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All children need early and regular dental care. During Reference well-child visits the doctor will check your child's dental health. A visit to a Reference dentist Opens New Window is recommended within 6 months of when your child's first tooth comes in but no later than your child's first birthday.Reference 1 Some parents dread their child's first visit to the dentist's office. You can make a trip to the dentist more positive for your child if you Reference choose his or her dentist carefully. Talk to your child about what to expect. And if you want, use books that are meant to help a young child prepare for the first dental exam. If you have concerns about how your child will behave, talk to your dentist before scheduling the visit. Your dentist may allow your child to come in once or twice before being examined. These types of visits help prepare your child and often make him or her more comfortable with the dentist, other staff, and the office environment. Regular dental visits are important to teach your child good dental care and to help prevent Reference cavities Opens New Window and other problems. The exam also helps to identify and treat problems early and prevent them from becoming more serious. For more information on routine checkups and tooth care, see the topics Reference Basic Dental Care and Reference Tooth Decay. |By:||Reference Healthwise Staff||Last Revised: Reference June 20, 2011| |Medical Review:||Reference Susan C. Kim, MD - Pediatrics Reference Thomas Emmett Francoeur, MD, MDCM, CSPQ, FRCPC - Pediatrics

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Design and ASIC Implementation of Root Raised Cosine Filter Raised cosine filter is a FIR filter that can be used to counter many problems of communication such as the Inter symbol interference. The rectangular pulse occupies a large bandwidth so an alternative to rectangular pulse is a sinc pulse, which reduces the bandwidth and inter symbol interference. The rectangular pulse is passed through the root cosine filter a set of FIR filters to pulse shape the pulses to sinc. The specification of the root raised cosine FIR filter considered in this design is sampling frequency of 15.36 MHz and the cutoff frequency of 1.92 MHz, which is suitable to 3G-WCDMA.

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Black History Month celebrates big moments: changing the Constitution to end slavery, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the election of the first black president. But February’s Black History Month also celebrates small moments that led to big changes, such as a black woman’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white person. That woman was Rosa Parks, who was born 100 years ago today. Her action in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 1, 1955, was intended to be a small protest. (AP Photo/USPS/AP PHOTO/USPS) - The US Postal Service created this stamp honoring Rosa Parks, the civil rights pioneer who was born on February 4, 1912. “I had no idea that when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to segregation laws in the South,” Parks wrote in her autobiography for kids, “Rosa Parks: My Story.” “I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around.” She was arrested and found guilty of violating segregation laws, rules that required black and white people to attend separate schools, drink from separate water fountains and sit in separate areas on buses. Lawyers filed a court case challenging the fairness of segregating buses. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that it was against the Constitution, and black people in Montgomery were allowed to sit in any bus seat. That victory led to many other challenges to segregation laws in the United States. Parks became a hero of those fighting for equality for blacks. She died in 2005, and three schools in the Washington area are named in her honor. Ransom Melettole, a sixth-grader at Hyattsville’s Rosa L. Parks Elementary, said he had heard the bus story several times but more recently began to understand the impact of Parks staying in her seat. “I realized because she did that, it changed the way people thought about segregation,” Ransom said. “I think she was very courageous to do something like that.” The school plans to broadcast some of Parks’s words during today’s morning announcements and to discuss her in classes. Sixth-grader Natalie Gil-Davis said Parks’s story is an important lesson about equality. “It doesn’t matter what color you are; we are all the same,” Natalie said. “We should be treated the same.” Black History Month Books: These people changed history — Christina Barron

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/rosa-parkss-little-protest-led-to-big-change/2013/02/01/a2cc0746-5e5b-11e2-a389-ee565c81c565_story.html

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Strengthening bones is especially important for preteen and teen girls, because women who don't get adequate calcium and vitamin D as teens may be at increased risk for developing osteoporosis later in life. You can work to avoid osteoporosis, which makes bones brittle, through adequate calcium intake, exercise, and plenty of fruits, vegetables, and vitamin D throughout your life. Calcium requirements change during one's lifetime. The body's demand for calcium is greater during childhood and adolescence, when the skeleton is growing rapidly, and during pregnancy and breast-feeding. Postmenopausal women and older men also need to consume more calcium. According to the National Institutes of Health, children 1 to 10 years old need 500 to 1,200 mg of calcium each day. Those 11 to 24 years old need 1,200 to 1,500 mg per day. Adults ages 25 to 50 need 1,000 mg a day, and those 51 and older need up to 1,500 mg per day. Your body uses vitamin D to absorb calcium. Being out in the sun for a total of 20 minutes every day helps most people's bodies make enough vitamin D. You can also get vitamin D from eggs, fatty fish, and vitamin D-fortified cereal and milk. If you think you need to take a supplement, check with your health care provider. Treating a broken bone Doctors still use X-rays to diagnose most broken bones, although more high-tech imaging devices may be used to detect subtle breaks, such as stress fractures. A stress fracture is a tiny fissure in bone often caused by sports overuse. Most broken bones in an arm, leg, hand, or foot require a cast or splint. Heavy, awkward plaster casts have given way to brightly colored fiberglass casts. These are lighter, easier to apply and remove, and more appealing to children. In general, fracture repair is directly related to age. So the older you are, the longer it will take to heal. Doctors can use a variety of mechanical and biological methods to speed healing. Electric and ultrasound stimulation have been used on U.S. gymnasts. The type of fracture also dictates recovery speed. A simple fracture heals quicker that a complicated break requiring bone grafts. Research on genetically produced growth-promoting proteins is promising. Such proteins may decrease extensive surgical fracture repairs.

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Migration and Migrant Workers As more and more people are on the move today than at any other point in human history, migration is considered one of the defining global issues of the early twenty-first century, Currently about 192 million people live in a country which was not their place of birth, making up roughly three per cent of the world's population. This means that roughly one out of every thirty-five persons in the world is a migrant. Between 1965 and 1990, the number of international migrants increased by 45 million - an annual growth rate of about 2.1 per cent. The current annual growth rate is about 2.9 per cent.

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"STATIC ELECTRICITY" IS CAUSED BY FRICTION? "Static" electricity appears whenever two dissimilar insulating materials are placed into intimate contact and then separated again. All that's required is the touching. Chemical bonds are formed when the surfaces touch, and if the atoms in one surface tend to hold electrons more tightly, that surface will tend to steal charged particles from the other surface immediately as they touch. This causes the surfaces to become oppositely they acquire imbalances of opposite polarity. One surface now has more electrons than protons, while the other has more protons than electrons. When the surfaces are later separated, the regions of opposite charge-imbalance also get separated. For example, when adhesive tape is placed on an insulating surface and then peeled off, both the tape and the surface will become electrified. No friction was required. Another example: when a thin material passes between rollers, sometimes the material becomes electrified. The rollers become oppositely electrified. For example, when newspaper passes between rubber rollers in a printing press, the paper becomes electrified and later on this can cause problems with cling and sparking. This situation in a large newspaper press inspired Robert VandeGraaff to design his famous generator. Friction is not required. if one of the materials is rough or fiberous and does not give a very large footprint of contact area, then the process of rubbing one material upon another can greatly increase the total contact area. Friction may also remove thin layers of oil or oxide, exposing a more pure surface beneath. The peeling tape does not have to be rubbed in order to generate charge-imbalance, but the hair does need to be rubbed by the balloon. But the rubbing is not the cause of electrification, electrification can come about purely from contact. The term "Frictional electricity" is misleading. I try to instead use the terms "Contact Electricity" or "Electrification by Contact," or "separation of charge," or "creating "STATIC ELECTRICITY" IS A BUILDUP OF ELECTRONS? It is not a buildup of anything, it is an IMBALANCE between quantities of positive and negative particles which existed beforehand. The electric particles were already there; they did not have to build up. It's an "un-cancelling," an event which occurs between the large quantities of oppositely-charged particles which were already present in matter. Contact electrification is more like "stretched atoms" than anything else. If we could take some atoms and pull their electrons far away from their protons, we would have created an imbalance of charge or "static It's true that during "frictional electricity" or contact electrification, it's *usually* only the negative electrons which are moved from one surface to the other. But this transferring of electrons then results in two areas of imbalanced charge, not one. As negative particles are pulled away from the positive particles, the positives and negatives are no longer near each other and are no longer are able to cancel each other. Because of this, equal and opposite areas of imbalanced charge are always created during the un-cancelling. If you take away a neutral object's electrons, you leave its protons exposed. For a visual demonstration of this, see my Red/Green electricity article And although the negative charges did the moving, this doesn't mean the positive charges are unimportant! Before the charges were separated, there were equal quantities of positive and negative charges present together within the materials. The positives null out the negatives, and the negatives null out the positives. After the separation of the charges complete, the positive charges are just as important as the negative. In one place you'll have more protons than electrons, and this place will have an overall positive charge. In the other spot you'll have more electrons than protons, for an overall negative charge in that region. You've not caused a "buildup of electrons", you've caused an imbalance, an un-cancelling, a stretching-apart, a separation of opposites which otherwise would cancel each other. In fact, one appropriate term for static electrification is CHARGE SEPARATION. Think for a moment: if you put the positive and negative imbalances back together, where does the "buildup of electrons" go? Nowhere, there was no buildup there in the first place. Putting the two polarities of charge back together eliminates the imbalance and forms normal uncharged matter again. ON THE CONTRARY, EVERYDAY 'STATIC ELECTRICITY' INVOLVES IMMENSE VOLTAGES. When two insulating surfaces are adhered (or rubbed) together, two opposite regions of imbalanced charge appear. When these surfaces are later pulled away from each other, a very strong "electric field" appears between them, and this e-field can raise hair, attract lint, etc. In addition, this e-field is an example of pure voltage, or voltage without current. The strength of this e-field is incredibly large when compared to the voltage of batteries and of common electronic circuitry. It is thousands of times stronger, sometimes hundreds of thousands of times stronger. Everyday "static electricity" involves immense voltages. The tiniest "static spark" is caused by about 1000 volts. Longer "car door sparks" and "doorknob sparks" can involve as much as 10,000 volts. For more info, see: ACTUALLY, ALL NEUTRAL OBJECTS ARE MADE OUT OF CHARGE We always talk of matter as if it only had passing relation to electrical effects. Yet if we look in detail into the nature of matter, we find physical substances, made of molecules, made of atoms, made of positive and negative electric charge. Matter is not electrical? No, quite the opposite: electric charge is the major component of all atoms. Therefor matter is *made out of cancelled electric charge.* If we cancel out some opposite charge by placing positive charge together with negative charge, do we get NOTHING? No, instead we get material substance. Positive protons plus negative electrons equals neutral atoms. Physical objects normally have no charge? Wrong. The physical objects *are* the ELECTRICITY IS ENERGY? WRONG. "electricity" is a catch-all word with many meanings. Unfortunately these meanings are contradictory, and this leads to the unsettling fact that there is no single substance or energy called "electricity." And the problem is not as simple as having different kinds of electricity. Instead, we wrongly use the word "electricity" to name completely different things. When we say "quantity of electricity," we could be talking about quantities of electrons or quantities of electrical energy. ...or quantity of potential, or forces, fields, net charge, current, power, or even talking about classes of electrical phenomena or fields of science. All of these are found under the definition of the word "electricity." This is a major mistake, it's like saying that miles, pounds, and degrees are measures of the same single "stuff." And can you have a cup full of "weather" or a bucket of "geology?" Part of this problem would if we used the word "electricity" only to designate a field of science or class of phenomena; in the same way we use the words "physics" or "optics." We do use it this way occasionally. But then we immediately turn around and do the equivalent of teaching our kids that "optics" is a substance which comes out of light bulbs, or that cars can move because they are filled with "physics"! That's how we misuse the ACTUALLY ELECTRICITY DOES NOT EXIST! See: What is Here are a few examples of errors caused by the contradictory meanings. - WELL, JUS EXZACTALY WHICH ONE OF THEM IS THE "ELECTRICITY?": electric circuits the *charges* sit in one place and wiggle back and forth, but the *energy* moves continuously forward. This is analogous to the way that sound in air moves continuously forward, while the air itself just wiggles back and forth. By applying contradictory definitions to the the term "electricity," we teach that electricity (charge) sits in one spot in the wires and wiggles, but at the same time electricity (energy) moves forward rapidly. Garbage! How can anyone possibly understand this?! It's like saying that sound and wind are the same thing! And the error is directly traceable to the bogus, contradictory "electricity" - Another: There are two forms of electricity, positive electricity and negative electricity. NO, the two forms of electricity are static and NO, there are many forms of electricity: triboelectricity, bioelectricity, myoelectricity, piezoelectricity. NO, there is only one electricity, the form of energy called Electromagnetism. NO, electricity is energy flow, haven't you ever heard of "watts of electricity?" ...Which one of the above is right? All of them. And none, because the word "electricity" has more than one contradictory definition, and the experts cannot agree. None are since there is no "electricity" which can be the charge, energy, and phenomena all at once. And all these statements are correct, because the word "electricity" is commonly used to name all these different things, and dictionaries support this. Volts of electricity. Amperes of electricity. Kilowatt-hours of electricity. Watts of electricity. Coulombs of electricity. It's all totally meaningless and confusing when yet it's inextrictably entwined in hundreds of textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. The solution? Say "amperes of electric current", not amperes of electricity. Say "kilowatt-hours of energy", and "coulombs of charge", and "Watts of power." To greatly imporve the clarity of your explanations, simply don't mention 'electricity' at all. 'Charging' a capacitor fills it with charge? Capacitors store electric charge? NO! The word "charge" has more than one contradictory meaning, so if you're using it, you're probably creating misconceptions. "Charge" refers to several things: to net-charge, to quantities of charged particles, and to "charges" of energy. No, because 'charged' and 'uncharged' capacitors actually contain the exact same amount of charge. - For example, even when a metal object is totally neutral, it contains vast quantities of movable electrons. You can imagine that all metals are soaked with a sort of "electric fluid" made of negative particles which are wandering among the "solid" positive copper ions. If copper is like a wet sponge, then the sponge is the protons in the atom nuclei, and the water is the movable electrons. On the other hand, since the positives and negatives cancel, could we say that wires contain no charge at all? Or should we say the opposite: that they contain immense quantities of charge because they are constructed from electrons and protons? Are they "charged" because they're partly composed of "liquid" electric charges, or are they "uncharged" because they contain exactly equal quantities of opposite charges ...which all Which is 'right?' I don't know the answer. Maybe it's better to abandon the word "charged", and use other, less misleading terms. Don't say "charged", say "electrified." Speak of "charge imbalance" and "the cancelled charge within all matter." That removes the contradictions. Another: if I place an electron and a proton together, do I have twice as much charge as before, or do I have a neutral hydrogen atom with no charge at all? What I DO have is confusion. Conflicting use of "charge" makes descriptions of electric circuits seem complex and abstract, when the explanations are really just wrong. - Another: electric currents in wires are a motion of *neutralized* charge, so if you teach that a wire is uncharged, and also teach that current is a flow of charge, how can anyone make sense of a situation where a wire has no charge at all, yet contains an enormous flow of charge? This situation arises everywhere in electric circuits, and so the confusion is spread everywhere too. - Another: when you charge a capacitor or a battery, you move from one plate to the other inside the device, and the device as a whole contains exactly the same charge whether it's "charged" or not. When speaking of "charging" batteries or capacitors, we've suddenly started to talk about energy rather than charge, and a "charged" battery has quite a bit more energy than an uncharged battery. Yet it contains exactly the same net-charge, and contains the same quantity of + and - particles. Before being "charged," a capacitor is neutral, and no matter how much "charge" you put into it, the capacitor remains neutral overall. One plate is positive, but the other plate is equally negative, so the capacitor's total charge never changes. In a capacitor, for every electron you remove from one plate, you inject an electron into the other plate, so none are gained or lost from the device. Capacitors and batteries are energy, not with electric charge. This concept is very important for gaining a solid understanding simple circuitry, yet we rarely teach it specifically because the way is blocked by the misleading term "charge." Those rare people who figure it out become experts. But it's not hard to be an expert when nearly universal confusion rules a field of study. 'STATIC' IS RARE? NO. If you believe typical explanations of "static electricity", you will come to see "static" as a fairly rare phenomena that has little connection with the rest of the world. Yes, yes, lightning is impressive, and copiers and laser printers are convenient, but if "static" didn't exist, the world wouldn't be much different, would it? IN FACT, 'STATIC ELECTRICITY' IS ACTUALLY AS COMMON AS MATTER In fact, electrostatics is a bit more important than we commonly assume. Contrary to popular belief, standard "electric current" circuits are deeply connected with electrostatics. For one thing, it is the electrostatic force that drives electric current! "Voltage" is an electrostatic phenomena, voltage is electrostatic fields. Without electrostatics, there could be no voltage, hence no current and no electrical devices. It is totally wrong to build a false wall between "Static" and "Current", it's as silly as teaching that "pressure" and "movement" are two separate types of water. "Static" and "Current" are two fields of study, not two substances or energies. They are subject areas which were created entirely by humans, they don't *really* exist separately in the real "Static electricity" is important in many other places besides lightning, photocopiers, and doorknob sparks. For example, your muscles are driven by long-chain molecules which are forced to slide across each other. This sliding is performed by electrostatic attraction and repulsion between parts of the molecule, and so your muscles are electrostatic motors! They are "linear motors", as opposed to the rotary electrostatic "pop bottle" motor found elsewhere on my website. Another example: nerves function as tiny capacitors, with charge pumps to electrify them, and ion gates to discharge them. Imagine a nerve as being a long tubular "Leyden Jar" having billions of tiny "VandeGraaff generators" scattered across its surface, and with billions of "spark gaps" which always close in sequence as the nerve impulse Another one: when Uranium atoms are hit by neutrons and their nuclei split, the main source of released energy is the repulsion between alike-charged positive protons in the fragments of the nucleus. Therefor, nuclear reactors release the electrostatic energy of uranium nuclei. A plutonium bomb is actually a "static electric" repulsion Another: when dissimilar materials touch, charge is separated. When dissimilar semiconductors touch, we get "contact potential", a microscopic electrostatic phenomenon which makes numerous devices possible: LEDs, solar cells, thermocouples, ...and diodes, transistors, computers, radios, television, internet, etc. Semiconductor electrostatics is essential to Another: one type of transistor in particular, the FET or "field effect transistor", is purely an electrostatic device. Electrostatic fields within it are used to open and close the conductive channel which regulates current. See "Charge Detector" for some suggested experiments. Are these sorts of transistors rare? No. Every single transistor in the memory, CPU, and IO chips of modern PCs are FET transistors. Most of the transistors in modern TVs and stereos are FETs. Few people realize that "static electric" devices have taken over the electronics industry, or that PCs are made from microscopic electrostatic components, or that all the data in all the computers all over the world is stored as tiny patterns of electrostatic charges. "ATP" is the fuel which drives living things, from bacteria to humans. One part of the 1997 Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to the researchers Boyer and Walker who discovered how energy is placed into ATP. It turns out that ATP is assembled by an enzyme which is run by a tiny rotating electrostatic motor! The "spring" in each ATP is "cocked" by a little rotating molecular machine run by electrostatics. The reaction is reversible, and ATP can drive the motor, changing it into an electrostatic typical human body contains around 10^16 of these rotary electrostatic A big one next. The world is molecules. And molecules are atoms, and atoms are themselves composed of positive and negative charged particles. Atoms are held together by electrostatic attraction. If matter is made of little dots, then the "bars" that connect all the dots together are made electrostatic fields. Also, atoms are connected to each other through chemical bonding, and chemical bonding is based upon electrostatic attraction/repulsion forces. Without "Static Electricity" there would be no chemistry, no living things. Without "Static Electricity", solids and liquids would be gas, the molecules of the gas would fall apart into atoms, and the atoms would turn separate electrons and nuclei. Without electrostatics, the entire universe would be a boring, featureless cloud of neutral-particle gas. Some people consider electrostatics to be boring. On the contrary, electrostatics is the very thing that lets this universe be an interesting NO, ELECTROSTATICS DOES NOT INVOLVE "ELECTRICITY AT REST." First let's look at an analogy which might help clear up our thinking. Within the science of Hydraulics there are sections called Hydrodynamics and Hydrostatics. Hydrostatics is the study of fluid pressure and forces. It's not the study of static water, it's the study of water pressure. When pressurized pipes are swelling, or when a piston is driving water ahead of it, those are situations involving Hydrostatics. If you draw maps of the distribution of pressure upon a surface, that's Does Hydrostatics involve water at rest? No, because fluid forces still exist even when water is moving. Just because water starts flowing, that doesn't mean that hydrostatic pressure must vanish. Does Hydrostatics involve a special kind of water called "Static Water?" No, that's just silly. "Static water" is a field of science otherwise known as Hydrostatics. Hydrostatics is not a stuff! OK, now look at the science called "Electricity." It has sections called "Electrodynamics" and "Electrostatics." Is Electrostatics the study of non-moving electricity? First think about Hydrostatics before you try to answer this question. As you suspect, Electrostatics is similar to Hydrostatics: it is the study of electric forces and the Electric Charge which creates those forces. It is the study of imbalanced charges in matter, and of voltage and electric fields. Notice that I didn't say anything about "charges at rest." This is intentional, since electrostatic forces don't go away when the charges start flowing in a current. And while electric voltage falls under the heading "Electrostatics," electric voltage is intimately involved with flowing charges. (Analogy: water pressure is intimately involved with water flow.) Is there a kind of electricity called "static electricity?" No. That's just silly. It's just as silly as believing in a special kind of water called Static Water. There's a field of science called electrostatics or "Static Electricity," but there's no such stuff as "Static." Where did this crazy misconception about "motionless charges" come from? There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of books which blatantly state "Electrostatics is the study of charges at rest." How can they say such things? I have a good idea. Look at the difference between Hydrodynamics and Hydrostatics. Hydrostatics ignores the changing parts and concentrates only on and the distribution of forces. On the other hand Hydrodynamics ignores the unchanging parts; it studies changing or "dynamic" events like fluid flow patterns, turbulence, etc. If we became slightly confused, we might decide that hydrodynamics was all about moving water while hydrostatics was only about motionless water. easy mistake. Yet it's a serious one, since the actual difference between "statics" and "dynamics" is something made up by human minds, not something that really exists out in the real world. It has almost nothing to do with water's movement. For example, if I look at a river and I ignore the flowing water while only observing the fluid forces, then I've made that moving river become a "Hydrostatic" system. If Hydrostatics was motionless water alone, then I couldn't think about common Hydrostatic topics such as the pressure in a moving river or the forces applied by curving flows. Back to electricity again: "statics" and "dynamics" are viewpoints, and they have almost nothing to do with motionless or flowing charges. I can look at a flashlight and, if I concentrate on voltage and electrical forces while ignoring electric current, I can transform it into an "electrostatic" device with my mind. "Electrostatics" is a way of thinking; a kind of viewpoint. It's a field of science. If I thought it was REALLY about "charges at rest", it would mentally damage me as an engineer. I'd no longer be able to understand common Electrostatic situations such as the forces driving electrons across a TV tube, or the voltage fields within the acid of a car battery. I'd end up with little understanding of Voltage at all. I'd end up thinking that the entire topic of Electrostatics was about Ben Franklin and about fur rubbed upon balloons, and I'd wrongly ignore it as useless historical stuff. I'd never know that electrostatics was actually the study of voltage. I'd end up crippled in my understanding of electricity, and I'd never quite know ELECTRIC CIRCUITS HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH "STATIC ELECTRICITY?" Electric currents are caused by voltage, and the voltage in a circuit is caused by the imbalances of charge which are present on the surface of the metal wires. "Static electricity" is what makes circuits operate! Without the "static electricity" supplied by batteries or generators, modern electrical devices could not exist. This shouldn't be a big surprise, since voltage and electrostatics are intimately intertwined. Here's another way to think about it: when you rub some fur on plastic, you generate many thousands of volts, while common batteries only generate a few volts. But both of these create surface charge imbalances. And both create electrostatic attraction and repulsion forces. It's the electrostatic forces which drives the charges through the wires in a circuit. Electric currents are pumped by "static See also: Unified Treatment of Electrostatics and Circuits , Chabay and Sherwood, 1999 (.pdf) 'STATIC ELECTRICITY' IS TOO WEAK AND FEEBLE TO BE USEFUL? WRONG. Some authors tell us that "static electricity" is much weaker than batteries and normal electric generators. They say that 'static' is to raise hair, or it can slightly repel some pieces of aluminum foil. Wrong! Electrostatic force is not inherently weaker than magnetic force. But they do have a point. First of all let's make one thing clear: all motors involve "static electricity." After all, voltage and surface-charge is the cause of electric currents, so all electric circuits and all electric motors are based on "static electricity." So what do they really mean when they say that static electricity is weak and feeble? They're actually talking about the attraction of opposite electric charges, versus the attraction of opposite magnetic poles. They're talking about the difference between coil motors which use magnetic fields, versus capacitor motors which use electric fields. Conventional coil motors are powerful because their electromagnet coils can strongly push or pull against magnets or other coils. But if we build a motor using charged aluminum foil, that motor will be quite feeble. But wait a minute! That's wrong, since magnetism isn't inherently more powerful than electric force. Don't forget that electric force is what holds solid steel together. Magnetism can even be feeble. The first magnetism motors were invented by Michael Faraday, and they were incredibly feeble. It took many years before anyone figured out how to construct powerful magnetic motors. First, they had to ignore the weak magnetic forces made by electric currents and liquid mercury, and instead invent the electromagnet coil. Then the inventors had to stop trying to build with flywheels turned by crankshafts with magnet pistons. Instead discovered how to use small rotating coils wrapped by larger coils. Modern electric motors are extremely powerful, but they're very different than Faraday's original feeble motor discovery. Ben Franklin invented the first motor which used electric charges that attract and repel. His "Franklin wheel" was extremely feeble, just as feeble as the "Soda-bottle Electrostatic Motor." Scientists and inventors eventually built much better capacitor motors. They used interleaved stacks of metal plates rotating in a vacuum chamber. These motors are as powerful as coil/magnet motors, but they're too expensive. Also they require very high voltage rather than high current. For these reasons you can't buy a one-horsepower capacitor motor, while 1HP coil motors are cheap and common. So make an honest comparison between 'static electricity' and batteries and generators, we must compare the force between two charged metal plates with the force between two current-carrying wires. Both forces are quite feeble. But there are ways to build powerful motors which are based upon coils *or* capacitors. BEN FRANKLIN'S KITE WAS STRUCK BY LIGHTNING? NEVER HAPPENED. Many people believe that Ben Franklin's kite was hit by a lightning bolt, and this was how he proved that lightning is electrical. A number of books and even some encyclopedias say the same thing. They are wrong. They have fallen victim to an infectious myth, an "urban legend of science" which is slowly spreading to more and more books. When lightning strikes a kite, the spreading electric currents in the ground can kill anyone standing nearby, to say nothing of the person holding the Franklin wrote about "drawing down the lightning" from a thunderstorm. What he actually did was to show that a kite would collect a tiny bit of imbalanced electric charge out of the sky during the early parts of a thunderstorm, before lightning strikes became a danger. Feeble electric leakage through the air caused his kite and string to become electrified, and the hairs on the twine stood outwards. Twine is slightly conductive on a humid day, and the twine served as Franklin's "antenna wire." The twine was then used to electrify a metal key, and tiny sparks could then be drawn from the key. (A metal object is needed because sparks cannot be directly drawn from the twine. The twine is slightly conductive, but not conductive enough to allow sparking.) No noise, no big flash, just boring yet earthshaking science experimenting. The presence of sparks suggested to Franklin that some stormclouds carry strong electrical charges, and it IMPLIED that lightning was just a large electrical spark. The common belief that Franklin easily survived a lightning strike is not just wrong, it is dangerous: it may convince kids that it's OK to duplicate the kite experiment as long as they "protect" themselves by holding a silk ribbon with a key tied in the middle. Make no mistake, Franklin's experiment was extremely dangerous. He could have been killed at any moment, and if lightning had actually hit his kite, today he would be regarded as a colonial politician who was killed by stupidity, not as a famous scientist who founded a major new research area. OK, so what IS Static Electricity?!!! 1. Static electricity is a field of science. Some people call it "Electrostatics." Same thing. So, if Static Electricity is a kind of science, then it can't be made by generators. In a similar way, you can dissect a dead frog, but you'll never find any biology. And rocks don't contain any tiny pieces of "geology." Remember: hydrostatics is the study of fluid pressure, Newtonian Statics is the study of physical forces, and Static Electricity is the study of charge, voltage, and electrical forces. Where can we find static electricity? In physics books... and in buildings at the 2. Static electricity is a set of events which humans have grouped Sparks and lightning are "static electricity," even though sparks and lightning are about the most dynamic things imaginable. Also, "dryer cling" is static electricity. The cling effect, THAT is the electricity. After all, "electricity" can mean "a class of phenomenon," and having your socks stick to the back of your sweater is certainly a phenomenon. Where does static electricity come from? From human minds: same as with "weather" and "bureaucracy" and other classes of phenomenon. 3. Static electricity is another word for high voltage. Whenever we have high voltage, then we also have electrostatic attraction and repulsion. High voltage can attract lint or tiny bits of paper, and it can make hair stand up. With high voltage we also get long sparks, crackling noises, and blue glows and flashes. High voltage makes ozone; the stuff that gives that funny chlorine smell. These things are the hallmarks of Static Electricity, but they are never caused by the "static-ness" of electric charges. Instead they are caused by intense e-fields. Intense e-fields are another way of saying "high votlage." If you can scuff your shoes on the carpet and then zap people with your finger, then you've been charging your body to several thousand volts. 4.Static Electricity means an imbalance of electric charge Electrically neutral matter contains closely-spaced electrons and protons. The "positives" and the "negatives" are very close together, so their effects cancel out. That's why electrical phenomena don't seem obvious in the everyday world. But if we accidentally remove a bunch of electrons from their atoms, then put these electrons in a distant spot, we'll create a region of positive net charge. We'll also create an equal region of negative net charge. These imbalances of charge will surround themselves with intense e-fields.

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Every so often, someone (generally not a practicing scientist) suggests that it's time to replace science with something better. The desire often seems to be a product of either an exaggerated sense of the potential of new approaches, or a lack of understanding of what's actually going on in the world of science. This week's version, which comes courtesy of Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired, manages to combine both of these features in suggesting that the advent of a cloud of scientific data may free us from the need to use the standard scientific method. It's easy to see what has Anderson enthused. Modern scientific data sets are increasingly large, comprehensive, and electronic. Things like genome sequences tell us all there is to know about the DNA present in an organism's cells, while DNA chip experiments can determine every gene that's expressed by that cell. That data's also publicly available—out in the cloud, in the current parlance—and it's being mined successfully. That mining extends beyond traditional biological data, too, as projects like WikiProteins are also drawing on text-mining of the electronic scientific literature to suggest connections among biological activities. There is a lot to like about these trends, and little reason not to be enthused about them. They hold the potential to suggest new avenues of research that scientists wouldn't have identified based on their own analysis of the data. But Anderson appears to take the position that the new research part of the equation has become superfluous; simply having a good algorithm that recognizes the correlation is enough. The source of this flight of fancy was apparently a quote by Google's research director, who repurposed a cliché that most scientists are aware of: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them." And Google clearly has. It doesn't need to develop a theory as to why a given pattern of links can serve as an indication of valuable information; all it needs to know is that an algorithm that recognizes specific link patterns satisfies its users. Anderson's argument distills down to the suggestion that science can operate on the same level—mechanisms, models, and theories are all dispensable as long as something can pick the correlations out of masses of data. I can't possibly imagine how he comes to that conclusion. Correlations are a way of catching a scientist's attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications. One only needs to look at a promising field that lacks a strong theoretical foundation—high-temperature superconductivity springs to mind—to see how badly the lack of a theory can impact progress. Put in more practical terms, would Anderson be willing to help test a drug that was based on a poorly understood correlation pulled out of a datamine? These days, we like our drugs to have known targets and mechanisms of action and, to get there, we need standard science. Anderson does provide two examples that he feels support his position, but they actually appear to undercut it. He notes that we know quantum mechanics is wrong on some level, but have been unable to craft a replacement theory after decades of work. But he neglects to mention two key things: without the testable predictions made by the theory, we'll never be able to tell how precisely it is wrong and, in those decades where we've failed to find a replacement, the predictions of quantum mechanics have been used to create the modern electronics industry, with the data cloud being a consequence of that. If anything, his second example is worse. We can now perform large-scale genetic surveys of the life present in remote environments, such as the far reaches of the Pacific. Doing so has informed us that there's a lot of unexplored biodiversity on the bacterial level; fragments of sequence hint at organisms we've never encountered under a microscope. But as Anderson himself notes, the only thing we can do is make a few guesses as to the properties of the organisms based on who their relatives are, an activity that actually requires a working scientific theory, namely evolution. To do more than that, we need to deploy models of metabolism and ecology against the bacteria themselves. Overall, the foundation of the argument for a replacement for science is correct: the data cloud is changing science, and leaving us in many cases with a Google-level understanding of the connections between things. Where Anderson stumbles is in his conclusions about what this means for science. The fact is that we couldn't have even reached this Google-level understanding without the models and mechanisms that he suggests are doomed to irrelevance. But, more importantly, nobody, including Anderson himself if he had thought about it, should be happy with stopping at this level of understanding of the natural world.

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Got me thinking about time and the passage of in a whole new way. How it'll be 70 years this December since the bombing of Pearl Harbor (72 this September since the official start of the war). How it took 59 years before there was even a monument devoted to those who served in that war. (I'm obviously not counting the years it took to build the beautiful monument.) And how of the 16,112,566 individuals were members of the United States armed forces during the war, as of September 2010 approximately 1,981,000. [wiki article] If you have the opportunity to visit, take the time to do so. On April 29, 2004, the National World War II Memorial opens in Washington, D.C., to thousands of visitors, providing overdue recognition for the 16 million U.S. men and women who served in the war. The memorial is located on 7.4 acres on the former site of the Rainbow Pool at the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The Capitol dome is seen to the east, and Arlington Cemetery is just across the Potomac River to the west. The granite and bronze monument features fountains between arches symbolizing hostilities in Europe and the Far East. The arches are flanked by semicircles of pillars, one each for the states, territories and the District of Columbia. Beyond the pool is a curved wall of 4,000 gold stars, one for every 100 Americans killed in the war. An Announcement Stone proclaims that the memorial honors those "Americans who took up the struggle during the Second World War and made the sacrifices to perpetuate the gift our forefathers entrusted to us: A nation conceived in liberty and justice." Though the federal government donated $16 million to the memorial fund, it took more than $164 million in private donations to get it built. Former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, who was severely wounded in the war, and actor Tom Hanks were among its most vocal supporters. Only a fraction of the 16 million Americans who served in the war would ever see it. Four million World War II veterans were living at the time, with more than 1,100 dying every day, according to government records. The memorial was inspired by Roger Durbin of Berkey, Ohio, who served under Gen. George S. Patton. At a fish fry near Toledo in February 1987, he asked U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur why there was no memorial on the Mall to honor World War II veterans. Kaptur, a Democrat from Ohio, soon introduced legislation to build one, starting a process that would stumble along through 17 years of legislative, legal and artistic entanglements. Durbin died of pancreatic cancer in 2000. The monument was formally dedicated May 29, 2004, by U.S. President George W. Bush. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it received some 4.4 million visitors in 2005.

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Solar Panels Headed to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West It must have been intimidating. Less than six weeks on the job and Sean Malone, CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, had to announce that he was installing solar panels at Taliesin West, making it one of the first structures in the National Register of Historic Places and on the National Historic Landmarks list to "go renewable." Malone, modestly, shakes it off. "To be able to be a visible example of environmental stewardship -- there aren't many historical landmarks that could do this," he says. "We can, and it's because of Frank Lloyd Wright's history of innovation and responsible use of resources." Read all about the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum in this week's art review by New Times' Kathleen Vanesian. Find more about the push for energy at Taliesin West after the jump... The project broke ground earlier this week, but planning began in early 2011, before Malone came on board, when the foundation hired Phoenix energy auditing company Big Green Zero to find ways to lower Taliesin West's $200,000 annual energy bill. The audit found that with a few energy-efficiency renovations (like replacing light bulbs and updating thermostats), Taliesin West could cut its bill in half. And with some renewable energy additions (solar panels), the complex could someday become net-zero. "After the assessment, we realized that we're not just reducing a bill, but taking this remarkably historic laboratory and bringing 21st century technology into it," says Bob Roth, CEO of Big Green Zero. Of course, at a 75-year-old school and studio, that's easier said than done. There are at least 5,000 light bulbs at Taliesin West, Roth says, many of which were specially placed and designed to provide architectural illusions. To replace them with more energy-efficient bulbs, Roth's team had to work with Scottsdale's Studio Lux to come up with entirely new designs. "It's a very unusual property, tremendously difficult to deal with," Roth says. "Take the canvas roof that Wright' experimented with. Today, it's an impossible situation. You can't air condition those spaces with no insulating value." Thanks to Wright's omnipresent impact on the Valley Taliesin West has garnered generous donations for the project from local businesses, including First Solar, a Tempe company that donated nearly two acres of solar panels at a value of more than $1 million. Though the panels will be installed by the end of April, it could take up to six years to finish the entire retrofitting project, Roth says, depending on whether and when more donations roll in. (It will take two to four years just to replace the light bulbs.) Like with any historical renovation, there was concern from the beginning about preserving the integrity of Taliesin West. Roth says he and the foundation worked tirelessly to ensure the complex would appear untouched. But how can you hide 1.9 acres of solar panels? Cleverly, Malone says. From any point of Taliesin West's "historic core," the solar panels won't be visible. They'll be pushed off to the side and surrounded by desert plants . The only time visitors will see them is when they're driving up to the complex -- that was intentional. "From any of the historic viewsheds, visitors won't be able to see the solar panels even if they try," Malone says. "Unless they happen to bring 100-foot stilts with them." And so far, there hasn't been much criticism from the design or historical communities. Roth says he's encountered at least 100 Wright architecture students since the project began, and that two or three total expressed concerns about the renovations. Those familiar with Wright's work can recognize that energy conservation is in line with the designer's vision, says Mark Vinson, design and preservation manager for the City of Tempe and architecture faculty associate at The Design School at ASU. "While I would be opposed to such an installation at the iconic Fallingwater, another Wright-designed National Historic Landmark, I see the Taliesin case in a somewhat different light," says Vinson, who has no affiliation with the project. "This was Wright's own winter home, architectural school and studio and, as such, served as a 'living laboratory' for ideas, methods and materials and was never intended to be frozen in time."

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In previous posts you’ve met Dr. Price and Dr. Pottenger and now I’d like to introduce you to Wisconsin’s own Dr. Royal Lee. He was a graduate of Marquette University’s Dental School, but even more - a researcher, inventor, scientist, scholar, and businessman. Like Price and Pottenger, Lee was interested in nutrition, believing there was an undeniable link between what we eat and how we feel. He was particularly focused on the value of whole foods versus the processed foods that were being pushed on the public. During his senior year he wrote a paper discussing the relationship between vitamin deficiency, tooth decay, and healthy endocrine gland function. Dr. Lee devoted significant energy to his inventions and acquired about 100 patents. He was able to combine his passion for inventing, scientific research, and nutrition in his work. In the early 1920’s heart disease suddenly appeared on the American scene. It is a little known fact that there were not many heart attacks until this time. Dr. Lee was certain that the refining of flour and rice (the processing of food) was a major contributor to this growing problem. He believed that the removal of real vitamins and minerals from our food supply and their replacement with synthetic vitamins was the root cause of the increase in heart disease and other illness as well. His research and practical experience showed that real and synthetic vitamins did not function the same in the human body. His major contribution to the world of nutrition was the development of nutritional products from raw food concentrate. He believed and proved that in concentrated form these foods had therapeutic applications. His products were distributed through medical doctors providing nutritional alternatives to drugs to treat illness and disease. As a result of his success in helping people get healthy through the use of these products he created the Vitamin Products Company in 1929. It is today known as Standard Process, one of the world’s leading provider of nutritional supplements. In 1941 he organized the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, a nonprofit organization to conduct and share nutritional research across the globe. It became a world wide clearinghouse for hundreds of thousands of research articles and thousands of books presenting the latest nutritional information. Dr. Lee was way ahead of his time. Here’s a quote from October of 1933, "Candy, all white sugar or its products, and white flour including its products such as macaroni, spaghetti, crackers, etc., should be absolutely barred from the diet of the child. All these are energy-producing foods that contain no building materials for the body. The consequences of their toleration are susceptibility to infections, enlarged tonsils, carious teeth, unruly dispositions, stunted growth, rickets, maldevelopment and very often permanent damage to many organs of the body (especially the endocrine glands) that depend upon the vitamin supply for their normal function and development." Every time I read this or similar quotations from these nutrition pioneers all I think of is – wow, they knew this in the 1930’s! However, for statements such as this he became a target of the food industry and the FDA. They got particularly upset as he would run newspaper advertisements pointing this out. They went after him, labeling him a “racketeer” because he promoted whole, natural foods that had their vitamins and minerals intact. After several years of proceedings, in the late 1950’s the final court decision was handed down. While Dr. Lee was never found guilty of anything, he was prohibited from speaking publicly or writing on health, medicine and nutrition. (So much for the First Amendment!) His research and published papers were ordered destroyed (can you say censorship) and he was forced to close several of his companies. Fortunately, the FDA did not get all his papers, and many of them are still preserved today by several organizations determined to keep his memory alive and to continue to spread the word. It is unfortunate that you can still find people today who still call label him a “quack” and write deceptive and misleading articles about him. Of course they never talk to the people who have greatly benefited by this man’s contributions. Bernard Rosen, PhD is a Nutrition Consultant and Educator. He works with individuals, groups, and at corporations to create individualized nutrition and wellness programs. His office is in Thiensville. To learn more or to schedule an appointment, e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.org, call (262) 389-9907 or go to www.brwellness.com.

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Category → Training The standard advice for a clothing fire, even in a lab, is still to stop, drop, and roll. According to the National Fire Protection Association Code 45, “Standard on Fire Protection For Laboratories Using Chemicals,” A.188.8.131.52: Laboratory personnel should be thoroughly indoctrinated in procedures to follow in cases of clothing fires. The most important instruction, one that should be stressed until it becomes second nature to all personnel, is to immediately drop to the floor and roll. All personnel should recognize that, in case of ignition of another person’s clothing, they should immediately knock that person to the floor and roll that person around to smother the flames. Too often a person will panic and run if clothing ignites, resulting in more severe, often fatal, burn injuries. Fire-retardant or flame-resistant clothing is one option available to help reduce the occurrence of clothing fires. Refer to NFPA 1975, Standard on Station/Work Uniforms for Emergency Services, for performance requirements and test methods for fire-resistant clothing. It should be emphasized that use of safety showers, fire blankets, or fire extinguishers are of secondary importance. These items should be used only when immediately at hand. It should be recognized that rolling on the floor not only smothers the fire but also helps to keep flames out of the victim’s face, reducing inhalation of smoke. I realize that finding enough floor space in a lab to roll effectively might be a challenge. That’s why it pays to think ahead with your experiments: If you’re doing something that could result in a fire, think about where best to do it. Working in a hood next to a safety shower or open floor space would be a wise choice. You should also make sure there’s nothing else flammable nearby and that nothing is blocking paths to the exit or emergency equipment, such as that safety shower or a fire extinguisher. And wear a fire-resistant lab coat. In a recent discussion on the ACS Division of Chemical Health & Safety e-mail list, some division members cautioned about using fire blankets. Fire blankets can be used to smother fires or to wrap around yourself if you need a shield to get past a fire. But do not wrap one around a standing person to extinguish a clothing fire, because doing so may create a chimney effect that serves to intensify the fire rather than extinguish it (Prudent Practices, section 2.F.2; Laboratory Safety for Chemistry Students, chapter 2). And, as always, don’t work alone. If your clothing catches fire, you can drop and roll or step into the shower while your companion assists and calls for help. One of the common threads that came out of the investigations into the laboratory incidents at UCLA and Texas Tech was a lack of training, communication, and supervision in the laboratories. Sheri Sangji at UCLA did not use the procedure that her adviser would have recommended. Preston Brown synthesized amounts of energetic materials well beyond the limits that his adviser, chemistry professor Louisa Hope-Weeks, thought she had set. I spoke with Hope-Weeks and chemical engineering professor Brandon Weeks recently about how they’re running their labs now. Continue reading → Another thing that struck me as I was preparing the safety talks is how few undergrad lab safety talks there are available on the internet – do we all just hide them away in the dark recesses of our virtual learning environments? Are we scared to make them public just in case something happens that the talk didn’t cover? I would have thought that prospective students and their families, and those of current students might quite like the idea of being able to see the safety requirements set out somewhere. Just a thought. And where can we actually share best practice for undergraduate lab safety? I know that the Journal of Chemical Education and the Journal of Chemical Health & Safety both publish papers related to lab safety education (and papers on some of the programs I wrote about last year appeared in JCHAS over the summer), but does anyone have ideas for faster, less formal dialogue in this area? If people have some good suggestions, perhaps this a project that the ACS Safety Culture Task Force would consider. Safety professionals who want to document their experience and skills have many options for professional certification. The Board of Certified Safety Professionals alone lists seven different programs, from the Certified Safety Professional to the Safety Trained Supervisor. Other organizations providing such programs include the World Safety Organization (17 different certifications), the National Association of Safety Professionals (a mind-boggling 50 programs), and the Board of Environmental, Health & Safety Auditors (just one, but in various specialties). I haven’t even mentioned venerable programs like the Certified Industrial Hygienist, which certainly requires some safety expertise. And how about the Polevault Safety Certification Board, for coaches and participants? Oh, wait, I’m supposed to focus on chemical safety here. For those specializing in laboratory safety, the best known certification may well be the Certified Chemical Hygiene Officer (CHO) program, offered by the National Registry of Certified Chemists (NRCC). The NRCC is heavily supported by the American Chemical Society, and the CHO certification is by far the most popular of its seven programs for chemists. Effective October 1, I will be taking over as executive director of the NRCC from long-time Director Gilbert Smith. With this alphabet soup of choices, where should a chemical safety professional go for certification, and is it worth the effort? First, I’ll say a qualified yes that it can be a good idea. Some states have certification requirements for certain positions. Some employers require or “prefer” certification as a condition of employment. These requirements may apply only to one certification program, or several may be listed as meeting criteria. Anyone in a job search for a chemical safety career should certainly consider becoming certified in at least a specialty field, if for no other reason than to have his or her resume stand out from the crowd. On the downside, some of these certifications are expensive to achieve and maintain. Many if not all require continuing education in order to maintain certification, and there are fees for application, testing, and renewal. I’m interested in how our readers feel about this – has certification been of value to you? Is it required for your job? Is it worth the effort? While we certainly missed our friends who were unable to make it to Denver because of the hurricane on the East Coast, I’d still say it has been an excellent meeting for both the Committee on Chemical Safety (CCS) and the Division of Chemical Health & Safety (CHAS). Safety culture in academic laboratories has become a popular topic. Efforts by CCS to raise the issue’s profile within ACS will result in today’s Council discussion on the discussion. Both CHAS & CCS meetings included presentations from the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board on their investigation of academic safety incidents and causes. I also saw several National Academies senior staff members in Denver; they continue to work on raising the necessary money to follow through on their initial meeting on the topic. It looks like this will continue to move forward on multiple levels. Hopefully there will be a consolidated effort to advance this important cause. On another subject, several former ACS Presidents have approached me about CHAS developing an online laboratory safety certificate program for graduate students. The objective is to give graduate students a “leg up” on preparing for life after academia. As many of you know, a major complaint by industry is that students don’t have the safety experience they need to succeed when they’re hired. By developing a comprehensive course with testing and a certificate, these graduates could add something helpful to their resumes. I’ll throw a disclaimer right here that hands-on experience in using safety equipment and PPE is also necessary, but a well-designed program could be a strong basis. I’ll be talking soon with both ACS staff and outside providers to determine the best approach. Feel free to chime in if you have ideas! Last but not least, thanks to the C&EN staff, particularly Jyllian and Amanda Yarnell, for including me in their get-together this weekend. I had a great time and would say they are not only professional and hard-working in their efforts to keep C&EN’s high profile, they’re also fun people! I spent much of my week following New Mexico’s Las Conchas wildfire, which caused the city of Los Alamos to evacuate and the adjacent Los Alamos National Laboratory to close. As of this morning, the fire is the largest known in New Mexico history, with more than 103,000 acres burned in a mere five days. Los Alamos and LANL generally appear to be out of danger at this point, but tribal lands to the north are sustaining heavy damage. New Mexico is also battling two other significant fires: Donaldson, which has burned 73,000 acres since it started on Tuesday, and Pacheco, which has burned 10,000 acres over the last two weeks. Officials are clearly worried that other fires will be sparked by fireworks over the Fourth of July weekend. Governor Susana Martinez says that she does not have the authority to completely ban fireworks state-wide, but she ordered (pdf) state police to increase staffing to help enforce a state ban on fireworks in wildlands as well as any local restrictions. Walmart and grocery store chains Albertson’s and Smith’s have all pulled fireworks from store shelves in the state; Walmart and Albertson’s also evicted vendors from their parking lots. Which brings me to say: If you plan to use fireworks this weekend, please be careful and don’t hurt yourself, your family, or your community. Perhaps consider watching a professional do it instead? (If you work with fireworks, OSHA has some information for you.) Other chemical health and safety news from the past week: - UCSD released a new safety video, this one aimed at undergrads - Chembark considered the issue of working alone in lab - More picric acid in Girl Scout first aid kits, in Colorado again and in Massachusetts - More than half of the hazmat transportation incidents in Canada are due to human error: “Improperly loading, unloading and handling dangerous cargo, drivers losing control of their vehicles, and carelessness and negligence.” - A wall of a chemistry building collapsed at Sindhu College in India. “Principal B Nag said it was just an accident and college authorities were not responsible for it. ‘The chemistry lab building is old and since the water tank is on the same floor, the place was moist and hence the wall collapsed partly,’ he said.” So it’s not the school’s responsibility to maintain facilities so that walls don’t fall down? Fires and explosions: - A lightning strike apparently caused a fire in a hydrochloric acid tank at SiVance in Florida - A magnesium fire at Olympic Tool & Machine In Pennsylvania injured four, one with severe burns - A fire at a pesticide-manufacturing factory in India also damaged neighboring buildings Leaks, spills, and other exposures: - Chlorine gas was released at a Tyson Foods plant in Arkansas after a chlorine solution was accidentally added to a drum of acid; 300 workers were evacuated, 173 treated for exposure, and at least 45 were admitted to the hospital (two were still hospitalized three days later) - And more chlorine was released from a leaking canister at an Airgas facility in Florida - A Notre Dame stduent was splashed in the eye with something–why was he not wearing eye protection? - On roads, railways, and shipards: an acid used in lotions, fertilizer, liquid asphalt, coal tar oil, sodium hypochlorite, more sodium hypochlorite Not covered: meth labs; ammonia leaks; incidents involving floor sealants, cleaning solutions, or pool chemicals; and fires from oil, natural gas, or other fuels I read Rudy Baum’s editorial “Educating Ph.D. Chemists” with interest, especially the discussion about safety culture in academia versus that in industry and government laboratories (C&EN, March 28, page 3). We continue to hear about a weak safety culture in academia. After many years’ experience working as a research chemist and as a health and safety manager in government, I believe the gap in the knowledge of chemistry graduates is a result of the inadequacy of the safety education process for chemistry un der graduates. Building a safety-conscious culture requires constant reinforcement of safety in all laboratory processes. If academic institutions would incorporate safety throughout the entire undergraduate curriculum, bringing up safety at each and every laboratory session over the four years of study, then they would begin to build stronger safety cultures. This in turn requires that faculty and staff become strong leaders and proponents of safety, not just in words but by their actions, demonstrating that safety is a critical and important component of all chemistry. Realizing that many would not know what an undergraduate student should learn about safety, Dave Finster and I wrote an undergraduate textbook, “Laboratory Safety for Chemistry Students.” [Jyllian notes: C&EN previewed the book a year ago.] Using this or some other resource to provide lessons in safety for each laboratory session will over time build the kind of safety culture that is needed in academia. This not only serves undergraduates who go on with their undergraduate degrees to become secondary school teachers and chemists working in industry, but it can also prepare graduate students to safely carry out their research in academic labs. Skills in laboratory safety should be essential and critical elements in the undergraduate process. The reason that safety is a critical skill is that if you don’t follow safety principles and practices, you or others can be injured or even killed. This cannot be said of other areas of chemistry study. Current educational efforts do not adequately teach the knowledge needed to develop strong laboratory safety skills. There are many ways to incorporate safety throughout the curriculum, including prelab assignments, lectures, homework assignments, etc. Academia needs to develop a strategy to teach strong laboratory safety skills to its undergraduate students. Robert H. Hill Jr. Stone Mountain, Ga. I’ve covered several schools’ approaches to undergraduate laboratory safety training over the last year. Anyone else doing something interesting with their lab curricula? Who’s tried using Hill & Finster’s book and how did it go? Inorganic chemistry undergraduate students at the University of California, Irvine, had a new feature added to their labs this spring: A 4.5-hour safety training session held at the beginning of the quarter. The inorganic lab course is not for the faint of heart. The labs are each seven hours long, and some of the experiments involve reactive complexes that require vacuum lines, glove boxes, and Schlenk techniques, chemistry professor William J. Evans says. The class is required for chemistry majors and typically enrolls 150 students, divided into sections of 12 to 14 students each. “Some people think it a little crazy to try to do such sophisticated chemistry with so many undergraduates, but we have been able to do it and the students seem to enjoy it,” Evans adds. The impetus for the additional safety training was a sense that the lab’s past effort—having students watch a video and take a quiz—wasn’t significant enough and students weren’t really getting the depth of training they needed, lecturer Kimberly D. Edwards says. Hazardous waste handlers, people involved in waste clean-up operations, and hazmat emergency responders must be trained in OSHA’s Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response Standard (HAZWOPER). As someone who provides safety training, both online and on-site, I’ve been stuck somewhere between amused and alarmed at the number and scope of companies claiming to offer 40-hour, online-only OSHA HAZWOPER training. The standard itself, in 29CFR 1910.120, doesn’t go into a lot of detail on the training that must be provided initially: General site workers (such as equipment operators, general laborers and supervisory personnel) engaged in hazardous substance removal or other activities which expose or potentially expose workers to hazardous substances and health hazards shall receive a minimum of 40 hours of instruction off the site, and a minimum of three days actual field experience under the direct supervision of a trained experienced supervisor. This would seem to imply that the 40 hours of instruction could be by any feasible means. However, looking further at how OSHA has interpreted the training requirements reveals clearly that there is a hands-on requirement and more. According to an OSHA interpretation: In OSHA’s view, self-paced, interactive computer-based training can serve as a valuable training tool in the context of an overall training program. However, use of computer-based training by itself would not be sufficient to meet the intent of most of OSHA’s training requirements, in particular those of HAZWOPER. Our position on this matter is essentially the same as our policy on the use of training videos, since the two approaches have similar shortcomings. OSHA urges employers to be wary of relying solely on generic, “packaged” training programs in meeting their training requirements. For example, training under HAZWOPER includes site-specific elements and should also, to some degree, be tailored to workers’ assigned duties. … Equally important is the use of hands-on training and exercises to provide trainees with an opportunity to become familiar with equipment and safe practices in a non-hazardous setting. … It is unlikely that sole reliance on a computer-based training program is likely to achieve these objectives. There are other interpretations from OSHA that also make clear the need for hands-on training, particularly in relation to donning and doffing personal protective equipment and working with site-specific equipment. So how is it that one provider of online 40-hour training can offer this claim? For those students who are looking to take the OSHA 40 Hour HAZWOPER training from their computer via the internet, we offer a course that can be completed entirely online. Instead of hands-on training, students are shown over 50 short video clips as if they were at the 8-hour hands-on session. These video clips are required viewing by each participant. The video clips demonstrate HAZWOPER equipment in great detail and students have the advantage to review the videos over and over as needed during their course. And, from another provider: We usually recommend online training to individuals who prefer a relaxed, comfortable, self-paced environment and on-site training for those who desire a more “hands-on” learning experience. In general, online learning is the more cost-effective choice for the individual learner. It seems to me that the employer is risking a great deal by trying to document 40-hour training solely through online sources. Yet there are several providers who claim their courses are “OSHA Accepted” or “OSHA verified.” We’re not talking one or two sites–there appear to be dozens offering this training online! My favorite is a provider advertising: “Need a Certificate Now? A temporary printable certificate will be made available immediately upon successful completion of course.” Some of these sites do have disclaimers regarding the need for hands-on training, though I’m not sure everyone would catch the one in 6.5 point typeface, in light green, disclaiming: Note: Trainees must have hands-on training in the donning, doffing, and use of the Personal Protective Equipment and/or suplemental [sic] equipment required for their jobsite(s) in accordance with 29 CFR 1910.120. This is typically done at the jobsite by the student’s employer. Workers must then have at least three days of actual field supervision at the site under a trained, seasoned supervisor. The three days field experience under a trained, experienced supervisor is the responsibility of the student’s employer. There are clearly advantages to online training of employees, particularly in respect to cost and time management. So what is reasonable to include in an online course, and how much time needs to be spent with a qualified trainer in person? My feeling is that 32 hours of online training covering the mandatory topics and eight hours of hands-on training is reasonable. The hands-on portion should include, at minimum, the following: donning and doffing personal protective equipment, working with monitoring equipment, practice/demonstration of sampling techniques, and a question-and-answer period.

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A risk factor is something that increases your likelihood of getting a disease or condition. It is possible to develop glaucoma with or without the risk factors listed below. However, the more risk factors you have, the greater your likelihood of developing glaucoma. If you have any risk factors for glaucoma, ask your healthcare provider if there is anything you can do to reduce your risk. Risk factors for glaucoma include: If someone in your family has glaucoma, your risk of getting glaucoma is increased. Glaucoma may be inherited. However, if someone in your family has glaucoma, you will not necessarily develop the disease. In black people, open-angle glaucoma is the leading cause of blindness and is six to eight times more common than in Caucasians. In addition, the risk among black people increases after age 40. Hispanics also have a high risk of developing glaucoma. Eskimos and Asians are more like to develop closed-angle glaucoma than other races. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the risk of getting glaucoma increases after age 50. For black people the risk generally increases after age 40. However, glaucoma can occur in anyone at any age. Guidelines recommend starting regular screening for glaucoma at the age of 40. People with an elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) have an increased risk of developing glaucoma. "Elevated" is usually defined as greater than 21 mm mercury (Hg). However, even people with “normal” pressures can develop glaucoma. Research indicates that taking eye drops to lower elevated intraocular pressure on a regular basis diminishes the risk of developing glaucoma. A recent large clinical trial discovered that patients with thinner corneas (the clear structure at the front of the eye) are at an increased risk of developing glaucoma. They also found that African-Americans have thinner corneas than Caucasians. Some studies have shown that having high blood pressure increases the risk of glaucoma. However, this is still controversial. Some studies have shown that diabetes is associated with an increased risk of developing glaucoma. If you are nearsighted (myopic), you are at an increased risk of developing open-angle glaucoma. If you are farsighted (hyperopic), you are at an increased risk of developing closed-angle glaucoma. Long-term use of all forms of corticosteroids may increases the risk of glaucoma by increasing the pressure in the eye. An eye injury may damage structures in the eye leading to impaired fluid drainage. Complications of eye surgery may also sometimes lead to glaucoma. A history of severe anemia or shock has been identified as possible risk factors associated with glaucoma or other optic nerve disorders. People with cardiovascular disease or conditions resulting in decreased blood flow to the eye may be at an increased risk of developing glaucoma. Hypothyroidism has also been identified as a possible factor. - Reviewer: Christopher Cheyer, MD - Update Date: 09/01/2011 -

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Forty years ago, the Navajo Nation and Southern Ute tribes languished side by side, mired in high unemployment and poverty. Today, worth billions, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe is one of the richest in the United States, while the Navajo still suffer as one of the most impoverished communities in the country. The difference? Energy. While the Southern Utes have natural gas, the Navajo Nation has coal, which has for decades been extracted to feed various large-scale power plants, including in the Four Corners. But that revenue has come under threat by tightening air-quality regulations. At the same time, natural gas, a cleaner fuel source for generating electricity, has grown cheaper and more abundant because of hydraulic fracturing. The shift has left Navajo leaders in a quandary: either continue investing in coal in the hopes it will remain a significant fuel source, or cut their losses and choose another investment. The tribe is staking its future on coal. The Navajo Nation is in negotiations to buy the Navajo Mine from BHP Billiton in 2016 when BHP's lease expires. Opponents say all the deal will do is saddle the tribe with a huge environmental cleanup. Tribal leaders say coal is a viable fuel source, and buying the Navajo Mine will save jobs and provide a foundation for the tribe to build a formidable energy portfolio similar to the Southern Utes. Tribal leaders' plans will have far-reaching effects, not only for members – some of whom still live without electricity or plumbing – but also for residents throughout the region, who have seen haze cloud their views and threaten their health. “We see how Southern Ute is using natural resources to advantage the tribe. We think they're doing well as far as adapting with the times,” said Navajo member Dailan Long, whose family lives near the Navajo Mine that is close to Fruitland on Navajo land. “I definitely see a much older mind-set managing our economy, which has gotten us to the point where we are now. I think they (the Navajo leaders) could take a much more rational and logical approach to energy alternatives,” said Long, who formerly worked for Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, a Navajo environmental-activist organization. The fossil fuel of the future Dust billows at the Navajo Mine as a dragline excavator scoops dirt into its bucket and transfers it into a pile nearby, exposing coal for a bulldozer to grab. Workers pour an ammonium-nitrate fuel-oil mixture into holes dug into the side of the mine to later blow up sections to reveal more coal in its depths. The coal mine accounted for $53.6 million in direct revenue in 2012, about $110 million when taking into account lease and royalty revenue. The 33,000-acre surface mine supplies the Four Corners Power Plant, about nine miles north, with about 8 million tons of coal a year. BHP and Arizona Public Service approached Navajo Nation this summer about buying the Navajo Mine after the two entities failed to reach an agreement over coal prices, said Erny Zah, spokesman for the Navajo Nation president. Under the preliminary negotiations, the tribe would give any federal and state tax revenue to BHP until 2016, when BHP's lease ends to pay for the mine, Zah said. It's unclear who would take on the legal liabilities associated with eventual mandatory cleanup of the mine. The Navajo Nation emphatically says the tribe will not be responsible, and BHP says the issue is still part of the negotiations. Going against the national energy tide While global demand for coal remains high, coal production in the United States dropped about 7 percent in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Coal still provided 42 percent of the nation's electricity in 2011, but just four years ago, it was providing nearly half. “If we're talking about coal development and revenue as a major source of funding for the tribe, why didn't they negotiate this (sale) decades ago?” Long said. He believes BHP wants to walk away from the cleanup responsibilities and leave the tribe with the bill. “I think that it's definitely an exit strategy on behalf of BHP,” he said. In contrast, the Southern Utes have focused on energy sources that will likely grow. In 2008, the Southern Utes formed a separate company to manage its new-energy investments that include wind farms and biofuel projects. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects coal power to decline to 35 percent of total American electricity generation by 2040. Natural gas is expected to generate 30 percent of the nation's electricity within three decades. Navajo Nation tribal officials acknowledge the new energy realities and have invested in alternatives, especially natural gas. Oil and gas contributed $48 million in revenue to the tribe in 2012. The tribe also has invested in an 850-megawatt wind farm. But coal will nonetheless remain the centerpiece of Navajo Nation's energy portfolio moving forward. “We want to make sure coal is part of the picture for at least another couple of decades, if not longer,” Zah said. But tightening environmental regulations that shutter coal-fired power plants could further strangle coal production. Mike Eisenfeld and other environmental activists don't anticipate the Four Corners Power Plant will remain open for more than 10 years, as federal scrutiny of its environmental impact increases. “I don't think they're sustainable now, and the sooner we figure out a transition plan to wean ourselves from big coal plants the better,” said Eisenfeld, New Mexico energy coordinator for the San Juan Citizen's Alliance. APS is decommissioning its three oldest generating units at the Four Corners Power Plant rather than install new equipment to meet EPA regulations. This will result in a 30 percent reduction in production at Navajo Mine and layoffs at both the mine and power plant. For a tribe with a roughly 50 percent unemployment rate and more than 50 percent of its members living below the poverty level, the closure will be a painful blow. “One of the reasons we're exploring the possibility of taking over Navajo Mine is we're looking at saving jobs at the mine and also at the power plant because one cannot exist without the other,” Zah said. If the power plant closes, Navajo Mine may have to shut its doors. This was the fate of the Black Mesa Mine in 2006 after the Mohave Generating Station, near Laughlin, Nev., which it supplied, shut down. Navajo Nation's other plans to secure a future for its coal haven't been met with much success. In 2003, The Navajo Nation proposed a new coal-fired power plant called the Desert Rock Energy Project, which would be supplied by an expanded Navajo Mine. Under the project, international energy developer Sithe Global Power would have built a new 1,500-megawatt power plant on Navajo land about 25 miles outside Farmington. The plant would have been among the largest in the country, and it would have provided electricity for 1.5 million customers. The tribe heralded the power plant as an economic victory, saying it would provide 400 jobs at the Desert Rock power plant, 200 additional jobs at Navajo Mine and $50 million in annual revenue – almost half of Navajo Nation's current total coal revenue. The EPA approved Desert Rock in 2008 and touted it as “state-of-the-art,” but the agency reconsidered the project's air permit after New Mexico joined environmental groups in appealing the EPA's initial approval. In 2009, the EPA reversed its decision and revoked the air permit. For the Navajos, losing the project was a crushing blow. “(Navajo Nation) viewed Desert Rock as a huge economic opportunity,” said Tom Shipps, an Indian law lawyer who works for Colorado's Southern Ute tribe. “The technology employed at Desert Rock could have been great improvements. Concerns about the environment drove a lot of the criticism, especially around here.” The project remains in the back of tribal leader's minds, Zah said. One idea is to convert it to a natural-gas plant. Still, the question of what to do with the Navajo Mine would remain if a new power plant were to run on natural gas. In the meantime, coal is the focus of the tribe's energy strategy. BHP gives a qualified endorsement of that strategy. “Coal will continue to be an important part of meeting the energy needs of the U.S.,” Norman Benally, spokesperson for BHP, said. “Granted there are mandates coming from the EPA that are limiting the use of coal and in some areas shutting down power plants that generate electricity. But we believe coal will be part of the energy portfolio, though limited, until such time that renewable energies have or will become viable.”

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Remake: Mac Terminal Tutorial Working with Files and Directories Welcome back to FreshMacApps Tutorials. We have decided to update and improve some of our earlier tutorials with additional information and some useful insights that will help you get the most out of your Mac.We believe that learning how to use OS X through the Terminal interface can open up new opportunities for Mac users. We hope this will empower users to explore the world of programming and increase their understanding of how the underlying technology operates. Learning the command line vastly increases your ability to accomplish your goals. Overall, it is a more powerful way to conduct your business. Additionally, we hope that these tutorials for the command-line (another term for the Terminal application) pique your interest in coding and lay a foundation for an understanding of the world of computer code. These tutorials are basic, but they are the first steps into a larger world of programming to explore. Getting Started With The Command Line To start off with, open up command-line and navigate to a folder where you can create and delete files without creating too much of a mess. I recommend using the Documents folder. A quick way that you can navigate to your Documents folder is: The cd stands for “change directory”. You will see the term directory a lot in the programming world. For the most part, terms like “folder” are tools to help humans adjust to the concepts of modern computing. Once you enter the world of programming, these crutches will fall away into a sea of technical jargon. However, for now all you need to know is that, in most cases, the term “folder” is interchangeable with “directory”. Keeping your workspace organized is especially vital when working with the Terminal. Before we get too far into this tutorial, I will show you two ways to clear your console screen in case things get a bit cluttered. For the first method you type in: What the clear function does is simply to push all the previous clutter up and offscreen. The end effect is to create a space on your console so that you may work. If you were to scroll up, you would see your previous work sitting right offscreen. The other method utilizes a keyboard shortcut to achieve the same end. To use it, hit the Control key then the L key. Many users prefer using the keyboard shortcut rather than type out “clear“. They essentially do the same thing, so I recommend that you use whichever method you feel the most comfortable with, i.e., the one that you can remember offhand. Creating Directories Within OS X As I explained previously, when you create a directory, what you are actually creating is a folder. Directories are subsections on your hard drive where you store files. Having directories makes the whole process of finding what you need a lot easier. For instance, you could have a directory for files that you made using a word processor, or ones made using a graphics editing program. Now, when you search for the essay you need, you can skip all the graphics files. We need to create a directory (folder) where we can create and delete files.To do that, we will use the mkdir command like so: If you type in ls, you should see the newly-created directory alongside your other files in the Documents folder. You are ready to take the next step by creating your first files. The touch command is a method for creating files with the Mac OS X command line utility. What touch does when called upon is create an empty shell file encoded to the user-specified file format. To work with the touch command, you will need to navigate to your Practice directory in the Terminal and input the following: From the Practice directory enter this code: If you type in ls you should see file.txt as the only file populating your Practice folder. Since we created a first file, it is the appropriate time to learn how to move that file from the Practice directory and to another folder (directory). Create a new directory called PracticeFile within the same directory that holds the Practice folder. Enter the following command into your Terminal console: mv file.txt PracticeFile Once you have completed that, navigate to PracticeFile using the cd command and then use ls to list all the files in the PracticeFile directory. You should see file.txt. If you are going to create files, you will most likely find the need for a way to dispose of them. You can delete the file.txt that you created earlier, using the rm command. In your Terminal type in: If you were to list the contents of PracticeFile, you should now see that it is empty. Now to delete everything you will need to navigate back to Documents. You can do so by typing the following command into your command line console: Using .. will navigate you backwards in the file tree by one directory. This is significantly quicker than typing out an entire file path. Now to delete the Practice directory and its contents, type in: rm -r Practice The -r is a flag (we will talk about flags in a bit) that stands for recursively. If you just use rm without the -r flag, the system will throw an error at you saying “Practice is a directory and you cannot delete it like a file” or to that effect. If we want the rm program to be able to delete the directory we will have to modify its behavior, with a flag, to use something called recursion. The concept of recursion in computer programming means that a program is able to call itself if certain sets of parameters have been met. Using rm recursively enables it to cycle through the contents of a directory and delete data over and over until there is nothing left. After using rm -r, every file or directory that we created so far should be deleted. Using the ls command you will see that the Practice directory has been removed from Documents. Searching with Grep The ability to search Mac OS X files using the command line will give you a tremendous boost in efficiency. One of the most basic, yet powerful ways to search through files is with the grep command. The grep command is a Terminal utility that sifts through text looking for a pattern that the user has specified. If grep matches the pattern, it prints the lines containing the match out to the console. Oh, and it first developed in nearly four decades ago. Right about now you might get to wondering: “Well that is friggin fantastic but what’s so special about this command? What is the relevance?” The grep command is deceivingly simplistic, which masks the power it can unleash. I am going to show you a few minor, non-mind blowing ways that grep may be used. Take the three nonsensical lines written below this paragraph, and copy them into a text file named grepped.txt and put that text file onto your Desktop. How now brown cow She sells sea shells Dad was very sad Open up the Terminal application and navigate to your Desktop using the cd command. From the Desktop enter the following into your console: grep sells grepped.txt You should receive feedback that looks like host:Desktop User_Account$ grep sells grepped.txt She sells sea shells Grep will by default use case sensitivity when searching for the pattern. If you type in the following command you will notice that the Terminal does not return anything. grep Sells grepped.txt To have grep search with case insensitivity you can use a flag to alter the behavior of the program. Flags are an essential part of using the command line, and the following explanation should be in no way be interpreted as complete. Flags are single characters either alphabetical or numerical that are prefaced by a dash that modify the behavior of the Unix command that it is attached to. Occasionally a flag can end up being a word. For instance, you will run across commands while using Unix that do not recognize the -h help flag; instead it will require –help. Concept of flags in Unix is an essential piece of the programming puzzle. I recommend that you find some resources on flags so you can read up on the topic. Understanding where flags fit into Unix is critical to using the Terminal application. Okay, now back to grep. To make grep case insensitive put a -i flag after the command like so: grep -i Sells grepped.txt The Terminal should now return to you something along the lines of: She sells sea shells That about does it for this tutorial. It is beneficial to remember that by diving into the Terminal you are eliminating one less intermediary between you and the CPU. It is like the difference between knowing your boss and knowing somebody who knows your boss. With fewer intermediaries, you can exert greater influence on events. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below, or if you have questions send us a message. Last updated byat .

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Brantley County dates to 1920 when the state legislature sliced and then combined parts of Charlton, Pierce and Wayne counties. Historians speculate that the county owes its name to either prominent landowner, Benjamin Daniel Brantley, or his son and U.S. congressman, William Gordon Brantley. Nahunta, the county seat, is not an Indian name, as one might guess. It was a timber stop on the railroad labeled N. A. Hunter Siding. The railroad men dubbed it "Nahunta."

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Nonprofit Worldreader gives Kindles to students in sub-Saharan Africa (and is working on a reading app for mobile phones). The organization just published the results of iREAD, its year-long pilot program in Ghana, and many of the findings are promising: Primary school students with access to e-readers showed significant improvement in reading skills and in time spent reading, and the program is cost-effective. The theft rate was “near-zero,” but nearly half the e-readers broke. USAID funded the Worldreader Ghana study and independent firm ILC Africa did the research. iREAD “involved the wireless distribution of over 32,000 local and international digital books using Kindle e-readers to 350 students and teachers at six pilot schools in Ghana’s Eastern Region between November 2010 and September 2011.” The full results are here (PDF). Some findings: - Kids learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they were quick to discover “the multimedia aspects of the e-reader, such as music and Internet features.” (Kindle has an experimental web browser and can play MP3s.) Worldreader is “exploring ways to limit functions on the e-reader such as music” so that kids don’t get distracted during class, but points out that e-readers can also be a useful “bridge” device for students who’d never used a computer before. - Near-zero theft. Only two e-readers (out of 600) were lost in the whole study, partly because “community involvement was encouraged through e-reader pledges, community outreach programs, and support from community leaders.” - Kids got access to way more books. Before the study, primary-school students (whose average age was 11) had access to an average of 3.6 books at home. Junior-high students (average age 13.5 years) had access to an average of 8.6 books at home and high-school students (average age 16.6 years) access to an average of 11 books (mostly textbooks they had to buy for school.) With the e-reader program, kids had access to an average of 107 books, including books Worldreader “pushed” onto the Kindles as well as free e-books that kids downloaded themselves. - Primary school students’ test scores improved, but effects on older kids were less clear. The reading scores of primary-school students who received e-readers increased from 12.9 percent to 15.7 percent, depending on whether they got additional reading support. That was an improvement of 4.8 percent to 7.6 percent above the scores of kids in control classrooms without e-readers. But results for older kids were mixed: “Student reading was affected almost exclusively at the primary level, and not at the junior and senior levels. This conclusion supports external data that students are most affected by reading interventions at the primary school stages between the ages of 4 and 10.” - Students sought out access to international news. “Amazon data revealed that students were downloading The New York Times, USA Today, and El País etc., demonstrating that students want to access a wide range of reading materials that were previously inaccessible.” - Some teachers worried kids became too dependent on the e-readers. ”For example, one teacher stated that students thought that everything on the e-reader was the ‘absolute truth.’ He had to correct them by explaining that the e-books may contain mistakes just as paper books do. Teachers also observed that some students have started to favor classes that use the e-reader and neglect classes that do not.” - Kids shared their e-readers with their families and friends. Students, even primary schoolers, got to take their e-readers home at night and many reported sharing the devices. Kids in the study had an average of five siblings, so “the e-reader’s reach potentially extended to many people beyond the device’s owner.” Some kids whose parents were illiterate read to their parents from their e-readers. - Kindles break too easily. Worldreader had not predicted how many Kindles would break: 243 out of 600, or 40.5 percent. Each time an e-reader broke, Worldreader sent it back to Amazon to conduct “a post-mortem analysis.” Turns out “fragile screens are the main weakness” and Amazon is working on Kindles with reinforced screens (at the same cost), which started shipping to Ghana in October 2011. Plus Worldreader is providing more rugged cases for the Kindles and providing more instruction on how to use them (don’t sit on it, for instance). - The program appears cost-effective. Worldreader estimates that “for the years 2014-2018, using a calculation focused strictly on the provisioning of textbooks, the e-reader system would cost only $8.93-$11.40 more per student over a 4 year period [$0.19 to $0.24 per month] than the traditional paper book system.” That calculation is made with the assumptions that e-reader prices will fall and e-readers will become more rugged (so they break less). And of course, e-readers give students access to many books, not just textbooks.

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Supplementation with the omega-3 fatty acid DHA may help improve reading skills and behavior in kids who need help most — those whose test scores place them in the bottom 20% of their elementary school class — according to a new controlled trial. Researchers at Oxford University’s Center for Evidence-Based Intervention studied 362 7- to 9-year-old children who had placed in the bottom third of their class in reading scores. For 16 weeks, the children were given either a placebo or 600 mg of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). The DHA was extracted from algae, which are the original source of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish. Researchers then tracked students’ improvement on a widely used British reading skills test and asked parents and teachers to rate changes in the kids’ behavior, including their attention and restlessness. Over the 16-week trial, the children receiving placebos progressed in their reading skills as expected. But those students who received DHA and had scored in the bottom 20% of readers at the start of the study advanced by nearly an extra month, while those in the bottom 10% gained nearly two extra months of progress. Students whose reading skills were less impaired — those whose scores had placed them at the highest end of the bottom third — did not see extra improvements with DHA. Parents of the kids who received DHA also rated their children as more attentive and less restless, as compared with those who got placebo. However, teachers did not report improvement in the children’s behavior. Noting that prior studies have suggested that omega-3 supplementation can improve behavior in children diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), lead author Alexandra Richardson, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Center says: “What’s new here is that we’re showing a benefit outside of a clinical population in healthy children, albeit with reading difficulties, and we showed a meaningful improvement.” DHA is an essential nutrient, which cannot be manufactured by the body, and is used by virtually all cells. It is especially important for vision and brain function, particularly during early development. “DHA is critical for vision and it’s possible that improvements in visual perception might allow children to read better, but it all remains speculative,” says Richardson. “We focused specifically on reading here,” notes Paul Montgomery, a co-author of the paper and professor of psychosocial interventions at Oxford, explaining that the effects of poor reading in schoolage children can be lifelong, contributing to everything from unemployment to the risk of criminal activity down the line. “If [reading] is not mastered at that stage, how that rattles through and affects [children’s] life chances later on is profound.” Most Western diets are deficient in omega-3s, whose main dietary source is oily fish like salmon and sardines, as well as flax seeds and walnuts. To make matters worse, the typical Western diet also includes high levels of omega-6 fatty acids, which can substitute for omega-3s in some functions, but are not as effective. “The sheer difficulty and expense of other forms of intervention, when compared with something as simple as making sure kids are getting what is known to be an essential nutrient in their diet, is something we think deserves more attention than it’s had to date,” says Richardson, adding that if the results of the current study are replicated, many children could benefit. But Charles Hulme, professor of psychology at University College London, who was not associated with the new research, had concerns about the statistical analysis used in the study. He called the overall design “good,” but he thinks that the way the data analysis was done may have overstated the effects of DHA. “For children like this, with relatively severe reading problems, [the change seen] is of little, if any, educational significance,” he says, adding, “I think this trial is too brief — only 16 weeks — to have a realistic chance of finding effects on reading, even if they exist.” Richardson acknowledges that follow-up research is needed. “We’re the first to say this needs replication,” she says, noting that her group is already working on a larger study that targets only the children with the very lowest reading scores. “We’d like to think it should be taken up by others as well.” The research, published in the journal PLOS One, was funded by DSM Nutritional Products, which made the supplement used in the study but was not involved in the data analysis.

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Most kids generate a little chaos and disorganization. Yours might flit from one thing to the next — forgetting books at school, leaving towels on the floor, and failing to finish projects once started. You'd like them to be more organized and to stay focused on tasks, such as homework. Is it possible? Yes! A few kids seem naturally organized, but for the rest, organization is a skill learned over time. With help and some practice, kids can develop an effective approach to getting stuff done. And you're the perfect person to teach your child, even if you don't feel all that organized yourself! Easy as 1-2-3 For kids, all tasks can be broken down into a 1-2-3 process. Getting organized means a kid gets where he or she needs to be and gathers the supplies needed to complete the task. Staying focused means sticking with the task and learning to say "no" to distractions. Getting it done means finishing up, checking your work, and putting on the finishing touches, like remembering to put a homework paper in the right folder and putting the folder inside the backpack so it's ready for the next day. Once kids know these steps — and how to apply them — they can start tackling tasks more independently. That means homework, chores, and other tasks will get done with increasing consistency and efficiency. Of course, kids will still need parental help and guidance, but you probably won't have to nag as much. Not only is it practical to teach these skills, but knowing how to get stuff done will help your child feel more competent and effective. Kids feel self-confident and proud when they're able to accomplish their tasks and responsibilities. They're also sure to be pleased when they find they have some extra free time to do what they'd like to do. From Teeth Brushing to Book Reports To get started, introduce the 1-2-3 method and help your child practice it in daily life. Even something as simple as brushing teeth requires this approach, so you might use this example when introducing the concept: Getting organized: Go to the bathroom and get out your toothbrush and toothpaste. Turn on the water. Staying focused: Dentists say to brush for 3 minutes, so that means keep brushing, even if you hear a really good song on the radio or you remember that you wanted to call your friend. Concentrate and remember what the dentist told you about brushing away from your gums. Getting it done: If you do steps 1 and 2, step 3 almost takes care of itself. Hurray, your 3 minutes are up and your teeth are clean! Getting it done means finishing up and putting on the finishing touches. With teeth brushing, that would be stuff like turning off the water, putting away the toothbrush and paste, and making sure there's no toothpaste foam on your face! With a more complex task, like completing a book report, the steps would become more involved, but the basic elements remain the same. Here's how you might walk your child through the steps: 1. Getting Organized Explain that this step is all about getting ready. It's about figuring out what kids need to do and gathering any necessary items. For instance: "So you have a book report to write. What do you need to do to get started?" Help your child make a list of things like: Choose a book. Make sure the book is OK with the teacher. Write down the book and the author's name. Check the book out of the library. Mark the due date on a calendar. Then help your child think of the supplies needed: The book, some note cards, a pen for taking notes, the teacher's list of questions to answer, and a report cover. Have your child gather the supplies where the work will take place. As the project progresses, show your child how to use the list to check off what's already done and get ready for what's next. Demonstrate how to add to the list, too. Coach your child to think, "OK, I did these things. Now, what's next? Oh yeah, start reading the book" and to add things to the list like finish the book, read over my teacher's directions, start writing the report. 2. Staying Focused Explain that this part is about doing it and sticking with the job. Tell kids this means doing what you're supposed to do, following what's on the list, and sticking with it. It also means focusing when there's something else your child would rather be doing — the hardest part of all! Help kids learn how to handle and resist these inevitable temptations. While working on the report, a competing idea might pop into your child's head: "I feel like shooting some hoops now." Teach kids to challenge that impulse by asking themselves "Is that what I'm supposed to be doing?" Explain that a tiny break to stretch a little and then get right back to the task at hand is OK. Then kids can make a plan to shoot hoops after the work is done. Let them know that staying focused is tough sometimes, but it gets easier with practice. 3. Getting it Done Explain that this is the part when kids will be finishing up the job. Talk about things like copying work neatly and asking a parent to read it over to help find any mistakes. Coach your child to take those important final steps: putting his or her name on the report, placing it in a report cover, putting the report in the correct school folder, and putting the folder in the backpack so it's ready to be turned in. Here are some tips on how to begin teaching the 1-2-3 process: Introduce the Idea Start the conversation by using the examples above and show your child the kids' article Organize, Focus, Get It Done. Read it together and ask for reactions. Will it be easy or hard? Is he or she already doing some of it? Is there something he or she would like to get better at? Brainstorm about what might be easier or better if your child was more organized and focused. Maybe homework would get done faster, there would be more play time, and there would be less nagging about chores. Then there's the added bonus of your child feeling proud and you being proud, too. Be clear, in a kind way, that you expect your kids to work on these skills and that you'll be there to help along the way. Make a Plan Decide on one thing to focus on first. You can come up with three things and let your child choose one. Or if homework or a particular chore has been a problem, that's the natural place to begin. Get Comfortable in Your Role For the best results, you'll want to be a low-key coach. You can ask questions that will help kids get on track and stay there. But use these questions to prompt their thought process about what needs to be done. Praise progress, but don't go overboard. The self-satisfaction kids will feel will be a more powerful motivator. Also, be sure to ask your child's opinion of how things are going so far. Start Thinking in Questions Though you might not realize it, every time you take on a task, you ask yourself questions and then answer them with thoughts and actions. If you want to unload groceries from the car, you ask yourself: Q: Did I get them all out of the trunk? A: No. I'll go get the rest. Q: Did I close the trunk? Q: Where's the milk and ice cream? I need to put them away first. A: Done. Now, what's next? Encourage kids to start seeing tasks as a series of questions and answers. Suggest that they ask these questions out loud and then answer them. These questions are the ones you hope will eventually live inside a child's head. And with practice, they'll learn to ask them without being prompted. Work together to come up with questions that need to be asked so the chosen task can be completed. You might even jot them down on index cards. Start by asking the questions and having your child answer. Later, transfer responsibility for the questions from you to your child. It will take time to teach kids how to break down tasks into steps. It also will take time for them to learn how to apply these skills to what needs to be done. Sometimes, it will seem simpler just to do it for them. It certainly would take less time. But the trouble is that kids don't learn how to be independent and successful if their parents swoop in every time a situation is challenging or complex. Here's why it's worth your time and effort: Kids learn new skills that they'll need — how to pour a bowl of cereal, tie shoes, match clothes, complete a homework assignment. They'll develop a sense of independence. Kids who dress themselves at age 4 feel like big kids. It's a good feeling that will deepen over time as they learn to do even more without help. From these good feelings, kids begin to form a belief about themselves — "I can do it." Your firm but kind expectations that your kids should start tackling certain jobs on their own send a strong message. You reinforce their independence and encourage them to accept a certain level of responsibility. Kids learn that others will set expectations and that they can meet them. This kind of teaching can be a very loving gesture. You're taking the time to show your kids how to do something — with interest, patience, love, kindness, and their best interests at heart. This will make kids feel cared for and loved. Think of it as filling up a child's toolbox with crucial life tools.

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At a Glance Why Get Tested? To detect excessive exposure to mercury When to Get Tested? When you have symptoms of mercury poisoning, to evaluate a known exposure to mercury, or to monitor occupational exposure to mercury A blood sample drawn from a vein in your arm and/or a urine collection Test Preparation Needed? The Test Sample What is being tested? Mercury is an element that exists in three forms: - Metallic or elemental mercury (liquid or vapor) is often used in dental fillings, some thermometers, and batteries. - Mercury can combine with other elements such as oxygen or sulfur to form an inorganic compound (mercury salt). In this form, it appears as a powder or crystal and is sometimes used in topical preparations such as skin-lightening or antiseptic creams. - When mercury combines with carbon, it can form a variety of organic compounds, the most common of which is methyl mercury. This form is produced by bacteria found in soil and water. Elevated levels are often found in large, older, predator fish such as sharks and king mackerel. Mercury is found in small quantities throughout the environment. It is released by the breakdown of minerals in rocks and soils and as a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion and waste incineration. It is inhaled with the air that we breathe, absorbed through the skin, and ingested with food. The tiny amounts to which the vast majority of people are exposed do not generally cause health concerns. However, people who are exposed to dangerous concentrations of mercury, such as might be found at a hazardous waste site, and people who are exposed chronically to mercury over long periods of time, such as those who work with heavy metals in their occupation, may have mercury-related symptoms and complications. Exposure to excessive amounts of mercury can be toxic. The amount of mercury absorbed by an individual and its effects on their health depends on the type of mercury, its concentration, and the exposure time. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), very little metallic mercury (less than 0.01%) is absorbed by the body, even if it is swallowed. However, if the same mercury is inhaled as a vapor, about 80% is absorbed into the bloodstream. About 95% of methyl mercury, which is the type found in fish and other seafood, is absorbed by the digestive tract. The most common source of human exposure to methyl mercury is as a result of eating contaminated seafood. Fish that come from contaminated waters and larger, predator fish fish that have eaten smaller fish may have significantly increased levels of methyl mercury. This is why it is recommended that you know the source of the fish you consume and that you limit the quantity of large predator fish you eat. Once mercury is absorbed, it can be deposited in a variety of body organs, including the kidneys and brain. The body will slowly rid itself of mercury through the urine and stool, but if an excessive amount accumulates, it can permanently damage the kidneys, nervous system, and brain. Pregnant women with elevated levels of mercury can pass it on to their unborn baby, affecting development, especially the baby's brain, kidneys, and nerves. Mercury can also be passed from mother to baby through breast milk during nursing. How is the sample collected for testing? NOTE: If undergoing medical tests makes you or someone you care for anxious, embarrassed, or even difficult to manage, you might consider reading one or more of the following articles: Coping with Test Pain, Discomfort, and Anxiety, Tips on Blood Testing, Tips to Help Children through Their Medical Tests, and Tips to Help the Elderly through Their Medical Tests. Another article, Follow That Sample, provides a glimpse at the collection and processing of a blood sample and throat culture. Is any test preparation needed to ensure the quality of the sample? No test preparation is needed. Consult your doctor or laboratory about urine collection to avoid sample contamination. Ask a Laboratory Scientist Form temporarily unavailable Due to a dramatic increase in the number of questions submitted to the volunteer laboratory scientists who respond to our users, we have had to limit the number of questions that can be submitted each day. Unfortunately, we have reached that limit today and are unable to accept your inquiry now. We understand that your questions are vital to your health and peace of mind, and recommend instead that you speak with your doctor or another healthcare professional. We apologize for this inconvenience. This was not an easy step for us to take, as the volunteers on the response team are dedicated to the work they do and are often inspired by the help they can provide. We are actively seeking to expand our capability so that we can again accept and answer all user questions. We will accept and respond to the same limited number of questions tomorrow, but expect to resume the service, 24/7, as soon as possible. NOTE: This article is based on research that utilizes the sources cited here as well as the collective experience of the Lab Tests Online Editorial Review Board. This article is periodically reviewed by the Editorial Board and may be updated as a result of the review. Any new sources cited will be added to the list and distinguished from the original sources used. Sources Used in Current Review (Updated September 3, 2010) Department of Health and Human Services, The Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction. Mercury. Available online at http://cerhr.niehs.nih.gov/common/mercury.html through http://cerhr.niehs.nih.gov. Accessed May 2011. (Updated March 3, 2011) Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Public Health Statement for Mercury. Available online at http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/phs/phs.asp?id=112&tid=24 through http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov. Accessed May 2011. (February 2009) Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry. Evaluating for Mercury Exposure: Information for Health Care Providers. PDF available for download at http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/mercury/docs/Physician_Hg_Flier.pdf through http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov. Accessed May 2011. (Updated September 21, 2009) Olsen D. Mercury. Medscape article. Available online at http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1175560-overview through http://emedicine.medscape.com. Accessed May 2011. (Updated September 11, 2009) Diner B. Mercury Toxicity in Emergency Medicine. eMedicine article. Available online at http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1175560-overview through http://emedicine.medscape.com. Accessed May 2011. (Updated June 30, 2010) Tan D. Pediatric Mercury Toxicity. eMedicine article. Available online at http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1009691-overview through http://emedicine.medscape.com. Accessed May 2011. (February 2, 2009) MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia. Mercury. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002476.htm. Accessed May 2011. Tietz Textbook of Clinical Chemistry and Molecular Diagnostics. Burtis CA, Ashwood ER, Bruns DE, eds. St. Louis: Elsevier Saunders; 2006, Pp1381-1382. (December 9, 2009) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Vaccines, Thimerosal in vaccines. Available online at http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/vaccines/research/Pages/vaccines.aspx through http://www.niaid.nih.gov. Accessed May 2011. Sources Used in Previous Reviews Thomas, Clayton L., Editor (1997). Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary. F.A. Davis Company, Philadelphia, PA [18th Edition]. Pagana, Kathleen D. & Pagana, Timothy J. (2001). Mosby's Diagnostic and Laboratory Test Reference 5th Edition: Mosby, Inc., Saint Louis, MO. (2004 August 02, Updated). Public Health Statement for Mercury. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs46.html through http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov. Severson, T. (2003 May 12, Updated). Mercury. MedlinePlus Health Information, Medical Encyclopedia [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002476.htm. Severson, T. (2003 April 30, Updated). Mercuric chloride. MedlinePlus Health Information, Medical Encyclopedia [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002474.htm. (© 2004). Mercury. ARUP's Guide to Clinical Laboratory Testing [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.aruplab.com/guides/clt/tests/clt_al12.jsp#2124716 through http://www.aruplab.com. Baratz, R. (2003 June 26). Dubious Mercury Testing. Quackwatch [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/mercurytests.html through http://www.quackwatch.org. Wellbery, C. (2004 April 15). Can Vaccines Containing Thimerosal Cause Autism? American Family Physician, Tips from Other Journals [from Hviid A, et al. Association between thimerosal-containing vaccine and autism. JAMA October 1, 2003;290:1763-6.] [On-line journal]. Available online at http://www.aafp.org/afp/20040415/tips/7.html through http://www.aafp.org. Cain, A. (2004 August 04, Updated). Mercury: A Brief for the Binational Strategy Implementation Workgroup, Frequently Asked Questions about Mercury Fever Thermometers. Great Lakes Binational Strategy Implementation Workshop [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/bnsdocs/hg/thermfaq.html through http://www.epa.gov. (2004 May) NIAID Research on Thimerosal. NIAID Fact Sheet [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/thimerosal.htm through http://www.niaid.nih.gov. (2002 December 31). Consumer Update: Dental Amalgams. U.S. FDA, CDRH Consumer Information [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/consumer/amalgams.html through http://www.fda.gov. (2007 July 24). Sushi lovers cautioned over mercury levels in tuna. MedlinePlus from Reuters Health Information [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_52573.html through http://www.nlm.nih.gov. Accessed on 8/12/07. Preidt, R. (2007 June 14). Antiques Can Pose a Mercury Danger Today. MedlinePlus from HealthDay [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_50928.html through http://www.nlm.nih.gov. Accessed on 8/12/07. (2007 August 7). Mercury, Health Effects. Environmental Protection Agency [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.epa.gov/mercury/effects.htm through http://www.epa.gov. Accessed on 8/12/07. Perez, E. (2006 December 6, Updated). Mercury. MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002476.htm. Accessed on 8/12/07. Perez, E. (2006 July 18 Updated). Methylmercury poisoning. MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001651.htm. Accessed on 8/12/07. Xue, F. et. al. (2007 March 12). Maternal Fish Consumption, Mercury Levels, and Risk of Preterm Delivery. Medscape from Environ Health Perspect. 2007;115(1):42-47. [On-line information]. Available online at http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/553133 through http://www.medscape.com. Accessed on 8/12/07. Clarke, W. and Dufour, D. R., Editors (2006). Contemporary Practice in Clinical Chemistry. AACC Press, Washington, DC. Pg 474. Wu, A. (2006). Tietz Clinical Guide to Laboratory Tests, Fourth Edition. Saunders Elsevier, St. Louis, Missouri. Pp 722-724. Tietz Textbook of Clinical Chemistry and Molecular Diagnostics Burtis CA, Ashwood ER, Bruns DE, eds. 4th edition, St. Louis: Elsevier Saunders; 2006. Pagana, Kathleen D. & Pagana, Timothy J. (© 2007). Mosby's Diagnostic and Laboratory Test Reference, 8th Edition: Mosby, Inc., Saint Louis, MO. Henry's Clinical Diagnosis and Management by Laboratory Methods. 21st ed. McPherson RA, Pincus MR, eds. Saunders Elsevier: 2007. LaDuo, J. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2nd ed, 1997 Pp. 421-423.

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This is a little different from my usual “The Best…” lists. Inspired by the twentieth anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall this week, I’ve begun to think about developing some lessons related to walls — physical, mental, and emotional — and how they’re used by us and others to stay separate. I’m thinking it’s also an opportunity to help students learn about metaphors and similes. This list is different, though, because usually I don’t post a list like this until I have some specific ideas on how to use the resources in a lesson. I’m not there year, and, instead, am sharing these resources and asking for ideas on how best to use them. Please share your thoughts in the comments section. Absent a lesson plan, here are my choices for the The Best Sites To Learn About Walls That Separate Us (and are accessible to English Language Learners): Raising Walls is an intriguing feature from The Wall Street Journal highlighting famous….walls in history and around the world. The interactive graphic is supplemented by a slideshow, video, and article focused on walls being built around slums in Rio de Janeiro. Great Walls In History is a slideshow from Newsweek magazine. Here are two sites on the Great Wall of China: One is a site from the University of Washington called the Great Wall that has text accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners and some nice photos. I really like this other site. It’s from an organization called The China Guide, and it’s a cool Virtual Tour of The Great Wall. It gives a 360 degree tour and you can click on “hot spots” to move throughout the wall. Of course, the United States is building a huge border fence between the U.S. and Mexico. The New York Times has a map showing it. Here’s an interactive interviewing people who live near it. Earlier this year, the U.S. built a fence in the middle of ‘Friendship Park,” which is near San Diego and a place where friends and relatives from both countries would gather. You can watch a slideshow about what happened and also hear and read an NPR report on the event. The Washington Post has an interactive about Israel’s plan to build a fence on the West Bank to separate Israel from the Palestinians. Here are a series of images of Hadrian’s Wall, which was built in Great Britain long ago by the Roman Empire. Walls of Incompetence is a series of photos of modern-day walls. Baghdad: City of Walls, Pt.1: Scars of war is from the British newspaper The Guardian and highlights giant walls that have been built to separate Shia and Sunni neighborhoods. CNN Go beyond borders Tape Art Project – Case Film is a short video on YouTube documenting a CNN project to place tape along the original border of the Berlin Wall. Here’s a CNN video on the same project. CNN also has several videos on the Great Wall of China, including: West Bank Barrier Protest is a CNN video about a Palestinian protest against a dividing wall being built by Israel. Eco-Wall Or Segregation is a CNN video about a wall being built in the slums of Brazil. “The Fall Of The Wall” is an interactive on The Berlin Wall. Walls that separate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast are called Peace Lines. Here are some multimedia features about them: Still Divided is an audio slideshow from The Guardian. Peace Walls of Belfast is another slideshow from The Guardian. Here’s another slideshow. Thanks to Ira Socol for writing about them. I had never heard of these walls before. The Border Fence Rises In The Southwest is the title of a slideshow from TIME Magazine. The Boston Globe has published an excellent piece titled “Building divisions:Political scientist Wendy Brown explains why the world is seeing a boom in wall building.” It’s not accessible to English Language Learners, but a teacher could certainly modify portions. “Growing Up Palestinian In The Age Of The Wall” is the title of a slideshow from TIME Magazine. Walled World is a fascinating infographic showing how our world is divided by real walls, income walls, and political walls. Remembering The Berlin Wall is a slideshow from The Boston Globe. The border fence is a wall by any other name is from The San Francisco Chronicle. US-Mexico immigration: Even oceans have borders is from The BBC. Crossing Into Nogales, Mexico is a NY Times slideshow. The Gated Community Mentality is from The New York Times. The State of the Gate is a photo gallery and article from The Wall Street Journal. Bethlehem nuns in West Bank barrier battle is from The BBC. Roman Walls is an interesting article from National Geographic. The Great Wall of China is a photo gallery from The Atlantic. The Berlin Wall: Then and Now is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal. Here are images of the border fence between Israel and Egypt. Controversy Flares Again at Berlin Wall is a Wall Street Journal slideshow. Same Southern Border, Varied Views is a photo gallery from The New York Times. The Great Wall Of America is a TIME slideshow. Readers Capture the Complexity of the U.S.-Mexican Border is a photo gallery from The New York Times. On the Border is a photo gallery from The Atlantic. Again, lesson ideas are welcome, along with suggestions of additional resources.

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New research might help people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder The discovery of a mechanism in the brain explains for the first time why people make particularly strong, long-lasting memories of stressful events in their lives and could help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder. The study, carried out by researchers from the University of Bristol's Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience & Endocrinology (HW-LINE) in the School of Clinical Sciences, and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), is published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The research found that stress hormones directly stimulate biochemical processes in neurons that play a role in learning and memory. The way these hormones stimulate these signalling and epigenetic processes in neurons is completely new and has never been shown before. In the healthy brain these processes operate smoothly and help people to cope with and learn from stressful events in their lives. In vulnerable people or in strongly traumatized people (victims of rape or war), these processes may be disturbed and stressful events may result in the formation of highly traumatic memories such as those seen in patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The discovery may lead to new ways to develop drugs to help these patients and to prevent PTSD in trauma victims. Professor Johannes Reul, Professorial Research Fellow in Neuroscience at HW-LINE, said: "Making memories of events in our lives is of critical importance in order to cope properly with new situations and challenges in the future. This is of particular importance for emotional and traumatic life events. Our newly discovered mechanism should be regarded as an adaptive mechanism. We believe this mechanism could be disturbed in stress-related psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety. "The new findings may be of particular significance for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as these patients are pained by pathological memories of an endured trauma (rape or war situations). We hope our discovery may help to generate a new class of drugs to help these patients." The researchers found that stress-induced glucocorticoid hormones enhance memory formation through a direct, physical interaction of glucocorticoid-binding receptors ("glucocorticoid receptor") with a particular intracellular signalling pathway in a specific population of neurons of the hippocampus. This signalling pathway, the so-called ERK MAPK pathway, is known to be strongly involved in learning and memory processes but it was not known that it could interact with glucocorticoid receptors and that this would lead to an enhancement of memory formation. This type of interaction has never been described before. The interaction has a major impact as the stimulated signalling cascade results in augmented epigenetic mechanisms in the nucleus of the affected neurons leading to enhanced expression of certain gene products. The induced gene products are known to evoke structural and functional changes in neurons allowing them to strengthen their role in the memory circuits of the brain. It is well known that people make very strong memories of stressful, emotionally disturbing events in their lives. These so-called episodic memories are memories of the place (e.g. room, office) or surroundings where the event happened, how we felt at the time (mood), and the time of the day at which it happened. These kind of memories can last a lifetime. The consolidation of such memories is taking place in a specific limbic brain region called the hippocampus part of the brain involved in memory and learning. Hormones secreted during stress like the glucocorticoid hormone cortisol (in rodents, corticosterone) act on the hippocampus to enhance the consolidation of these memories. However, until now it has been unknown how these hormones act on the hippocampus to enhance the formation of emotional event-related memories. Provided by University of Bristol - 'Trauma pill' could help those with PTSD Jan 30, 2006 | not rated yet | 0 - Stress can enhance ordinary, unrelated memories Dec 21, 2010 | not rated yet | 0 - New strategy to weaken traumatic memories Mar 17, 2009 | not rated yet | 0 - Controlling our brain's perception of emotional events Apr 20, 2009 | not rated yet | 0 - Fear boosts activation of young, immature brain cells Jun 14, 2011 | not rated yet | 0 - Motion perception revisited: High Phi effect challenges established motion perception assumptions Apr 23, 2013 | 3 / 5 (2) | 2 - Anything you can do I can do better: Neuromolecular foundations of the superiority illusion (Update) Apr 02, 2013 | 4.5 / 5 (11) | 5 - The visual system as economist: Neural resource allocation in visual adaptation Mar 30, 2013 | 5 / 5 (2) | 9 - Separate lives: Neuronal and organismal lifespans decoupled Mar 27, 2013 | 4.9 / 5 (8) | 0 - Sizing things up: The evolutionary neurobiology of scale invariance Feb 28, 2013 | 4.8 / 5 (10) | 14 Why is zone 1 in liver more prone to ischemic injury? 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Parent to Parent Is my child ready to compete? By Kate Taylor There are several factors involved in a parent’s decision to have their child enter the world of competitive chess. Before you take the plunge, ask yourself these questions… 1) Can they sit still for 30-60 minutes and concentrate on their game without being distracted or distracting others? 2) Can they be quiet in the tournament hall? 3) Do they know all of the rules? 4) Can they ultimately checkmate their opponent? 5) Will they be able to make it through 5 rounds of chess over a 6-7 hour period of time? 6) Can they be a good sport? 7) Will they ask for help if they are having difficulty with their opponent? Can they handle defeat? 9) Can they handle winning in a kind way? 10) Can they keep their room clean? Okay, one of these isn’t really necessary, but you get the picture. Playing competitive chess isn’t just about knowing how to play chess well… it’s knowing how to play well during chess.

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WASHINGTON — The government is setting what it calls an ambitious goal for Alzheimer’s disease: Development of effective ways to treat and prevent the mind-destroying illness by 2025. The Obama administration is developing the first National Alzheimer’s Plan to find better treatments for the disease. A newly released draft of the overall goals sets the 2025 deadline, but doesn’t provide details of how to fund the necessary research to meet that target date. Today’s treatments only temporarily ease some dementia symptoms, and work to find better ones has been frustratingly slow. A committee of Alzheimer’s experts began a two-day meeting Tuesday to help advise the government on how to finalize the plan. An estimated 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or similar dementias. It’s the sixth-leading killer, and is steadily growing as the population rapidly ages. By 2050, 13 million to 16 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer’s, costing $1 trillion in medical expenditures. The national plan is supposed to tackle both the medical and social aspects of dementia, and advocacy groups had urged that it set a deadline for progress. Among the draft’s goals: n Improve timely diagnosis. A recent report found as many as half of today’s Alzheimer’s sufferers haven’t been formally diagnosed, in part because of stigma and the belief that nothing can be done. Symptomatic treatment aside, a diagnosis lets families plan, and catching the disease earlier would be crucial if scientists ever find ways to slow the disease’s progress. n Improve support and training for families so they know what resources are available for patients and what to expect as dementia worsens. Alzheimer’s sufferers gradually lose the ability to do the simplest activities of daily life. In meetings around the country last summer and fall, families urged federal health officials to make sure the national plan addresses how to help patients live their last years at home without ruining their caregivers’ own health and finances.

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A surprising amount of what we think we know about the brain comes from neuropsychology; famous case studies such as HM have informed theories of memory so that they include short and long term storage, which are separable, and so on. These case studies can have a profound effect on research; my favourite story, though, was about a memory researcher who had a skiing accident and temporarily developed retrograde amnesia - he couldn't remember anything except that there was this guy in Connecticut (HM) who couldn't remember things either! I always enjoyed classes in neuropsychology; the case studies are always fascinating. But they are deeply limited in what they can actually tell us about the brain. First, they are typically single patient case studies, which restricts how general the conclusions are. Second, they are data from damaged brains; the fairly linear assumption that some localised function has been subtracted out is simply not true, and the damage will have had complex effects on distributed functional networks.Third, the damage is never straight-forward, because these almost all come from accidents or strokes (HM's surgery being a rare example of more detail being known). This has not stopped the field being very excited by these cases, though, and from basing a lot of theory on these patterns of deficits. In movement research, the most famous neuropsychology case study is Patient DF She suffered bilateral damage along the ventral stream of visual processing (James et al, 2003). The effect was visual form agnosia: she is able to control her actions with respect to objects, but cannot describe or recognise these objects verbally. Crucially, her accident did not damage her parietal lobe; specifically, the dorsal stream of visual processing was left intact. These two streams are well defined anatomical pathways leading out of primary visual cortex, and were first described by Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982). DF's pattern of deficits led Mel Goodale and David Milner (Goodale & Milner, 1992) to suggest functional roles for these streams. The ventral stream, they suggested, was for perception - things like object and scene recognition. The dorsal stream, in contrast, was for perception-for-action, and used visual information for the online control of action. This perception-action hypothesis has been hugely dominant in the field, and the theory rests heavily on DF's shoulders. Recently, Thomas Schenk (2012a) published some data which claims to show that DF's visually guided reaching is not normal if she doesn't have access to haptic feedback about the object. His data suggests that the only reason she succeeds at reaching while failing judgment tasks is that haptic information is only normally available in the former case. If correct, this is actually quite a shot across the bow of the perception vs perception-for-action work; naturally Goodale and Milner don't buy it, and have published a reply to which Schenk has then replied. I like seeing these arguments happen in the literature; but to be honest, the time scale is too slow. Schenk publishes, then Milner et al get to reply and Schenk gets right of reply to that. They may or may not iterate again and it's always left as 'we agree to disagree'. But these critiques have answers, and I think a blog comment feed might be the right place to work through the various cycles of suggestions and rebuttals until the obviously wrong things have been weeded out. It would also provide a place for other interested parties to weigh in. So if Schenk, Milner and Goodale (and anyone else!) feel like using the comments for this post or another made to purpose to bang around ideas until an obvious experiment or analysis pops out, please feel free! Schenk (2012a): Patient DF and haptic feedback The classic result from DF that inspired the Goodale and Milner account has two parts (a dissociation). When DF is asked to reach for an object, she can do so well and she shows appropriate pre-shaping of her hand which scales correctly with the size of the object. This suggests she has intact visual perception-for-action. However, if you ask her to judge the size of the object without reaching for it, she cannot do it; she has selectively impaired visual perception. Schenk ran the following experiments on DF and to demonstrate that her unimpaired reaching is not because of intact visual perception-for-action, but rather because of haptic feedback from real objects. 'Perception': these are the tasks DF typically fails due to her visual form agnosia, and she fails them here too. - Size discrimination: Choose the largest of two objects - Manual estimation: Judge the size of an object by shaping your hand correctly - Standard grasping: Reach to grasp an object in the mirror and there is actually an object there (vision + haptic information match) - Grasping without haptic feedback: Reach for the reflection but there is no actual object there. - Grasping with intermittent haptic feedback: there was an object present on half the trials; these were scattered randomly throughout the session and a light cued participants when the object would be present. - Grasping with dissociated positions: participants saw an object in the middle location, were asked to reach for an object at the far position, and there was a real object there. |Figure 1. Grip performance for controls (open circles) and DF (red diamonds).| Milner, Ganel & Goodale (2012) Unsurprisingly, Milner et al (2012) do not agree that these data cast doubt on the perception-action hypothesis about the function of the dorsal and ventral streams. They make the following criticisms: - They suggest that "so-called 'haptic feedback'" (to quote the paper) from trial n could only inform a reach on trial n+1 if the objects were the same size in both trials; object size was randomised across trials, however. - They then claim that Schenk's interpretation means he thinks DF's reaches are prepared on the basis of previous haptic, rather than current visual information. Therefore, they suggest, Schenk must make 'the inescapable prediction' that a reach on trial n+1 should be appropriate for what happened on trial n, regardless of what is presented on trial n+1.They allow that there may be some 'minor intrusion' of haptic information from previous trials. Again unsurprisingly, Schenk (2012b) does not agree with Milner et al's evaluation. - He claims that the Milner et al critique assumes that prehension requires the visual computation of an object's size. He then cites recent work by Smeets & Brenner (1999) who claimed to show that prehension involves the independent targeting of the thumb and forefinger, and thus you don't need object size. - He then suggests that DF is generally able to reach successfully because she has access to the necessary egocentric information (in hand-centred coordinates) about the location of object edges. This information requires regular calibration (Bingham et al, 2007) to remain accurate. - He therefore predicts that if DF has egocentric information about the object, and this information has been calibrated recently, she can reach successfully, otherwise she fails. His 2012a data then support this pattern. - Regarding the pantomime problem: Schenk tested this in Task 5 with the trials with no objects. DF knew there would be no object on these trials (the light cue) but still produced normal reaches because of the calibration on other trials. There is a lot that is weird about the replies. Milner et al make some odd claims, and Schenk goes to strange places in his defence. Let's address those first. 1. "So-called 'haptic feedback'" Milner et al want to keep claiming that DF reaches on the basis of current visual information, and not on the basis of previous haptic information. But there's a problem for them - this is the claim Schenk's data actually refutes! So they make an odd move, and simply claim that earlier haptic information does not affect reaches, and that even if it could, it won't here because the size changes from trial to trial. However, Coats, Bingham & Mon-Williams (2008) have demonstrated (using a mirror rig similar to Schenk's) that if you systematically change the size of the grasped object while leaving the visual object the same size, people happily recalibrate their reach actions and change their grip apertures. Bingham et al (2007) have also shown that even occasional calibration allows stable reach behaviour to persist; calibration lasts some time. So even when the visual size remains unchanged, people's grip behaviour reflects the haptic calibration of the visual perception of size and if this calibration changes, so does grip. Milner et al's second point - that haptic feedback can't help because the object size changes randomly - is actually addressed by Schenk's control data, which shows that neurologically intact people can happily scale their grips appropriately under these conditions (albiet slightly more noisily). 2. Reaching and the need for visual size Schenk centres his reply on the idea that Milner et al assume you need to compute (or perceive) the size of objects in order to scale your grasp. He then cites Smeets & Brenner (1999) who claim that instead, you simply control your thumb and forefinger independently and bring them into alignment with the edges of the object. The problem here is that Smeets & Brenner's work is highly controversial, and in fact more recent work from Mon-Williams & Bingham (2011) tested the predictions of this account in great detail and found no support for this claim. Instead, they showed that the unit of control is an opposition axis (Iberall, Bingham & Arbib, 1986). This is the space between the thumb and forefinger, and Mon-Williams & Bingham (2011) demonstrated that prehension is about aligning this space with the object. You do still therefore need to perceive object size, specifically the maximum object extent. I'll blog this paper in more detail sometime, it is a master class in affordance research. I think Schenk had it basically right in the first paper; the explanation for his data is that in tasks 3 and 5, DF has sufficient access to haptic information about the object's size to allow her to bypass her visual perceptual deficit. She can therefore successfully reach to grasp. In all other tasks, she can't go round the problem and she fails. This suggests that her visual deficit is not simply restricted to 'perception'; the visual system involves both anatomical streams working in concert and these are not functionally independent of each other. What Schenk needs to do is treat haptic information as perceptual information for size in it's own right, not simply feedback or an 'egocentric cue'. DF has unimpaired access to this information and when it's available, she can reach-to-grasp. Bingham, G. P., Coats, R., & Mon-Williams, M. (2007). Natural prehension in trials without haptic feedback but only when calibration is allowed. Neuropsychologia, 45, 288 –294. Download Coats, R., Bingham, G.P. & Mon-Williams, M. (2008). Calibrating grasp size and reach distance: Interactions reveal integral organization in reaching-to-grasp movements. Experimental Brain Research, 189, 211-220. Download Goodale, M. A., Jakobson, L. S., & Keillor, J.M. (1994). Differences in the visualcontrol of pantomimed and natural grasping movements. Neuropsychologia, 32(1), 1159-1178. Goodale, M. A., & Milner, A. D. (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neuroscience, 15(1), 20 –25. Download Iberall, T., Bingham, G. P., & Arbib, M. A. (1986). Opposition space as a structuring concept for the analysis of skilled hand movements. In: Heuer H, From C (eds) Experimental Brain Research Series 15. Springer, Berlin, pp 158–173. Download James, T.W., Culham, J., Humphrey, G.K., Milner, A.D, & Goodale, M.A. (2003). Ventral occipital lesions impair object recognition but not object-directed grasping: an fMRI study. Brain 126, 2463–2475. Download Milner, A., Ganel, T., & Goodale, M. (2012). Does grasping in patient D.F. depend on vision? Trends in Cognitive Sciences DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.004 Mon-Williams, M. & Bingham, G.P. (2011). Discovering affordances that determine the spatial structure of reach-to-grasp movements. Experimental Brain Research, 211(1), 145-160. Download Schenk, T. (2012a). No Dissociation between Perception and Action in Patient DF When Haptic Feedback is Withdrawn. Journal of Neuroscience, 32 (6), 2013-2017 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3413-11.2012 Schenk, T. (2012b). Response to Milner et al.: Grasping uses vision and haptic feedback Trends in Cognitive Sciences DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.006 Smeets, J.B.J., & Brenner, E. (1999). A new view on grasping. Motor Control, 3, 237-231. Download Ungerleider, L.G., & Mishkin, M. (1982). Two cortical visual systems. In Analysis of Visual Behavior (Ingle DJ, Goodale MA, Mansfield RJ, eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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August 4, 2012 by fosco lucarelli First World War was such a traumatic experience for Otto Dix, (he served as a machine-gunner in the Western front from 1914 to 1918) that he later described a recurring nightmare: “As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through…” Based upon his grisly memories, the fifty one etchings of Der Krieg (The War) were an unflinching account of the horrors and the perversity of war. This cycle is a brutal representation of the body: dying, dead, mutilated, decomposing, resting on a landscape becoming lifeless. The technique used (acid etching a metal printing plate to heighten the sense of decay) is a further reminder of the corrosive nature of the artist’s experience. Francisco de Goya‘s Los Desastres de la Guerra (The disasters of war) – [1746–1828] provided an obvious model for Der Krieg. Like Goya’s account of the barbarity of Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1814), Otto Dix exploited the possibility of a long sequence of images and a stark realism. GH Hamilton describes Dix’s cycle as “perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art… It was truly this quality of unmitigated truth, truth to the most commonplace and vulgar experiences, as well as the ugly realities of psychological experience, that gave his work a strength and consistency attained by no other contemporary artist, not even by [George] Grosz…” However, although this portfolio became a commonplace indictment against the horrors of war, one cannot deny Dix was equally horrified and fascinated by it. In 1963 he explained why he volunteered for the Army: “I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself…” Nightmare and hallucinations pervade Der Krieg, as much as an addiction for the sensuousness and delight of the barbaric details. Education resource material: Beauty, Truth and Goodness in Dix’s War, by Roy Forward Der Krieg‘s slideshow, in pdf format The online Otto Dix project Otto Dix The War, Moma NGA’s Der Krieg Otto Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924 at the National Gallery Canberra Monthly Stumblings # 6: Otto Dix, by Domingos Isabelinho German Expressionism site at Moma

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Cougar sightings in Louisiana not that long ago were considered figments of the imagination of spooked hunters, hikers and others in the outdoors. A citizen sent LDWF a trail camera picture taken Aug. 13, 2011. LDWF Large Carnivore Program Manager Maria Davidson and biologist Brandon Wear conducted a site investigation that confirmed the authenticity of the photograph. “It is quite possible for this animal to be captured on other trail cameras placed at deer bait sites,” Davidson said. “Deer are the primary prey item for cougars; therefore, they are drawn to areas where deer congregate.” It is unlikely this cougar will remain in any one area longer than it would take to consume a kill. Cougars do not prefer to eat spoiled meat and will move on as soon as the Louisiana heat and humidity take its toll on the kill. “It is impossible to determine if the animal in the photograph is a wild, free-ranging cougar, or an escaped captive,” Davidson added. “Although it is illegal to own a cougar in Louisiana, it is possible that there are some illegally held ‘pets’ in the state.” LDWF has documented several occurrences since 2002. The first cougar sighting was in 2002 by an employee at Lake Fausse Point State Park. That sighting was later confirmed with DNA analysis from scat found at the site. Three trail camera photos were taken of a cougar in Winn, Vernon and Allen parishes in 2008. Subsequently on Nov. 30, 2008, a cougar was shot and killed in a neighborhood by Bossier City Police Department. The mountain lion, cougar, panther or puma are names that all refer to the same animal. Their color ranges from lighter tan to brownish grey. The only species of big cats that occur as black are the jaguar and leopard. Jaguars are native to South America and leopards are native to Africa. Both species can occur as spotted or black, although in both cases the spotted variety is much more common. Although LDWF receives numerous calls about black panthers, there has never been a documented case of a black cougar anywhere in North America. The vast majority of these reports received by LDWF cannot be verified due to the very nature of a sighting. Many of the calls are determined to be cases of mistaken identity, with dog tracks making up the majority of the evidence submitted by those reporting cougar sightings. Other animals commonly mistaken for cougars are bobcats and house cats, usually seen from a distance or in varying shades of light. The significant lack of physical evidence indicates that Louisiana does not have an established, breeding population of cougars. In states that have verified small populations of cougars, physical evidence can readily be found in the form of tracks, cached deer kills, scat and road kills. The recent sightings of cougars in Louisiana are believed to be young animals dispersing from existing populations. An expanding population in Texas can produce dispersing individual cougars that move into suitable habitat in Louisiana. Young males are known to disperse from their birthplace and travel hundreds of miles seeking their own territories. Cougars that occur in Louisiana are protected under state and federal law. Penalties for taking a cougar in Louisiana may include up to one year in jail and/or a $100,000 fine. Anyone with any information regarding the taking of a cougar should call the Operation Game Thief hotline at 1-800-442-2511. Callers may remain anonymous and may receive a cash reward.

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As we begin a new year, I’d like to share with you a selection of highlights from some of my columns this past year: Antibiotics:Antibiotics are useful for bacterial infections only, and not for viral infections, such as the common cold, bronchitis and sore throats. Strokes:If you are having any symptoms that you think might be caused by a stroke, do not hesitate — seek help immediately from the nearest emergency room. Insomnia:Remedies for sleep problems include lifestyle and behavioral therapies, alternative medicine and prescription medication. Sleep apnea:This condition needs to be treated, as it leads to a greater risk of heart attacks. Depression:This is a true medical illness treated with therapy or medication, sometimes in combination. Asthma:Although it can be deadly, asthma is easily treated with proper medication and close follow-up with a doctor. Sun exposure:Take the harmful effects of the sun seriously and use sunscreen liberally and frequently. Cover up as much as possible when in the sun. Cholesterol:To help prevent heart attacks and strokes, keep cholesterol at a normal level. Coffee:On the whole, coffee is much more beneficial than harmful to your health. Backpacks for students:Lighten them up. Heavy packs cause neck and back problems for kids. Influenza vaccine:Flu shots are useful to prevent influenza and can be given from fall to spring. It’s still not too late. Head injuries:Concussions should be taken very seriously, as they can be deadly and can lead to long-term brain disability. Calling in sick:Staying home when ill not only helps you recover quicker, but also prevents spreading the illness to your co-workers or fellow students. Stress:Dealing with stress can help prevent poor health. The full columns and all others I have written can be found here on my blog at http://valleydoctor.wordpress.com. Have a very healthy and happy new year.

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MIT team finds that the ratio of component atoms is vital to performance. Judith L. Rapoport, chief of the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, is this year's winner of the McGovern Institute's Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, an annual award recognizing an outstanding discovery or significant advance in the field of neuroscience. Rapoport was selected for her groundbreaking studies of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Childhood Onset Schizophrenia, according to Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, which established the award in 2003. Rapoport will receive $50,000 with the award. She will present a public lecture at MIT, hosted by the McGovern Institute and followed by a gala awards dinner sometime this spring. "Dr. Rapaport has contributed significantly to our current understanding of the human brain," said Desimone. "Her groundbreaking research has benefited thousands around the globe, while fundamentally changing the way in which we view child psychiatry." Rapoport pioneered the fields of neuroanatomy and neurochemistry ADHD studies, was the first to document that the symptoms of OCD in children and adolescents are similar to those seen in adults, and was the first to use structural magnetic resonance imaging to examine developmental changes in brain size and structure in children with schizophrenia. She is known for her book, "The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing," which was on The New York Times Bestseller list for 10 weeks. The Scolnick Prize provides an important focus for the international neuroscience community, building bridges that will promote future collaborations and an accelerated pace of neuroscience research. It honors Edward M. Scolnick, former president of Merck Research Laboratories.

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Art of Belgium From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia Despite its size, Belgium has a long and distinguished artistic tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, considerable pre-dating the foundation of the country itself. History of Belgian art Mosan art is a regional style of Romanesque art from the valleys of the Meuse in present-day Wallonia, and the Rhineland, with manuscript illumination, metalwork, and enamel work from the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Among them the masterpiece of Renier de Huy and perhaps of the whole Mosan art Baptismal font at St Bartholomew's Church, Liège. The architecture of Roman churches of the Walloon country are also named Mosan, exemplified by the Collegiate Church of Saint Gertrude in Nivelles, and the churches of Waha and Hastière, Dinant. The Ornamental brassware is also a part of the Mosan art and among these dinandiers Hugo d'Oignies and Nicholas of Verdun. Early Modern art During the so-called Northern Renaissance, Belgium experienced an artistic boom, spawning the immensely popular Baroque Flemish school of painting. The cities of Bruges and Antwerp, some of the richest in the region, became artistic centres during the period. Flemish art was not confined to the boundaries of modern Flanders and several leading artists came from or worked in areas in which langues d'oïl were spoken, from the region of modern Wallonia, e.g. Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden (Rogier de la Pasture) and Jacques Daret. Joachim Patinir Henri Blès are generally called mosan painters. Lambert Lombard (Liège, 1505 – 1566) was a Renaissance painter, architect and theorist for the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. Gérard de Lairesse, Bertholet Flemalle were also important painters in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. The Brueghel Dynasty - See also Bruegel Family Flemish genre painting is strongly tied to the traditions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and was a style that continued directly into the 17th century through copies and new compositions made by his sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Many of these are kermis paintings and scenes of peasants partaking other outdoor enjoyments viewed from an elevated viewpoint. Belgian art in the 19th-20th centuries Originating in France, the Impressionist style was also adopted by Belgian artists. Anna Boch, Eugène Boch (a close friend of Vincent Van Gogh), Georges Lemmen and Théo van Rysselberghe were all influential Belgian impressionist or neo-impressionist painters. During the 19th and 20th centuries many original romantic, expressionist and surrealist Wallon painters emerged, including Félicien Rops, Paul Delvaux, Pierre Paulus, Fernand Verhaegen, Antoine Wiertz, René Magritte... The avant-garde CoBrA movement appeared in the 1950s. Jacques du Broeucq was a sculptor of the 16th century. Constantin Meunier was an influential Belgian sculpter of the late 19th-early 20th century. Unusually, his figures often depict industrial workers. George Grard (1901 — 1984) was a Walloon sculptor, known above all for his representations of the female, in the manner of Pierre Renoir and Aristide Maillol, modelled in clay or plaster, and cast in bronze. And in Liège also, principally Jean Del Cour, the sculptor of the Virgin in Vinâve d'Isle, Léon Mignon the sculptor of Li Tore and Louis Jéhotte of the statue of Charlemagne. Gustave Serrurier-Bovy (Liège, 1858-Antwerp, 1910) architect and furniture designer, credited (along with Paul Hankar, Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde) with creating the Art Nouveau style, coined as a style in Paris by Bing. Comic art (known as bande dessinée) first became popular in Belgium in the 1920s, but achieved huge popularity internationally after the Second World War. The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé first appeared in 1929, and have been translated into fifty languages, selling a total of 200 million copies. Notable art collections in Belgium The most significant art collection in Belgium is the national collection at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, however, there are more than a douzen other significant art collections around the country. Some of the most impressive museums in Belgium are The Royal Museum for Fine Arts, in Antwerp, which has an admirable collection of works by Peter Paul Rubens, the Groeningemuseum, in Bruges, with the Flemish Primitives, the Museum Aan de Stroom (MAS), which is the biggest museum in Belgium. There are also numerous smaller museums, often supported by the state, focused on individual artists, with museums devoted Magritte, Wiertz and Meunier amongst many others. Belgium also has numerous galleries devoted to collections of non-indigenous art, including Oriental, Classical and Congolese painting, sculpture and other visual art.

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Our sense of hearing is truly remarkable, all the more so when you understand the rich layers of information that exist within even a single spoken sentence. Of course this is something most of us take for granted, until you discover what life is like for people who don’t have the benefit of fully functioning hearing. I have no direct experience with cochlear implants (CIs) – electronic devices that partly compensate for severe hearing impairment. But listening to a simulation of the sound produced is salutary. It is rather like hearing things underwater: fuzzy and with an odd timbre, yet still conveying words and some other identifiable sounds. It is a testament to the adaptability of the human brain that this information can be recognizable even when the characteristics of the sound are so profoundly altered. Some people with CIs can appreciate and even perform music. But there are serious limitations to what people with CIs can hear. And understanding these limitations could provide insights into how sound is processed in people with normal hearing – insights that can help us identify what can potentially go wrong and how it might be fixed. That is evident in a trio of papers buried in the little-known but infallibly fascinating Journal of the Acoustical Society of America – a publication whose scope ranges from urban noise pollution to whale song and the sonic virtues of cathedrals. These three papers examine what gets lost in translation in CIs. Much of the emotional content, as well as some semantic information, in speech is conveyed by the rising and falling of voice – known as prosody. In the English language, prosody can distinguish a question from a statement (at least before the rising inflection became fashionable). It can also tell us whether the speaker is happy, sad or angry. But CIs cannot fully convey the pitch of sounds, as well as their “spectrum” of sound frequencies, and this means that users may find it harder to tell whether someone’s voice is happy rather than sad, for instance. So users rely more on visual than on audio information to gauge a speaker’s emotional state. In the first study, Takayuki Nakata of Future University Hakodate in Japan and his co-workers verified that Japanese children who are born deaf but use CIs are significantly less able to identify happy, sad, and angry voices than normal hearers of the same age. They went further than previous studies, however, by showing that these difficulties prevent children from communicating emotion through prosody in their own speech. This suggests two things: first, that we learn to communicate emotion by hearing and copying; and second, that CI users face an additional burden in that other people are less likely to understand their emotions. Difficulties in hearing pitch can create even more severe linguistic problems. In tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, changes in pitch may alter the semantic meaning of a word. So CI users may struggle to distinguish such tones even after years of using a device, and hearing-impaired Mandarin-speaking children who start using them before they can speak are often scarcely intelligible to adult listeners – again, they cannot learn to produce the right sounds if they cannot hear them. To understand how CI users might perceive these language tones, Damien Smith and Denis Burnham of the University of Western Sydney in Australia tested normal hearers with audio clips of spoken Mandarin altered to simulate CIs. The results were surprising. Both native Mandarin speakers and English-speaking subjects do better in identifying the (four) Mandarin tones when the CI-simulated voices are accompanied by video footage of the speakers’ faces. That is not so surprising. But all subjects did better with visuals alone – and in this case non-Mandarin speakers did better than Mandarin speakers.

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The High Mountain Habitats The mountain heights of Wales may seem an inhospitable environment, but there are some surprising species that thrive amongst the crevices, ledges, rocks and scree slopes of even our highest mountains. Ledges and crevices High mountain ledges and rock crevices are important places for some of the rarest mountain plants, particularly where veins of base-rich rock break the surface. Their inaccessibility to sheep makes them a refuge for many plants with a sensitivity to Such places include the tall-herb ledges, where the mineral-rich water flushing through them and the shade of the north-facing slopes create conditions suitable for species that would normally be associated with woodland. In summer, these aptly named tall-herb ledges can provide some of the most attractive and spectacular displays of wild plants in the mountains. They often have the appearance of hanging gardens, supporting plants with names such as wild angelica, ladies mantle, globeflower and roseroot Also well adapted to this mountain habitat are the arctic-alpines – plants usually found in high Alpine mountains or far north in the arctic. They are found here in Wales on the very edge of their distribution, and include the Saxifrages, mountain avens and moss campion. Many of these species survive by growing in pockets of soil in cracks and crevices. They are generally small and often hug the rock by means of creeping stems, or by adopting a cushion shape to minimise their exposure to strong winds. They survive in this hostile environment because under gentler conditions they would soon be overcome by competition from more aggressive species. These plants would appear to be safe in their mountain refuges but even they face challenges – from rising temperatures, acid rain, overgrazing by sheep and the attentions of increasing numbers of feral goats in parts of North Wales. Scree slopes and summits Another rocky habitat of the mountains occurs on scree slopes. These distinctive landforms are widespread, reflecting the geology of their parent cliffs. Where screes are unstable and acidic (the most common type in Snowdonia), the vegetation is usually composed of a pioneer community of parsley fern, with various mosses and Extremes of wind and temperature on the summits of the higher mountains mean that few plants can survive. Nevertheless, species such as the stiff sedge and the hardy dwarf willow are virtually confined to this high ground. The latter species is locally common in montane heath communities in Snowdonia that are not too heavily grazed. The small size of its stems and leaves initially give the impression of a low-growing bilberry, but closer inspection reveals it to be a tree in miniature.

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Au Sable River A world-famous trout stream, the Au Sable River runs about 80 miles from near Grayling to Lake Huron. Along the river’s eastward flow, Consumers Energy operates six hydroelectric dams: Mio, Alcona, Loud, Five Channels, Cooke and Foote. The hydros were built between 1911 and 1924. Together, they can generate 41,000 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power a community of about 20,500 people. How it Works When Consumers Energy pioneered the development of hydroelectric power along the Au Sable, the land was ravaged by decades of logging. Between the mid-1920s and the 1950s, Consumers Energy planted millions of pine trees along the river to stabilize the banks for the six dams. The Au Sable (the name means “River of Sand”) now provides excellent fishing, recreation and wildlife viewing from Grayling to Oscoda. Most of the river frontage is Huron National Forest land managed by the U.S. Forest Service or land owned by Consumers Energy. Consumers Energy owns about 3,500 acres and leases much of its property to public or private operators of boat rental companies, swimming areas or campgrounds. Aspen, oak, maple, pine, balsam, spruce and cedar trees provide shelter and food for deer, wild turkey, ruffled grouse, snowshoe hares and other animals. Bald eagles nest along the river. Portages are available at each Consumers Energy hydro, to allow recreation-seekers to canoe down the winding river or float on an inner tube. In fact, canoeing has become so popular, the Au Sable hosts an annual canoe marathon. The Au Sable River hydroelectric projects are also included as “watchable wildlife” viewing areas in Michigan’s Wildlife Viewing Guide. Consumers Energy works with the USDA Forest Service and other entities to build and maintain these areas and assist in providing viewing opportunities. Wildlife habitat efforts on the Au Sable River were first certified by the Wildlife Habitat Council in 1999. Consumers Energy manages hundreds of acres of wildlife habitat around its six hydroelectric dams along the Au Sable. In addition to meeting all of its licensing requirements, the company manages important wildlife initiatives at its Au Sable facilities, including programs that monitor bald eagles and ongoing efforts to reintroduce the familiar trumpeter swan. The company helped reintroduce 14 native trumpeter swans to the area in 1997-1998. During December 2003, the Iosco Audubon Society counted 138 trumpeter swans on Consumers’ Alcona, Cooke and Foote reservoirs. The company also maintains nesting structures for wood ducks, purple martin colonies, bluebirds and ospreys along the Au Sable. With a capacity of 4,900 kilowatts, the hydro was built between 1914-16 and is the company’s hydro furthest upstream (west) on the Au Sable River. Named after the nearby city, Mio was the first hydroelectric plant to use a conduit or under-sluice spillway. Before this, all dams had included a massive above-ground concrete spillway that typically included a system of gates to pass excess flows. The under-sluice spillway was built into the powerhouse foundation and eliminated the need for the above-ground structure. The under-sluice spillway was invented and patented by William W. Tefft, a Consumers civil engineer and vice president. Tefft’s innovation reduced tailwater erosion during spill operation, increased the plant’s power production and reduced construction expense. It was refined and used at subsequent Consumers’ projects at Alcona Hydro on the Au Sable River, at Hodenpyl Hydro on the Manistee River and at Hardy Hydro on the Muskegon River. Oscoda County Park is the perfect place for scenic views of the Mio dam and watching bald eagles soar above the forest, with 153 campsites in a quiet forest setting on the Mio Hydro pond. Capable of producing 8,000 kilowatts, the hydro was originally named for a nearby road called Bamfield. Work began on Bamfield Dam in 1917, but the project stalled due to unstable sand and World War I. Construction resumed in 1923, and Alcona Hydro, named after the county where it is located, began commercial operation in 1924. Alcona Park, on the Alcona Hydro pond, is an 1,100 acre outdoor paradise with more than 450 campsites and many special features. Capable of producing 4,000 kilowatts, the hydro was completed in 1913. It is named for Edward Loud, who had done extensive lumber business along the Au Sable and bought up most of the cut over Au Sable lands between 1900-06, then later partnered with company founder William Foote and others to build the Au Sable hydros. Five Channels Hydro Capable of producing 6,000 kilowatts, the hydro was completed in 1912. This hydro is named for the nearby location on the Au Sable River where there were once five distinct river channels. The site of the workers’ camp built to support construction of the dam was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 13, 2002. It is an early American example of incorporating worker safety and health provisions into construction site living, drawing heavily on lessons learned in the building of the Panama Canal. With an original capacity of 9,000 kilowatts, the hydro began generating electricity in December 1911, making it the first of the six Au Sable River hydros. Cooke is named for banker Andrew Cooke, who helped secure financing for the project. Cooke Hydro was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on Aug. 2, 1996. The honor recognizes the hydro’s transmission of 140,000 volts, 125 miles to Flint, establishing a world record. Innovations included three-legged windmill-like towers that supported the transmission line and advances in insulator design. Cooke Hydro is also part of the River Road Scenic Byway and listed in the National Scenic Byways Program. Lumberman’s Monument, a 14-foot bronze statue dedicated to Michigan lumbermen, is the centerpiece of a major Forest service visitor Center located on the Cooke Hydro pond. The site features interpretive displays, along with a panoramic overlook and staircase leading down to the pond. With a capacity of 9,000 kilowatts, the hydro was completed in 1918. It is located 9 miles upstream from Lake Huron and is named for William A. Foote, the founder of Consumers Power, which later became Consumers Energy. In 1896, Foote took a side trip from Kalamazoo to Allegan, where he conceived the idea of a hydroelectric plant along the Kalamazoo River. In Foote’s mind, that plant and others would power the industrial centers throughout the state. The Au Sable River Queen on the Foote Hydro pond offers an unique paddlewheel boat cruise that combines spectacular scenery with the history and lore of the Au Sable. Old Orchard Park on the Foote Hydro pond, operated by Oscoda Township, is a popular destination with 500 campsites and many amenities.

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Active and passive voice exercises with answers Active voice | passive Present simple: The car is repaired. Present continuous: The car is being repaired. Past simple: The car was repaired. Past continuous: The car was being repaired. Present perfect: The car has just been repaired. Past perfect: The car had been repaired. Future simple: The car will be repaired. Present conditional : The car would be repaired. Perfect conditional: The car would have been repaired. The passive voice in English is formed with the verb to be and the past participle, which is different for regular verbs (translated, mended) and irregular verbs (taken, thrown). Statement: The letter is written. This shop has been opened. Question: Is the letter written? Has the shop been opened? Negative: The letter is not written. The shop has not been opened. The continuous is as follows. (Other continuous tenses are normally used in the active voice, but not in the passive.) Present: A new house is being built in our street. Past: A new house was being built in our street. In all the examples above the agent is not mentioned. We do not know it. Similarly: Flowers were planted in the garden. (We do not know who did it). If we want to say who planted the flowers we mention the agent at the end of the sentence and use the preposition by. The flowers were planted by my mother. But: The window was smashed with a stone. (The stone is not the agent. We do not know who smashed the window. We only know how he or she did it). Direct and indirect objects If there are both direct and indirect objects in the active voice, the indirect object becomes the subject in the passive voice. Active: My friend sent me a letter. Passive: I was sent a letter by my friend. (Not: A letter was sent to me by my friend. This sentence does not sound natural in English.) Similarly: They offer Trevor a place. - Trevor is offered a place. The infinitive without to In the active voice some verbs are followed by the infinitive without to. In the passive form we use most such verbs with the infinitive with to. Active: We saw them come. She made him do it. Passive: They were seen to come. He was made to do it. But: They let us go. - We were let go. The passive is used: 1. If the action is more important then the agent. A demonstration has been held. This theatre was built in 1868. The important thing is what happened, not who did it. 2. If the agent is not known. He was offered a job. (someone offered him the job) They are supposed to be good students. (some teachers suppose that) The difference in meaning between the simple and continuous A new house is built in our street. (The house is finished.) A new house is being built in our street. (They are building it these days, it is not finished.) I was being introduced to Mrs. Jones when her husband arrived. (Her husband arrived in the middle of the introduction.) When her husband arrived I was introduced to Mrs. Jones. (Her husband arrived first and then she introduced me.) This form is typical of an impersonal and formal style, that is why you can often find it in public notices, announcements, instructions or scientific articles. English is spoken in this shop. Visitors are not allowed to smoke. The seal must be removed. In a less formal style the active voice is more usual. English is spoken in this shop. - We speak English in this shop. He was seen in Dover. - They saw him in Dover. The seal must be removed. - You must remove the seal. In the English language this form is more frequent than in many other languages. Moreover, you can find some stuctures in English which are not possible in some languages. I am told that you are going to have a baby. It is thought that the crises will end soon. - Try some passive voice exercises to practise the difference between the active and passive voice in English tenses. - If you want to download pdf grammar rules with more examples have a look at E-grammar printables. - A marked printable test with answers is available at Mixed exercises.

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An atlas report from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) outlines the monstrous wave energy potential of the country's southern coastline. The report, Ocean Power for Australia -- Waves, Tides, and Ocean Currents [pdf], outlines that if Australia could harness just 10% of the wave energy produced, it would meet all of its current electricity consumption. "If we look at the sustained energy resource along the southern coastline - and we're looking between Geraldton in West Australia and southern tip of Tasmania -- that has a sustained wave energy resource of about five times larger than Australia's present day electricity consumption," said Dr. Mark Hemer from The Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research. "We figured out that if we could harness just 10 per cent of the wave energy along a 1,000km strip of the southern coast, then that would be enough to meet the Australian Government's renewable energy targets of 20 per cent renewable energy before 2020." Of course, this doesn't happen overnight. The predicted timeline would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade. And Australia's wave energy projects of late have had considerable troubles. But Dr. Hemer attributes these recent troubles to wave energy's infancy stages. "Wave energy really is a baby at the moment -- there's currently only about four megawatts of wave energy generating capacity installed globally," he said. "If you compare that to wind energy, there's about 200,000 megawatts of installed capacity, or 50,000 times more, so wave energy is a long way behind on the cost learning curve." But the latest report provides a promising continuum for ongoing research. Efforts and further study can now be concentrated to specific areas. After that comes the more arduous task of convincing investors about the relatively new technology and its durability. Learn more about wave energy at eBoom's Emerging Energy Learning Page. Any opinion contained in this article is solely that of the writers, and does not necessarily shape or reflect the editorial opinions of Energy Boom. Energy Boom content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be advice regarding the investment merits of, or a recommendation regarding the purchase or sale of, any security identified on, or linked through, this site.

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Since President Soeharto fell from power in 1998, Indonesia has struggled to address a legacy of abuse cultivated under his regime. ICTJ works with civil society and state officials to help Indonesians ensure accountability for the human rights violations and crimes of the past. Indonesia was under General Soeharto’s “New Order” regime from 1965 to 1998. This period was rife with violence and widespread repression, including systematic abuse in Timor-Leste, Aceh, and Papua. After the Soeharto ended in 1998, the country took commendable steps towards democracy and rights protection. Indonesia introduced human rights provisions into its constitution and established a Human Rights Court to try those accused of crimes against humanity and genocide. Despite these efforts however, of 34 persons tried by the Human Rights Court to date, all have been acquitted or had their convictions overturned on appeal. A law establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was passed in 2004. Human rights organizations and victims’ representatives raised concerns about a clause in the law which allowed amnesty for perpetrators of serious crimes, and required victims to forgive perpetrators in order to qualify for reparations. In response, in 2006 the Constitutional Court annulled the entire law, effectively halting the TRC process. This decision has also stalled the establishment of local truth commissions in Papua and Aceh. The Indonesian government is currently in the process of drafting a new TRC law. ICTJ has been engaged in Indonesia since 2002. We work with many different groups, strengthening their capacity to develop and pursue transitional justice at the community and national levels.

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CORAL GABLES, FL (October 28, 2010)?To help unravel the mysteries of human cognitive development and reach new the frontiers in robotics, University of Miami (UM) developmental psychologists and computer scientists from the University of California in San Diego (UC San Diego) are studying infant-mother interactions and working to implement their findings in a baby robot capable of learning social skills. The first phase of the project was studying face-to-face interactions between mother and child, to learn how predictable early communication is, and to understand what babies need to act intentionally. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Neural Networks in a study titled "Applying machine learning to infant interaction: The development is in the details." The scientists examined 13 mothers and babies between 1 and 6 months of age, while they played during five minute intervals weekly. There were approximately 14 sessions per dyad. The laboratory sessions were videotaped and the researchers applied an interdisciplinary approach to understanding their behavior. The researchers found that in the first six months of life, babies develop turn- taking skills, the first step to more complex human interactions. According to the study, babies and mothers find a pattern in their play, and that pattern becomes more stable and predictable with age,explains Daniel Messinger, associate professor of Psychology in the UM College of Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study. "As babies get older, they develop a pattern with their moms," says Messinger. "When the baby smiles, the mom smiles; then the baby stops smiling and the mom stops smiling, and the babies learn to expect that someone will respond to them in a particular manner," he says. "Eventually the baby also learns to respond to the mom." The next phase of the project is to use the findings to program a baby robot, with basic social skills and with the ability to learn more complicated interactions. The robot's name is Diego-San. He is 1.3 meters tall and modeled after a 1-year-old child. The construction of the robot was a joint venture between Kokoro Dreams and the Machine Perception Laboratory at UC San Diego. The robot will need to shift its gaze from people to objects based on the same principles babies seem to use as they play and develop. "One important finding here is that infants are most likely to shift their gaze, if they are the last ones to do so during the interaction," says Messinger. "What matters most is how long a baby looks at something, not what they are looking at." The process comes full circle. The babies teach the researchers how to program the robot, and in training the robot the researchers get insight into the process of human behavior development, explains Paul Ruvolo, six year graduate student in the Computer Science Department at UC San Diego and co-author of the study. "A unique aspect of this project is that we have state-of-the-art tools to study development on both the robotics and developmental psychology side," says Ruvolo. "On the robotics side we have a robot that mechanically closely approximates the complexity of the human motor system and on the developmental psychology side we have a fine-grained motion capture and video recording that shows the mother infant action in great detail," he says. "It is the interplay of these two methods for studying the process of development that has us so excited." Ultimately, the baby robot will give scientists understanding on what motivates a baby to communicate and will help answer questions about the development of human learning. This study is funded by National Science Foundation. About the University of Miami The University of Miami's mission is to educate and nurture students, to create knowledge, and to provide service to our community and beyond. Committed to excellence and proud of the diversity of our University family, we strive to develop future leaders of our nation and the world. www.miami.edu

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The way to a healthy garden is to feed the soil and build the ecosystem. Growing cover crops and compost crops in your garden will help you do that and set you on the path to sustainability. Cindy Conner, former market gardener and now sustainable agriculture college instructor, demonstrates how to manage these crops, using only hand tools. Watch through the seasons as crops come to maturity and are either cut as mulch in the beds they were grown in, or cut as food for the compost pile. Using these methods, you also reap the benefits of the biomass of the huge amount of roots left in the bed when the mulch and compost crops are grown there. Growing them to maturity allows seed to be saved for next year, while attracting beneficial insects that help with pest control. Timing and crop choices are of the ultimate importance for successful results. Whether you are gardening on a small or large scale, this video will give you information and ideas to help you develop your own sustainable garden. Run time is 66 minutes.

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Articles tagged ash-lilac borer | Category: Insects & Diseases | Tags: Borers are a group of insect pests that spend part of their adult or larval life stage feeding inside roots and branches, or tunneling beneath the bark or into the heartwood of many trees and shrubs. Many species of boring insects are capable of... - Plant Health Care report May 4, 2012 | Category: Plant Health Care Reports | Tags: May 4, 2012 issue 2012. 3_________________________________________________________________ Our report includes up-to-date disease and insect pest reports, as well as color images, for... - Plant Health Care Report June 10, 2011 (Issue 2011.08) | Category: PHC Reports Archive | Tags:

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Published in Women's Health Weekly, February 23rd, 2006 According to a report from scientists at the University of Gottingen, "Worldwide, each year approximately one million women are newly diagnosed with breast cancer (BC), in Germany 65 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants are registered yearly. The fact that incidence has been rising in parallel with economic development indicates that environmental factors might play a role in the causation of BC." "Migrational data have pointed to nutrition as one of the more relevant external factors involved," stated V. Hanf and U. Gonder. "Preventive dietary advice... Want to see the full article? Welcome to NewsRx! Learn more about a six-week, no-risk free trial of Women's Health Weekly NewsRx also is available at LexisNexis, Gale, ProQuest, Factiva, Dialog, Thomson Reuters, NewsEdge, and Dow Jones.

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You have no items in your shopping cart. Olive oil is often considered the queen of oils. Touted for its taste, aroma and health benefits, it is not only used in cooking, but in personal care, home improvement, natural remedies and more. So where does this wonderful substance come from? With references dating back to ancient mythology, the exact story of the olive tree is unknown. The wild tree is native to the Mediterranean basin, and its fruit has been collected by numerous people and civilizations for centuries. Some believe that the first cultivation of olive trees took place on the island of Crete. Others argue that the formal cultivation happened on the coasts of modern day Syria and Palestine. While we may never know the true story, the use of olive oil became widespread in food preparation, religious rituals, medicines, fuel, skin care and soap making of many Mediterranean civilizations. By the 16th century, the use and importance of olive oil was so great that Solon, the great Athenian statesman, issued a decree that not only regulated the planting of olive trees, but also made the destruction of the olive tree a crime punishable by death. Further evidence of the olive’s importance comes from its English name. “Olive” is derived from the Greek “elaion” (olive tree), which is most likely borrowed from the Semitic Phoenician “el’yon,” a word meaning “superior.” As the trees were domesticated, the cultivation of olive trees began to spread, eventually appearing in Anatolia, Egypt, Tunis, Tripoli, Sicily and Southern Italy. Modern technology has allowed the tree to spread even further, into such diverse places as China, the United States, Australia, and Argentina. These trees, with their elongated leaves and fleshy, oil-rich fruit are a far cry from their original, wild and bushy ancestors. As olive oil has played an increasingly significant role in the economy, commerce, and culture of many civilizations, the cultivation of the trees, the oil production process and the standards for the different variety of oils have received strict attention. Today, while the oil is made all over the world, Spain, Italy and Greece are the world’s three larges producers of olive oil, creating more than 75% of the world’s production. You must be logged in to post a comment. click here to log in

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| As Iraqis who fled their homes during the war begin to return, some are finding it safer to move into areas inhabited by other members of their sect, creating segregated communities of Shia and Sunni Muslims at ever-increasing rates. The country has seen a drop in sectarian violence as a result, but some observers are concerned by the trend's other possible 1 million Iraqis were displaced within the country during Saddam Hussein's regime, and another 1.2 million to 1.3 million have been displaced internally since his 2003 ouster. Another estimated 1.4 million Iraqis went to Syria, about 750,000 to Jordan, and thousands more to Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and other Persian Gulf states, according to September 2007 statistics from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Now, as Iraqis return -- due to the decline in violence or because they ran out of money or face new visa restrictions in other countries -- many cannot move back to their homes because they are destroyed or occupied by other families, or they are choosing to live elsewhere. Some Iraqis would rather live in areas where they feel safe, and those places are where they are not the ethnic minority, said Elizabeth Ferris, senior fellow of foreign policy at the Brookings To illustrate her point, Ferris cited reports from the International Organization for Migration, which tracks internally displaced Iraqis. Basra, a city in southern Iraq, is populated by mainly Shia and is attracting other Shia, and only about 5 percent the displaced there want to return home. However, in Baghdad -- once a mosaic of different ethnic and sectarian groups -- 80 percent of internally displaced Iraqis want to go Even Baghdad is becoming more segregated, with Shia concentrated in the East and Sunnis congregating in the West, she said. As the groups consolidate, there is a propensity to want to push out members of other sects, said James Phillips, research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Heritage Foundation. The forced population movements help strengthen the hand of hard-line leaders among all contending groups and weaken the authority of the central government, said Phillips. "Once those populations move into refugee camps, they become dependent on groups that take care of them, and that's often the militias or anti-government groups," he explained. And since about one-third of Iraqis are in mixed marriages, "we're getting reports of families who are being split up," Ferris In addition, the longer Iraqis are displaced, the harder it is for their children to go to school, which will create huge consequences for society down the line, she said. The United Nations is seeking $265 million this year from donor governments to help displaced Iraqis, and some of that funding is earmarked for supporting educational and health programs in neighboring countries that have taken in Iraqis, according to a U.N. statement. The funding also is intended to support services within Iraq, such as counseling, providing household items and assisting refugee camps, although delivering aid in much of the country is still difficult because of the continuing security problems, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees' office said. According to Ferris, the Iraqi government should implement systems to help returning Iraqis, such as instituting processes to register and verify property claims, to avoid a major potential for conflict that will only grow over time, she said.

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In the summer of 2012, four Princeton students traveled to Koidu, Sierra Leone, looking for a community to partner with for a new Engineers Without Borders project. Senior Michael Showak and junior Christine Feng acted as project co-managers. Video stills courtesy of Caden Ohlwiler, Class of 2015 Video feature: Engineers Without Borders, Sierra Leone Posted January 28, 2013; 12:00 p.m. Dorma is a small village in the heart of the Kono District of Sierra Leone, which was ravaged by the country's civil war that concluded in 2002. It lies about two miles from the center of Koidu, the district capital, and is surrounded by rice fields where many of its residents farm. A group of four students working with the Princeton chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-Princeton) were in Sierra Leone last summer to talk with local citizens and leaders about opening a new program. In this video EWB-Princeton participants talk about their partnership with the village of Dorma to address a few of the basic needs of the community. The students noted that the village has seen little continual effort for a redevelopment of infrastructure in the postwar decade. Play the "Engineers Without Borders, Sierra Leone" video. "The community lacks infrastructure that we would view as essential — clean water and basic sanitation — not from a lack of interest, but from a lack of resources and opportunity," said senior Michael Showak, a chemical and biological engineering major who served as project manager of EWB-Princeton's Sierra Leone team. "We're hoping to be able to work with them to offer our knowledge and engineering skills to assist them to reach the goals they have for themselves." The program will work to improve quality of life in the community. Most pressing is the need for clean and consistent drinking water. To access water during the dry season, when wells often run dry, residents dig pits in the swamps where they grow their rice. Even when the well produces water, it is highly unsafe to drink. "During our visit, we tested the well water they drink for contaminants and found high levels of bacterial contaminants — something that would never pass WHO [World Health Organization] water quality standards," commented junior Christine Feng, an operations research and financial engineering major. Showak, who led the project along with Feng, said that the team consisting of about 20 Princeton students and a professional mentor has a number of challenges to address as they begin to design the system. Students are working on designs of wells that are operational all year long and eliminate contamination issues. The group plans to return in August to finalize technical measurements and help with the formation and training of a group of community members who will oversee the project. "Working on an engineering project halfway around the world is a large undertaking," Showak said. "Luckily, we have great partners within Dorma who are eager to make the partnership work." The Princeton chapter of Engineers Without Borders was established by two undergraduates in 2004 and has completed projects including a library in Ghana and a sanitation system in Peru. Although many of its 90 members are engineering majors, the chapter draws students from across the University. It is supported by the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, Princeton Environmental Institute, Grand Challenges Program and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

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Venerable John Henry Newman, C.O., preached a sermon, of which the following notes survive: The One Sacrifice 1. Christ a sacrifice. We keep the feast at Easter: 'Christ our Pasch,' etc. 2. What is meant by sacrifice?—offering, killing, eating. Objects—(1) worship, (2) thanksgiving, (3) propitiation, (4) impetration. 3. Heathen sacrifices, 1 Cor. x. 20, 'The things which the heathen sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God.' Taurobolium, etc.; human sacrifices, etc. 4. Jewish sacrifices, Lev. ix., x., xvi. 5. Fulfilled in Christ. Two things—death and intercession. Therefore the Aaronic priesthood and bloody sacrifice fulfilled in one act and time by our Lord in the flesh. Scripture speaks of our Lord as not only fulfilling a bloody sacrifice (which is once for all), but besides this of a sacrifice according to Melchisedech, that is, bread and wine. 6. Superiority—once for all; all sin. 7. His mercy in continuing the sacrifice, that it might not be a mere matter of history. 8. This is the Mass; which is His sacrifice reiterated, represented, applied, as He continues it in heaven. Mal. i. 11 . 9. Order of Melchisedech. 10. One priest, one victim, one sacrificing, everywhere. 11. From the first—various liturgies—points in common. Detail of rites as in the bloody [sacrifice on Mount Calvary]—as our Lord taken before Pilate, etc., etc. 12. Arguments for apostolicity of the Mass.

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Squatting is the act of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use. Squatters often claim rights over the spaces they have squatted by virtue of occupation, rather than ownership; in this sense, squatting is similar to (and potentially a necessary condition of) adverse possession, by which a possessor of real property without title may eventually gain legal title to the real property. Squatting has a long history, as old as or older than the idea of property itself. To squat in many countries is in itself a crime; in others it is only seen as a civil conflict between the owner and the occupants. Property law and the state have traditionally favored the property owner. However, in many cases where squatters had de facto ownership, laws have been changed to legitimize their status. It is said that the United States Homestead Act is an example of such legislation. Additionally, US states which have a shortage of housing tend to tolerate squatters in property awaiting redevelopment until the developer is ready to begin work; however, at that point the laws tend to be enforced.

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Analysis: Evidence for climate extremes, costs, gets more local OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists are finding evidence that man-made climate change has raised the risks of individual weather events, such as floods or heatwaves, marking a big step towards pinpointing local costs and ways to adapt to freak conditions. "We're seeing a great deal of progress in attributing a human fingerprint to the probability of particular events or series of events," said Christopher Field, co-chairman of a U.N. report due in 2014 about the impacts of climate change. Experts have long blamed a build-up of greenhouse gas emissions for raising worldwide temperatures and causing desertification, floods, droughts, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels. But until recently they have said that naturally very hot, wet, cold, dry or windy weather might explain any single extreme event, like the current drought in the United States or a rare melt of ice in Greenland in July. But for some extremes, that is now changing. A study this month, for instance, showed that greenhouse gas emissions had raised the chances of the severe heatwave in Texas in 2011 and unusual heat in Britain in late 2011. Other studies of extremes are under way. Growing evidence that the dice are loaded towards ever more severe local weather may make it easier for experts to explain global warming to the public, pin down costs and guide investments in everything from roads to flood defenses. "One of the ironies of climate change is that we have more papers published on the costs of climate change in 2100 than we have published on the costs today. I think that is ridiculous," said Myles Allen, head of climate research at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute. "We can't (work out current costs) without being able to make the link to extreme weather," he said. "And once you've worked out how much it costs that raises the question of who is going to pay." Industrialized nations agree they should take the lead in cutting emissions since they have burnt fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases, since the Industrial Revolution. But they oppose the idea of liability for damage. Almost 200 nations have agreed to work out a new deal by the end of 2015 to combat climate change, after repeated setbacks. China, the United States and India are now the top national emitters of greenhouse gases. Field, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at the University of Stanford, said that the goal was to carry out studies of extreme weather events almost immediately after they happen, helping expose the risks. "Everybody who needs to make decisions about the future - things like building codes, infrastructure planning, insurance - can take advantage of the fact that the risks are changing but we have a lot of influence over what those risks are." Another report last year indicated that floods 12 years ago in Britain - among the countries most easily studied because of it has long records - were made more likely by warming. And climate shifts also reduced the risks of flooding in 2001. Previously, the European heatwave of 2003 that killed perhaps 70,000 people was the only extreme where scientists had discerned a human fingerprint. In 2004, they said that global warming had at least doubled the risks of such unusual heat. The new statistical reviews are difficult because they have to tease out the impact of greenhouse gases from natural variations, such as periodic El Nino warmings of the Pacific, sun-dimming volcanic dust or shifts in the sun's output. So far, extreme heat is the easiest to link to global warming after a research initiative led by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Meteorological Office. "Heatwaves are easier to attribute than heavy rainfall, and drought is very difficult given evidence for large droughts in the past," said Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh. Scientists often liken climate change to loading dice to get more sixes, or a baseball player on steroids who hits more home runs. That is now going to the local from the global scale. Field said climate science would always include doubt since weather is chaotic. It is not as certain as physics, where scientists could this month express 99.999 percent certainty they had detected the Higgs boson elementary particle. "This new attribution science is showing the power of our understanding, but it also illustrates where the limits are," he said. A report by Field's U.N. group last year showed that more weather extremes that can be linked to greenhouse warming, such as the number of high temperature extremes and the fact that the rising fraction of rainfall falls in downpours. But scientists warn against going too far in blaming climate change for extreme events. Unprecedented floods in Thailand last year, for instance, that caused $45 billion in damage according to a World Bank estimate, were caused by people hemming in rivers and raising water levels rather than by climate change, a study showed. "We have to be a bit cautious about blaming it all on climate change," Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, said of extremes in 2012. Taken together, many extremes are a sign of overall change. "If you look all over the world, we have a great disastrous drought in North America ... you have the same situation in the Mediterranean... If you look at all the extremes together you can say that these are indicators of global warming," said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengabe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. (Additional reporting by Sara Ledwith in London; Editing by Louise Ireland) - Tweet this - Share this - Digg this

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Suggested Reading List Galapagos, A Natural History Guide Author: Michael Jacks Description: This comprehensive overview of the habitats, plants, birds, and animals of the islands, written with the curious visitor in mind, is practically mandatory reading. It's the single best overview of the archipelago. Jackson also includes a useful bibliography, wildlife checklists and a list of plants by vegetation zone. Illustrated with many charts and maps, we refer to the book often. Galapagos, World's End Author: William Beebe Description: A wry, wonderfully evocative account of a 1924 scientific expedition, including an excellent chapter on the human history of the Galapagos by Ruth Rose. A contemporary reviewer wrote, "Galapagos is a glorious book. It is high romance, exact science and wild adventure." Originally published in 1924, it includes several color plates and maps. Insight Pocket Guide Ecuador and Galapagos Author: Peter Frost Description: Written and photographed by South America expert Peter Frost, this handy pocket guide features a pullout map of Ecuador, hundreds of color photographs and suggested itineraries. Voyage of the Beagle Author: Charles Darwin Description: The wide-eyed tale of a young man on a five-year voyage that changed his life -- and our way of thinking about the world. First published in 1839, this book is still essential reading. Darwin's South American chapters are an excellent introduction to the Galapagos, Beagle Channel, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, the Chilean fjords and the Brazilian coast. With maps and appendices. Galapagos Wildlife, A Visitor's Guide Author: Bradt Travel Guides Description: FIELD GUIDE: A compact guide to the birds, reptiles, insects, plants and marine life of the archipelago featuring a very good selection of large color photographs. Separate chapters cover visitor sites, history, conservation and habitats. The authors present key information on the flora, fauna and places in Galapagos for the traveler. Evolution's Workshop, God and Science on the Galapagos Islands Author: Edward J. Larson Description: A vivid history of the Galapagos -- and the role of the islands as a crucible of evolutionary ideas. It covers not just Darwin but the discovery of the islands, visits of Hancock and Beebe, influence of the United States during WWII, and the establishment of the national park. Pulitzer Prize-winning Larson, a historian of science, has also written about the Scopes trial (Summer for the Gods) and the creationist controversy in the United States (Trial and Error). Galapagos Islands Explorer Map Author: Ocean Explorer Maps Description: A detailed map of the Galapagos archipelago for the traveler at a scale of 1:400,000, including illustrated biographies of famous visitors, a brief wildlife guide with color photographs, a map of Darwin's route. The Panama Hat Trail Author: Tom Miller & Tony Hillerman Description: An accurate and wonderfully descriptive picture of Ecuador and its people. The author tells the story of the Panama hat and the lives it touches; from growing the straw, processing it, and weaving it, to the final product that is exported worldwide. Charles Darwin Slept Here Author: John Woram Description: John Woram recounts with verve and humor the human history of the archipelago, featuring a colorful cast of buccaneers, scientists and adventurers. With ar-chival drawings, maps and extensive notes. Galapagos: The Enchanted Islands, Through Writer's Eyes Author: John Hickman Description: John Hickman weaves original accounts by Galapagos whalers, gentleman pirates, fitful castaways, settlers and scientists, including Ambrose Crowley Herman Melville, Charles Darwin and William Beebe, in this these tales of the color-ful human history of the archipelago. The Boy on the Back of the Turtle Author: Paul Quarrington Description: Humorist, novelist and family man on a quest, Quarrington offers an entertain-ing account of a Galapagos voyage in the company of his seven-year-old daugh-ter and seventy-year-old father. Galapagos, A Novel Author: Kurt Vonnegut Description: In this madcap novel, a classic, Vonnegut looks back from the future (alas, the human race has been wiped out except for a small group stranded in the Ga-lapagos) on the Nature Cruise of the Century. Galapagos, Preserving Darwin's Legacy Author: Tui De Roy Description: Tui de Roy corralled researchers and friends for this stunning survey of the natural history, ecology and conservation of the Galapagos. With 450 breath-taking color photographs and chapters by Jack Grove (fishes), Peter and Rose-mary Grant (finches), Dennis Geist (geology) and many other scientists. Galapagos, Exploring Darwin's Tapestry Author: John Hess Description: Professor Hess pulls off the rare trick of being both scientifically accurate and inviting in this illustrated coffee-table primer on Galapagos, its geol-ogy, evolution and magnificent wildlife. Reef Identification, Galapagos Author: Paul Humann Description: Sturdy enough to take along on a boat, this comprehensive photographic guide includes a map, checklist and brief overview of the archipelago. Flowering Plants of the Galapagos Author: Conley McMullen, Ghillean Prance Description: Indispensable for the botanically minded, this excellent guide features color photographs of 436 species, an overview of ecology and habitats, and a plant checklist for each visitor site. Author: Pocket Naturalist Description: This fold-up, laminated card includes color drawings and short descriptions. Galapagos, Discovery on Darwin's Islands Author: David Steadman Description: All the birds, mammals, reptiles and other vertebrates of the Galapagos are beautifully illustrated in this insightful overview of natural history and evolution by a researcher who has worked throughout the islands. Steadman's brother Lee provides the full-color, full-page water color illustrations. Birds, Mammals and Reptiles of the Galapagos Islands Author: Andy Swash, Robert Stills Description: This strikingly compact, comprehensive field guide features 500 color photo-graphs, distribution maps and information on status, habitat and behavior. The Beak of the Finch Author: Jonathan Weiner Description: This Pulitzer Prize-winning work is an accessible look at the modern debate on the mode and rhythm of evolution, using the story of Peter and Rosemary Grant and their field work on Daphne Major as an example. Galapagos, The Islands That Changed the World Author: Paul D. Stewart Description: This stunning three-part BBC documentary captures the rugged beauty, allure, wildlife and history of the archipelago like never before

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18 abril 2012 | EN | FR Regreening is being monitored by village committees in Niger World leaders must promote effective land use methods to mitigate drought, says Luc Gnacadja of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. Severe droughts in Africa are a stark reminder of global unfairness. About 13 million people still struggle to have enough food in the Horn of Africa, and about the same number, most of them children, suffer from hunger in the Sahel region, which stretches across Africa below the Sahara. Droughts now hit these parts of Sub-Saharan Africa more frequently than the usual ten-year cycle, and more severely. And people living there are the least responsible for this climatic change. Last year, the response of the international community to the Horn of Africa crisis was catastrophically late and slow. Tens of thousands of people may have been rescued if we had not waited for the food crisis across East Africa to escalate into famine in Somalia. To make things worse, humanitarian relief eventually leaves communities that depend on agriculture even more vulnerable to the next drought. Food aid disrupts local markets — farmers lose income and a major incentive to grow crops when local people can get food for free. This article is part of our coverage of preparations for Rio+20 — the UN Conference on Sustainable Development — which takes place on 20-22 June 2012. For other articles, go to Science at Rio+20 Now, the latest reports from early warning systems predict a crisis in both the Horn of Africa and Sahel again this year, when they have not yet recovered from the 2010 and 2011 droughts. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Protect and thrive Farmers in the Maradi and Zinder regions of Niger know what to do. During the past 20 years they have protected trees on some five million hectares of farmland. Where they had no trees or only a few per hectare, they now have up to 120. These trees not only improve soil fertility but also provide about a million households with fodder, fruit and firewood. A recent survey shows that the farmers who preserve trees are able to cope better with drought than other farmers in the same area. Some of them even produced a modest cereal surplus in 2011. This is just one example of highly successful sustainable land management on a grassroots level. Another is Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer in Burkina Faso who featured in the documentary film, The Man Who Stopped the Desert. He has combined tree and crop planting techniques to turn the barren land in his village into a 15 hectare cultivated forest within three decades. We should not wait until the next food crisis emerges — we need to disseminate this experience and scale it up to national and regional levels. Drought is predictable. The tools and knowledge farmers need to cope with it are already there. What is missing is the political will and the lack of awareness about existing, sustainable land-use practices. First steps are local The first step is to empower local communities and foster farmer-to-farmer communication. In 2004, the International Fund for Agricultural Development helped to create the first village committee in the Aguie district of the Maradi region in Niger to monitor regreening activities. The initiative is recognised at a national level, prompting the establishment of similar committees in neighbouring villages. Today, these committees regularly meet to share experience in land management and protect trees from theft. Then in 2008, several farmers from Senegal visited re-greened areas in Niger. On their return, they used what they learned to protect young trees on their farmland on about 40,000 hectares. Local authorities should encourage such experience sharing. These successes should be communicated by local, national and international media — especially radio, which is the most accessible medium for farmers across Africa. National and international strategy But strategies that work on the level of individual farmers are not enough. We need to make sure that each drought-prone country has a national drought policy, based on the principles of early warning, preparedness, risk management and response. This effort is led by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and the World Meteorological Organization. Such policies would embrace insurance schemes, for example, allowing farmers and herders affected by drought to receive state subsidies. Most importantly, we should empower smallholder farmers to become 'champions' in the race against the disastrous effects of climate change. In most African countries, the land that local people have been cultivating for generations is legally owned by the government. But farmers will preserve their trees if they have clearly defined rights to them. So governments in Africa need to recognise these rights in forestry and agriculture laws. We know from numerous studies that building long-term resilience is much more cost-effective than ad-hoc crisis response. Still, it seems easier for donors to justify spending money to feed a starving child rather than supporting his or her father to grow enough crops. With the global community discussing the green economy and sustainable development in the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), it is unthinkable that we would continue standing by and allow tens of thousands of people to die of hunger. We should act at local, national and global levels to give farmers the lead, and promote sustainable land use and re-greening initiatives. The Rio+20 summit should make this a top priority. It is essential to averting the next food crisis in Africa, and meeting the global challenge of feeding nine billion people by 2050. Luc Gnacadja is executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which promotes a global response to desertification, land degradation and drought. This article is part of our coverage on Science at Rio+20. Al Jazeera Aid agency warns of West Africa food crisis. (9 March 2012) Food security and water in Africa's drylands (African re-greening initiatives, 2012) 1080 Films The Man Who Stopped the Desert. (2010) Todos los comentarios están sujetos a revisión. Nos reservamos el derecho de editar los comentarios que contengan un lenguaje inapropiado o inadecuado. SciDev.Net mantiene los derechos de autor de todo el material que se publica en el portal. Por favor lea las condiciones de uso para más detalles. Todo el material de SciDev.Net se puede reproducir gratuitamente siempre que se de crédito a la fuente y al autor. Para más detalles ver Creative commons.

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All New! Free Download! With over two years of development and prototyping behind it, the E4 Complete Edition compiles the revised, updated and polished versions of all 32 E4 vocabulary lessons, plus an all-new introduction, into one convenient PDF eBook. (173 pages, 23.4MB) Everyday learning in the classroom requires the asking of a variety of questions. A teacher asks students to answer a difficult math problem. Students ask the teacher to clarify instructions for a writing assignment. A student may ask another student about a homework assignment. As illustrated in the word web, the word ask can be used in a multitude of ways. How the word is used in a sentence provides the framework for the meaning of the word. These different uses should be emphasized for English Language Learners. Some synonyms of ask can imply emotion or meaning. For example, a person begging for money, or mercy, indicates desperation. To merely ask for something doesn’t suggest an emotion. Ask is a neutral term. Look at the synonyms of ask and see if there are other words that convey feelings or special meaning. The word ask comes from an Old English word, ascian, for “to seek.” The Spanish word for to ask is preguntar. Ask and preguntar are not cognates. However, some synonyms for ask do have Spanish cognates.

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No Matter What Shape Your Fractions are In These activities are designed to cause students to think; they are not algorithmic. They do not say, to add fractions, do step one, step two, step three. Students will explore geometric models of fractions and discover relations among them. Arithmetic, Geometry, Patterns

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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah regulators are promising to deliver a set of plans to curb air pollution by July but said Wednesday that the task won't be completed easily. Officials told a powerful state board their plans will achieve as little as 80 percent of the emissions reductions required by the federal government for urban areas of northern Utah. Regulators don't know how to close the gap. Tailpipe emissions account for more than half of Utah's pollution problem, but regulators have shown no interest in mandating cleaner gasoline or more efficient cars. Utah already is moving to reduce industrial emissions, but regulators say industries represent a small piece of the pollution puzzle. The problem could be the nation's most difficult to solve, regulators said. They blamed a combination of mountain geography and weather systems that trap emissions in valleys for days or weeks at a time, allowing no escape. One plan requires Utah to reduce emissions in the Salt Lake region by 227 tons a day. Regulators said Wednesday that they were 22 tons short of reaching that goal. In Utah County, the gap is wider. Regulators are 10 tons shy of reducing emissions by 52 tons a day. "It's incredible how much reduction we have to get" to comply with federal air standards, said David McNeill of the Utah Division of Air Quality. The Utah Air Quality Board has already acted to ban the sale of wood-burning boilers for home heating. It's moving against aerosol-powered consumer products like hairspray by requiring more environmentally friendly propellants. The board also is imposing new emissions controls on hamburger joints that use conveyor-driven flame broilers to cook their beef. "It's going to crimp everyone's lifestyle, and people aren't noticing that yet," McNeill said.

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Ensuring Accurate White Balance Why is it that sometimes you end up with blue faces, even when you know you white-balanced your camera before making a shot? The possible causes are simple and rather limited. There might have been something in the shot that was brighter than your white reference, perhaps a window or other light source. Or your assistant might have held the white card so that light from a fluorescent or tungsten lamp on one side of the room illuminated it when the camera was positioned so that a nearby window had a greater influence on the lighting. Perhaps the white-balance was done with a camera-mounted light illuminating a white card held five feet from the lens while the subject was 15 feet away -- too far for the camera light to have the same effect. Following two basic rules will ensure accurate and predictable white-balances. First, always be sure that the white you have chosen to balance on is the brightest object in the shot. While most professional cameras do not require that you fill the entire frame with white, you should always zoom in enough to exclude windows or anything else the camera could mistakenly choose as a reference. And remember that failure to keep the white card in focus can allow color from adjacent parts of the shot to pollute the white. Second, always position the white card so it is vertical, aimed directly at your camera, and positioned at the most critical part of the shot. Since we most frequently are photographing people, and since skin tones are most likely to reveal even minute color shifts, the best place to hold the white card is directly in front of the principal subject's face. Tilting the card upward will allow ceiling mounted lamps to have a greater influence on your balance than they do on the overall scene. And in cases where there is a mixture of lighting sources, aiming the card at anything but your lens will prevent the white-balance from accurately assessing the mix. In the next Sharpshooters' Tips we'll look at the color temperature values displayed in the viewfinder and decode their cryptic message.

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What is the role of a mentor? The knowledge, advice, and resources a mentor shares depend on the format and goals of a specific mentoring relationship. A mentor may share with a mentee (or protege) information about his or her own career path, as well as provide guidance, motivation, emotional support, and role modeling. A mentor may help with exploring careers, setting goals, developing contacts, and identifying resources. The mentor role may change as the needs of the mentee change. Some mentoring relationships are part of structured programs that have specific expectations and guidelines: others are more informal. The concept of mentoring is simple, but successful implementation can be challenging. A document on disability issues posted by the American Psychological Association lists characteristics of effective mentoring to include "the ability and willingness to - value the mentee as a person; - develop mutual trust and respect; - maintain confidentiality; - listen both to what is being said and how it is being said; - help the mentee solve his or her own problem, rather than give direction; - focus on the mentee's development and resist the urge to produce a clone." For more information about mentoring, visit: - The National Center on Secondary Education and Transition's Mentoring Youth in Transition - The Peer Mentoring Tool Kit by the Center for Women and Information Technology - Mentoring and Peer Support for People with Disabilities by DO-IT Last update or review: January 23, 2013

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In Roman times, gold, silver, copper and glass were used to make jewellery. Metals were mixed to make alloys such as bronze, a mixture of copper and tin. Roman bronze sometimes had zinc in it that gave it a gold colour. The Romans often used stones and gems in their jewellery. Sapphires, rubies, garnets and amber were often worn in rings. The Romans were probably the first to use rings as a symbol of engagement This Emperor Gem Ring is made from 22ct gold plated lead-free pewter and is supplied in a clear plastic blister. The information card is full colour on the front and has historical information on the reverse.

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Title: President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson Description: President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson meet in the Oval Office. Ship models and art work in the Oval Office reflected President Kennedy’s naval career and love of the sea. Because he experienced back pain, President Kennedy often sat in a special rocking chair that gave him proper support. Date: September 17, 1963 Creator: Abbie Rowe, National Park Service

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Changes in the economic environment and a world of low growth make following Rogers' method more difficult than ever. Stock spruikers argue that equities are “undervalued”. But changes in the economic environment may make quaint measures such as price-earning (“PE”) ratios misleading. In a world of low growth, the dynamics of corporate earnings, which ultimately underlie stock prices, have become more complex. Profit margins and cash flow improve, perversely, in a period of low growth. Initially, companies cut costs improving profitability. As revenues are stagnant, companies have no need to invest in expanding capacity or working capital, releasing cash flow. Reduction in depreciation charges and the ability to use cash flow to reduce debt reduces interest expenses. In the present cycle, sharp decreases in interest rates, though not necessarily interest margins, have also improved profit margins. These effects are short term. In effect, they misstate earnings. As English Economist John Hicks argued true income must to allow for sustained productive capacity, which is the amount that can be withdrawn or paid out without diminishing the ability to produce the same next year. Plant must eventually be replaced. Cost cutting, productivity improvements and restructuring cannot be repeated endlessly. In the long run, increases in profitability require revenue growth. But lower growth translates into lower demand slowing revenue increases. Lower demand and also over capacity in many industries have reduced corporate pricing power decreasing profitability. A striking feature of recent corporate history has been low and poor quality revenue growth. Earnings have increased more than revenues. Where companies or sectors experience revenue growth, the causes are interesting. Beneficiaries of government spending targeted at increasing demand have benefitted. Artificially low interest costs have encouraged substitution of technology and mechanised equipment for human resources boosting revenues of technology and industrial equipment manufacturers. Commodity producers’ revenues have benefitted from rises in volumes (driven by emerging market demand) and higher prices. Banks and financial institutions’ earning have benefitted from central bank activity to create artificially low interest rates and provide near unlimited funding. Policy measures have provided additional “carry” income, allowing banks to borrow at near zero rates to invest in government bonds or higher yielding assets. These investors have also profited from capital gains as central banks have intervened aggressively to bring down asset yields. Low rates have also reduced loan losses allowing weak borrowers to continue to service crippling debt. In the US, specific actions targeted at the housing market have boosted returns for mortgage lenders. Unsurprisingly, bank earnings and stock prices have performed well. Some firms have increased revenue by cannibalising competitors and adjacent industries. RIM and Nokia have lost market share to i-Phones. Sony’s Walkman and other makers of mobile entertainment devices have lost market share to i-Pods. Makers of personal digital assistants – Palm Pilots and Handsprings- were superseded by smart phones. Tablets have increased market share at the expense of desktop and notebook computers. Picking the winners and losers in this game is difficult. The build-up of cash on corporate balance sheets is frequently cited as a sign of corporate health. In the US, since 2008 companies have been net lenders rather than borrowers and now hold around US$1 trillion in cash. Japanese companies hold liquid assets of US$2.8 trillion. European companies too hold large cash balances. Mark Carney, the newly appointed Bank of England governor, referred to the $300 billion of cash held by companies in his native Canada as “dead money”. He urged vainly for firms to “put money to work and if they can’t think of what to do with it, they should give it back to their shareholders”. The high cash balances reflect uncertainty about future financing conditions and the willingness of banks to lend. But it primarily reflects the lack of investment opportunities. The cash balances are a drag on corporate earnings, given the near zero interest rates in most developed markets. But cash surpluses have influenced stock prices and returns. Following Mark Carney’s advice, many companies have returned capital, through stock buybacks and higher or special dividends. In late 2012, fear of US tax changes prompted such actions. But investors are now faced with the problem of where to deploy the cash. Other companies have used surplus cash to purchase competitors, businesses or assets. Given the indifferent results of many mergers and acquisitions (many acquisitions by technology firms and resource companies come to mind), it is unclear that this will benefit anyone other than shareholders of the acquired company and investment bankers. Equity valuations increasingly will reflect changes in the market environment. Changing demographics affect stocks. Investors approaching retirement may switch to more defensive asset and seek steady income, favouring bonds and cash. Low and declining returns over time has also undermined demand for equities. The reduction is evident in outflows from equity funds into other assets. But a major factor is increasing distrust of the market itself. Government policies especially zero interest rate policies, quantitative easing and other forms of financial repression, now exert a significant effect on stocks. Low holding costs have driven stock prices. Dividend paying stocks have benefitted from the attention of investors seeking income. With limited policy options and central bank desire to boost asset prices to protect financial institutions and increase consumption, further intervention, including direct purchases of stocks, cannot be ruled out. The Bank of Japan has purchased risky assets including corporate bonds and stocks. During the 1997/1998 Asian monetary crisis, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority purchased stocks. Algorithmic trading now dominates stock markets, making up between 30% and 70% of all activity. While necessary to facilitate execution, computerised trading may increase volatility. Holding periods now average a few seconds. Computer generated market failures, such as the Flash Crash and the problems of Knight Capital, reduce confidence in the integrity of the market. Average investment periods for traditional investors have fallen from 7 years in 1940, 5 years in 1960s, 2 years in the 1980s to 7 months currently. Short term trading feeds volatility and may distort values. Responding to shorter investment holding periods, the European Union have proposed a quixotic investor loyalty plan (rather like a mileage scheme offered by airlines!). Under the plan (which faces significant opposition), loyal shareholders in European companies would benefit from extra voting rights and higher dividends. This would be a significant change to the “one-share one-vote” principle of corporate structures. Despite the increase in computer driven trading, overall trading volumes have declined by 15-30%. The reduced liquidity affects stock valuations. Revelations of insider trading reduce and expert networks designed to secure preferential access to tips has emerged. As Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement SEC put it in his successful prosecution of Galleon: “Raj Rajaratnam is not a master of the universe, but rather a master of the Rolodex”. Institutionalised wrong doing further undermines investment interest, especially from retail investors. Equity market analyst Laszlo Birinyi may have been right when he observed that “the relationship between the stock market and the economy is tangential, not causal”. But in the longer term, the disjunction between fundamentals of real earnings or cash flow and stock prices as well as changes in the structure of the market undermines investor interest in and demand for stocks. John Maynard Keynes famously likened the stock market to a beauty contest, where success depended on anticipating the views of the judges rather than an investor’s own perspectives on pulchritude. Stocks may or may not be undervalued. But fundamental changes in the drivers of stocks and trading in equities now make Keynes views on investing success more important than ever. © 2013 Satyajit Das Satyajit Das is a former banker and author of Extreme Money and Traders Guns & Money

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William Ellsworth Glasscock was born in Monongalia County. After graduating from West Virginia University, he served as superintendent of Monongalia County schools, clerk of the circuit court, collector of internal revenue, and as chair of the state Republican committee. Admitted to the bar in 1903, Glasscock rose quickly in the Republican party as an attorney for United States Senator Stephen B. Elkins. As governor, Glasscock advocated taxing natural gas, funding for education, mine safety laws, creation of a public service commission, anti-lobby legislation, an anti-trust law, and environmental legislation. A dispute with the legislature over the appointment of two United States senators effectively nullified most of Glassock's measures. The last year of his term was marred by a violent coal strike in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek area of Kanawha County. On three separate occasions, Glasscock declared martial law and sent in troops. He refused to release Mary Harris "Mother" Jones from house arrest although she was at least sixty-seven years old and suffering from pneumonia. She had been arrested for inciting to riot during the last period of martial law. After leaving office, Glasscock returned to his law practice. He died in Morgantown in 1925. West Virginia's Governors West Virginia History Center

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PNW Agricultural Trade: Comparative Advantage and Competitiveness are Fundamental Keywords: trade, competitiveness, arbitrage The concepts of comparative advantage and competitiveness are important foundations for understanding the importance of international trade in Pacific Northwest agriculture. These concepts illuminate the underlying factors responsible for current trade patterns. The potential for ongoing trade negotiations to alter established world trade patterns can be more readily understood by thinking in terms of comparative and competitive advantage. Comparative advantage and competitiveness are related, but are often mistakenly exchanged for one another. Comparative advantage explains how trade benefits nations through more efficient use of the world's resource base when that trade is totally unrestricted. Competitive advantage defines trading patterns as they exist in the real world including all the barriers to free trade ignored by comparative advantage. These concepts were originally applied to trade among nations, however trade between U.S. states or even trade among individuals in a family may be explained by applying these same principles. A World Without Trade To begin a discussion of comparative advantage it is useful to imagine a world where trade does not exist and each country must be self sufficient in producing all commodities. In this imaginary world without trade, prices of commodities in each country are determined by the availability of the factors of production (land, labor, and capital inputs) and consumer demand. Prices of the same commodity under self sufficient conditions would vary substantially among countries even if consumer demand was the same in each of those countries. This price variation is due to the variable quantity and quality of productive factors such as land and climate, and the presence of skilled labor more suitable for production of certain products than others. Due to these resource variations some goods may be produced only at very high cost, or perhaps not at all, in some nations. For example, the production of oranges in Canada could only be accomplished under greenhouse conditions resulting in extremely high unit production costs while oranges are produced in California at relatively low cost due to the immovable factors of climate, water and land favorable for orange production. Free Trade Among Nations Now consider a world where trade among nations is possible while maintaining the previous assumption of immovable productive resources. Consumers will compare prices of locally produced commodities with the prices of the same commodities produced in other nations. Consumers will choose to purchase identical commodities at the lowest price regardless of where produced. As trade proceeds among nations, commodity prices rise in those nations which had relatively low prices in the absence of trade while prices fall in nations with relatively high pre-trade prices. Arbitrage Between Nations The price adjustment is accomplished through the process of arbitrage as practiced by traders who buy goods in nations with low prices and in turn sell the goods in nations with higher prices. For example, suppose a produce trader can purchase oranges in California, transport them to Canada and sell them for a price which yields him a profit while undercutting the price of our hypothetical hothouse oranges produced in Canada. This new competition in the international orange market will cause Canadian orange producers to lower their prices in order to compete with the added supply of California oranges while the added demand for oranges in California allows producers there to increase prices. The arbitrage process leads to a set of equilibrium prices for all commodities in the trading nations. The set of prices for the same product in all nations will vary by no more than the cost of transporting one unit of a good from the low cost nation to the high priced nation. Gains Through Trade The key to an appreciation of comparative advantage lies in its explanation of gains from trade even if one nation can produce all commodities at lower cost than every other nations. The gains arise through increased supplies of all goods when each nation makes more intensive use of the its abundant factors in the production of commodities for which the resources are best suited. This can be illustrated by expanding our earlier example to include milk and oranges produced in both California and Canada. Let's assume that California can produce both commodities more cheaply than Canada but that its cost difference is largest in orange production. Does California gain by trading with Canada under these assumptions? Yes, by the law of comparative advantage gains are available to both nations through specialization and trade. As California shifts resources from milk production to orange production, gains arise because the resources shifted to orange production yield enough additional oranges that when traded with Canada they return more milk than was given up to produce them in the first place. Similarly, the resources freed from producing oranges in Canada yield enough extra milk so that when traded for oranges more oranges are available in Canada than were produced before trade was initiated. Trade results in each nation specializing in the good produced with comparative efficiency. This results in trading bundles of goods which embody abundantly available, immovable factors of production in exchange for goods embodying relatively scarce factors of production. Gains arise by specializing and trading because the relatively abundant factors of production are used more intensively in both nations. Comparative Advantage Alone Isn't Enough Comparative advantage in production of agricultural commodities is slow to change over time since it is based upon immovable factors such as climate and land, and location relative to markets. The world as we observe it has always had many governmental policies in all nations which distort the trade patterns which would prevail if trade were solely determined by comparative advantage in an unfettered fashion. Tariffs, exchange rate policies, interest rates, and whole sets of technical restrictions alter the assumptions of trade based on pure comparative advantage. Competitive Advantage Encompasses More Factors our world, trade is complicated by many variations in policies and marketing practices that violate conditions necessary for trade based solely on comparative advantage. Competitive advantage is a term which more properly describes trade patterns when all these additional factors are considered. Competitive advantage characterizes trade patterns resulting from comparative advantage coupled with policy effects, product quality differences and industry marketing skills. Trade shares are frequently used to compare competitive advantage among regions or nations. If a region is expanding its share of trade in a given product then its is said to be gaining competitiveness in world markets. Market shares can be changed by manipulating the many competitive factors in control of governments, commodity groups and managers of industry. Comparative advantage is fundamental to understanding international trade. It must be kept in mind, however, that world trade patterns are not solely the result of the narrowly defined conditions necessary for comparative advantage. Instead, existing and future trade patterns are determined by competitive advantage outcomes which are based on all policy and industry forces with influence on trade in addition to the law of comparative advantage. Thomas Worley is a member of the Western Extension Marketing Committee and is an Extension Economist at Washington State University. Return to Marketing Concepts Index Return to Globalization Index Return to the Western Extension Marketing Committee This site is hosted by the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, University of Arizona Questions regarding content: Russell Tronstad Send all other questions and feedback to: email@example.com Document located at http://ag.arizona.edu/ext/wemc/papers/PNWAgTrade.html

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The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy. prevention. These teens serve as peer outreach workers in schools and the community and serve as "peer experts" not only for HIV and other STDs, but for other reproductive health and general health issues as well. The program has established a close working relationship with the Young Adult Clinic and encourages teens to use the clinic for HIV and other STD testing and treatment or general health care. Part of the teens' outreach work includes conducting presentations in various high schools in a five-part series that includes topics such as HIV, STD, and pregnancy prevention, substance abuse, and violence. The program has also extended its outreach presentations to middle schools. These activities are supported by the local school council. To coordinate an effective prevention strategy in the West Town community of Chicago, Vida/SIDA brought together community health and educational organizations in West Town to form the West Town STD/HIV Prevention Network. The network brings together many community agencies that work together to develop new, interrelated prevention programs. Working with the Young Adult Clinic, Vida/SIDA is able to refer youths to the clinic for STD-related or other services. While the program appears to be running well, peer educators report that there is a common perception in the adolescent community that STDs are "no big deal." Although the program has strong support from the community and school board, it has not been formally evaluated. Vida/SIDA is currently working in collaboration with the CDC to establish a formal evaluation process. West Central Health District Columbus, GA The West Central Health District (District 7) is composed of 16 counties with a total population of approximately 450,000, with 22 percent of residents living below the federal poverty level. The largest health clinic in the district is located in Columbus and is staffed by "expanded role" nurses who work under the standing protocols and supervision of physicians. These nurses have been specifically trained in STD-related care at the regional STD training center and also receive periodic training updates at the center. Other counties in the district have health department clinics of varying sizes that provide STD screening and treatment. In two counties that do not have physicians available to treat STDs, patients frequently have to cross county lines for STD treatment. Contact-tracing is conducted for syphilis only, but West Central Health District staff are skeptical of the effectiveness of this service. Staff have proposed that efforts should be focused in high morbidity areas within the district. STD screening and treatment and HIV testing and counseling are also integrated into family planning services provided by the health department. The Columbus Health Department operates separate clinics for teenagers that provide comprehensive health services such as prenatal care, STD screening, and pre- and post-HIV counseling and testing. In general, the private physicians in the community

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A keystone species is a species which maintains the balance and diversity of its community. Often keystone species are predators which check the population of other species that might otherwise become dominant. Sometimes they are mutualists which perform a necessary function for a community. Other keystone species are engineers, changing the habitat in a way that creates food or shelter for other species. In conservation ecology which is the idea of studying how an ecosystem works and helping to preserve that ecosystem as best we can in amongst all the needs and pressures that we humans put on it. In conservation ecology there's this big concept called a keystone species and what that refers to is in an arch at the very top of the arch you'll have what's called the keystone. That's the one stone that if you remove it may cause the entire arch to fall. So the idea here is that there might be in some ecosystems a one species or a couple of species that plays a major role despite being in very small numbers because it impacts in many other species. So what are some examples of a keystone species? One would be otters in Kelp forest now you maybe thinking otters they're cute but, well otters like to eat sea urchins and so they help keep down the levels of sea urchins and so they help keep down the levels of sea urchins in the Kelp forest. Well it turns out that sea urchins without otters around tend to increase their population dramatically and they wind up attacking the anchor of things called holdfast that are at the bottom of the Kelps and which if you have a bunch of sea urchins eating that it eventually winds up destroying the Kelp forest. So that every other organism that is dependant upon the Kelp winds up suffering and perhaps die. This has been really demonstrated couple of times, first when humans started hunting the sea otters for their fur, when legislation was passed to protect them, they came back and the Kelp forest started looking better. But recently there's been some reports in some areas of the coast of Alaska where the otters are disappearing and so are the Kelp forest. It's suspected that this is due to the effect not of humans in this case but killer whales, what people are wondering about is why the killer whale is going after the otters, and there're some suspicion that maybe due to depredations of seal and other normal targets of the killer whales activities. Another example might be the wolves being reintroduced into Yellowstone park. Wolves originally were mostly haunted out and that allowed the elk to get out of control and the elk were eating a lot of the aspin and spoors trees before they got a chance to build up and do tall trees. You maybe thinking so why is that a big deal? Well it wound up that without a lot of aspin and spoors shading the rivers and streams that change the temperature of the streams killing off a lot of the organisms that lived in the water plus without the wolves there, coyotes started moving in to replace them as the top predator in that ecosystem. But coyotes well they can wipe out foxes and other animals, they can't handle to take down the big elk. So they wound up causing all sorts of problems and greatly reduced the biodiversity in Yellowstone. They've recently reintroduced the wolves and they seems to have brought back a lot of the original biodiversity that people loved about Yellowstone. Now there's still kind of a controversial area especially with the ranches that surround Yellowstone but this is an example of what people mean by keystone species.

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by Jon Meacham As a new American president takes the stage, reading a history of an American president some 180 years prior is an enlightening joy. Watching Barack Obama utilize his mandate from the 2008 election has been the perfect backdrop for going back in time to learn how — in 1828 and during the eight years of two terms Andrew Jackson showed many U.S. presidents how the power of the presidency might be used to lead. A youth during the War of Independence, a hero of the War of 1812 and a renown Indian fighter, the man those close to him called “the General” won the popular vote as well as the electoral vote in two elections, and he never let it be forgotten by those who disagreed with his reasoning. Meacham paints a thorough portrait of Old Hickory — warts and all — yet his loving brush strokes are obvious. Readers, too, will find much to admire in Andrew Jackson, yet much for which to find fault with him as well, and that’s to the historian Meacham’s credit: He lets Jackson be human, not all good, not all bad, but multi-dimensional. One way: Jackson’s Jackson was the break-through candidate, the one who saw the president as the representative of the people against entrenched interests. He took that mandate from his election as a voucher giving him the right to make changes — and that he did. Coming from his Tennessee home (the Hermitage) to a Washington that was just decades old but already seemingly set in its ways — particularly with regard to who had a “right” to government jobs — Jackson made it plain that he do things differently — and his way. Hundreds of long-time government staff found they were replaced by Jackson appointees, for one thing. That was new. When it came to Congress, Jackson initiated greater use of the veto, enhancing presidential power: In 40 years no more than four or five Acts of Congress had been vetoed by six presidents; Jackson vetoed four in three days. A man of firsts Jackson was the first Democrat, and might be credited — for good or ill — as the one who started party-line voting, and a president who offered favors for votes in Congress. During the election year of 1832, when he sought a second term, Jackson broke with tradition and initiated the first presidential campaign tour. Not willing to let others do his bidding, Jackson made the barbecue circuit, shaking hands and being seen as he made his way from his home in Tennessee to Washington and elsewhere. In New York City, one observer likened a Jackson torchlight parade to Catholic processions. The campaign of 1832 may be where image first played a major role in how Americans voted. Jackson’s men repeated the message that “a vote for Jackson was a vote for the people while a vote for (Henry) Clay was a vote for the privileged,” Meacham noted. Jackson understood the power of his personality and how the power of personality gave a president power. Along the way, though, President Andrew Jackson made what today society would say were serious errors — even immoral ones. For one thing, Jackson was a slave owner and upheld the practice of slavery. He moved to curb the forces of abolition, even suppressing with presidential orders the right of printed material to be delivered from abolitionist writers. He also saw Native Americans as just in the way of the progress of white U.S. citizens, and his policies and practices led to cruel resettlement of Indian tribes. The “Trail of Tears” — the forced removal of the Cherokee to the west — was a shameful result of Jackson’s Indian policy though it took place a year after he left office. An estimated 4,000 of the 16,000 Cherokees forced out of Georgia died along the way due to brutal treatment by the U.S. military. Reading of his life now, though, is a good reminder, Meacham points out, “that evil can appear perfectly normal to even the best men and women of a given time.” Ironically, despite his own participation in slavery, Jackson is also credited with preventing the southern states from seceding from the Union. When South Carolina felt compelled to reject Acts of Congress, Jackson stamped down and denied that any state had the right to do that. When the tariff on southern cotton proved to be a divisive issue that could lead to succession, Jackson worked out a compromise that cooled tempers. He is still with us For my taste, too much of Meacham’s work pays attention to the pettiness of Washington society and how it impacted Jackson’s cabinet and household. But Meacham shines in showing how Jackson has influenced and continues to influence the presidents of the United States: – Running at the head of a national party; – Fighting for a mandate from the people to govern in a particular way on particular issues; – Depending on a circle of insiders and advisers; – Mastering the media of the age to transmit a consistent message at a constant pace; – Using the veto as a political weapon. “He gave his most imaginative successors the means to do things they thought right,” Meacham noted, citing examples of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman as evidence. A man of prayer Readers interested in Jackson’s spirituality will find consistent references in “American Lion” that show the seventh president to have been a man of prayer. Jackson’s rhetoric regularly includes mention of the Almighty, he is seen in prayer and frequently a nearby church, though he didn’t join a particular denomination — Baptist — until after he left office. His reasoning? He didn’t want it to look like he was joining just to improve his image. One wonderful anecdote that captures a whiff of Jackson’s spirituality and a large bite of his sense of power is told upon his death near the end of the 360 pages of prose in this Random House book. Meacham writes: according to legend, a visitor to the Hermitage asked a slave on the place whether he thought Jackson had gone to heaven. ‘If the General wants to go,’ the slave replied, ‘who’s going to stop him?’” — bz

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Pronunciation: (shad'ō), [key] 1. a dark figure or image cast on the ground or some surface by a body intercepting light. 2. shade or comparative darkness, as in an area. 3. shadows,darkness, esp. that coming after sunset. 4. shelter; protection: sanctuary in the shadow of the church. 5. a slight suggestion; trace: beyond the shadow of a doubt. 6. a specter or ghost: pursued by shadows. 7. a hint or faint, indistinct image or idea; intimation: shadows of things to come. 8. a mere semblance: the shadow of power. 9. a reflected image. 10. (in painting, drawing, graphics, etc.) a. the representation of the absence of light on a form. b. the dark part of a picture, esp. as representing the absence of illumination: Rembrandt's figures often emerge gradually from the shadows. 11. (in architectural shades and shadows) a dark figure or image cast by an object or part of an object upon a surface that would otherwise be illuminated by the theoretical light source. Cf. shade (def. 16). 12. a period or instance of gloom, unhappiness, mistrust, doubt, dissension, or the like, as in friendship or one's life: Their relationship was not without shadows. 13. a dominant or pervasive threat, influence, or atmosphere, esp. one causing gloom, fear, doubt, or the like: They lived under the shadow of war. 14. an inseparable companion: The dog was his shadow. 15. a person who follows another in order to keep watch upon that person, as a spy or detective. 1. to overspread with shadow; shade. 2. to cast a gloom over; cloud: The incident shadowed their meeting. 3. to screen or protect from light, heat, etc.; shade. 4. to follow (a person) about secretly, in order to keep watch over his movements. 5. to represent faintly, prophetically, etc. (often fol. by forth). 6. Archaic.to shelter or protect. 7. Archaic.to shade in painting, drawing, etc. 1. of or pertaining to a shadow cabinet. 2. without official authority: a shadow government. Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.

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Sockets are used nearly everywhere, but are one of the most severely misunderstood technologies around. This is a 10,000 foot overview of sockets. It’s not really a tutorial - you’ll still have work to do in getting things operational. It doesn’t cover the fine points (and there are a lot of them), but I hope it will give you enough background to begin using them decently. Sockets are used nearly everywhere, but are one of the most severely misunderstood technologies around. This is a 10,000 foot overview of sockets. It’s not really a tutorial - you’ll still have work to do in getting things working. It doesn’t cover the fine points (and there are a lot of them), but I hope it will give you enough background to begin using them decently. I’m only going to talk about INET sockets, but they account for at least 99% of the sockets in use. And I’ll only talk about STREAM sockets - unless you really know what you’re doing (in which case this HOWTO isn’t for you!), you’ll get better behavior and performance from a STREAM socket than anything else. I will try to clear up the mystery of what a socket is, as well as some hints on how to work with blocking and non-blocking sockets. But I’ll start by talking about blocking sockets. You’ll need to know how they work before dealing with non-blocking sockets. Part of the trouble with understanding these things is that “socket” can mean a number of subtly different things, depending on context. So first, let’s make a distinction between a “client” socket - an endpoint of a conversation, and a “server” socket, which is more like a switchboard operator. The client application (your browser, for example) uses “client” sockets exclusively; the web server it’s talking to uses both “server” sockets and “client” sockets. Of the various forms of IPC (Inter Process Communication), sockets are by far the most popular. On any given platform, there are likely to be other forms of IPC that are faster, but for cross-platform communication, sockets are about the only game in town. They were invented in Berkeley as part of the BSD flavor of Unix. They spread like wildfire with the Internet. With good reason — the combination of sockets with INET makes talking to arbitrary machines around the world unbelievably easy (at least compared to other schemes). Roughly speaking, when you clicked on the link that brought you to this page, your browser did something like the following: #create an INET, STREAMing socket s = socket.socket( socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) #now connect to the web server on port 80 # - the normal http port s.connect(("www.mcmillan-inc.com", 80)) When the connect completes, the socket s can now be used to send in a request for the text of this page. The same socket will read the reply, and then be destroyed. That’s right - destroyed. Client sockets are normally only used for one exchange (or a small set of sequential exchanges). What happens in the web server is a bit more complex. First, the web server creates a “server socket”. #create an INET, STREAMing socket serversocket = socket.socket( socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) #bind the socket to a public host, # and a well-known port serversocket.bind((socket.gethostname(), 80)) #become a server socket serversocket.listen(5) A couple things to notice: we used socket.gethostname() so that the socket would be visible to the outside world. If we had used s.bind(('', 80)) or s.bind(('localhost', 80)) or s.bind(('127.0.0.1', 80)) we would still have a “server” socket, but one that was only visible within the same machine. A second thing to note: low number ports are usually reserved for “well known” services (HTTP, SNMP etc). If you’re playing around, use a nice high number (4 digits). Finally, the argument to listen tells the socket library that we want it to queue up as many as 5 connect requests (the normal max) before refusing outside connections. If the rest of the code is written properly, that should be plenty. OK, now we have a “server” socket, listening on port 80. Now we enter the mainloop of the web server: while 1: #accept connections from outside (clientsocket, address) = serversocket.accept() #now do something with the clientsocket #in this case, we'll pretend this is a threaded server ct = client_thread(clientsocket) ct.run() There’s actually 3 general ways in which this loop could work - dispatching a thread to handle clientsocket, create a new process to handle clientsocket, or restructure this app to use non-blocking sockets, and mulitplex between our “server” socket and any active clientsockets using select. More about that later. The important thing to understand now is this: this is all a “server” socket does. It doesn’t send any data. It doesn’t receive any data. It just produces “client” sockets. Each clientsocket is created in response to some other “client” socket doing a connect() to the host and port we’re bound to. As soon as we’ve created that clientsocket, we go back to listening for more connections. The two “clients” are free to chat it up - they are using some dynamically allocated port which will be recycled when the conversation ends. If you need fast IPC between two processes on one machine, you should look into whatever form of shared memory the platform offers. A simple protocol based around shared memory and locks or semaphores is by far the fastest technique. If you do decide to use sockets, bind the “server” socket to 'localhost'. On most platforms, this will take a shortcut around a couple of layers of network code and be quite a bit faster. The first thing to note, is that the web browser’s “client” socket and the web server’s “client” socket are identical beasts. That is, this is a “peer to peer” conversation. Or to put it another way, as the designer, you will have to decide what the rules of etiquette are for a conversation. Normally, the connecting socket starts the conversation, by sending in a request, or perhaps a signon. But that’s a design decision - it’s not a rule of sockets. Now there are two sets of verbs to use for communication. You can use send and recv, or you can transform your client socket into a file-like beast and use read and write. The latter is the way Java presents their sockets. I’m not going to talk about it here, except to warn you that you need to use flush on sockets. These are buffered “files”, and a common mistake is to write something, and then read for a reply. Without a flush in there, you may wait forever for the reply, because the request may still be in your output buffer. Now we come the major stumbling block of sockets - send and recv operate on the network buffers. They do not necessarily handle all the bytes you hand them (or expect from them), because their major focus is handling the network buffers. In general, they return when the associated network buffers have been filled (send) or emptied (recv). They then tell you how many bytes they handled. It is your responsibility to call them again until your message has been completely dealt with. When a recv returns 0 bytes, it means the other side has closed (or is in the process of closing) the connection. You will not receive any more data on this connection. Ever. You may be able to send data successfully; I’ll talk about that some on the next page. A protocol like HTTP uses a socket for only one transfer. The client sends a request, the reads a reply. That’s it. The socket is discarded. This means that a client can detect the end of the reply by receiving 0 bytes. But if you plan to reuse your socket for further transfers, you need to realize that there is no “EOT” (End of Transfer) on a socket. I repeat: if a socket send or recv returns after handling 0 bytes, the connection has been broken. If the connection has not been broken, you may wait on a recv forever, because the socket will not tell you that there’s nothing more to read (for now). Now if you think about that a bit, you’ll come to realize a fundamental truth of sockets: messages must either be fixed length (yuck), or be delimited (shrug), or indicate how long they are (much better), or end by shutting down the connection. The choice is entirely yours, (but some ways are righter than others). Assuming you don’t want to end the connection, the simplest solution is a fixed length message: class mysocket: '''demonstration class only - coded for clarity, not efficiency ''' def __init__(self, sock=None): if sock is None: self.sock = socket.socket( socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) else: self.sock = sock def connect(self, host, port): self.sock.connect((host, port)) def mysend(self, msg): totalsent = 0 while totalsent < MSGLEN: sent = self.sock.send(msg[totalsent:]) if sent == 0: raise RuntimeError("socket connection broken") totalsent = totalsent + sent def myreceive(self): msg = '' while len(msg) < MSGLEN: chunk = self.sock.recv(MSGLEN-len(msg)) if chunk == '': raise RuntimeError("socket connection broken") msg = msg + chunk return msg The sending code here is usable for almost any messaging scheme - in Python you send strings, and you can use len() to determine its length (even if it has embedded \0 characters). It’s mostly the receiving code that gets more complex. (And in C, it’s not much worse, except you can’t use strlen if the message has embedded \0s.) The easiest enhancement is to make the first character of the message an indicator of message type, and have the type determine the length. Now you have two recvs - the first to get (at least) that first character so you can look up the length, and the second in a loop to get the rest. If you decide to go the delimited route, you’ll be receiving in some arbitrary chunk size, (4096 or 8192 is frequently a good match for network buffer sizes), and scanning what you’ve received for a delimiter. One complication to be aware of: if your conversational protocol allows multiple messages to be sent back to back (without some kind of reply), and you pass recv an arbitrary chunk size, you may end up reading the start of a following message. You’ll need to put that aside and hold onto it, until it’s needed. Prefixing the message with it’s length (say, as 5 numeric characters) gets more complex, because (believe it or not), you may not get all 5 characters in one recv. In playing around, you’ll get away with it; but in high network loads, your code will very quickly break unless you use two recv loops - the first to determine the length, the second to get the data part of the message. Nasty. This is also when you’ll discover that send does not always manage to get rid of everything in one pass. And despite having read this, you will eventually get bit by it! In the interests of space, building your character, (and preserving my competitive position), these enhancements are left as an exercise for the reader. Lets move on to cleaning up. It is perfectly possible to send binary data over a socket. The major problem is that not all machines use the same formats for binary data. For example, a Motorola chip will represent a 16 bit integer with the value 1 as the two hex bytes 00 01. Intel and DEC, however, are byte-reversed - that same 1 is 01 00. Socket libraries have calls for converting 16 and 32 bit integers - ntohl, htonl, ntohs, htons where “n” means network and “h” means host, “s” means short and “l” means long. Where network order is host order, these do nothing, but where the machine is byte-reversed, these swap the bytes around appropriately. In these days of 32 bit machines, the ascii representation of binary data is frequently smaller than the binary representation. That’s because a surprising amount of the time, all those longs have the value 0, or maybe 1. The string “0” would be two bytes, while binary is four. Of course, this doesn’t fit well with fixed-length messages. Decisions, decisions. Strictly speaking, you’re supposed to use shutdown on a socket before you close it. The shutdown is an advisory to the socket at the other end. Depending on the argument you pass it, it can mean “I’m not going to send anymore, but I’ll still listen”, or “I’m not listening, good riddance!”. Most socket libraries, however, are so used to programmers neglecting to use this piece of etiquette that normally a close is the same as shutdown(); close(). So in most situations, an explicit shutdown is not needed. One way to use shutdown effectively is in an HTTP-like exchange. The client sends a request and then does a shutdown(1). This tells the server “This client is done sending, but can still receive.” The server can detect “EOF” by a receive of 0 bytes. It can assume it has the complete request. The server sends a reply. If the send completes successfully then, indeed, the client was still receiving. Python takes the automatic shutdown a step further, and says that when a socket is garbage collected, it will automatically do a close if it’s needed. But relying on this is a very bad habit. If your socket just disappears without doing a close, the socket at the other end may hang indefinitely, thinking you’re just being slow. Please close your sockets when you’re done. Probably the worst thing about using blocking sockets is what happens when the other side comes down hard (without doing a close). Your socket is likely to hang. SOCKSTREAM is a reliable protocol, and it will wait a long, long time before giving up on a connection. If you’re using threads, the entire thread is essentially dead. There’s not much you can do about it. As long as you aren’t doing something dumb, like holding a lock while doing a blocking read, the thread isn’t really consuming much in the way of resources. Do not try to kill the thread - part of the reason that threads are more efficient than processes is that they avoid the overhead associated with the automatic recycling of resources. In other words, if you do manage to kill the thread, your whole process is likely to be screwed up. If you’ve understood the preceeding, you already know most of what you need to know about the mechanics of using sockets. You’ll still use the same calls, in much the same ways. It’s just that, if you do it right, your app will be almost inside-out. In Python, you use socket.setblocking(0) to make it non-blocking. In C, it’s more complex, (for one thing, you’ll need to choose between the BSD flavor O_NONBLOCK and the almost indistinguishable Posix flavor O_NDELAY, which is completely different from TCP_NODELAY), but it’s the exact same idea. You do this after creating the socket, but before using it. (Actually, if you’re nuts, you can switch back and forth.) The major mechanical difference is that send, recv, connect and accept can return without having done anything. You have (of course) a number of choices. You can check return code and error codes and generally drive yourself crazy. If you don’t believe me, try it sometime. Your app will grow large, buggy and suck CPU. So let’s skip the brain-dead solutions and do it right. In C, coding select is fairly complex. In Python, it’s a piece of cake, but it’s close enough to the C version that if you understand select in Python, you’ll have little trouble with it in C. ready_to_read, ready_to_write, in_error = \ select.select( potential_readers, potential_writers, potential_errs, timeout) You pass select three lists: the first contains all sockets that you might want to try reading; the second all the sockets you might want to try writing to, and the last (normally left empty) those that you want to check for errors. You should note that a socket can go into more than one list. The select call is blocking, but you can give it a timeout. This is generally a sensible thing to do - give it a nice long timeout (say a minute) unless you have good reason to do otherwise. In return, you will get three lists. They have the sockets that are actually readable, writable and in error. Each of these lists is a subset (possibly empty) of the corresponding list you passed in. And if you put a socket in more than one input list, it will only be (at most) in one output list. If a socket is in the output readable list, you can be as-close-to-certain-as-we-ever-get-in-this-business that a recv on that socket will return something. Same idea for the writable list. You’ll be able to send something. Maybe not all you want to, but something is better than nothing. (Actually, any reasonably healthy socket will return as writable - it just means outbound network buffer space is available.) If you have a “server” socket, put it in the potential_readers list. If it comes out in the readable list, your accept will (almost certainly) work. If you have created a new socket to connect to someone else, put it in the potential_writers list. If it shows up in the writable list, you have a decent chance that it has connected. One very nasty problem with select: if somewhere in those input lists of sockets is one which has died a nasty death, the select will fail. You then need to loop through every single damn socket in all those lists and do a select([sock],,,0) until you find the bad one. That timeout of 0 means it won’t take long, but it’s ugly. Actually, select can be handy even with blocking sockets. It’s one way of determining whether you will block - the socket returns as readable when there’s something in the buffers. However, this still doesn’t help with the problem of determining whether the other end is done, or just busy with something else. Portability alert: On Unix, select works both with the sockets and files. Don’t try this on Windows. On Windows, select works with sockets only. Also note that in C, many of the more advanced socket options are done differently on Windows. In fact, on Windows I usually use threads (which work very, very well) with my sockets. Face it, if you want any kind of performance, your code will look very different on Windows than on Unix. There’s no question that the fastest sockets code uses non-blocking sockets and select to multiplex them. You can put together something that will saturate a LAN connection without putting any strain on the CPU. The trouble is that an app written this way can’t do much of anything else - it needs to be ready to shuffle bytes around at all times. Assuming that your app is actually supposed to do something more than that, threading is the optimal solution, (and using non-blocking sockets will be faster than using blocking sockets). Unfortunately, threading support in Unixes varies both in API and quality. So the normal Unix solution is to fork a subprocess to deal with each connection. The overhead for this is significant (and don’t do this on Windows - the overhead of process creation is enormous there). It also means that unless each subprocess is completely independent, you’ll need to use another form of IPC, say a pipe, or shared memory and semaphores, to communicate between the parent and child processes. Finally, remember that even though blocking sockets are somewhat slower than non-blocking, in many cases they are the “right” solution. After all, if your app is driven by the data it receives over a socket, there’s not much sense in complicating the logic just so your app can wait on select instead of recv.

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Vacuum expectation value |Quantum field theory| In quantum field theory the vacuum expectation value (also called condensate or simply VEV) of an operator is its average, expected value in the vacuum. The vacuum expectation value of an operator O is usually denoted by . One of the best known examples of an observable physical effect that results from the vacuum expectation value of an operator is the Casimir effect. - The Higgs field has a vacuum expectation value of 246 GeV (Amsler, C.; Doser, M.; Antonelli, M.; Asner, D.; Babu, K.; Baer, H.; Band, H.; Barnett, R. et al. (2008). "Review of Particle Physics⁎". Physics Letters B 667: 1. doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2008.07.018. ) This nonzero value underlies the Higgs mechanism of the Standard Model. - The chiral condensate in Quantum chromodynamics, about a factor of a thousand smaller than the above, gives a large effective mass to quarks, and distinguishes between phases of quark matter. This underlies the bulk of the mass of most hadrons. - The gluon condensate in Quantum chromodynamics may also be partly responsible for masses of hadrons. The observed Lorentz invariance of space-time allows only the formation of condensates which are Lorentz scalars and have vanishing charge. Thus fermion condensates must be of the form , where ψ is the fermion field. Similarly a tensor field, Gμν, can only have a scalar expectation value such as . - Wightman axioms and Correlation function (quantum field theory) - vacuum energy or dark energy - Spontaneous symmetry breaking |This quantum mechanics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.|

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histrionic personality disorder histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is defined by the american psychiatric association as a personality disorder characterised by a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, including an excessive need for approval and inappropriately seductive behaviour, usually beginning in early adulthood. these individuals are lively, dramatic, vivacious, enthusiastic, and flirtatious. histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is one of the most common found in the united states and effects 40% of inpatients, effecting more women than men by about 4:1 ratio. this disorder can easily be mistaken for immaturity, however a person with HPD does not simply grow out of this selfish state of being. you may perceive people with HPD to be very dependent, rude and demanding, shallow, and far from genuine.

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Kathakali is said to be the greatest and complex of all art forms. It is said to have evolved from other performing arts like Kootiyattam, Krishnanattam and Kalarippayattu. Kerala owes its transnational fame to this nearly 300 years old classical dance form which combines facets of ballet, opera, masque and the pantomime. Kathakali explicates ideas and stories from the Indian epics and Puranas. Koothu is a solo narrative performance interspersed with mime and comic interludes. It is a socio-religious art performed in the Koothambalam or the Koothuthara of temples, either independently or as part of Kootiyattam. Through the inimitable narration of stories from the epics (The Ramayana and The Mahabharatha), the Chakkiar satirises the manners and customs of the time. His wit ranges from innocent mockery to veiled innuendoes, barbed pun and pungent invectives. Koothu is intermittently accompanied by the percussion instrument Mizhavu. is a variation of the Koothu performed by the Nangiars or the female members of the Chakkiar community. This is a solo dance drama mainly centred on the legends of Sree Krishna. The Syrian Christians of Kerala usually perform Margomkali. A dozen dancers sing and dance around a lighted lamp (Nilavilakku) in the simple traditional white dhoti. The narration is stark without musical accompaniments. The songs date back to a period much before the Portuguese invasion. Nowadays, women perform Margomkali only as a stage item. Chavittunadakam is a Christian art form of Kerala evolved at the turn of the 16th Century AD during the Portuguese colonization and bears definite traces of the European Christian Miracle Play. It is a musical drama in which the actors wear Greco-Roman costumes and even the stage props bear several foreign influences. In the past, the Chavittunatakom was performed on open stages, though sometimes the interior of a church was also a venue. The language is a colloquial mix of Tamil and Malayalam. Oppana is a traditional dance form of the Malabar Muslims. It is a part of the wedding entertainment and festivities. Maidens and young female relatives sing and dance around the bride, clapping their hands on the eve of the marriage. The themes are often teasing comments and innuendoes about the bride's anticipated nuptial bliss. Oppana is often presented as a stage item today. Krishnatotom is a traditional art form of Kerala. It is a treat to watch for both the scholar and the simple rustic. The performance lasts for eight days and covers the whole span of Krishna's life from his birth to 'Swargarohanam' or ascension to the heavens. Mohiniyattom, said to be poetry in motion, is the classical dance form of Kerala with slow, graceful, swaying movements of the body and limbs and highly emotive eye and hand gestures. It is the sinuous dance of the enchantress. Mohiniyattom was performed by the Devadasis or temple dancers, hence also the name 'Dasiattam' which was very popular during the Chera reign from 9th to 12th century. Thiruvathirakali is a dance performed by women, in order to attain everlasting marital bliss, on Thiruvathira day in the Malayalam month of Dhanu (December- January). The dance is a celebration of marital fidelity and the female energy, for this is what brought Kamadeva (the god of love) back to life after he was reduced to ashes by the ire of Lord Siva. The sinuous movements executed by a group of dancers around a nilavilakku, embody 'lasya' or the amorous charm and grace of the feminine. The dance follows a circular, pirouetting pattern accompanied by clapping of the hands and singing. Today, Thiruvathirakali has become a popular dance form for all seasons. Kolkkali is a folk art mainly of the agrarian classes. It is highly rhythmic and never miss a beat. In Malabar, Kolkkali is more popular among Muslim men. Thullal, also known as the poor man's kathakali, was introduced by Kunchan Nambiar in the 18th century. Thullal is a solo performance combining the dance and recitation of stories in verse. Staged during temple festivals, the performer explicates the verses through expressive gestures. The themes are based on mythology. Kutiyattam literally means "acting together" was evolved in the 9th century AD based on Bharatha's 'Natyasasthra'. This is the earliest classical dramatic art form of Kerala. Theyyam also known as Kaliyattam, it is a ritual dance popular in north Kerala or the erstwhile Kolathunadu. Theyyam incorporates dance, mime and music and enshrines the rudiments of ancient tribal cultures which attached great importance to the worship of heroes and the spirits of ancestors. Of the over 400 Theyyams performed, the most spectacular ones are those of Raktha Chamundi, Kari Chamundi, Muchilottu Bhagavathi, Wayanadu Kulaveni, Gulikan and Pottan. These are performed in front of shrines, sans stage or curtains, by persons belonging to the Vannan, Malayan and other related castes. 'Thudangal' (the beginning) and 'Thottam' (the invocation) are the introductory rituals of the Theyyam or the Thira, as it is known in south Malabar. The headgear and other ornamental decorations are spectacular in sheer size and appearance. Karivalloor, Nileswaram, Kurumathoor, Parassini, Cherukunnu, Ezhom and Kunnathoorpadi in north Malabar are places where Theyyams are performed annually from December to April. Patayani is a week- long ritual dance, held in Kaali temples on the banks of the Pamba river during the Malayalam months of Meenam and Medam (March - April). Kadammanitta, Kadalimangalam and Othara in Pathanamthitta district are famous for annual Patayani performances. Arjuna nritham (the dance of Arjuna) is a ritual art performed by men and is prevalent in the Bhagavathy temples of Kerala. Arjuna, the most valiant of the five heroic brothers - the Pandavas - of the epic Mahabharatha, was also a renowned singer and dancer and is said to have propitiated goddess Bhadrakaali by a devotional presentation. Kummattikkali is a mask dance popular in some of the northern districts of Kerala. The dancers, wearing painted wooden masks and sporting sprigs of leaves and grass, go dancing from house to house. A popular Kummatti character is Thalla or the witch; the others represent various Hindu gods and goddesses. The songs deal with devotional themes and are accompanied by a bow like instrument called Ona-villu. No formal training is required to perform the Kummattikkali, and often the spectators join in the performance. Kavadiyattam, a colourful ritual art, is a votive offering to Sree Subramanya. Basically of Tamil origin, Kavadiyattam is widely prevalent in the Subramanya temples all over Kerala during the festival seasons. Kalaripayattu the martial art form of Kerala is reagarded as the oldest and more scientific in the world. Training in combat is given at the kalari (training school). The principles of kalari education stipulate that training in martial art begins with an oil massage of the body, which goes on until the body is agile and supple. Kalaripayattu training aims at the ultimate co-ordination of the mind and body. The traditional training in a kalari includes specialization in indigenous medical practice too.

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Some of gaming's most cunning foes have been computers. Think GlaDOS from Portal, or Shodan from System Shock 2. At least part of what makes them so memorable is that their artificial intelligence is brought to life by a cold, calculating, female voice. Friendly artificial intelligence usually skews female as well. Anyone who's played Deus Ex: Human Revolution will know this, while Halo and Mass Effect are two other big franchises with prominent computers voiced by female actors. Actually, when you think about it, a lot of real fake robot voices sound like fake women as well. Apple's new Siri, for one (at least she is for American users). Or just about any automated subway announcement system. Or default GPS navigator. Ever wonder why this is? Why designers and engineers the world over choose a woman's voice for their systems and not a man's? A great piece on CNN seeks to answer this question for the ages. Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass has an idea. "It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes," he says. "It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices." While this is a primal theory, there are more historical ones too, such as the fact early telephonists and aircraft navigation aides were voiced by women, creating a precedent. Silicon Valley analyst Tim Bajarin has a cooler idea, though: He reckons HAL, the evil computer from 2001, is the reason most artificial voices are female. He was so evil, and so memorable, that he scared companies off using a male voice. "A lot of tech companies stayed away from the male voice because of HAL," he said. "I've heard that theory tossed around multiple times."

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For the parents who have been wondering, "Why is it that my daughter plays with dolls and my son just wants a toy fire truck?" scientists reported this week that they've seen something similar among chimpanzees in a forest in Uganda. The scientists say they've observed young, female chimps playing with sticks and logs as though they were dolls. For 23 years, Richard Wrangham has been part of a team of scientists studying wild chimpanzees in a national park in Uganda. The team would sometimes see young chimps pick up sticks and carry them around. But Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, didn't think too much about it at first. But one day in 1993, his team saw a young male chimp carry a short log into a nest in a tree. The chimp lay down, put the log on the palm of his upturned hand, and flew it back and forth, back and forth. "It really looked just like a chimp or a human mother playing the airplane game, saying 'wee, wee' as it goes from side to side," Wrangham said. And every once in a while, Wrangham saw something else that made him think these young chimpanzees seem to be treating sticks and logs like imaginary infants. If they were treating these sticks as infants, Wrangham figured he would see young female chimps doing it more often than males, because in many primate species, it's the girls who play with real babies. "You'd find that young females are more interested in infants smaller than themselves than young males are," Wrangham says. "They carry them and show more interest in playing with them than young males do." Nature Or Nurture? So he and a colleague went back through 14 years of the team's records, adding up all the times when scientists wrote down that a young chimp did something with a piece of wood. And indeed, the young female chimps carried around sticks twice as often as the young male chimps. But there's an intriguing twist. Scientists who have been watching other chimpanzees in other places have not reported this behavior. "So it looks as though there's a social tradition, a behavior that has become part of the cultural repertoire of this particular community for some reason," Wrangham says. "So that means that these chimps are learning the behavior from others in the community." Wrangham published the observations this week in the journal Current Biology. Is That A 'Carry' Or A 'Cradle'? Another primate researcher, Kim Wallen at Emory University in Atlanta, would like to see more evidence. For instance, Wrangham's study includes a picture showing a young female chimp carrying a stick. Is she really cradling it like a baby? "This doesn't happen to look like that to me," Wallen says. "This looks like pausing to reconnoiter before shuffling off into the woods." But Wallen is not surprised to hear that girl chimps and boy chimps treat sticks differently. In Wallen's experiments with a group of captive rhesus monkeys, young females were happy to play with trucks or stuffed animals. Young males only liked the toys with wheels. As for whether that difference comes from biology or culture, Wallen prefers to say that biology produces a bias, which is channeled by experience. "For example, the bias could be something as simple as increased energy expenditure in males and less energy expenditure in females," he says. But environment -- and culture -- could channel that difference in energy toward specific ways to play. And so we get trucks for boys and dolls for girls. Maybe, even, among chimpanzees.

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Warrant Officers have always been specialists carried on board ships for specific responsibilities requiring a very high level of experience and detailed knowledge. These attributes were not expected of the "fighting" officers who were primarily concerned with the tactics necessary to make contact with the enemy and then to "fight" the ship. To do this successfully it was essential for warships to carry others who would ensure that the ship was always in a high state of readiness. It had to be well maintained and its guns always ready for use, with ample charges and projectiles. More importantly it had to be in the right place at the right time. These specialists were attached to the ship throughout its life, whether in commission, or "in ordinary" ("laid up"). They did not hold a King's, or Queen's Commission, but had a Warrant signed by members of the Board of Admiralty The First Warrant Officers Five specialists were ranked as Warrant Officers, and had the following responsibilities: Boatswain (Bo'sun) - "Running" and "standing rigging", sails, anchors and cables. He was also responsible for the maintenance of discipline on board. This category also served in Royal Dockyards for similar duties. The origin of the title is buried in antiquity and dates from The Master - Navigation of the ship. Carpenter - Hull maintenance and repair. Clerk - All correspondence. Gunner - Guns, ammunition and explosives. Cook - Feeding all on board. Two other categories were later elevated to Warrant status having previously been considered to be ratings: Chaplain - All matters concerned with religious affairs. Schoolmaster - General teaching requirements. In 1843 The Master and the Chaplain were given Commissioned rank. A further change in 1861 granted a Commission to Schoolmasters engaged in the instruction of naval officers in shore training establishments. They were renamed "Naval Instructors", but those serving on ships retained the "Schoolmaster" title with added distinctions of "Senior Master" and "Headmaster" for those having greater responsibilities. These titles remained in use until 1946 when all Schoolmasters were given Commissioned rank as Instructor Officers. Warrant Officers of all specialisations had to be capable of carrying out instructional duties ashore and afloat. This criteria still pertains to-day. Impact of new Technology in the late 19th Century Advances in scientific knowledge had a most significant effect on the Royal Navy since they completely changed design requirements for warships. Use of steel for ship construction and installation of new types of equipment introduced new manning and support requirements. Educational and training standards had to be totally revised to provide new types of rating for the new much larger Fleet. Each category would require specialist supervision by officers of Warrant rank. The equipment mountings and optical range finders. propulsion and other machinery. for lighting and other services pre-World War 1 cruiser HMS Fox (no enlargement) New Categories of Warrant Officer in 1913 It took some years before the necessary expertise was available but study of "King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions" (KR&AI) for 1913 shows the extent to which Warrant Rank had been introduced for duties ashore and afloat. These Warrant Officers were responsible for supervision and training of their specialist category. It should be noted that these new titles are shown in association with the present Branches of the Service which differ from those in 1913: Gunner + Selected Gunners - given training as Instructors with particular emphasis on ships armament. Identified by a Dagger (+) suffix to their rank title and hence known as "Dagger" Gunners. Gunner (T) - a direct equivalent of the "Gunner" (see above). Specialised in torpedo armament equipment operation, maintenance and repair, and in addition was responsible for electrical distribution circuits. Warrant Telegraphist - operation, maintenance and repair of all wireless communication outfits. Signal Boatswain - all visual signalling matters. Recent developments had introduced more complex procedures for manoeuvring and tactical control of Warrant Master at Arms - all disciplinary matters and ratings drafting in Depots ashore. Supervision of Regulating Branch Warrant Bo'sun (PRT) - physical training and organisation of recreational activities in large shore establishments Warrant Engineer - skilled tradesman with high standard of education and long initial training to provide professional standards needed to supervise the operation and repair of complex mechanical and electrical power generation equipment. Warrant Mechanician - introduced to provide an avenue of promotion for selected Stoker ratings. Received skill training similar to that given to Engine Room Artificers. Mainly employed for shore training of Stoker ratings. Warrant Shipwright - skilled tradesman with long initial training or entry after a shore apprenticeship. Responsible for hull repair and maintenance in wooden and steel ships including operation and maintenance of anchors and cables. Also employed in Royal Dockyards. Warrant Ordnance Officer - skilled tradesman with high educational qualifications and long initial training Responsible for maintenance and repair of all types of gunnery equipment, including optical instruments and Warrant Electrician - skilled tradesman specialising in maintenance and repair of all electrical equipment including instrumentation and generating machinery as well as torpedo control equipment. Warrant Writer - all pay and ships Warrant Supply Officer - custody and accounting of naval and victualling stores. "Warrant Instructor in Cookery" - shore training of Cook ratings. Warrant Wardmaster - administrative duties and patient care in naval hospitals and hospital ships, other than any associated directly with the work of medical officers and nurses. pre-World War 2 destroyer HMS Glowworm (courtesy CyberHeritage) New Post 1930 Categories The various specialisations remained but by 1935 Warrant Rank had been introduced for rating categories which had evolved since 1918. These reflected the new requirements such as the increased use of aircraft and the development of improved anti-submarine weapons. These were: Boatswain (A/S) - 0peration and training of personnel in submarine detection outfits and anti-submarine weapons together with their maintenance and repair. This was due to the introduction of equipment which embodied modern techniques. Warrant Photographer - all photographic services in ships and shore establishments. Photography was extensively used in air operations and gunnery training. Warrant Steward - supervision of work of Stewards and administration of Wardroom Mess services to give an improved standard in large shore establishments. The Warrant Officer in World War 2 The tremendous changes in terms of types of equipment and increase in personnel made great demands on all holding Warrant Rank during WW2. Their professional and man-management experience enabled them to make an invaluable contribution. Quite apart from their instructional duties they did much to ensure a high standard of availability of equipment and services at sea. As the RN was largely made up of officers and ratings serving only for the duration of hostilities, the value of this leavening provided a basis for efficiency which cannot be disregarded. Although the introduction of radar and improved weapons had been made before 1939 these equipments were comparatively rudimentary. The many changes made as new techniques were developed demanded a considerable degree of professional expertise by existing categories. In the Fleet Air Arm, Warrant rank was introduced for aircrew (Pilot and Telegraphist/Air Gunner) and for Aircraft Maintenance ratings. These latter required similar skills to those of the Engineering Branch in ships and their suitability was assessed by professional examination. Qualifications and Promotion In general all candidates for Warrant Rank were required to have achieved the same educational standard by having passed the Higher Educational Test (A standard slightly less than that of the pre-1944 School Certificate). Although most branches had professional examinations these varied considerably between branches and some promotions were made on the basis of "long and zealous service". Candidates for Warrant rank were required to have qualified for Petty Officer rating, and in some cases to have served as such for a number of years. Few promotions could be made before the age of 30 because of these constraints. In some cases promotions were made without sufficient regard to suitability of individuals to their new status and their ability to adapt to change. The average age of promotion to Warrant Rank was between 31 and 35, whereas the majority of commissioned officers were younger. Integration into the new environment was more easily achieved by those whose education and interests covered a wide enough horizon to meet their new responsibilities. In this connection previous experience in activities whether within the service environment or otherwise, and beyond their particular specialist knowledge was a great asset. The transition did however require considerable adjustment and needed goodwill on the part of all involved. When achieved the contribution made by Warrant Officers to overall efficiency was clearly apparent. Further advancement to "Commissioned Officer from Warrant Rank" was a slow process and required 10 years service as a Warrant Officer. The number of promotions was also limited by the number of complement billets allowed for that rank. This factor meant that few Warrant Officers could expect any further promotion until they were over 40 years of age. It was a major cause of disquiet to them since it showed little appreciation of their contribution and the advantages to be gained by recognising their merit. There were however an increasing number of Warrant Officers promoted direct to Lieutenant rank after 1937 although the few so promoted was a very small proportion of the total number The Contribution of the Warrant Officer 1913 to 1948 Wide experience gained over many years enabled Warrant Officers to provide the necessary lubrication to ensure that the wheels of the "command machinery" worked smoothly. They were able to ensure that all foreseeable situations were dealt with promptly and efficiently by virtue of their specialist knowledge and long service. When necessary, they could improvise and adapt existing facilities and procedures with a degree of competence simply not available in the case of many younger officers. Years of supervision of ratings and direct daily contact with all matters essential to the smooth running of all departments did much to ensure efficient conduct of affairs whether ashore or afloat. Because Warrant Officers retained their association with the Manning Port Division which they had chosen, usually on entry to the service, they accumulated a wide range of contacts within the local dockyard and in the Depot. This gave them unrivalled advantages compared with younger General List Officers who would be appointed to ships manned from any of the main Depots. Local knowledge of the personnel involved in dockyards and in the administration of the Depot was gained over Each dockyard and Manning Depot had its own local procedures and knowledge of these could be very valuable in obtaining the best possible service from local support facilities. Family connections or school friendships also played their part. Many Warrant Officers had family roots in the close knit local community, some of whom were likely to be employed in Admiralty service. Those who attended the local Dockyard School before entry as Artificers would have received their craft training with dockyard personnel. This affinity lasting over several years enabled continuity of contact to be maintained with individuals who carried out work essential to the running of the Fleet. As a result barriers presented by "officialdom" could be circumvented and many impossible situations could be satisfactorily overcome through these personal connections. Hospitality in the Warrant Officers Mess for those who rendered services was an added bonus to help this process. One of the most important capabilities required of all specialisations at Warrant level was that of instructional competence. Since training of all ratings and some officers was carried out at the Manning Depot, most Warrant Officers had continued association with trainees extending over several years. In addition to influencing training policies they gained knowledge of individuals whom they would meet again many times during their subsequent careers. The bond which existed between all Warrant Officers was another asset. It allowed many quite intractable problems to be settled "in the Mess" by suitable arrangements, without the need to use more formal channels. There was rarely a department in any large ship or establishment which had no Warrant officer within its structure, so they were in an excellent position to ensure full benefit was obtained from the resources of men, material and knowledge available to them. Warrant Officers who were Heads of Departments, such as Engineer Officer in a destroyer, had, apart from his overall responsibility for machinery, to be able to co-operate with other departments requiring engineering or associated services. To an experienced professional this presented no major difficulty. Understanding of the reactions of the average rating to particular circumstances was a man management asset which did much to ensure smooth running of their Department. As Divisional Officers they were therefore able to make the necessary balance between compassion and naval practice by virtue of their experience of men and circumstances. Many General List officers have good reason to be grateful for the accumulated wisdom of a Warrant Officer with whom they served as a Midshipman or Sub-Lieutenant. During the period before 1948 when Warrant Officers lived apart from other officers in all large ships, their associations with their fellow officers were largely professional. Although they took part in social and sporting activities, various other factors had great influence on their social relationship with Wardroom officers. Service in Destroyers, Sloops and Small Ships postwar destroyer HMS Decoy (courtesy NavyPhotos) Both Warrant Engineer and Gunner (T) specialisations were appointed to these ships and also to some submarines. Of the two, the Warrant Engineer had the advantage of a good educational background and was used to the higher standard of social conduct found in Artificers Messes. The Gunner (T) was less advantaged since he would, in all likelihood, have joined the service as a Boy Seaman without the benefit of the type of academic training given to the Artificer entrant. He would also have spent much of his earlier career in Broadside and Chief or Petty Officers Messes with a less refined atmosphere than was to be found in a Wardroom. However, the wide experience and professional ability of each made them valued members of any small ship wardroom as long as they were able to adapt to their new social In this connection a great deal depended on the attitude of the Captain who would need to recognise these basic facts and make it clear that a certain degree of "give and take" was needed by all concerned if his ship was to be "happy" and efficient. Regrettably this was not always the case and prejudice together with a lack of understanding on both sides did much to delay the acceptance of the Warrant Officer as a valuable asset in a Wardroom. There were instances of officers who took advantage of their status and brought discredit on their fellow Warrant Officers, but these were by no means the majority. Warrant Officers Messes In large ships and most shore establishments the complement would include Warrant Officers of many specialisations who were accommodated in their own Mess. As very few activities did not affect them they were able to exercise considerable influence on the quality of life on board. The Mess President, usually the Senior Seaman Officer, a Commissioned Gunner or Boatswain, had responsibility for ensuring that all Warrant Officers conducted themselves socially in a manner which met the standards expected by the Captain. The disadvantages of a less extensive education than that of Wardroom officers and the less exacting standards previously acceptable still applied. Although adjustment was frequently without difficulty there were instances where the President concerned lacked the very qualities necessary to maintaining conduct which would enhance the standing of all Warrant Officers. A great deal depended on the make-up of each Mess with its members of very varying educational and family backgrounds which undoubtedly affected their social attitudes. On the credit side it should be said that Warrant Officers took their part in all sporting and social activities both as ships' officers and as a separate Mess, with great success. The conduct of those who adapted quickly to life as an officer did much to ensure that the representations being made about the status of the Warrant Officer were favourably forwarded by their Captain. As in small ships the Captain and the Executive Officer played a very important role in providing clear guidelines about the standards expected. The availability of alcohol was a factor needing careful handling, but in most circumstances did not lead to major problems any more than it did in Wardroom Messes. The introduction of more modem weapons and other equipment into the RN had a significant effect on the calibre of rating required. It was evident that there would be a need for experienced officers to supervise work on more complex equipment, whether as operators or in the support role. This trend began to make itself evident by 1948 and a better quality of rating was becoming available for promotion at the time of introduction of the Branch List. The reduction of the required minimum age on promotion to 28 also improved the prospects of promotion before completion of a 12 years Engagement. The standards required during professional examinations for many categories was more stringently applied. A higher general education was necessary to carry out duties as senior ratings satisfactorily, which did much to ensure that candidates for promotion to Warrant rank were better able to deal with their new status on promotion. Change of Title Following the many representations made by officers holding Warrant Rank during and immediately after the end of WW2, an Admiralty Committee was set up to investigate the status of Warrant Officers. The principal areas of concern which had been represented Change of title to more accurately align with the responsibilities carried. Coupled with this was the desire for replacement of the "bootlace" single "half stripe" insignia worn Officers, which it was considered made a further unnecessary differentiation The Committee, chaired by Admiral Noble, took into account the submissions were made by Presidents of all Warrant Officers Messes. It concluded that amendments should be made to the existing regulations. Much attention was given to suggestions from the Messes in Port Divisions since they were recognised as coming from the largest number of more senior representatives. Whether this was a sound principle is, in retrospect, questionable, as there was no consensus, especially relating to Title. The proposal largely supported in many Warrant Officers Messes was that these be changed to Sub. Lieutenant and Lieutenant, but this was not agreed by many members of the Committee and not adopted. The new structure was announced with the Naval Estimates on 9 March 1948 and introduced on 1 July that year. This went some way to improving matters although the contentious subject of title, and the change from the "half stripe" insignia were not resolved and they continued to fester for another 9 years. Post-Noble Committee Report Improvements Warrant Officers to be known in future as "Commissioned Officers", and "Commissioned Officers from Warrant Rank" as "Senior Commissioned "Officers ". They were to be collectively identified as Branch List" officers and to be equivalent to Sub Lieutenant and Lieutenant respectively. Minimum age on promotion was reduced to 28. Officers Mess was to be abolished and all officers above the rank of Midshipman were to be accommodated in the Wardroom in all ships and Establishments although it was recognised that space may not always have been available and any existing Warrant Officers Mess were then to be known as "Wardroom II" until enlarged existing or proposed facilities could be provided both ashore and afloat. selection for the next promotion being made after 10 years in the rank, a "Zone" between 5 and 9 years was introduced for "Commissioned Officers". selected Branch List Officers were to be given direct promotion to Lieutenant on the General List. They would then be eligible to take up appointments for any General List Officer with the same prospects for The number of specialist appointments for Senior Commissioned Officers to Lieutenant on the Branch List was also to be increased to allow a greater number of promotions to be made but this particular change could not be effective immediately because wartime conditions had made necessary the promotion of Warrant Officers to "Acting Commissioned Officer from Warrant Rank" status. The number of new promotions had to include officers holding Acting rank which meant that the promotion of many younger officers was delayed. The reduction in size of the Fleet also caused a corresponding reduction in the number of billets available. All other officers became identified as General List Officers or Supplementary List Officers who had joined for shorter naval service Warrant Rank titles were changed as from 1 April 1948 and officers were accommodated in Wardrooms on 1 July. The prefix "Mr" was replaced by "Commissioned or Senior Commissioned" followed by the specialist title (e.g. "Boatswain" became "Commissioned Boatswain" and "Warrant Writer" became "Commissioned Writer Officer".) Introduction of the new Electrical Branch The formation of the Electrical Branch in 1946 had a very significant effect on other existing branches. Consequential changes involved many structural upheavals in existing categories of rating. The new Branch took over responsibility for maintenance and repair of equipments from other existing departments. Power Supply and Generation from the Engine Room and Torpedo Branches. and Radar from the W/T element of the Signals Branch. Gunnery and Torpedo armament from the Seaman Branch. A major transfer of ratings and officers into the new Electrical Branch took effect from the beginning of 1947 and Branch List Officers received new titles appropriate to their specialisation. Seamen Branch - Gunners (T) who transferred to the Electrical Branch became Commissioned Electrical Officers (L). Gunners (T) who remained in the Torpedo Branch became Gunners (TAS). A new category of Boatswain (PR) was introduced for the Seaman Branch radar and plot operators. Gunnery ratings were re-categorised to suit their new duties. Signals Branch - Warrant Telegraphists who transferred to the Electrical Branch became Commissioned (R). Warrant Telegraphists and Signal Boatswains who remained Branch became Electrical Branch - Sub-divisions were created as follows, Commissioned Electrical Officer having suffices: (L) - Power Generation Distribution and all electrical services. (R) - all communications and radar equipment (AL) and (AR) - for aircraft equipment as above. Warrant Engineers were sub-divided into categories, again, Commissioned Engineer having suffices: (ME) - for Marine (AE) - for Air (OE) - for Ordnance Engineers transferred later from Electirical Branch in 1948. Transitional Period 1948 - 1956 A gradual increase in the proportion of Branch List officers entering the Wardroom took place as the changes made in 1948 had time to take effect. The new intake initially faced the same problems of prejudice and adjustment. Although acceptance was slow in some ships, the improvements made when the Branch List was formed were shown to be most beneficial. Very extensive changes to the armed forces made in 1957 involved a complete review of the strength of the Fleet and the officer structure as a whole. Special Duties List It was decided during 1956 as part of an overall Review to abolish the Branch List and replace it by a different designation to be called the "Special Duties List". As a result meaningful recognition was given to officers promoted by virtue of their specialist expertise. At one stage serious consideration was being given to providing special uniform buttons marked “SD" for these officers. Such a distinction was felt by all Branch List Officers to be quite unnecessary and a way of maintaining the distinctions so evident before 1939. Following many representations by individual officers that this would be against the best long term interests of the Service the proposal was dropped. Another innovation was the removal of the coloured lace worn by all specialist officers on General, Supplementary and Special Duties Lists. Only Medical, Dental and Constructor Officers were to have this indication of their specialisation. In future there would be no visible distinction between other officers. Although not totally welcomed by all, experience showed that this change helped to further reduce some of the prejudice still evident in some wardrooms. As from 1 January 1957, "Commissioned Officers" were accorded the title of "Sub-Lieutenant", and "Senior became "Lieutenants". In consequence the associated stigma of the "half stripe" was removed and Special Duties List Officers were to wear the full single or two full stripes as worn by other officers of these ranks. The specialist qualifications of each officer on the SD List was indicated as part of their new rank title. Examples: Commissioned Boatswains became Sub-lieutenants (B). Engineer - Senior Commissioned Engineers (AE) became Engineer lieutenants (AE). Supply - Commissioned Writer Officers became Supply Sub-lieutenants (W). New promotions to Sub-Lieutenant received a Commission signed by the Queen but existing Branch list Officers retained their original Admiralty Warrant as their authority to "observe and execute 'Regulations for the Government of Naval Service'". As part of the naval reorganisation, Schemes of Complement were altered to provide more appointments afloat to give these officers greater opportunity to extend their responsibilities and hence to improve their promotion prospects. By the 1970's the SD Officer had been fully accepted in most Wardrooms for his true value as a professional colleague and messmate who took part in all ship activities on Final Phase of Transition 1970 to 1985 During this period very extensive administrative changes within the RN including the amalgamation of the Electrical and Engineering Specialisations. These have allowed alterations to complement requirements ashore and afloat. After suitable training Special Duties list Officers can now be employed as Head of Department instead of General List Officers. Revised promotion policies allow promotions for Lieutenant Commanders to Commander on the SD List so culminating the aspirations of previous holders of Warrant Rank. With very few exceptions, no officer from Warrant Rank, or its later equivalents, previously had any reasonable chance of attaining this rank unless already transferred to the General List. At last due recognition of experience and a high degree of professional competence had been achieved. Re-introduction of Warrant Rank On 1 September 1970 the cycle was completed by the introduction of a status equivalent to that of Warrant Officers in the Army and Royal Air Force. Those who joined the RN as ratings and wished to be advanced in status within their particular specialisation could be promoted to a new rank, Fleet Chief Petty Officer. The "Royal Coat of Arms" was to be used for the insignia of rank as in the other services. In 1986 their title was changed to Warrant Officer thus completing the cycle. They continue to be accommodated with Chief Petty Officers and carry out specialist duties very similar to those of the original RN Warrant Officer. The likelihood of the pattern repeating is unlikely because opportunities are available for the new Warrant Officer to qualify for further promotion on the SD List. Owing to a shortfall in manning requirements advancement is possible to Temporary Sub-lieutenant (SD) and there were 13 Temporary Sub-Lieutenants and six Temporary Lieutenants holding Commissions in the 1991 SD list. It is interesting to note that the current Navy List includes specialisations by rank within the Special Duties Section, as opposed to the previous practice of listing each specialisation separately. The new SD List officer has broader responsibilities and carries out duties outside his basic specialisation in the same way as any other Commissioned officer. Extensive changes in social attitudes outside the naval service and training appropriate to modem requirements within it have significantly altered the type of officer now serving. As a result the earlier prejudices have largely disappeared. The Special Duties List provides an avenue of promotion with none of the inherent disadvantages faced by the pre-1948 Warrant Officer. The modem well-trained, experienced and dedicated specialist rating is more socially aware and better able to take his place within the officer structure. Having shown the necessary initiative and perseverance he may be sure his professional competence will be recognised and can be rewarded to far greater extent than was possible in the past. Navy Lists 1948, 1958, 1966 and KR&AI 1913, 1926, 1938 and "The Royal Navy Since The Eighteenth Century, The Navy in Transition" by Michael Lewis (H&S "A Social History of the Royal Navy" by Michael Lewis (Allan and Urwin)

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Research and Study New Deal Document Library Over 900 articles, speeches, letters and other texts, organized by subject, date and author. New Deal Photo Gallery Over 5000 Great Depression era images from the National Archives, the FDR Library and many other sources. New Deal Network Classroom Lesson plans, web projects, and bibliographical materials on the Great Depression. A moderated H-Net discussion list for teachers and historians. Archives in the Attic Documents from the Great Depression. Contributed from the family collections of New Deal Network visitors. The Great Depression and the Arts Four lesson plans developed by teachers and historians working with the National Center for History in the Schools and the Organization of American Historians. A New Deal for Carbon Hill, Alabama A photo-documentary of the impact of the Great Depression and New Deal on a small Southern town, by WPA photographer William C. Pryor. The Magpie Sings the Great Depression During the 1930s, students from the Bronx's DeWitt Clinton High School documented their life and times. This feature includes 193 poems, articles, and short stories and 295 graphics. Past New Deal Network features, including Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, TVA: Electricity for All, Rondal Partridge, NYA Photographer and others.

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Copyright © University of Cambridge. All rights reserved. 'Cuisenaire Spirals' printed from http://nrich.maths.org/ Why do this problem? provides a good environment for discovery and surprise. There are lots of different ways of exploring the ideas once the main ideas have been grasped. It can develop into a visual pattern spotting exercise as well as a numerical pattern spotting one. If possible it would be good for all the pupils to see the interactivity and observe closely the gradual formation of the example shown. The activity can then take several different routes according to the questions that are asked. If there is no access for pupils to use or see the interactivity then using Cuisenaire rods would be best. It would also be possible to create a set of laminated rods in different colours by using this sheet .doc .pdf What do you notice? Is there some reason why that happens? What other groups of rods could you use? Can you predict the pattern that using different rods produce? The two shown have a clear pathway in between the rods. It's a spiral too! Could we form a spiral with a sequence of rods that would leave no spaces? Challenge the pupils to form a spiral in which the lengths of the rods increase in a pattern and they create longer rods to continue it further. Further extension work can be found by movein competent pupils to Number Spirals found here Pupils will find this task easier if they have access to concrete apparatus.

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Determinants of Copper Needs Across the Life Span In the area of mineral supplements, the ODS cosponsored a workshop initiated by the Fogarty International Center and the University of Chile, Genetic and Environmental Determinants of Copper Metabolism, on March 18-20, 1996. This workshop was also cosponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The workshop brought together over 60 international scientists from academia, industry and governments who work in the area of copper metabolism, requirements, or toxicity. This group reviewed, from an international perspective, the recent significant advances in understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic disorders of copper metabolism and their implications for copper intake and exposure. One session of this workshop focused on the difficult question of how to adequately measure copper status in humans. The proceedings of this workshop have been recently published as a supplement to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Copper is a trace mineral that is part of several enzymes and proteins that are essential for adequate use of iron by the body. While frank hypocupremia is rarely seen in the US population, lower copper intake has been implicated with other variables such as heightened cholesterol in some studies as a possible risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Copper toxicity is rare in the US population. Due to the difficulty in measurement of copper status, the many factors such as zinc, carbohydrate and vitamin C intake that affect copper bioavailability, and the inability at that time to establish a requirement for copper, the Subcommittee on the Tenth Edition of the RDAs could not establish a RDA for copper and instead recommended a safe and adequate range of copper intake. While copper is viewed as a nutrient that is thus under effective homeostatic control in humans, adequate dietary supplementation with copper in relation to total parental nutrition, and in relation to nutrient-nutrient, hormone-nutrient and nutrient-pharmaceutical interactions remain important areas for study. Most multivitamin dietary supplements on the market today include 2 mg of copper which is the midpoint of the Safe and Adequate Range of Intake recommended by the FNB. The conference on copper metabolism that was co-sponsored by the ODS further identified gaps in basic research related to copper metabolism and pointed to specific areas where research is needed related to copper requirements, copper-nutrient interactions, and specific disease endpoints with regard to dietary supplementation with copper.

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Fliessbach, A. and Mäder, P. (2005) Biological soil quality as a factor of efficient resource utilization in organic farming systems. In: Leifert, C. (Ed.) Organic Farming, Food Quality and Health. Limited to [Depositor and staff only] In 1978 the DOK long-term field experiment was installed at Therwil close to Basel comparing the farming systems „bio-Dynamic“, „bio-Organic“ and „(K)conventional“. In the first years of the trial, crop yield and feasibility of organic farming were investigated. Soils were analysed with respect to long-term effects on fertility and were evaluated in the view of farming effects on the environment. Today the interrelation of diversity and efficiency and the quality of organic products is the research focus. Long-term trials like the DOK-trial offer unique opportunities for this kind of research. The DOK-trial compares the three systems mentioned above on the basis of the same intensity of organic fertilization (i.e. the same number of animals per area), the same crop rotation and the same soil tillage. Fertilization and plant protection are different and done according to the farming system. A minerally fertilized conventional treatment is mimicking stockless farming and unfertilized plots serve as controls. Crop yields of the organic systems averaged over 21 experimental years at 80% of the conventional ones. The fertilizer input, however, was 34 – 51% lower, indicating an efficient production. The organic farming systems used 20 – 56% less energy to produce a crop unit and per land area this difference was 36 – 53%. Maintenance of soil fertility is important for a sustainable land use. In DOK field plots the organically treated soils were biologically more active than conventional, whereas chemical and physical soil parameters differed less significantly. Soil organic matter after 21 years shows substantially higher values in farming systems with manure fertilization and especially in biodynamic field plots fertilized with composted farmyard manure. Organic farming systems are suggested to utilize non-renewable resources more efficiently due to a higher inherent soil fertility. |EPrint Type:||Conference paper, poster, etc.| |Type of presentation:||Paper| |Keywords:||Anbautechnik einjährige Kulturen, Bodenfruchtbarkeit, ökologischer Landbau, DOK, soil quality, organic farming| |Subjects:|| Soil > Soil quality > Soil biology| Soil > Soil quality |Research affiliation:||Switzerland > FiBL - Research Institute of Organic Agriculture Switzerland > Soil Sciences| |Related Links:||http://www.fibl.org, http://www.fibl.org/forschung/anbautechnik-einjaehrig/index.php| |Deposited By:||Fliessbach, Dr. Andreas| |Deposited On:||24 Aug 2006| |Last Modified:||12 Apr 2010 07:33| Repository Staff Only: item control page

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This last point was perhaps best expressed by an Iowa infantryman who wrote that one look at a "frowning fort" on the edge of town "made us glad the rebels had concluded to evacuate. . . (7)" Within a few days, however, it became apparent that the "stronghold of Camden" was something less than impregnable. As Steele's engineers inspected and mapped the Confederate fortifications they found a number of alarming and hitherto unsuspected problems. The redoubts had been situated with a keen awareness of the value of high ground but with little apparent understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of fixed fortifications. The five strongpoints simply were too small, too few in number, and too far apart to defend Camden effectively. None of the redoubts could have been taken without a bitter and perhaps bloody fight, but as a group they were inadequate to the task at hand. Moreover, the almost complete absence of infantry trenches encircling the town and connecting the redoubts deprived the bulk of the defenders of the protection normally enjoyed by a fortified garrison. To make matters even worse, despite exaggerated early reports that vast fields of fire had been cleared away, Federal engineers discovered that in places attacking troops could approach dangerously close to the redoubts without leaving the cover afforded by the "fresh green forests" surrounding the town (8)."

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This Dawn framing camera (FC) image of Vesta shows many curved ridges that are typical of Vesta's southern hemisphere. These curved ridges are oriented diagonally across the image and are typically around 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) in length. The curved ridges are not visible in the top part of the image. Also in this image, there are two nice examples of craters that have formed on the rim of another crater. One is located in the top left of the image and the other is offset from the center of the image. This image is located in Vesta's Sextilia quadrangle, in Vesta's southern hemisphere. NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Dec. 18, 2011. This image was taken through the camera's clear filter. The distance to the surface of Vesta is 272 kilometers (169 miles) and the image has a resolution of about 25 meters (82 feet) per pixel. This image was acquired during the LAMO (low-altitude mapping orbit) phase of the mission. The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington D.C. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The Framing Camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL. More information about the Dawn mission is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

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(Phys.org)—Research indicates the out-of-Africa spread of humans was dictated by the appearance of favourable climatic windows. By integrating genetics with high resolution historical climate reconstructions, scientists have been able to predict the timing and routes taken by modern humans during their expansion out of Africa. Their research reveals that the spread of humans out of Africa was dictated by climate, with their entry into Europe possibly delayed by competition with Neanderthals. The research is published today, 17 September, in the journal PNAS. Dr Anders Eriksson, from the University of Cambridge, the lead author of the paper said: "By combining extensive genetic information with climate and vegetation models, we were able to build the most detailed reconstruction of human history so far." The role of climate change in determining the timing of the expansion of human populations has been long debated. The oldest fossil remains of anatomically modern humans are found in Africa and date back to around 200 thousand years ago, but there is no trace outside Africa until 100 thousand years later. The newly published model provides the first direct link between climate change and the timing of the expansion out of Africa, as well as the routes taken. To investigate the role of climate, the Cambridge scientists built a highly detailed model tracking the fate of all individuals on the planet. The project involved specialists from a variety of fields. Working together with climatologists and vegetation modellers, they reconstructed climate and sea level changes and their effect on food availability through time, with a resolution of 100km. After exploring several million demographic scenarios (e.g. birth rates, local movement rates, link between food availability and population sizes), they were able to identify the scenarios that were most compatible with the geographic patterns of genetic diversity in modern humans. Working with anthropologists and archaeologists, they were then able to compare these scenarios against the dates and localities of known archaeological and fossil finds. The demographic scenarios chosen by the model revealed a link between food availability and population density in the past was very similar to the link found in present day hunter-gatherers. Based on this link, the model found that climate prevented humans from exiting Africa until a favourable window appeared in North-East Africa approximately 70-55k years ago. Most movement occurred through the so-called Sothern Route, exiting Africa via the Bab-el-Mandeb strait into the Arabian Peninsula. The dating of the out-of-Africa exit as well as the arrival times for other continents identified by the model, were also found to largely agree with archaeological and fossil evidence, with the notable exception of Europe. For Europe, the model based on climate predicted arrival times approximately 10 thousand years earlier than the available archaeological evidence. This discrepancy could be explained by competition with Neanderthals, which was not accounted for in their model, and would likely have slowed down the colonization of Europe by modern humans. Dr Manica, who co-led the study, said: "The idea that we can reconstruct climate, and estimate food availability and finally figure out the demographic changes and movements of our ancestors all over the world is simply amazing. The fact that most of our results are in agreement with archaeological and anthropological evidence – which was not used to generate our model – points to the fact that our reconstructions based on genetics are quite realistic." Explore further: New research raises doubts about whether modern humans and Neanderthals interbred More information: "Late Pleistocene climate change and the global expansion of anatomically modern humans," by Anders Eriksson et al. PNAS, 2012.

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How far will a college go to win the NCAA tournament? And why do so few athletes graduate from college? President Obama announces 10 states will be exempt from "No Child Left Behind" rules in exchange for new reforms. Ten states are being granted waivers to free them from some requirements of the No Child Left Behind education reform law, with President Barack Obama explaining Thursday that the move aims to "combine greater freedom with greater accountability." A good teacher not only improves a child's test scores in the classroom, but also enhances his or her chances to attend college, earn more money and avoid teen pregnancy, according to a new seminal study. Ten years ago, "No Child Left Behind" became the law of the land. Fourth and eighth grade students scored higher in mathematics last spring than anytime since the Nation's Report Card began measuring their performance decades ago, data showed Tuesday. A number of states, including Georgia, already are putting things in place to opt out of the controversial No Child Left Behind Law, following President Barrack Obama's announcement Friday that states can now apply for waivers. President Barack Obama announced Friday that states will be allowed to opt out of certain requirements imposed by the controversial No Child Left Behind law, the landmark education reform initiative passed with broad bipartisan support a decade ago. How did Finland's education system go from among the worst to the best? CNN.com contributor LZ Ganderson takes a look. When newly minted West Virginia Schools Superintendent Dr. Steven Paine told parents, teachers and educators in 2005 that he wanted to use Finland as a model for their education system, he got a lot of blank stares: Finland? What, people asked, does West Virginia have to do with Finland? In the past couple months, thousands of teachers and parents have been calling for radical change in the education system, citing issues with the No Child Left Behind policy. Teachers, students, and parents across the country have come together with one goal in mind: fix a faulty education system. The recent disclosure of test altering practices across Atlanta's public school system has turned the spotlight on a national crisis. Instances of grade changing and test tampering have also been reported across the country in cities such as Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Washington. The latest shock to hit American schools and education reformers is the revelation that teachers and administrators have been fiddling with test scores in Atlanta and, evidently, in Washington, Baltimore and half a dozen other locales. An open letter of appreciation to teachers from the Obama administration's chief education official has highlighted the administration's difficult relationship with the nation's teachers. President Barack Obama called Monday for Congress to pass education reforms by the time students return to school next fall, telling a Virginia middle school that fixing problems in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- more commonly known as "No Child Left Behind" -- should be a top priority. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday his department estimates that four out of five schools in the United States will not make their "No Child Left Behind" benchmarks by the law's target year of 2014 -- and when the test scores are counted for the current school year, numbers could show that U.S. schools are already at that failure rate. As governors have looked for savings through union concessions, the budget debates in Wisconsin and other states have inspired a national discussion about the teaching profession. During one recent panel I was on for CNN, someone asked: How is it that teachers have become "public enemy number one?" President Obama should be applauded for keeping education at the top of the nation's policy agenda at a time when so many other important issues -- the ongoing recession, two wars, health care, etc. -- demand his attention. President Obama calls for higher expectations and performance in education during his State of the Union address. Michelle Rhee, former DC schools chancellor, unveils Students First, a non-partisan group for education reform. The chancellor of the District of Columbia's Public Schools announced she was stepping down Wednesday, after three-and-a-half years as head of the troubled school system. Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid Tuesday, falling to City Council Chairman Vincent Gray in the District of Columbia's Democratic primary, the AP projected. D.C.'s mayoral primary is being watched far beyond the city, as education is playing a significant role in the race. Mayor Adrian Fenty swept into office in 2006 promising to fix the District of Columbia's struggling schools. Now, Fenty is in the fight of his career in part because of how he's tried to reform the district's schools. CNN's Thelma Gutierrez reports on a new California "trigger law" that allows parents to take back failing schools. It's back-to-school time, which means some in the media have gone back to asking: "What's wrong with our schools? And how can we fix it?" Across the country, parents have been busy preparing their children for the return to school. They have been buying new backpacks, new school supplies and new clothes. The U.S. Education Department is set to announce the winners in the second round of its Race to the Top competition on Tuesday. President Barack Obama said Thursday his plan to improve America's education system includes charter schools, intense teacher education and parent involvement. Steve Perry visits Overland Elementary School in Los Angeles to discuss how to involve parents in child's education. U.S. education issues in 2010 boil down to two questions: how to fund cash-strapped state universities and how to fix so-called high school "drop-out factories." Saying the United States is "falling behind" in education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan worked Wednesday to persuade lawmakers that the Obama administration's plan to rewrite a federal education law is the right move for the nation's students and schools. Little Rhode Island made big news in the education arena last month. Superintendent Frances Gallo fired all the teachers at Central Falls High School after negotiations with the teachers' union failed. Dozens of teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island are fired over poor performance. President Obama plans to change the way public schools are evaluated. CNN's John Roberts reports. The Obama administration plans to send a wide-ranging overhaul of the No Child Left Behind education law to Congress on Monday, arguing that the current legislation has pushed schools to lower their standards to meet federal requirements. In most high schools in America, they teach Shakespeare. But at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, they're acting out a Shakespearean drama. A Rhode Island High school struggles to make the grade and fires teachers and staff. The Rhode Island school superintendent who last week fired all the teachers and staff from a school whose students were performing poorly said Wednesday she is willing to negotiate now that the union has agreed to support changes. President Obama says his administration will work to turn around failing schools. A school board in Rhode Island has voted to fire all teachers at a struggling high school, a dramatic move aimed at shoring up education in a poverty-ridden school district. Public school students in major metropolitan areas are showing improvement on test scores in mathematics compared with scores from previous years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Department of Education. U.S. schoolchildren still have work to do when it comes to mathematics, the secretary of education said Wednesday. In our first 100 days, the Obama administration has presented a comprehensive education agenda -- from the cradle through college -- that protects children and jobs in the short term and invests in the long term by advancing education reform. Raising the quality of teaching and learning in American schools is a priority. It receives a great deal of attention in our national discourse and should receive more. Math and reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders in public schools improved nationwide, but African-American students continued to lag behind their white classmates, a new federal study found. With 1 in 4 U.S. teens becoming dropouts, tough new federal regulations will start to measure schools by how many students graduate within four years A recent controversy at Baylor University has brought new attention to the widespread misuse of standardized college admission tests to rank the quality of America's colleges and universities. Washington public schools undergo "radical changes" under a new leader. Will they work? CNN's Kate Bolduan reports Michelle Rhee says she runs at 100 miles per hour. As the chancellor of one of the nation's lowest-performing school districts, she says she has no choice -- too much bureaucracy to cut through, too many problems to fix after decades of neglect. A former Administration official says Bush's signature domestic initiative was spoiled by inflexible standards, a narrow focus and mixed motives Wake Forest University will no longer require applicants to take the SAT and ACT exams, boosting a movement to lessen the importance of standardized tests in college admissions American public schools are struggling to attract and retain high-quality teachers. Is it time we paid them for performance? The Nation's Report Card shows U.S. students are improving slightly in math, but less so in reading New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a potential independent presidential candidate, pushes for performance-based merit pay for teachers in the nation's public schools One maverick state devised its own education strategy that bucks the trend toward high-stakes tests and federal control Students at the West Atlanta Young Scholars Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, are expected to go to college. As more of America's school-age children are growing fatter, the physical education curriculum that might help them win the fight is gasping for air, says a recently released report. They come from all walks of life to the searing desert heat in Phoenix, Arizona: parents, some who are also teachers; administrators and school board representatives. School's out in nearly every part of the country, and students are delightfully spilling into their summer vacations with little, if any, thought of what September will bring. MEAP, ITBS, CRCT, TAKS. There are scores of acronyms in educational testing, but these four-letter terms stand for far more than No. 2 pencils and pages of tiny circles. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday called claims that the No Child Left Behind Act isn't fully funded "a red herring," and suggested states that are balking may simply fear seeing the test results. Homebuying hits high season in the spring as parents of school-age children rush to time their move with summer break. Federal law has forced the nation's children to meet rigid academic performance standards that create "too many ways to fail," a bipartisan panel of state lawmakers who reviewed the No Child Left Behind Act said Wednesday. If only it were still 2001. President Bush on Wednesday nominated domestic policy adviser Margaret Spellings to be the next education secretary, replacing Rod Paige. President Bush has tapped domestic policy adviser Margaret Spellings to be the next education secretary, replacing Rod Paige, a senior administration official told CNN on Tuesday. The following is a transcript of the debate between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry held Friday night at Washington University. The second debate took a town hall style format. In his speech Wednesday night to the Republican National Convention, Vice President Dick Cheney sought to contrast the record of the Bush administration with the record of the Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. Here are the highlights. Education Secretary Rod Paige addressed the Republican National Convention on its second night, touting the No Child Left Behind Act. This is a transcript of his remarks. Schools are being held accountable and are progressing under the Bush administration, Secretary of Education Rod Paige told the Republican National Convention on Tuesday. President Bush on Saturday praised the No Child Left Behind Act as "a bipartisan law that is challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations in public education." When the schedule of prime-time speakers for the Republican National Convention was announced two months ago, it was full of the some of the party's top stars, many of them moderates: Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Check out the links below to hot political stories around the country this morning. Sen. Edward Kennedy launched a blistering election-year attack on the Bush administration's candor and honesty Monday, saying President Bush has created "the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon." The president of the nation's largest teachers' union Tuesday blasted Education Secretary Rod Paige for calling his group a "terrorist organization." James Dillard isn't negotiating anymore. Gearing up for an election-year fight over the centerpiece of his education agenda, President Bush hailed his "historic" No Child Left Behind Act Thursday and announced he will seek a substantial increase in its funding for 2005. The idea sprang fully formed from Chris Whittle's mind about a decade ago, and it was a stunner: transform public education in America with a chain of 1,000 or more for-profit, privately run gramma... Thomas Jefferson considered himself the father of the University of Virginia, and like any father he left a complicated legacy. "Our university is the last of my mortal cares and the last service I... The presidential candidates have seized on education in the hope of finding an issue that will ignite voter excitement. Bush's and Gore's plans differ in nuance, but both men advocate policies that... With prep school costs running nearly as high as the $26,000 a year that Ivy League colleges command these days, most families who send their kids to private or parochial schools must sacrifice new... AFTER A DECADE of adopting schools, lobbying legislators, consulting on curriculums, wrangling with teachers' unions, and struggling to understand a culture practically devoid of secretaries, telep... THE BELLS you hear ringing in your local schools these days may be the tocsins of revolution. Stung by the failure of earlier reforms, an increasing number of states and cities are radically alteri... WILL THE DRIVE to revive America's ailing public schools, launched in the early 1980s, start producing results in the 1990s? It had better. By the latest tally, the high school dropout rate remains... ALBANY, NEW YORK -- Slow growth typical of older Northeastern cities, low unemployment, and the difficulty of getting anyone outside state government to move there may turn companies away from New ... By the year 2000, every child must start school ready to learn. The United States must increase the high school graduation rate to no less than 90%. In critical subjects, at the fourth, eighth, and... BUY A BURGER and catch a disturbing glimpse of America's future. When they ring up your order, those bustling teenagers behind most fast-food restaurant counters are pressing pictures of hamburgers... SO IGNORANT and benighted are many young recruits to the U.S. work force that ) one executive after another has recoiled in horror, gasping with astonishment. These are the troops we're supposed to... America's founding fathers believed that the new republic, in forsaking a hereditary nobility, must look to a ''natural aristocracy'' for its leadership. Two centuries later, the country generally ...

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The administrative wheels turned slowly but finally in 1959 the Navy got ready to release some of its property in Wedgwood for the site of a much-needed elementary school. In 1961 Decatur School opened at 7711 43rd Ave NE. It was still surrounded on its block by Shearwater housing for Navy personnel, and the first students at Decatur were almost all from Navy families. Other proposed plans for parts of the school site were resisted by the community, such as a post office to face 40th Ave NE or a city water tower at the corner of NE 80th Street and 40th Ave NE. By 1966 an addition had been built to the school building and the rest of the block kept as a playground and sports field as it is today, for a total of ten acres on the Decatur School site. “Shearwater Elementary School” was proposed as the name for the new school, but some Wedgwood residents objected. They believed that the Shearwater housing would soon be torn down and there would be no remaining vestiges of Navy housing in Wedgwood, so they didn’t want the name “Shearwater” retained. Wedgwood parents living near the site did not want to send their children to a school named for what had become slum housing. As an alternative, the new school was named after Stephen Decatur, an American Naval officer who was a hero of the War of 1812. A second association of the name Decatur was a reference to “the ship which saved Seattle.” At the Battle of Seattle on January 26, 1856, which was part of the Puget Sound Indian War, white settlers took refuge in a blockhouse on the present site of First & Cherry Streets in downtown Seattle. They could not see beyond the tree line which was at Third Avenue, where gunfire came from Indian attackers. The US Sloop-of-War Decatur came into Elliott Bay and by firing cannonballs up onto the hillside, repelled the attack and saved the lives of Seattle’s early residents. In the summer of 1957 the Wedgwood Community Club had been victorious in getting the Seattle City Council to vote that the Shearwater area should be zoned single-family only. It was thought this meant that the Navy would take action to tear down the deteriorating housing. The August 1957 edition of the community council newspaper, the Wedgwood Echo, told of communication with Congressman Jack Westland (US House of Representatives 1953 to 1965; Congressman Westland was elected to the seat vacated by Henry M. Jackson when Jackson advanced to the US Senate.) Congressman Westland wrote to the Wedgwood Community Club to say that the Navy planned to build “Capehart housing” somewhere in Seattle to compensate for the loss of Shearwater. Capehart was the name of a government program for private contractors to build duplexes which would then be turned over to military use. Since the Capeharts could only be built in areas zoned for multiple dwellings, readers of the Wedgwood Echo understood the message that was being sent: Shearwater would be torn down and could not be replaced with other military housing, because Wedgwood’s Shearwater area had been rezoned single-family-only as of 1957. But after the seeming victory of 1957, years went by and nothing changed. Except for the site cleared for Decatur School, the rest of the Shearwater housing (on nearby streets) still stood and it continued to deteriorate. By the 1960’s the Shearwater situation was getting worse, as some of the units were vacant and had been vandalized. The Wedgwood Community Club tried various strategies. They wrote to Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was known for her campaign to beautify American cities and highways by cleaning up blight and planting flowers. The community club appealed to City Councilmember Clarence F. Massart to have the deteriorating Shearwater housing “abated” as a public nuisance. But nothing seemed to work until Washington State’s powerful US Senators, Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, stepped in. Known collectively as “Scoop and Maggie,” US Senators Jackson and Magnuson were completely different in character and lifestyle but together the two men were a dynamic duo. They worked together 28 years in Congress, 1952 to 1980, and were able to bring in a steady stream of military contracts and federal appropriations funding for their home state. It was said that the survival of Boeing Aircraft Company depended upon the senators who were able to get military contracts for them, and that while the two senators were in office, Washington State consistently got more than its share of federal funds. Sen. Jackson was on the powerful US Senate Armed Services Committee. In January 1965 Sen. Jackson proposed a bill which went through the committee and was approved in Congress, that the Navy’s Shearwater housing in Wedgwood should be vacated and the property should be sold. Finally, with this order by Congressional authority, the Navy gave a date of July 1, 1965, as the deadline when all remaining Navy personnel had to move out of Shearwater. The next step in the Shearwater process was the effort to get the slow-moving General Services Administration of the federal government to arrange for sale of the Shearwater property. On September 1, 1965, the GSA acted to transfer ownership to Seattle Public Schools of the rest of the block where the Decatur School, 7711 43rd Ave NE, had been built in 1961. The school district paid for the tear-down of the eighteen remaining Shearwater buildings on the site, and made a 1966 addition to the Decatur School. The rest of the block was left as playground and athletic fields for a total of ten acres, as the site is today. Another controversy erupted in October 1965 when it was learned that the GSA had no plans to tear down the Shearwater buildings which remained on several streets surrounding the Decatur School block. GSA officials said that they had a responsibility to the taxpayers to sell the property at the best possible price and that the tracts would fetch higher bids if the buildings were left intact. This implied that a buyer of the Shearwater land parcels might conceivably use the buildings as-is for rental property income. The Wedgwood Community Club renewed their efforts to get the buildings removed. The Wedgwood Community Club, joined by the View Ridge Community Club and once again with the help of City Councilman Clarence F. Massart, all united in efforts to have the Shearwater structures abated as a public nuisance and torn down. Senators Jackson and Magnuson joined the fray, asking the GSA to delay the sale until it could be determined whether the GSA had authority to tear down the buildings itself. Senators Jackson and Magnuson, City Councilmembers Clarence Massart and Charles M. Carroll along with Wedgwood Community Club president Ray Oglesby, all toured the site of the abandoned, boarded-up Shearwater buildings in November 1965. Another person who was influential in helping to get the Shearwater problem resolved was Mrs. Jeanette Williams who lived in View Ridge. She served on Seattle City Council from 1969 to 1989 but even before taking political office, Mrs. Williams was politically influential. (See HistoryLink Essay #9087.) In 1962 Mrs. Williams became chairwoman of the King County Democrats organization. As such, she had the ear of elected officials as to what voters wanted. What northeast Seattle voters wanted was the removal of the badly deteriorated, vacant and boarded-up Shearwater housing, and Mrs. Williams made this clear to Senators Jackson and Magnuson on their November 1965 visit to the site. Sen. Magnuson indicated that the very next day, he would see the director of GSA at a meeting in Pasco, eastern Washington. This key timing was the final turning point in resolving the Shearwater problem. The sale of the property by public auction was first scheduled for December 7, but there was another brief delay while Senator Magnuson pushed through the stipulation that the buyer of Shearwater would be required to remove all buildings on the site within ninety days of the purchase. This stipulation of sale was added, and the Government Real Estate Auction was finally set for December 16, 1965, at the Seattle Center Coliseum. In news articles it was mentioned that as of the Seattle City Council zoning decision of 1957, the Shearwater blocks were zoned single-family. The 1965 auction notice clearly listed the property description, the single-family zoning, and that the buildings must be removed within ninety days of sale. After the auction, the type of housing which would replace Shearwater became the next controversy in the long-running saga. To be continued in Part Four of the Shearwater story: the developer and the Wedgwood Community Club don’t see eye to eye.

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From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia In 1794 Jefferson added a nailmaking operation to his blacksmith shop on Mulberry Row at Monticello. He hoped it would provide a source of cash income while he restored the depleted soil of his farms. Nail rod was shipped from Philadelphia and hammered into nails ranging in size from six-pennies to twenty-pennies. In 1796 Jefferson acquired a nail cutting machine, which made four-penny brads from hoop iron. In his Farm Book Jefferson wrote: "Children till 10. years old to serve as nurses. From 10. to 16. the boys make nails, the girls spin. At 16. go into the ground or learn trades." Up to fourteen young male slaves, aged ten to twenty-one, worked at the forges of the nailery. From 1794 to 1796, when he was retired to Monticello, Jefferson calculated the efficiency of the nailers, each day weighing their nail rod and the nails they produced. Most of the slaves who began their working lives in the nailery became tradesmen. Moses Hern and Joe Fossett became blacksmiths; Lewis and Shepherd were carpenters; Barnaby Gillette was a cooper; James Hubbard a charcoal burner; Wormley Hughes a gardener; and Burwell Colbert was Monticello butler as well as a painter and glazier. The nailery was quite profitable in its early years, supplying nails throughout Albemarle and Augusta counties. Management problems and the competition of cheaper imported nails later made it an only intermittent source of income. Primary Source References 1791 May 27. (Jefferson's Travel Diary). "Waterford [NY]. Saw nails made by cutting them with a pr. of sheers from the end of a bar of iron, the thickness of which corresponded with the thickness of the nail, & it's breadth with the length. We saw 120. cut off in a minute, & 24 headed in a minute, which would amount to 20. a minute cut off and headed, but they make habitually about 4000. a day. The iron formed into bars costs about 50 pr. cent more than nail rod. The sheers cost 9. dollars. The bit is sometimes welded to the sheers, sometimes fixed on with screws so as to be taken off to be ground. They are made at Lebanon in N. York. The lever vice for heading is very simple." 1795 March 11. (Jefferson to Henry Remsen). "Indeed I would be glad to know the cost of the cutting & heading machines, & of the right to use them if under a patent." 1795 April 2. (Jefferson to Henry Remsen). "I have recollected that at either Troy or some other little town up the Hudson I saw a man cutting the 4d. nails and that the implements were of very small cost, and not under a patent, and I suppose this to be the method of cutting to which your letter refers. I therefore have concluded to ask the favor of you to send me immediately all the implements (if they be few & of little cost as I suppose)..." 1795 April 29. (Jefferson to Jean Nicolas Demeunier.) "I now employ a dozen little boys from 10. to 16. years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself and drawing from it a profit on which I can get along till I can put my farms into a course of yielding profit. My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe." 1795 June 18. (Jefferson to Henry Remsen). "...I observed your expected Mr. Burral to be shortly in New York & to give you further information on the subject of the machine for cutting nails. Without waiting for the further information, (as I am much pressed for nails) I am disposed to accept his offer of making a machine for 40. Dollars. The difference of a few Dollars is of no account in adopting a thing which is to be of long continuance. So that unless you shall have received information which in your own judgment renders some other more eligible, I will pray you to get on of Mr. Burral's very complete, & to forward it to Colo. Gamble in Richmond, with 500. lb. of the proper iron for cutting 4 pennies, and a few (say 150.) 4 pennies, 6 pennies & 8 pennies, of the cut nails, by way of sample." 1795 July 10. (Jefferson to James Lyle). "A nailery which I have established with my own negro boys now provides completely for the maintenance of my family, as we make from 8. to 10,000 nails a day and it is on the increase." 1795 November 14. (Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph). "Biby's boats are arrived & have not brought my 4d. nail machine nor hoop iron. Gamble & Temple write me it was in the hands of a Mr. Ball, and sent somewhere up, perhaps to Westham. Will you be so good as to have it sought for, or it may lie months in some out of the way place, or perhaps never be found. It had better come in some waggon to Colo. Bell, if it can be handily got aboard one, as there is no Milton boat down & the article is important to be guarded against miscarriage." 1796 January 11. (Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph). "I am in hopes my curring machine, hoop iron & rope will be up soon. If this should find you in Richmond perhaps you can aid in getting them off, as also 3. or 4. tons of nail rod lodged for me at Gamble & Temple's." 1796 February 7. (Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph). "Faris is gone down & promised me to call on Britton again for the machine. The difficulty has been to find him at home. Should he fail this time it would be well to have the machine carried back to Colo. Gamble, from whence it can be got at any time. My nailrod is arrived safe. The hoop iron I presume is with the cutting machine as they came together." 1796 February 22. (Jefferson to Archibald Stuart). "I have just received my cutting machine, & iron for 4. pennies, which I shall shortly begin to cut." 1798 February 12. (James Madison to Jefferson). "I returned from Albemarle on Monday last, where I consulted with your Nailer on the subject of the Sprigs & lathing nails not included in the parcels prepared for me. I found that the cutting machine has never been reestablished, & I did not request this slight kind of nails should be made in the common way. If you mean however that the machine shall be set up again, or it be a part of your plan to make such nails in the common way..." 1798 February 22. (Jefferson to James Madison). "Tho' it is my intention & orders I left were, that the cutting machine should be repaired, yet I think it would be adviseable [sic] for you to depend on it, as to your sprigs & lathing nails if you want them before my return...Immediately on my return my own wants will oblige me to recommence cutting." 1801 May 15. (Benjamin Perkins Washington to Jefferson). "The Letter Inclosed Came to me with a Request to furnish you with a Drawing of a Machine for Cutting Nails for which My Brother Obtained a Pattent. The Drawing Shall be Handed to you & any Explanations Neciry [sic] given by Wednesday Next..." 1801 March 24. (Jefferson to Thomas Perkins). "My nailers are employed in hammering nails, except one cutter for four pennies only, our neighborhood requiring no other cut nail, so that is it but a small business with me...I am not certain that I perfectly understand the manner of making the vice for holding and pushing up the hoop iron; tho I have some idea of it; and you do not mention whether you cut your hoop cold or warm. I cut it warm, in which case the frequent changes necessary would waste time." '1806 October. (Jefferson to Edmund Bacon). "Those who work in the nailery are Moses, Wormley, Jame Hubbard, Barnaby, Isbel's Davy, Bedford John, Bedford Davy, Phill Hubbard, Bartlet, and Lewis. They are sufficient for 2 fires, five at a fire." 1806. "Jim makes 15 pounds. 20d Nails Barnaby makes 10 pounds, 10d do. Wagner Davy makes 10 pds. 10d do. Bedford John makes 8 pounds. 8d do. Bedford Davy makes 6 pounds. 6d do. Bartlet makes 6 pounds. 6d do. 4 Boys makes 8 pounds. 6d [total] 63 pounds nails" 1812 June 22. (Charles Artzt to Jefferson). "The object upon which my choice fell, was nailcutting machinery, for, although these machines, used in the vicinity of Boston, were almost in every respect perfect uncorrigible, yet there had one important improvement often been attempted and never been attained, viz. to have these machines selffeeding. It seemed therefore the most convenient..to undertake the invention of a selffeeding nail machine, as after four months working, had the satisfaction, to present to the public a complete selffeeding nail machine, made on a small scale, yet all from metal, and only fit to cut nails from hoops of tine, or lead or copper..." - ↑ PTJ, 20:454. - ↑ Ibid, 28:305. - ↑ Ibid, 28:323. - ↑ Ibid, 28:341. - ↑ Ibid, 28:388. - ↑ Ibid, 28:405-406. - ↑ Ibid, 28:527. - ↑ Ibid, 28:580. - ↑ Ibid, 28:608. - ↑ Ibid, 28:618. - ↑ 28:616. - ↑ Ibid, 30:95-96. - ↑ Ibid, 30:127. - ↑ Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0031 - ↑ PTJ, 33:434-435. - ↑ Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, 53. - ↑ Overseer's account of daily task of nailers. - ↑ Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mtj1&fileName=mtj1page046.db&recNum=123

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Tue November 15, 2011 Re-Telling The Story Of 'The Trail Of Tears' The trail of tears — The forced migration of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homeland in the south West to Oklahoma — is taught in many classrooms as one of the darkest moments in American history. The episode is typically understood as a single event that happened to the Cherokee people and many other Native American tribes. But that isn't the full story, argues historian and filmmaker Daniel Blake Smith. His book, An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears, depicts the series of events and decisions that led up to the relocation of the Cherokee — decisions made not only by the federal government, but by actors from within the Cherokee nation as well. NPR's Brian Naylor talks with Smith about the long and complicated relationship between the Cherokee nation and the U.S. government, and the present day legacy of the trail of tears.

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Cause and Effect Essay - Cheating School systems today are so lenient in their rules, guidelines and consequences; thus causing cheating, copying or forgeries to be frequently used. Many students take advantage of copying someone else's work whenever they are given the chance. Other times, students will simply have someone else do their work and turn it in as their own, not realizing the effects this behavior can create. This creates a lack of creativity, no sense of responsibility and the students will never acquire new knowledge. These practices of cheating , copying and forgery by students are unethical and should be brought to the surface whenever possible. Students that copy other student's work are hurting themselves in the long run. Their creativity level drops every time they copy or have someone else do their work. After a while of copying and forging, the student's ability to think creatively and successfully becomes next to nothing. "Educators must continue to socialize students of all ages about the importance of maintaining high ethical standards," (Glazer 222). The educational system is where students learn these tricks and proceed to carry them on into there professional careers. Corners are too easy to cut these days, and in order for people to keep their minds as functional as possible, they need to do their own work. It is too easy for students to buy a students paper that had the same class the quarter before, reword it a little, and turn it in as their own. Students are no longer able to write a fictional story by themselves because the computer or someone else can do it for them. Students also begin to lose the sense of responsibility when they have other people do their work. They don't feel that they have to do anything to pass a class, only that as long as they turn in a paper, their thoughts or not, they will receive credit for the assignment along with a passing grade. This creates the feeling that life will always be a handed to them on a silver platter. This type of thinking is what is going into the work environment when these people leave the education system. Employers don't want workers that can't pull their own weight, and that is all they are going to get from these people that think cutting corners is all right. Even worse is when these people that "cut the corners" hold management positions. These "crooked managers" infringe on the ethical workers by asking them to do unethical practices on the job, such as asking their factory workers to pretend they didn't see the failing scores from the health and safety inspections. Thanks to "ethical resisters" some of these unethical practices are being brought to the surface, exposed and corrected. Along with losing their creativity, the students that copy other's work never get to feel that sense of accomplishment that comes when the paper you have been working on is finally complete. They don't get the uplifting feeling when they get their paper back and they have received a good score. The feeling isn't there because the work isn't their own. They use other people to receive the score, but they feel nothing. If they never have that feeling, there is nothing to motivate these people to do better the next time around. Yet, there may be one thing that is the worst of all when people pass off someone else's work as their own. That would be that the forger doesn't gain any knowledge. People can only learn from the things they do, and if someone else is doing their work, they are never going to learn anything. Making mistakes and learning from them may be one of the most effective methods of learning. For instance, if a student performs extremely poorly on a very important paper, chances are that student will always remember what they did wrong and what would have been better, where as the same student wont even remember the lecture that was taught for an entire week straight. If people don't do the work themselves, they can never learn from their mistakes. These people that cheat will go through life expecting someone else to always be there to do their work. When the time comes that they will actually have to do the work themselves, they aren't going to have a clue on where to start. They won't know to take responsibility for the things they do and they will never be able to think something up on their own. They will be so used to simply grabbing someone else's work that they will fail at anything they try to accomplish themselves. These people need to be stopped not only for their sake but because it is not fair to the people whose work they are always stealing. People work hard and should receive credit for the things the do, the people that don't work hard, should not receive credit. We must reward the "ethical resisters" that are brave enough to speak up when they notice these unethical practices taking place. "For ethical resisters are, indeed, the heart of a national resolve for individual responsibility on behalf of the common good" (Glazer 225). Glazer, Myron Peretz and Glazer, Penina. "A New Tradition of Courageous Dissent." From Community to College. Ed. Jeff Sommers and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. New York: St. Marins's Press, 1996. 219 - 227.

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Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. It results from the interaction between three compounds of the nervous system: the peripheral nerve, the spinal cord and the brain. Pain messages are sent from the peripheral nerve to a section of the spinal cord called the dorsal horn and to a section of the brain called the thalamus. There are two kinds of pain: ACUTE PAIN is temporary and may be caused by injuries such as bruises, cuts, strains, sprains and fractures; and CHRONIC PAIN that is caused by injuries, conditions and diseases. Conditions that cause chronic pain include back pains, neck pains, joint pains, arthritis, fibromyalgia, cancer pains, AIDS pains, neuropathic pain, cranial pain etc.. The severity of chronic pain may be mild, moderate or severe. Pain overwhelms many aspects of our lives. Personal relationships and work productivity may suffer; appetite may be reduced; pain may limit mobility and prevent performance of daily tasks; pain may also take an emotional and psychological toll, cause irritability, give rise to hopelessness, and at times even to suicide. Three symptoms are related to pain: suffering, sleeplessness and sadness. These are known as the TERRIBLE TRIAD. When untreated, or undertreated, pain can create an extreme rise in pain levels and anxiety. On the other hand, when pain undergoes pain-management, a patient’s quality of life improves and the vicious circle of an ever- increasing pain is alleviated. Patients who manage to keep their pain under control will be less stressed physically and emotionally. They will be able to sleep, focus on work, and enjoy social activities and relationships with their loved ones. The primary goal of PAIN THERAPY is to return the patient to optimal function. Treatments can be classified as NON-MEDICAL or MEDICAL. Non-medical treatment options include: observation, rest, stretching, exercise, weight reduction, heat and ice application, and other treatments such as acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, manipulation, electrical stimulation, biofeedback, hypnosis and surgical procedures. Medical treatments are carried out with the administration of analgesics and anti-inflammatories. An analgesic (colloquially known as a painkiller), is any member of the diverse group of drugs used to relieve pain (achieve analgesia). The word analgesic derives from Greek an- ("without") and -algia ("pain"). Analgesic drugs act in various ways on the peripheral and central nervous systems. ALTA CARE Laboratoires – Paris has produced a wide range of therapeutic products. The FLODOL PATCH is effective in reducing the intensity and frequency of pain when applied on joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments. It has a rapid onset of action and is fast acting; it is a trans-dermal and anti-inflammatory treatment. The active ingredients of the FLODOL ARTRO AMPOULES do not undergo any radical changes as they are not processed; remaining fresh they are thus more effective in reducing the intensity and frequency of pain; the ampoules treat acid-base imbalance, inflammation, demineralisation, toxins, etc. The FLODOLOR FLEXI SYRUP is a supplement that helps the trophism of the bone tissue, joints and muscles. It also helps to reduce the intensity and frequency of discomforts. The FLODOL HEAT PATCH is an original formulation based on essential oils. It has an immediate warming and long lasting effect. The application helps to relieve the sensation of rheumatism and muscular pain. The FLODOL ICE CRYOGEL MASSAGE gives a cold effect that improves micro-circulation. The cold effect improves the penetration of active ingredients which relieve pain, besides acting as an anti-inflammatory.

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- Downloaded the latest volume of "Antiphospho...What?"? - Checked out our links page? - Joined our online support forum? - Shopped in our Cafepress* and Zazzle* stores for APS, Lupus, Infant Loss (& many more!) awareness items? - Sent a family member or loved one flowers through our FlowerPetal* shop? - Watched the videos on our YouTube page? - Joined our mailing list to receive our newsletters and updates? - Read how you can help the APSFA? - Joined us on Facebook or Twitter? - Submitted your patient story for our quarterly newsletter? - Seen our segment on "Mystery Diagnosis"? You can buy it now on iTunes! This brochure is available for download on our downloads page. - What is Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome? - APS Is an Autoimmune Disease - APS: The Statistics - Clinical Features of APS - How is APS Diagnosed? - APS Treatment - Doctors and Information on APS - Women & APS - Other Points to Consider - Safety When Traveling - Take Your Medication - Symptoms to Watch For - Coping with APS - Other Sources of Information on APS - How Can You Help? This pamphlet is a layman’s terms summary of Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS). It covers such topics as diagnosis, symptoms, treatment, and coping. It is meant for patients newly diagnosed, however would also be good for informing friends and family about your disease. What is Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome? Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome or APS is an autoimmune disorder in which the body recognizes certain normal components of blood and/or cell membranes as foreign substances and produces antibodies against them. Patients with these antibodies may experience blood clots, including heart attacks and strokes, and miscarriages. APS may occur in people with systemic lupus erythematosus, other autoimmune diseases, or in otherwise healthy individuals. APS is also known as APLS, APLA, Hughes Syndrome or "Sticky Blood." APS is an Autoimmune Disease One way in which our immune system fights infections is by making antibodies. Antibodies are proteins in the blood and body fluids that bind to foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses and help the immune system destroy and remove them. Sometimes the immune system doesn’t function properly and makes antibodies against normal organs and tissues in the body. These self-reactive antibodies are called autoantibodies. The autoantibodies in APS were originally thought to recognize that recognize certain phospholipids, fatty molecules that make up part of normal cell membranes, hence the name “antiphospholipid” antibodies. It is now known that most of the autoantibodies in APS patients actually recognize certain blood proteins that bind to phospholipids, not the phospholipids themselves. Two blood proteins that are major targets of antiphospholipid antibodies are b2-glycoprotein I and prothrombin. APS: The Statistics - 1-5% of the general population is believed to have APS. - 15-20% of all cases of blood clots in large veins (deep vein thrombosis), including blood clots that go to the lungs (pulmonary embolism) are due to APS. - 10-25% of women with recurrent miscarriages have APS. - One third of strokes occurring in younger people (under the age of 50) are due to APS. - APS is a major women’s health issue: 75-90% of those affected by APS are women. - 40-50% of patients with lupus also have APS. Clinical Features of APS People with antiphospholipid antibodies have an increased risk of developing one or more of the following problems: - Blood clots in veins, particularly deep vein thrombosis (DVT) - Blood clots that go to the lungs (pulmonary embolism) - Blood clots in arteries - Miscarriages – these can occur at any stage of pregnancy but are most common in the late first trimester or early second trimester - Pre-eclampsia, eclampsia, fetal growth retardation, premature delivery - Heart attacks, angina - Brief stroke-like episodes called transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), for example, loss of vision - Decreased levels of platelets (small blood cells involved in blood clotting) - Heart valve problems, sometimes requiring valve surgery or valve replacement - Persistent or transient blotchy, lacy bluish rash (livedo reticularis) - Skin ulcers, most commonly on the legs or feet - “Catastrophic” APS – a very rare, life-threatening syndrome in which clots form in small blood vessels of multiple organs (such as heart, lungs, brain, kidneys) Other features that might be associated with antiphospholipid antibodies include: - Problems with thinking clearly (loss of concentration, difficulty with reading comprehension and performing calculations, memory loss) - Neurological problems similar to multiple sclerosis. - Migraine headaches, sometimes with visual disturbances - Other neurological symptoms including episodes of partial or total vision loss, dizziness, vertigo, loss of balance, seizures, and other abnormal movements How is APS Diagnosed? Physicians use a combination of clinical symptoms (see above) and laboratory tests to diagnose APS. The common blood tests for antiphospholipid antibodies are as follows: - Anticardiolipin antibodies (IgG, IgM, and IgA) - Lupus anticoagulant – a panel of blood clotting tests that may include the dilute Russel Viper venom time (dRVVT), lupus aPTT, mixing studies, and hex phase phospholipid test, platelet neutralization procedure - Antibodies to b2-glycoprotein I (IgG, IgM, IgA) Panels of tests for antibodies to phospholipids other than cardiolipin are available but have not undergone the rigorous international standardization efforts applied to anticardiolipin assays. A number of experts in the field question the usefulness of these panels, which may be quite expensive. There is no cure for APS, but there is treatment. The treatment of choice for patients with APS who have had a blood clot is anticoagulant therapy. This is usually successful in preventing further clots. For women with APS and recurrent miscarriages who have not had a prior blood clot, the use of anticoagulant therapy during the pregnancy significantly increases the likelihood of a successful outcome. Some individuals may have elevated antiphospholipid antibodies but have no clinical manifestations of the syndrome. These individuals are usually treated with aspirin. Aspirin reduces the risk of blood clots by making the platelets less sticky. Studies are ongoing to determine how helpful aspirin is and whether low doses of anticoagulants might be more effective. In general patients who have had a blood clot (i.e., stroke, heart attack, DVT) and have persistently positive tests for antiphospholipid antibodies should be treated with anticoagulants indefinitely. Discontinuing treatment after a fixed period of time, such as six months, may be quite dangerous in such patients. In some patients with a history of blood clots, antiphospholipid antibodies may disappear after a certain period of time. It is not known whether it is safe to stop anticoagulation in this situation. Consultation with a doctor experienced in treating APS is recommended for such patients. Doctors and Information on APS Although APS is actually one of the more common autoimmune diseases, some primary care doctors remain uniformed about it. When their patients have symptoms of APS, these doctors may not test for antiphospholipid antibodies soon enough or at all. Unfortunately, many patients have had to see several physicians and specialists before getting the proper diagnosis and treatment. The type of doctor a patient sees should be determined by the symptoms the individual patient is having, and any given patient may benefit from the input of several specialists. For patients with blood clots, a hematologist would be involved, often for management of anticoagulant therapy (blood thinner). For patients with recurrent miscarriages, a high-risk obstetrician should be consulted. For patients who also have rheumatologic symptoms, such as symptoms of lupus, a rheumatologist would be important to see. Of course, all patients would benefit from having a single physician identified as their primary care provider, to help coordinate all of their health care needs. Women & APS APS and Pregnancy Complications Women with APS may have difficulties with pregnancy. During pregnancy, women are at higher risk of developing blood clots and preeclampsia. In APS, pregnancies are thought to be lost because blood clots form in the placenta and starve the baby of nutrition. Some women may have trouble getting pregnant, while others may experience repeated miscarriages. Blood clots that develop in the placenta can cause fetal growth problems, fetal distress, preterm birth, or pregnancy loss. Expert care and close monitoring of the pregnancy is essential by a doctor knowledgeable about APS. During pregnancy, physicians may recommend low doses of aspirin and daily injections of the blood thinning drug, heparin. This gives the fetus about an 80% chance of survival, a drastic improvement from the 1980's when fetal survival was around 20%. The therapy is started at the beginning of pregnancy and halted just before delivery to reduce the risk of bleeding during childbirth. Soon after birth, the treatment resumes for about six weeks because of an increased risk for clotting in the postpartum period. In a more serious case preeclampsia may set in towards the end of pregnancy and a planned premature birth may be necessary. Heparin can cause bone loss, so women may need to take additional calcium during pregnancy. In addition, women need to be monitored for development of a low platelet count. Over the long term, many doctors recommend women continue to take a low dose of aspirin to reduce the risk of developing dangerous blood clots. Many women with APS are unaware they have the condition, but it can be diagnosed with a blood test. Doctors may consider the diagnosis when a woman has repeated, unexplained pregnancy loss. If you are trying to get pregnant or are pregnant it is very important to let your doctor know immediately. Continued use of warfarin may cause birth defects. The doctor will change your medication to a different blood thinner that is safe. Using proper treatment, women with APS have about the same risks as other women during pregnancy. APS pregnancies are not normal. Normal pregnancy is 40 weeks. In APS, it is more common to deliver the baby between 30-35 weeks, and between 3-5 pounds. Heparin protects the placenta partially, but not fully so that the baby gets enough nutrition to survive longer in the mother. Once born, the babies do fine. Many women who have problems with APS during pregnancy are completely fine when not pregnant. Others do go on to develop problems with clotting. Currently there is no way of telling which women will be unlucky, until a clot actually occurs. Infertility has also been linked to antiphospholipid antibodies. Testing for these antibodies is becoming routine in infertility clinics. Birth Control Pills & Hormone Replacement Therapy Women also need to avoid estrogen therapy (such as birth control or hormone replacement therapy) because estrogen predisposes patients to clotting. Other forms of contraception should be discussed with your doctor. Problems with Periods Some women taking warfarin experience problems with increased bleeding. It can lead to anemia. Tell your doctor about this problem. The doctor can recommend several options and prevent anemia. One example is: for women who have already given birth and are not actively trying to conceive, the Mirena® IUD has been successful in reducing period blood loss. As it only releases hormones to the uterus lining and is not absorbed into the blood stream, therefore, it is safe for women with APS to use. Other Points to Consider You may notice you bruise more easily or little cuts will bleed longer when you are taking warfarin (Coumadin®). Injuries can be more serious when on anticoagulants and care should be taken during any activity that can result in injury. Contact sports are not recommended. If, while on anticoagulants, you injure your head, go directly to the Emergency Room. Your brain is very sensitive to a bleeding while on anticoagulants. If a serious injury does occur go directly to the Emergency Room and be sure they know you are taking anticoagulants and tell them what your most recent INR was. You should have Medical Alert bracelet and wear it at all times. You can order one through Medic Alert at http://www.medicalert.org. A bracelet is the most visible, the easiest and the most recognized however, there are also necklaces and other types available. Safety When Traveling Long trips, especially by air, have some clotting risk even for non-APS people. It is important for people with APS to get up and walk around at least every couple of hours. On long car trip stop at least every two hours and walk. Drink plenty of water and wear compression stockings to help reduce your chance of DVT. If you plan to be away during the time of a periodic blood test, arrange for the blood test before you leave for the trip. Take Your Medication It is very important to take your medicine every day. Try to take your the medicine at the same time each day for consistency. You may want to get a pillbox that holds at least one week’s supply of the pill(s) or to mark it on a calendar when you take your medicine. This will help you to know when you have taken your pills. Do not take two doses in one day if you have forgotten your dose. Symptoms to Watch For If you test positive for APS Antibodies you should be aware of the symptoms caused by blood clots. If any of these symptoms occur, seek medical help immediately. Symptoms that could be caused by a blood clot include:Heart Attack Chest discomfort or pain. Most heart attacks involve discomfort in the center of the chest that lasts more than a few minutes, or that goes away and comes back. It can feel like uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain. Generally becomes so bad that it may feel unbearable and relentless, but occasionally the pain can be milder. - Discomfort in other areas of the upper body. Symptoms can include pain or discomfort in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach. - Shortness of breath. This feeling often comes along with chest discomfort. But it can occur before the chest discomfort. - Other signs may include breaking out in a cold sweat, nausea or light-headedness. Strokes (Blood Clot in the brain) can be life threatening. Some stroke symptoms may last only minutes or a few hours and are called TIA’s. (Transient Ischemic Attack or mini stroke.) Rapid treatment (within three hours) is vital. Medical treatments that reverse the stroke damage is available—but only if you seek immediate treatment. Stroke symptoms are: - Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body. - Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding speech. - Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes. - Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination. - Sudden, very severe headache with no known cause. Can also be very severe headache that lasts for days. Clots in other locations Muscle pain, numbness, or tingling, pale color, weakness, muscle spasm in a leg or arm. - The arm or leg feels cold, hot or swollen to touch. May feel like a muscle strain. - Extreme pain without a cause, anywhere in the body. - Shortness of breath, or chest pain (under the breast bone or on one side of the chest) may radiate outward from the chest. (This could indicate a clot in the lungs or a heart attack.) - Sudden heavy cough especially if you cough up blood. - Rapid breathing. Heart attacks, strokes and other blood clots need immediate medical attention. Go immediately to Emergency Room. f you feel these warning signs, DIAL 911 IMMEDIATELY. Most people wait 2 or 3 hours before seeking care, yet by then the heart may suffer significant damage. Dial 911 within 5 minutes if you or someone you are with experiences these symptoms. Coping with APS APS treatment is life long. Treatment of blood clots caused by APS outweighs the small side effects by treatment. Most of the time people with APS will appear on the outside just as they did before they were diagnosed. Because of this, it may be difficult for family and friends to understand that you have a life threatening illness and that you just can’t do some of the things that you could before. They can’t see what is going on with your body and this can become quite frustrating on both ends. In some cases you may want a therapist to help you adjust. Any person with a life threatening disease is at risk of being depressed. In some cases this progresses to clinical depression. It is very important to discuss your mental health with your doctor as well as your physical health. The APS Foundation of America, Inc has a place on the Internet where you can communicate with others who have this disease. You can find our support forum at http://www.apsforum.com. You are the only one who knows exactly how you feel. Others with the same disease are very understanding and support groups of some kind can make your life much fuller. Your immediate family and children should be told about your disease, how it affects you, what it means to them as well as what you may have to expect of them in support. The good news is: many people with proper treatment live normal full lives. Others may find their lives changed forever due to APS, but a positive attitude will mean that life can still be worthwhile and fulfilling as the correct treatment prevents further problem. Other Sources for APS Information - The APS Foundation of America, Inc. Founded in June 2005, the APS Foundation of America, Inc. is dedicated to fostering and facilitating joint efforts in the areas of education, support, research, patient services and public awareness of Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome in an effective and ethical manner. - The APS Friends and Support Forum This is an open forum for people who have Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome, friends, family and caregivers. Please feel free to participate in any of the discussions listed, browse around or post your own new discussion. We always welcome new members and returning members with open arms! - Antiphospholipid Syndrome Collaborative Registry (APSCORE) The Antiphospholipid Syndrome Collaborative Registry (APSCORE), sponsored by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) and the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD). The purpose of this national registry is to collect and update clinical, demographic, and laboratory data on patients with Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS), as well as patients with antiphospholipid antibodies who do not have other symptoms commonly associated with APS. The registry also serves as a repository of blood samples from those enrolled in the registry. - Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network The Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network was created to facilitate collaboration among experts in many different types of rare diseases. Our goal is to contribute to the research and treatment of rare diseases by working together to identify biomarkers for disease risk, disease severity and activity, and clinical outcome, while also encouraging development of new approaches to diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. - Hospital for Specialized Surgery and Barbara Volker Center for Women and Rheumatic Disease - Thrombosis Interest Group of Canada (T.I.G.C) Thrombosis Interest Group of Canada (T.I.G.C) is dedicated to furthering education and research in the prevention and treatment of thrombosis. The Thrombosis Interest Group of Canada consists of a group of 40 specialists in fields related to thrombosis who collaborate to write evidence-based or consensus-based clinical guides on the investigation, management, and diagnosis of thrombotic disorders. How can you help? There are many ways you can help the APS Foundation of America, Inc. You can volunteer your time & talents such as in the area of fundraising, advocacy, finance or support group experiences, donate money or purchase APS gear through our webpage at www.apsfa.org, through our CafePress store at http://www.cafepress.com/apsfoundation or through our Zazzle store at http://www.zazzle.com/apsfoundation. The APS Foundation of America, Inc is a non-profit organization. Your donations are greatly needed to help us provide awareness, support, and education of this disease. We need your enthusiasm and monetary support to help our individuals, family, friends and caregivers battle the long-term consequences caused by APS. Thank you in advance for your support and time. Please contact us through our website or at 608-782-2626 for more information. Please send donations to: of America, Inc Post Office Box 801 La Crosse, Wisconsin 54602-0801 We also accept PayPal donations via our website. We thank you for your support! APS Foundation of America, Inc. is not intended to replace standard doctor-patient visits, physical examination, and medical testing. Information given to members is only an opinion. All information should be confirmed with your personal doctor. Always seek the advice of a trained physician in person before seeking any new treatment regarding your medical diagnosis or condition. Any information received from APS Foundation of America, Inc is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure. This brochure is for informational purposes only. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. A team of people contributed to this publication. Information was adapted from various website, books and other media sources. Please contact us through the website for a complete list of sources. This pamphlet was assessed at draft stage by doctors, allied health professionals, an education specialist and people with APS. A non-medical editor rewrote the text to make it easy to understand and an APS Foundation of America, Inc. medical editor is responsible for the content overall. ©Copyright 2005, 2006. All rights reserved. All content in this pamphlet is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and may not be reprinted, reposted, or otherwise reproduced wholly or in part without prior written permission from the APS Foundation of America, Inc. Bibliography available here. Revised October 2006 Page last update: 11/13/10 The APS Foundation of America, Inc. website and forums are both volunteer run and funded by donations to the APSFA. Website hosted by Dreamhost. Website created and maintained by Heidi P. DISCLAIMER: APS Foundation of America, Inc. website is not intended to replace standard doctor-patient visits, physical examination, and medical testing. Information given to members is only an opinion. All information should be confirmed with your personal doctor. Always seek the advice of a trained physician in person before seeking any new treatment regarding your medical diagnosis or condition. Any information received from APS Foundation of America, Inc. website is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure. This site is for informational purposes only. Please note that we will be listing all donor or purchaser's names on the Donor page of our foundation site. If you do not want your name listed, please contact us to opt out. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately.

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WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has determined that 16 areas across the country are not meeting the agency’s national air quality standards for lead. These areas, located in 11 states, were designated as “nonattainment” because their 2007 to 2009 air quality monitoring data showed that they did not meet the agency’s health-based standards. Exposure to lead may impair a child’s IQ, learning capabilities and behavior. Areas designated today as not meeting the standard will need to develop and implement plans to reduce pollution to meet the lead standards. Nonattainment areas must meet the standards by Dec. 31, 2015. No areas in Indian Country are being designated as nonattainment. EPA will designate areas as meeting or not meeting the standards in two rounds. In the first round announced today, EPA is designating areas that do not meet the standards based on air quality monitoring data from the existing lead monitoring network. In October 2011, EPA will use data from new monitors to complete a second round of designations that will classify the remaining areas in attainment, unclassifiable or nonattainment. In October 2008, EPA strengthened the nation’s air quality standards for lead tenfold to 0.15 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air. The agency also finalized requirements for new monitors to be located near large sources of lead emissions. EPA has data from existing monitors indicating violations of the standards, and is currently collecting data from new monitors that began operation in January 2010. National average concentrations of lead in the air have dropped almost 92 percent nationwide since 1980, largely the result of the agency’s phase-out of lead in gasoline. Lead in the air comes from a variety of sources, including smelters, iron and steel foundries and general aviation gasoline. Issued November 16, 2010, and for More information on the designations: http://www.epa.gov/leaddesignations Contact: Enesta Jones email@example.com 202-564-7873 Final Rule in Federal Register on 11/22/2010: http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/2010-29405.htm

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Japanese swords, £18.00 Weight: 4.410 g Gift of Dr F. Parkes Weber Coins and Medals Silver 2 reales coin of Philip V, mutilated for use in Dominica as 2 bitts Issued in Spain, AD Mutilated for use in Dominica, about 1770-72 A coin pierced officially for use in a British colony The island of Dominica in the eastern Caribbean became a colony, firstly of France and then of Great Britain in the eighteenth century. Like other West Indian colonies, Dominica provided the colonial power with the important commodity, sugar. To work the sugar plantations the colonists needed labour, which was provided by the trade in slaves from Africa. As the colonies had no coinage of their own, mutilated Spanish or Portuguese silver coins were used instead. These were either cut into segments, or a hole was stamped into them, which in the case of Dominica was heart-shaped. This mutilation of the coins had a dual purpose: it identified the currency for use in the colony, and also reduced the weight of the silver in the coin, thereby discouraging the export of the coin from the island. The metal disks cut out of the coin (known as dumps) were also used as money in their own right. F. Pridmore, The coins of the British Commo, Part 3: West Indies (London, Spink, 1965)

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The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) passed the House of Representatives in late September and the Senate this week, and is being sent to President Obama for his signature. This long overdue legislation overturns many loopholes and provides critically important upgrades to weak, current protections. Passage of the WPEA plays a significant role in food safety oversight, as it better protects those charged with enforcing food safety laws – including U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) veterinarians and inspectors, as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees. Over the past several years, FIC has heard from countless federal whistleblowers that desperately want to expose food industry wrongdoing or threats to public health, but failed to come forward due to a lack of strong whistleblower protections, which are necessary to safeguard against retaliation. "America's food just got a lot safer," said FIC Director Amanda Hitt. "Government workers who serve as the public's watchdog are now themselves safer from retaliation. Federal food safety employees have finally been deputized to protect the food supply." Under the new legislation's improvements, a federal employee is now protected even when s/he: - is not the first person who discloses given misconduct - blows the whistle while carrying out job duties - makes a disclosure to a supervisor - discloses the consequences of a policy decision, or - does not have "irrefragable proof" (defined as "undeniable, incontestable, incontrovertible proof") of government misconduct. For a fuller list of protections, see GAP's earlier press release about the law's passing here. What Types of Whistleblowing Actions by Federal Food Workers are now Protected? There are a number of types of workers and disclosures that will now receive solid and enforceable whistleblower protections. They include: - A public health veterinarian reporting to his/her USDA supervisor that a slaughterhouse repeatedly violated humane handling regulations - An FDA inspector who tries to expose falsification of Salmonella records at a cantaloupe farm - A Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) district office manager reporting frequent complaints by FSIS poultry inspectors that increased line speeds have made it impossible for workers to pull all potentially contaminated birds off the line - An FDA researcher whose attempts at publishing new findings on a controversial food ingredient are stifled by upper management

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I think that to note the differences between religions is respectful. Different religions and even various traditions within the same religion may vary greatly. So I don't think it's skillful to say it's all the same. But His Holiness the Dalai Lama often talks about the value of being respectful towards other faiths. And he sometimes points out some common ground that can be found among world religions such as teachings about the value compassion. I've given a small excerpt from "Glimpse of Reality" below. What do you think? Do you have a particular mindset or approach when it comes to other faiths? The Buddhist View toward Other Religions Singapore August 10, 1988 Revised excerpt from Berzin, Alexander and Chodron, Thubten. Glimpse of Reality. Singapore: Amitabha Buddhist Centre, 1999. Question: How does Buddhism view the existence of other religions? Answer: Because not everyone has the same inclinations and interests, Buddha taught various methods to different people. Citing this example, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said that it is wonderful that so many different religions exist in the world. Just as one food will not appeal to everybody, one religion or one set of beliefs will not satisfy everyone's needs. Therefore, it is extremely beneficial that a variety of different religions is available from which to choose. He welcomes and rejoices at this. Nowadays, there is a growing dialogue, based on mutual respect, between Buddhist masters and leaders of other religions. The Dalai Lama, for example, meets the Pope frequently. In Assisi, Italy, in October 1986, the Pope invited the leaders of all the world religions to a large assembly. About one hundred and fifty representatives were there. The Dalai Lama was seated next to the Pope and was given the honor of making the first speech. At the conference, the spiritual leaders discussed topics that are common in all religions, such as morality, love and compassion. People were very encouraged by the cooperation, harmony and mutual respect that the various religious leaders felt for each other. Of course, if we discuss metaphysics and theology, there are differences. There is no way to get around the differences. However, that does not mean that we need to argue with the attitude of "My daddy is stronger than your daddy." That is very childish. It is more beneficial to look at the things that are in common. All the world religions are seeking to improve the situation of humanity and to make life better by teaching people to follow ethical behavior. They all teach people not to become totally caught up in the material side of life, but at least to strike a balance between seeking material progress and spiritual progress. It is very helpful if all religions work together to improve the situation of the world. We need not only material progress, but spiritual progress as well. If we only emphasize the material aspect of life, then to make a better bomb to kill everyone would be a desirable goal. If, on the other hand, we think in a humanistic or spiritual way, we are aware of the fear and other problems that come from the further buildup of weapons of mass destruction. If we only develop spiritually and do not take care of the material side then people go hungry, and that is not very good either. We need a balance.

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May 23rd is World Turtle Day and is celebrated throughout the globe by people who appreciate turtles and their hard-shelled cousins. Turtles, including terrapins and tortoises, are reptiles belonging to the Order Testudines and first appeared on earth about 200 million years ago. There are about 12 types of turtle, all of which are threatened in some way but no more so than the sea turtle. Sea turtles face numerous threats, mainly from fishing activities, poaching and destruction of their habitats, and rate among the most endangered species on the planet. It’s quite extraordinary that these wonderful animals have managed to survive for millions of years, despite the constant threat from sea-faring predators, yet, as with an array of marine life, it is mankind’s blind destruction and selfishness that will result in their demise unless things change for the better, and soon. Read on for Ten Tips for Safe Turtle Watching One organisation that works hard to protect sea turtles and their habitats is American based Ocean Conservancy. They run a program called SEE Turtles which links people with sea turtle nesting and feeding sites in ways that directly support efforts to protect the turtles. “Almost every type of sea turtle is endangered or threatened, and they need our help for survival,” said Vicki Cornish, vice president of marine wildlife conservation at Ocean Conservancy. “We can conserve sea turtles by traveling to places important to sea turtle survival where we learn about them and bolster the work local conservationists are doing. SEE Turtles puts travelers on the path to a vacation that is fun and positive for our environment.” Travellers who visit the surrounding communities help by putting money into the local economy. The money generated goes towards providing conservation jobs for the very people who used to poach the animals; they now realise protecting turtles is the better alternative. Ten Tips for Safe Turtle Watching For travellers thinking of taking a trip to see the turtles, Ocean Conservancy recommends the following ten tips to keep the animals safe while enjoying a vacation that will make a difference for the environment in beautiful ocean settings. 2. Clear beaches and water of litter, even if it’s not yours; turtles often confuse trash for food. 3. Nesting turtles like their beaches dark and quiet; avoid flash pictures, strong flashlights, fires, loud noises, vehicles and even light-colored clothing. 4. Hire local guides; they will best know where and how to spot turtles and prevent stress to them once found. 5. Do not feed turtles (or other wildlife). It can make them sick and more vulnerable to harm from people. 6. When boating, slow down when turtles are present and avoid anchoring in sensitive coral reefs and seagrass beds. 7. Choose to eat local seafood caught with turtle-friendly fishing gear preferably troll or hook and line. When you order fish at a local restaurant, ask your server how it was caught. 8. Maintain a respectful distance from turtles in the water and on land. 9. Donate to or volunteer with local and regional conservation organizations that conserve sea turtles and improve community living standards. 10. Reduce your carbon footprint year-round. Climate change affects turtles by altering their habitat and affecting their food sources. For more information on Ocean Conservancy and their programs, visit their website. Photo Credits: Ocean Conservancy >>> More information on marine ecotourism.

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Blue Collar Design The construction industry, to use a loose term, is by and large concerned with implementing designs on a one-by-one basis. each part of the house, high-rise, or landscape, is worked over by an individual, and brought to completion as part of a hands-on process. Concrete foundations are formed by people with tape measures and transits, walls are framed one at a time with a hammer or nail gun, and landscapes are brought (literally) to fruition by pick and shovel. Contrast this with large-scale mass-production, where a million widgets are produced as part of an assembly line. The point to pay attention to is that in an assembly line, quality control is implemented as adjustments to the machines producing parts. In a house, quality control is done constantly, with every swing of the hammer. If something doesn't fit, it's a matter of trimming, whacking, splitting the difference or otherwise changing what's right in front of you. Snap judgments are intrinsic to the assembly process of a house, since the real world never works out exactly the way you want it to. The carpenter can be a designer as much as the architect, depending on how much is specified in a blueprint. The carpenter sometimes has a great deal of responsibility for working out the details of trim and siding. The landscaper might be taking a very general planting plan and working out the ideal placement of stones and plants by hand, with soil and a shovel. There is sometimes more design work going on in the head of a skilled tradesperson as in the head of a mediocre architect. At times, the architect's plan must be revised to accommodate the reality of wood and drywall, where only someone on the building site can get that darn beam to actually fit into the ceiling space, and only with a good deal of creative chiseling. Where this stops being true is in the use of standardized parts. Plumbing and electrical work is primarily built around premade parts, such as pipe fittings and electrical boxes. Windows used to be built into houses with a fairly involved and skilled process, but most windows these days are built in one piece, to be screwed quickly to the outside if a house, with little or no fine corrections. There is a conscious effort on the part of manufacturers to provide parts that require less skill (and therefore money) to install. In short, an attempt to put as much mass-production in a house. How does your design integrate the best of these two extremes? A design for a yacht can't be put on an assembly line, but a plastic bottle pretty much needs to be. What about a table, however? How much are you going to use readily available hardware and production machining, and how much are you going to depend on having reliable woodworkers taking care of the details? What about a bike? If you're planning on producing only two hundred of them, what difference does it make to keep the production in your home country, rather than outsourcing? Are you going to weld up your own components like forks and handlebars, or purchase from another OEM? This is not to say that skilled labor will always be the better alternative - mass production is here for a reason. It's finding the right mix for your product that can put that touch of excellence on your product. Copyright 2004-2006 Dominic Muren and IDFuel Team

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GDP and the Players Three Investment: Business Buys as Well as Sells The word investment can mean several things: a purchase of stock by an individual investor, a college student's “investment in herself” in the form of tuition, a company's investment in a new factory or a new fleet of trucks. Only the last of these would be counted in investment in the formula for GDP. The other two would be counted in “C” as consumption. By definition, a capitalist economy is one in which people in the private sector can raise capital, invest it in a business, produce goods and services, and attempt to sell them in the market at a profit. Several forces drive business investment, and the most important of these are: Keep in mind that wages and salaries paid by companies are not included in investment. Doing so would double count wages and salaries in GDP, because that money is already included in consumption expenditures. Interest Rates and Taxes, Again Why would interest rates and taxes be listed first for business investment but last for consumption? Because, compared with consumption, business investment is more sensitive to interest rates and taxes. Of course, people are people, and people are making a decision to spend money whether they are part of a household or a business. However, people making business investment decisions usually (but not always) make them in a more disciplined and analytical manner than people making household spending decisions. A business analyzes the amount of money it will earn on a new factory or piece of equipment and expresses it as a percentage of the money invested. That percentage is the investment's rate of return. The managers of the business compare the rate of return on an investment with the interest rate they will have to pay on the money that will finance the investment. If the rate of return on the investment is lower than the interest rate they must pay, the managers will not make the investment. For example, if a piece of equipment that costs $10,000 a year to lease and operate will produce goods that can be sold for a profit of $1,000, then the rate of return on the investment is 10 percent. ($1,000÷$10,000 = 10 percent) If the business pays an interest rate of, say, 7 percent on the money for the investment, then the investment would probably be considered attractive. The rate of return on an investment is the amount of profit earned on the investment—that is, the amount of money earned after subtracting the expenses from the revenue brought in by the investment—expressed as a percentage of the investment. Budget deficits occur when a government of a nation, state, or city spends more than it acquires in tax revenue during the period under consideration. The government borrows money from households and businesses to cover the spending that is not covered by taxes. A budget surplus occurs when the government takes in more tax money than it spends in a period. Lower interest rates mean that more (lower return) projects become attractive to businesses, and therefore they will make more investments. For instance, projects with a rate of return of 12 percent are attractive to a company that only has to pay 8 percent interest. But at an interest rate of 12 percent, the investment is not worth pursuing. Taxes on business, such as the corporate income tax and the capital gains tax, also affect business investment. This is a politically charged issue. Those who favor taxes (or higher taxes) on business believe a business benefits from government services, such as national defense, and should therefore pay its “fair share” of the cost. Those who favor no taxes (or lower taxes) on business believe that everyone who works for or invests in a business already pays personal income taxes. They also believe that taxes discourage business investment by taking money away from businesses and lowering the amount of money—the return—that the company realizes on an investment. Although lower taxes can boost business investment, other factors, particularly interest rates, are usually more important drivers than taxes. Availability of Capital The availability of investment capital—that is, money—drives interest rates, but for the sake of clarity I discuss it separately from interest rates. Investment capital comes from households, through the banking system and the financial markets. People save their money in banks, buy insurance policies, and invest in stocks, bonds, and vehicles such as 401(k) accounts and mutual funds. A good portion of that money goes to businesses that invest it in plant and equipment. As I mentioned earlier, U.S. households have a relatively low savings rate. They spend a larger portion of their income than consumers in most other industrial nations. But the U.S. economy is so stable and productive that many foreign financial institutions, which channel the savings of foreign households into investments, quite willingly invest in the United States. This foreign investment increases the supply of capital in the states beyond what it would be if U.S. businesses relied solely on the savings of U.S. citizens. The government, however, also borrows money from households through the financial markets to finance budget deficits. When the government borrows truly large sums of money relative to the available capital, a phenomenon known as “crowding out” occurs. Crowding out refers to the fact that the government can borrow enough funds to crowd businesses out of the market for investment capital. In other words, if the government borrows enough money, it can curtail the availability of funds to other borrowers. The major determinant of business investment may be the one least subject to economic analysis: the number of good investment opportunities that businesses have to choose from. It's true that lower interest rates can make low-return investments more attractive. It's also true that lower taxes and good availability of capital can spur investment. However, unless businesses see good opportunities, they will hold onto their cash or distribute it to their stockholders as dividends. The business cycle of expansion and recession affects the number of opportunities for better or worse. Business formation—the number of businesses being established in a period—also contributes to or detracts from the level of business investment. For instance, business investment remained relatively low throughout 2001 and 2002. As mentioned earlier, consumers did their part to hold the economy up. They continued to spend. But businesses saw few opportunities, particularly relative to all the opportunities they saw (or thought they saw) during the “e-business revolution” of the 1990s. Also, during the 1990s, they had invested heavily in productive capital, especially information technology, and needed time integrate it into their operations. During 2001 and 2002, interest rates remained at 30-year lows. However, when business didn't see opportunities, they certainly weren't about to invest. Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Economics © 2003 by Tom Gorman. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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The actions of antibody are many and varied. Antibodies can act independently of the rest of the immune system or they can work to help immune cells and other products recognize a pathogenic threat and work in cooperation to remove the danger. / IgG response to pathogens When a foreign antigen enters the body and elicits an antibody response there is a certain set protocol that B cells and antibody production follows. If the invading pathogen has antibodies that the body has never seen before, it takes a little time for the B cells to get their act together. There is a time lag between the first presentation of the antigen to B cells and their proliferation and differentiation into antibody producing plasma cells. The time lag may last several hours to several days depending on what type of antigen is presented. The first antibody type produced by B cells is IgM. Once production begins it rises exponentially, rapidly increasing the responsive antibody concentration in the blood serum. Several hours after the start of IgM production, IgG producing B cells swing into action. Eventually the blood serum concentration of IgG rises higher than IgM levels. IgG is more potent in destroying pathogens and because of its small size it can penetrate into all tissues to carry the war to the site of danger. IgM activity is mainly limited to the blood stream. IgM is therefore the first line of defense in an antibody response, attempting to keep a lid on the pathogen invasion until enough IgG antibodies can be made. Both IgM and IgG antibody continue to be produced for as long as the antigen is present. Eventually the B cell stimulation tails off as the amount of antigen present is removed from the body. Remaining unused antibody is catabolized and broken down. Different antibodies have different abilities to survive in the body. For example the half life (time it takes for a concentration of antibody to reduce by half) of IgG1, IgG2 and IgG4 is 20 days. IgM is less robust with a half life of 10 days, IgA lasts 6 days with IgD and IgE type antibodies having a half life of 2 days before being broken down. Should the same pathogen with the same antigens attempt to re-invade the body the subsequent antibody production is faster and stronger than first time around. The B cell system has already seen this threat before and has learnt what to do. This time the IgG antibody producing cells proliferate and release IgG just as quickly as the IgM producing cells. This time around the IgM type antibodies are virtually superfluous. The antibody production persists for longer and reaches up to ten times the concentration of antibody produced in the initial antigenic challenge. Classic defense against a pathogen involves antibody binding to the pathogens antigens. This signals the immune cells that the substrate the antibodies are bound to should be destroyed. Immune cells will link to the antibodies via Fc receptors. This receptor linking activates the immune cell into destroying Use of X ray crystallography has demonstrated the shape and function of antibody binding sites on the Fab arms of the "Y" shape molecule. Shape is what defines which antigen shape the antibody can bind. Actual binding is an active process involving several chemical and electrical interactions between the antigen and antibody receptor. Chemical binding involves the linking of oxygen or nitrogen molecules in the antigen and antibody to a hydrogen atom (usually taken from water in the vicinity). Electrical bonding works in two ways. Overall, antibodies are negatively charged whereas antigens are frequently positively charged. The electrostatic attraction between the two can help keep them together. A second and stronger electrical method of binding involves "Van der Waals" forces. Essentially each atom of a molecule has a net positive or negative charge depending on how many electrons it contains. Positive and negative atom charges can provide a quite strong bond between antibody and antigen. Finally the strongest form of antigen/antibody bonding is "hydrophobic bonding". Some parts of molecules don't like water (hydrophobic) and will physically bond to anything to force water molecules away from the immediate vicinity. Antibody binding sites have this property. For all of these attractive forces to work the antigen and antibody molecule must be close to each other. There must be a pretty good fit between the shape of the antigen and shape of the antibody receptor site before the molecules get close enough to each other to form the bonds. It is possible for several antigens to be very similar in shape. Perhaps they only have one or two molecules difference between them. It is possible for an antibody to bind to all of these antigens but those that don't fit perfectly will have weaker bonding ability. The reduced bonding strength may not be strong enough to overcome repulsive forces that are ever present pushing the antibody and antigen apart. The ability of an antibody to bind a particular antigen is called antibody "affinity". An antibody has greater affinity for an antigen with the right shape to fit its receptors than an antigen with a looser fit. It is possible to have antibodies produced against an antigen that have low affinity and other antibodies that have a high affinity. We often find that when the body is challenged by a pathogen it has never seen before the antibodies produced have a slightly loose fit (low affinity) around the pathogens antigens. If the body is challenged by the same pathogen later in time the immune system, using its previous experience, produces antibodies with a better fit (high affinity). When considering antibody/antigen binding we must also consider what is called antibody "avidity". Each antibody has at least two receptor sites (10 receptor sites on an IgM molecule). Each pathogen may have numerous copies of the same antigen spread over its surface. So one antibody can bind to several antigens on the same pathogenic organism. The strength of several bindings between antigen and antibody is far greater than the sum of the individual bonds. This is because for the antibody to be separated from the antigen it has bound all the bonds at all the receptor sites must be broken simultaneously and that takes a lot of energy. An IgG antibody for example bound by both its receptor sites to an antigenic particle has a 1000 fold stronger bond than if it were bound to two separate antigens. In all of the above you should see that there is a degree of imperfection in an antibody's specificity for a particular antigen. It is possible for two or more antigens to be very similar but not quite the same. The similarity may be good enough for an antibody to loosely bind an antigen it was not made for. If the antibody binds to several of the wrong antigens on the same organism then the strength of the bonds can be quite strong. This is called "cross-reactivity". In most instances this is of no lasting significance. A pathogenic organism can have subtle differences in its surface antigens due to imperfect manufacture or because of damage. It makes sense to have a little flexibility in the bind properties of an antibody. However, sometimes an antibody can cross react with an antigen on an entirely innocuous structure including our own self antigens. Only one antigen will fit into an antibody receptor cup fit absolutely perfectly. Each antibody receptor might accept other antigens that look similar to the one it was designed for, but if the fit is not good then most likely the binding between antibody and antigen will be weak. If it is too weak the link will probably be broken by heat and fluid motion around the antibody/antigen. complexes / antigen precipitation Immune complexes are a regular feature of infection and/or tissue damage. Any inflammatory reaction is a destructive process. The intention of inflammation is to break down bacteria or cells or whatever the perceived threat is to render it harmless to the body. This destruction and breakdown of the target creates a lot of debris. The bacteria or cell fragments have to be removed from the tissue and blood stream otherwise over time they will increase in concentration and basically gum up the works. In addition, these fragments may still be antigenic. For as long as they remain in the system they have the ability to stimulate the immune system. Permitting these antigenic fragments to persist in the body could be dangerous as they will perpetuate the immune response long after the threat has been destroyed. This prolonged stimulation might result in the immune system turning on the body and the development of an autoimmune The immune system likes to keep a clean ship and antibodies help in the process of mopping up these fragments. Antibodies bind the fragments together and help precipitate the fragments out of solution. Binding the fragments together also makes it easier for phagocytes to latch on to the particles and engulf them. Immune complexes are removed from the blood primarily by liver Kuppfer cells and also by phagocytes in the lungs and spleen. Immune complex formation between antigenic material (bacteria, viruses, tissue fragments etc.) and antibodies. Immune complexing pulls small particles out of solution and makes it easier for phagocyte cells to see the material and engulf it.

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The exhibit illuminates the cross cultural connections between the two continents as well as the rich diversity that makes each country unique. Although both have roots as British colonies, the British influence on children’s books has manifested itself in different ways. In Australia early picture books strongly reflected English and European flora and fauna, evident in Outhwaite and Maltby. The pictures portrayed a romanticized version of what was seen. In America, however; European influence is represented by the importation of foreign books, including elaborately illustrated "gift" books by Rackham, Dula and Nielsen. N. C. Wyeth was the first illustrator to depict American settings with the same romance, richness and sense of drama as the European "classics" in books like The Last of the Mohicans and Rip Van Winkle. A significant change took place in both Australian and American children’s books in the 1940s. Picture books began primarily to reflect the native landscape and people of each country in everyday settings—in a meadow, on Main Street, at the public garden. Instead of offering children romanticized and exotic views of the world, they could now see and read about people and animals "in their own backyard." Dorothy Wall stands out as an early pioneer in these indigenous reflections of Australian settings. In America, Robert McCloskey and Lois Lenski lovingly portrayed a variety of settings across the country. This appreciation for domestic, regional settings has continued with many contemporary American and Australian illustrators like Barbara Cooney, Wendell Minor, Tomie De Paola, Alice and Martin Provensen, Julie Vivas, and Robert Ingpen. In the 1960s, for the first time, a few books began to portray racially mixed neighborhoods or focused on families from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, reflecting significant social movements that were taking place at the time. Another noteworthy trend has occurred in the last decade with a virtual explosion of books reflecting a wide range of cultures within each country. Not only is there an awareness of people from different backgrounds but, more significantly, an appreciation and celebration of the rich tapestry of a multicultural society. In the work of Brian Pinkney, Carmen Lomas Garza, Lin Onus, and Pat Torres, one can see a pride in both contemporary and traditional life styles. The exhibit offers an intercontinental journey through the rich heritage of children’s book illustration in Australia and America, featuring intimate moments and vast landscapes, the quiet beauty of rural settings and the vitality of city life, and even some fantasy places that exist only in the artist’s imagination.Dodd Research Center

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How To Do Easy Tricks In Basketball Learning how to do easy tricks in basketball are reachable with some practice. There are also some things to keep in mind to make the process easier. Take the following considerations into account to learn how to do easy tricks in basketball. - Improve your ball handling skills. Seeing as how most easy basketball tricks are based off of some type of dribble, having better ball handling skills will make it much easier. Even the simplest of tricks in basketball, such as the between the legs dribble or a crossover, are much easier once ball handling is addressed. - Practice it slowly. If you can't dribble between your legs quickly at first, it is only reasonable to take it down a notch. You can always add speed once you get the basic mechanics of the trick down. - Break up the trick in parts. Many easy tricks seem difficult at first. Let's take the spin move for example. Instead of trying to do it all at the same time, working on one aspect can help, such working on turning around and switching the dribbling hand, which is an important (yet difficult when attempting the trick all at once) part of the trick. Take the systematic approach and you will likely find it much simpler. - Add them into games. When you're working on a trick, you will improve your skill level with them with more practice. Add your trick into pickup, casual, and even more competitive games. After all, these easy tricks become extremely effective once you get comfortable with them. Posted on: Aug. 26, 2010

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The Davies Sisters during the First World War The First World War had a profound effect on the lives of Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, two sisters from mid Wales whose gifts and bequests completely transformed the range and quality of Wales's national art collection. They lost much-loved relatives and served with the Red-Cross in France, seeing the destruction first hand. They were deeply conscious of the horrors experienced by both British and French soldiers, and shocked at the suffering of civilian refugees. While their brother David flung himself into the cause of international peace, the sisters hoped to repair the lives of ex-soldiers traumatized by the war, through education in the crafts and through music. Out of this grew the idea of Gregynog, as a centre for the arts, and for the discussion of social problems. Bringing Refugee Artists to Wales On 4 August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium, precipitating the First World War. Over a million Belgians fled their homes. The Davies family decided that Belgian artists should be brought to Wales, where they could work in safety, and inspire the country's art students. Major Burdon-Evans, their agent, and their friend Thomas Jones journeyed to Belgium where they assembled a group of ninety-one refugees, including the sculptor George Minne, and the painters Valerius de Saedeleer and Gustave van de Woestyne and their families. All three artists were to spend the rest of the war as refugees, largely dependent on the Davies family for support. While their impact on the arts in Wales was limited, the work of all three was to be profoundly influenced by their Welsh exile. The Sisters in France, 1916-1918 Initially the sisters undertook charitable work at home in connection with the war. They were keen to do more 'in the way of helping', but few women managed to go out to France. One way of doing so was to volunteer through the London Committee of the French Red Cross. There was little provision in the French army for the welfare of the ordinary soldier, and the Committee sent women to operate canteens at railway stations, hospitals and transit camps. In July 1916 Gwendoline was posted to a transit camp near Troyes. Margaret joined the canteen there in June 1917, and her journals record their lives at this period. The sisters were deeply moved by the stoicism of the ordinary soldiers of the French army and by the suffering of exhausted, sick, and hungry refugees. The sisters sometimes managed to add to their art collection during the First World War. Although wartime travel in France was difficult, trips to Paris on Red Cross business provided Gwendoline with opportunities to visit the Berneheim-Jeune gallery. She bought a Daumier and a Carriêre there in April 1917, and paintings by Renoir, Manet and Monet in December. In February 1918 she bought her two celebrated landscapes by Cézanne, Midday, L'Estaque and Provençal Landscape, which are among her most important and far-sighted purchases. In February 1916, Gwendoline Davies spent £2,350 on ten oils and a drawing by Augustus John. Both she and Margaret went on to acquire more, and they collected the work of no other artist on this scale. Gwendoline was determined that the work of Augustus John be seen at Amgueddfa Cymru, later placing several of her own purchases on loan to the Museum. Guide to the paintings - Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Provençal Landscape, oil on canvas, about 1887-8. Bought by Gwendoline Davies with Cézanne's Midday - L'Estaque in 1918, this picture cost half as much, £1,250. It was probably painted at his family's property outside Aix-en-Provence. Full of the shimmering colour of the South of France where the sisters had holidayed in 1913-14, it must have seemed a world away from war-time Paris in winter. Amgueddfa Cymru (Bequest of Gwendoline Davies, 1951) NMW A 2438. - Paul Cêzanne (1839-1906), Midday, L'Estaque, oil on canvas, about 1879. This landscape is one of Gwendoline Davies's greatest pictures, bought in Paris for £2,500 in February 1918. The Troyes canteen was closed for repairs. She was in the city, then under intermittent German bombardment, on Red Cross business. She may have seen it on a previous visit, as in January Margaret had translated from the French the art dealer Ambroise Vollard's anecdotal account of Cêzanne's life. Together with Provençal Landscape acquired with it, this was one of the first Cêzannes to enter a British collection. Amgueddfa Cymru (Bequest of Gwendoline Davies, 1951) NMW A 2439. - Camille Pissarro (1831-1903), Sunset, the Port of Rouen (Steamboats), oil on canvas, 1898. Margaret Davies bought several works by Pissarro at the Leicester Galleries, London, in June 1920. This was the most expensive at £550. The previous year she had worked at a canteen in Rouen run by the Scottish Churches Huts Committee. Amgueddfa Cymru (Bequest of Margaret Davies, 1963) NMW A 2492. Article Date: 29 July 2007

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People around the world were shocked and horrified by a viral video that showed Karen Klein, a 68-year-old public school bus monitor, desperately trying to ignore malicious verbal jabs by a group of middle schoolers on her own bus. For most, it was extreme. For many educators and school staff members, it's no surprise. School workers said it's a regular aspect of their daily lives. "I've had erasers thrown at me, among other things, but these are things that teachers go through," said Rosalind Wiseman, author of the bestseller "Queen Bees and Wannabes." "When these types of things come up, there's all of this attention. But most teachers have at least had one student call them a bad name under their breath." While bullying among students has dominated conversations in school, homes and in the media, kids bullying adults at school is a topic rarely discussed. What some call misbehavior, pranks or insubordination can be bullying, too, educators said. Kids can act threateningly and create a hostile environment inside the limitations of the law, said educator and author David M. Hall, who often leads anti-bullying workshops - and school workers might never report it. "Schools often forget about the adults," said Jessie Klein, author of "The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying America's Schools." "People are so resigned to it. It's almost invisible - it's just the way things are. Kids can't imagine what a school would look like without bullying, so teachers are resigned to it, too." Severe incidents, such as shootings, become part of police statistics. But there aren't many numbers about kids bullying adults, according to Tom Lansworth, media affairs specialist for the American Federation of Teachers. Most school districts aren't required to track incidents, he said. The Canadian Teachers Federation conducted a study in 2005 that found one-third of teachers in Ontario had been bullied by students. Part-time teachers and those without regular grade assignments were most likely to experience bullying, the study found. Some educators said bullying incidents aren't taken seriously by administrators, and school workers without unions might be discouraged from acting. Educators might be discouraged from reporting bullying because it could hurt the image of the school, or make them appear ineffective in their jobs, teachers said. "I think it's very difficult for teachers to report to their administrators that their kids are being disrespectful," said Wiseman, who is also a parent educator. "It's shameful for teachers to admit that, because you're admitting that you don't have any control over the kids. It's embarrassing." Teachers CNN talked with shared stories ranging from thrown erasers to verbal threats. Students are known to key teachers' cars or deflate their tires, said Lansworth, the American Federation of Teachers spokesman. He's heard about students who steal teachers' property; cyber-bully teachers by creating fake Facebook pages or postings; push teachers to snap, and capture teachers' responses on camera. "We're supposed to be strong," said teacher Hall. "It's the same embarrassment that kids feel." Just as students can create hostile environments for each other, they can do the same toward teachers, school janitors or cafeteria staff, Hall said. He said he worked with a Jewish teacher who felt intimidated by a student who professed to be a neo-Nazi. The student, he said, would insist on reading Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in the teacher's study hall periods. "A kid may not be doing anything he can't do, but he's using his rights to extend intimidation against a teacher," Hall said. Outside the view of principals and parents, workers who aren't perceived to have power in school communities -- bus monitors, for example -- are often targets, educators said. "If there are children who feel empowered to abuse somebody that they see as weaker, then it can happen that those children would go after an adult, especially someone that they see as someone without any authority," Wiseman said. Some educators said bullying is a matter of perspective; they draw a line between bad behavior and bullying at different points. Elizabeth Jordan, a middle school teacher from California, said it's important to remember that kids have their own struggles, too -- few coping tools, rapidly changing bodies and bullies of their own. "It's just sort of an epidemic of the age that I teach, that the kids can be very angry," Jordan said. "You're going to find that the common thought everywhere is that they should get shipped out to an island for three years and they'll come back as normal human beings. But you have to have a certain attitude when you teach middle school. I try to keep a sense of humor." When children cross "lines of respect" with peers and teachers at early ages, it's misbehavior, said Ana Messinger, a fourth-grade teacher from South Carolina. As they get older, students figure out what they can and cannot get away with -- and who will tolerate such behavior. "When it becomes consistently directed at another, it's bullying," Messinger said. "I have seen incidences that have crossed the line of respect, of empathy for other people, absolutely."

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Changes to Visitor Service due to Sequestration Due to mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts, some visitor services in this park have changed. Please check the Plan Your Visit section for more information. Balloons, Hot Coals, and the Earth People gather at parks to have a good time, share a meal, play, and relax. They have a right to expect the National Park Service to address hazards and enforce regulations to minimize damage to parks and neighboring areas. Some of these hazards may not be apparent to the average visitor. In the 1980s marine animals stranded on beaches were found to be starving with stomachs full of plastics. Biologists found these whales, turtles, and other animals were eating balloons, bags, and other plastic debris, washed from land to the ocean, mistaking the plastics for food. Helium filled balloons have been found hundreds of miles from their release sites, sometimes drifting over water or near water on the wind. The National Park Service responded to this threat to marine life with legislation prohibiting helium filled balloons in parks to prevent injury and death to marine animals. Please leave balloons at home, inside, where they can not escape to become deadly. Grass and wood (trees) are fuel for fires. Hot coals kill grass and trees when dumped on the grass and the base of trees. Take responsibility for proper disposal of coals in a park grill or in a closed, fire proof container when you leave. Leave the trees and grass alive. Likewise, keep hot coals away from structures and play areas where a breeze could blow a cinder to dry grass and start a wildfire where people are gathered. If you enjoy sea food from the Chesapeake Bay, you may want to pay close attention to protecting that grass and those trees from damage by soil compaction from heavy foot traffic or other threats. These park areas are filters for a host of chemicals that come from the roads and neighborhoods and flow right into the Anacostia River and on to the Chesapeake Bay. Each blade of grass, each tree, no matter how small, is a part of a green defense that encourages clean water in the Chesapeake Bay, and sea food for years to come. Did You Know? Washington DC is is the middle of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Trash and balloons from the neighborhood or park go from the streets to the Bay and oceans where it may kill marine life. Do your part to keep litter in its place. More...

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Nukina Kaioku, Japanese Ink on paper; mounted on silver leaf as a six-fold screen 67 inches x 11 feet 8 1/2 inches (170.2 x 356.9 cm) Each image: 54 x 20 inches (137.2 x 50.8 cm) Each panel: 65 x 23 inches (165.1 x 58.4 cm) Purchased with the Henry B. Keep Fund, 2005 [ More Details ] In the seventeenth century, in response to the ideas of self-expression traveling from China, the Japanese created their own, highly sophisticated version of the Chinese literati culture. This exhibition explores the works of art that flourished as a result, both collaborative works and unique objects created by individual artists. One important avenue for the importation of works from the continent were the Chinese Zen priests, particularly those belonging to the Ōbaku temple Mampuku-ji. A rare handscroll of calligraphies by fifteen early leaders of the sect, established in 1661 near Kyoto, Japan, is on view in this exhibition. Collaborative works became a hallmark of Japanese literati culture, whether in the form of handscrolls, albums, or sets of fans. Images of poetic gatherings became popular as well, reflecting both Chinese culture and Japanese poetry. The literati culture also acknowledged and encouraged individuality, and even eccentricity, in artists. The free and open atmosphere of eighteenth-century Japan set the stage for a period of creative experimentation and the flourishing of literature and art by a remarkable group of talented men and women. Two of them, Ike Taiga (1723–1776) and Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727–1784) are the subjects of a separate special exhibition, Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush

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| || | Developing Essential Literacy Skills A Continuum of Lessons for Grades K–3 The continuum of lessons presented in this book is based on a simple, effective premise: Introduce and reinforce essential literacy skills starting in kindergarten, build on these skills in each successive year, and children will be reading and writing at grade level by the end of grade 3. More important, students will have the foundation necessary to continue to develop their literacy skills throughout their formal education. The book’s research-based reading and writing lesson plans follow a balanced literacy model and include the following: Plenty of modeling, scaffolding, guided practice, and independent practice A focus on skills such as writing letters and personal narratives, understanding genres, and recognizing story elements and main idea Step-by-step procedures that are easy to follow and implement immediately Supplemental reproducibles and lists of suggested texts Similar terminology and methods throughout the grades so students and teachers start on even footing each year Best of all, with minor modifications, you can implement this framework into your existing curriculum. Primary-grade students deserve a solid literacy foundation, and their teachers deserve quality instructional ideas to help them meet state- and federally mandated goals. This resource provides both and can serve as a great tool for any teacher, administrator, curriculum developer, or literacy specialist. © 2008 | 200 pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-87207-607-5

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April 30, 2009: A NASA spacecraft gliding over the surface of Mercury has revealed that the planet's atmosphere, magnetosphere, and its geological past display greater levels of activity than scientists first suspected. The probe also discovered a large impact basin named "Rembrandt" measuring about 430 miles in diameter. These new findings and more are reported in four papers published in the May 1 issue of Science magazine. The data come from the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft--MESSENGER for short. On Oct. 6, 2008, MESSENGER flew by Mercury for the second time, capturing more than 1,200 high-resolution and color images of the planet. Right: The Rembrandt impact basin discovered by MESSENGER during its second flyby of Mercury in October 2008. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Smithsonian Institution/Carnegie Institution of Washington. [more] "This second Mercury flyby provided a number of new findings," said Sean Solomon, the probe's principal investigator from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "One of the biggest surprises was how strongly [Mercury's magnetosphere] had changed from what we saw during the first flyby in January 2008." "During the first flyby, MESSENGER measured relatively calm dipole-like magnetic fields close to the planet. Scientists didn't detect any dynamic features other than some Kelvin-Helmholtz waves," said James Slavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Slavin is a mission co-investigator and lead author of one of the papers. "But the second flyby was a totally different situation," he says. MESSENGER observed a highly dynamic magnetosphere with "magnetic reconnection" events taking place at a rate 10 times greater than what is observed at Earth during its most active intervals. "The high rate of solar wind energy input was evident in the great amplitude of the plasma waves and the large magnetic structures measured by the spacecraft's magnetometer throughout the encounter." Above: An artist's concept of Mercury's surprisingly active magnetosphere. Credits: Image produced by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory//Carnegie Institution of Washington. Image reproduced courtesy of Science/AAAS. [more] Another exciting result is the discovery of a previously unknown large impact basin. The Rembrandt basin is more than 700 kilometers (430 miles) in diameter and if formed on the east coast of the United States would span the distance between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Rembrandt formed about 3.9 billion years ago, near the end of the period of heavy bombardment of the inner Solar System, suggests MESSENGER Participating Scientist Thomas Watters, lead author of another of the papers. Rembrandt is significant, not only because it is big, but also because it is giving researchers a peek beneath the surface of Mercury that other basins have not. "This is the first time we've seen terrain exposed on the floor of an impact basin on Mercury that is preserved from when it formed," explains Watters. "Landforms such as those revealed on the floor of Rembrandt are usually completely buried by volcanic flows." Half of Mercury was unknown until a little more than a year ago. Globes of the planet were blank on one side. Spacecraft images have since revealed 90 percent of the planet's surface at high resolution. This near-global coverage is showing, for the first time, how Mercury's crust was formed. Right: In this interpretive map of Mercury's surface, shades of yellow denote smooth plains of mainly volcanic origin. This type of terrain covers approximately 40% of the planet. The white (empty) slice is the portion of Mercury not yet photographed. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Arizona State University/Carnegie Institution of Washington. [more] "After mapping the surface, we see that approximately 40 percent is covered by smooth plains," said Brett Denevi of Arizona State University in Tempe, a team member and lead author of a paper. "Many of these smooth plains are interpreted to be of volcanic origin, and they are globally distributed. Much of Mercury's crust may have formed through repeated volcanic eruptions in a manner more similar to the crust of Mars than to that of the moon." Another finding of the flyby is the first detection of magnesium in Mercury's exosphere. The exosphere is an ultrathin atmosphere where the molecules are so far apart they are more likely to collide with the surface than with each other. Material in the exosphere comes mainly from the surface of Mercury itself, knocked aloft by solar radiation, solar wind bombardment and meteoroid vaporization: The probe's Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer instrument detected the magnesium. Finding magnesium was not surprising to scientists, but the abundance was unexpected. The instrument also measured other exospheric constituents including calcium and sodium. Researchers believe that big day-to-day changes in Mercury's thin atmosphere may be caused by the variable shielding of Mercury's active magnetosphere. is an example of the kind of individual discoveries that the science team will piece together to give us a new picture of how the planet formed and evolved," said William McClintock of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. McClintock is co-investigator and lead author of one of the four papers. "The third Mercury flyby [coming up on Sept. 29th] is our final dress rehearsal for the main performance of our mission, the insertion of the probe into orbit around Mercury in March 2011," said Solomon. "The orbital phase will be like staging two flybys per day and will provide continuous collection of information about the planet and its environment for one year." "Mercury has been coy in revealing its secrets slowly so far, but in less than two years the innermost planet will become a close friend." MESSENGER -- home page The MESSENGER project is the seventh in NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, scientifically focused missions. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory of Laurel, Md., designed, built and operates the spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science instruments were built by the Applied Physics Laboratory; Goddard; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and the University of Colorado in Boulder. GenCorp Aerojet of Sacramento, Calif., and Composite Optics Inc. of San Diego provided the propulsion system and composite structure. NASA's Future:US Space Exploration Policy

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What is Acid Reflux? Acid Reflux is also known as GERD, Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. So what causes it? Its cause is said to be complex. There almost certainly are numerous causes, and diverse causes may be found in many patients or even in the same individual at various times. It is characterized in that a small number of patients with GERD produce unusually large amounts of stomach acid, but this is unusual and not a contributing factor in most patients. The causes of Acid Reflux are found in the lower esophageal sphincter, hiatal hernias, emptying of the stomach, and esophageal contractions. The lower esophageal sphincter or (LES) is possibly the most significant factor for preventing reflux. The esophagus is a muscular tube that extends from the lower throat to the stomach. The LES is a particular ring of muscle that surrounds the lower-most end of the esophagus where it connects to the stomach. The muscle that makes up the LES is constantly in use, constricting and closing off access from the esophagus into the stomach. This closing of the passage prevents reflux. When food or saliva is swallowed, the LES opens for a few seconds to let the food or saliva pass from the esophagus into the stomach, and then it closes up again. For patients with GERD defects of the LES are pretty common. Two of these defects involve the function of the LES. The first is an unusually weak tightening of the LES, which decreases its capability to avoid stomach acids refluxing into the esophagus. Second is an irregular relaxation of the LES, called transient LES relaxations. Usually, they go in sync with swallowing and pause for a long time, up to a few minutes. As a result, these protracted relaxations permit reflux to take place without difficulty. The temporary LES relaxations occur in patients with GERD most frequently after meals when the stomach is swollen with food. Hiatal hernias add to reflux, even though the way in which they add to the problem is not clear. Many patients with GERD have hiatal hernias, but others do not. As a result, it is not essential to have a hiatal hernia to have GERD. Additionally, many patients have hiatal hernias but do not have GERD. It is not exactly clear how or why hiatal hernias occur. As mentioned earlier, swallowing is vital to removing acid in the esophagus. Swallowing causes a ring-like wave of tightening of the esophageal muscles, which constricts the inner cavity of the esophagus. This tightening, referred to as peristalsis, starts in the upper esophagus and moves to the lower esophagus. It thrusts food and saliva which is in the esophagus into the stomach. In patients with Acid Reflux, more than a few abnormalities of contraction have been described. Most reflux during the day takes place after to meal times. This reflux almost certainly is due to transient LES reductions that are caused by distention of the stomach with food. If you suspect you are suffering from Acid Reflux, you should first consult your primary care physician before taking other steps.

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The Online Teacher Resource Receive free lesson plans, printables, and worksheets by email: - Quick and Easy - Instant Verbs - Over 5,000 Worksheets - 16,000+ Words Age Range: Grade 9 through Grade 12 (High School Level) Overview and Purpose : Every picture tells a story! Students will enjoy expressing their creativity as they find ways to present their vocabulary words through pictures and artistry. Objective: The student will be able to create a poster showing the meaning of a vocabulary word. Poster board for each pair of students Divide the class into pairs. Assign each group a vocabulary word. Have them make a poster depicting the meaning of their word. Encourage them to cover the entire board with background pictures or colors that relate to the word. The entire sheet should be a visual representation of the word. Have each group present their poster to the class and then hang them up around the room. Offer students the option to create their posters on the computer. They can use Paint or Photoshop. Encourage them to be creative and to try to show the whole meaning of the word.

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