10%= 1210||13310|
That is how compound interest is calculated. Now, it looks easy on simple amounts over a small period of time. But if you have to calculate the compound interest on, let’s say, Rs.679270 over a period of 8 years, it might get a bit tricky. But do not worry. Here is Compound Interest Formula for calculating compound interest. The formula is given by-
You can do all that or you can do the clever thing, which is, use the Byju’sCompound Interest calculator which allows you to calculate the compound interest on any sum for any period of time. All you need to do is input the numbers and relax. The Byju’s Compound Interest Calculator will do the rest for you. It is true for all values, however small or big.
Another thing that bugs many students in Maths is the Trigonometry formulas. Byju’s has a solution for that too- the trigonometry calculator which calculates sine, cosine, tangent, secant, cosecant and cotangent of a triangle. Just put the values for the Perpendicular and the base of the triangle, and the calculator will give you all the trigonometric values. Easy, right?


Goodfellow’s tree kangaroos are primarily solitary (2), with large male territories overlapping several smaller female territories (5), and breeding occurs year-round (2) (6). As a marsupial, the female of this species has a well-developed pouch on its abdomen into which the tiny newborn climbs, where it grows for up to the next ten to twelve months. Even after it leaves the pouch, the joey continues to return to nurse for several months (3). Sexual maturity is reached at two years of age, and individuals have been known to live over 14 years in captivity (5).
A superb climber and capable of leaping long distances, this tree kangaroo spends much of its time in the trees, but also frequently descends to the ground in search of food (6). A largely nocturnal species, Goodfellow’s tree kangaroo emerges at night to feed mainly on leaves and fruit, but also on flowers, grass and even cereals along the forest edges. Its large, sacculated stomach is specially adapted to this diet, allowing the breakdown and digestion of tough leafy material (3).


English language requirements Externwebben - SLU
The first aim is to develop tests capable of yielding reliable and valid scores of receptive knowledge of English collocations as a single construct, for use with In the present thesis, young Swedes'. awareness of grammatical differences between British and American standard English and. which variety they use are The results show that teachers predominantly teach British Standard English (BrSE) and adults, their use of English was constrained by the discourse topic. English FCE preparation - improve 'Use of English', Speaking, Writing, Reading. Metodologi. Längd : 5 h - one part - Pris : 1200.00kr - Stad : LuleåThis is a Quick Solutions to Common Errors in English; tải ebook Quick Solutions to Common Errors in English - Được thiết kế để giúp giải quyết vấn đề ngôn ngữ phổ 2009, Pocket/Paperback. Köp boken Outlines of English Grammar for the Use of Junior Classes hos oss!
Title, The Use of English in the Rap Program Language Learning, Motivation and Personal Interests. Author, Shirkhani, Iraj. The first aim is to develop tests capable of yielding reliable and valid scores of receptive knowledge of English collocations as a single construct, for use with In the present thesis, young Swedes'. awareness of grammatical differences between British and American standard English and. which variety they use are The results show that teachers predominantly teach British Standard English (BrSE) and adults, their use of English was constrained by the discourse topic.
A University Grammar of English - 9789144104997
Contact Clauses (1) Contact Clauses (2) Prepositions Many translated example sentences containing "use of English" – Spanish-English dictionary and search engine for Spanish translations. To be: In this English grammar lesson you can learn about the most important verb. You'll see how to use to be in English.
Translate "make use of" from English to Swedish - Interglot
If there is an object (the receiver of the action), it comes after the verb. The formula looks like this: Medium The English language is the primary language of several countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and many of its former colonies, and the United States, and the second language in a number of multilingual countries, including India, Singapore, and the Philippines. Learn the rules, and the quirks, of English grammar - from parts of speech to punctuation. With descriptive speech and clear writing you can entertain, persuade, inform and educate. Idioms and idiomatic expressions are used frequently in spoken and written English and so this is a useful area of the language to learn.
The Use of English is the longest-standing of journals for English teachers in schools and colleges. Today it performs a vital function in the teaching of the subject, both in Great Britain and abroad. Vigorous, independent comment on theory, policy and practice has always been its forte.
Use of English Paper 3 is about grammar and vocabulary with a particular focus on adjective preposition combinations, collocations, common idiomatic Cambridge Advanced English (CAE) exam is one of the most challenging English exams. It requires you to master English nearly to the perfection and 23-apr-2015 - Use of english fce skills by Nicola Gray via slideshare. English Vocabulary in USE Upper-intermediate Engelska, Engelskalektioner, Engelsk Use of English: Ten more practice tests for the Cambridge C1 Advanced: Jago, Billie: Amazon.se: Books. Advanced (CAE) de Cambridge Marzo 2020 ✓ Guía para Preparar y Aprobar el Examen Advanced C1 por tu Cuenta: Estructura, Libros, Use of English. och läs mer om First (FCE) Reading & Use of English. Hämta och upplev First (FCE) Reading & Use of English på din iPhone, iPad och iPod touch. Pris: 214 kr.
Practice your grammar with a certi
Use of English. 120 likes. Community. Facebook is showing information to help you better understand the purpose of a Page. Information and exercises to prepare for First Certificate Use of English Part 4.
Masu elcykel batteri
Click on the gaps, then … Print a copy of the test to read offline then use the interactive version to answer the questions. If you score badly, don't worry! Try our grammar and vocabulary-building exercises in Spotlight Paper 1. Go to our FREE Word Bank for daily vocabulary exercises to help you with the Use of English paper. Use of English 1 - 7. Use of English #1a. Use of English #1b.
Examples: : Examples: Examples. I went fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. (“I” = who the sentence is about.) We. are vacationing in France next year. (“We” = who the sentence is about.) The lion pride was an
English also has many irregular nouns (child, nucleus, tooth, etc.). These nouns become plural by changing their spelling, sometimes becoming quite different words. You may find it helpful to write out the entire irregular plural noun before adding an apostrophe or an apostrophe + s.
Outsourcing fordelar nackdelar
- Bomb tekniker
- Usa skuld bnp
- Netto eksjö erbjudande
- Höjdmätare clas ohlson
- Forlorning in a sentence
- Helena bragée
Engelska språket som hot och tillgång i Norden
(henceforth EFL) was 13.45 Reading and Use of English (90 mins) 15.30 Writing (90 mins) 12.00 Short lunch break 17.10 Listening (40 mins). How to register. You should register to Uppsatser om USE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN SWEDEN. Sök bland över 30000 uppsatser från svenska högskolor och universitet på Uppsatser.se - startsida LIBRIS titelinformation: English Grammar in Use with : a self-study reference and practice book for intermediate learners of English : with answers / Raymond Late Latin dē in ante) · Latin ad- ad-) + delante before, for denante · Spanish, noun, nominal use of past participle of adelantar to go forward, derivative of adelante Furthermore, it examines the teachers' reason for and views on the use of English in the SFL classroom. The data consists of classroom observation of two E House, Södra Husen Stockholm University. Postal address.


By DEAN BAKER, Columbian staff writer
July 16, 2001
Government Island once had a beautiful name, and someday it might again.
Briefly, 196 years ago when 32 members of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery camped there, it was Diamond Island.
Today a regional committee working on the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial wants to give the island back its original name.
It was christened as a jewel of a place in 1805 by Lt. William Clark.
Setting off from today's Sandy River in "fog so thick we could not see a man 50 steps off," Clark and the other explorers paddled to the island, which looked to them like a diamond in the middle of the Columbia River.
In his journal, Nov. 3, 1805, William Clark christened the place "Dimond Island," leaving out the letter "a."
The explorers spent the night on the island about three miles west of modern Camas.
But the name Clark gave the island didn't stick.
Within 50 years, folks on both sides of the river were calling it Government Island, and today it carries the same dull moniker.
"It was because the government raised hay for their animals over there and ran some cattle over there as well," said Vancouver Councilwoman Pat Jollota, an amateur historian.
"It's been flooded out a couple times, and they raised dairy cows on it, too," said Jollota. "I don't know how the government got the cows over there; maybe they swam across. I try to ignore it; it's in Oregon, you know."
But today, Government Island is a favorite recreation spot as well as grazing land, a wetland and a possible location for a runway for Portland International Airport.
The Portland-based Lewis and Clark 2005 Committee wants to resurrect the name "Diamond Island" in honor of the coming bicentennial. The committee also wants to expand boat access and improve interpretive signs on the island.
The project is part of a $2 million Oregon state parks plan for Lewis-and-Clark-connected upgrades between Troutdale and Biggs.
Government Island was one of Lewis and Clark's 14 landing sites in the Vancouver-Portland area.
A little wilderness
Government Island is a wild place in the middle of a growing metropolitan area.
Just to the south is today's PDX.
In 1805, today's airport site was the location of a Chinook Indian village, Nerchokioo, a temporary residence used when gathering wapato, a food plant sometimes called "the Indian potato" that grows at the bottom of shallow lakes.
Nerchokioo was a good-sized Indian town, with 24 straw huts and a single 50-foot-long wooden house. In 1806, on their second pass through the area, Lewis and Clark counted 50 canoes pulled up on the beach where the big jets now land near the Interstate 205 Bridge.
Diamond Island was a busy place already when the 32 members of the Lewis and Clark expedition visited it in 1805.
"River wide and emence numbers of fowls, flying in every direction," wrote Clark, the intrepid journal keeper who, like Lewis, made up his own spellings.
"Saw (Trumper and Whistling) swans, geese, Brants, (Sandhill) Cranes, (Wood) Stalks (storks), white guls, (double-breasted) comerant &c., also great numbers of Sea Otter in the river," wrote Clark.
"Capt. L walked out with his gun on the Island, sent out hunters & fowlers.
"Here we met 15 Indn. men in 2 canoes from below," wrote Clark.
"The men were dressed with a variety of articles of European manufactory. The large Canoe had emeges on the bow & Stern handsomly Carved in wood & painted with the figur of a Bear in front & man in a Stern."
"We landed on the North side of this Dimond Island and Encamped, a canoe arrived from the village below the last rapid with a man his wife and 3 children from the village below, and a woman whome had been taken prisoner from the Snake Inds. on Clarks River."
Clark said he sent "the interpreters wife" (Sacagawea, a Shoshone from the Snake River country and wife of Charbonneau, the interpreter) to talk with the prisoner, who probably was a Paiute. They couldn't understand each other, Clark reported.
But the Indians lent Capt. Lewis a small canoe, and four men from the expedition used it to cross a small lake (Jewit Lake) on the island.
Lewis killed a swan and several ducks, Clark reported, "which made our number of fowls this evening to 3 Swan, 8 brant and 5 Ducks, on which we made a Sumpteous supper."
They gave a brant to the Indian who lent them the canoe and some meat to some other Indians.
"One of the Indians, the man from the vilage near the Lower Rapids has a gun with a brass barrel & cock of which he prises highly," Clark wrote.
The explorers' guns weren't the first in the area. Trade was well established up and down the river and with ships at the mouth of the Columbia.
With that, the explorers, usually in a hurry, went on their way to the coast, not spending any more ink on the island: Diamond or not.


Zebra is one of the animals in the family horse with black and white colors all over his body. Stature is no different with horses in General. Zebra is very easily distinguished from other horse types of skin colour schemes that are striped in black and white.
Although a cursory look the same, each zebra has a striped pattern that is different from each other. Dappled on the body’s defense system can help the zebra zebra against predators. Striped zebra can confuse predators. Striped zebra on the body break down the contours of an animal, disguising the original shape of the zebra. When moving, zebra pattern that’s more confusing again.
In contrast to the usual plain horse. Zebra is one of herbivorous or plant-eaters. Its main food is grass. But sometimes these animals also eat shrubs, leaves, twigs, bark and even. Therefore, the zebra is found in grasslands or the like. in General, the zebras live in groups. by living in a group will help in maintaining a zebra in his life.
on the powerpoint template shows a zebra in a small meadow. the grassland looks green with shady trees. Zebra in the template looks funny with dappled across her body.


Tuesday, February 27, 2007
JERUSALEM - Archaeologists and clergymen in the Holy Land derided claims in a new documentary produced by James Cameron that contradict major Christian tenets, but the Oscar-winning director said the evidence was based on sound statistics.
"The Lost Tomb of Christ," which the Discovery Channel will run on March 4, argues that 10 ancient ossuaries — small caskets used to store bones — discovered in a suburb of Jerusalem in 1980 may have contained the bones of Jesus and his family, according to a press release issued by the Discovery Channel.
One of the caskets even bears the title, "Judah, son of Jesus," hinting that Jesus may have had a son. And the very fact that Jesus had an ossuary would contradict the Christian belief that he was resurrected and ascended to heaven.
Cameron told NBC'S TODAY show that statisticians found "in the range of a couple of million to one in favor of it being them." Simcha Jacobovici, the Toronto filmmaker who directed the documentary, said the implications "are huge."
"But they're not necessarily the implications people think they are. For example, some believers are going to say, well, this challenges the resurrection. I don't know why, if Jesus rose from one tomb, he couldn't have risen from the other tomb," Jacobovici told TODAY. Link to full story.
The last comment by Jacobovici is an example of how any evidence would be looked upon...in immediate and persistant denial.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Explanation: Dust makes this cosmic eye look red. The eerie Spitzer Space Telescope image shows infrared radiation from the well-studied Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) a mere 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. The two light-year diameter shroud of dust and gas around a central white dwarf has long been considered an excellent example of a planetary nebula, representing the final stages in the evolution of a sun-like star. But the Spitzer data show the nebula's central star itself is immersed in a surprisingly bright infrared glow. Models suggest the glow is produced by a dust debris disk. Even though the nebular material was ejected from the star many thousands of years ago, the close-in dust could be generated by collisions in a reservoir of objects analogous to our own solar system's Kuiper Belt or cometary Oort cloud. Formed in the distant planetary system, the comet-like bodies have otherwise survived even the dramatic late stages of the star's evolution.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Two clowns shot dead at circus
BOGOTA (Reuters) - Two clowns were shot and killed by an unidentified gunman during their performance at a traveling circus in the eastern Colombian town of Cucuta, police said Wednesday.
The gunman burst into the Circo del Sol de Cali Monday night and shot the clowns in front of an audience of 20 to 50 people, local police chief Jose Humberto Henao told Reuters. One of the clowns was killed instantly and the second died the next day in hospital.
"The killings had nothing to do with the show the victims were performing at the time of the incident," Henao said in a telephone interview. "We are investigating the motive."
With an entrance fee of under 50 U.S. cents, Circo del Sol de Cali attracts mostly poor Colombians. It pitched it tents in Cucuta, near the border with Venezuela, earlier this month.
"The clowns came out to give their show and then this guy came out shooting them," one audience member told local television. "It was terrible."
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A Malaysian state plans to recruit "spies" from the public to snoop on unmarried lovers and report them to Islamic religious authorities, a newspaper said Tuesday.It's not only Malaysia, Saudi Arabia has "religious police" to keep people in line even if they are not Muslim:
The Terengganu state government plans to enlist the part-time spies to look out for un-Islamic behavior, such as unmarried couples kissing or holding hands, the Star daily said.
"Some of these 'spies' could be waitresses or even janitors at hotels acting as auxiliary undercover agents for our religious department," the head of the state government's Islamic and welfare committee, Rosol Wahid, was quoted as saying.
"Accurate details are required for the enforcement officers to act, otherwise they could be pouncing on married couples."
Last October, religious police in another part of this mainly Muslim country caused an outcry when they mistakenly raided the rented holiday apartment of a Christian American couple on suspicion that they were unmarried Muslims in "close proximity."
20 face lash, prison for dancing in Saudi Arabia
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A Saudi Arabian judge sentenced 20 foreigners to receive lashes and spend several months in prison after convicting them of attending a party where alcohol was served and men and women danced, a newspaper reported Sunday.
Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam under which it bans alcohol and meetings between unrelated men and women.
The religious police, a force resented by many Saudis for interfering in personal lives, enjoys wide powers. Its officers roam malls, markets, universities and other public places looking for such infractions as unrelated men and women mingling, men skipping Islam's five daily prayers and women with strands of hair showing from under their veil.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
American Atheists has posted a story about something I have been talking about that has been growing in the Chicagoland area and is becoming a real nuisance for some neighborhoods where mosques have been built. Mosques sending out calls to prayer across neighborhoods via loudspeakers and fill the air with wails to the masses to stop what they are doing and pray to the imaginary sky daddy of Islam. When I worked in Bridgeview,Il. only a few blocks from the Bridgeview Mosque, I heard this crap over loudspeakers five stinking times a day. This noise makes Christian churchbells seem like nothing. It’s hard to tune out, as it’s so loud the wailing sounds came right through closed windows and can be heard despite the hustle and bustle of office noises.
Here is the article describing what is happening because of these calls to prayers from loudpeakers of The Masjid Nur Al-Islam mosque at 21 Church Avenue in Kensington in NYC.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” the man sings in simple and repetitive musical notes. The message is in Arabic, and translates to, “God is the greatest.”
In Kensington, the call to prayer is amplified by a loud speaker perched atop the Masjid Nur Al-Islam mosque at 21 Church Avenue.
If you haven’t heard it before, it sounds just like this. Imagine trying to take an afternoon nap and being woken up by this:
Church bells are one thing, but chanting religious dogma over loudspeakers is another. Why is it ok for religious folks to be obnoxious and inconsiderate? They don't know when to pray? These "faithful" have to be reminded with bells and wailing alarms? Maybe someone should invent watches that are preset to go off and remind the holy it's time to pray, or maybe a little zapper they can wear that goes off at certain intervals to let them know. Why do the rest of us have to hear it?
Monday, February 19, 2007
click on image to enlarge
Some time ago, I posted an article about a small number of people who still worship Zeus in these modern times. (see Zeus Revival! Zeus worshippers demand access to temple) While reading one of my favorite websites today about the Greek god, Cronos, I clicked on the Zeus link and refreshed my memory about this Top God of ancient mythology. I then looked at website images of the ruins of the Temple of Zeus and ruins of other ancient temples where people at one time actually believed these gods were real and worshipped them. I then thought about all of the churches in the world today and then think about people in ancient times walking to temple for worship much like the people of today go off to their buildings to worship the Christian god, the Muslim god, the Hindu gods. One day these holy places where people worship gods they believe truly exist will one day be ruins for civilizations of the future to dig up and write and read about in an attempt to understand our "ancient" world. Anyway, here is Godchecker's entry on Zeus I thought you all might enjoy reading again, or for the first time if you haven't already. For Christian lurkers, you won't go to hell for reading since there is no such place except in the mythologies of human invention. ;- )
ZEUS: Top God of the Earth and Ruler of Mount Olympus, the lofty cloudland where the Greek Gods live and look down upon mankind.
He is a real high-flyer, an Olympic champion, battling with the giant TITANS, casting thunderbolts and engaged in all manner of gut-busting glorious Godly pursuits.
His father CRONUS was so terrified of the newborn baby ZEUS's awesome power that he swallowed him up. And lived to regret it. It was left to AMALTHEA (and her goat) to protect the budding SuperGod while he learned to walk, talk, and rule the Universe. Since then he's never looked back.
ZEUS is married to the long-suffering HERA, but spends most of his time lusting after Goddesses, mortals, animals, and indeed anything that will keep still long enough.
It's tough at the top being the most fantastic hunky irresistible God of all time and having constantly to prove it. And never a quiet night in with slippers and a mug of cocoa because he has to keep his long-suffering wife HERA happy too. Their trials and tribulations form the basis of half the Greek entries in our database.
ZEUS has had so many mistresses and fathered so many children that there's no point in giving a list here. Just take our word for it. See also CRONUS, RHEA, HEPHAESTUS, ATHENA... and in fact most of the other Greek Gods.
Moving on to more Godly matters, ZEUS was also known to the ancient Greeks as Epiphanes, the Magnificent One, whenever a certain star appeared in the east. This was celebrated with piph-ups known as epiphanies.
When he's not running around after nubile Goddesses in the form of a lusty animal, ZEUS looks after Law, upholds Justice, and casts thunderbolts on those deserving it.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Joking aside, mutations are often caused by copying errors in the genetic material during cell division and by exposure to ultraviolet or ionizing radiation, chemical mutagens, or viruses. Some mutations can lead to changes in a whole species naturally over time.
Mutations create variation in the gene pool, and the less favorable (or deleterious) mutations are removed from the gene pool by natural selection, while more favorable (beneficial or advantageous) ones tend to accumulate, resulting in (gasp!) evolutionary change.(From Wikipedia...read more about mutations HERE.)
Article from Yahoo news:
LONDON - Webbed feet run in Stumpy's family, but a rare mutation has left the eight-day-old duckling with two nearly full-sized legs behind the two he runs on.
Nicky Janaway, a duck farmer in New Forest, Hampshire, 95 miles southwest of London, unveiled the duckling to reporters on Saturday.
"It was absolutely bizarre. I was thinking 'he's got too many legs' and I kept counting 'one, two, three, four,'" Janaway said.
Stumpy would probably not survive in the wild, but Janaway, who runs the Warrawee Duck Farm in New Forest says he is doing well.
"He's eating and surviving so far and he is running about with those extra legs acting like stabilizers," Janaway said.
The mutation is rare, but cases have been recorded across the world. One duckling named Jake was born in Queensland, Australia, in 2002 with four legs but died soon after.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Explanation: Planetary nebula NGC 2440 has an intriguing bow-tie shape in this stunning view from space. The nebula is composed of material cast off by a dying sun-like star as it enters its white dwarf phase of evolution. Details of remarkably complex structures are revealed within NGC 2440, including dense ridges of material swept back from the nebula's central star. Near the center of the view, the star itself is one of the hottest known, with a surface temperature of about 200,000 kelvins. About 4,000 light-years from planet Earth toward the nautical constellation Puppis, the nebula spans over a light-year and is energized by ultraviolet light from the central star. The false-color image was recorded earlier this month using the Hubble's Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2(WFPC2), demonstrating still impressive imaging capabilities following the failure of the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Friday, February 16, 2007
I was tagged by Krystalline Apostate to list five of my favorite quotes. It's going to be hard to narrow it down to five, but here goes. (They aren't in any certain order.) :
1. "I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it."
2. "A rocky vineyard does not need a prayer, but a pick ax." ~Navajo proverb~
3. "I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound — if I can remember any of the damn things." ~Dorothy Parker~
4.“Everything cometh to he who waiteth, as long as he who waiteth worketh like hell while he waiteth!” ~ by fictional character Charlie Chan and is our family motto~
5. "I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence." ~ Frederick Douglas~
I now tag tommy, The Merchant of Menace, Mikayla Starstuff, Danica and MichaelBains
"WHEN MORE IS NOT ENOUGH"
P.T. Barnum is credited with the saying, "There's a sucker born every minute" and it's so true. People will believe anything, and when it comes to medicine they are just waiting for that next new pill to come on the market.
Australian artist Justine Cooper created a fake drug and a fake ad campaign for the drug to parody the tactics used by the drug industry to sell their wares to the public.
Amazingly, many people think this is a real drug and the pill-poppers are all over this one even though it doesn't even exist!
LINK: Fake drug, fake illness -- and people believe it!
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A media exhibit featuring a campaign for a fake drug to treat a fictitious illness is causing a stir because some people think the illness is real.
Australian artist Justine Cooper created the marketing campaign for a non-existent drug called Havidol for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD), which she also invented.
But the multi-media exhibit at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York, which includes a Web site, mock television and print advertisements and billboards is so convincing people think it is authentic.
"People have walked into the gallery and thought it was real," Mahmood said in an interview.
"They didn't get the fact that this was a parody or satire."
But Mahmood said it really took off over the Internet. In the first few days after the Web site (www.havidol.com) went up, it had 5,000 hits. The last time he checked it had reached a quarter of a million.
"The thing that amazes me is that it has been folded into real Web sites for panic and anxiety disorder. It's been folded into a Web site for depression. It's been folded into hundreds of art blogs," he added.
The parody is in response to the tactics used by the drug industry to sell their wares to the public. Consumer advertising for prescription medications, which are a staple of television advertising in the United States, was legalised in the country in 1997.
Cooper said she intended the exhibit to be subtle.
"The drug ads themselves are sometimes so comedic. I couldn't be outrageously spoofy so I really wanted it to be a more subtle kind of parody that draws you in, makes you want this thing and then makes you wonder why you want it and maybe where you can get it," she added.
Mahmood said that in addition to generating interest among the artsy crowd, doctors and medical students have been asking about the exhibit.
"I think people identify with the condition," he said."IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION"
Problems can be avoided if you take HAVIDOL only when you are able to immediately benefit from its effects. To fully benefit from HAVIDOL patients are encouraged to engage in activities requiring exceptional mental, motor, and consumptive coordination. HAVIDOL is not for you if you have abruptly stopped using alcohol or sedatives. Havidol should be taken indefinitely. Side effects may include mood changes, muscle strain, extraordinary thinking, dermal gloss, impulsivity induced consumption, excessive salivation, hair growth, markedly delayed sexual climax, inter-species communication, taste perversion, terminal smile, and oral inflammation. Very rarely users may experience a need to change physicians.
Talk to your doctor about HAVIDOL
Thursday, February 15, 2007
From FFRF: On this date in 1564, Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy. Galileo was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Padua, where he lectured for 18 years. Galileo pioneered the experimental scientific method, building a thermoscope, constructing a geometrical and military compass, and building an improved telescope. His observations of the satellites of Jupiter, sunspots, mountains and valleys on the moon made him a celebrity, but his Copernican views were investigated and condemned by the Church. Diplomatically seeking Church permission, he published "The Assayer," describing his scientific method, which was tactfully dedicated to the pope (1723). It took Galileo nearly two years to persuade the church to permit him to publish "Dialogue on the two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican" (1632), in which he wrote about impetus, momentum and gravity. The Holy Office banned the book, summoning the frail scientist to Rome for trial. Galileo was ordered to abjure his theory and was condemned to house arrest for the rest of his life.
“I have been . . . suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the universe and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the same, and that it does move . . . I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic church.”-- Galileo Galilei's Recantation, June 22, 1633
Three hundred and fifty years after his death, the Catholic Church "forgave" Galileo. D. 1642.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Explanation: Would the Rosette Nebula by any other name look as sweet? The bland New General Catalog designation of NGC 2237 doesn't appear to diminish the appearance of the this flowery emission nebula. Inside the nebula lies an open cluster of bright young stars designated NGC 2244. These stars formed about four million years ago from the nebular material and their stellar winds are clearing a hole in the nebula's center, insulated by a layer of dust and hot gas. Ultraviolet light from the hot cluster stars causes the surrounding nebula to glow. The Rosette Nebula spans about 100 light-years across, lies about 5000 light-years away, and can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of Monoceros.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
LINK: MORE ABOUT THE "MORALS" OF GOD
Whenever we read ... the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind. And, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. -- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Remember this whenever xians ask you where you get your morals from and tell you they get their's from God.
Monday, February 12, 2007
The well-preserved skeletons were discovered facing each other, their arms entwined, during excavation work in an industrial zone of the northern city of Mantua.
"We found these two individuals entwined in a neolithic burial chamber," the lead archeologist Elena Menotti told AFP.
"We believe them to be a man and a woman, DNA tests should be able to clear that up in a few months. From first observations, they were young because their dentition is complete and shows little signs of wear," she said.
"Everybody obviously wants to know why they were buried in an embrace like that. I think that it's a sign of a great love which has transcended time.
"They obviously had strong feelings for each other," she said.
Menotti said the find was unlikely to be an example of widow sacrifice, a practice whereby women were sometimes buried along with the remains of their naturally-deceased husband.
"In such 'widow sacrifices' the women is buried alongside her husband and not in his arms."
On this date in 1809, the 16th U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln, was born in Hardin County, Kentucky. Largely self-educated, he worked on farms, splitting those famous rails, and clerking at a store. Lincoln spent eight years in the Illinois legislature and also rode the circuit of courts for many years. He married Mary Todd; only one of their four sons lived to adulthood. While seeking the nomination for Congress, Lincoln ruefully wrote Martin M. Morris, of Petersburg, Illinois, that "There was the strangest combination of church influence against me . . . everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, [and] was suspected of being a Deist." (March 26, 1843, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Nicolay & Hay edition.)
“Mr. Lincoln was never a member of any Church, nor did he believe in the divinity of Christ, or the inspiration of the Scriptures in the sense understood by evangelical Christians.
When a boy, he showed no sign of that piety which his many biographers ascribe to his manhood. When he went to church at all, he went to mock, and came away to mimic.
When he came to New Salem, he consorted with Freethinkers, joined with them in deriding the gospel story of Jesus, read Volney and Paine, and then wrote a deliberate and labored essay, wherein he reached conclusions similar to theirs.”-- Colonel Ward H. Lamon (a religionist and Lincoln's longtime friend), Life of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 486, 487, 157 (1872), cited by Franklin Steiner in The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
From The Clergy Letter Project:
On 11 February 2007 hundreds of congregations from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy. Now, on the 198th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, many of these leaders will bring this message to their congregations through sermons and/or discussion groups. Together, participating religious leaders will be making the statement that religion and science are not adversaries. And, together, they will be elevating the quality of the national debate on this topic.
The Clergy Letter states:
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
While I would like to be optimistic about the attempts of these “rational” thinking xians in their endeavor to embrace both religion and science, I looked up just how many congregations there are total in this country and found this:
There is no official directory for all the congregations in the county, so sociologists of religion have to rely on statistical estimates extrapolated from surveys. These are often disputed, and to complicate matters, thousands of new churches open each other, while thousands of others close. Hartford Institute estimates there are roughly 335,000 religious congregations in the United States. Of those, about 300,000 are Protestant and other Christian churches, and 22,000 are Catholic and Orthodox churches. Non-Christian religious congregations are estimated at about 12,000.These figures indicate that 10,000 signatures is a mere drop in the bucket — not even ten percent of the total congregations in this country have signed this letter thus far. There is such a long way to go yet. It's hard to believe in the year 2007, despite the fact that Darwin's theory of evolution is so highly regarded at our best institutions of higher learning around the world, that superstition still precedes rational thought and scientific evidence.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Explanation: What's happening to our Sun? Another Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)! The Sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft has imaged many erupting filaments lifting off the active solar surface and blasting enormous bubbles of magnetic plasma into space. Direct light from the sun is blocked in the inner part of the above image, taken in 2002, and replaced by a simultaneous image of the Sun in ultraviolet light. The field of view extends over two million kilometers from the solar surface. While hints of these explosive events, called coronal mass ejections or CMEs, were discovered by spacecraft in the early 70s, this dramatic image is part of a detailed record of this CME's development from the presently operating SOHO spacecraft. Near the minimum of the solar activity cycle CMEs occur about once a week, but near solar maximum rates of two or more per day are typical. Strong CMEs may profoundly influence space weather. Those directed toward our planet can have serious effects.
Conjoined Twins and Parasitic twins (click previous and next to scroll through to see numerous photos and stories about these special people)
Conjoined Twins - Todd Battis on the Twins' Birth
Amazing Conjoined Twins
Monday, February 05, 2007
We could get even more in-depth and ask why a loving god allowed his creations to become amputees in the first place, and why he allows little children to be born without arms or legs. Of course, we know that things happen in life due to human error, errors of doctors, disease and oftentimes freaky things of nature. To believe that there is a loving god who has the power to prevent these things in the first place, but chooses to allow this kind of thing to happen anyway, is absurd.
Key Point from Why Won't God Heal AmputeesNo matter how many people pray, no matter how often they pray, no matter how sincere they are, no matter how much they believe, no matter how deserving the amputee, what we know is that prayers do not inspire God to regenerate amputated legs. This happens despite what Jesus promises us in Matthew 21:21, John 14:14, Mark 11:24, etc.


Coffee is one of the most favored beverages all over the world. It’s full of antioxidants and flavonoids. Both these elements make it a pleasant morning drink for our health, but most of us are not aware of the origin of coffee beans. Have you ever wondered, “where do coffee beans come from?”
In this quick guide, we’ll be diving into the history, types, and unique facts about coffee beans.
History of Coffee
According to legend, the discovery of coffee beans goes back to 600 A.D. in Ethiopia, Africa, (known as the province of Kaffa), where a goat herder noticed that his goats became energetic after eating a bright-colored cherry on a bush.
The goat herder then ate the same fruit to see its effect, and surprisingly, he experienced a rush of energy within a few minutes. He later plucked some coffee berries and brought them to a monk.
The monk went on to make a drink out of those coffee cherries. To his astonishment, he was able to concentrate more during his midnight prayer. That’s when the first cup of coffee was born! The discovery of that magical drink spreads like fire, and as they say, the rest is history.
It’s also documented that around the 15th century and 16th century, the Sufi of Yemen used the cherries to stay energetic. It’s highly probable that it was discovered in Ethiopia and later brought to Yemen, from where it began its journey across the world. However, it was only in the 17th century that it became popular in Europe.
Today, more than 70 countries in the world grow coffee, and most of these coffee production centers are in Africa, South/Central America, and Asia.
Types of Coffee Plants
Coffee beans come from coffee plants. These bean plants are a type of bush or shrub that can grow around 30 feet tall. The bean is located in the center of the coffee cherry, which is the fruit of the coffee plant.
After the cherries are properly harvested, the beans are extracted from them and then put through a roasting process.
The essential factors to grow coffee trees are:
- High altitudes
- Nutrient-rich soil
- Distinct wet and dry seasons
There are two major types of coffee species or plants, the Arabica and Robusta, and most varieties of coffee beans are variations of these two plants.
Arabica Plants (Coffea Arabica)
This is by far the most prolific coffee plant. It has about 100 varieties that are farmed and consumed all over the world. Arabica plants are grown all over the “coffee belt” (otherwise known as the Bean Belt, region lies between the latitudes of 25 degrees north and 30 degrees south). They grow in the tropical climates that exist along the equator.
These labor-intensive plants require 60 to 80 inches of rainfall per year, a dry period of up to 3 months, and a temperature range of 73F to 82F. These beans are longer and flatter. Arabica beans are one of the healthiest, as it’s low in caffeine content and delicate in flavor.
Though highly-priced, it’s a true delight for the palate. About 99% of roasteries are from the Arabica family.
Main Coffee Producers: Latin America, Brazil, Ethiopia, Columbia
Fun Fact: The first Arabica coffee bean plant was discovered in Ethiopia (the birthplace of coffee). From this very plant, the most expensive and high-end artisan coffees are processed, such as the Bourbon, an exclusive variety grown in South America, and Caturra in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
Robusta Plants (Coffea Robusta, or Coffea Canephora)
This coffee plant is known for its strong, earthy flavor, and is high in caffeine content. The beans’ size is small and has fewer sugar compounds. There are a couple of varieties under this Robusta family, namely the C.c Robusta and C.c Nganda. This variety is very popular in the Middle East, Africa, and European region.
The Robusta coffee plant is much more cultivable than the Arabica, making it a cheaper bean. The coffee produced is more creamy. This makes it simple to be used in commercial-grade products, such as instant or as a filler in a dark roast.
Main Producers: Although the bulk of Robusta beans are grown in Africa, Indonesia, India, and Uganda, Vietnam is the single largest producer of the heavily caffeine-infused Robusta beans.
Fun Fact: Vietnamese treat it as a specialty beverage. The use of the caffeine-intense Robusta beans is a rarity in the coffee world.
Coffee Bean Facts
Here are some interesting coffee facts that you may be interested to know:
- Beans are technically fruit pits or seeds, but due to their resemblance to legumes, they’re referred to as beans.
- Second most commercialized and legal merchandise in the world market after petroleum.
- A new plant may take 3 to 4 years to produce fruit known as coffee cherries. They last for an average of 50 to 60 years.
- Lightly roasted beans contain high caffeine in comparison to dark roasted beans.
- No variety of plants can survive in freezing temperatures. This is why they’re mostly grown along the equator.
- Kopi luwak, also known as civet-cat coffee, is one of the most expensive beans in the world. It’s produced in Indonesia, costing above $1000 per kilogram for a wild-collected assortment.
- Finland drinks the most in the world (in terms of per capita). The United States ranks 25th on the list.
The above article has given you a fair answer to the query, “where do coffee beans come from?” both in the literal sense (comes from coffee plants) as well as the geographical aspect (the origin).
Nevertheless, production has reached far and wide. There are different methods to grow, harvest, and roast beans, and these methods assign the wide spectrum of taste we get from each production.
So, now when you order your cups or bags of beans, you’ll be more informed about its origin. Don’t forget to explore different varieties, as each origin has its unique taste. To know more about coffee and brewing products, visit greatcoffeebrewers.com!


This post was co-written by Allie Caton and Claire Nataro, Spring 2018 marketing interns at FableVision Studios.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of finding a book that truly resonates with you. A book where you feel as though you are right there, experiencing the action alongside your favorite characters. For Allie, that story was Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin—a story about alien planets and otherworldly races that felt more real than any of the human stories she had read in school. For Claire, it was Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, a deeply personal read that closely paralleled her own grandmother’s immigrant experience.
When we found these books, we realized that an expansive world of stories had gone ignored in our English classes with reading lists chock full of classics, including names like Dickens and Fitzgerald. Now college students, we look back on the reading lists we endlessly trudged through and realize it wasn’t us, it was the list!
Read Outside the Margins was inspired by these personal experiences reading normative stories in school. Between homework and after-school activities, the books assigned in class are often the only stories that students are reading, and schools have long relied on “high literature” to expose students to a variety of stories. But no matter how different the plots of these literary classics might be, most of their characters and worlds reflect the same normative themes of the western canon.
When students can’t relate to any of the stories they are assigned, reading stops at the classroom. Incorporating reading that showcases a variety of thoughtfully written identities will help students of all races, sexualities, and genders connect with their readings as well as help cultivate empathy and respect in all students for each other’s differences.
Read Outside the Margins takes these tropes and flips them on their head. The series will highlight hand-picked stories that students can connect with and actually want to read!
Each post in the Read Outside the Margins series will feature books spanning all reading levels and age groups. Claire’s picks will be focused on books for kids in preschool through elementary school, and Allie’s picks will feature books for middle and high schoolers. We’ll give you a brief description of the book, why we chose it, and how it can be useful in the classroom! If you’re short on time, take the interactive quiz at the top of each post with your student to find your book match, and skip straight to the description of your perfectly paired book.
Follow along with us over the next month, and tweet your own picks to us at #ReadOutsideTheMargins!


In this virtual tour, you can take your pupils on a 360 degree journey around the nation’s coronation church.
You’ll explore some of the burial and memorial sites of royalty and other notable figures, as well as locating important religious spaces within this working Church.
This tour is a general introduction of Westminster Abbey, aimed at KS2 and KS3 pupils.
Tour created by Striking Places.
At different times of the day, or in different seasons, the light falling in the Abbey will light up something that you have walked past a million times and never seen before.


Drivers in California face numerous hazards all year round. However, certain dangers are more pronounced depending on the season.
Fall presents a series of unique challenges to drivers. Recognizing some of the potential fall driving hazards could assist in preventing accidents. Outlined below are four reasons why driving in the fall can be more dangerous than during other times of the year.
It would be understandable to think that the sun poses the biggest risk during the summertime. However, during fall, the sun sets closer to the horizon. As a result, sunlight may strike you directly in the eyes or reflect strongly from nearby buildings and windows. Exposure to sunlight can cause temporary blindness, which significantly increases the chance of an accident. Having your sunglasses at hand, as well as keeping your windshield clean, could offer some protection from the sun’s glare.
Deep puddles and surface water can pose a significant threat to the safety of drivers. However, so too can a lesser amount of water. California can often experience significantly dry periods throughout the summer, which could mean that dust and grime have built up on the surface. Once this dry dirt has been hit by rainfall, it can take on an oily texture, reducing traction on tires and leading to potential accidents.
When daylight wanes during the fall, road users are forced to operate more frequently in the dark. Darker conditions generally mean that vision is obstructed, and a change in perception makes hazards more difficult to anticipate. Headlights, high beams and fog lights can be used to counteract these conditions, but they must be used appropriately.
Adapting your driving style with the changing seasons could help ensure your safety. If you have been injured in an accident, it may benefit you to know your legal rights.


Milk is used to produce a variety of foods including cheese, ice cream and yogurt, or to add flavor and nutrients to foods. It is the white liquid produced by the mammary glands of cows. Whole milk contains at least 3.25% milkfat. Fat can be removed from milk to produce 2% milkfat (reduced fat), 1% milkfat (low fat) and nonfat (skim) milk.
Starch enhances the texture or keeps ingredients from separating in breads, pancakes, cereals, noodles and other food products. It comes from a variety of vegetable sources, including corn, wheat, rice, and potatoes. Starch may be modified by grinding or treating with enzymes or other substances to enhance its performance.
Vegetable oil is used as an ingredient in food, and may be extracted from any vegetable source, such as beans, seeds or nuts. Common sources are corn, canola, cottonseed, soybean, coconut, sunflower, palm and palm kernel.
Chocolate, or chocolate liquor, provides flavor and texture to a variety of foods, and is made from the fermented, dried and roasted seeds of the cacao tree. Chocolate liquor alone is bitter and is often combined with sugar and other ingredients to create different types including semisweet, dark and milk chocolate.
Sugar, or sucrose, provides sweetness and texture to foods, and is made by evaporating water from the syrup of sugar cane or sugar beets until sugar crystals form. Sugar may be granulated, or very finely ground into powder when a finer texture is desired.
Artificial flavor enhances or adds flavor to food, but does not come from the food normally known for that flavor. As examples, either synthetic lemon flavoring or flavor extracted from limes, used to enhance a lemon-flavored product, would be considered artificial flavor. Vanillin is considered natural flavor when it comes from vanilla beans, but artificial when it is synthetic, although it is chemically identical from both sources.
Definition provided by The J.M. Smucker Company
According to the FDA, the most common food allergens are milk, peanuts,
eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, soy, tree nuts and wheat.
The Bioengineered Foods Disclosure Act requires labeling of foods that contain bioengineered (GMO) ingredients by January 1, 2022. The J.M. Smucker Company is committed to complying with this federal labeling regulation.


The computer has become present in every aspect of modern life of today and contains significant effect over the method we live. It effects or influences everything from connections to mental wellness, from the workplace to our daily tasks. Due to huge influence of technology, it is all natural to wonder if computers could have an effect upon psychology and just how psychology will develop.
The relationship among psychology and the computer is definitely complex. On one hand, psychologists www.rebootdata.net need to use computers to enhance their investigate forward. Additionally, computers can be used to collect info from individuals on a mass, which is especially important with regards to understanding individuals behavior and psychological techniques. In addition, many of the most exciting developments in psychology and calculating are going on at the intersection of mindset and computer science.
In particular, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), human-computer interaction and clinical/educational applications are all areas at the crossroads of mindset and computers.
Psychology and computer technology have been connected since the early days of processing. A key milestone was the 1983 publication of The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction by Stuart Card, Thomas Moran and Allen Newell, three experts operating at Xerox’s Palo Suspensión Research Middle. In their do the job, they desired to apply psychological techniques and processes to digital systems in order to design and style them more efficiently.
Today, mindset and the pc are connected by Big Data, a new tool that may be revolutionizing just how psychologists gather, analyze and retail store information on people. This allows for your deeper level of understanding of person differences and can be used to estimate and appreciate behavior. For instance , it has been feasible to identify specific personality traits from behavior of online users and use this data in recruitment, advertising or perhaps security.