Datasets:

HuggingFaceFW

/

fineweb-edu-score-2

like 67

Follow

HuggingFaceFW 282

Teardown: Misfit Shine Activity Tracker More than just fancy pedometers, a whole new class of mobile devices are flooding the market, designed to make us more aware of our own physical activity. And in this emerging market jam-packed with competitors like Nike, Garmin, and Fitbit, the Misfit Shine is easily the… prettiest. Hardly bigger than a US Quarter and barely thicker than a pencil, it can be worn anywhere on the body and looks more like a piece of jewelry than a high tech activity tracker. But can you really fit a fully functional fitness tracker in something that size? There’s only one way to find out… Don't Open 'Til Doomsday Getting into the Shine turns out not to be that hard. After popping open the case like you’re changing the battery, anything sharp will pop the retaining ring off of the pcb and give you access to this: Wow! That’s a lot of stuff in such a small package! There are really three parts to the Shine, everything else on the board is essentially just there to support these three. Let’s examine each part and how it helps the Shine track your fitness: Brains of the Operation The EFM32 Leopard Gecko microcontroller from Silicon Labs is the controller that keeps this whole operation in one piece. The Leopard Gecko is a 32-bit microcontroller based on an ARM Cortex-M3 core. It comes packed with energy saving features that make it ideal for this kind of application. Of particular note is the Leopard Gecko’s low-energy sensor interface which plays a big role in the Shine’s advertised 4-month battery life. The low-energy sensor interface allows the EFM32’s peripherals to communicate independently of the core (gathering accelerometer data, for instance) and allowing the core to stay in energy saving mode. The Leopard Gecko’s 256k of program storage and 48MHz processing speed are also well suited to this application since the Shine not only has to store and process sensor data using complex algorithms, but also has to communicate that processed data using the (somewhat sizable) Bluetooth low energy software stack. A Sense of Purpose Of course just wearing a microprocessor on your sleeve won’t tell you a lot about your fitness. To get a handle on what you’re up to, the Shine relies on the LIS3DH Accelerometer from STMicro, another ultra low-power part. This tiny LGA-16 package saves real estate on the PCB but still serves up acceleration data at speeds up to 5kHz. Communication is Key Collecting and processing sensor data is a neat trick, but, if you can’t ever get to that data, what good is it? Transmitting the data wirelessly is the perfect way to get it out of the device, but it takes a lot of power to send things over air. To solve this problem, Misfit is taking advantage of the brand-newish Bluetooth Low Enegry (BLE) protocol. The device behind that ability is the CC2541 Bluetooth SoC by Texas Instruments. With its programmable output power and low energy operation, the CC2541 does its part to keep the battery healthy too. All Together Now If I had to guess what’s going on in there, which I do, I’d say that the Leopard Gecko is spending 98% of its time in power saving mode, only waking up on boot, when syncronizing, and after detecting a double or triple tap event. The accelerometer data probably gets processed either at synchronize time or when some buffer gets filled with raw data… maybe both? Either way, I’m almost sure that your phone never receives raw accelerometer data. People who have reviewed the Shine online say that it doesn’t usually live up to its 4 month battery life promise, but it still lasts impressively long on a standard coin cell battery. Using low energy parts and keeping everything in power-save mode as long as possible has a lot to do with that. I tried to find some way of hacking the firmware on this, but I didn’t have any luck identifying a point of entry. I probed every test pin and package lead that I could reach, but I couldn’t find anything interesting on the logic analyzer. The controller, being a BGA package, wasn’t very accessible from a hardware hacking standpoint. Ultimately I gave up hope on trying to figure things out on the device side. Because the Shine is a Bluetooth Low Energy device, however, I figured it might be possible to get some information on the host side. I downloaded a utility for my smartphone that reads BLE device attributes and connected to the Shine. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any way for me to access the sensor data form that end either. For anyone interested, though, here’s what I was was able to find out using the BLE utility… After connecting to the device, you have access to 4 services, which are basically categories of attributes that can be read, written, or otherwise manipulated. Generic Access, Generic Attribute, and Device Information are all standard services on the BLE protocol and will give you things like this: Device Name (UUID 0x2A00): Shine Appearance (UUID 0x2A01): Generic: Running Walking Sensor Firmware Revision String (UUID 0x2A26): 0.0.50r Not very interesting. You can also get your device serial number and stuff like that. There’s another service on the device, and it’s a proprietary service with its own UUID that I won’t bother typing here. It has writable characteristics, but, without knowing what I’m doing, I’m reluctant to try writing to them. They may not even be related to the primary function of the device. I guess some things will remain a black box. I threw the device back together, and I’m going wear it for a while to see how it holds up! After all, even if you can’t hack it, Misfit has hinted at the release of an API in the future, and we can all look forward to that. Resources and Going Further If you enjoyed this teardown (or even if you didn’t, heck) then check out these other SparkFun teardowns: And for more information on Bluetooth and accelerometers, check out these tutorials:

<urn:uuid:6ac6fb90-4130-4d03-8bdd-d630d04c4b93>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/teardown-misfit-shine

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

As part of the Mobile Public Library’s recent showing of the Manifold Greatness traveling exhibition, local residents and universities lent rare Bibles that were included in the display. Mobile resident Robert S. Edington provided a 1583 Geneva Bible, which is also known as the “Breeches Bible.” “Breeches Bible” is a book collector’s term for the Geneva Bible, which was first printed 1560. The term derives from the reference in Genesis iii: 7 to Adam and Eve clothing themselves in “breeches” made from fig leaves. The Geneva Bible was one of the results of the persecution under infamous Queen Mary I, popularly known as “Bloody Mary” (1553-1558). Several of the Protestant reformers had fled to Geneva, Switzerland, to escape persectuion in England. Geneva was a free city, politically and religiously, dominated by Calvinism, the “cradle of the Reformed Faith” and a haven for religious reformists. The Geneva Bible offered the first new English translation of the Bible in nearly 20 years. Many of the previous translations also had their inceptions under duress, such as William Tyndale’s work producing the New Testament at a time when English translations of the Bible were prohibited. Tyndale suffered execution as a result. For more information on the volatile history of English translations of the Bible, visit The Crown and the Bible on the Manifold Greatness website. Spring Hill College contributed several Bibles to the exhibition, including a Gutenberg Bible facsimile that was produced in 1961. The Gutenberg Bible, known also as the Mazarin Bible and the 42-Line Bible, is a Latin edition of the Bible, printed at Mainz, Germany, sometime between 1450 and 1456. Although German bibliographers claim that it was printed by the German printer Johann Gutenberg, the edition may have been finished and perfected by Johann Fust, a wealthy financier who gained Gutenberg’s share of the business in a lawsuit; and Peter Schöffer, Gutenberg’s assistant. The book is the first volume known to have been printed with movable metal type. The College also provided a 1512 Vulgate Bible, a 1546 Hebraica Biblica (Hebrew-Latin Bible), and a 1871 Luther Bible. The Vulgate is a early translation of the Bible into Latin, originally undertaken in the 4th century. It remained the standard translation of the Bible for centuries, and was widely used throughout the middle ages. The Luther Bible is based on a translation by Martin Luther and was first published in 1534. Over 300 years later, his translation remained important enough for an edition to be printed in 1871. In addition, the University of Mobile lent several Bibles. Local residents Clyde and Ira Jenkins displayed their 1949 New Standard Reference Bible, and Robert Hyde showed his grandmother’s 1869 American Bible Society version. Amber Guy is a public relations officer at Mobile Public Library, which hosted the Manifold Greatness traveling exhibition from February 29 to March 30, 2012. Last week, Dr. Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature, spoke at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas on translating scripture and the influence of the King James Bible. This interview originally appeared on the Harry Ransom Center’s Cultural Compass blog. In several interviews you have stated that you appreciate the King James Version. You have also created your own translations of many books of the Hebrew Bible. Are your goals in translating different from the King James Version translators’? For me, the power of the Hebrew Bible is inseparable from its stylistic virtuosity—its strong, compact rhythms; its expressive use of syntax; the subtlety and liveliness of its dialogue; the fine precision of its word-choices; the purposeful shifts of levels of diction. Though the King James Version often has its own stylistic beauty (though not as consistently as people tend to remember), the 1611 translators paid attention to none of these considerations and probably were unaware of most of them. Their goal was to provide as exact an equivalent as they could, according to their own understanding, of each word in the original. I share their commitment to a certain literalism but as part of a tight weave of stylistic effects in the Hebrew. In your book Pen of Iron you examine the influence of the King James Bible on famous American writers such as William Faulkner and Herman Melville. Do you see the same influence in the work of any contemporary American writers? Fewer American writers now, for rather obvious cultural reasons, are drawing on the King James Version, but its influence has far from disappeared. Two contemporary novelists I discuss in Pen of Iron who reflect the language of the King James Bible are Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy. Another is the late Barry Hannah. With so many new translations available, is the King James Version still important and relevant today? Translations that cast the Bible in up-to-the-minute American English are definitely cutting into the constituency of the King James Version because they are easier to read and seem more “accessible.” My own sense is that such translations lack any literary grace and distort the feeling and the meaning of the Bible. Though we are distanced from the 1611 version now because of its archaic language, its beauty is undiminished, and I think it will always have readers as a great literary achievement that altered the course of the English language. Kelsey McKinney is an undergraduate intern at the Harry Ransom Center and a regular contributor to the Cultural Compass blog. The King James Bible: Its History and Influence, a companion exhibition to Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible, is on view at the Ransom Center until July 29, 2012. Hope College recently hosted a workshop on the care and restoration of family Bibles and other rare books. Kari Miller Fenwood, of Kari Miller Restoration, spoke about the complexities involved in book restoration due to the variety of materials involved. She demonstrated several restoration techniques, and offered tips on how to properly care for old books. - Eliminate care of dust and other surface contaminates by vacuuming. Using a vacuum with a HEPA filter is preferred. - When placing newspaper articles, flowers, leaves and other materials into a book, protect the page with glacine or other archival paper. - Store books away from direct sunlight. - Control moisture levels as much as possible. The guidelines for furniture apply to books – make sure the environment is neither too damp nor too dry. - When doing repairs at home, be sure to use archival-quality materials. DO NOT use scotch or masking tape to repair tears. - Before making any repair, clean the surface of the page with a dry cleaning pad intended for documents. - If books are badly damaged or deteriorated, store them in acid-free boxes, or wrap them in acid free paper. This will help to protect them from further damage. You may wish to consult a conservator to determine the best course of action for books that are valuable and/or meaningful. Fenwood emphasized reversibility, noting that any repairs should be able to be undone if necessary. Books may be permanently damaged by a well-intended “fix.” For more information on caring for family Bibles or heirlooms books, two excellent resouces include Your Old Books, a guide sponsored by the Rare Books and Manuscript Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Care, Handling and Storage of Books webpage from the Library of Congress. This workshop is part of a series of lectures and workshops offered throughout March as part of the Manifold Greatness traveling exhibition at the Hope College Van Wylen Library. Approximately 40 people attended the hands-on workshop, which also included demonostrations on cleaning and repairing several items from the Hope College Rare Book Collection. Kelly Jacobsma is Director of Libraries at Hope College. The Manifold Greatness traveling exhibition opens today at Hope College in Holland, MI and will be on view in the Van Wylen Library. In addition to an opening reception, lectures, and other public programs, Hope College will also display items from the library’s rare book collections. “This is the only place the exhibit will travel to in all of Michigan, Indiana and Illinois,” Director of Libraries Kelly Jacobsma said. “I hope students take a few minutes to come and enjoy the panels as well as see some of the treasures that we have.” Read more about Manifold Greatness at Hope College on the Hope College Libraries blog, Common Knowledge. Amy Arden assisted in the development and production of the Manifold Greatness website. She is a communications associate at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

<urn:uuid:38723e93-8d3a-43ab-b926-1e630cbfb17f>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://manifoldgreatness.wordpress.com/2012/03/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Far more people die every year in the United States in auto accidents than due to “gun violence.” I was not able to find statistics for the same period in my quick Google search, but here’s a sampling of data to back up my point (the annual death toll from cars and guns does not vary greatly from year-to-year, so please accept my laziness for the sake of argument): 2005 Auto Deaths – 42,636 2006 Firearm Deaths (including suicide which accounts for about 30% of gun deaths) – 29,569 2005 Auto Injuries – 2.9 million 2006 Gun Injuries – 64,389 With this particular sample of data there were almost 30% more automobile-related deaths than gun related deaths. The comparative injury statistics are not even in the same universe. Yes, you read that right, there were 2.9 MILLION auto injuries compared to 64,389 firearm injuries for a similar period. When somebody is shot in America the gun gets the blame and editorials about the epidemic of “gun violence” flood the newspapers. When somebody dies in a car it’s simply labeled an “accident.” There’s no moral outrage of any kind. If we’re going to euphemize away the reality of tough situations, we should at least apply the rules evenly. From now on I will not refer to motor-related deaths and injuries as “accidents” and will instead refer to them simply as “car violence.” Cars certainly deserve the title if the much maligned firearm does. Our absolute blindness to the sheer carnage caused by motordom is demonstrated in our language. We demonize and euphemize things that we hate. If any single product was injuring millions and killing thousands of people per year it would likely be banned (perhaps with the exceptions of alcohol and tobacco) . Not so for the lovely and innocent car. Our love affair with passenger vehicles has made us blind to the death and suffering that they enable. Much like “gun violence” perhaps we should be talking about “car violence” and “car control.” The numbers don’t lie.

<urn:uuid:56c0a280-348c-4b7a-8e8f-e488a3abd191>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://mplsrad.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/car-violence/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

The purpose of authorization is to determine whether an identity should be granted the requested type of access to a given resource. There are two fundamental ways to authorize access to a given resource: - File authorization File authorization is performed by the FileAuthorizationModule, and is active when you use Windows authentication. It does an access control list (ACL) check of the .aspx or .asmx handler file to determine if a user should have access. Applications can further use impersonation to get resource checks on resources that they are accessing. For more information about impersonation, see ASP.NET Impersonation. - URL authorization URL authorization is performed by the URLAuthorizationModule, which maps users and roles to pieces of the URL namespace. This module implements both positive and negative authorization assertions. That is, the module can be used to selectively allow or deny access to arbitrary parts of the URL namespace for certain sets, users, or roles. The URLAuthorizationModule is available for use at any time. You only need to place a list of users and/or roles in the <allow> or <deny> elements of the <authorization> section of a configuration file. To establish the conditions for access to a particular directory, you must place a configuration file that contains an <authorization> <[element] [users] [roles] [verbs]/> An element is required. Either the users or the roles attribute must be included. Both can be included, but both are not required. The verbs attribute is optional. The permissible elements are <allow> and <deny>, which grant and revoke access, respectively. Each element supports three attributes, which are defined in the following table. |roles||Identifies a targeted role for this element. The associated IPrincipal object for the request determines the role membership. You can attach arbitrary IPrincipal objects to the context for a given request and they can determine role membership in whatever way you like. For example, the default WindowsPrincipal class uses Microsoft Windows NT groups to determine role membership.| |users||Identifies the targeted identities for this element.| |verbs||Defines the HTTP verbs to which the action applies, such as GET, HEAD, and POST.| Anonymous users are also denied. The following example grants access to Kim and members of the Admins role, while denying it to John and all anonymous users: <authorization> <allow users="Kim"/> <allow roles="Admins"/> <deny users="John"/> <deny users="?"/> </authorization> Both users and roles can refer to multiple entities by using a comma-separated list, as shown in the following example. <allow users="John, Kim, contoso\Jane"/> Notice that the domain account ( contoso\Jane) must include both the domain and user name combination. In addition to identity names, there are two special identities, as shown in the following table. |*||Refers to all identities| |?||Refers to the anonymous identity| To allow John and deny everyone else, one might construct the following configuration section. <authorization> <allow users="John"/> <deny users="*"/> </authorization> The following example lets everyone do a GET, but only Kim can use POST. <authorization> <allow verb="GET" users="*"/> <allow verb="POST" users="Kim"/> <deny verb="POST" users="*"/> </authorization> Rules are applied using the following heuristics: - Rules contained in configuration files at lower directory levels take precedence over rules at higher directory levels. The system determines which rule takes precedence by constructing a merged list of all rules for a URL, with the most recent (nearest in the hierarchy) rules at the head of the list. - Given a set of merged rules for a URL, the system starts at the head of the list and checks rules until the first match is found. Note that the default configuration for ASP.NET contains an <allow users="*"> element, which authorizes all users. If no rules match, the request is allowed unless otherwise denied. If a match is found and the match is a <deny> element, it returns the 401 status code. Applications or sites can easily configure a <deny users="*"> element at the top level of their site or application to prevent this behavior. If an <allow> matches, the module does nothing and lets the request be processed further. There is also a <location> tag that you can use to specify a particular file or directory to which settings wrapped by that tag (between <location> and </location> tags) should apply.

<urn:uuid:b404f64e-1636-4e36-8cc0-367a180826b7>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wce3kxhd(v=vs.71).aspx

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” It’s all about the right words. In reading, the right words transport you, change you a little, and offer a new lens for seeing the world. In writing, the right words create telepathy: allowing someone else to see the inner workings of your mind. In teaching, the right words turn on metaphorical lightbulbs for students, providing “Aha!” moments. That’s the gift and the challenge of all three. There’s so much potential, so much possibility for connection and meaning and change, but all three can be so difficult! - How do you find a book that speaks to you? Does how enjoyable it is matter more than substance over fluff, or good writing versus good storytelling? - How do you convey a thought in words when you write? How do you express it clearly enough for another person to understand not only the idea of it but the tone and the emotion and intention? - How do you teach students to master concepts that you’ve gained through experience? How do you replicate those experiences for them in a way that will make the concepts stick? That’s what I want to explore here, both on the pages and in the blog entries. How do we make ourselves better readers, writers, and teachers? What ideas should we explore in each of these areas to make them more effective? I majored in English Education at Brigham Young University, completed a semester of student teaching high school in Salt Lake City, and then went straight into an English graduate program emphasizing in creative writing. My thesis was a young adult novel. I also taught introductory writing classes as a grad student and now continue that at Salt Lake Community College in the evenings. I read constantly, write daily, and teach twice a week, intertwining all three: I can’t imagine trying to do any one of them without the other two. Oh, and in case it’s not obvious, I love books and can’t get enough of them. Also, in spare moments I practice my end of future conversations like when an agent or editor someday calls to make an offer on my manuscripts.

<urn:uuid:9afbbf03-43dc-475c-aa42-da5b4afa30ab>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://nikkimantyla.wordpress.com/about/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Send the link below via email or IMCopy Present to your audienceStart remote presentation - Invited audience members will follow you as you navigate and present - People invited to a presentation do not need a Prezi account - This link expires 10 minutes after you close the presentation - A maximum of 30 users can follow your presentation - Learn more about this feature in the manual Do you really want to delete this prezi? Neither you, nor the coeditors you shared it with will be able to recover it again. Make your likes visible on Facebook? Connect your Facebook account to Prezi and let your likes appear on your timeline. You can change this under Settings & Account at any time. Meyer Lemon: Hybrid or GMO? Transcript of Meyer Lemon: Hybrid or GMO? Native to China, it was introduced to the United States in 1908 by agricultural explorer Frank Nicholas Meyer who collected a sample of it on a trip to China. A sweeter, less sour version of the lemon, the Meyer lemon tree was commonly grown in China as an ornamental tree. Gained popularity in America as an edible during the California Cuisine Revolution, and through Martha Stewart's usage of it in some of her recipes. As a result of its climate, California currently has the highest American production of Meyer Lemons. Can sometimes ripen with an orange tint. Rounder than a true lemon. The pulp is a dark yellowish color. Contains up to 10 seeds per fruit. Have a thin and smoother skin than that of the ordinary lemon. During the mid-1940s it was discovered that a vast majority of the Meyer lemon trees being grown were carriers of the Citrus tristeza virus, thus they were banned in the US to protect against viral spreading. In 1973, a new virus-free Meyer lemon tree was created and accepted by the USDA for production. Although many believe it to be a genetically modified fruit, it is in fact categorized by the USDA as a "natural" hybrid fruit. Has a highly perishable nature, so usually found at local Farmer markets when in season. Martha Stewart is called the "Fairy GodMother" of the Meyer Lemon. A single Meyer Lemons contains (according to the USDA): 4 grams of total Carbohydrates (1g of which is sugar) 1 gram of dietary fiber 1 gram of protein 19% of the daily requirement of vitamin C 1% of the daily calcium requirement Are full of antioxidants Are believed to keep you cool, refreshed, and "collected" while purifying your stomach. by: Jiyja Anderson Citrus Fruit Diagram

<urn:uuid:608feda2-6bcb-404c-8d34-01435712cb20>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://prezi.com/nn9lhwzo6xrl/meyer-lemon-hybrid-or-gmo/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Both health status and net worth can affect retirement decisions. In some cases, early retirement may be precipitated by a shock to an individual’s health and/or economic status. The authors examine how health and wealth shocks affect retirement decisions. They use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate a first-differences model of health and wealth shocks on retirement over the course of the 2000s in the United States. Their results suggest that acute health shocks are associated with labor market exits for older American men but not women. These results appear particularly strong for blacks, whose labor force participation seems particularly sensitive to health status, which may be due to different occupations for blacks and whites.

<urn:uuid:8990c213-ffdd-4272-bb73-3488a2bf47fe>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2013/10/01/the-effects-of-health-and-wealth-shocks-on-retirement-decisions/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

We are so pleased to announce that our new website is up and running, and our blog has moved with it too. On the new website you are able to create your own user account and follow along with our actions, activities, and successes, and be part of the thriving RESULTS community. This blog will soon be closed down and automatically redirect you, but for now you have to go visit by clicking below. You will find us at results.org.uk, and our blog is now at blog.results.org.uk. Please update all your bookmarks, and looking forward to seeing you on our new website! Posted in News Tagged news, RESULTS UK On Tuesday Andrew Mitchell MP, Secretary of State for International Development announced the results of his Department’s multilateral and bilateral aid reviews. An overview of the results is available here. The reviews were established shortly after the Coalition Government was formed to look at all areas of the Department’s work and make recommendations for changes to make it more effective. The results are the most comprehensive overview we have yet seen of the Government’s approach to international development and therefore the announcement is an important milestone. Overall RESULTS strongly welcomes the reviews. It is crucial that UK support for developing countries is focused on truly achieving results for poor people and supporting their own efforts to escape poverty. The top-line results that the Department has committed to delivering through both multilateral and bilateral channels over the next four years to 2015 are: - Secure schooling for 11 million children - Help vaccinate more children against preventable diseases than there are people in the whole of England - Provide access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation to more people than there are in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - Save the lives of 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth - Stop 250,000 newborn babies dying needlessly - Support 13 countries to hold freer and fairer elections - Help 10 million more women get access to modern family planning - Provide 50 million people with the means to help work their way out of poverty [by providing them with access to financial services] - Stop 10 million more children going hungry - Help halve malaria deaths in 10 of the worst affected countries - Help millions of poor people protect their livelihoods from the impact of climate change. Below we discuss the two reviews in more detail, and while we are broadly supportive of their contents we raise a few questions on specific decisions, as well as pointing out the need for further information on funding decisions and the specifics of country-level programmes. Continue reading Posted in Department for International Development, International Institutions, News Tagged Aid, Andrew Mitchell, bilateral aid review, Burundi, Coalition government, DFID, Education for All, Ethiopia, Financial Services, FTI, Gambia, GAVI, Global Fund, Global Health, MDGs, multilateral aid review, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poverty, RESULTS, UNESCO, UNITAID, Yemen The 2011 UNESCO Global Monitoring Report (GMR) was released on Tuesday. The report, which is released annually, details progress toward achieving the Education for All (EFA) Goals. The good news from this year’s report is that the number of out-of-school children in 2008 reduced to 67 million, from 72 million the year before. However, the reduction is slowing and there may be more children out of school by 2015 than there are today if more is not done. In addition, each year’s report addresses a focus theme, which in 2011 is education and conflict in fragile states. The report, called “The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict in Education”, points out that the provision of universal education is seriously hampered by armed conflict, war and civil unrest. With half of all out-of-school kids living in conflict affected or fragile countries, this issue needs to be addressed and taken seriously. Continue reading Posted in Education for All, News Tagged Arms, Conflict, Education for All, Education in India, Global Monitoring Report, Maternal health, Poverty, School, UNESCO, Women The RESULTS UK Parliamentary delegation recently returned from Rwanda after a week long visit to observe the country’s remarkable best practices adopted to combat infectious diseases and the Millenium Development Goals. MPs Cathy Jamieson and Angus MacNeil alongside RESULTS staff Aaron Oxley (Executive Director) and Aparna Barua (ACTION Project Associate) met with health centre staff, patients and civil society organisations across the country to learn and discuss health issues and the impact of tuberculosis (TB) on development. Continue reading Posted in Global Health, TB, Women Tagged Action Project, Africa, Angus MacNeil, Cathy Jamieson, GeneXpert, Global Health, HIV, MP, Parliamentary delegation, Rwanda, TB-HIV, Tuberculosis, Women On Tuesday we held our March Conference Call entitled: “World TB Day: still neglected, still killing”. March the 24th 2011 marks the 29th anniversary of World TB Day. TB is a preventable and curable disease, yet it kills 1.7 million people every year. While progress has been made towards fighting TB, many challenges remain, the greatest of which is the lack of prioritisation of this global health threat from governments in the developing and developed world. If we do not address the issue now, 20 million people will die from TB in the next decade. Our guest speaker on the call was Joel Spicer, senior strategist at the Stop TB partnership, a coalition of donors, governments and NGOs working to end TB, which is hosted in the World Health Organisation (WHO). If you were unable to join us on the call, you can now listen to the recording here. Continue reading Posted in Global Health, Monthly actions, TB Tagged Global Health, Global Plan to Stop TB, HIV, Joel Spicer, Poverty, Stop TB Partnership, TB, TB-HIV, World TB day We are pleased to announce a new session has been added to the skills day –Sunday 10th April- at our National Conference. The session is going to be an optional extra session that has the working title of ‘Your RESULTS- talking shop for activists’. We are planning on running the session as a meeting, chaired by RESULTS staff, which will be an open forum for RESULTS activists to raise and discuss issues that are important to you in terms of your engagement with RESULTS. You can sign up to take part in the conference by downloading the booking form here and sending it in to the office. The conference runs from 9-10th April with an optional practical advocacy day on Monday the 11th, and costs just £15 Continue reading As we have mentioned on this blog recently, our new website is now live. You can find it at www.results.org.uk. We’re really pleased with it and we hope that it will create an interactive environment to connect with each other and with us in the office. One of the most exciting functions of the new site is the ability all members have to share the results of their actions with one another. To post a result, visit the ‘latest action’ section on the homepage and select ‘submit your results’. You can then add a title and a description. You can then attach files to the action, such as a scanned copy of a letter you receive or an article you get published. Posted in Department for International Development, Global Health, Grassroots network, News Tagged Andrew Mitchell, DFID, GAVI, Grassroots, interactive, internet, online advocacy, result, RESULTS, website

<urn:uuid:3a0dbdc5-72f6-4544-82a1-9db9ea3b881e>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://resultsuk.wordpress.com/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

The Revista Aequitas. Estudios sobre Historia, Derecho e Instituciones has been created by the Asociación Veritas para el Estudio de la Historia, el Derecho y las Instituciones (Veritas Association for the Study of History, Law and Institutions). The field of study of the journal aims to cover as broad as its name suggests: history, law and institutions and, in particular, the interrelationships between these three fields of study. In terms of geographical frame, studies about Spanish or Hispanic History, Law and Institutions will be preferred, but not in an exclusive manner. Topics related to other nations will be published in the Revista Aequitas if the studies are presented in Spanish or any other language commonly used to spread knowledge, science and culture, in order to ensure that the text can be accessed by a reasonable number of readers. The journal is published on an annual basis. Authors interested in contributing to the journal should send their articles to the secretary at the email firstname.lastname@example.org, stating in the subject line Article Aequitas Journal. Selected articles will be evaluated by experts outside the editorial board. The format of the articles must be according the following criteria: The articles must contain, in Spanish and English, a brief summary and a selection of key words. Text in Times New Roman, size 11, single spaced. The footnotes must be written in Times New Roman, size 10, single spaced. In the bibliography, the first citation must be submitted in the following format: surname of the author, in capitals; name or initial of the author, title of the work in italics, place of publication, year of publication; volume, in the case the work has multiple that corresponds to the reference, page that corresponds to the reference. For example: MARTINEZ PEÑAS, L., El confesor del Rey en el Antiguo Régimen,.Madrid, 2007, p. 87. Book chapters and journal articles, for the first citation, must be submitted in the following format: surname of the author in capitals, name or initial of the author, title of the chapter or article in quotation marks, title of the book or name of the journal in which it come from in italics, volume, in the case the work has multiple that corresponds to the reference, year of publication, page that corresponds to the reference. For example: MARTÍNEZ PEÑAS, L. “La ley Benot”, en Revista Aequitas. Estudios sobre Historia, Derecho e Instituciones, nº 1, 2011, p. 34. Failure to follow the above mentioned formatting criteria could be considered as a motive for not admitting an article.

<urn:uuid:1fdfaead-8446-441b-8787-af3bb2d377af>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://revistaaequitas.wordpress.com/english-version/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

I keep on bumping into the same parallel conversations around the future of the impact investing sector. With those in the trenches, what I hear continuously is that it is a long, hard slog. That companies take a long time to build, that the costs of getting things right are high, that grants and really forward-looking and patient risk capital is key, and that there’s not a straight path from here to there. And yet the reports that keep on coming out and the sectoral conversations continue to cheerlead about all the capital that is coming into the space – prevailing estimates for total potential market size by 2020 are in the $500 billion (Monitor Group) to $1 trillion (JP Morgan) range – and to get there, we’re told, impact investing has to become an “asset class.” Part of getting from here to there, it’s implied, might mean sweeping under the rug the significant segments of impact investing where the economics don’t seem to fully work and where the financial risks are too big relative to the expected financial returns. An investor I recently met at a roundtable on understanding and quantifying impact put it simply to me: “anyone who is looking at less than a ‘market’ rate of return is mispricing risk.” (Whereas I think the big problem in the world is that we’re mispricing returns by equating returns with what we can see in a discounted cash flow analysis, thereby demoting “impact” to a fuzzy, non-quantifiable something for which it’s not worth taking actual, real risk.) Without getting dragged into what is clearly a definitional conversation – namely, until we agree on what we mean by “impact” we can never have a serious conversation about the economics of “impact investing” – I have an observation that keeps on nagging at me: increasingly across sectors I meet more and more people who acknowledge that most of the most important (dare I say the most “impactful”?) work they do has crummy economics. Getting these projects/endeavors/businesses to happen requires the dogged determination to get many different stripes and flavors of capital to come together, lots of irregular stakeholders to develop a shared vision of the future, and, usually, a healthy dose of subsidy or public funding because there’s a clear public good being created when you succeed. And yet in the impact investing sector we often hear that if investors aren’t fully financially compensated for the risks they take, capital will never flow in any serious way. If that’s right, how do we explain away the fact that we have managed to create trillions of dollars’ worth of parks or mixed-use developments or hospitals or museums or great schools, most of which don’t make full economic sense but all of which are integral to a vital, vibrant society? The truth is that markets don’t fully work all the time, and yet huge amounts of capital are regularly mobilized to create things that are worth creating. What I’m struggling to do is to better explain, by looking outside our sector, my feeling that the conversation we’re having in the impact investing sector is far too narrow and binary. When I identify the underpinnings of what makes vibrant, successful societies – you know, all those things that disappeared for a little while when Hurricane Sandy hit – and if I think about all of the incredible pure market plays that have been built on top of the existing infrastructure that was provided by the public sector….well it becomes clear that the “markets” / “not markets” conversation we’re having is far too simple. And yet I don’t know specifically which data to look for to help tell this story. I need more examples across sectors and history, more evidence that helps explain clearly and succinctly what I know to be true: that solving big, intractable problems for disadvantaged communities by and large doesn’t pay (nor should it pay) handsome financial rewards. And the fact that it doesn’t isn’t some sort of failure of a prevailing orthodoxy, it is in fact a vindication of a rich history of bringing public, private and third sector players together – to bring the best of what each has to offer, including skills and preferences and the right kind of capital – to solve big problems. I’ll be talking about some of these questions next month at the Global Philanthropy Forum, and I’d love your great ideas on how to prepare for this talk. So, help, please! What are the best examples out there from other sectors (housing, roads, infrastructure, parks, museums, schools, biotechnology, the Internet, telecommunications…) that will bust open this “market return” mindset that is hobbling our thinking about how to create real and lasting change through impact investing?

<urn:uuid:58edfd63-622f-42ee-8df5-ce23655192d1>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://sashadichter.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/what-it-takes-to-build-dreams/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

miRBase: microRNA sequences, targets and gene nomenclature. The miRBase database aims to provide integrated interfaces to comprehensive microRNA sequence data, annotation and predicted gene targets. miRBase takes over functionality from the microRNA Registry and fulfils three main roles: the miRBase Registry acts as an independent arbiter of microRNA gene nomenclature, assigning names prior to publication of novel miRNA sequences. miRBase Sequences is the primary online repository for miRNA sequence data and annotation. miRBase Targets is a comprehensive new database of predicted miRNA target genes. miRBase is available at http://microrna.sanger.ac.uk/.

<urn:uuid:421d65bb-a8e6-4901-88e7-b43b10a5a40b>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://scicrunch.org/16381832/resource/nlx_144509

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Our colleague, Chaeyoon Lim, wrote a summary of his research findings on the connection between religiosity and wellbeing using the amazing Gallup- Healthways data (that has surveyed 1,000 people a day for several years). Excerpt: “Americans who attend a church, synagogue, or mosque frequently report experiencing more positive emotions and fewer negative ones in general than do those who attend less often or not at all. Frequent churchgoers experience an average of 3.36 positive emotions per day compared with an average of 3.08 among those who never attend. This relationship holds true even when controlling for key demographic variables like age, education, and income.” Not included in Chaeyoon’s published comments, he also found that, even controlling for other factors like age, gender, race, and the like, Americans would have either had to increase their income by $90,000 a year or gain a college education to have the same increase in life satisfaction as they get from weekly church attendance.” If you click on the below graph, you can see that all religions and even respondents with no religion frequently reported higher life satisfaction as they went to church more often (controlling for all the standard factors like age, region, gender, income, education, etc.). You may ask how those with no religion attended “church” frequently; most typically in our Faith Matters surveys it was when a religious spouse got their non-religious spouse to accompany them. Chaeyoon’s work also shows that while all Americans are happier on the weekend, secular Americans experience a drop from Saturday to Sunday in their happiness; religious Americans are happier every day from Monday through Saturday and then their happiness, rather than declining on Sunday, goes up even higher than Saturday. For other work on the connection between happiness, life satisfaction and religiosity, see American Grace (end of Chapter 12) and “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction” by Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam, American Sociological Review 2010, Vol. 75(6): 914–93.

<urn:uuid:10ec4b7a-908a-489d-816e-8c35fd786895>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-connection-between-religiosity-and-wellbeing/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

According to a new Pew Research Center global survey: "The Obama administration's increasing use of unmanned drone strikes to kill terror suspects is widely opposed around the world. … In 17 out of 21 countries surveyed, more than half of the people disapproved of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders and groups in nations such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia." The major exception? “… in the United States, a majority, or 62 percent, approved the drone campaign.” You can read the Pew Survey HERE.

<urn:uuid:b36d10a1-4a01-49e9-854e-01ac72747c57>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://sojo.net/articles/drone-watch/drone-watch-world-opinion-opposes-drones

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Eating Less Meat Posted by Richard Conniff on September 12, 2011 Sunday’s (UK) Guardian has an article on the environmental benefits of eating less meat. It turns out, instead, to be largely a pitch for eating a fungus-derived protein with the very ill-conceived name quorn. It also contains this unintentionally laughable tidbit: Meat-reducing, as the marketers have branded it, may just have acquired fresh momentum. Self-confessed king carnivore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has switched from meat to vegetables as his latest celebrity cause. But maybe I am just too far across The Atlantic to have experienced the cultural tsunami that is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Even so, these paragraphs in the article are of interest: The two most pressing reasons for cutting back on meat today are climate change and global population growth. The post-war years have seen an explosion in the numbers of animals intensively reared for meat and milk. This livestock revolution, and the change in land use that has gone with it, however, now contribute nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. Most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys. The UN predicts that the number of farm animals will double by 2050. Except, of course, it can’t. The livestock of Europe already require an area of vegetation seven times the size of Europe to keep them in feed. If people in emerging economies start eating as much meat as we do, there simply won’t be enough planet. Intensive meat production is a very inefficient way of feeding the world. Farm a decent acre with cattle and you can produce about 20lbs of beef protein. Give the same acre over to wheat and you can produce 138lbs of protein for human consumption. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed instead directly to people, there may be just enough food to go round when population peaks. Replacing meat with more plant foods would also reduce diet-related diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and some cancers, according to reports in the Lancet.

<urn:uuid:d6428dc1-a0fb-4c4c-a07d-d59249e23e10>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/eating-less-meat/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Scientists are tracking down the first people who squeezed this nutritious liquid out of animals thousands of years ago We put it in cereal. We drink it with cookies. And we eat tons of foods that are made from it, including yogurt, cheese and even some crackers, breads and granola bars. For most of us, milk is a staple that would be hard to live without. Thousands of years ago, though, only babies drank milk — and that milk came from their mothers. Now, scientists are investigating the beginnings of mankind’s long-lasting love for daily products. They are looking back thousands of years, to the days when people first squeezed milk out of cows and other animals for use as food and drink. Tracking down the first milk drinkers could give insight into some bigger questions. For example, why do so many people today still get sick from drinking milk? In some countries, almost nobody can digest dairy products. The work could also help explain major events in human history. Before refrigerators and grocery stores kept a steady supply of fresh food around, dairying probably transformed societies. “If you can have an animal supply nutrition without killing it, that’s a real step in agriculture,” says Richard Evershed, a chemist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “That’s spectacular in terms of human nutrition.” As easy as milk is to find these days, though, its history is challenging to piece together. Like detectives, researchers are tackling the milk mystery in more ways than one. They are analyzing ancient milk scum on extremely old pots. They’re tracking down the genes that allowed people to digest milk, which is surprisingly hard for many people to stomach. They’re even looking for clues in the buried bones of cows, sheep, horses and other milk-making animals. “Milk was probably the world’s first superfood,” says Mark Thomas, a scientist at University College London who studies how genes have changed throughout history. The advantages of being able to drink it, he adds, “are just out of this world.” To most people, milk comes in a carton. But milk originally comes from the bodies of mammals. Human as well as other mammal mothers, including dogs, cats, pigs and mice, produce milk to feed their babies. Mammal babies, including goats, get milk from their mothers. Human mothers also provide milk to their very young children, but most people get milk from the store. Most of the milk in U.S. grocery stores comes from cows. In other countries, it is common to drink the milk of sheep, goats, camels, even horses. Each type of milk has a different flavor. Some types are easier to stomach than others. Evershed recently sampled milk from horses in Kazakhstan. “It was the most disgusting drink I’ve ever tasted,” he says. “I just didn’t like it.” Unlike meat, milk does not require that an animal be slaughtered. But the first dairy farmers had to figure out for themselves how to turn wild animals into ones that could be raised in captivity. Then, they needed to herd the animals, care for them and continue to milk them even after the animals’ babies grew up. Another complication: Milk drinking doesn’t come naturally to older kids and adults. Milk contains a type of sugar called lactose. In order to turn lactose into energy, our bodies need an enzyme called lactase. Enzymes are proteins that help the body do its work. Like other newborn mammals, baby humans have plenty of lactase, which allows them to gulp down their mothers’ milk. After age 2 or so, though, lactase levels drop. Without lactase, people can get very sick from dairy products. Symptoms include gas, stomach cramps and severe diarrhea. The condition is called lactose intolerance. None of our early ancestors could digest milk as adults because their bodies never had to — milk drinking simply wasn’t an option. As people began to extract milk from animals, though, some people developed the ability to keep drinking it throughout their lives. That biological switch proved to be a huge boost toward survival. Milk is full of calories, fat, protein, calcium and other nutrients. For ancient man, it would have been a valuable and steady source of food. Scientists now know of a milk-related mutation in our genes — the chemical instructions for life that we carry in almost every cell in our bodies. People who have a mutated form of one particular gene can drink milk just fine. People without the mutation tend to get sick from milk. “The ability to digest milk, Thomas says, “has been incredibly important for people’s survival for the last 8,000 to 10,000 years. We still just don’t know why.” The first milk drinkers To figure out where, and possibly why, milk drinking started, some scientists have been looking at who has the milk-digesting mutation today. Patterns are striking. Most adults in Northern and Central Europe are able to digest milk — and they do. Cheese, butter and other dairy products are popular in countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Germany and England. Because European settlers dominated North America, most people here can handle milk just fine, as well. That may explain why ice cream is such a popular dessert in the United States. In much of Africa, Asia and South America, on the other hand, people tend to avoid dairy products because they lead to diarrhea and other stomach problems. (That’s why you won’t typically find cheese on the menu at a Chinese, Japanese or Ethiopian restaurant.) Native Americans are also unable to digest lactose. Based on these genetic patterns, scientists have long thought that milk drinking started in Northern Europe, where dairy is an institution and the milk-digesting mutation is everywhere. The different circles of color on this map of Europe show where lactose tolerance—the ability for older children and adults to drink milk without it causing illness or discomfort—developed in a particular area. The red area in the center shows w |Yuval Itan, Adam Powell, Mark G. Thomas| A recent study painted a different picture. With a computer model, Thomas and colleagues looked at the spread of the milk-drinking mutation, farming and other related factors. Working backward, the scientists concluded that the first milk-drinkers lived in Central Europe around what’s now Hungary about 7,500 years ago. The practice didn’t start farther north, as scientists had thought before. Around that time, a farming culture called the Linearbandkeramik also sprouted in the area that’s now Hungary. The culture spread quickly over the next few hundred years into most of northwestern Europe. Milk drinking, Thomas says, was probably responsible for the success of the Linearbandkeramik. And milk-drinking Linearbandkeramik may have transformed Europe. “They probably shaped the language and cultural map of Northern Europe over the last several thousand years,” Thomas says. “We now think the ability to digest milk was crucial to [their] spread.” Dairy before milk The story doesn’t start or end there. It’s now clear that people ate dairy foods before they actually drank milk. Over the last decade, Evershed has analyzed pottery remains from many hundreds of ancient vessels at dozens of sites in Europe. His group has also identified dried-up milk fat on the oldest pottery shards ever found, dating back 9,000 years from an area outside Europe, in the Middle East, called the Fertile Crescent. The region now includes Iraq, Syria and Israel. It’s probably where people first domesticated animals. In fact, milking may have started even earlier than that. Although archaeologists haven’t found older pottery remains, scientists do have evidence that early sheep herds were mostly female. That might mean that the herd was used for milk, rather than meat. It’s the females, after all, that produce milk. Despite those clues, Thomas — who has pulled genetic material out of the bones of early European farmers — has found no sign that people had the gene mutation for digesting lactose before 7,500 years ago. So, why were people milking animals if they couldn’t digest the milk? It turns out that fermenting and processing milk into yogurt, cheese and other products removes much of the lactose. Even people who are lactose-intolerant can often eat these foods without getting sick. Dairy foods last longer than milk without spoiling. And fermenting, for instance, is not hard to do: In a hot country, people would have just needed to leave milk in a pot outside for most of the day to turn the milk into a nutritious, digestible yogurt. “We are now pretty convinced,” Thomas says, “that the ability to digest milk came after the skills necessary to produce it.” From when and where, to why? Now that scientists know more about when and where milking started, they are struggling to explain why people started drinking milk in the first place. Among a variety of theories about milk, Thomas likes the idea that animals provide a steady supply of it. Crops boom and then bust. Meat comes with finality: the end of an animal’s life. But on the other hand, as long as you keep feeding and milking a cow, her milk keeps coming. There would have been other advantages, too. Milk is cheap. It’s nutritious. And it harbors fewer dangerous bacteria compared with liquids like river water, which could have made people terribly sick. Investigating milk, scientists say, is a great way to help people connect with their food and where it comes from. In a recent presentation for schoolkids, Evershed included a poster of someone squeezing milk from the udders of a cow into a pot. “It was a lovely picture,” Evershed says, and the image was symbolic, too. “It brought home man’s intimate relationship with animals and the way we live with them and rely on them. The supermarket makes you forget that.”

<urn:uuid:d56ce201-e928-4068-a676-c03bde7bc5b6>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://student.societyforscience.org/article/got-milk-how

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

The large white cross overlooking the city of Jinotega in the West side is one of the most renowned symbols of the municipality not only for the festivities that are held in its honor, but also because of the impressive views one gets after hiking the hill where this cross is situated. Measuring about 800 meters high, the La Cruz Hill looks dominant from any point of the city. A 45-minute walk is necessary to get to the top and to be able to see Lake Apanas, the Dantali - El Diablo Natural Reserve, the city of Jinotega and the green mountains of Northern Nicaragua. There are two versions regarding the name of the hill. One of them states that the priest Agustín Morel de Santa Cruz, who lived during colonial times in the area, put a cross on top of the hill because he believed this would stop torrential rains and floods from hitting the city. On the other hand, the second version explains that the cross was placed there to protect Jinotegans from evil spirits attracted by people who practiced indigenous rituals in the Chirinagua Hill. Whatever the reason, this white cross remains in its original place and is visited by thousands of catholics on May 3rd, which is when the "festivities of the cross" are held. Therefore, this is a good time to visit the place and see this kind of religious expression although tourists can visit the hill at any time of the year, except when it has rained. It is worth mentioning that hiking this hill is not a formal tourist activity. Hence, the visitor should not expect to find guides offering a tour. The most practical thing is to ask at a hotel, city hall or at La Cuculmeca (local NGO) if they can contact a person who can take you there or give you advice related to this activity. The most impressive views of the city of Jinotega, the Dantalí – El Diablo Natural Reserve, Lake Apanas and the green mountains of Nothern Nicaragua can be seen after a 45-minute hike on La Cruz Hill, one of the many attractions of the municipality of Jinotega. The hill might seem like an intimidating challenge when seen from the center of the city, but hiking it is actually not that difficult. The road that leads to the top is not entirely steep and surrounds the hill, making it easier to hike. The journey begins when one arrives in the cementery of the city, located in the Western side of it. Several viewpoints are reached as the hiker ascends, providing the opportunity to observe Jinotega's cathedral and other parts of the city. After about 45 minutes (depending on the physical condition of the person), one gets to the top of the hill. The entire city of Jinotega and all its surroundings can be seen at this point and the views are impressive. However, the hike does not end there. The famous white cross located at the summit must also be part of the hike. Once you are there, you can sit on the cross, rest and finally enjoy the whole landscape. An interesting fact is that La Cruz Hill is visited every May 3rd by hundreds of catholics who travel to the city of Jinotega in order to make this same journey. A mass takes place at the summit of the hill on this day.

<urn:uuid:13c2bb37-29b5-4ad5-9e19-f4545f87d886>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://vianica.com/attraction/413/la-cruz-hill

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

In this blog post, Paul Parsons, Research Scientist - IBM Canada R&D Centre, discusses the importance of not only visualizing the large "bodies of information" we're interested in analyzing, especially given our access to big data, but also being able to interact with this visualized data to extract the full value, or big insights, we're truly after. Each one of these mechanism - visualizing the data and interacting with the visualized data - is really two sides of the same coin each equally important in fully understanding what the data is trying to tell us. Here's Paul's post: This is the first in a series of posts dealing with interactive visualization. These posts take a conceptual rather than technical approach, and are not concerned with any specific technology, platform, or type of visualization. This first post will discuss the general importance of interaction, and subsequent posts will dive into more detail. The role of visualization in making informed decisions, making sense of bodies of information and datasets, achieving valuable insights in the era of big data—and, in general, performing data-driven and information-intensive activities—has become widely acknowledged in recent years. Additionally, research to date has uncovered and characterized many of the benefits of visualization for performing all kinds of tasks and activities. For instance, we know that visualization can reveal properties of datasets that are not revealed by common statistical analysis, determine what information is perceived and processed, help distribute cognitive and perceptual load, and benefit human tasks and activities in numerous other ways. Although we know that visualizations can help with understanding, making decisions, and performing other such activities, in the modern era, visualizing the data is only half the concern—we must also be concerned with opportunities for interacting with data (or, more correctly, interacting with the visualization of data). Historically, largely due to media constraints, visualizations have been static (think about the use of charts, graphs, and diagrams in books throughout the past centuries—even back to the use of drawings on cave walls). Because we are accustomed to static visualizations, interaction is often considered only as an afterthought to visualization design. Moreover, much of the visualization design guidance we currently have has come from an era in which static media were dominant. If we want to get the most out of our data, we must have interaction at the forefront of consideration. Indeed, research has shown that static visualizations can lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about the underlying information! Interaction is not simply a nice thing to have—it actually goes to the heart of human thinking itself—that is, we think and carry out our tasks by interacting with things in the world! In other words, interaction is a fundamental part of human activity. Let’s look in a bit more detail: When we engage in any type activity that involves data or information that is external to our brains, and that requires a reasonable degree of mental effort (e.g., making a decision about where to distribute resources based on complex sales data from the last quarter), a certain amount of cognitive load is placed on the person who is doing the reasoning. When we use tools to help us (e.g., visualizations), some of the burden is ‘offloaded' onto the visualizations due to their exploitation of perceptual characteristics of human beings. While we can gain much valuable information about visualization design simply from understanding this, it is a mistake to assume that this is the extent of the utility of visualization. What is missing from such an assessment is an understanding of the fundamental manner in which human beings engage in such cognitive, information-intensive activities: we interact with things in the world. Research done in the cognitive sciences in recent decades suggests that actions that we perform in the world should often be considered as part of thought itself! Think about how we naturally want to pick objects up, handle them—interact with them—in order to understand, make sense of, and use them to make future decisions. If we think of visualizations in a similar fashion, we will begin to see the deep potential that interaction brings to gaining insights from data. To illustrate this point simply, consider the visualization shown here: This particular visualization is a type of matrix diagram that represents character co-occurrences in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. In this visualization, each colored cell represents two characters that appeared in the same chapter; darker cells indicate characters that co-occurred more frequently. Take a second to reflect on what insights can be gained from looking at this visualization in its static form. Now, head over to this site to see the interactive version. Interact with it using the drop-down menu, and see if you gain any more insight into the underlying relationships. Making this visualization interactive brings it to life and provides numerous benefits for thinking and reasoning about the underlying data. Although this is a very simple example, it is used to give an indication as to the possibilities and utility of interaction in visualization. That’s it for now. Subsequent posts will dive further into the issue of interaction, and will address the following: • fundamental patterns of interaction with visualizations and their benefits for supporting tasks and activities • common properties of visualizations that influence how they are perceived, and how they should be made adjustable through interaction Stay tuned for these in the near future!

<urn:uuid:49285b2c-247f-4ff7-8975-eabfb57204e1>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/predictiveanalytics/entry/the_importance_of_interaction_in_visualization?lang=en_us

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Balak and Balaam 1The Israelites#Literally “sons/children of Israel” set out, and they encamped on the desert-plateau of Moab, across from Jericho beyond the Jordan. 2Balak son of Zippor saw all that Israel did to the Amorites,#Hebrew “Amorite” 3and Moab was very terrified in the presence of the people because they#Hebrew “he” or “it” were numerous; and Moab dreaded the presence of the Israelites.#Literally “sons/children of Israel” 4And Moab said to the elders of Midian, “Now the crowd will lick up all around us, like a bull devours the grass of the field.” And Balak son of Zippor was king of Moab at that time. 5He sent messengers to Balaam son of Beor at Pethor, which is by the river,#That is, the Euphrates in the land of the children of his people, to summon him, saying, “Look! A people went out from Egypt. Look! They cover the surface of the land;#Literally “the eye of the land” they are about to dwell opposite me. 6Now, please go, curse this people for me because they#Hebrew “he” are stronger than me; perhaps I will be able to strike them#Hebrew “he” and drive them#Hebrew “he” out from the land because I know whoever you bless is blessed, and whoever you cursed is cursed.” 7So the elders of Moab and the elders of Midian went with a fee for divination in their hand; they came to Balaam and spoke the words of Balak to him. 8He said to them, “Spend the night here, and I will return, and I will return word to you, just as Yahweh speaks to me.” So the princes of Moab stayed with Balaam. 9And God came to Balaam and said, “Who are these men with you?” 10And Balaam said to God, “Balak son of Zippor, king of Moab, sent word to me, 11‘Look! A people went out from Egypt. Look! They cover the surface of the land.#Literally “the eye of the land” Now, go, curse them#Hebrew “him” for me. Perhaps I will be able to attack them#Hebrew “him” and drive them#Hebrew “him” out.” 12God said to Balaam, “You will not go with them; you will not curse the people, because they#Hebrew “he” are blessed.” 13Balaam got up in the morning, and he said to the princes of Balak, “Go to your land, because Yahweh refused to allow me to go with you.” 14The princes of Moab got up and went to Balak, and they said, “Balaam refused to come with us.” 15Balak again sent many princes, who were more honored than the former.#Literally “than these” 16They came to Balaam and said to him, “Thus says Balak son of Zippor, ‘Please, let nothing keep you from coming to me 17because I will surely honor you greatly, and all that you say to me I will do. Please, come; curse this people for me.’ ” 18Balaam answered and said to the servants of Balak, “Even though Balak gives to me his house full of silver and gold, I am not able to go beyond the command of Yahweh#Literally “the mouth of Yahweh” my God to do a little or a lot. 19And now please, you also stay here#Literally “please stay in this” the night, and let me find out#Literally “let me know” again what Yahweh will say with me.” 20And God came to Balaam at night, and he said to him, “If the men have come to call you, get up and go with them; but only the word that I will speak to you, you will do.” 21So Balaam got up in the morning and saddled his donkey, and he went with the princes of Moab. Balaam and the Angel 22But God became angry#Literally “God’s nose became hot” because he was going, and the angel of Yahweh stood in the road as an adversary to him; he was riding on his donkey, and two servants were with him. 23The donkey saw the angel of Yahweh standing in the road with his sword drawn in his hand, and the donkey turned aside from the road and went into the field. And Balaam struck the donkey to turn her back to the road. 24The angel of Yahweh stood in the narrow path of the vineyards, with a wall on either side.#Literally “a wall from this and a wall from this” 25When the donkey saw the angel of Yahweh, she pressed herself into the wall, and she pressed the foot of Balaam into the wall, so he struck her again. 26Then the angel of Yahweh went further ahead and stood in a narrow place where there was not a way to turn aside to the right or left. 27When the donkey saw the angel of Yahweh, she lay down under Balaam, so Balaam became angry,#Literally “Balaam’s nose became hot” and he struck the donkey with his staff. 28Yahweh opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What did I do to you that you struck me these three times?” 29Balaam said to the donkey, “Because you made a mockery of me! If only I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now!” 30The donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your donkey on which you have ridden all your life until this day? Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?” He said, “No.” 31Then Yahweh exposed the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of Yahweh standing in the road with his sword drawn in his hand, and he bowed down and worshiped to his face. 32The angel of Yahweh said to him, “Why have you struck this donkey three times? Look, I have come out as an adversary because your conduct is perverse before me. 33The donkey saw me and turned aside from me these three times. If she had not turned aside from my face, then I would have killed you and kept her alive.” 34Balaam said to the angel of Yahweh, “I have sinned because I did not know that you were standing to meet me in the road. Now, if it is displeasing to you,#Literally “if it is evil in your eyes” I will turn back.” 35The angel of Yahweh said to Balaam, “Go with the men, but speak only the word that I will speak to you.” So Balaam went with the princes of Balak. 36When Balak heard that Balaam was coming, he went out to meet him by the city of Moab, which was on the boundary of Aaron at the end of the territory. 37And Balak said to Balaam, “Did I not urgently send to meet with you? Why did you not come to me? Am I really not able to honor you?” 38Balaam said to Balak, “Look, I came to you now. Am I really able to speak anything at all? I speak the word that God puts in my mouth.” 39Balaam went with Balak, and they came to Kiriath-Huzoth. 40And Balak sacrificed cattle and sheep, and he sent them to Balaam and to the princes who were with him. 41And it happened, in the morning Balak took Balaam and took him up to Bamoth-Baal, and he saw from there the end of the nation.

<urn:uuid:ac4132ba-5203-4c26-add4-4efcb6c2f1c4>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.bible.com/en-GB/bible/90/num.22.leb

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

This Earth Exploration Toolbook chapter uses ArcGIS and climate data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Climate Change Scenarios GIS Data Portal to help users learn the basics of GIS-based climate modeling. The five-part exercise involves calculating summer average temperatures for the present day and future climate modeled output, visually comparing the temperature differences for the two model runs, and creating a temperature anomaly map to highlight air temperature increases or decreases around the world. In this activity, students learn about how climate change is affecting the Arctic ecosystem and then investigate how this change is impacting polar bear populations. Students analyze maps of Arctic sea ice, temperature graphs, and polar bear population data to answer questions about the impact of climate change on the Arctic ecosystem. This is a multi-faceted activity that offers students a variety of opportunities to learn about permafrost through an important sink and source of greenhouse gas (methane), about which most students living in lower latitudes know little. This lab exercise is designed to provide a basic understanding of a real-world scientific investigation. Learners are introduced to the concept of tropospheric ozone as an air pollutant due to human activities and burning of fossil fuel energy. The activity uses, analyzes, and visualizes data to investigate this air pollution and climate change problem, determines the season in which it commonly occurs, and communicates the analysis to others in a standard scientific format. In this hands-on activity, students explore whether rooftop gardens are a viable option for combating the urban heat island effect. Guiding question is: Can rooftop gardens reduce the temperature inside and outside houses?

<urn:uuid:7cd3f653-578e-4d97-80fe-fd8d9a46ce14>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.climate.gov/teaching/resources/education/high-school-9-12?keywords=&page=1

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

What do you think is the most common expression of ageism? Please respond with at least 50 words. Thanks Find the best study resources around, tagged to your specific courses. Share your own to gain free Course Hero access or to earn money with our Marketplace. Get one-on-one homework help from our expert tutors—available online 24/7. Ask your own questions or browse existing Q&A threads. Satisfaction guaranteed! Browse existing sets or create your own using our digital flashcard system. A simple yet effective studying tool to help you earn the grade that you want!

<urn:uuid:68ce2d7e-ab5f-4e5a-8f68-48213b480cd4>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.coursehero.com/tutors-problems/Other-Homework/8319032-The-most-common-expression-of-ageism-I-think-in-society-today-is-that/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Find a tour Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, has endured several incidents of destruction, but like a steadfast warrior, it has survived. Today, situated on the banks of the Vardar River, the city is home to a third of Macedonians. It is a very multi-ethnic place, populated with Albanians, Turks, Romas, Serbs, and Bosniaks, among others. Formerly known as Skupi, the Roman capital of Dardanian province, it was first destroyed by a massive earthquake in 518AD and subsequently rebuilt. Landmark structures from that age include the Kale Fortress, built by Byzantine Emperor Justinian. Extended and reinforced over the centuries, the fortress has long served as a military stronghold and it continues to overlook the city with commanding towers and fortifications.Read more In 1395, Skopje was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire and became the seat of power for several Sultans. The city acquired an Islamic flavour, still evident in the Old Bazaar. Don’t miss its historic inns, where travelling merchants would rest after plying the Balkan caravan routes, its fine domed hamams, clock tower, or its many Mosques – including Sultan Murat, the largest in the Balkans. In 1689, Skopje endured yet more carnage when the Austrian General Piccolomini burned it to the ground. Not to be deterred, it rose from the ashes in the 19th century as an important centre of trade and crafts. Disaster struck once more in 1963, when 75% of the city’s buildings were levelled in a massive earthquake. It was rebuilt in modern style using plans drawn up by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, who redesigned Hiroshima after it was destroyed in the Second World War. Today, Skopje is a lively post-Soviet city, rich in culture and off-beat intrigue - it takes special pride in its many festivals dedicated to art, music, opera, ballet, and theatre. In Macedonia square, the spiritual heart of the city, you’ll find a statue of Alexander the Great triumphantly riding a horse – a symbol of both the Macedonian nation and Skopje’s fierce resilience.

<urn:uuid:a8fc9ef0-2aa1-4840-a77a-cbf384062c22>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.explore.co.uk/destinations/europe/macedonia/skopje/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

“No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom” is the ABA’s national theme for Law Day. And this year, there is special urgency in Florida to help educate citizens not only about the importance of maintaining a fully funded court system, but to ensure that the judiciary remains independent and free of political attacks. A cautionary tale comes from Iowa, where three justices were ousted from the bench in a merit retention election in 2010. They were targeted by special interest groups led by the Mississippi-based American Family Association, riled up by a unanimous decision allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage. (See February 15 story.) This year in Florida, three Supreme Court justices are up for merit retention: Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente, and Peggy Quince. Another 15 members of the Florida courts of appeal also face merit retention. They are bracing for an Iowa-style effort to unseat them when their names are on the general election ballot in November. Bar President Scott Hawkins tells Florida lawyers in the March Journal: “You are in the best position in our society to help others understand what judges do. And now is the time to begin sharing that message. The critical role of judges is fundamental to our democracy. Why do I say this? So often we hear others talk about the importance of the rule of law — which undoubtedly is bedrock to American democracy. However, very seldom does public discussion focus on the fact that the rule of law is only as strong as the quality of the judges who uphold it.” But gauging the quality of justices and judges can be difficult for the average voter, who may never have set foot in court. It’s also hard to assess the merits of judges because they can’t tell you how they will make decisions in future cases and are constrained on what they can communicate. “Unless one has been through litigation, it is difficult to grasp what judges do,” Hawkins said. “Hence, the importance of your role as firsthand observers of judges in our culture. “. . .In the coming months, there will be political rhetoric about particular courts or why particular judges should not be retained. Further, as the fall elections get closer, Bar members will be asked by voters in their communities to give their views on particular courts and whether particular judges should be retained. As you respond to such questions and evaluate political comments about the court, I urge you to reflect on what judges do — including their fundamental role in upholding the rule of law. In the process, I urge you to share your perspective on what judges do and what factors should be considered when determining whether a judge merits retention.” An independent judiciary is not only threatened by political attacks, but by financial cutbacks, Hawkins said. Florida’s courts have already been stung by the consequences of funding shortages: hiring freezes, staff layoffs, and increased filing fees in recent years. Last year, Chief Justice Charles Canady had to go hat in hand to the governor for multi-million-dollar advances to ward off the real threat of outright closures. As State Courts Administrator Lisa Goodner has said, she can’t make people work if she can’t pay them. While Florida’s court funding crisis has been rescued with greater stabilization and less reliance on volatile foreclosure filing fees, Hawkins emphasizes the Bar can never become complacent because there are dire consequences when serious funding shortages endanger the ability of courts to provide access to justice for all people. With dramatic cuts in funding to the Florida Bar Foundation, because of low interest rates on trust accounts, low-income and indigent people are in danger of losing that access to justice. “Given their historic role as the protectors of the least advantaged in our nation, the courts have rightly been called ‘Society’s Emergency Room.’ And never is that title so warranted as in times of economic distress. The same recession that has led legislatures to reduce access to our justice system has obviously increased the numbers of people who need it,” said an ABA Task Force on the Preservation of Justice. ABA President Bill Robinson has invited The Florida Bar, and all state and voluntary bars, to join in a national dialog on raising awareness of just how vital the courts are to people’s everyday lives in resolving disputes and carrying out justice. The American way of life depends on open and accessible courts. Law Day, officially May 1, is an opportunity to educate the community about the courts, the law, and our rights. Voluntary bar associations in Florida are busy planning special Law Day celebrations to do just that. Among the plans for Law Day celebrations are: Sorraya Solages, president of the Dade County Bar Association Young Lawyers Section, described week-long plans for Law Day activities, including a community fair to educate the public about the courts, why access to everyone is crucial, and to raise awareness about the budget crisis. The Young Lawyers Section of the Hispanic Bar Association of Central Florida is making plans for Law Day 2012. “Our goal is to join forces with local judges and attorneys to hold an interactive session about the function of the court system in the United States,” said Jessica Gonzalez-Monge. “The session will be directed towards teens and/or pre-teens. Ultimately, our objective is to enhance their knowledge and interest in the U.S. court system and law as a whole.”

<urn:uuid:3170584a-bb35-4580-9837-98adc873555f>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.floridabar.org/__85256AA9005B9F25.nsf/0/4A9927908DCFE68E852579AA004ADF58?OpenDocument

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

The GM North American Heritage Collection is made up of approximately 600 cars and trucks. Many reflect GM's industry firsts, like the first electric self-starter, used on the 1912 Cadillac, the first production V8 that powered the 1915 Cadillac, and the first air bag, found on 1974 Buick, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile models. Others are technological experiments like the first American gas turbine-powered car, Firebird 1, or the world's first hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle, the 1966 Electro-van. Concept cars and special-interest styling/performance one-offs are part of the mix, along with significant race cars and milestone production vehicles such as the first production 1966 Olds Toronado featuring General Motors' front-wheel drive. The GM Heritage Collection is ever-changing. New vehicles are constantly being obtained to fully represent GM's product story of the past 100+ years.

<urn:uuid:44c9b33a-dd24-4665-b4d1-bcb64fe79ac4>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.gmheritagecenter.com/gm-vehicle-collection/index.html

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

- music theory - making new creations ProsDesign is outstanding, and writing music is beyond fun with these guys at your fingertips. ConsPlay can become repetitive, and kids may tire of it eventually. Bottom LineMusically minded kids will go wild here, creating compelling pieces of music in minutes, and beginners will feel like pros right away. Graphite Expert Review Common Sense Graphite Reviewer It's SO fun. That's all there is to it. Kids will get addicted to shaping songs, and the chill posse of animated beatboxers couldn't be better designed. While it feels like playing, there's definitely learning tucked in behind the music-making. Kids who love experimenting here can move on to other, more complex digital programs. Aside from a short intro video outlining the basics, there's not a ton of instruction. Songs can be recorded and saved, and there's a solid community of Incredibox fans out there. Incredibox is a music creation website that allows users to put together songs from a collection of pre-created musical elements. A handful of sleepy-eyed hipsters become your very own beatboxing crew with Incredibox's simple interface. Beginning with a single character on-screen, users assign him a particular musical element, which he will repeat. Drag and drop from a bar of options -- Effects, Beats, Melodies, Chorus, and Voices. Another dude appears next to the first, and you choose a sound for him, and so on, until the screen is full and you've created a rich song. No sound is "wrong"; they all fit into the ever-developing song.Read More Read Less Kids can learn to put together a great-sounding song by experimenting with 20 different beats, melodies, and other musical elements. They'll make decisions about what sounds best, and create mood and atmosphere by adding or subtracting certain elements from a composition. Discovering where a single sound fits into the whole of a song, kids will gain an understanding of the combinations it takes to make all kinds of music. Layering these song elements is crazy fun, and kids will love playing around with this site (and although the never-ending jam might get a little repetitive to parental ears, it's better than Barney). The site's a bit difficult to navigate at first, but after a little poking around, everything makes sense. The black-and-white characters are modern and funny to watch as they make their musical contributions. Creativity and experimentation are at the forefront. In terms of musical composition, the tools are somewhat limited. Kids won't be able to take the learning experience very far; however, they will get to see how simple sounds come together to create a dynamic piece of music.Read More Read Less Incredibox would make a great warm-up activity for a choir, band, or any sort of music appreciation class. Heck, it's so fun, any classroom could benefit from a few musical rounds. Kids can easily sing along or improvise to the simple tunes (very easy to harmonize with) that come from Incredibox combinations. Incredibox appears to be a totally fun place to play around, but it's teaching music and composition skills at the same time. Score! You may go crazy hearing your kids' somewhat repetitive songs, but they will love this beatboxing crew.Read More Read Less See how teachers are using Incredibox Field Notes Field Notes are reviews by teachers for teachers. In Field Notes, teachers rate products as well as share their hands-on experience with using the products in the classroom. Teacher ReviewsWrite Your Own Review - Engaging game for young kids...Incredibox is incredible!5November 25, 2014 - Incredibox is a tool to help students visualize how music is layered.Jeremy R. Liberty High School Glen Daniel, WV2July 15, 2014 - Create and remix your own beats in a visual and engaging wayCraig L. San Diego County Office Of Education San Diego, CA2June 6, 2014 - Entertaining way to teach students about creating patterns in music.Jennifer K. North Schuylkill Elementary School Ashland, PA3May 8, 2014

<urn:uuid:cab3d591-3d8b-4c26-a4d4-549a494614d8>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.graphite.org/website/incredibox

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Web Fonts Performance: Making Pretty, Fast The use of web fonts is surging. Just over the last year, the use of web fonts has doubled from ~6% to over ~12% according to the HTTP Archive. In the same time, Google Web Fonts has seen a 10x in the amount of requests, recently crossing 1B font views per day across 100M+ web pages. And there are no signs of slowdown in the adoption. Historically, web fonts have not had a great story when it comes to performance, but this is definitely changing fast: better compression formats, improved browser handling, unicode and character subsetting, and the list goes on. Not to mention the many accessibility, indexing, translation, file size, zoom and high DPI device friendly benefits of rendering text as, well, text! To discuss this, and more, we sat down with David Kuettel from the Google Web Fonts team, for an in-depth look at web fonts. Serving a web font is deceiving simple: download the file, put it on the local server, and we're done? Turns out, it is much more interesting than that. First, there are four different formats (woff, ttf, eot, svg), and not one of them provides universal adoption. To have a consistent experience across all platforms we have to provide multiple formats. In the long run, the goal is to have a single, well supported format, but in the meantime we have to support all the legacy browsers. Next, the font file itself can be massive: Arial Unicode, which supports nearly all languages, weighs in at over 22MB! Of course, an average page does not need the entire unicode character set, hence we need a mechanism to restrict the font to a character subset (e.g. latin, or cyrillic only). Open Sans, which is one of the most popular Google web fonts, provides support for 20+ languages, and comes in at 217kB total, but only 36kB when restricted to latin subset. Sidenote: an average font served by Google Web Fonts today is ~35kB. <!-- Serve Open Sans font family, but only the latin character set --> <link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans&subset=latin" rel="stylesheet" /> Next, the font file size can be further reduced by eliminating font hinting meta-data for platforms that do not support it. With that out of the way, we can apply optimized compression algorithms for a ~15% win over simple gzip compression. With WOFF 2.0 in the pipeline, we should see another 30%+ compression improvement in the foreseeable future. Put all of these optimizations together, and it translates to 30+ static variants for each web font, custom tailored to each platform and user agent. So much for serving one file! Not to mention the dynamic optimizations, such as character subsetting, which allows you to specify the individual characters to meet your exact needs for a small headline or a similar use case. <!-- Serve Inconsolata font family, but only provide "H", "e", "l", "o" characters --> <link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata&text=Hello" rel="stylesheet" /> All Google web fonts are free and open-source, which enables very effective cross-site caching: Open Sans served on this site, is the same Open Sans served across 1M+ other domains using the font. In fact, the top 40 Google web fonts are shared by 100K+ domains, and top 300 by 10K+. In other words, using a popular web font will likely translate to a browser cache hit for the font, even if this is your first time visiting my site (which uses Open Sans). The wider the adoption, the higher the likelihood of a cache hit, the better the performance! Let's dissect a simple example of how a Google web font is served: The CSS stylesheet provided by Google Web Fonts is a dynamic stylesheet which specifies the optimal file format for the visitors platform and browser - as determined by the combination of the optimizations we discussed earlier. This stylesheet is cached for 24 hours. Inside of the stylesheet is a URL reference to the web font resource itself. Why not inline the web font? Well, given the growing popularity of web fonts, the bet is that you already have a copy in your cache - no request is better than no request. Instead of storing N copies of Open Sans, one for each site, the browser maintains a single copy across all sites. Leveraging the 24 hour CSS cache, and the one year cache for the web font itself allows quick and easy rollout of updates while optimizing for a fast browsing experience - vast majority of page renders will require zero requests for the fonts. The combination of a global CDN, optimized file formats, and a shared and global cache pay high dividends when it comes to performance. Web Fonts are Here to Stay Web fonts are here to stay, and that is a good thing - yes, even for performance. Better accessibility, zoom and high DPI friendly, optimized compression, and improved handling from all browser vendors are all working in favor of growing adoption. Not to mention the ability to combine web fonts with CSS3 for some spectacular visuals. Having said that, serving web fonts definitely has its gotchas. If you are going the DIY route, then make sure you support all of the latest formats, optimize your fonts, serve the appropriate versions, and keep up with the latest developments - lots of things to get right! For the rest of us, a web font provider like Typekit, or Google Web Fonts is a much better bet.

<urn:uuid:b0f7ec16-0ec7-4423-b9ee-2742594b23ea>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.igvita.com/2012/09/12/web-fonts-performance-making-pretty-fast/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+igvita+%28igvita.com%29&utm_content=feed

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

The following essay was adapted from the author's keynote address at for the Future of Minority Studies Summer Institute Colloquium, at Stanford University last month. Last week, Scott McLemee explored the colloquium in Intellectual Affairs. Preamble: What Keeps Chancellors Up at Night? Two years ago I attended a conference of presidents in which among the many panel discussions on American Competitiveness (“The World is Flat” ), Federal Science Funding, The Future of the Humanities, and the like, was one panel entitled: “What Keeps Presidents and Chancellors Up at Night?” Expecting to hear a great deal about the arms race in intercollegiate athletics -- absolutely a genuine concern -- I was rather surprised to hear instead about multiculturalism and what might be called its associated “culture wars.” Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised, as there had been so many high profile examples, from the public’s reaction to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assigning the Qur’an as its first year shared reading to the media coverage of strife in Middle East studies at Columbia University. Moreover, I had just spent six years defending affirmative action at Michigan and three years in the midst of debates at Illinois on the campus mascot, Chief Illiniwek. Anyone in these positions long enough knows well that universities are like sponges for society’s tensions and that one way or another something will erupt on every campus that reflects the fraying of multicultural community and the state of “civil” society. Whether it is in athletics or the student media, in the classroom or in campus organizations, tensions over religion, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, are powder kegs on our multicultural campuses -- as they are of course in our cities and towns. As one of my colleagues noted, conflicts, such as occurred at Duke recently, can happen on any one of our campuses in one form or another. At Syracuse, for example, we are overcoming the impact on our campus of the production of an entertainment television show, by a student-run station, that used caricatures of various groups as “humor.” As at Duke, when we go beyond finger pointing, these incidents alert us to our communal responsibilities, and to the work still to be done on our campuses and in our connected communities. For not being surprised doesn’t mean we can stop talking about it. There is a crying need to take these kinds of incidents -- and they are indeed widespread -- seriously as symptoms of a society that is not comfortable with pluralism. I suggest that we address this state of affairs with the same deep thinking that we give to understanding how to respond to our increasingly “flat world,” for it is as much in our national interest. In fact, I suggest that thoughtful analyses of group dynamics and communal responsibility in a diverse society may actually help us better face the “flat world.” Instead of competitively fighting between ourselves for a shrinking piece of the pie -- whether in higher education or in our connected communities -- shouldn’t we learn to live and work together and find innovations that enlarge the pie? Wouldn’t that get us closer to fulfilling the agenda of universal human rights that lies at the foundation of a just and effective society? Taking Groups Seriously Many people’s reaction to these “culture wars” is to suggest that we all just turn our backs on groups altogether -- as when people call for a color-blind or culture-blind or gender-blind society. Not only do I see this as naïve (in the face of pervasive group dynamics and tensions), but also as missing the constructive role that groups must play in promoting a social justice agenda and building an effective multicultural community. Taking groups seriously can be constructive both for those who are on the “outside” trying to get in to a particular community and for those who are more securely established as insiders. This is especially true in a world full of insiders and outsiders -- and we all occupy both positions -- in which as outsiders we could benefit from seeing more personal possibilities (on the inside) and as insiders we could contribute by taking more social responsibility (for those outside). And, like it or not, we need to build effective multicultural communities to be competitive and just, so we better start taking groups seriously. We first need to recognize some “facts” of social life and the pervasive disparities in our pluralistic, insider-outsider world, and find an avenue to constructively confront them. Here is where it helps to know something about the psychology of multiculturalism (and of insiders and outsiders) and to work with it, rather than remain oblivious to its powerful impact. For, in the midst of this fraying of community, and widening of the gap between those who belong and those who don’t, it is easy to miss the fundamental interdependence of individuals and community. Easy to miss the truth in the oft repeated notion that if we don’t all hang together we will all hang separately. So, in the hopes of starting this discussion, I turn now, as a social psychologist and educator, but also as a chancellor in charge of a multicultural campus community, to consider why and how we go wrong in our group dynamics, and what we might do differently to face our challenges head on. The Social Embedding of Individuality To see how the social embedding of individual human potential -- which I will abbreviate from now on as “individuality” -- works, it is important to start from the premise that self-construals -- who we think we are and what we see as possible for our selves -- matter. But, we do not think about our selves in a social vacuum, either. Our self-construals are embedded within and shaped by critical cultural practices and social organizations that constitute a matrix of opportunities and constraints in our daily lives. Over the long course of history, for example, numerous different cultures and societies have expressed more concern about the educational and career paths of boys than girls. These self-construals are also embedded in a matrix of critical interpersonal relations through which we garner diagnostic input from other people about our selves. Other people serve as sources of social comparison, including those whom we take on as models or idols. Importantly, other people play a fundamental role in legitimating our selves -- as we are now and might possibly become -- especially those with some power over us, but also sometimes those peers who provide consensus information about similar experiences. Social group memberships, particularly those organized around gender, race/ethnicity, religion, sexuality, disability, and nationality, constitute critical influences in most cultures on both the matrix of opportunities and constraints and the input received from others. Of course, individuals personalize their social identities (contrary to an essentialist view of identity politics), by accepting or rejecting group-based constraints and feedback, but nevertheless, their impact is pervasive. Claude Steele’s elegant demonstrations of stereotype vulnerability document the pervasiveness of these group-based dynamics. For example, as he has shown in laboratory experiments at Stanford, the performance of high achieving women students, including those who consider themselves as analytically smart, can be undermined by simply and subtly invoking gender stereotypes with an off-hand comment about the test measuring analytic ability. There is nothing overt or “in your face” about these experimental manipulations, and certainly nothing that should over-ride a student’s own acknowledged individual performance history. Yet, it is hard to act as an individual, when the “group” lurks in the background. And beyond the laboratory, our groups often don’t just lurk quietly in the background. This is a media culture in which there is relatively constant attention to and (perhaps inadvertent) promotion of group-based stereotypes of all sorts, in the sports and entertainment arenas, in politics, and, yes, even in the academy. Consider, for example, the flood of media coverage after Larry Summers questioned the capacity of women and girls to be stars in science and mathematics. Even, as in his case, when the marketing of group-based stereotypes comes unintentionally, those who are “marked” by highly visible and/or contested identities find them hard to ignore. Few women scientists had a choice of whether to be scrutinized under those conditions -- their individuality was swept into a tidal pool of issues defined by their “group.” “Insiders” and “Outsiders” and the Social Embedding of Individuality However, the social embedding of individuality varies importantly as a function of the “location” of one’s significant groups -- with respect to status, security, and power -- in a particular community. Those whose groups are less well-entrenched in a community -- “outsiders” -- will be more marked by and connected to their group(s) than will “insiders.” By contrast “insiders” operate more easily as “individuals” and feel both less connection to and less identified by their groups. In turn, this different psychology of insiders and outsiders is readily apparent in different attitudes toward communal responsibility in a diverse and multicultural community. That is, as insiders, we take a great deal, cognitively and socially, for granted in daily life. We engage in cognitive egocentrism, using, for example, our own experience and assumptions as a road-map for making judgments about others, rarely taking into account that they may be operating with a different matrix of opportunities and constraints, and with less of a sense of individuality. Most specifically, we underplay the level of scrutiny and constraint that is felt by an outsider when his or her group is even subtly or minimally invoked, not to mention derided. The degree to which outsiders’ identities are wrapped up in their group(s) seems almost irrational to an insider, prompting them to question the authenticity of outsider reactions. Frequently, for example, an outsider will be described as “over-reacting,” or being too “pc.” It is extremely difficult for an insider to imagine their individuality so intertwined with their group(s). They simply don’t live a life of “guilt by group association,” and so they are skeptical of and not particularly empathetic to those who do. In turn, by failing to recognize these constraints on individuality and on the freedom to dissociate from the group, insiders miss a lot about the social life of outsiders, and this is a critical impediment to interpersonal trust. By contrast, the psychology of the insider at least with respect to his or her “visible” groups -- such as race or ethnicity or gender -- is much less explicit or “marked.” For the insider, groups are more about voluntary association, such that they can be held at an “arms length,” especially if something goes wrong. Since, as insiders, we each view ourselves largely as individual actors, it is relatively easy, in good conscience, to distance from the group’s mistakes or the culture of an organization. There is little or no “guilt by group association.” Others may have made a mistake, but “if I didn’t touch it, I didn’t do anything.” Moreover, the insider remains ever on guard against any ill-informed accusations that would implicate him or her in some unfair guilt by association with the (mistakes of others in the) group. This psychology is, of course, perfectly rational and fair from an individualistic perspective, but not terribly good for building a community in which only some people feel disproportionately “marked” by their groups, unable to just walk away. Surely, we all want to avoid unfair individual blame, but at the same time we should feel some communal responsibility when an organization or group to which we belong ends up hurting others. This should be the case even when no harm was intended and you can’t imagine why they are hurt. This “arms length” relationship to group behavior is another critical impediment to facilitating a broad sense of fairness and interdependence in a diverse community. “Epistemic Privilege” of the Outsider While the insider’s gaze is generally away from the group, the outsider instead looks right at it with, what Satya Mohanty and others refer to as the “epistemic privilege of the oppressed.” Outsiders typically see how their group marks them, and how therefore social location matters for what they can do and how they can expect to be treated. Largely, this clarity of vision comes from being in a perpetual state of guardedness and uncertainty, examining the social landscape, always prepared for some group-based challenge. By contrast, the challenges faced as an insider come less routinely, and relate more to individual comparisons or interactions, one on one, with peers, competitors, idols, and the like. What insiders rarely face head on is some group-based challenge -- direct or subtle -- that they see as constraining who they are or what they (as individuals) can do. In other words, the outsider lives with the discomfort of epistemic privilege and the insider lives with the comfort of cognitive egocentrism, often oblivious to the effects of social location on others. And, the epistemic privilege of the outsider does not raise the probability of being heard by the insider. The outsider always has a “theory” about social location in need of some validation. Like any theory, there are multiple avenues for validation. The outsider can spend time with other group members, sharing experiences and insights that provide some validation by consensus. Many of us remember the “consciousness raising” groups of the women’s movement as just such experiences. And we see powerful examples of the importance of consensus information in group affirmation all the time, including, for example, the social support that junior faculty give each other, the importance of professional identity group organizations (such as black journalists or women engineers), and the theme houses on college campuses. These consensus-building experiences are very important and should never be under-estimated as part of the constructive role that groups can play when we take them seriously. However, precisely because the insiders in the community will likely remain blind to or skeptical of the conclusions of such discussions, other avenues of validation are needed. The outsider needs to be heard beyond the group, and the insider needs to listen to other groups. How do we create a context for such inter-group dialogue in which the guardedness of the outsider can lessen and the insider can go beyond the egocentrism of individuality. As insiders, we each can listen -- and move toward communal responsibility -- when we get past an individualized framework to see the powerful role of groups in social life. When insiders begin to acknowledge that outsiders have little or no choice but to be seen through their groups then suspicion often evaporates, and the potential for collaboration and community grows. This is when multicultural education is at its best, and when colleges and universities can play a very constructive role in turning the tables of epistemic privilege. In this regard, it is worth repeating that contrary to an essentialist version of identity-politics, we are all both insiders and outsiders in our lives. That is, the experiences of group-based vulnerability, on one hand, and individuality, on the other, are shared, even if they are distributed differently for different groups or individuals. This is not to say that some dimensions of social organization, such as race/ethnicity or gender in our society, don’t powerfully tip the scale toward constraint over opportunity, group over individual. It is simply to say that the ground is ripe, even for those frequently on the inside, to engage attention to social inequality, in part by turning the tables on whose insights matter and who is listening. Giving Voice to Outsiders and Asking Insiders to Listen But, how do we do this in the midst of inter-group competition and suspicion? How do we do it when our campuses and our communities more broadly are quite divided, with many insiders and outsiders, and two strikingly different psychologies about group life? I would point to two types of multicultural “projects” that can help bridge these two psychologies, while also creating more educational opportunity and more scholarly innovations that matter to the world. One project is internally-focused on constructing opportunities for intra- and inter-group dialogue that capitalize on the relevance of group-based vulnerabilities for virtually everyone. The other project is outwardly focused on connecting the campus -- and its diverse group of scholars and students -- to our broader communities, capitalizing in that case on faculty interest in public scholarship and students’ interests in volunteerism. In each project, however, the central ingredient to success will be to take multicultural groups seriously, unpacking rather than covering up disparities in voice and opportunity and building communal responsibility. As to the “internal” project of facilitating intra- and inter-group dialogue that address social inequalities head on, this work is, of course, at the core of the expertise of those gathered here and central to the agenda of the Future of Minorities Studies. In this work, and I would point to the curriculum developed at the University of Michigan by Patricia Gurin and her colleagues as a prototype -- there is a commitment to exposing inter-group inequality through group-based experiences that individuals can share. So, for example, women in a dialogue on gender might find consensus support for their experience of not always being listened to by men. At the same time, the men in the group might begin to listen to these observations and take them seriously, even if they believe there was no “intent” to discriminate. Sometimes, the tables turn in a dialogue, so that the experience of being “marked” by one’s group can be felt even by those who more often than not operate with more individuality in their lives. These moments of “epistemic privilege” for the insider -- when our own group-based vulnerability intersects with the consensually expressed views of the outsiders -- can make us more receptive to seeing the situation of outsiders in a new and more empathic light. When the tables turn, common ground, respect and shared responsibility emerge. At that point, it is also critical to relate these personal experiences to the pervasive social inequalities that attach to some groups -- and therefore to their members -- in particularly powerful ways in our society, and therefore also on our campuses. Through this mixture of the personal and the general, in narratives and in empirical work, it is possible to begin to unpack how for some people, there is often “guilt by group association,” whereas for others, communal responsibility is easy to keep at “arm’s length.” To make a real difference, however, these dialogues on the power of groups and the effects of social location -- the different psychologies of outsiders and insiders -- must reach far across a campus. While there is little doubt that some group-based vulnerabilities are more pernicious and pervasive than others -- and certainly race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability fall in this category -- the framework here can be applied broadly and in helpful ways. Many campuses, for example, worry about the kinds of mentoring given to their junior faculty -- in whom they have a substantial investment for the future. I would suggest that this same analysis can be applied constructively to the experiences of untenured versus tenured faculty, and especially if at the same time one considers the issues confronting women and junior faculty of color. Taking this approach one step further, I believe that academic leaders -- including chancellors, deans and department chairs -- can profit from a better understanding of the outsider experiences of particular groups of faculty, staff, and students, and particular disciplines, such as minority studies, for example. It is not at all uncommon on campuses to see the tell-tale signs of insiders and outsiders, each with “good intentions,” talking past each other -- operating with different expectations from different psychologies. We can do something about this if we take on this multicultural campus project. Connecting to Communities and Turning the Epistemic Table The complementary project that I see for universities is an external one, in which we forge outward-looking connections to diverse communities, working on the pressing issues of our times -- from failing schools to environmental degradation to inter-religious conflict. When universities start collaborating with their connected communities (at home and abroad) on the most pressing issues of the day, I have seen the tables turn in ways that benefit both our innovations and the quality of our multicultural community. Why does this happen? I believe the answer lies first in the nature of the problems to be solved now and the connected question of who becomes the expert. It is hard, for example, to make progress on environmental sustainability in an urban ecosystem without addressing questions of environmental justice, and whose voice do we need to listen to in that case? How do we tackle the urban epidemic of diabetes, even if we develop a better understanding through genomics of the disease itself, without contextualizing its spread within the broader questions of race disparities in health? Wouldn’t we understand the genesis of inter-religious conflict better if we engaged with refugee communities in our own cities and towns? It is virtually impossible to find a problem of major importance to our society in which the insights of a diverse, multicultural community would not be very valuable to the solutions. Additionally, there is a growing cadre of faculty -- including many women and faculty of color -- extending well beyond the social sciences into the arts, humanities, sciences and professions, who are increasingly doing scholarly work that matters to communities. This engagement can also capitalize on the robust presence of service-learning curriculum and volunteerism on campuses. For oddly, interest in service-learning and volunteerism is very high, despite the individualism and detachment, even communal “irresponsibility,” that I described earlier. This engagement of students and faculty in community-based work, and work around the world, can provide a launching pad for sustained attention to questions of social inequality and multicultural community. It also does something else dramatic. It turns the tables on who has voice, and who can benefit by listening. It reverses roles and the epistemic privilege -- perhaps even its enlightening discomfort -- spreads to a different set of actors. As George Sanchez has suggested, those who often feel relegated to the outside of our campus communities, such as faculty and students of color, emerge with more expertise and authentic voice in this agenda, as they often begin with more “standing” in the surrounding community and on the issues at hand. The social/academic landscape begins to change when the insights of outsiders -- either from the community outside or on the academic margins -- begin to be heard. This reversal of perspective (or social location) not only prepares everyone for doing the work of the nation, but as importantly it shines some light on inequality. It shows both the strength of diverse groups and cultures and constraints on them. In turn, this is a lesson with powerful ramifications back on campus. As we engage with our communities, we also recognize the stresses of the broader world as they are “brought to” the campus, and then feel some fundamental responsibility to address them as part of building a productive campus community. Rewarding Scholarship in Action And when we take that responsibility seriously, then new scholarly and educational vistas open too. At Syracuse, for example, our academic vision is based on the notion of "Scholarship in Action," where interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students engage with communities of experts on issues that matter, such as disabilities, shrinking cities, failing schools, neighborhood entrepreneurship, religious pluralism, or environmental sustainability and the urban ecosystem. These collaborations, like our Partnership for Better Education with the Syracuse City Schools, create a shared mission that breaks down barriers, between campus and community, and embeds the traditional diversity agenda within the academic work of the institution, and in turn embeds that work in the public good. To make the Scholarship in Action agenda work, however, we must change our reward structure for faculty who do this collaborative work. We must, for example, support faculty members who want to do public scholarship, with results that may be published in academic, peer-reviewed journals, but may also result in network news specials, digital modules for public libraries, or museum exhibitions. We must find the right incentives for a diverse faculty to engage with communities of experts on innovation that matters, and to that end, many institutions, including Syracuse, are re-evaluating their tenure and promotion criteria. A tenure-team initiative, organized by Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a 70-institution consortium, is gathering best practices on how to promote standards of excellence in public scholarship. Momentum is growing to take public scholarship seriously. In my view, investing in excellence in public scholarship in our multicultural communities is a pathway toward bringing questions of diversity and diverse students and faculty from the margins of our institution to the center. As we work on innovation that matters -- from the science needed to remediate environmental pollution in our cities and waterways to the art that gives voice to refugees resettling in America -- we learn to value diversity and the insights of diverse others. We also learn to listen harder to each other, dropping a bit of the egocentric covering of our own positions. We see the observations of our peers and colleagues within the broader social landscape in which they are shaped, and we take more responsibility for changing that landscape. We come to see that multicultural progress will be shared, but only if we also take groups seriously. Multiculturalism, Universalism, and the Lessons of Citizenship At the end of the day, the hope of these two kinds of projects -- internal multicultural dialogue and external multicultural collaboration -- is that we all come to value diverse groups, not just diverse individuals. We will do this by expanding the lesson of citizenship from one purely about individual rights to one about connectivity and responsibility -- and the social embedding of individuality. We’ll learn that we are all in this together, and we can’t just make creating opportunity someone else’s project. If this works, then I believe that, at least in this regard, presidents will sleep at night, and, more importantly, universities will make a difference in promoting social justice and universal human rights. Nancy Cantor is chancellor of Syracuse University. Her keynote address in full is available online. A video of the address is available on the institute's Web site. The last episode of the HBO series "Deadwood" ran on Sunday evening, bringing to an end one of the most unusual and absorbing experiments in historical storytelling ever attempted on the small screen. The network’s decision not to continue the program is understandable (it was very expensive to film) if by no means easy to forgive. Set in a mining camp in the Dakota Territory during the late 1870s, "Deadwood" belongs to the sub-genre of the “revisionist Western” -- a skeptical retelling of how the frontier was settled, one grittier and less prone to melodrama than B-movie versions. Among the people finding their way into town are historical figures who have long since become part of the Western mythology: Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, the brothers Earp. Most of the other major characters can also be found in chronicles of the real-life town of Deadwood. A few others were imagined into existence by David Milch, the show’s creator -- but not quite ex nihilo. I’m pretty sure that Alma Garrett, the genteel widow who sets up Deadwood’s bank, wandered into the show from one of Henry James’s notebooks. The refined sociopath Francis Wolcott -- the (fictional) geologist employed by the (very real) mining tycoon George Hearst -- might well have felt at home in William S. Burroughs’s transgressive Western novel The Place of Dead Roads. And while the unctuous hotel proprietor and mayor E. B. Farnum is based on an actual person who lived in the South Dakota town, he also comes by way of Charles Dickens. E.B. is the American cousin of Uriah Heep, if ever there were one. Such literary allusions might all exist solely in my imagination, of course. But probably not. Milch, the show’s executive producer and head writer, was a student of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks at Yale University in the 1960s. Interviews reveal someone whose mind turns easily to questions of literary form and verbal texture. The scripts Milch has written for television -- in the early years of "NYPD Blue," for example -- exhibit an interest in how a group of people who live and work together create an argot capable of infinite subtleties of inflection, depending on the circumstance. His years around Warren and Brooks (founding fathers of the old-fashioned New Criticism) must have drilled into Milch the idea that literary works are characterized by irony, tension, and paradox. He seems to have taken this insight to the next step -- listening for how those formal principles can shape the rhythms of ordinary conversation. With "Deadwood," the Milchian penchant for conveying the stylization of speech broke new ground -- thanks to HBO’s freedom from the conventional restraints of broadcast television. The characters delivered intricate arias of Victorian syntax and repetitive obscenity. It sounded like some hitherto unimaginable blend of Walter Pater and gangster rap. It was often exhilarating, if sometimes farfetched. You felt awe at the power of the actors to memorize their lines, let alone speak them. The combination lent itself to parody but it is difficult to imagine its like ever being heard on television again. Milch’s tendency toward stylization bothered some people, who found it mannered and arch. I don’t agree, but will leave the show’s defense in more capable hands. Instead, let me use this chance to discuss another element of the language of "Deadwood" that has passed largely without comment, although it usually proves far more bracing than the familiar obscenities. I mean the epithets. The women who work in the saloons of Deadwood are called “whores.” Nobody blinks at the word, least of all the women so addressed. The Sioux Indians are more often referred to as “dirt worshippers.” The town’s Chinese laborers live in “Chink Alley.” One of the owners of the hardware store is the entrepeneur Sol Star, better known simply as “the Jew.” (He teaches his girlfriend Trixie, a former whore, how to do bookkeeping. In moments of frustration she calls it a “Jew skill.”) A black drifter arrives in town wearing an old Civil War uniform. If he has a given name, it isn’t mentioned twice. Everyone refers to him as the Nigger General -- in part, because that is what he calls himself. Often enough the words are used as weapons. But sometimes the insults flow so casually that the offense barely has time to register. And there are moments when they carry no more charge than a “damn” would. It is all a matter of context. But it is a context in which racism, for example, is naked and unashamed. "Deadwood" takes this for granted as a fact about the world it is presenting -- a reality scarcely more worthy of comment than the mud in the streets. One citizen of Deadwood in particular is prone to loud and resentment-fueled tirades about the honor that is due him as a white man. You see that most other characters find him disgusting. But that isn’t a matter of his attitudes, so much as his demeanor. After all, he is universally known as Steve the Drunk. The language proves jarring -- for the television audience, anyway -- precisely because it is treated as ordinary. The charge of symbolic violence can be taken for granted, just like the fistfight taking place out in the thoroughfare at two in the morning. Its cumulative effect is powerful and eye-opening. (Or maybe “ear-opening,” rather.) While reading Eric Rauchway’s new bookBlessed Among Nations -- the subject of last week’s column – I found that the ambience of "Deadwood" was almost always at the back of my mind. But only after interviewing Rauchway did it occur to me to ask if he watched the program. Not surprisingly, he did. I asked if he had any thoughts on the show, now that it was winding down. “There's an overall story arc of the transition from wilderness to civilization,” he responded, “and the major plot lines have to do with the circumstances under which civic institutions evolve. But it's not Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier – or if it is, it's a decidedly modified Turner.” It might be worth mentioning here that, of all the historians of the Progressive era, Turner has probably had the most contradictory posthumous career. It’s been a while since any scholar wholeheartedly endorsed his thesis about the closing of the American frontier. But it remains a landmark -- if only the kind used by later generations for target practice -- and I doubt a non-historian can watch "Deadwood" for very long without reinventing some approximation of Turner’s notion that the national character was shaped down to its cells by the Western edge of expansion. Anyway, as Rauchway was saying, before I so digressively interrupted.... “There's some evidence that [the show’s characters] are safety-valve types. They're people who say, as Ellsworth does, that they might have "fucked up their lives flatter than hammered shit, but they're beholden to no human cocksucker".... But they're not, Turner-style, out there to get an opportunity to civilize themselves. Which is to say, they don't go West because only there can they get a patch of land and settle, Jeffersonian-like, into civilization.” Rather, people finding their way to the mining town are looking for a new start -- often because the economy has destroyed their other options. “In several conversations on 'Deadwood',” notes Rauchway, “we've been told that these people have bumped into each other in other boom towns, before those booms went bust, and now their predilections have brought them here. And we can infer that soon they'll move on again. If they're the advance agents of civilization, they're doing that work unwillingly.” And the civilization they create reflects that restlessness. The first two of "Deadwood"’s three seasons told a story about people slowly -- almost unwittingly -- establishing a social contract. A swarm of disconnected and sometimes violent individuals created a rough semblance of order (with the emphasis in “rough”). It was not so much a matter of coming to trust one another, as learning the limited utility of constant suspicion and fear. This past season led up to the town’s first election -- an initial step toward the eventual incorporation of the territory into the United States, proper. But that bit of progress only comes at the cost of sacrifice: the destruction of that order we have watched grow over time. A new regime emerges, now under the control of a consolidated mining operation. The final image of the series really did sum it up perfectly. It shows a man on his knees, scrubbing a pool of blood off the wooden floor. Another character, Johnny, has just asked for some reassuring words about the event that led to the giant stain. Johnny leaves, and the man with the brush gets back to work. "Wants me to tell him something pretty," he says. It's not a rebuke, exactly -- just a reminder that, as someone once put it, every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. "I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it." --Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph" On December 17, 2005, “Saturday Night Live” ran a skit by Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg called "Lazy Sunday," a rap video about going out on a "lazy Sunday" to see The Chronicles of Narnia and procuring some cupcakes with "bomb frostings" from the Magnolia Bakery in New York City. The rap touches on the logistics of getting to the theater on the Upper West Side: "Let's hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route./ I prefer Mapquest!/ That's a good one too./ Google Maps is the best!/ True that! Double true!/ 68th and Broadway./ Step on it, sucka!" Parnell and Samberg make it to the Magnolia for their cupcakes, go to a deli for more treats, and hide their junk food in a backpack for smuggling past movie security. They complain about the high movie prices at the box office ("You can call us Aaron Burr from the way we're dropping Hamiltons") and brag about participating in the pre-movie trivia quiz. Doesn't seem like much if you've never seen it, but for pure joie de vivre, and white suburban dorkiness, "Lazy Sunday" just can't be beat. What makes "Lazy Sunday" special, however, is how its original airing coincided with the birth of Internet video-sharing, enabling the two minute clip to be viewed millions of times on YouTube, a free service that hosts videos posted by users. In fact, the popularity of the clip on YouTube was so great that NBC forced the site to remove it several months later, citing copyright infringement. The prospect of its programming being net-jacked by Internet geeks and magnified through YouTube's powerful interface was just too much for NBC. I bring up "Lazy Sunday" to foreground my discussion of the pedagogical uses of YouTube because it sums up its spirit and helps us define the genre of video with which YouTube is most associated. Although YouTube is awash in clips from television and film, the sui generis YouTube video is the product of collaborative "lazy Sunday" moments when pals film each other or perform for the camera doing inane things like dancing, lip synching or making bottles of Diet Coke become volcanic after dropping Mentos candies in them. Parnell and Samberg's references to Internet tools and movie trivia, as well as their parody of rap, perfectly capture a zeitgeist in which all pleasures can be recreated, reinvented and repeated ad nauseam through the magic of the Web. As Sam Anderson describes it in Slate, YouTube is "an incoherent, totally chaotic accretion of amateurism -- pure webcam footage of the collective unconscious." Whatever you're looking for (except porn) can be found in this Borgesian hall of mirrors: videos of puppies, UFO footage, ghosts on film, musical memento mori about recently deceased celebrities, movie and documentary clips, real and faux video diaries, virtuoso guitar picking performances and all kinds of amateur films. In my case, the video that sold me on YouTube was "Where the Hell is Matt Harding Dancing Now?" -- a strangely uplifting video of a guy called Matt Harding who traveled around the world and danced in front of landmarks such as Macchu Picchu in Peru, Area 51 in the U.S., the head-shaped monoliths of Easter Island, and the Great Wall of China, among many others. OK, that's all nice, but what can YouTube do for professors, apart from giving them something to look at during their lunch breaks? Inside Higher Ed has reported on the ways in which YouTube is causing consternation among academics because it is being used by students to stage moments of guerilla theater in the classroom, record lectures without permission and ridicule their professors. Indeed, a search on YouTube for videos of professors can bring up disquieting clips of faculty behaving strangely in front of their students, like the professor who coolly walks over to a student who answers a ringing cell phone in class, politely asks for the device, and then violently smashes it on the floor before continuing on with his lecture as if nothing had happened. It could be staged (authenticity is more often than not a fiction on YouTube) but it is still disturbing. But I would like to argue for an altogether different take on YouTube, one centered on the ways in which this medium can enrich the learning experience of college students by providing video realia to accompany their textbooks, in-class documentaries and course lectures. Although I can't speak to the applicability of YouTube to every discipline, in what follows I make a case for how the service can be harnessed by professors in the humanities and social sciences. As a professor Latin American literature and culture, I often teach an introductory, third year course called Latin American Culture and Civilization in which students study history, literature and any other media that the instructor wishes to include in the course, such as music, film, comics and the visual arts. My version of the course emphasizes student engagement with foundational documents and writings that span all periods of Latin American history and that I have annotated for student use. One of the figures we study is President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose outsized political persona has made him a YouTube star. Apart from having my students watch an excerpt of his "Bush as sulfurous devil" speech at the United Nations, I assigned a series of animated cartoons prepared by the Venezuelan state to educate children about the Bolivarian constitution championed by Chávez. These cartoons allow students see the ways in which the legacy of the 19th-century Venezuelan Liberator, Simon Bolívar, remains alive today. The textual richness of these cartoons invites students to visually experience Bolivarian nationalism in a way that cannot be otherwise recreated in the classroom. It invites them to think critically about the ways in which icons such as Bolívar are creatively utilized to instill patriotism in children. In a similar vein, a Cuban cartoon about Cuba's founding father, José Martí, depicts how a child is transformed into the future champion of independence and social justice when he witnesses the horrors of slavery (this video has now been removed from YouTube). With regard to the Mexican Revolution, one of the most important units of the class, YouTube offers some fascinating period film of the revolutionary icons Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, and especially their deaths. Although I cannot say that these are visual texts that lend themselves to the kind of rich dialogue provoked by the aforementioned cartoons, they are nonetheless an engaging visual complement to readings, discussions and lectures. Another course in which YouTube has played a part in is my senior-level literature course on the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. It may seem farfetched to use Internet video in a poetry class, but in this case, YouTube offers several useful media clips. I have utilized film clips in which Neruda's poetry appears (such as Patch Adams and Truly, Madly, Deeply), as well as music videos of Latin American singers who use lyrics by Neruda. More than anything that I could say in class, these videos illustrate the reach and enduring quality of Neruda's poetry in Latin American and North American culture. This said, there are a surprising number of student-produced videos about Neruda on YouTube that are cringe-worthy, the "Lazy Sunday" versions of the poet and his poetry. These are quite fascinating in of themselves as instances in which young people use video to interpret and stage Neruda, in ways that might be set into dialogue with more literary and canonical constructions of his legacy, but I confess that I am not yet convinced of their pedagogical value. In this regard, the case of Neruda is not so different from that of other literary figures, such as Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Frost, who are also the subject of interesting home-made YouTube videos. What do we do, for example, with a Claymation film that recreates Frost's "The Road Not Taken"? I would argue that this film is interesting because it captures the banality of a certain canonical image or version of Robert Frost that is associated with self-congratulatory, folksy Hallmark Card moments. There are all kinds of video with classroom potential on YouTube. Consider, for example, one of YouTube's greatest stars, Geriatric1927, a 79 year-old Englishman whose video diaries document his memories of World War II, as well as of other periods of English history. Then there are the Michel Foucault-Noam Chomsky debates, in which Foucault sketches out, in animated, subtitled conversation, the key arguments of seminal works such as Discipline and Punish. There's an excellent short slide show of period caricatures of Leon Trotsky, news reels and lectures about the Spanish Civil War, rare footage of Woody Guthrie performing, Malcolm X at the University of Oxford, clips of Chicana activist Dolores Huerta discussing immigration reform and a peculiar musical montage, in reverse, about Che Guevara, beginning with images and reels of his death and ending with footage of him as a child. Don't let me tell you what you can find; seek and ye shall receive. YouTube is not necessary for good teaching, in the same way that wheeling a VCR into the classroom is not necessary, or bringing in PowerPoint slide shows with images, or audio recordings. YouTube simply makes more resources available to teachers than ever before, and allows for better classroom management. Rather than use up valuable time in class watching a film or video clips, such media can be assigned to students as homework in the same way that reading is assigned. However, to make it work, faculty should keep in mind that the best way to deliver this content is through a course blog. YouTube provides some simple code that bloggers can use to stream the videos on a blog, rather than having to watch them within the YouTube interface. This can be important because we may not want students to have to deal with advertisements or the obnoxious comments that many YouTube users leave on the more controversial video pages. On my free wordpress.com course blog, I can frame YouTube videos in a way that makes them look more professional and attractive ( sample page here). At this point, courseblogging is so easy that even the least technologically-minded can learn how to use services like blogger or wordpress to post syllabi, course notes and internet media. There are problems however, the most glaring of which is the legality of streaming a clip that may infringe on copyright. If I am not responsible for illegally uploading a video of Malcolm X onto the web, and yet I stream it from my course blog, am I complicit in infringing on someone's copyright? Now that Google has bought YouTube, and a more aggressive purging of copyright protected works on the service has begun, will content useful for education dwindle over time? I don't have the answers to these urgent questions yet, but even in the worst of cases, we can assume that good, educational material will be made available, legally, on YouTube and other such services in the future, either for free or for a modest fee. For example, I am confident that soon I will be able to tell my students that, in addition to buying One Hundred Years of Solitude for a class, they will have to purchase a $5 video interview with García Márquez off of the World Wide Web and watch it at home. And, even as I write this, podcasting technologies are already in place that will allow faculty members to tell their students that most of their lectures will be available for free downloading on Itunes so that class time can be used more productively for interactive learning activities, such as group work and presentations. Unlike more static and limited media, like PowerPoint and the decorative course Web page, video and audio-sharing help professors be more creative and ambitious in the classroom. In sum, my friends, YouTube is not just for memorializing lazy Sundays when you want to "mack on some cupcakes." It can help your students "mack" on knowledge. Christopher Conway is associate professor of modern languages and coordinator of the Spanish program at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he teaches Latin American literature and culture. Well, so much for the instantaneous availability of information: I've only just learned about the death of George Trow, whose passing, almost two weeks ago, was noted among some of the blog entries ( this one, for example) regularly channeled through my RSS feed. There is a bitter irony in this situation, and most if it is at my own expense. Nobody was smarter than George Trow about the bad faith that comes with being "plugged in" to streams of randomized data. He once defined a TV program as "a little span of time made friendly by repetition." (Friendly, the way a con man is friendly.) That was long before most of us started spending ever more of our lives in front of another kind of screen. Perhaps the name does not ring a bell.... George W.S. Trow, who was 63 when he died, can best be described as a minor American author (no insult intended, it's a better title than most of us will ever merit) who wrote fiction, essays, and the occasional screenplay. Two years ago, the University of Iowa published The Harvard Black Rock Forest, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1984. It was the kind of piece that people once had in mind (maybe with admiration and maybe not) when they thought of "a New Yorker article" -- stately in pacing, full of deep-background references, heedless of breaking-news type topicality. Iowa included the book in a series on literary nonfiction. That makes sense, but it's also been hailed by the journal Environmental History as something "every student of the history of conservation should read. Twice." But it was another essay by Trow that really defined him as a writer to reckon with. "Within the Context of No Context" ran in The New Yorker in 1980 and was brought out the next year by Little, Brown as a book. It was reprinted by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1997 with a new introduction by Trow. He also published a kind of supplement to it, My PilgrimÂ’s Progress: Media Studies 1950-1998 (Vintage, 1999). I say "supplement" and not "sequel" because the two books cross-connect in all sorts of odd, nonlinear ways. Odd and nonlinear "Within the Context of No Context" itself certainly is. It is short, consisting of a number of brief sections. They range from a single sentence to several paragraphs, and each section has a title. While brief, the text actually takes a while to read. The relationships among the parts are oblique, and some of the prose has the strange feel that you would probably get from a translation of Schopenhauer done by Gertrude Stein. "Within the Context of No Context" is about television, among other things -- about the history of the mass media, with television as its culminating moment, but also about what TV does to the very possibility of understanding the world as having a history. It is an essay in cultural criticism. But it can just as well be called a work of prose poetry. Trow's thoughts unfold, then draw back into themselves. This is very strange to watch. After a quarter of a century, it may be difficult to appreciate the originality and insight of Trow's essay. He seems to be making points about the media that are now familiar to almost everyone. In 1980, though, they were not so obvious. It's not that he was venturing into futurology. Nor was Trow a sociologist or historian, except in the most ad hoc way. He did not offer theories or arguments, exactly, but took notes on the texture of American life following three decades of television. He was describing long-emerging qualities of everyday experience that had been quietly taking over the entire culture. He assumed existing tendencies would continue and deepen. It was a smart bet, but a depressing one to win. Trow's central intuition was that TV played a decisive role in shaping "the new scale of national life" in the United States following the second World War. As the scion of a New York publishing family, Trow has various points to make about the shift of power from established WASP elites to the new professional-managerial class. (That social subtext is fleshed out with abundant and eccentric detail in My Pilgrim's Progress.) But those structural changes were occurring behind the scenes. Meanwhile, the national consciousness was changing Having won the war, the country was starting to come to terms with its own place in the world as an incredibly affluent society holding hitherto unimaginably military power. At the same time, we were starting to watch TV. We were starting to see the world through its eye. These two developments (a new level of power, a new kind of passivity) coincided in ways it was easy to overlook, just because the process was so ubiquitous and inescapable. More than print or even radio ever had, television could address an audience of millions simultaneously. "It has other properties," he wrote, "but what television has to a dominant degree is a certain scale and the power to enforce it." And the medium's sense of scale was defined by two grids: "The grid of two hundred million," as Trow put it, "and the grid of intimacy." Trow does not spell out in any detail what he means by "the middle distance" -- the regions of the culture left out of the TV "grids." But by implication, it seems to include most of what's usually called civil society: the institutions, meeting places, and forums for discussion through which people voluntarily associate. His point isn't that the media completely avoid representing them, of course. But TV does not really encourage participation in them, either. Watching it is an atomized experience of being exposed to programs crafted to appeal to tens of millions of other people having the same experience. "Everything else fell into disuse," wrote Trow. "There was national life -- a shimmer of national life -- and intimate life. The distance between these two grids was very great. The distance was very frightening.... It followed that people were comfortable only with the language of intimacy." And it has a cumulative effect. Not so much in the sense that TV destroys the mediating institutions of civil society -- you know, how there used to be bowling leagues, but now everybody is bowling alone. Rather, it's that the yearning for "mirages of pseudo-intimacy" (as Trow puts it) becomes a routine part of public life. Off the top of my head, I do not remember 1980 well enough to recall what Trow might have had in mind, at the time. Perhaps it was the interviewing style of Barbara Walters, or Jimmy Carter admitting that he had lusted in his heart. Today we are far downstream. The "grid of two hundred million" has become the grid of three hundred million. And finesse at handling the routines of "pseudo-intimacy" now seems like a prerequisite for holding public office. What you also find tucked away in Trow's gnomic sentences is the anticipation of countless thousands of broadcast hours in which people discuss personal problems before a vast audience of strangers. The media would create, he wrote, "space for mirages of pseuo-intimacy. It is in this space that celebrities dance. And since the dancing celebrities occupy no real space, there is room for other novel forms to take hold. Some of these are really very strange." No one had thought of "reality TV" when Trow wrote this. The idea of becoming famous by leaking videotapes of oneself having sex had not yet occurred to anybody. What makes the essay powerful, still, is that the word "television" now tends to fade from view as you read. It serves as a synecdoche. It is a name for the whole culture. "Television is dangerous," wrote Trow in one haunting passage, "because it operates according to an attention span that is childish but is cold. It simulates the warmth of a childish response but is cold. If it were completely successful in simulating the warmth of childish enthusiasm -- that is, if it were warm -- would that be better? It would be better only in a society that had agreed that childish warmth and spontaneity were equivalent to public virtue; that is, a society of children. What is a cold child? A sadist." Over time, the media-nurtured attention span ceases to comprehend anything outside its own history. As Trow put it in a line giving his essays its title: "The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no context and to chronicle it." That seems much less like a Zen koan today than it did when first published. It now often feels as if the people making decisions in the media world were deliberately using Trow's work as a guidebook for what to do next: A program like "I Love the '90s" is a literal effort "to establish the context of no context and to chronicle it." (In another line already quoted, Trow anticipated a certain now-familiar tone of nostalgic hipster posturing: "It simulates the warmth of a childish response but is cold.") My precis of here is selective. It traces one or two strands woven into a very complex pattern. The most it can do is to encourage a few more readers to read Trow himself. "George W. S. Trow is a sort of tragic hero," as the novelist Curtis White wrote in the best commentary on him I've seen. "His essays offer us clues to how we might correct our national life. But his wisdom is likely to be lost on us, even on those who would agree with him. Like Cassandra, he can tell us things that are true and that would save us if we could understand them, but his working premise seems to be: You will not understand what I am going to say. In fact, why we won't understand is a large part of the truth Trow has to tell us." Yes, but that's why you find yourself reading him over and over. Valentine’s Day seems an appropriate occasion to honor the late Gershon Legman, who is said to have coined the slogan “Make love, not war.” Odd to think that saying had a particular author, rather than being spontaneously generated by the countercultural Zeitgeist in the 1960s. But I've seen the line attributed to Legman a few times over the years; and the new Yale Book of Quotations (discussed in an earlier column) is even more specific, indicates that he first said it during a speech at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, sometime in November 1963. Legman, who died in 1999 at the age of 81, was the rare instance of a scholar who had less of a career than a profound calling -- one that few academic institutions in his day could have accommodated. Legman was the consummate bibliographer and taxonomist of all things erotic: a tireless collector and analyst of all forms of discourse pertaining to human sexuality, including the orally transmitted literature known as folklore. He was an associate of Alfred Kinsey during the 1940s, but broke with him over questions of statistical methodology. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else; by all accounts, Legman was a rather prickly character. But it is impossible to doubt his exacting standards of scholarship after reading The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (University Books, 1964) -- a selection of Legman's papers reflecting years of exploration in the “restricted” collections of research libraries. (At the Library of Congress, for example, you will sometimes find a title listed as belonging to “the Delta Collection,” which was once available to a reader only after careful vetting by the authorities. The books themselves have long since been integrated into the rest of the library’s holdings, but not-yet-updated catalog listings still occasionally reveal that a volume formerly had that alluring status: forbidden yet protected.) Legman approached erotic literature and "blue" folklore with philological rigor, treating with care songs and books that only ever circulated on the sly. Some of Legman's work appeared from commercial publishers and reached a nonscholarly audience. He assembled two volumes of obscene limericks, organized thematically and in variorum. The title of another project, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, only hints at its terrible sobriety and analytic earnestness. Sure, you can skim around in it for the jokes themselves. But Legman’s approach was strictly Freudian, his ear constantly turned to the frustration, anxiety, and confusion expressed in humor. Not all of his work was quite that grim. Any scholar publishing a book called Oragentialism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation may be said to have contributed something to the sum total of human happiness. The first version, devoted exclusively to cunnilingus, appeared from a small publisher in the 1940s and can only have had very limited circulation. The commercial edition published in 1969 expanded its scope -- though Legman (who in some of his writings comes across, alas, as stridently hostile to the early gay rights movement) seemed very emphatic in insisting that his knowledge of fellatio was strictly as a recipient. Defensiveness apart, what’s particularly striking about the book is the degree to which it really is a work of scholarship. You have to see his literature review (a critical evaluation of the available publications on the matter, whether popular, professional, or pornographic, in several languages) to believe it. Thanks to Legman’s efforts, it is possible to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a proper sense of tradition. Legman was a pioneer of cultural studies, long before anyone thought to call it that. He served as editor for several issues of Neurotica, a great underground literary magazine published between 1948 and 1952. Most of its contributors were then unknown, outside very small circles; but they included Allen Ginsberg, Anatole Broyard, Leonard Bernstein, and an English professor from Canada named Marshall McLuhan. As the title may suggest, Neurotica reflected the growing cultural influence of Freud. But it also went against the prevalent tendency to treat psychoanalysis as a tool for adjusting misfits to society. The journal treated American popular culture itself as profoundly deranged; and in developing this idea, Legman served as something like the house theorist. In a series of essays adapted from his pamphlet Love and Death (1948), Legman cataloged the seemingly endless sadism and misogyny found in American movies, comic books, and pulp novels. (Although Love and Death is long out of print, a representative excerpt can be found in Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester's collection Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2004.) Legman pointed out that huge profits were to be made from depicting murder, mutilation, and sordid mayhem. But any attempt at a frank depiction of erotic desire, let alone of sex itself, was forbidden. And this was no coincidence, he concluded. A taste for violence was being “installed as a substitute outlet for forbidden sexuality” by the culture industry. Censorship and repression were warping the American psyche at its deepest levels, Legman argued. The human needs that ought to be met by a healthy sexual life came back, in distorted form, as mass-media sadism: "the sense of individuality, the desire for importance, attention, power; the pleasure in controlling objects, the impulse toward violent activity, the urge towards fulfillment to the farthest reaches of the individual’s biological possibilities.... All these are lacking in greater or lesser degree when sex is lacking, and they must be replaced in full.” Replaced, that is, by the noir pleasures of the trashy pop culture available in the 1940s. Here, alas, it proves difficult to accept Legman's argument in quite the terms framing it. His complaints about censorship and hypocrisy are easy to take for granted as justified. But the artifacts that filled him with contempt and rage -- Gone With the Wind, the novels of Raymond Chandler, comic books with titles like Authentic Police Cases or Rip Kirby: Mystery of the Mangler -- are more likely to fill us with nostalgia. It's not that his theory about their perverse subtext now seems wrong. On the contrary, it often feels as if he's on to something. But while condemning the pulp fiction or movies of his day as symptomatic of a neurotic culture, Legman puts his finger right on what makes them fascinating now -- their nervous edge, the tug of war between raw lust and Puritan rage. In any case, a certain conclusion follows from Legman’s argument -- one that we can test against contemporary experience. Censorship of realistic depictions of sexuality will intensify the climate of erotic repression, thereby creating an audience prone to consuming pop-culture sadomasochism. If so, per Legman, then the easing or abolition of censorship ought to yield, over time, fewer images and stories centering on violence, humiliation, and so on. Well, we know how that experiment turned out. Erotica is now always just a few clicks away (several offers are pouring into your e-mail account as you read this sentence). And yet one of the most popular television programs in the United States is a drama whose hero is good at torture . They may have been on to something in the pages of Neurotica, all those decades ago, but things have gotten more complicated in the meantime. As it happens, I’ve just been reading a manuscript called “Eros Unbound: Pornography and the Internet” by Blaise Cronin, a professor of information science at Indiana University at Bloomington, and former dean of its School of Information and Library Science. His paper will appear in The Internet and American Business: An Historical Investigation, a collection edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi scheduled for publication by MIT Press in April 2008. Contacting Cronin to ask permission to quote from his work, I asked if he had any connection with the Kinsey Institute, also in Bloomington. He doesn’t, but says he is on friendly terms with some of the researchers there. Kinsey was committed to recording and tabulating sexual activity in all its forms. Cronin admits that he cannot begin to describe all the varieties of online pornography. Then again, he doesn’t really want to try. “I focus predominantly on the legal sex industry,” he writes in his paper, “concentrating on the output of what, for want of a better term, might be called the respectable, or at least licit, part of the pornography business. I readily acknowledge the existence of, but do not dwell upon the seamier side, unceremoniously referred to by an anonymous industry insider as the world of ‘dogs, horses, 12-year old girls, all this crazed Third-World s—.’ ” The notion of a “respectable” pornography industry would have seemed oxymoronic when Legman published Love and Death. It’s clearly much less so at a time when half the hotel chains in the United States offer X-rated films on pay-per-view. Everyone knows that there is a huge market for online depictions of sexual behavior. But what Cronin’s study makes clear is that nobody has a clue just how big an industry it really is. Any figure you might hear cited now is, for all practical purposes, a fiction. The truth of this seems to have dawned on Cronin following the publication, several years ago, of “E-rogenous Zones: Positioning Pornography in the Digital Marketplace,” a paper he co-authored with Elizabeth Davenport. One of the tables in their paper “estimated global sales figures for the legal sex/pornography industry,” offering a figure of around $56 billion annually. That estimate squared with information gathered from a number of trade and media organizations. But much of the raw data had originally been provided by a specific enterprise -- something called the Private Media Group, Inc., which Cronin describes as “a Barcelona-based, publicly traded adult entertainment company.” After the paper appeared in the journal Information Society in 2001, Cronin says, he was contacted “by Private’s investor relations department wondering if I could furnish the company with growth projections and other related information for the adult entertainment industry -- I, who had sourced some of my data from their Web site.” That estimate of $56 billion per year, based on research now almost a decade old, is routinely cited as if it were authoritative and up to date. “Many of the numbers bandied about by journalists, pundits, industry insiders and market research organizations,” he writes, “are lazily recycled, as in the case of our aforementioned table, moving effortlessly from one story and from one reporting context to the next. What seem to be original data and primary sources may actually be secondary or tertiary in character.... Some of the startling revenue estimates and growth forecasts produced over the years by reputable market research firms ... have been viewed all too often with awe rather than healthy skepticism.” Where Legman was, so to speak, an ideologue of sex, Blaise Cronin seems more scrupulously dispassionate. His manuscript runs to some 50 pages and undertakes a very thorough review of the literature concerning online pornography. (My wife, a reference librarian whose work focuses largely on developments in digital technology and e-commerce, regards Cronin’s paper as one of the best studies of the subject around.) He doesn't treat the dissemination of pornography as either emancipatory or a sign of decadence. It's just one of the facts of life, so to speak. His paper does contain a surprise, though. It's a commonplace now that porn is assuming an increasingly ordinary role as cultural commodity -- one generating incalculable, but certainly enormous, streams of revenue for cable companies, Internet service providers, hotel chains, and so on. But the "mainstreaming" of porn is a process that works both ways. Large sectors of the once-marginal industry are morphing into something ever more resembling corporate America. “The sleazy strip joints, tiny sex shops, dingy backstreet video stores and other such outlets may not yet have disappeared,” writes Cronin, “but along with the Web-driven mainstreaming of pornography has come -- almost inevitably, one has to say -- full-blown corporatization and cosmeticization.... The archetypal mom and pop business is being replaced by a raft of companies with business school-trained accountants, marketing managers and investment analysts at the helm, an acceleration of a trend that began at the tail-end of the twentieth century. As the pariah industry strives to smarten itself up, the language used by some of the leading companies has become indistinguishable from that of Silicon Valley or Martha Stewart. It is a normalizing discourse designed to resonate with the industry’s largely affluent, middle class customer base.” As an example, he quotes what sounds like a formal mission statement at one porn provider’s website: “New Frontier Media, Inc. is a technology driven content distribution company specializing in adult entertainment. Our corporate culture is built on a foundation of quality, integrity and commitment and our work environment is an extension of this…The Company offers diversity of cultures and ethnic groups. Dress is casual and holiday and summer parties are normal course. We support team and community activities.” That’s right, they have casual Fridays down at the porn factory. Also, it sounds like, a softball team. I doubt very much that anybody in this brave new world remembers cranky old Gershon Legman, with his index cards full of bibliographical data on Renaissance handbooks on making the beast with two backs. (Nowadays, of course, two backs might be considered conservative.) Ample opportunity now exists to watch or read about sex. Candor seems not just possible but obligatory. But that does not necessarily translate into happiness -- into satisfaction of "the urge towards towards fulfillment to the farthest reaches of the individual’s biological possibilities," as Legman put it. That language is a little gray, but the meaning is more romantic than it sounds. What Legman is actually celebrating is the exchange taking place at the farthest reaches of a couple's biological possibilities: the moment when sex turns into erotic communion. And for that, broadband access is irrelevant. For that, you need to be really lucky. Entertainment is in the eye of the beholder. Consider the case of what are usually called “beach novels” -- bulky sagas of lust, money, and adventure, page-turning epics of escapism that are (it’s said) addictive. I’ve never been able to work up the appetite to read one, even while bored on vacation in a seafront town. Clive James characterized the dialogue of one such novelist as resembling “an argument between two not-very-bright drunks.” Which might be fun to witness in real life, actually, depending on the subject of the dispute. But reading the transcript seems like an invitation to a bad headache. Diversion doesn’t have to be mind-numbing, let alone painful. With the end of the semester at hand, then, a few recommendations of recent books and DVDs that are smarter than your average bar fight -- and more entertaining. The two dozen or so contributors to When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School managed to wear the entire range of unfortunate hair styles available throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. This collection -- edited by John McNally, who spent last semester as a visiting writer at Columbia College Chicago -- is one of the less solemn works of “creative nonfiction” (as the term of art now has it) currently available. Published by the Free Press, it is available in both paperback and e-book formats. Most of the mortified authors are novelists and poets, ranging in age from their early 30s through their late 40s. It’s not that their memoirs are devoted to mullets or feathering, as such. But the stories they have to tell are all about the pressure to fit in, to be cool -- failure to do so bringing various penalties, as you may recall. There, on the cusp of adulthood, one has the first opportunity to create a new self. And hair is where it tends to happen first. Sex, religion, and first-job experiences also have their place. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, the whole effort can seem embarrassing. The essays in When I Was a Loser are all about the different grades of self-consciousness and awkwardness. A few are lushly overwritten (adolescence is a purple thing) and one or two seem more than a little fictionalized. But most have the feel of authentically remembered humiliation, now rendered bearable by time and the cultivation of talent. Several are well-known, including Dean Bakopoulos, whose novel Please Don't Come Back from the Moon was named by The New York Times as one of the notable books of 2005, and the prominent literary blogger Maud Newton. In the spirit of full disclosure, it bears mentioning that Maud is a friend, and her essay "Confessions of a Cradle Robber" (revealing the dark shame of having once been a fourteen year-old girl with a boyfriend who was twelve) was the first thing I read. My other favorite piece here was "How to Kill the Boy that Nobody Likes" by Will Clarke, a novelist who recalls being the most despised kid in junior high -- one nicknamed "The Will-tard" for his admittedly peculiar comportment. Clarke's rise to the status and celebrity of Student Council treasurer is a tribute to the power of a very silly 1970s paperback about the secret techniques of subliminal advertising. The author's name didn't ring a bell when I picked the book up, but it certainly will in the future. Adolescence isn’t just for teenagers any more. "Twitch City," an absurdist sitcom that premiered on Canadian television in 1998, offers one of the funniest portraits around of someone determined to avoid the demands of adult life.It ran through 13 episodes before the show ended in 2000. The recent DVD release doesn’t provide many features. Still, it’s good to have the whole series available to those of us who weren’t part of its original cult following. Its central character, Curtis (played by Don McKellar), is a man in his 20s who spends nearly every waking hour watching television. Among his few distractions from distraction is the effort to sublet more and more of his grungy apartment to anyone who can help him make the rent. His girlfriend Hope (played by the luminous Molly Parker) works at a variety of low-paying jobs. She can never quite figure out why she’s attracted to someone not just utterly lacking in ambition but unwilling even to leave the couch. Part of the pleasure of "Twitch City" comes from seeing just how many stories can be generated around such a constrained, even claustrophobic premise. It is minimalist without being repetitive, and plausible, somehow, in spite of being preposterous. When a chain of odd circumstances makes Curtis a media celebrity, he is visited by a woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) claiming to be a graduate student in semiotics. She interviews him about his habits and outlook, and he delivers an analysis of the aesthetics of “Gilligan’s Island” that is a real tour de force -- a great moment of meta-TV. "Twitch City" is set in a neighborhood of Toronto, which occasionally made me wonder what Marshall McLuhan (who taught at U of T) would have made of it. Another product of Canada worth a look is "Slings and Arrows," an ensemble comedy/drama that just finished its third and final season on the Sundance Channel. The first two (each consisting of six one-hour episodes) are now available on DVD. Set at a repertory theater best known for its Shakespeare productions, "Slings and Arrows" is in some ways a show about trying to keep viable routines from turning into a rut of mediocrity. The theater’s regular audience is aging. It buys its season tickets out of force of habit, mostly. But box office sales aren’t what they could be, and it’s hard to find corporate sponsors who won’t try to meddle with how the place is run. And in any case, the troupe’s creative spark has diminished over time. Revitalization isn’t impossible, but it takes some doing. Each season tracks the production of a different Shakespeare play ( Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear) with a keen eye and ear for the way the artistic director and the actors work out the staging. At the same time, plenty of drama and farce takes place behind the scenes. People who have worked in theater tell me that the situations and backstage dynamics in "Slings and Arrows” are absolutely typical of professional productions. As much as I enjoyed the first season, it was hard to believe that the second would be anything beyond a repetition -- reducing success to a formula. But those misgivings were completely off track. The third season carried things to a natural close. Nowadays there are sessions at the Modern Language Association meeting devoted to the great German literary theorist Walter Benjamin, whose selected writings have appeared in English in four hefty volumes from Harvard University Press. But if the man himself showed up and wandered the corridors, I doubt he would survive the usual quick and dismissive nametag-check. After all, he wrote mostly for magazines and newspapers. He’d be wearing the wrong kind of nametag to be worth anybody’s time. Whether or not Howard Hampton is actually the reincarnation of Walter Benjamin, they have the same extraterritorial position vis-a-vis academic criticism. (Hampton writes for The Village Voice, Film Comment, and The Boston Globe, among other endnote-free zones.) And now they share the same publisher, with the recent appearance of Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (Harvard University Press). Drawn from 15 years’ worth of running commentary on film, music (mostly rock), and books, Hampton’s selected essays transcend “mere reviewing” (as it’s called) to become examples of a fully engaged critical intelligence responding to the mass-media surround. Some of the best pieces are compact but sweeping analyses of changes in sensibility, amounting to miniature works of cultural history. One example is “Reification Blues: The Persistence of the Seventies,” which listens to how the pop soundtrack of that decade left its mark on later music despite (or maybe because of) artists’ best efforts to forget it. Another case is “Whatever You Desire: Movieland and Pornotopia” -- an analysis of how mainstream Hollywood and pornography have shaped one another over the years, whether through mimicry or rejection of one another’s examples. The curse of a lot of pop-culture commentary is its tendency to move too quickly toward big sociocultural statements -- ignoring questions of form and texture, instead using the film, album, etc., as pretext for generalized pontifications. That’s not a problem with Born in Flames. It’s a book that helps you pay attention, even to the nuances of Elvis’s performance in "Viva Las Vegas." Perhaps especially to the nuances of Elvis’s performance in "Viva Las Vegas".... "It's an alternate universe governed by sheer whim," writes Hampton about the King's cinematic ouevre, "untouched by any sense of the outside world." Sounds like the perfect vacation spot. Half a century before "The Sopranos" hit its stride, the Caribbean historian and theorist C.L.R. James recorded some penetrating thoughts on the gangster -- or, more precisely, the gangster film -- as symbol and proxy for the deepest tensions in American society. His insights are worth revising now, while saying farewell to one of the richest works of popular culture ever created. First, a little context. In 1938, shortly before James arrived in the United States, he had published The Black Jacobins, still one of the great accounts of the Haitian slave revolt. He would later write Beyond a Boundary (1963), a sensitive cultural and social history of cricket – an appreciation of it as both a sport and a value system. But in 1950, when he produced a long manuscript titled “Notes on American Civilization,” James was an illegal alien from Trinidad. I have in hand documents from his interrogation by FBI agents in the late 1940s, during which he was questioned in detail about his left-wing political ideas and associations. (He had been an associate of Leon Trotsky and a leader in his international movement for many years.) In personal manner, James was, like W.E.B. DuBois, one of the eminent black Victorians -- a gentleman and a scholar, but also someone listening to what his friend Ralph Ellison called “the lower frequencies” of American life. The document James wrote in 1950 was a rough draft for a book he never finished. Four years after his death, it was published as American Civilization (Blackwell, 1993). A sui generis work of cultural and political analysis, it is the product of years of immersion in American literature and history, as well as James’s ambivalent first-hand observation of the society around him. His studies were interrupted in 1953 when he was expelled by the government. James was later readmitted during the late 1960s and taught for many years at what is now the University of the District of Columbia. American Civilization's discussion of gangster films is part of James's larger argument about media and the arts. James focuses on the role they play in a mass society that promises democracy and equality while systematically frustrating those who take those promises too seriously. Traveling in the American South in 1939 on his way back from a meeting with Trotsky in Mexico, James had made the mistake of sitting in the wrong part of the bus. Fortunately an African-American rider explained the rules to him before things got out of hand. But that experience -- and others like it, no doubt -- left him with a keen sense of the country's contradictions. While James's analysis of American society is deeply shaped by readings of Hegel and Marx, it also owes a great deal to Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of “the closing of the frontier.” The world onscreen, as James interpreted it, gave the moviegoer an alternative to the everyday experience of a life “ordered and restricted at every turn, where there is no certainty of employment, far less of being able to rise by energy and ability by going West as in the old days.” Such frustrations intensified after 1929, according to James’s analysis. The first era of gangster films coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. “The gangster did not fall from the sky,” wrote James. “He is the persistent symbol of the national past which now has no meaning – the past in which energy, determination, bravery were sure to get a man somewhere in the line of opportunity. Now the man on the assembly line, the farmer, know that they are there for life; and the gangster who displays all the old heroic qualities, in the only way he can display them, is the derisive symbol of the contrast between ideals and reality.” The language and the assumptions here are obviously quite male-centered. But other passages in James’s work make clear that he understood the frustrations to cross gender lines -- especially given the increasing role of women in mass society as workers, consumers, and audience members. “In such a society,” writes James, “the individual demands an aesthetic compensation in the contemplation of free individuals who go out into the world and settle their problems by free activity and individualistic methods. In these perpetual isolated wars free individuals are pitted against free individuals, live grandly and boldly. What they want, they go for. Gangsters get what they want, trying it for a while, then are killed.” The narratives onscreen are a compromise between frustrated desire and social control.“In the end ‘crime does not pay,’” continues James, “but for an hour and a half highly skilled actors and a huge organization of production and distribution have given to many millions a sense of active living....” Being a good Victorian at heart, James might have preferred that the audience seek “aesthetic compensation” in the more orderly pleasures of cricket, instead. But as a historian and a revolutionary, he accepted what he found. In offering “the freedom from restraint to allow pent-up feelings free play,” gangster movies “have released the bitterness, hate, fear, and sadism which simmer just below the surface.” His theoretical framework for this analysis was strictly classical, by the way. James was deeply influenced by Aristotle’s idea that tragedy allowed an audience to “purge” itself of violent emotions. One day, he thought, they would emerge in a new form -- a wave of upheavals that would shake the country to its foundations. In 6 seasons over 10 years, “The Sopranos” has confirmed again and again C.L.R. James’s point about the gangster is an archetypal figure of American society. But the creators have gone far beyond his early insights. I say that with all due respect to James’s memory – and with the firm certainty that he would have been a devoted fan and capable interpreter. For James, analyzing gangster films in 1950, there is an intimate connection between the individual viewer and the figure on the screen. At the same time, there is a vast distance between them. Movies offered the audience something it could not find outside the theater. The gangster is individualism personified. He has escaped all the rules and roles of normal life. His very existence – doomed as it is – embodies a triumph of personal will over social obligation. By contrast, when we first meet Tony Soprano, a boss in the New Jersey mob, he is in some ways all too well integrated into the world around him. So much so, in fact, that it is giving him panic attacks from trying to meet all the demands from juggling the different roles he plays. In addition to being pater of his own brood, residing in a suburban McMansion, he is the dutiful (if put-upon) son in a dysfunctional and sociopathic family. And then there are the pressures that attend being the competent manager of a successful business with diversified holdings. Even the form taken by his psychic misery seems perfectly ordinary: anxiety and depression, the tag-team heart-breakers of everyday neurosis. James treats the cinematic gangsters of yesteryear as radical individualists – their crimes, however violent, being a kind of Romantic refusal of social authority. But the extraordinary power of “The Sopranos” has often come from its portrayal of an almost seamless continuum between normality and monstrosity. Perhaps the most emblematic moment in this regard came in the episode entitled “College,” early in show’s first year. We watch Tony, the proud and loving father, take his firstborn, Meadow, off to spend a day at the campus of one of her prospective colleges. Along the way, he notices a mobster who had informed to the government and gone into the witness protection program. Tony tracks the man down and strangles him to death. At the college he sees an inscription from Hawthorne that reads, “No man ... can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true." Earlier, we have seen Tony answer Meadow’s question about whether he is a member of the Mafia by admitting that, well, he does make a little money from illegal gambling, but no, he isn't a gangster. So the quotation from Hawthorne points to one source of Tony’s constant anxiety. But it also underscores part of the audience’s experience – an ambivalence that only grows more intense as “The Sopranos” unfolds. For we are no more clear than Tony is which of his faces is “true.” To put it another way, all of them are. He really is a loving father and a good breadwinner (and no worse a husband, for all the compulsive philandering, than many) as well as a violent sociopath. The different sides of his life, while seemingly distinct, keep bleeding into one another. Analyzing the gangster as American archetype in 1950, C.L.R. James found a figure whose rise and fall onscreen provided the audience with catharsis. With “The Sopranos,” we’ve seen a far more complex pattern of development than anything found in Little Caesar or High Sierra (among other films James had in mind). With the finale, there will doubtless be a reminder – as in the days of the Hays Code – that “crime does not pay.” But an ironized reminder. After all, we’ve seen that it can pay pretty well. (As Balzac put it, “Behind every great fortune, a great crime.”) Closure won’t mean catharsis. Whatever happens to Tony or his family, the audience will be left with his ambivalence and anxiety, which, over time, we have come to make our own. One generation’s faculty gossip is sometimes another’s cultural history. At the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, a professor stopped a teenage student leaving one of his classes. She was not properly enrolled in the course, but bureaucratic proprieties really did not have anything to do with it. She was stunning. He was smitten. They had lunch. And 10 days later, give or take, Philip Rieff was joined in marriage to a young woman who never actually did change her name to Susan Rieff, instead always being known as Susan Sontag. They did not live happily ever after. The opening pages of Sontag’s last novel, In America, are written in a first-person voice that sounds very much like the author’s. The narrator mentions reading George Eliot as a young bride and bursting into tears at the realization she had, like Dorothea in Middlemarch, married Casaubon. As you may recall, Dorothea is at first transfixed by the learning and gravitas of Casaubon, a scholar who is many years her senior. It soon dawns on her (as it does perhaps more quickly for the reader) that he is a bloodless pedant, joyless except when venting spleen against other bloodless pendants. And there are hints, as clear as Victorian propriety will allow, that Dorothea’s honeymoon has been disappointing in other ways as well. Sontag’s allusion must rank as one of the more subtly devastating acts of revenge ever performed by an ex-wife. At the same time, it is in keeping with some durable and rather less literary attitudes towards professors -- the stereotype that treats them as being not just other-worldly, but also rather desexed by all the sublimation their work requires. This view really took hold in the 19th century, according to the analysis presented by A.D. Nuttall in Dead From the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination (Yale University Press, 2003). But a different cliché is emerging from Hollywood lately. The summer issue of The American Scholar contains an essay by William Deresiewicz called “Love on Campus” that identifies a “new academic stereotype” visible in popular culture. The sexually underachieving Casaubon’s day is over. The new stereotype of the professor has some notches in his bedpost (this character is almost always a male) and for the most part demonstrates his priapic prowess with students. Universities in real life are “the most anxiously self-patrolled workplace in Ameican society,” writes Deresiewicz, “especially when it comes to relations between professors and students. This is not to suggest that sexual contact between college students and professors, welcome or unwelcome, never takes place, but the belief that it is the norm is the product of fantasy, not fact.” Yet the fantasy is played out in numerous contemporary films. It merits examination for what it implies about how academe is perceived and (mis)understood. The stereotyped character in question is often a professor of English or creative writing, as in "The Wonder Boys" or "The Squid and the Whale." But sometimes he teaches philosophy ("The Life of David Gale") or French ("Little Miss Sunshine"). He is consumed with ambition. But he is also a loser. Those condition -- academic ambition, abject failure -- are identical, at least given the implicit logic of the stereotype. “In the popular imagination,” writes Deresiewicz, “humanities professors don’t have anything to be ambitious about. No one really knows what they do, and to the extent that people do know, they don’t think it’s worth doing.... It may be simply because academics don’t pursue wealth, power, or, to any real extent, fame, that they are vulnerable to such [criticism]. In our culture, the willingness to settle for something less than these Luciferian goals is itself seen as emasculating.” So he neglects his family, or drinks, or both. Above all, he seduces his students. The latter is not so much an abuse of power as a symptom of having no real power at all. He is “a figure of creative sterility,” writes Deresiewicz, “and he is creatively sterile because he loves only himself. Hence his vanity, pomposity, and selfishness; his self-pity, passivity, and resentment. Hence his ambition and failure. And thence his lechery, for sleeping with his students is a sign not of virility but of impotence: he can only hit the easy targets; he feeds on his students’ vitality; he can’t succeed in growing up.” At one level, this new character may look like the negation of earlier clichés about absent-minded and asexual professors. But that appearance is, in some ways, misleading. These more recent fictional figures are, so to speak, Casaubon on Viagra. Like his ancestor, the contemporary on-screen professor is empty and vain, and going nowhere fast. But he has another way to vent. “In both ‘Terms of Endearment’ and ‘We Don’t Live Here Anymore,’” notes Deresiewicz, “ ‘going to the library’ becomes a euphemism for ‘going to sleep with a student.’ ” Deresiewicz offers a cogent analysis of how this stereotype may reflect the changing place of academe in American society and the contradictory attitudes it evinces. He also presents some thoughts on a dimension of education that popular culture for the most part ignores: the eros of learning, the way a student can fall in love with a teacher for reasons having nothing to do with sexuality. Combining them, as Sontag tried to do with Rieff, seems like a bad idea. It is a remarkable essay -- cogent on many points, and adventurous in making some of them, given the inescapable risk of being misunderstood. (I half expect to see Deresiewicz on a cable program with the words "Professor Advocating 'Brain Sex' " at the bottom of the screen.) Rather than quote or paraphrase any more of it, let me simply recommend that you read the whole thing. Recently I was cornered by a university employee who knows I’m a scholar of British literature, specializing in Jane Austen. “I started Pride and Prejudice last week,” he told me. “It’s one of those books I know I should have read, but I couldn’t get past the first few chapters.” “Really,” I replied, eyebrows raised. “Yeah, I just lost interest,” he went on. “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Oh, brother. I think I know where this is going.’” Was this disarming honesty or throwing down the gauntlet? Was I being called out? Whatever it was, I shifted nervously as I listened to the rest of his monologue: “My theory is that the novel can be pretty much summed up as Elizabeth and Darcy meet, Elizabeth and Darcy hate each other, Elizabeth and Darcy fall in love, yadda, yadda, yadda.” Reader, I stared at him blankly. Of course, I spent hours afterward constructing witty, cynical comebacks, such as “Yeah, I know what you mean. I have that response to episodes of VH1’s 'Behind the Music' and to reading the Bible.” But in the moment, all I managed to spit out was something clichéd and professorial resembling, “Hmm. That’s interesting. I think maybe it takes a few readings of Austen to really appreciate her fiction’s depth, humor, and irony.” That’s also my stock answer to traditional-aged undergraduates on the first day of class -- 20-year-olds who confess that they’ve signed up for a literature class on Austen and her contemporaries because they absolutely love (or absolutely hate) her fiction -- or maybe just the film adaptations. Or Colin Firth or Keira Knightley or Clueless. The Austen-haters often claim to be taking the course because they want to understand what in the world is the big deal. A few of them end up seeing it by the end of the semester, a few more don’t, and that’s fine. But the yadda-yadda-yadda employee was a well-read, middle-aged guy with no sophomore excuse for being sophomoric. My gut reaction to his confession registered somewhere between crestfallen and incensed. I'm having a similarly mixed reaction to the latest wave of Austen mania in the U.S. and U.K., shifting nervously, while approaching it with a combination of anxiety and dread. I know that all English professors worth their salt should be constructing some theories and responses now, in advance of being cornered by colleagues and co-workers and co-eds, so as not to have to resort to the professorial and clichéd. What will we say when asked about Anne Hathaway’s Becoming Jane (2007); about upcoming The Jane Austen Book Club film, with its star-studded cast; or about PBS’s planned 10-week winter 2008 airing of the Complete Jane Austen on "Masterpiece Theatre"? What’s the witty, cynical comeback to this cultural flowering of Austen-related stuff, I find myself wondering: “Can’t wait to see it!” “Wish I’d thought of it first!” “The Decline and Fall of Austen’s Empire.” “A tippet in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “A stitch in the huswife saves nine.” “Don’t look a gift pianoforte in the mouth”? But along with such repartee, we’ll also need to ready weightier observations. First, I believe it’s imperative that we call a moratorium on starting sentences with “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” as in, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that this is the first time in television history Austen’s complete works have been aired in succession.” In the coming months we will no doubt suffer through dozens of newspaper and magazine articles beginning, “It is a truth universally acknowledged.” Best not to add to the collective torture. In addition, when constructing our soundbites, we ought not to forget the sheer breadth of today’s Austen craze; it’s more than just films and television adaptations we’re in for. New books have appeared, too, like Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (2007) and Jane Austen for Dummies (2006). Though I worry that these books make reading her fiction sound like something done at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for slow learners, surely it’s not too late for some well-placed damage control? After all, the Austen-inspired publicity stunts are already in full swing. Perhaps you’ve heard about the kerfluffle that unfolded over the pond, “Jane Austen Rejected!” Thinly veiled versions of Austen’s fiction were sent out to British publishers as new work, under the name of Allison Laydee (a.k.a. David Lassman), and all were rejected. Even Harlequin Mills & Boon passed on publishing adulterated Jane Austen plots. The horror! The horror! But isn’t this is déjà vu all over again? Please raise your tussy mussy if you remember 10 or so years ago, when we were last inundated with Austen film and TV adaptations; with Bridget Jones novels and films; and with Austen board games, stationery, and editorial cartoons. Everyone then seemed to be asking, “Why Austen? Why now?” The late 1990s were strange days for us longtime members of the Jane Austen Society of North America. It was as if we no longer had to apologize for indulging in our versions of wearing plastic Spock ears, whether quadrille, or quilling, or merely quizzing. Many of us became instant pundits among our friends, family, and the media, providing copy for everything from the Arkansas Democrat to The Wall Street Journal. Only a few periodicals continued to misspell Jane’s name as Austin, while many more managed to render correctly Bennet, Morland, and Love and Freindship. Oh, those were heady times. If you were there, then you’ll no doubt recall that we came up with some pretty wild theories to explain the Jane train, too. Remember when Camilla Paglia said Austen’s popularity could be explained as a cultural symptom in reaction to the O.J. Trial, as people longed for stories in which no one was being butchered? That was a good one. Or how some claimed that the return to Austen was a result of the fin de siècle’s prompting us to take stock and return to works of past centuries? Seems pretty thin now. Others claimed that Austen’s resurgence happened because we needed to measure the worth of our male heroes, from Bill Clinton and Brad Pitt to Kurt Cobain and Ross Perot. (Jane Austen and Ross Perot?) So here we are, circa 2007, finding ourselves in danger of being asked yet again, “Why Austen? Why now?” How delightful. How frightening. I’m determined not to be caught off guard, so I’ve constructed some all-purpose answers to explain the latest Austen craze, suitable for everything from The Nation to "Larry King Live" to Marie Claire. Anyone struggling for words is, of course, welcome to use these as conversational building blocks: Option A: “Today’s Austen mania is a form of cultural compensation for the disaster of the Iraq War and for the genocide in Darfur. Her novels offer us a way to forget the world’s evils by allowing us to travel back to those halcyon post-French Revolutionary days of Napoleon.” Option B: “Austen’s timeless narratives of women’s romantic searching provide a welcome distraction from the Supreme Court’s rolling back of abortion rights, as we yearn for an era when many women had the power to refuse a proposal of marriage.” Option C: “Austen’s newfound popularity signals that empire-waist frocks are due for a fashion revival; that irony, having been shunned after 9/11, is back and better than ever; and that Wal-Mart will roll back prices on its imported teas.” This list is just a draft of talking points. I still have a few more ideas to work out. For instance, can it be an accident that Austen’s popularity is surging, just as Jane magazine has gone defunct? There is certainly a quotable quip in the making there. Even if we don’t perfect our theories in the coming months, I don’t think there should be much cause for worry. Check back with me in 2013, the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice’s publication. Oh, brother. I think I know where this is going. Devoney Looser is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the author of British Women Writers and the Writing of History (Johns Hopkins University Press). She has just completed a book on British women writers and old age, to be published next year. A few weeks ago, a new edition of the selected works of Edmund Wilson appeared. Another monumental book this season is David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (HarperCollins). The critic and the cartoonist never crossed paths, so far as anyone knows. But there is some overlap between these publications, it seems to me. The biography of Charles M. Schulz, who died in 2000, calls to mind Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow, a collection of essays published in 1941 and reprinted in the second of the two Library of America volumes. The connection is indirect but insistent. In the essay that lent The Wound and the Bow its title, Wilson revisits one of the lesser-known plays by Sophocles -- a telling of the story of Philoctetes, who also appears in the Iliad. Philoctetes is a skilled and powerful archer, but he is also a man in exile through no fault of his own. A snakebite has left him with a wound that not only festers but reeks. Unable to bear the stench or his groans, the Greeks abandon him on a desert island. And there he stays until Odysseus is forced to bring him back into service as the only man able to bend the bow of Heracles. Wilson (who had started using psychoanalysis as a means of interpreting literary works well before this was required by law) saw in the figure of Philoctetes something like an allegorical emblem for the artist’s inner life. Neurosis is the agonizing wound that leaves the sufferer isolated and bitter, while genius is the ability to bend the bow, to do what others cannot. Creativity and psychic pain, “like strength and mutilation,” as Wilson put it, “may be inextricably bound up together." Not such a novel idea, after all this time. And one prone to abuse -- reducing artistic creativity to symptomatology. (Or, worse, elevating symptomatology into art: a phenomenon some of us first encounter while dating.) In Wilson’s hands, though, it was a way through the labyrinth of a writer’s work, of finding hidden passages within it. The two longest studies in The Wound and the Bow were interpretations of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling: two authors whose critical reputations had been nearly done in by their commercial success. Wilson’s criticism, while biographical in method, did not take the debunking route. If he documented the wound, he also showed the strength with which each figure could draw the bow. Now, I’m not really sure that the archer serves all that well as a model of the artist. (The myths of Daedelus or Orpheus work better, for a variety of reasons, and cover much of the same analogical ground.) On the other hand, Philoctetes did tend to complain a lot -- as did Charles Schulz, it seems. The cartoonist emerges from his biographer’s pages as a man of numerous griefs and grievances. His life was shaped by an upbringing that was economically secure but emotionally complex. His childhood was spent among among relatives who expressed affection through joking insults (to give things the most positive construction possible). Michaelis, who has also written about the life of the painter N.C. Wyeth, offers numerous well-framed appreciations of Schulz’s artistry. The book is Wilsonian, in that sense. But any revaluation of “Peanuts” as cultural artifact is bound to be less a topic for conversation than the unveiling of details about his melancholia and his resentments. An episode of the documentary series "American Masters" on PBS airing later this month will be tied to the book, which should reach stores any day now. Soon it will be common knowledge that everyone who met the cartoonist’s first wife had a pretty good idea where Lucy originated. Numerous “Peanuts” strips are embedded throughout the book -- each of them echoing events or situations in Schulz’s life or some aspect of his personality and relationships. (Members of his family are complaining about the biography, a development to be expected.) The cartoons themselves -- however telling as illustrations of things the biographer has discovered about Schulz -- are rich works in their own right. They fall somewhere between art and literature; but those categories really don't matter very much, because they create their own little world. The biography derives its meaning from the cartoons and not vice versa. So in an effort to restore some balance, I’d like to recommend some supplementary reading about “Peanuts” -- an essay that says very little about Schulz himself. It focuses instead on what he created. How an artist becomes capable of bending the bow is difficult to understand. Biography is one approach, but it does not exhaust the topic. (In a way it only begins to pose the riddle.) The piece in question is “The World of Charlie Brown” by Umberto Eco. It appeared in his collection Apocalittica e integrati, a volume that became rather notorious when it first appeared in 1964. Parts of the collection were translated, along with some later pieces, as Apocalypse Postponed (Indiana University Press, 1994) Like other essays in the book, the analysis of “Peanuts” is part of Eco’s challenge to familiar arguments about “mass culture,” whether framed in Marxist or conservative terms. Either way, the theorists who wrote about the topic tended to be denunciatory. Eco, who was 32 when Apocalittica appeared, had published a couple of monographs on medieval intellectual history and was also working on semiotics and the philosophy of language. Aside from teaching, he paid the bills by working for a television network and a trade publisher. All the quasi-sociological hand-wringing about the media struck Eco as rather obtuse, and he did not hesitate to say so. From the vantage point of someone who had written about the aesthetic theory of Thomas Aquinus, it was not self-evident that “mass culture” was the fresh horror that worried his contemporaries. He saw it beginning with the cathedrals -- or at least no later than the printing press. The fact that Eco wrote about Superman and television worried some of the reviewers. One of them complained that treating “Plato and Elvis Presley” as both “equally worthy of consideration” was bound to have grave consequences: “In a few years the majority of Italian intellectuals will be producing films, songs, and comic strips....while in the university chairs, young dons will be analyzing the phenomena of mass culture.” It would be the closing of the Italian mind, I guess. “The World of Charlie Brown” is evidence that Eco meant to do more than stir up argument. It originally appeared as the preface to the first collection of Schulz’s strips to appear in Italy. It is the work of a critic determined to win “Peanuts” a hearing as a serious work of art. Eco seems unable to resist a certain amount of elitist chain-yanking. He says that the translators lavished on their work “the meticulous passion that Max Brod devoted to the manuscripts of Kafka...and Father Van Breda to the shorthand notes of Edmund Husserl.” The round-headed Charlie Brown embodies “a moment of the Universal Consciousness,” he writes, “the suburban Philoctetes of the paperbacks.” (I confess that I did not remember that part of the essay until rereading it just now.) But the tongue soon comes out of his cheek. Eco reveals himself as a devoted student of the history of the American comic strip. He triangulates “Peanuts” with respect to Jules Feiffer’s satirical cartoons and “the lyric vein of Krazy Kat” -- comparisons that are so brilliantly apt that they immediately seem obvious, which they aren’t. And Eco warns the Italian reader that appreciating the strip involves learning Schulz’s rhythm of theme and variation. “You must thoroughly understand the characters and the situations,” he writes, “for the grace, tenderness, and laughter are born only from the infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns....” At this point, it is tempting to quote at length from Eco’s quick analysis of the essence of Schulz's characters essence. Each one embodies or resists some part of the human condition -- even, and perhaps especially, Snoopy. In the world of “Peanuts,” writes Eco, “we find everything: Freud, mass-cult, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence.” The strip is “a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated.” A child can enjoy them, and so can the reader who is tempted to draw analogies to Samuel Beckett. The sophisticated part of Eco’s sensibility can recognize in Schulz’s art a depth that is full of shadows: “These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of industrial civilization.” But the depths aren’t an abyss. The little monsters, while sometimes cruel, never become unspeakable. They “are capable suddenly of an innocence and a sincerity which calls everything into question....” Charles Schulz was a neurotic, no doubt; but most neurotics aren’t Charles Schulz. He was something else. And it may be that we need an Italian semiotician to remind us just what: "If poetry means the capacity of carrying tenderness, pity, [and] wickedness to moments of extreme transparence, as if things passed through a light and there were no telling any more what substance they are made of,” as Eco wrote, “then Schulz is a poet.”

<urn:uuid:71bc4057-d0f8-47c9-aacf-e950887134c4>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.insidehighered.com/taxonomy/term/136?page=2

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Profiles of a handful of women who have influenced American culture and politics. Ware (Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism, 1993) starts her book with an ambitious premise. Drawing on the lives of seven outsize leaders in the realms of politics, journalism, anthropology, acting, sports, dance, and music, she sets out to explicate the often difficult relations between private and public faced by American women. Though well-trod territory, the subject is perennially fascinating. However, the way she chooses to present these women--Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, Margaret Mead, Katharine Hepburn, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Martha Graham, and Marian Anderson—presupposes an intimate knowledge of them not necessarily shared by the reader. She puts out a casting call for “strong, independent characters”--a device that lends a chummy tone to the book that doesn—t necessarily make up for lack of documentation. As she launches into each profile, she explores these women’s professional lives as well as their personal relationships, and therein lies the problem. With the exception of Dorothy Thompson, substantial biographies have already been devoted to Ware’s subjects. Therefore, one cannot escape the feeling that more nuanced portraits of these women can be found elsewhere. By trying to place them under a larger canopy, Ware corners herself into writing synopses of the women’s lives: Eleanor Roosevelt had “a need to love and to be loved”; Dorothy Thompson “worked hard to make it as a woman in a man’s world”; Martha Graham had a “primal fear of being outside the limelight,” etc. The result is a few illuminating anecdotes, a brief analysis from the author on the psyches of her subjects, and an explanation of why these women were important. What is missing is the continuous thread that can tie all these women together, and the lesson women in America today can take from these pioneers. It’s not for lack of material that Ware fails to deliver what she promises.

<urn:uuid:52a2e3b1-5c09-4401-8c6f-877813cd9373>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/susan-ware/letter-to-the-world/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

(a)Offered as an exhibit. The prepared written testimony of any witness must be offered as an exhibit. The presiding officer will allow a reasonable period of time for the preparation of such written testimony. (b)Time for filing. Any prepared written testimony must be filed and served within the time provided by the presiding officer, in no case later than 10 days before the session of the hearing at which such exhibit is offered, unless a shorter period is permitted under paragraph (c) of this section. (c)Late-filed testimony. (1) If all participants in attendance at the hearing agree, the 10-day requirement for filing any written testimony under paragraph (b) of this section is waived. (2) The presiding officer may permit the introduction of any prepared written testimony without compliance with paragraph (b) of this section, if the presiding officer determines that the introduction of the testimony: (i) Is necessary for a full disclosure of the facts or is warranted by any other showing of good cause; and (ii) Would not be unduly prejudicial to any participant. (3) If any written testimony is served and filed within the 10 day period provided in paragraph (b) of this section, the presiding officer will provide the participants in attendance with a reasonable opportunity to inspect the testimony. (d)Form; authentication. Prepared written testimony must have line numbers inserted in the left-hand margin of each page and must be authenticated by an affidavit of the witness. Title 18 published on 2014-04-01. The following are only the Rules published in the Federal Register after the published date of Title 18. For a complete list of all Rules, Proposed Rules, and Notices view the Rulemaking tab. This is a list of United States Code sections, Statutes at Large, Public Laws, and Presidential Documents, which provide rulemaking authority for this CFR Part.

<urn:uuid:480694fd-fa6a-4b9b-bac3-3cbfb239295d>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/18/385.507

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Without getting into politics, let’s look at Bitcoin as a technology product and analyze the misconceptions both naysayers and fans have about it. Articles by Miguel Leiva-Gomez One vulnerability called the Dark Jedi exploit has managed to slip through the cracks and has affected older Apple computers. This is what it is all about. The newly announced Android Pay by Google doesn’t require you to enter your PIN for your cards. Is this actually safe? Are PIN-less payments the way to go? Let’s check it out. Cryptography is supposed to keep you safe, but what if there is a backdoor that allows the government access to your account? What would be its consequence? Let’s find out. Security questions are supposed to be yet another secure way to log in to your account in case you forgot your password, but it is really a bad idea. Here’s why. Now robots are capable of writing news reports and painting the masterpieces of great artists. Is this the end for those who are in these niches? Let’s find out. A report from the JEDEC about SSDs suggests they might not be able to retain storage over long periods of time without power. Is this true? Let’s find out. You may have heard about the “right to be forgotten”, But what exactly is the “right to be forgotten”, and can we even enforce such a right? Let’s check it out. On May 8, 2015, Microsoft announced they won’t be producing any more Windows ‘versions’ after Windows 10. What exactly does this mean? Let’s find out. While you can make free call over the Internet, why is it that we are still paying to make long distance calls on a traditional phone? Let’s find out why. Tesla came up with a new device that could make battery technology more affordable and reliable. The question is can we power an entire house with a battery? The upcoming release of Windows 10 might lock out older PCs that do not support the DRM technologies to watch 4k movies. Here is what you need to know. Manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have recently introduced image stabilizers into their cameras. Find out everything about image stabilization here. How much are you paying for Internet services now? Imagine paying none of that to connect to the world’s biggest knowledge library. Is it even possible? Let’s find out. It’s a trend that hardware devices are getting smaller and smaller, but does being smaller make it a better device? Let’s check it out. Most smartphones nowaday come with a kill-switch. Are kill switches really a good idea for the purposes they serve? Let’s look into the details. There is a probability that a Chrome extension you are using is injecting advertisements without your knowledge. What can you do about it? One of the questions aspiring coders ask themselves is, “Where do I start?” Here are a couple of programming languages that you should pick up in 2015. Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will not require manufacturers to include an option to turn off secure boot. Is Linux being phased out by design? The innovation in wearable devices has now allowed us to track our health on the move. Is this a boon or a bane? Find out all you need to know about wearable health tracking.

<urn:uuid:388d86d2-1768-4778-aed5-0452adea84a4>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.maketecheasier.com/author/miguel/page/2/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

NEW RUSSIA'S PRIMER: The Story of the Five-Year Plan CONQUERORS OF THEIR OWN COUNTRY 1. Conquerors of Their Own Counlry Following the troops of scouts goes an army of conquerors, an army of workers. What are they going to conquer? They go to conquer their own country. But really must it be conquered? Is not the land in which we live our own? No, it is not ours. Ask informed people and they will tell you that we yet have a great deal of unowned land, unowned forest, and unowned steppe. But what does 'unowned' mean? It means not our own. And in truth can we really call unpeopled steppes our own? Can we really call Yakut our own? Yakut is a vast region–a fifth part of our entire Union. And how many people live there? Two hundred and eighty thousand. In all of Yakut there are only as many inhabitants as in a few streets of Leningrad or Moscow! In Yakut are limitless forests. Every summer fires destroy there thousands of hectares of woods. In Yakut there are also coal, and iron, and silver, and lead, and gold. But the coal which lies untouched beneath the soil is as yet nobody's coal. And the forest which we do not cut and which we do not protect is as yet nobody's forest. All of this will be ours, if we will it so, but as yet it belongs to no one. Our steppes will truly become ours only when we come with columns of tractors and ploughs and break the thousand-year-old virgin soil. Then these steppes will be ours. But until then they will belong to no one. We must discover and conquer the country in which we live. It is a tremendous country. Nine thousand kilometers from west to east, four and one half thousand from north to south. The world's coldest region is in Verkhoyansk–there it is sometimes seventy degrees below zero! And tropical heat is in Samarkand–there in the summer it is as hot as in Africa near the sources of the Nile. Snow and ice in the north–palms in the south. On such a far-flung front we must wage war. And the Five-Year Plan is one of the first great battles in the war. We must burrow into the earth, break rocks, dig mines, construct houses. We must take from the earth, lift, and transport millions of tons of ore, of coal, of peat, of building materials. But are we to do all of this with our hands? With shovel, spade, and pick? No, other weapons are needed here. We must have a shovel which can raise a wagonload of earth at once. We must have a pick which can break huge boulders into bits. But even if we should make such a shovel or such a pick, who would wield it? Obviously giant workmen are needed. But are there such giant workmen? 2. Giant Workmen There is a giant excavator. It has only one arm, but this arm is twenty meters in length. In its hand it holds a shovel. This is not really a shovel, but huge scoop or bucket with a long handle. In the little cabin at the base of the arm sits one man, a mechanic, with seven electrical motors. For each movement of the excavator there is a special motor like a special muscle. The mechanic first turns on one motor. The scoop cuts into the ground with teeth made of forged steel and is filled with earth. Then he starts another motor. The great arm slowly moves upward, raising a huge bucket of earth. Stop! The third motor begins its work. The giant excavator turns to the left in a circle, as a soldier at drill. And there a car is already prepared to receive its burden. The operator pulls a chain, the bottom of the bucket opens, and the earth rushes like a waterfall into the iron box of the car. There is another giant loader which resembles its comrade, the excavator. It also has a huge arm. But with this arm it holds not a shovel, but a cable with a hook at the end. If a load is to be raised, this giant grabs the load with the hook and drags it wherever is necessary. Then there is a mast forty meters high, which is a giant stonemason. If, let us suppose, the foundation for a bridge or dam is to be laid, wooden forms are first built and then into these forms liquid cement is poured. And it is here that we make use of the giant stonemason. At the bottom of the mast liquid cement is poured into a container. A mechanic starts the engine, and the container dies upward along the mast. Stop! It reaches the top and empties the cement into a trough. And along the trough the cement, like a stream of water, runs directly into the form. A stream of liquid stone! And where is it? In the air high above our heads! Men have invented many giant machines. There are machines that burrow into the earth; there are machines that gnaw through a bed of coal; there are machines that suck slime and sand from the bottom of a river. One machine stretches itself upward in order to raise loads aloft; another contracts itself into a little cake in order to creep and crawl under the ground. One machine has teeth, another a trunk, a third a fist. The first gnaws, the second sucks, the third strikes. And each one has its own name. The earthdigger is called an excavator; the loader, a lifting crane; the stonemason, a pouring mast; the borer, a drilling lathe; the coal-digger, a hewing machine. Innumerable machines have been invented and we shall need them all in our great work.

<urn:uuid:85486594-bd06-46b0-9f4e-9d2deec16256>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/children/texts/ilin/new/ch04.html

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Placement Testing - After you have been admitted to the college, you must take the college placement test. You may be exempt from all or part of the test if you have successfully completed a college level English or math course from another college or have taken the MCC placement testing at an earlier date. If you have not been admitted to the college yet, you can apply online now. Prepare for your Placement Test Because your test results will determine your initial course placements, it is important that your scores accurately reflect your ability. You might find it helpful to prepare for the test by learning more about the test format. To view sample questions and learn more about the test itself, you may access the ACCUPLACER website. You may also want to refresh your arithmetic, algebra, or reading skills prior to taking the placement test. Students often approach the test ‘cold’ – that is without any practice- and wind up in a lower course than necessary. This costs you additional time and money. By reviewing before you take the test, you can brush up on some of the basics that you have had, but perhaps don’t remember. We have a number of ways for you to do this. - We are currently offering Free Math Refresher Workshops for students who are planning to take or retake the math portion of the test. These workshops review basic math skills. - We also offer Free Reading Refresher Workshops for students who are planning to take or retake the reading portion of the test. These workshops review specific reading skills you may need to improve your scores. - Free Writing Refresher Workshops are available for students who are planning to take or retake the writing portion of the test. These workshops review these workshops review specific writing skills you may need to improve your score. You can also review for the math test with MyMathTest, an online program that has sample tests designed for MCC students. The program contains a study plan based on your responses and includes videos and other resources to help you understand the problems. To take advantage of MyMathTest, you will need to register online. You will also need a valid email address and a student access code. The Math Centers and the Reading Labs in Bedford and Lowell provide one-on-one tutoring and "Review Packets" that provide some practice problems for the placement test. The Bedford location is in the Academic Resources Building, room 214 and in Lowell in the Cowan Center in room 406B. You can drop in or call for an appointment. The Bedford Math Center can be reached at 781-280-3707, and the Lowell Center at 978-656-3368. The Bedford Reading Lab can be reached at 781-280-3727, and the Lowell Reading Lab at 978-656-3364. Also, our Adult Learning Center offers CPT prep to high school graduates on a space available basis. Note: The test administrator will ask to see a picture ID so please be certain to bring one with you. Need your User ID and/or password? Please visit our online tool or call 1-800-818-3434.

<urn:uuid:8dbe5aa7-3d2f-4af4-8465-aa2e5d88b57c>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.middlesex.mass.edu/esarsmenu/about.aspx

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

- Teacher Blogs - Video Library Fine with Notes - Iceland 06-06 (memory game) A young student and her mother play FINE (fee-nay) to practice the sequence of notes using notes and rests cards. FINE can also be used to practice intervals, the position of clefs, dynamics, the Card Chart, notes on the staff, tempos, scales and key signatures.

<urn:uuid:bfacaa98-45d9-4ca2-b734-9e50e35396ea>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.musicmindgames.com/finewithnotes

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, MARYLAND 20755-6000 NSA PRESS RELEASE NSA Honored at DoD's 30th Annual Disability Awards Ceremony Allen Meadows was only 19 when a suspension chain gave out as he worked underneath a car, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. But that incident didn't affect his passion for restoring and repairing vehicles, which he continues to do decades later in his spare time. It also didn't hurt his overall pursuit of excellence. Now deputy chief of the National Security Agency's Space Planning, Zoning, and Management Division, Meadows was among this year's recipients of Secretary of Defense Awards at the Defense Department's annual disability awards ceremony. "NSA is a great place to work," Meadows said in an interview. "I just do my job and try to do the best that I can." He and 18 other individual awardees were recognized for outstanding contributions to national security at a Dec. 7 ceremony in Bethesda, Md. In 2009 Meadows played a key role in creating the division where he works, which is considered the "front door" for all facilities projects at NSA. He has also helped to develop the division's strategies. Meadows oversees roughly 10 million square feet of real estate and more than 20,000 desks. Dr. Harvey Davis, NSA's associate director for installations and logistics, nominated Meadows for the award. "Allen is a visionary leader and imaginative problem-solver," Davis recently explained. "He willingly took on a difficult job and turned it around quickly. He's the kind of person who always aims for the best, regardless of the challenges that must be overcome." NSA itself was one of four DoD components that received awards for outstanding achievements in the employment of people with disabilities. NSA Chief of Staff Deborah Bonanni accepted the agency's award at the ceremony, which was hosted by Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Dr. Clifford L. Stanley and Stephen M. King, who directs the department's disability programs. NSA is now DoD's "best intelligence component" in the employment of people with disabilities, the department announced. Both awards reflect the agency's unwavering commitment to diversity, said Linda M. Grimm, NSA's director of equal employment and diversity. "NSA offers a work environment that allows all employees, including those with disabilities, to have productive careers," she said. "People with disabilities are among the exceptional individuals who help us tackle some of the most difficult intelligence challenges facing the nation." The annual ceremony presents an overview of the department's disability policies and initiatives, recognizes DoD organizations for their efforts in the employment of people with disabilities, and highlights the accomplishments of DoD employees and service members with disabilities. Information about NSA's Office of Disability Affairs is available online at http://www.nsa.gov/about/eeo_diversity/disability_affairs/index.shtml. Historical Document | Date Posted: Jan 15, 2009

<urn:uuid:4097384c-7f9f-4c91-abe4-48e2f7ec5395>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2010/disability_awards_ceremony.shtml

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

QT prolongation is associated with increased risk of sudden cardiac death in the general population and in people exposed to QT-prolonging drugs. Mutations in the KCNH2 gene encoding the HERG potassium channel cause 30% of long-QT syndrome, and binding to this channel leads to drug-induced QT prolongation. We tested common KCNH2 variants for association with continuous QT interval duration. [ hide abstract ] Reminder: you don't need to add entities already covered in variant annotations -- they'll be added automatically.

<urn:uuid:5dad357c-8bf3-4005-83e6-1f1aeabd853e>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.pharmgkb.org/pmid/17709632

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

As the nation grapples with the tragedy of Sandy Hook, our complicated relationship with firearms is on everybody’s mind. As if things weren’t already distressing enough, my quiet little town has recently been touched by gun violence, too. The victims, this time, have been animals. A Lyons, Colorado family is reeling from the brutal slaying of their pet miniature donkey named Kaitlin. According to police reports, early in the morning on Dec. 21 someone with a long range high-powered rifle stopped somewhere along a rural road and shot at two miniature donkeys who had probably, being curious and friendly, wandered closer to get a look at the stranger. Kaitlin was hit in the neck and chest and was killed. Her brother, Tucker, was frightened by the noise of the gun and ran back to the barn. When Tucker’s human saw him in the barn alone, she knew something was wrong because the sibling donkeys were inseparable. After searching the property, she found Kaitlin’s body. I feel immensely sad for the human owners who have lost their friend. But what is even more heartbreaking about this event is the impact on Tucker. He and his sister had never been more than twenty feet apart, for their whole six years of life. Since Kaitlin’s death, Tucker has been in mourning. After the owners brought Kaitlin’s body up near the barn, Tucker stood watch over Kaitlin’s body until her owners took the body away. Since then, Tucker has been wandering aimlessly around the property. I have to think the person wielding the gun was deranged. Why else would someone shoot at an innocent pet? Oh… but now I remember: We live in a nation where shooting animals is seen as sporting and macho. On this note, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals this week called for Obama to stop justifying hunters’ gun violence against animals. In a letter to Obama and Joe Biden, the executive vice president of PETA took issue with Obama’s statement that “the vast majority of gun owners in America are responsible—they buy their guns legally, and they use them safely, whether for hunting or sport shooting, collection or protection.” The letter says, among other things: “As the mother of a child in elementary school, I cannot imagine telling my son that killing for fun is wrong when the victim is a human but perfectly acceptable when the target is a member of another species, say, a deer or a dove. Children must be taught that all gun violence is wrong, no matter how different from them the victim appears to be.” I don’t always agree with PETA, but in this case, I must say that they make a good point.

<urn:uuid:1c7fd750-8f74-4265-b902-b5db25126d87>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-dogs-go-heaven/201301/gun-violence-impacts-animals-too

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

This blog documents some of the bizarre, insulting, and hostile comments I have received over the years from other, sometimes very accomplished, scholars, when I have had the unmitigated gall to point out: 1. That stereotypes are largely accurate 2. That people rely on stereotypes in a manner largely rational and reasonable 3. Social psychologists routinely discriminate against nonliberal scholars, ideas and scientific conclusions that contest liberal narratives of liberal moral superiority, and liberal narratives of oppression. 4. Sometimes, received wisdom in social psychology is entirely disconnected from the data (You can find much of this in my book, Social Perception and Social Reality, and some of it in many of my prior blog entries). Unless otherwise stated, these are exact quotes. Some are paraphrased from memory, and, when that is the case, I clearly state so. Here goes: “Should our articles have titles like ‘Are blacks really stupid’ and ‘Are Jews really cheap’” (reviewer comment circa 1990 on paper declaring, “If social psychologists wish to keep claiming that ‘stereotypes are inaccurate’ it behooves them to actually collect data assessing the accuracy of people’s stereotypes”). "You really do not want to be accusing your colleagues of hypocrisy” (paraphrased, received TWICE, 1995, 2012; both times after I characterized social psychological perspectives on stereotypes as more distorted than laypeople’s stereotypes). “I am glad Lee Jussim lives in a world where all stereotypes are accurate and no one ever relies on them anyway.” (2005, Susan Fiske’s introductory comment at Association for Psychological Science panel). “Nonsense!” (2005, Lee Ross’s comment at Association for Psychological Science panel after I reviewed data showing that when people rely on an accurate stereotype their person perception judgments are more accurate than if they ignore their stereotype.) “Extremist!” (2006, comment blurted out by a social psychology faculty member at Rutgers, during my talk titled “The unbearable accuracy of stereotypes”). “I'm not a fan of your efforts to publicly undermine social psychology…” (2013 email from a social psych colleague). “[Paraphrased:] I refuse to carry on this correspondence because you have been [direct quote:] manic and insulting [paraphrased:]AND I DO NOT agree to allow you to post the entire exchange.” (2011, email from a famous Ivy League social psychologist after:1) s/he emailed me asking, “What evidence do you have for liberal bias in social psychology?” (paraphrased) 2) I sent a 1200 word response. After realizing I had nothing to hide, I asked if s/he would object to me posting the whole exchange, and this person’s response is paraphrased above, with certain key words quoted exactly. Here are a series of comments, paraphrased from memory, I received after giving a talk at Stanford's Social Psychology program in early November, 2013: In response to my review of the overwhelming evidence that social psychologists discriminate against conservative colleagues and against scientific conclusions that contest liberal narratives and values:"You are saying that discrimination against conservatives in social psych is a more severe problem than bias and discrimination in the wider world." In response to my review showing that the "received wisdom" of social psych is that stereotype bias effects are large and that it is very difficult to get people to judge individualson their merits, against the overwhelming meta-analytic evidence showing the exact opposite:that stereotype biases are small, and people judge others primarily on their merits:"Small bias effects are very important. What you are calling large individuating info effects are not large enough and testify to ongoing injustice." In response to my review of the data showing that there has been a long slow reduction to near zero (purge? given the evidence of political discrimination?) in the number of conservatives in psychology: "The problem is not the disappearance of conservatives, the real problem is the disappearance of Marxists; there is no serious Marxist critique in social psychology as there was 70 years ago." In response to my putting up data showing that people's beliefsabout African Americans pretty closely correspond to Census data on things like likelihood of having a high school degree, receiving welfare, being born out of wedlock, etc.: "Those are are not really on stereotypes, those are beliefs." In response to the whole talk: "Social psychologists should be studying how situations create disadvantage, not whether people are accurate in perceiving groups." Two things for the record: 1. I never get this type of bizarre hostility when I give talks on other topics, so it is not me. Indeed, I do not take any of this personally. A new and terrific review paper just came out showing that the conventional scholarly wisdom that conservatives are more "intolerant" than liberals is simply wrong -- liberals are just as intolerant. It is just that conservatives are intolerant of liberal groups and liberals are intolerant of conservative groups (Brandt et al, in press), something that went long undiscovered because most social scientists are liberals and it never occurred to many of them to even study prejudice against conservative groups. Why is this important? It helps explain the extraordinary hostility my talks evoke on topics that contest liberal superiority and narratives of oppression. 2. I have learned over the years, mostly from viewing other people's talks, that when an audience member reacts with this sort of visceral defensive hostility, the speaker is usually right, or, at least on to something. This does not mean my claims are necessarily correct and I recognize that pointing this out is a bit self-serving. I am certainly not right because the audience gets hostile. But, usually, such hostility has, in the past with other speakers, meant the other speaker was pretty much on target. Brandt, M.J., Reyna, C., Chambers, J.R., Crawford, J.T., Wetherell, G. (In press). The ideological-conflict hypothesis: Intolerance among both liberals and conservatives. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Jussim, L. (2012). Social perception and social reality: Why accuracy dominates bias and self-fulfilling prophecy. New York: Oxford University Press.

<urn:uuid:11637d6f-dc8d-42d5-8707-3cb475b96368>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201311/liberal-bias-in-social-psychology-personal-experience-iii

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Energy Efficiency in Regulated and Deregulated Markets Rotenberg, Edan, UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy INTRODUCTION AND THESIS The efficient use of electricity is a moral and environmental concern of contested economic validity. Opponents argue that the pursuit of energy efficiency is the pursuit of economic inefficiency. Proponents counter that the pursuit of economic efficiency in the electricity sector is an environmental disaster due to market failures caused by environmental externalities and transaction costs. In the interests of brevity, this paper focuses solely on end-use efficiency, not generation or distribution efficiency. This paper takes the position that there is merit in the pursuit of end-use energy efficiency measures in the electricity sector. Those measures are often called demand side management or DSM. Energy efficiency measures can be effective tools to correct market failures and achieve environmental goals, both in regulated and deregulated markets. Although they are useful tools, energy efficiency measures are certainly not the only tools needed to correct these failures and achieve environmental goals. This paper also explores the effect of the new deregulatory era on the achievement of energy efficiency, arguing that this worthwhile goal can and should be kept. The new deregulated environment has created a different market for electricity, but one that still has problems from an environmental and an economic point of view. An effective policy must provide incentives to the actors who are best suited to overcome market failures in the new regulatory environment. Those incentives must be developed in a way that harmonizes energy efficiency policy with new environmental policies, particularly the development of emissions trading markets and renewable portfolio standards. Part Two of this paper defines energy efficiency. Although there are multiple, conflicting definitions of energy efficiency, here the term is used in a hybrid economic and environmental sense. That is, energy efficiency policies aim at setting social use of electricity at the level that would be set by consumers in a perfect market where price reflects the true social cost of electricity. Since that price does not exist, and cannot be ascertained precisely, energy efficiency measures seek to approximate it. Part Three identifies the relevant features of the regulated and deregulated eras. "Deregulation" does not signal the end of regulation in the electricity sector. It instead represents a new regulatory regime that requires an end to vertically integrated electric monopolies to allow a greater degree of competition, particularly in electricity generation. Distribution is still monopolized, often operated by a regulated non-profit corporation. Retail supply is also monopolized in most American jurisdictions. Thus, there is a substantial role for regulators in a deregulated electricity sector. However, energy efficiency measures developed in the regulated past of the electricity industry require re-examination and change during the new era of deregulation. After establishing what energy efficiency, regulation, and deregulation mean, Part Four examines the policy justifications for energy efficiency regulations. The underlying assumption of this section is that there has always been a role for environmental policy in the regulation of the electricity sector. Determining the optimal way to provide electricity has always been treated by our society as a multi-criteria problem because it is a political problem. The interests of capitalists, consumers, and those affected by the environmental disruption of electricity production are in conflict. Environmental considerations have always been, and will always be, a part of electricity policy. Most justifications for energy efficiency involve market imperfections, although energy security is often mentioned. The core question of any electricity policy in a capitalistic society is the optimal price for electricity. In both a regulated and deregulated market, private actors will step in, where there is sufficient profit, to pursue energy efficiency measures. …

<urn:uuid:ef4d0458-952c-4675-bf57-ca823d4bc6d5>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-150966540/energy-efficiency-in-regulated-and-deregulated-markets

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Hill, Brian J., Parks & Recreation Wilderness. There was a time when the beauty of the land was everywhere, running on for miles in any direction. Today not much wilderness remains. And wild, untamed places shrink as humanity continues to grow. Only 2% of the lower 48 states is protected as wilderness. The future of wilderness in this country is being hotly debated. Questions and controversy about wilderness preservation continue. Difficult decisions, especially concerning wildlands in the West, are yet to be made. Many justifications for wilderness preservation exist. Wilderness advocates use philosophical arguments that defend wilderness designations. Scientists and scholars study the benefits to people and nature from wildland conservation. Decision-makers examine the quantitative measures of wilderness value. In fact, each of these views has a place in decisions concerning wilderness preservation. Benefits to Individuals, Societies, Others Wilderness preservation provides benefits to individuals, societies, plants and animals, and ecosystems. These benefits sometimes are called wilderness values. Wilderness values can be categorized into three broad areas: personal benefits, social benefits, and intrinsic benefits. Personal wilderness benefits include developmental, therapeutic, physical health, self-sufficiency, social identity, educational, spiritual, creative, symbolic, and nurturance benefits. Social wilderness benefits include historic cultural, quality of life, nature preservation, and economic benefits. Intrinsic wilderness benefits include organism, species, and ecosystemic benefits. The process of considering and estimating wilderness worth is known as wilderness valuation. What follows is a discussion of several wilderness valuation systems and their strengths and weaknesses. Wilderness valuation is the process of considering and estimating the importance or worth of wilderness preservation. Most talk about wilderness values surrounds the issues of wilderness benefits. Those wilderness benefits form the center of a three-dimensional valuation theory. Figure 1 on the next page graphically represents the wilderness valuation theory. Wilderness benefits most commonly come to mind while considering wilderness values, but the deeply held beliefs and desires, or values, of individuals, societies, and nature greatly influence which benefits will be recognized and deemed important. Also, the wilderness benefits sought and achieved by individuals, societies, and nature directly influence the perceived worth of wilderness. The left side of the Figure 1 represents the way that value ideals lead to benefit attribution and then to worth recognition. This valuation theory roughly coincides with three key aspects of wilderness valuation systems. Each justification for wilderness incorporates one or more of these valuation aspects. For instance, an economic valuation system includes a theoretical basis, a set of wilderness benefits it considers, and quantitative methods used to estimate the monetary worth of those benefits. As human, societal, and intrinsic belief systems lead to activities that seek the realization of wilderness benefits, philosophical foundations lead to a particular set of wilderness benefits that receive assessment. Recognizing the worth of wilderness benefits in money, time, effort, or sacrifice invested coincides with the various valuing methods used to measure wilderness value. Wilderness values are influenced by value ideals and, in turn, influence the final worth of wilderness. Likewise, wilderness valuation systems are based on a philosophical or theoretical base, assess some compatible set of wilderness values, and measure or assess the magnitude of wilderness benefits with some valuing method. Wilderness Valuation Systems Wilderness valuation systems build on a philosophical base and assess wilderness benefits through a valuing methodology. …

<urn:uuid:fad03bab-205b-408b-b7b1-4327b9815372>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-15769900/wilderness-valuation

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

The Changing World of Christianity: The Global History of a Borderless Religion Phan, Peter C., International Bulletin of Missionary Research The Changing World of Christianity: The Global History of a Borderless Religion. By Dyron B. Daughrity. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Pp. x, 290. Paperback $34.95 / SFr 35 /euro22.50 /£20.30. This volume by Dyron Daughrity, assistant professor of religion at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, joins the mushrooming rank of textbooks on what church historians and theologians now speak of as "world Christianity." In the introductory chapter Daughrity emphasizes the recent changes in Christianity, within itself and in relation to the other three "world religions." Within itself, Christianity, now claiming one-third of the total world population of just under seven billion, is undergoing dramatic changes. The bulk of its membership is no longer found in the Global West or North but in the Global South - Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. The other religions that can claim to have a global presence are Islam (20. 8 7 percent), Hinduism (13.41 percent), and Buddhism (5.78 percent), but their reach is far from worldwide. Both Hinduism and Buddhism are confined mostly to Asia, and even Islam is dominant only in the so-called Islamic Crescent. Of these three religions, only Islam is a real competitor of Christianity, which enjoys a decided advantage thanks to its intentional adaptability; this fosters genuine growth and a lasting impact in the places in which it is established. As Daughrity puts it, Christianity "is always changing, geographically, theologically, liturgically, and socially" (p. 17). As a result, we are witnessing "a universal, transcultural, multi-lingual religion" (p. 19). How can a borderless religion such as world Christianity best be studied? …

<urn:uuid:78deb333-9f41-4216-a408-d1262c45c7c4>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.questia.com/read/1P3-2419849731/the-changing-world-of-christianity-the-global-history

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Grander Visions, Grander Problems This book has sought to broaden the meaning of "economic" and "the economy" to include all the resources, goods, and activities that contribute to our economic well-being, whether or not they are associated with commercial markets. In this expanded context, the book has recast local economic-development efforts. It has shown why growth-oriented efforts are likely to fail to improve local economic well-being. It has also suggested that, despite the limits imposed upon such efforts by national and international market forces, there are alternative ways in which communities can improve the economic well-being of their residents. In doing these things, the book has glossed over some very serious problems with the way a capitalist market economy limits, diverts, or distorts efforts to improve well-being. We now turn to this darker side of our economy. We will then return to our analysis of appropriate economic-development strategies, to seek the seeds of an alternative vision of an economy free of the limits our economic system now imposes upon us. Our dominant economic institution is the commercial market. Most coordination of economic activities, distribution of economic goods, and motivation of productive behavior are left to the market. The market is the centerpiece of our system of economic organization, and we have made strong political, social, and cultural commitments to it. For most of the last several centuries, we have experimented with extending the range of the individual and social activities that can be disciplined and coordinated by the market. Today, for instance, we are increasingly turning to commercial organizations to take over much of what has been noncommercial "housework" or "homemaking": child care, the preparation of meals, the care and cleaning of our homes, and so on. We are fanning out the operation of our prisons, parks, schools, and hospitals to private firms. The ultimate range of

<urn:uuid:7ece77d9-1b68-4596-8381-54804cbc1a3c>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.questia.com/read/91930093/environmental-protection-and-economic-well-being

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Florida Board of Education openings. Two coming up, notes Gradebook. When Florida and Mississippi schools were peas in a pod. Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Tax credit scholarships in Chronicle of Philanthropy. (subscription required) The story leads with Step Up For Students and quotes “neovoucher” expert Kevin Welner: “He also argues that most states don’t really know if they are saving money, since few have closely tracked how many students receiving scholarships would have gone to private schools without them.” Welner has raised this argument before, and it’s not the case in Florida, as redefinED has noted. Charter school facilities funding. A state task force deadlocks on recommendations, reports the St. Augustine Record. Charter school pay raises. Charter schools in Lake Wales look for ways to compensate their teachers, reports the News Chief. F charter schools. Two in Escambia offer updates to the school board, reports the Pensacola News Journal. Amendment 8 in the Washington Post. The amendment and its impact on vouchers is referenced, incorrectly, in a story on quality control issues with the D.C. voucher program. Here again is the real story.

<urn:uuid:d41d05d5-0f23-4eae-9eb7-ab740eba488d>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.redefinedonline.org/2012/11/florida-roundup-charter-school-funding-tax-credit-scholarships-amendment-8/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

For the purposes of this chapter and chapter 518A, the following terms have the meanings provided in this section unless the context clearly requires otherwise. [Renumbered subd 9] Unless otherwise agreed by the parties: (a) "Legal custody" means the right to determine the child's upbringing, including education, health care, and religious training. (b) "Joint legal custody" means that both parents have equal rights and responsibilities, including the right to participate in major decisions determining the child's upbringing, including education, health care, and religious training. (c) "Physical custody and residence" means the routine daily care and control and the residence of the child. (d) "Joint physical custody" means that the routine daily care and control and the residence of the child is structured between the parties. (e) Wherever used in this chapter, the term "custodial parent" or "custodian" means the person who has the physical custody of the child at any particular time. (f) "Custody determination" means a court decision and court orders and instructions providing for the custody of a child, including parenting time, but does not include a decision relating to child support or any other monetary obligation of any person. (g) "Custody proceeding" includes proceedings in which a custody determination is one of several issues, such as an action for dissolution, divorce, or separation, and includes proceedings involving children who are in need of protection or services, domestic abuse, and paternity. "Maintenance" means an award made in a dissolution or legal separation proceeding of payments from the future income or earnings of one spouse for the support and maintenance of the other. "Marital property" means property, real or personal, including vested public or private pension plan benefits or rights, acquired by the parties, or either of them, to a dissolution, legal separation, or annulment proceeding at any time during the existence of the marriage relation between them, or at any time during which the parties were living together as husband and wife under a purported marriage relationship which is annulled in an annulment proceeding, but prior to the date of valuation under section 518.58, subdivision 1. All property acquired by either spouse subsequent to the marriage and before the valuation date is presumed to be marital property regardless of whether title is held individually or by the spouses in a form of co-ownership such as joint tenancy, tenancy in common, tenancy by the entirety, or community property. Each spouse shall be deemed to have a common ownership in marital property that vests not later than the time of the entry of the decree in a proceeding for dissolution or annulment. The extent of the vested interest shall be determined and made final by the court pursuant to section 518.58. If a title interest in real property is held individually by only one spouse, the interest in the real property of the nontitled spouse is not subject to claims of creditors or judgment or tax liens until the time of entry of the decree awarding an interest to the nontitled spouse. The presumption of marital property is overcome by a showing that the property is nonmarital property. "Nonmarital property" means property real or personal, acquired by either spouse before, during, or after the existence of their marriage, which (a) is acquired as a gift, bequest, devise or inheritance made by a third party to one but not to the other spouse; (b) is acquired before the marriage; (c) is acquired in exchange for or is the increase in value of property which is described in clauses (a), (b), (d), and (e); (d) is acquired by a spouse after the valuation date; or (e) is excluded by a valid antenuptial contract. "Mediation" means a process in which an impartial third party facilitates an agreement between two or more parties in a proceeding. "Parenting time" means the time a parent spends with a child regardless of the custodial designation regarding the child. "Pension plan benefits or rights" means a benefit or right from a public or private pension plan accrued to the end of the month in which marital assets are valued, as determined under the terms of the laws or other plan document provisions governing the plan, including section 356.30. "Private pension plan" means a plan, fund, or program maintained by an employer or employee organization that provides retirement income to employees or results in a deferral of income by employees for a period extending to the termination of covered employment or beyond. "Public pension plan" means a pension plan or fund specified in section 356.20, subdivision 2, or 356.30, subdivision 3, the deferred compensation plan specified in section 352.965, or any retirement or pension plan or fund, including a supplemental retirement plan or fund, established, maintained, or supported by a governmental subdivision or public body whose revenues are derived from taxation, fees, assessments, or from other public sources. "Residence" means the place where a party has established a permanent home from which the party has no present intention of moving. 1951 c 551 s 1; 1969 c 1028 s 2,3; 1973 c 725 s 74; 1974 c 107 s 18; 1978 c 772 s 48; 1979 c 259 s 2,23,34; 1981 c 349 s 2; 1981 c 360 art 2 s 45; 1982 c 464 s 1; 1983 c 144 s 1; 1986 c 444; 1987 c 157 s 14-16; 1988 c 590 s 1; 1988 c 668 s 15,16; 1989 c 282 art 2 s 189; 1990 c 568 art 2 s 68,69; 1990 c 574 s 6,7; 1992 c 463 s 29; 1993 c 340 s 31; 1994 c 488 s 8; 1995 c 202 art 1 s 25; 1997 c 203 art 6 s 40,41; 1997 c 245 art 3 s 9; 1998 c 382 art 1 s 3-5; 1999 c 107 s 66; 1999 c 196 art 1 s 5; 2000 c 343 s 4; 2000 c 444 art 1 s 1; art 2 s 15; 2005 c 116 s 1-3; 2005 c 164 s 5,29,31; 1Sp2005 c 7 s 26,28; 2006 c 280 s 21,43; 2008 c 349 art 11 s 11 Copyright © 2015 by the Revisor of Statutes, State of Minnesota. All rights reserved.

<urn:uuid:ab38c912-e55d-4d2c-bfc0-449f7636a935>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=518.003

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Autonomous Guidance for small UAV Safe Flight Operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) Small Business Information 100 West Cushing Street, Tucson, AZ, 85701 AbstractSafe flight by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in unrestricted airspace, including the National Airspace, will only be possible with effective and reliable Sense and Avoid technologies and techniques. Several projects, including four Office of Naval Research STTR's, are underway to develop sensors capable of addressing the first aspect. Latitude Engineering, LLC proposes to address the second aspect using modern control methods to design and analyze a collision avoidance control algorithm that will first assure minimum separation distances are maintained, and second, will avoid a collision, should a dangerous situation arise. Our approach uses differential game theory to develop well-defined zones of complete or partial safety to analyze the volume around the UAV and the performance of the control law. The algorithm will be capable of effective avoidance using sensors of different performance characteristics, including those that output only bearing information, such as acoustic or optical sensors, or complete relative position, such as radar or ADS-B. In addition, the control law will be designed so as to balance the requirements of safe flight with needs of the mission. * information listed above is at the time of submission.

<urn:uuid:18ad4c8c-90e9-4a90-9cae-ccf4a8880909>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/214188

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Hole-to-Edge Measurement Tool Small Business Information P.O. Box 71, Hanover, NH, - AbstractABSTRACT: Accurate determination of the distance between fastener holes and part edges is critical to ensure structural integrity in military aircraft. These measurements are particularly important as part flanges are reduced and tolerances are tightened to save weight and increase performance. Current measurement methods rely on manual calipers and are extremely time consuming, labor intensive, and prone to operator-induced errors. Creare proposes to develop a handheld inspection tool capable of measuring hole diameter and associated hole-to-edge distance. Our system is designed to be very easy to use and fast enough to provide immediate feedback to the operator. During Phase II, we will develop a prototype system and evaluate system performance in conjunction with our Manufacturing Partner to evaluate accuracy, suitability for use in the manufacturing environment, and ease-of-use. BENEFIT: The handheld inspection tool developed on this project is expected to have broad application in aircraft inspection for measurement of part geometry, fastener placement, and gap thickness. Creare is also actively pursuing commercial applications in industrial manufacturing and other sectors. * information listed above is at the time of submission.

<urn:uuid:e036c649-3dff-453c-81ca-3bc0d2a69da9>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/410029

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Cometlike crashes produce building blocks of life Amino acids in collision residue support importance of extraterrestrial impacts By Jessica Shugart, 10:26 AM September 16, 2013 Smacking a steel projectile into a comet-like icy concoction has produced the ingredients for making proteins. The findings add weight to the hypothesis that primordial life on Earth arose from the wreckage of comet collisions. Space debris relentlessly pummeled Earth when life began, an estimated 3.8 billion years ago. Some scientists think that icy carbon-bearing comets delivered life’s ingredients. Energy from the impacts may have catalyzed the transformation of simple carbon compounds into... Source URL: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cometlike-crashes-produce-building-blocks-life?mode=magazine&context=187368

<urn:uuid:d71460f8-17b7-4750-87ca-a33d4ec87ed0>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.sciencenews.org/print/node/16329?mode=magazine&context=187368

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Next week the Alpine airport will be the site of a Young Presidents and World Presidents Organization Fly-In Conference, sponsored by Aviat Aircraft of Afton and Cessna Aircraft of Wichita, Kan. As part of the conference, a MIG demonstration has been set for Friday, Sept. 5, 2014 at 6 p.m. over the Palisades Reservoir. Area residents are invited to park along the reservoir highway to enjoy watching the MIGs. The registered guests of the conference are being hosted by the Aviation Network of the Young President’s and World President’s Organization that represents business leaders in some 130 countries worldwide, as well as the Alpine airport community, the Bank of Star Valley, Aero Condos, and the Town of Alpine. In 2012, 65 acres and 25 lots were attached to the 6,000 foot runway and another dozen hangars and homes started construction. Contracts for excavation, asphalt, concrete, materials, building supplies, and labor have been sourced in the Valley. With some 70 hangars and homes on the runway and taxiways, the airport will have room for no more than about another 50 hangars or homes, and stands as a gem for the area as a world class destination for outdoor life and aviators. The airport is also encouraging and keeping business in Wyoming, for hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, golfing, skiing and more, and is of great importance to the continuing stability and growth of Afton’s and Lincoln County’s world famous backcountry plane manufacturer, Aviat Aircraft. One of the goals of the fly-in is to showcase the Alpine Airport as well as celebrate the history of aviation in this area. Some notable features of the airport include the following: • The Alpine airport is effectively longer than the Jackson Hole airport as its 6,000′ long runway is 800′ lower than the Jackson Hole airport. • A resident of the Alpine residential community can literally get to North America’s number one ski destination at Teton Village in the same amount of time as having landed at the Jackson Hole airport. • The residential community at Alpine is attracting business, community, and social supporters to the Valley. The Sept. 3 edition of the Star Valley Independent will include a feature on The Refuge Development at the Alpine Airport.

<urn:uuid:96797ca5-936a-43cc-8773-0fba496dc4c7>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.starvalleyindependent.com/2014/08/28/mig-demonstration-part-of-alpine-fly-in-next-week/

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Instructional Texts teaching resources Primary English- Instructional Texts Pupils first learn of instructions in list formats, such as personal reminders and simple planning notes, and soon move onto writing their own instructions for everyday activities and processes. Instructional writing uses the second person, imperative mood (or ‘bossy verbs’) and often employs time connectives, such as ‘first’, ‘next’, ‘finally’. The correct order of instructions is vital, so sequencing activities are widely used. Our contributors have uploaded detailed planning and sets of instructions for a huge amount of subjects, from making a jam sandwich to putting up a tent… OR browse below for resources uploaded by the TES community: Resources aimed at KS1 A two week unit linked with D&T ‘moving pictures’, History ‘Toys’ and Science ‘Pushes & Pulls’. Two weeks’ detailed planning for Year 1, based on Pirates, with a Notebook file to support the lessons. 3 days of planning for introducing and reiterating instructions. Daily plans with illustrated instructions for washing hands to sequence. Weekly planning for instructional writing, where pupils write instructions to make a folding book. Activities and presentations An introduction to instructional writing, with excellent illustrated slides and a task to write instructions for an alien. A writing frame for instruction writing, complete with success criteria, guidelines and a space for a diagram or picture. Differentiated sets of instructions to put into order, on the topic of how to clean your teeth. A set of simple, illustrated instructions for planting spring bulbs. Perfect for studying instruction writing in Literacy. Differentiated sets of instructions for pupils to sequence. Instructions for children to reorder correctly. Includes easier and harder version. Various instruction worksheets and writing formats to support the teaching of instructional writing in KS1. A selection of yucky ingredients for a Monster Soup to be cut up and used for sorting. Aimed at year 2, four sets of instructions for pupils to arrange into the correct sequence. Pupils write a set of instructions on how to build a snowman, using ‘bossy’ verbs and numbered instructions. A template flow chart to use for drawing or writing instructions. Photos and instructional text showing children the steps in icing and decorating a biscuit. The children draw their own picture and then write instructions of how they drew it underneath. Use this apptivity to help pupils to write instructions about how to make a pancake. With a video clip and high quality images, word prompts and decorative clip art. Resources aimed at KS2 A Year 5, 3 week unit, based on instructions. Year 3 literacy plans for instructional writing, plus resources. In this unit the children research camping equipment and write instructions for how to put up a tent. They then become web designers and create ‘The Ultimate Guide to Camping’ website. Includes links to well known websites and various interactive activities, as well as a link to French vocabulary in the recipe.

<urn:uuid:b74c3ba9-c05e-42ea-a520-81a6493546ab>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.tes.com/article.aspx?storycode=6087301

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Guest from 18.104.22.168 Forum Moderators: phranque i'm not very familiar with streaming audio so your help is very appreciated. i have a potential client that wants to add audio to their site where users can choose to play different songs while they browse the web site. say five channels and a few songs on each channel. like an online radio console. anyone have any experience with this type of stuff? Another way (and it's a way I've used) is to build a little console like interface, and have the buttons linking to the streaming media. In my case I used the Real Player .ram and .rm format. It worked fine. The user clicked his/her preference, and if they clicked a different channel it just loaded up that files. If I remember correctly..... create your RM file and place it on the server. Then, create a simple file with one line: the complete http:// path to the RM file. call this file xxx.RAM have your user link to the RAM file. your sound file is called mysong.rm in directory songs create a file with one line: call this file mysong.RAM That's all you need to do. smil files can configure realplayer to do all sorts of the things. I used to use them for webcasts to have different feeds in different portions of the realplayer. They were all synced so you could watch the slides while people were speaking. For some of the archived webcasts we had links in the player to play different portions of the presentation. I think you may even be able to embed them. I think the flash jukebox would be the best though. You could embed it into the page or menu and not spawn an external player.

<urn:uuid:87f4a9e2-b817-49d9-ac42-25fd92b6c30a>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.webmasterworld.com/forum23/1139.htm

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License - n. One who, or that which, dissolves or dissipates. from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English - n. One who, or that which, has power to dissolve or dissipate. from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia - n. One who or that which dissolves, or has the power of dissolving, in any sense of that word. - n. In paper-making and other industries, a machine for dissolving, purifying, freeing from acids, and otherwise treating salts, chemicals, clays, colors, and paper pulp in water or other liquids. from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. - n. a liquid substance capable of dissolving other substances I, Fenris Badwulf, dependable Satrap and dissolver of problems, wrote this. You've got this great illustration, a debt dissolver on how to tackle this. You've got this really great sort of illustration, a debt dissolver, on how to kind of tackle this. Melanie, a late-comer to traditional morality (and still 'open-minded' on to abortion, torture, nukes not to mention that dissolver of the instituion of marriage, contraception (which she recommends) etc.) really should practice the virtue of humility. There's a somewhat shady treatment called mesotherapy which involves an injection of something called phosphatidylcholine, a purported fat-dissolver. Do I dislike Cillit Bang the fat dissolver, because it's bad for the environment? Commercial-free space, pollution dissolver and spam killers are priced at anything between 2 and 20 Euros. But recurrent episodes of Carterism -- sentimentality about "dialogue" as the dissolver of differences, leavened by vanity about the power of one's personality -- waste time, which we are running short of. Its stock closed 2005 at $8.11 and has nearly doubled in the past week of trading, after announcing on Jan. 5 a $385 million deal with Bayer to commercialize its blood clot dissolver, alfimeprase, outside of the United States. Com a derrocada generalizada dos regimes vermelhos, os espartilhos artísticos têm-se desfeito, e até mesmo na China, que é de não esquecer que continua a ser a China Vermelha em algo mais do que nome, as restrições à práctica artística estão a dissolver-se.

<urn:uuid:db69433c-e39d-4f77-a21b-5bd959aee951>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.wordnik.com/words/dissolver

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en

Sorry, no definitions found. Sorry, no etymologies found. Kachina, for example, also denotes one of the elaborately masked dancers who impersonate a kachina at agricultural ceremonies, and yeibichai and shalako similarly have the same kind of dual usage. (NID3 describes the word as being akin to pauwau, a Natick word for conjurer, as well as meaning a tribal council or conference with an Indian leader or group, whence its modern meaning.) shalako a Zuñli ceremony which celebrated the advent or departure of the kachinas (see above) and in which dancers inpersonating a Zuñi mythical being of extraordinary stature played a central role. yeibichai a Navaho initiation or curative ceremony performed by masked dancers representing a supernatural being.

<urn:uuid:434dcb2d-3c5a-424a-852e-16b26561967c>

CC-MAIN-2015-35

https://www.wordnik.com/words/shalako

s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645366585.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031606-00229-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz

en