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Guadeloupe, in the West Indies about 300 mi (483 km) southeast of Puerto Rico, was explored by Columbus in 1493. It consists of the twin islands of Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre and five dependencies—Marie-Galante, Les Saintes, La Désirade, St. Barthélemy, and the northern three-fifths of St. Martin. The volcano Soufrière (4,813 ft; 1,467 m), also called La Grande Soufrière, is the highest point on Guadeloupe.
French colonization began in 1635, and in 1674 Guadeloupe became part of the domain of France. In 1946, it became an overseas department of France.
See also Encyclopedia: Guadeloupe .
| 3.569236 |
(AP) Many Brazilians cast their country as racial democracy where people of different groups long have intermarried, resulting in a large mixed-race population. But you need only turn on the TV, open the newspaper or stroll down the street to see clear evidence of segregation.
In Brazil, whites are at the top of the social pyramid, dominating professions of wealth, prestige and power. Dark-skinned people are at the bottom of the heap, left to clean up after others and take care of their children and the elderly.
The 2010 census marked the first time in which black and mixed-race people officially outnumbered whites, weighing in at just over 50 percent, compared with 47 percent for whites. Researchers suggest that Brazil actually may have been a majority-nonwhite country for some time, with the latest statistics reflecting a decreased social stigma that makes it easier for nonwhites to report their actual race.
It is a mix of anomalies in Brazil that offers lessons to a United States now in transition to a "majority-minority" nation: how racial integration in social life does not always translate to economic equality, and how centuries of racial mixing are no guaranteed route to a colorblind society.
Nearly all TV news anchors in Brazil are white, as are the vast majority of doctors, dentists, fashion models and lawyers. Most maids and doormen, street cleaners and garbage collectors are black. There is only one black senator and there never has been a black president, though a woman, Dilma Rousseff, leads the country now.
A decade of booming economic growth and wealth-redistribution schemes has narrowed the income gap between blacks and whites, but it remains pronounced. In 2011, the average black or mixed-race worker earned just 60 percent what the average white worker made. That was up from 2001, when black workers earned 50.5 percent what white workers made, according to Brazil's national statistics agency.
Brazil recently instituted affirmative action programs to help boost the numbers of black and mixed-race college students, though both groups continue to be proportionally underrepresented at the nation's universities. They made up just 10 percent of college students in 2001, and now account for 35 percent. Those numbers probably will continue to rise because of a new law that reserves half the spots in federal universities for high school graduates of public schools and distributes them according to states' racial makeup.
Still, black faces remain the exception at elite colleges.
Nubia de Lima, a 29-year-old black producer for Globo television network, said she experiences racism on a daily basis, in the reactions and comments of strangers who are constantly taking her for a maid, a nanny or a cook, despite her flair for fashion and pricey wardrobe.
"People aren't used to seeing black people in positions of power," she said. "It doesn't exist. They see you are black and naturally assume that you live in a favela (hillside slum) and you work as a housekeeper."
She added that upper middle-class black people like herself are in a kind of limbo, too affluent and educated to live in favelas but still largely excluded from high-rent white neighborhoods.
"Here it's a racism of exclusion," de Lima said.
| 3.182988 |
As 2012 nears its end, one thing stands out as the major theme in human evolution research this year: Our hominid ancestors were more diverse than scientists had ever imagined. Over the past 12 months, researchers have found clues indicating that throughout most of hominids’ seven-million-year history, numerous species with a range of adaptations lived at any given time. Here are my top picks for the most important discoveries this year.
1. Fossil foot reveals Lucy wasn’t alone: Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, lived roughly 3.0 million to 3.9 million years ago. So when researchers unearthed eight 3.4-million-year-old hominid foot bones in Ethiopia, they expected the fossils to belong to Lucy’s kind. The bones do indicate the creature walked upright on two legs, but the foot had an opposable big toe useful for grasping and climbing. That’s not something you see in A. afarensis feet. The researchers who analyzed the foot say it does resemble that of the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus, suggesting that some type of Ardipithecus species may have been Lucy’s neighbor. But based on such few bones, it’s too soon to know what to call this species.
2. Multiple species of early Homo lived in Africa: Since the 1970s, anthropologists have debated how many species of Homo lived about two million years ago after the genus appeared in Africa. Some researchers think there were two species: Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis; others say there was just H. habilis, a species with a lot of physical variation. It’s been a hard question to address because there’s only one well-preserved fossil, a partial skull, of the proposed species H. rudolfensis. In August, researchers working in Kenya announced they had found a lower jaw that fits with the previously found partial skull of H. rudolfensis. The new jaw doesn’t match the jaws of H. habilis, so the team concluded there must have been at least two species of Homo present.
The London Olympics are a great excuse to talk about England’s hominid history. Current evidence suggests that hominids reached Great Britain by at least 800,000 years ago, when the island was connected to mainland Europe. Since then, as many as four different hominid species have lived there. Coming and going in response to climate change, hominids probably fled England during extreme cold times when glacial ice covered the area. Sometime between 450,000 and 200,000 years ago, catastrophic flooding of a glacial lake eroded the land bridge connecting Great Britain and Europe and changed the drainage patterns of the region’s rivers. As a consequence, during warm periods when polar ice sheets melted and sea levels rose, the land bridge was transformed into a channel. This barrier probably explains why hominids are absent from the fossil record 180,000 to 60,000 years ago. It wasn’t until 12,000 years ago that the ancestors of modern Brits finally arrived on the island and stayed for good.
With that mini-review in mind, here are five of England’s most important human evolution discoveries.
| 3.487757 |
The Bible indicates that Adam and Eve's first son, Cain, slew his younger brother Abel because of jealousy over the acceptance of his brother's offering over his own. Immediately after being banished to the east in the land of Nod, Cain found a wife and raised a family and founded a "city" called Enoch. If Cain was the firstborn of Adam and Abel the second, then how could Cain have found a wife and built a city?
Creation of humanity
The Bible describes the creation of humanity in Genesis, the first book. According to the chapter one account, God created male and female human beings in His image.1 Chapter two of Genesis goes into more detail about the creation of mankind. According to the narrative, God created Adam, the first man,2 then, some time later, created Eve.3 Adam and Eve sinned and were banished from Eden.4 They produced two sons, Cain and Abel.5 Both Cain and Abel presented sacrifices to God, but Cain's was rejected,6 because he expended a half-hearted effort.7 So, Cain became angry and murdered his brother in a fit of jealousy.8
Cain is exiled
God confronted Cain about the murder of Abel and banished him to the east of Eden. The problem arises in the next verse, where suddenly Cain is married and builds a city:
- Then Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. (Genesis 4:16)
- Cain had relations with his wife and she conceived, and gave birth to Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city Enoch, after the name of his son. (Genesis 4:17)
The assumption seems to be that Cain and Abel were the first two children of Adam and Eve. Although Cain does seem to be the firstborn, the text is not clear that Abel was the second born, but only that he was the second son.5 Later, the narrative indicates that Adam and Eve produced "other sons and daughters."9 So, it is possible that Adam and Eve produced daughters between the births of Cain and Abel. It is also likely that others sons and daughters were produced after the birth of Abel. We don't know how old Cain and Abel were when Cain murdered his brother, but they seem to be at least young adults, since they are both engage in a trade for their living.5 The second thing one notices is Cain's seeming paranoia about being found and revenge being taken against his for killing Abel.10 The only way this makes sense is if the brothers and sisters of Abel were upset that Cain had killed their brother. Although the period of time between the birth of Cain and the death of Abel is not given in the Bible, it would seem that this period was probably over 100 years, since the birth of Adam's next son, Seth is said to have occurred when Adam was 130 years old.11 Adam and Eve could have produced many daughters during that period of time.
Cain builds a "city"
So, the Genesis narrative suggests that Cain had other brothers and sisters when he was exiled by God. One of those sisters married Cain (or more likely had already been married to Cain when he killed his brother), became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch somewhere east of Eden. The next problem that arises is the claim that Cain "built a city." To us, in the 21st century, this evokes images of skyscrapers and high density housing. However, the original Hebrew word, translated "city," merely had the meaning of a place that was guarded by a watch or with a wall.12 At its minimum, the Hebrew root referred to an encampment or post. So, it is entirely possible that Cain could have built such a "city."
Skeptics have pointed out that the only viable solution to the problem of Cain's wife (Cain marrying his sister) suffers from theological problems, since close relations were not allowed to marry according to Jewish law.13 However, all of these events happened before the law was given. According to the Apostle Paul, when there is no law, there can be no violation of the law or sin.14 So, since the law against incest was not given until thousands of years later, there was no theological problem with Cain marrying his sister.
Many skeptics object to the idea that Cain married his sister from a scientific viewpoint, since inbreeding leads to the expression of detrimental recessive mutations. This is why punctuated equilibrium does not represent a viable evolutionary mechanism, since species sorting does not really lead to the formation of new species, but to the extinction of the current species.15 However, scientists have developed completely inbred strains of mice whose individuals are all genetically identical. The process involves selecting out the defects. The resulting strains of mice are regularly interbred and do not suffer from any defects (although scientists also raise strains of inbred mice that possess a single genetic defect, for study). In the same way, I believe that the first two humans were created without genetic defects. Inbreeding among their offspring did not lead to defects until many generations later as spontaneous mutations accumulated. At that point, God instituted laws against incest to minimize the expression of genetic mutations that had developed within our species.
Is has been shown that the Bible's claim that Cain, the first offspring of Adam and Eve, could have found a wife is found to be plausible if he had chosen among one of his sisters (and he probably had already done so before he murdered Abel). Since there seems to have been at least 100 years between the birth of Cain and the death of Abel, Adam and Eve would have had plenty of time to produce daughters for Cain to choose from. Brothers and sisters marrying seems to be a theological problem, since the Bible is quite clear that one should not marry a close relative. However, the Jewish laws were not instituted until thousands of years later, so there would have been no prohibition against such marriages at that time. Skeptics also say that such interbreeding would have produced a genetically crippled population. However, if God had created human beings, as the Bible says, then it would be expected that they would have been created without genetic defects. The accumulation of detrimental mutations would taken many generations, at which time God instituted the laws against incest to protect against the majority of these defects.
- Doesn't Genesis One Contradict Genesis Two?
- Answers to Biblical "Contradictions"
- Eye for an Eye or Love Thy Neighbor? Are the Messages of the Old and New Testaments Different?
- The Biblical Design for Human Sexuality
- General Rebuttal to the Theory of Evolution
- Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." (Genesis 1:26-28)
- Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. (Genesis 2:7-8)
- Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him." Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. (Genesis 2:18-22)
- Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"-- therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:22-24)
- Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, "I have gotten a manchild with the help of the LORD." Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. (Genesis 4:1-2)
- So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an
offering to the LORD of the fruit of the ground. Abel, on his part
also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat
portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and for his offering; but
for Cain and for his offering He had no regard. So Cain became very
angry and his countenance fell. (Genesis 4:3-5)
By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts, and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks. (Hebrews 11:4)
For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother's were righteous. (1 John 3:11-12)
- Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it." (Genesis 4:6-7)
- Cain called Abel his brother. And it came about when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. (Genesis 4:8)
- Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters. (Genesis 5:4)
- "Behold, You have driven me this day from the face of the ground; and from Your face I will be hidden, and I will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me." (Genesis 4:14)
- When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. (Genesis 5:3)
- Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew Definitions:
‛ı̂yr/‛âr/‛âyar עיר/ער/עיר (Strong's H5892)
- excitement, anguish
- of terror
- city, town (a place of waking, guarded)
- city, town
A Related Word by BDB/Strong’s Number: from H5782 a city (a place guarded by waking or a watch) in the widest sense (even of a mere encampment or post)
Same Word by TWOT Number: 1587a, 1615
- excitement, anguish
- Incest (sexual relations with close family members, including
your mother, sister, niece, aunt, daughter-in-law, and
sister-in-law) is prohibited:
- "'No one is to approach any close relative to have
sexual relations. I am the LORD. Do not dishonor
your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your
mother; do not have relations with her. Do not
have sexual relations with your father's wife; that would dishonor your
father. Do not have sexual relations with your
sister, either your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether
she was born in the same home or elsewhere. Do not
have sexual relations with your son's daughter or your daughter's
daughter; that would dishonor you. Do not have
sexual relations with the daughter of your father's wife, born to your
father; she is your sister. Do not have sexual
relations with your father's sister; she is your father's close relative.
Do not have sexual relations with your mother's
sister, because she is your mother's close relative. Do not dishonor your father's brother by approaching his wife to
have sexual relations; she is your aunt. Do not
have sexual relations with your daughter-in-law. She is your son's wife;
do not have relations with her. Do not have
sexual relations with your brother's wife; that would dishonor your
brother. Do not have sexual relations with both a
woman and her daughter. Do not have sexual relations with either her son's
daughter or her daughter's daughter; they are her close relatives. That is
wickedness. Do not take your wife's sister as a
rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.'"
"Cursed is the man who sleeps with his sister, the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother." Then all the people shall say, "Amen!" Cursed is the man who sleeps with his mother-in-law." Then all the people shall say, "Amen!" (Deuteronomy 27:22-23)
- "'No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the LORD. Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your mother; do not have relations with her. Do not have sexual relations with your father's wife; that would dishonor your father. Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere. Do not have sexual relations with your son's daughter or your daughter's daughter; that would dishonor you. Do not have sexual relations with the daughter of your father's wife, born to your father; she is your sister. Do not have sexual relations with your father's sister; she is your father's close relative. Do not have sexual relations with your mother's sister, because she is your mother's close relative. Do not dishonor your father's brother by approaching his wife to have sexual relations; she is your aunt. Do not have sexual relations with your daughter-in-law. She is your son's wife; do not have relations with her. Do not have sexual relations with your brother's wife; that would dishonor your brother. Do not have sexual relations with both a woman and her daughter. Do not have sexual relations with either her son's daughter or her daughter's daughter; they are her close relatives. That is wickedness. Do not take your wife's sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.'" (Leviticus 18:6-18)
- There is no sin when there is no law:
- For all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law, and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law; (Romans 2:12)
- for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation. (Romans 4:15)
- for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. (Romans 5:13)
- See General Rebuttal to the Theory of Evolution.
Last Modified August 15, 2009
| 3.140486 |
The Stockholm Syndrome
when they receive good from whence they expected evil, feel the more indebted
to their benefactor.”
“Men, when they receive good from whence they expected evil, feel the more indebted to their benefactor.” – Machiavelli
What is the Stockholm syndrome?
How did the expression Stockholm syndrome originate?
What other situations does this syndrome cover?
Slavery and Bondage
An interesting aside
is the Stockholm syndrome?
Stockholm syndrome is a psychological state in which the victims of a
kidnapping, or persons detained against their free will, develop an emotional
attachment, a bond of interdependence with their captors.
This is enhanced when the captive is placed in a life-threatening
situation and is then spared. The
relief that results from the removal of the threat generates intense feelings of
gratitude which, combined with the fear, makes the victim reluctant subsequently
to cooperate with those seeking to prosecute the oppressor.
defining characteristic of Stockholm syndrome is the tendency to react to
threatening circumstances not with the usual fight-or-flight response, but by
"freezing," as some animals do by playing dead in order to fool
predators. Stockholm syndrome is a position of passivity and acquiescence that
works in a similar way as a strategy for survival.
This situation was summed up well by one of the hostages of the TWA Flight 847 hi-jack in June 1985: “They weren’t bad people. They let me eat, they let me sleep, they gave me my life.”
did the expression Stockholm Syndrome originate?
In August 1973, a 32 year old named Jan-Erik Olsson, having escaped from prison, attempted to rob a Stockholm bank. His attempt went awry and, in the best Hollywood tradition, he held four employees hostage in a vault for six days. Despite Olsson’s threats to kill them, the four bank workers bonded so thoroughly with him that they refused to denounce him and, indeed, criticized their rescuers.
here for The Name is Bond, a detailed
description of the event.
other situations does this syndrome cover?
is now accepted that there are a number of situations where people, held in
thrall by forces they feel helpless to resist, seek to appease those forces and
work with them. This is no more than a basic survival instinct.
It applies, for example, to “battered women” who display a strange
need to be loyal to their husbands or partners and often resist appeals to
escape or take other defensive action.
Both hostages and battered women share psychological and emotional responses to their victimizers. Hostages are overwhelmingly grateful to their captors for giving them life; battered women are inordinately grateful to their abusers for giving them love. Each focuses on the victimizer's kindnesses not their acts of brutality. Both feel fear, as well as love, compassion and empathy toward someone who has shown them any kindness. Such acts of kindness help to ease the emotional distress that has been created and sets the stage for emotional dependency. Battered women may assume that the abuser is a good man whose actions stem from problems that she can help him solve.
Against Domestic Violence (WADV) states that: "battering is a pattern of
behavior used to establish power and control over another person through fear
and intimidation, often including the threat or use of violence. Battering
happens when one person believes they are entitled to control another. Assault,
battering and domestic violence are crimes.
may include emotional abuse, economic abuse, sexual abuse, using children,
threats, using male privilege, intimidation, isolation, and a variety of other
behaviors used to maintain fear, intimidation and power. In all cultures, the
perpetrators are most commonly the men of the family. Women are most commonly
the victims of violence. Elder and child abuse are also prevalent.
of domestic violence generally fall into one or more of the following
Battering - The abuser’s physical attacks or aggressive behavior can range
from bruising to murder. It often begins with what is excused as trivial
contacts which escalate into more frequent and serious attacks. Sexual Abuse -
Physical attack by the abuser is often accompanied by, or culminates in, sexual
violence wherein the woman is forced to have sexual intercourse with her abuser
or take part in unwanted sexual activity.
"Psychological Battering -The abuser’s psychological or mental violence can include constant verbal abuse, harassment, excessive possessiveness, isolating the woman from friends and family, deprivation of physical and economic resources, and destruction of personal property. Battering escalates. It often begins with behaviors like threats, name calling, violence in her presence (such as punching a fist through a wall), and/or damage to objects or pets. It may escalate to restraining, pushing, slapping, and/or pinching. The battering may include punching, kicking, biting, sexual assault, tripping, throwing. Finally, it may become life-threatening with serious behaviors such as choking, breaking bones, or the use of weapons."
Differences between hostages and battered women *
|Typically male||Typically female|
|Involuntary initiation of relationship||Voluntary initiation of relationship|
|Emotional attachment to captor begins after abuse begins||Love for abuser begins before abuse begins|
|Short period of victimization: days, weeks or months.||Long term victimization. Can last for decades.|
|Public authorities sympathetic to plight, seeing them as having little control over their situation. Media attention.||Victim-blaming: "They like/want/cause and/or deserve abuse. All they need to do is leave.|
|Outsiders likely to negotiate for release. Hostages generally released from captivity or rescued by authorities.||Battered women negotiate with abuser on own and their children's behalf. Victim thrown on own devices for leaving.|
|Negotiations for release not dependent on proving they are targets of physical violence nor wanted or provoked it.||Outsiders reluctant to intervene unless a battered woman can prove she was subject to life-threatening violence.|
|Authorities attempt to capture and punish hostage-takers.||Abusers rarely punished unless women or children killed.|
|Hostages who kill captors are regarded as heroes.||Most battered women who killed their abuser have been convicted and punished.|
|Hostages are known to visit imprisoned captors and refuse to testify against them.||Victims will often drop charges and/or return to their abuser after having left.|
|Hostages report feeling that their captors, even those who are jailed, will return to capture them again.||Battered women who return often report doing so from fear they will be killed, or believe abuser has or can be reformed.|
(a) Patty Hearst
Patricia (Patty) Hearst was a millionaire’s daughter, granddaughter of the American publishing baron William Randolph Hearst, who was kidnapped and tortured by a group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
In February 1974 she was abducted from her Berkeley, California apartment and extortionate demands from the SLA led to donations by the Hearst family of six million dollars-worth of food to the poor of the San Francisco Bay Area. But of, or from, Miss Hearst there was no word.
April 1974, however, she was photographed wielding an assault rifle during the
course of a robbery of the Sunset branch of the Hibernia Bank.
Later communications from her revealed that she had changed her name to Tania and was committed to the goals of the SLA. A warrant was issued for her arrest and in September 1975 she was arrested in an apartment with other SLA members.
At her trial, which started in 1976, Hearst claimed she had been locked blindfolded in a closet and physically and sexually abused, which caused her to become a convert to the SLA, A clear analogy exists here between the case of Patty Hearst and the bonding that had occurred in the Stockholm bank incident of two years earlier, albeit that this was a rather more extreme example of the syndrome.
(b) Elizabeth Smart
Elizabeth Ann Smart was kidnapped in June 2002 from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was five months short of her 15th birthday.
Nine months after her abduction Elizabeth was found with two homeless adults, Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, in Sandy, Utah, when they were stopped by police. At that time she refused to reveal her true identity, nor had she earlier run for help when the opportunity had been available to her. Mitchell had earlier done handyman work at the Smart house.
The case inevitably provoked comparison with Patty Hearst and evoked references to the Stockholm syndrome, although the generally expressed opinion of her family and friends was that she must have been brainwashed by her captors.
Mitchell's lawyer has told a television station that his client considers the 15-year-old his wife and "still loves her". He added that he did not consider Elizabeth's disappearance a kidnapping, but a "call from God."
"He wanted me to tell the world that she is his wife, and he still loves her and knows that she still loves him, that no harm came to her during their relationship and the adventure that went on,"
Mitchell, an excommunicated Mormon and self-style prophet, wrote a rambling manifesto last year espousing the virtues of polygamy. The Mormon church has long distanced itself from polygamy and excommunicates those who practice it. His lawyer suggested that giving a light sentence to his client could send a signal to kidnappers that they should keep their captives alive.
"As a doctor, it's amazing to me that you can become so brainwashed that you identify with your captor," grandfather Charles Smart said. During her time with her abductors, "Elizabeth had the chance of escaping. One day she was completely by herself, but she didn't try to run away," he added. He did not elaborate on circumstances in which the girl was left alone.
SLAVERY AND BONDAGE
applies also to the reluctance or refusal to escape from political or economic
bondage. In the area of racial,
ethnic or geographical slavery, the oppressed usually appear blind to the
reality of their enslavement after long periods (sometimes generations) of
subjugation to political and economic forces.
They may complain or agitate, but seem strangely incapable of
comprehending the precise nature of their situation in order to escape.
Slavery, it has been said, has been the fate of almost everyone during the whole history of human political activity. If you think that you are not caught up in some form of slavery (in particular, slavery to implanted beliefs) then you are either captivated and blinded by your situation and the deceit of your oppressors, or you have had a life of miraculous good luck. If the latter then you must feel quite lonely and frustrated at not being able to convey the truth of their situation to others.”
This may be a time to recall the wisdom of Thomas Szasz:
"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
“It is so difficult to face the sacrifice of ideas to which we have adapted our lives. But it may become possible, even easy, if we understand that it is our human ability to self-sacrifice that creates the food of wisdom and a healthy mind. Self-sacrifice (of belief to better information) is the fuel of our intellectual progress.”
could be postulated that the willingness of many people to accept the abuse of
goods and service providers is merely a variant on the Stockholm syndrome, akin
to that of battered wives. In order
to justify bad choices, people will often rationalize and defend their
decisions. Mobile telephone
companies, TV satellite suppliers, internet service providers . . . no matter
how much we may complain directly to them, we tend to defend them when speaking
to others. To denounce them would
be to admit to our own insufficiency.
Here’s an interesting variation on the theme.
Helen Smith, in her TCS essay on the book by David Frum and Richard Perle, An
End to Evil: (Random House, 2004) writes:
. . some Americans seem to believe that if we can "feel our enemies'
pain," then we will be on the path to enlightenment and peace. This belief
could not be further from the truth. In my private practice, I don't work with
terrorists but I do work with violent people. I used to believe (as many of my
colleagues still do) that empathizing with my patients and increasing their
self-esteem would help them on the path to self-actualization.
course, for some anxiety-ridden patients who need faith in themselves, the
technique of empathy and support works. However, for
those patients with serious violent tendencies, just the opposite is true.
With those patients, I've found that setting clear boundaries and making
judgments about their immoral behavior works like a charm.
“Those patients who threatened me backed down only when I got up
in their face and told them forcefully to stop -- the slightest hint of
fear or intimidation (or sympathy!) on my part was met with increased
threats. In the real world of private practice,
confronting real murderers, I learned to act in ways that were different from
what I had been taught in graduate school.
there are still those in the ivory tower who have not learned this valuable
lesson. They continue to believe that to humanize and to empathize with violent
students, professors, and terrorists is the only way to treat those who wish to
do them harm. In fact, however, the old saw "give them an inch and they'll
take a mile" applies. Without clear boundaries, and a sense of
consequences, their behavior will spiral out of control until they injure
themselves and others.”
“In our attempt to be
overly-tolerant and empathetic, we start to identify too much with the enemy
(very much like those suffering from Stockholm
and start to dehumanize
the victims of terror.”
Thomas Strentz spend 20 years as a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. He was a former marine, an expert in hostage situations, negotiation and survival, and stress management in correctional environments. Also, as a crime scene assessor and profiler, he conducted worldwide research for the FBI on terrorist activities, and was responsible for much of the original research on the Stockholm syndrome.
In 1980 he commented that "the victim's need to survive is stronger than his impulse to hat the person who has created his dilemma." The victim comes to see the captor as a "good guy", even a saviour. This situation occurs in response to four specific conditions:
1. A person threatens to kill another and is perceived as having the capability to do so.
2. The other cannot escape, so her or his life depends on the threatening person.
3. The threatened person is isolated from outsiders to that the only other perspective available to him or her is that of the threatening person.
4. The threatening person is perceived as showing some degree of kindness to the one being threatened.
For example, battered women assume that the abuser is a good man whose actions stem from problems that she can help him solve. Hostages are overwhelmingly grateful to terrorists for permitting them to live; they focus on the captors' kindnesses, not their acts of brutality.
* Based on details provided by the site of Women Helping Battered Women (WHBW)
LINKS TO SITES OF INTEREST
http://www.knut.com/english/stockhs.htm#eng - English translation of Swedish knut.com website.
http://familyrightsassociation.com/info/stockholm/syndrome.html - From the website of AFRA (American Family Rights Association)
http://www.nodo50.org/mujeresred/violencia-am-i.html - Domestic Stockholm Syndrome in Violence Against Women - English version from a Spanish university site .
http://strangerbox.topcities.com/disorders.html - Post-trauma page from The Real Dark Side site.
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By the early 1920s, AT&T engineers recognized that the open wire and cable in use at the time would be unable to carry the high frequencies needed for the broadband systems of the future. So Espenschied and Affel developed a new kind of wire system that could transmit a continuous range of high frequencies over long distances.
This revolutionary transmission system was based on the use of a coaxial conductor: two concentric cylinders of conducting material separated mainly by air. This structure reduced frequency losses and provided freedom from outside interference.
Espenschied and Affel were granted a patent in 1931. And in November 1936, the first voice transmission was made over coaxial cable installed between New York and Philadelphia.
The introduction of broadband coaxial cable made possible not only higher-capacity long distance circuits, but also intercity transmission of moving images, which paved the way for television.
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - 18:30 in Earth & Climate
WUDA, China, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say a 300 million-year-old tropical forest was preserved in ash, Pompeii-like, when a volcano erupted in what is today northern China.
- Penn researcher helps discover and characterize a 300-million-year-old forestMon, 20 Feb 2012, 21:31:15 EST
- Rare rhino fossil preserved by prehistoric volcanic eruptionWed, 21 Nov 2012, 23:03:32 EST
- Ancient forest emerges mummified from the ArcticWed, 15 Dec 2010, 11:52:02 EST
- Where the wild things go… when there's nowhere elseThu, 28 Feb 2013, 21:36:02 EST
- Small family farms in tropics can feed the hungry and preserve biodiversityMon, 22 Feb 2010, 15:39:14 EST
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The Geologic Timescale
Part of the Geology For Dummies Cheat Sheet
Geologists organize the 4.6 billion years of earth's history into sections based on important changes seen in the geologic record. The largest intervals are eons, with each eon composed of many millions of years. Within the eons are eras, which begin and end with dramatic changes in the types of plants and animals living on earth. Within each era are multiple periods, and within each period are multiple shorter epochs.
Because the intervals of the geologic timescale are based on observed changes in fossilized remains on life on earth, the span of time within each interval varies. While the divisions may be confusing at first, learning about the events in earth's history goes hand-in-hand with learning the geologic timescale, shown below. (The numbers on the right side reflect the absolute age, expressed in millions of years ago, of the earth at each interval.)
The geologic timescale is continually being revised by new research and more accurate dating methods. When changes are proposed, the International Commission on Stratigraphy determines if an official change to the timescale should be made. For the most recent version, check out the Commission's website at http://stratigraphy.org.
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Good, clean and fair
Three words: good, clean and fair. What do they mean?
In the context of Slow Food, they underpin everything that the movement stands for, namely food that’s GOOD, in other words food that is fresh, in season, and locally grown; CLEAN, is food that is produced and consumed in a way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and FAIR, means fair market conditions and pay for small-scale producers (and their workers) and reasonable prices for consumers.
Slow Food sees the role of the consumer (that’s you and me) differently. At Slow Food, we consider ourselves co-producers, not consumers, because by being informed about the food we eat, where it comes from and how our choices affect the rest of the world – we become a part of the production process.
As co-producers, our choices can change how our food is cultivated and produced. It’s up to us to seek out and support, in some cases even demand, food production that’s good, clean and fair.
To do this, we need to know who’s producing our food. Slow Food encourages co-producers to develop relationships with producers whenever possible by purchasing from them, and asking for product advice and information, and giving them feedback. Direct contact between local consumers and producers increases our understanding of what is seasonally available in our region, and confidence in the provenance of our food.
It’s a win-win relationship. Co-producers are better informed and rewarded with healthy, tasty, sustainably produced food, and farmers are motivated to safeguard food quality, biodiversity, and the environment.
Read more about food that’s GOOD, CLEAN, and FAIR
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Individual differences |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
Egotism means that you think the world revolves around you, and that you believe you are more important then you really are.
Egotism is the opposite of humility.
Egotism is not to be confused with high self-esteem, in which one views oneself favorably for whatever reason.
It is closely related to narcissism, or "loving one's self," and the possible tendency to speak or write of oneself boastfully and at great length. Egotism may coexist with delusions of one's own importance, at the denial of others. This conceit is a character trait describing a person who acts to gain values in an amount excessively greater than that which he/she gives to others. Egotism is often accomplished by exploiting the altruism, irrationality and ignorance of others, as well as utilizing coercive force and/or fraud.
Egotism differs from both altruism, or acting to gain fewer values than are being given, and egoism, a determination to gain and give an equal amount or degree of values. Various forms of "empirical egoism" can be consistent with egotism, as long as the value of one's own self-benefit is entirely individual.
Egotism is not to be confused with selfishness. Egotism is likely to cause selfishness, but a person can be egotistical without being selfish, and a person can be relatively selfish without being egotistical.
- Dominance (biology)
- Emotional superiority
- Vicarious autotheism
- Ethical egoism
|This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).|
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New Jersey is called the crossroads of the American Revolution, because it held a key geographical position at the center of the new nation, and the armies were in or crossing it throughout the war. It was heavily involved in the fighting, due to the troop movements through the state, and its key geographic position between New York City and Philadelphia. New Jersey had more engagements than any other state during the war, closely followed by South Carolina.
Major actions in the state include:
Washington's troops crossed NJ from NY in 1776, chased by the British after the fall of NY to the British . In late Dec, 1776 to mid Jan 1777, he in turn chased the British out of most of NJ. See THE BATTLES OF TRENTON and PRINCETON, and the NJ Militia during the Revolution. November through December, 1776, is called the Crisis of the Revolution because it seemed the American army could not stand against the British, and the support for the Revolution came to a low ebb, until Washington reversed the military and political situation by the victories in Trenton and Princeton. During the Crisis, NJ, like many states, did not always perform well. The militia in large part refused to turn out to fight with Washington, many began to refuse to accept Continental paper money, and hundreds a day went to the British to sign allegiance papers. Much of this was caused by the poor showing of the Army, which had performed sometimes poorly in the Battles for New York. All the states at that time found support for the revolution decreasing. Still, some militia men resisted the British, such as the ones who ambushed Cornet Geary and his dragoons, south of Flemington, in mid Dec. of 1776. After these battles, the militia came out strong and defended the state well-see The Battle of Millstone for an example of what they did after the Battle of Princeton.
Many people at the time in NJ were "disaffected" as they called it- Tories and loyalist who supported the King. The revolution was actually a civil war, neighbor against neighbor, and it took years after the war to settle the old hatreds. The patriots looted the Tories, raided their strongholds, confiscated their lands, homes and businesses under the treason acts. The Loyalists returned the treatment whenever possible,and paid them back with interest, and passed information to the British about the rebels. Sometimes a father would have one son in one army and an other in the opposing camp in an effort to play both sides and keep his property no matter what the outcome of the war.
The British and their Hessian troops who entered the state to crush the rebellion were brutal in their habits, stealing, looting and raping, both patriots and loyalist. This later worked against them, since it seemed to many Jerseyians better to have local leaders than to trust to British protection after that horrible experience.
In the fall of 1777, the Lower Delaware River was held for a time against the British fleet from the Jersey shore, in the Delaware River Defense at Forts Mifflin and Mercer. In 1778 when the British abandoned Philadelphia, they crossed through NJ again, and Washington engaged them, and won, at Monmouth Court House.
The American army spent two winters at Morristown (see the Morristown site)(see the NPS site:Jockey Hollow National Park) in 1777, and again in 1779-80. Washington passed the winter of '78-'79 in MIDDLEBROOK, between Somerville and Bound Brook. In the winter of '81-82, some units were again posted at Morristown, and the lack of pay and supplies lead to two mutinies, one by the Pennsylvania troops there, and one by the NJ troops in Elizabethtown. Many times various armies passed through the state, on the way to New York, or Philadelphia, or upstate New York. The French allies marched through with the American forces on the way to Yorktown, and again on the way to New England to ship home.
In an attempt to open the route to Washington in the Watchung mountains in July of 1780, The British attacked the Americans around Springfield twice, the 2nd being one of the larger, but least mentioned battles of the war. The British were stopped at the foothills, and the Americans never understood what they hoped to accomplish. At this battle the militia came out strongly to support Washington's troops and were an important factor in the British withdrawal. This was the last of the battles between the armies in NJ. Raids continued throughout the war, especially by Loyalists from British held Staten Island and New York City.
Raids by loyalist units and from British held Staten Island, and against them in return, were common throughout the war. See Poor Twist- the death of a soldier. After the battle of Yorktown in Virginia, the regular troops just watched each other, but the bitter struggle between loyalist and patriot groups continued, and the hatred between sides remained high even after the war.
NJ made important contributions of war material such as raw iron and worked iron, including field pieces, muskets, and shot, salt, gunpowder, and cloth. Manufacturing had been prohibited by the British, and these were new and vital industries that were started.
New Jersey has a long sea coast with many small bays and small ports. During the Revolution they became important points for shipping since NYC was held by the British, and Philadelphia was held for a time. Both commercial shipping and privateers out to capture British shipping based themselves in NJ, and British losses to NJ privateers was a constant sore spot. Occasionally, the British would raid a small port, or supply loyalist units from one. Ships were built along the ocean and Delaware rivers for use against the British. The fighting force of the United States fleet, and State ships was small, but the effect of the commerce raiding on British merchantmen was an important factor in winning the war. Many sea battles were fought in N.J. ocean waters. The small towns along the shore were raided much like the Neutral Ground. They were accessible by water, provided various materials to the revolution, such as salt, and raided the British, so were targeted.
Through the war, with New York City held by the British, the surrounding areas near water were "The Neutral Ground", a no-mans land held by neither side and raided by both. The Americans could only patrol the area and post sentries to warn of attacks by British and Tory troops. They could not prevent the enemy excursions. The civil war in these areas- along the Hudson River and coast to Sandy Hook-were brutal, with neighbor raiding neighbor, assisted by the armed forces of both sides. Both sides thought of the other as little better than murderous thieves. See an example from south Jersey- The Pine Tree Robbers.
In June of 1780, with the troops at Jockey Hollow in very low morale, the British launched an attack towards Morristown, and were held first at Connecticut Farms, (now Union) and then at Springfield. This was the last major action in the north during the war. See The Battles of Connecticut Farms and Springfield
The last local fighting of the war was done by raiding Tories from New York City against the Americans in the surrounding areas, especially in NJ. The British finally stopped supporting the raiders when they murdered an American prisoner taken from a NYC prison, a Captain Joshua Huddy of Monmouth County. Washington ordered a lottery of British Captains to chose one to hang in return, and a Capt. Asgill was selected. Congress supported and reinforced the decision. Washington bargained for the murderers for Asgill, but the British refused to turn them over. They held a trial of the officer responsible, who was found Not Guilty, as he was under orders of the Loyalist Council, a group of high ranking loyalist in New York. The British broke up the Loyalist group and sent most to England. Washington, the war almost over, had no reason or desire to hang Asgill, but could not get Congress to order his release. Finally Lady Asgill, the Captains mother, wrote to King Louis XVI of France and begged for her sons life. The French minister sent a request to Washington to release the boy, and Washington was able to push Congress into acting to release him.
Finally the war petered out to an end. On April 14th, 1783 Governor William Livingston announced the End of the War. No offical hostilities occured after this, but Loyalist were still a problem, even after the war, and the militia still had to keep an eye on the British in New York City until late Novemeber, 1783 when the British handed over first Manhattan, then Staten Island, and took ship for Britian.
See The sufferings of a Continental soldier to understand the difficulties, and hardships faced by the American soldiers of the Revolution.
REVWAR '75 has several articles by John Rees on the NJ Continental Line, and has many other online resources. John Rees also has a HISTORY OF THE NEW JERSEY LINE .
The New Jersey Dept. of Environmental Protection, Geographic section, sells a map of NJ battles during the Revolution, $5.00, which is helpful. Also see my History links page.
My own pages: New Jersey during the Revolution:
The Battle of Trenton
The Battle of Princeton.
The Whaleboat Wars- crossing the water
More on whaleboats
Those seeking New Jersey hair replacement advice should visit this pages sponsor, New Jersey hair restoration surgeon Dr. Greg Pistone, to learn how a hair transplant might help them regain their confidence.
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Organized music lessons appear to benefit children’s IQ and academic performance–and the longer the instruction continues, the larger the effect. Music lessons may boost IQ and grades through technologically advanced online guitar lessons websites.
Leading researchers say the recent study builds on work published in 2004, in which 6-year-olds given a year of guitar lessons saw a significantly larger increase in IQ than a control group that waited a year for musical instruction.
Considering that study’s results, the natural question posed to himself is, “Would the effect get bigger with more than a year of lessons?”
“There is lesson amount-response association, that in general, the longer a child takes lessons, the higher the IQ and the better the performance in school.
In the recent work, Scientists and fellow researchers studied two groups of students: children 6 to 11 years old and college freshmen.
The younger group received an IQ test, an evaluation of their school grades and a measure of academic achievement. More than half of the group had taken music lessons, either online guitar lessons, in private or group instruction.
The older students surveyed in a second study received an IQ test and supplied their high school grade point average. They also described how many years of music instruction they had received and how many years they had regularly played a musical instrument.
The study involving the younger children found that each additional month of music lessons was accompanied by an increase in IQ of one-sixth of a point, such that six years of lessons was associated with an increase in IQ of 7.5 points, compared with children who did not have the same amount of beginner guitar instruction.
For the college students, six years of playing music regularly as a child predicted an increase of two points in IQ over their peers.
Overall, the study found that taking video guitar lessons in childhood was a reliable predictor of a higher IQ in young adulthood and a history of better high school grades. For the younger children, the study found a positive association between music lessons and higher school grades and higher scores on achievement testing in mathematics, spelling and reading.
For the college student, a history of playing music regularly as children and teenagers had “small but significant” associations with IQ, perceptual organization, working memory and average high school grades, with the associations remaining significant after controlling for differences in family income, parents’ education levels and gender.
Researchers are not exactly sure why music lessons, the guitar in particular are associated with higher IQ and stronger academic performance, but he has several theories: Children with higher IQs have more cognitive ability to handle the mental challenges of music lessons and school, so music instruction probably exaggerate that advantage. School itself boosts IQ, so the school-like features of online music lessons such as learning to read music might also lead to improved intellectual functioning.
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When evaluating the tangent function, to find values of the tangent function at different angles, we first identify the reference angle formed by the terminal side and the x-axis. Then, we find the tangent of this reference angle and, based on which quadrant the terminal side is in, decide if tangent is positive or negative. Tangent is positive in the first and third quadrants, where both sine and cosine are positive and both are negative.
Okay, we just learned some basic values of the tangent function in the first quadrant. And I want to show you how to find values of tangent in other quadrants. For example find the tangent of 3 pi over 4.
The first step is to draw a diagram. Done. The second step is to identify the reference angle. Now the reference angle is the angle between the terminal side and the x axis. In this case, pi over 4. Once you've identified the reference angle then you want to take, oops. Sorry. You want to take the tangent, the tangent of that angle. That's our first quadrant angle and its tangent is 1. Once you've got that, the tangent of 3 pi over 4 is either plus or minus this value. It's plus or minus depending on which quadrant you're in. And you have to remember the mnemonic all students take calculus. We're in the second quadrant right now, where only sine is positive. the others are negative. So tangent's negative here and that means tangent of root 3 over 4 is -1.
So just remember draw a diagram, identify the reference angle, find the tangent of that reference angle and then use the quadrant to decide whether the tangent's positive or negative.
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Engligh 2.2 Analyse specified aspect(s) of studied visual or oral text(s), supported by evidence
- Use exemplars or examples of student work as a model for your own answers.
- Make sure the writing is your own. You may not use or repeat material from exemplars or samples, or work written by other students.
- View or listen to the text several times from beginning to end.
- Practise planning and writing essays of 350–400 words within the time limit.
- Choose a question that suits your text and that you understand fully.
- Answer the question by applying your knowledge rather than memorising essays.
- Use keywords in the question to help focus your answer and to link back to the question at the end of each paragraph.
- Plan your answer and select appropriate evidence to support your points.
- Use the correct terminology to help analyse ideas.
- Answer all parts of the question.
- Memorise quotations so they are accurate.
- Respond to the question by explaining what the text made you think about.
- Demonstrate a wider knowledge of the text by showing how each feature of the text relates, connects, and influences the other.
- Make sure you use the correct answer booklet for your text.
- To help make your meaning clear it is important to aim for quality writing and to check your spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
Back to top
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American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Having the shape of the Greek letter lambda.
- adj. Anatomy Relating to the deeply serrated suture in the skull between the parietal bones and the occipital bone.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Having the shape of the Greek capital lambda (
Λ): specifically applied in anatomy to the suture between the supraoccipital and the two parietal bones of the skull, which has this form in man. See cut under cranium.
- adj. Shaped like the Greek letter lambda:
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Shaped like the Greek letter lambda (Λ).
- from the Greek letter λάμδα (lambda) (Wiktionary)
“In one section, Ms. Falk declares: "Dart had mistakenly identified the lambdoid suture of the skull that had been imprinted on Taung's endocast as the lunate sulcus!”
“So: nine glass and paper lambdoid forms stand clustered, as ciphers and as semblances.”
“Nine glass and paper lambdoid forms stand in a cluster.”
“One on each temporal bone and two side by side just above the lambdoid suture.”
“_Entry_ (Mauser), through the lambdoid suture on the right side of the mid line.”
“Behind the wound of exit comminution of the parietal bone, extending back to the lambdoid suture, existed.”
“The point of junction of the sagittal and coronal suture is named the bregma, that of the sagittal and lambdoid sutures, the lambda; they indicate respectively the positions of the anterior and posterior fontanelles in the fetal skull.”
“G. Schwalbe has recently used the glabella-inion line (glabella, the central point between the arches of the eyebrows; inion, the protuberance of the occiput at the median line) for the comparison of the brainpans at the sagittal sutures, while H. Klaatsch has returned to the glabella - lambda line formerly proposed by Hamy (lambda, the point of union of the lambdoid and sagittal sutures).”
“Donne 13.85 describes an athletic laborer of twenty-five who received a wound from a rifle-ball penetrating the cranial parietes immediately in the posterior superior angle of the parietal bone, and a few lines from the lambdoid suture.”
“Donne describes an athletic laborer of twenty-five who received a wound from a rifle-ball penetrating the cranial parietes immediately in the posterior superior angle of the parietal bone, and a few lines from the lambdoid suture.”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘lambdoid’.
List of adjectives such as everduring that do not frequent common speech and writing. A continuation of my list Adjectival Arcana, which had grown to over 7700 words and had become far too cumbersome.
I'm wading through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels one by one, and someday, I'll wade through them again and list all the words I learned while reading them.
Edit: I started ma...
I can use these.
Looking for tweets for lambdoid.
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About the Study
| How Does this Affect You?
You've certainly heard of antioxidants. They are a favorite term of health marketers everywhere, toted as a powerful element with numerous health benefits. Antioxidants are believed to protect our cells from damage by blocking harmful free radicals. These antioxidants are abundant in our foods such as fruits and vegetables. They are also sold as supplements or "healthy" additives to many foods. Unfortunately, most studies in humans have not shown a clear link between antioxidants and our overall health benefits or disease prevention.
Researchers in Australia wanted to investigate the effect of eating fruits and vegetables high in antioxidants, or taking a antioxidant supplements (lycopene), in adults with asthma. The randomized trial, published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that a diet high in fruits and vegetables was associated with fewer asthma exacerbations in adults.
About the Study
The randomized trial included 137 adults with an average age of 56 years who had asthma. The participants were randomized to one of two groups:
- High-antioxidant diet (5 servings vegetables and 2 servings fruit daily)
- Low-antioxidant diet (≤ 2 servings vegetables and 1 serving fruit daily)
After 14 days, an antioxidant supplement (lycopene) was added to half of the participants in the low-antioxidant diet group. The other half received placebo (sugar pill). The participants in the high-antioxidant group received a placebo pill also.
The participants were followed for 14 weeks and assessed for any exacerbation of their asthma symptoms. Exacerbation events were noted in:
- 19.6% of participants who had high fruit and vegetable diet vs. 27.5% of participants who had low fruit and vegetable diet
In the low-antioxidant group, there was no difference in inflammation of airways in participants that had the antioxidant supplement compared to those that had placebo.
How Does this Affect You?
A randomized trial is considered one of the most reliable methods of research. However, problems during the study that can effect the reliability of the results. In this study there was a high drop out rate. In this trial it means that the participants did not continue to be followed due to the diet not being suitable or for other reasons. The researchers did make statistical changes to account for the lost participants but this step does decrease the reliability of the results. It may mean the effect of the diet was over- or under-estimated. An additional factor to consider is that fruits and vegetables have many health benefits besides antioxidants. There may be other factors or a combination of factors that provided the asthma benefits.
Whole fruits and vegetables showed benefit but a supplement version of antioxidants didn't. Although one study can't provide a definitive link you may consider whole foods over supplements when possible. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables is often linked to many health benefits and no harmful side effects. Unfortunately, most Americans do not meet minimum standards of at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables. To increase your intake, gradually add fruits and vegetables into your diet. They should be a significant part of your meals, but be careful about adding fats on your vegetables like salad dressing or butter. Use fruit or vegetables for snacks instead of processed snacks. The good news is that most fruits and vegetables are low in calories and fat so feel free to fill up. It won't only satisfy your hunger but may also keep you breathing a little easier.
Wood LG, Garg ML, Smart JM, et al.
Manipulating antioxidant intake in asthma: a randomized controlled trial.
Am J Clin Nutr. 2012 Sep;96(3):534.
Last reviewed December 2012 by Brian Randall, MD
Please be aware that this information is provided to supplement the care provided by your physician. It is neither intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. CALL YOUR HEALTHCARE PROVIDER IMMEDIATELY IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider prior to starting any new treatment or with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Copyright © EBSCO Publishing. All rights reserved.
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FRIDAY, Jan. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Many of the greatest pieces
of music sound highly complex but can be reduced to simple patterns
by the brain, a new study shows.
The brain does this in much the same way that "lossless" music
compression formats reduce audio files to a smaller size -- by
removing redundant data and identifying patterns, explained study
author Nicholas Hudson.
It's believed that the subconscious mind recognizes patterns
within complex data and that our brains are hardwired to find
simple patterns pleasurable, he noted.
In this study, Hudson used lossless music compression programs
to mimic the brain's ability to compress audio information. He
compared the compressibility of random noise to a wide range of
music, including classical, techno, rock and pop.
Hudson found that random noise could only be compressed to 86
percent of its original "file size," compared with about 60 percent
for techno, rock and pop, and 40 percent for Beethoven's 3rd
Symphony, which is considered a highly complex piece of music.
The study appears in the journal
BMC Research Notes.
"Enduring musical masterpieces, despite apparent complexity, possess high compressibility," and it is this compressibility that appeals to listeners, Hudson concluded.
His advice for composers? "If you want immortality, write music
which sounds complex but that, in terms of its data, is reducible
to simple patterns."
The American Music Therapy Association explains how
is used to heal.
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On this day in 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance. For most of us, the Pledge was part of the daily school ritual. But today, schools across the country either modify the Pledge to remove “potentially offensive” words or ban the recitation all together.
Instead of writing about the Pledge, I recently came across this article by iconic entertainer, Red Skelton, which sums it up so nicely.
Commentary on the Pledge of Allegiance
by Red Skelton
As a schoolboy, one of Red Skelton’s teachers explained the words and meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance to his class. Skelton later wrote down, and eventually recorded, his recollection of this lecture. It is followed by an observation of his own.
I - – Me; an individual; a committee of one.
Pledge - – Dedicate all of my worldly goods to give without self-pity.
Allegiance - – My love and my devotion.
To the Flag - – Our standard; Old Glory ; a symbol of Freedom; wherever she waves there is respect, because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts, Freedom is everybody’s job.
United - – That means that we have all come together.
States - – Individual communities that have united into forty-eight great states. Forty-eight individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose. Read more
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American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- interj. Used to express sorrow, regret, grief, compassion, or apprehension of danger or evil.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- An exclamation expressive of sorrow, grief, pity, concern, or apprehension of evil: in old writers sometimes followed by the day or the while: as, alas the day, alas the while. See alackaday.
GNU Webster's 1913
- interj. An exclamation expressive of sorrow, pity, or apprehension of evil; -- in old writers, sometimes followed by
dayor white; alas the day, like alack a day, or alas the white.
- adv. by bad luck
- From Old French a las (French hélas), from a ("ah") + las, from Latin lassus ("weary"). (Wiktionary)
- Middle English, from Old French a las, helas, ah (I am) miserable, from Latin lassus, weary; see lē- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
“About the time Carver was recovering from rejection of that story, Samuel Vaughn at Doubleday returned a manuscript of stories.53 Ray asked Lish to take a look at it, noting that he was sticking with his title alas, he does not say what it was after rejecting “for instance, ‘Bad Check, His Mama, and Beautiful Songs.’””
“This, alas, is going to end up throwing off the "contest," because if I declare myself done at 60,000 or 65,000 words, that's not fair to Kelly would will surely write exactly as many words as required.”
“This, alas, is not a reasonable way to write a novel.”
“This cup, alas, is unuseable, because it has a longitudinal crack inside.”
“Cameron, alas, is merely reflecting the primitive state of the British debate on the EU.”
“That sort of thinking, alas, is why most of the population has such a hard time connecting with the tech world, and why many view computers and kindred devices with fear and suspicion.”
“The only other nonwhite face on tap, alas, is the unguided missile Michael Steele, its new national chairman.”
“My mother, alas, is still with us, I say alas because passed a certain point prolongation approaches uncivility ( 'un' - is also valid, I looked it up.)”
“The same, alas, is rarely true of technology, where things going wrong are the order of the day.”
“Equally foolish, alas, is the strategy of over-compensating, of putting everything out there as free and legal MP3s.”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘alas’.
Good for poetry, or just artistic on their own.
Words with the prefix "a"
All words of the poem
by Gerard Nolst Trenité
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse <...
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favorite word" and adds it to this list.
grabbable, retuiteando, leaving, fantastic, absolutely, kurwa, hella, ridic, underpass, hate, interlude, plush and 2369 more...
words to reference while writing something
My big word list.
because wordsmith is not a verb.
An assortment of words, which, when used, should inject some vibrancy into your day, hopefully expunging any ennui!
Looking for tweets for alas.
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|Home > Facts > Folate|
...folate masks vitamin B12 deficiency allowing prog
...folate and potassium, as well as fibre. Meat, fis
...folate (folic acid); excess blood loss from menst
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)
...folate, vitamins such as B12, A, and E), and prot
...folate reductase; an enzyme that regulates folic
...folate): helps make new cells; important in devel
Nutrition and Mental Health
...folate or folic acid and Depression and that thos
...folate/folic acid (B9), and cobalamin (B12). Esse
...folate are associated with high homocysteine leve
...folate essential fatty acids; and far less: sugar
Highlight any text in the article to look up more information!
Folate is a naturally occurring water-soluble vitamin that the body needs to remain healthy. Folic acid is a stable synthetic form of folate that is found in dietary supplements and is added to fortified foods such as flour and cereal. Humans cannot make folate or folic acid, so they must get it from foods in their diet or as a dietary supplement Folic acid and folate are both converted into an active form in that the body can use, although folic acid is more easily used (more bioavail-able) in the body. Folic acid is also called vitamin B9
Folate is necessary to create new DNA (genetic material) and RNA when cells divide. It plays a critical role in developing healthy red blood cells. Folate also helps protect DNA from damage that may lead to diseases such as cancer. Along with vitamins B6 and
(Illustration by GGS Information Services/Thomson Gale.)
B12, folate helps regulate the level of the amino acid homocysteine in the blood. Homocysteine regulation is related to cardiovascular health. In the fetus, folate is necessary for the proper development of the brain and spinal cord.
Folate is one of eight B-complex vitamins. Its function is closely intertwined with that of vitamins B6 and B12. Folate, from the Latin word folium meaning leaf, was discovered in the late 1930s in yeast and later found in spinach and other green leafy vegetables and in liver. Starting in 1998, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required certain foods, such as flour, corn meal, bread, cereal, rice, and pasta, to be fortified with a folic acid. In Canada and Chile fortification of flour is mandatory.
Folate’s role in health
Folate is essential for the normal development of the neural tube in the fetus. The neural tube develops into the brain and spinal cord. It closes between the third and fourth week after conception. Too little folate at this time can lead to serious malformations of the spine (spina bifida) and the brain (anencephaly). Because many women do not realize that they are pregnant so soon after conception, the United States has included folic acid in its fortified foods program. Adding folic acid to common foods made with grains has substantially reduced the number of babies born with neural tube defects in the United States.
The body also needs folate to produce healthy red blood cells. When not enough folate is present, the red blood cells do not divide; instead they grow abnormally large. These malformed cells have a reduced ability to carry oxygen to other cells in the body. This condition is called megaloblastic anemia. It is identical to the condition of the same name caused by too little vitamin B12. Folate also aids in the production of other new cells. Adequate supplies of folate are especially important in fetuses and infants because they are growing rapidly. However, since the lifespan of a red blood is only about four months, the body needs a continuous supply of folate throughout life to create healthy new replacement blood cells.
Folate acts together with vitamin B6 and vitamin B12 to lower the level of homocysteine in the blood. Homocysteine is an amino acid that is naturally produced when the body breaks down protein. Moderate to high levels of homocysteine in the blood are linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (e.g. atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke). The trio of folate, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12 lower homocysteine levels. However, it is not clear whether taking large doses of these vitamins, either alone or in combination, will prevent heart disease from developing in healthy individuals. The official position of the American Heart Association stated in its Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations Revision 2006 is that “Available evidence is inadequate to recommend folic acid and other B vitamin supplements as a means to reduce CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk at this time.’
Damage to DNA appears to contribute to the development of many different cancers. Because folate helps protect against DNA damage, researchers have looked at whether it can reduce the risk of developing cancer. Results are mixed, with benefits seen for some cancers, but not for others. The American Cancer Society in its 2006 Guidelines on Nutrition and Physical Activity for Cancer Prevention states: “Folate deficiency may increase the risk of cancers of the color-ectal and breast, especially in people who consume alcoholic beverages. Current evidence suggests that to reduce cancer risk, folate is best obtained through consumption of vegetables, fruits, and enriched grain
products.” The American Cancer Society does not endorse taking megadoses of folic acid to prevent cancer.
Clinical trials are underway to determine safety and effectiveness of folate/folic acid both alone and in combination with other vitamins in preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease. Cognitive decline and some forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, are associated with lower folate levels, which is common amongst older people in some countries. Individuals interested in participating in a clinical trial at no charge can find a list of open trials at <http://www.clinicaltrials.gov>
Normal folate requirements
The United States Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences has developed values called Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) for vitamins and minerals. The DRIs consist of three sets of numbers. The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) defines the average daily amount of the nutrient needed to meet the health needs of 97-98% of the population. The Adequate Intake (AI) is an estimate set when there is not enough information to determine an RDA. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) is the average maximum amount that can be taken daily without risking negative side effects. The DRIs are calculated for children, adult men, adult women, pregnant women, and breastfeeding women.
The IOM has not set RDAs for folate in children under one year old because of incomplete scientific information. Instead, it has set AI levels for this age group. RDAs and ULs for folate are measured in micrograms (mcg). Unlike the UL for many vitamins, the UL for folate/folic acid refers only to folic acid that comes from fortified food or that is in folic acid dietary supplements, multivitamins, or B-complex vitamins. There is no UL for folate found in natural plant and animal foods. Dietary supplements containing more than 1,000 mcg (1 mg) of folic acid require a prescription. 1 mcg of folate from natural food sources is equal in biological activity in humans to 0.6 mcg of folic acid from supplements or fortified food.
The following are the daily RDAs and IAs and ULs for folic aside for healthy individuals:
Sources of folate
The following list gives the approximate folate/ folic acid content for some common foods:
Most healthy people in the United States get enough folate in their diet because folate is added to many common foods such as bread; however, this is not the case elsewhere.In Europe, low intakes are commonly reported particularly in teenage girls and older people. Causes of folate deficiency include inadequate intake, impaired absorption, (celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, certain medications), inability of the body to use folate (enzyme deficiencies), increased folate needs (pregnancy, cancer), or increased loss or excretion (kidney dialysis, alcoholism). As a group, the elderly are the largest group at risk to develop folate deficiency.
The major symptom of folate deficiency in pregnant women is having a baby born with a brain or spinal cord abnormality. Other symptoms of folate deficiency include slow growth in infants and children, megaloblastic anemia, digestive problems such as diarrhea, sore tongue, irritability, forgetfulness and changes in mental state. These changes can also have other causes and should be evaluated by a healthcare professional.
Since many pregnancies are unplanned and unrecognized until after the critical period for brain and spinal cord formation, any woman who may become pregnant should be careful to include enough folate in her diet and folic acid supplements should be taken before and in the first trimester of pregnancy.
Folic acid may mask vitamin B12 deficiency. Folic acid supplements will reverse anemia symptoms, but they do not stop nerve damage caused by B12 deficiency. Permanent nerve damage may result. People with suspected folate deficiency who begin taking folic acid supplements should also be evaluated for vitamin B12 deficiency.
The following medications may interfere with the ability of the body to absorb and use folate. Individuals taking these medications should check with their physician about the effects they may have on folate/ folic acid levels in the body:
No complications are expected when folate/folic acid is taken within recommended levels. Complications related to deficiencies are discussed above. Complications of excess folic acid intake at levels above 1,000 mcg daily over an extended period can include seizures in individuals taking anticonvulsant medications and general irritability, and restlessness in otherwise healthy individuals.
Parents need to be aware that infants and rapidly growing children are at higher risk for folate deficiency. Parents of children with digestive disorders or allergies to wheat products should discuss the need for a folic acid supplement with their pediatrician.
Berkson, Burt and Arthur J. Berkson. Basic Health Publications User’s Guide to the B-complex Vitamins. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2006.
Fragakis, Allison. The Health Professional’s Guide to Popular Dietary Supplements Chicago: American Dietetic Association, 2003
Gaby, Alan R., ed. A-Z Guide to Drug-Herb-Vitamin Interactions Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition: Improve Your Health and Avoid Side Effects When Using Common Medications and Natural Supplements Together New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.
Lieberman, Shari and Nancy Bruning. The Real Vitamin and Mineral Book: The Definitive Guide to Designing Your Personal Supplement Program. 4th ed. New York: Avery, 2007.
Pressman, Alan H. and Sheila Buff. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vitamins and Minerals 3rd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books, 2007.
Rucker, Robert B., ed. Handbook of Vitamins. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2007.
Department of Health Folic Acid and the Prevention of Disease. Report on Health and Social Subject. London, The Stationery Office, 2000.
Kushi, Lawrence H., Tim Byers, Colleen Doyle, et al.
“American Cancer Society Guidelines on Nutrition and Physical Activity for Cancer Prevention.’ CA: Cancer Journal for Clinicians., 56 (2006):254-281. <http://caonline.amcancersoc.org/cgi/content/full/56/5/254>
American Cancer Society. 1599 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta GA 30329-4251. Telephone: 800 ACS-2345. Website: <http://www.cancer.org>
American Heart Association. 7272 Greenville Avenue, Dallas, TX 75231. Telephone: (800) 242-8721. Website: <http://www.americanheart.org>
British Nutrition Foundation. 52-54 High Holborn, London WC1V 6RQ telephone: 0207 404 6504, fax: 0207 404 6757. Website: <http://www.nutrition.org.uk>
Linus Pauling Institute. Oregon State University, 571 Weniger Hall, Corvallis, OR 97331-6512. Telephone: (541) 717-5075. Fax: (541) 737-5077. Website: <http://lpi.oregonstate.edu>
Office of Dietary Supplements, National Institutes of Health. 6100 Executive Blvd., Room 3B01, MSC 7517, Bethesda, MD 20892-7517 Telephone: (301)435-2920. Fax: (301)480-1845. Website: <http://dietary-supplements.info.nih.gov> .
Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition Folate and Disease Prevention. <http://www.sacn.gov.uk>
American Cancer Society “Vitamin B Complex.’ American Cancer Society, October 6, 2005. <http://www.cancer.org/docroot/ETO/content/ETO_5_3X_Vitamin_B6.asp?sitearea=ETO>
American Heart Association Nutrition Committee. “Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations Revision 2006.’ American Heart Association, June 19, 2006.<http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3040741>
Gentilli, Angela. “Folic Acid Deficiency.’ emedicine.com, May 22, 2006. <http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic802.htm>
Higdon, Jane. “Vitamin A.’Linus Pauling Institute-Oregon State University, April 2, 2002. <http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/vitamins/VitaminA>
Maryland Medical Center Programs Center for Integrative Medicine. “Vitamin B9 (Folic Acid).’ University of Maryland Medical Center, April 2002. <http://www.umm.edu/altmed/ConsSupplements/VitaminB9FolicAcidcs>
Medline Plus. “’ U. S. National Library of Medicine, August 1, 2006. <http://www.nlm.nih/gov/medlineplus/druginfo/natural/patient-folate.html>
Office of Dietary Supplements. ’Dietary Supplement Fact Sheet: Vitamin D.“National Institutes of Health, August 22, 2005. <http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Folate_pf.asp>
Tish Davidson, A.M.
Folic acid see Folate
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Pub. date: 2006 | Online Pub. Date: September 15, 2007 | DOI: 10.4135/9781412952453 | Print ISBN: 9780761930297 | Online ISBN: 9781412952453 | Publisher:SAGE Publications, Inc.About this encyclopedia
Neandertals made their appearance midway through the 19th century, at a critical moment in intellectual history, when old but comfortable ideas about the human past were beginning to fall apart and new but shocking ideas (such as evolution) were coming in. The old ideas did not explain Neandertals. The new ones, which could, were generally poorly understood. Therefore, no one was prepared for the sight of a primitive-looking skeleton in the human closet. But when such a skeleton appeared in Germany in 1856, in the Neander Valley (or Neandertal in old German), it brought on a sense of denial to its connection to Homo sapiens . The workmen, who had blasted open a small cave in their search for limestone, never realized the significance of their find. Neandertals and present-day Homo sapiens , although they have many similarities, have significant anatomical differences. Neandertals lived 100,000 to 35,000 years ago and ...
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Leach’s Storm Petrel Oceanodroma leucorhoa
Leach’s storm petrel is silent at sea, but it makes a high-pitched purring sound, interrupted by sharp whistles, in and near its nest. Unlike Wilson’s storm petrel, this species breeds in the Northern Hemisphere. It migrates southward in late summer, roaming throughout the north Pacific and much of the Atlantic. Small and brownish black, with a sharply forked tail, it flies rapidly, changing direction frequently as it scans the water’s surface for food. It feeds on planktonic animals and small fish, pattering on the surface with its feet and occasionally settling on the water to rest. Leach’s storm petrels breed in colonies, laying a single egg and returning to their burrows at night with food for their hatched young. In the far north, some birds delay nesting until August to avoid the 24-hour daylight of the Arctic summer, during which they would be more vulnerable to predators.
- Order Procellariiformes
- Length 7–8 in (19–22 cm)
- Weight 1–1 oz (40–50 g)
- Habitat Coasts, islands (breeding); open ocean
- Distribution North Pacific, north Atlantic, coastal North America and Aleutian Islands
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includes daily Core French
Parents can enroll their children in the English Program or the French
Immersion Program. The English Program is exclusively in English and
includes a Core French component. French Immersion provides a balance
of English and French instruction.
In Rainbow Schools, Core French is offered daily beginning in Grade 4. Through the study of French, students will communicate and interact purposefully and with confidence while developing the necessary skills to be intercultural citizens of Canada and the world. The Core French program emphasizes the development of oral competence skills while focusing on authentic learning related to real-life experiences and interests. The value of learning French, one of Canada's two official languages, is reinforced in an inclusive classroom environment. The Core French program offers students the opportunity to develop a basic usable command of the French language that can be expanded through further study at the secondary school level.
For more information about Core French, contact the Rainbow School near you.
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Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
A microscope (Greek: micron = small and scopos = aim) is an instrument for viewing objects that are too small to be seen by the naked or unaided eye. The science of investigating small objects using such an instrument is called microscopy, and the term microscopic means minute or very small, not easily visible with the unaided eye. In other words, requiring a microscope to examine.
The most common type of microscope—and the first to be invented—is the optical microscope. This is an optical instrument containing one or more lenses that produce an enlarged image of an object placed in the focal plane of the lens(es).
See also: Microscopy.
Simple optical microscope
A simple microscope, as opposed to a standard compound microscope (see below) with multiple lenses, is a microscope that uses only one lens for magnification. Van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes consisted of a single, small, convex lens mounted on a plate with a mechanism to hold the material to be examined (the sample or specimen). This use of a single, convex lens to magnify objects for viewing is still found in the magnifying glass, the hand-lens , and the loupe.
Compound optical microscope
The diagrams below show compound microscopes. In its simplest form—as used by Robert Hooke, for example—the compound microscope would have a single glass lens of short focal length for the objective, and another single glass lens for the eyepiece or ocular. Modern microscopes of this kind are usually more complex, with multiple lens components in both objective and eyepiece assemblies. These multi-component lenses are designed to reduce aberrations, particularly chromatic aberration and spherical aberration. In modern microscopes the mirror is replaced by a lamp unit providing stable, controllable illumination.
Compound optical microscopes can magnify an image up to 1000× and are used to study thin specimens as they have a very limited depth of field. Typically they are used to examine a smear, a squash preparation, or a thinly sectioned slice of some material. With a few exceptions, they utilize light passing through the sample from below and special techniques are usually necessary to increase the contrast in the image to useful levels (see contrast methods). Typically, on a standard compound optical microscope, there are three objective lenses: a scanning lens (4×), low power lens (10×), and high power lens (40×). Advanced microscopes often have a fourth objective lens, called an oil immersion lens. To use this lens, a drop of oil is placed on top of the cover slip, and the lens moved into place where it is immersed in the oil. An oil immersion lens usually has a power of 100×. The actual power of magnification is the product of the powers of the ocular (usually 10×) and the objective lenses being used.
To study the thin structure of metals (see metallography ) and minerals, another type of microscope is used, where the light is reflected from the examined surface. The light is fed through the same objective using a semi-transparent mirror.
The stereo, binocular or dissecting microscope is designed differently from the diagrams above, and serves a different purpose. It uses two eyepieces (or sometimes two complete microscopes) to provide slightly different viewing angles to the left and right eyes. In this way it produces a three-dimensional (3-D) visualisation of the sample being examined.
The stereo microscope is often used to study the surfaces of solid specimens or to carry out close work such as sorting, dissection, microsurgery, watch-making, small circuit board manufacture or inspection, and the like. Great working distance and depth of field here are important qualities for this type of microscope. Both qualities are inversely correlated with resolution: the higher the resolution (i.e., magnification), the smaller the depth of field and working distance. A stereo microscope has a useful magnification up to 100×. The resolution is maximally in the order of an average 10× objective in a compound microscope, and often way lower.
Other types of optical microscope include:
- the inverted microscope for studying samples from below; useful for cell cultures in liquid;
- the student microscope designed for low cost, durability, and ease of use; and
- the research microscope which is an expensive tool with many enhancements.
A lens magnifies by bending light (see refraction). Optical microscopes are restricted in their ability to resolve features by a phenomenon called diffraction which, based on the numerical aperture (NA or AN) of the optical system and the wavelengths of light used (λ), sets a definite limit (d) to the optical resolution . Assuming that optical aberrations are negligible, the resolution (d) is given by:
Due to diffraction, even the best optical microscope is limited to a resolution of 0.2 micrometres.
History of the microscope
It is impossible to say who invented the compound microscope. Dutch spectacle-makers, Hans Janssen and his son Zacharias Janssen, are often said to have invented the first compound microscope in 1590, but this was a declaration by Zacharias Janssen himself halfway the 17th century. The date is certainly not likely, as it has been shown that Zacharias Janssen actually was just about born in 1590. Another favorite for the title of 'inventor of the microscope' was Galileo Galilei. He developed an occhiolino or compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens in 1609. Christiaan Huygens, another Dutchman, developed a simple 2-lens ocular system in the late 1600's that was achromatically corrected and therefore a huge step forward in microscope development. The Huygens ocular is still being produced to this day, but suffers from a small field size, and the eye relief is uncomfortably close compared to modern widefield oculars.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) is generally credited with bringing the microscope to the attention of biologists, even though simple magnifying lenses were already being produced in the 1500's, and the magnifying principle of water-filled glass bowls had been described by the Romans (Seneca). Van Leeuwenhoek's home-made microscopes were actually very small simple instruments with a single very strong lens. They were awkard in use but enabled van Leeuwenhoek to see highly detailed images, mainly because a single lens does not suffer the lens faults that are doubled or even multiplied when using several lenses in combination as in a compound microscope. It actually took about 150 years of optical development before the compound microscope was able to provide the same quality image as van Leeuwenhoek's simple microscopes. So although he was certainly a great microscopist, van Leeuwenhoek is, contrary to widespread claims, certainly not the inventor of the microscope.
Other types of microscopes
See also microscopy
- Atom probe
- Atomic force microscope
- Electron microscope
- Field ion microscope
- Field emission microscope
- Phase contrast microscope , see Frits Zernike
- Scanning tunneling microscope
- Virtual microscope
- X-ray microscope
- Total internal reflection fluorescence microscope
- Confocal laser scanning microscopy
- Angular resolution
- How to prepare an onion cell slide
- Microscope image processing
- Microscope slide
- Microscopy laboratory in: A Study Guide to the Science of Botany at Wikibooks
- Micscape - a monthly magazine directed towards the amateur microscopist
- Microscope Directory
- Royal Microscopical Society
- The Microscope - quarterly journal
- virtual microscope on plankton
- A virtual polarization microscope (requires Java)
The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details
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Common Expressions for ReportViewer Reports
Some expressions are commonly used in reports. These include expressions to change the appearance of data in a report, calculate totals, and change properties of report items. This topic describes some expressions that can be used for common tasks within a report.
Many expressions within a report contain functions. You can write expressions that use functions from the Microsoft.VisualBasic, System.Convert, and System.Math namespaces, or you can add references to other assemblies or custom code. You can also use classes from the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK. For more information, see the .NET Framework SDK Class Library documentation.
Most functions within a report are either Microsoft Visual Basic or built-in report functions. You can format data, apply logic, and access report metadata using these functions.
Visual Basic Functions
You can use Visual Basic functions to manipulate the data that is displayed in text boxes or that is used for parameters, properties, or other areas of the report. This section provides examples demonstrating a few of these functions. For more information about Visual Basic functions, see the Visual Basic documentation.
You can use Visual Basic functions to provide date information in your report.
The following expression contains the Today function, which provides the current date. This expression can be used in a text box to display the date on the report, or in a parameter to filter data based on the current date:
The DateAdd function is useful for supplying a range of dates based on a single parameter. The following expression provides a date that is six months after the date from a parameter named StartDate:
=DateAdd(DateInterval.Month, 6, Parameters!StartDate.Value)
The following expression contains the Year function, which displays the year for a particular date. You can use this to group dates together or to display the year as a label for a set of dates. This expression provides the year for a given group of order dates:
The Month function and other functions can also be used to manipulate dates. For more information, see the Visual Basic documentation.
You can use Visual Basic functions to manipulate strings in your report.
You can format dates and numbers within a string with the Format function. The following expression displays values of the StartDate and EndDate parameters in long date format:
=Format(Parameters!StartDate.Value, "D") & " through " & Format(Parameters!EndDate.Value, "D")
If the text box contains only a date or number, you should use the Format property of the text box to apply formatting rather than the Format function within the text box.
The Right, Len, and InStr functions are useful for returning a substring, for example, trimming DOMAIN\username to just the user name. The following expression returns a portion of a string to the right of a backslash (\) character from a parameter named User:
=Right(Parameters!User.Value, Len(Parameters!User.Value) - InStr(Parameters!User.Value, "\"))
The following expression results in the same value as the previous one, using members of the .NET Framework String class instead of Visual Basic functions:
You can use Visual Basic functions to evaluate an input value and return another value depending on the result.
The Iif function returns one of two values depending on whether the expression evaluated is true or not. The following expression uses the Iif function to return a Boolean value of True if the value of LineTotal exceeds 100. Otherwise it returns False:
=Iif(Fields!LineTotal.Value > 100, True, False)
The following expression uses multiple Iif functions (also known as "nested Iifs") to return one of three values depending on the value of PctComplete.
=Iif(Fields!PctComplete.Value >= .8, "Green", Iif(Fields!PctComplete.Value >= .5, "Amber", "Red"))
The following expression also returns one of three values based on the value of PctComplete, but uses the Switch function instead, which returns the value associated with the first expression in a series that evaluates to true:
=Switch(Fields!PctComplete.Value >= .8, "Green", Fields!PctComplete.Value >= .5, "Amber", Fields!PctComplete.Value < .5, "Red")
Reporting Services provides additional report functions that you can use to manipulate data within a report. This section provides examples for two of these functions. For more information about report functions and examples, see Built-in Functions for ReportViewer Reports.
The Sum function can total the values in a grouping or data region. This function can be useful in the header or footer of a table group. The following expression displays the sum of data in the Order grouping or data region:
An expression containing the RowNumber function, when used in a text box within a data region, displays the row number for each instance of the text box in which the expression appears. This function can be useful to number rows in a table. It can also be useful for more complex tasks, like providing page breaks based on number of rows. For more information, see "Page Breaks" later in this topic.
The following expression displays the row number from the first row in the outermost data region to the last. The Nothing keyword indicates that the function will begin counting at the first row in the outermost data region. To begin counting within child data regions, use the name of the data region.
Appearance of Report Data
You can use expressions to manipulate how data appears on a report. For example, you can display the values of two fields in a single text box, display information about the report, or affect how page breaks are inserted in the report.
Page Headers and Footers
When designing a report, you may want to display the name of the report and page number in the report footer. To do this, you can use the following expressions:
The following expression provides the name of the report and the time it was run. It can be placed in a text box in the report footer or in the body of the report. The time is formatted with the .NET Framework formatting string for short date:
=Globals.ReportName & ", dated " & Format(Globals.ExecutionTime, "d")
The following expression, placed in a text box in the footer of a report, provides page number and total pages in the report:
=Globals.PageNumber & " of " & Globals.TotalPages
You can also refer in the report header or footer to report items from the body of the report. The following examples describe how to display the first and last values from a page in the page header, similar to what you might find in a directory listing. The example assumes a data region that contains a text box named LastName.
The following expression, placed in a text box on the left side of the page header, provides the first value of the LastName text box on the page:
The following expression, placed in a textbox on the right side of the page header, provides the last value of the LastName text box on the page:
You can apply aggregates to a report item reference in a page header or footer. (You cannot apply an aggregate to a report item reference in the report body, however.) The following example describes how to display a page total. The example assumes a data region that contains a text box named Cost.
The following expression, placed in the page header or footer, provides the sum of the values in the Cost text box for the page:
You can refer to only one report item per expression in a page header or footer.
In some reports, you may want to place a page break at the end of a specified number of rows instead of, or in addition to, on groups or report items. To do this, create a group in a data region (typically a group immediately outside the detail), add a page break to the group, and then add a group expression to group by a specified number of rows.
The following expression, when placed in the group expression, assigns a number to each set of 25 rows. When a page break is defined for the group, this results in a page break every 25 rows.
Expressions are not only used to display data in text boxes. They can be used to change how properties are applied to report items. You can change style information for a report item, or alter its visibility.
You can use expressions to vary the appearance of report items in a report.
The following expression, when used in the Color property of a text box, changes the color of the text depending on the value of the Profit field:
=Iif(Fields!Profit.Value < 0, "Red", "Black")
The following expression, when used in the BackgroundColor property of a report item in a data region, alternates the background color of each row between pale green and white:
=Iif(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "PaleGreen", "White")
You can show and hide items in a report using the visibility properties for the report item. In a data region such as a table, you can initially hide detail rows based on the value in an expression.
The following expression, when used for initial visibility of detail rows in a group, shows the detail rows for all sales exceeding 90 percent in the PctQuota field:
=Iif(Fields!PctQuota.Value>.9, False, True)
You can use expressions in a parameter to vary the default value for the parameter. For example, you could use a parameter to filter data to a particular user based on the user ID that is used to run the report.
The following expression, when used as the default value for a parameter, collects the user ID of the person running the report:
You can use custom code within a report. Custom code is either embedded within a report or stored in a custom assembly which is used in the report. For more information about custom code, see Adding Custom Code to a ReportViewer Report.
The following example calls the embedded code method ToUSD, which converts the StandardCost field value to a dollar value:
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Oshakati, the capital of Oshana Region in north-central Namibia, was widely flooded during the annual rainy season that takes places each year in southern Africa. The city sits in a flat area of meandering, ephemeral stream channels and salt pans that fill with water when Namibia’s northern neighbor, Angola, experiences heavy rains.
This pair of images from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’ Terra satellite shows the city in its flooded state on March 28, 2009 (top), compared to normal conditions on April 29, 2000. The images combine infrared and visible light, a technique that makes water (dark blue or blue-green) stand out distinctly from vegetation (red) and bare or developed areas (beige and white). Water that is deep and clear is dark blue, while muddy or shallow water is blue-green. Flood waters fill low spots and channels throughout the city on March 28. A section of the major highway in the area, C-46, is underwater southeast of Ongwediva.
Oshakati is Namibia’s second-largest city, with a population of around 42,000 people. Since the beginning of 2009, the region has been experiencing torrential rains and repeated floods. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the repeated episodes of flooding have made it difficult for Namibians to repair the damages to bridges, roads, buildings, and houses. Combined with crop damages, the devastation set the stage for food shortages and suffering in coming months. In response, the President declared a state of emergency and appealed for international aid to provide food, sanitation, clean water, and temporary shelter for people displaced by floods.
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i want to
Moles, or nevi, are very common. Moles are areas of the skin where there are more cells called melanocytes. Melanocytes are the cells in the body that produce pigment, or color. Moles can be many colors including skin-tone, pink, tan, brown and very dark brown to black. Moles can be raised or flat. Moles can have hair. Moles can grow on any skin surface, including the scalp, hands and feet.
When someone is born with a mole, or develops one in the first months of life, the mole is called a congenital, or birthmark mole. About 1 in 100 people are born with one or more moles. Most people develop their moles later in childhood or adulthood. These are called acquired moles. They are most common on sun exposed areas of skin such as the face, neck, upper body, arms and legs.
Most moles are harmless, but in rare cases moles may become cancerous. Checking moles and looking for changes is an important step in helping to catch worrisome changes early.
Some changes to look for are asymmetry (moles that do not look the same on each half), irregular shapes or borders, uneven color or large size. Also look for any moles that bleed, itch or become painful. Looking at your child’s skin regularly can help you recognize moles that are more at risk for becoming cancerous.
Your doctor may send you to see a dermatologist (a doctor who specializes in treating skin problems) if your child’s moles change or have any of the features mentioned above.
Call your doctor if you see any of the following changes in a mole:
Often a dermatologist may be able to simply look at your child’s moles and tell you if they look worrisome. If the dermatologist is not concerned about the look of your child’s moles at the appointment, he or she may measure some moles and take some photos that will allow the moles to be watched for future changes.
If a mole is getting irritated frequently, bleeding, difficult to watch due to location or dark color, atypical in appearance or worrisome, the dermatologist may perform a skin biopsy. A skin biopsy is a procedure that involves removing the mole so that it can be looked at under a microscope.
There are many ways used to remove moles. The method your doctor will choose depends on the age of your child, the location of the mole, the size of the mole and the amount of concern for skin cancer. Generally, removing moles in the dermatologist’s office is a simple and safe procedure that can be done with local anesthesia.
You can do some things to prevent moles from becoming cancerous:
HH-I-199 4/99 Revised 1/12 Copyright 1999-2012, Nationwide Children’s Hospital
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Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD, is a U.S. board-certified Anatomic Pathologist with subspecialty training in the fields of Experimental and Molecular Pathology. Dr. Stöppler's educational background includes a BA with Highest Distinction from the University of Virginia and an MD from the University of North Carolina. She completed residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Georgetown University followed by subspecialty fellowship training in molecular diagnostics and experimental pathology.
Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Japanese Encephalitis
Hepatitis A: Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver. Hepatitis A is found throughout the world and is transmitted primarily when tiny amounts of human waste are inadvertently swallowed. The disease is caused by a virus that attacks the liver.
Infection is common throughout the developing world. In developed countries, including the United States, community outbreaks still occur.
Food that is handled by infected workers can transmit the disease to unwary tourists, as can vegetables or fruit grown in human night soil. Risk for infection increases with a longer duration of travel. The risk is higher for those traveling to rural areas and for those who eat and drink in settings with poor sanitation. To decrease this risk, it is important to wash hands frequently and observe food and water precautions.
Symptoms don't appear immediately. It takes about a month before the sudden onset of fever, fatigue, nausea, and a yellowing of the skin called jaundice. Full recovery may take weeks. Death is rare but does occur. Unlike some other types of viral hepatitis, hepatitis A goes away completely and does not cause chronic disease.
Protection against hepatitis A is recommended for all those traveling to developing countries. The vaccine is especially important for those who will visit rural areas or eat in local restaurants. Three options exist to protect the traveler from hepatitis A:
A single dose of the inactivated vaccine in adults is 94-100% effective in preventing disease and provides protection for at least one year. Frequent travelers or those with prolonged stays should get a booster dose at least six months after the first shot. Estimates suggest that the booster shot may protect against hepatitis A for 20 years. The vaccine is not approved for children younger than 2 years.
Immune globulin, also known as gamma globulin, is about 85% effective in preventing hepatitis A. Unfortunately, the protection lasts only two to five months (depending on the dose). Those traveling with children under 2 years of age and those who are allergic to a vaccine component should consider immune globulin.
A combined vaccination protecting against both hepatitis A and hepatitis B is available for adults. This vaccination is given in three doses, the same as the regular hepatitis B vaccine schedule.
Hepatitis B: Like hepatitis A, hepatitis B is caused by a virus that attacks the liver. The two diseases have significant differences, however.
Hepatitis B is transmitted through sexual intercourse, dirty needles used to inject drugs, and contaminated blood transfusions. In addition, the virus can be transmitted when having medical, dental, or cosmetic procedures (including tattooing or body piercing) with needles or contaminated equipment. Hepatitis B is not transmitted through more casual contact such as shaking hands, eating, or drinking.
Hepatitis B infection occurs throughout the world. The areas with the highest number of people with chronic infection include Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Pacific Islands, Amazon regions, and certain parts of the Caribbean.
Once the virus enters the body, the virus begins to attack the liver. It takes an average of four months for symptoms to develop. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. The hallmark of the disease is the yellowing of the skin called jaundice. Death is rare, but does occur.
Most people can clear their body of the virus after a few weeks, but about 6-10% of adults and 30-90% of infants and children fail to clear the virus and become chronic carriers of the disease. Chronic carriers may develop cirrhosis (irreversible scarring of the liver) or primary cancer of the liver.
Effective vaccines are available to prevent hepatitis B. The vaccine is recommended for those traveling to areas with increased levels of transmission, especially travelers contemplating sexual intercourse abroad, those likely to seek medical and dental care in local facilities, and those providing health care. All unvaccinated children and adolescents in the United States should receive the vaccine. The vaccine is safe and is actually recommended as one of the routine childhood vaccines for U.S. children. Complete protection requires three shots over six months, but even one or two shots offer significant protection. In addition, a combined vaccination is available that offers protection against both the hepatitis A and hepatitis B virus.
Japanese encephalitis: Japanese encephalitis is caused by a virus that is transmitted by mosquitoes. This rare disease exists in much of Asia, but it is very unusual for travelers to contract it. Transmission is more marked in rural areas, in flooded rice paddies, and during wet seasons. Even where the disease is common, only 1-3% of mosquitoes are infected. The risk to the average traveler is less than one case per million per year. The risk is increased by prolonged stays in infected areas.
Symptoms include fever, lethargy, and coma. Up to one in five infected people die, and the remainder often have nerve or brain damage.
An effective vaccine is given as a three-shot series over two to four weeks. The vaccine can cause side effects including arm pain, fever, and even serious allergic reactions. Vaccination should be reserved for long-term (usually more than one month in duration) travelers to Asia with significant exposure to infected areas during appropriate seasons (often May through October). The CDC has listed the important areas and seasons for transmission on their Web site.
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If asked about Andrew Jackson, most of us would vaguely remember snippets from history classes of good and bad about the seventh president. He was "Old Hickory" in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beating the British, and he expanded the idea of democracy. But his policy on Indians was directly responsible for the genocidal "Trail of Tears."
He was "the most contradictory of men," lauded by some, dismissed by others. Some thought him a wild man, a bumpkin, and then were surprised to find him genteel and kind when they met him. He was loyal, stubborn and complicated.
After serving as Tennessee attorney general, U.S. representative then senator, federal judge and major general of the state militia, Jackson was president from 1829 to 1837. He was the first to champion the idea that more power should be in the hands of the people, even as he expanded the powers of the presidency.
Jackson came from a poor background; his siblings and both parents were dead by the time he was 14. He was relatively uneducated and therefore scorned by the cluster of men who expected they would keep the presidency among themselves. They didn't see much more to him than the crusty (and successful) soldier. As if to support that theory, Jackson, tall and lean with penetrating blue eyes and silver hair, challenged at least 13 men to duels and killed one.
Jon Meacham, author of the new "American Lion," describes Jackson as "a figure who could be at once so brilliant and yet so bloody-minded, so tender yet so cold," and says, "the complexities of his character and the consequences of his public life will always invite fresh scrutiny."
Jackson and his beloved wife, Rachel, had no children of their own but adopted his wife's nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson, and Lyncoya, an Indian orphan, whom he planned to send to West Point, but the boy died from tuberculosis at age 16. Jackson seemed to crave family. Meacham proposes the view that family was his lifelong theme and that he thought of himself as a father to his country.
Right before Jackson's inauguration, Rachel died of a heart attack. She had worried that he would let power and adulation of the people be placed above his family. Even had she lived, her words probably wouldn't have moved him. Meacham says, "He lived for power. And he loved Rachel a bit more than he listened to her."
Although Jackson had been steeped in the Bible, a contemporary said that in his youth, "He was the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, card- playing, mischievous fellow. . ." Those who knew him early on were stunned to find out he would be president.
In our most recent election, some were disgusted with the hurling of insults, lies and innuendo, but in comparison to Jackson's first election, they almost seem benign. His wife was called a bigamist (true), and his mother was called a whore. That was apparently standard stuff during that time, but Jackson believed the insults killed his wife.
Without Rachel, faced with living alone in the White House, Jackson brought Rachel's niece Emily (who had married Andrew, her first cousin) up from Tennessee. Emily was apparently born understanding the thrust and parry of politics. At 21, she knew how to run the huge home, to make her uncle feel comfortable and loved, and she was ready with excellent advice for her husband in his role as personal secretary to Jackson.
For his part, Jackson considered the couple his closest family and loved them without
Jackson became enraged when the wife of his vice president, John C. Calhoun, snubbed Margaret Eaton, the stunning and flirtatious wife of the secretary of war, who always had sexual rumors swirling about her. The secretary, John Eaton, was a good friend of Jackson's. All the gossip reminded Jackson of the attacks on his wife, and he demanded that everyone accept Margaret socially. But the vice president's wife snubbed her, Emily sided with her and the infighting was on. As one woman said: "Ladies wars are always fierce and hot." If you sided with Margaret, you were for Jackson; if not, you were against him.
An amazing amount of energy was spent on this "problem," even though huge ones faced Jackson, from South Carolina being on the verge of seceding from the union (and Jackson believed in the union above all) to problems with the national bank. His stubborn stand about Margaret resulted in Emily, someone he loved, being sent home several times and brought back again. Many readers will find the focus on this situation ridiculous, but perhaps not so different from what goes on today.
Jackson lived to be 78 — which was amazing after his painful life. As a prisoner of the British, he had to walk 45 miles with no shoes. A British soldier slashed his head and hand with a sword because he refused to clean the soldier's boots. During one of the 13 duels, he let the other man shoot first; he took a bullet in the chest, and then killed the other man. That wound caused him pain his whole life. Two assassination attempts were made on his life. In the second one, when the assailant's pistol misfired, Jackson went after him with his cane.
There's certainly much to be learned here about men (and women) in power, and about how things don't change very much. But readers may not be thrilled with the minutiae and the tiny details of political skirmishes.
Still, Meacham, editor of Newsweek, has an informal and readable style — this book is preceded by New York Times best sellers "Franklin and Winston" and "American Gospel."
"American Lion" is a good study of the times, when America had only 24 states, when the scope of government was changing and when the country began moving from agrarian to industrial. It's been suggested that reading this is a nice way to rest and recuperate after our election and see America from a different perspective.
Diane Hartman is a freelance writer and editor.
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham, $30
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Dental emergencies are common in children and it can refer to pain, bleeding and other kinds of trauma to kid’s teeth. A serious dental emergency can be caused by falls, accidents and fights resulting in a knocked out, broken, chipped or cracked teeth. Milder to severe forms of dental emergencies include dental pain, swelling and bleeding caused by various kinds of bacterial diseases such as pulpitis, painful caries, pericoronitis and abscess.
Dental trauma is very common in children (especially between 5 to 12 yrs old). Up to one-third of five year olds lose one or more baby teeth due to trauma. Up to one-fourth of twelve year olds lose or damage one or more permanent teeth due to trauma. Different types of dental trauma include: knocked out teeth (called "avulsion"), cracked, chipped or broken teeth, and loose teeth.
1. Knocked out teeth
If the child’s permanent tooth is knocked out, parents should ensure that they preserve the tooth. First, the tooth should be rinsed gently in water. It should not be cleaned with soap or any other liquid. It should not be rubbed or touched in order to prevent removal of ligament fibers required for successful re-implantation. If possible (and if the child cooperates) the tooth should be placed back in the socket. If this is not possible, the tooth should be placed in milk, water with a little salt, or simply a moist cloth. The child (plus the tooth) should be taken to the pediatric dentist’s office or the emergency room immediately. The quicker this is done, the higher the chances for saving the child’s tooth.
In the case of a knocked out baby tooth, the child should be evaluated by a pediatric dentist. However, the child’s baby tooth will not be replanted due to the potential damage caused to the developing permanent teeth.
2. Cracked or chipped or broken teeth
In case of cracked or chipped tooth, parents should ensure that they find the tooth fragment(s) and place them in cold milk, water or in a wet cloth. The child’s mouth should be rinsed with warm water and made sure that no fragments are caught between the other teeth or gums. Cold compression can be applied to reduce swelling if the lip is injured as well. Often teeth fractures like chipped or cracked teeth, limited to enamel and dentine damage may not require admission to ED. However, it is recommended that the child be evaluated by a dentist to make sure that the pulp of the tooth (centre of the tooth) is not affected and for verifying the viability of fixing the cracked or chipped tooth.
If the tooth is broken badly affecting the centre or the pulp, it may require immediate action to prevent infection and to ease severe pain. The child’s (plus the preserved tooth) should be taken to the pediatric dentist office or the emergency room immediately for tooth extraction and for the possibility of fixing the broken tooth.
3. Loose teeth
Sometimes dental traumas may result in loose or displaced teeth. In cases where the tooth is extremely loose affecting normal chewing, then it may require extraction or repositioning. This should be discussed with the child's dentist
Cavities or tooth decay (dental caries) is a bacterial disease of the teeth which when worsens becomes dental reversible pulpitis (mild inflammation) affecting the center of the teeth. Signs of dental caries may appear as opaque white areas in centre of the tooth while signs of pulpitis are severe plagues and cavities. Usually pulpitis is not considered a dental emergency for pain emerges only when exposed to hot or cold liquids or sweet stimulants and often resolves on its own. However, if reversible pulpitis is left untreated it may develop into irreversible pulpitis causing severe inflammation of the pulp and persistant pain. Irreversible pulpitis is a dental emergency requiring tooth extraction or root canal treatment.
Periodontitis is a disease which affects tissues surrounding the teeth such as gums, gum line, bone and ligament. Irreversible pulpitis sometimes lead to periodontitis affecting the roots of the teeth. Periodontitis is severe inflammation causing excruciating pain which is constant and spontaneous. Immediate treatment is root canal treatment and tooth extraction.
When a bacterial infection develops between the root of the teeth and the gum line, it results in abscessed teeth. Abscessed teeth cause swelling in the gums and gum line with or without pus formation. If the pus drains a little on its own, pain may be mild. Other symptoms include redness and irritation of the gums, swollen neck glands, general feeling of illness and bad breadth. Immediate treatment would require draining of the pus along with root canal treatment and tooth extraction.
Preventing dental diseases and trauma
Dental diseases and dental trauma can be prevented in children by following certain guidelines:-
Dental disease prevention
- Parents should develop the habit of brushing teeth in children with fluoride toothpaste.
- Children should be limited soft drinks or fruit juices which are high in sugar
- The milk children drink should be high in calcium and low in fat and sugar
- Regular dental checkups for kids is essential
Dental trauma prevention
Parents should ensure that children use mouth guards and face shields when indulging in sports activities like rugby, baseball, football, etc. Parents should also make sure that children wear helmets when riding bikes. Many falls while riding bikes or skates result in dental trauma which can be serious. Wearing seat belts in cars is a must for kids.
A note for parents
If the child has a cavity, gum problem or other kind of dental problem, seeing a pediatric dentist is essential. Early dental evaluation is better than delayed treatment. The pediatric dentist will determine the treatment plan based on the child’s age, extent of the disease and other medical history. The child’s tolerance for treatment, therapy and medication will also be considered before arriving at the treatment plan.
Parents should not hesitate seeing a pediatric dentist assuming that their child is too young for dental treatment. Regular dental checkups and following the treatment plan as suggested by the pediatric dentist is best for the child’s oral health and overall well-being.
Written by: Irene J
Edited by: Michael K. Davis, MD
1. American Academy of Family Physicians, 2003, Common Dental Emergencies,
2. American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, 2010, Emergency Care
Last Updated (Monday, 08 November 2010 16:07)
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How do we find the balance in managing natural resources to meet the needs of both people and nature?
With the 9 billion people expected on this planet by 2050, food production will have to keep up—while at the same time we need to make food better available to people, particularly to the poor. In order to make the best decisions on how to develop agriculture and achieve food security, we need to be able to see a much better picture of agriculture’s impact on the environment as well as on people.
Unfortunately, the information necessary to look at agriculture from this joint perspective hasn’t been available. For too long, people working to grow food have had a different language from those who work to preserve the natural resources of the earth. This is funny, since agriculture needs those natural resources and a healthy environment in order to prosper.
An ambitious and innovative new project aims to address this by providing the tools to see the whole picture, for the very first time. The foundation has recently awarded a grant to Conservation International. This group will work with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of South Africa, the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and a wider group of scientists to create a monitoring system for agriculture, the environment, and human well-being in sub-Saharan Africa. Why is this necessary?
First, agriculture is extractive. It takes natural resources from the earth and turns them into food. We need food—and more of it—but when we intensify agriculture, we have to make decisions about acceptable environmental tradeoffs.
We also want to ensure that farmers can take advantage of opportunities for additional environmental benefits from their agricultural practices. Since we haven’t had the right information to make informed choices to balance these goals, examples of unintended consequences unfortunately abound.
Second, the majority of people living on less than $2 a day are farmers. They, together with all of humanity, don’t only depend on natural resources for growing food, but also need clean water, clean air, and animal feed. Therefore, we also need better information to understand the tradeoffs rural households make facing competing needs for their limited resources so that agricultural policies can better serve them.
With this new information, African policymakers and the farmers they serve will be able to take actions that lead to sustainable agricultural production: agriculture that balances food production, sustains natural resources, and reduces poverty.
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Essay Format – Rules That Can Make or Break Your Essay!Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Follow This Essay Format to Achieve Maximum Readability
Everyone writes essays. Every Tom, Dick and Harry writes essays on something or the other since childhood. But do we know how to define an essay? Well, it is nothing but a short piece of writing that is usually written from the author’s own point of view. It is normally written by students who attend schools and colleges. You must have the capacity to write a good essay because people judge you based on the essays that you write. There are many educational institutions where you are asked to write an essay for the purpose of assessment. At this juncture most students find it a bit difficult to write impressive College Entrance Essays. Good vocabulary is essential for writing any essay. Well, your job is not done just by having a good vocabulary. You must also know to present it in such a way that it reaches your readers efficiently. Hence, being aware of the college essay format is very important.
An essay usually has three main parts.
The introduction is of primary concern because here is where the writer introduces the topic. The reader glances through the introduction to know what the essay is all about. Therefore one must know how to write an essay introduction. The introduction must make the readers aware of the subject that you are going to talk about in the main body. Avoid vague usage of sentences. Avoid redundancy. Use simple words so that everyone can understand.
The Main Body
The name “main body” conveys everything there is to convey! The body of the essay revolves around the core matters of the subject that you are talking about. This is where you prove or disprove something or express your opinions and so on. Here also, it is important that you use simple but effective language to reach the different audiences. This is one of the main parts of the essay format. Avoid repetition of ideas and words. Otherwise, people will only get bored. You can repeat something only when you want to stress on its importance. Otherwise avoid repetition as much as possible. There must be a flow in your essay. You must not jump from one topic to the other without establishing a connection. Finally, make the essay interesting so that readers do not get diverted. Try to write the essay in such a way that your readers do not lose interest from the beginning till the end.
The essay conclusion is a summary of the entire essay. This is where you reinforce your opinions or ideas. You can state the main points that are related to the essay. This is where you also tie loose ends, if there are any. Here is where you answer the readers’ Famous Question “So what?”! The conclusion is therefore another area of primary concern. Make it brief and simple and very clear.
These are some tips to write an essay effectively. This is a fundamental college essay format that everyone who writes an essay must know. Any essay should have all these parts. Depending on your way of writing, the content and style may differ but it is essential that you follow this format to achieve maximum readability.
Tags: buy essay, college essay writing, English essay, essay format, essay introduction, essay topics, essay writers, essay writing tips, essays, good essay writing, how to write an essay introduction, student essay
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Change comes hard to Western water policy. The Prior Appropriation Doctrine, interstate compacts, groundwater law, the "law of the river" -- all of these seem set in stone in the minds of the region's policymakers. Of course, the West's rivers aren't bound by such a static existence. Indeed, they are changing in fundamental ways, opening a wide chasm between our water policy and our water sources. This is particularly true for the Colorado River Basin.
Climate scientists are predicting a 10-to-30 percent reduction in flow for the Colorado -- a stark contrast to the rosy assumptions that underlay the Colorado River Compact when it was signed 88 years ago. Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography recently predicted that Lakes Mead and Powell have a 50 percent chance of going dry by 2021. These days, Lake Mead is at 45 percent capacity and Lake Powell is at 57 percent capacity.
Farther south, water shortages are predicted for northern Arizona communities, including Flagstaff, by 2050. The Central Arizona Project, which provides water to Phoenix and Tucson, may run short of water as early as 2012.
And farther downstream, Mexico is looking at a disaster along its stretch of the river due to inadequate flows, prompting one Mexican official to declare, "We are clearly on a collision course with a catastrophe," according to the Los Angeles Times.
Then there are the numerous environmental problems in the basin. Six aquatic species are threatened or endangered, though the invasive quagga mussels are doing just fine. The river corridor in the Grand Canyon, deprived of sediment and choked with tamarisk, is dying; the river's delta is already on its deathbed. The Colorado is plagued by water quality problems, especially salinity, perchlorate rocket fuel, runoff from agriculture and inadequate sewage treatment.
The shortage of surface water has pushed some communities to mine groundwater. Communities as diverse as Tucson, Ariz., Las Vegas, Nev., and Cedar City, Utah, are experiencing subsidence because of their excessive withdrawals of groundwater.
The sediment that once was the lifeblood of the river now forms a giant plug at the junction of Cataract Canyon and Glen Canyon. It is simply a matter of time before Lake Powell becomes the world's largest mud catchment, rendering the 710-foot-tall dam useless.
Water shortages in the Lower Basin will be greatly exacerbated by proposals to build giant pipelines. Las Vegas, which gets 90 percent of its water from Lake Mead, wants to build a $4 billion pipeline to central Nevada to pump groundwater from beneath several valleys in the Great Basin. This 300-mile pipeline is likely to lower groundwater levels, threatening a national park, national wildlife refuges, an Indian reservation, and local ranchers and farmers. The resulting loss of surface flora is not just a cosmetic problem; it could result in huge dust storms that blanket Salt Lake City.
St. George, Utah, sort of a Las Vegas wannabe in terms of growth rate (but without the sinful fun), wants to build a billion-dollar pipeline that sucks water out of Lake Powell -- despite the imminent demise of the lake. In the Upper Basin, Aaron Million, with dreams to match his name, wants to build a 560-mile pipeline from the Green River to Colorado's Front Range and divert 250,000 acre-feet. In addition to these proposed pipelines, the city of Denver wants to dramatically increase the water it pumps out of the Colorado River Basin, and the state of Wyoming recently created a new state "Dam and Reservoir Section" to investigate the feasibility of new diversions on the Green River.
These grandiose schemes for new diversions are not "the way of the future," but rather the last gasp of a dying water ethos. The myriad problems of the Colorado River point to one inescapable conclusion: Western water policy is hopelessly, irrevocably unsustainable. Policies that once created stability are now an albatross, preventing the West from making fundamental changes in the way it allocates and uses its water.
It is time for a new era in water management. The first step requires dispensing with the absurd notion that infinite growth can take place in a region with severely constrained resources.
The second step is to realize that agriculture, which uses the lion's share of the river, is going to take a big hit. Many of the crops grown in the basin are low value, such as hay, or are commodity crops that are already over-produced in the United States.
And the third step requires improving the quality of the water by forcing all polluters to clean up their mess. That includes agriculture, mining and municipalities with inadequate urban treatment. These changes will not be easy -- it's like prescribing a root canal for an entire region without offering nitrous oxide. But the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to make the transition to a policy that meets the reasonable needs of cities, a service economy and the age of limits.
Dan McCool is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a political science professor and director of environmental studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
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|abamp the cgs unit of current in the electromagnetic system; the constant current that, when flowing through two parallel straight infinitely long conductors 1 centimetre apart, will produce a force between them of 2 dynes per centimetre: equivalent to 10 amperes|
|a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.|
|an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle.|
abampere ab·am·pere (āb-ām'pēr')
The centimeter-gram-second electromagnetic unit of current equal to ten amperes.
|abampere (āb-ām'pîr') Pronunciation Key
The unit of electromagnetic current in the centimeter-gram-second system, equal to ten amperes.
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By Pure Matters
Your bones are constantly changing. Old bone continuously breaks down and is replaced by new. When you're young, your body makes bone fast enough to replace what's lost. This helps you reach your peak bone mass, the point at which your bones are strongest.
At about age 30 (if you're a woman; later, if you're a man), you start to lose bone mass faster than your body can replace it, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This increases your risk for osteoporosis, a disease that causes bones to become less dense. This makes them weak and more vulnerable to breaks. The disease affects 10 million Americans, 8 million of whom are women.
Men begin to catch up to women in rate of bone loss as they age. By ages 65 to 70, men and women lose bone at the same rate, the NIH says. And the ability to absorb calcium, which is important for bone health, decreases for both men and women. Women's bone loss is tied to menopause and the lack of estrogen; for men, osteoporosis is often caused by medications used to treat asthma and rheumatoid arthritis; low levels of testosterone; alcohol abuse; smoking; gastrointestinal diseases that interfere with the body's ability to absorb nutrients; losing too much calcium through the urine; or lack of mobility.
Helping your bones
You can help prevent osteoporosis by including enough calcium in your diet and exercising regularly. Like muscles, bones are living tissue, and exercise makes them stronger. In fact, studies have shown that exercise even may help generate new bone in older adults. Two types of exercise can help build bones:
• Weight-bearing exercises. When your feet and legs bear all of your weight -- as they do when you're walking -- your muscles and bones become stronger because they're working against gravity. Jogging, climbing stairs, dancing, hiking and sports such as tennis, basketball and soccer can benefit your bones, too. Swimming and bicycling are good ways to exercise your heart and lungs, but they don't strengthen your bones because they're not weight-bearing exercises.
• Resistance exercises. Also known as strength training, these types of activities use your muscles to pull or push against something to build bone and muscle strength. Free-weights, weight machines and other fitness tools such as elastic bands, or weights designed to be used in a pool are often used for strength training. To avoid possible injury, be sure to learn the proper techniques for the activity you're doing. Many gyms offer classes, or you can work with a trainer.
In addition to exercise, men and women should make sure they get adequate amounts of calcium and vitamin D; avoid smoking; use alcohol moderately; and talk to their health care provider to find out if any prescribed medications increase bone loss.
Tips to get started
Talk with your health care provider before beginning any exercise program. This is especially important if you have a chronic condition such as heart disease. If you're a woman older than age 65, your provider may recommend a bone mineral density test to screen for osteoporosis. You may need to be tested earlier if you have other risk factors. If you have osteoporosis, your provider may advise you to avoid certain activities and suggest medication to help slow bone loss.
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World's leggiest millipede put under microscope
The anatomical secrets of the world's leggiest creature, a millipede with 750 legs, have been revealed by scientists.
The species, called Illacme plenipes, was first seen 80 years ago but was recently rediscovered in California.
Now researchers have found that as well as bearing an extreme number of legs, the creature may have more in common with millipedes that lived millions of years ago than today's species.
The study is published in the journal ZooKeys.
"It's a kind of mythical creature in the millipede world," said Dr Paul Marek, an entomologist from the University of Arizona and the lead author of the paper.
In 2005, Dr Marek and his brother discovered some of the leggy arthropods lurking under boulders in the mountains of California. Until then, I.plenipes had not been glimpsed since 1926.
A paper published in the journal Nature outlined the rediscovery and described the creature's basic biology, but the new research looked at the creature's anatomy in much more detail.
Despite the name - most millipedes have far fewer than 1,000 feet. Most species belonging to the most common order Polydesmida have an average of just 62.
But Dr Marek confirmed that I.plenipes safely holds the record for the leggiest creature: females can have up to 750 legs, while males have up to 562.
"It seems like these legs evolved for their subterranean lifestyle," he explained.
"They live deep underground: we found them about 10-15cm (4-6in) below the soil's surface.
"They are typically found clinging onto sandstone boulders. Based on functional morphology of closely related species, it seems like all of these legs evolved to burrow under the ground and to cling onto these large boulders."
Though they have many limbs, the creatures are small, measuring about about 3cm-long (1in).
Close examination of the creature revealed that it had some ancient features.
End Quote Dr Paul Marek University of Arizona
Its anatomy retains a number of primitive characteristics”
Most millipedes chew leaves and decaying vegetation with grinding mouth parts.
But the scientists found that this species had a more rudimentary anatomy. Its jaws are fused to its head, and Dr Marek believes that it pierces and then sucks up plant and fungal tissues to satisfy its appetite.
The creature's body segments were also more similar to ancient millipedes than to most other species found today.
Dr Marek said that millions of years ago creatures like I.plenipes would have been widespread, but now it was one of the last of its kind.
He explained: "It is a relict species. Its most closely related lineages are in South Africa and there is nothing related to this species in the entire North America region. Its anatomy retains a number of primitive characteristics."
The animal, which also has a number of other unusual features such as body hairs that secrete silk, is thought to be extremely rare and only found in a small area close to San Francisco.
Dr Marek said: "Based on our search of the area, it seem like it is known in three spots - and these spots are about 4.5km (3 miles) away from one and other.
"It does seem that this creature is restricted both in terms of geography and also evolutionarily."
Dr Marek, a self-confessed millipede enthusiast, said that rediscovering the record breaking creature was a staggering experience, but that it would be "awesome" if someone unearthed an even leggier creature.
He said: "The name millipede would no longer be a misnomer - it would only need to add a few more segments to get an even 1,000 (legs), which would be fantastic."
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Field Trip Planner
Activities for Students
From the History Center
Contact Us: [email protected]
Many historical sites, including Civil War sites, will provide field trip guidelines and procedures to help you during the field trip planning process. The following general guidelines will also help you plan a memorable learning experience for your students.
1.) Select a Civil War site.
Civil War sites range from plantation homes to cemeteries, from stops on the Underground Railroad to battlefield parks.
The Civil War Trust has a list of more than 500 sites across the nation that are part of our Civil War Discovery Trail.
Find a Civil War site near you »
2.) Scout the site.
Take a trip to the site on your own to make certain that it is appropriate for your students and your curriculum. Many sites will waive entrance fees if you let them know that you are a teacher scouting for a field trip.
3.) Contact the site to make arrangements for your group.
Some sites offer their own programs for school groups or will tailor their programs based on your curriculum. Have all the details of your trip on hand, such as the number of students, your length of stay, and so on. Discuss any special needs you and your students might have. Don't forget to ask if the site has restrooms and lunch facilities. Ask the site if it has any special rules of its own concerning fees, number of chaperones, etc.
4.) Make arrangements with your school administration.
Follow your school district's procedures concerning the following:
- - Health and safety;
- - Permission slips;
- - Transportation arrangements;
- - Hiring substitutes;
- - Finding chaperones
(education students from a local college may be available to assist);
- - Any special policies and procedures outlined by your school district.
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Mukat and his people lived in one big house. Animals were human then. They were all very happy here. Moon taught the people many games and they loved her very much. Every morning she took her people far away to the water, and here they played all day long, returning to Mukat’s house late in the evening.
She taught them how to make things. “Cat’s cradle” was one of the games she taught them. It was a game played by making figures by means of string twined around the fingers. There were many figures they had to know. Later when they died and went to Telmekish, they had to know how to make these figures and tell Montakwet, the guardian. If they could not do this, they were not admitted.
Moon taught them that they would be getting married after a while, and explained to them what this meant. She said they would have children; that they must name their children and have songs for them. She said these children should be instructed in the right way to live; that the old people were the best instructors.
Rattlesnake was the only one that remained at home all day with Mukat. He stayed at the door of Mukat’s house all day long. When the people returned at night, there was one man among them who always danced on and around the snake. This was To, the funny man whom they all loved; he was very tiny. To made fun of Rattlesnake and made his head flat, by dancing on him; it is still flat. Rattlesnake complained to Mukat and asked him what to do.
At this time Rattlesnake was not poisonous, for he had no teeth. Mukat decided that Rattlesnake should have teeth. He tried many ways of making them for him, but none succeeded until he pulled some of his whiskers out and used them for teeth. He then made the teeth poisonous and told Rattlesnake to bite To when To came home that night and danced on him, and then he must run away to the rocks so that no one could find him. Accordingly, when the people returned that night, very happy as usual, To began dancing on Rattlesnake, but Rattlesnake bit him and then ran away. Rattlesnake was the first to leave the big house and not return.
Moon was very beautiful. One night Mukat seemed to notice this for the first time, and desired her as his wife. He did not tell her, but she knew it, and it made her feel very sad, for he was her father. She decided to leave, and told her people. She told them that there were a great many games she had not yet taught them, but that it was now too late. She said she would never die or have diseases as other people had, for Tamaioit had helped to create her. She told the women how to care for themselves during menstruation and pregnancy; they must not eat salt, meat, or fat, or drink cold water. She showed them certain herbs to use if they became ill.
That night she left and got beetles and ants to crawl over her tracks so that no one would follow her. Everyone felt very badly and tried to find her. Coyote went to the water where they always bathed to look for her. He saw her reflection in the water and thought it was she. He jumped in after her but couldn’t find her. When he climbed out and looked in again, he was sure he saw her and again he jumped in, with the same result. As he came out this time, Moon, who had gone to the sky, spat on him. He looked up to see where the spit had come from, and he saw her. He begged her to return but she would not talk, only smiled. He then returned to the others to tell them where their beloved playmate and teacher had gone. He felt very sad, so he hung his head as he said, “Here she is, here she is.” The people looked down where he was looking, but of course could not see. Finally someone happened to look up and there saw Moon in the sky. She seemed very far away and they all wept. Each night, for a long time, she went higher up, until she was where we now see her.3
Soon Mukat decided he want for have a little more fun with his people. For several days he thought about it. Then one day Sun rose out of the east. As soon as it was fully light, the people all talked in different languages and could not understand each other. Sun made them hot and many ran in search of shade. Many turned into trees or animals or birds. This probably was meant to happen from the beginning. Those that looked for water and found water, turned into sea animals. Those that looked for shade turned into trees. The people who stayed with Mukat remained human.
Mukat taught them how to make bows and arrows; just what kind of material to use, how to dry it, and how to make arrowheads out of rock. When the people put them down, after making them, the arrows made a queer noise. It frightened the people and they would not touch them. Mukat had showed them how to use these arrows and had promised that the arrows would not hurt them, but they were afraid when they heard this sound. One among them, Takwich, picked up an arrow, and said, “Why be afraid of this? It will not hurt you.” He put one right through his stomach and then pulled it out and it left no opening. When they saw this, the others were afraid no longer.
Mukat lined them up on two sides and they shot at each other, as he had shown them how to do. The dust became very thick, so they stopped, and then they saw that several of their number were dead. They wept, for they could not bring them to life. Mukat told them not to worry; that the dead would return.
At night the people heard them return, but it was only their spirits. These spirits could not find their abiding place; they had hunted in all directions. Finally they thought of Tamaioit. They started down into the earth to find him. Tamaioit heard them coming and stopped them before they got there. He told them that he was sorry for them, that he had wanted the people to live always, but that he saw now why Mukat had made them as he did. It was so there would be sorrow in the world. Tamaioit said that, since they were not his people, he could do nothing for them. He said his people were all happy and he did not want any other kind down there. However, he could tell them something that might bring them back to life. They should go to the water and smear mud all over themselves and twine brush around their bodies. They did as he advised them, but it did no good.
The spirits then returned to Mukat and asked him where to go. He told them about Telmekish and that there was no sickness or sorrow there. He said this world was just to raise children in; Telmekish, the next world, would last forever.
At the time Sun came the people turned different colors. The Negroes are those who stayed close to Sun. White people ran farther away than anyone else. Indians went only a short distance, so they are brown.
3 Formerly, the Cahuilla would not look at the full moon, for fear of disease. If they ate during an eclipse, they were likely to eat a “moon spirit.” Whoever died during an eclipse was thought to have eaten one of these moon spirits.
|© Agua Caliente Cultural Museum. All rights reserved.|
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July 29, 1999 LEXINGTON, KY (July 26, 1999) - Spinal cord injuries result from damage to cells during the weeks following the injury as well as at the time of the trauma. In the August issue of Nature Medicine, University of Kentucky College of Medicine researchers report the discovery of the molecular signals that lead to apoptosis, or programmed cell death, following spinal cord injury.
"This work represents a major advancement in our understanding of how and why cells in the spinal cord die following injury," said Joe Springer, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, UK College of Medicine, and lead author of the paper. "This study will be important in directing future research efforts, including the development of drugs to limit the consequences of spinal cord injury."
About 250,000 Americans have spinal cord injuries, and about 10,000 new cases occur each year. In Kentucky, about 1,100 people suffer from spinal cord injuries with about 200 new cases each year.
People between the ages of 16 and 30 account for more than half of all spinal cord injuries, and spinal cord injuries are three times more prevalent in males than females.
The incidence of spinal cord injuries is rare compared to other health problems, such as heart disease, cancer or stroke. However, the total financial burden of spinal cord injuries is disproportionately high. The estimated cost of spinal cord injuries in the United States was $7.7 billion in 1995, and a 27-year-old with complete quadriplegia will incur lifetime costs of about $1 million.
Apoptosis is a "suicide" process. The dying cell activates internal biochemical reactions, such as fragmentation of the DNA, to disassemble itself systematically. One cell type that undergoes apoptosis after the injury is the oligodendroglia, which provides myelin to the nerves controlling motor function. Myelin acts as an essential insulator of nerves, and without myelin, the nerves do not function properly, contributing to paralysis.
"Through molecular signals, the injury spreads throughout the spinal cord," said Pamela Knapp, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, UK College of Medicine, and co-author of the paper. "The oligodendroglia, although undamaged by the original injury, can die in the weeks following the trauma. By developing therapeutic strategies that can prevent the death of the oligodendroglia by inhibiting the apoptotic molecular pathway, we hope to promote nerve function and improve recovery from spinal cord injury."
The caspase family of proteases, enzymes that destroy proteins by breaking them into individual amino acids, regulates apoptosis in humans and other mammals. This research clearly shows that in cells that are damaged by spinal cord injuries, the release of a protein called cytochrome c from the mitochondria causes the proteins Apaf-1 and procaspase-9 to bind together. This, in turn, activates caspase-3 which then cleaves several proteins (gelsolin, PAK2, fodrin, and DFF40/CAD), resulting in DNA fragmentation and destruction of the cellular structure. These molecular signals then spread to surrounding areas of the spinal cord.
This research project was one of the first supported by the Kentucky Spinal Cord and Head Injury Research Trust (KSCHIRT). Established by the 1994 General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, KSCHIRT allocates funds to support spinal cord and head injury research at UK and the University of Louisville with the major goals of understanding how cells die following head or spinal cord injury and identifying effective therapeutic treatments.
"The UK Chandler Medical Center has several established clinical and basic scientists investigating spinal cord and head injury," Springer said. "With continued support from KSCHIRT and other funding organizations, the UK Chandler Medical Center clearly has the potential to become an internationally-recognized leader in discovering effective ways to treat people suffering from these devastating injuries."
Robert Azbill, a graduate student in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, UK College of Medicine, also contributed to the paper.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University Of Kentucky Medical Center.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
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RIM-8 Talos was a long-range high-altitude cruise missile designed to give the fleet stand-off protection against enemy aircraft and the ability to attack distant surface targets. It could attack aircraft, missiles, ships, radar installations and other shore facilities with either conventional or nuclear warheads. Talos had an effective range of about 100 miles and could engage airborne targets from 50 feet to 70,000 feet altitude.
Talos was the first surface-to-air and surface-to-surface guided missile developed by the U.S. Navy. It was a product of the Bumblebee program that started during World War II, along with the other "Ts", RIM-2 Terrier and RIM-24 Tartar. Damage inflicted by Japanese Kamikaze aircraft and German guided air to surface missiles and glide bombs during World War II brought light to the need for more effective fleet air defense. The three "Ts" were the first fleet missile defenses against the rapidly developing aircraft and missile threats.
Talos was the first operational beam riding missile and the first with semi-active homing. It was supposed to be the first antiaircraft missile deployed to the fleet, but because of the complexity of the Talos system and a series of performance improving design changes, the missile wasn't actually deployed until after the Terrier system was deployed. Originally intended for deployment in 1949, the missile didn't become operational until the commissioning of the USS Galveston CLG-3 in 1959.
The Talos missile relied upon guidance information from the firing ship. This limited the number of missiles a single ship could control at the same time. The guidance system transmitted a signal to direct the desired flight path. The missile followed this guidance signal to the target. A significant advantage of this beam riding control method was that the missile did not end up in a long, circuitous, fuel consuming tail chase as it approached the target. Instead the missile was guided to an altitude where it operated efficiently, and it was then flown to a predicted intercept point ahead of the target. This gave the missile a very long effective range. The ship illuminated the target with a signal from guidance radars and the missile homed in on the signal reflected from the target - this is called "semi-active homing." In the final phase of the intercept the missile dove on the target from above.
The Talos missile success rate was better than 80% but the overall system effectiveness was less than that. The Talos system occupied a huge amount of shipboard space and required a great deal of maintenance. Each missile had to be tested every 30 days. In addition, the Talos system could track only six targets, and engage only two of these at a time. This made it vulnerable to saturation attacks by large numbers of aircraft. A relatively slow response time and long minimum intercept distance limited its effectiveness for countering low flying short range "pop up" targets. The last versions of Talos were introduced in the late 1960s. The anti-radiation RIM-8H missile carried additional electronics that allowed it to actively home on transmitting radars, and the RIM-8J used a high energy fuel that extended the range to 130 nautical miles. More than 2400 Talos missiles were built and about 1350 were fired in practice exercises and combat between 1958 and 1979. Unit cost has been reported as $386,000, or almost a billion dollars for all.
The Talos launching system was was too large and expensive for most post World War II ship construction. Only one new ship was designed to carry it, the USS Long Beach CGN-9. Eventually Terrier was developed into the Navy's Standard missile, and Talos was retired from the fleet by 1979. The missiles continued to be used as land launched supersonic targets in the MQM-8 Vandal supersonic target program until 2005. For this use the missile was modified to allow it to fly in a surface-skimming cruise mode in addition to the normal high altitude mode. The Vandal targets contributed to the development of advanced Standard missiles. They were very challenging targets that were difficult to shoot down. Talos booster rockets were used to launch a variety of high altitude sounding rockets.
The Talos system was complex. Descriptions of various parts and operations can be found at these links:
- Talos RIM-8 guided missile
- Talos Mk 7 Guided Missile Launching System
- Talos Mk 77 Guided Missile Fire Control System
- Talos missile firing operations
- Additional Talos information
- History of the Talos missile
1. The Bumblebee Project, Evan D. Nau, 1998
2. Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles, RIM-8, Andreas Parsch, 2005
3. Evolution of the Talos Missile, William Garten, Jr. and Frank A. Dean, Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest, Vol 3 No 2, 1982, p 117.
4. The First Forty Years, Chapter 3, The Missile Age, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Schneidereith & Sons, Baltimore Md, 1983, page 19.
5. Gunner's Mate Missile 3 & 2, Rate Training Manual NAVTRA 10199-B, Naval Training Command
6. Gunner's Mate Missile 1 & C, Rate Training Manual NAVTRA 10200-B, Naval Training Command
7. History of Ramjet and Scramjet Propulsion Development for U. S. Navy Missiles, Waltrup, P.J. et al, Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1997
8. Talos Missile Handling, Cruiser Installation, Technical Training Film Bulletin No. 45, Part II, Defense Atomic Support Agency
9. The Unified Talos, Frank A. Dean, Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest Vol. 3, No. 2, 1982, page 123.
10. US Naval Weapons, Norman Friedman, Naval Institute Press, 1985.
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A frame check sequence (FCS) refers to the extra checksum characters added to a frame in a communication protocol for error detection and correction. A checksum is a form of Redundancy check, a simple way to protect the integrity of data by detecting errors in data that are sent through space ( Telecommunications In Computer networking, a frame is a Data packet of fixed or variable length which has been encoded by a Data link layer communications protocol for digital In the field of Telecommunications, a communications protocol is the set of standard rules for data representation signaling authentication and error detection required to In Mathematics, Computer science, Telecommunication, and Information theory, error detection and correction has great practical importance in
The sending host computes a checksum on the entire frame and appends this as a trailer to the data. In Information technology, trailer refers to supplemental Data placed at the end of a block of data being stored or transmitted which may contain information The receiving host computes the checksum on the frame using the same algorithm, and compares it to the received FCS. This way it can detect whether any data was lost or altered in transit. It may then discard the data, and request retransmission of the faulty frame.
The FCS is often transmitted in such a way that the receiver can compute a running sum over the entire frame, including the trailing FCS, and expect to see a fixed result (such as zero) when it is correct. Such an FCS generally appears immediately before the frame-ending delimiter.
By far the most popular popular FCS algorithm is a cyclic redundancy check, used in the Ethernet, X.25, HDLC, Frame Relay, Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) and other data link layer protocols. A cyclic redundancy check (CRC is a type of function that takes as input a data stream of any length and produces as output a value of a certain space commonly a 32-bit integer Ethernet is a family of frame -based Computer networking technologies for Local area networks (LANs X25 is an ITU-T standard Network layer protocol for packet switched Wide area network (WAN communication High-Level Data Link Control ( HDLC) is a bit-oriented Synchronous Data link layer protocol developed by the International Organization In the context of Computer networking, frame relay consists of an efficient Data transmission technique used to send digital information In networking, the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, is a data link protocol commonly used to establish a direct connection between two nodes The Data Link Layer is Layer 2 of the seven-layer OSI model. It responds to service requests from the Network Layer and issues service requests to the In the field of Telecommunications, a communications protocol is the set of standard rules for data representation signaling authentication and error detection required to
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Interactive whiteboards are a great way for teachers to engage classrooms in learning. These tools are also cost effective. The Internet has tons of free sources to help teachers learn about and use IWBs with students. Here is a list of 20 interactive whiteboard resources and activities guaranteed to stimulate learning:
TeacherLED – TeacherLED is a site dedicated to making the use of Interactive Whiteboards (IWB) easier and more productive. This comprehensive site features resources to use with IWBs in math, English, and geometry.
SMART – This SMART Board interactive whiteboard site provides several lesson plans and activities for teachers to use in the classroom. SMART lessons are available for a variety of ages and subjects.
Topmarks – With some of the best free educational materials for IWBs, Topmarks is a great resource for finding IWB lesson plans and activities. This educational site also features teacher resources, educational sites for classroom, and homework help.
Interactive Whiteboard in the Classroom – This site for whiteboard users features tutorials, interactive websites, and software.
Eduscapes – This guide to interactive whiteboards explains different activities and resources that can be used with IWBs. Eduscapes is a good starting place for teachers who are just beginning to use this technology in the classroom.
Games and Activities
PBS – PBS provides a collection of fun, interactive SMART Board games. All of the games featured on this site are age appropriate and screened by educators.
MathFrame.co.uk – This site, created by a school teacher, houses several interactive math games specifically designed for IWBs. All activities are aimed at reinforcing mathematical concepts and skills.
BBC History Game – BBC offers several interactive activities that can be used with interactive whiteboards. This Famous People history game is a great way to teach elementary children about historical figures.
Scholastic – Scholastic provides interactive whiteboard lessons for phonics, math, science, and history. This site also features a search engine for finding more lessons across North America.
Crickweb.co.uk – Crickweb.co.uk provides 15 free resources for use with interactive whiteboards. These math activities are designed to teach elementary students the basics of math.
Math Playground – The Math Playground offers interactive math activities for middle schoolers. These games and activities work well for teachers who want to engage the entire class.
Classbrain – This game site features several interactive math games that work with IWBs. A fun game worth trying with students is Regrouping.
Funbrain – Funbrain offers several interactive educational games for use with IWBs. These fun games cover a range of subjects and grades.
Kerpoof – Kerpoof is an educational interactive website from the Walt Disney Company that can be used with IWBs. This site is a great way for children to create, discover, and learn.
Skeleton of the Beast – This interactive game from Discovery Education is a useful learning tool for IWBs. Skeleton of the Beast features four skill level timed games that teach children about prehistoric animals.
Xpeditions – Xpeditions from National Geographic provides an atlas that can be used on interactive whiteboards. This atlas explores every region of the world.
Periodic Table – This interactive periodic table site was designed for educational use by elementary to high school students. The site works with interactive whiteboards to introduce and engage children in learning the element table.
Archiving Early America – Archiving Early America features a range of short videos on American history that are perfect for use on IWBs.
Memorial Hall Museum – This free online museum features a complete interactive website for teachers. IWB teachers can view collections, online exhibits, and games.
Place the State – Place the State is an interactive geography game from Bensguide.gpo.gov. This resource can be used with IWBs to teach students about U.S. states.
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Wabi-sabi (侘寂) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The phrase comes from the two words wabi and sabi. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". It is a concept derived from the Buddhist assertion of the Three marks of existence (三法印 sanbōin ), specifically impermanence (無常 mujō ). Note also that the Japanese word for rust, 錆 is also pronounced sabi (the borrowed Chinese character is different, but the word itself is of assumed common etymology), and there is an obvious semantic connection between these concepts.
Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of traditional Japanese beauty and it "occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West." "if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi." "It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."
The words wabi and sabi do not translate easily. Wabi originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, remote from society; sabi meant "chill", "lean" or "withered". Around the 14th century these meanings began to change, taking on more positive connotations. Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.
From an engineering or design point of view, "wabi" may be interpreted as the imperfect quality of any object, due to inevitable limitations in design and construction/manufacture especially with respect to unpredictable or changing usage conditions; then "sabi" could be interpreted as the aspect of imperfect reliability, or limited mortality of any object, hence the etymological connection with the Japanese word sabi, to rust.
A good example of this embodiment may be seen in certain styles of Japanese pottery. In the Japanese tea ceremony, the pottery items used are often rustic and simple-looking, e.g. Hagi ware, with shapes that are not quite symmetrical, and colors or textures that appear to emphasize an unrefined or simple style. In reality, these items can be quite expensive and in fact, it is up to the knowledge and observational ability of the participant to notice and discern the hidden signs of a truly excellent design or glaze (akin to the appearance of a diamond in the rough). This may be interpreted as a kind of wabi-sabi aesthetic, further confirmed by the way the colour of glazed items is known to change over time as hot water is repeatedly poured into them (sabi) and the fact that tea bowls are often deliberately chipped or nicked at the bottom (wabi), which serves as a kind of signature of the Hagi-yaki style.
Wabi and sabi both suggest sentiments of desolation and solitude. In the Mahayana Buddhist view of the universe, these may be viewed as positive characteristics, representing liberation from a material world and transcendence to a simpler life. Mahayana philosophy itself, however, warns that genuine understanding cannot be achieved through words or language, so accepting wabi-sabi on nonverbal terms may be the most appropriate approach. Simon Brown notes that wabi sabi describes a means where students can learn to live life through the sense and better engage in life as it happens rather than caught up in unnecessary thoughts. In this sense wabi sabi is the material representation of Zen Buddhism. The idea being that being surrounded by natural, changing, unique objects helps us connect to our real world and escape potentially stressful distractions.
In one sense wabi sabi is a training where the student of wabi sabi learns to find the most simple objects interesting, fascinating and beautiful. Fading autumn leaves would be an example. Wabi sabi can change our perception of our world to the extent that a chip or crack in a vase makes it more interesting and give the object greater meditative value. Similarly materials that age such as bare wood, paper and fabric become more interesting as they exhibit changes that can be observed over time.
The wabi and sabi concepts are religious in origin, but actual usage of the words in Japanese is often quite casual. The syncretic nature of Japanese belief systems should be noted.
Many Japanese arts over the past thousand years have been influenced by Zen and Mahayana philosophy, particularly acceptance and contemplation of the imperfection, constant flux, and impermanence of all things. Such arts can exemplify a wabi-sabi aesthetic. Here is an incomplete list:
During the 1990s the concept was borrowed by computer software developers and employed in Agile programming and Wiki to describe acceptance of the state of ongoing imperfection that is the product of these methods.
On 16 March 2009, Marcel Theroux presented In Search of Wabi-sabi on BBC Four as part of the channel's "Hidden Japan" season of programming. Marcel travelled throughout Japan trying to understand the aesthetic tastes of Japan and its people.
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A study in 1985 “On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein” found that Einstein’s brain was actually not significantly different from others. As an Organization Development blogger put it:
===> what made Einstein different was his mind. <===
His thinking and passion for learning were the basis of his genius. His brain was the same, but his intellect was markedly different. He was often humble about his intellect, and instead said that learning relied on working hard and imagining the impossible. So what made his learning so different? What can we learn from Einstein?
Read more, very interesting, a MUST:
Via Ana Cristina Pratas, Gust MEES, Les Howard, Mary Perfitt-Nelson
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The Digital Legal Landscape in South America: Government Transparency and Access to Information
Teresa M. Miguel
Yale Law School - Lillian Goldman Law Library
June 16, 2011
The governments of ten South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) vary widely in the quantity and quality of free legal information each offers to its citizens. Each country has made a significant effort in providing basic legal texts, such as codes, laws and decrees, in a systematic, searchable, and reliable database. Jurisprudence of the courts, whose significance varies widely among these countries steeped in the civil law tradition, is often less accessible. Some countries have more means and better infrastructure than others which, naturally, is reflected in the quality of the databases, search engines, and archives.
Most of these countries have enacted transparency laws to which all government entities are subjected. Countries with laws pertaining to transparency in order of strength of law are: Chile (2008), Peru (2002), Ecuador (2004), Uruguay (2008), Colombia (1985), Argentina (2003 decree), and Bolivia (2005 decree). These transparency laws do not only pertain to budget, fiscal responsibility, and political accountability, but also to free public access to legal information. The transparency laws from both Peru and Ecuador, for example, are entitled, Law of Transparency and Access to Information, and obligate government entities to be proactive in making legal information freely accessible.
In the following report, the transparency laws are briefly discussed at the beginning of each country report. The focus of this overall project, however, is not specifically on whether a country has laws governing transparency and access to information, but rather, whether a country is indeed making available to its citizens free, current, reliable, official, and authentic legal information in a way that is easy to find, access, obtain, and read. Supplementary information is also provided about how non-profit legal databases and commercial providers of legal information fit into each country’s digital legal landscape. Please note that unless otherwise indicated, all websites and documents are in the vernacular language, i.e. Spanish or Portuguese for Brazil.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 81
Keywords: Government Transparency, Access To Information, Latin America, South America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela
JEL Classification: K33, D83working papers series
Date posted: June 18, 2011
© 2013 Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This page was processed by apollo1 in 0.562 seconds
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2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Geology and geophysics
The Eocene epoch (55.8 ± 0.2 - 33.9 ± 0.1 Ma) is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Palaeogene period in the Cenozoic era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Paleocene epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene epoch. The start of the Eocene is marked by the emergence of the first modern mammals. The end is set at a major extinction event called Grande Coupure (the "Great Break" in continuity), which may be related to the impact of one or more large bolides in Siberia and in what is now Chesapeake Bay. As with other geologic periods, the strata that define the start and end of the epoch are well identified, though their exact dates are slightly uncertain.
The name Eocene comes from the Greek ἠώς (eos, dawn) and καινός (kainos, new) and refers to the "dawn" of modern ('new') mammalian fauna that appeared during the epoch.
|Paleocene epoch||Eocene epoch||Oligocene epoch|
| Danian | Selandian
| Ypresian | Lutetian
Bartonian | Priabonian
|Rupelian | Chattian|
The Eocene epoch is usually broken into Early and Late, or - more usually - Early, Middle, and Late subdivisions. The corresponding rocks are referred to as Lower, Middle, and Upper Eocene. The Faunal stages from youngest to oldest are:
|Priabonian||(37.2 ± 0.1 – 33.9 ± 0.1 Ma)|
|Bartonian||(40.4 ± 0.2 – 37.2 ± 0.1 Ma)|
|Lutetian||(48.6 ± 0.2 – 40.4 ± 0.2 Ma)|
|Ypresian||(55.8 ± 0.2 – 48.6 ± 0.2 Ma)|
The Ypresian and occasionally the Lutetian constitute the Lower, the Priabonian and sometimes the Bartonian the Upper subsection; alternatively, the Lutetian and Bartonian are united as the Middle Eocene.
Marking the start of the Eocene, Earth heated up in one of the most rapid (in geologic terms) and extreme global warming events recorded in geologic history, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or Initial Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM or IETM). This was an episode of rapid and intense warming (up to 7 °C at high latitudes) that lasted less than 100,000 years . The Thermal Maximum provoked a sharp extinction event that distinguishes Eocene fauna from the ecosystems of the Paleocene.
The Eocene global climate was perhaps the most homogeneous of the Cenozoic; the temperature gradient from equator to pole was only half that of today's, and deep ocean currents were exceptionally warm. The polar regions were much warmer than today, perhaps as mild as the modern-day Pacific Northwest; temperate forests extended right to the poles, while rainy tropical climates extended as far north as 45°. The difference was greatest in the temperate latitudes; the climate in the tropics however, was probably similar to today's.
Climates remained warm through the rest of the Eocene, although slow global cooling triggered by the Azolla event, which eventually led to the Pleistocene glaciations, started as ocean currents around Antarctica formed.
At the beginning of the period, Australia and Antarctica remained connected, and warm equatorial currents mixed with colder Antarctic waters, distributing the heat around the planet and keeping global temperatures high. But when Australia split from the southern continent around 45 mya, the warm equatorial currents were deflected away from Antarctica, and an isolated cold water channel developed between the two continents. The Antarctic region cooled down, and the ocean surrounding Antarctica began to freeze, sending cold water and icefloes north, reinforcing the cooling.
In western North America, mountain building started in the Eocene, and huge lakes formed in the high flat basins among uplifts, resulting in the deposition of the Green River Formation lagerstätte.
In Europe, the Tethys Sea finally vanished, while the uplift of the Alps isolated its final remnant, the Mediterranean, and created another shallow sea with island archipelagos to the north. Though the North Atlantic was opening, a land connection appears to have remained between North America and Europe since the faunas of the two regions are very similar.
It is hypothesized that the Eocene hothouse world was caused by runaway global warming from released methane clathrates deep in the oceans. The clathrates were buried beneath mud that was disturbed as the oceans warmed. Methane (CH4) has ten to twenty times the greenhouse gas effect of carbon dioxide (CO2).
At the beginning of the Eocene, the high temperatures and warm oceans created a moist, balmy environment, with forests spreading throughout the Earth from pole to pole. Apart from the driest deserts, Earth must have been entirely covered in forests.
Polar forests were quite extensive. Fossils and even preserved remains of trees such as swamp cypress and dawn redwood from the Eocene have been found on Ellesmere Island in the Arctic. The preserved remains are not fossils, but actual pieces preserved in oxygen-poor water in the swampy forests of the time and then buried before they had the chance to decompose. Even at that time, Ellesmere Island was only a few degrees in latitude further south than it is today. Fossils of subtropical and even tropical trees and plants from the Eocene have also been found in Greenland and Alaska. Tropical rainforests grew as far north as the Pacific Northwest and Europe.
Palm trees were growing as far north as Alaska and northern Europe during the early Eocene, although they became less abundant as the climate cooled. Dawn redwoods were far more extensive as well.
Cooling began mid-period, and by the end of the Eocene continental interiors had begun to dry out, with forests thinning out considerably in some areas. The newly-evolved grasses were still confined to river banks and lake shores, and had not yet expanded into plains and savannas.
The cooling also brought seasonal changes. Deciduous trees, better able to cope with large temperature changes, began to overtake evergreen tropical species. By the end of the period, deciduous forests covered large parts of the northern continents, including North America, Eurasia and the Arctic, and rainforests held on only in equatorial South America, Africa, India and Australia.
Antarctica, which began the Eocene fringed with a warm temperate to sub-tropical rainforest, became much colder as the period progressed; the heat-loving tropical flora was wiped out, and by the beginning of the Oligocene, the continent hosted deciduous forests and vast stretches of tundra.
The oldest known fossils of most of the modern mammal orders appear within a brief period during the early Eocene. At the beginning of the Eocene, several new mammal groups arrived in North America. These modern mammals, like artiodactyls, perissodactyls and primates, had features like long, thin legs, feet and hands capable of grasping, as well as differentiated teeth adapted for chewing. Dwarf forms reigned. All the members of the new mammal orders were small, under 10 kg; based on comparisons of tooth size, Eocene mammals were only 60% of the size of the primitive Paleocene mammals that preceded them. They were also smaller than the mammals that followed them. It is assumed that the hot Eocene temperatures favored smaller animals that were better able to manage the heat.
Both groups of modern ungulates (hoofed animals) became prevalent because of a major radiation between Europe and North America; along with carnivourous ungulates like Mesonyx. Early forms of many other modern mammalian orders appeared, including bats, proboscidians, primates, rodents and marsupials. Older primitive forms of mammals declined in variety and importance. Important Eocene land fauna fossil remains have been found in western North America, Europe, Patagonia, Egypt and southeast Asia. Marine fauna are best known from South Asia and the southeast United States.
Reptile fossils from this time, such as fossils of pythons and turtles, are abundant.
During the Eocene, plants and marine faunas became quite modern. Many modern bird orders first appeared in the Eocene.
Some scientists believed that the first primates appeared around 55 Ma in the Ypresian era of the Eocene; however, the molecular clock and new paleontological finds indicate that the first primates appeared much earlier, around 90 Ma in the Cretaceous era.
The Eocene oceans were warm and teeming with fish and other sea life. The first Carcharinid sharks appeared, as did early marine mammals, including Basilosaurus, an early species of whale that is thought to be descended from land animals, the hoofed predators called mesonychids, of which Mesonyx was a member. The first sirenians, relatives of the elephants, also appeared at this time.
The Grande Coupure, or "great break" in continuity, with a major European turnover in mammalian fauna about 33.5 Ma, marks the end of the last phase of Eocene assemblages, the Priabonian, and the arrival in Europe of Asian immigrants. The Grande Coupure is characterized by widespread extinctions and allopatric speciation in small isolated relict populations. It was given its name in 1910 by the Swiss palaeontologist Hans Georg Stehlin, to characterise the dramatic turnover of European mammalian fauna, which he placed at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. A comparable turnover in Asian fauna has since been called the "Mongolian Remodelling".
The Grande Coupure marks a break between endemic European faunas before the break and mixed faunas with a strong Asian component afterwards. J.J. Hooker and his team summarized the break:
- "Pre-Grande Coupure faunas are dominated by the perissodact family Palaeotheriidae (distant horse relatives), six families of artiodactyls (cloven-hoofed mammals) (Anoplotheriidae, Xiphodontidae, Choeropotamidae, Cebochoeridae, Dichobunidae and Amphimerycidae), the rodent family Pseudosciuridae, the primate families Omomyidae and Adapidae, and the archontan family Nyctitheriidae.
- "Post-Grande Coupure faunas include the true rhinos (family Rhinocerotidae), three artiodactyl families (Entelodontidae, Anthracotheriidae and Gelocidae) related respectively to pigs, hippos and ruminants, the rodent families Eomyidae, Cricetidae (hamsters) and Castoridae (beavers), and the lipotyphlan family Erinaceidae (hedgehogs). The speciose genus Palaeotherium plus Anoplotherium and the families Xiphodontidae and Amphimerycidae were observed to disappear completely.
- "Only the marsupial family Herpetotheriidae, the artiodactyl family Cainotheriidae, and the rodent families Theridomyidae and Gliridae (dormice) crossed the faunal divide undiminished." (Hooker et al. 2004)
Whether this abrupt change was caused by climate change associated with the earliest polar glaciations and a major fall in sea levels, or by competition with taxa dispersing from Asia, few argue for an isolated single cause. More spectacular causes are related to the impact of one or more large bolides in Siberia and in the Chesapeake Bay impact crater. Improved correlation of northwest European successions to global events (Hooker et al. 2004) confirms the Grande Coupure as occurring in the earliest Oligocene, with a hiatus of about 350 millennia prior to the first record of post-Grande Coupure Asian immigrant taxa.
An element of the paradigm of the Grande Coupure was the apparent extinction of all European primates at the Coupure: the recent discovery of a mouse-sized early Oligocene omomyid, reflecting the better survival chances of small mammals, further undercut the Grand Coupure paradigm.
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RoundNews reported that a group of scientists from Korea’s Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology have created a lithium-ion battery that charges up to 120 times faster than normal and now plan to make an improved lithium-ion battery pack for cars.
As quoted in the market news:
Their plan is to build a battery pack for electric powered vehicles. The group estimates that the vehicle lithium-ion battery will be fully charged in less than a minute. Conventional lithium-ion batteries take a longer time to charge. This is because the charging time is proportional with the volume of the battery. A solution to cut-down charging time is to split larger batteries in smaller ones. This solution was used in the past but it can only improve charging time to a certain extent.
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Last week in How to Electronically
Modify Your Car, Part 6 we looked at a special way in which pots can be used
to alter the output of sensors used in electronic car systems. It’s a very
tricky technique that allows you to achieve lots of effective outcomes at
nearly zero cost. This week we’re also looking at simple and cheap electronic
components that are again often overlooked as ways of achieving excellent car
modifications – relays.
What’s a Relay?
A relay is just a small switch whose movement is
caused by the action of an electromagnet inside the box. When power is applied
to the relay’s coil, the electromagnet comes alive and pulls across the
The simplest relay is a single pole, single throw
(SPST) design. This designation refers to the switching part of the relay where
when it's activated, one wire (a "single pole") can be connected only one way (a
"single throw"). Just like an on/off switch, when you power up the relay's coil,
the connection is made; when you un-power the coil, the connection is broken.
In this diagram the relay's coil is yellow. Near
to the coil you can see a switch, which is open. This is called a Normally Open
contact - it's open when there's no power being applied to the relay. When power
is applied to the relay’s coil, the single contact closes. This is a Single Pole
Single Throw relay - SPST.
SPST relays have four terminals - two are to power
the coil and the other two are the connections for the internal switch. Look at
the diagram and identify which terminals are which. As you can see, there
is no electrical connection between the pair of contacts for the coil and the
pair of contacts for the switching part of the relay.
Car Modification – Auto-Dimming LED Indicator
In How to Electronically Modify Your Car, Part 3 we talked about using
LEDs in a car. As this diagram shows, if the LED is to survive, you need to place a series resistor in the
we’ve added a pot (wired as a variable resistor) into the circuit. By turning
the pot, the brightness of the LED will able to be adjusted. Because the
resistor is still there, you can’t blow-up the LED – even you turn the pot fully
in the ‘bright’ direction.
we’ve added a switch in parallel with the pot. By closing the switch, the pot is
bypassed – as far as the circuit is concerned, it ceases to exist. So we can
have two switched light levels for the LED – one that’s bright (switch closed)
and one that is dim (switch open). The ‘dim’ setting can be adjusted by the pot.
now we’ve replaced the switch with a relay. This SPST relay is a normally
closed design – it opens when power is applied to its coil. Here we’ve wired the coil
so it is activated whenever the parking lights are switched on. So what have we
ended up with? A LED dashboard indicator that is bright in daytime and dims
itself whenever you turn on the lights! You can even fine-tune the ‘night’ level
with the pot.
LED could show turbo boost (just add a boost switch, as shown here), indicate
that a fan is running – or a whole host of things.
here is the built circuit – from left to right: resistor, pot and relay (the LED
and switch are remote mounted).
In the above example, the relay’s contacts had to
take only a very small current – just enough to run the LED. Therefore, a quite
light duty relay could be used (more on relay ratings in a moment). But many
relays used in cars are heavy duty designs.
In fact, the most common application for a SPST
relay is to use a small electrical current to control a large electrical
For example, a radiator fan might be triggered by
a temperature switch. The temp switch is capable of flowing only 2 amps, but the
radiator fan at switch-on takes 15 amps (and then settles back to 8 amps
If you wire the radiator fan to the switch like
this, after a few weeks the temp switch will fail – its contacts are being
The solution is to add a SPST relay that is wired
into the circuit like this. Now the temp switch only has to pass enough current
to turn on the relay’s coil – a much easier job than directly running the fan!
Neither the relay coil nor the switching part of
the relay has a polarity – both can be connected either way around to 12V and
Ground. As we said earlier, relays are very hard to blow-up!
On automotive SPST relays, the pins are given
standardised numbers. The coil connections are 85 and 86, while the two
connections for the internal switch are 30 and 87. However, most general purpose
relays don’t have any numbers on the pins – instead the functions of the pins
are shown on a little diagram on the body of the relay.
But wouldn't it be good if we had two contacts
inside the relay – one that was opened at the same time as another one was
closed? That's what happens in the Single Pole, Double Throw (SPDT) design.
(Can’t think of much use for that type of relay? There is – and I’ll show you in
This is what a SPDT relay looks like inside. When
the relay is energised, one contact is opened and the other one (the Normally
Open contact) is closed. We still have only a single pole to be switched, but
now it can be connected two ways - a double throw design. As you can see, it has
both Normally Open (NO) and Normally Closed (NC) contacts. (Some people call
this a changeover relay.)
A SPDT relay allows you to control two devices,
switching one off as the other is switched on. SPDT automotive relays use the
following codes for their pins: the coil connections are again 85 and 86, the
normally closed output is 87a, the normally open output is 87 and the input is
Car Modification – Switchable Fuel Pressure
example of where I used a SPDT relay was in a fuel system that needed to be
switched between two different fuel pressures. To raise the fuel pressure, a
solenoid valve had to be turned off and at the same time, a fuel pump needed to
be switched on. Both devices draw a fair amount of current so a heavy duty
automotive relay was used – one of the pictured relays did this function.
circuit diagram for the fuel system relay looked like this. Power was normally
supplied to the solenoid through the Normally Closed (NC) relay contact,
energising the solenoid. But when the relay’s coil was activated (by closing the
High/Low Fuel Pressure switch), the relay pulled the contact across, switching
off the solenoid and switching on the fuel pump.
you get lost, follow the circuit in two parts, starting off from either of the
‘12V’ power supplies.)
High/Low Fuel Pressure switch had to handle only enough current to switch the
relay’s coil, so this could have been be a light-duty switch (eg a boost
pressure switch or a microswitch).
A Double Pole, Double Throw relay allows you to
switch two different circuits simultaneously. The 'Double Pole' bit just means
that it has two separate inputs that can be switched - and we now know the
'double throw' means that one contact gets opened as the other is closed. With
this type of relay you can:
These relays are less common in automotive
aftermarket use and so don’t have coded numbers for the pins.
Car Modification – Switching Out Oxy Sensors
what use is a DPDT relay, then?
I’ll use an example from a car modification I’ve done. What was needed was the
on-demand disconnection of two oxygen sensor input signals from the ECU.
two signal wires from the oxy sensors to the ECU needed to be kept completely
separate; this meant they couldn’t be joined together and a SPST relay used.
Instead a DPDT relay was used. (It didn’t actually have to be a double throw
design, but DPDT relays are more common than SPDT designs.)
the relay’s coil was energised, both oxy sensors were simultaneously
disconnected from the ECU.
Using a relay is made a lot simpler if you follow
Draw a circuit diagram. The first step is to draw a simple circuit diagram showing where the wires
go. Which wires go to the relay coil, which to the Normally Open and Normally
Closed contacts of the relay?
Decide what type of relay is
needed. If just one connection needs to be switched on and off, you’ll use a
SPST design. If two connections need to be switched, a DPST or (more commonly) a
DPDT design will be the one to use. A changeover (where one device is switched
off and the other switched on) can use a SPDT or a DPDT design.
Work out the functions of
each pin. If it’s a standard automotive relay, read the numbers. If it’s a
general purpose relay, look for the diagram on the relay body. If neither of
these apply, by careful use of a short-circuit protected power supply and a
multimeter, you can work out the functions of each pin. (Unless you use too high
a test voltage, you can’t damage the relay!)
Wire the relay coil
first. If you wire the relay’s coil first, you’ll be able to check that the
relay is working by listening to its click.
Car Modification – Disabling Traction Control
easy to think of relays as being suitable for just simple car modifications, but
that’s not always the case.
circuit shows the use of two relays that deactivate traction control
without affecting ABS or stability control.
system works by connecting the un-driven wheel ABS sensor outputs to the driven
wheel ECU inputs, so that the ECU cannot see a speed difference between the
undriven and driven wheels. The modification is automatically switched off
whenever the brakes are applied, or by a manual on/off switch. This diagram
shows only half of the system - the complete the system mirror-images the wiring
for the other side of the car.
total cost of the modification was well under AUD$30 – relays are cheap! For
more on this approach, see Modifying Electronic Car Handling Systems, Part 3.
In addition to its contact configuration (SPST,
DPDT, etc) there are at least three other specifications that are important.
This refers to the voltage which the relay is
designed to have its coil triggered by. A nominally 12V relay is fine on car
voltages, even though they can extend as high as 13.8V. However, you shouldn’t
use a 5V coil relay on a 12V system.
This is the amount of current the relay coil will
draw when energised. This can be expressed directly in milliamps, or indirectly
as a coil resistance. A very sensitive relay might have a coil resistance of 360
ohms. 13.8 volts divided by 360 ohms gives a coil current of 0.038 amps, or 38
milliamps. In other words, the switch that you’re using to operate the relay has
to handle just 38 milliamps. That is a very low value of required current.
A typical automotive relay is more likely to have
a coil resistance of 80 ohms, giving a coil current flow of 170 milliamps.
(13.8/80 = 0.17 amps). That’s still low – most switches will handle this without
This spec refers to the max current that a relay’s
contacts can handle. To avoid arcing, you should use a factor of safety where
the max current of your switched circuit is less than the relay’s spec.
Automotive relays are available with current
ratings like 25, 30 and even 60 amps. Be careful when checking max current specs
that the listing is for the DC at or above the voltage you’ll be using – ie, in
cars, 13.8V. For example, a relay rated at 10 amps at 240V AC is not the same as
one rated at 10 amps at 12V DC.
Relays can be utilised in nearly every electrical
or electronic car modification. Get your head around their use and you’ll never
regret having spent the time to find out how they work.
Next week we’ll look at using an off-the-shelf
The parts in this series:
Part 1 - background and tools
Part 2 - understanding electrical circuits.
Part 3 - volts, amps and ohms
Part 4 - using a multimeter
Part 5 - modifying car systems with resistors and pots
Part 6 - shifting input signals using pots
Part 7 - using relays
Part 8 - using pre-built electronic modules
Part 9 - building electronic kits
Part 10 - understanding analog and digital signals
Part 11 - measuring analog and digital signals
Part 12 - intercepting analog and digital signals
Part 13 - the best approaches to modifying car electronics ? and the series conclusion
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Roger Johnston is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory. Not long ago, he and his colleagues launched security attacks on electronic voting machines to demonstrate the startling ease with which one can steal votes. Even more startling: Versions of those machines will appear in polling places all over America on Tuesday. The touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX will be used by more than 26 million voters in 20 states; the push-button Sequoia AVC Voting Machine will be used by almost 9 million voters in four states, Harper’s magazine reported recently (subscription required). Here, Johnston reveals how he hacked the machines--and why anyone, from a high-school kid to an 80-year-old grandmother, could do the same.--Ed
The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory looks at a wide variety of security devices-- locks, seals, tags, access control, biometrics, cargo security, nuclear safeguards--to try to find vulnerabilities and locate potential fixes. Unfortunately, there’s not much funding available in this country to study election security. So we did this as a Saturday afternoon type of project.
It’s called a man-in-the-middle attack. It’s a classic attack on security devices. You implant a microprocessor or some other electronic device into the voting machine, and that lets you control the voting and turn cheating on and off. We’re basically interfering with transmitting the voter’s intent.
We used a logic analyzer. Digital communication is a series of zeros and ones. The voltage goes higher, the voltage goes lower. A logic analyzer collects the oscillating voltages between high and low and then will display for you the digital data in a variety of formats. But there all kinds of way to do it. You can use a logic analyzer, you can use a microprocessor, you can use a computer--basically, anything that lets you see the information that’s being exchanged and then lets you know what to do to mimic the information.
So we listened to the communications going on between the voter, who in the case of one machine is pushing buttons (it’s a push-button voting machine) and in the other is touching things on a touchscreen. Then we listened to the communication going on between the smarts of the machine and the voter. Let’s say I’m trying to make Jones win the election, and you might vote for Smith. Then my microprocessor is going to tell the smarts of the machine to vote for Jones if you try to vote for Smith. But if you’re voting for Jones anyway, I’m not going to tamper with the communications. Sometimes you block communications, sometimes you tamper with information, sometimes you just look at it and let it pass on through. That’s essentially the idea. Figure out the communications going on, then tamper as needed, including with the information being sent back to the voter.
We can do this because most voting machines, as far as I can tell, are not encrypted. It’s just open standard format communication. So it’s pretty easy to figure out information being exchanged. Anyone who does digital electronics--a hobbyist or an electronics fan--could figure this out.
The device we implanted in the touchscreen machine was essentially $10 retail. If you wanted a deluxe version where you can control it remotely from a half a mile away, it’d cost $26 retail. It’s not big bucks. RadioShack would have this stuff. I’ve been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects than the ones needed to rig these machines.
Because there’s no funding for this type of security-testing, we relied on people who buy used machines on eBay [in this case the touchscreen Diebold Accuvote TS Electronic Voting Machine and the push-button Sequoia AVC Advantage Voting Machine]. Both of the machines were a little out-of-date, and we didn’t have user manuals and circuit diagrams. But we figured things out, in the case of the push-button machine, in under two hours. Within 2 hours we had a viable attack. The other machine took a little longer because we didn’t fully understand how touchscreen displays worked. So we had learning time there. But that was just a couple days. It’s like a magic trick. You’ve got to practice a lot. If we practiced a lot, or even better, if we got someone really good with his hands who practiced a lot for two weeks, we’re looking at 15 seconds to 60 seconds go execute these attacks.
The attacks require physical access. This is easy for insiders, who program the machines for an election or install them. And we would argue it’s typically not that hard for outsiders. A lot of voting machines are sitting around in the church basement, the elementary school gymnasium or hallway, unattended for a week or two before the election. Usually they have really cheap cabinet locks anyone can pick; sometimes they don’t even have locks on them. No one signs for the machines when they show up. No one’s responsible for watching them. Seals on them aren’t much different from the anti-tamper packaging found on food and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Think about tampering with a food or drug product: You think that’s challenging? It’s really not. And a lot of our election judges are little old ladies who are retired, and God bless them, they’re what makes the elections work, but they’re not necessarily a fabulous workforce for detecting subtle security attacks.
Give people checking the seals a little training as to what to look for, and now they have a chance to detect a reasonably sophisticated attack. Do good background checks on insiders, and that insider threat would be much less of a concern. Overall, there’s a lack of a good security culture. We can have flawed voting machines, but if we have a good security culture, we can still have good elections. On the other hand, we can have fabulous machines, but if the security culture is inadequate, it doesn’t really matter. We’ve really got to look at a bigger picture. Our view is: It’s always going to be hard to stop James Bond. But I want to move it to the point where grandma can’t hack elections, and we’re really not there.
Read more about elections security here.
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.
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What is the definition of an American ally? On an ideological level, an ally is a country that shares America's values, reflects its founding spirit, and resonates with its people's beliefs. Tactically, an ally stands with the United States through multiple conflicts and promotes its global vision. From its location at one strategic crossroads, an ally enhances American intelligence and defense capabilities, and provides ports and training for U.S. forces. Its army is formidable and unequivocally loyal to its democratic government. An ally helps secure America's borders and assists in saving American lives on and off the battlefield. And an ally stimulates the U.S. economy through trade, technological innovation, and job creation.
Few countries fit this description, but Israel is certainly one of them. As U.S. President Barack Obama told a White House gathering, "The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel," a statement reflecting the positions of Democrats and Republicans alike. The importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance has been upheld by successive American administrations and consistently endorsed by lawmakers and military leaders. It should be unimpeachable. But for some it is not.
"The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel." President Barack Obama
Rather than viewing Israel as a vital American asset, an increasingly vocal group of foreign-policy analysts insists that support for the Jewish state, including more than $3 billion in annual military aid, is a liability. Advocates of this "realist" school claim that the United States derives little strategic benefit from its association with Israel. The alliance, they assert, arises mainly from lobbyists who place Israel's interests before America's, rather than from a clearheaded assessment of national needs. Realists regard the relationship one-dimensionally -- America gives Israel aid and arms -- and view it as the primary source of Muslim anger at the United States. American and Israeli policies toward the peace process, the realists say, are irreconcilable and incompatible with relations between true allies.
By definition, realists seek a foreign policy immune to public sentiment and special interest groups. In this rarefied view, the preferences of the majority of the American people are immaterial or, worse, self-defeating. This would certainly be the case with the U.S.-Israel alliance, which remains outstandingly popular among Americans. Indeed, a Gallup survey this February showed that two out of three Americans sympathize with Israel. Overall, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and in spite of Israel's responses to the second intifada and rocket attacks from Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008 -- support for Israel in the United States has risen, not declined.
The surveys prove that most Americans do not accept the argument that U.S. support for Israel provokes Islamic radicals or do not especially care even if it does. In a Senate hearing last year, Gen. David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command, testified that the Arab-Israeli conflict "challenges … our ability to advance our interests." Critics of the U.S.-Israel relationship seized on the remark as evidence of the alliance's prohibitive costs -- an interpretation Petraeus strenuously rejected -- but the incident wrought no change in popular opinion. In fact, a CNN survey taken later that week showed that eight out of 10 Americans still regarded Israel as an allied or friendly state.
That kind of popular foundation for the Israeli-American alliance is all the more important at a time of great upheaval in the Middle East. As Iran's malign influence spreads and Turkey turns away from the West, Israel's strategic value in the region, both to the United States and to pro-Western Arab governments, will surely increase. Following Hezbollah's recent takeover of Lebanon and the political turmoil in Egypt, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf, Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that is certain to remain stable and unequivocally pro-American. In Israel alone, the United States will not have to choose between upholding its democratic principles and pursuing its vital interests.
And yet, for all their urgency, the close ties between the United States and Israel are hardly new. Their roots extend further than Israel's creation 63 years ago -- rather, they took hold with the Pilgrims' arrival in North America.
The forbears who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 considered themselves the founders of a "New Israel." Committed to studying Hebrew and bridging the Old and New Canaans -- the Holy Land and America -- they pledged to restore the Jews to their ancestral homeland. Far from peripheral, this "restorationist" movement flourished in colonial America and widely influenced the Founders: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted the likeness of Moses leading the children of Israel to serve as the Great Seal of the newly independent United States. John Adams wrote that he "really wish[ed] the Jews again in Judea an independent nation." Abraham Lincoln similarly backed the "noble dream" of a re-created Jewish state, as did Woodrow Wilson, a descendant of Presbyterian ministers, who declared, "To think that I … should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people."
America's commitment to the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state deeply influenced Harry S. Truman. A fervid Baptist and past member of the restorationist American Christian Palestine Committee, Truman made the United States the first nation to recognize Israel on May 14, 1948. None of the predictions of his realist advisors -- that recognition would trigger an Arab oil embargo, Europe would fall to the Soviet Union, and Israel would turn communist -- became a reality.
The spiritual attachment to the reborn Jewish state has continued to resonate in America.
The spiritual attachment to the reborn Jewish state has continued to resonate in America, the nation with the highest frequency of church attendance in the industrialized world. Many Americans have also been drawn to the Zionist story of pioneering, hearing in it echoes of their own national narrative. Theodore Roosevelt, who fancied himself a frontiersman, urged that "the Jews be given control of Palestine" and that "a Zionist state around Jerusalem" be created. In a similar vein, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, on talking with Palestinian Jews in 1929, "could think of nothing but the early English settlers who came to the bleak shores of Massachusetts.… Here is the same heroism dedicated to the same ends."
Israel emerged not only as a Jewish and pioneering state, but also as a democracy. In urging Truman to recognize Israel in 1948, White House counsel Clark Clifford argued that "in an area as unstable as the Middle East … it is important to the long-range security of our country … that a nation committed to the democratic system be established, one on which we can rely." The fact that Israelis cherished the same values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution -- free speech and assembly, respect for individual rights, an independent judiciary -- created another layer of affinity with Americans. John F. Kennedy said Israel "carries the shield of democracy and honors the sword of freedom," and Bill Clinton likened Israel to America, "an oasis of liberty, a home to the oppressed and persecuted."
While grappling with the challenges posed by its large Arab minority and, since the Six-Day War, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has remained the Middle East's only functional democracy. In a region in which some countries deem homosexuality a capital offense, Israel has hosted gay pride parades and provides shelter for Palestinian homosexuals. And in contrast to the Middle Eastern leaders who hold themselves above the law, a former Israeli president was recently convicted of sexual offenses, the verdict handed down by three judges -- two women and an Arab. Withstanding pressures that have crushed many liberal societies, Israel is one of a handful of states that has never experienced interregna of nondemocratic rule.
Americans intrinsically value these facts -- and that appreciation is reciprocated in Israel. As there are streets in the United States named for David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, so, too, can one find Washington and Lincoln streets in Israel. Alone in the Middle East, Israel hosts memorials for Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and two exact replicas of the Liberty Bell.
Still, accepting the dispassionate definition of America's interests, can Israel realistically be considered an ally? Has it traditionally stood by the United States on issues of world importance and in periods of crisis? Is American support for Israel based on calculated estimates of national interests, or is it the product of pressure from richly funded lobbies?
Israel has always sided with the United States on major global issues. At the United Nations and in other international institutions, the two countries' voting patterns are virtually identical, as are their policies on human rights and international law. Beginning with the Korean conflict and throughout the Cold War, Israel backed America's military engagements, and it has maintained that support in the struggle with radical Islam. In times of danger, especially, Israel has responded to America's needs. Acceding to Richard M. Nixon's request to intervene to save Jordan from Syrian invasion in 1970, Israel mobilized its army, and in 1991, in spite of missile attacks from Iraq, Israel honored George H.W. Bush's request not to retaliate.
Israel is not, of course, situated in some geographical backwater, but at the junction of paramount American interests. Its prominence on the eastern Mediterranean littoral, at the nexus of North Africa and Southwest Asia, has enabled the United States to minimize its military deployments in the area. In the Persian Gulf, by contrast, the absence of a dependable and sturdy ally like Israel has impelled the United States to commit hundreds of thousands of troops and trillions of dollars. Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig's observation 30 years ago still resonates today: "Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security."
The strategic synergy between the United States and Israel melds into tactical realities.
The strategic synergy between the United States and Israel melds into tactical realities. U.S. troops train with their Israel Defense Forces (IDF) counterparts in aerial combat and special operations. U.S. Navy ships routinely dock in Haifa, Air Force planes refuel at Israeli bases, and the Marines will soon use an Israeli laser to pinpoint targets. In addition to pre-positioning $800 million of arms and medical equipment in Israel, the United States guarantees by law its commitment to preserving Israel's "qualitative military edge," enabling the Jewish state to defend itself, by itself, against Middle Eastern adversaries. As Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro put it, "Israel is a vital ally and a cornerstone of our regional security commitments," and, accordingly, the two countries have developed the world's most advanced anti-ballistic missiles. Together with the X-band radar station in the Negev -- manned by the first American troops deployed permanently on Israeli soil -- these systems can protect friendly nations from Iranian rockets.
In the intelligence field, in particular, the cooperation between Israel and the United States is vast. According to Maj. Gen. George J. Keegan Jr., former head of U.S. Air Force intelligence, America's military defense capability "owes more to the Israeli intelligence input than it does to any single source of intelligence," the worth of which input, he estimated, exceeds "five CIAs." Israeli and American intelligence agencies continuously exchange information, analyses, and operational experience in counterterrorism and counterproliferation. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its Israeli counterpart also share technical know-how in defending ports and terminals from terrorist attacks, countering unconventional weapons and cyberthreats, and combating the drug trade. On the battlefield, Israeli armament protects Bradley and Stryker units from rocket-propelled grenades, while Israeli-made drones and reconnaissance devices surveil hostile territory. U.S. fighter aircraft and helicopters incorporate Israeli concepts and components, as do modern-class U.S. warships. The IDF has furnished U.S. forces with its expertise in the detection and neutralization of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the largest cause of American casualties.
Israel not only enhances America's defenses -- it also saves American lives. A kibbutz-based company in the Galilee has provided armor for more than 20,000 U.S. military vehicles. "Two days ago, my patrol was ambushed by insurgents using 7.62mm PKM Machineguns," David C. Cox, a platoon sergeant in Iraq, wrote the manufacturers. "None of the rounds penetrated the armor of the vehicle, including one that would have impacted with my head." Marine gunner Joshua Smith, whose Israeli-armored vehicle tripped an IED near Marja, Afghanistan, described how his unit "walked away smiling, laughing, and lived to fight another day." Military medical experts from both countries also meet annually to discuss advances in combat care. One such breakthrough was a coagulating bandage, the brainchild of a Jerusalem start-up company, a million of which have been supplied to U.S. forces (and even applied by a Tucson SWAT team medic to stanch the life-threatening head wound of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords).
In return for its aid to Israel, the United States receives not only an armed but an innovative ally, enhancing America's military edge. That contribution is real and requires no lobbyists to fabricate it. While organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) press Israel's case in government and in popular forums, they represent American citizens who view the alliance with Israel as a national American interest. By contrast, the lobbyists for the Arab states and their domestic oil industries represent foreign interests. The hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent on lobbying and public relations campaigns and donations to influential universities such as Harvard and Georgetown have vastly exceeded the budgets of Israel's advocates in Washington.
Pro-Israel groups neither determine America's course in the Middle East nor derail it. Responding to the realists' charge that a so-called Israel Lobby exerts undue influence over American policies, White House Middle East special advisor Dennis Ross wrote in this magazine that "never in the time that I led the American negotiations on the Middle East peace process did we take a step because 'the lobby' wanted us to. Nor did we shy away from one because 'the lobby' opposed it." A 30-year veteran of Middle East diplomacy, Ross concluded that pro-Israel groups "don't distort U.S. policy or undermine American interests."
Israel, according to America's highest-ranking officer, is "absolutely critical" to U.S. national security.
Understandably, the most sober assessment of American interests is conducted by the U.S. military. The alliance with Israel, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen told Congress in March, "is of extraordinary value." Israel, according to America's highest-ranking officer, is "absolutely critical" to U.S. national security.
Israel is among the few countries in the world -- and the only Middle Eastern state -- to consistently stand alongside the United States on strategic issues. But the U.S.-Israel relationship is far from one-dimensional. The two countries also cooperate in a broad range of nonmilitary fields -- humanitarian, commercial, and scientific.
Close coordination with the United States enabled Israeli medical teams to arrive first on the scene in earthquake-devastated Haiti. They similarly assisted the victims of Turkish and Indonesian quakes and of famines in Somalia, Mauritania, and Kenya. Together with the U.S. Agency for International Development, Israel's Agency for International Development Cooperation has trained more than 200,000 people from Africa, South America, and Asia in fields as diverse as agrobusiness and ophthalmology. Since 1985, American and Israeli scientists have jointly consulted for developing countries on public health and women's issues.
Israel also assists the American people by stimulating trade, spurring technological innovation, and creating jobs. Despite a population of just 7.7 million people, Israel is America's 20th-largest customer in the world, surpassing Russia and Spain. Warren Buffett's first foreign investment was a $4 billion stake in Iscar, an Israeli tool manufacturer. "I believe in the Israeli market and the Israeli economy," Buffett explained. Between 2000 and 2009, direct U.S. investment in Israel totaled $77.2 billion, while Israelis invested $51.4 billion in the United States. More than 25 years ago, America's very first free trade agreement was signed -- with Israel.
Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AOL, and Motorola are just some of the high-tech companies with major research and development operations in Israel. In addition to providing software and hardware for most American computers and mobile phones, Israel also pioneered the USB flash drive, the ingestible microcamera, advances in drip irrigation, and the portable MRI. Through Better Place, the world's first comprehensive electric-car system, Israel is poised to help Obama achieve his goal of placing 1 million electric vehicles on America's roads by 2015. "It's no exaggeration to say that the kind of innovation going on in Israel is critical to the future of the technology business," observed Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on a 2005 visit to Israel. After the United States and China, Israel is the most represented country on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
And at a time when American corporations are outsourcing to Asia, Israel is outsourcing to the United States: Tens of thousands of Americans are employed by Teva, the world's leading generic-drug producer, and by dozens of Israeli high-tech, textile, and defense plants throughout the United States. The nearly 6,000 projects mounted by three U.S.-Israel foundations have generated myriad American jobs, as does the $3 billion in American military aid to Israel, $2.25 billion of which is spent in the United States.
In spite of the overwhelming advantages of the U.S.-Israel alliance, the realists still insist that it stokes Muslim rage and renders Americans more vulnerable to terrorism. To substantiate their claim, the realists quote Osama bin Laden as well as the state-controlled Middle Eastern media. But bin Laden initially justified his attacks on America's profligacy and only later, after his setbacks in Afghanistan, linked them to Israel. An influential Saudi Wahhabi book published online describes the United States as "the source of evil, moral corruption, oppression, despotism, and aggression … in the world" and makes no mention of Israel. Neither do recently published diplomatic papers from the Middle East or most of the demonstrations that have convulsed the region.
Arab rulers are not preoccupied with Israel but with the perils posed by Iran.
The official U.S. documents released by WikiLeaks show that Arab rulers are not preoccupied with Israel but with the perils posed by Iran. One report recounted Saudi King Abdullah urging the United States to "cut off the head of the snake" -- Iran -- and to attack the country's nuclear facilities at once. Bahrain's king warned that "the danger of letting [the Iranian nuclear program] go on is greater than the danger of stopping it." The word "Israel" does not appear.
Middle Eastern populations, meanwhile, have shown that they, too, are less concerned with Israel than with urgent issues at home. When able to express themselves freely, they have preferred to focus on political rights and economic opportunity. Conspicuously absent from the protests that swept the region in 2011 were burning Israeli -- or American -- flags or any reference to the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Although emerging Arab governments might in the future -- as in the past -- seek to gain legitimacy by harnessing anti-Israeli sentiment, the claim that American support for the Jewish state axiomatically translates into anti-Americanism in the Middle East is no longer sustainable.
Israel is America's staunchest ally in the Middle East, but even the warmest friendships are never disagreement-free. This was certainly the case with the Anglo-American relationship during World War II, modern history's most celebrated alliance, but one that was riven by disputes over military planning and postwar arrangements.
The United States and Israel could not, therefore, realistically be expected to concur on all of the Middle East's labyrinthine issues. Ronald Reagan, for example, condemned Israel's attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, and Israel objected to his sale of advanced jets to Saudi Arabia.
The realists say that the gaps between Israeli and American policies on the peace process are unbridgeable. The United States, they maintain, is committed to creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel allegedly opposes these goals and thwarts them by building in those areas.
But historically, progress in the peace process has been directly related to the strengthening of America's alliance with Israel. That bond convinced Arab rulers that they had no conventional military option against Israel and fortified Israelis to make the concessions necessary for peace. American security assurances -- including guarantees of continued oil supplies from Sinai and the replacement of evacuated air bases -- enabled Israel to withdraw from an area three times its size and to conclude the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.
The realists ignore or dismiss this linkage, as they do Israel's record of seeking peace. In the euphoric aftermath of the Six-Day War, Israeli leaders offered to create a West Bank Palestinian state, but Palestinian leaders rejected the plan. Israel in 2000 offered the Palestinians sovereignty over virtually the entire West Bank, all of Gaza, and part of Jerusalem, but the Palestinians refused the deal and instead killed more than 1,000 Israelis in terrorist attacks. In 2005, Israel provided the Palestinians with the chance to create a peaceful prototype in Gaza, but it quickly devolved into a launching pad for thousands of rockets. In spite of these traumas, a significant majority of Israelis -- 66 percent, when recently asked by the Tel Aviv University Peace Index -- still favor the two-state solution, testifying to their commitment to peace.
Settlements have never been the impediment to peace.
Settlements, meanwhile, have never been the impediment to peace. They did not preclude the signing of the Egyptian and Jordanian treaties or 16 years of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Israel uprooted all 21 settlements in Gaza and received war, not peace. Later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu froze West Bank construction for an unprecedented 10 months, but the Palestinians still refused to negotiate. Internal Palestinian documents published recently by Al Jazeera reveal that Palestinian negotiators in 2008 were willing to concede the bulk of the Israeli communities in the West Bank, as well as most of the Jewish neighborhoods built over the 1967 line in Jerusalem, as part of a peace arrangement. Israeli leaders were ready to sign; the Palestinians again walked away.
Blind to Israel's record of peacemaking, the realists also overlook the broad confluence of American and Israeli policies toward the process. Both insist that there is no alternative to direct negotiations and no solution to the conflict other than two states for two peoples. They understand that the Palestinian state, situated opposite Israel's narrowest and most populous area, will have to be demilitarized and that Israel will require detailed security guarantees. And they agree that any peace treaty must provide for mutual recognition between the nation-states of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, signifying an end to all claims.
American and Israeli positions also dovetail on the most monumental -- and potentially divisive -- Middle Eastern issue: Iran. A nuclear-armed Iran, both countries hold, will imperil every pro-Western Middle Eastern state and ignite a nuclear arms race in an inherently unstable region. The United States and Israel have promoted international sanctions designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, while keeping all options on the table. Americans know that, at a time of transformation in the Middle East balance of power, Israel remains the region's only credible foil to Iran.
Ultimately, the litmus test of any alliance is not whether the partners agree on every issue, but rather the ways they deal with discord. During World War II, the United States and Britain bridged their differences and achieved victory. America and Israel have similarly worked through their differences and are together striving for a different triumph -- peace.
Who are America's allies in the world today? Which countries are both capable and willing to advance American interests? A truly realist assessment would strive to answer these questions and fairly weigh Israel's worth.
In the Middle East, every Arab or non-Arab Muslim country has at times vacillated in its support of the United States or adopted anti-American positions. Some regimes have also placed oil embargoes on Americans and bankrolled their enemies. Although democratic governments may yet emerge in some Middle Eastern states, autocracy, monarchy, and dictatorship remain the region's norm. And even elected representatives can be profoundly hostile to the United States, as in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
Elsewhere in the world, new powers are arising, but few are likely to act as American allies in the realist sense. Others will be robust competitors. America's European allies, meanwhile, are further restricting the conditions under which their forces fight and drastically slashing defense budgets. British military sources estimate that troop numbers will soon be reduced to 80,000, leaving Britain with its smallest army since the 1820s. With similar cuts expected in Germany, Italy, and France, the United States will become harder-pressed to rely on European support during crises."[W]e won't be able to defend the security on which our democratic societies … depend," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has warned. "We risk a Europe increasingly adrift from the United States."
Israel is the only Middle Eastern state never to oppose America on major international issues. Its fundamental interests, like its values, are America's. For the price of annual military aid equaling roughly half the cost of one Zumwalt-class destroyer, the United States helps maintain the military might of one of the few nations actively contributing to America's defense. It reinforces the only country capable of deterring Hamas and Hezbollah and impeding the spread of Iranian hegemony. According to published sources, the Israel Defense Forces is larger than the French and British armies combined. The IDF is superbly trained and, when summoned, capable of mobilizing within hours.
These benefits of the U.S.-Israel relationship are of incalculable value to the United States, far outweighing any price. Americans know that Israelis have always stood by them, ready to share technology, intelligence, and innovation -- ready to aid them in conflict and to make the painful sacrifices for peace. Israel may be one of a handful of countries that fully fits the definition of ally, but its willingness to support the United States unwaveringly makes it the partner par excellence, America's ultimate ally.
This article appears in the May/June 2011 edition of Foreign Policy.
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- Enter a word for the dictionary definition.
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
Wherry \Wher"ry\, n.; pl. Wherries. [Cf. Icel. hverfr shifty, crank, hverfa to turn, E. whirl, wharf.] (Naut.) (a) A passenger barge or lighter plying on rivers; also, a kind of light, half-decked vessel used in fishing. [Eng.] (b) A long, narrow, light boat, sharp at both ends, for fast rowing or sailing; esp., a racing boat rowed by one person with sculls. [1913 Webster]
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Building a Baby from the Foundation Upwards:
Neurological Issues Can Start From Conception If the Conditions Are Right
Genetics, nutrition, environmental toxins, vaccines, and their combined impact on the immune system, can all play a role in Autism spectrum disorders. Think of it as a pyramid with the child at the top and all the damaging features underneath starting in utero. Some children don’t need vaccines to tip them over the edge if the child was born at the top or near the top of the pyramid to begin with. Other children who are close to the top, all they would need is a major mineral imbalance combined with one or two vaccines to tip them over the edge.
Think about this quote in the United States Senate on May 12, 1999 by Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, a Professor of Immunobiology:
“I would challenge any colleague, clinician or research scientist to claim that we have a basic understanding of the human newborn immune system. It is well established in studies in animal models that the newborn immune system is very distinct from the adolescent or adult. In fact, the immune system of newborns in animal models can easily be perturbed to ensure that it cannot respond properly later in life.”
Children who have gone into an immediate regressive autism after vaccines are the ones who may have been able to cope, and not tipped over the edge, if they had more time to mature their immature immune systems. Others, without vaccines, were just too close to the top of the pyramid at birth or in utero.
Birth Control Pill Use:
Anything that affects hormones enough to stop a lining shedding could cause issues. The use of hormones disrupts mineral balance, and further disturbs the normal running of metabolic pathways. If enough are disturbed, then it could contribute to an unstable foundation for a baby. The pill can strip out magnesium, zinc, B6, folic acid and EFA’s from the body.
The pill can skew the hormone system long-term and changes vascular circulation permanently, and further trashes the body’s supply of magnesium, zinc, B vitamins, folic acid and essential fatty acids. All these things lay the foundation for a pregnancy in which fetal nutrient absorption comes from a deficit position right at the outset.
Dr. Ellen Grant wrote a book called Sexual Chemistry which explains it. She was involved in the original large trials on what the pill does to the body.
…”Our studies in 1981 and 1989 found significantly higher concentrations of copper and cadmium in hair in dyslexic children compared with matched controls.1,2 Sweat zinc was severely deficient in the dyslexic children, being 66% lower than that for control children. However, the control children in 1989 had much lower average zinc level than the children tested for laboratory reference range purposes 10 years before in 1979.2,3 Zinc deficiency allows accumulation of toxic metals which may be important causes of the increase in autism, asthma, dyslexia and hyperactivity in the past few decades.4,5
Biolab Medical Unit offers analyses of all toxic metal levels in blood, metal sensitivity tests and the effects of toxic metal substitution on proteins and some binding sites.6,7 Dr John McLaren- Howard presented the results of testing 61 autistic children at a Biolab Workshop for Doctors in June 2004, as he was attempting to find out which nutritional tests should be recommended. Among the 42 boys and 19 girls most were deficient in zinc and magnesium. Many were also deficient in copper, chromium, manganese, molybdenum and B vitamins. Therefore, essential fatty acids were also likely to be deficient. 16 children had DNA-adducts in leucocytes to malondialdehyde, 12 to cadmium, 9 to nickel. Three of the 61 children had DNA-adducts to mercury and one had DNA- adducts to lead. 37 children had antigliadin IgG antibodies, while 30 children had malabsorption detected by a D-xylose test. Malabsorption was most common in those with Asperger’s type syndrome, 16 out of 18 children.
The zinc and magnesium lowering effects of maternal use of progesterones and oestrogens, parental smoking and alcohol use and parental dental mercury and other dental metal levels like nickel and tin, need to be looked at in larger studies. Mercury is a toxic metal whether it is in dental amalgams or in vaccines. If 5% of autistic children show evidence of signs of mercury exposures, this still means large numbers of children have been adversely affected. Clearly the increasing incidence of childhood diseases needs proper biochemical scientific investigations.”
Toxic metals for vegetable fruit sprays, like Arsenate of copper and Arsenate of Mercury, DDT used to be used. Now, sprays are different, but are they really better? Our stolen future and Chem Trails.
The vaccine becomes the bullet for many children. They start out seemingly healthy, even with perhaps a shaky foundation. But once the bullet (vaccine) is injected, they begin to spiral downwards. Symptoms are pathway dysfunction, not illness.
Diet and Nutrition/Minerals:
Copper and zinc are important because if they are out of sync the enzymes that create neurotransmitters, that the brain cells use to transmit their messages from one brain cell to another, won’t work properly. B6 works with those. Proper balance is what is needed because if you get the copper and zinc right, you can modulate the brains regulation of mood and reaction to stress. These enzymes also need B6; as B6 often helps in treating depression. In women, low zinc and high copper can be linked to ‘rage’ episodes during PMS.
Suphur has a key interaction with selenium. Selenium is good for skin, hair, nails, to build certain amino acids in the cells and brain, and make sulfonated compounds for the joints. When there is a deficiency, there is a reduction in the activity of the enzyme gluthathione peroxidase. This results in reduced immune function, which has its greatest effect on the helper T dependent cells, and production of Ig.M is impaired. IgM is one of the front line Th1 antibodies which are made in the early stages of an infection. Children suffering from malnutrition fail to grow when given a recuperative diet, if it remains selenium deficient because selenium is necessary for protein synthesis. While it protects against the toxic effects of the pollutant cadmium, and mercury from all sources, it also increases the effectiveness of vitamin E, and it reduces the chances of all types of cancer. In communities where selenium intake is low, the cancer rate is high.
Maternal selenium nutrition and neonatal immune system development.
Skeletal muscle disorders associated with selenium deficiency in humans.
Deficiency in selenium or Vitamin E also shows reduced natural killer cell activity. With regard to the enzymes; Glutathione is essential for:
-detoxification and liver function
-effective immune response
-male fertility (low sperm counts)
-blood sugar metabolism
-blood pressure regulation
-inhibition of thrombus formation in diabetes
-prevention of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson disease, Huntington’s chorea, stroke and brain trauma.
Effective Glutathione is important for T cell proliferation, development of large CD8+ T cells, cytotoxic T cell activity and production of CD16+ natural killer cells. Glutathione protects and repairs liver tissue under severe acute and chronic alcohol exposure.
Selenium protects against the toxic effects of the pollutants cadmium, and mercury. It helps prevent chromosome breakage in tissue culture. It is the basis of the unique enzyme system Glutathione peroxidase, which destroys peroxides before they can attack cellular membranes, while the vitamin E acts within the membrane itself preventing the oxidation of membrane lipids.
When discussing epigenetics; they know demethylation is carried down through the generations and they know it can be reversed.
This is the list of tests a DAN doctor may perform:
*Complete blood count w/ differential and platelet count
*Serum metabolic assay (complete)
*Thyroid profile (T3, T4 and TSH)
*Amino acid profile (plasma)
*Organic acid profile (urine)
*Lactic acid level
*Pyruvic acid level (pyruvate)
*Heavy metal profile (lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium), blood
*Vitamin A level
*Zinc and copper (serum)
*Measles, mumps and rubella antibody IGG titers
*IgG, A, M, E
*T cell function tests
*Myelin basic protein and neural axon filament antibodies
But other minerals should be tested as well such as:
Immunologist have begun to test for a genetic variant in an enzyme called Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) and Glutathione.
METALLOTHIONINE PROTEIN DYSFUNCTION
Diseases that can occur because of MT protein dysfunction include:
· Psoriasis and eczema
· ADD and ADHD
· Schizophrenia and Obsessive Compulsive disorder
· Chronic fatigue syndrome
Metallothionine protein disorder is thought to be a genetic defect involving more than one gene. This disorder results in a decreased ability of the MT protein to function normally. Metallothionine protein helps regulate zinc and copper levels in the blood, withdrawal heavy metals as they enter the body, help development and continued functioning of the immune system, help development and pruning of brain cells, (neurons), help prevent yeast overgrowth in the intestines, aid in the production of enzymes that break down casein and gluten, aid in the production of hydrochloric acid by stomach cells, help taste and texture discrimination by the tongue, and aid in the behavior control and development of memory and social skills.
In 2000, William Walsh, Ph.D. of the Pfeiffer Treatment Center discovered that the majority of autistic patient’s exhibit MT dysfunction and the classic signs of autism can be explained by a MT dysfunction. There are four primary types of MT proteins and each has an important role in the body.
MT-I and II are present in all cells throughout the body. They regulate copper and zinc, are involved in cell transcription, detoxify heavy metals, play a role in the immune function, and are involved in a variety of G.I. tract functions.
MT-III is found primarily in the brain and functions as a gross inhibitory factor in the brain. MT-III is located primarily in the central nervous system with small amounts present in the pancreas and intestines. It plays a major role in the development, organization and programmed death of brain cells.
MT-IV is found in the skin and upper G.I. tract. They help regulate stomach acid pH, taste and texture discrimination of the tongue and help protect against sunburn and other skin traumas.
Deficits in sulfur metabolism
Abnormal liver detoxification
A genetic weakness (C4B null allele) and/or predisposition, combined with one or more of the following:
1) Shortened or absent breast-feeding preventing the full development of transferred cellular immunity. (Fudenberg)
2) Early gluten (usually wheat) introduction prior to one year of age. Wheat has been genetically manipulated in the last 100 years to increase the gluten content.
3) Early use of cow’s milk or casein based formulas. (Allergenic and altered)
4) Immunizations with live viruses, especially the MMR after 1978. There is frequent regression after the MMR vaccine that has been observed and published (Wakefield). Other vaccinations and the resulting effects on interleukin or autoimmunity. (Singh) DPT (especially if whole cell pertussis is used) and HepB (not live viruses) may also play a role in immune alterations.
5) Use of antibiotics and resulting yeast and pathogenic bacteria infection or overgrowth, with resulting immune modification and toxic exposure. (Shaw, Fudenberg, Wuepper)
6) Maternal allergy, chronic fatigue syndrome, or leaky gut problems that caused the child to be pre-sensitized in the womb. (Fudenberg)
7) Leaky gut from any number of the above or also related to parasites or GI infections in the child that allow gluten and casein to leak into the bloodstream. Once in the body, the body alters them into toxic substances. Sucrose (table sugar) also leaks in and it is an abnormal sugar in the blood stream that causes a host of problems.
8) Defect in the detoxification pathway of the brain, Phenol Sulfur-Transferase or PST enzyme defect. Inadequate intake of sulfur compounds. (Rosemary Waring, Birmingham University, England).
9) They develop autoantibodies to Myelin Basic Protein (Singh, Fudenberg, and Gupta) and other brain components. Measles is known to induce MBP antibodies. I’ll talk about this a lot more later.
10) Defective cellular immunity, especially in the NK cell activity towards self and pathogens. (Fudenberg, Gupta). And the probable elevation of Interleukin-2 and 12.
Jeff Bradstreet, M.D., FAAFP
The International Child Development Resource Center
Let’s break each one above down…
1. Breast milk creates the right probiotics which absorb minerals the right way, and provide the foundation for cellular immunity and nutrient absorption. The gut makes up 70 % of the immune system. It also plays a role in e-coli endotoxin production.
2. It has nothing to do with the gluten. Salivary fluid has an enzyme in it, to break down grains when the molar teeth cut. Celiac for example isn’t caused by too much gluten. It’s caused by lack of the enzyme opening the pathway to those with epigenetic susceptibility. Before 1900′s, celiac was pretty much unheard of. More gluten isn’t good for some people.
3. Unpasteurized animal milk worked well versus pasteurized.
4. True, but you only know what you have looked at. What about the others?
5. Antibiotics cause immune modification all on their own, not necessarily as a result of the resulting yeast and pathogenic bacteria infection and overgrowth. What about e.coli?
6. What caused the maternal allergy? If you look at minerals and other, you may be able to eliminate the allergy.
7. Leaky gut would not be a problem if the foundation was laid right and a change in nutrition better understood.
8. If you have an inadequate intake of sulfur compounds and/or an inadequate intake of other minerals such as magnesium, zinc, selenium.
9. That is not the cause, but the end result. The cause needs to be worked out.
10. See # 9.
Fever reducers lower glutathione levels. When glutathione levels are reduced, you increase the level of the hormones. They also suppress the immune system further.
Filed under: Autism News, Questioning the Vaccine Decision | Tagged: autism, babies preconception, birth control pills, chem trails, METALLOTHIONINE PROTEIN DYSFUNCTION, minerals, Neurological Issues, nutrition, selenium, toxins, vaccines | Leave a Comment »
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(NewsUSA) - We all have dealt with dry mouth at one time or another. For some, however, it's more than just a casual occurrence.
What exactly is dry mouth? Basically, it is when your mouth feels parched. If you suffer from dry mouth symptoms, you naturally have less oxygen-rich saliva in your mouth, which creates an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment -- the perfect environment for bacteria that cause bad breath.
Are bad breath and dry mouth signs that some other health condition is present? Possibly. It's true that serious cases of dry mouth have been linked to health problems such as diabetes, Sjogren's syndrome and hypertension -- just to name a few. However, even if your dry mouth isn't being caused by a more serious health condition, ignoring it can lead to more health problems down the road.
"No one likes having bad breath, but dry mouth can also increase your risk of gum disease, tooth decay and mouth infections. In fact, it can even damage your throat," says Dr. Harold Katz, a dentist, bacteriologist and creator of TheraBreath premium oral care products from Beverly Hills, Calif. "Medications, smoking, health conditions and dehydration can cause it."
Over 75 percent of prescribed medications list dry mouth as a side effect. Plus, mouthwashes with alcohol will only exacerbate the problem. If you have dry mouth, here are some solutions that can help fix it:
* Stop using products with sodium lauryl sulfate. Sodium lauryl sulfate can dry out your mouth, which feeds bacteria, creates bad breath and induces bitter and sour tastes.
* Avoid drinking citrus juices. Acidic drinks, like orange, grapefruit and tomato juice can compound dry mouth.
* Drink more water. Getting enough water will keep your mouth moist, especially if you're ingesting things like coffee or orange juice. High levels of oxygen in your saliva balance acids and deter sulfur-producing bacteria.
* Use mouth-wetting lozenges.
If your dry mouth remains an issue, talk to your doctor. Be sure to find out if the medication you take is known to give patients dry mouth.
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The Georgia Conservancy is a statewide environmental organization working to ensure that present and future generations of Georgians have healthy air, clean water, unspoiled wild places, and community greenspace. The Conservancy's tools include advocacy and education
The Georgia Conservancy was founded in 1967 after a former U.S. congressman from Decatur, James Mackay, convened a group of concerned citizens to discuss Georgia's vanishing resources. The earliest work of the organization focused on protecting threatened places. Working in partnership with other organizations, the Conservancy won some early victories when Sweetwater Creek and Panola Mountain in metro Atlanta became state parks, Cumberland Island became a national seashore, and the Okefenokee Swamp was designated as Wilderness.
The Georgia Conservancy focuses on more than environmentally sensitive places. Early on, the group expanded its efforts to include advocacy for clean water and clean air. It worked in the Georgia General Assembly to pass the Metropolitan River Protection Act, which was aimed at increasing protections for the Chattahoochee River, and successfully opposed the construction of a dam on the Flint River at Sprewell Bluff near Thomaston. As early as 1971 the Conservancy's executive committee called for investment in rapid transit in metro Atlanta because of the link between automobile emissions and air pollution.
Because of the connections among land use, quality of life, and environmental protection, by the mid-1990s the Georgia Conservancy began to emerge as a leader in the "smart growth" movement. The Conservancy's Blueprints for Successful Communities program has gained a national reputation for bringing diverse constituencies together to develop and implement thoughtful solutions to combat sprawl. To date, more than twelve communities in metro Atlanta and around Georgia have developed plans for a more sustainable future through the expertise of the Georgia Conservancy. Currently the program is focusing on the implementation of watershed-based plans along the middle Chattahoochee near Columbus, the revitalization of the Ocmulgee River corridor in downtown Macon, and the continued survival of the unique coastal community of Sandfly near Savannah.
The Georgia Conservancy continues to work for sustainable policies for air, water, and natural areas. The organization supported the creation of the Georgia Community Greenspace Program and is currently calling for a statewide vision for protecting natural areas in the state. The group works with transportation planners and state air-quality officials to restore and maintain air quality and thus protect public health and the natural environment throughout the state. It is represented on the board of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) and works cooperatively with GRTA and other groups to propose alternatives and to comment on proposed regulatory strategies as an advocate for air quality and public health concerns. The Conservancy has urged state and local leaders to take steps to conserve water and has opposed efforts to build reservoirs until the state better understands their full impact. As part of the Georgia Water Coalition, the Conservancy is working to ensure that water continues to be a public resource, managed by the state for the good of all.
The Georgia Conservancy also offers a variety of environmental education programs. Annually it holds the Youth Environmental Symposium to honor middle and high school environmental projects. "Native Seasons," developed by the Conservancy, is the only environmental education curriculum offered in Georgia that is specific to the state. It focuses on how plants and animals adapt to the changes of season. Educators who participate in Conservancy workshops receive the curriculum and tips on how to use it with their students. Children's programs are also available.
Georgia Conservancy members take part in educational programs, conferences, and symposia and enjoy travel to some of Georgia's most interesting places. They receive a bimonthly newsletter and have opportunities to participate in the Conservancy's advocacy work.
Fred Brown and Nell Jones, Georgia Conservancy's Guide to the North Georgia Mountains (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996).
Chuck Leavell, Forever Green: The History and Hope of the American Forest (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 2001).
Richard J. Lenz, Longstreet Highroad Guide to the Georgia Coast and Okefenokee (Atlanta: Longstreet, 1999).
Grace Trimble, Atlanta Regional Commission
A project of the Georgia Humanities Council, in partnership with the University of Georgia Press, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Office of the Governor.
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In the style of "My Ghost Story", this special will tell the terrifying tales of people whose pasts literally come back to haunt them. These are the stories of people who wronged the one person they shouldn't have: a person so hell bent on revenge that even death won't stop them. When a vengeful ghost returns to get payback, nothing is off limits.
African-Americans have a long history of activism in America, from fighting for the right to vote to pushing for integrated public spaces. Activists like Stokely Carmichael organized freedom rides, James Meredith fought to integrate blacks and whites at the University of Mississippi, and Rosa Parks instigated the Montgomery Bus Boycott. These protests were often legal and nonviolent, and made a powerful impact on civil rights in the United States. With the help of activists like these—and many others—the country slowly worked to acknowledge the basic rights and contributions of African-Americans. Activists outisde of the U.S. include Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, who have fought against apartheid in South Africa. Learn more about the many black activists who fought against the odds in order to achieve equality.
They are the famous African-American writers who have fearlessly examined cultural stigmas, provided intimate life details, presented new ideas and created remarkable fiction through literary works. For their prophetic genius, these men and women have received Pulitzer Prizes, NAACP awards and even Nobel Prizes, among other honors. Our list of prominent African-American authors includes Toni Morrison, who has detailed the lives of black characters who struggle with identity amidst racism and hostility; Langston Hughes, a founder of the Harlem Renaissance; and Maya Angelou, who has eloquently chronicled various eras of her life through her autobiographies.
"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love." Stated by legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., these words represent a basic human philosophy to which black history's greatest leaders have passionately subscribed. Learn more about the world's most revered civil rights activists, known for their fight against social injustices and lasting impact on the lives of black citizens, including Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nelson Mandela, Nina Simone, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lena Horne, Marva Collins, Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
After the Civil War, many of the country's best and brightest black advocates, artists, entrepreneurs and intellectuals moved to the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Thanks largely to the efforts of these residents, Harlem became both the cradle of a cultural revolution and the heart of the civil rights movement. Meet some of the many people who gave—and continue to give—this neighborhood a voice, simply by calling it home.
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Middle East Environmental Law
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan gained independence in 1946. It is a constitutional monarchy with a conventional hereditary system. Jordan is bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the southeast, and the Palestinian territories and Israel to the west. It is ruled by the Hashemite family, which can trace its lineage to the fifth century.
Under the Constitution of Jordan, Islam is the state religion and Arabic is the official language. The nation has a parliamentary system of government with a hereditary monarchy, which means that the King is the head of the state and the Prime Minister is the head of the government and the chief of the Council of Ministers. Legislative power is vested in the the Parliament, which consists of an upper house, the Senate, the members of which are appointed by the King, and a lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, the members of which are selected by a popular election held every four years.
The parliament has the authority to adopt and amend the Constitution, enact legislation, and approve the state budget. The parliament also has the power to request policy information by directing questions to particular ministers on matters relating to the performance of their duties. The Chamber of Deputies can impeach ministers by a vote of two-thirds of the members of the Chamber. An impeachment must be presented to a tribunal consisting of both Senate members and Judges. Moreover if an absolute majority of the Chamber of Deputies approves a vote of no confidence in the Council of Ministers, the Council must resign.
The Prime Minister is appointed by the King and in turn appoints the members of the cabinet. The Chamber of Deputies must approve a vote of confidence in the government before the ministers can officially exercise their powers. If the Chamber of Deputies fails to approve a vote of confidence, the King must dismiss the government and appoint a new one.
The judicial branch operates independently from the other branches. While judges are appointed and can be dismissed by the King, the operations of the judiciary are in practice supervised by the Higher Judicial Council. The Council, headed by judges, supervises the judges in the kingdom, including the appointment, delegation, promotion, transfer, accountability, disciplining and retirement. Thier Constitution divides the courts into three categories: civil, religious and special courts. The civil courts exercise general jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters including cases brought against the government. The Supreme Court of Jordan (Court of Cassation) is the highest court and is made up of 15 judges.
The population of Jordan in 2010 was estimated at 6,113,000. Arabs represent the largest portion (98%) of the population of Jordan. Caucasians, Chechens, and Armenians make up the rest of the population. Islam is the predominant religion (96%), followed by Christianity (4%).
The primary law governing environmental management in Jordan is Environment Protection Law No. 52. The law was adopted in 2006 and established the Ministry of Environment. Article 3 designates the Ministry of Environment as the only competent authority for the protection of the environment as well as the lead entity environmental affairs at the national, regional and international level. Articles 4 and 5 define the competencies and tasks of the Ministry and require public and private entities to implement instructions and resolutions issued under the provisions of the Environment law.
The Environment Law addresses water protection, air protection, nature protection, environmental impact assessments and protection against chemical contamination.
• Regulation No. 26 of 2005 on pollution prevention in emergency situations. The regulation requires industrial projects to provide means of protection and prevention (including human resources, equipment and devices) ready for use in case of emergency in order to reduce the risk of damage to the environment and human life.
• Regulation No. 65 of 2009 on Environmental Inspection. The regulation stipulates that facilities that undertake projects with potentially negative environmental impacts are subject to random and pre-announced environmental inspections carried out by inspectors from the Ministry of Environment to ensure compliance with environmental requirements.
• Regulation No. 37 of 2005 on Environmental Impact Assessment the regulation requires facilities with potentially negative environmental impacts (such as facilities dealing with corrosive substances, ozone depleting substances or flammable materials) to perform an environmental impact assessment before starting their operations.
• Solid Waste Management Regulation No. 27 of 2005. According to article 5 of this regulation, an employer has the obligation to control all solid wastes, determine their respective paths and transport them to an adequate location for disposal. Moreover, the employer in charge of the facility is prohibited from burning of solid wastes.
• Air Protection Regulation No. 28 of 2005
• Natural Reserves and National Parks Regulation No. 29 of 2005
• Instructions No. 10 of 2009 on registration, manufacturing, processing, importing, trading of pesticides and its amendments.
• Instructions on the management, storage, transport and treatment of organic fertilizers of 2009
• Regulation No. 43 of 1998 on the Protection and Safety from Industrial Tools and Machines and Work Sites.
• Instructions on management and handling of hazardous waste for the year 2003.
• Instructions of 2011 on the protection of water resources. The instructions require activities affecting water resources to obtain a permit from the concerned authorities. Water protected areas are divided into two zones, Groundwater Protection Zone and Surface Water Protection Zone.
Jordan is endeavoring to accede to most international agreements related to sustainable development. As of 2011, Jordan has ratified international agreements such as:
• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol,
• Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
• Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa
• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)
• The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal
• Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes
• Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer on (Montreal Protocol)
• The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat (Ramsar Convention)
• United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)
In 2006, Jordan submitted an implementation plan developed in accordance with the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) adopted at the International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM). An Integrated Hazardous Substances Information Management and Control System were created for the control and management of hazardous materials. The system provides information on banned substances and identifies the authorities in charge of providing licenses. Still, many challenges face Jordan. Reports on early implementation steps reveal the absence of proper mechanisms to cover all stages of chemicals management due to a lack of sufficient resources or knowledge. In the Middle East generally, a lack of resources impedes national development and implementation plans.
Jordan suffers from variety of environmental problems, including insufficient water resources, water pollution, desertification, soil erosion, and deforestation.
A lack of effective regulatory enforcement mechanisms is the nation's greatest obstacle in pursuing its environmental protection goals. Other environmental problems in Jordan are described below
Desertification is one of the main problems facing Jordan. The country receives little rainfall; ninety percent of the country receives less than 200mm a year. Unwise land use and cultivation practices, climate change and chronic drought all contribute to increasing desertification. The Ministry of Environment's report on the National Strategy and Action Plan to Combat Desertification identified the main causes of desertification in different parts of Jordan.
The causes of desertification in different zones were described as follow:
• Zone 1: Saharo-Arabian (eastern region, bordering Saudi Arabia)
• Dominant desert land
• High salt content of soil
• Low annual rainfall
• Extensive sand dunes
2. Zone 2: Badia Region (north-eastern region)
• ubstantial accumulation of calcareous soil
• Low germination rate of plants and low intensity of plant cover caused by overgrazing and poor rainfall distribution
3. Zone 3: Mediterranean region (north and central regions)
• oodland cutting
• Urbanization and land fragmentation
• Recession of forest areas
• High rate of water erosion due to expanding urbanization urbanization
• Over-pumping of groundwater
4. Zone 4: Jordan Valley (western region, from Tiber Lake to Dead Sea)
• oil salinization
• Oergrazing of natural vegetation
• Mismanagement of irrigated land
• Unsupervised use of pesticides and chemical fertilizer
Pollution of the environment is attributed to industrial and agricultural practices in Jordan. Despite efforts to prevent the use of chemicals in agriculture such as DDT, the use of pesticides and herbicides in inappropriate ways has led to many problems such as the reduction of organic matter, soil compaction, the reduction of soil fertility, salting, water-logging, contamination by pesticides and inorganic fertilizers, the degradation of soil structure, and the increased soil erosion by water and wind.
Since 2000, Jordan has witnessed rapid industrial progress with many industrial facilities operating in different areas. According to the Jordan Biodiversity National Report, pollution from such sources has increase of due to a lack of awareness and a lack of effective legislation. The absence of hazardous waste collection and treatment sites has led some industrial facilities to store waste on the grounds of factories, putting at risk workers as well as local environment. In addition, hazardous wastes are produced and disposed by industry with limited protective treatment techniques and without proper recycling methods. According to the report, the total amount of hazardous waste produced in Jordan in 1993 was about 43,000 tons. This amount is expected to increase and to reach about 26,200 tons by the year 2015.
The country has suffered serious losses in wildlife biodiversity, as exemplified by the Arabian oryx and the Asiatic lion, which are subject to uncontrolled hunting. ,
Jordan is a semi-arid country with approximately 7% arable land. Water drawn from groundwater is estimated to serve approximately 4% of the nation's water needs. Jordan is ranked among the poorest countries in the world in terms of water availability. The Ministry of Water and Irrigation determined the annual per capita water availability for the year of 2007 to be 145 m3/year, which is well below the international water poverty standard of 500 m3.
A lack of water availability is a major concern for the country since the population is expected to reach 7.80 million by 2020, along with Palestinian and other refugees from neighboring countries. The instability of the region has impeded efforts to confront the nation's water supply problems. Jordan needs to develop effective policies in regard to water management and develop the legal mechanisms and water distribution infrastructure to better meet future water needs.
Renewable Energy Resources
Jordan has very limited energy resources. The country depends heavily on imported petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas from neighboring Arab countries. The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources and the Royal Energy Committee have recommended expanded use of renewable energy resources, including wind energy and solar energy, and the development of energy efficiency projects. According to the Ministry of Energy, the average daily solar radiation in Jordan is 5 to 7 kWh/m2, which is one of the highest in the world.
1. Ministry of Environment Jordan
2. Jordan Ministry of Water and Irrigation
3. United Nation Development Program: Drylands Development Centre (DDC)
4. Convention on Biodiversity
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1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Alberus, Erasmus
|←Albertus Magnus||1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 1
|See also Erasmus Alberus on Wikipedia, and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.|
ALBERUS, ERASMUS (c. 1500-1553), German humanist, reformer and poet, was a native of the village of Sprendlingen near Frankfort-on-Main, where he was born about the year 1500. Although his father was a schoolmaster, his early education was neglected. Ultimately in 1518 he found his way to the university of Wittenberg, where he studied theology. He had here the good fortune to attract the attention of Luther and Melanchthon, and subsequently became one of Luther's most active helpers in the Reformation. Not merely did he fight for the Protestant cause as a preacher and theologian, but he was almost the only member of Luther's party who was able to confront the Roman Catholics with the weapon of literary satire. In 1542 he published a prose satire to which Luther wrote the preface, Der Barfusser Monche Eulenspiegel und Alkoran, an adaptation of the Liber confermitatum of the Franciscan Bartolommeo Albizzi of Pisa (Pisanus, d. 1401 ), in which the Franciscan order is held up to ridicule. Of higher literary value is the didactic and satirical Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit (1550), a collection of forty-nine fables in which Alberus embodies his views on the relations of Church and State. His satire is incisive, but in a scholarly and humanistic way; it does not appeal to popular passions with the fierce directness which enabled the master of Catholic satire, Thomas Murner, to inflict such telling blows. Several of Alberus's hymns, all of which show the influence of his master Luther, have been retained in the German Protestant hymnal. After Luther's death, Alberus was for a time Diakonus in Wittenberg; he became involved, however, in the political conflicts of the time, and was in Magdeburg in 1550-1551, while that town was besieged by Maurice of Saxony. In 1552 he was appointed Generalsuperintendent at Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg, where he died on the 5th of May 1553.
Das Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit has been edited by W. Braune (1892); the sixteen Geistliche Lieder by C. W. Stromberger (1857). Alberus' prose writings have not been reprinted in recent times. See F. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Erasmus Alberus (1894).
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Herpes simplex is a viral
infection caused by one of two Herpes
Simplex Viruses (HSV), members of the Herpesviridae
family. Manifestations of herpes infections vary significantly between
individuals. Most cases of genital herpes are caused by HSV-2. It is widespread,
affecting an estimated 1 in 4 females and 1 in 5 males in the United
States. Although certain therapies can prevent
outbreaks or reduce the risk of transmission to partners, no cure is yet
There are two types of Herpes Simplex Virus: HSV Type 1 and
HSV Type 2. The ways in which herpes infections manifest themselves vary
tremendously among individuals. The following are general descriptions of the
courses outbreaks may take in the oral and genital regions.
Infectious fluid-filled blister on lower lip (herpes
Herpes is also formed on the tongue as bumps or white dots
Orofacial infection (generally
- Skin appears irritated
- Sore or cluster of fluid-filled blisters
- Lesion begins to heal, usually without scarring
It is estimated that 50% of adults in the United Kingdom are carriers of the
Herpes Simplex Virus,
many of which will never exhibit any symptoms of infection. Similarly, 50% of
Americans have HSV-1 antibodies in their blood by the time they're teenagers or
young adults and 80-90% of Americans have HSV-1 antibodies by the time they are
over age 50.
It is also possible for the virus to be transmitted across the skin in the
absence of a coldsore. Oral herpes lesions typically occur on the lips, but can
occur almost anywhere on the face. They can also occur on the fixed mucosa
inside the mouth, including the hard
palate (roof of the mouth), and gingiva
(gums). Oral herpes and cold sores can sometimes be confused with canker
sores. Only a medical physician can provide adequate
Genital infection (generally HSV-2)
- Prodromal symptoms
- Itching in affected area
- Sore appears
- Lesion begins to heal, usually without scarring.
In males, the lesions may occur on the shaft of the penis, in
the genital region, on the inner thigh, buttocks, or anus. In females, lesions
may occur on or near the pubis, labia, clitoris, vulva, buttocks, or anus. This
may require a very careful examination; for example, during delivery,
examination by use of a flashlight may be necessary. Symptoms can be confused
with that of chlamydia
so careful observation by a doctor is important.
The appearance of herpes lesions and the experience of
outbreaks in these areas varies tremendously among individuals. Herpes lesions
on/near the genitals may look like cold sores. An outbreak may look like a paper
cut, or chafing, or appear to be a yeast
infection. Symptoms of a genital outbreak may include
aches and pains in the area, discharge from the penis
and severe discomfort and burning when urinating.
Initial outbreaks are usually more severe than subsequent
ones, and generally also involve flu-like
symptoms and swollen glands
for a week or so. Subsequent outbreaks tend to be periodic or episodic,
typically occur four to five times a year, and can be triggered by stress,
illness, fatigue, menstruation,
and other changes. The virus sequesters in the nerve
that serve the infected dermatome
during non-eruptive periods, where it cannot be conventionally eliminated by the
body's immune system.
Physical or psychological stress can trigger an outbreak.
Local injury to the face, lips, eyes or mouth, as through trauma, surgery, or
sunburns are well established triggers of recurrent orolabial herpes due to
herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1). Similarly, intercurrent infections, such as
upper respiratory viral infections or other febrile diseases, can cause
outbreaks, hence the historic terms "cold sore" and "fever
blister". Generalized psychological stress and anxiety are also triggers.
Controversy exists about triggers of recurrent outbreaks of
genital herpes, typically due to HSV-2. It is often stated that stress,
menstruation, diet (such as foods high in arginine,
or sexual activity may increase the chance and severity of outbreaks. However,
no scientific studies have clearly documented such triggers, and the objective
data available suggest that outbreaks are not influenced by stressful events,
anxiety, depression, or similar influences. The clinical experience of most
experts involved in clinical care is that attempts by infected persons to modify
external triggers is virtually never effective in controlling symptomatic
oubreaks of genital herpes. Similarly, neither objective data nor biological
plausibility support the notion that excessive usage of antibiotics
affect the immune system's ability to keep the disease within the nerve ganglia
(particularly as antibiotics are useless against viruses of any type) or
otherwise affect herpes recurrences, nor the occasional assertion that
"chronic" genital herpes is in any way related to low-level food
Herpes infections, whether initial or recurring, are usually
first felt as a tingling and/or itching sensation in the affected location.
These initial feelings are usually followed, depending on how severe the
infection is, by the emergence of a raised or swollen area on the skin. This
swollen area then becomes painful in general, but acutely sore when touched,
stretched or moved. Eventually the sore area will abscess, and emit a virus
laden clear fluid for several days before scabbing over. Once scabbed over the
lesion will usually heal completely within a period of a week to ten days. In
immuno-compromised individuals this cycle can be significantly protracted.
From the onset of infection/outbreak, many patients experience
headaches, fatigue (sometimes extreme), and peculiar twitching sensations in the
nerves that lead to the area of the outbreak. The fatigue associated with herpes
infections can concatenate with depression brought on by the cosmetic or
sexually compromising nature of the infection, to yield a deeply gloomy overall
mental state that some believe can contribute to increasing the length and
severity of an infection.
Herpes is contracted through direct skin
contact (not necessarily in the genital area) with an infected person, and less
frequently by indirect contact (for instance, by sharing lip balm or a virus
infested shared towel). The virus travels through tiny breaks in the skin (or
mucous membranes in the mouth and genital areas), so, healthy skin and mucous
membranes are normally an effective barrier to infection. However, in the case
of mucous membranes, even microscopic abrasions are sufficient to expose the
nerve endings into which the virus splices itself. This is why most herpes
transmission happens in mucous membranes, or in areas of the body where mucous
membranes and normal skin merge (e.g., the corners of the mouth).
Symptoms usually appear within 2 weeks. The sores usually heal
within 2 - 4 weeks.
Transmission was thought to be most common during an active
outbreak; however, in the early 1980s, it was found that the virus can be shed
from the skin, saliva and genital secretions in the absence of symptoms.
Herpes recurs only at a site of previous infection. The
periodicity (frequency) and amplitude (severity) of recurrence varies greatly
depending on the individual and various environmental factors including stress
(both physical and mental). Often, for a given site, the infection will recur
only two or three times, with severity attenuating (decreasing) each time. The
mechanism by which the body seems to gain the upper-hand for a given recurrence
site is poorly understood by the medical community.
Self reinfection, known medically as autoinoculation, is more
likely during intensely virulent initial infection with either HSV-1 or HSV-2 in
a given infection site. The most common manifestations are herpetic whitlow, a
pustular lesion typically of a finger, and herpes of the eye (keratitis,
General hygiene principles suggest that persons with recurrent
oral or genital herpes should avoid direct contact with active lesions and
should wash their hands immediately after using the toilet or touching the area
of an oral lesion, to further limit the low risk of autoinoculation.
In cases where herpes is present in an area where the dermis
is subject to high abrasive forces (such as the often irritated shaved beard
region, or the surfaces of the penis and vagina during vigorous sexual
activity), it is quite common to spread an initial lesion to other sites, which
then become highly virulent initial infections, and so on. The medical community
has failed to make this very obvious fact clear to patients and this has
resulted in great amplification of their general misery, not to mention the much
higher likelihood that a person infected in multiple sites (whether genital, or
otherwise) will spread this disease to friends, family and sexual partners.
HSV asymptomatic shedding is believed to occur on 2.9% of days
while on antiviral therapy, versus 10.8% of days without. Shedding is known to
be more frequent within the first 12 months of acquiring HSV-2, and concurrent
infection with HIV
also increases the frequency and duration of asymptomatic shedding.
There are some indications that some individuals may have much lower patterns of
shedding, but evidence supporting this is not fully verified. Sex should always
be avoided in the presence of symptomic lesions. Oral sex performed by someone
with oral lesions or other symptoms should be avoided, to avoid transmission of
HSV-1 to the partner's genitals. Even without symptoms it is possible for
transmission to occur. Many people still believe Herpes cannot be transmitted
through oral sex. This is a dangerous myth.
Women are more susceptible to acquiring genital HSV-2 than
men; in the US, 11% of men and 23% of women carry HSV-2.
On an annual basis, without the use of antivirals or condoms, the transmission
risk from infected male to female is approximately 8-10%. This is believed to be
due to the increased exposure of mucosal tissue to potential infection sites.
Transmission risk from infected female to male is approximately 4-5% annually.
Suppressive antiviral therapy reduces these risks by 50%. Antivirals also help
prevent the development of symptomatic HSV in infection scenarios by about 50%,
meaning the infected partner will be seropositive but symptom free. Condom use
also reduces the transmission risk by 50%. Condom use is much more effective at
preventing male to female transmission than vice-versa.
The effects of combining antiviral and condom use is roughly additive, thus
resulting in approximately a 75% combined reduction in annual transmission risk.
These figures reflect experiences with subjects having frequently-recurring
genital herpes (>6 recurrences per year). Subjects with low recurrence rates
and those with no clinical manifestations were excluded from these studies.
For genital herpes, condoms
are a highly recommended way to limit transmission of herpes simplex infection,
as demonstrated in research.
However, condoms are by no means completely effective. The effectiveness of this
method is somewhat limited on a public
health scale by the limited use of condoms in the
and on an individual scale because some blisters may not be covered by the
condom, or free virus in female vaginal fluid may enable infection around the
base of the penis or testicles not covered by the condom.
Condoms do not prevent the condom wearer from spreading the
infection to new sites either on himself through abrasion (if he is already
infected and suffering an outbreak), or on the female partner if she is
suffering from an outbreak and the sexual activity spreads this infection from
one site to another on her own body (see "Self Reinfection" above).
The use of condoms or dental
dams can limit the transmission of Herpes from the
genitals of one partner to the mouth of the other (or vice versa) during oral
When one partner has herpes simplex infection and the other
does not, the use of valaciclovir,
in conjunction with a condom, has been demonstrated to decrease further the
chances of transmission to the uninfected partner, and the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this as a new
indication for the drug in August 2003.
for HSV are currently undergoing trials. Once developed, they may be used to
help with prevention or minimize initial infections as well as treatment for
existing infections.
Other measures that have been suggested include:
- Abstinence from sexual activity while HSV blisters are
- Avoidance of cross-infecting new sites on the body if HSV
blisters are present
- Gentle and well lubricated as opposed to vigorous, abrasive
- Thorough washing of the genitals after sex
- Not ejaculating inside a partner during sex (if herpes
lesions have appeared inside the urethra)
- Management of stress
- Adequate sleep and nutrition
- Use of a lip protectant or lip gloss to avoid cracks and
abrasions through which the virus may infect
- Treatment using ascorbate-Cu(II)
Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United
States is currently in the midst of phase
III trials of a vaccine against HSV-2, called Herpevac.
The vaccine has only been shown to be effective for women who have never been
exposed to HSV-1. Overall, the vaccine is approximately 48% effective in
preventing HSV-2 seropositivity and about 78% effective in preventing
symptomatic HSV-2. Assuming FDA approval, a commercial version of the vaccine is
estimated to become available around 2008. During initial trials, the vaccine
did not exhibit any evidence in preventing HSV-2 in males. Additionally, the
vaccine only reduced the acquisition of HSV-2 and symptoms due to newly acquired
HSV-2 among women who did not have HSV-1 infection at the time they got the
vaccine. Because about 50% of persons in the United States have HSV-1 infection,
this further reduces the population for whom this vaccine might be appropriate.
Currently, there is no cure for herpes. There is no treatment
that can eradicate herpes virus from the body at reactivations of the virus.
can reduce pain and fever during initial outbreaks.
There are several prescription antiviral
medications for controlling herpes outbreaks, including aciclovir
(Famvir), and penciclovir.
was the original and prototypical member of this class and generic brands are
now available at a greatly reduced cost. Some prescription drugs to treat herpes
can cause diarrohea several times a day so patients are advised to take non
prescribed diarrohea tablets as required in these cases along with the
medication. It has been claimed that the evidence for the effectiveness of
topically applied cream for recurrent labial outbreaks is weak.
Likewise oral therapy for episodes is inappropriate for most non-immunocompromised
patients, whilst there is evidence for oral prophylactic role in preventing
Valaciclovir and famciclovir are prodrugs
of aciclovir and penciclovir respectively, with improved oral bioavailability
(55% vs 20% and 75% vs 5% respectively). These antiviral medications work by
interfering with viral replication, effectively slowing the replication rate of
the virus and providing a greater opportunity for the immune response to
intervene. All drugs in this class depend on the activity of the viral thymidine
kinase to convert the drug to a monophosphate
form and subsequently interfere with viral DNA
replication. Penciclovir's primary advantage over
aciclovir is that it has a far longer cellular half-life
– 10 hours (HSV-1)/20 hours (HSV-2) for penciclovir versus 3 hours (HSV-1/2)
is the recommended antiviral for suppressive therapy to prevent transmission of
herpes simplex to the neonate.
The use of valaciclovir
while potentially improving treatment compliance and efficacy, are still
undergoing safety evaluation in this context.
There is evidence in mice that treatment with famciclovir, rather than aciclovir,
during an initial outbreak can help lower the incidence of future outbreaks by
reducing the amount of latent virus in the neural ganglia. This potential effect
on latency over aciclovir drops to zero a few months post-infection.
Other drugs exhibiting anti-viral activity
(Abreva) is another treatment that may be effective. Docosanol works by
preventing the virus from fusing to cell membranes, thus barring entry into the
cell for the virus. This may keep an outbreak contained to a smaller area than
would otherwise be observed.
is an early relief cold sore/fever blister gel that works by applying the gel,
which when dry forms a "shield" to prevent the sore from increasing in
size and prevents spreading by breakage or oozing during the healing process.
is another antiviral drug effective against herpes.
a common component of heartburn medication, has been shown to lessen the
severity of herpes zoster outbreaks in several different instances, and offered
some relief from herpes simplex
. This is an off-label
use of the drug.
It and probenecid
have been shown to reduce the renal clearance of aciclovir.
The study showed these compounds reduce the rate, but not the extent, at which
valaciclovir is converted into aciclovir. Renal clearance of aciclovir was
reduced by approximately 24% and 33% respectively. In addition, respective
increases in the peak plasma concentration of acyclovir of 8% and 22% were
observed. The authors concluded that these effects were "not expected to
have clinical consequences regarding the safety of valaciclovir". Due to
the tendency of aciclovir to precipitate in renal tubules, combining these drugs
should only occur under the supervision of a physician.
Availability of non-generic
Availability of generic
is no longer under US patent protection, available in generic form
Drugs in development
- BILS 179 BS, BILS 45 BS, BILS 22 BS,
also inhibitors of helicase-primase enzyme, researched in Ridgefield,
Connecticut, by James Crute's team at Boehringer
Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals.
supplementation has been proposed as a complementary therapy for the prophylaxis
and treatment of herpes simplex. Lysine supplementation is highly
dose-dependent, with beneficial effects apparent only at doses exceeding 1000 mg
per day. A small randomised
controlled trial indicated a decrease in recurrence
rates in nonimmunocompromised patients at a dose of 1248 mg of lysine
monohydrochloride, but no effect at 624 mg daily. This study did not show any
evidence of shortening the healing time compared to placebo.
Another small randomised controlled trial indicated the benefit of 3000 mg
lysine daily for the reduction of occurrence, severity and healing time for
recurrent HSV infection.
Tissue culture studies have shown the suppression of viral
replication when the lysine to arginine ratio in vitro favours lysine.
The therapeutic consequence of this finding is unclear, but dietary arginine may
affect the effectiveness of lysine supplementation.
Lysine intake may be supplemented by varying the diet. Dairy
products offer the highest ratio of lysine to arginine amino-acid content.
Contrarily, nuts (and peanuts, even though they aren't true nuts), deliver a
large dose of arginine. To help forestall outbreaks, you might avoid nuts during
stressful periods, and eat cheese any time you do eat nuts. During an outbreak,
eating cheese may slow the spread of lesions, and reduce virus shedding and
self-reinfection. Eating 100g (~4oz) of Parmesan cheese supplies 3.3g of lysine,
vs. 1.3g of arginine. The same amount of almonds provides 0.7g of lysine, but
2.4g of arginine. (Cf. the Danish Food Composition Databank, http://www.foodcomp.dk/fcdb_alphlist.asp)
High doses of lysine (greater than 10 grams daily) are known
to cause gastrointestinal adverse effects. Dyspepsia
was reported in 3 of 114 subjects treated with L-lysine in one study.
Prolonged and/or very high lysine doses may also have adverse effects on renal
function, indeed lysine is contraindicated in lysine hypersensitivity and kidney
or liver disease. (Anon., 2005) One patient, with a history of risk factors for
renal impairment, developed tubulointerstitial nephritis
Syndrome) after taking lysine 3000 mg daily for
approximately 5 years.
linear sulphated polysaccharides
extracted from red seaweeds,
have been shown to have antiviral effects in HSV-infected cells.
- There are indications that a carrageenan
based gel may offer some protection against HSV-2 transmission by binding to
the receptors on the herpes virus thus preventing the virus from binding to
cells. Researchers have shown that a carrageenan-based gel effectively
prevented HSV-2 infection at a rate of 85% in a mouse model.
There is an ongoing large-scale trial of the efficacy of a similar
formulation on humans results are expected to be published in 2007.
- The natural carrageenans 1T1, 1C1, 1C3 isolated from Gigartina
inhibited the replication activity of HSV-1 and HSV-2 in infected mouse astrocyte
nerve cells and vero
a component of whey protein, has been shown to have a synergistic effect with
aciclovir against HSV in vitro.
The concentration of lactoferrin which achieved 50% of maximum effectiveness
observed (that is, the EC50)
also acted in synergy with aciclovir; the concentration required to achieve EC50
for each substance was reduced "two- to seven-fold."
a compound in red wine, has been shown by researchers to prevent HSV replication
by inhibiting a protein needed by the virus to replicate. Resveratrol alone was
not considered potent enough by the researchers to be an effective treatment.
A more recent in vivo
study in mice showed the efficacy of topical resveratrol cream in preventing
cutaneous HSV lesion formation.
Research on a much more potent derivative of resveratol, named stil-5, is
ongoing. There is no evidence that red wine consumption provides any similar
Limited evidence suggests that low dose aspirin
(125 mg daily) might be beneficial in patients with recurrent HSV infections. A
small study of 21 volunteers with recurrent HSV indicated a significant
reduction in duration of active HSV infections, milder symptoms, and longer
symptom-free periods as compared to a control group.
A recent animal study found that aspirin inhibited thermal stress-induced ocular
viral shedding of HSV-1, and a possible benefit in reducing recurrences.
Aspirin is not recommended in persons under 18 years of age with herpes simplex
due to the increased risk of Reye's
syndrome. Long term daily doses of aspirin have a side
effect of reduced blood coagulation, facilitating bruising. A single 81 mg
"daily dose" aspirin is a safer regimen given that there are no
studies of the correlation between dosage and anti-viral effects of aspirin.
The evidence for the effectiveness of zinc
C supplementation is poor.
Other supplements with anecdotal evidence of benefits include monolaurin, vitamin
Daily multivitamin intake may be beneficial through maintenance of immune
system health. High doses of vitamin A should not be
taken in early pregnancy due to linkage with birth defects. In addition, some
anecdotal reports indicate that placing ice in contact with an emerging cold
sore for 5-10 minutes throughout the day can help shorten the duration of the
outbreak, or prevent it from developing further.
Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT),
commonly available as a food preservative, has been shown in in-vitro
laboratory studies to inactivate the herpes virus.
In-vivo studies in animals confirmed the anti-viral activity of BHT
against genital herpes.
However BHT has not been clinically tested and approved to treat herpes
infections in humans.
Latent infection and biology
The herpes virus is a double-stranded DNA (dsDNA)-type
virus. Herpes establishes a latent infection in cells of the nervous system.
Double-stranded DNA is incorporated into the cell physiology by infection of the
nucleus, where a loop of dsDNA is maintained. During
inactive, or latent, periods of the infection, a subset of the Herpes genome
Associated Transcript is active and may be involved in
maintenance of latency.
The long-term effects of herpes are not well known, but the
blisters may leave scars, and historically it was thought to contribute to the
risk of cervical
cancer in women. Subsequently, another virus, human
papillomavirus (HPV), has been shown to be a primary
cause of cervical cancer in women. Additionally, people with herpes are at a
higher risk of HIV
transmission because of open blisters. In newborns, however, herpes can cause
serious damage: death, neurological damage, mental retardation, and blindness.
The immune system is able to destroy active herpes virus
particles but the herpes virus has the ability to hide from the immune system in
an inactive (or latent) state. Current research suggests that this ability to
hide may be achieved via modification to cellular enzyme histone deacetylases (HDACs),
namely HDAC1 and HDAC2.
Hypothetically, by interfering with the HDAC enzymes' effectiveness, it may be
possible to block the virus's ability to hide from the immune system, leading to
a complete elimination of the virus by the immune system. Studies on the impact
of HDAC inhibitors on viral latency are ongoing in the HIV arena.
Obstetric / Neonatal risks
Recurrent genital herpes has very significant
obstetrical/neonatal risks associated with it, and probably may merit treatment
with acyclovir as an independent problem.
It is reasonably well-established in the last few years that
herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) is the most common cause of recurrent viral meningitis
(Mollaret's meningitis).
Psychological and social effects
Herpes can have a dramatic effect on an individual's mental
well-being and sexual behaviour.
Quality of life issues
Upon diagnosis of genital herpes, people can experience a
number of negative feelings related to the condition. Though these feelings
lessen over time, they can include:
- depression 81%
- fear of rejection 75%
- feeling of isolation 69%
- fear of being found out 55%
- self-destructive feelings 28%
The impact of genital herpes included:
- partial or complete cessation of sexual activity
- total or partial loss of interest in sex
- decreased sexual pleasure
- sex life more inhibited and less spontaneous
- anxiety related to sexual desirability
- increased depression
In order to improve the well-being of people with herpes, a
number of support groups ,
and dating sites
have formed a presence on the Internet.
Some common misconceptions about herpes are:
- that it is fatal. Fact: This is only true for
newborns, which is rare, but it is fatal in 25% of all such cases. It can
also possibly kill an adult if it infects the brain causing encephalitis,
or infects the meninges
- that it only affects the genital areas. Fact: It
can affect any part of the body. If you touch a genital herpes sore and then
touch another part of your body, you can potentially spread the virus.
- that condoms are completely effective in preventing the
spread of this disease. Fact: They do greatly improve protection
but are imperfect, only preventing transmission 50% of the time.
- that it is only transmittable in the presence of
symptoms. Fact: There is more viral shedding during an outbreak
but it's possible to transmit any time.
- that it can make you sterile Fact: Genital
Herpes cannot make you sterile.
- that Pap
smears detect herpes Fact
PAP smears are not designed to detect herpes simplex virus infections.
Type-specific serology tests and viral cultures are used to diagnose genital
herpes and are not normally conducted during a woman's annual gynecological
- that it can not be transmitted between the genitals and
the mouth. Fact: Even the use of a condom will not prevent
transmission between genital and oral regions.
- that only promiscuous people get it. Fact: It
is so common that anyone can contract it. The more sexual partners an
individual has, however, the more likely they are to contract the disease.
There is a basis in fact that herpes could be transmitted via
an inanimate object such as a toilet seat or wet towel but the conditions
required for this kind of transmission (high heat, high moisture, and a
vulnerable exposure site) make it extremely unlikely. Although there are no
confirmed cases of this type of transmission, sharing a towel with somebody with
active lesions should be avoided. Likewise, sharing lip or mouth products
(toothbrushes, lipstick, lip balm, or similar) with somebody with active lesions
should also be avoided.
| 3.186169 |
|Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003
|Microsoft PowerPoint® 2002
Whether you're pitching your ideas at a company meeting or creating a special, presentation-based photo album for the family reunion, using sounds or music can spice up your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. When you're adding sound and music to a presentation, it's important to understand the difference between embedded and linked objects.
The differences between linked and embedded objects
The term "object" in this article refers to a sound (including a piece of music). An object can be the sound itself, or it can be the file that contains the sound.
The main differences between linked objects and embedded objects are where you store them and how you update them, if need be, after you place them in the destination file (in this case, your presentation).
Linked object A linked object is created and stored in a separate source file, and then it is linked to the destination file. Because the two files are linked, when you make changes to one file, the changes appear in both the source and destination files.
Embedded object An embedded object is created in a separate source file too, but then it is inserted into the destination file, becoming part of that file. If you make a change to the original source file, the change will not show up in the destination file.
An embedded object
A linked object
The source file that contains the linked object
How to choose the best file type
Let's say you've created a presentation to which you've added several music files that act as a soundtrack. You've set up all the transitions and timings and such, and it works like a charm on your computer. Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself before considering this project finished. In fact, you can save yourself a lot of time if you think about these things before you add your sound files.
How big is each sound file?
Use these criteria to choose a file type based on size:
- If each individual sound or music file is 50 megabytes (MB) or less, you can insert it as either a linked or embedded object. (Note that embedded objects larger than 100 KB may slow down the performance of your presentation, however.)
- If your file is more than 50 MB, it should be linked — it won't play in your presentation if you embed it. The default setting in PowerPoint for the allowed maximum size of embedded objects is 100 kilobytes (KB), but you can change it to a maximum of 50,000 KB (50 MB).
How do I change the maximum size allowed?
- On the Tools menu, click Options.
- On the General tab, increase the Link sounds with file size greater than ___ Kb setting to a size just larger than your largest sound file, up to 50,000 KB (50 MB).
- Click OK.
Will you use the same computer to create and show the presentation?
Consider the following:
- If you plan to show your presentation using the computer you created it on, you can insert either embedded or linked files (assuming your linked files are within the size limits described above).
- If you plan to show your presentation on another computer, you must be careful about using linked files. Make sure that the source file that contains your linked sound files, as well as the folder it's in, are saved on the computer you're using to present. Otherwise, the sound files won't play because the presentation won't know where to link to — the source files will be on a different computer.
- If you're saving your presentation on a floppy disk or CD-ROM, one way to ensure that your linked files go with you to the new computer is to use the Package for CD (PowerPoint 2003) or Pack and Go Wizard (PowerPoint 2002) feature.
Use Package for CD
If you want to run your presentation, distribute it on CD, or save it to a folder or network share, you can use the Package for CD command on the File menu. Package for CD copies your presentation along with any supporting files either onto a CD or to a single folder or network share. When you package your presentation, you can make your slide show play automatically. Also, the Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 Viewer is included by default, which means the computer that plays the CD does not need to have PowerPoint installed. For more information, see the Help topics About packaging and copying a presentation to CD and Package a presentation for CD.
Use the Pack and Go Wizard
Will you need to change the objects after they've been added to the presentation?
If you want to update the objects after adding them to your presentation, think about these points:
- If you plan to make changes to the source file, use linked objects. When you make changes to the source file, the changes will be recognized in the presentation because the files are linked.
- If you don't plan to make any changes to the source file, you can use embedded objects. When a file is embedded, information in the destination file doesn't change if you modify the source file.
You can usually get away with using either linked or embedded sound files if your sound files are 50 MB or less (for embedded sound files) or if you present and create the presentation on the same computer (for linked files). Below are a few guidelines to consider when including music and sound in your presentations.
|Type of file
||When to use it
- Your files are 100 KB or less. This is the recommended maximum size. You may embed files that are up to 50 MB, but it may slow down the performance of the presentation.
- You want all the pieces of your presentation contained within that presentation.
- You don't plan to make any changes to the source files.
- You plan to use the same computer to create and display your presentation.
- Your files are large.
- You plan on making changes to the source files.
Note If the path name of a linked file exceeds 128 characters, Microsoft Office PowerPoint is not able to find and play that linked file. In such a case, you can either rename the linked file, or shorten the path name by copying the linked file into the folder where your presentation is located. Then either update links automatically by using the Package for CD feature, or update them manually by removing the sounds from the presentation and then adding them again.
| 3.372322 |
These consumable books provide independent decoding, fluency, and comprehension practice for the skills and stories from the Reader. All text is decodable, including the directions, after students have learned to read key direction and question words such as circle, match, who, what, where, and when. The Teacher's Guide also provides directions for these pages in the Independent Work section of each lesson.
- Type: Paperback ()
- Category: > Home Schooling
- ISBN / UPC: 9780838827130/0838827136
- Publish Date: 3/1/2008
- Item No: 73950
- Vendor: Educators Publishing Services
| 3.508993 |
Those following me here or on Twitter will notice a pronounced uptick in invertebrate conversation in the next couple of months. This is because my partner raises moths.
Each year the terrariums come back into the dining room and living room. Filled with leaves, eggs, cocoons, and caterpillars, they are home to three different species of moths. This year she’s raising Cecropias, Lunas, and probably Prometheas. (Last year we raised Polyphemous, but not Luna.)
Here’s how this goes.
In the early summer the adult moths emerge from their over-wintering cocoons. The males, on emerging, fly around looking for a female. The females get free and sit, broadcasting scent to attract a male. They mate, and a few days later the female lays eggs. Both adults go forth to die after mating. Mostly they are eaten by birds.
After a few days or weeks the eggs hatch. The caterpillars grow for weeks. They start out eating leaves, a few every couple of days. After five weeks or so the caterpillars are inches long and need fresh leaves twice a day, at least. The Cecropias in particular get to be huge — three or four inches long, and as big around as a thumb. Sometime around the middle of August the caterpillars spin cocoons.
These are moth caterpillars. They spin cocoons. Butterflies do not spin cocoons. They chrysalize. They molt their caterpillar skin, leaving a hard chrysalis attached to a branch. We raise moths. They spin cocoons, attaching them to branches.
I harp on this because children’s books completely confuse this, leaving otherwise educated people under the impression that all caterpillars spin cocoons. They don’t.
The cocoons over-winter. That is to say, we clean out the water and the dead leaves, and we put the tanks of cocoons in the garage in the fall. They sit out there all winter, through the snow and the ice and the subzero temperatures. That’s how these particular species work.
In the spring, J hauls the tanks out into the fresh air. She puts a tarp over them in rain, so the cocoons don’t drown. In late spring or early summer — right around now, in fact — the cocoons hatch and adult moths emerge.
J lets the males go. The females, she keeps in a mesh container. At around 3:45 in the morning she opens the mesh. The adult female stays in the enclosure, calling for a male. A male comes by most of the time and the two moths mate. The male leaves. J puts fresh leaves in and zips the enclosure shut. This way the female will lay eggs in a location J can find later.
Thus we begin all over again.
The most labor-intensive part of this is the late summer, when the caterpillars need fresh leaves two or three times a day. In August the dining room is filled with the constant noise of chewing. Endless, endless chewing. The most amusing part, to me, is the late spring wheeling and dealing among the neighborhood moth breeders. Envelops of eggs are left in mailboxes, tupperware containers of cocoons left on front steps. I find this very funny.
Why do we do it?
Well, because we can. Because all life is interesting, not merely the charismatic megafauna. Because Cecropias and Lunas are stunningly gorgeous, and huge, and otherworldly to human eyes. Because my kids see our involvement with the natural world. Because we are part of a community of people re-populating native moth species in our urban forest. Because birds need to eat, too. Because we are massively outnumbered as a species on this planet, and we would do good to remember that.
Endless, endless, relentless chewing. And in the early summer, at 4:00 in the morning, a quivering moth unfurling its wings for the first time in the pre-dawn light.
| 3.04079 |
1. Static stretching decreases risk of injury
If people warm-up at all, they usually static stretch. Static stretching immediately before exercise can cause performance decrements; it can also increase your risk of injury. Stretching can also cause a short-term decrease in musculotendinous stiffness. If joints are relying on this stiffness for force production or stability, this decrease can lead to undesired joint movements and eventually cause injury. This is especially true in runners who do the standard calves and hamstrings stretches outside, and go immediately into their run.
There is research demonstrating that runners who static stretch immediately before they run actually suffer more injuries than those who don’t. Dynamic warm-ups with joint mobility and muscle activation exercises will improve your range of motion while promoting muscular control. This gives you the best chance to move efficiently and avoid injury.
2. Getting in shape is good for fat loss
Most people equate losing weight with getting in shape. By definition, getting in shape means that any given workload (for example, a three-mile run at 7 mph) will be easier to perform and less costly in terms of energy. Using jogging as an example, this means you’ll need to run longer or harder to get the same metabolic disturbance (what causes weight/fat loss). This can lead to excessively long training sessions that take a significant toll on your body. One way to minimize this adaptation is to alter your methods of conditioning, like with biking, running, slide-boarding (if possible), and resistance training circuits. This prevents your body from becoming too efficient at any one modality and therefore increases the metabolic disturbance from each.
3. Long-distance cardio is good for fat loss
Just about every piece of cardio equipment currently manufactured comes with a nice display of target heart rate zones for “fat burning.” The idea behind these zones is that working at the specified target heart rates will allow you to burn the largest proportion of your energy from fat. Sounds tempting. What few people realize is that you actually burn the highest proportion of fat while at rest (around 70 percent of your energy comes from fat).
There is a growing body of research now supporting the use of high-intensity interval training for fat loss. This form of “cardio” takes well less than half the time (typically 12 to 20 minutes) of traditional long distance cardio and leads to better results. The only people that should ever do long-distance cardio are endurance athletes, people who have a complete disregard for the value of their time and people who aren’t in good enough health to pursue high-intensity intervals (in which case, lower-intensity intervals would still be better).
4. Pasta is the ultimate pre-workout meal
For endurance athletes, there may be some benefit to the idea of carb loading. With that recognition, carb loading has been misinterpreted as requiring the need for large amounts of carbohyrates in the meal eaten before exercise. Pasta is the most frequent culprit. Most men have fully depleted their body’s carbohydrate stores through the foods they eat throughout the rest of the day. Overeating pasta does little in the way of providing energy and likely leads to fat storage. Carbohydrates can also cause people to feel tired. A better meal option would be a balance of lean protein (like turkey, ham, fish, chicken, and lean beef), whole-grain products (such as quinoa) and vegetables. This provides a wider range of nutrients and gives your body the fuel it needs to perform optimally.
5. A quick jog and a few stretches is a sufficient warm-up
Not overlooking the fact that many people don’t warm up at all, the quick jog to “break a sweat” and a few stretches is the default warm-up of those that do. There are a few benefits of this type of warm-up. By going for a quick jog, you’ll increase your circulatory rate and your body temperature, which can help improve the elasticity of your muscles. But this type of warm-up does little to stimulate the nervous system (or increase the excitability of the working muscles) and doesn’t take the working joints through a full range of motion.
Static stretching immediately before exercise has been shown to decrease performance measures like power, speed, and balance. While the deleterious effects of static stretching are datable and frequently misinterpreted, this type of warm-up can still be improved upon. A dynamic warm-up consisting of joint mobility and muscle-activation exercises will take your joints through a full range of motion, increase the neural drive to the working muscles, increase the extensibility of commonly locked-up muscles, increase your circulatory rate, and increase your internal body temperature. This type of warm-up is ideal both in terms of performance and injury prevention.
6. More is better
In an effort to get stronger, faster or to improve athleticism, most people default to adding more volume. This is often at the expense (or neglect) of added recovery. In order for your body to adapt, it needs sufficient recovery time. While brief planned periods of volume increases can be beneficial in increasing your capacity, continually adding volume will eventually have deleterious effects on your performance. Many men have heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. This may be true in some cases, but it’s important to remember that quality practice leads to quality muscle memory and that fatigue masks fitness. In other words, you need to give yourself time to recover from skill-based practices, or you’ll be teaching your body to remember garbage movement strategies. Stress is necessary to stimulate improvement; recovery is necessary to realize adaptation.
7. Strength isn’t important for distance running
It’s true that every distance runner doesn’t need to be and, well, shouldn’t be built like a powerlifter. With that said, every distance runner should be doing some form of resistance training. This doesn’t mean the low-weight, high-rep crap that seems to frequent endurance training; this means strength training designed to actually get you strong (like sets of 6-8 reps). Distance running events are about covering a set distance as fast as possible, meaning speed is the key. Speed is improved by putting more force into the ground in each stride. More force means more strength.
Think of it this way: If you need to put an average of five units of force into the ground each stride to attain your time goals, and you’re maximal capacity is 10 units of force, you’re working at 50 percent of your maximum capacity. If you improve your capacity through quality strength training to 15 units of force, then running at five units per stride is only 33% of your capacity. More likely, you’d increase your speed to maintain your given work intensity (in this case 50%). Strength is far from the only component of being a successful distance runner, but it’s one of the most overlooked.
8. Basketball shoes protect against injury
High-top basketball shoes were invented in an attempt to minimize the risk of rolling an ankle as a result of landing on someone’s foot. These shoes, which increasingly have ankle support that mirrors ski boots, effectively limit side-to-side ankle motion. This will minimize the risk of ankle sprains but causes excessive range of motion at the knee. The knee has some rotational ability, primarily flexes and extends. Unfortunately, basketball shoes also limit the ankle’s range of motion in dorsiflexion (shin coming toward toes) and rotation. When these ankle movements are restricted, compensatory motion occurs at the knee. Over time, this leads to a number of knee problems. Couple this with the fact that restricted ankle motion causes a decrease in sensory and reflexive ability of lower-leg musculature and consequent impairment of balance, and basketball shoes can be viewed as both injury inflicting and performance inhibiting.
9. Squatting is bad for your knees
The idea that squatting is bad for your knees has a few sources. Data on patellofemoral contact (kneecap against the joint) forces during these movements can show forces in excess of nine times an individual’s body weight as the knee flexes through 90 degrees. This is coupled with doctors concluding that squatting is bad from your knees after seeing men come to them in pain from squatting. From the doctor’s viewpoint, this is a logical conclusion. If you hear people say they hurt their knees from squatting again and again, squatting must be bad for your knees.
The gap in this logic is that most people without a history of knee pain squat without ever experiencing it. Regarding the patellofemoral contact force data, a number that seems strikingly high doesn’t necessarily imply that the body is not built to sustain these forces. Most men that have squatting-related knee pain have poor technique. In an attempt to keep their torso vertical, they drive their knees excessively forward. In a good squat, the angle of the shin matches the angle of the torso. This ensures loading of the posterior hip musculature (glutes and hamstrings) and minimizes the anterior shearing forces across your knee. In people with a history of knee pain, it’s best to try to maintain a vertical shin angle throughout the motion.
10. Crunches are the best way to get a six-pack
Everyone, from the average civilian to elite level athletes, has been fooled by the same misconception. Doing crunches and sit-ups are not the best way to get a six-pack. Having a visible six-pack is almost entirely a function of body fat and minimally a function of abdominal development. We all know the rail-thin guys that have a shredded midsection. Contrast the overwhelming majority of powerlifters who have insanely strong core muscles but don’t sport a six-pack. Intuitively, we all know this, but when we start to feel saggy in the midsection, we go straight for the ab exercises. Contrary to popular belief, training a muscle group will not burn fat locally. This means that doing ab exercises won’t burn fat from your midsection. Save yourself the wasted time and probable back pain — the best way to get a six-pack involves making better dietary choices and doing high-intensity interval training
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/03/17/10-fitness-myths/#ixzz1kPPKIpaI
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The Right of Association
The Constitution provides workers, except members of the military and police, the right to associate in trade unions, and workers exercised this right in practice. The Constitution also provides that unions are prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity; however, government interference in union activities, especially union elections and leadership struggles, was common both before and during the civil war.
Although most economic activity was interrupted by the conflict, unions proliferated. There were approximately 30 functioning unions organized loosely under two-umbrella groups, the Liberian Federation of Labor Unions (LFLU) and the Congress of Liberian Trade Unions (CLTU), with the common objective of protecting the rights of their 60,000 members, who largely were unemployed. The actual power that the unions exercised was extremely limited. Since the country's work force largely was illiterate, economic activities beyond the subsistence level were very limited, and the labor laws tended to favor management.
During the year, the Government strictly enforced the union registration requirements that fell into disuse during the war. Applicants needed to register at two different ministries, and processing time was arbitrary. Some groups received official status in only a few days while the Government never issued registration for others.
The law does not prohibit anti-union discrimination; however, under the Taylor administration, there were discriminations against union activities.
Labor unions traditionally have been affiliated with international labor groups such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
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Volume 14, Issue 6 (November 1986)
A Suggested Role of Combustion Toxicity in Fire Risk Assessment
At least 17 test methods have been developed to examine the acute toxicity of thermal decomposition products produced in fires. However, a consensus has not been reached on a method of integrating this information into a fire risk assessment. This paper suggests a fire risk assessment methodology with the goal of improving risk management and reducing future fire deaths. Following hazard identification, four steps are presented: (1) calculation of the probability that a material will be present in a fire, (2) estimation of smoke concentrations in specific fire scenarios, (3) determination of the qualitative and quantitative nature of toxic effects of smokes, and (4) estimation of the likelihood of the toxic injury resulting to humans based on correlations between animal models and humans. A concentration-time product is used in estimating exposure, since recent reports indicate it is likely to be the most appropriate method for comparing the toxicity of smokes with each other and to pure gases.
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Culture and history
The park area since colonisation
Before becoming a national park the area of Mt Kaputar was used largely for grazing. Throughout the park you'll find remnants from the pioneering families who lived in extremely harsh conditions.
One such family were the Scutts who lived in the area above Kurrawonga Falls in a hut that still stands today. The Parry family (Mrs Parry and Mrs Scutt were sisters) lived near the Scutts but their hut was burned down in a bushfire in the 1950s.
Sheep and cattle grazed the plateau area up until the 1950s, with stockmen sometimes spending weeks at a time scouting around for their stock and keeping watch over them. It was a lonely life for these stockmen and sometimes months would go by without them seeing another human being.
History of the park
In 1925 an area of 775 hectares around Mt Kaputar was proclaimed a Reserve for Public Recreation. Two years later the local shire council gave control over to the Mt Kaputar Trust, which was a group of very interested and dedicated local people. This group gave advice and guidance on management issues within the reserve.
In 1959 the reserve became Mt Kaputar National Park but remained under the management of the trust. In 1967 the park (14,244 hectares) came under control of the newly-established National Parks and Wildlife Service. A regional advisory committee now gives advice and guidance.
In 1965 two cabins were constructed providing accommodation at Dawsons Spring. A permanent water supply was provided and shower, toilet and picnic facilities built.
There are now 3 cabins at Dawsons Spring and the Bark Hut site has been developed for picnicking and camping, including showers and toilets.
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How Kisa-Gotami Came to Understand Sorrow and Death
Theme: bereavement, grief and compassion for humanity as a whole
This is what we have been told. Ever since she was a little child Gotami was much thinner than the other girls, and as a result she had to put up with the insulting nick-name ‘Kisa-Gotami’, or ‘Skinny Gotami’. And then, on top of that, when she got married her husband treated her badly, so it was only when she bore a child that at last people started to treat her with some respect. At last, it seemed, she was to have some happiness in her life. However, just when her little boy was old enough to begin to run about and play, he became ill and died. At this point, remembering how much she had always been insulted before her little boy was born, Gotami became almost crazy with sorrow, and refused to believe that he was dead. So she took the little corpse from house to house, asking for medicine to cure her child. ‘Why are you asking for medicine?’ everyone said. ‘Can’t you see that the child is dead? You are crazy.’
But one of her neighbours, wiser and more kindly than the others, realised that Gotami’s strange behaviour was due to the depth of her sorrow, and said: ‘Why don’t you go to the Buddha; perhaps he can give you the medicine you need.’ So she took the dead body of her little boy, showed it to the Buddha, and said, ‘Please, O Wise One, give me some medicine for my poor sick child.’ The Buddha looked at Gotami and at the little dead body, and he could see that deep down Gotami had enough wisdom and strength to understand her sorrow and gain comfort, even though her terrible loss had made her almost mad with grief. So he said to her, ‘Go back to the town, knock on all the doors and wherever you find a household where no-one has died, ask them to give you a little mustard seed. Then, in the evening, bring me all the mustard seed you collect and we will be able to make some medicine for your child.’
So Gotami went into the town, still carrying the dead body of her little boy, knocked on the door of the first house and said, ‘If no-one has died in your family, please give me some mustard seed: I need it as a medicine for my sick child.’ The woman of the house looked at her sadly and said, ‘Certainly I can give you some mustard seed, but I’m afraid that we have had many, many deaths in our family.’ And Gotami looked sadly at the woman, saying, ‘In that case, I’m sorry for you, but your mustard seed will be of no use as medicine for my little boy.’ She went to the second house, and the same thing happened: yes she could have some mustard seed, but in that house also there had been many deaths and much sorrow. And at the third, fourth and fifth house it was the same. At every house where she knocked at the door the family told her that they also were in sorrow for the death of a dearly loved relative – a mother, or a father, or an uncle, or an aunt, or a son, or a daughter.
So by the evening, she still had no mustard seed for medicine for her child. However, something important had happened. As a result of sharing her sorrow with so many other people who also had lost a loved one, she found that her own sorrow was now different. No longer did she feel agonized and almost mad with grief. Instead, although she still felt sorrow at the loss of her child, she also knew that there were many others in the town who had also experienced a similar loss and the same terrible sorrow. Suddenly she realized that sorrow and death are part of how life is, not only for her but for everyone. So she took her dead child to the cemetery outside the town and, sadly, lovingly, buried his little body.
Then she went back to the Buddha, who asked, ‘Well, Gotami, have you got the mustard seed for the medicine?’ Gotami answered, ‘Thank you, O Wise One. No, I have not brought any mustard seed, but your medicine of the mustard seed has already worked, as you knew it would. Because I now see that my own sorrow is part of the sorrow of all people, and that the death of our loved ones is part of the pattern of life for everyone. That is the medicine I needed, and that is what you have helped me to understand.’
And from that time onwards, Gotami became one of the wisest and most respected followers of the Buddha. She became famous for her sad and beautiful poetry on the sufferings of women, caused by the pains of giving birth, the difficulties of marriage, the deaths of husbands and, particularly, the deaths of children.
Richard Winter, Cambridge Buddhist Centre
Based on C. Rhys Davids and K. Norman: Poems of Early Buddhist Nuns, Pali Text Society, pp.88-9, a translation of the Therigatha from the Pali Canon, and the commentary by Dhammapala (6th century AD) who claimed he was following traditional interpretations.
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The Chinese in America
A Narrative History
A major history of the Chinese American experiencefrom the bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking
In an epic story that spans 150 years and continues to the present day, Iris Chang tells of a people’s search for a better life—the determination of the Chinese to forge an identity and a destiny in a strange land and, often against great obstacles, to find success. She chronicles the many accomplishments in America of Chinese immigrants and their descendents: building the infrastructure of their adopted country, fighting racist and exclusionary laws, walking the racial tightrope between black and white, contributing to major scientific and technological advances, expanding the literary canon, and influencing the way we think about racial and ethnic groups. Interweaving political, social, economic, and cultural history, as well as the stories of individuals, Chang offers a bracing view not only of what it means to be Chinese American, but also of what it is to be American.
The story of the Chinese in America is the story of a journey, from one of the world's oldest civilizations to one of its newest. The United States was still a very young country when the Chinese began arriving in significant numbers, and the wide-ranging contributions of these immigrants to the building of their adopted country have made it what it is today. An epic story that spans one and a half centuries, the Chinese American experience still comprises only a fraction of the Chinese diaspora. One hundred fifty years is a mere breath by the standards of Chinese civilization, which measures history by millennia. And three million Chinese Americans are only a small portion of a Chinese overseas community that is at least 36 million strong.
This book essentially tells two stories. The first explains why at certain times in China's history certain Chinese made the very hard and frightening decision to leave the country of their ancestors and the company of their own people to make a new life for themselves in the United States. For the story of the emigration of the Chinese to America is, like many other immigration stories, a push-pull story. People do not casually leave an inherited way of life. Events must be extreme enough at home to compel them to go and alluring enough elsewhere for them to override an almost tribal instinct to stay among their own.
The second story examines what happened to these Chinese émigrés once they got here. Did they struggle to find their place in the United States? Did they succeed? And if so, how much more difficult was their struggle because of the racism and xenophobia of other Americans? What were the dominant patterns of assimilation? It would be expected that the first-arriving generations of Chinese, like the first generations of other immigrant groups, would resist the assimilation of their children. But to what degree, and how successfully?
This book will also dispel the still pervasive myth that the Chinese all came to America in one wave, at one time. Ask most Americans and even quite a few Americans of Chinese descent when the Chinese came to the United States, and many will tell you of the mid-nineteenth-century Chinese laborers who came to California to chase their dreams on Gold Mountain and ended up laying track for the transcontinental railroad.
More than one hundred thousand Chinese laborers, most from a single province, indeed came to America to make their fortunes in the 1849-era California gold rush. But conditions in China were so bad politically, socially, and economically that these émigrés to California represented just a small part of the single biggest migration out of that country in history. Many who left China at this time went to Southeast Asia or elsewhere. Those who chose America were relying on stories that there was enough gold in California to make them all rich quickly, rich enough to allow them to return home as successes, and the decision to leave their ancestral homeland was made bearable only by the promise they made themselves: that no matter what, they would one day return. But most stayed, enduring prejudice and discrimination, and working hard to earn a living, and their heritage is the many crowded Chinatowns dotting America from San Francisco to New York. Of their descendants, however, very few are still laborers or living in Chinatowns; many are not even recognizably Chinese because, like other immigrant groups, their ancestors intermarried. If we restrict the definition of Chinese American to only full-blooded Asians with an ancestral heritage linking them to China, we would exclude the many, many mixed-race descendants of Chinese immigrants.
This is just the beginning of the story. In terms of sheer numbers, the majority of Chinese in America probably have no forty-niner ancestors; they are, as I am, either part of later waves or children of those who arrived here more than a century after the gold rush. Life in China had changed dramatically over those one hundred years and sent a second, very different wave of immigrants. After the 1949 Communist revolution, many bureaucrats, professionals, and successful businessmen realized that their futures were not in China. They packed their belongings, often in extreme haste, and left the land of their ancestors. My own parents and grandparents belonged to this group of refugees. For some the destination was America, for others it was Hong Kong, but for most people, such as my family, the next stop would be Taiwan. These émigrés were devoted anti-Communists who longed to return to their homeland. Indeed, many Nationalist legislators considered themselves the official ruling body of China, now forced by wartime expediency to occupy a temporary capital on an offshore island. However, their children were different. For many young Chinese in Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, nothing was more prestigious or coveted than a scholarship to a top American university. The Nationalist government in Taiwan imposed a restriction on those who wanted to study in the United States-they had to be fluent in English.
Thus making up the second major wave of Chinese coming to America were not just the anti-Communist elites but their most intellectually capable and scientifically directed children. Like many of their peers, my parents came to the United States on scholarships, obtained their doctoral degrees, and later became professors. And across the country, their friends-doctors, scientists, engineers, and academics-shared the same memories and experiences: a forced exile from the mainland as children, first in Taiwan and then in the United States.
Most of these newest émigrés did not find their way to the old Chinatowns, other than as tourists, but instead settled in the cities and suburbs around universities and research centers. Because they saw themselves as intellectuals rather than refugees, they were concerned less about preserving their Chinese heritage than with casting their lot with modern America, and eventual American citizenship. It is in connection with these immigrants, not surprisingly, that the term "model minority" first appeared. The term refers to an image of the Chinese as working hard, asking for little, and never complaining. It is a term that many Chinese now have mixed feelings about.
Not all of those who arrived here during the mid-twentieth-century second wave were part of this success story, however. Many entered not as students but as political refugees, and often they did end up in American Chinatowns, only to be exploited as cheap labor in factories and restaurants. The arrival of these two disparate contingents in the 1950s and 1960s created a bipolar Chinese community in America, sharply divided by wealth, education, and class.
The story does not end here either. A third wave entered the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Interestingly, this large wave encompassed Chinese of all socioeconomic groups and backgrounds, who arrived as Sino-American relations thawed and as the People's Republic of China (PRC) began its rocky transition from a pariah communist state to a tenuously connected capitalist one.
Although the three waves came at different times and for different reasons, as Chinese Americans they shared certain common experiences. In the course of writing this book, I discovered that the Chinese in general brought distinctive cultural traits to America-such as reverence for education, hard work, thriftiness, entrepreneurship, and family loyalty-which helped many achieve rapid success in their adopted country. Many Chinese Americans, for example, have served an important "middleman minority" role in the United States by working in occupations in which they act as intermediaries between producers and consumers. As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance.
But as with other middleman minorities, the Chinese diaspora generally found it easier to achieve economic and professional success than to acquire actual political power in their adopted countries. Thus the Chinese became, in the words of historian Alexander Saxton, "the indispensable enemy": a people both needed and deeply feared. Throughout history, both the U.S. government and industry have sought to exploit Chinese labor-either as raw muscle or as brain power-but resisted accepting the Chinese as fellow Americans. The established white elite and the white working class in the United States have viewed the Chinese as perpetual foreigners, a people to be imported or expelled whenever convenient to do one or the other. During an economic depression in the nineteenth century, white laborers killed Chinese competitors and lobbied politicians to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act. Later, in the twentieth century, the United States recruited Chinese scientists and engineers to strengthen American defense during the Cold War, only to harbor suspicions later that some Chinese might be passing nuclear secrets to the PRC.
The great irony of the Chinese American experience has been that success can be as dangerous as failure: whenever the ethnic Chinese visibly excelled-whether as menial laborers, scholars, or businessmen-efforts arose simultaneously to depict their contributions not as a boon to white America but as a threat. The mass media have projected contradictory images that either dehumanize or demonize the Chinese, with the implicit message that the Chinese represent either a servile class to be exploited, or an enemy force to be destroyed. This has created identity issues for generations of American-born Chinese: a sense of feeling different, or alien, in their own country; of being subjected to greater scrutiny and judged by higher standards than the general populace.
Another important theme has been the struggle of Chinese Americans for justice. A long history of political activism belies the myth that Chinese Americans have stood by and suffered abuse as silent, passive victims. Instead, from the very beginning, they fought racial discrimination in the courts, thereby creating a solid foundation of civil rights law in this country, often to the benefit of other minorities. But with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, large-scale Chinese immigration ceased entirely for eighty years, and at one point the ethnic Chinese population in the United States dwindled to only a few tens of thousands of people. Only new legislation in the middle of the twentieth century permitted the second and third waves of Chinese immigrants to arrive, forcing these newcomers to start almost from scratch as they built their own political coalitions. But build them they did.
The stories in this book reveal the ever precarious status of the Chinese community in America. It has historically been linked to the complex web of international politics, and more recently to the relationship between two of the world's great powers, the United States and China. When Sino-American relations are excellent, the Chinese Americans benefit as goodwill ambassadors and role models, serving as cultural and economic bridges between the two countries; but when Sino-American relations deteriorate, the Chinese Americans have been vilified as enemies, traitors, and spies-not just in the United States, but in mainland China. To describe the vulnerability of his people, one Chinese American aptly called them "an egg between two big plates."
Throughout history, some Chinese immigrants and even their American-born children adopted the naïve and misguided notion that if things turned sour for them in the United States, they could always "go back to China." But as some would learn the hard way, to do so could be dangerous: during the Korean War and the Cultural Revolution, a number of returning Chinese were persecuted in mainland China because of their former association with the United States. Ronald Takaki, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California at Berkeley, once called the Chinese and other Asian Americans "strangers from a different shore." I propose to take this a step further. At various times in history, the Chinese Americans have been treated like strangers on both shores-a people regarded by two nations as too Chinese to be American, and too American to be Chinese.
When I was in junior high school in the early 1980s, a white classmate once asked me, in a friendly, direct manner, "If America and China went to war, which side would you be on?" I had spent all of my twelve years in a university town in Illinois and had never visited either mainland China or Taiwan. Before I could even answer the first question, she continued, "Would you leave and fight for China? Or try to support China from the U.S.?" All I could think of at that moment was how disastrous such a scenario would be for the Chinese American population, who would no doubt find themselves hated by both sides. I don't remember my exact response, only that I mumbled something along the lines that, if possible, I would try to work for some kind of peace between the two countries.
Her question, innocently put, captures the crux of the problem facing the ethnic Chinese today in America. Even though many are U.S. citizens whose families have been here for generations, while others are more recent immigrants who have devoted the best years of their lives to this country with citizenship as their goal, none can truly get past the distinction of race or entirely shake the perception of being seen as foreigners in their own land. Not until many years later did I learn that this very question has been posed to numerous prominent ethnic Chinese throughout American history, ranging from a brilliant aeronautics professor to a political candidate for Congress. Indeed, the attitudes and assumptions behind this question would later drive much of the anti-Chinese antagonism I have had to describe to make this book an honest chronicle of the Chinese experience in the United States. My classmate unwittingly planted the seed in my psyche that grew into this book.
But it was not until the mid-1990s, when my husband and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, that I really became interested in the history and complexity of the Chinese American population. I learned about a nonprofit organization that would later be known as the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, whose mission was to educate the world about the unrecognized wartime horrors committed by Japan in the Pacific theater. For the first time in my life, I met Chinese Americans who were not simply academics or scientific professionals, but committed activists, driven by idealism I had seen only in organizations such as Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union. These Chinese Americans, working with leaders of other ethnic groups, were outspoken on a wide range of human rights abuses around the globe. Learning from them led me to write The Rape of Nanking, about the rape and massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in the former capital of China.
As I toured the United States and Canada giving talks on the subject, I encountered vibrant Chinese American communities that I had not even known existed. The people I met ranged from descendants of transcontinental railroad workers to new immigrants studying here on scholarships, from illiterate factory workers to Nobel laureates at leading universities, from elderly survivors of Japanese wartime atrocities to baby girls adopted by white parents. I had the privilege of talking with several Chinese Americans whose work had transformed entire industries or intellectual disciplines, such as David Henry Hwang, the Tony Award-winning playwright of M. Butterfly; David Ho, a preeminent medical researcher whose antiviral drugs have helped thousands of AIDS victims; and David Chu, head of the Nautica fashion empire.
Soon I learned that all across the United States, Chinese American groups were busy organizing to talk about themselves, their history, and their future, and to make their presence heard in American society. The Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles was preparing a huge exhibit about the Chinese in America. A new museum of Chinese American history was scheduled to open also in Los Angeles. The Chinese community in San Francisco was lobbying for better preservation of the poetry written on the walls of Angel Island, where newly arrived Chinese immigrants were detained and interrogated during the early decades of the twentieth century. Chinese American researchers were demanding full access to the immigration case files stored in the National Archives in San Bruno, California. And new ethnic magazines geared toward younger Chinese and Asian Americans, such as A, Monolid, Face, and Jade, proliferated. It seemed to me there was a big, exciting story to be told.
At first, I feared the subject might too broad, but I couldn't let go of the idea of exploring the history of my people. Moreover, I believed I had a personal obligation to write an honest history of Chinese America, to dispel the offensive stereotypes that had long permeated the U.S. news and entertainment media. Saturday morning cartoons flattened the Chinese into buck-toothed, pigtailed caricatures, with slanted dashes for eyes. Elementary school libraries were still carrying racist, out-of-date textbooks, with images and descriptions of the Chinese eating meals of fermented snails with long, clawlike fingernails. Hollywood films depicted Chinese men as bowing sycophants, spies, or crime kingpins; Chinese women as sex toys or prostitutes. The lack of strong Chinese American role models in popular culture-or even of realistic images of Chinese Americans as diverse and multifaceted human beings-bothered me deeply. People tend to perform at a level society expects of them, not their actual potential, and I imagined there must have been many young Americans of Asian descent who suffered a crisis of confidence as a result of coming to see themselves as they thought others saw them. But worse, I also knew that, based on my knowledge of the literature on genocide, atrocities are more likely to occur if the perpetrators do not see their victims as real people. The first, essential, step toward getting a population to visit torture and mass murder on a group is to dehumanize the group, to reduce them to alien things. This is what those books, films, and television programs were doing; they were far from depicting the kinds of fascinating, complex, accomplished people I knew.
There is nothing inherently alien about the Chinese American experience. In the end, the Chinese shared the same problems as all other immigrants-universal problems that recognized no borders: The eternal struggle to make a living and provide their children with food, shelter, and a good education. The exhaustion of striving to sustain cherished values in a changing world. The loss of a place once called home. And yes, the initial reluctance of all people in a new land to drop their cultural habits and risk new associations-only to discover, years later, that they have already done so.
If the Chinese American story is a journey, then the writing of this book has been a journey for me as well: one that has taken me deep into a voluminous body of records, including oral histories, autobiographies, Chinese-language newspapers, diaries, court transcripts, immigrations records, and more, all showing the vast range of experiences of a people that have truly helped shape America. Ultimately, in this book, I try to show the Chinese Americans as they really were and are: real, and diverse, flesh-and-blood individuals in search of a dream. All I ask of the reader is to look past ethnicity and see the shared humanity within us all.
Note on usage and spelling
Most names of places and other Chinese terms in this book are spelled according to the Hanyu Pinyin system. Exceptions have been made for certain Cantonese terms, or the more familiar Wade-Giles term by which a person, place, organization, event, etc., may be known. In the Chinese system of naming, the family name precedes the person's given name. This practice has been followed except for those individuals who have adopted the Western system (given name followed by family name) or are better known by the Western version of their names.
The Old Country: Imperial China in the Nineteenth Century
A journey of a thousand miles begins where you are standing," says an old Chinese proverb. And so the story of the first wave of Chinese emigration to the United States properly begins not in nineteenth-century America but rather in the world these immigrants left behind.
Perhaps no country exudes a greater air of mystery to Westerners than China. It is remote (from the West, at least), and it is vast. The territory of China today (almost 3.7 million square miles) comprises the third largest country in the world. Though it only just surpasses the size of the continental United States, its diversity is breathtaking. Its borders stretch from the mountains of Siberian Russia to the Himalayas of India, from the densely populated coastal lands that border the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas to the almost uninhabitable Gobi Desert of north-central China, then farther west to the isolated plateaus of Central Asia.
China's true grandeur, however, is not vested in its size or distance, but in its age-five thousand years of continuous civilization and intact practices and traditions. The Chinese state is considered by many historians to be the oldest functioning organization on earth. It is also the world's most populous country. China is home to more than one billion people-fully one-fifth of humanity.
In the mid-nineteenth century China was still an imperial state, ruled by the surviving members of the Qing dynasty. The Qing, originally from Manchuria, a region north of China, had held power for two hundred years, but that power was waning. Monumental changes were about to take place that would transform not only the lives of people inside China, but also their entire relationship to the world beyond China's borders.
Westerners of the time, when they thought of China, imagined a genteel and exotic land filled with quaint pagodas, curved stone bridges, and lotus blossoms-images popularized by the paintings and poetry and observations of the handful of writers, missionaries, travelers, and merchants who had come there. But few outsiders who traveled in China could understand the language or the culture around them. While most noted-accurately-that it was a culture in whose bedrock was respect for social, economic, and family traditions-the culture that also invented paper and printing, rocketry and gunpowder, and introduced to the West exquisite foods, silks, and spices-the real China was far more complicated.
Few visitors were able to travel the length and breadth of the country, so they failed to grasp how dramatically the geography itself shifted, and along with it, cultural customs that were often in great conflict from region to region. Within the boundaries of this one nation were divisions as dramatic as you would find crossing border after border in Europe.
In western China, a remote area encompassing more than half of the nation's territory, in a shifting landscape of deserts, rugged mountains, and grassy valleys, lived some of the many ethnic minorities of China, most notably the Mongols and the Tibetans. In the desert were scattered oasis cities on what was once called the Silk Road, along which Marco Polo traveled in the thirteenth century to find marvels so dazzling, so magnificent, that when he put together a record of his travels Europeans thought it all a creation of his imagination. Over the steppes, nomads roamed about on horseback, or tended sheep, a fiercely independent, rugged people, skilled at hunting and warfare.
In the southwest corner was Tibet itself, with its villages and towers of stone, desolate and hauntingly beautiful structures, built into the sides of cliffs. Tibetans crossed some of the local gorges by rope bridge-nothing more than a single plaited cable of bamboo. (Snapping a wood cylinder around the sagging rope, a Tibetan traveler would slide halfway across the abyss with his or her feet dangling, then shimmy hand over hand up to the other side.) Very few people or sights here would fit the silk-and-pagoda stereotypes that so many Westerners held (and hold). In fact, some inhabitants would have distinctly southern European or Arabic features and wear Middle Eastern garments and jewelry.
Moving west to east, a visitor could follow one of two rivers: the famous Yangtze River of south China, or the Yellow River of the north, both flowing from the highlands of Tibet to the sea. The significance to Chinese civilization of these two rivers rivals that of the Nile to Egypt; the area between them was the heart of China, a region of fertile farmland, fed with silt, webbed together by lakes, rivers, and canals. Millions of Chinese depended on the rivers for their survival, but one of them, the Yellow River, was known as China's "sorrow" for its unpredictable floods of yellow, muddy water that all too frequently surged beyond the river's course, swirling through or even drowning entire villages.
Dominating the north-central area of China was the Gobi Desert, and to the northeast Manchuria and the Great Khingan Range. Some of the vast, flat stretches of land were covered with wheat and millet; other areas were overcultivated into desert. In the winter, icy gusts buffeted the plains, and many farmers chose to live in earth-walled villages, or in caves deep within the steep cliffs of mountains.
Not so farther south. Here the air turned humid and balmy, and the fields, flooded with water and webbed by stone pathways, sparkled in the sun like shards of mirror. Spread throughout these fields was the classic beauty of the Chinese countryside: the bamboo and willow groves, the silver lacework of canals between towns. Farmers tended lush mulberry groves used for the cultivation of silkworms, and in the nearby villages teams of women boiled cocoons in vats of water, spinning long, delicate threads to be woven into lustrous fabrics. There were graceful pavilions, monasteries, and curved dragon bridges, teahouses nestled in wooded, mist-shrouded hills, spas built over natural hot springs, with people soaking in the water-all the trappings of a sophisticated society.
Yet over all these diverse regions, each with its own ethnic tradition and history, ruled one all-controlling, coherent authority, maintained by one of the oldest bureaucracies on earth. One significant element of this formal cohesion was language. Out of a welter of dialects in China, only one written language had emerged. About the time that Hannibal crossed the Alps in Europe, the first emperor of China mandated an official script of three thousand characters, and these pictographs (which, unlike the letters of Western alphabets, are not phonetic) became the basis of the modern Chinese vocabulary. This universal set of characters made it possible for an official to travel from one end of China to the other, bearing official documents that could be read by all educated people in each region, even if they spoke different tongues. A centralized state using such a uniform written language could exercise effective control over a diverse population speaking very different dialects, despite the fact that most people seldom traveled far from their home villages and had little personal interaction with the rulers and their officials. Also aiding the institutionalization of the Chinese civil service was a system of imperial examinations exploited by the Qing dynasty in the seventeenth century. As China moved into modern times, this bureaucracy managed to exercise at least some control over three very different populations: the China of the inland, the China of the elite, and the China of the coast.
Inland China in the mid-nineteenth century was filled with dirt-poor families. At that time, most people in China, 80 to 90 percent of them, lived in the countryside as peasants, serving as the nation's raw muscle. Their costumes rarely varied-in south and central China the men wore baggy cotton trousers, sandals of leather or grass, and broad-brimmed hats to protect their faces from the sun. Their lives followed an endless cycle dictated by the seasons: pushing plows behind water buffalo to break the soil and prepare the seed bed; planting rice seedlings by hand in ankle-deep water, stepping backward as they progressed from row to neat row; scything the rice stalks at harvest, then threshing them over a hard earth floor-in short, lives spent, generation after generation, in nonstop, backbreaking labor.
The work was mind-numbing, but ingenuity was often evident, as when peasant farmers devised a complex system of irrigation to flood or drain the fields. They built special equipment, water wheels and water mills, to harness the forces of nature. In the countryside you might see a peasant pedaling away on a treadmill field pump, as if putting in time on a modern stationary exercise bicycle. Foreigners who visited China in the mid-nineteenth century marveled at the ingenuity of these contraptions, and at the remarkable economies they helped produce.
No group in China worked harder for so little than the peasants. In the typical rural village, people slept on mats on dirt floors, their heads resting on bamboo pillows or wooden stools. They ate a spare but nutritious diet: rice and vegetables, supplemented by fish and fowl, which they cooked over a wok-shaped boiler. An armload of fuel warmed and fed a dozen people. Hardly anything was wasted; even their night soil would later be used to fertilize the fields. In times of famine, people had little more than a bit of rice to sustain them. To survive hard times, some ate tree bark or even clay. Rice was by no means the only crop the peasants grew, but it evolved into China's main food staple because of its nutritional value and ability to sustain a huge population. Rice could be harvested more frequently than wheat, and its system of cultivation far predated historical Chinese civilization.
Most lived and died without gaining more than a dim comprehension of the world beyond their own village. If a peasant traveled, it was usually only over dirt roads to a nearby market town to purchase or sell goods. Along the way, he might encounter his countrymen bumping along on horseback, by wheelbarrow, or on foot. A common sight during his journey would be the baggage porter accompanying a wealthier traveler or merchant. With bamboo poles balanced over their shoulders, weighed down on both ends with other people's luggage, these men served the public as beasts of burden. At night, they stayed in hostels that resembled stables in their crudeness, where they washed themselves with filthy communal rags and collapsed into sleep on an earthen floor.
Few peasants would ever see any member of the class who actually ruled their lives, as they often lived thousands of miles away. In mid-nineteenth-century China, the center of power could be found in the capital city of Beijing-the nerve center of the nation, in the far north of the country-where a handful of bureaucrats and their civil servants could alter the destinies of large parts of the population with the stroke of a pen.
Everywhere in the city stood silent monuments to power. Surrounded by acres of marble, darkened by the shadow of three domes, the Temple of Heaven humbled the visitor who came into its presence. But far more intimidating was the Forbidden City, the ancient home to generations of emperors. Constructed in the fifteenth century, this city within a city has earned its place in the pantheon of the world's great architectural masterpieces. Within the Forbidden City was a Chinese vision of paradise on earth. A breathtaking array of art-dragons of marble, lions of bronze, gilded gargoyles carved into balustrades-guarded a gigantic maze of palaces and pavilions, gardens and halls. A series of arches stretched from the edges of Beijing to this imperial labyrinth, and everything in the Forbidden City complex, right down to the last courtyard, converged upon the imperial throne, reflecting the belief that the entire world radiated out from the royal seat of China and its emperor: the son of heaven, the core of the universe.
North of Beijing was the Great Wall of China, the longest structure on earth. The Great Wall took many generations to build, and its purpose was simple: to protect the Han, who were the dominant ethnic population, from foreign incursion. For more than a thousand miles, it wound a serpentine path from east to west over mountains and the Mongolian plateau, a concrete expression of the Chinese resolve to repel all outsiders. Han rulers-the Ming dynasty-had controlled the empire for three centuries, during which time the wall had successfully kept out the barbarians from the north. But in 1644, nomads from Manchuria-the Manchus-fought their way past the barrier and conquered the Han people.
The new Manchu rulers might have been seen as barbarians by the Han, but they were swift, effective, and savvy conquerors, and they seized Beijing for their own. Moving into the Forbidden City, they established their own ruling line, the Qing dynasty, and declared their own capital in Beijing. They quickly adopted the habits of the previous Chinese ruling class and exploited its infrastructure, its vast system of laws and bureaucrats, though they added their own refinements to the system. To enforce the subjugation of the Han people, they mandated that all Han men wear long, braided queues as a badge of their humiliation (to shave one's head was considered a sign of treason). Eager to guard their status as a privileged class, they outlawed intermarriage between Han and the Manchu. They also forbade Han migration to Manchuria, for as a minority population they wanted their own region within China to which they could safely retreat in case they were ever ousted from power.
But the most effective weapon in the Manchu arsenal was the imperial examination system, which used civil service tests as a mechanism of social order, forcing all aspiring officials to write essays on ancient Chinese literature and philosophy. Three tiers of examinations-local, provincial, and national-determined entrance into and promotion through the Chinese civil service bureaucracy. These tests created the illusion of meritocracy, of a system in which power and prestige were achieved not through lineage but through individual hard work and the rigors of learning. The examination process itself as well as its subject matter, converging with the Chinese respect for tradition and the Confucian emphasis on education, contributed to the development and maintenance of the culture's reverence for education.
Children were told that "ministers and generals are not born in office"-they had to earn their way to the top. Like many motivational stories told to children, however, this one was not entirely true. Only certain groups were allowed to take the tests (women were entirely excluded from the process), and elite families had resources to hire the best tutors to prepare their sons for the examinations, giving wealthy test takers an enormous advantage over the sons of the poor. Most Chinese villages had special schools and tutors for the children of prosperous peasants and landlords.
In addition, as designed, defined, and dictated by the Manchus, the examination system had the nefarious result of creating a society in which the Han constantly competed against each other for favor with their rulers. More significantly, the system suppressed rebellion until the nineteenth century. The memorization and mastery of Chinese classics served as a safe outlet for the nation's most ambitious, talented young men, encouraging them to direct their youthful energies into scholastic competition rather than openly questioning and challenging the system. The imperial exams soon became more potent than any military force, as the people themselves embraced this instrument of their own oppression.
Further, the system bred a sense of entitlement that turned the most talented sons of the Han Chinese, who should have been their leaders, into agents of the oppressor group. The very purpose of Qing hierarchy was to divorce the most talented from the masses from which they came. Passing the first test transformed a young man into a local magistrate, and even at the lowest level of government, he would enjoy the prerogatives of lifetime job security and exemption from torture, as he ascended to a world that severed him from his people. Once an official was in the system, it was impossible to get him out. The system gave him no incentive to serve the commonweal, because most of his tasks could be relegated to clerks who would interface with the suffering masses. The imperial exam system encouraged officials to think of their current position as merely one step on the ladder to the next, and to spend their days dreaming of passing the next exam.
Meanwhile, such men often ruled their districts like totalitarian despots. Virtually no redress could be taken against any official who broke the law, because he was the law. A Chinese magistrate could, with no threat of retaliation, accuse a peasant of banditry, throw him in jail, take his property, and even execute him if he proved a troublesome prisoner. If he lusted after a girl in the village, he could coerce her father to surrender her to him as one of his concubines. So absolute was his power that a Chinese man once told a Western observer, "I would rather be mayor in China than President of the United States."
“A thought-provoking overview of how the Chinese have been an integral part of American history... An exemplary achievement.” (Christian Science Monitor)
“Richly detailed... I know of no better introduction to this multilayered and emotionally charged story.” (Jonathan D. Spence)
“Comprehensive, beautifully written, filled with deft and passionate analysis—the definitive book on Chinese American history for a new generation. Iris Chang places today’s Chinese Americans brilliantly into 150 years of U.S. history.” (David Henry Hwang, Tony Award–winning playwright)
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Example: Children who (that) play with fire are in great danger of harm.
The man who bought all the books by Hemingway has died.
Generally, who and which are more usual in written English whereas that is more usual in speech when referring to things.
Relative Pronouns Used As The Object of Defining Relative Clauses
Example: That's the boy (Ø , that, who, whom) I invited to the party.
There's the house (Ø, that, which) I'd like to buy.
Relative Pronouns Used As A Possessive In A Defining Relative Clauses
Example: He's the man whose car was stolen last week.
They were sure to visit the town whose location (OR the location of which) was little known.
NOTE: It is preferable to use that (not which) after the following words: all, any(thing), every (thing), few, little, many, much, no(thing), none, some(thing), and after superlatives. When using the pronoun to refer to the object, that can be omitted.
Example: It was everything (that) he had ever wanted.
There were only a few (that) really interested him.
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By Henry Workman
Marine Science Today Writer
Authentic Maine lobster is considered by many to be an unparalleled seafood dining experience. Despite estimations that a large percentage of “Maine lobster” sold worldwide doesn’t actually originate from the Maine coast, these crustaceans have been the enduring cornerstone of the state’s seafood industry. Lobstering here has enjoyed a steep rise recently compared to previous decades, as well as neighboring regions.
Today lobsters account for 80% of Maine’s total seafood market, compared to about 50% in 1990, when species such as Atlantic cod were more abundant. 2010 set an all-time record high for the lobster haul, with over 90 million pounds harvested. That amount was valued at around $313 million, nearly quadruple that of 20 years prior, and up from a $6 million industry in 1950. With numbers such as these it’s hardly surprising that the term “golden age” has been tossed around to describe the current lobster boom in the Gulf of Maine, while catching continues to experience a rising trend.
Aside from a simple increase in lobstering activity there are a few potential bases for the spike. For one thing, certain regulations aimed at protecting sustainability have been met with diligent adherence. These practices include marking and returning breeding females, throwing back lobsters below a particular size standard, and other strategies that help keep the population at stable levels. In addition, some species of lobster-eating groundfish have seen significant drops due in part to fishing, which also at least partially accounts for the lobsters’ takeover of Maine’s seafood industry. The sheer amount of bait now providing them with an artificial food source of sorts may also play a role in the surge.
However, an industry entirely dependent on a single wild species is not typical, and nor should it be, suggests an essay appearing in Conservation Biology. According to researchers it’s normal for a population to go through cycles, and if for any reason the lobsters’ dropped off as steeply as it’s risen, the consequences could be severe for those who have come to rely on them. Lobster numbers in the past have been shown to respond to environmental fluctuations such as warmer air and lower levels of oxygen in the sea, which can contribute to the development of shell diseases. Such hazards have already proven problematic on the coast of states farther south where the lobsters have become scarcer. Dr. Rick Wahle and colleagues at the Darling Marine Center surmise that these populations have made a movement north in search of more suitable conditions.
In the words of Dr. Robert S. Steneck, a marine biologist at the University of Maine, these times represent a “gilded trap” for the state. The paper states: “large financial gain creates a strong reinforcing feedback that deepens the trap.” The all-too-real threat of a years, or even decades-long lull ahead would alter not only the local ecology, but coastal communities. Waterfront real estate has the potential to attract rapid development in areas once defined by fishing business.
Coming up with a reliable solution to prevent such a catastrophe, though, is trickier than simply anticipating it. Some have proposed the introduction of measures to bring back cod, halibut, and other species that feed on juvenile lobsters. Of course, this would harm lobstermen in the short term, and for the time being, many see no reason to panic. The Maine coast may simply be less susceptible to the difficulties experienced in warmer waters, which could be what makes it the ideal hotspot for American lobster in the first place.
Copyright © 2011 by Marine Science Today, a publication of OceanLines LLC
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The greatest movement of men and arms began on the morning of June 22, 1941, when slightly more than 3 million German troops invaded the USSR. Although German preparations had been visible for months and had been talked about openly among the diplomats in Moscow, the Soviet forces were taken by surprise. Stalin, his confidence in the country's military capability shaken by the Finnish war, had refused to allow any counteractivity for fear of provoking the Germans. Moreover, the Soviet military leadership had concluded that blitzkrieg, as it had been practiced in Poland and France, would not be possible on the scale of a Soviet-German war; both sides would therefore confine themselves for the first several weeks at least to sparring along the frontier. The Soviet army had 2.9 million troops on the western border and outnumbered the Germans by two to one in tanks and by two or three to one in aircraft. Many of its tanks and aircraft were older types, but some of the tanks, particularly the later famous T-34s, were far superior to any the Germans had. Large numbers of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground in the first day, however, and their tanks, like those of the French, were scattered among the infantry, where they could not be effective against the German panzer groups. The infantry was first ordered to counterattack, which was impossible, and then forbidden to retreat, which ensured their wholesale destruction or capture.Originally Posted by Adolf Hitler
Hitler at his Fuhrer Headquarters
In preparation for the attack, Hitler moved 3.2 million German soldiers and about 1 million Axis soldiers to the Soviet border, launched many aerial surveillance missions over Soviet territory, and stockpiled materiel in the East. The Soviets were still taken by surprise, mostly due to Stalin's belief that the Third Reich was unlikely to attack only two years after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet leader also believed that the Nazis would likely finish their war with Britain before opening a new front. He refused to believe repeated warnings from his intelligence services on the Nazi buildup, fearing the reports to be British misinformation designed to spark a war between the Nazis and the USSR. The German government also aided in this deception, telling Stalin that the troops were being moved to take them out of range of British bombers. The Germans also explained that they were trying to trick the British into thinking they were planning to attack the Soviet Union, while in fact the troops and supplies were being stockpiled for an invasion of Britain. As a result, Stalin's preparations against a possible German invasion in 1941 were half-hearted. The spy Dr. Richard Sorge gave Stalin the exact German launch date; Swedish cryptanalysts led by Arne Beurling also knew the date beforehand.
The Germans set up deception operations, from April 1941, to add substance to their claims that Britain was the real target: Operations Haifisch and Harpune. These simulated preparations in Norway, the Channel coast and Britain. There were supporting activities such as ship concentrations, reconnaissance flights and training exercises. Invasion plans were developed and some details were allowed to leak.
Hitler also researched into Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia. At Hitler's insistence, the German High Command (OKW) began to develop a strategy to avoid repeating these mistakes. The strategy Hitler and his generals agreed upon involved three separate army groups assigned to capture specific regions and cities of the Soviet Union. The main German thrusts were conducted along historical invasion routes. Army Group North was assigned to march through the Baltics, into northern Russia, and either take or destroy the city of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). Army Group Center would advance to Smolensk and then Moscow, marching through what is now Belarus and the west-central regions of Russia proper. Army Group South was to strike the heavily populated and agricultural heartland of Ukraine, taking Kiev before continuing eastward over the steppes of southern Russia all the way to the Volga and the oil-rich Caucasus.
Hitler, the OKW and the various high commands disagreed about what the main objectives should be. In the preparation for Barbarossa, most of the OKW argued for a straight thrust to Moscow, whereas Hitler kept asserting his intention to seize the resource-rich Ukraine and Baltics before concentrating on Moscow. An initial delay, which postponed the start of Barbarossa from mid-May to the end of June 1941, may have been insignificant, especially since the Russian muddy season came late that year. However, more time was lost at various critical moments as Hitler and the OKW suspended operations in order to argue about strategic objectives.
OKW plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union
Originally Posted by Adolf Hitler
A German squad attacking on the first shots of Barbarossa
Intro sourced from Wikipedia and History Channel. Everything below this line is originally written
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CCGPS changes are coming this year 2012-2013. Unit 1 Number Systems. Students will continue to apply and extend rational numbers. We will learn more about integers, opposites, & absolute value. Unit 2 consist of our pre-algebra unit: expressions and equations. These two units are the foundation for a successful year in 8th and 9th grade algebra.
- Integers - Opposites, Absolute Value
- How to + - x / integers.
- Rational Numbers - how to + - x / rational numbers (fractions, decimals, integers)
- Coordinate Plane
- Convert decimals to fractionn
- Compare and order all forms or rational numbers
- Rational Numbers - Decimals + - x \
- Rational Numbers - Fractions + - x |
- Exponents x2
- Order of Operations
- Properties - Commutative, Associative, Identity, & Distributive
- Translating words into math
- Variables & algebraic expressions
- Combining Like Terms (& with distributive)
- Final Exam
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died Aug. 29, 1966, Dallas, Texas?
African-American poet who worked within the modernist tradition to explore African-American issues. His concern with poetic form and his abiding optimism set him apart from many of his contemporaries. Writing after the Harlem Renaissance but adhering to its ideals, Tolson was hopeful of a better political and economic future for African-Americans.
Tolson attended Lincoln University (B.A., 1923) and received a master's degree from Columbia University in 1940. His first collection of poetry, Rendezvous with America (1944), includes one of his most popular works, Dark Symphony, a poem in six movements that contrasts European-American history with African-American history. The success of this collection led to Tolson's appointment as poet laureate of Liberia in 1947. The last of his works to be published during his lifetime was Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965), planned as the first of a projected five-volume history of African-Americans.
Tolson's most important work is the posthumous collection A Gallery of Harlem Portraits (1979). Modeled on Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, this collection is an epic portrait of a culturally and racially diverse community. The lives and emotions of its characters are portrayed in blues lyrics, dramatic monologues, and free verse.
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Drawing the human form, whether male or female, takes practice and attention to detail. The basic concepts of drawing and shading apply, but the way line, value and form are executed is paramount to successful figure drawing. Without proper execution the human body may not look human at all, and may appear two-dimensional or ill-proportioned. Use basic drawing techniques to create a human figure drawing that you can be proud of.
Drawing the frame of a human figure using geometric shapes allows artists to create compositions with correct proportions. Use circles and ovals to indicate the head and joints of your figures. An inverted triangle can represent the chest region, while a smaller triangle forms the pelvic region of a figure. Use rectangles and oblong shapes to create the outlines of appendages and fill in the trunk of the human form. These interlocking shapes help create a full and natural form.
The relative thickness of a line can allude to the weight of a shape. Generally, thin lines indicate lightness while thick lines suggest heaviness or darkness. Pencils and charcoal, two expressive media for figure drawing, come in different grades that indicate the their softness or hardness; use soft grades to create thick or dark lines and hard grades to create lighter, narrow lines. Experiment with the strength and scope of each pencil grade by using different degrees of pressure to create a range of strokes. The weight of a line can be used to indicate the weight and shape of each part of a human's anatomy.
A range of values provides a human form a sense of depth and realism. Shading a human figure involves filling in the outline of your figure with hatching, cross-hatching, stippling or scumbling creates varied patterns and textures within your drawing. As with lines, using hard grade pencils and light strokes suggests that light is nearby, while heavy strokes and soft pencils suggests shadows or darkness. Layering with different values creates a realistic figure that seems to jump off the medium.
The Importance of Details
While the framework, line and shading values can create a good semblance of human form, the details are what create interest in a portrait. Incorporating even small details -- such as stray, windblown hairs separated from the main hairstyle, wrinkles in the skin or other human imperfections -- gives your figure a true sense of depth. To make a figure look convincing, it is important to remember to highlight a few major imperfections rather than detailing every single line and nuance presented in the human figure. The viewer will understand the point and importance if you use a few light lines to indicate the age of a person rather than covering the entire drawing with every wrinkle you see.
- Elfwood; Figure Drawing: Basic Pose and Construction: William Li
- Computer Arts; Figure Drawing Techniques; Ron Lemen; August, 2008
- "Figure Drawing for Dummies"; Kensuke Okabayashi; 2008
- Real Color Wheel; Human Proportions; Donald A. Jusko
- "Anatomy and Perspective: The Fundamentals of Figure Drawing"; Charles Oliver; ; 2004
- "Basic Figure Drawing Techniques"; Greg Albert 1994
- "The Figure Drawing Workbook"; John Raynes 1997
- Comstock Images/Comstock/Getty Images
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White County Indiana was formed in
1834 and is named for
Colonel Isaac White, one of 13 United States Counties named in honor
of fallen heroes at the historic Battle of
Isaac White was born around 1776 in Prince William County,
Virginia to a family of refined English origin, shortly after the Revolutionary
War began. When he was 23 years old, Isaac and his brother,
Thomas, left home,
unhappy with their mother's second marriage. They traveled to Vincennes where
Isaac met and married Sallie Leech, daughter of
Judge George Leech. Their union
produced three children,
George Washington Leech White, Harriet Grandson White
and Juliet Greenville White.
He was an American frontiersman who was in charge of the salt works in Equality,
Illinois. Isaac White was also a Colonel in the Illinois Militia. He was a close friend to
of the Indiana
Territory, and to Joseph
Hamilton Daviess, a U.S.
District Attorney for Kentucky.
Like Daviess, White answered Governor
William Harrison's call for volunteers in 1811 to march on Tecumseh's
village at Prophetstown. Governor Harrison declined the
offer of Illinois troops. Colonel White therefore enlisted as a private in the
which had been placed under the command of Joseph Daviess for
Indiana service. At Fort
Vincennes the two exchanged swords.
Both White and Daviess were killed on Nov. 7,
1811 and buried in a common grave at the
Battle of Tippecanoe, just a few miles south of what is now the city of Monticello.
White's name is the last inscribed on the tablet honoring that war's dead.
A rare historical attraction in White County is
the Anson Wolcott House, located on U.S. 24 about 20 miles west of Monticello in
downtown Wolcott. Wolcott House is one of two homes in the county listed in the
National Register of Historic Places. Historic
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BY RACHEL CRIPPIN CLARK
Ken Kornman, DDS, Ph.D., editor in chief of the Journal of Periodontology; Ray Williams, Dean, State University of New York at Stony Brook
School of Dental Medicine; AAP President David Cochran, DDS, Ph.D; and Thomas Van Dyke, Director, Postdoctoral Periodontology, Boston University Goldman School of Dental Medicine, who planned the 2008 Workshop on Inflammation.
Before you were even in kindergarten, you probably knew the importance of
brushing your teeth. Scrub gently in circles. Don’t forget the ones way in back.
Brush as long as it takes you to sing “Happy Birthday” twice. And as you got
older, flossing came into the picture. Flossing gets in between your teeth where
your brush can’t reach. It helps clean off dirty little things called bacteria. >>
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Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia have very close linguistic roots. Their histories and cultures are closely interwoven. Yet all three have distinctive features that define their unique traditions and will direct their futures. Along with many other factors their history has been shaped by their physical geography. The discussion below is taken from Twenty-Five Lectures on Modern Balkan History (The Balkans in the Age of Nationalism); click here to return to the Table of Contents page to view the other lectures.
Balkan geography revolves around three features: the area's situation as a peninsula, its mountains, and its rivers. Leften Stavrianos has pointed out the influence of geography on Balkan history.
Map: GENERAL REFERENCE MAP OF EUROPE
[Clicking here will display a general reference map of Europe -- including the Balkans, with physical features and 1999 borders -- in another browser window, while leaving this lecture text in the original browser window.]
The Balkan region is a triangular peninsula with a wide northern border, narrowing to a tip as it extends to the south. The Black, the Aegean, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Seas surround it; they have served as both barriers and entry points. Unlike some peninsulas, the Balkan area has not been physically isolated from nearby regions. In the northeast, Romania is exposed to the steppe regions of the Ukraine, an easy invasion route from prehistoric times to the present. In the northwest, the valley of the Danube and the flat Hungarian plain are easy points of entry. Most (but not all) of the ethnic groups in the region entered by one of these paths.
While it is surrounded on three sides by water, the peninsula is not cut off from neighboring regions to the east, west or south. To the east, the narrow straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles are a natural pathway between the Balkans and Anatolia, and Asia beyond. To the west, the Italian peninsula is only forty miles away across the Adriatic from Albania, and influence from that direction has been another constant. Finally, the Aegean and Mediterranean islands to the south are stepping stones to the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. Not surprisingly, the Balkan region has been a crossroads for traffic passing to and from all these destinations.
The mountains which divide the region are a prominent internal physical characteristic. The region takes its name from the "Balkan" mountain range in Bulgaria (from a Turkish word meaning "a chain of wooded mountains"). On a larger scale, one long continuous chain of mountains crosses the region in the form of a reversed letter S, from the Carpathians south to the Balkan range proper, before it marches away east into Anatolian Turkey. On the west coast, an offshoot of the Dinaric Alps follows the coast south through Dalmatia and Albania, crosses Greece and continues into the sea in the form of various islands.
The first effect of these mountains is to divide the region into small units within which distinct ethnic groups have been able to sustain themselves. This area, a little smaller in size than France and Germany or the states of Texas and Oklahoma, is home to a dozen or more prominent ethnic groups.
Second, the mountains have been physical obstacles, hampering efforts at regional combination, whether political, economic or cultural. The ethnic groups have tended toward distinct national cultures, local economies and political autonomy.
Third, the mountains have subdivided every district into vertical ecological zones, ranging from more valuable lowland farming areas to less valuable wooded or rocky uplands. This variety of ecological niches supports various cultures in close proximity: traders, farmers, transhumant herders, forest dwellers. In general, the higher up the zone, the less productive the land, and so the upper regions of the mountains act as places of exile and refuge for defeated ethnic groups expelled from more desirable coast and valley lands. In general, then, the mountain features of the Balkans have contributed to the continued fragmentation of human groups in the area.
The rivers of the region are short; their influence is usually local, with one exception. The small rivers of the area typically rise in coastal mountains and drop into the nearest sea after a short course. They are too small to carry water traffic; instead they cut ravines that block travel along the coasts. The great exception is the Danube. It enters from the northwest, passes through the Hungarian plain, skirts the south Slavic states, and exits through Romania into the Black Sea on the east. Despite its size, the Danube also fails to be a source of regional integration. Several factors prevent easy use of the Danube for regular communication and trade: low water in the summer, marshes obstructing access to the river bank, the narrow passage of the Iron Gates between Serbia and Romania (fully opened to shipping by modern engineering techniques only in 1896), and the tendency of the Black Sea delta to silt up. Instead, the Danube acts to introduce outside influences. The western reaches of the river point to the German world; the eastern reaches lead to a dead end in the Black Sea, and leave travel at the mercy of Russia and Turkey. The Danube serves the needs of powerful external forces far more than it helps the internal needs of the Balkan peoples. Like the mountains, the Balkan rivers have done little to foster unity in the area.
Intensive Language Programs
The American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) website has a page that describes intensive programs in Slavic and East European languages as well as in the languages of the Republics of the former Soviet Union. The listings include those programs offered in U.S. (and some Canadian) colleges and universities as well as in programs abroad. This is a free service provided by AATSEEL to such programs.
Each language has its own page, and programs are divided into the following categories: Summer Programs in the U.S., Summer Programs Abroad, and Semester/Year Programs Abroad. Information is added to this page as it is received, so check frequently for updates.
The website has a table which allows you to click on the language you are interested in, and it directs you to links to the program/school websites teaching the language.
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HIV and AIDS
What is AIDS?
AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which kills or impairs cells of the immune system and progressively destroys the body's ability to fight infections and certain cancers. HIV is most commonly spread by sexual contact with an infected partner.
The term AIDS applies to the most advanced stages of an HIV infection. Official criteria for the definition of AIDS are developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is responsible for tracking the spread of AIDS in the United States. The 2008 CDC definition of AIDS includes all HIV-infected people who have fewer than 200 CD4+ T cells (healthy adults usually have CD4+ T-cell counts of 800 or more.) In addition, the definition includes HIV-infected people who have been diagnosed with one or more of 26 clinical conditions (opportunistic infections) that affect people with advanced HIV disease.
According to the CDC, at the end of 2006, an estimated 1.1 million adults and adolescents were living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. An estimated 2.7 million new HIV infections occurred worldwide during 2007, which equates to about five new infections every minute. This indicates that the AIDS epidemic still rages out of control. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at the end of 2008, there were 33.4 million people living with AIDS globally.
How is HIV/AIDS transmitted?
HIV is spread most commonly by sexual contact with an infected partner. The virus enters the body through the lining of the vagina, vulva, penis, rectum, or mouth during sexual activity.
HIV may also be spread through contact with infected blood. However, due to the screening of blood for evidence of HIV infection, the risk of acquiring HIV from blood transfusions is extremely low.
HIV is frequently spread by sharing needles, syringes, or drug use equipment with someone who is infected with the virus. Transmission from patient to healthcare worker, or vice-versa through accidental sticks with contaminated needles or other medical instruments, is rare.
HIV also can be spread to babies born to, or breastfed by, mothers infected with the virus.
HIV/AIDS cannot be spread through:
Casual contact, such as sharing food utensils, towels, and bedding
Biting insects (such as mosquitoes)
What are the symptoms of HIV/AIDS?
Some people may develop a flu-like illness within a month or two after exposure to the HIV virus, although, many people do not develop any symptoms at all when they first become infected. In addition, the symptoms that do appear, which usually disappear within a week to a month, are often mistaken for those of another viral infection. These may include:
Enlarged lymph nodes
Persistent or severe symptoms may not surface for 10 years or more, after HIV first enters the body in adults, or within two years in children born with an HIV infection. This "asymptomatic" period of the infection is highly variable from person to person. But, during the asymptomatic period, HIV is actively infecting and killing cells of the immune system. Its most obvious effect is a decline in the blood levels of CD4+ T cells (also called T4 cells)--the immune system's key infection fighters. The virus initially disables or destroys these cells without causing symptoms.
As the immune system deteriorates, complications begin to surface. The following are the most common complications, or symptoms, of AIDS. However, each individual may experience symptoms differently. Symptoms may include:
Lymph nodes that remain enlarged for more than three months
Lack of energy
Frequent fevers and sweats
Persistent or frequent yeast infections (oral or vaginal)
Persistent skin rashes or flaky skin
Pelvic inflammatory disease that does not respond to treatment
Short-term memory loss
One or more infections (opportunistic infections) related to having a diminished immune system, such as tuberculosis and certain types of pneumonia
Some people develop frequent and severe herpes infections that cause mouth, genital, or anal sores, or a painful nerve disease known as shingles. Children may have delayed development or failure to thrive.
During the course of the HIV infection, most people experience a gradual decline in the number of CD4+ T cells, although some individuals may have abrupt and dramatic drops in their counts.
The symptoms of an HIV infection may resemble other medical conditions. Always consult your doctor for a diagnosis.
How is HIV/AIDS diagnosed?
Early HIV infection often causes no symptoms, and must be detected by testing a person's blood for the presence of antibodies--disease-fighting proteins--against HIV. These HIV antibodies generally do not reach levels high enough to detect by standard blood tests until one to three months following infection, and may take as long as six months. People exposed to HIV should be tested for HIV infection as soon as they are likely to develop antibodies to the virus.
When a person is highly likely to be infected with HIV and yet antibody tests are negative, a test for the presence of HIV itself in the blood is used. Repeat antibody testing at a later date, when antibodies to HIV are more likely to have developed, is often recommended.
Treatment for HIV/AIDS
As with many other conditions, early detection offers more options for treatment. Today, there are medical treatments that can slow down the rate at which HIV weakens the immune system, but currently there is no cure for the disease. However, there are other treatments that can prevent or cure the conditions associated with AIDS. Consult your doctor for more information regarding various drug therapies for the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Are we getting close to finding a vaccine for AIDS?
Yes, however, even with extensive prevention efforts from multiple government and private agencies, HIV is still spreading worldwide.
In an attempt to develop a vaccine against HIV, which could protect against infection and disease, an AIDS vaccine, called AIDSvax, was tested in several countries, including the US. The vaccine composition tested varies from country to country, because different strains of HIV are found in Asia than in North America, for example. Designed to stimulate the body to produce antibodies to certain types of HIV, results from the first large-scale clinical trials of an AIDS vaccine show the inoculation is largely ineffective in protecting people from the AIDS-causing HIV virus.
But the research does offer some hope. The shot did appear to significantly lower the infection rate among African-Americans and other non-Hispanic minorities, according to the company that produces the AIDSvax vaccine.
Researchers say they are at a loss to explain the apparent differences in responses among racial and ethnic groups. Always consult your doctor for more information.
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The Evolution Deceit
Imaginary Dinosaur-Bird Links
As you saw in earlier chapters, it's impossible for birds to have evolved from dinosaurs, since no mechanism can have eliminated the enormous physiological differences between the two groups. Despite this, evolutionists still raise the scenario of birds being evolved from dinosaurs in various ways. They frequently resort to news reports, using pictures of reconstructions and sensational headlines regarding these so-called dino-birds, as if they represented the true facts. These accounts are intended to convince people feathered dinosaurs once lived on Earth.
This scenario is presented persistently as it were a proven fact. All objections, criticisms and counter-evidence are totally ignored, clearly indicating that this is deliberate propaganda intended to impose dino-bird myths on society. The biased fossil interpretations we shall examine in the following pages reveal their hollow, deceptive nature.
The claim that birds evolved from dinosaurs is actually opposed by a great many paleontologists or anatomists who otherwise support the theory of evolution. As you have seen, two renowned ornithologists, Alan Feduccia and Larry Martin, think this scenario is completely erroneous. This is set out in the textbook Developmental Biology, taught in U.S. universities:
Not all biologists believe that birds are dinosaurs... This group of scientists emphasize the differences between dinosaurs and birds, claiming that the differences are too great for the birds to have evolved from earlier dinosaurs. Alan Feduccia, and Larry Martin, for instance, contend that birds could not have evolved from any known group of dinosaurs. They argue against some of the most important cladistic data and support their claim from developmental biology and biomechanics. 170
Many evolutionist publications refer to the thesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs as if it were based on solid evidence and accepted by the entire scientific community. They try to give the impression that the only subject up for debate is which species of dinosaur birds evolved from. Although Martin earlier supported the dino-bird claim, he eventually realized in the light of his research that it was invalid, and abandoned his former ideas:
Every time I look at the evidence formerly discovered and then make a claim about the origins of the theropod, I saw its inaccuracy. That is because everything shows its inadequacy. The truth of the matter is that…I seriously suspect that they have the same features with birds and don't think that there exist striking features supporting that birds are of theropod origin. 171
Feduccia admits that concerning the origin of birds, the theory of evolution finds itself in a state of uncertainty. He attaches no credence to the deliberately maintained dino-bird controversy, which is in fact groundless. Important information is contained in his article, "Birds Are Dinosaurs: Simple Answer to a Complex Problem," published in October 2002 in The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists' Union, in which the most technical aspects of ornithology are discussed. Feduccia describes in detail how the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs, raised by John Ostrom in the 1970s and fiercely defended ever since, lacks any scientific evidence, and how such an evolution is impossible.
Feduccia is not alone among evolutionists in this regard. Peter Dodson, the evolutionist professor of anatomy from Pennsylvania University, also doubts that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs:
I am on record as opposing cladistics and catastrophic extinction of dinosaurs; I am tepid on endothermic dinosaurs; I am skeptical about the theropod ancestry of birds. 172
Despite being an evolutionist, Dodson admits the unrealistic claims of the theory of evolution, and has come in for severe criticism from his evolutionist colleagues. In one article, he responds to these criticisms:
Personally, I continue to find it problematic that the most birdlike maniraptoran theropods are found 25 to 75 million years after the origin of birds . . . .Ghost lineages are frankly a contrived solution, a deus ex machina required by the cladistic method. Of course, it is admitted that late Cretaceous maniraptorans are not the actual ancestors of birds, only "sister taxa." Are we being asked to believe that a group of highly derived, rapidly evolving maniraptorans in the Jurassic gave rise to birds, as manifested by Archaeopteryx, and then this highly progressive lineage then went into a state of evolutionary stasis and persisted unchanged in essential characters for millions of years? Or are actual ancestors far more basal in morphology and harder to classify? If the latter, then why insist that the problem is now solved? 173
Alan Feduccia sets out an important fact concerning the dino-birds said to have been found in China: the "feathers" on the fossils said to be those of feathered dinosaurs are definitely not bird feathers. A considerable body of evidence shows that these fossil traces have nothing at all to do with bird feathers. He says this in an article published in The Auk magazine:
Having studied most of the specimens said to sport protofeathers, I, and many others, do not find any credible evidence that those structures represent protofeathers. Many Chinese fossils have that strange halo of what has become known as dino-fuzz, but although that material has been "homologized" with avian feathers, the arguments are far less than convincing. 174
Citing Richard O. Prum, one of the supporters of the dino-bird claims, as an example, Feduccia goes on to mention the prejudiced approach so prevalent on the subject:
Prum's view is shared by many paleontologists: birds are dinosaurs; therefore, any filamentous material preserved in dromaeosaurs must represent protofeathers. 175
Latest Research Has Dealt a Severe Blow to Feathered Dinosaur Claims
The fossilized structures referred to as dinosaur feathers were shown by Theagarten (Solly) Lingham-Soliar, a paleontologist from Durban-Westville University in South Africa to be nothing more than decayed connective tissue. Professor Lingham-Soliar performed an experiment by burying a dolphin in river mud, semi-permeable to air for a year. The reason a dolphin was selected was that its flesh is easy to analyze. At the end of this period, the professor examined the dolphin's bunches of collagen—which constitutes connective tissue in the bodies of most living things— under a microscope. According to him, the decayed collagen in the dolphin's body bore "a striking resemblance to feathers."1 The German magazine Naturwissenschaften commented that: "The findings throw serious doubt on the virtually complete reliance on visual image by supporters of the feathered dinosaur thesis and emphasize the need for more rigorous methods of identification using modern feathers as a frame of reference." 2 With this finding, it emerged that even a dolphin could leave behind traces of apparent feathers. This once again showed that there are no grounds for regarding extinct dinosaurs with "feathers" as proto-birds.
1. Stephen Strauss, "Buried dolphin corpse serves science," 11 November 2003; http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20031111/UDINO11/TPScience/
According to Feduccia, one factor that invalidates this preconception is the presence of these same traces in fossils that have no relationship with birds:
Most important, "dino-fuzz" is now being discovered in a number of taxa, some unpublished, but particularly in a Chinese pterosaur and a therizinosaur, which has teeth like those of prosauropods. Most surprisingly, skin fibers very closely resembling dino-fuzz have been discovered in a Jurassic ichthyosaur and described in detail. Some of those branched fibers are exceptionally close in morphology to the so-called branched protofeathers ("Prum Protofeathers"") described by Xu. That these so-called protofeathers have a widespread distribution in archosaurs is evidence alone that they have nothing to do with feathers. 176
Feduccia recalls that various structures found around these fossils and thought to belong to them, were later determined to consist of inorganic matter:
One is reminded of the famous fernlike markings on the Solnhofen fossils known as dendrites. Despite their plantlike outlines, these features are now known to be inorganic structures caused by a solution of manganese from within the beds that reprecipitated as oxides along cracks or along bones of fossils. 177
The fossil beds preserve not only an indefinite structure such as dino-fuzz but also bird feathers. But all the fossils presented as feathered dinosaurs have been found in China. Why should these fossils have not emerged from anywhere else in the world—Feduccia draws attention to this intriguing state of affairs:
One must explain also why all theropods and other dinosaurs discovered in other deposits where integument is preserved exhibit no dino-fuzz, but true reptilian skin, devoid of any featherlike material (Feduccia 1999), and why typically Chinese dromaeosaurs preserving dino-fuzz do not normally preserve feathers, when a hardened rachis, if present, would be more easily preserved. 178
Feduccia states that some of these creatures portrayed as feathered dinosaurs are simply extinct reptiles with dino-fuzz and that others are genuine birds:
There are clearly two different taphonomic phenomena in the early Cretaceous lacustrine deposits of the Yixian and Jiufotang formations of China, one preserving dino-fuzz filaments, as in the first discovered, so-called "feathered dinosaur" Sinosauropteryx (a compsognathid), and one preserving actual avian feathers, as in the feathered dinosaurs that were featured on the cover of Nature, but which turned out to be secondarily flightless birds. 179
Peter Dodson, on the other hand, says, "I hasten to add that none of the known small theropods, including Deinonychus, Dromaeosaurus, Velociraptor, Unenlagia, nor Sinosauropteryx, Protarcheaeopteryx, nor Caudipteryx is itself relevant to the origin of birds."180 He means that these creatures cannot be the ancestors of birds because the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, lived long before the Cretaceous Period.
In short, the fossils portrayed as feathered dinosaurs or dino-birds either belong to certain flightless birds like today's ostriches, or else to reptiles possessed of a structure known as dino-fuzz which has nothing to do with actual feathers. There exists not a single fossil that might represent an intermediate form between birds and reptiles. Therefore, the claim that fossils prove that birds descended from dinosaurs is completely unrealistic.
1) The Alleged Intermediate From: Mononychus
Mononychus is one of the fossils used as a vehicle for evolutionist propaganda and depicted with feathers in the 26 April 1993 edition of Time magazine. It was later realized, on the basis of further evidence, that this creature was not a bird.
One of the best-known fossils in the alleged dino-bird chain is Mononychus, discovered in Mongolia in 1993 and claimed to be an intermediate form between dinosaurs and birds. Although not the slightest trace of feathers was found in this fossil, Time magazine reconstructed the creature with feathers on the cover of its 26 April, 1993 issue. Subsequent evidence revealed that Mononychus was no bird but a fossorial (digging) theropod.
The fact that this fossil had a bird-like breastbone and wrist bones led evolutionists to interpret Mononychus as an intermediate form. Biased interpretations and support from the media gave the impression that some proof existed to back this up. However, the anatomical features depicted as evidence are also found in other animals, such as moles. These inferences represent no evidence at all and they have only led to misinterpretations.
Writing to Science News, Richard Monastersky reports, based on observations, why this fossil cannot be classified;
Mongolian and U.S. researchers have found a 75-million-year-old bird-like creature with a hand so strange it has left paleontologists grasping for an explanation. . . Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago notes that Mononychus had arms built much like those of digging animals. Because moles and other diggers have keeled sternums and wrists reminiscent of birds, the classification of Mononychus becomes difficult.181
In addition, this fossil is at least 80 million years younger than Archaeopteryx—which totally undermines any proposed
2) Bambiraptor Feinbergi, Depicted with Imaginary Feathers
Evolutionist media immediately give certain bird-like features to biased interpretations. The fossil Bambiraptor feinbergi, claimed to be an intermediate form between dinosaurs and birds, was depicted as a feathered reptile in media illustrations. However, there is no evidence that this creature ever had feathers.
In 1994, another dino-bird claim was made on behalf of a fossil called Bambiraptor feinbergi, estimated to be 75 million years old. Found in the Glacier National Park in northern Montana, the fossil is 95% complete. Evolutionists promptly claimed that it represents an intermediate form between dinosaurs and birds. When the fossil, belonging to a dinosaur, was introduced as an alleged dino-bird, the report admitted, "Feathers, however, have not yet been found."182 Despite this reservation, the media drew the animal as a feathered creature, and the missing details were added using plenty of creative imagination.
The most evident objection to this so-called missing link is again, an error in dating. This alleged intermediate form fossil is 75 million years younger than Archaeopteryx, itself a species of flying bird. This fossil is therefore a specimen that demolished the ancestral relationship claimed by evolutionists. In the same way that this fossil provides no evidence for evolution, it also demolished the ancestral relationship claimed by evolutionists. According to Ohio University professor of zoology John Ruben:
A point that too many people always ignored, however, is that the most birdlike of the dinosaurs, such as Bambiraptor and Velociraptor, lived 70 million years after the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx. So you have birds flying before the evolution of the first birdlike dinosaurs. We now question very strongly whether there were any feathered dinosaurs at all. What have been called feathered dinosaurs were probably flightless birds. 183
Evolutionists use a few bird-like characteristics as grounds for their preconceived interpretations. Yet the effort of building a line of descent based on similarities is full of contradictions that evolutionists cannot explain. Whenever evolutionists construct an alleged evolutionary relationship between clearly different living things based on similar structures, they immediately close the subject by describing it as "parallel evolution." They claim that living things with similar complex organs but with no ancestors in common, evolved independently. However, since they cannot account for the origin of these complex organs in even one living thing, their statements that these organs supposedly evolved several times presents a serious predicament.
Alan Feduccia states that certain similarities between birds and dinosaurs do not show any evolutionary relationship between the two groups:
Bambiraptor is a small dinosaur, but it does have a number of birdlike features, as do many other forms. However there is nothing special about hollow bones, as some mammals and frogs have them. The problem, of course, is that Bambiraptor is some 80 million years beyond Archaeopteryx, and yet is claimed to be the dinosaur most close to bird ancestry. That alone should be a red flag, and a warning that the situation is far more complicated than suspected. 184
3) Confuciusornis Sanctus: Identical to Modern Birds
Two paleontologists, Lianhai Hou and Zhonghe Zhou, researching at the Vertebrate Paleontology Institute in China in 1995, discovered a new species of fossilized bird, which they named Confuciusornis sanctus. This was presented to the public as the earliest flying dinosaur, even as evidence for how hands used for grasping turned into hands used for flight. According to Alan Feduccia, however, this fossil is one of the frequently encountered beaked birds. This one had no teeth, and its beak and feathers share the same features as present-day birds. There are claws on its wings, as with Archaeopteryx, and its skeletal structure is identical to those of modern-day birds. A structure known as the pygostyle, which supports the tail feathers, can also be seen.
In short, evolutionists regarded this fossil as a semi-reptile, the earliest ancestor of all birds, of a similar age (about 142 million years) as Archaeopteryx and, bearing a close resemblance to present-day birds. This clearly conflicts with the evolutionist theses that Archaeopteryx is the earliest ancestor of all birds. 185
This is also definitive proof that Archaeopteryx and other archaic birds are not intermediate forms. These and similar fossils show no evidence that different bird species evolved from earlier ones. On the contrary, it proves that present-day birds and certain unique bird species similar to Archaeopteryx lived at the same time. Some of these species, such as Confuciusornis and Archaeopteryx, are extinct, but a few have survived to the present day.
What is in the heavens and in the Earth belongs to Allah. Allah encompasses all things. (Surat an-Nisa, 126)
4) Protarchaeopteryx Robusta and Caudipteryx Zoui: Vehicles for Biased Interpretations
Caudipteryx zoui , Protarchæopteryx robusta
The fossils Protarchæopteryx robusta and Caudipteryx zoui do not belong to dinosaurs, but to extinct flightless birds. The efforts to portray these creatures as dinosaurs is an example of evolutionists' eagerness to produce evidence.
In the summer of 1996, farmers working in the Yixian Formation found three separate turkey-sized fossils, so well preserved as to give genuine evidence of bird feathers. At first, Ji Qiang and his colleague Ji Shu-An concluded that these fossils must belong to a single species. Noting their surprising similarity to Archaeopteryx, they gave the creature the name Protarchaeopteryx robusta.
During his research in the autumn of 1997, Philip Currie concluded that these fossils belonged to two different species, neither of which resembled Archaeopteryx. The second species was given the name Caudipteryx zoui. 186
The discoveries of the Protarchæopteryx robusta and Caudipteryx zoui fossils were depicted as evidence that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. 187 The popular press stated that these fossils were definitely the so-called ancestors of birds. One commentator even wrote that the dinosaur-bird link was "now pretty close to rock solid."188 However, this certainty was again, only a biased interpretation.
According to evolutionist claims, Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx were small dinosaurs whose bodies were largely covered in feathers. But on their wings and tails were longer and more complex feathers, arranged like those in present-day birds. However, it is no surprise that these creatures should have feather arrangements similar to modern birds', because their feathers are symmetrically shaped, as observed in present-day flightless birds.189 Therefore, the creatures in question are flightless birds, not dinosaurs.
In severely criticizing the dino-bird dogma, Larry Martin and Alan Feduccia stated that these fossils were flightless bird species like the modern ostrich. 190
But adherents of the dino-bird theory are reluctant to accept this because they want to classify the creatures as dinosaurs, even though this fossil provides no support for evolutionist claims. Indeed, this fossil represents a new contradiction to evolutionists' alleged ancestral relationships.
According to the evolutionist scenario, these dinosaurs and modern birds both have a special bone that lets them bend their wrists. Again according to evolutionist claims, this feature enabled them to move their forefeet in a wide manner, to catch fleeing prey with their long arms and gripping talons. This allegedly powerful beating movement represented an important part of the wingbeats the today's birds use to fly. However, such interpretations are scientifically invalid, because flight consists of far more complex actions than just wing beating:
Any forward beating movement gives rises to a counter impulse that propels the bird backward. For the purpose of flight, the main flight feathers are arranged at such an angle as to push the air back and propel the birds forwards. As in planes, the wings have a special aerofoil shape, which causes air to flow faster over the upper surface than the lower. This, according to the Bernoulli principle, reduces air pressure on the upper surface and creates lift. This is the main factor in take-off, but there is also the question of Newton's Third Law—the reaction to the air being propelled downward.). 191
While refuting the theory of evolution's dino-bird claims, the world of science also confirms that living things are perfectly created. The attitude of evolutionist scientists clearly reveals that they are blindly devoted to the theory in question.
In addition, the structure of a wing hypothesized to catch prey is very different from that created for beating in flight. A feathered wing is no advantage to a bird using its wings to catch prey, because a feathered wing's broad surface will only increase air resistance and make movement more difficult. If, the bird flapped for hunting, as evolutionists maintain then its wing structure should help the bird move forward by pushing air back. Therefore, it would be a greater advantage for the bird's wings to let air pass through them, like a sieve or flyswatter. Thus evolutionist accounts are full of illogicalities that conflict with their own claims.
In addition to its feathers, Caudipteryx has a series of other features showing it to be a bird—such as that it was carnivorous. Caudopteryx was portrayed as a theropod since it was first unearthed, it was thought to be a carnivore.192 But there were no teeth in its lower skull and lower jaw, and the first two fossil specimens contained the remains of crops that birds use for digesting plant materials.193 Organs such as the crop are found only in birds and not in any species of the theropod family. 194
Protarchæopteryx and Caudipteryx are therefore extinct birds. The only reason they are referred to as dinosaurs is because that's what evolutionists want them to be.
5) Sinosauropteryx: Another Fossil Subjected to Speculative Claims
Today's evolutionists have entirely abandoned their claim that the creature was feathered. But a dogmatic approach towards evolution and accepted preconceptions make such errors inevitable.
With every new fossil discovery, evolutionists speculate about the dinosaur-bird link. Every time, however, their claims are refuted as a result of detailed analyses.
One example of such dino-bird claims was Sinosauropteryx, announced with enormous media propaganda in 1996. Some evolutionist paleontologists maintained that this fossil reptile possessed bird feathers. The following year, however, examinations revealed that these structures so excitedly described as feathers were actually nothing of the sort.
One article published in Science magazine, "Plucking the Feathered Dinosaur," stated that the structures had been misperceived as feathers by evolutionist paleontologists:
Exactly 1 year ago, paleontologists were abuzz about photos of a so-called "feathered dinosaur" . . . The Sinosauropteryx specimen from the Yixian Formation in China made the front page of The New York Times, and was viewed by some as confirming the dinosaurian origins of birds. But at this year's vertebrate paleontology meeting in Chicago late last month, the verdict was a bit different: The structures are not modern feathers, say the roughly half-dozen Western paleontologists who have seen the specimens. . . . Larry Martin of Kansas University, Lawrence, thinks the structures are frayed collagenous fibers beneath the skin—and so have nothing to do with birds. 195
About the speculative claims regarding feathers and Sinosauropteryx, Alan Brush of Connecticut University had this to say:
The stiff, bristlelike fibers that outline the fossils lack the detailed organization seen in modern feathers. 196
Another important point is that Sinosauropteryx had bellows-like lungs, like those in reptiles. According to many researchers, these show that the animal could not have evolved into modern-day birds with their high-performance lungs.
6) Eoalulavis Hoyasi Shares with Wing Structure of Modern-Day Birds
The wing structure in Eoalulavis hoyasi is also present in certain present-day flying birds. The feathers on this bird's wing contain a small bunch of feathers attached to the "finger". When the bird wishes to slow down or descend to earth, it decreases the angle of the wing to the horizon. This allows air to flow over the wing's top surface and to stop without falling.
Another fossil to demolish evolutionist claims was Eoalulavis hoyasi. This, estimated at some 120 million years old, is older than all the known theropod specimens. Nonetheless, wing structure in Eoalulavis hoyasi is identical to some modern-day flying birds. This proves that vertebrates identical in many respects to modern birds were flying 120 million years ago.197 Any suggestion that theropods, which appeared after this creature, were the ancestors of birds is clearly irrational.
This bird's wing has a bunch of small feathers attached to the "finger." Recognizable as the alula, this structure is a basic feature of many birds alive today and consisting of several feathers that permits the bird to engage in various maneuvers during flight. But it had never before been encountered in a fossil bird from the Mesozoic. This new bird was given the name Eoalulavis hoyasi, or "ancient bird with an alula."198 Its presence shows that this bird, the size of a chaffinch, was able to fly and maneuver as well as modern-day birds.
The alula functions like the wing flap on an airplane. When the bird wants to reduce its speed or landing, it increases of its wing to the horizon. The drag produced by this wing position helps the bird to slow down. But when the angle between the direction of the air flow and the wing surface gets too steep, turbulence over the wing increases until the bird loses the lift necessary to maintain flight. Like an airplane under similar circumstances, the bird is in danger of stalling in midair. The alula now enters the equation. By raising this small appendage, the bird creates a slot between it and the main part of the wing, similar to what happens when a pilot deploys a craft's wing flaps. The slot allows air to stream over the main wing's upper surface, easing turbulence and allowing the bird (or plane) to brake without stalling. 199
Birds 120 million years ago were using the same technology as that employed present. This realization added yet another insuperable difficulty facing the theory of evolution.
7) Unenlagia Comahuensis: A Dino-Bird Based On Artists' Imaginations
Fernando E. Novas of the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires and Pablo F. Puerta of the Paleontology Museum in Trelew announced a new fossil, said to be 90 million years old, in the 22 May, 1997, edition of Nature magazine, under the caption "Missing Link."200 They named this fossil Unenlagia comahuensis, meaning "half-bird from north-west Patagonia." This fossil, discovered in Argentina's Patagonia region, consisted of more than 20 pieces of the creatures leg, rib and shoulder bones. Based on these fragments, artists drew a creature complete with a neck, jaw and tail—and subsequently announced that this fossil was an intermediate stage in the transition from dinosaurs to birds.
However, Unenlagia comahuensis is manifestly a dinosaur, in many respects. In particular, certain features of its skull and the bone formations behind its eyes closely resemble those of theropods. There is also no evidence at all that it bore feathers. Evolutionist scientists, however, claimed that by raising its forearms, it could make similar movements to those used by birds for flying. But clearly, these prejudiced guesses and assumptions cannot be regarded as definitive proof.
On account of its different features, Lawrence M. Witmer of Ohio University describes this creature as a genuine "mosaic". 201
Alan Feduccia also states that Unenlagia comahuensis cannot be a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, emphasizing that it lived 55 million years after Archaeopteryx. 202
As Feduccia stressed in a 1996 article written together with several other authors in Science magazine, almost every dinosaur said to resemble the bird dates back to long after the emergence of the first true birds.203 This creates the problem that scientists refer to as the time paradox.
8) Dromaeosuar: The Dinosaur That Evolutionists Were
| 3.093484 |
Sand Creek Papers, 1861-1864, Mf 0018
Professor Harvey Carter of the Colorado College History Department presented
the Sand Creek Papers to CC in 1964. He had received them from Professor
R. H. Irrmann of Beloit College in 1962.
The Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864) is one of the most controversial
Indian conflicts. This event has been the subject of army and Congressional
investigations and inquiries, newspaper debates, the object of much oratory
and writing biased in both directions and with bitter conflict between the
men who were involved. The Sand Creek Massacre was undertaken by citizen
and military troops from the Colorado Territory. Evidence is that Chivington
undertook the Indian expedition on his own and it did not reflect official
government policy. The era of the Indian trader in Colorado came to an end
with the Sand Creek Massacre. The dominance of the Cheyennes and Arapahos
to the land east of the mountains was broken. Years of bloody battles with
the plains tribes followed.
John M. Chivington in 1862 was appointed colonel of the newly created
military district of Colorado. He had fought at La Glorieta Pass and had
been in charge of the Union troops during the Apache Canyon fracas.
Black Kettle was a Southern Cheyenne chief and the great peacemaker
of the Cheyennes. His dictated letter in this collection proposes peace
between his people and the U.S. Army. The chief was a self-described "friend
to the whites."
- Letter from S. G. Colley, Agent for the Upper Arkansas, Dec. 19, 1861
to William Gilpin, ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs in and
for the territory of Colorado. 5 pages, holograph signed (on outside,
"Copy report, Dec. 19th 1861)
- Letter from William P. Dole, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Oct.
9, 1861 to Samuel G. Colley, Esq, Denver City, Colorado Territory. Concerns
Colley's appointment as Agent for the Indians of Arkansas Agency. 2
pages, holograph. (on outside, "letter of appointment for agent")
- Letter from John Evans, Governor of Colorado Territory & Superintendent
of Indian Affairs, Denver Sept. 19, 1864, to Major S. G. Colley, U.
S. Indian Agent, Ft. Lyon, Colorado Territory. Informs of arrival of
three Indians at Ft. Lyon with a letter from Black Kettle proposing
peace and enclosing "copy of the same" 1 page, holograph.
- Letter (dictated) from Black Kettle (signed Black Kittle), Cheyenne
Village, Aug. 29, 1864, to Major Colley "brought to Ft. Lyon, Sunday,
Sept. 4, 1864 by One Eye". Concerns the wish to make peace. (on
outside, "Maj. Colley, Indian Agent Fort Lyon") 1 page, holograph
in pencil. Transcript of Black
- Letter, pages 2-5 only, holograph. No signature. Probably other page(s)
elsewhere. Concerns the necessity of introducing among the tribes the
means of agricultural and pastoral pursuits. Indians in starving conditions
- made application to officer commanding at the barracks and rations
from the commissariat were issued to party of Arapahos. Remove Indians
from necessity of theft -- cannot preach peace to a starving savage,
- Circular, printed 6 pages titled "Chivington Massacre of the
Cheyenne Indians". Written after the Sand Creek Massacre, it includes
the proclamation, Aug 11, 1864, of John Evans which authorized all citizens
to go in pursuit of all hostile Indians, etc.
- One printed sheet, Denver, June 27, 1864. Colorado Superintendency
Indian Affairs. To the Friendly Indians of the Plains, from John Evans,
Governor of Colorado and Superintendent of Indian Affairs.
Other resources on the Web:
Other primary and secondary sources in Tutt Library:
- Scott, Robert, Blood at Sand Creek: the massacre revisited,
Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1994.
- White, Lonie J., Hostiles and horse soldiers; Indian battles and
campaigns in the West Boulder, Colo., Pruett Pub. Co.,1972
- Dunn, William R., "I stand by Sand Creek" : a defense
of Colonel John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Calvary Ft.
Collins, Colo. : Old Army Press c1985
- Howbert, Irving, The Indians of the Pike's Peak Region, including
an account of the Battle of Sand Creek... New York, The Knickerbocker
- Cutler, Bruce, The Massacre at Sand Creek; narrative voices
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, c 1995
- Schultz, Duane P., Month of the Freezing Moon New York, St.
Martin's Press, 1990
- Howbert, Irving, 1846-1934, Papers Correspondence, notes and
drafts for articles, lectures and books by Irving Howbert, including
material on the early history of the Pike's Peak Region and the Battle
of Sand Creek.
- United States. Army. Courts of Inquiry. Sand Creek Massacre, 1864.
Report of the Secretary of War; communicating ... ordered to enquire
into the Sand Creek massacre, November, 1864. Washington : Govt.
Print Off., 1867
- Svaldi, David, Sand Creek and the rhetoric of extermination: a
case study in Indian-White relations Lanham, MD: University Press
of America, c1989
- Hoig, Stan , The Sand Creek Massacre Norman, University of
Oklahoma Press, 1961
- The Sand Creek Massacre: a documentary history New York: Sol
- Sand Creek papers; testimonies and statements reflecting facts
concerning the killing of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians on November 29,
1864 by the Third Colorado Volunteers Black Forest, Colo., Black
Forest Bookman, 1959
- Mendoza, Patrick M., Song of Sorrow: Massacre at Sand Creek
Denver, Colo.: Willow Wind Pub. Co., c1993
- Nelson, Todd David, The Two Fights at Sand Creek: Indian vs. White
and East vs. West Senior Thesis -- Colorado College, 1997
- Straight, Michael Whitney, A Very Small Remnant Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1976
- Stiles, T.J., editor, Warriors and Pioneers New York: Berkley
Pub. Group, 1996
- Time-Life Books, The American Indians -- War for the Plains
Alexandria, Virginia 1994
| 2.998149 |
Wildlife Without Borders 2012-2013 Planner
Download the planner in PDF (note: large file, 7MB)
For answers to the trivia questions, click on the month below!
Q: Why are white rhinos called 'white'?
A: It is a mis-translation from the word wyd meaning wide in Afrikaans, for their wide square lip, which is used for grazing on grass. Black rhinos, which are not a different color, have a prehensile extension on their lip for browsing (plucking leaves).
Q: What are three factors which threaten the continued survival of the tiger?
A: Poaching, habitat loss and human tiger conflict
Q: What are some important, ecosystem-services that wetlands provide?
A: Wetlands provide a vast array of important benefits and ecosystem services. In addition to moderating local climate and recharging and purifying groundwater, wetlands slow floodwaters and help prevent upland and coastal erosion. Occurring from the tundra to the tropics, wetlands are among the world’s most productive ecosystems. They are cradles of biological diversity, providing the necessary water and resources upon which a myriad of plant and animal species depend for their survival. They also directly benefit humans by producing valuable timber, peat, fish, rice, cranberries, and a variety of other commercial and agricultural products.
Q: What percentage of earth’s wildlife can be found in China’s ecosystems?
A: Approximately 10 percent.
Q: How many species of African great apes are there?
A: 4 – West African Gorilla, East African Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Bonobo
Q: How many scales does a leatherback have?
Q: Which region of the world has the most amphibian species?
A: The Tropics contain more amphibian species than any other region of the world, with Brazil having the most known species of any single country. Amphibians--including toads, newts, and salamanders--are vertebrates, creatures with a backbone and an internal skeleton. Amphibians live part of their lives in water and part on land. They are ectothermic, or cold-blooded, and must warm their bodies by absorbing heat from their surroundings. This makes them particularly susceptible to the effects of global climate change.
Q: How many monarch butterflies travel each year from Canada and the U.S. to the forests of Mexico to spend the winter?
A: Approximately 100 million per year.
Q: Which ape is known as the “man of the forest” in Malay?
Q: What are the two biggest threats facing the scarlet macaw today?
A: Illegal Pet Trade and Poaching
Q: What is the most obvious difference between Asian and African elephants?
A: The most obvious difference between the African and the Asian elephant is the size of their ears - those of the African are larger and shaped like the outline of Africa while those of the Asian are smaller and shaped like the outline of India.
Q: What is the USFWS Wildlife Without Borders' signature initiative in the Africa program and what does it do?
A: The MENTOR program. The Mentoring for ENvironmental Training in Outreach and Resource conservation (MENTOR ) Program builds the capacity of multi-disciplinary teams of African conservationists who can work together to address complex conservation challenges.
Q: Of the twenty-five most endangered primates in the world, how many are found in Latin America?
A: According to the IUCN, three of the twenty five most endangered primates in the world are found in Latin America: the Cotton-top Tamarin ( Saguinus Oedipus ), the Variegated or Brown Spider Monkey ( Ateles hybridus ), and the Peruvian Yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey (Oreonax flavicauda ). Each of these species is facing a number of serious threats to their immediate survival including habitat loss, poaching, and the illegal capture for the local pet trade. The Wildlife Without Borders-Critically Endangered Animals Conservation Fund (WWB-CEACF) currently supports the conservation education efforts of Fundación Proyecto Tití , a nonprofit in Colombia that is working to protect the Cotton-top Tamarin by establishing protected areas, developing sustainable alternatives for local communities to decrease their dependency on forest resources, and decreasing the number of animals sold illegally as pets.
Q: How many polar bears are estimated to still exist in the world?
A: Scientists estimate that they are between 20,000 and 25,000 total polar bears. They range across the borders of Alaska to Russia, from Canada to Greenland, and into Norway's Svalbard archipelago.
Q: How do elephants communicate with one another?
A: They communicate using ultralow frequency sound, mostly below the range of human hearing.
| 3.712107 |
AAO image reference AAT 112. « Previous || Next »
Top left is NE. Image width is about 15 arc min
Image and text © 1992-2010, Australian Astronomical Observatory, photograph by David Malin.
Messier saw this fine open cluster in 1780, indeed it is hard to miss, being almost 30 arc minutes in diameter. The cluster is about 2500 light years away in the direction of Cancer. NGC 2682 is among the oldest open clusters, with an age of about 4 billion years, almost as old as the Sun. Being so old (for an open cluster) and so nearby it has been extensively studied since all its stars are at essentially the same distance. Because this eliminates two variables, distance and age, studying stellar evolution in such a cluster is greatly simplified. Nonetheless there remain large differences in values for the absolute age of the cluster and its mass, which is over 1000 solar masses.
This photograph deliberately was taken on the AAT under conditions of poor seeing and with a series of short (4 minute) exposures. The idea was the let the seeing spread out the star images so the colour would be more obvious. In most photographs the centres of bright stars are completely over-exposed so they appear white. however there is some colour information in the 'wings' of the stellar image, where the effective exposure gradually tails off. The wings are bigger in poor seeing, spreading the starlight over a larger area. The colours in this picture are hardly visible, so the experiment did not work too well. A rather better result was obtained with the next photograph M93 (NGC 2447).
AAT 91. The old open cluster, Trumpler 5
Constellation of Cancer (external site)
For details of photographic exposure, search technical table by AAT reference number.
| emission nebulae
| reflection nebulae
| dark nebulae
| planetary nebulae
| star clusters
50 Favorites | Messier objects | Repro conditions | Images site map | AAO images page
| 3.004471 |
- v. present participle of form.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The act or process of giving form or shape to anything; as, in shipbuilding, the exact shaping of partially shaped timbers.
“Then cast away _all_ the loathsome littleness which has rusted and fouled around you, and look at Nature as she literally _is_, in her naked beauty, conceiving and forming, quickening and warming into infinitely varied and lovely life, and then _forming_ once again with the strong and harsh influences of death, pain and decay.”
“The film is continually suggesting trios; the ménage à trois is its underlying structure, from the title forming a threesome between the girls and the city, to the shifting romantic dynamics between the girls, Juan Antonio, and his wild, passionate ex-wife Maria Elena Penélope Cruz.”
“She saw the expression forming on his face and hurried to kill it.”
“The mountain Soevo, which he describes as forming a vast bay called Codanus, extending to the promontory of the Cimbri, is supposed by some to be the mountains that run along the Vistula on the eastern extremity of Germany, and by others to be that chain of mountains which commence at Gottenburgh.”
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 18 Historical Sketch of the Progress of Discovery, Navigation, and Commerce, from the Earliest Records to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, By William Stevenson
“This process of forming a vernacular word by modifying, in a traditional manner, a technical word, exemplifies an oral folk process among people to whom literacy is supremely important.”
“By that time I wonder how much toy makers and fast food joints had a hand in forming the characters.”
“The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship.”
“It is clear that the parties involved in forming the American Action Network all have a history of fighting for pro-corporate policies.”
“Whether a new party forms, or the existing parties change to address that demand; the interest generated by the movement is important in forming the future political landscape.”
“What a disgrace that our own people were involved in forming this legislation.”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘forming’.
All words of the Lisbon Treaty
(Persons' names, foreign and grammatical words have been eliminated, MWEs have been split up into individual words. Capitalization has been retained if r...
Listening to this as an audio book for the second time. Tim O'Brien uses simple words and phrases to great effect. Very few unfamilar and big words . The writing style reminds me of words from Joh...
Looking for tweets for forming.
| 3.185735 |
Peace amongst nations means decreasing the wealth gap between rich and poor, between the industrialized nations and the developing nations.
Global poverty, aspects and issues are related to the problem of overpopulation.
People have to regulate their population by means that are voluntary and benign and have to take along with a fair proportion of other lifeforms. Proper Earth management will certainly be a necessary tool to achieve this goal. If not there will be a collapse of humanity and of the environment. From now on every global decision we do will have tremendous consequences on our future.
In general, populations of all lifeforms grow exponentially that is by a steady proportion of whatever was there before. When there is no practical limit on resource then populations usually grow maximally and the only limit is that of the reproductive capacity of the female animal. About 10,000 years ago, human beings were obliged to commit themselves more or less fully to agriculture and the human population was 5 to 10 million. By the time of Christ, after only 8,000 years of large-scale agriculture, the human population was 100 to 300 million. After this time, the exponential growth of the population entered its rapid phase. The billion mark was passed by 1800 A.D. By year 2000, the human population exceeded 6 billion. Thus agriculture allowed a thousand-fold increase in numbers over a period of 10,000 years.
In practical sense, agriculture cannot feed a human population that has grown beyond the capacity limit. We must ask ourselves whether we can stop the growth by means that are voluntary and benign, or whether the eventual environmental restraint will be out of our hands. At some questionable time in our future we will find that our soil will no longer have the nutrients it needs to produce quality food. For some time we may counter this problem by fresh weathering of rock. Not for long! The loss of lifeforms on Earth will be permanent.
Obviously something has to be done! Earth Government proposes a tight global policy, benignly implemented, or it will be very nasty indeed. In practice, a human population of 10 to 12 billion would be too uncomfortably high and would add a high strain on world resources. What kind of world population would be reasonable? What goal should we aim at? A population should be small enough to be sustainable indefinitely and still allow plenty of leeway for ourselves and other lifeforms. It should also be large enough to allow the formation of healthy civilizations.
We propose a world population of 500 million. The policy to apply is for every family to have only one or two children. It would take a thousand years to reach our goal of a population of 500 million.
The continued economic growth in India and China is an important factor to reduce world poverty. The rich-poor gap is getting wider in developing countries as well as within richer countries. Factors to help reduce the gap:
* increase trade
In 30 years an additional 200 million hectares will be needed to feed the growing populations in the tropics and subtropics, but only 93 million hectares are available in these nations for farms. Most of that land is forested and should be preserved. Other ways to feed this new population include:
* improved agricultural practices
With one-fifth of the world's total population, China has only 7% of the world's arable land. Mountains or deserts cover two-thirds of China, making only the balance of the land available to 1.3 billion people.
Beside the global warming, the human activity that affects Earth most is that of food production. We need to form a global ministry dealing only about agriculture and the protection of our soils. All nations will be part of the ministry. We have to design systems of food production that meet our own needs, and also leave room for these other lifeforms we want to take along with us. Western agriculture is designed in the end to maximize profit. As a primordial human right, the prime concern of the human species is to feed people. Therefore we have to do things differently. We will have to produce less livestock as we effectively double the population we need to feed: ourselves, plus the livestock that is supposed to be feeding us. We also have to apportion the land surface of the whole world more efficiently, using some for highhly intensive food production (which makes use of less land), some for extensive agriculture (combining food production with wildlife conservation) and designing some specifically as wilderness areas with global corridors between them.
In developing countries, the most important environmental pressure is linked to poverty. Poor people put pressure on the land and forests, over-exploiting them to survive. These countries must be helped. They must accept the implementation of the Scale of Human and Earth Rights and the Charter of Earth Government into their way of life. We must give them access to technologies that use fewer resources, energy efficient technologies, 'clean' technologies.
The debt of the poor nations or 'developing nations' to the rich nations was a form of global tax and therefore the poor or 'developing' nations dont have to pay it back. In fact poor nations should expect way more money as tax by the rich nations and not as loans. The state of the world today is the result of a specific set of interlocking institutions: the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. These institutions are designed to generate massive wealth for the few and poverty for the rest. The same people who make the decisions in government and corporation make the profit. They create a tight concentration of power. Together they are a form of anti-government whose only goal is profit. The IMF, through Structural Adjustment Programs, now directly runs the economies of over 70 countries. That means that about 1000 economists and bureaucrats control the economic policies for 1.4 billion people in these countries. That is a form of anti-government. The people that profit most from the global economy are white people. The people who are most oppressed by the global economy are people of colour. Racism and sexism have become the norm. The entire planet is in a state of low intensity civil war. The ruling elite profit off of the exploitation of the rest of the world. Earth Government was looking for a method of raising global taxes, of redistributing incomes to the poorest communities, of providing debt-free technical assistance to non-industrial and developing countries to help them out of poverty and to meet environmental and social standards, but there it was all along right on our eyes. The Earth Court of Justice will be asked to decide on the debt be changed into an actual tax to be paid by the rich nations to the poor nations, and to decide on the amount of tax to be paid. Developing nations will then be able to start rebuilding their communities as per the Scale of Human and Earth Rights and the Charter of Earth Government. They will not have to satisfy the economic needs and wishes of the rich nations. The Earth Court of Justice will also be asked to rule illegal the activities of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO unless they become a part of a greater whole such as the Earth Ministry of Financial Institutions, a part of Earth Government. These institutions will be controlled by the greater whole.
Because governments of poor nations had to promote 'free trade', this situation cause barriers to trade to be eliminated and now we are seeing the globalization of 'free trade'. Poor nations are now asked to produce only the products they are good at producing and buy from other countries the products they are not as good at producing. This way the economy of a nation will function at maximum efficiency. So now governments are told to open up their borders and to stop meddling in markets, so that competition will be free internationally. Often what is called trade is really moving of resources across borders between subsidiaries of the same corporation. Nothing to do with free competition. Economic activity is centrally-managed and planned by the corporate elite. Capital move freely across borders as restrictions on the flow of money have been removed. Corporations can relocate their operations to the countries with the lowest wages, the least active unions and the lowest environmental standards. The reality is that more polluting industries are encouraged to relocate to poorer countries. A polluting industry tends to increase the chances that people in the surrounding area will have health problems. If pollution kills someone or makes them unable to work, the cost to the economy, or to the industry in the case of a law-suit, would be roughly equal to the projected wages that the person would have earned in the rest of their life. In a country with low life expectancy and low wages, this cost will be lessened. It costs less to dump a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country.
Today the watchdog, the 'enforcer' for 'free trade', and also the bedfellow of both the IMF and the World Bank, is the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO is responsible for monitoring national trading policies, handling trade disputes, and enforcing the GATT agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) encourage the privatization of public services and the settling of international disputes their own way. Any government, acting on behalf of a corporation, can challenge the acts of another government if they "interfere with trade." Complaints are taken to a WTO dispute resolution body which then make a binding decision. The WTO has forced governments to lower their environmental standards in favour of a corporation to allow more pollution into the environment, and that is a form of anti-government gone bad with absolute no respect or care for life and the global-life support systems. Corporations can sue governments if they harm their profits through any unfair barriers to trade. NAFTA and WTO tribunals usually rule in favor of corporations. So now we really have a new definition for the word 'property' to mean both what is currently owned and profits that could potentially be made. To compensate, we propose a new definition for 'pollution' and 'human destruction' to mean the pollution and human destruction that the policies of the IMF, World Bank and WTO are causing now in the world plus the pollution and human destruction that they will cause in the future to the next generations. By providing corporations with a mean to override governmental decisions, NAFTA and the WTO (and the proposed FTAA) shift power even more into the hands of the elite. And that is also a form of anti-government.
The global economy can be affected by the deregulation in the movement of capital and thus by speculation. Money is made off tiny fluctuations in the relative prices of currencies. Speculation makes it possible for huge amounts of money to be transferred half-way around the world in a matter of seconds. Whereas world trade associated with actual goods and services is estimated at $7 trillion a year, speculation is estimated at $1.5 trillion a day. If a country's economy starts to slow, billions of dollars can be transferred out of the country instantaneously, which can significantly affect its economy and the people. This has been the case in 1997 of a number of East Asia countries. They were bankrupted by speculation. The people were enormously affected for the worst. Speculation can exert tremendous pressure on the internal politics of a country. It can bankrupt a country's economy. Speculation should be de-institutionalized. Humanity has no real need for speculation, and it does way more harm than good.
Rich countries manipulate trade agreements in order to ensure profitability. Their governments insist on tariffs and protectionism in areas in which they are weak. For instance, Canada and the USA are now going through the process of an economic war in the softwood industry. The imposition of a 29 percent tariff on softwood lumber by the U.S. Commerce Department shows that Canadians were duped by the Free Trade Agreement(FTA) and NAFTA. The U.S. Government protectionism is itself aimed at reducing the value of the Canadian companies just long enough for American competitors to acquire them. Many Canadian industries have already been bought by US competitors. The energy sector is one of them. Free trade opens up a poor country's economy to competition with strong, developed, well-financed, multinational corporations. In consequence, most of the local producers and manufacturers go out of business thus leaving a poor country's economy entirely in the hands of the transnational elite. It is a form of colonization and of world anti-government. Rich countries force poorer countries to open up their markets, and then take them over.
Postal address: 186 Bowlsby Street, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada V9R 5K1
Electronic mail: [email protected]
| 3.232432 |
Teach Vocabulary by Building Background Knowledge
Students need to develop an extensive vocabulary to read with fluency. In turn, fluency in reading leads to increased comprehension. Fluency also comes from the written language of the reader since the student writes words he or she knows. Increased comprehension enhances the written language of the learner.
The act of reading calls for several critical elements to interact simultaneously: word knowledge, fluency, comprehension, and writing. Students need to develop an extensive vocabulary to read with fluency. In turn, fluency in reading leads to increased comprehension. Fluency also comes from the written language of the reader since the student writes words he or she knows. Increased comprehension enhances the written language of the learner.
Students read what they write with fluency and comprehension because it is their story written in their own words — words they know and comprehend. These words comprise the key vocabulary, or the inner language, of learners. These are their "first words," and the "next words" consist of the more formal vocabulary they add to this organic, natural language of their speaking vocabulary.
The concept of adding next words to first words focuses on the element of word knowledge as it relates to reading. Moving from first words to next words is a method of sight vocabulary development that incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, and structural analyses. Sight words are at the heart of the case for word knowledge as it relates to fluency.
It is important to note that vocabulary development encompasses a speaking/listening vocabulary, as well as a reading/writing vocabulary. While the speaking/listening vocabulary is initially more expansive than the reading/writing vocabulary, both vocabularies are inextricably linked in the mind of the learner. In fact, the speaking/listening vocabulary often provides the cues for the rhythm and sound of the language that translates into the reading/writing vocabulary. And, at the same time, the reading/writing vocabulary can enrich and enhance the speaking/listening vocabulary through a richness of topics that the reader may encounter or write spontaneously.
Organic reading and writing programs suggest ways for students to write words from their speaking/listening vocabulary and to use organic word collections to spark the reading and writing processes. Students can manipulate a personally relevant listing of words into written pieces that they can read with fluency and understanding. Students can collect their words over time on word cards. which they can place in word boxes (Showers et al., 1998) or in vocabulary logs or journals. Students manage the boxes, logs, or journals as the owner of the words and update them on a regular basis. Students routinely keep the individual lists current, which encourages meaningful use in reading and writing activities. Accompanied with a more structured and formal reading program, the development of an organic vocabulary for the reading, writing, speaking, and listening processes facilitates the overall literacy skills of the learner.
An engaging strategy to generate vocabulary is called ABC Graffiti. In this activity, students work in pairs. Focusing on the target word, they begin by writing the alphabet down the left-hand side of the page. Then, they use the alphabet as an advance organizer and brainstorm a word for each letter of the alphabet that describes or relates to the target word. For example, if the target word were war, the list might read aggression, battle, conflict, destruction, and so on. While they do not have to go in any order, the ABC pattern becomes quite a compelling motivator. Students rarely stop until they have each and every letter filled in. The activity allows students to unpack the meaning of the target word and, at the same time, to produce a rich list of words. This is a perfect activity for concepts in various subject areas:
Math: symmetry, fractions, probability
Science: cycle, hypothesis, experiment
Social Science: democracy, power, war
Language Arts: genre, protagonist, essay
The Arts: melody, perspective, drama
Health/Physical Education: cardiovascular, fitness, exercise
Journals and Logs
To develop vocabulary for the older students, word logs or vocabulary journals serve the same purpose as the word boxes. Students can use these growing lists of words in their writing or to better understand content-specific reading material. Vocabulary journals or logs work on the same principle as the word boxes, but are geared for the older, more mature students.
Use vocabulary logs to build vocabulary around the content of disciplines through analysis skills, root words, and derivatives. Have science social studies words, and a literature vocabulary to facilitate learning by themes. Help students become aware and eventually skillful in using word analysis to figure out unknown words.
Little books are paper foldables that provide a place and a purpose for writing, summarizing, and synthesizing information. Here's how to create a little book:
1. Fold a sheet of paper in half the short way (a hamburger bun or taco fold). Then fold it in half again, into four corners; and fold it in half one more time. When you open the paper, it will have eight sections.
2. Now, fold the paper again into the hamburger bun. Keep the fold at the top and tear along the center vertical through the fold to the horizontal mark, half way down. If you did this correctly, there should be a hole in the middle of the paper that you can look through.
3. After the tear has been made, refold the paper the long way, like a hot dog bun or a burrito. The fold and the hole are on the top.
4. Hold both ends of the hotdog fold and push the ends toward the center — your hands are pushing toward each other — until all four sections touch. It looks kind of like a pinwheel.
5. Then, gently fold the pages around, and you have a little book with a cover and seven pages.
6. Put the ragged edges on the bottom, and you are ready to write on the cover.
Simple metal rings can be used to collect a personal set of words. Students use word cards and add cards to the ring for quick reference. The ring of words can target one subject area, a story or unit, or general word gathering all day long.
Well known and popular, word walls are seen often in classrooms, as students are surrounded by the key words of their school day.
Four-Fold Concept Development
The four-fold activity is a strategy to build vocabulary and develop a concept. It can be used with an individual student, pairs. or a small group of students. The paper (regular copy paper or large poster paper, depending on the number of students) is folded in four sections as indicated below. When the paper is folded, the corners where the folds meet is turned down to create a triangle; once it is opened, there will be a diamond shape in the center of the paper for the target word. Each of the four sections is labeled from left to right starting at the top left and ending at the bottom right: LIST, RANK, COMPARE, ILLUSTRATE.
Then each section is addressed as the students unpack the language of the target word.In the example, the target word is from language arts. It is the noun "plot," meaning the plot of a story. Students follow these four steps:
1. LIST: Brainstorm 15-20 synonyms
2. RANK: Prioritize the top three words, the best words to clarify the word "plot"
3. COMPARE: Students use the following to create an analogy: "Target Word" is like (Concrete/ tangible word) because both
4. ILLUSTRATE: Draw a visual metaphor of the analogy; make a poster.
Once the four steps are completed, students can share the information. The process helps develop vocabulary and concepts and can be used with target words from any subject area. Possible words to use that are key
concepts in the various disciplines might include:
Math: distributive, associative, infinity, equal, algebra
Language Arts: comprehension, literature, fiction, nonfiction
Science: energy, motion, environment, chemistry, physics
Social Sciences: Bill of Rights, Civil War, citizenship, election
Health/Physical Education: wellness, sportsmanship, genes, muscles,nutrition
Arts: media, medium, sculpture, comedy, tragedy, opera
Fogarty, R.J. (2007). Literacy matters: Strategies every teacher can use. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
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By far the most common response to providing environmental quality or to conserving natural resources has been command-and-control regulations where the government decides what actions shall be taken by individuals and organizations to meet an environmental objective and enforces them with its police powers. As one would expect, there are numerous problems with this approach; let’s focus on air pollution control and fisheries to illustrate them.
One problem is that regulators do not have the information required to set a cap on the right amount of air pollution or total fishing. They typically rely upon the assessments of agency experts that may or may not coincide with what actual users believe. Indeed, the relationship between users and regulators is often understandably antagonistic with little trust or cooperation. And in other cases, influential parties use regulatory rules to advance their position relative to their competitors. In either case, the “wrong” regulation is likely to be put into place—at least for meeting the objective of improving the environment or protecting a resource in a cost-effective manner.
Another related problem is that because regulators do not have the correct information, they typically mandate uniform technologies or performance standards for all parties. Those regulations do not account for the differences across firms in their abatement costs. In the case of electricity utilities, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Clean Air Act required that all utilities install flue gas scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide even if some emitted little sulfur dioxide because they used natural gas or low-sulfur coal in their power plants.
Ideally, regulations should be flexible, allowing those organizations that can reduce pollution at lower cost to do so and be compensated, while allowing those that have higher compliance costs to cut back less, but pay a price. In this manner, a total pollution objective could be met at the lowest cost because most of the reductions would be accomplished by the organizations that can do so most efficiently. Further, these policies would gradually equalize marginal abatement costs across firms. What kind of program would meet these goals?
In both air pollution control and fishery regulation there has been an ingenious “property rights” solution. Because air and migratory ocean fisheries cannot be easily bounded into individual property rights, the alternative has been to designate private “use rights” to the resource, while not to the resource itself. What this means is that fishermen have a right to fish, but do not own the fishery. Similarly, firms have the right to pollute, but do not own the atmosphere. While traveling fish stocks and the air cannot easily be carved up into property rights, their use can.
The way this works is that in the case of air pollution, the total annual amount of allowable emissions is set—usually by a regulator. But instead of commanding that all firms meet this goal, firms are issued tradable shares in the allowable emissions. For each ton of air pollution released, the firm must give up emission shares. The total number of allowable emission shares can be reduced each year until the desired cap or pollution objective is met. Firms can trade them—those with high pollution control costs can buy shares from others that have lower control costs so long as the price is lower than the firm’s abatement cost.
Firms need incentives to invest in pollution control.
This trading opportunity encourages firms to invest in technologies and new ways of controlling emissions so as to free up shares that they can sell. And since the buying firms must purchase the additional “right” to pollute, they have incentives to invest in more efficient ways of controlling pollution. Overall, the objective of a particular desirable pollution amount can be met at the lowest cost in this manner and the regulator has little role, except to set the total cap and issue the shares. The firms and the market do the rest.
In this way, regulation adapts to the market.
Similarly with fisheries, a total annual allowable catch is determined and the fishermen in the fishery are granted individual shares in the total catch, often called ITQs or IVQs (individual tradable quotas or individual vessel quotas). The total cap can be reduced each year so that the shares are to a smaller allowable harvest until the harvest is at a level that is consistent with preserving the fish stock.
The shares should be tradable so that new fishermen can enter the fishery and more efficient fishermen can expand by buying the shares of less efficient fishermen. And importantly, through purchase of shares, vessels and crews can be taken out of the fishery, a major objective because most fisheries that are under threat are subject to over-harvest by too many vessels and crews chasing too few fish—the Tragedy of the Commons.
In all cases, these shares should be secure property rights with the same constitutional protections as for any other type of property. This security makes the market work—for the environment, for the natural resource, and for the users themselves. This is a necessary condition for effective environmental and natural resource policy.
With property rights security, owners can plan ahead with investment in pollution abatement technologies, knowing that their benefits will be captured in saved emission shares that can be banked. Fishermen can invest in new technologies that save the stock or its habitat, knowing that the value of their shares will grow with the vibrancy of the fish stock. And they can trade them when new opportunities develop or use the shares as collateral for loans and other investment funds. Security also makes the market work more effectively by reducing volatility. When share or allowance prices jump or fall for some exogenous reason, any banked shares can be sold (purchased) to smooth price patterns.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, with secure property rights, regulators are restrained by the costs of the taking of property if new regulations reduce the value of the share. There may be reasons for regulatory change, but compensating owners for property and past investments that have benefited the environment reveals the opportunity cost of any policy change. Regulators then must seek funding through Congress or other means and this in itself is a useful process because legislative negotiations reveal social preferences and the weighing of the costs and benefits of alternative policies—environment, health, education, defense, infrastructure, and so forth.
U.S. pollution control costs have increased by over 300 percent since 1972.
Absent property rights security, regulators are much freer to adjust policies with little concern as to the costs involved because they are borne by shareholders. Further, the policy is subject to greater litigation challenge because the rights are not firm and with broader agency discretion, there is greater opportunity for other constituencies to seek to modify property. With secure property rights, constitutional guarantees constrain such litigious activities and promote greater stability in the environment.
So what has the U.S. done in this regard? Let’s take a look.
Sulfur Dioxide Allowance Trading.
In the 1960s there was growing awareness of the damage caused to lakes and forests from acid rain downwind from power plants that released sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. In the same decade, economists Thomas Crocker and J.H. Dales proposed a property rights solution to sulfur dioxide emission problems with tradable emission shares. Instead of implementing this approach, the 1970 and 1977 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) set national maximum concentrations of sulfur dioxide, and the states were charged with meeting those standards.
Most sulfur dioxide was released by electricity-generating utilities in the Midwest and North East that used high-sulfur coal as a fuel and often had older facilities. Under the regulations to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, utilities were to add flue gas scrubbers (often at a cost of $10 million or more) even if low-sulfur coal was being burned and/or other new low-polluting equipment was being used. Advanced technology standards for reducing pollution were to be applied to any new generating plants put on board.
Owners of existing, less-efficient facilities had little incentive to build new ones or upgrade old ones that would require the new technologies, thus slowing the pace at which sulfur dioxide emissions were reduced. We won’t get into the politics of why the earlier Clean Air Act worked in this way, but it will come as no shock that it was due to constituent group politics and political and bureaucratic incentives.
Not surprisingly, acid rain continued to be a problem. By 1990, U.S. pollution control costs had reached $125 billion annually, nearly a 300 percent increase in real terms from 1972. Finally, over twenty years after they were first suggested, property rights in the form of tradable emission permits were made part of Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. An even tighter target was set and emission shares were given out to utilities in the upper Midwest and Eastern states.
The result was spectacular. They were a major success. Emissions were reduced by approximately 50 percent—more than under the original Clean Air Act and at much lower cost than the uniform standards previously used. The program’s long-term goal to reduce the amount of nationwide utility emissions of sulfur dioxide to 8.95 million tons was achieved by 2007 through the nationwide trading of emission shares. It has been estimated that abatement costs would have been over three times as high as they actually were to achieve this level of pollution reduction, $2.6 billion annually as compared to the actual program cost of $747 million.
The law required a two-phase gradual reduction of pollution through the use of emission shares. Phase I (1995–99) focused on the dirtiest plants and Phase II (2000 and after) included most other utilities. Under the legislation, firms were granted annual emission shares and then required to relinquish one for every ton of sulfur dioxide released. Shares could be banked by firms across both phases, and there was an active trading market in shares.
Property rights can reverse the global trend toward the collapse of fisheries.
Even with all of this success, there was programmatic danger. The emissions shares were vulnerable to agency discretion and adversarial litigation because in the legislation and in EPA policies they were explicitly declared not to be property rights.
By the late 1990s there was also growing concern about particulate emissions from electricity and their health effects. In 2002, the Bush Administration tried to amend the Clean Air Act to tighten controls on particulates, but the legislation did not pass. The EPA then attempted to implement its own program broadly within existing legislation. In 2005, the agency introduced the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) that further reduced the cap on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, and focused more stringent requirements on certain facilities with high particulate releases in twenty-eight states.
To meet the lower cap quickly, the EPA required 2 emission shares to be relinquished for every ton of sulfur dioxide and 2.86 emission allowances for every ton by 2015, requirements that were not authorized in the original legislation. Allowance trading was still feasible, although the specialized regional restrictions in CAIR raised questions about the nationwide exchange program. In 2008, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA had gone beyond its delegated authority under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments in a variety of ways, and CAIR was rejected. Uncertainty regarding the status of the emission share trading program and the rights critical to it rose.
Another court ruling in 2010 further restricted EPA plans, and in July 2011, the agency implemented a new cross-state pollution rule (CSAPR). The new policy does not allow for cross-state emissions share trading, only exchanges within states, and the EPA has returned to command-and-control technology requirements.
Some 12 million emission shares that had been purchased and banked were not recognized, and their values collapsed, bringing losses of an estimated $3 billion with no takings implications. The future of any interstate trading program to reduce pollution is now questionable. Clearly, no firms would consider use permits to be credible property rights because history has shown they are not. The figure below shows the pattern of emission allocation prices that I calculated from 1995–2012.
As with air pollution control, regulators in fisheries have used command-and-control regulations, but with little benefit. Fishermen have maneuvered around the restrictions and stocks have plummeted. In 1973, fishery economist Francis Christy outlined how property rights to fish created through individual transferable quotas could solve the problem. In 1986 and 1989, New Zealand and Iceland, two countries that depend on fisheries for a large portion of their economies, adopted ITQs. The United States did not follow suit until 1991.
As with air pollution control, the results have been beyond anyone’s wildest dreams in many cases. A recent study by my colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara and published in Science in 2008 found that after examining some 11,135 fisheries worldwide from 1950 to 2003, the implementation of catch shares as property rights halts, and even reverses, the global trend toward the widespread collapse of fisheries. This institutional change has the potential for greatly altering the future of global fish stocks.
Just as with tradable emission shares, these rights-based institutions have been more effective because they better align the harvest practices of fishers with practices that protect or enhance the fishery. The value of their quotas, which often can be major sources of wealth, depends on the long-term health of the stock. Hence, there are incentives for self and group monitoring of compliance. Moreover, because ITQs are transferable property rights, they provide the basis for trade among fishermen to reduce fishing pressure by buying quota and retiring vessels.
The data in the table below from a 2000 paper in the Journal of Law and Economics reveal the effects of tradable fishery shares or ITQs. Prior to the adoption of the ITQ program under regulation, there were fishing derbies, congestion, and gradual shortening of the fishing season. In 1990, the season length was only six days, which meant that all the halibut had to be caught at that time, frozen, and then shipped to market as less-valuable frozen halibut. After the ITQ program was implemented in 1990, the season expanded to 245 days, the number of vessels declined, and importantly, valuable fresh halibut could be available for most of the year.
But just as with emissions permits, there is regulatory risk and a threat to these ITQs. The strength of ITQ property rights varies. In New Zealand, quota ownership is viewed as a perpetual right to fish, and the rights can serve as collateral in financial markets. In contrast, ITQs in the United States have been controversial and are a weaker ownership right. In 1996, a four-year moratorium was placed on new ITQs under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and the law included specific language stating that quota shares were a permit only, revocable any time and not private property—sound familiar?
Further, there were restrictions placed on transferability. In some U.S. fisheries, quotas are granted to the community or have restrictions on how many can be held by any fisherman in an effort to maintain a small-vessel, local fishery. Unfortunately, limiting exchange only weakens property rights and their ability to reduce harvest pressure and protect the fishery upon which these small communities depend.
Where property rights are weaker, sales values should be lower than in cases where rights are stronger, and short-term lease prices should be higher. With ownership uncertainty fishermen prefer to lease shares from one another than to purchase them. Comparing the ratio of quota lease prices to sales prices across fishers in the United States, New Zealand, and Canada, my colleagues Corbett Grainger and Christopher Costello found that the ratio values for the United States are significantly higher than in the other countries. This result supports the perception that the United States has more uncertain property rights to fishery use than its peer countries.
Can government credibly commit to property rights in environmental and natural resource use regulation? The answer is no. Politicians and bureaucratic officials appear not to be able to assign secure use rights. We must let the markets operate and bear the opportunity costs of any programmatic changes. If we don’t, there will be serious implications for the environment, natural resource stewardship, and for the American economy, given the total costs of environmental regulation.
Gary D. Libecap is the Sherm and Marge Telleen Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Bren Professor of Corporate Environmental Policy, Donald R. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An expert on natural resource and environmental economics, he specializes in property rights and markets. His current research examines the legal and regulatory transaction costs of water marketing in the western United States. He is the cochair of Hoover's Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force.
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An amputation is a surgery to remove a body part. It is removed because of disease or damage.
Reasons for Procedure
An amputation is typically done for one of the following reasons:
Peripheral arterial disease
- Untreatable pain
- Severe soft tissue infection
- Severe trauma that can not be repaired
- Complications of diabetes
- Untreatable bone infection ( osteomyelitis )
- Malignant tumor
- Congenital deformity (present at birth)
- Severe frostbite
- Complications of connective tissue diseases, such as:
If you are planning to have an amputation, your doctor will review a list of possible complications, which may include:
- Poor healing at amputation site, resulting in the need for a higher level of amputation
- Skin breakdown
- Swelling at surgical site
- Phantom limb pain —feeling pain in amputated limb area
- Phantom sensation—feeling that amputated limb is still there
- Blood clots
- Complications of anesthesia
Some factors that may increase the risk of complications include:
- Peripheral vascular disease
- Prolonged immobility
- Heart disease
- Smoking or lung disease
- Blood clotting disorders
- Certain medicines (eg, steroids)
What to Expect
Prior to Procedure
Your amputation may be planned. In this case, your doctor will review with you how it is done and what to expect. An emergency amputation may need to be done. This can happen because of trauma or life-threatening infection. In this case, you may not have this preparation.
Depending on the injury and location, your doctor may do some of the following before your surgery:
- X-rays —a test that uses radiation to take a picture of structures inside the body, especially bones
- CT scan —a type of x-ray that uses a computer to make pictures of structures inside the body
- MRI scan —a test that uses magnetic waves to make pictures of structures inside the body
- Bone scan to check for infection
- Tissue cultures
- Blood tests
- Heart evaluation
- Preoperative antibiotics
- Tests to evaluate blood flow in the part of the body that is being amputated
Leading up to your surgery:
- Arrange for a ride home from the hospital.
- Arrange for help at home after your surgery.
- Follow instructions for eating before surgery—usually nothing after midnight.
- You may be asked to use an antibacterial soap the morning of your surgery.
This will depend on the body part operated on. You may receive:
Description of Procedure
An incision will be made into the skin of the affected limb or limb part. If needed, the muscles will also be cut. Blood vessels will be tied off or sealed to prevent bleeding. The bone will then be cut through. The diseased or damaged body part will be removed.
Muscle will be pulled over the bone. It will be sutured in place there. The remaining skin will be pulled over the muscle. The skin will be sewn to form a stump. A sterile dressing will be placed over the incision.
If severe infection is involved, the incision may be left open to heal.
How Long Will It Take?
This procedure can take 20 minutes to several hours. The length will depend on the type of amputation being done.
How Much Will It Hurt?
During the surgery, anesthesia will block any pain. After surgery, you will feel pain as you begin to heal. Your doctor will give a medicine to help manage pain. You may feel phantom pain, which is a feeling of pain in the amputated portion of the limb that is no longer present. If you do, tell your doctor so it can be treated.
Average Hospital Stay
Your hospital stay will depend on the type of amputation you had. Typically:
- Foot or toe amputation: 2-7 days
- Leg amputation: 2 days to 2 weeks
- Upper extremity: 7-12 days
- Finger amputation: 0-1 day
After surgery, you can expect some of the following:
- The area involved will be elevated. This will decrease swelling.
- Your limb will be dressed in bulky dressing, elastic bandage, or cast.
- You will be encouraged to get up and walk as soon as possible.
- Physical therapy will begin within a day or two of surgery. It will focus on improving strength and mobility.
- You may wear a cast or special shoe for toe/foot amputations.
- You may be given certain medicines. This may include antibiotics or blood thinners.
- You will be fitted with a prosthesis as soon as your wound has healed.
Stitches will be removed within a few weeks of surgery. When you return home, do the following to help ensure a smooth recovery:
- If you smoke, quit . Smoking can interfere with healing.
- Follow the instructions for keeping your incision clean .
- Follow instructions on how to care for your prosthesis.
- Counseling may be recommended for the emotional trauma of an amputation.
- Attend follow up appointments with your doctor. They will make sure you are healing well.
- Check with your doctor about which medicines to take at home.
Also, ask your doctor about when it is safe to shower, bathe, or soak in water.
Call Your Doctor
After you leave the hospital, call your doctor if any of the following occurs:
- Signs of infection, including fever and chills
- Redness, swelling, increasing pain, excessive bleeding, or discharge from the incision sites
- Increasing or excessive pain
- Cough, shortness of breath, or chest pain
- Severe nausea and vomiting
- Reviewer: John C. Keel, MD
- Review Date: 12/2012 -
- Update Date: 12/30/2012 -
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Figure 1. 1A. Cool, foggy weather that occurs during winter tomato production in Florida is ideal for late blight disease development. B. Tomato leaves heavily symptomatic for late blight lesions. C. Late blight lesions on fruit and leaves. D. Tomato leaves on water agar to induce sporulation of Phytophthora infestans, which can be observed as the white, fluffy structures on the leaf surface.
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is a northern constellation
, named after the mythological winged horse Pegasus
. It is one of the 88 modern constellations, and was also one of the 48 constellations listed by Ptolemy
(Markab), β Peg
, and γ Peg
, together with α Andromedae
(Alpheratz or Sirrah) form the large asterism
known as the Square of Pegasus
. 51 Pegasi
, a star in this constellation, is the first Sun-like star known to have an extrasolar planet
. IK Pegasi
is the nearest supernova
candidate. Spectroscopic analysis of HD 209458 b
, an extrasolar planet in this constellation has provided the first evidence of atmospheric water vapor beyond the solar system.
Deep sky objects
History and mythology
Pegasus was born from the blood of Medusa
when she was slain by Perseus
Pegasus has an appearance resembling a grazing horse, with a large square area as its body. Due to the presence of the 4 brightest stars in the square, i.e. the 4 horses of Pegasus, this may be part of the origin of the myth of the Mares of Diomedes , one of The Twelve Labours of Heracles, together with another feature in the Zodiac sign of Aquarius, namely Aquarius itself, pouring out the waters.
The star formerly known as Delta Pegasi (labeled "Sirrah" in the map), one of the 4 stars in Pegasus' square, is now considered to be part of Andromeda, (α Andromedae) and is more usually called "Alpheratz." By moving the star, the square became a triangle attached to a stick body, thus resembling a wing. As a winged horse, Pegasus features in Greek mythology as its namesake, Pegasus.
The body of the horse consists of a quadrilateral formed by the stars α Peg, β Peg, γ Peg, and α And.
The front legs of the winged horse are formed by two crooked lines of stars, one leading from η Peg to κ Peg and the other from μ Peg to 1 Pegasi.
Another crooked line of stars from α Peg via θ Peg to ε Peg forms the neck and head; ε is the snout.
- H. A. Rey, The Stars — A New Way To See Them. Enlarged World-Wide Edition. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1997. ISBN 0-395-24830-2.
- Ian Ridpath and Wil Tirion (2007). Stars and Planets Guide, Collins, London. ISBN 978-0007251209. Princeton University Press, Princeton. ISBN 978-0691135564.
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German scientists have trace a disease that killed one polar bear and sickened another at the Zoological Gardens in Wuppertal to an unlikely source - zebra herpes.
In 2010, 20-year-old bear Jerka and 16-year-old male Lars began showing the symptoms of the brain-swelling disease encephalitis. Jerka died, but zoo veterinarians were able to save Lars.
Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research scientist Alex D. Greenwood and his colleagues studied DNA and RNA from Jerka's brain and liver compared to samples from other polar bears. In a paper published in the journal Current Biology on Thursday, the researchers say Jerka died thanks to a bug normally found in zebras that's an amalgam of two different kinds of equine herpes virus.
It's still a mystery as to how the bears contracted the virus. At Wuppertal, the zebra enclosure is more than 200 feet away from the polar bears and the animals are not tended by the same zookeepers.
The scientists were also surprised to find that Struppo, a bear in a different zoo that died of kidney failure, also contracted the virus. Since Struppo had no contact with Lars or Jerka, that suggests that the zebra herpes has spread in by least two independent vectors.
But bears and zebras aren't the only animals that play host to this particular kind of virus. The two equine herpes viruses that gave rise to the particular zebra strain have also caused fatal encephalitis in gazelles and guinea pigs.
"These viruses do not seem to respect species boundaries and in fact, we don't really know whether they have any," co-author and Freie Universitat Berlin researcher Klaus Osterrieder said in a statement. "One conundrum is that these viruses are not particularly stable in the environment, so it is important to figure out how they move between species."
Osterrieder and his colleagues think that another animal could be the guilty party, possibly mice or rats.
The deaths of Jerka and Struppo illustrate both the danger of pathogens jumping from species to species - as seen in the deaths of 162 seals last autumn, struck down by a new strain of avian flu - and the potential cauldron of disease created by housing lots of animals within a very small range.
"Zoos unintentionally provide pathogens with a high diversity of species from different continents and habitats assembled within a confined space," the authors wrote.
SOURCE: Greenwood et al. "A Potentially Fatal Mix of Herpes in Zoos." Current Biology published online 16 August 2012.
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The arts of a sculptor or stonemason are generally too broad in scale to fall within the definition, though chiseling inscriptions in stone, and preparing laboratory 'thin sections' may be considered lapidary arts. The term is most commonly associated with jewelry and decorative household items (e.g. bookends, clock faces, ornaments, etc.) A specialized form of lapidary work is the inlaying of marble and gemstones into a marble matrix, known in English as "pietra dura" for the hard stones like onyx, jasper and carnelian that are used, but called in Florence and Naples, where the technique was developed in the 16th century, opere di commessi. The Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo in Florence is completely veneered with inlaid hard stones. A lapidary specialty developed from the late 18th century in Naples and Rome are the "micro-mosaics" assembled out of many minute slivers of stone to create still life, cityscape views and the like.
At present, most lapidary work is accomplished using motorized equipment and resin or metal bonded diamond tooling in successively decreasing particle sizes until a polish is achieved. Often, the final polish will use a different medium, such as tin oxide, glasitite or cerium(IV) oxide. Older techniques, still popular with hobbyists, used bonded grinding wheels of silicon carbide, with only using a diamond tipped saw. Diamond cutting, because of the extreme hardness of diamonds, cannot be done with silicon carbide, and requires the use of diamond tools.
There are also many other forms of lapidary, not just cutting and polishing stones and gemstones. These include: casting, faceting, carving, jewellery, mosaics (eg. little slices of opal on potch, obsidian or another black stone and with a clear dome (glass or crystal quartz) on top. There are lapidary clubs through-out the world and in Australia there are numerous gemshows including an annual gemshow, the Gemborree which is a nation-wide lapidary competition. There is a collection of gem and mineral shows held in Tucson, Arizona at the beginning of February each year. This group of shows constitutes the largest gem and mineral event in the world. The event was originally started with the Tucson Gem and Mineral Society Show and has now grown to include dozens of other independent shows.
Another meaning is a treatise on the subject of precious stones, one example being the so-called Old English Lapidary, a tenth or eleventh-century translation into Anglo-Saxon of earlier Latin glosses on stones mentioned in The Book of Revelation.
| 3.133156 |
November 9, 2012
A couple of cups of coffee may help our brains process some words faster, a small experiment suggests. But we only get the message faster if the words are emotionally positive. The study included 66 healthy young men. They were told to consume no caffeine, nicotine or alcohol in the 12 hours before the experiment. The men were randomly divided into 2 groups. One group took a tablet containing 200 milligrams of coffee, about the amount in 2 to 3 cups of coffee. Each person in the other group received a placebo (fake) pill. Half an hour later, the men were given tests that involved being shown a series of real and invented words. They had to press buttons to indicate whether a word was real or not. Men who took the caffeine pills did this faster and more accurately for words with a positive emotional connotation. They did not perform better than men who got the placebo pills for recognizing neutral or negative words. The journal PLoS One published the study online. HealthDay News wrote about it November 8.
By Howard LeWine, M.D.
Harvard Medical School
What Is the Doctor's Reaction?
You often hear people say things like "Don't talk to me. I haven't had my coffee yet." Researchers from Germany offer us new insight into why we might feel that way. The study comes from the Department of Psychology at Ruhr University.
In general, people recognize and process the meaning of words faster if the words have a positive emotional slant. What these researchers found is that caffeine speeds up that link even more. But caffeine did not speed up how quickly people recognize and process emotionally neutral or negative words.
Low doses of caffeine tend to put you in a more positive mood. Caffeine also generally helps you do mental tasks faster and with fewer errors. Now we can add the faster processing of positively charged emotional content. These are good explanations for why you want that first cup of coffee before talking to anyone.
How caffeine affects the brain is not completely understood. But here is how most experts explain it.
Caffeine gets absorbed in the stomach and small intestine. It enters the blood stream and is distributed throughout the body, including the brain.
Once it reaches the brain, caffeine probably has multiple targets. But the main one seems to be adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a chemical that dampens brain activity. This counters the action of another brain chemical, dopamine.
Dopamine acts as a brain stimulant and mood enhancer. By hogging the adenosine receptor sites, caffeine doesn't allow adenosine to dampen brain activity. This puts the balance in favor of dopamine. It leads to feeling more awake and alert, with a more positive mood.
What Changes Can I Make Now?
Overall, coffee is generally safe when used in moderation. But the key word is moderation.
In some people, too much caffeinated coffee can raise blood pressure. Teenagers seem to be more susceptible to an increase in blood pressure from caffeine.
Coffee also can interfere with how well your body absorbs iron and calcium. But you need to drink a lot of coffee for it to greatly lower the amount of iron and calcium in your bloodstream. And it's not the caffeine that interferes with the absorption. It's related to another ingredient in coffee called phenolic acid. So decaf coffee also will decrease absorption of these minerals.
Depending on how you make your coffee, it can raise cholesterol levels a little. Again, it's not the caffeine that influences cholesterol levels. It's the coffee oil from the bean. If you boil or press your coffee, then the coffee oil gets into the brew. However, today most coffee in the United States is filtered through paper. And filtered coffee does not increase cholesterol levels.
So what's the bottom line? If you are already a coffee drinker, enjoy it. If you don't drink coffee, processing of words that convey positive emotions is not a good enough reason to start.
There's probably some amount of coffee (and other drinks containing caffeine) that carries a risk of real health hazards. I am still unclear as to what that level is for an otherwise healthy adult.
My advice: If even one cup of coffee makes you jittery or anxious, or interferes with sleep, that is one cup too many. I am honest with patients. I don't know if 10 cups of coffee per day is too much. I would not drink that much; 3 cups per day is my own limit.
What Can I Expect Looking to the Future?
The great majority of medical studies looking at coffee drinkers have shown better health outcomes for people who drink coffee. Almost none have suggested that coffee is bad for you. In fact, my personal limit of three cups per day may be too cautious. Maybe I'd be better off drinking more!
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Zooming into NGC 253
Lying only 13 million light-years away from us, the spiral galaxy NGC 253 is one of the brightest in the sky. This sequence zooms into this nearly edge-on galaxy, starting with a "naked-eye" very wide-angle view, and then plunging into its heart, where a team of astronomers from Instituto de Astrofisíca de Canarias (Spain) discovered many young, massive and very dusty stellar nurseries. The sequence then blends from the visible light into a very high resolution composite of NACO images obtained with the VLT in the infrared, together with an ACS image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In the final image, the stellar nurseries appear as reddish blobs near the centre of the Galaxy.
ESO, NASA/ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2 and A. Fujii
About the Video
|Release date:||19 January 2009|
About the Object
|Type:||• Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Spiral|
• X - Galaxies
| 3.496077 |
Keep your powder dry
Be prepared and save your resources until they are needed.
The allusion is to gunpowder which soldiers had to keep dry in order to be ready to fight when required. This advice reputedly originated with Oliver Cromwell during his campaign in Ireland. In Ballads of Ireland, 1856, Edward Hayes wrote:
"There is a well-authenticated anecdote of Cromwell. On a certain occasion, when his troops were about crossing a river to attack the enemy, he concluded an address, couched in the usual fanatic terms in use among them, with these words - 'put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry'."
19th century citations of the phrase invariably give the full version - trust in God and keep your powder dry. This emphasizes that the keep your powder dry was seen only as an additional insurance. This is made clear in a piece from The Times Literary Supplement, 1908:
"In thus keeping his powder dry the bishop acted most wisely, though he himself ascribes the happy result entirely to observance of the other half of Cromwell's maxim."
See also: the List of Proverbs.
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Seed Starting Problems: Seeds Don't Sprout
We all agree... seed sprouting should be easy. Well, for some seeds, sprouting
certainly is fast and easy. For, others it can be difficult, and takes
weeks to occur.
Are you providing ideal seed sprouting conditions for your seeds? Let's find
You planted seeds (indoors or out). But, they are not coming up....yet.
The Causes of Seed Sprouting Problems:
By far, the most common reason seeds do not sprout, is that they are planted
too deeply. If it is too deep, the seedling struggles to emerge.
Heavy, clay soils makes it difficult, impossible for a seedling to break
through the cement-like soil..
Soil and temperature conditions may not be ideal. This can delay germination,
or result in the seeds not sprouting at all.
Another "cause" is the anxious gardener, who is unaware of how long it takes
to sprout a particular seed. Some seeds sprout in as little as three days.
Others, take two or more weeks.
First and foremost, plant seeds at the proper depth. Consult the seed packet,
for this information. We also, recommend, sowing seeds, slightly LESS deep
than indicated. You can always add soil around a seedling after it has grown
a couple inches.
TIP: Fine seeds can wash too deeply into the soil, by just watering
them.For fine seeds, sprinkle them on top of the soil. Then, add a dusting
of starter soil on top. Water lightly.
When planting outdoors in heavy clay soils, mix in ample amounts of compost,
to make the soil lighter and looser. When you dig the hole or furrow, drop
in the seeds, then cover with a layer of starter soil.
Moisture levels are very important. The best rule of thumb, is to keep the
soil moist, but not wet. If the soil is dry, then moisture doesn't penetrate
the seed cover to begin the germination process. Wet soils, results in rotting
of the seeds.
Soil temperatures are too hot or too cold. It takes a minimum temperature
for a seed to germinate. There is a maximum temperature for successful
germination, over this temperature, the seed "cooks". The ideal temperature
range varies by type of seed. The ideal range for most garden plants
is 70-85 degrees. Cool weather crops germinate at the lower range. And, warm
weather crops germinate at higher temperatures in this range.
For outdoor plantings, try a raised bed, or a raised row. This helps to warm
the soil, and helps avoid overly wet soils.
See Raised Beds.
Heated germination mats are highly recommended for indoor starts.
Buy a heated germination mat.
Consult the information on the back of the seed packet. It should tell you
how long it germination will take before sprouting, under ideal circumstances.
Old seeds may no longer be viable. This shouldn't be the cause of the germination
problem, if you bought fresh seed from a reputable seed company. But, it
could be the cause for older, leftover seeds, or seed harvested by you or
a gardening friend. See Seed Germination
Seed Tays and Seed Starting
Supplies Learn about the types of seed starting supplies, from seed trays
to to peat pots and peat pellets.
Buy Guarden Raised Garden Bed Frames Attractive, long
lasting and affordable. Guarden raised bed frames are the strongest in the
industry. A greenhouse system can be added to them, too.
Buy Flower, Vegetable and Herb Seeds Take the worry
out of seed starting. Use the finest quality Ferry Morse and Lilly Miller
seeds, with their famous "guarantee to grow".
| 3.214985 |
The Storm Drain Marker Program was implemented to help increase public awareness of the environmental effects of dumping in storm drains and their contribution to water pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, Back Bay and the ocean. Storm water pollution is a major source of our nation’s water quality problems. A study showed that 50% of the pollution in the Chesapeake Bay is due to storm water runoff. Water that runs off streets and buildings picks up litter, motor oil, excess fertilizers and other pollutants as it makes its way into natural waters.
How can you help?
The markers we are currently using are watershed-specific. Each storm drain will be tagged with a marker which will identify which watershed it drains to. Volunteers simply adhere 4-inch stainless steel markers on storm drains with the message “Drains to…” with the specific watershed listed on it. Volunteer groups of 2 or more people are needed. Materials are provided by the City and the Virginia Beach Clean Community Commission.
Contact Waste Management and let us know what neighborhood(s) your group would like to volunteer to place the storm markers. Currently there are over 30,000 storm drains to be marked in Virginia Beach, so we encourage volunteers to assist in this much needed project. It only takes approximately 5 minutes to attach each marker and you can schedule your own hours. Due to weather restrictions, the Storm Drain Marker project is generally conducted during the Spring, Summer and Fall only. For details, call 385-4650.
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Learn something new every day More Info... by email
Organic sunscreen is a type of sunscreen typically made with all-natural or non-toxic ingredients. Non-organic sunscreens usually contain chemical ingredients that are absorbed by the skin, causing some concern these ingredients could present a health hazard with long-term use. Organic sunscreens typically contain barrier-type mineral ingredients, such as titanium dioxide or zinc oxide, that stop UVA and UVB rays from reaching the skin. Recent advancements in nano technology allow organic sunscreen manufacturers to create mineral-barrier sunscreens that are thin and appear transparent when applied to the skin. The general ingredients in organic sunscreen are typically non-toxic, biodegradable, and friendly to animals.
Excessive exposure to the sun's rays can lead to accelerated aging, skin damage, and cancer, but many people are concerned that the chemical ingredients in traditionally manufactured sunscreens could also contribute to severe health problems with long-term use. Organic sunscreens offer an alternative for those concerned about the possibility of toxic chemical absorption from traditional sun creams. Organic sunscreen almost always contains a combination of titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, two minerals that, when applied to the skin, create a barrier against the sun's rays. These minerals are generally considered safer than chemical sunscreen ingredients. They can be found in most conventionally manufactured sunscreens and in sun-protective cosmetics, as well as in organic or natural sunscreen.
Most organic sunscreen products contain other ingredients, often plant extracts considered beneficial for skin health. Coconut oil, lavender and shea butter are common ingredients in natural sunscreen. In many cases, these additional ingredients also come from organic sources.
Organic sunscreen typically provides adequate protection against UVA and UVB radiation, especially when applied repeatedly during extended periods of sun exposure. These sunscreens don't typically absorb into the skin, so they can rub off onto clothing and objects. Though many organic sunscreen products are designed and marketed to be water resistant, almost all of them will rinse away to some extent in the water, and should generally be re-applied after swimming or excessive perspiration.
Some people choose organic sunscreens because they are concerned about the toxicity of traditional sunblocks to fish and other aquatic life. All-natural sunscreen products are considered safer for marine and aquatic ecosystems because their ingredients are generally biodegradable and non-toxic. Many of these all-natural sunscreen products are touted as perfectly safe even when ingested, and are often considered a good sun protection choice for babies and small children.
| 3.083515 |
I recently finished reading Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap. The book’s subtitle was what originally interested me: “Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need – and What We Can Do About It.” The book lists 7 survival skills for careers, college, and citizenship. Each skill can be promoted through the use of PBL and is essential for producing students who bridge the achievement gap. Teaching these skills through PBL can finally bring classrooms into the 21st Century.
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: When was the last time you asked students to think critically rather than merely regurgitate information? In fact, in the era of Google, memorizing lots of trivial facts when the answer is merely a click away is less important than the ability to use information. Does your classroom environment ask students to create solutions to problems that have no one right answer?
PBL promotes investigations of new solutions to problems. Ask your students to create a solution to lower the crime statistics in your community and be amazed at the results. Have students design a new pool for your school that is cost effective and meets the approval of the tax paying public. PBL harnesses the power that critical thinking requires of students. Create an open-ended task; let the students investigate, and the solutions to the problems will begin to flow.
Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence: How often are students asked to work in teams, instead of sitting alone at their desks? Or if they do group work, are they really taught how to collaborate effectively? The workforce today requires constant collaboration between colleagues. Isolation is the less likely option and working in teams is the requirement.
PBL creates an atmosphere with collaboration as the focus. While students must complete some tasks individually, the whole cannot be completed without each individual component. Learning to work together in the classroom creates a student prepared for better workforce production.
Agility and Adaptability: Students all too often are bored in school. They have become immune to the school experience because they are not asked to adapt to new situations. Each year, in each class, the tasks are the same and the results are less promising. In the world beyond the classroom, however, it is a requirement for employees to learn to adapt to new situations, solve new problems, and produce high-end results for an increasingly changing environment.
In PBL students continually face new challenges. With each project, comes a new set of circumstances, new problems, new collaborative partnerships, and newly developing skills. Students need flexibility in their learning to determine the path to take toward greater understanding of the curriculum and standards.
Initiative and Entrepreneurship: When is the last time you asked your students to lead the discovery, rather than follow you? Chances are you may not remember. However, in the world beyond the classroom, an employee who does not take the lead is one who is easily expendable.
In PBL students must take charge and work independently. The teacher becomes the facilitator and self-directed learning is key. Who knows, you may even create a PBL experience in which your students run a business!
Effective Oral and Written Communication: Today text-speak is the norm and spelling and grammar are ignored. Thus it is increasingly important to promote effective oral and written communication skills. Do we really want students to start a journal entry that starts a sentence with “IMO”?
In PBL students no longer simply write for a teacher audience or present solely for classmates. Bringing in an outside, professional audience necessitates effective communication. Students must learn to get to the point efficiently and with conviction. Presenting or writing to a professional means taking a professional approach, or your ideas are more likely to be ignored.
Accessing and Analyzing Information: Google is the crutch that students rely on for the answers to questions. However, we must determine if our students really know how to analyze information or if they even know how to effectively search for that information. Does the first webpage provide the right answer or are students even conducting a search for the right information?
PBL requires students to effectively research and evaluate material to create answers to given challenges. Data is processed, findings interpreted, strategies planned, and information synthesized. In all phases of the challenge, students are actively seeking the information rather than passively receiving it.
Curiosity and Imagination: Children today rely on video game entertainment and teachers wonder why students rarely are curious about our curriculum. Boredom quickly sets in before the end of the first month of school. However, it is the responsibility of teachers to stimulate the curiosity of our students and require them to use their imaginations to solve authentic problems.
PBL is a means for students to tap into their imaginations. Pose an authentic, relevant, and engaging problem for students to solve and watch the piquing of the curiosity and the creative imaginations that flow. For example, the classroom has been transformed into a “CSI” crime scene and students are asked to solve the case using dramatic evidence and authentic forensic techniques.
Hopefully this post has left you asking yourself questions. Are you thinking critically about PBL and wondering with whom you could collaborate on the creation of PBL experiences? Are you able to adapt your teaching methods to include PBL or are you satisfied with your teaching? Are you ready to start a new classroom initiative that includes PBL? Are you prepared to require your students to communicate effectively to professional panels and write about their findings? Are you going to merely give your students the answers to memorize or teach them how to effectively analyze information in order to apply it to new situations? Finally, has your curiosity prompted you to investigate PBL in more detail?
BIE National Faculty
| 3.489189 |
Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
A charter airline is one that operates charter flights, that is flights that take place outside normal schedules, by a hiring arrangement with a particular customer.
In the context of mass tourism, charter flights have acquired the more specific meaning of a flight whose sole function is to transport holidaymakers to tourist destinations. Such charter flights are contrasted with scheduled flights, but they do in fact operate to regular, published schedules. However tickets are not sold directly by the charter airline, but by holiday companies who have chartered the flight (sometimes in a consortium with other companies).
Although charter airlines typically carry passengers who have booked individually or as small groups to beach resorts, historic towns, or cities where a cruise ship is awaiting them, sometimes an aircraft will be chartered by a single group such as members of a company, a sports teams, or the military.
Many charter flights are sold as part of a package holiday in which the price paid includes flights, accommodation and other services. At one time this was a legal requirement (or one enforced by the airlines' cartel), but this is no longer the case, and so-called "flight-only packages" can be bought by those who merely want to travel to the destination. Such packages are frequently cheaper than regular schedule airline fares. Furthermore charter airlines frequently operate on routes, or to airports, where there is no scheduled service. Much of the traffic through small and medium sized airports in the United Kingdom consists of charter flights, and the survival of these airports often depends on the airline landing fees they get from the charter companies.
Many airlines operating regular scheduled services have set up charter divisions, though these have not always proved competitive with the specialist charter companies. In addition, some cargo airlines occasinally carry a few charter passengers on their jets. Conversely, some charter airlines have branched out into scheduled services when their charter operations have uncovered a need or a market niche.
The economics of charter flights demand that the flights should operate on the basis of near 100% seat occupancy, and the standard of seating and service may be lower than on scheduled airlines (though this is by no means always the case).
The airlines operating charter flights, and the holiday companies who are the initial purchasers of seats on them, have acquired an unhealthy reputation for financial instability. There have been a number of high-profile cases where holiday-makers have had their arrangements cancelled at short notice (and sometimes lost the substantial sums they have paid for package holidays), or have been left stranded at their destinations, by the collapse of airline or holiday company. A number of compulsory insurance and bond arrangements have been put in place to minimise at least the financial risk to the public from such events.
Among airlines who offer or have offered charter services are:
- Air Anatolia
- Air Atlanta Icelandic
- Air Srpska
- Air Tindi
- Air Transat
- AOM French Airlines
- Arrow Air
- British Caledonian
- Britannia Airways
- Capitol Air
- Carnival Airlines (Owned by Carnival Cruise Lines)
- European Airlines
- First Choice Airways (formerly air2000)
- Frontier Flying Service
- Japan Airlines
- Lion Air
- Miami Air
- Monarch Airlines
- My Travel/Premiair
- North American Airlines
- Sterling European Airlines
- Tango (a division of Air Canada)
- TransMeridian Airlines
The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details
| 3.340836 |
It’s 7,000 years older than Stonehenge and the pyramids. It predates villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and agriculture. So gather the implications for our view on the earliest development of human civilization. As it is a temple, moreover, it might also change our view of how civilization developed – suggesting that the urge to worship and build temples sparked the need to develop architecture, farming, writing and statecraft, rather than the other way around.
From a beautiful article in Newsweek, worth reading entirely:
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill”—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community.
The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is “unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,” according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford’s archeology program. Enthusing over the “huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art” at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: “Many people think that it changes everything… It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong.”
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion.
Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance.
The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts.
| 3.146199 |
Eye Gaze Boards (e-tran)
An eye gaze communication board (also known as an e-tran) is a vertically held/mounted board, made of plexiglass or sturdy paper with a window cut in the middle, that enables children with severe speech and orthopedic impairments (i.e. children who are unable to speak or use their hands to point out pictures or symbols on a communication display) to communicate by focusing their gaze on selected items displayed on the board.
Again, this strategy, if a match for a student’s needs, skills and existing strategies, can further expand a multi-modal communication system.
Limited to the four quadrants! Items can be displayed in any configuration and can be encoded to provide more choices on each board.
When the eye gaze board is held up at eye level to the child, the child and his/her communication partner should be able to make eye contact through the open window.
Several steps may be involved in the training process, including:
- Learning to scan the items available on the board
- Learning to fixate eye gaze on the desired item
- Learning to look back at the communication partner to confirm the selection
Adapted from Goosens and Crain, Augmentative Communication Intervention Resource, 1986.
Elle looks at all her choices and then makes a selection by looking at the word and then looking back at the teacher. She confirms her choices by saying ‘yeah’.
Courtney uses a generic eye-gaze communication board to answer multiple choice questions about 8th grade literature. For students who are able to use four symbols to represent multiple meanings, this method provides some nice flexibility – especially for testing and spontaneous discussions.
| 3.56174 |
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