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The Dubai Islamic Economy Development Centre (DIEDC) lately held its first board meeting for 2021, presided by His Excellency Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansouri, Chairman of DIEDC. Convening DIEDC’s board members to review the progress of strategic initiatives made by the Centre last year, the meeting also detailed the action plan for 2021, with a specific focus on the DIEDC 2022-2030 Strategy.
His Excellency Sultan Al Mansouri confirmed that the Islamic economy has witnessed four years of outstanding achievements that can largely be attributed to the robust DIEDC 2017-2021 Strategy. Implemented in collaboration with the Centre’s strategic partners, a key outcome of the Strategy was the year-on-year growth of the Islamic economy and an increase in its contribution to Dubai’s GDP.
He said: “Following several years of positioning the UAE as a global capital of Islamic economy, today we are happy to lead the nation into the next phase of growth for the sector. Impactful collaborations with nations across the globe and defining public-private partnerships, as well as prioritising the exchange of knowledge and shared success stories have facilitated our journey so far. We are now set to continue our march to shape a sustainable economy following the downturn that was a direct outcome of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Dubai’s Pioneering Status
His Excellency Sultan Al Mansouri added: “Dubai’s status as the global capital of Islamic economy can be attributed to the vision and continuous support of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. Since he first launched the Strategy in 2013 as a pillar of a strong Islamic economy based on sustainable development, the sector has witnessed continuous growth. Through combining ethics, innovation and true growth, the Islamic economy ecosystem serves not only as an instrument to resolve economic crises, but also to safeguard against any potential ones.”
Furthermore, His Excellency confirmed that the Dubai: Capital of Islamic Economy initiative, as part of the national economic diversification agenda, is making significant strides given the strong synergies that DIEDC boasts with its diverse strategic partners from across the public and private sectors. He noted that as a key contributor to the non-oil sector of the national economy that boosts Dubai’s GDP growth year on year, the success of the Islamic economy testifies to the remarkable vision of the wise leadership.
His Excellency Al Mansouri added: “The next phase requires us to intensify collaborations with DIEDC’s strategic partners to continue building on the successful track record Islamic economy has achieved to date, and will aim to elevate the Islamic economic system to greater heights.”
Achieving Strategic Objectives
For his part, His Excellency Essa Kazim, Secretary General of DIEDC, confirmed that the executive plans will continue to prioritise the strategic objectives of the Dubai: Capital of Islamic Economy initiative, to boost the industry’s contribution to Dubai’s GDP, and also bring on board more international partners keen to benefit from the growing investment opportunities the Islamic economy presents.
His Excellency Kazim said: “The Dubai: Capital of Islamic Economy initiative continues to make significant advances in realising its strategic objectives, through multiple programmes that are well aligned with Dubai’s executive plans for 2021. Today, Dubai and the wider UAE are building growing credibility in the Islamic economy space through attracting Islamic economy experts and subject matter specialists as well as startups and young entrepreneurs. This bodes well especially in the run up to the fifth edition of the Global Islamic Economy Summit, scheduled to take place on the sidelines of Expo 2020 Dubai.
He added: “The Islamic economy has the potential to serve as a safety net in the face of crises, given its ethical values and transparent operating principles with regard to wealth accumulation and distribution, while supporting the mission of sustainable development.”
Achieving Comprehensive Development
During the meeting, Abdulla Mohammed Al Awar, CEO of DIEDC, presented the various initiatives and outcomes achieved in line with the Dubai: Capital of Islamic Economy Strategy in 2020 and announced DIEDC’s action plan for the upcoming year that covers proposed new initiatives and expected milestones on existing ones.
Abdulla Al Awar shared the latest preparations for the fifth Global Islamic Economy Summit that will take place on 1 and 2 November 2021. Addressing the board, he said: “This landmark event is taking place during exceptional circumstances and will convene minds from across the globe to discuss the future of the Islamic economy, as well as its pivotal role in restructuring international economy and trade.”
Al Awar also outlined initiatives the Centre is currently working on with its strategic partners that are expected to further bolster Dubai’s status as the global capital of Islamic economy. He shared the latest updates on the Global Islamic Finance Code, under development in partnership with the Ministry of Finance and other international strategic partners, that will considerably broaden the reach of Islamic finance worldwide through standardisation. | https://mediaoffice.ae/en/news/2021/March/13-03/Dubai-Islamic-Economy-Development-Centre-Launches-2021-Plan-Reinforces-Dubais-Status |
OTTAWA – November 3rd, 2020 – 1VALET announced today that company Warrant Holders have exercised their warrants, resulting in the closing of the proptech firm’s latest funding round.
This funding will support the successful deployment of 1VALET’s Building Operating System (BOS) and smart building ecosystem across a number of marquee Canadian and foreign projects over the coming months. It will also drive the expansion of their supply chain to meet their significant product demand.
“The recent milestones we have achieved as an organization, such as the Rogers Reseller Agreement among many others, really made this decision a simple one for our shareholders,” said 1VALET President & CEO Jean-Pierre Poulin. “We have successfully positioned our company as an industry leader, and continue to power multi-family buildings with our disruptive building operating system (BOS), entry system, and mobile resident application.”
As 1VALET continues to secure significant partnerships and add industry giants to its customer pipeline, the company also announced it is expecting the imminent close of its non-dilutive S.A.F.E round of funding. | https://1valet.com/1valet-announces-close-of-warrant-exercise/ |
Dr. Michael Lebby Issues Letter to Lightwave Logic Shareholders
Fellow Shareholders,
Today, with great pride I assume the post of CEO of Lightwave Logic. I have been an independent board member since mid-2015, and I have personally seen the company move quickly and efficiently towards the commercialization of its polymer photonics materials under the leadership of Tom Zelibor and Jim Marcelli. Going forward, Tom will remain as Chairman of the Board, and Jim will continue in the President/Chief Operating Officer role; both continuing to provide the valued and expert leadership we have all seen over the past few years. Lightwave Logic is in excellent health, and is ideally positioned to advance polymer photonics based technologies onto the world stage.
I am also proud to have Fred Leonberger as an outside board member (see Press Release dated March 29, 2017). Fred is one of the most famous, and technically successful engineering leaders in the fiber communications business. Fred is a veteran of this field and has driven many technical photonic device programs to product, both at JDSU,United Technologies, as well as other companies. We are proud and privileged to have Fred on our team assisting both at the board level as well as part of our Operations Committee.
My enthusiasm for Lightwave Logic has been reinforced by the fact that we not only have achieved our stated milestones, but also have exceeded them and continue to exceed them. The momentum is building and we believe that we are rapidly accelerating toward becoming a truly world-class polymer device revenue-generating enterprise, as can be seen by last week’s press release (dated April 26, 2017) which reports Lightwave Logic achieving high speed modulation enabling 25Gbps in our polymer based optical modulator.
For 2017, our development route is now clear. We need to scale the performance of the ridge waveguide modulator to a point where customers will ask to evaluate the device. As we noted in our December 27, 2016 press release, one of the major opportunities over the next decade is the 100Gbps node which is composed of 4 channels, each operating at 25Gbps)—and that is where we are focusing our development efforts. Our press release last week reported that we now have seen high speed performance from our modulator to enable 100Gbps solutions in the market place, which is extremely exciting for us. We intend to leverage significant advances in our organic polymer materials development to fully develop our P2IC™ (polymer PIC or polymer photonics integrated circuit)platform to address 4x25Gbps customer-ready devices that also can pass reliability and quality assurance metrics.
The opportunity that awaits us is large. At the start of 2017, I took on the challenge to explore the market trends in the datacom and telecom market segments, and produced internal data to forecast which markets would be attractive to us over the next decade. It quickly became evident that market demand for 100Gbps devices (using 25Gbps devices) is explosive with demand exceeding supply. We also saw the market upgrading device performance to 50Gbps to support the growing demand for 400Gbps data rates, especially in the data center segment of the market. I look forward to sharing this data with you at our upcoming annual meeting of shareholders on May 18 in Boulder, Colorado [A live feed of the meeting (10 AM Mountain Time) can be accessed online at: http://public.viavid.com/index.php?id=123175].
The good news here is that we know our ridge waveguide modulator device is scalable, and capable of much more. We are now capable of addressing the 100Gbps opportunity head-on through with 4 channels of 25Gbps. We plan to focus the remaining part of 2017 on development work to optimize data rates and other performance parameters for the ridge waveguide modulator, and we will report on those milestones as we achieve them.
Marketing
Our marketing and communications efforts are planned to continue to expose Lightwave Logic to a much broader audience, both inside the datacom and telecom segments of fiber communications, but also outside of this market. The company made two significant presentations to important industry audiences that showcased the promise of Polymer Photonic Integrated Circuits (P2ICTM) in 2016, and will look to make more presentations later in 2017 and 2018 as we complete more milestones in our device development program for the ridge waveguide modulator. We continue to receive invites for presentations of our technology platform, and we expect this to increase as we report on our development progress.
We started early in 2016 by demonstrating that our organic polymer materials could withstand greater than 4,000 hours of photochemical stability (in nitrogen) – a key metric that determines the ultimate ability of our material to function in a commercial environment without degradation. By year end 2016,we not only achieved our goals for a 2.5Gbps working ridge waveguide modulator, we exceeded them with modulator bandwidths that exceeded 5GHz and can support data rates of 10Gbps. Again in 2017 we are ahead of schedule, and now with a 25Gbps capable modulator, we will continue to improve device performance for the remainder of 2017.
While our ridge waveguide modulator will be our primary area of device development, we will also further optimize our polymer materials and look to partner with companies to further the work on an ultra-miniaturized silicon photonics hybrid slot waveguide modulator.
Summary
The company under Tom and Jim’s leadership has benefited immensely over the past two years to bring polymer photonics to the forefront of the technology community and to demonstrate working polymer ridge waveguide modulators ahead of schedule. Tom and Jim will continue their important leadership at Lightwave Logic as Chairman, and President/COO roles, respectively. It is critical that Lightwave Logic continues this impressive technical progress. My role is to take these exciting results with the assistance from Fred Leonberger and aim them towards product development. We are attracting the brightest and best in the field who have recognized our technological achievements who now want to join us to commercialize our polymer photonics P2IC™platform.
2017 will be an important year for us as we progress our technology development further towards commercialization. We still have many issues to address, specifications to hone, and performance to optimize; however, by 2018 we believe our company will be in a much stronger position to engage with large partners for business development opportunities. Because the value proposition of our polymer technology is so compelling, we expect to attract enormous interest by
potential partners.
Thank you, | https://www.lightwavelogic.com/news/new-release-48/ |
Intellia Therapeutics, Inc. announces its strategic priorities for the upcoming two years as the Company enters its next phase of pipeline execution and platform innovation.
Among the 2023-2024 Strategic Priorities are to initiate global pivotal trials for Intellia’s investigational in vivo CRISPR-based therapy NTLA-2002 for HAE.
“2022 proved to be another outstanding year for Intellia, with several significant clinical milestones achieved across our pipeline, further reinforcing the ability of our modular CRISPR genome editing platform to target a broad range of diseases,” says Intellia President and CEO John Leonard, M.D. “These accomplishments reflect steady execution against our core strategy: to harness the immense power of genome editing, both for in vivo and ex vivo applications. As we look ahead, our highest priority will be to prepare for the initiation of global pivotal trials for our investigational in vivo CRISPR-based therapy NTLA-2002 for HAE. As this program continue to progress, we believe we are moving closer to setting a new standard of care for people living with HAE and other serious diseases. In addition, we are advancing the next wave of platform capabilities, such as in vivo gene insertion and our proprietary allogeneic solution. Importantly, while the possibilities to apply our industry-leading genome editing technology are expansive, we are taking a disciplined approach with our portfolio by deploying resources on high-impact opportunities and collaborating with a network of other scientific leaders to expand the applications of our innovative technologies.”
Based on the strategic priorities, which will be the Company’s focus over the next two years, Intellia anticipates to initiate Phase 2 portion of the ongoing NTLA-2002 Phase 1/2 study in 1H 2023, to submit an IND in 1H 2023 to support the inclusion of U.S. sites in the Phase 2 study of NTLA-2002, and to present additional clinical data from the ongoing first-in-human study of NTLA-2002 in 2023. | https://haei.org/intellia-moving-closer-to-setting-new-standard-of-care/ |
Don’t blame me for putting a case for Agile here. As with any process maturity, a process or discipline goes through a lot of churns and several hype cycles before settling down as a stable process with embedded quality in it. The indicators and checks and balances slowly emerge that highlight the true status of its efficiency and effectiveness.
Project Management as a discipline is not new and has been there for more than half a century as a formal discipline. Its scope originated from the industrial revolution and was embedded in the manufacturing industry, then it spread to other engineering disciplines and thus came down to IT project management.
IT has its unique variation and its own maturity journey as compared to any other industry. As we progressed from data entry systems to Management Information Systems to Business Intelligence Systems to the latest buzzword of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning driven systems, the project management transformed with every transformation of the industry too.
The primary change that is coming in is the change in the attitude of business and their engagement with the IT functions. Predominantly a BRD (Business Requirements Document) driven approach where business knew what they wanted we’re progressing to a Platform & strategic partnership-driven approach where IT works closely with business and together they solve the puzzles of a product or a service offering roadmap. No one knows what right system is to be built as now we’re more driven by the empirical data that provides us insights to build more intuitive, engaging and productive systems.
User adoption and feedback of the systems is paramount as compared to the feature completion and meeting timelines. As now the project plan with a defined timeline transformed into a product journey, the time axis became fluid, and the other axis emerges as user adoption & satisfaction (app store stars – for mobile app driven projects).
To facilitate that, the entire movement of Agile came into being, where some radical rethinking was done and based on which the Agile Manifesto was envisioned. People hold on to this manifesto as a bible which I believe is a huge mistake. Many times, the essence and the idea behind a process change is forgotten and what remains is a shoddy documentation that people follow without even knowing the truth behind it. Religion is no different, but that’s a different discussion or debate to have for some other time.
Coming back to Agile, as what happens with any new methodology and technology the hype cycle grows and picks up its momentum with time. Though Agile was coined in 2001, it took more than a decade to have a huge hype cycle to be built, as that’s when mass adoption happened, before this, it was used by product companies as they were the early adopters of the trend. The services companies and IT departments of other industries (the banks) caught on to it, the word was abused, misused and thrown around within any related or unrelated argument.
Just like the above mentioned CMMI maturity chart, first signs of maturity came in 2016, when people started realizing that Agile is no Silver bullet, and many projects were struggling or failing to meet the soft milestones, and MVPs as the structure put in place was supporting only the small initiative being run in Agile format, but the entire organization’s rest of the departments are pretty much annual budget cycle driven.
Think about it yourself, how many times, new product initiatives have to follow, and file for the budget requests and then keep extending the budgets or resubmitting the revised budget requests on the yearly basis as this fits the finance department’s reconciliation cycle of IT spend. The buzzword process does have a merit to it as it simplifies the complexity of calculating a cost of an initiative run under Agile methodologies for their milestone achieved in a calendar year rather than on-going velocity chargebacks.
But, with time, teams realized that to meet the milestones that get the chargeback model work, the rest of the organization need to support the Agile methodology as well. That’s when Organizational Agility started to be discussed and taken seriously. Organizations must focus on building a value-based roadmap for agile adoption in the organization where all sub-departments are also embracing Agile practices, to enable the whole organization to become nimble on value delivery that just one IT team being agile and trying to deliver value within a constrained environment.
There are debates happening in the Agile community whether to focus on adopting Agile based on a list of prescribed practices or a dedicated effort to embrace and internalize the core values and principles of agility are to be attempted. In the end what conclusion industry is coming to is a maturity process from Doing Agile to Being Agile and that is what brings the organization from Agile organization to Organization that has Agility.
Shailendra Malik has 15 years of industry experience in delivering strategic solutions on paper to real life and delivering PoC initiatives to live production systems for his clients. Known for identifying the real problems that stop a breakthrough to happen. He is working with a consulting firm in Singapore and has worked in the Singapore market for more than 8 years, working with multiple banks as his clients.
Are we doing justice with Agile? | https://agilityexchange.com/from-agile-to-agility/ |
24 July 2020
Following their April 2020 announcement, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) Steering Committee have now achieved two more important milestones in their work to formalize and develop CRediT both as a NISO/ANSI standard and as a community.
In short time, NISO and the CRediT Steering Committee collaborated to establish a small initial working group, which expects to complete editorial changes to the taxonomy language and submit the draft for final approval in September. In addition, they have launched a new, information-rich website http://credit.niso.org, to replace the prior version, which has now been sunset. And, to help further engage the community, a CRediT Twitter account has also been created — @contributor_roles.
“With NISO’s strong support and adept project management, our team has been able to accelerate the pace of our work to share CRediT with the community – to make it as usable and useful as possible,” commented Liz Allen, Director of Strategic Initiatives at F1000, one of the Taxonomy’s originators, and current Steering Committee member. “We look forward to full standardization, wider adoption, and continued interest, feedback, and support from both NISO and the broader community of integrators and adopters.”
“It is a pleasure to support CRediT,” commented Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO. “There is real, palpable momentum centered around the taxonomy, and we are thrilled to be helping secure its foundation and support its scale-up, as transparency into contributions has many benefits for the scholarly information ecosystem.”
About CRediT
CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 roles, that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scientific scholarly output. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output.
Visit the website to learn more. | https://www.uksg.org/newsletter/uksg-enews-475/credit-niso-collaboration-achieve-key-milestones |
My first automotive job was with Mercedes-Benz in Germany where I started in an international management program after finishing university in 1996. I always had a passion for sports cars and was excited about joining a global and dynamic industry.
One of my recent achievements was the successful restructuring of a plant without any disruption of deliveries to customers. This was the result of a team effort supported by key initiatives, such as the launch of a training program for all employees (both those departing and those staying). We implemented industry best practices for lean manufacturing and continuous improvement. We also encouraged the team to use their imagination and know-how to set and execute actions to regain the plant’s competitiveness. These initiatives helped us increase customer satisfaction and performance. This successful outcome was achieved by establishing a clear mission that kept us focused, as well as by building trust and credibility and showing respect and appreciation. One of my personal achievements was climbing the Thorung La mountain pass in central Nepal. That was an unforgettable adventure.
Two business partners and I set up a start-up B2B trading platform in China many years ago. At the time, it was the first online platform with niche technology of its kind in China. We ended up exiting the business because of conflicting views among the main stakeholders. The lessons I learned from the experience were the importance of establishing a common vision and mission; of having the will to execute the plan; and of putting your heart into what you believe and what you do.
As I recently joined Faurecia, my current challenge is getting to know my new team well, inspiring the team to become strong business partners, and helping the team members to reach their full potential. Simultaneously, I have been immersing myself in the organization, the products and processes to support operational performance, strengthen our market position and deploy our “Being Faurecia” cultural change.
That it is so very competitive and that there is such strong passion and desire to initiate and lead the next big trend.
Be ready to change yourself before you try to change the world.
This is an exciting, dynamic journey, so be passionate about what you do, be resilient and courageous, embrace the industry’s global reach, never stop learning and have fun.
I would start by getting to know the employees and key external stakeholders, making sure I fully understood the organizational culture, the business environment, and the level of operational and financial performance. With this knowledge my team and I would develop a common vision that would be shared with the entire company. I would put together a great management team and ensure that we had the right people in the right places to support and execute the strategy.
I enjoy what I am doing and my focus is on doing it well. In the future, I hope to increase my responsibilities and become a better leader by further developing my credibility and competence.
Have a laugh with friends; travel with my wife. I also like outdoor sports and nature. | https://europe.autonews.com/article/20150518/RISINGSTARS/305199997/yanik-cantieni |
Dr Edward Ademolu outlines how his interest in the politics of visual representation particular in the development/humanitarian spheres evolved.
What role, if anything, do representations of Africa by NGOs have on identity and engagement with International Development, by African diaspora communities?” Do they, readily accept development representations as visual documentaries upholding authoritative truths about Africa and communities therein? Are these popular images in sync with their own personal interpretations and views of their countries of heritage? Or do they simply reflect more popular understandings of and by ‘the British public’ within which African diaspora are implicated? As such, all these speculative questions and theoretical possibilities necessarily form and undergird the foundation upon which my research is situated.
While many studies in International Development have critiqued the different ways in which popular development and humanitarian representations affect, shape and inform public perceptions, knowledge and dispositions. There is a tendency in much of this literature to homogenise British audiences of NGO communication productions. This has imagined audiences as some form of monocultural Western-situated community, coextensive with the ‘general’ British public. It further assumes that audiences are rather similar in how they read, interpret and are impacted by development representations. No …, Surely not? This assumption precludes any critical engagement with the diversity, complexities and particularities of and within audiences, and doesn’t reflect the multiplicitous and differentiated ways in which audiences think, feel, are impacted by, and behave in response to, NGO representations. As well as, their philanthropic propensity and other important forms of engagement in International Development.
One such group of people are British audiences of African descent – and specifically, as it relates to my study, Nigerian diaspora individuals and communities – who have their racial/ethno-cultural identities and heritages within the places and among the people that are subject(ed) to NGO representation. As such, using a range of qualitative methodologies including focus group discussions, one-to-one interviews and online-ethnography with over 60 diaspora participants and 8 NGOs; my research set out to examine three interrelated issues, two of which are discussed here. Firstly, “how and with what effects do development representations impact African diaspora perceptions and understandings of their country of origin?” And secondly, on the back of this, “how does this become meaningful and materialised in the different ways that diaspora engage – or disengage, with International Development?”
One of the key findings of this study is that development representations impact Nigerian diaspora audiences in diverse and complicated ways, that both reproduce and contradict popular, largely negative and stereotypical ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘of knowing’ Africa and Nigeria specifically. Several viewed these places within predominant imaginings and normative assumptions of ‘helplessness’ ‘primitivity’ and ‘rurality’ much in the spirit of similar observations made in the literature regarding mainstream British audiences. Suffice to say, for these individuals there was a significant degree of reciprocity between how they viewed and comprehended their country of origin and its mediated representation by NGOs. However, this patterning was not the same for all diaspora, those who had personal histories of, relationships with, and biographical references for Africa, for example, were imbued with a unique repertoire or ‘stock of knowledges’ from which to draw nuanced, critical and multiple contradictory thoughts about their country of origin vis-à-vis development representations.
However, what is particularly revelatory is how this study reveals the complex and contested ways that individual diaspora identities and subjectivities linked to their skin-color or identifications as ‘black, ‘African’ ‘Nigerian’ or all three, are implicated in and complicate their construal of development representations and how they are influenced by them. This is realised in their paradoxical relationships with development representations. Whereby, Nigerian’s simultaneously abhor and yet ethno-racially identify with these images in response to the seemingly unavoidable difference through similarity that they create. These harmoniously conflicting relationships with development representations is managed by participants adopting and appropriating new, alternative and preferential identities or ‘personae’, such as the ‘taking up’ of Afro-Caribbean identities that ‘down-play’ and conceal their African heritage. While others, negotiate this seemingly irreconcilable tension with development representations by adopting self-ascribed “Afro-centric”, “unapologetically black” or “fiercely Nigerian” identities. These newly formed identities are essentially ethnosymbolic performances of the ‘Diaspora Self’ which are summoned and strategically mobilised by Nigerians in their attempt to make ‘meaning’ legible in the semiosis of African representation by NGOs. It is through these identities that diaspora become their own ‘walking, talking PR machine’ by which they exercise autonomy, self-determination, complete ownership, and flexibility over how they are viewed and received by the world. A privilege not afforded to them by the often tricky, impenetrable terrain of NGO African representation in their stereotyped and de-contextualised images of the continent.
Another important interrelated finding, is that these perceptions, understandings and identity reconfigurations by diaspora, also inform and are implicated in their level of trust – or lack thereof, and willingness to financially support NGOs and engage in International Development more generally. With Nigerian’s circumventing mainstream, popular NGOs in favour of more informal, often remittance-giving channels, and philanthropic giving via the church or mosque, as a way to side-step or symbolically boycott NGOs and their seemingly racist, over-simplified and discouraging images.
Interestingly, this study found that NGO professionals are largely unaware of diaspora audiences in their representational practices. Rather their communications are informed by the intra-organisational limitations, politics and economic determinants of their operations, which ultimately prioritise fundraising. These internal considerations, not the implications of their visual messaging for African diaspora communities, determine what images of Africa are available and possible, as well as, how they are mediated and received by larger publics.
So, why is all this important?
Well …, you see, while NGOs are in the business of humanitarianism and development, they are also necessarily concerned with the visual business of representations – representations that are deeply implicated in how and why African diaspora audiences comprehend, perceive, connect or disconnect with International Development. We are reminded that NGOs as apparatuses of development discourse, determine the space and create the visual frame within which Other people and places are defined and knowable. However, it is also within this space that the diversity and complexities of audiences, including the impact of images on different communities is lost in the simplification and concealment that this creates. If anything, this research implores NGOs and academics to critically engage in an attitudinal and epistemological shift in how they theorise, treat and engage with audiences of development representations in ways that are as multiple and diverse as the communities that compose them.
This article was first published on the Global Development Institute blog.
Dr Edward Ademolu (@ed_ade1) has a PhD in Development Policy & Management from The University of Manchester. His doctorate and research interests are centred on the politics of visual representation, with a particular focus on development/humanitarian representations of Africa and African diaspora by NGOs, Western news reporting and contemporary mainstream media. His broader interests include works on race, black minority identities, postcolonial discourse and criticism, as well as, The New Social Studies of childhood and anti-oppressive discourses in Social Work practice. He is also a blogger and journalist.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the Africa at LSE blog, the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa or the London School of Economics and Political Science. | https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2018/09/05/how-representations-of-africa-by-ngos-impact-diaspora-communitys-identity-and-engagement-with-international-development/ |
This panel investigates the concept of “cultural heritage” as both a political category and a discursively fertile ground for ethnic groups to re-construct their traditions, interpret their relationships to the nation, and negotiate their place in multicultural Asia. Across China and Inner Asia, “heritage” has become an ideological and cultural instrument for minority groups to imagine ways of being simultaneously ethnic and modern, countering normative movements toward homogenizing modernity. How do co-ethnics across national borders shape the articulation of ethnic heritage? Is heritage discourse a vehicle for forging inter-ethnic and/or supranational identification as a form of alternate modernity? This diverse panel draws together junior and senior scholars from literature, anthropology, and ethnomusicology, addressing the issue of how ethnic groups position themselves and define value in relation to complex inter-ethnic and international flows within the interconnected spaces of Asia.
The panel illuminates how minority groups strategically navigate ethnic, national, and transnational influences to articulate “heritage” and imagine their identities in Asia. Charlotte D’Evelyn and Kip Hutchins probe the question of cultural authenticity as ethnic Mongol musicians craft Mongolian musical heritage around contested sites of rural/urban and Inner/Outer Mongolia. Ujin Kim investigates the linguistic heritage of Turkic speakers in Xinjiang, who negotiate their uses of Arabic script as a language of aesthetic choice and Mandarin Chinese as a language of practical modernity. Yanshuo Zhang reveals how ethnic Qiang and Yi writers and villagers in southwest China formulate inter-ethnic links to challenge contemporary China’s relentless pursuit of secular modernity. | https://eventscribe.com/2019/AAS/fsPopup.asp?efp=S0FFSFpSUlY3MTU1&PresentationID=462817&rnd=0.7901633&mode=sessionInfo |
A new study lounge dubbed The House has become a hub for students seeking respite and challenging conversation.
Created for students affiliated with the Urban Scholars Initiative, Lesley Center for the Adult Learner and the Office of Multicultural Affairs and Student Inclusion, The House appeals to students of color and commuters who often struggle to get their footing on campus.
The Office of Multicultural Affairs and Student Inclusion, Urban Scholars Initiative and Lesley Center for the Adult Learn established the lounge this year after students voiced the need for an inclusive space for students on campus. The creation of the lounge is one of several initiatives to better meet the needs of underserved students, including a food pantry where commuter students can pick up snacks and light meals.
Students often stop at the pantry before heading to The House, located at 13 Mellen St.
The lounge features a few computers and seating space for at least 10 people, and it has become a respite for minority students, says senior Mosheh Tucker.
Tucker often feels the need to censor his conversations among white members of the community due to microaggressions — subtle prejudices — that he experiences on a regular basis. Tucker finds there is more openness in the conversations that take place in The House. It’s also a place where students can share their common experiences and challenge each other’s ideas in a constructive way.
Office of Multicultural Affairs and Student Inclusion Director Lilu Barbosa has heard numerous reports of these microagressions, including someone describing a student as “exotic” and people assuming that individuals from a particular continent are all the same.
Student Michel Denis, enrolled through the Lesley Center for the Adult Learner, has also found community through The House. Now in his second semester, the Haitian native came to Lesley through the Bunker Hill Community College partnership, and said the transition was difficult. He had a hard time making friends, figuring out which classes to take and getting involved.
(L to r) Students Rocky Cotard and Albert Myers are pictured in The House with Amy Rutstein-Riley and Jennifer Castro.
Connecting with fellow students of color and varied backgrounds (Denis is half-Cuban) has helped him integrate into university life.
This is exactly the purpose of the house, said Barbosa.
“While students navigate their college experience, it is important to offer them a space where they have ownership and that is an affirming space given all of their identities,” he said.
As The House primarily draws students of color, the space could be misconstrued as a way for minority students to segregate themselves from the rest of the university, but Tucker rejects the idea.
He says sometimes they just need a break from people who can’t relate to their experiences.
“We’re consistently out there. We don’t spend the whole day in here,” he said, adding that anyone is welcome to join in the conversations at The House.
“For students of marginalized identities, to navigate an environment where the dominant norms, languages and perspectives may be different than their own, it is important to also provide them a space where the environment is shaped by their own identity-based norms — a space that is affirming culturally, ethnically, linguistically, with respect to gender identity, socioeconomic status and in other ways,” he said.
Barbosa, and many students, would like to see additional inclusive spaces created on campus.
“It is important to provide them with access to a space where they can be at ease, do homework, engage socially and connect with staff members when needed,” he said. | https://lesley.edu/news/new-lounge-gives-space-to-diverse-students |
SPECIAL TO THE DAYTONA TIMES
As part of Stetson University’s celebration of Black History Month, the Honorable Lubbie Harper Jr., a Supreme Court justice in Connecticut, will speak at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 20, at the DeLand campus.
The keynote address is titled, “Social Justice – An Ongoing Search/A Never Ending Challenge.” The public is invited, free of charge. The event will be held in the Stetson Room, second floor of the Carlton Union Building, 131 E. Minnesota Ave., DeLand.
Harper is a member of the bars of the State of Connecticut, the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.
He is currently the chairman of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparity in the Criminal Justice System as well as Connecticut’s Representative to the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts.
Other Black History Month events
In addition to Harper’s lecture on Feb. 20, the following is Stetson University’s schedule of events, all open to the public, to commemorate Black History Month.
Feb. 19
The Color ME Brown Project: “Conversations with Unmuted Voices’’ is sponsored by the Cross-Cultural Center, Safe Zone and Stetson University’s Gender Studies Program. It will be held in the Rinker Auditorium Room 108, Lynn Business Center, 345 N. Woodland Blvd. The program begins at 10 a.m.
Directed by young college LGBTQIA activist Nicole Townsend, “Conversations with Unmuted Voices’’ is a documentary primarily focusing on the Black and Latino communities and explores the complexities that each person experiences as they navigate their communities. The purpose is to expose issues around race, class, gender and sexuality that are muted in order to break down racism, homophobia and discrimination.
Black Pride: Negotiating triple minority is sponsored by the Cross-Cultural Center, Safe Zone and Kaleidoscope, Stetson Room, CUB, 131 E. Minnesota Ave.
Time: 7 to 8:30 p.m.
It is a “fishbowl” look into the ways Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer and Questioning individuals address the complexities of race, gender, gender expression, and social pressures as they shift identities to “survive,” “pass” and “succeed.” Candid conversations followed by Q&A from the audience. Refreshments will be provided.
Feb. 21
Book Feast: Arrested Justice: Black women, violence, and America’s prison nation, by Beth Richie. 4:30-6 p.m.
It is sponsored by the Multicultural Student Council, Africana Studies and the Cross-Cultural Center, Cross-Cultural Center, 611 N. Bert Fish Drive, DeLand.
Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change. The Book feast will be led by Dr. Pepper Bates. Free refreshments will be provided. For more information about where to pick up a free copy of the book, contact ygonell@stetson.edu.
For more information on Stetson University’s schedule for Black History Month, contact Yolany Gonell, assistant director, Intercultural Initiatives, at Stetson University’s Cross Cultural Center, at ygonell@stetson.edu, or call 386-822-7402. | https://daytonatimes.com/2013/02/14/stetsons-black-history-events-to-include-lecture-by-connecticut-supreme-court-justice/ |
This paper summarises findings from a research study which investigated how 11- to 17-year-old mixed-heritage adolescents living in London negotiate the demands of living with multiple cultures. The study also explored how these adolescents construe themselves in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality. It was found that these individuals had multiple identifications which were subjectively salient to them, and that they were very adept at managing their various identities in different situations. There was no evidence of a sense of marginality, or of being ‘caught between two cultures’, and there was no difference in the strength of British identification exhibited by these mixed-heritage adolescents and white English adolescents of the same age. However, the identities and cultural practices of the mixed-heritage adolescents were fluid and context-dependent, and they appreciated the advantages of being able to negotiate and interact with multiple ethnic worlds. | http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1630/ |
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Moroccan immigrant children in a time of surveillance: navigating sameness and difference in contemporary Spain
Author(s): Inmaculada Garcia-Sanchez
Abstract:
Moroccan Immigrant Children in a Time of Surveillance: Navigating Sameness and Rooted in twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Southwestern Spain, this dissertation analyzes the socio-cultural and linguistic lifeworlds of 8-11 year-old Moroccan immigrant children as they navigate family, school institutions, and peer groups in Spain. To illuminate the constraints and affordances in Moroccan immigrant children's emerging processes of identification, this study focuses on how these children negotiate (and are impacted by) both local and macro politics of inclusion/exclusion in light of the increased levels of tension and surveillance directed towards Muslim and North African immigrants. This dissertation draws from theoretical and methodological approaches in linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology, sociology, and philosophy to provide a grid for mapping the complex issues that emerge in the lives of immigrant children growing up in multicultural and multilingual settings. First, children's social encounters in educational settings are analyzed. In spite of the discourse of inclusion that characterizes the public school's stated ideology, children's social engagements with peers and teachers reveal that Moroccan immigrant children are racialized as the 'Other' and constituted as 'outsiders' through routine participation in exclusionary practices and linguistically mediated regimes of surveillance. Second, in medical visits in which these children translate for their families and for Spanish doctors, children's modified translations are examined to illuminate how these children understand and traverse conflicting cultural spaces of host and immigrant communities. Third, the investigation of children's interactions with peers in ludic activities focuses on the socio-cultural and linguistic resources that children draw on to explore imagined transgressional possible identities and moral worlds. Within the framework of pretend-play, Moroccan children (re)produce and contest the everyday constraints that they must navigate in their communities. The coexistence of Moroccan Arabic and Spanish in children's games encapsulates a heteroglossic polyphony of voices that not only brings to bear the gendered, socio-political and cultural valences of these languages, but also distinct points of view on ways of being in the world. In addition to its relevance as a case study of language socialization in immigrant communities undergoing rapid change, this dissertation has implications for broader debates regarding Muslim immigrant children's educational and socio-cultural welfare in Europe.
APA Citation:
Garcia Sanchez, I. (2009). Moroccan immigrant children in a time of surveillance: navigating sameness and difference in contemporary Spain. Unpublished Dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles. | https://cxarchive.gseis.ucla.edu/xchange/repertoires-of-linguistic-practice/student-commons/moroccan-immigrant-children-in-a-time-of-surveillance-navigating-sameness-and-difference-in-contemporary-spain |
Wandering around the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, you can’t help but feel you’re at the Glastonbury of global education. Amid the thousands of delegates from hundreds of countries, teachers with roving microphones provide lessons on creativity, international artists celebrate the contributions of the world’s top teachers with concert performances, tech start-ups pitch their innovative education tools to frantically scribbling ministers, while a ten-year-old student lectures assembled education leaders on their moral duty to ensure his generation is equipped for the challenges and opportunities of the future.
Everyone at the forum, which brought together world leaders from the public, private and social sectors from 23 to 24 March, was united by a profound conviction about the power of education to effect transformative social change. And while access to schooling was presented as an inalienable right for young people, the content and manner of this teaching were undoubtedly the burning questions for this global community of educators.
Navigating the Complexities of Globalisation
The phrase “21st-century skills” was at the heart of many of the discussions, and there was an overriding sense that almost two decades into that century, education systems had so far failed to keep up with the demands of rapidly changing societies and economies.
From Singapore to Brazil, shared questions resounded. What skills are needed to navigate the complexities of globalisation and be resilient to the dramatic changes that are characterising our world? And with 10 million people reaching working age each month, how do policymakers bridge the skills gap required for a new global workforce? Whether preparing the future workforce for the inevitable impact of automation on the labour market, or shaping a generation of young people at ease with complex identities in a rapidly globalising world, neither teachers nor policymakers were naive about the scale of the challenge.
The weight of this responsibility was particularly evident in the winner of this year’s Global Teacher Prize, Kenya’s Peter Tabichi. A science teacher in a remote region of Kenya’s Rift Valley region, Tabichi has transformed his school into a hub for quality education. While driving a revolution in academic achievement in science and technology in the school, he also champions equality of education for girls. He has built a successful extra-curricular programme for confronting narratives of division between the school’s diverse ethnic and religious communities.
This issue of schools as places of increasing diversity recurred across the forum. As the United Arab Emirates celebrates its Year of Tolerance, there was a major focus on how education could be used as a tool for building co-existence between people of different backgrounds and beliefs. Meeting the challenge of reaching refugees, migrants and displaced populations with education was a major international priority. But I also came across some remarkable case studies of innovative educational approaches to building more resilient societies, including in South Africa, where history lessons are being used to navigate fraught narratives about apartheid.
From Singapore to Brazil, shared questions resounded. What skills are needed to navigate the complexities of globalisation and be resilient to the dramatic changes that are characterising our world?
Tackling Extremism Through Education
Despite its potential for fostering cohesion, there were also signs of education becoming increasingly politicised, and concerns were raised over a growing populist backlash against education. With education level a much more salient predictor of values and politics than any other demographic measure, there were worries about growing societal divides along educational lines. These divides are exploited by populists who decry expertise and thrive off disinformation and a lack of understanding.
At a time when more young people than ever identify as global citizens, there are growing questions about how to square global identities with a resurgent nationalism that is sweeping many societies. In an increasingly interconnected world, there is an urgent need for greater digital literacy in young people. Social media can underpin everything from a global student climate-change march to the perverted transnational far-right narratives that radicalised the March 2019 Christchurch terrorist attacker. It is crucial to encourage the use of social media for good and help build the resilience of young people to extreme and violent narratives.
As part of the forum, a round table hosted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change brought together education leaders to discuss the burning need for political leadership and international collaboration on advancing pluralism and tackling extremism through education systems. Over the coming months, our Institute will be working with global partners to develop an international architecture that helps to build consensus and momentum on the education reforms required to build open-mindedness in young people. We will then take this to world leaders to call for political action at the highest levels to achieve the change the world urgently needs.
At an event like the Global Education and Skills Forum, the centrality of effective education policy to many pressing international challenges is self-evident. But there is also an acknowledgement that these common global challenges will not be properly addressed unless there is a commitment to effective implementation and smart collaboration, rather than just well-intentioned ideals. Fortunately, my time in Dubai demonstrated that a remarkable global cohort of education professionals stands willing to address these emerging challenges and take creative solutions to scale. | https://institute.global/policy/power-effective-education |
The increased contact between nations and cultures in the globalization of the twenty-first century requires an increased accountability for the ways in which individuals and countries negotiate these points of contact. New World and Caribbean Studies envision the cross-cultural and transnational encounters between indigenous, European, and African peoples as important contributors to a paradigm within which identity in relation offers an alternative to identities rooted in national and filial frameworks. Such frameworks limit the ability to construct identity without relying upon static representations of history, culture, and ethnicity that tend to privilege one group over another. In the literature of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez, however, a fictional space is created that rewrites national histories and problematizes rooted identities through their novels' characterization. This fictional space is a transnational paradigm that—in the vocabulary of the critical theories of Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and David A. Hollinger—explores the effects of cultures founded on ideas of relation and affiliation rather than on rooted socio-cultural legitimacy and ethno-political authority. Danticat and Alvarez's characters engage in a process of present living that allows them to negotiate their experience of diaspora and maintain a stable construction of identity in relation.
Degree
MA
College and Department
Humanities; Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature
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BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Kerby, Erik R., "Negotiating Identity in the Transnational Imaginary of Julia Alvarez's and Edwidge Danticat's Literature" (2008). Theses and Dissertations. 1402. | https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1402/ |
Awareness of, and respect for differences of gender, race, religion, language, and culture have liberated many oppressed groups from the hegemony of white, Western males. However, respect for previously denigrated collective identities should not be allowed to confine individuals to identities constructed around one main component used for political mobilisation, or to identities that depend on a priority of properties that are not optional, like race, gender, and language. In this article I want to sketch an approach for accommodating different kinds of identity within a multicultural constitutional democracy. From a vantage point provided by a definition and explanation of personal identity, I want to show how people define, construct and change their personal identities to make themselves into unique individuals. Next I show how democratic political institutions and the personal identities of individuals reciprocally influence one another. In the final section I sketch ways in which diverse personal identities ought to be accommodated in multicultural constitutional democracies. The conclusion is that a society which gives its members the liberty, space, and opportunity to freely construct their own identities might avoid the formation of closed groups committed exclusively to their own sectional interests.
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The increasing diversity of societies is one of the most important educational issues of the globalised era. However, while some attention has been paid to the schooling experiences of racial, ethnic and immigrant minorities in Western societies, little research has been conducted with religious adolescents. This thesis explores the complexities of religious adolescents’ experiences of English secondary schools. As an exploratory study, I employed an emergent research design carrying out loosely-structured, group and single interviews at eleven places of worship to investigate the schooling experiences of 99 adolescent Christians, Jews and Muslims. In order to interpret their reported experiences, I applied a theoretical model based on the Students’ Multiple World Framework in conjunction with concepts of religious identity negotiation and construction. The interview data show how Christians, Jews and Muslims negotiate their religious identities in the context of the numerous challenges presented by secondary schools in a religiously plural and largely secular society. In classroom worlds participants perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented. In peer worlds participants reported that they could experience prejudice, and criticism of their beliefs. Christians, Jews and Muslims reported two principal management strategies in the face of these challenges, either: declaring their religious identity openly, or by masking it in public. The findings of this study are highly relevant to debates about the role of religion in education, including those concerning faith and Church schools and the nature and purpose of the curriculum subject Religious Education. | https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.595991 |
My PhD dissertation explores a qualitative methodology of inquiry in the humanities, social sciences, and education called poetic inquiry. The exploration takes place in three movements. The first movement inquires into poetry, as a distinct form of expression from prose, that is concentrated, performative, and affective, resulting from a unique creative process in which the poet responds to her past experiences attentively. This process is promoted by the poet becoming a self-for-an-other whom she presents in her poetry. Here, responsiveness is the lyrical dimension of living that the poet brings to her writing to inspire it. The second movement is a collection of my poetry written in Canada, responsive to the question of my identity as an Iranian-born woman living in diaspora. The poetry is followed by an example of poetic inquiry that emerges out of an intuition of the pathos of belonging/non-belonging and unhomeliness of the world experienced by immigrants. Finally, the third movement includes both an examination of poetic inquiry as a minor form of research distinct from prose-based methodologies and its application to the discourse of the politics of recognition which informs major researches on immigrants’ identities and their recognition in multicultural societies such as Canada. In poetic inquiry, the researcher not only employs a conventional research methodology but, as a poet, also responds ethically to her research in the same way a chorus in Greek drama responds to the dramatic narrative enacted on the stage. This responsiveness is an invocation that makes discursive inquiry act in ways different from its orderly operations so as to transform itself into poetic inquiry. Poetic inquiry includes both customary research and responsiveness as the lyrical dimension of inquiry. I advocate for re-inclusion of the lyrical in the realm of knowledge as research and education. By adding lyrical sensibilities into education, we can restore coherence, enactive complexity, and intensity to educational practices and renders them into educational poetics as termed by Gitlin and Peck. To theorize poetic inquiry, I borrow concepts from philosophers, poetry scholars, literary theorists, and poets such as Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, Zwicky, Bakhtin, Bachelard, Auden, and Leggo. | https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0165900 |
Self-Defence Course session will cover application and techniques related to Karate and Tai Chi Chuan training. Practical , simple and effective techniques relating back to kata and why each art has its own system of self protection embedded into its training methods.
Karate, Covering, entering, striking, vital points, take downs, sweeps and throws, body positioning, with angles of attack and defence plus groundwork also covered, cross referencing to kata. Time on discussion and questions.
Tai Chi Chuan, Covering, entering, strikes, vital points, body positioning, with angles of attack and defence, cross referencing to kata. Time on discussion and questions.
Please note: places are limited space available on the Self-Defence Course and will be given on a first come, first served basis.
Self-Defence Overview
It is a universally accepted principle that a person may protect themselves from harm under appropriate circumstances, even when that behavior would normally constitute a crime. In the United States legal system, each state allows a defendant to claim self-defense when accused of a violent crime, as does the federal government. The specific rules pertaining to self-defense vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, however. This article offers explanations of the broad concepts that make up self-defense law in the US, but you should check the laws of your particular jurisdiction to understand the specific requirements for a claim of self-defense.
Introduction
Self-defense is defined as the right to prevent suffering force or violence through the use of a sufficient level of counteracting force or violence. This definition is simple enough on its face, but it raises many questions when applied to actual situations. For instance, what is a sufficient level of force or violence when defending oneself? What goes beyond that level? What if the intended victim provoked the attack? Do victims have to retreat from the violence if possible? What happens when victims reasonably perceive a threat even if the threat doesn’t actually exist? What about when the victim’s apprehension is subjectively genuine, but objectively unreasonable?
As you can see, self-defense is more complicated than it first appears. In order to handle the myriad situations where self-defense arises, states have developed rules to determine when self-defense is allowed and how much force a victim can use to protect themselves. As mentioned, the exact rules differ between states, but the considerations are largely the same.
Is the Threat Imminent?
As a general rule, self-defense only justifies the use of force when it is used in response to an immediate threat. The threat can be verbal, as long as it puts the intended victim in an immediate fear of physical harm. Offensive words without an accompanying threat of immediate physical harm, however, do not justify the use of force in self-defense.
Moreover, the use of force in self-defense generally loses justification once the threat has ended. For example, if an aggressor assaults a victim but then ends the assault and indicates that there is no longer any threat of violence, then the threat of danger has ended. Any use of force by the victim against the assailant at that point would be considered retaliatory and not self-defense.
Was the Fear of Harm Reasonable?
Sometimes self-defense is justified even if the perceived aggressor didn’t actually mean the perceived victim any harm. What matters in these situations is whether a “reasonable person” in the same situation would have perceived an immediate threat of physical harm. The concept of the “reasonable person” is a legal conceit that is subject to differing interpretations in practice, but it is the legal system’s best tool to determine whether a person’s perception of imminent danger justified the use of protective force.
To illustrate, picture two strangers walking past each other in a city park. Unbeknownst to one, there is a bee buzzing around his head. The other person sees this and, trying to be friendly, reaches quickly towards the other to try and swat the bee away. The person with the bee by his head sees a stranger’s hand dart towards his face and violently hits the other person’s hand away. While this would normally amount to an assault, a court could easily find that the sudden movement of a stranger’s hand towards a person’s face would cause a reasonable man to conclude that he was in danger of immediate physical harm, which would render the use of force a justifiable exercise of the right of self-defense. All this in spite of the fact that the perceived assailant meant no harm; in fact, he was actually trying to help!
Imperfect Self-defense
Sometimes a person may have a genuine fear of imminent physical harm that is objectively unreasonable. If the person uses force to defend themselves from the perceived threat, the situation is known as “imperfect self-defense.” Imperfect Self-Defence does not excuse a person from the crime of using violence, but it can lessen the charges and penalties involved. Not every state recognizes imperfect Self-Defence, however.
For example, a person is waiting for a friend at a coffee shop. When the friend arrives, he walks toward the other person with his hand held out for a handshake. The person who had been waiting genuinely fears that his friend means to attack him, even though this fear is totally unreasonable. In order to avoid the perceived threat, the person punches his friend in the face. While the person’s claim of self-defense will not get him out of any criminal charges because of the unreasonable nature of his perception, it could reduce the severity of the charges or the eventual punishment.
Some states also consider instances where the person claiming Self-Defence provoked the attack as imperfect Self-Defence. For example, if a person creates a conflict that becomes violent then unintentionally kills the other party while defending himself, a claim of Self-Defence might reduce the charges or punishment, but would not excuse the killing entirely.
Proportional Response
The use of Self-Defence must also match the level of the threat in question. In other words, a person can only employ as much force as required to remove the threat. If the threat involves deadly force, the person defending themselves can use deadly force to counteract the threat. If, however, the threat involves only minor force and the person claiming Self-Defenne uses force that could cause grievous bodily harm or death, the claim of Self-Defence will fail.
Duty to Retreat
The original laws regarding self-defense required people claiming Self-Defence to first make an attempt to avoid the violence before using force. This is also known as a “duty to retreat.” While most states have removed this rule for instances involving the use of nonlethal force, many states still require that a person make an attempt to escape the situation before applying lethal force. | http://karate.shizendo.co.uk/2018/04/04/self-defence-course/ |
Rule 16 – Excluding reasonable unforced participatory activities and defense of self or other people against physical violence, physical violence in any form against other people is wrong and should be punished.
Basically one is not allowed to be physically violent towards any one else. And physically means just that, it does not include talking or writing ideas, even violent ones which are not real threats.
Excluded from this are activities where violent actions may be present (think hockey) or are deliberately a part of the activity, such as boxing. As long as the participants are doing it of their own free will then they should be allowed to do it.
Reasonable implies that the objective of the activity is not to do permanent damage to someone. In other words, getting depressed people to fight to the death is not reasonable!
And excluded from the no harm to others doctrine is when it involves defending yourself or others. And defending against includes against physical harm, physical intimidation, oppression, and slavery.
The response must be in proportion to the threat. In other words you cannot kill someone for raising their fist in anger. But if necessary you can kill someone who is attempting to physically enslave you.
Enslavement in this case implies physically controlling you by law or force for an extended period. It does not include parents limiting their children’s physical activities, or reasonable punishment for crimes.
This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and the HypatianSociety.org as well as any noted 3rd party attributions. | http://hypatiansociety.org/the-21/21-rules/rule-16/ |
In her urgent and powerful new collection of essays and poems, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World, author and Xtra columnist Kai Cheng Thom tackles the questions of community, love, justice and healing during in our current cultural, environmental and political climate. In this exclusive excerpt, Thom analyzes the problem with punishment and accountability processes, and offers a vision of what love-based justice could look like.
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You have the right to tell your story … You do not have the right to traumatize abusive people, to attack them publicly, or to sabotage anyone else’s health. The behaviors of abuse are also survival based, learned behaviors rooted in some pain. If you can look through the lens of compassion, you will find hurt and trauma there. If you are the abused party, healing that hurt is not your responsibility, and exacerbating that pain is not your justified right.
—Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown
I’m not a big believer in justice. That skepticism extends to the notions of accountability, restorative justice, transformative justice, and most of the related terms that have taken hold in social justice culture—though I do very strongly believe in integrity, honesty and personal honour. “Integrity” is a word you hear used fairly frequently in social justice circles, but honesty and honour, as I know them, are values that come to me through my Chinese family and upbringing. Honesty, in my family, means saying what you mean, even if it is unpopular. Honour means acting in a way that your ancestors would be proud of, even if it requires personal sacrifices to do so. However, “honour” is not a word you hear very much in social justice community, and I feel its distinct lack as an influence on activist conduct.
I used to be much more of a believer in justice. I had drunk the Kool-Aid, though I wasn’t ever really clear on exactly what justice meant. Rather ironically, I think a lot of people who are involved in social justice “activism”—scare quotes used because activism means a lot of different things to different people—aren’t too clear on a working definition of justice. There is a subset of folks, of course, who have thought about the definition of justice a lot, but my sense is there is great disagreement and confusion among them. And why not? Justice is a pretty highfalutin philosophical concept.
Over the years of my adolescence and early adulthood, I gave a great deal of myself to the idea of justice: Time, energy, dignity, health. I made huge personal sacrifices to try to live up to the leftist ideals of justice, particularly accountability—which in the circles I ran in had a lot to do with using the right political language (which always changes) and doing all the right political things all the time, and then admitting in no uncertain terms that you were guilty and “problematic” when you were inevitably called out for infractions. There’s actually a fair amount of good learning in that ideology—it teaches humility and listening to the voices of people in pain, which is pretty much always good in my book.
Unfortunately, the enactment of “justice” in radical leftism also played out in my life as a total invalidation of my boundaries (and I am not great at boundaries in the first place). For a time, I became quite valorized in my local community as a “good” upholder of social justice because I was very skilled at using the right language and doing the right things, and I tended to apologize unreservedly and perfectly when I “fucked up.” I now recognize this as a skill born of trauma: The ability to ceaselessly and accurately scan the people in one’s environment for a sense of what will please them, and then to enact it, no matter the cost to one’s long-term health. This skill is a brilliant short-term survival strategy, as most trauma coping strategies are, designed to negotiate the unpredictability and cruelty of punishment—and unfortunately, a punishment narrative is deeply embedded in much of social justice.
Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.
—Porpentine Charity Heartscape, “Hot Allostatic Load”
I’m not a believer in justice because I have never gotten it from or against those who have harmed me. I really am not certain that it would be good for me if I did. I gave so much of myself trying to obtain justice for others, and it eventually rendered me traumatized and deeply disabled. I’m saying that as a literal statement of fact, not as a metaphor or to be melodramatic: I am now sick. I can’t do things I used to be able to do without severe physical or psychological pain.
Many times in Social Justice Land, I was quite seriously taken advantage of and badly treated by white women in positions of power over me. This was done in public, when we were surrounded by so-called activists. Sometimes bystanders expressed sympathy to me in private afterward, but they never protected me or pushed back. I am, of course, angry about this, but I don’t judge these vulnerable bystanders. I have done this exact same thing myself, many times: Witnessed exploitation or violence, and then tried to be supportive without actually taking a stand. It has to do with fear—of punishment, of losing relationships and social status.
I have seen many white women call for justice in situations of personal conflict, violence, and abuse. I have seen others do it as well, but it tends to be white women who get the most attention, because white women are assumed to be inherently innocent. The ideological “innocence” I speak of here not only refers to the literal “not guilty of wrongdoing” but also encompasses a sense of “purity” or “virtue” that makes it blasphemous or deeply evil to be accused of harming a white woman. This, of course, is part of a historical legacy of the use of white womanhood as a justification for violence against people of colour—not too long ago, it was common for men of colour, especially Black men, to be lynched or imprisoned for supposedly endangering the virtue of white women, a practice that continues in more covert forms to this day.
Interestingly, I have also seen many people who are not white women attempt to claim the same kind of “innocence” in their own calls for justice—which entails, first, that the “innocent” person is seen as free of all and any responsibility for the situation and, second, that the “guilty” party is then rendered available for punishment. The logic then follows: If someone has done something bad, it is okay to be aggressive or even violent toward them.
We like punishment in Social Justice Land (lots of people, in many societies and subcultures, like punishment). Of course we do. It feels good to see someone who has hurt you receive a painful consequence for their actions, and we get that feeling by proxy when we see someone who has hurt someone else get punished. I don’t think that’s wrong in and of itself. I have lots of revenge fantasies, and they are very, very comforting to me at certain times. The problem is the enactment of punishment and revenge (and, no, I don’t really see a meaningful distinction between punishment and revenge, though that is up for debate): pain and violence tend to replicate themselves, like a virus. Punishment does not end violence; on the contrary, it breeds it.
We like to think of our punishments as humane; that is, we like to think of them as not-punishment. We prefer to tell ourselves that our punishments are natural, justified consequences. Because punishment feels good in the moment, but it also makes us feel guilty. Leftists, in particular, do not like to see ourselves as perpetrators of cycles of violence because we claim to abhor violence. One notices, though, that the prison-industrial complex and legal criminal justice system also make claims to the moral sanctity of their use of punishments.
On the left, there is a nominal preference for “self-crit” and “accountability,” rather than outright punishment, which usually means that the person who is understood to be guilty of an offence must immediately (immediately!) denounce themselves, often publicly, and then perhaps engage in some sort of reparative labour. This has the potential to be positively transformative but requires great skill to do successfully. We cannot be forced into immediate personal and spiritual growth—we must come to it willingly, or else we only end up disappointed at best and retraumatized at worst. This takes time, resources, and compassion on all sides. It takes compromise and is not immediately gratifying (or even gratifying in the medium term, frankly).
In social justice culture, accountability is enforced by public shaming and shunning, which often continues to affect the person’s social standing long after the act of accountability/reparation is done. Collective measures for assessing the effectiveness of accountability processes and the degree of enforcement necessary are not in common usage; indeed, some people in social justice communities seem to prefer an endless bombardment of online call-outs to the resolution of conflict. The human dignity of someone who has done something “problematic” becomes deprioritized at best and outright trampled at worst.
We have all seen the dogpile of social media—people being relentlessly verbally attacked for making problematic statements despite their good intentions, or even for expressing legitimate differences of opinion. The movement seeks uniformity because uniformity and purity feel safe. This, too, is the language of trauma. I have also seen people doxed and stalked both online and in person. I have been stalked, by someone I had never met or spoken to, because they perceived me to be “abusing” them by not responding to a Facebook friend request. I have seen my friends spread rumours about others in community, advocating for shunning and ostracization over allowing ideological disagreements. On rare occasions, I have seen activists encourage the physical beating of abusive people in community.
As a whole, we have a tendency to escalate rather than de-escalate conflict. In our (rightful) desire to ensure that harm is not minimized or ignored, we use inflammatory language, binary concepts of right and wrong, and oversimplified narratives that more often than not increase tension and heighten rage and shame. We do not ask the questions that are central to transformative justice: Why has harm occurred? Who is responsible (beyond the individual perpetrator—as in, how is community implicated)? How can this harm be prevented in the future?
There are distinctions to made between punishment, justice, and healing. Punishment is a gratifying process of enacting revenge that also perpetuates cycles of violence. Justice is a slow process of naming and transforming violence into growth and repair; it is also frustrating and elusive—and rarely ends in good feelings. Healing is the process of restoration for those who have been hurt, and although justice can aid this process, my own experience is that healing is an individual journey that is almost entirely separate from those who have caused me harm. No apology, or amount of money or punishment, can give me back the person I was, the body and spirit I possessed, before I was violated. Only I can do that.
People who perpetrate violence are not the authors of it; they are the instruments of it. They are solely responsible for the violence they inflict on others. We are all responsible for the violence in our culture.
—Michael White, narrative therapist
I do not have much faith in justice, but I have no choice but to believe in it. The other option is nihilism—total lack of faith in humanity—which I reject. We must reject nihilism because that way lies fascism. We must reject despair and embrace healing, slow and imperfect though it may be, and turn instead to love—love strong enough to live without faith. I am trying to embrace my own healing. I am trying to love my own painful, wounded life. As adrienne maree brown suggests, I am trying to embrace growth and constant transformation, like a flower growing in poisonous radiation.
I am trying to let love emerge from my traumatized body.
So if we must do the work of justice, I suggest that we begin by redefining justice. Rather than a lens of punishment, consequence, or even accountability, we might try understanding justice through an ethic of love. Concrete steps toward building this love-based justice might look like the following:
- We must create flexible, working, practical definitions of justice so that we understand what we are doing and what values we share. There might need to be different definitions of justice for different contexts, but I believe that justice is the naming of harm and the transformation of the people as well as the conditions that perpetuated the harm.
- We must be open to the notion that survivors of harm can also be perpetrators of harm. Survival is not a badge of purity, nor a shield from accountability.
- We must invest deeply and fervently in the dignity of human life. We must not give in to the urge to do harm, even in justice’s name. We must recognize, name, and transform the instinct to humiliate, harm, and coerce those we see as bad or as wrongdoers. No one is disposable.
- We must accept that we cannot force others to change their thinking or their beliefs. We can, however, set boundaries on violent behaviour, and we can enforce those boundaries.
- The practice of facilitating justice work demands complex skills and experience, and it requires great integrity. The facilitator of a justice process must operate honestly, transparently, and with an awareness of their own capacity for abusing the power of their role. As with any position of power, the facilitation of social justice may attract those more interested in that power than in the work itself, or it may present facilitators with the temptation to use that power unwisely. There must be guidelines and strategies to moderate the power of facilitators, and to prevent its misuse.
- Justice may not always be successful at making everyone, or anyone, feel good. We do not all have to like each other or be friends or share personal space. Justice should work toward reducing future harm through de-escalation, as well as ensuring that everyone has the basic resources they need to live, heal, and enjoy life—Yes! We have the right to enjoy our lives.
- Everyone has the right to access support while the work of justice is happening. Many seasoned practitioners of transformative justice suggest the use of “pods,” or small groups of community to create agile networks of support.
- The community must accept its own responsibility for producing, condoning, and reproducing violence. We cannot spend years—decades—in community spaces watching people act badly and hurt each other, and making excuses for them, and then suddenly turn around and act shocked when an individual names that violence. We cannot pretend that we had no hand in covering up, minimizing, and even encouraging violence. We cannot have parties where everyone is deeply intoxicated, and physical, sexual, and verbal boundary-pushing is encouraged, and then act as though “abusers” are all sociopathic monsters who have infiltrated our otherwise perfect communities.
- We must love ourselves. We must encourage love—love that is radical, love that digs deep. Love that asks the hard questions, that is ready to listen to the whole story and keep loving anyway. Love for the survivors, love for the perpetrators, love for the survivors who have perpetrated and the perpetrators who have survived. Love for the community that has failed us all. We live in poison. The planet is dying. We can choose to consume each other, or we can choose love. Even in the midst of despair, there is always a choice. I hope we choose love.
I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World is available now from Arsenal Pulp Press. | https://www.dailyxtra.com/we-can-choose-to-consume-each-other-or-we-can-choose-love-162493 |
One of the most often reported but under-studied phenomenon in post-conflict states is that of revenge violence. While such violence is widely acknowledged to occur after wars, it is often dismissed as epiphenomenal to the central problem of restoring order and good governance in the state. This paper seeks to refocus attention on this phenomenon and challenge the way that it is normally portrayed as a normal, almost incidental consequence of armed conflict. It develops an ideal-type distinction between revenge violence and its strategic mirror, reprisal violence. While revenge violence is premised on a judgement of individual responsibility for a prior act of harm, reprisal violence is driven by an assumption of collective guilt. This paper argues that these two types of violent activity—one expressive and the other strategic—are often intermixed in post-conflict states. Moreover, the interplay between them provides political cover for those who would employ violence to achieve strategic or political goals, while lowering the risks involved when doing so by attributing it to revenge for wartime atrocities. In effect, the fact that revenge and reprisal violence are mirror images of one another can serve to explain and subtly justify the use of organised violence against disadvantaged groups in post-conflict states. This paper examines the validity of this heuristic distinction through a within-case analysis of violence in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and identifies the policy consequences of this distinction.
Do Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Go Together?
One of the underlying assumptions of the contemporary debate over Afghanistan is that counterterrorism objectives can be achieved through counterinsurgency methods. The recent decision by President Barack Obama to deploy 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan is premised on the idea that to disrupt Al Qaeda and prevent it from forming training camps in Afghanistan it will be necessary to first reverse the momentum of the Taleban insurgency. This approach—which places the US and UK on the offensive to disrupt terrorist plots before they arrive on their shores—assumes that the threats from Al Qaeda and the Taleban are intertwined and thus the strategy of response must seamlessly comprise elements of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. In fact, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are very different—often contradictory—models of warfare, each with its own associated assumptions regarding the role of force, the importance of winning support among the local population, and the necessity of building strong and representative government. Rather than being mutually reinforcing, they may impose tradeoffs on each other, as counterterrorism activities may blunt the effectiveness of counterinsurgency approaches and vice versa. The last four years in Afghanistan provide evidence that when employed in the same theatre counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies can offset one another. To be in a position to begin the withdrawal of US troops before July 2011, the Obama administration will need to find a way to manage the tradeoffs between its counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies in Afghanistan. | http://pcr-project.insct.org/author/michaelboyle/ |
Libertarians claim that the foundational moral principle of libertarianism is that it is immoral to “initiate force.” This concept of “initial use of force” – sometimes called the Non-Aggression Principle or the Non-Coercion Principle – is often explained as the principle that the only legitimate use of force is as a defense against illegitimate force. The implication here is that illegitimate force is offensive rather than defensive. Thus the person that initiates force is identifiably the one in the wrong and response to that initial use of force is legitimate.
In this post, I’m going to discuss my introduction to the libertarian concept of “initial use of force” and explore some of the difficulties libertarians have had agreeing with each other as to what constitutes an initial use of force. In addition, I’ll explore why I believe it is that libertarians can’t agree on what constitutes ‘initial use of force.’
Speed Limits and “Reckless Driving”
I remember the very first libertarian I ever argued politics with. He was the first person to explain to me about “initial use of force.” The first question that came to my mind was how libertarians, like him, looked at reckless driving and, in particular, speeding laws. I still remember his interesting response.
He insisted to me that speeding laws violated the principle of “initial use of force” so they were immoral laws. He claimed that in a libertarian society there would be no speeding laws. However, he imagined, there would be nothing wrong with the engineers who built the road could post ‘suggested speed limits’ based on their knowledge of the roads. If a driver decided to violate those suggestions, and they later caused a collision, then the fact that they were traveling faster than the engineer recommended speeds would come up in a civil case.
When I asked what would happen if the driver had no insurance to cover damages for an accident, he said that such a person would never be allowed to ever drive again, so people would always choose to have insurance in a libertarian society.
This answer shocked me because it waited for a problem rather than trying to avoid the problem in the first place. But it did seem to follow a certain ruthless internal logic. If one is against “initial use of force” then how else would you deal with someone driving recklessly but by waiting for them to actually cause damage and then sue them?
However, this answer seemed to leave a number of uncomfortable questions (i.e. explanation gaps). The first problem is that one person’s “reckless driving” is bound to be another person’s “acceptable risk”? Amplifying this concern is the fact that rules of the road are intentionally arbitrary. There is no reason why driving on the left side of the road is better or worse than driving on the right side of the road. The point of having such a convention comes from the value of having everyone arbitrarily pick a single side and stick with it. Taking a stance that no one has the right to tell you which side of the road to drive on — and then only stopping people once they cause a crash — wouldn’t make for very safe roads.
Are speed limits any different? On freeways, the maximum speed a lone automobile can drive (particularly on a straightaway) without reducing safety is quite high. A lot higher than any current speed limit in the USA anyhow. What makes driving at high speeds dangerous isn’t that certain speeds are inherently more dangerous than others. (Depending on the make and model of the automobile, of course.) The danger comes from the relative differences in speeds between vehicles. That’s why we went from limits of 55 MPH to 90 MPH and hardly affected road safety.
So I am not sure road engineers have a technical way to come up with a “best speed” (particularly on long freeway straightaways) rooted in the laws of physics or their craft. Instead, they’d likely need to pick a max speed based on personal experience and an understanding of human social conventions. Wouldn’t this essentially be a ‘speeding law’ disguised as ‘expert opinion?’
And wouldn’t this all ultimately be an inferior version of what we already have? Aren’t the roads safer precisely because we do have speeding laws that are enforced rather than waiting for people to cause harm and then suing them?
The Wild World of Libertarianism?
Honestly, this introduction to the “libertarian world” sounded pretty awful to me. I suspect it went a long way towards forming an early negative opinion of the whole philosophy. I conjured up images of a world where anyone could choose to shoot a gun in the park for fun, or drive down the ‘wrong’ side of the road, and you had to wait for them to kill someone before you could sue them because you couldn’t act without an ‘initial use of force’ which I was convinced (after my first conversation) required actual physical violence.
Luckily it turned out that my introduction to libertarianism was from a branch that was extra extreme. Many libertarians would have no concerns at all with laws against reckless driving or setting speed limits. In fact, I’ve met libertarians just as insistent that speeding and reckless driving laws in no way violate the idea of ‘initial use of force.’
Negligence as “Initial Use of Force”
It’s interesting to look at the reasoning from these other libertarians. Consider the act of firing a gun in the park for fun again. Shouldn’t this act itself be defined as an “initial use of force”? The person doing this is certainly acting in a severely negligent way. Even if their intent really wasn’t to cause people harm (perhaps they were even doing their best to make sure they weren’t firing in the direction of others!) the very act of them firing a gun where they are likely to cause harm to others is itself a “coercive act” in that most people would rather not be around someone doing something dangerous like that.
Once you realize that an “initial use of force” can include something like negligently firing a gun in a park, the idea of having speeding laws / reckless driving laws doesn’t seem problematic anymore. ‘Driving recklessly’ (which we then narrowly and legally define in some admittedly arbitrary way) is an “initial use of force” for the exact same reasons firing a gun in a park can be so classified. Your choice to drive in a way that puts others at risk against their will is as much an act of ‘coercion’ as any other despite there being no clear physical force, or even harm, taking place.
Intellectual Property Laws
Another interesting difference between libertarians is over how to define “initial use of force” within the realm of intellectual property laws. Some libertarians believe that all intellectual property laws are immoral because they amount to trying to limit what people are allowed to think when no actual physical ‘property’ is being exchanged. Can one truly make thoughts the basis for property? And is ‘stealing an idea’ truly ‘stealing’ at all? In what sense is it “initial use of force?” (See this link for discussion)
But other libertarians strongly disagree. They start with a view that ideas can be owned and that this is a perfectly natural way to think of ‘property.’ For these libertarians, someone that plagiarizes them has “initiated force” against them and they have no issue at all with the idea that this person can now be sued and have money taken from them.
Intellectual Property is a Culture Specific Notion
It’s interesting to note, however, that whether or not ideas can be ‘property’ does seem to be a purely cultural idea. Throughout history, most cultures had no concept of intellectual property at all. In fact, during the ‘biblical era’ people could hardly imagine owning an idea. Instead, they gladly wrote books and claimed that someone else (presumably a famous mythical person) wrote the book so that their ideas would spread easier. This led to the whole category of writings known as pseudepigrapha where authors would fraudulently claim that their book was written by some great mythical hero (Abraham, Moses, etc.) in hopes of getting their ideas to replicate as much as possible because people thought that a great hero wrote the book. Such societies still had their secrets, of course, but the assumption was that a secret was yours to keep, not that you could sue someone for ‘stealing it.’
In other words, throughout most of history, most people that have lived not only couldn’t conceive of ‘owning an idea’ but intentionally didn’t take credit for their ideas – ascribing them to mythical people instead – as a way to encourage the spread of their own ideas. This is basically the opposite of how we see things today.
So it is interesting that part of what determines if you perceive “initial use of force” to include intellectual property seems to be related to purely cultural ideas that first require laws to be made to create a new kind of ‘property’ that treats ideas as if analogous to physical objects.
To clearly see how strange it is to think of intellectual property violations as an ‘initial use of force,’ imagine someone violates your copyright and you sue them and a court decides they must pay you for ‘damages’. Yet nothing physical was ever damaged. For that matter, presumably, the copyright violator never agreed to the copyright laws in the first place. Further, he has no contract with you. So libertarians that believe in Intellectual Property (which are fairly common!) are certainly getting rather creative in their interpretation of what constitutes an ‘initial use of force.’
Initial Use of Force vs Initial Use of Physical Force
This then brings us to one of the main issues that exist with the Libertarian concept of ‘initial use of force.’ When libertarians speak of it, they often try to leave you with the impression that they mean ‘initial use of physical force.’ Consider, for example, Logan Chipkin’s interview with Stephan Kinsella.
The libertarian understanding of rights which is the non-aggression principle. The core way we state [the non-aggression principle] is that you can never initiate violence. …it’s not wrong to respond with violence… [like] defensive retaliation. …we don’t think it’s immoral to use force to defend your rights, but we do think it’s wrong to start force or initiate force. (Link)
Note how Stephan doesn’t here refer to it as initial use of ‘force’ but instead calls it ‘violence.’ And Stephen is hardly the only libertarian I’ve come across that acts as if ‘initial use of force’ and ‘initial use of violence’ are one and the same thing.
But as we’ve seen, they aren’t. In fact, they aren’t even close to the same. Speeding laws, laws against reckless driving, laws against firing guns in parks, and intellectual property laws are all examples of laws that libertarians apparently can’t agree upon as to what does or does not constitute an ‘initial use of force.’ And both sides view their side as the only reasonable interpretation of ‘initial use of force’ and see it as ‘objectively obvious.’
Contract Law is NOT Initial Use of Violence
It’s tempting here to then claim that maybe this is two branches of libertarianism. Perhaps one branch interprets ‘initial use of force’ as specifically ‘initial use of violence’ and the other interprets it as something more like ‘any action that may lead to harm (or at least loss of property, including intellectual property).’ However, it turns out that this can’t be the case.
One thing that all libertarians of all schools agree upon is that contract law is paramount. But contract law requires us to interpret ‘initial use of force’ as something other than ‘initial use of violence.’
Imagine that you live in a libertarian stateless world and someone hires you as a painter and that a dispute takes place between you and your employer. In your view, the employer got what they paid for. But the employer insists that you didn’t do the agreed-upon work to his specification and you owe him at least $1000 back.
Now for the sake of argument, let’s say that the employer takes you to the court and police system he’s hired. (See this article for how libertarians feel this might work in a stateless society. But see also this article criticizing that view.)
Now it happens that you have not hired this security company. But suddenly they show up at your door with their warrant from the court (that you also haven’t hired!) stating that their court system found you to be guilty and you now owe your employer $1000.
Now bear in mind that this is a company you have not hired that is now insisting they have a right to forcibly enter your home and take your money that you sincerely believe is still your money. You have no contractual obligation to them whatsoever.
Now it doesn’t matter who is in the right or wrong here. It’s possible you really do owe this money and you are mistaken that the money is yours. Or the court system itself might be mistaken.
The key point is that contract law can never work in a world where “initial use of force” is equated to “initial use of physical force (or violence).” Or else the court and police would be unable to take your money from you to settle this contract and would have to wait for you to first do something violent first. So it must be the case that libertarians that try to equate ‘initial use of force’ with ‘initial use of violence’ are simply mistaken and no libertarians truly believe those are one and the same.
Mask Laws
In light of the above discussion, it’s interesting to see how all of this applies to one of the recent libertarian political flash points: mask laws.
In the current political environment, it seems most libertarians have come down against mask laws. This is usually justified on the grounds of said laws violating “initial use of force” or being ‘coercive.’ Yet, some libertarians have argued exactly the opposite – that choosing to not wear a mask is itself the “initial use of force” because it represents a negligent act. From this point of view, choosing to not wear a mask in a pandemic is negligent behavior similar to our example of shooting a gun in the park. And again, both sides vehemently insist it is objectively obvious they are right and the other side is wrong.
In short, it would appear that an appeal to ‘initial use of force’ can be used by both sides of the mask law debate.
Is “Initial Use of Force” Easy-to-Vary?
So is the Non-Coercion Principle truly objective or is it just a matter of taste and libertarians are simply backing into it. Or put another way, is ‘initial use of force’ really just an easy-to-vary explanation?
Libertarians certainly act as if finding an ‘initial use of force’ is an objectively obvious thing – even while vehemently disagreeing with each other over where to draw the line. But as we’ve seen, libertarians apply (or not) the concept of ‘initial use of force’ to such wide-ranging ideas as negligent acts, contract laws, and intellectual property.
Once you realize that libertarians can’t possibly mean ‘violence’ (or physical force) when they refer to ‘force’ this raises an interesting question. Is it possible that there is enough latitude in how one interprets the word ‘force’ such that any law can by justified as a violation (or not!) of ‘initial use of force’?
Here would be my question to my libertarian friends. Can you name a law that currently exists in real life that you feel violates the principle of ‘initial use of force’ that I can’t just as easily claim follows the principle?
Given that the word ‘force’ can include any form of physical violence, any form of negligence that might cause harm, any enforcement of a cultural norm that is deemed valuable (i.e. intellectual property), or any violation of contract, I feel doubtful it’s even possible for libertarians to point to an objective counterexample to this principle. Certainly mask laws do not qualify because one can easily just argue that not wearing a mask in a pandemic is negligence and therefore coercive to those that don’t want to be around someone acting in that way.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure. I would challenge my libertarian friends to do their best to find a good example of a law that violates this principle of initial use of force that I can’t cleanly argue the opposite using the very same principle. If they can’t come up with such an example, then it must be the case that this principle is an easy-to-vary explanation and thus a bad explanation.
“Force” as Theory-Laden Observation
One consistent observation I’ve made throughout this post is that not a single libertarian I’ve ever argued with has ever thought ‘initial use of force’ was anything but obvious — even while vehemently disagreeing with each other. This strikes me as a classic example of how theory determines observation — not the other way around.
If you are starting with the assumption that ‘force’ delineates moral and immoral acts, then whatever you personally experience as undesirable will automatically be seen as ‘force’ against yourself and thus the ‘initial use of force.’ This may even radically differ from situation to situation because you can’t experience how the other person feels, i.e. when your actions are experienced by the other party as coercive. You may therefore apply the principle entirely inconsistently over time. It will likely always be you that just happens to always experience the ‘initial use of force’ first in every circumstance.
Could it therefore be that Andy is correct that the Non-Aggression (or Non-Coercion) Principle is a circular argument?:
By calling on the NAP, one is just stating that “I am entitled to this” [but] using different words. If I have a different theory of justice (and by extension theory of entitlement) than a Libertarian, calling on non-aggression or defense of coercion will offer no insight on which theory is correct.
Borrowing from Popper, to make sense of any piece of data, one must have a working theory. The piece of data alone can’t tell you much, as he said “all observations are theory-laden.” The same goes for coercion or aggression. One needs a working theory of entitlements to decide what is coercion or aggression vs defense. Unfortunately, many Libertarians do not understand that aggression is merely a way to define violence presupposing a theory of entitlement. Instead, they think that non-coercion is a theory of entitlement itself, aka begging the question.
Put another way, is the Non-Aggression principle simply a fancy way of saying “you shouldn’t act in ways inconsistent with libertarian political views because we feel libertarian political views are the correct ones”? How does searching for an ‘initial use of force’ help us answer this question if ‘force’ simply means ‘breaking the laws we feel should have been implemented’? | https://fourstrands.org/2021/01/15/is-initial-use-of-force-an-easy-to-vary-explanation/ |
Montgomery County Domestic Violence Lawyer
In Montgomery County, domestic abuse is not defined under one statute. You can be charged with one or several offenses in the county when abuse is alleged between household or family members. Maryland prosecutors take domestic abuse seriously and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.
A minor incident between you and your spouse or sibling can still result in a domestic violence charge, even if there is no physical contact. If you have been charged with domestic violence in MoCo, contact an experienced Montgomery County domestic violence lawyer for a consultation.
Types of Domestic Violence Charges in MoCo
The following are potential charges you could face when accused of domestic violence:
Assault
Assault in the first degree (Section 3-202) is intentionally causing or attempting to cause serious physical injury to another individual. This assault definition includes using a firearm. Serious physical injury means trying to cause bodily injury or death.
Assault in the second degree, which falls under Section 3-203 is similar to the above statute. Physical injury includes minor scrapes or cuts.
Other crimes in Montgomery County that are considered as domestic abuse include:
Under Section 3-802, malicious conduct involves pursuing or approaching another person where they intend to place that person in fear and is considered a serious crime. It also includes contact that places the individual in reasonable fear of:
- Assault in any degree
- Seriously bodily injury
- Rape
- False imprisonment
- Death
Rape
There are two degrees of seriousness for a charge of rape. Rape in the first degree (Section 3-303) involves vaginal intercourse by threat of harm or force without consent. Rape may also involve the use of a dangerous weapon. Rape in the second degree is listed under Section 3-304. It has the same definition as rape in the first degree; however, the alleged victim is a minor or mentally or physically incapable of giving consent.
Sexual offense
False imprisonment
In addition to criminal law statutes that fall under domestic violence, a judge may issue a protective order, commonly called a restraining order, under the state’s family law section 4-508.1. This is a civil order that prevents you from talking to or following the alleged victim. For example, a judge can order that you:
- Stay away from your own home
- Stay away from certain members of your household, including your children
Domestic Violence Penalties in Montgomery County
If you are convicted of any domestic violence charges, you could face some tough fines and/or jail and prison sentences. That is why it is so important to consult a MoCo domestic violence lawyer. A conviction can result in serious ramifications, especially if it goes on your permanent criminal record. Penalties for domestic violence include:
- Up to 25 years in prison for assault in the first degree
- Up to 10 years in prison for assault in the second degree. In addition, there is the possibility of a $5,000 fine
The penalty for violating a protective order is a jail sentence. It does not matter if the victim under protection called or visited you, you could still be found guilty of the violation. Punishment consists of:
- 90 days in jail for a first offense
- Up to one year in jail for a second offense
Prosecutors do not dismiss domestic violence-related charges lightly, even when there is little to no evidence. However, with the assistance of an experienced MoCo domestic violence lawyer, you have a better chance of avoiding jail time.
Potential Defenses to Domestic Violence Charges
You have the right to defend yourself against any domestic violence allegations. In fact, a strong domestic violence defense could mean the difference between jail or prison time and protecting your freedom and reputation. Your domestic violence lawyer will help build your case based on the facts.
The following are some defenses available to you:
- Wrong suspect
You are being wrongly accused of domestic violence. Maybe your spouse has a significant other who actually committed the offense but they want to blame you instead.
- False allegations
Your accuser is lying for some reason. He or she may dislike you or want to retaliate for some reason. Domestic violence allegations often arise amidst heated child custody cases and divorce proceedings.
- Self-defense
You were protecting yourself, which you have the right to do under Maryland law. Maybe the altercation began with raised voices but escalated when he or she tried or did hit you. The law allows you to use reasonable force to protect yourself or another party.
- Lack of proof
This defense challenges the prosecutor’s evidence. It involves your MoCo domestic violence lawyer showing a judge that a prosecutor does not have enough solid evidence for a conviction.
- Consent
This is a rarely used defense. It refers to admitting that some actions happened between you and the other party, but proving that he or she consented. An example of this could be if you and the alleged victim were pretending to fight. The individual consented to being hit, but thinks you hit him or her too hard.
Domestic violence is a serious matter. Unproved allegations can damage your reputation and your career. It is vital to speak to a Montgomery County domestic violence lawyer to protect your rights and your future. | https://criminallawyermaryland.net/montgomery-domestic-violence-lawyer/ |
Florida law defines robbery as a violent crime, implying the use of force, threat, or violence to the other person when taking something from them. As a result, the law takes these cases very seriously. Therefore, if you are convicted of this crime, you’ll face severe consequences, which is why it’s essential to seek the help of a robbery lawyer.
In addition, the law classified this type of crime as a felony. Suppose you don’t get timely and aggressive legal representation; you risk stiff penalties such as excessive fines, long prison terms, probation, or other severe penalties that could affect your personal life. It’s therefore vital that you secure a solid and compelling defense if accused of robbery in Miami.
Types of Robbery in Miami
The severity of the charges depends on the amount of force used when committing the crime. For instance, you risk severe charges if you use a gun than when you don’t use any weapons. In addition, there are different types of robbery offenses in Miami, Fl, based on the characteristics of the crime. These include:
- Carjacking- this involves robbing a car from someone by use of threats, force, or violence. The charges for the crime are severe if you use a weapon such as a gun.
- Armed robbery- this type of crime implies that the defendant carried a weapon when committing the crime. In Florida, the use of firearms in a crime includes more than just a gun. It also provides for the use of deadly weapons that can harm the victim.
- Strong-arm robbery- in this type of robbery, the defendant doesn’t use a firearm like in the case of armed robbery. However, it includes violence, threats, and force.
- Home invasion robbery- this type of crime is when the defendant enters premises and robs the occupants. The offense has similar characteristics as a burglary, but it involves violence.
In each of these cases, there are various aggravating factors that the prosecutors put into consideration, such as:
- Possession and use of a firearm or other deadly weapons
- Bodily harm to the victim and the severity of the injuries
- Degree of violence and amount of intimidation used during the crime
- Previous convictions for violent crimes
- Other crimes or felonies committed during the robbery
If faced with either type of robberies discussed above, you shouldn’t leave your future up to chance. Instead, consider hiring the services of an experienced robbery attorney who understands and helps you navigate the law and fight for your rights.
How to Fight a Robbery Crime in Miami
The first step to fighting a robbery charge in Miami is hiring a professional robbery lawyer who can help you build a strong case in your favor. Such an attorney uses the following strategies to increase your chances of getting freedom.
There Was No Use of Firearm
When charged with an aggravated robbery, your attorney will try to reduce your charges to robbery or theft. They can achieve this by proving that you didn’t use a firearm or any deadly weapon, hence no chance that the robbery was aggravated. By focusing on this case element, you can get a difference of 20 to 99 years in prison.
Lack of Intent
Robbery is categorized as a theft crime. In that case, the prosecutor has to prove that you took the property with the intent of depriving the other person. An experienced attorney looks at the facts of your case to show the court that you didn’t intend to take or keep the property. In that case, you can’t be guilty of robbery.
No Bodily Harm Caused
Another tactic that your lawyer can use to try and get your charges reduced is arguing that you didn’t cause any bodily harm to the victim. The prosecutor has to prove that you caused physical injury. Otherwise, the judge will reduce your charges to theft. In addition, the judge can reduce your sentence if the bodily harm caused was unintentional.
Involuntary Intoxication
In this case, your lawyer tries to prove to the judge that you were involuntarily intoxicated before committing the crime. For instance, they can argue that you drank at a punch bowl at a party without knowing it had alcohol. It’s a rare form of argument, but it can get you off the hook if presented professionally.
Lack of Proof
Just like any other criminal case, you are innocent of any robbery charges until proven guilty. In this case, the prosecutor has to prove that you committed the robbery. On the other hand, your attorney has to successfully question the evidence against you or have it stricken from your record. When that happens, the prosecutor cannot convict you.
Understanding Different Terms Used in Theft Cases
When you hire a robbery attorney, the first thing they need to determine is the type of theft crimes you’re accused of. In this case, you need to differentiate different terms used in theft cases. Theft crimes fall under four main categories.
- Larceny is the legal term for theft and is further categorized into shoplifting, petty theft, and grand theft. In this case, the prosecutor has to prove the defendant took the property from the victim without permission.
- Robbery- this is when the defendant applies violence, intimidation, or force to commit a theft. The prosecutor only needs to prove the presence of violence for your theft crime to be considered robbery. As mentioned earlier, Miami law considers this as a felony, and the result is some jail time.
- Fraud- this occurs when the defendant tries to gain money or goods from another person through deception. It’s a type of white-collar crime since it doesn’t involve any violence.
- Identity theft- this is a pervasive crime and affects thousands of people each year. It involves the use of another person’s identity for monetary gain.
Speak to a Robbery Lawyer
Since robbery crimes involve a lot of violence, they attract hefty penalties in Miami. However, an experienced defense attorney knows the right strategies to help you fight the charges. If you want to explore the possible avenues of your case, contact us today.
At Meltzer and Bell, PA, we are dedicated to representing clients who face criminal charges, including robbery. If you or your loved one is faced with such a crime, don’t hesitate to reach out to us and explore your options. | https://miamicriminalteam.com/robbery-lawyer-can-you-beat-a-robbery-crime-in-florida/ |
vengeance, retribution, payback(noun) the act of taking revenge (harming someone in retaliation for something harmful that they have done) especially in the next life. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord”–Romans 12:19; “For vengeance I would do nothing.
What does God mean when he says vengeance is mine?
It means God will vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked. He judges with perfect justice and perfect mercy.
What does it mean to be vengeance?
: punishment inflicted in retaliation for an injury or offense : retribution. with a vengeance. 1 : with great force or vehemence undertook reform with a vengeance. 2 : to an extreme or excessive degree the tourists are back—with a vengeance.
Is God a God of vengeance?
God is not a God of revenge but a God of vengeance, which is different. Revenge is personal – someone meting out justice because of some personal hurt felt or experienced. It is often cruel, dirty and way beyond the hurt of the original crime. Vengeance has to do with righteousness, justice and honor.
What does divine vengeance mean?
Divine vengeance is the wrath of God.
Where does God say vengeance is mine?
Vengeance is mine is a biblical quotation from: Deuteronomy 32:35. Romans 12:19.
How do you pray for vengeance?
Lord, forgive me for any malice and hatred in my heart. I want your righteous anger, not my own. I want your blessing on the just and the unjust. I want your will for myself and the people I care about.
Is vengeance and revenge the same?
The word vengeance is universally recognized and used as a noun, meaning that it describes a specific thing. Vengeance is the noun used to describe the action of revenge. On the other hand, revenge can be both a verb and a noun, and derives its meaning depending on which part of speech it takes.
Why is vengeance bad?
“Like hate, revenge is something that takes a toll on the person who feels wronged, as well as the [person’s] enemy. It is inherently unhealthy because it takes a psychological and physical toll on the person. Venting those feelings of anger and hostility does not decrease those feelings,” he said.
What is the difference between revenge avenge and vengeance?
Avenge (verb) : Inflict harm in return for an injury or wrong done to oneself or another. Revenge (noun) : The action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands. Vengeance (noun) : Punishment inflicted or retribution exacted for an injury or wrong. … Avenge is a verb.
What does God say about revenge in the Bible?
The Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 12, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.
What is the wrath of God?
Wrath of God (Latin:Ira Dei) may refer to: Suffering construed as divine retribution.
Who is the goddess of vengeance?
Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution and revenge, who would show her wrath to any human being that would commit hubris, i.e. arrogance before the gods. She was considered a remorseless goddess.
What is the meaning of spirit of vengeance?
The Spirits of Vengeance were a team of benevolent beings who protected mankind during ancient times. … There have been different sorts of Spirits of Vengeance around the world based on each country’s customs, belief and religion.
What is divine justice?
The Scriptures inform us that God is supremely good, merciful, and just and that divine justice is the highest law there is. The action of divine justice in human consciousness and experience destroys sin and frees the individual to express his or her true nature as God’s spiritual likeness.
What is another word for vengeance?
Vengeance Synonyms – WordHippo Thesaurus.
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What is another word for vengeance? | https://raymundtamayo.com/theology/what-is-the-biblical-definition-of-vengeance.html |
There is no real difficulty in distinguishing criminal prosecutions from tort claims, if only because they are tried in different courts by different procedures. Generally, criminal proceedings are brought by “the state” or some authorised body and although a private prosecution is still possible, the object of the proceedings in any case is the imposition of some sanction in the nature of punishment, for example imprisonment or a pecuniary fine, even though the sanction imposed may have a reformative rather than a strictly punitive purpose. Nevertheless, there are functional overlaps between the two categories.
Assault means something very specific when it comes to torts and personal injury law. In tort law, an assault refers to an attempt or threat of violence – not actual violence itself. This may surprise people. But it’s one of the first things most lawyers’ learned in law school.
Most people think of “assault” as referring to a violent attack. For example, as in “the gang assaulted a rival gang member on the corner of the street” or “the marines began their assault on the enemy position” Violence, or at least some sort of physical contact, is generally implied in the term.
However, while state laws sometimes differ, assault generally doesn’t require that physical contact actually occurred. Instead, legal scholars define assault as an intentional attempt or threat to inflict injury upon a person, coupled with an apparent, present ability to cause the harm, which creates a reasonable apprehension of bodily harm or offensive contact in another.
Notice the words “attempt” and “threat” above. In tort law, assault does not require actual touching or violence to the victim. We use another term for the touching or contact:”battery.” You may have heard the term “assault and battery.” This refers to situation where both an assault (attempting to injure or threatening to injure) and a battery (actually touching someone) occur in the same incident. Often the assault occurs immediately after the battery: Right before Fred shot Jon, Jon saw Fred aiming the loaded rifle at him.
Three types of damages may be awarded. Compensatory damages, such as medical expenses, are meant to compensate for the injury sustained. Nominal damages are a small sum. Nominal damages act as an acknowledgment that a person has suffered a technical invasion of rights. They are awarded in cases where no actual injury has resulted, or where an injury occurred, but the amount has not been established. Finally, punitive damages may sometimes be awarded. Punitive damages may be awarded in particularly egregious circumstances, as a way to further punish the wrongdoer.
Punitive damages go above and beyond compensatory damages Assault can range from the threat of violence (causing apprehension or fear of harm), to unwanted touching (such as groping), to an act of violence. Regardless of the circumstances, you have the right to seek compensation for any injuries — physical and/or emotional — that result from an assault. Have an attorney review your assault claim today, at absolutely no charge.
Any direct intentional interference with the person of another is actionable in the absence of lawful justification. It is now settled that if the interference is unintentional the injured party’s only cause of action lies in negligence.
Trespass to person is actionable per se, i.e., without proof of special damage. The tort seeks to protect personal integrity, which is regarded as being fundamental that it is protected even in the absence of damage.
The fear by the plaintiff must be immediate and the plaintiff must have reasonable belief that the defendant has present ability to affect his purpose. It is not an assault for example where ‘A’ who is in a train that is moving out of a station, shakes his fist at ‘B’ who is on the platform nor to shake a fist at a man who by his distance from the scene of action is inaccessible to such violence. Also, words may negative what would otherwise have been an assault.
Battery is the direct and intentional application of force to another without lawful justification. This is so, however trivial the amount or nature of the force may be, and even though it does nor is intended nor is likely or able to do any manner of harm. Force means any physical contact with the body of the plaintiff. There is a battery when the defendant shoots the plaintiff from a distance just as much as he strikes him with his fist, and probably the infliction of such things as heat or light, if in such a degree as to cause injury or discomfort, will also suffice. Physical hurt is not necessary. It is sufficient if the act is done with hostile intent.
The least touching of another in anger or without his consent or some other lawful reason or spitting in a man’s face, an unwanted kiss, taking finger prints of a person without observing statutory requirements, to pull a chair from under a person where s/he fall to the ground, to forcibly take from a person some object which he holds or wears is battery. In PURSELL V. HORNE 91838) 3N AND P 564, it was held that to throw water at a person is an assault but if any drops fall upon him, it is battery.
The least touching of another in anger is a battery.
If two or more meet in a narrow passage, and without any violence or design of harm, the one touches the other gently, it will be no battery.
The act by the defendant must be voluntary.
Threats of personal violence which are purely oral and do not lead to injury are not actionable.
It is certainly clear that consent is implied to such physical contacts as are a reasonably necessary consequence of social life, e.g. touching another on the shoulder to attract his attention and in crowded conditions there is a judicial tendency to widen this exception.
Fear in the sense of alarm is not an essential ingredient in the tort of battery: a blow from behind is a battery.
The appropriate tort for personal injuries resulting from medical treatment is not battery but negligence.
Assault and battery are crimes as well as torts.
In most societies protection of individual’s bodily integrity is likely to rank high on the agenda of the interest worth protecting; hence one of the earliest remedies provided by the English law was for forcible wrongs against the person.
the plaintiff’s statement of claim alleged that on a certain date and at a certain place, the defendant shot the plaintiff and thus suffered injury. The defendant objected that this statement of claim disclosed no cause of action in that it did not allege that the shooting was intentional or negligent.
– While on holiday, in Cornwall, Mrs. Letang was sunbathing on a piece of grass where cars were parked. Mr. Cooper drove into the car park. He did not see her and ran into her legs injuring her. She claimed damages on both negligence and trespass to person.
In his opinion Lord Denning went ahead to state that when the injury is not inflicted intentionally, but negligently, then the only cause of action is negligence and not trespass. If it were trespass, it would be actionable without proof. Thus, trespass to the person is actionable per se.
Forcible – used to describe any kind of threatened or actual physical interference with the person of 3another.
Injury –includes any infringement of personal dignity or bodily integrity. Actual physical harm is however not an essential ingredient of trespass to the person since the tort is actionable per se.
It has three components which may either occur together or separately: assault, battery and false imprisonment. In their definitions, these components incorporate the words intentional and direct. This paper will endeavour to discuss the two in relation to the subject matter ie an assault and battery and further proscribe a possible legal action the aggrieved party can take in relation to the question.
According to Winfield and Jolowicz pg 71, assault is defined as an act of the defendant which causes the claimant reasonable apprehension of the infliction of battery on him by the defendant.
defines assault as an act which causes another person to apprehend infliction of immediate, unlawful force on his person. An obvious example can be A pointing a loaded gun at B. In such a case by virtue of pointing the gun the claimant reasonably apprehends the infliction of an immediate battery.
–Tuberville put his hand upon his sword and said ‘If it were not assize-time, I would not take such language from you.’ Savage later sued Tuberville for assault.
The court held that to be liable for assault at least one of the following must be present: 1. an act intending to cause harmful control to another person, or imminent apprehension, or 2. a third person put in apprehension if he believes the person can do damage. An assault exists even if the other party can defend against the action and the action is not inevitable. Mere threats of future harm are insufficient.
In this case the court held that the declaration of Tuberville was that he would not assault Savage at that point in time. To commit an assault there must be intention followed by an act. An assault is present if the fear is reasonable. The court held that in this case there was clearly no intention of assault.The intention as well as the act makes an assault.
The victim’s fear that the threat is likely to be carried out must be reasonable. This partly depends on a subjective test which looks at the victim’s view of the situation. In R v St George18the judge said that it is an assault to point a weapon at a person though not loaded, but so near that if loaded, it might do injury. However, if the victim knew that the gun was unloaded, any fear would be regarded as unreasonable.
. It therefore arises that ability to carry out the threat must exist at the time the threat is made.
but in the modern day there are other forms of communication such as telephone and emails that can be used as channels for assault.
To throw water at a person is an assault but if any drops fall upon him it is battery.
Pulling a chair as a practical joke from somebody who is about to sit on it is an assault until he reaches the floor because as he is falling he reasonably expects that the withdrawal of the chair will result in harm to him. When he hits the floor and gets hurt, then it is a battery.
Abusive and threatening emails and text messages are the most recognized growing forms of assault. This area of law must be looked into since it is a prominent channel being used to commit assault.
According to Salmond and Heuston (p125) battery is the application of force to the person of another without lawful justification.
Goff LJ in Collins v Wilcock states that battery is the actual infliction of unlawful force on another person. He states that touching will only amount to a battery where it does not fall within the category of physical contact generally acceptable in the ordinary conduct of general life.
For there to be liability for battery, the touching must be intentional whether or not the D intended to cause injury, and if it is non-intentional, then it amounts to negligence. (Letang v. Cooper). If the D misses the person he intends to hit and he hits someone else, the doctrine of transferred malice is considered. A intending to hit B, actually hits C, C will have action against A as As’ intention to hit B is transferred to C.
The appellant, an infant, sued through his father, for damages for the loss of his right eye after it was hit by a rope that the respondent, his teacher, was using to whip him. The appellant and other pupils gave evidence that he had suffered injury as a result of deliberate act of the respondent. Respondent denied battering and assaulting the appellant and stated that the injury had risen out of accident. It was held that the respondent was liable and was fined sh.30000.
– a soldier in Northern Ireland fired a baton round targeting a rioter but he missed and hit the claimant instead. It was held that the soldier had intentionally applied force to the claimant.
The battery must be the direct result of the D’s intentional act. Scott v. Shepherd – shepherd threw a lighted squib into a market house and it landed on the stall of a ginger bread seller. To prevent damage to the stall, Willis picked it up and threw it across the market. Ryal, to save his own stall, picked it up and threw it away. It struck the claimant in the face and exploded, blinding him in one eye. The D intended to scare someone although he did not intend to hurt the particular person who was actually injured, however he was held liable in battery. The force applied does not have to be personal contact e.g. in Pursell v. Horn– Where the D threw water over the claimant. In Nash v. Sheen – the claimant had gone to the D’s hairdressing salon where she was to receive a ‘permanent wave’ D was held liable in battery.
There must be an intentional touching or contact by the D which must be proved to be a hostile touching. Wilson v. Pringle– A School boy admitted that he had pulled a bag which was over the shoulder of another boy making him fall and get injured. Summary judgment on the basis of battery was entered for the claimant. The school boy’s act of pulling the bag was merely a prank, the necessary element of hostility was lacking. This was expounded in R v. Brown Unlawful touching can also be described as unlawful. Though there is the issue of directness of touching, that is the touching must be applied directly from the defendant, case law dating back over the centuries just shows how widely courts are prepared to stretch the meaning of direct.
It is a characteristic feature of the law of tort that the damages to which a plaintiff is entitled from the defendant in respect of a wrongful act must recovered once and for all. He cannot bring a second action upon the same facts simply because his injury proves to be more serious then was though when judgment was given. There are certain instances however when damages can be recovered more than once.
a. Where two distinct rights are violated. Where distinct wrongful acts of the defendant cause damage to distinct rights of the plaintiff, successive action can obviously be brought. In BRUNSDEN v HUMPHREY (1884) 14 QBD 141, the plaintiffs’ cab was damage by the defendant’s negligence and the plaintiff himself was injured. Having recovered damages in respect of the cab alone the plaintiff was held entitled to bring second action for his personal injuries.
b. Continuing injury. If I wrongfully place something on your land and leave it there, that is not simply a single act of trespass, but is a continuing trespass giving rise to a fresh cause each time damage occurs as a result of it and accordingly successive actions can be brought defendant whipped a horse so that it bolted and ran down the claimant. The defendant was liable in battery for claimant’s injury.
This assignment was based on the tort of assault and battery in as proscribed by legal findings the if one is found in breach of the law as set out in chapter 87 of the laws of Zambia section (9 ) or in as illustrated in the pathorer of cases in or judicial precedent pursuant to the English law (extent of application ) chapter 11 of the laws of zambia.and if at all their exist any remedies or defences to the said breach.
the facts in brief are that two secondary school girls maria and martha are in a heated argument which latter results in the assault and battery of Martha by maria in a bid to understand the findings even further a question can be asked whether a school girl can sue in her own name ? bearing in mind that the age of the two has being omitted in the details .
it is judicial notice that minors can only proceed in a legal action were they have sued through a next friend or legal guardian , if this is the case then the matter in question can proceed as guided .when Maria advanced pushed Martha she in that action alone committed an assault but coupled with the fall and cut to head resulting from the fall she further committed a battery on to the person of another ie Martha. In looking at the reasonable man test as illustrated by lord Atkinson in donogue v stevenson need not go as far because the tort, here in committed is not fault based simply put the negligent act alone of pushing another to the ground makes you guilty without looking at the intention behind your action.
– a police officer needed to obtain a woman’s name and address in order to caution her for soliciting for the purpose of prostitution. The officer detained the woman by holding her by the elbow. The woman scratched the officer and was charged with assaulting a constable in the execution of her duty. The police officer’s action went beyond the generally acceptable conduct of touching a person to engage his or her attention. It therefore follows that the officer’s action constituted a battery on the woman. Reasonable force may be used to make an arrest but that force must be reasonable and proportionate to the crime being prevented.
The mental health act 1983 permits treatment for mental disorder to be given to patients who have been compulsorily detained and treatment may be given without the consent of the patient.
– The claimant was completely paralyzed, able to move her head very slightly and to speak. She was being kept alive on a ventilator and had no hope of any recovery. She faced the rest of her life like this and informed those caring for her that she wanted the ventilator turned off. She was effectively saying that she withdrew her consent to the treatment. The doctors who had been caring for her for over a year found it impossible to accept her decision and argued that she lacked capacity to make her own decisions. The claimant sued for a declaration that she had the necessary capacity and that her continued treatment was a trespass to her person. The Defendants were therefore liable for trespass during the time the claimant had been treated against her will and a small sum by way of damages for battery was awarded. She later went to another hospital where her decision was respected.
– F aged 36 had serious mental disability and the mental capacity of a child of four. She had formed a sexual relationship with another patient and the doctors were concerned that pregnancy would be disastrous for her so they sought for a declaration from the court for an operation for her sterilization. It was held that it was in F’s best interests to be able to maintain the sexual relationship hence the operation should take place.
A parent will not be be liable for assault or battery for inflicting punishment on a child if the force used is reasonable and is proportionate to the wrong committed by the child. The child must understand the purpose of punishment which must be proportionate to the wrong committed by the child.
There was a scuffle in court between a lawyer and a clerk where the clerk thrust his fingers towards the lawyer’s eyes so the lawyer bit off one of the clerks fingers. It was held not to be proportionate response to the threat. | https://nnunion.net/introduction-6/ |
Perpetrators of domestic violence
If you are a man or woman who is living, or has lived, in a relationship in which your behaviour may have alarmed, violated the dignity of or physically or psychologically harmed your loved ones, you can receive support and therapy to help you change your ways. The Centre Against Violence can offer you professional help. There are alternatives to violence.
Do you recognise yourself in the following?
- Have you lost control of yourself in a manner that made someone close to you afraid or distressed?
- Do your partner or children feel that you are overly controlling and limit their freedom in a way that makes their life difficult?
- Have you been physically or psychologically violent to someone close to you?
- Have you stopped yourself using violence but feared that you would?
- Are you concerned for the wellbeing of your children because of any of the above?
We offer individual or group therapy to help you find methods to curb your behaviour so that you do not harm your loved ones, whether physically or psychologically. Get in touch and we will be happy to tell you more about what our therapy involves.
The service is free of charge
It costs nothing to get help and support from us. Our staff have a duty of confidentiality, meaning that those who work at the Centre Against Violence are not permitted to disclose anything you say to them to anyone else. The only exception is if this conflicts with their duty to report concerns about the welfare of a child under 18 years of age, in which case they will contact social services, initially with your cooperation, to ensure that your child receives the support and help they need. If you need an interpreter, they will help to arrange this.
At the Centre Against Violence, you can:
- learn to deal with and set boundaries for your anger and aggression;
- talk about responsibility, power and powerlessness;
- get parenting support (including Breaking the Legacy of Violence);
- meet other people with similar experiences to your own;
- acquire knowledge about violence and its impact;
- process violent outbursts; and
- train in alternatives to violence.
Breaking the legacy of violence: parental precautions against violence
Are you worried about how things you were exposed to as a child will affect your own parenting? Perhaps you are already a parent of young children or are considering parenthood? Perhaps, given your experiences of violence, you have doubts about whether you can cope with parenthood.
Get help with your parenting through the course Breaking the Legacy of Violence.
Research shows that we repeat patterns of behaviour inherited from our own parents, with a negative impact on how we behave towards our children. If you have been subjected to violence as a child, it is important to take such concerns seriously.
We can arrange for you to attend a group of five to ten people in your situation. These groups are for those over 23 years of age, perhaps already with a child up to five years of age, expecting a baby or considering having children. You can attend alone or as a couple.
When?
Due to the ongoing pandemic, we are unable to hold courses during spring 2021. However, as soon as the situation improves, we will be starting!
How?
We will work together to disseminate knowledge, perform simple exercises and activities and discuss and exchange experiences, ideas and good solutions.
Meetings are led by Jonerik Nilsson and Anna Gustafsson from Skellefteå Municipality’s Centre Against Violence, both of whom have a wealth of experience of working with domestic violence.
Contact
Please get in touch for further information or to register for a course.
Call us on 073 063 87 70 or 070 661 23 28.
Or send an email to jonerik.nilsson@skelleftea.se or anna.gustafsson@skelleftea.se
If you can’t reach us by telephone, please leave a message with your telephone number on our voicemail and we will get back to you.
Meetings
This is where we will post information about dates and places for meetings.
Meeting agenda:
- What is anger? What is violence?
- How does growing up with domestic violence affect children?
- What do children need to be safe?
- From guilt and shame (afraid to talk) to openness and responsibility.
- How do we safely deal with our own anger?
- What should we do if...? There is a great to deal of security to be had from knowing how to deal with difficulties.
- Where can you turn when you need parenting help?
What is violence?
Any act that frightens, injures, causes pain to or degrades another person in order to influence or control them is violence.
Violence occurs in all social groups and at all ages. One cannot say that it only applies to a specific type of person or relationship. In Sweden, domestic violence is a crime.
People use violence in intimate relationships in order to assert power and control over their partner. It is common for the perpetrator of violence to have attempted to exert other forms of control over their partner before they resort to hitting them. Once violence does start it will almost always escalate if the relationship continues.
Definition of domestic violence
Domestic violence is characterised by the victim having a close relationship, and often strong emotional bonds, with the perpetrator. This complicates matters and makes it harder to resist and leave the relationship. This kind of violence generally occurs in the victim’s home. The longer the relationship continues, the more likely the violence is to increase in intensity and severity.
The term domestic violence encompasses all types of violence between people in close relationships: in heterosexual and homosexual relationships, relationships between siblings and within other familial relationships.
Psychological violence
Psychological violence can take many forms but it always has a tremendous impact on the wellbeing of the victim. If you are regularly criticised, questioned, degraded and treated as if you are stupid by your partner, you may well become insecure about yourself and what you think and say. You may even begin to think that what they say is true and that you are to blame for any conflicts or arguments that arise in your relationship. You may do what your partner tells you simply to avoid an argument, threats and/or violence.
If your partner threatens to take their own life if you leave the relationship, that too is psychological violence. They may also threaten to harm you or someone close to you, or harm your pet in some way.
Another form of psychological violence is to prevent you from comforting your children or seeking treatment for yourself or the children.
Psychological violence may involve your partner doing one or more of the following:
- Saying and doing things to degrade you.
- Accusing you of something you did not do.
- Making you believe that you are the one who usually thinks or does the wrong things in the relationship.
- Behaving unpredictable. What was right yesterday is wrong today; in fact, you can do no right.
- Checking and offering unsolicited opinions about your social media posts and text messages.
- Controlling you to the extent that it becomes difficult for you to maintain contact with friends and family.
- Threatening to harm you or someone you love, whether a person or animal.
- Scaring you with threatening gestures or comments.
- Making everyday life difficult for you, for example, by hiding things you need.
- Breaking furniture or other objects you like.
- Having fun at your expense, ridiculing and mocking you.
- Controlling household finances.
Physical violence
Physical violence can range from pulling hair, slapping, pushing, punching, kicking, strangulation or attempted suffocation to assault with a weapon. The perpetrator of physical violence often deliberately targets areas of the body where bruises and other injuries will not attract the attention of outsiders. The violence may even cause injuries that cannot be hidden, such as fractures, eye damage or scratches. bruises and cuts on exposed areas of the body. Physical violence may be a recurring event or remain an ever-present threat.
They are many ways to inflict physical violence. For example, your partner may do one or more of the following:
- Pinch, shake or restrain you.
- Pull your hair.
- Drag or pull you.
- Throw things at you.
- Place a stranglehold on you.
- Punch or kick you.
- Bang your head against something.
- Prevent you from sleeping.
Sexual violence
Sexual violence refers to any sexual act committed against your will, ranging from pestering you into having sex all the way to rape. You may be forced to perform degrading sexual acts against your will. Physical violence against your breasts and genitals may also be sexual violence.
Sexual violence can be both physical and psychological; for example, your partner may do one or more of the following:
- Have sex with you against your will.
- Make unsolicited sexual remarks to you.
- Touch you sexually against your will.
- Pester you into having sex or force you to perform various types of sexual act.
- Force you to watch pornography against your will.
- Force you to have sex with multiple partners.
- Put you in a situation where you feel unable to say no to sex. The victim may feel that the price of refusing sex will be too high.
Sweden has a consent law stating that sex must be voluntary; otherwise, it is a criminal offence. This means that, unless you actively consent to having sex, the offence is the same as if you had said no and your wishes were not respected.
Material violence
Material violence may involve destroying the family’s joint possessions, the partner’s personal property or the children’s toys. The perpetrator of violence may well select things of particular sentimental value to the partner or child in order to threaten, degrade and hurt them. They may also target things that their partner needs in their everyday life.
Economic violence
Economic violence means that the perpetrator controls the family’s finances and the partner’s money in such a way that the partner must ask for money for every purchase. It may also refer to the opposite relationship, where the partner is forced to pay for all household expenses while the perpetrator uses their money for their own pleasure and investments.
Violence against people with disabilities
People who are dependent on others for everyday nursing and care may also be subjected to neglect, such as the withholding of medication or being given a diet without sufficient nutrients.
This category of violence also includes one partner forcing the other to do things against their will or threatening them, keeping them confined at home or being in their home without permission.
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People in unhealthy relationships often share a defining characteristic of the relationship, which is a partner’s desire to maintain power and control over the other partner. To maintain that power and control, a partner may go to great lengths, resorting to physical violence, threats of violence, verbal abuse, stalking, harassment, and even false imprisonment.
There are also relationships where it appears that someone is engaging in controlling behavior to an outside observer, but in fact it is not an unhealthy or controlling relationship. There are also incidents that involve consensual conduct, such as a relationship that involves role play, which gives an appearance that is not, in fact, the reality of the dynamics of a relationship.
Seattle domestic violence attorney Jennifer Horwitz knows every relationship is different, and sometimes bad things happen to good people. Jennifer’s compassion allows her to listen to your side of the story, regardless of whether you are the victim or the accused, and formulate a strategy to best assist you based on your needs. Approaching each case without judgment, Jennifer wants to help all of her clients, regardless of the situation.
The Complex Relationship Between Control, Harassment, False Imprisonment and Domestic Violence
Domestic Violence Generally
Domestic violence describes a category of harmful behaviors toward loved ones or those living in the same household. Domestic violence is defined as physical harm, bodily injury, assault, sexual assault, threats of any of these harms, or stalking of an intimate partner by another intimate partner or of a household member by another household member. Domestic violence is often used to physically control another person by causing physical harm or placing another person in fear of physical harm.
However, domestic violence is more than just causing bruises or breaking bones. It is creating an environment that places a victim in constant fear to maintain control. There are many ways to instill fear. The most obvious is the physical abuse that leads to the constant fear of harm. Other behaviors include harassment, stalking, or unlawful imprisonment.
Harassment
Harassment is a crime defined as knowingly threatening to:
(1) cause bodily injury to another person;
(2) cause physical damage to property of another person;
(3) subject another person to being physically confined or restrained; or
(4) any other action that is intended to cause substantial physical or mental harm to another person.
Harassment includes both threats made by words and by conduct or actions that place another person in reasonable fear that the threat will be carried out. Examples of harassment include sending threatening text messages, breaking another person’s belongings, or locking a person in a room.
Harassment is a crime classified as a gross misdemeanor. The punishment for a conviction of a gross misdemeanor is not more than 364 days in prison and/or a fine of not more than $5,000. Harassment will be escalated to a Class C Felony if the accused is a repeat offender, threatens to kill another person, or the threats are made against anyone involved in the Washington criminal justice system. A Class C Felony is punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a fine of up to $10,000.
At the most basic level, harassment is threatening another person. Accordingly, those accused of domestic violence are often charged with harassment because domestic violence involves threats of physical violence.
False or Unlawful Imprisonment
False or unlawful imprisonment is also a crime that is defined as knowingly restraining another person. Unlawful imprisonment is classified as a Class C Felony and is punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a fine of up to $10,000.
Grabbing someone or holding onto them can constitute restraining a person, and those accused of domestic violence are often charged with unlawful imprisonment. Other examples of unlawful imprisonment include taking something like a cellphone and refusing to give it back, which prevents a person from leaving or refusing to unlock a car door.
Relying on Legal Protections
Whether domestic violence presents itself as direct physical abuse or living in constant fear of abuse, the Revised Code of Washington protects those in unhealthy and harmful relationships.
If You are a Victim of Domestic Violence, Harassment, or False Imprisonment
If a partner or member of your household commits domestic violence against you, there are ways to protect yourself. If you have experienced a domestic violence incident in a relationship or household, you can obtain a protective order from the Washington Courts to prevent an abuser from contacting you. Attorney Jennifer Horwitz has helped hundreds of clients in need of protection to obtain court orders limiting contact between the victim and the accused. Jennifer’s understanding of the law means she knows how to persuade the court to give you an order of protection.
If You are Accused of Domestic Violence, Harassment, or False Imprisonment
If you have been wrongfully accused of domestic violence, harassment, threatening behavior, or unlawful imprisonment, you have rights in both criminal and civil proceedings. In criminal proceedings, you have constitutional rights to protect the wrongfully accused. In civil proceedings, you have the opportunity to present your side of the matter and rebut any allegations against you. Attorney Jennifer Horwitz is experienced in both criminal prosecution and domestic violence protection cases and can represent you every step of the way in both proceedings.
Consult with a Seattle Area Domestic Relations Attorney
Whether you are a victim of domestic violence or crimes involving a domestic relationship or have been accused of domestic violence, attorney Jennifer Horwitz has over 25 years of experience representing clients on both sides of this domestic issue. Contact Jennifer Horwitz Law to discuss your case today. Jennifer Horwitz is located in Seattle, WA, and also serves the areas in and around King County, Issaquah, Sammamish, and Bellevue. | https://www.jenniferhorwitzlaw.com/practice-areas/domestic-violence-victim-representation/domestic-violence-false-imprisonment-and-harassment-in-seattle/ |
Retribution, arguably the oldest of the ideologies/philosophies of punishment, is the only backward-looking philosophy of punishment. That is, the primary goal of retribution (in its original form) is to ensure that punishments are proportionate to the seriousness of the crimes committed, regardless of the individual differences between offenders, other than mens rea and an understanding of moral culpability. Thus, retribution focuses on the past offense, rather than the offender. This can be phrased as “a balance of justice for past harm.” People committing the same crime should receive a punishment of the same type and duration that balances out the crime that was committed. The term-backward-looking means that the punishment does not address anything in the future, only for the past harm done.
It is argued as the oldest of the main correctional/punishment ideologies because it comes from a basic concept of revenge, or “an eye for an eye.” This concept of an eye for an eye, or vengeance, basically means that if someone perceives harm, they are within their right to retaliate at a proportional level. This idea that retaliation against a transgression is allowable has ancient roots in the concept of Lex Talionis, which roughly translates into the law of retaliation. A person who injures someone should be punished with a similar amount of harm (punishment). This concept was developed in early Babylonian law, and it is here that we see some of the first written forms of customs and practices. Thus, around 1780 b.c., the Babylonian Code, or the Code of Hammurabi, is considered the first attempt to codify practices by individuals of a group. We recognize these today to be our first attempt at written laws. These laws (pictured below) represent a retributive approach to punishment. That is proportional punishments for past harms done.
The retributivist philosophy also calls for any suffering beyond what was originally intended during sentencing to be removed. This is because the dosage of punishment is the core principle of retribution: offenders who commit the same crime must receive the same punishment. Punishments beyond the original balancing of justice for the past harm is outside of the scope of retribution, and thus, does not fit with retribution. This also helps to explain why retribution is a backward-looking ideology. As we continue forward in the history of punishment, we see changes to our perceptions of how to react to crime. This includes our changing views of punishment, to include punishment ideologies that are more forward-looking. | https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/ccj230/chapter/9-2-retribution/ |
Domestic Violence Crimes Under Illinois Law
In recent years, most states, including the state of Illinois, have taken steps to strengthen existing domestic violence laws and increase potential punishments for those convicted of these crimes. The consequences from a domestic violence criminal conviction can be quite severe; these penalties may include imprisonment and restrictions on your ability to possess firearms. Furthermore, false allegations of domestic violence often surface for other reasons, such as in the midst of custody battles. As a result, it is essential that you contact an experienced Naperville criminal defense attorney as quickly as possible if you are facing charges for a crime related to domestic violence.
Domestic Battery
One type of domestic violence crime under Illinois law is domestic battery. You can commit the crime of battery when you intentionally cause bodily harm to another individual or make physical contact with him or her in an insulting or provocative way. However, domestic battery occurs if you commit battery against a family or household member, including parents, children, stepchildren, and any individuals who are related in some way, either by blood or by marriage. Domestic battery also can involve someone with whom you currently are in a relationship or formerly were in a relationship. The law does not distinguish between individuals who were formerly or are currently married or those who simply lived together or were in a dating relationship.
Aggravated Domestic Battery
Aggravated domestic battery is also battery against one of the individuals described above, but results in great bodily harm, permanent disability, or disfigurement to the victim. If the battery involves strangulation, it also can constitute aggravated domestic battery.
Other Crimes Often Related to Domestic Violence
There are a variety of other crimes that sometimes arise in domestic violence situations. For instance, the Illinois law concerning harassing and obscene communications includes crimes such as harassment by telephone and harassment by electronic communications. Illinois law also has specific provisions in the criminal code dealing with stalking and cyberstalking, which are both crimes that often occur in the context of a domestic violence situation. Convictions for these crimes also can result in severe penalties.
Protective Orders and Violations of Protective Orders
A court often will issue a protective order that prohibits the individual accused of domestic battery in order to protect the alleged victim. A protective order can include many different provisions that are tailored to the situation but typically keeps the accused individual from having contact with the victim, including personal or telephonic contact at the victim’s home, workplace, or school. If an individual who is subject to the protective order violates one or more provisions of the order, the consequences can be just as severe as those that might result from a conviction of domestic battery.
Call Your Naperville Criminal Defense Attorney Today
While the legislature has justifiably enacted various laws that make domestic violence-related incidents crimes, cases involving allegations of domestic violence are not always so clear-cut. Disputes over parenting time schedules and revenge motivations following a break-up all too often result in domestic violence charges that law enforcement authorities later determine to be false. This is why the assistance of an experienced Illinois criminal defense lawyer is essential in all cases involving allegations of domestic violence. Contact the skilled Naperville criminal defense attorneys of Law Office of Glenn M. Sowa, LLC today, and learn how we can help you resolve any criminal charges that you may be facing.
Source: | https://www.dui-criminal-lawyers.com/dsmlaw-blog/domestic-violence-crimes-under-illinois-law |
Over the past 25 years that I’ve been in practice, the criteria for domestic violence has expanded in many ways, especially in San Fernando Valley, California. Domestic violence occurs when one or both members of a domestic partnership or relationship cause physical harm to the other.
The harm has to be physical, so simply yelling at someone would not be considered domestic violence. It also has to be physical harm that is done in an unlawful manner, which means that a person who is being attacked and is exercising self-defense would not be charged with domestic violence.
How Does Police Determine The Aggressor In Domestic Violence?
When determining who the aggressor was in a domestic violence situation, police will be considering who caused the most damage, who is the larger party, and who won the fight.
Oftentimes, these determinations are made unfairly, because the police were not there and did not see what happened. When one party injures another while reasonably defending themselves, they are often arrested, which is simply not fair.
In determining who the aggressor was, the police are put in a very difficult position. This is because the people involved in these situations are often emotional and manipulate the facts in order to avoid getting into trouble.
It is not uncommon for the watch commander or sergeant to be called out to the scene in order to help determine which person was the aggressor. Even the prosecutors must sometimes second-guess the police when making their own determination as to which person was the aggressor.
Additional Charges A California Domestic Violence Arrest
There are a number of additional charges that may accompany a domestic violence arrest in LA County. If a couple is married and living together and acts of physical force occur between them, then Penal Code Section 273.5 would apply.
Another charge I see is Penal Code 243(e)(1) which is when physical force occurs between two people who are cohabitating, such as a boyfriend and girlfriend. I am often able to get these charges reduced to a 242 (simple battery) or 415 (disturbing the peace), even if the person was responsible for what they did.
It will depend on what happened, how bad the injuries were, and whether or not it is difficult to determine which person was the aggressor. In most cases, there will be some sort of battery charge, and the guilty party will have to take domestic violence courses, pay fines, and be on probation for three years. Depending on the gravity of what occurred, there may be other ramifications, including jail time.
Do Police Make An Arrest Regardless Of Circumstances?
When the police are called out to a domestic violence situation in San Fernando Valley, they will usually make an arrest unless it can be determined that no one was physically injured.
If it was just a couple of people shouting at each other and a neighbor called the police, then the police probably would not make an arrest. If the police are unable to determine which person was the aggressor, then they will just arrest and charge both parties.
This can actually work to the defense’s benefit by creating a problem for the prosecutor. This is because when the case goes to trial or some sort of hearing and one party testifies, they may say something to incriminate themselves.
If a person is charged with domestic violence in the San Fernando Valley, then they would definitely want to obtain an criminal lawyer and be careful about what they say.
For more information on Domestic Violence Charges In California, a free initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (213) 542-0940 today. | https://www.heddinglawfirm.com/crimes/how-does-the-state-of-california-define-domestic-violence/ |
A Psalm of David.
1 Plead my cause, O LORD, with those who strive with me; Fight against those who fight against me. 2 Take hold of shield and buckler and stand up for my help. 3 Also draw out the spear and stop those who pursue me. Say to my soul, “I am your salvation.” 4 Let those be put to shame and brought to dishonor who seek after my life; Let those be turned back and brought to confusion who plot my hurt. 5 Let them be like chaff before the wind and let the angel of the LORD chase them. 6 Let their way be dark and slippery, and let the angel of the LORD pursue them. 7 For without cause they have hidden their net for me in a pit, which they have dug without cause for my life. 8 Let destruction come upon him unexpectedly and let his net that he has hidden catch himself; Into that very destruction let him fall. 9 And my soul shall be joyful in the LORD; It shall rejoice in His salvation. 10 All my bones shall say, “LORD, who is like You, delivering the poor from him who is too strong for him, yes, the poor and the needy from him who plunders him?” 11 Fierce witnesses rise up; They ask me things that I do not know. 12 They reward me evil for good, to the sorrow of my soul. 13 But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth; I humbled myself with fasting; And my prayer would return to my own heart. 14 I paced about as though he were my friend or brother; I bowed down heavily, as one who mourns for his mother. 15 But in my adversity, they rejoiced and gathered together; Attackers gathered against me, and I did not know it; They tore at me and did not cease; 16 With ungodly mockers at feasts they gnashed at me with their teeth. 17 Lord, how long will You look on? Rescue me from their destructions, my precious life from the lions. 18 I will give You thanks in the great assembly; I will praise You among many people. 19 Let them not rejoice over me who are wrongfully my enemies; Nor let them wink with the eye who hate me without a cause. 20 For they do not speak peace, but they devise deceitful matters against the quiet ones in the land. 21 They also opened their mouth wide against me, and said, “Aha, aha! Our eyes have seen it.” 22 This You have seen, O LORD; Do not keep silence. O Lord do not be far from me. 3 Stir up Yourself, and awake to my vindication, to my cause, my God and my Lord. 24 Vindicate me, O LORD my God, according to Your righteousness; And let them not rejoice over me. 25 Let them not say in their hearts, “Ah, so we would have it!” Let them not say, “We have swallowed him up.” 26 Let them be ashamed and brought to mutual confusion who rejoice at my hurt; Let them be clothed with shame and dishonor who exalt themselves against me. 27 Let them shout for joy and be glad, who favor my righteous cause; and let them say continually, “Let the LORD be magnified, who has pleasure in the prosperity of His servant. 28 And my tongue shall speak of Your righteousness and of Your praise all the day long.
Two words sound familiar. I am talking about ‘Revenge’ and ‘Avenge.’ As revenge and avenge fall among the many pairs of words in English language that have similar meanings but are not synonymous, one should know the difference between revenge and avenge if one is to use these words accurately. Many people, thinking such words like revenge and avenge to be the same, use them interchangeably, which is a wrong practice. Though having nearly same meaning, the words revenge and avenge are different and are used in different contexts.
Avenge is a verb. To avenge is to punish someone for his wrongdoing for the sake of justice. The word avenge means ‘to inflict harm in return for (an injury or wrong done to oneself or another.’ The word ‘Avenger’ is a noun that is known as a derivative of the verb avenge.
While avenge is a verb, revenge can be both verb as well as a noun. Revenge also has similar meaning to avenge, but justice takes a back seat and the focus is to inflict harm on the other person using violence. However, revenge can be an insult or a taunt in words and not necessarily physical in the true sense of the term. | https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/the-avenger-thomas-swope-sermon-on-revenge-241953 |
9.01. Cosmology and calculating models
Cosmology, the science of the entire physical Universe, from the beginning of its contemporary development, that is from the time when Albert Einstein wrote down a single set of mathematical equations and suggested that it represent the entire material world, has employed models for presenting its results. Models, in the sense used in cosmology, are strict mathematical conclusions drawn from simplified but distinctly formulated assumptions. Other branches of astronomy and physics also used models. There were models of atoms, models of stellar interiors, models of the Earth's core....Models were first used for understanding structures and processes not accessible to direct observation. The atoms were too small to be observed; the stellar and terrestrial interiors were screened by the outer shells of those bodies. Similarly, the regions of the Universe situated beyond the cosmological horizon were unobservable and thus needed to be represented through models.
However, the difference is that in other sciences those processes, though unobservable directly, have some impact on the phenomena accessible to human experience and so can be indirectly compared with the observations. Thus, models can be somehow checked, compared with reality in the same way as any other hypotheses. So it is the case with, for example, quantum mechanical models. Even the quark models of elementary particles yield some observable consequences. Yet the matter looked otherwise, from the very beginning, for cosmological models. When the cosmological horizon appeared in the first model calculation of the Universe in the 20th century, it was obvious that all occurrences beyond the horizon can have no influence on the observable part of the Universe; they never cause any observable phenomenon. Thus, one has a limited possibility of comparing the properties of calculated cosmological models with reality; it can be done only locally, in an exceedingly small part of the Universe. All the global features of models must, however, remain forever unchecked in any direct way. Thus, in other branches of human knowledge, models served as supplementary tools for investigating reality. In cosmology, they were rightly considered the only method possible. Constructing models became something characteristic of cosmology. Those first models appeared in times when numerical calculations had to be performed with the help of arithmometers, mechanical calculating machines, when the obvious tools of theorists were the analytical, mathematical deduction and transformations of formulae. This changed diametrically with the invention of computers. Making models became easier. At present, thinking in terms of models is standard in almost all branches of the sciences and even in the humanities. Sometimes constructing models is considered theoretical work. Some people do not discriminate between the basic significance of theoretical considerations and the secondary significance of numerical calculations based on them. Models are also provided in disciplines where reality can be observed without difficulty. In such situations, models serve as a simplified way of depicting reality. Such simplified models, simplified pictures of reality, can be used for easily predicting events in any possible domain of interest. In this respect, cosmology with its numerous models of the Universe does not seem to be so different from other sciences. There is little understanding of the difference between cosmological models and other types of models widely used today.
9.02. Cosmology without models
Question (1) may be put thus: is constructing models the only possible way of getting knowledge of the Universe as a whole? However, before we start to discuss this question, a more precise notion of the scientific model has to be introduced. In principle, any case of simplification in science may be called a model. One could say that even in the simple situation when we explain the motion of a thrown stone by using notions of free fall and inertia, we use a model. And, in fact, the transition between applying such straightforward concepts like inclined plane and very sophisticated ones like steady state Universe is a continuous one. Nevertheless, some line of division, even when not a sharp one, can be drawn here.
Even in our daily life, we distinguish between 'concept', which the Germans call 'Begriff' and 'mental picture,' or 'representation' (German: 'Vorstellung'). One could say that it corresponds more or less to the difference between 'concept' and 'conception.' To communicate our thoughts to other people, or even to comprehend our own thoughts better, we have to use some 'notions', some 'concepts,' some logical units which are either so simple and need no definition (we call them elementary notions), or which can be defined with the help of other notions. Even though such concepts can be used for emotional descriptions, they remain inherently objective. When a human being wants to comprehend some sensual perceptions, to describe them in an impersonal way, he uses concepts. We make efforts to put our feelings aside when creating concepts. However, our life, even our scientific life, would be completely impossible if we were to restrain from any feelings and emotions. Therefore an important ingredient of our activity is the power of imagination. When we personally experience a single notion (concept) or a complex one, when we supplement them with our feelings, our personal propensities, we create mental pictures, conceptions. When such a conception gives rise to a more or less compact picture of some physical reality, it can be called a "model" for this reality. Cosmological models are special examples.
A theory, as regarded in this book, in opposition to models, is a logical structure consisting solely of concepts in the given sense. As (1) stated above, there is no sharply limiting line between theories and models. Nevertheless, there is an obvious difference between such constructions from various epochs like the Theory of Four Elements, the Theory of Flogiston, the Theory of Evolution, the Theory of Sets or General Relativity on the one hand, and, on the other hand, such model descriptions as the Cosmological Model of Eudoxos, the Model of Jupiter's interior, or models of economical growth.
So understood, modeling is of long standing in cosmology. Mathematically calculated cosmological models were used even in antiquity. Geometrically conceived "systems of worlds" were constructed in times when constructions of such a type were completely unknown in other disciplines. However, this tradition of modeling in cosmology is not the only one. If we choose to take a closer look at antiquity we find not only Eudoxos with his model, but also, for example, Epicurus with his general, philosophical considerations of the Universe. At that time, philosophical argumentation was a received style of working in the domain that is now called science.
In more recent times, a classic example of the non-model kind of cosmological research was the cosmological paradoxes. Let us analyze the Photometric Paradox, called also Olbers' Paradox. There is a combination of assumptions. The mathematical assumption: (i) our space is Euclidean. The physical assumptions: (ii) the surface brightness of a body is independent from its distance from the observer, (iii) the principles of propagation of light are valid in space up to infinity. The astronomical assumption: (iv) there is no obscuring matter in astronomical space. And, the philosophical assumptions: (v) the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic, (vi) the Universe is infinite, (vii) there is no general evolution of and in the Universe. In fact, some other assumptions were involved here too, but they seemed at that time and to date, so obvious that as long as nobody introduces any assumptions contradicting them, they are not worthy of mention. Such hidden assumptions include, for example: the validity of ordinary arithmetic, the linear character of time, the validity of our logic in all times, etc., etc. An elementary calculation made under those assumptions shows that the line of sight, in every direction, within a certain distance must intersect the surface of some star. Thus, one can draw a conclusion that in every direction the celestial sphere should shine with the surface brightness equal to that of an average star. The "paradox" carne about because all the assumptions were considered at that time as the most obvious ones, and still the conclusion did not agree with the elementary observation that the night sky is quite dark.
No model is constructed here in the sense given above. Out of some general assumption, a simple but general conclusion is drawn. And the fact that this conclusion did not agree with observations showed that at least one of the assumptions was wrong. Thus, out of this argument we can learn something about the entire Universe: one or more among the accepted properties are not valid over all of it. This is certainly a negative kind of knowledge, but by eliminating some possibilities we do approach the true idea of the Universe. Most of today's cosmologists are convinced that out of the 7 main assumptions, only two (v - homogeneity, and vi - infinity of space) remain (approximately) valid. All the other ones are wrong. In fact, this last statement is founded on the knowledge of only the observable part of the Universe. The Universe at large may be, for example, Euclidean, and perhaps there is no general evolution (e.g. model of Jaakkola). Thus we cannot be sure which ones among the assumed properties are actually wrong. However, we can be absolutely sure that some of them (at least one) are unfulfilled in the Universe at large. The cosmological paradoxes are usually underestimated. In fact, they demonstrate clearly the power of thinking, which is able to make up for an absence of other types of perception and penetrate otherwise inaccessible regions.
We have arrived here at an answer to Question (1). This answer is negative, although few examples of non-model cosmological results can be cited to date.
9.03. Cosmological principles and the evolution of world views
The premises of cosmological paradoxes are of the same type as general assumptions formulated as cosmological principles. The very foundation of the Generalized Copernican Principle, the assumption of homogeneity and isotropy, can easily be found among the assumptions used for formulating the photometric paradox. Question (2) can be stated thus: are assumptions in the form of cosmological principles necessary for cosmological research at all? (cf.: Klotz 1979) To address that question, let us once more make a short review of the basic cosmological principles. The first known cosmological principle was conceived by the ancient Indian culture, where spiritual existence was considered the only important mode of being. This principle is so sublime in content that it is still impossible, even applying modern mathematics, to construct any specific model based on this principle. The cosmological principle based on the half-materialistic world view of the ancient Greeks is also half-materialistic and looks, from today's standpoint, like a mockery of reality. It is neither truly spiritual, nor strictly materialistic, trying to reconcile two, in fact contradictory, tenets. Copernicus furthered this process of considering the sensual world an agglomeration of material bodies. His cosmological principle, in contrast to their predecessors, regards also planets (i.e. a certain kind of celestial bodies) as physical bodies. A generalization of his principle leads us to consider all that we can perceive with our senses - all the Universe - a physical entity. In the course of this process, the Universe becomes, in the minds of scientists, more and more homogeneous.
The generalization of Copernican views seems to be self-evident for cosmologists. Sometimes they even do not take notice of what they assume (Einstein). However, here an important fact is involved. There was increasing awareness in the first half of the 20th century that there is something like a cosmological principle and that it is not given from above but rather assumed by cosmologists by choice. The period of purposefully creating cosmological principles began. One can find attempts to weaken the Copernican Cosmological Principle (the Softened Copernican Principle of Zieba, see 4.22). However, these attempts are not very typical. Better known and more characteristic of this epoch is the attempt to make the Copernican Principle stronger and narrower, the Perfect Principle. From a certain point of view, the birth of the Perfect Principle can be regarded as a final move towards a thoroughly materialistic view of the Universe, as it is indeed viewed by some conscious and dedicated materialists. For example, Jaakkola (1989) considers the Perfect Cosmological Principle as the only one satisfying the requirements of strict scientific thinking free from any metaphysical ideas. Therefore, he proposes to call it simply "the Cosmological Principle" without any other adjective. Can one proceed further in this direction? In an abstract way, yes; in any relation to reality, no (cf.: 5.10).
In the middle of the 20th century there began a peculiar process. Some considered it a new trend towards a spiritual comprehension of the world, some - just the opposite - as a tendency to reduce everything (including life) to a sub-physical reality, and still others considered it a complex mixture of both. Whatever it is and however it will be called by posterity, this trend marked a distinct departure from the classical form of materialistic science of the 19th century. Carter (1984) maintains that the Copernican standpoint (that the Earth is an average celestial body) was merely an unfounded reaction to the ancient Greeks' endowing a privileged position to the Earth as the center of the Universe. It seems that there exists a general trend today at least to bring together, if not to reconcile, many old and new convictions and principles, not only the cosmological ones. What are the main symptoms? The strict causal relations in physics are replaced with probabilistic causality for microcosmic phenomena and in certain sense also for macrocosmic ones (cf.: Neyman and Scott 1959). Some practices of folk medicine, rejected before as sheer superstitions, are generally accepted and practiced by certified physicians (acupuncture, acupressure etc.). The same pertains to some systems of esoteric medicine (homeopathy). Some astronomers do believe that the entire Universe is a living being (cf.: Hoyle 1988). Some beliefs of astrology are tested in scientific ways and accepted as scientific reality (cf.: Culver and Philip. 1977). Telepathy, the ability of foreseeing the future, telekinesis, and similar phenomena are being examined in official scientific institutes. Certainly this is a period of some scientific turmoil. It is too difficult to evaluate it at present and predict in which direction it will eventually go. In any case, a new cosmological principle - the Anthropic Principle - arose just in this period. Is this a spiritual principle which brings us closer to the idea of purposeful creation of the world, or is it, rather, a mechanistic perspective of seeing the Universe, which make it possible to claim that automata (intelligent and feeling) will replace humanity? The matter here is much confused. This particular cosmological principle is a true child of its scientific time.
9.04. Cosmology and the Gaia Hypothesis
It seems to be not incidental that more or less simultaneously with the Anthropic Principle, another scientific conjecture which also attempts to unite physical existence with elements of life and consciousness appeared. It is the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1979). The hypothesis (which in its original formulation and in the opinion of other scientists, considers the Earth as a more or less "self-aware" organism capable of exploiting other beings for its own good and capable of defending itself but also endowed with some kind of "feelings" toward earthly mankind) belongs - from the formal standpoint - to geophysics but is closely related to cosmology as well (cf.: Follgett 1988). If the Earth is an "organic" being, then what about the other planets? What about all the celestial bodies, what about the entire Universe? One could even think that this hypothesis says more than the Anthropic Principle in its three versions. The Anthropic Principle states that the Universe is capable of producing and maintaining intelligent beings.
If we extend the Gaia Hypothesis to all celestial bodies and their agglomerations, then we obtain a Universe which is not only able to produce and maintain intelligent beings but is also intelligent in itself.
This opinion is close to the old Indian views that the Universe is a Body of some spiritual being (possibly even of the Highest Spiritual Being). However, the basic difference is that the Indians considered only spirit of importance, whereas in the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis such properties as life, intelligence, and consciousness are all closely related to or even (in some interpretations) deduced from material existence. It may be said that in the old Indian times the spiritual aspect of existence was overestimated, and only the later evolution of scientific views led to ascribing more significance to the material aspect of life. Ideas of that kind reached their climax in the Perfect Cosmological Principle. And now it tends towards equilibrium of some sort: acceptance of the physical and the spiritual aspects of the Universe as equally valuable. The spiritual side is sometimes understood as autonomic or even as primary - that which brought the sensory world to existence. Sometimes it is considered secondary, something descending from physical reality. Both these versions do somehow coexist in science. In this new approach to the Universe and to its spiritual-physical existence the modern tendency to attain a certain kind of balance between spiritual and materialistic world views manifests itself.
One can say that the Gaia Hypothesis supports the Anthropic Principle. In fact, the situation is not so simple. The Anthropic Principle provides the argument that the size of a physical and intelligent being striving to knowledge must be approximately the size of a man. If we, following the Gaia Hypothesis, allow the physical intelligent beings to be as large as the earthly globe (if not the stars), then some important arguments usually used in support of the Anthropic Principle have to be rejected. Both the hypothesis and the principle arose out of the same philosophical attitude. However, they do possess some features which are mutually contradictory.
9.05. Future cosmological principles
Can we expect some further cosmological principles? What kinds will appear in the future? That strictly depends on the evolution of scientific world views. So far, we can see an enormous proliferation of models in all the fields of science. This is an obvious consequence of the proliferation of computers. And understandable, too. When there are new tools available it is profitable to see what can be obtained using them. As long as this development proceeds, mathematical modeling will not ebb. Such models must be calculated from well-defined assumptions. For cosmology it means that cosmological principles (old or new) will remain fundamental for cosmological research as long as constructing mathematical models dominates scientific research.
This demand for strictly and consciously formulated assumptions for the purpose of ca1culating models brought about the formulation of the "minor" cosmological principles discussed in the Chapter 7.
However, no scientific style of research has lasted forever. Today we can see the development of some quite novel approaches to scientific investigations, methods which are likely to replace the old ones. Almost all of present day science has developed in the following manner: one makes a hypothesis and then tests whether or not observations and experiments confirm it. Fritz Zwicky (1957, 1959) developed another approach to reality. He proposed not to form individual hypotheses but to take into account all plausible hypotheses and then exc1ude those that have not withstood verification. One thinks here in a rather deductional way, and the research is done using as few assumptions as possible. Zwicky's method has been developed within the general stream of Goetheanism (see. Appendix), which in the last decades has spread among some scientific circ1es. Is this a trend to deliver cosmology from accepting a priori philosophical assumptions, from using cosmological principles?
After the epoch of direct, mental seeing of the truth (Ancient India), after the epoch of coming upon intellectual truths through revelation (Egypt, Chaldea, Babylon), after the epoch of deriving all truths from logical thinking (Greece, Rome, up to the Middle Ages) comes an epoch which tries to found all logical thinking on physical experiment. In its contemporary stage it attempts to calculate models of everything or states hypotheses which have to be checked afterwards by comparing them to reality. In all these epochs the power of thinking was used - but differently in each one.
Should we be so self-satisfied and arrogant as to think that our approach to thinking as a scientific tool is the superior and concluding one? Are we to believe that human thinking cannot be used for scientific purposes in a still better way?
Fritz Zwicky used to say that the most important scientific instrument is the scientist himself and that this instrument must be well set, well adjusted. Do we really think that the scientific attitude most common today is the best possible?
9.06. Is any simplification a shortcoming?
The above considerations were stated with the implicit assumption that the cosmological principles' simplification of the structure of the Universe is their weak point. We want to obtain a true picture of the Universe and so look for a possibility to bypass cosmological principles. This is not the only stance possible. Stanislaw Zieba (1991) maintains that cognition of the actual structure of the Universe cannot be regarded as the true aim of cosmology. The Universe is too complicated, even in its most general outline, to be comprehensible for us. We simplify its picture using cosmological principles because we want to do so.
The principal aim of science is to provide simplified pictures of reality: Even the logic we use as the basis of every scientific argumentation is - according to Zieba - not the way we actually think, not the way we distinguish truth from falsehood, but just a model of our thinking, a simplified model of human cognition of reality. Woe betides him who trusts the received laws of logic as absolute ones. The same situation exists in other disciplines of knowledge. And so it must be in cosmology. The physical Universe is ex definitione the largest object of sensory investigations, and it is enormously complicated, even in the regions accessible by observation. When we want to describe the distribution of extragalactic objects in neighboring regions of our Galaxy, we do not give spatial coordinates of all extragalactic objects, even if they are determined. Such a true picture of the distribution of objects is just incomprehensible and thus useless for us. Also, in cosmology we have to look for the most basic features of the structure of the Universe in order to understand it. In this sense, cosmological principles will be always needed and useful. There can even be a number of cosmological principles, not necessarily consistent with each other, each one revealing a different feature of the Universe. The problem consists in remaining aware of the extent to which each of the principles accepted approximates reality.
One cannot object to this idea, but a remark should be made that in Zieba's view the cosmological principle is regarded more as a result than as a tool of cosmological research.
9.07. Models without principles
We have .arrived at the conclusion that it is possible to use cosmological principles without constructing models and also that one can practice cosmology without involving cosmological principles. The question still remains if it is possible to create models without resorting to cosmological principles. Ellis wrote that "...we are unable to obtain a model of the universe without some specifically cosmological assumptions which are completely unverifiable," - but what sort of unverifiable assumptions did he have in mind?
This question can be understood in various ways. If we ask whether one has to consciously accept some philosophical assumption as a cosmological principle, then obviously the answer is negative. Neither Eudoxos nor Hipparchus was aware of the Ancient Greek Cosmological Principle as such. Einstein, when introducing the assumption of homogeneity of the Universe, considered this just a simplifying mathematical assumption and did not expect that in the future it would be ranked as a cosmological principle. A cosmological principle has to be used first - explicitly or implicitly - by a certain number of scientists and only later acknowledged as such. Even the deliberately created Perfect Principle, which was so named right after its conception, does not breach this rule. However, it may be asked whether one can construct a model involving no philosophical assumptions, only mathematical and physical ones. Of course we do not like to ask silly questions. We are aware that philosophical assumptions are involved in all mathematics and physics and many of them are unverifiable. Thus perhaps the question should be so formulated: is it possible to create a model of a Universe without introducing any assumptions not commonly used in mathematics and physics? This was done several times. It was the case with the model called Schwarzschild's solution in general relativity (cf.: 2.12). This solution was found by Schwarzschild in 1917, when Einstein constructed his first model. It describes the case of all mass concentrated in one point in empty curved space. This was considered at first by all the physicists and by Schwarzschild himself as a solution useful only for celestial mechanics and not relevant to cosmology. Only many years later was it realized that this is a kind of Universe model, remarkable from a methodological point of view. Schwarzschild's solution found an application in the theory of black holes, which are sometimes considered as little universes. Thus it obtained the status of a cosmological model, even if not corresponding to the actual Universe.
Apparently the model of Gödel (1949) was also constructed without any particular cosmological principle. However, in fact, it fulfills an assumption very similar to that of the Zone-Model of Zieba. The mean density of mass in both models is constant all over space. There is a preferred direction in any space point. It is the rotation axis direction for Gödel; it is the direction perpendicular to local density layers in the Zone-Model. The anisotropy distinguishes it from the Generalized Copernican Principle. The model of Gödel also fulfills the Softened Copernican Principle (4.22).
Ellis and his collaborators (1978) proposed the so-called Static Spherically Symmetrical (SSS) Universe Model with our Galaxy in the center of the Universe. Instead of any cosmological principle, two features were assumed, static character and spherical symmetry. One can say that this was a particular philosophical assumption, not a cosmological principle. However, if there were a number of models based on that assumption of spherical symmetry, it would certainly deserve to be ranked among the cosmological principles. In 2.13, I called it the Generalized Ancient Greek Principle.
9.08. What is a cosmological principle?
Up to now, we have considered more than thirty cosmological principles, most of them known only to a small number of specialists. As we have seen, six of them exerted a considerable effect on cosmology. Out of those six, three are often used and discussed in contemporary cosmology. We reviewed specifications of a number of cosmological principles and found that most of them are useful in extrapolating the properties of the observable parts of the Universe to the unobservable ones. We saw also that not all statements, not all hypotheses, proclaiming something about those unobservable parts, can count as cosmological principles. However, we did not come to any general definition;
we still do not know what is a cosmological principle and what is not.
Exact definitions are usually not easy. We had trouble defining what a theory is and what a model is. The same is true for most other areas. Can we strictly define what is (and what is not) a philosophical idea, what is (and what is not) a law of nature, what is (and what is not) science? We have some ideas about them but there are no strict definitions which would be acceptable to everybody.
It cannot be strictly delimited what is a cosmological principle and which, even remarkable and general, statements about the Universe are to be considered as cosmological hypotheses but not as cosmological principles. However, allowing myself to present my rather lenient demands in this area, I propose that a cosmological principle is a statement fulfilling the three following conditions:
a. it states something about important features and properties of the Universe as a whole;
b. it indicates how to extrapolate our local scientific results to the entire Universe, or it explains why such an extrapolation is not possible;
c. it is embedded in some general attitude concerning human knowledge.
Of course any group of cosmologists, or even an individual cosmologist, can have their own judgment regarding what is an "important" and what is an "unimportant" property of the Universe. And naturally everyone will have his own general attitude concerning human knowledge. | https://southerncrossreview.org/131/rudnicki-9.html |
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The Aristotelian cosmos was like an onion consisting of a series of some 55 spheres nested about Earth, which was fixed at the centre.
In order to unify the system, Aristotle added spheres in order to “unroll” the motions of a given planet so that they would not be transmitted to the next inner planet.
This calendar played an important role in the history of astronomy, allowing astronomers to calculate the number of days between any two sets of observations.
, constitutes one of the earliest systematic, scientific treatments of the physical world.
theory of homocentric spheres, a model that represented the universe by sets of nesting concentric spheres the motions of which combined to produce the planetary and other celestial motions.
Using only uniform circular motions, Eudoxus was able to “save” the rather complex planetary motions with some success.
Celestial mechanics, the science of the motion of planets and other solid objects within the solar system, was the first testing ground for Newton’s laws of motion and thereby helped to establish the fundamental principles of classical (that is, pre-20th-century) physics.
During the following centuries, however, the study of stars, galaxies, nebulas, and the interstellar medium became increasingly important.
Each of these is in turn divided into fields and subfields.
This article discusses the historical development—with due attention to the scope, principal concerns, and methods—of the first three of these areas.
In the 20th century physics and astronomy became more intimately linked through cosmological theories, especially those based on the theory of relativity.
( Physical science, like all the natural sciences, is concerned with describing and relating to one another those experiences of the surrounding world that are shared by different observers and whose description can be agreed upon.
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Believing that the order of the cosmos is fundamentally mathematical, they held that it is possible to discover the harmonies of the universe by contemplating the regular motions of the circular motion. | http://rossobianco.ru/astronomydating-com-32666.html |
Many of the scientists and engineers I have worked with have an illusory view of the way in which science generates knowledge. Using modern technology to perform complex computations, they assume that the intensive use of mathematical models and methods will lead them to the “discovery” of truths which are otherwise unobservable, and which will contribute to the further development of science, decision-making, and problem solving.
Contrary to this belief, mathematical models construct their own reality through their formal architecture and the form of input data – in the same way that humans construct their own reality through their neurobiological nature. Mathematical models possess an internal truth which corresponds to the coherency produced by the rules of the formal system, but this does not mean that this truth corresponds to the external world. As a consequence, the hypotheses produced by the application of mathematical models can only possess a degree of plausibility with respect to their descriptive and predictive power.
This aspect of mathematical models is usually not taken into account. An inference formulated in mathematical language will almost always seem to be more valid than a statement in human language. Nonetheless, the comparison of the structure of mathematical models with the function of human cognition shows that both possess the same degree of validity.
Humans create inferences through a process which starts from the sensual and informational receptors of the person. The human sensory system is composed of the proprioceptors, exteroceptors, and interoceptors. Proprioceptors are the sensors which transmit information of the person’s motion and relative position of the body parts. Exteroceptors include all the receptors that react to the direct environmental stimuli, such as vision, taste, and touch. Finally, interoceptors are the effectors and receptors which signal bodily conditions such as hunger. These three groups of sensors constitute the connectors between the person and the world. According to the cognitive constructivist theory, for a human the world consists only of the totality of sensorial activity.2 The concrete function and specific type of the sensors as well as their coordination play a central role in the way that the world is reflected in the human organism, as the sensors provide all of the information which the nervous system processes. Organisms with different sensorial systems live in completely different realities, as the constructed worlds they are embedded in are constituted by the limits of their sensory systems. This idiosyncrasy of individual realities is further strengthened by the existing individual neural structure of the organism.
The person’s beliefs about the world are created through inferences, which are based on information sent by the sensors to the nervous system, the architecture, and structure of the nervous system, and its functional mechanisms. Hence, the reality of the person is constructed from a limited interaction of the person through her/his senses and her/his movement in the world. The sensory input is assimilated by the existing neural structure, a process which is imprinted in the plasticity of the neurons3, and then it is transformed into inductive inferences, through the synergy of semi-formal axiomatic and hypothetic-deductive human reasoning4, together with the intuitive operations5 and emotional forces6 of the human mind (fig. 1 a).
Hence, everybody constructs their own reality tied to their personal history, within the capacities of the human brain. Each person and each animal has a different perceived reality. Thus, a universal notion of truth cannot exist, as the limits of the human do not allow it. Even if more than one person agree that something is true, it is true only in the shared constructed reality they live in.
The human inferences seem to have an absolute validity only in the person’s constructed world, which is built out of a small number of fundamental elements using the concrete tools of the human brain. Consequently, there is no necessity that those inferences are going to be valid when applied in a different, more complex world. Hence, in no case is the claim justified that they could be characterized as true, as truth possesses an essence of absoluteness, which can never be acquired by the human mind.
Mathematical inferences have a similar structure to the inferences produced by human thought (fig. 1 b). A mathematical model is fed with a data-set in order to process it and derive a result. This data-set constitutes the only connection of the model to whatever it is the model describes. Moreover, the data-set works as a projection of the described entities on a constructed space with a specific quantitative and qualitative form. Any result is thus solely linked with this limited projection, as the mathematical model can only “perceive” this dimension of the world. Furthermore, the architecture of the mathematical model strongly influences the capabilities of each model and can pose strong restrictions in their predictive powers.
Despite this, mathematical models are broadly treated as true descriptions of the world: A popular view that prevails in the scientific community in the discussion about the power and reliability of data-intensive science is that so-called Big Data* models can discover true and precise correlative relations in the social world.
*Big Data represent huge datasets, which cannot be processed through standard databanks. Therefore special software, parallel computing, and special econometric methods are combined in order to evaluate the data and form predictions about the world.
Data-intensive science claims that it can overcome the limitations of scientific theories and provide inferences with “unprecedented fidelity”.7 This view is based on the assumption that the input data-set contains all data.8 Something which does not hold, but it is assumed, as the huge number of data is adequate to overcome problems of ordinary statistics. Moreover, the inherent information of sufficiently large datasets exceeds by far the information that can be incorporated in a simple econometric model. Ideally, the model can possess the total projection of the world and consequently detect all correlative relations in it.
There are problems with this assumption. One is that the question “Can someone really gather all data of the world?”, is of metaphysical nature and is connected with the limits of the human. Another has to do with the qualitative difference between the projected data and the world under investigation. The way that the data is chosen to be quantified can influence the result of any mathematical model. A simple formulation of this problem is this: If a variable is described in the model as nominal, ordinal, or purely quantified, it always can have an effect on the final result. A variable is nominal when it does not have a numerical value. Take, for example, the color of a car. An ordinal variable ranks something according to given criteria (think of the hierarchy in a company). Purely quantified variables are attached to a numerical scale (think of the speedometer of a car). Ordinal and nominal variables are of qualitative nature. In order to be inserted in a mathematical model, an ordinal or nominal variable must be assigned a number. This can only be done by subjective criteria, there is no formal rule. As a consequence, different quantifications of these variables lead to different modeling results.
This problem is directly linked to the nature of data and the act of classification, as well as to the question whether or not everything that exists in the world can be described with numbers.
Furthermore, these models face restrictions coming from mathematics and the limits of matrix calculus. A typical issue in some econometric models is multicolinearity, which comes up when two or more variables have an almost linear relation to each other. This becomes a problem because the model requires the inversion of the data matrix, a process which includes dividing by 0 – an operation which is undefined in arithmetic.
The same mathematical property was the reason why Henri Poincare (1854–1912) came to the conclusion that Newton’s differential equations for the description of the motion of more than two celestial objects with gravitational interaction do not have an analytical solution.10A result which led to the development of the complex systems theory.
The discourse becomes more intense when the decisions that are based upon them have a major impact on the social life of humans and evoke radical changes in social structure. In economic science, the use of formal methods prevails as a necessity, because it is believed that in this way the field becomes rigorous and scientific,11 although the inferences made by these formal tools very often fail to make any valid predictions.12 This obsessive use of econometrical and probabilistic models ends up being problematic.
The most fundamental aspects of mainstream economics (concerning the structure of the market, of labor relations, and the way the state and social institutions should function in society) spring out of inferences based on some economic assumptions, simple mathematical models of few financial variables together with the famous ceteris paribus**. Thus, every time the models fail the excuse is that there was a political incident, or that a rare event occurred, etc. Still, these problems do not evoke any change in the way economic scientists handle their predictions. Economists keep on using the same methods with the same poor results, justified on the inherent truth of the models, ignoring that there might not exist any correspondence between the models’ results and the social interactions taking place.
**Latin: other things being equal. Economic models are designed under the assumption that other factors that influence the model-variables will not appear or they will have a constant effect on the latter.
Even if a model does describe the world accurately, it does not mean that we learn something true about the world. It merely signifies that the model used has a specific descriptive power under some specific conditions.
In political science, game-theoretic models are broadly used for the description of conflicts and bargaining. A case study which is often referred to the success of these methods is the “Cuban missile crisis” of 1962,13 when the threat of a nuclear war between the US and the USSR was highly probable. Many different variations of game-theoretic models have been applied to these events in order to show the descriptive power of the methods. But what is not analyzed is the way in which the starting conditions of the models are decided upon. Every “player” in a game has a payoff for a possible move she/he makes, which is chosen under some empirical assumptions from the scientist. According to these payoffs the nature and outcome of the game totally changes. Hence, that the models were calibrated a posteriori in a specific way, capable of describing a social interaction, does not mean that every application of the model in a similar situation will have the same success.
The difference between an epistemic model and the world also has to be kept in mind in cosmology. The idea of the Big Bang theory came from the application of the equations of general relativity theory and their extension by the physicist Friedman.14 The emergence of a mathematical singularity in the equations together with the investigation of empirical facts led to the creation of the Big Bang hypothesis. This does not mean that the Big Bang theory is true. The hypothesis is rather a construction that emerged from a mathematical model. As long as empirical evidence does not falsify it, it can be considered a descriptive hypothesis, and Friedman’s equations can be seen as plausible descriptions of the world.
In summary, mathematical models produce inferences which are only absolutely valid in their respective mathematical world. They face limitations in their structure and their results similar to the limitations of human thought. Although some in the scientific community do not accept this thesis, scientists should incorporate this perspective in their working assumptions.
It is necessary to overcome dogmatic formalism and claims of absolute truth in order to move forward and face new challenges in the scientific discourse.
Kenneth J. Gergen, The social constructionist movement in modern psychology American Psychologist 40, no. 3 (1985), 273.
Heinz von Foerster, On Constructing a Reality , in: Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (Springer Publishing Company, 2010), 211–227.
Gisela Labouvie-Vief, Integrating emotions and cognition throughout the lifespan (Springer, 2015), 34.
Jean Piaget, The psychology of intelligence (London: Routledge & Paul, 2005), ch. V.
Chris Anderson, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete (2008), http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory (accessed: November 30, 2015).
Wolfgang Pietsch, Aspects of theory-ladenness in data-intensive science , Philosophy of Science Assoc. 24th Biennial Mtg. Chicago, IL (2014), 7.
Äozgäur Yeniay, A comparison of partial least squares regression with other prediction methods Hacettepe Journal of Mathematics and Statistics, no. 31 (2002). 99–111.
Henri Poincare, New methods of celestial mechanics , vol. 3, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (ed.) (Springfield VA, 1967), 167, http://www.archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19670017950 (accessed: November 30, 2015).
Geoff Hodgson, On the problem of formalism in economics , Voprosy Economiki, no. 3 (2006), 112–124.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), ch. 11.
Avinash K. Dixit and Susan Skeath, Games of strategy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 471–496.
Alexander Friedman, On the Curvature of Space, General Relativity and Gravitation , no. 31 (1999),1991–2000. | https://www.fatum-magazin.de/ausgaben/traeume-und-wahrheiten/vom-wesen-der-dinge/the-constructed-world-of-mathematical-models.html |
BuildWind was asked by Sky-Walls to perform a study aimed at assessing the performance of their glazing solution by means of CFD simulation. The Sky-Walls system features a triple-glazing equipped with a series of fans in each cavity aimed at controlling the heat transfer characteristics.
Parc Stormy
Impact of new buildings on wind turbine energy output
Fluid dynamic simulation of air flow in an office space with workers
Haseeb Ahmed is an American research-based artist who lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. He produces objects, installations and films. Ahmed integrates methodologies from the hard sciences into his art works. BuildWind was asked by Ahmed to perform a CFD simulation of an office space with workers for Pneuma In and Out (2020). Ahmed’s purpose is to render visible both the otherwise invisible air and labor conditions at stake in work environments, such as in an office space.
Mechelen Train Station
Aerodynamics and wind actions
International Finance Forum
Preliminary wind analysis
Les Docks
Wind of comfort and safety
Wind comfort and safety on a building terrace (France, confidential location)
Computational fluid dynamics is a powerful tool to investigate how wind affects particular areas of a building, such as terraces, balconies, passages, courtyards, in order to guarantee the appropriate level of comfort and safety. Engineers’ expertise is fundamental to identify the architectural elements which can have a significant role in the analysis of the airflow around and inside these areas. On the basis of accurate CFD results, BuildWind engineers are able to suggest innovative or convenient solutions to mitigate possible fluid dynamic issues.
Himalayan mountain hut
This study has been commissioned by Sara Gottardo, an architect based in Paris, for an international architectural competition. Participants were asked to submit clever and inventive proposals for a feasible and efficient Himalayan Mountain Hut to be positioned along any of the trekking trails in order to provide trekkers safe, comfortable and inviting lodgings. The core of this project is the dome. BuildWind performed simulations of the aerodynamics and heat transfer in order to assess the technical feasibility of the project. | https://www.buildwind.net/projects/ |
Abstract: The objectives of the present Action Group AD/AG-48 of the 'Group for Aeronautical Research and Technology in EURope' (GARTEUR) on 'Lateral jet interactions at supersonic speeds' is to deeply analyse the effects of the hot-gas jet by the use of CFD simulations. At the end, the main goal is to define the most appropriate similarity parameters for wind-tunnel tests using cold gases. Experiments from DLR Cologne and ONERA/MBDA-France on generic missile models are used in order to achieve numerical simulations of the interaction between a lateral jet and a supersonic cross flow of a missile. These experiments using either a cold-air jet or a hot-gas jet, the latter produced by the combustion of a solid propellant, are well documented and the data are used for the validation of the numerical simulation using either an ideal gas or a multi-species fluid, respectively. The objective of the present work is only the validation of the numerical simulations by comparison with the DLR and ONERA/MBDA-France experiments. The action group members use the same computational meshes for the comparison of the numerical results got from different CFD codes solving 3D, turbulent, RANS equations.
Keywords: missiles; lateral jet interactions; hot-gas jet; cold-air jet; aerodynamics; numerical simulation; RANS computation; numerical results; experimental results; supersonic speed; CFD; computational fluid dynamics; wind tunnel testing; cold gases; missile models; modelling. | https://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=52384 |
The aerodynamic design of small aeroplanes involves two main methods (prior to wind tunnel testing & flight testing). The first uses the theory of 2D airfoils, while the second focuses on 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations.
Since 1915, when the Advisory Commission for Aeronautics was formed, 2D airfoils have been extensively researched and developed. This commission later became the National Advisory Commission for Aeronautics (NACA) and any airfoils created under this program were called NACA airfoils. Still today, aeroplane wings are often 3D extrusion elements based on 2D airfoils from the NACA database. Check out our guide to the best aerodynamic resources where you can find databases of airfoils, such as Airfoiltools.
At the other end of the spectrum is 3D CFD. These are essentially simulations that capture the behaviour of airflow as it interacts with complex 3D objects. They are an excellent method of learning how much the flow deviates from the predicted 2D flow along a selected airfoil. These simulations can also be utilised to understand the intricate flow around other elements of an aeroplane such as the landing gear, cockpit and wing fuselage.
An important aspect of determining the lift capacity of a wing based on 2D airfoils is the wing span. The 2D lift and drag properties of an airfoil are often provided for a section of an ‘infinitely wide’ wing. This means that end effects, such as wing tip vortices, where air crosses from high to low pressure via the side edge of the wing, are not taken into account. Therefore, the lift generated per unit length by a finite wing is much smaller than an infinite one, as the wing loading near the tips and even further away can be significantly reduced.
To counter this loss of lift, winglets can be implemented which, in their simplest form, are vertical flanges preventing the air from crossing and curling around the wing tip. This is relevant for all types and sizes of wing, even for fixed wing drones.
To demonstrate that a small airplane can also benefit from optimized winglets, we used AirShaper’s Aerodynamic Shape Optimization software to optimize the winglets of a Cessna 210J Centurion.
We asked the software to morph the wing tip to improve the amount of lift generated by the wing and the results are shown below. The software designed a new 3D shape for the winglet which improved the lift of this section of wing by almost 60% with a minimal increase in drag.
As always with CFD simulations, the results need to be validated with wind tunnel or real world testing and at different angles of attack. There are also other factors such as manufacturing constraints and aesthetics that need to be evaluated before a design can be put into production. However, the software was able to optimize the complex 3D shape of a winglet quickly and robustly; providing an incredible tool that allows designers the freedom to create new, innovative and exciting shapes. | https://airshaper.com/cases/optimization/cessna |
Numerical wind tunnel
Wind tunnel tests are supported by means of numerical models. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can be complementary to wind tunnel tests when based on methods validated by expertise and physical measurements. There is the expertise in several commercial, open-source and in-house computational codes. The most suitable numerical model for the reproduction of the phenomenon under study is adopted, to optimize the computational cost to the research target. All state of the art methods are available in order to investigate properly the phenomenon under study, namely:
- Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS)
- Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (URANS)
- Detached Eddy Simulation (DES)
- Large Eddy Simulation (LES)
The use of CFD may fulfill the following goals:
- To explain the phenomena observed through experimental wind tunnel tests. Typical application is the reproduction of a wind tunnel test to have a deeper insight in the flow field characteristics
- To perform the appropriate corrections to the measured data. Typical application is the estimation of the angle of attack correction for fixed-wing aircraft or shaft angle correction for model rotor tests
- To preliminary estimate the aerodynamic loads on the model, in order to correctly design the structure of the model itself and the supports
- To preliminary estimate the possible simplification of complex geometries details, which may be omitted in the design of a reliable scaled model
- To evaluate Reynolds number or Mach number scale effects, which cannot be reproduced in the wind tunnel tests.
CFD may also allow to perform parametric studies on geometries that are too complex to be realized in wind tunnel or to reproduce conditions that cannot be consistently measured or cannot be realized in experimental tests. An example can be found in measuring the aerodynamic forces on moving vehicles (rolling contact forces influence the measurement of aerodynamic forces) or in the modelling of buoyant forces (for pollutant dispersion studies), that may not be properly investigated through wind tunnel tests; the wind tunnel tests on still vehicles or neutrally buoyant conditions can be used to validate a numerical model that can be subsequently used to reproduce the actual condition. | http://www.windtunnel.polimi.it/numerical-wind-tunnel/ |
Aerodynamic drag in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is affected by the structure and density of obstacles (surface roughness) and nature of the terrain (topography). In building codes and standards, average roughness is usually determined somewhat subjectively by examination of aerial photographs. For detailed wind mapping, boundary layer wind tunnel (BLWT) testing is usually recommended. This may not be cost effective for many projects, in which case numerical studies become good alternatives. This thesis examines Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for evaluation of aerodynamic roughness of the built environment and complex terrain.
The present study started from development of an in-house CFD software tailored for ABL simulations. A three-dimensional finite-volume code was developed using flexible polyhedral elements as building blocks. The program is parallelized using MPI to run on clusters of processors so that micro-scale simulations can be conducted quickly. The program can also utilize the power of latest technology in high performance computing, namely GPUs. Various turbulence models including mixing-length, RANS, and LES models are implemented, and their suitability for ABL simulations assessed.
Then the effect of surface roughness alone on wind profiles is assessed using CFD. Cases with various levels of complexity are considered including simplified models with roughness blocks of different arrangement, multiple roughness patches, semi-idealized urban model, and real built environment. Comparison with BLWT data for the first three cases showed good agreement thereby justifying explicit three-dimensional numerical approach. Due to lack of validation data, the real built environment case served only to demonstrate use of CFD for such purposes.
Finally, the effect of topographic features on wind profiles was investigated using CFD. This work extends prior work done by the research team on multiple idealized two-dimensional topographic features to more elaborate three-dimensional simulations. It is found that two-dimensional simulations overestimate speed up over crests of hills and also show larger recirculation zones. The current study also emphasized turbulence characterization behind hills. Finally a real complex terrain case of the well-known Askervein hill was simulated and the results validated against published field observations. In general the results obtained from the current simulations compared well with those reported in literature.
Recommended Citation
Abdi, Daniel S., "Numerical evaluation of aerodynamic roughness of the built environment and complex terrain" (2013). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 1705. | https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1705/ |
Abstract:Effect of blockage ratio on heat transfer from non-circular tube is studied experimentally. For doing this experiment a suction type low speed wind tunnel with test section dimension of 14×14×40 and velocity in rage of 7-20 m/s was designed. The blockage ratios varied between 1.5 to 7 and Reynolds number based on equivalent diameter varies in range of 7.5×103 to 17.5×103. The results show that by increasing blockage ratio from 1.5 to 7, drag coefficient of the cam shaped tube decreased about 55 percent. By increasing Reynolds number, Nusselt number of the cam shaped tube increases about 40 to 48 percent in all ranges of blockage ratios.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, cross-flow, non-circular tube, blockage ratio, experimental heat transferProcedia PDF Downloads 204
24 Aerodynamic Analysis of Vehicles in the Wind Tunnel and Water Tunnel
Authors: Elmo Thiago Lins Cöuras Ford, Valentina Alessandra Carvalho do Vale
Abstract:The simulation in wind tunnel is used thoroughly to model real situations of drainages of air. Besides the automotive industry, a great number of applications can be numbered: dispersion of pollutant, studies of pedestrians comfort and dispersion of particles. This work had the objective of visualizing the characteristics aerodynamics of two automobiles in different ways. To accomplish that drainage of air a fan that generated a speed exists (measured with anemometer of hot thread) of 4,1m/s and 4,95m/s. To visualize the path of the air through the cars, in the wind tunnel, smoke was used, obtained with it burns of vegetable oil. For “to do smoke” vegetable oil was used, that was burned for a tension of 20 V generated by a thread of 2,5 mm. The cars were placed inside of the wind tunnel with the drainage of “air-smoke” and photographed, registering like this the path lines around them, in the 3 different speeds.
Keywords: Aerodynamics, Wind Tunnel, vehicle drag, vegetable oilProcedia PDF Downloads 442
23 Aerodynamic Analysis of Vehicles
Authors: V. A. C. Vale, E. T. L. Cöuras Ford, J. U. L. Mendes
Abstract:Two of the objective principal in the study of the aerodynamics of vehicles are the safety and the acting. Those objectives can be reached through the development of devices modify the drainage of air about of the vehicle and also through alterations in the way of the external surfaces. The front lowest profile of the vehicle, for instance, has great influence on the coefficient of aerodynamic penetration (Cx) and later on great part of the pressure distribution along the surface of the vehicle. The objective of this work was of analyzing the aerodynamic behavior that it happens on some types the trucks of vehicles, based on experimentation in aerodynamic tunnel, seeking to determine the aerodynamic efficiency of each one of them.
Keywords: Safety, Vehicles, Aerodynamic, Wind Tunnel, ActingProcedia PDF Downloads 363
22 Construction of Wind Tunnel for Aerodynamic
Authors: Elmo Thiago Lins Cöuras Ford, Valentina Alessandra Carvalho do Vale, José Ubiragi de Lima Mendes
Abstract:The study of the aerodynamics is related to the improvement in the acting of airplanes and automobiles with the objective of being reduced the effect of the attrition of the air on structures, providing larger speeds and smaller consumption of fuel. The application of the knowledge of the aerodynamics not more limits to the aeronautical and automobile industries. In that way, being tried the new demands with relationship to the aerodynamic study in the most several areas of the engineering, this work presents the stages of the project and construction of a wind tunnel for application in aerodynamic rehearsals. Among the several configurations of existent wind tunnels, opted to build open circuit, due to smaller construction complexity and installation; operational simplicity and cost reduced. Belonging to the type blower, to take advantage of a larger efficiency of the motor; and with diffusion so that flowed him of air it wins speed before reaching the section of rehearsals. The guidelines for project were: didactic practices: study of the layer it limits and analyze of the drainages on proof bodies with different geometries. For the pressure variation in the test section a connected manometer used a pitot tube. Quantitative and qualitative results showed to be satisfactory.
Keywords: Aerodynamics, Air, Wind Tunnel, AirplaneProcedia PDF Downloads 331
21 Experimental Study of Flag Flutter in Uniform Flow
Authors: M. Sedghi, A. Sadeghi, M. R. Emami Azadi, R. Gharraei Khosroshahi
Abstract:Flags are objects with very low bending stiffness and under wind forces start to vibrate and finally to flutter. Even in lower velocities of wind their flutter can be seen. In this research physical property of fabric is determined by performing tensile tests. Then with performing laboratory experiments in wind tunnel, determination of initial flapping speed and also study of displacement amplitude at leech and calculation of their frequency would be targeted. Laboratory tests are performed in a wind tunnel and with different velocities of wind flow for specimens with different dimensions. The results show that extension of specimens' width increase flutter initiation velocity and increase of specimen length decreases it. Also by increasing wind velocity displacement amplitude at leech of specimens are decreased. This displacement has a straight relation with specimens' length and width.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, flutter, Wind Velocity, flag, flutter amplitudesProcedia PDF Downloads 328
20 Measurement of Turbulence with PITOT Static Tube in Low Speed Subsonic Wind Tunnel
Authors: Gopikrishnan, Bharathiraja, Boopalan, Jensin Joshua
Abstract:The Pitot static tube has proven their values and practicability in measuring velocity of fluids for many years. With the aim of extensive usage of such Pitot tube systems, one of the major enabling technologies is to use the design and fabricate a high sensitive pitot tube for the purpose of calibration of the subsonic wind tunnel. Calibration of wind tunnel is carried out by using different instruments to measure variety of parameters. Using too many instruments inside the tunnel may not only affect the fluid flow but also lead to drag or losses. So, it is essential to replace the different system with a single system that would give all the required information. This model of high sensitive Pitot tube has been designed to ease the calibration process. It minimizes the use of different instruments and this single system is capable of calibrating the wind tunnel test section. This Pitot static tube is completely digitalized and so that the velocity data`s can be collected directly from the instrument. Since the turbulence factors are dependent on velocity, the data’s that are collected from the pitot static tube are then processed and the level of turbulence in the fluid flow is calculated. It is also capable of measuring the pressure distribution inside the wind tunnel and the flow angularity of the fluid. Thus, the well-designed high sensitive Pitot static tube is utilized in calibrating the tunnel and also for the measurement of turbulence.
Keywords: Turbulence, Wind Tunnel, velocity, pitot static tubeProcedia PDF Downloads 388
19 Prediction of Flow Around a NACA 0015 Profile
Authors: Boukhadia Karima
Abstract:The fluid mechanics is the study of fluid motion laws and their interaction with solid bodies, this project leads to illustrate this interaction with depth studies and approved by experiments on the wind tunnel TE44, ensuring the efficiency, accuracy and reliability of these tests on a NACA0015 profile. A symmetric NACA0015 was placed in a subsonic wind tunnel, and measurements were made of the pressure on the upper and lower surface of the wing and of the velocity across the vortex trailing downstream from the tip of the wing. The aim of this work is to investigate experimentally the scattered pressure profile in a free airflow and the aerodynamic forces acting on this profile. The addition of around-lateral edge to the wing tip was found to eliminate the secondary vortex near the wing tip, but had little effect on the downstream characteristics of the trailing vortex. The increase in wing lift near the tip because of the presence of the trailing vortex was evident in the surface pressure, but was not captured by circulation-box measurements. The circumferential velocity within the vortex was found to reach free-stream values and produce core rotational speeds. Near the wing, the trailing vortex is asymmetric and contains definite zones where the stream wise velocity both exceeds and falls behind the free-stream value. When referenced to the free stream velocity, the maximum vertical velocity of the vortex is directly dependent on α and is independent of Re. A numerical study was conducted through a CFD code called FLUENT 6.0, and the results are compared with experimental.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, CFD code, NACA Profile, detachment, angle of incidenceProcedia PDF Downloads 302
18 Risk of Plastic Shrinkage Cracking in Recycled Aggregate Concrete
Authors: M. Oliveira, M. Eckert
Abstract:The intensive use of natural aggregates, near cities and towns, associated to the increase of the global population, leads to its depletion and increases the transport distances. The uncontrolled deposition of construction and demolition waste in landfills and city outskirts, causes pollution and takes up space. The use of recycled aggregates in concrete preparation would contribute to mitigate the problem. However, it arises the problem that the high water absorption of recycled aggregate decreases the bleeding rate of concrete, and when this gets lower than the evaporation rate, plastic shrinkage cracking occurs. This phenomenon can be particularly problematic in hot and windy curing environments. Cracking facilitates the flow of liquid and gas into concrete which attacks the reinforcement and degrades the concrete. These factors reduce the durability of concrete structures and consequently the lifetime of buildings. A ring test was used, cured in a wind tunnel, to evaluate the plastic shrinkage cracking sensitivity of recycled aggregate concrete, in order to implement preventive means to control this phenomenon. The role of several aggregate properties on the concrete segregation and cracking mechanisms were also discussed.
Keywords: Durability, Wind Tunnel, recycled aggregate, plastic shrinkage crackingProcedia PDF Downloads 296
17 Experimental Investigation of Boundary Layer Transition on Rotating Cones in Axial Flow in 0 and 35 Degrees Angle of Attack
Authors: Ali Kargar, Kamyar Mansour
Abstract:In this paper, experimental results of using hot wire anemometer and smoke visualization are presented. The results obtained on the hot wire anemometer for critical Reynolds number and transitional Reynolds number are compared by previous results. Excellent agreement is found for the transitional Reynolds number. The results for the transitional Reynolds number are also compared by previous linear stability results. The results of the smoke visualization clearly show the cross flow vortices which arise in the transition process from a laminar to a turbulent flow. A non-zero angle of attack is also considered. We compare our results by linear stability theory which was done by Garret et. Al (2007). We just emphasis, Also the visualization and hot wire anemometer results have been compared graphically. The goal in this paper is to check reliability of using hot wire anemometer and smoke visualization in transition problems and check reliability of linear stability theory for this case and compare our results with some trusty experimental works.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, transitional reynolds number, rotating cone, smoke visualizationProcedia PDF Downloads 158
16 Numerical and Experimental Investigations of Cantilever Rectangular Plate Structure on Subsonic Flutter
Authors: Mevlüt Burak Dalmış, Kemal Yaman
Abstract:In this study, flutter characteristics of cantilever rectangular plate structure under incompressible flow regime are investigated by comparing the results of commercial flutter analysis program ZAERO© with wind tunnel tests conducted in Ankara Wind Tunnel (ART). A rectangular polycarbonate (PC) plate, 5x125x1000 mm in dimensions, is used for both numerical and experimental investigations. Analysis and test results are very compatible with each other. A comparison between two different solution methods (g and k-method) of ZAERO© is also done. It is seen that, k-method gives closer result than the other one. However, g-method results are on conservative side and it is better to use conservative results namely g-method results. Even if the modal analysis results are used for the flutter analysis for this simple structure, a modal test should be conducted in order to validate the modal analysis results to have accurate flutter analysis results for more complicated structures.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, flutter, Subsonic Flow, PlateProcedia PDF Downloads 382
15 Experimental Investigation of Boundary Layer Instability and Transition on a Rotating Parabola in Axial Flow
Authors: Ali Kargar, Kamyar Mansour
Abstract:In this paper the boundary layer instability and transition on a rotating parabola which is sheathed shape on a rotating 30 degrees total apex angle cone have been study by smoke visualization. The rotating cone especially 30 degrees total apex angle is a well-established subject in some previous novel works and also in our previous works. But in this paper a stabilizing effect is detected by the bluntness of nose and also surface curvature. A parabola model which is satisfying those conditions (sheathed parabola of the 30 degrees cone) has been built and studied in the wind tunnel. The results are shown that the boundary layer transition occurs at higher rotational Reynolds number in comparison by the cone. The results are shown in the visualization pictures and also are compared graphically.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, transitional reynolds number, smoke visualization, rotating parabolaProcedia PDF Downloads 274
14 An Analytical Study of Small Unmanned Arial Vehicle Dynamic Stability Characteristics
Authors: Abdelhakam A. Noreldien, Sakhr B. Abudarag, Muslim S. Eltoum, Salih O. Osman
Abstract:This paper presents an analytical study of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SUAV) dynamic stability derivatives. Simulating SUAV dynamics and analyzing its behavior at the earliest design stages is too important and more efficient design aspect. The approach suggested in this paper is using the wind tunnel experiment to collect the aerodynamic data and get the dynamic stability derivatives. AutoCAD Software was used to draw the case study (wildlife surveillance SUAV). The SUAV is scaled down to be 0.25% of the real SUAV dimensions and converted to a wind tunnel model. The model was tested in three different speeds for three different attitudes which are; pitch, roll and yaw. The wind tunnel results were then used to determine the case study stability derivative values, and hence it used to calculate the roots of the characteristic equation for both longitudinal and lateral motions. Finally, the characteristic equation roots were found and discussed in all possible cases.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, model, simulating, SUAVProcedia PDF Downloads 244
13 Development of a Self-Retractable Front Spoilers Suitable for Indian Road Conditions to Reduce Aerodynamic Drag
Authors: G. Sivaraj, K. M. Parammasivam, R. Veeramanikandan, S. Nithish
Abstract:Reduction of ground clearance or (ride height) is a vital factor in minimizing aerodynamic drag force and improving vehicle performance. But in India, minimization of ground clearance is limited because of the road conditions. Due to this problem, reduction of aerodynamic drag and performance are not fully improved. In this view, this paper deals with the development of self-retractable front spoilers which are most suitable for Indian road conditions. These retractable spoilers are fitted in the front portion of the car and in speed below 60 km/hr these spoilers are in retracted positions. But, when the car crosses a speed above 60 km/hr, using electronic circuit the spoilers are activated. Thus, using this technique aerodynamic performance can be improved at a speed above 60 km/hr. Also, when the car speed is reduced below the 60 km/hr mark, the front spoiler are retracted which makes it as a normal car. This is because, in Indian roads, speed breakers are installed to cut off speed at particular places. Thus, in these circumstances there are chances of damaging front spoilers. Since, when the driver sees the speed breaker, he will automatically apply break to prevent damage, at this time using electronic circuit the front spoiler is retracted. However, accidentally when the driver fails to apply brakes there are chances for the front spoilers to get a hit. But as the front spoilers are made of Kevlar composite, it can withstand high impact loads and using a spring mechanism the spoilers are retracted immediately. By using CFD analysis and low-speed wind tunnel testing drag coefficient of the 1:10 scaled car model with and without self-retractable spoilers are calculated and validated. Also, using wind tunnel, proper working of self-retractable at car speed below and above 60 km/hr are validated.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, CFD analysis, aerodynamic drag, kevlar composite, self-retractable spoilersProcedia PDF Downloads 228
12 The Characteristics of the Operating Parameters of the Vertical Axis Wind Turbine for the Selected Wind Speed
Authors: Zdzislaw Kaminski, Zbigniew Czyz
Abstract:The paper discusses the results of the research into a wind turbine with a vertical axis of rotation which was performed with the open return wind tunnel, Gunt HM 170, at the laboratory of the Department of Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics and Propulsion Aviation Systems of Lublin University of Technology. Wind tunnel experiments are a necessary step to construct any new type of wind turbine, to validate design assumptions and numerical results. This research focused on the rotor with the blades capable of modifying their working surfaces, i.e. absorbing wind kinetic energy. The operation of this rotor is based on adjusting angular aperture α of the top and bottom parts of the blades mounted on an axis. If this angle α increases, the working surface which absorbs wind kinetic energy also increases. The study was performed on scaled and geometrically similar models with the criteria of similarity relevant for the type of research preserved. The rotors with varied angular apertures of their blades were printed for the research with a powder 3D printer, ZPrinter® 450. This paper presents the research results for the selected flow speed of 6.5 m/s for the three angular apertures of the rotor blades, i.e. 30°, 60°, 90° at varied speeds. The test stand enables the turbine rotor to be braked to achieve the required speed and airflow speed and torque to be recorded. Accordingly, the torque and power as a function of airflow were plotted. The rotor with its adjustable blades enables turbine power to be adjusted within a wide range of wind speeds. A variable angular aperture of blade working surfaces α in a wind turbine enables us to control the speed of the turbine and consequently its output power. Reducing the angular aperture of working surfaces results in reduced speed, and if a special current generator applied, electrical output power is reduced, too. Speed adjusted by changing angle α enables the maximum load acting on rotor blades to be controlled. The solution under study is a kind of safety against a damage of a turbine due to possible high wind speed.
Keywords: Renewable Energy, Power, Wind Tunnel, Wind turbine, drive torqueProcedia PDF Downloads 138
11 Aerodynamics and Aeroelastics Studies of Hanger Bridge with H-Beam Profile Using Wind Tunnel
Authors: Matza Gusto Andika, Malinda Sabrina, Syarie Fatunnisa
Abstract:Aerodynamic and aeroelastics studies on the hanger bridge profile are important to analyze the aerodynamic phenomenon and Aeroelastics stability of hanger. Wind tunnel tests were conducted on a model of H-beam profile from hanger bridge. The purpose of this study is to investigate steady aerodynamic characteristics such as lift coefficient (Cl), drag coefficient (Cd), and moment coefficient (Cm) under the different angle of attack for preliminary prediction of aeroelastics stability problems. After investigation the steady aerodynamics characteristics from the model, dynamic testing is also conducted in wind tunnel to know the aeroelastics phenomenon which occurs at the H-beam hanger bridge profile. The studies show that the torsional vortex induced vibration occur when the wind speed is 7.32 m/s until 9.19 m/s with maximum amplitude occur when the wind speed is 8.41 m/s. The result of wind tunnel testing is matching to hanger vibration where occur in the field, so wind tunnel studies has successful to model the problem. In order that the H-beam profile is not good enough for the hanger bridge and need to be modified to minimize the Aeroelastics problem. The modification can be done with structure dynamics modification or aerodynamics modification.
Keywords: Aerodynamics, Wind Tunnel, vortex induced vibration, aeroelastic, hanger bridge, h-beam profileProcedia PDF Downloads 193
10 Affordable Aerodynamic Balance for Instrumentation in a Wind Tunnel Using Arduino
Authors: Pedro Ferreira, Alexandre Frugoli, Pedro Frugoli, Lucio Leonardo, Thais Cavalheri
Abstract:The teaching of fluid mechanics in engineering courses is, in general, a source of great difficulties for learning. The possibility of the use of experiments with didactic wind tunnels can facilitate the education of future professionals. The objective of this proposal is the development of a low-cost aerodynamic balance to be used in a didactic wind tunnel. The set is comprised of an Arduino microcontroller, programmed by an open source software, linked to load cells built by students from another project. The didactic wind tunnel is 5,0m long and the test area is 90,0 cm x 90,0 cm x 150,0 cm. The Weq® electric motor, model W-22 of 9,2 HP, moves a fan with nine blades, each blade 32,0 cm long. The Weq® frequency inverter, model WEGCFW 08 (Vector Inverter) is responsible for wind speed control and also for the motor inversion of the rotational direction. A flat-convex profile prototype of airfoil was tested by measuring the drag and lift forces for certain attack angles; the air flux conditions remained constant, monitored by a Pitot tube connected to a EXTECH® Instruments digital pressure differential manometer Model HD755. The results indicate a good agreement with the theory. The choice of all of the components of this proposal resulted in a low-cost product providing a high level of specific knowledge of mechanics of fluids, which may be a good alternative to teaching in countries with scarce educational resources. The system also allows the expansion to measure other parameters like fluid velocity, temperature, pressure as well as the possibility of automation of other functions.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, Arduino, strain gauge, aerodynamic balance, load cell, low-cost educationProcedia PDF Downloads 233
9 Estimation of Pressure Profile and Boundary Layer Characteristics over NACA 4412 Airfoil
Authors: Erwin Sulaeman, Waqar Asrar, Anwar Ul Haque, Jaffar S. M. Ali
Abstract:Pressure distribution data of the standard airfoils is usually used for the calibration purposes in subsonic wind tunnels. Results of such experiments are quite old and obtained by using the model in the spanwise direction. In this manuscript, pressure distribution over NACA 4412 airfoil model was presented by placing the 3D model in the lateral direction. The model is made of metal with pressure ports distributed longitudinally as well as in the lateral direction. The pressure model was attached to the floor of the tunnel with the help of the base plate to give the specified angle of attack to the model. Before the start of the experiments, the pressure tubes of the respective ports of the 128 ports pressure scanner are checked for leakage, and the losses due to the length of the pipes were also incorporated in the results for the specified pressure range. Growth rate maps of the boundary layer thickness were also plotted. It was found that with the increase in the velocity, the dynamic pressure distribution was also increased for the alpha seep. Plots of pressure distribution so obtained were overlapped with those obtained by using XFLR software, a low fidelity tool. It was found that at moderate and high angles of attack, the distribution of the pressure coefficients obtained from the experiments is high when compared with the XFLR ® results obtained along with the span of the wing. This under-prediction by XFLR ® is more obvious on the windward than on the leeward side.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, Subsonic Flow, boundary layer, pressure testingProcedia PDF Downloads 171
8 An Experimental (Wind Tunnel) and Numerical (CFD) Study on the Flow over Hills
Authors: Tanit Daniel Jodar Vecina, Adriane Prisco Petry
Abstract:The shape of the wind velocity profile changes according to local features of terrain shape and roughness, which are parameters responsible for defining the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) profile. Air flow characteristics over and around landforms, such as hills, are of considerable importance for applications related to Wind Farm and Turbine Engineering. The air flow is accelerated on top of hills, which can represent a decisive factor for Wind Turbine placement choices. The present work focuses on the study of ABL behavior as a function of slope and surface roughness of hill-shaped landforms, using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to build wind velocity and turbulent intensity profiles. Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations are closed using the SST k-ω turbulence model; numerical results are compared to experimental data measured in wind tunnel over scale models of the hills under consideration. Eight hill models with slopes varying from 25° to 68° were tested for two types of terrain categories in 2D and 3D, and two analytical codes are used to represent the inlet velocity profiles. Numerical results for the velocity profiles show differences under 4% when compared to their respective experimental data. Turbulent intensity profiles show maximum differences around 7% when compared to experimental data; this can be explained by not being possible to insert inlet turbulent intensity profiles in the simulations. Alternatively, constant values based on the averages of the turbulent intensity at the wind tunnel inlet were used.
Keywords: numerical modeling, Wind Tunnel, Atmospheric Boundary Layer, Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD)Procedia PDF Downloads 230
7 Optimization of the Aerodynamic Performances of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Authors: Fares Senouci, Bachir Imine
Abstract:This document provides numerical and experimental optimization of the aerodynamic performance of a drone equipped with three types of horizontal stabilizer. To build this optimal configuration, an experimental and numerical study was conducted on three parameters: the geometry of the stabilizer (horizontal form or reverse V form), the position of the horizontal stabilizer (up or down), and the landing gear position (closed or open). The results show that up-stabilizer position with respect to the horizontal plane of the fuselage provides better aerodynamic performance, and that the landing gear increases the lift in the zone of stability, that is to say where the flow is not separated.
Keywords: Aerodynamics, Wind Tunnel, turbulence model, lift, dragProcedia PDF Downloads 100
6 Investigation of Vortex Induced Vibration and Galloping Characteristic for Various Shape Slender Bridge Hanger
Authors: Matza Gusto Andika, Syariefatunnisa
Abstract:Hanger at the arch bridges is an important part to transfer load on the bridge deck onto the arch. Bridges are subjected to several types of loadings, such as dead load, temperature load, wind load, moving loads etc. Usually the hanger bridge has a typical bluff body shape such as circle, square, H beam, etc. When flow past bluff body, the flow separates from the body surface generating an unsteady broad wake. These vortices are shed to the wake periodically with some frequency that is related to the undisturbed wind speed and the size of the cross-section body by the well-known Strouhal relationship. The dynamic characteristic and hanger shape are crucial for the evaluation of vortex induced vibrations and structural vibrations. The effect of vortex induced vibration is not catastrophic as a flutter phenomenon, but it can make fatigue failure to the structure. Wind tunnel tests are conducted to investigate the VIV and galloping effect at circle, hexagonal, and H beam bluff body for hanger bridge. From this research, the hanger bridge with hexagonal shape has a minimum vibration amplitude due to VIV phenomenon compared to circle and H beam. However, when the wind bruises the acute angle of hexagon shape, the vibration amplitude of bridge hanger with hexagonal shape is higher than the other bluff body.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, vortex induced vibration, hanger bridge, gallopingProcedia PDF Downloads 145
5 Aerodynamic Study of an Open Window Moving Bus with Passengers
Authors: Bhanu Gupta, Pawan Kumar Pant, S. R. Kale, S. V. Veeravalli
Abstract:In many countries, buses are the principal means of transport, of which a majority are naturally ventilated with open windows. The design of this ventilation has little scientific basis and to address this problem a study has been undertaken involving both experiments and numerical simulations. The flow pattern inside and around of an open window bus with passengers has been investigated in detail. A full scale three-dimensional numerical simulation has been used for a) a bus with closed windows and b) with open windows. In either simulation, the bus had 58 seated passengers. The bus dimensions used were 2500 mm wide × 2500 mm high (exterior) × 10500 mm long and its speed was set at 40 km/h. In both cases, the flow separates at the top front edge forming a vortex and reattaches close to the mid-length. This attached flow separates once more as it leaves the bus. However, the strength and shape of the vortices at the top front and wake region is different for both cases. The streamline pattern around the bus is also different for the two cases. For the bus with open windows, the dominant airflow inside the bus is from the rear to the front of the bus and air velocity at the face level of the passengers was found to be 1/10th of the free stream velocity. These findings are in good agreement with flow visualization experiments performed in a water channel at 10 m/s, and with smoke/tuft visualizations in a wind tunnel with a free-stream velocity of approximately 40 km/h on a 1:25 scaled Perspex model.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, vortex, Air Flow, moving bus, open windowsProcedia PDF Downloads 90
4 Plasma Actuator Application to Control Surfaces of a Model Aircraft
Authors: Etsuo Morishita, Yuta Moriyama
Abstract:Plasma actuator is very effective to recover stall flows over an upper airfoil surface. We first manufacture the actuator, test the stability of the device by trial and error basis and find the conditions for steady operations. We visualize the flow around an airfoil in the smoke tunnel and observe the stall recovery. The plasma actuator is stationary device and has no moving parts, and it might be an ideal device to control a model aircraft. We can use the actuator not only as a stall recovery device but also as a spoiler. We put the actuator near the leading edge of an elevator of a model aircraft as a spoiler, and measure the aerodynamic forces by a three-component balance. We observe the effect of the plasma actuator on the aerodynamic forces and the device effectiveness changes depending on the angle of attack whether it is positive or negative. We also visualize the flow caused by the plasma actuator by a desk-top Schlieren photography which is otherwise very difficult in a low-speed wind tunnel experiment.
Keywords: Aerodynamics, Wind Tunnel, model aircraft, plasma actuatorProcedia PDF Downloads 186
3 Implementation of a Low-Cost Instrumentation for an Open Cycle Wind Tunnel to Evaluate Pressure Coefficient
Authors: Cristian P. Topa, Esteban A. Valencia, Victor H. Hidalgo, Marco A. Martinez
Abstract:Wind tunnel experiments for aerodynamic profiles display numerous advantages, such as: clean steady laminar flow, controlled environmental conditions, streamlines visualization, and real data acquisition. However, the experiment instrumentation usually is expensive, and hence, each test implies a incremented in design cost. The aim of this work is to select and implement a low-cost static pressure data acquisition system for a NACA 2412 airfoil in an open cycle wind tunnel. This work compares wind tunnel experiment with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation and parametric analysis. The experiment was evaluated at Reynolds of 1.65 e5, with increasing angles from -5° to 15°. The comparison between the approaches show good enough accuracy, between the experiment and CFD, additional parametric analysis results differ widely from the other methods, which complies with the lack of accuracy of the lateral approach due its simplicity.
Keywords: Wind Tunnel, CFD simulation, experimental testing, low cost instrumentationProcedia PDF Downloads 37
2 An Experimental Study of Downstream Structures on the Flow-Induced Vibrations Energy Harvester Performances
Authors: Pakorn Uttayopas, Chawalit Kittichaikarn
Abstract:This paper presents an experimental investigation for the characteristics of an energy harvesting device exploiting flow-induced vibration in a wind tunnel. A stationary bluff body is connected with a downstream tip body via an aluminium cantilever beam. Various lengths of aluminium cantilever beam and different shapes of downstream tip body are considered. The results show that the characteristics of the energy harvester’s vibration depend on both the length of the aluminium cantilever beam and the shape of the downstream tip body. The highest ratio between vibration amplitude and bluff body diameter was found to be 1.39 for an energy harvester with a symmetrical triangular tip body and L/D1 = 5 at 9.8 m/s of flow speed (Re = 20077). Using this configuration, the electrical energy was extracted with a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric beam with different load resistances, of which the optimal value could be found on each Reynolds number. The highest power output was found to be 3.19 µW, at 9.8 m/s of flow speed (Re = 20077) and 27 MΩ of load resistance.
Keywords: Energy harvesting, Wind Tunnel, Flow-induced Vibration, piezoelectric material, downstream structuresProcedia PDF Downloads 34
1 Numerical and Experimental Comparison of Surface Pressures around a Scaled Ship Wind-Assisted Propulsion System
Authors: James Cairns, Marco Vezza, Richard Green, Donald MacVicar
Abstract:Significant legislative changes are set to revolutionise the commercial shipping industry. Upcoming emissions restrictions will force operators to look at technologies that can improve the efficiency of their vessels -reducing fuel consumption and emissions. A device which may help in this challenge is the Ship Wind-Assisted Propulsion system (SWAP), an actively controlled aerofoil mounted vertically on the deck of a ship. The device functions in a similar manner to a sail on a yacht, whereby the aerodynamic forces generated by the sail reach an equilibrium with the hydrodynamic forces on the hull and a forward velocity results. Numerical and experimental testing of the SWAP device is presented in this study. Circulation control takes the form of a co-flow jet aerofoil, utilising both blowing from the leading edge and suction from the trailing edge. A jet at the leading edge uses the Coanda effect to energise the boundary layer in order to delay flow separation and create high lift with low drag. The SWAP concept has been originated by the research and development team at SMAR Azure Ltd. The device will be retrofitted to existing ships so that a component of the aerodynamic forces acts forward and partially reduces the reliance on existing propulsion systems. Wind tunnel tests have been carried out at the de Havilland wind tunnel at the University of Glasgow on a 1:20 scale model of this system. The tests aim to understand the airflow characteristics around the aerofoil and investigate the approximate lift and drag coefficients that an early iteration of the SWAP device may produce. The data exhibits clear trends of increasing lift as injection momentum increases, with critical flow attachment points being identified at specific combinations of jet momentum coefficient, Cµ, and angle of attack, AOA. Various combinations of flow conditions were tested, with the jet momentum coefficient ranging from 0 to 0.7 and the AOA ranging from 0° to 35°. The Reynolds number across the tested conditions ranged from 80,000 to 240,000. Comparisons between 2D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and the experimental data are presented for multiple Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) turbulence models in the form of normalised surface pressure comparisons. These show good agreement for most of the tested cases. However, certain simulation conditions exhibited a well-documented shortcoming of RANS-based turbulence models for circulation control flows and over-predicted surface pressures and lift coefficient for fully attached flow cases. Work must be continued in finding an all-encompassing modelling approach which predicts surface pressures well for all combinations of jet injection momentum and AOA. | https://publications.waset.org/abstracts/wind-tunnel-related-abstracts |
What IS aging?
An explanation of aging must account for all cells, all organisms, and – if we are candid – all of biology and isn’t merely entropy. Prior posts defined our boundaries: what we must include – and exclude. We know that we cannot simply point to entropy, wash our hands of any further discussion, and walk away with our eyes closed. Likewise, an honest explanation can’t simply consider humans and a few common mammals but ignore the entire gamut of Earth’s biology.
So, what IS aging? As a start, we might acknowledge that life has been on Earth for more than four billion years and during that entire time, life has resisted entropy. This serves as an excellent starting point: life might be defined as the ability to maintain itself in the face of entropy. In that case, we might rough out our initial definition: aging is the gradual failure of maintenance in the face of entropy.
We miss the point, however, unless we realize that aging is an active, dynamic process. Aging is not simply a matter of a failure of maintenance in the passive sense. To use an analogy, if entropy were an escalator carrying us downwards, then it is not the only process involved. It is countered by cell maintenance, which is precisely like walking upwards on the same escalator (see Figure 1.3a). Young cells are entirely capable, as are germ cells and many other cells, of indefinitely maintaining their position at the top of the escalator. Entropy and maintenance are equally balanced. Older cells, however, have a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) imbalance, in which maintenance is less than entropy.
As aging occurs, the problem is not that the escalator (entropy) carries us downwards, but that we are no longer walking upwards (maintenance) at the same rate as the escalator. To view aging as the descending escalator alone is to miss the essential point of biology: life remains on this planet because cells and organisms “walk upwards” and maintain themselves indefinitely in the face of being “carried downwards” by entropy. The process is a dynamic balancing act. To explain aging, it is not enough to cite the escalator, but requires that we explain why maintenance fails, and then only in certain cells and at certain times, while remaining functional in other cells and at other times. Aging is far from universal. A valid explanation of aging must account for why aging occurs in some cases yet does not occur in other cases.
Aging is not the escalator but is a combination of two forces: entropy carrying cells into dysfunction and maintenance ensuring that cells remain functional. Aging occurs only when maintenance is down-regulated. If maintenance is not down-regulated, then the cells and the organism do not age. Aging cells, such as many somatic cells, age because they down-regulate maintenance. “Immortal” cells, such as germ cells, do no age because they do not down-regulate maintenance.
We might try an analogy to see where it takes us, comparing biological aging to “aging” in a car. We could say that aging in a car is not simply what happens as the car undergoes weathering and degradation over time. Rather, car aging would be what happens if we fail to maintain the car on a regular and detailed basis. There are exceptional antique cars that have been in active use longer than most human lifetimes, but they are in excellent shape not because they had better parts (i.e., have the right genes) or were made by a better manufacturer (i.e., are part of the right species), but because they were maintained scrupulously and carefully on an almost daily basis by generations of owners. Such cars are oiled, painted, repaired, realigned, and cared for on an almost daily basis, compared to most cars that are lucky to be cared for annually. The critical difference is not the chronological age of the car nor the amount of wear-and-tear, but the frequency and excellence of their maintenance. Given frequent and excellent maintenance, sufficient to keep up with entropy, a car can last indefinitely, while with sloppy and merely annual maintenance, cars typically last only a few years before “aging” takes them off the road.
In a sense, organisms are no different: the degree of aging is not just a matter of time or entropy, but of the quality and frequency of maintenance. Likewise, aging is not purely a matter of which genes or what species pertain to that organism. Rather, aging is a matter of the rate of repair and recycling within cells, that is, maintenance in the face of entropy.
It’s not the genes, it’s the gene expression.
Let’s use another example, that of water recycling. Every molecule of water that you ingest has been recycled endlessly, but the speed and efficiency of that recycling determines the quantity and quality of the water you drink. Imagine that we plan a trip to Mars. If the average astronaut needs 2 liters per day and 4 astronauts are on a 2.5-year roundtrip to Mars, we might calculate that we need to bring 7 tons of water. But that (incorrectly) assumes no recycling. We can get by on a lot less water, depending on how we recycle. The amount we need to bring with us depends not only on the amount the astronauts use daily, but on the quality and rate of recycling (from urine, for example). The faster the recycling, the less water we need to carry along. The better the quality of our recycling, the longer we can stay healthy.
In a “young” and efficient cell, we recycle molecular pools rapidly and effectively. In an old cell, however, the rate and effectiveness of the recycling decreases. The analogy for our Mars trip would be slower recycling, along with an increasing percent of contaminants that are not being removed in our water recycling unit. The outcome, whether in aging cells or a mission to Mars, is gradually increasing dysfunction. Aging cells no longer function normally (as when they were young cells) and our sickening astronauts no longer function normally either (as when they started out on Earth).
As another example, you oversee a huge office building with multiple daily customers and hundreds of employees. Every night, your cleaning crew comes through, mopping the solid floors, vacuuming the carpets, cleaning the windows, and (when necessary) repainting the walls. Maintenance is frequent and excellent; as a result, the building always looks new (i.e., young). Now let’s radically cut back on your maintenance budget. Instead of daily maintenance, the carpets are vacuumed once every two weeks, the floors are mopped once a month, the windows are cleaned once a year, and repainting occurs once a decade. The resulting problem is not due to the amount of dirt (the entropy), nor the quality of the vacuum, the mop, the washer fluids, or the paint (think of these as the quality of your genes). The problem isn’t the dirt nor is it the cleaning crew, but the rate of maintenance. The outcome is that your building looks dirty and is increasingly incapable of attracting clients or customers – or for that matter, incapable of retaining employees. This parallels the changes in aging cells: the genes (the cleaning products) are excellent and the quality of repair (the cleaning staff) are both excellent, but the frequency of maintenance is too low to maintain the quality of the building. In aging cells, molecular turnover is too slow to keep up with entropic change.
This same analogy could be applied to home repairs, garden weeding, or professional education. The problem is not entropy, but our ability to resist entropy and maintain function. Aging occurs because cell maintenance becomes slower. The quality of gene expression is fine, but molecular turnover (see figure 1.3b) – the “recycling rate” – declines. This effect is subtle but pervasive and the result is increasing dysfunction. This concept – the failure of maintenance to keep up with entropy — is not only central to aging but can account for all of aging and in all organisms, whether at the genetic level, the cellular level, the tissue level, or the clinical outcome – age-related disease.
Aging is a dynamic process, in which entropy begins to gain as maintenance processes become gradually down-regulated.
In subsequent posts, we will explore the detailed mathematics of this change, reviewing the formula and the primary variables, letting us see the remarkable results that occur in terms of denatured molecules and cellular dysfunction. For now, however, let’s look at a few specific clinical examples in human aging, all of which we’ll return to in later posts, when we consider age-related diseases in great detail.
In human skin, between cells, we see changes in collagen and elastin (among dozens of other proteins) as we age. Many people mistakenly assume that these changes are a simple, static accumulation of damage over a lifetime, but these changes are anything but static. These molecules are in dynamic equilibrium, in which the molecules (and their complex structures) are constantly being produced (anabolism) and broken down (catabolism). The overall rate of recycling (the overall metabolism) is high in young skin, with the result that at any given time, most molecules are undamaged and functional (and relatively new). This rate slows with aging, however, with the result that molecules remain longer before being “recycled” and the percentage of damaged and dysfunctional molecules rises, slowly but inexorably. In old skin, molecules “sit around” too long before being recycled. Old skin isn’t old because of damage, but because the rate of maintenance becomes slower and slower. Naïve cosmetic attempts to “replace” skin collagen, elastin, moisture, or other molecules fail because they are transient interventions. By analogy, these cosmetic interventions would be like – in the case of our old, dirty office building – suggesting that we will send in one person, one night, to clean one window pane. Even if you notice a small, transient improvement, the problem isn’t resolved by bringing in one person for a single visit, it requires that we resume having the entire cleaning crew come in every night. Intervening in skin aging is not a matter of providing a few molecules, but of increasing the rate of turnover of all the molecules.
The same problem occurs in aging bones. The problem that lies at the heart of osteoporosis is not “low calcium”, but the rate at which we turnover our bony matrix. Looking solely at calcium as one example, osteoporosis not a static problem (add calcium), but a dynamic problem (increase the rate of calcium turnover). Moving our attention from minerals to cells, young bone is constantly being taken apart (by osteoclasts) and rebuilt (by osteoblasts). The result is continual remodeling (recycling) and repair. Bone turnover is a continual process that slows with age. Young fractures heal quickly and thoroughly. In old bone, however, the rate of remodeling falls steadily, and rebuilding falls slightly behind. The result is that we have decreased matrix, decreased mineralization, decreased bone mass, and an increasing risk of fractures. The fundamental problem underlying osteoporosis is not “a loss of bone mineral density”, but an inability to maintain bony replacement. It’s not the calcium or the phosphorous, but the osteocytes themselves. Loss of bone mineralization is a symptom, not the cause of osteoporosis.
A more tragic and more fatal example is Alzheimer’s disease. Until relatively recently, the leading pathological target was beta amyloid, a molecule which (like tau proteins and other candidates) shows increasing damage and denaturation (plaques in the case of amyloid) in older patients, especially in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Again, however, amyloid is not a static molecule that is produced, sits around, and slowly denatures over a lifetime. Amyloid is continually produced and continually broken down, but the rate of recycling falls as we age. The result is that the percentage of damaged amyloid (plaque) rises with age, solely because the rate of turnover is slowing down. As we will see, the cells that bind, internalize, and breakdown this molecule become slower as we age. To address Alzheimer’s, we don’t need to remove amyloid or prevent its production, we need to increase the rate of turnover. Beta amyloid plaques are a symptom, not the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.
Wherever we look — an aging cell, an aging tissue, or an aging organism – we see that aging is not a static, linear loss of function due to entropy. Rather, aging is a dynamic process in which the rate of recycling – whether of intracellular enzymes, extracellular proteins, aging cells, or aging tissues – becomes slower as cells senesce. Aging is a programmed failure of maintenance at all biological levels. This is equally true of DNA repair, mitochondrial function, lipid membranes, proteins, and everything else we can measure in an aging system.
We’ve had a glimpse at the core of aging. Let’s explore an overview of how changes in gene expression translate into cell dysfunction, tissue failure, clinical disease, and aging itself. | http://www.michaelfossel.com/blog/?p=316 |
Hurricane Guillermo Update – 8 a.m.
- Hurricane Guillermo is 845 miles east southeast of Hilo, Hawaii. It is moving west northwest at 13 mph.
- Guillermo is a Category 2 hurricane. Maximum sustained winds remain near 105 mph with higher gusts. Slow weakening is expected during the next couple of days, but Guillermo is forecast to remain a hurricane through Monday.
- A High Surf Advisory is now in effect for east facing shores of all islands. The National Weather Service says surf will building to 5 to 8 feet this afternoon… 8 to 12 feet tonight… and 10 to 14 feet Monday.
- Hawaii County Civil Defense says the community is encouraged to take this time to prepare for possible storm impacts that could include high surf, strong winds, and heavy rains. “Although there is some indication the system will weaken,” the latest Civil Defense message says, “early preparations are recommended and encouraged.”
NWS Discussion – 5 a.m.
The deep convection around Hurricane Guillermo appears to be slightly better organized early this morning in infrared satellite imagery. The most recent subjective dvorak current intensity estimates from SAB… HFOand JTWC were all 5.0/90 kt. As a result… The initial intensity will remain 90 kt for this advisory.
Guillermo continues to move toward the west-northwest or 285 degrees at 11 kt. The main steering feature is the western end of a deep subtropical ridge located north and northeast of the hurricane. However…There is a break in the mid- and upper-level ridging to the northwest of Guillermo… And an upper-level trough is expected to deepen to the north of the hurricane later today. As a result… The forward motion of the tropical cyclone is expected to become somewhat slower starting later today or tonight. Most of the objective track guidance based on reliable dynamical models and the consensus models is tightly clustered. The most recent track forecast is similar to the previous one through day 3. There is a very slight nudge to the right during days 4 and 5 due to a northward shift of the TVCN consensus guidance. Note that the latest forecast track continues to bring Guillermo very close to the main Hawaiian Islands from Wednesday through Thursday night.
In regards to the intensity forecast… As Guillermo moves into the weakness in the ridge aloft… The outflow will likely become disrupted in the northwest quadrant. At the same time… The environmental vertical wind shear will also likely increase. The current estimates of vertical wind shear in the vicinity of Guillermo are 12 to 13 kt from 305 degrees based on the latest UW/CIMSS and ships guidance. The adverse impacts of this shear on Guillermo are expected to become more significant starting in 48 hours based on the ships guidance. The current forecast continues to indicate Guillermo will be a weakening tropical storm as itapproaches the main Hawaiian Islands.
It is important for those in the main Hawaiian Islands not to focus too closely on the exact forecast track of the center of any tropical cyclone… Including Guillermo. The average 96 hour forecast track error is just over 200 statute miles… While the 120 hour forecast error is about 300 statute miles. It is still too soon to determine with any certainty which islands would most likely experience the greatest impacts from Guillermo. It is also important to note that significant impacts from tropical cyclones can extend well away from the center. | https://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2015/08/02/hurricane-guillermo-tracks-closer-to-hawaii/ |
Do you know the nature of oxygen? Do you know what happens when you breathe?
Do you know the role oxygen has not only in keeping you alive but for the evolution of the species as well?
If not, this is a good place to start finding out the answers to those questions.
Who Should Read “Oxygen” and Why?
“Oxygen” is a book about the gas that keeps us alive, and as you will see once you read the book, poisons us really slowly.
We recommend it to all readers who would like to know the role oxygen played in the evolution of organisms, and how the world became as it is today, as well as to those who wish to understand the process of breathing and how it affects our bodies.
About Nick Lane
Dr. Nick Lane is a prolific author who holds a degree in biochemistry from the Imperial College in London.
“Oxygen Summary”
If we ask you what is Oxygen, then you will probably tell us that it is what keeps you alive, right?
But did you know that Oxygen also kills you?
Yes, breathing both keeps you alive and slowly kills you at the same time.
With every breath you take, some toxic byproducts are produced and stored in your body, and over time these byproducts harm you.
It is not like you can stop it.
If we found the answer to this – we would have stopped aging already.
Anyway, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start from the very beginning.
Today, in the air we breathe, there is around 21 percent oxygen. However, that was not the case around four billion years ago when the atmosphere had very little oxygen.
Then, after the Cambrian explosion, the only survivals on earth were plants.
In order to survive the harsh conditions, they had to do much photosynthesis and produce vast amounts of oxygen in the process.
The single cellular organisms which were not used to this amount of oxygen tried to escape it, but not being able to, they ultimately had to group themselves, and that is how the multi-cellular organisms evolved.
After some time, in the air there a lot of oxygen – almost double of today’s levels.
This percentage made it easier for cells to grow and thus the giant animals were created. However, this percentage did not only make it easier for the animals to grow, but they could also move more easily, which made hunting easier as well.
One significant name to note during our explanation of the topic is the world-renowned Marie Curie.
Curie is a Nobelist which discovered radiation. However, her discovery seemed to be fatal since she died of leukemia when she was 67.
But why is Curie important to oxygen?
Because her discoveries of radiation are closely related to oxygen as well.
Do you remember that we told you that oxygen could kill?
Well, Curie’s findings show that the biological damage as a result of radiation and oxygen poisoning are almost the same.
Wait, what?
Yes! I was just as surprised when I read this information as well!
When radiation pierces the body, it breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen, in the process producing toxic byproducts.
When you breathe, however, these byproducts are turned into water.
So, breathing is poisoning you – it just does it very slowly.
But, if it is so, how can you protect yourself? You cannot stop breathing, can you?
Filling yourself up with antioxidants is one way of doing it. Another technique is to exercise cardio exercises – to run.
Although there are many innovations nowadays, we cannot seem to answer the one question that has been pressing people forever: how to stop aging.
In the modern world, two theories of aging exist stochastic and programmed theories.
The first ones argue that aging has nothing to do with genes. This is where the oxygen poisoning theory comes into play.
The programmed theories, on the other hand, are those that believe that aging is mainly genetical.
The author of the book believes that the truth about aging is somewhere in between.
And until someone proves it – we cannot state anything for certain. However, it is quite reasonable to think that the fewer toxins we enter in our body, the slower the aging process will be.
The question is, how can we stop oxygen from producing toxins that harm us in the long term?
Key Lessons from “Oxygen”
1. Multi-Cellular Life Developed Thanks to the Increase in Oxygen
2. Giant Animals Can Exist Only With High Levels of Oxygen
3. Breathing Determines the Speed of Aging
Multi-Cellular Life Developed Thanks to the Increase in Oxygen
Most of the organisms we interact with in everyday life are multi-cellular.
However, primate life was not like that. Multi-cellular organisms developed thanks to the increase in oxygen that happened because the plants that survived the Cambrian explosion started photosynthesizing a lot of oxygen to survive.
Giant Animals Can Exist Only With High Levels of Oxygen
The giant animals from the past could only exist because of the huge levels of atmospheric oxygen. When these animals live, there was 35% oxygen in the air. To compare it with, today we have only 21% oxygen in the air.
Oxygen made it easy to grow and breathe, but also it eased the movement as well.
Breathing Determines the Speed of Aging
Did you know that breathing both keeps you alive and kill you?
With every breath you take your body produces toxic byproducts, and stores them. These byproducts over some time are the cause of damage.
However, there is not a limit of how much oxygen you can breathe – it all depends on your body.
Like this summary? We’d Like to invite you to download our free 12 min app, for more amazing summaries and audiobooks.
“Oxygen Quotes”
Our bodies are historical accidents of evolution and ultimately can only be understood from an evolutionary perspective: how things got to be the way they are. Click To Tweet
Mitochondria, as we have seen, are only passed on in the egg, so all 13 mitochondrial genes come from our mothers. If these genes really do influence lifespan, and we can only inherit them from our mothers, then our own lifespan should… Click To Tweet
As conventionally stated, the idea that breathing oxygen causes aging is disarmingly simple. Click To Tweet
Unlike infections, aging is not easily reversed: mitochondrial damage accumulates continuously. Click To Tweet
The expression of normal genes in an oxidized environment is the basis of their negative pleiotropic effects in old age. Click To Tweet
Our Critical Review
This is not a book you pick up to read for fun, but it is filled with so many interesting information that you would not come across.
Also published on Medium.
Learn more and more, in the speed that the world demands. | https://blog.12min.com/oxygen-summary/ |
Received January 10, 2012
The programmed vs. non-programmed aging controversy has now existed in some form for at least 150 years. For much of the XX century, it was almost universally believed that evolution theory prohibited programmed (adaptive) aging in mammals and there was little direct experimental or observational evidence favoring it. More recently, multiple new evolutionary mechanics concepts that support programmed aging and steadily increasing direct evidence favoring it overwhelmingly support the existence of programmed aging in humans and other organisms. This issue is important because the different theories suggest very different mechanisms for the aging process that in turn suggest very different paths toward treating and preventing age-related diseases.
KEY WORDS: aging, senescence, evolution, gerontology
DOI: 10.1134/S000629791207005X
The programmed (adaptive) aging concept holds that organisms possess potentially complex evolved mechanisms that exist for the purpose of pro-actively limiting the organism’s lifespan beyond a species-specific age. Non-programmed evolutionary theories of aging contend that aging passively and incidentally results from lack of evolutionary force toward continuing life beyond a species-specific age.
As shown in the figure, evolutionary non-programmed theories of aging depend on the idea that the net (of any tradeoffs) evolutionary force toward living and reproducing beyond some species-specific age is effectively zero (dotted curve). If this force was even slightly positive (living longer creates evolutionary benefit), presumably the organism would have evolved a longer lifespan. If the force beyond that age was even slightly negative (continuing life creates evolutionary disadvantage – dashed curve), presumably the organism would have evolved pro-active means for limiting life, i.e. programmed lifespan limiting mechanisms. Note that in the latter case there is evolutionary force (f) both toward maintaining life prior to and limiting life after the optimum lifespan. The evolutionary difference between non-programmed and programmed aging is therefore essentially the difference between “effectively zero” and “at least slightly negative”.
In both concepts, species-unique intrinsic and extrinsic factors clearly influence evolved lifespan. The most important intrinsic factor is the age at which the organism is initially capable of reproducing. Everybody agrees that lifespan must match or exceed this age. The age at which the organism is developmentally mature and fully expresses adult characteristics is another factor. The evolution of adult characteristics requires organisms to live long enough to become adults and express adult characteristics. Animals that nurture or protect their young would need additional lifespan to perform that function. Extrinsic factors that plausibly affect lifespan include degree of predation, existence of famine or drought conditions, population density, and environmental factors. Note that the extrinsic factors can change depending on temporary or local conditions and that an organism design capable of accommodating its lifespan to these temporary or local changes would have an evolutionary advantage. Note also that in mammals and other more complex organisms, age of reproductive maturity (and consequent reproductive behavior) is itself controlled by a complex mechanism capable of detecting and accommodating to external conditions such as seasons. An organism would benefit from the ability to accommodate its lifespan to such changes in its age of reproductive maturity. Regulated programmed aging refers to an organism design capable of adjusting lifespan to accommodate temporary or local extrinsic or intrinsic conditions.
Evolutionary cost or benefit of continued life as a function of age. Dotted line, non-programmed aging theory – net benefit of continued life declines to zero. Dashed line, programmed aging theory – life beyond optimum lifespan produces evolutionary disadvantage
Because they relate evolved lifespan to multiple species-unique factors, evolutionary programmed and non-programmed theories provide a much better match to multi-species lifespan observations than the generic damage or “wear and tear” theories.
INDIVIDUAL BENEFIT ISSUE
For much of the XX century, it was very widely thought that only individual benefit or disadvantage could influence the evolution process. According to this concept, any evolved organism design characteristic must provide a net benefit to the ability of the possessing individual organisms (or their direct descendants) to survive or reproduce. It was further widely thought that only in special cases, specifically excluding gradually aging mammals, would there exist an individual benefit to a purposely limited lifespan. Salmon are often cited as an example of such a special case. Salt-water salmon spawn in the restricted environment of a fresh-water stream. If the adult salmon were programmed to die soon after spawning (as observed), their corpses could plausibly provide food for their direct descendants, creating an individual benefit from death, per se, and driving the evolution of a suicide mechanism. Salmon that possessed the suicide mechanism could therefore have an individual benefit advantage over those that survived spawning and died later after parents and direct descendants were widely dispersed. No such individual advantage of death or aging is apparent for most animals.
Beginning in 1952, a series of non-programmed mammal aging theories appeared based on the idea proposed by Medawar that the net individual benefit of continuing life declines to zero at a species-specific age related to reproductive maturity. These included the mutation accumulation theory (Medawar), antagonistic pleiotropy theory (Williams), and disposable soma theory (Kirkwood). This effort has not been notably successful despite its long duration. The theories attack each other, and they have many apparent logical flaws . None has achieved general consensus.
However, beginning in 1962, a series of evolutionary diffuse benefit theories appeared. All of these theories contend that a diffuse (non-individual) benefit can offset individual disadvantage and cause evolution of an organism design characteristic that produces a wider benefit even if it also produces some degree of individual disadvantage. The diffuse benefit theories now include:
– group selection (benefit to survival of a group can offset individual disadvantage);
– kin selection (benefit to close relatives can offset individual disadvantage);
– gene-oriented selection (benefit to propagation of genes common to a population can offset individual disadvantage);
– evolvability (benefit to the evolution process can offset individual disadvantage).
Note that these theories were developed in efforts to explain observed discrepancies between observations and traditional individual-benefit-only theory other than aging and lifespan. Altruism or observed inherited animal behaviors that operate against the individual interest of an animal but simultaneously provide plausible group benefit was a major early incentive for developing diffuse theories. Other apparent discrepancies between observations and the individual benefit concept include observation of apparently unnecessarily late reproductive maturity, some mating behaviors, and the individually adverse nature of sexual reproduction.
Since about 1950 there has been an explosive and continuing increase in knowledge regarding biological inheritance mechanisms, which are crucial to evolutionary mechanics because inheritable changes in organism designs are propagated and retained through biological inheritance. The diffuse theories are all either directly based on or greatly supported by these discoveries.
Specific mammal programmed aging theories have been developed based on group selection , kin selection , and evolvability [, ]. Unlike the individual benefit aging theories, these theories contend that design-limited organism lifespan is generally beneficial and that species that do not need programmed lifespan management (if any) are the special cases. This is an important difference in emphasis: Non-programmed proponents contend programmed aging only applies in special cases and tend to discount non-mammal observations as irrelevant to mammal aging. Programmed aging proponents contend that species have a general need for lifespan control and consequently data from a wide variety of species is relevant. Some programmed aging theories [11, 12] contend that mammals and other complex organisms have a greater need for programmed lifespan management than simpler organisms. There has been little scientific objection to the many specific proposed diffuse benefits of a design-limited lifespan. Objections have centered on propagation issues described below.
ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST DIFFUSE BENEFIT THEORIES
A classical argument against the diffuse theories is that they all appear to require a tradeoff between a long-term diffuse benefit and a short-term individual disadvantage (e.g. between reduced probability of species extinction and reduced probability of individual survival and reproduction). This raises an obvious evolutionary mechanics question: How would an individually adverse organism design characteristic propagate and be retained long enough for the long-term benefit to be achieved? Experience with selective breeding shows that very large phenotypic changes can be produced in a very short time. Would not individual advantage thus be selected over any amount of long-term benefit? Perhaps diffuse theories only work for relatively short-term benefit such as benefit to small groups, small isolated populations, etc.
In 1957 Williams suggested a solution to this problem in aid of his non-programmed aging theory that apparently works even better for programmed aging and for diffuse benefit theories generally : In selective breeding, the breeder is usually interested in enhancing or attenuating some specific organism characteristic and relatively unconcerned about inadvertent associated changes to other design parameters. In contrast, natural selection is “concerned” with the combined net effect of all of an organism’s inherited design characteristics. Williams’ problem was that he believed that indefinitely continued life (and reproduction), per se, was generally at least mildly individually beneficial. How then to explain why organisms would arrive at an age at which further life and reproduction would have zero net individual benefit? Williams suggested that an individually adverse design characteristic could be rigidly linked to an individually beneficial design characteristic (or characteristics) in such a way that the evolution process could not obtain the beneficial effect(s) without incurring the adverse effect, in this case, aging. The linked benefit could be to any organism characteristic that aided younger organisms in surviving or reproducing, because, per the figure, the evolutionary value of survival or reproduction in younger organisms is greater. The beneficial effect(s), if sufficient, would then protect the adverse characteristic from being removed by natural selection and result in the required zero net individual benefit at the target age. Williams cited antagonistic pleiotropy (based on genomics discoveries) as the linking mechanism. Because there would have always, since primordial time, been evolutionary force toward breaking the linkage and allowing the beneficial characteristic without the adverse effect of limited lifespan, Williams had to assume that the linkage was perfectly rigid, that is unbreakable, despite operation of evolutionary mechanisms for any duration.
Analysis of subsequent genetics discoveries shows that not only is antagonistic pleiotropy a valid source of linkage, there are many other sources of linkage associated with various aspects of genomic design. Further, different sources have different degrees of rigidity defined as a measure of the difficulty and therefore the time required for the evolution process to remove the linkage. This analysis suggests that antagonistic pleiotropy, per se, is not sufficiently rigid to protect an adverse characteristic from being selected out during a very long evolutionary time period but would be sufficient to protect an individually adverse characteristic having a diffuse benefit from being selected out during the time required for the diffuse benefit to be effective, even a species-level benefit. Surviving species could then pass the linked characteristics to their descendants.
Another counter-argument is associated with evolvability. The evolvability proposal is that organism design characteristics that enhance the evolution process (i.e. the rate at which an organism could adapt to a change in its external world) can be evolved and retained despite some degree of individual disadvantage. Evolvability is sometimes seen as benefiting the species or future descendant species and therefore producing a very long-term benefit. However, analysis shows that an evolvability characteristic affects the preconditions required for the evolution process to operate and therefore is effective regardless of the evolutionary timeframe contemplated. A benefit to the evolution process operates on the same time-scale as natural selection.
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE AND AGING THEORIES
Proponents of non-programmed theories typically contend that any examination and interpretation of empirical evidence concerning the programmed/non-programmed issue should be very heavily biased in favor of non-programmed aging because of evolutionary considerations. In 2004, Hayflick et al. said that their evolutionary mechanics concept made human programmed aging “impossible” and implied that any empirical evidence favoring programmed aging such as genes that cause aging should be derogated, discounted, and disregarded. Following this philosophy, the development of a biological aging theory is limited to devising the least implausible non-programmed theory and then constructing the least implausible interpretations of empirical evidence that support the theory. Such a philosophy does not support funding or performing experiments designed to find evidence of programmed aging or designed to distinguish between programmed and non-programmed theories and is therefore substantially a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 2011, Kirkwood and Melov similarly suggested that because of their evolutionary concepts, empirical evidence of programmed aging would have to overcome “high barriers” to acceptance not required of non-programmed theories. They went on to say that, in their opinion, a belief in programmed mammal aging was equivalent to a belief that “the sun orbits the Earth”. One can easily imagine the chilling effect such ideological pronouncements by senior scientists might have on research and funding.
The reality is that in the last 50 years our collective certainty with respect to most aspects of evolution theory has indeed steadily increased. However, during the same period, our certainty regarding details that are absolutely crucial to evolutionary aging theory has obviously decreased. It is increasingly clear that the rich complexity in genomic designs exposed by genetics research affects evolutionary mechanics issues that directly bear on the programmed/non-programmed question. Additionally, as described above, distinguishing between evolutionary aging theories requires hair-splitting the difference between “effectively zero” and “at least slightly negative”. With regard to aging theory, “evolution theory” no longer provides a scientifically acceptable rationale for rejecting empirical evidence or biasing its interpretation. There now exists a long list of observations and experiments that have been cited as supporting programmed aging in mammals including genes that cause aging, negligible senescence, progerias, caloric restriction effects, stress effects, regulated aging in worms, and octopus suicide. Those interested in this issue should compare the regulated programmed aging explanation (e.g. ) with the non-programmed aging explanation, if one exists (e.g. ) in regard to each of these observations. In general, the reader will find that the non-programmed explanation is much more convoluted and implausible, and in some cases depends on assumptions for which no evidence is presented.
Understanding aging mechanisms is obviously critical to our ability to prevent and treat age-related diseases. Programmed aging theories predict the existence of opportunities not predicted by non-programmed theories. For example, if aging is purposely imposed by a biological mechanism, interfering with the operation of that mechanism is a likely possibility. Such a mechanism plausibly includes a clock mechanism and provisions for signaling, which offer points at which intervention might be attempted. If aging is substantially the result of a regulated mechanism, then detection, signaling, and other mechanics involved in regulation represent additional points at which intervention could be attempted.
The cause of aging is a serious issue having manifest impact on public health and deserves careful attention by a wide scientific community.
REFERENCES
1.Medawar, P. (1952) An Unsolved Problem of
Biology, H.K. Lewis & Co., London.
2.Williams, G. (1957) Evolution, 11, 398-411.
3.Kirkwood, T., and Holliday, R. (1979) Proc. Roy. Soc. London B, 205, 531-546.
4.Goldsmith, T. (2011) Aging by Design, Azinet Press, Annapolis, ISBN 0-9788709-3-X.
5.Wynne-Edwards, V. (1962) Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh.
6.Hamilton, W. (1964) J. Theor. Biol., 7, 1-16.
7.Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-286092-5.
8.Wagner, G. (1996) Evolution, 50, 967-976.
9.Mitteldorf, J. (2004) Evol. Ecol. Res., 6, 1-17.
0.Libertini, G. (1988) J. Theor. Biol., 132, 145-162.
1.Goldsmith, T. (2008) J. Theor. Biol., 252, 764-768.
2.Skulachev, V. (1997) Biochemistry (Moscow), 62, 1191-1195.
3.Olshansky, S., Hayflick, L., and Carnes, B. (2004) Scientific American.
4.Kirkwood, T., and Melov, S. (2011) Curr. Biol., 21, R701-R707. | http://www.protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v77/full/77070876.html |
The seeds of life on Earth may have been flown in from space
While humanity continues our search for possible life on other planets, it’s important to note that we’re still figuring out the origins of life here on Earth. We know that the complex organisms of today evolved from much more basic, single-celled organisms, but even those cells had to be built from other, non-living ingredients. Getting the necessary components assembled would take a lot of luck, or perhaps a few Earth-bound comets.
Studies of comets, including celebrity-comet 67P by the Rosetta spacecraft, have found that they can be carriers of frozen water and amino acids. The 16 organic compounds found so far include polyoxymethylene, which is considered a possible template for carbohydrates and sugars commonly found on Earth. None of these components was considered to be samples of organisms, but the building-blocks were found in sufficient concentrations to suggest that comets are carrying some high-value materials.
Peptides created in comets’ crashes
Space-faring amino acids would have needed to be delivered to Earth of course, and recent simulations show that that delivery process may have also transformed them into more complex organic molecules. The energy from a comet impacting the Earth could have been the necessary catalyst to turn these froze ingredients into functioning peptides, which are chains of amino acids needed to make actual proteins.
While all this fills in more gaps in the timeline for the origins of life on this planet, it opens up some bigger questions at the same time. If the amino acids riding around on comets were able to kick-start life here on earth, what put them on the comet in the first place? And maybe more exciting, have they managed to “seed” any other locations with similar success? | https://2newthings.com/the-seeds-of-life-on-earth-may-have-been-flown-in-from-space/ |
Sunset on Mars. (NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell) SPACE Earth Germs Probably Can't Contaminate The Briny Waters on The Surface of Mars MICHELLE STARR 13 MAY 2020
When we found what seemed to be liquid water flowing across the surface of Mars in 2015, scientists around the world were itching to test it. There was just one problem, and it was a biggie: the United Nations' Outer Space Treaty of 1967 mandates that space exploration must be conducted in such a way as to avoid contamination.
Since we have no way of sterilising our equipment completely of Earth's microbes, that meant no touchy on the water.
According to new research, however, we needn't have worried – although there could be briny liquid water on Mars, the surface conditions otherwise really are inhospitable to terrestrial life.
"Life on Earth, even extreme life, has certain environmental limits that it can withstand," explained planetary scientist Edgard G. Rivera-Valentín of the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI).
"We investigated the distribution and chemistry of stable liquids on Mars to understand whether these environments would be suitable to at least extreme life on Earth."
While seeking to understand how life might exist elsewhere, we often look at extremophiles – organisms that live in some of Earth's most extreme environments. These include the arid Atacama Desert in Chile, the salty, acidic Dallol Geothermal Area in Ethiopia, and even near-Earth space aboard the ISS.
But while these environments have things in common with Mars, they are distinctly not Mars. Liquid water seems to be a requirement for life, but on Mars, liquid fresh water can't hang around on the surface. It's so dry and cold there, the water will either freeze or evaporate.
Of course, water doesn't have to be fresh to support life. Earth's salty oceans are teeming with it. And we know that salts of sodium, magnesium, and calcium are abundant on Mars; if these salts mixed with the water to create a high-salt solution called brine, it would lower the freezing point and slow the evaporation rate of the liquid, potentially allowing it to linger on the surface.
And if there was enough moisture in the Martian atmosphere, some of the salts could undergo a process called deliquescence, whereby they absorb the moisture to form a liquid solution.
But questions remain: Can this liquid brine form and remain on the Martian surface long enough for terrestrial life to thrive?
"Our team looked at specific regions on Mars – areas where liquid water temperature and accessibility limits could possibly allow known terrestrial organisms to replicate – to understand if they could be habitable," said planetary scientist Alejandro Soto of the Southwest Research Institute.
"We used Martian climate information from both atmospheric models and spacecraft measurements. We developed a model to predict where, when and for how long brines are stable on the surface and shallow subsurface of Mars."
Based on years of experimental data on chemical reactions in simulated Mars conditions in the laboratory, as well as the climate data, the team put together a picture of when and where liquid brines might be present on the surface of Mars, and a few centimetres below.
They found that liquid brines could persist for up to six hours from the equator to high latitudes, over 40 percent of the Martian surface. And this could only occur seasonally, for around 2 percent of the year.
It may not sound like a lot, but it's a broader range than scientists previously thought. But that still doesn't mean Earth's life could survive in it.
"The highest temperature a stable brine will experience on Mars is -48 degrees Celsius (-55 degrees Fahrenheit)," Rivera-Valentín said. "This is well below the lowest temperature we know life can tolerate."
This means, the team concluded, that Martian brines don't meet the Special Region requirements laid out by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) of the International Council for Science, and should therefore prove no hindrance to a crewed Mars exploration mission.
It's also important to note that these results don't have any bearing on native Martian life, if there is or was any throughout the planet's history – they're based entirely on our understanding of terrestrial life. And that could be a limitation, too.
"We have shown that on a planetary scale the Martian surface and shallow subsurface would not be suitable for terrestrial organisms because liquids can only form at rare times, and even then, they form under harsh conditions," Rivera-Valentín said.
"However, there might be unexplored life on Earth that would be happy under these conditions."
The research has been published in Nature Astronomy. | https://highiqcommunity.com/earth-germs-probably-cant-contaminate-the-briny-waters-on-the-surface-of-mars/ |
Journey of a Lifetime: A Group Story is an account of the journey of a group through more than thirty years’ work. From February 2018 a chapter is being posted each month. Here is this month’s chapter. Please Note: Copies of the book are available from Sydney Goodwill.
CHAPTER SEVEN The Subtle Senses
When we work within the subjective or subtle planes of our being, we function through the use of our subtle senses which are the higher counterparts of the external senses we know so well in our everyday lives. Each sense has its counterpart on all planes of expression. . The physical senses can have the powerful grip of habitual use discouraging our mental acceptance of the existence of our subtle senses let alone their facility of use.
Scientific developments in our time ever parallel our human possibilities and extensions of capacities. The Internet or the World Wide Web is a fine example. We have created a virtual world of cyberspace within which we communicate in a flash of speed, across the planet, around the globe. The advantages to human understanding are enormous while at the same time, as with everything we human beings utilise, there can be misuse. This ever-present risk, in whatever field of human involvement, is perhaps unavoidable at this stage of human development in consciousness yet must not be allowed to hold back the forward movement of the whole.
Considering the world-wide web we note that communication within the subtle worlds of ‘ inner space’ operates in very similar fashion. It is directed by the power of thought and functions at the speed of thought.
The scientific community studies our world and its means of expression from within the material dimension. Those interested in the esoteric approach to reality examine and experiment within the subtle worlds of being and expression. These two sciences are not in conflict when they acknowledge the contribution made by each other. And they can have complementary roles.
The Blind Man and the Chair
One evening at an open meeting a co-worker embracing the esoteric approach entered into discussion with a man of material science. He was very interested in the subjective world of life but felt it was necessary to be able to demonstrate the reality of the subjective in some objective way to satisfy the requirements of his field of science and also to convince those who needed empirical proof of the existence of the subtle world.
The esotericist pointed to a chair in the room and invited the scientist to discuss its actual presence and reality. They both of course were in agreement that they could see the chair. It was in fact right there. So the esotericist suggested to the scientist that he should now imagine that he had someone who was blind beside him and proceed to convince this person of the presence of the chair. The blind person of course could not see the chair but it is quite likely he would be willing to accept that one who could see was correct in his statement about the chair’s presence in the room.
Those of us who have normal sight do not question one another’s external observations of objects, or the use of sight. But are we willing to accept that one may have extended perception or developed yet another reliable sense, just as those senses we now use so readily have developed progressively in our vehicles of expression since the very night of time? And will that person be heard and understood when describing the subtle dimension to one who is blind as yet to this realm?
Let us not be like the scientist who dissects a frog in the laboratory to answer the question, “What is a frog?” Science has looked deeply into life’s secrets, from the atom to the universe and yet has not discovered the true nature of being. What we have discovered is how the mechanisms work but nothing about the driver.
Astronomers assess our solar system and say planet Earth is the only planet capable of supporting life. How limiting to consider that intelligent life can only exist on our planet, or that we are the defining form of intelligent life and thus the same environment would be required to support life elsewhere. What telescope can introduce us to the teeming life throughout the universe? Our outer senses question the possibility; our inner senses tell us otherwise.
In our everyday world we observe that from babyhood we learn how to take charge of our physical senses without having to understand the electrical impulses of the brain that drive the bodily system. Similarly, the subtle senses are an inalienable part of our equipment from birth. Have we ever thought we needed to know how electricity worked before we could tum on the light?
The Power of the Eye
There is much to discover about sight and the power of the eye. We all may have noticed that if we are in a room full of people and someone is looking at us, then it is not too long before we turn and meet the eyes upon us. We consider a similar function where we may ‘look towards’ another in the subjective dimension, thus making contact, as difficult of achievement and therefore we make it so. It is not a matter of force or of ‘ trying hard’ any more than if I speak to you, you reply. I speak your name and you respond. There is no effort in that.
The subjective senses work in conjunction with one another just as do our outer or objective senses. As illustrated in the previous paragraph, ‘looking towards’ proceeds to ‘hearing’ and responding. Our failure to hear those ‘ messages ‘ which reach us telepathically is usually due to the fact of our almost entire focus of awareness upon the foreground of life, the outer plane of living.
Within an integrated group telepathy is automatic. Even so, the participants do not always respond to a particular contact until later in group discussion they may find they have overlooked certain thought or information because they were not sure they were accurate in registration. Perhaps also external matters had trapped their attention. However, unless we can act on impression with trust we will never discover or activate our natural capacities that do not need to be developed so much as brought into expression. At the opposite extreme we may try so hard to produce our subjective faculties that we cause blocks to free flow. It is not force that is required but clarity.
A note of caution must be sounded as we consider the various extended faculties or powers which we may use and where they can take us. We will discover much of compelling interest but unless this brings a clearer, deeper perspective upon our service, we may find ourselves side-tracked into an undue focus upon the world of phenomena. This danger is offset while we maintain our spiritual focus in service. The phenomenal world is not something to be eliminated or negated. It is in fact evidence of the creative forces at work and with these energies we are required to work.
When considering the subtle senses, we acknowledge that eventually we will operate with a continuity of awareness on both inner and outer planes at every moment, twenty-four hours a day. Awareness on the inner plane during sleep manifests as yet for most people through the dream life which is ever open to interpretation. Identification with the true being on the inner plane will eventually lead us to that direct knowing hidden by the veil of dreams and the screen of symbols.
Experiments in Group Work
Experiments underway in group work which transfer the consciousness entirely onto the inner or subjective planes of being, reveal to us our true identity. The true spiritual entity is naturally endowed with the faculties or powers that we have been discussing and, being completely immersed within the realisation of Oneness, there is no danger of misappropriation of perceptions or powers for the personal ends of the separated self When a group can function in this way a new vision of life is revealed on the outer plane because of the light thrown upon it and on the inner plane because of the realisation of that far vaster surrounding dimension. The result is a clarification and simplification of living.
Consider for a moment the personal life seen in the light of the spiritual dimension or the group life viewed in the same way. The usual external difficulties of relationship that are played out within the experience of group life, and often consume so much time and attention, fade out and are no longer seen as a major challenge. Wherever we focus attention, there we live our lives. Because everything is seen clearly from the inner plane the smaller personal issues do not loom so large nor do the non-essentials in expression of the work. Each member in the group is seen exactly as they are at any moment in time.
In the personal world of living, people feel uncomfortable about the thought that another can possibly see them inwardly. When working within the inner group focus this is not a concern. The work in hand is the primary point of emphasis. It certainly is noted if there is anything within an individual that could be inhibiting to the work but more important is the recognition of those potentialities ready to burst into expression. In this soul dimension it is the latter that attract notice and receive stimulation.
In this view we are more concerned about what can be brought into useful expression than those things that would appear to prevent it. Such things are irrelevant and everyone has some.
Assessing from this inward position everything is seen as a whole – it just is. From the ‘outside’ people are concerned about how they look or are seen by others. That is a partial picture of our identities. In reality things are just not like that. We understand the whole process of the incarnating cycle and if anything inhibits there is no judgment, only the impulse to set energies in free flow.
One further thought, if there is something manifesting within the group as force it can attract one’s attention. If one is aware of a difficulty that is affecting the group then that draws one’s attention. The group is visible with its every movement, its every thought, without ceasing. One does not have to focus one’s entire attention on the inner plane at every moment. The group is at all times visible to the inner sight.
In the third phase of the Group’s life the above understanding became automatic in expression. The principles of operation being recognised and implemented, it was almost as though this state of being had burst forth of its own accord. All members participated in this experience of Oneness and knew it could never be otherwise. All subsequently understood the freedom that this realisation afforded while at the same time they recognised the necessity to learn to work with the energies thus released. | https://sydneygoodwill.org.au/journey-of-a-lifetime-a-group-story-chapter-7/ |
The sun does not shine so bright in the 22nd century. This is a time of thick polluted air, of watersheds choked with plastic bags, and fish upturned and smelling. This is a time of pale trees and quieting forests. At the dawn of this century cities had swollen to one hundred times there size as people left their homes, escaping natural disaster and war. Crops failed because there were no bees, they couldn't withstand droughts, and major bug infestations killed off large genetically identical crops. Amidst widespread suffering violence broke out, everywhere, while elites continued to accumulate wealth. The effects of climate change were felt in ways scientists had been warning of for decades, never taken seriously by the world’s leading powers.
2101 marked the centennial anniversary of America’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. As this event was a stain on the state of the world to come, this date was remembered and memorialized in mass protests from Scandinavia and Siberia (the farthest land masses in the north) to Paraguay and United SouthAsia (the land masses farthest south); from the United West Coast of America to New Timbuktu. By 2102, Delta Collaborative had been formed in the midst of utter chaos and disaster, we stand amazed at the phoenix like rise of hope within humanity, and quickly became the leading underground organization fighting these injustices through space-time dilation. Delta Collaborative’s first members came from all walks of life and professions. They were a motley group of Story-Keepers, former water dealers, university students, mechanics, one or two troubadours, and two scientists and an engineer from the Earth Institute.
Space-time travel had been first achieved in 2089 and made available to commercial purveyors in 2094. Initial research of this technology was first completed at the Earth Institute, funded by 182 independent nations and unions, but quickly was bought up by commercial purveyors including the Koch brothers, and Musk Zuck inc. Many of the wealthy class were quick to create time-dilated minute trust funds for their posterity, believing that they may someday need to escape to a more peaceful past time and place. To ensure that time-travel would not pose a threat to the status-quo, each time-dilated minute was marketed at a base minimum of 50 million dollars (eliminating the majority of humanity’s ability to access this technology), and regulations were set in place to prohibit any tinkering of past events. Despite these precautions, there were two separate attempts to manipulate history in 2094 (on the educational tour of 1938 and the cruise of 1981); those involved in these attempts have not been seen since. By the end of 2094 all space-time dilation excursions were heavily monitored and policed by the newly created Bureau of Space-Time Affairs and the Space-Time Police Department (STPD).
Between 2102 and 2112, forced to meet in the carcasses of vacant libraries, abandoned malls, and friendly basements, Delta Collaborators focused on mapping out the main causes for the world’s turmoil and to pinpoint events in history when things went astray. During the record-breaking heat of August, 2112, eight members of Delta Collaborative were arrested and taken prisoner by the STPD for plotting to tinker with the past. Three were never heard from again. Two were able to escape: Emma and Elena.
Fearing for their lives, for the failure of their plans, and fearing for the planet, the two went into hiding. For nine months they waited. In 2113 they successfully stole TIMESHIP #39 from the Koch Foundation, which had been illegally chartering it in order to enjoy disco parties of the 1970’s. Although learned, Elena and Emma had no experience driving a TIMESHIP. At first, hoping to return to 1950, they ended up in New Orleans, Louisiana, 2018.
And so, Emma and Elena embarked upon their journey in January of 2113 to encourage love and compassion for other humans and creatures on earth, but mostly to ask people to think of all the other possible futures.
In loving memory of Shuji Kawaguchi, María Hooke, Dr. Neil Simona Butler, Donx Anahi Lombardi, Saneeya Hussain Khan, Aurik Weber, and the rest of Delta Collaborative. We wouldn’t be here without you. | https://deltacollab.org/history-of-future |
You certainly have a better developed and normally functioning brain, if you feel younger than the years you have, and this is presented in a recent and comprehensive study that highlights the correlation between the psychological age and the normal functioning of the healthy brain.
Numerous are the health benefits that people feel just because of this feeling as younger persons of their real age. This fact has been proven by a group of scientists who have conducted a new study that helps us understand why adults often say ‘you’re just as old as you feel.’
According to some research done in the past, the psychological or subjective age may be an indicator that predicts the health status later in life. Otherwise, for clarification, the age when an individual feels younger than his real age is called a subjective or psychological age.
Famous Doctor Jean Young Chevy from the University of Seoul asks an issue that leads to thinking, “Why do some people feel younger or older than their real age?” This relates to the still unclear connection of the neurobiological process of aging and the psychological age of a person.
Additionally, he replies: “Some possibilities include depressive states, personality differences or physical health. However, no one had investigated brain aging processes as a possible reason for differences in subjective age.”
To determine how older adults are feeling in this new study, a survey was conducted that determines the psychological age, and also magnetic resonance imaging was performed in sixty-eight adults who were in good health.
The authors of this comprehensive study have created a model that predicts the aging process using an open-type database. “We utilized both voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and age-prediction modeling techniques to explore whether the three groups of SA (i.e., feels younger, same, or older than actual age) differed in their regional gray matter (GM) volumes, and predicted brain age.”
Noteworthy is the better and healthier functions of the brain in the examinees who felt younger
The predicted younger age of the brain in people who reported to be younger than their real age is proven, and in the results of this study in the superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, a larger GM volume was observed.
In this research, all scientists agree that ‘subjective experience of aging is closely related to the process of brain aging and underscores the neurobiological mechanisms of SA as an important marker of late-life neurocognitive health.’
Dr. Chey further explains: “We found that people who feel younger have the structural characteristics of a younger brain.” Clarifies: “Importantly, this difference remains robust even when other possible factors, including personality, subjective health, depressive symptoms, or cognitive functions, are accounted for.”
We should try to behave like younger people, not according to our age
According to scientists, people who act as if they are younger than their real age, have a greater desire to activate themselves in physical or mental activities, and to make changes for the better, unlike their boring everyday life, thus improving the health condition of their brain.
This study, despite its success, failed to prove the way psychological age works, but it still succeeded in establishing the correlation between the aging of the brain and the psychological age among all other studies. | https://healthylivingidea.com/feeling-younger-than-your-age-may-actually-mean-you-have-a-healthier-brain/ |
I was perhaps in my mid-twenties, deep into an existential crisis regarding my lack of clear vocational direction, when I heard another passenger on the Greyhound bus I was riding say that he was a “healer.”
Something about that both intrigued and bothered me. It seemed both noble and conceited at the same time. Doctors and nurses are professionals with well-worn educational and credentialing paths, with social status and defined roles. But what, exactly, was a “healer”? Images of shamans, witches, and medicine bundles came into my mind, but I had no clue as to what a “healer” in our contemporary culture could be. To proclaim one’s self as a healer appeared to jettison as irrelevant these established vocations to go directly to the point of it all. Could that really be possible?
I confess I still am uncomfortable with using the word “healer” to describe a person’s vocation: the act of healing, it seems to me, comes from a transcendent force and power within and inherent to each person. However, there are certain qualities, skills, knowledge sets and practices that we can cultivate to enhance each other’s capacity to heal. Therapists of all types catalyze healing in their patients by creating a healing space and practice which optimizes the power of that healing force to overcome disease.
A powerful way to accomplish this is through Noetic Mirroring. Noetic is a lovely word derived from the Greek noetikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding. Mirroring, of course, is the action of reflection. Thus Noetic mirroring refers to the art of reflecting back to the patient their inner wisdom, their subjective experience, and the contents of their consciousness. One familiar way to do this is through spoken language. Active listening, counseling, psychotherapy all rely on this basic principle.
But as increasing numbers of psychotherapists are discovering, language has limitations. Illness rarely confines itself to the mind and to accessible reaches of the psyche. When an individual is stressed or traumatized the body and soul are also affected, and, in fact, carry wounds, shame, memories, and feelings of inadequacy more persistently and deeply than conscious awareness. These seeds of disease become woven into the stories of our cells, the songs of our DNA, the lyrics of our genes, and can pass down to successive generations, hidden from the gaze of conscious awareness.
This may seem to suggest that our physical body takes on disease when our psyche is unable to cope with experiences it encounters in life. But developments in quantum physics point towards a radically different, paradoxical truth. Our bodies, right from the beginning, are reflections of our minds, and both develop under the influence of a morphogenetic field connecting us to some essential aspect of the universe with which we are embedded. We will return to the idea of morphogenetic field in just a moment. But first let’s stay with the revolutionary, mind-blowing revelations of quantum physics.
David Darling puts it this way:
Out of the heart of quantum mechanics, that most basic branch of science, has come the realization that consciousness can never be divorced from matter, that every aspect of the universe—and indeed, the universe as a whole—has both an objective and a subjective nature. “Things” have no reality independent of their location in experience; they require the intimate involvement of mind to be given substance. And so, quantum physics insists, consciousness has to be seen in a radical new light—not as some quirky, local by-product of matter, but as the very groundswell of creation. (1)
Creation is not just “out there”. It is US! As goes our consciousness, so goes our body! This is not a simple argument for the value of positive thinking; far from it. It is a statement about the unity of mind and body, and that dis-ease in one is usually matched by disease in the other, and that both mental and somatic disease are rooted in a deeply embedded field of meaning that is beyond the reach of conscious awareness.
The process of mirroring seems to be a fundamental aspect of subjective experience. It is essentially the same phenomenon described by Carl Jung as synchronicity, the co-occurrence of events linked not by causality but rather by the attribution of meaning. The practice of linking events through shared meaning rather than by causal reasoning is one that doesn’t come naturally to us. We are all steeped in a culture which prizes logical, reductionist reasoning. And this kind of seeking after causes has served humanity superbly, just as Newtonian physics and common sense reasoning help us navigate everyday life. But if we allow ourselves to make connections through intuition, associative reasoning, and pattern recognition, we stand to gain remarkable insights about our subjective experiences.
One fascinating variant of mirroring is the correlation of inner conscious states with outward events. Let me relate how a patient described with alarm as well as wonder a case of this: He was deeply traumatized by the sudden appearance of secret service, police, and FBI outside his apartment with guns drawn, and a warrant for his arrest. Due to an instance of mistaken identity, he was charged with bank robbery and subjected to months of investigation and legal turmoil before he was ultimately cleared of all charges. This strange turn of events in my patient’s life was underlined by his description of what he was doing at the time of his arrest: he was watching a movie about a man who was a bank robber. At the moment the “feds” surrounded his residence he was just at the point in the movie where the robber was being marched off to jail, and the patient was breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t him in the movie!
The living universe is far more paradoxical and mysterious than we can comprehend. Commonsense notions that physical objects have a solidity or reality independent of consciousness, that events in one location can only influence events in another location if there is time for a signal to travel between the two locations at no faster than the speed of light, or that every event can be fully accounted for by previous events and causes, have been thoroughly debunked by quantum physics. The basic building blocks of the universe are more like Alfred North Whitehead’s “throbs of experience” than material atoms. (2)
Grasping this is essential to practicing the art of healing, for if we approach the mind or body as distinct, separate spheres of disease, or if we try to force the brain or body to comply with our ideas of proper functioning with material, chemical means we will forever fail to reach the deepest source of the trouble.
Now let’s return to the idea of morphogenetic fields. The physicist Rupert Sheldrake says:
“Natural systems, or morphic units, at all levels of complexity — atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and societies of organisms — are animated, organized, and coordinated by morphic fields, which contain an inherent memory. Natural systems inherit this collective memory from all previous things of their kind by a process called morphic resonance, with the result that patterns of development and behavior become increasingly habitual through repetition. There is a continuous spectrum of morphic fields, including morphogenetic fields, behavioral fields, mental fields, and social and cultural fields.” (3)
Morphogenetic fields are invisible organizing patterns that act like energy templates to establish forms on various levels of life. It turns out that each of us is shaped by at least one of these fields: the contents of our consciousness, the parameters of our physical being, and the tendency towards certain vulnerabilities, sensitivities, capacities, and deficiencies. The morphogenetic field which shapes your experience is also a field which has shaped something else in the universe: an element or plant, for example, or an animal or imponderable energy, such as moonlight or the color orange. We are not separate from the cosmos: we are enfolded in it as much as a thread is part of a quilt, as inseparable as a wave from the ocean. Thus, if a homeopath can identify the material or energetic representative of the morphic field in which you are enfolded, he or she can create a noetic mirroring which will optimize your chances of healing.
This is what a homeopathic remedy ultimately is: a map of your “throb of experience”, elaborated and differentiated into a morphogenetic field, unfolded like a map, and linked to a pellet or drop of water. Remedies are imprints of these informational fields, capable of touching, catalyzing, energizing, and guiding your latent vital energy towards healing.
Noetic Mirroring, therefore is the act of presenting to Pure Awareness (Consciousness), the archetypal image of the shape of the contents of consciousness, which leads not to an annihilation of this archetypal image, but rather to a refinement, perfection, and integration of the wisdom contained therein in the lived experience of the patient.
The discovery and practice of homeopathy has been the most significant revelatory experience of my life: it has opened my eyes to the deeper, mysterious nature of being. Yet I ask myself: if noetic mirroring can trigger such profound healing at the individual level, mustn’t there be some equivalent and yet as-of-now untapped way of healing our collective malaise? Of healing our increasingly traumatized planet?
Just as individuals become disordered and diseased in a way which mirrors their experience in life, collectives can also demonstrate vibrational or energetic patterns which point to an underlying disharmony. Take, for example, the global flu pandemic of 1918: World War I, which engulfed Europe and then the entire world, and left more than 16 million people dead, finally ended in November, 1918. Never before had humanity unleashed such deadly technology against itself on such a horrific scale.
Yet during the same year in which the calamitous “Great War” reached its end, a conclusion that would lay the groundwork for an even greater global conflagration and holocaust twenty years later, an infectious plague caught fire that also afflicted the entire globe, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million people. The mirroring of diseased global geopolitics with an infectious pandemic is reflected in the unusual demographics of the epidemic. While most influenza outbreaks have a U-shaped mortality rate, disproportionately killing the very young and the very old, with higher survival rate for those in-between, the 1918 pandemic had a W-shaped mortality rate, with a higher than expected mortality rate for young adults, the same cohort that was sacrificed by the powers that be to the mayhem of chemical warfare, trenches, and massive artillery and cannon. (4) One might reasonably say that the H1N1 virus, rather than simply being a cause of the pandemic, was a willing participant in mirroring back to humanity its collective disregard for human life, especially in that age group.
How can we apply our newer yet fragile understanding of these deep truths to collective and global disease? How can we noetically mirror the disease of our nation, and of our planet, in such a way that healing and integration will occur? This is the frontier upon which humanity stands, and a challenge which homeopathic medicine and its practitioners have yet to respond to.
Footnotes:
- David Darling. Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation. 1996. Harper Collins. NY. P. 175.
- Shimon Malin. Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality, a Western Perspective. 2001. Oxford University Press. | https://hpathy.com/homeopathy-papers/noetic-mirroring-an-untapped-method-of-healing-our-planet/ |
Is aging just an unnecessary evolutionary technique to keep the human population balanced? With the proliferation of anti-aging studies and the prospect of space colonization I’m beginning to think we should consider the pursuit of life extension for the sake of preserving an individual’s experience of life. I personally don’t really give in to the philosophical or religious arguments against it. Some species reverse their own aging naturally and some don’t age at all, and we all share the same genetic possibilities.
To clarify, I’m not suggesting true immortality like many propose. That seems a bit too radical a notion for serious modern discussion. My view for the time-being is that we should preserve an individual’s youth throughout their life and as a result we could see moderate life extension like maybe in the range of 30-50 years, for starters. But those additional years are lived with the same vigor as someone at the peak of their physicality like a middle-aged athlete. Maintaining a body at the end of its life is wrought with high costs both medically and economically, and could be a burden on family and friends. One of my main hopes with life extension too would be to keep geniuses and innovators alive who could still contribute to society in important ways. I’m sure Steve Jobs would have a lot to say with how Apple is ran today, and I bet a debate between Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein would’ve been fascinating. One of the advantages of our current lifespans is the fact that we do have people old enough to have experienced decades worth of history that they can pass down to generations first hand.
Different species have evolved survival mechanisms unique to their niche and scale. For our ancestors it made evolutionary sense to keep the human body alive until around age 30, because that was about how long it took to raise offspring to an age where they could fend for themselves (that, and we were less equipped to deal with the dangers of the environment). In the 21st century the average life-expectancy is 70-85 depending on where you live. To the generations alive today this seems absolutely normal. This is the way it’s been for decades and we are getting by just fine. We are conditioned to the milestones of the average lifespan: birth, primary school, high school, college, marriage and family, retirement, death. That’s just how life is, right? Many say that life extension (and not to mention immortality) is unethical and that it is unnatural for humans to do this. Modern biology has taught us that all life on Earth is based on the same chemical code known as DNA. By combining the four base pairs that comprise DNA, you can build an organism with various genes and proteins that allow the organism to survive in the world. Many genes are common among different species, while some species possess traits that make them unique to the animal kingdom. One important thing that we’ve learned in biology is that many organisms possess genes in their DNA that are currently dormant (not useful to the organism in question anymore), and we have also found that it’s possible to take genes that are prominent in one organism and splice them into another organism’s genome. My favorite example is the gene for bioluminescence which is what allows deep-sea, light-deprived animals to deter or attract predators/prey. This gene has been inserted into everything from trees, toys, and neurons for various purposes. We now know that genes are interchangeable and can function properly in organisms that don’t naturally express them. Like previously stated, there are many organisms that can reverse their aging, some that age very slowly, and some that can freeze their aging in suspended animation. If it’s possible for these organisms to express anti-aging traits like this, then why can’t humans attempt to implement that into their own genome?
If humans radically increase their lifespans, then overpopulation will be an expected problem. If nobody is dying then we are not freeing up space for future generations. My simple response to this concern is space colonization. But if space colonization seems too-far off to you, then I propose expanding our idea of what we consider suitable real-estate on Earth. 70% of Earth’s surface is water, so why are we not utilizing that space. Floating cities would be an amazing engineering feat and could steal away a large fraction of the human population living on land. Energy could be produced through a combination of wave, wind, and solar energy. Storms could be handled with bio-domes or gigantic walls. Google has already proven that transatlantic cables can cross the vast ocean and connect people overseas. The possibilities with floating cities are endless and I know that if the idea were seriously brainstormed then creative humans could make it possible, safe, and sustainable. However I think the holy grail of addressing overpopulation will be outsourcing humans to space. I personally would be the first to sign up for citizenship aboard an Earth-orbiting space colony. Space has ample real-estate for massive space structures the size of whole continents. And then there are the various rocky worlds spread among the solar system. Mars colonization is already a hot topic. Next on the list would be many of the rocky satellites orbiting some of the gas giants further out in space. Even the Moon or an asteroid could be a viable option with the right combination of artificial habitats. But the threat of overpopulation is not just space. Food will be an issue as well. This is where we can implement vertical farming, lab-grown meat, and possibly even super-nutritious pills that would reduce the need for humans to eat in the first place.
I posted an article on Facebook about life-extension recently, fully expecting nobody to Like it or for some people to voice negative opinions about it. I was surprised to see that the article was one of my most Liked posts in awhile. Apparently extending human lifespans is a desire for many of my Facebook friends, even the ones who aren’t super sci-fi nerds like myself. But I have still heard plenty of rebuttals towards life-extension in general. One being: “won’t we get bored?” Human culture and our understanding of reality is an ever-changing process. Each decade presents humanity with a new political, cultural, and technological atmosphere. In such a dynamic civilization it’s hard for me to imagine ever being bored with life. New science will take us to the farthest reaches of space. Virtual Reality will provide endless entertainment in the digital realm. New artists utilizing new techniques and new history will captivate audiences like never before. Human culture will be so diverse, and there will be so many new places to travel and new art to indulge in it almost seems as though boredom could be eradicated. Questions about how life-extension and potentially immortality would affect religion leads to circular arguments caused by the fact that the afterlife and most other religious topics are not falsifiable at this point in time, and therefore I think moot when discussing life-extension in scientific terms. In fact, I don’t see how life-extension even violates religious belief systems. For one, extended life does not equal no death. Anyone can still die in a freak accident. Furthermore, perhaps the ethics behind euthanasia will be further addressed when considering the possibility of someone choosing to reverse their anti-aging biology and succumb to the process of death. If we are to give people the right to live via life-extension, then we should also give people the right to die. Death may seems like an unnecessary end to experience, but a life of needless suffering is also undesirable. The Buddhists teach us that life is inherently suffering, and that this is okay and necessary to contrast with joy. But if a person would rather cease their experience rather than endure prolonged and unavoidable suffering then perhaps there should be an option for them to go peacefully. I imagine many scenarios where someone who has lived multiple centuries chooses to die in a choreographed way, such as climbing to a mountain summit only to take a pill that painlessly ends their life, or by entering Earth orbit and ending their life with a spectacular view of Earth floating below them. The thing about not having to die unpredictably due to old age is that you can better plan the circumstances of your death in a more favorable way.
To wrap this post up I invite you to add any other points for or against life-extension that I have not covered. I’m sure there is much, a topic like this can be discussed in a book. As we venture further into a world of rapidly changing technology I think it is of utmost importance that we seriously discuss issues that have formerly been seen as science fiction, because it is becoming more apparent that science fiction has a very predictive nature. | https://dgtlzen.com/2016/07/05/life-extension/ |
To live a happy life, you need to learn to accept death.
I like writing about death. Writing helps you think better, and thinking about death is good, even necessary. In a way, life is about learning how to accept death and die in peace with oneself. It takes us a lifetime to understand this, and many people never do. I haven’t learned this yet myself. I am afraid of death, terrified by it, so that’s why I like to think and write about it.
In You have been dead before, I shared some of my musings about death and why it isn’t that terrible after all. When we die, we’ll stop existing, we’ll stop experiencing, and we haven’t existed and we haven’t experienced for most of the time this universe has been around, so it shouldn’t be too bad after all.
The time we have left wasn’t about death per se, but it was related. In that post, I reflected on the finiteness of time we have left in this life, and how we will never get back the day that just passed, so we should make the most of the time we have. Before we die, that is; so it was about death as well, after all.
Today I wanted to write about death again, but from another angle. I will talk about the link between death and identity and subjective experience and the paradox of death when this link is severed. It is another step on the path of learning to accept death as something necessary and even good.
The Paradox of Death
An episode of Sam Harris’s podcast Making Sense entitled the Paradox of Death made me think about it. Most of Harris’s reflections are based on the philosopher Tom Clark’s essay Death, Nothingness and Subjectivity. It is a bit complex, but I’ll try to explain it the best I can.
Both Harris and Clark mention a quote from the classic Greek philosopher Epicurus, which I think is an excellent starting point:
“Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness end with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.”Epicurus
When we die, experiencing ceases. We are no longer there to think, feel, see, hear, smell, touch… Since we were born, we have constantly been experiencing. Life is a continuous chain of subjective experience. You cannot stop experiencing while alive, except when you are heavily sedated (even when asleep, we do experience dreams and are somewhat aware of our surroundings, as we can be awakened by external stimuli such as noise, a pinch, etc.).
When you go into induced sedation for surgery, for example, the lights go out, and the next thing you know, you are awake and aware, experiencing again. You feel this as a chain of experiences: the moment before you are sedated and then immediately the moment you are awake again. Subjective experience never abandons us. It doesn’t matter if you are gone due to sedation or a coma for minutes, hours, days, or weeks: for the person doing the experiencing, one experience follows another one.
A thought experiment
Having established this, Clark introduces an interesting thought experiment. Imagine a person goes into a very long sleep (it could be a cryogenisation, for example) and wakes up centuries from now. They would still feel a continuous experience: they remember the time before going to sleep, and then they are experiencing again when waking up. They would have the feeling of always being there and being the same person. Now imagine the experimenter can change the memories of this person, their tastes and character, even their personality. The changes could be minimal or could be huge.
At what stage would you say that this is not the same person? How much would the person have to change for you to say they are another person altogether?
Regardless of where you put the cutting point, it wouldn’t matter for the person in question. For them, they would still have an uninterrupted experience and the feeling of always having been there, experiencing from their very personal perspective. You could change their memories (this would be equivalent to a person waking up with amnesia from a long coma, are they not the same person they were before the coma?), their personality, their gender, the way they look, but they would still be them. Subjectively, they would be the same consciousness that was constantly experiencing.
Clark argues that when we die, something similar happens. We go to sleep somewhere and stop experiencing, but someone new is born elsewhere and starts experiencing. It doesn’t matter that this person has another personality, physical appearance, or memories. New experiencing is born, like in the thought experiment. Subjective experience soldiers on and continues its existence.
He is not talking about reincarnation or our soul being born in another body or anything like that. What he means is that the fact that we are experiencing from this body doesn’t really matter; what matters is that there is subjective experience, and someone is doing the experiencing. It is a concept that is difficult to grasp, and I think I understand it, but yet, it’s of no consolation to me. My experiencing will cease when I die, and I don’t really care if someone else will be doing new experiencing. I don’t want to stop feeling, loving, laughing, dancing, or writing.
What makes you, you?
This is probably the key question and the main learning from Clark’s experiment: the link between death and identity and what makes us, us. So what makes you, you?
I have been thinking about this since I was a kid, and I guess I wasn’t the only one (or yes, maybe I was a strange kid). I always thought about what it would be like to be someone else, which naturally made me think: what made me, me? Why was I Iker, and not somebody else, like my brother, my friend, or a girl from my class?
I thought it was my personality, my memories, maybe something people called my soul, but what was it? Then I realized that if I were born in someone else’s body and were raised by other parents, my personality and way of behaving would be a bit different, my experiences would be different. Therefore, my memories would also be different. The only thing that would make me, me, is that the person seeing things, feeling things, thinking about them, and making sense of them would be me and nobody else.
What makes you, you, is that you see and experience the world from your own perspective. That’s it. Only subjective experience gives you your “youness”. The fact that you are inside your head looking at the world from that perspective is the only thing that makes you, you, nothing else. If you were in someone else’s head, you would be that other person.
What would be in that other person’s head? Your soul? I don’t think we need to enter metaphysical concepts such as souls to explain this. It is just your consciousness, your awareness, your subjective experience, that make you, you.
When you die, you stop being you
When we die, we just stop being. We stop being ourselves; you stop being you. There is no you anymore.
What is important for you is that your viewpoint, life from your perspective, your subjective experience, continues. You don’t really care if subjective experience, somebody else’s experience, continues elsewhere.
In that sense, Clark’s arguments don’t work for me. I understand where he is coming from and where he is going, but personally, it is no consolation for me.
When I was younger, I never thought about death. It was too far away, too distant in the future. I knew I wasn’t immortal, but I sometimes felt like it, so far was death from me. However, the older I get, the more I think about death. It sometimes scares me. Other times I’m starting to be OK with it and accept it.
I think it’s a process, and this is probably one of the most important lessons in life: to learn how to die in peace, accept death, and learn to live with death. Death is part of life, after all.
It helps to know that I won’t feel anything when my time arrives. Death is the absence of experience, and therefore it is the absence of feeling. I won’t know I’ll be dead. The suffering and pain will be for those I leave behind, those who love me. Unfortunately, it will be them who will suffer my death, not me.
Hopefully, there is still a long time left until that happens, so let’s first enjoy life, try to accomplish all the things we would like to achieve, and spend as much quality time as possible with those loved ones. There won’t be a second life to do it, yesterday has already passed, and it’s not coming back. Carpe Diem! | https://humanefutureofwork.com/some-cheerful-thoughts-on-death/ |
NASA on Thursday revealed astronomers have discovered what appears to be Jupiter's doppelgänger. Using data from NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, the star, about the size of Jupiter, features a cloudy storm similar to our neighbor's Great Red Spot. Scientists say the star's beauty mark is at least two years old, but probably older.
The star, dubbed W1906+40, is known as an L-dwarf, which fuses atoms and generates light, similar to our sun; other suns are sometimes referred to as brown dwarfs, or "failed stars." W1906+40 is estimated to feature a temperature of about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, which is actually relatively cool for a star. In fact, it's so cool that clouds can form in its atmosphere.
The cloudy storm, which rotates around the distant star once every 9 hours, is so big it can hold about three Earths, giving you an example of the immense scale.
"We don't know if this kind of star storm is unique or common, and we don't [know] why it persists for so long," said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark.
NASA aims to use the data to search for other stormy stars in the future, and hopefully learn more about why they occur. As for Jupiter, the planet's Great Red Spot has actually been shrinking over the past few decades, though scientists aren't really sure why.
You can see an artist's illustration of star W1906+40 above. | https://www.technobuffalo.com/nasa-star-jupiter-storm |
Exactly how long does it take for the exposed core of a star to cool from its starting temperature (several billion K) to ~50,000 K?
The answer is of order 1 million years to cool from a standard end of He burning temperature of just over $10^8$ K to the top end of the white dwarf temperature range you give in your question. The details would depend exactly on the mass and composition of the white dwarf and there are also some theoretical uncertainties in neutrino cooling rates. The ...
5
How large will our Sun get during the red giant phase (ie which planets will it engulf) before the helium flash?
Low mass stars like the Sun do become very large prior to He ignition in the core. The exact value depends a bit on models for mass loss from the extended atmosphere (e.g. Guo et al. 2016), but estimates of 250 times its current size are possible (Schroeder & Smith 2008; Spiegel & Madhusudhan 2012). At this radius both Mercury and Venus are engulfed. ...
5
The Sun will not become a red giant for approximately 7 billion years, so there is little chance that Proxima Cen will be anywhere near it. [EDIT: To answer a comment, the current helocentric radial velocity of Proxima Cen is -22 km/s. The Sun's escape velocity at the distance of Proxima Cen is about 0.1 km/s. So the Sun and Proxima Cen are totally unbound. ...
3
Higher mass stars will have shorter lives. Even though they have more fuel for nucleosynthesis, they burn this fuel much quicker than lower mass stars. Generally, you should think of "red-giant" as an evolutionary phase and not a particular type of star. Looking at the Scheller et al. (Aston. Astrophys. Suppl., 96, 269, 1992) data given in one of ...
3
Where does the evolution actually stop? Is the Helium Core Flash the last thing a Sun-like stars experiences or does it in fact follow the rest of the tractory? Stars with masses below about 2 solar masses undergo a helium flash but their evolution does continue afterwards, as shown in the second diagram (Fig. 13.4). So no, the core flash is not the last ...
2
In response to the question of how plants would look in this hypothetical arrangement, it's important to know that green plants did not evolve to maximize our sun's energy because they were not always the dominant photosynthetic organism on Earth. They specifically evolved in the margins around the purple sulfuric bacteria which were once the dominant sun ...
1
The sun, when it becomes a red giant, will be more 100 times more luminous than it is now, but that only gives it an absolute magnitude of about -1, and an apparent magnitude at 4 light-years of about -5: similar to Venus. It is possible for this to cast a very faint shadow, but you need a very dark place to see it. The sun will still be much too small to ... | https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/tags/red-giant/hot?filter=year |
EPSILON SCO (Epsilon Scorpii). Though bright, second magnitude (2.29), in most other constellations Epsilon Sco would have a prominent place and probably a proper name. Here, in one of the grandest patterns of the sky,
Scorpius
, it has neither. It's just one of many of the Scorpion's bright stars and currently ranks just fifth after
Antares
(Alpha),
Dschubba
(Delta),
Shaula
(Lambda), and
Girtab
(Theta), consistent with its
Greek letter
designation. (Dschubba, historically fainter than Epsilon, is in a brightened state.) Scorpius is loaded with relatively distant, luminous, hot class B stars, many of which are associated with one another. At a distance of only 65 light years, Epsilon, a class K (K2.5) giant, departs from the local norm and just happens to be in the general line of sight to the rest of the figure. Epsilon's nature rather eludes analysis. Even the temperature is not all that well defined. Averaging all values gives 4400 Kelvin, a luminosity (accounting for infrared radiation) of 72 times that of the
Sun
, a radius of 15 solar (not all that large), an uncertain mass of 1.25 times solar, and an age rather similar to that of our Sun. Direct measure of angular radius gives a reasonably consistent value of 13 solar. The evolutionary status of the star is also uncertain. Not a stable helium-fusing "clump" giant (so called because on a graph of luminosity vs. temperature there are so many of them), it could be brightening as red
giant
with a dead helium core, dimming after just firing up its internal helium to fuse to carbon and oxygen, or brightening for the
second time
with a dead C-O core. Though the first option is the most likely, an apparent slight variability of about 10 percent (with no defined period) suggests the last option. We really do not know. A lower, and perhaps better, temperature of 4250 Kelvin gives just one solar mass. More detailed analysis with other evolutionary calculations yields 1.5 solar masses. Whatever the case, the star gives at least some idea of what will someday happen to the Sun. The metal abundance is around 70 percent solar. A low projected rotation speed of 1.7 kilometers per second leads to a rotation period that could be as long as 1.3 years. There is also some evidence for mass loss through an accelerated wind. Epsilon's most outstanding characteristic is a high speed of 63 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, three to four times greater than that of the local stars of the Galaxy's disk, showing that not only is Epsilon not a part of the general Scorpius gang, but that it is also something of a visitor from an older thickened Galactic disk that provides a transition to the outer, ancient halo.
Written by
Jim Kaler
. Return to
STARS
. | http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/epssco.html |
A hot snowball sounds as contradictory as a frosty forest fire, but European astronomers think they've found one orbiting a dwarf star about 33 light-years from Earth.
The strange planet, GJ 436 b, is about the size of Neptune. It orbits a red dwarf star, about half the mass of the sun but a hundred times dimmer.
The coolness of the star is a major reason water can persist on the planet's surface, according to research published recently in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The planet "turns out to be a Neptune-like ice giant, mostly composed of water ice, not a rock/iron 'super-Earth,' nor a low-mass gas giant," according to the research paper. The team made its findings using telescopes in Switzerland, Israel and Chile.
"It's not a very welcoming planet," said Frederic Pont, an astronomer at the Geneva Observatory. "The water is frozen by the pressure, but it's hot. It's a bit strange . . . but, in fact, water can be solidified by pressure."
The planet was discovered in 2004, by a team of American researchers led by astronomer Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley. It is one of more than 200 planets orbiting other stars discovered in recent years.
The existence of planets can be inferred by the way their gravity tugs on their host stars, making them wobble. The weakness of this technique is that it turns up planets in very close orbits, which by their nature are too hot for life.
GJ 436 b has one of the tightest orbits of the so-called exoplanets, circling its star every three days. So although the star is relatively cool, the planet's surface is hot, about 476 degrees Fahrenheit.
Scientists said the planet could have an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, as well as a rock-iron core, like Earth. Large amounts of methane, which also shrouds Saturn's giant moon Titan, also could be present, the scientists said.
Combined with the scorching heat, that would make the planet hostile to life as we know it. But if the planet is covered in water, it makes the possibility of finding other planets with water in more hospitable orbital zones more likely.
"It shows there are many ocean planets," Pont said. | https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2007-05-28-planet28-story.html |
It is one of the densest planets ever discovered: it has the same size of Jupiter, but six times its mass. And it is a planet from doom: its parent star, a red giant, between 200 million years will engulf it relentlessly.
A giant planet, extremely rare, the extreme seasons and that day – or rather the years – counted. That’s how the researchers describe Kepler-432B, one of the densest planets discovered so far. Two research groups at the University of Heidelberg (Centre for Astronomy and the Max Planck Institute) worked separately but have come together with this extraordinary discovery. The planet has six times the mass of Jupiter, but more or less the same size (for this is definitely very dense).
Source: https://kepler.nasa.gov
But bizarre Kepler-432B has also the elliptical orbit around a red giant that probably between 200 million years it will swallow. “Until a few months ago, we did not know the planets in orbit around giant stars whose semi-major axis is less than 0.5 astronomical units. The existence of this type of planets had been predicted theoretically but had not yet been proven because they have a short life and they are hard to find: they are swallowed up by their star as soon as it evolves and becomes a red giant”, says Davide Gandolfi, one of the authors of the study and researcher at the Center for Astronomy of the University of Heidelberg and researcher Rita Levi Montalcini at the Department of Physics of the University of Turin. “Kepler-432 has a semi-major axis of 0.3 astronomical units and it is the fifth planet discovered so close to a red giant. It will not have a long life: between about 200 million years -a small time, astronomically speaking – will be “swallowed up” by its star! “, he added.
Source: https://kepler.nasa.gov
“Most of the known planets around giant stars have orbits large and circular – said then the Italian researcher -. With its small and very elongated orbit, Kepler-432B is a true exception among the planets of this type. “This star has already spent nuclear fuel and for this it is gradually expanding. Its radius is already four times that of our sun and will grow more and more. For this the future of the planet is now marked.
The orbit of Kepler-432B to periapsis comes incredibly close to its star and much farther to apoapsis (The point at which an orbiting object is farthest away from the center of mass of the body it is orbiting), thus creating huge temperature differences during the year of the planet (which corresponds to 52 Earth days). “During the winter, the temperature on Kepler-432B is about 500 degrees Celsius, while in the short summer period, you get up to nearly 1,000 degrees,” said Sabine Reffert. We say that its temperature does not make it certainly a candidate to be included in the list of possible habitable planets discovered by Kepler (has been identified by the method of transit).
Both research groups have used the 2.2-meter telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, to collect their data. One of the team also used the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands. Thanks to these optical instruments, experts have obtained precise measurements on the mass of Kepler-432B. | https://spacefan.org/kepler-432b/ |
DOVER — Tiffanee Lee-Scott always wanted to be an architect growing up, but instead of designing buildings for a living, she now designs cakes at Tiffanee & Co Bakery in Dover.
“I always loved baking and had a background in art,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “I always loved to paint and draw and I just combined those two loves.”
The bakery, at 147 S. Governors Ave., specializes in custom cakes and also sells cookies and cupcakes, which are freshly baked every day.
“I’m usually here about 5 in the morning,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “I don’t open up until 7, as it gives me time to get everything ready.”
Mrs. Lee-Scott was a full-time phlebotomist and worked from home as a baker before opening up her business.
“My business just kept growing,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “I decided I wanted to do it full time and put my all into baking.”
With the help from her family members she was able to find a building that fitted her vision.
“I knew when I wanted to open up a bakery I always wanted to be downtown,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “I always wanted a place with a really big front window. I came across this place and seen that it was available. It used to be an antique store so we had to renovate it, but it wasn’t hard at all.
“My family members helped me fund it, as I don’t have any loans or anything like that.”
The business officially opened in October, as it has received a lot of great feedback.
“It’s been going very well,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “Business has been great. The weather is starting to warm up, so I’ve seen a lot of foot traffic and I think with my custom cakes there’s been a lot of word of mouth.
“I have a Facebook page and website, which I update daily. It gives people a chance to see what I can do, which has helped with attracting more customers.”
Mrs. Lee-Scott also has a specialty green champagne cupcake named after her that seems to be a fan favorite amongst customers.
“People always ask what it tastes like — I’m like you have to find out for yourself,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “When they taste it they usually love it. I also have a cinnamon roll cupcake that I haven’t seen anywhere else.”
Some of Mrs. Lee-Scott’s custom creations include a Lego cake, peanut butter and jelly cake and Army tank cake.
“Anything you want I can make,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “I think it’s just my arts side and I just envision what I want and then bake it. Then I just start carving it and watch it come to life.”
Mrs. Lee Scott said baking the cake is the longest part of the process.
“Decorating takes about one or two hours,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “I use icing or fondants, whatever it takes to make my vision come to life.”
Luckily Mrs. Lee-Scott said she hasn’t had any mishaps yet.
“I haven’t had a cake fall apart,” Mrs. Lee-Scoot said. “I just take my time and give myself enough time for trial and error.
“After baking I give myself four hours before it needs to be picked up just in case the cake collapses I can bake another one and keep going.”
Part of that is due to her husband Marcus, who serves as that taste tester for the business.
“I tell her everything she needs to know before-hand,” Mr. Scott said. “If I don’t like it or don’t think it tastes good then customers won’t like it either. I don’t want to set her up for failure.”
Mr. Scott said he never gets tired of it.
“I love it,” Mr. Scott said. “As soon as she makes something new I’m the first person to try it. That’s the best part about it.”
Being the only baker can sometimes be overwhelming, but that’s the sacrifice she’s willing to take.
“My husband helps out with deliveries,” Mrs. Lee-Scott said. “I’m the only baker here. I do get overwhelmed. I told myself to not take as many orders, but I just love what I do. If it requires me waking up 3 in the morning to get some orders done then that’s what I will do.”
Arshon Howard is a freelance writer living in Dover. E-mail comments to newsroom@newszap.com. | https://delawarestatenews.net/business/dover-bakery-serves-up-art-you-can-eat/ |
John Harbanno (1955–2017), better known by his pseudonyms John the Baker, John Baker, The Baker, or George, is a fat Gamelonian baker who sells very flammable cakes, much to his dismay. He is the owner of John's Bakery, and since 2010, he has appeared in commercials. He lives in Konkogi.
Biography
John—named by his parents after the newborn John Harkinian—was born somewhere in Gamelon in mid-1955. As a young man, he was drafted into the Hylian army to fight in the Hylian Civil War. He was caught in a bomb blast at some point during the war, which resulted in a slide whistle becoming lodged in his pelvis as a piece of shrapnel. (Now you know why he makes that noise whenever he leaves the screen.) Decades later, in an effort to solve Hyrule's food shortages during the Form Wars, he created gray spaghetti. This spaghetti turned out to be highly toxic, however, and Gay Luigi killed him during the Great Eluryhian Offensive for tarnishing the food's public image.
Appearance
The Baker is a fat elf with orange hair and a pink nose similar to Wario's, possibly indicating a relation between the two. He usually wears a white chef's hat and sometimes sells bricks when he runs out of food.
Quotes
- "My cakes will burn!"
- "Oh, my cakes!"
- "It's awful!"
- "Come see my cakes!"
- "Pelvic.... THRUST!"
Trivia
- He's responsible for the Hylian Market Crash and the Gray Spaghetti Plague. This makes him one of the most hated people in Hyrule.
- He has a son, known as Balka, with Lady Alma.
- The League of Fire offered him membership, but he accidentally burned the invitation before he could read it. | https://king-harkinian.fandom.com/wiki/The_Baker |
Founded in Edinburgh in 2014, Kingfisher Bakery prides itself on delivering bespoke and beautifully hand-crafted cakes of the highest quality, hand-made fresh to order and with locally-sourced ingredients where possible.
In 2018, the bakery relocated to its present home: a blissful waterside location on the marina in Staverton, Wiltshire. We continue to work tirelessly to ensure that each and every cake is completed precisely to our customers' specifications, and that your cake tastes every bit as delicious as it looks.
We specialise in classic cakes lovingly finished with our signature buttercreams, and we also offer a selection of hand-made decorations, including fondant work, macarons, candied fruit, and meringues.
Owner & Executive Baker
Michelle Anthony-Cresswell
"Freshly made, beautifully decorated."
Michelle has enjoyed baking for her family and friends ever since she was a little girl, learning many of the recipes she still uses today from her grandfather.
In her spare time Michelle runs a number of community choirs in the Wiltshire and Somerset area: | https://www.kingfisherbakery.com/our-story |
71333027 - Artisan bakery making special sourdough bread, a proving basket of dough.
60144460 - Slices of bread with strawberry jam
71333030 - Artisan baker in apron patting her hands with flour.
71333029 - A platted glazed fresh baked cinnamon bun.
71333028 - Baker with a pastry brush adding glaze to a tray of cinnamon buns ready for the oven.
60101033 - Bread oven
60144458 - Apricot and almond tart
60245463 - A mini veal burger with coriander and a glass of rosé wine
60144468 - Flammenküeche
60144474 - Fougasses
60224126 - Baking bread
71227583 - Meringue cakes with cream and fresh strawberries, close up.
71118996 - Italy, Campania, Amalfi Coast, listed as World Heritage by UNESCO, Amalfi, Pasticceria Andrea Pansa dating of 1830, candied fruits
11301542 - A young woman, seen from behind, in a bakery with various mixers
11203174 - A brick-built oven in a bakery
60051948 - Raisin brioche
11301541 - Hands wearing oven gloves removing a freshly baked cake from the oven
11301543 - A woman pouring cake mixture into cake tins in a bakery
71227808 - Round small cupcakes with dried fruits on a brown wooden board, close up.
71197353 - Chocolate muffin sprinkled with nuts and cocoa powder on a brown piece of kraft paper, close up.
71227582 - Baked meringue with cream and fresh strawberries, dessert pavlova.
71154703 - Chocolate cake with berries and cream filling
71114505 - France, Savoie, Val d'Isere, brioche with pralines by Patrick Chevallot baker and confectioner, Meilleur Ouvrier de France (The Best Workman of France)
70005423 - Ciabatta, italian bread
11203175 - A brick-built oven in a bakery
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Park Avenue Bakery & Cafe is Helena's European-style, scratch bakery offering artisan breads, breakfast pastries and specialty desserts along with a full expresso bar. A place where people gather, meet friends for coffee, read and relax.Our lunch menu includes hearth baked pizza, sandwich features, homemade soups and other daily specials. The bakery offers custom special occasion cakes, wedding cakes, and catering.Seasonally - enjoy outdoor seating on the patio.
Park Avenue Bakery & Cafe is located at the corner of Park Avenue and Broadway, one block west of the downtown walking mall.
Know the name of the business or event you are looking for? Please make a selection: | https://southwestmt.com/listings/15037.htm |
Today we’d like to introduce you to Melisa Allen.
Melisa, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Growing up, I remember always wanting to make cakes for special occasions. I specifically remember coloring canned frosting and spreading it onto a sheet cake in the shape of a Christmas tree with a butter knife when I was maybe 10. Several years later my brother in law said he wanted to have crab cakes on his birthday, so I made him a cake adorned with a buttercream crab… thank goodness, there are no pictures of either of these masterpieces!
When my daughter was turning one, I was that mom who just had to make her cake. In preparation, I started taking cake decorating classes at a hobby store, and I would take my homework into the office for my co-workers. From that, I gained a small clientele and decided I wanted to pursue baking as a serious business. I started taking pastry classes at a local culinary school, and I went from making the occasional birthday cake for friends to specializing in wedding cakes full time. The only thing better than talking about a couple’s vision for their wedding is seeing their reaction to the cake on the big day!
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I have come up against a few challenges along my way. The first is when I was pregnant with my second child. My little bun in the oven made it really hard to lean over the three compartment sink at school. Fortunately, this was early in my transition to wedding cakes, so I was able to plan ahead a take a few months off when my son was born.
Then we moved about a year ago. I knew it would be hard to keep my kitchen ready for potential buyers to walk through so we spoke with realtor months in advance and came up with a plan. I took a couple months off again when our house was on the market. My next wedding order was two weeks after we moved into our new house. I unpacked all my cake boxes and baked a sample cake to test the oven as soon as we moved in. I also had my sister on speed dial in case I needed to ‘borrow’ her kitchen if our closing was pushed back.
As a cottage baker, I still face challenges today. I would love to be a one-stop shop, but cottage bakers in Texas cannot make a final product that requires refrigeration such as cheesecake or pumpkin pie. I have to refer that business to a brick and mortar bakery. Also, I homeschool our two children, and a lot of planning takes place around their schedule too. I bake before the kids are up, and decorate after they are in bed some nights. I have always been a planner though, and I take time to schedule out the process for each order a couple weeks in advance.
Sweet By Design – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Although I specialize in wedding and groom’s cakes, Sweet By Design is a custom bakery located north of Dallas in Melissa offering personalized cakes, cupcakes, and other treats for all special occasions. We want to take your vision for your event and make it a little sweeter! A memorable cake takes both great flavor and design, and we strive to give our clients a fantastic dessert centerpiece that their guests continue to talk about way beyond the big day.
Sweet By Design is a home bakery operating under and meeting all the requirements of, the current Texas Cottage Food laws. Because this is a home bakery, I only take a limited number of orders each week. We are small, and that is a good thing for both my family and my clients.
All my orders are for special occasions – since I’m not a retail shop, you can’t swing by on your way home from work for a cupcake or two. I love that my cakes are part of the celebration of life’s milestones. My goal is to provide my clients with a personalized, centerpiece dessert worthy of their celebration, and my prayer for each of my clients is that not only will the event be blessed, but that the life events surrounding the celebration would be blessed as well.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Overall, I define success as when I provide a client with amazing wedding and groom’s cakes that exceed their expectations along with great customer service. However, success markers look different depending on where I am in the process of an order. At a consultation appointment, I mark success as designing a cake I can tell the couple loves in addition to hearing them rave about the samples. When making the cake, I feel successful when I hit all the milestones it takes to make the order. I don’t see that you can operate any other way when running a business where the final product has to be delivered on a specific day and time. Another huge criterion in determining if I am successful is referral business. I love to hear a couple tell me that they had my cake at a friend’s wedding or another wedding vendor recommended to me!
Contact Info:
- Website: sweetbydesigncakes.com
- Phone: 214-298-3119
- Email: sweetbydesigncakes@gmail.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/sweetbydesigncakes/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/SweetByDesign.CakesByMelisa
Image Credit:
Brilliant Captures, Skys the Limit
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here. | http://voyagedallas.com/interview/meet-melisa-allen-sweet-design-melissa-just-north-mckinney/ |
A baker bakes breads, pastries, pies, cakes, cookies, tarts, and other baked goods by combining raw ingredients according to recipes. Though the traditional idea of a baker is somebody who works in his own bakery and caters to a local market, nowadays, bakers may also work in specialty shops or restaurants where they produce smaller quantities for consumption at the location itself, or in manufacturing positions where they oversee the production of large quantities of goods for distribution. Becoming a baker involves enrolling in a training program at a supermarket, or apprenticing with a craft baker to gain practical experience. If you want to know how to become a baker, see Step 1 to get started.
Steps
Part 1 Getting the Training
- 1Have a high school diploma. Though it’s not mandatory for you to get a high school diploma to become a baker, having one can help you become a more desirable candidate. For one thing, high school will help you learn basic math, as well as other concepts that can help you in your profession. Additionally, you may choose to go to culinary school to get a leg up in your field, and you’ll need a high school diploma to do that. Though it may not be worth it for you to go back to high school to become a baker, if you’re still in high school, you should finish the course.
- While you’re in high school, you should take home economics, cooking, or other baking-related elective courses to help you get a head start on your passion and career.
- 2Attend a technical or culinary school. A technical or culinary school can help you improve your craft, learn more techniques, and to find your niche as a baker. These programs typically last from 1 to 2 years and they will give you an education in nutrition, health, and mathematics, among other relevant subjects. If this sounds like the best path for you, look into programs in your area that offer a reasonable financial package and take your studies seriously.
- You shouldn’t look at this experience as slowing you down from being a real baker. You can even begin working as an apprentice or trainee in your area while being in school, if you can make the time commitment for both.
- If you want to be a high end pastry chef, for example, then you should get trained at the best program you can afford. This kind of work is highly specialized and extra training will give you the edge you need to get noticed and hired.
- 3Apply to be an apprentice or trainee in your area. You can be a trainee at a local store or supermarket, where you’ll learn more basic cooking skills, like how to bake a variety of cookies, or you can become an apprentice at an artisan bakery, where you’ll learn more complicated skills, like how to bake cakes. This training typically takes 1-3 years, and you may be able to find an apprenticeship for aspiring bakers at a bakery in your area. Of course, it always helps to have some connections, or to have worked at a bakery or local store in some capacity so you have a leg up when looking for work as a baker.
- It’s common for bakers to start out as an apprentice or a trainee in a bakery or grocery store, working on learning the basics of baking, icing, and decorating.
- As you work as an apprentice or trainee, you’ll also learn topics such as basic sanitation procedures and nutrition.
- If you begin your training or apprenticeship in a manufacturing facility, then you will also learn how to operate industrial-sized blending and mixing machines for producing baked goods.
- You can also look into becoming a baker’s assistant if you have the experience and determination to do so.
- 4Choose a specialty. Though you don’t need to make this decision as soon as you begin your training or apprenticeship, it helps to have an idea of the type of baking you’re most interested in. You can be an in-store, plant, or craft baker. Being a craft baker requires the most skill, and you can also work your way up to becoming successful in this field by starting off at a store or a plant. Here’s what else you should know about choosing what type of baker you want to be:
- Plant or commercial bakers most often work in manufacturing facilities that make baked goods at high speeds. If you choose this route, you’ll need to learn to use high-volume industrial machines, ovens, and conveyors, and you must carefully follow instructions and schedules. There’s definitely less room for creativity in commercial baking than in craft baking.
- In store or retail bakers most commonly work in specialty shops, bakeries, or grocery stores. They produce a smaller volume of baked goods for people to buy or to eat directly in the store. They may even take orders from customer, prepare special-order goods, and, depending on where they work, they may even serve the customers themselves.
- Some retail bakers even own their own shops. In this case, they’ll need to not only make a variety of breads, pastries, pies, and cupcakes, but they’ll also have to hire, train, and supervise staff, as well as budget their supplies, set their prices, and manage daily production.
- 5Consider getting certified. Though you don’t have to get certified to become a true baker, certification can help show that you have the knowledge and skills to work at a retail baking establishment. It can help you catch the attention of bakeries where you want to work, and it can help you stand out from the rest of the candidates. There are different areas of specialization that you can get certified in, which include management, retail sales, baking sanitation, and staff training. To become certified, you must meet a series of requirements, which are based on both your experience and your education, before taking an exam to prove your competence.
- There are different levels of certification based on your level of experience. For example, to be a certified journey baker, you don’t need any formal education, but you do need 1 year of work experience. To be a certified baker, you need to have 4 years of work experience, and to call yourself a certified master baker, you’ll need 8 years of work experience, along with 30 hours of professional development training and 30 hours of sanitation coursework.
Part 2 Possessing the Qualities
- 1Be detail-oriented. Being detail-oriented is an incredibly important part of the job, even if you’re working as a commercial baker. You’ll need to closely monitor your baked goods to make sure that they don’t burn while being cooked to perfection. If you bake cupcakes or cakes, then you’ll need to have an eye for detail in order to decorate those cakes and cupcakes to perfection. You’ll also need an eye for detail in order to follow recipes and cooking instructions to perfection, or to tweak those recipes thoughtfully if you’re trying out something slightly different.
- You’ll also need an eye for detail if you’re taking orders from customers so you know exactly what they want.
- 2Be creative. Though you may think that creativity may be the last skill you need when it comes to being a baker, in fact, you may need to use your creative faculties to succeed in your career. If you work as a craft baker and create your own recipes, you may need your creativity to try something different, so you can keep your customers interested in your goods. You may also need your creativity if you’re missing a certain ingredient or two while still needing to cook a certain baked good or pastry, or if you want to fix a recipe where something has already gone wrong. Sometimes, the most important part of your job will lie in improvising, and you’ll need your creativity to make things work.
- Of course, if you don’t work for yourself, you shouldn’t spend all day experimenting, or you’ll have an unhappy boss and many confused customers. However, if you have the means and the green light, then being creative can lead to some of your best discoveries.
- 3Have strong people skills. You may think that bakers work in isolation, perfecting their craft as they make delicious treats. However, people skills are actually vital for most bakers. If you work in a retail store where you have to interact with customers, then you’ll need to have people skills in order to talk to customers, take their orders, and keep them happy with your store and your products. As you move further along in your career, you may have people working under you or you may even own your own bakery. If that’s the case, then you’ll definitely need those people skills in order to train, or even to supervise or hire your employees.
- Even if you don’t have anyone working under you, it’s likely that you’ll be baking along with several other bakers. Being able to get along with your coworkers will make for a more pleasant work environment, and will make your work easier and more enjoyable.
- 4Have strong basic math skills. Having a strong grasp of basic math is essential to being a great baker because you’ll need to understand math, especially fractions, in order to mix recipes, weigh your ingredients, or adjust your recipes to fit a given quantity. If you didn’t get formal math training in a high school or certification program, then it’s important to brush up on basic math on your own. Having these skills can make or break a recipe, and you don’t want to end up ruining a batch of croissants because you didn’t know how to multiply fractions.
- If you were never an ace at math, don’t worry about it. You don’t need to learn calculus or trigonometry to make delicious baked goods. You should, however, learn how to add, subtract, or multiply numbers with ease.
Part 3 Going on the Job
- 1Wake up early. Though many bakers typically work a 40-hour workweek, they don’t normally work the 9-5 shift. In fact, many of them get up as early as two o’clock in the morning in order to prepare their baked goods for the morning shift. They’ll need to be morning people in order to get the job done, and sleeping in or getting tired in the morning is not an option, because this will be the most important time of your day. If you want to be a baker, then you have to be prepared to get up early to start preparing your recipes, mixing your ingredients, and making sure that your baked goods are cooked to perfection.
- The good news is, since your working day will start early, it will tend to wrap up earlier than the evening. Some bakers are done working by the early or late afternoon.
- 2Complete your daily tasks. Being a baker is about more than just cooking. When you go on the job, you will be required to complete a number of tasks, which will vary a bit depending on the type of baker you are and your place of employment. However, many aspects of the job are true for any baker. Here are some of the things you’ll be expected to do:
- Prepare your equipment for baking
- Weigh and measure ingredients for cooking
- Combine the ingredients in mixers or blenders
- Knead, roll, cut, and shape your dough
- Place the shaped dough on sheets, molds, or pans
- Set the oven temperature
- Place your items in grills or ovens
- Observe your goods as they cook
- Apply toppings, icing, or glaze when your goods have cooked
- 3Perform well under pressure. Baking is very time-sensitive, both in managing the time it takes to make each baked good, and in delivering your products to customers in a timely manner. Many bakers are often under pressure to create delicious goods while also producing them rapidly, especially when they have a large customer base. In order to succeed as a baker, you’ll have to be able to perform well in a time crunch.
- One way to make it easier for yourself to perform well in a time crunch is to make sure that your work station and recipe information are organized. That way, you won’t waste time looking for something you misplaced.
- Bakers have a higher rate of injuries than people in other professions because of the heavy and often hot equipment that they work with. You’ll need to wear protective clothing and keep your cool while being on the job in order to stay safe. You can let a time crunch affect your safety.
- 4Stay physically fit. In order to be a baker, you must have both physical strength and stamina. You’ll need strength in order to carry the ingredients and equipment you’ll be using, such as heavy bags of flour, large baking equipment, and cooked baked goods. You’ll also need to have physical stamina because most bakers rarely sit down. You’ll spend most of the day on your feet while you prepare recipes, package your goods, check on your goods while they’re baking, or when you monitor your employees or chat with customers.
- Being physically fit is an important part of the job. It’s important that you get your exercise and eat well to stay prepared for the daily rigors of the job.
- 5Be prepared for a unique schedule. In addition to waking up early, many bakers have a work schedule that is far from typical. Because baked goods are high in demand during holidays, many bakers will be expected to work on Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, or other holidays when people typically order more baked goods. They may also be required to work more on weekends, since bakeries are often at their most busy during these times. If they work at a commercial bakery that bakes continuously, then they may be required to work late in the evenings and on weekends. | http://75-3-247-200.lightspeed.sntcca.sbcglobal.net:81/en-wikihow/A/pages/become-a-baker.html |
William Edmonson’s decorated cakes were legendary about town, but none compared to the large fruitcake displayed in the bakery’s front window at Christmas 1872.
Fruitcake: Do you love it or hate it?
Its heyday has passed, but this sweet bakery was once a staple in Christmas traditions across Europe and North America.
When the Romans were trying to conquer Britain, they brought this ancient version of an energy bar to support their soldiers.
If you don’t like the modern version of the Christmas fruit cake, you may want to increase the original recipe. The Roman fruit cake was barley, raisins, nuts, honey and a liberal splash of wine. When the Romans left, their idea of the cake remained and changed over time to what we see today.
Another good feature of this cake, which is not important today, is its exceptional shelf life. All those sugary, boozy ingredients made great preserves in the days before refrigeration.
So how did fruitcake become a Christmas thing? After the church reforms that swept across Britain and Europe in the 1500s, an era of austerity entered, and frivolous things like cake were largely abandoned. Slowly, sweet products became acceptable in certain celebrations and in a way fruitcake became associated with Christmas.
Of course, this traditional food made its way to North America with the arrival of European immigrants. One such newcomer was William Edmanson, a baker from Yorkshire, England.
Edmanson was born in 1830 and traveled to Canada by sailing ship, a six-week journey, in 1855. He brought his wife and three children to Woodstock, Ontario.
Within a decade, the family had grown to five more children and the whole group relocated to nearby Bradford. William Edmanson soon became the operator of a successful bakery there.
In the 1870s, that unwelcome visitor known as fire made frequent appearances in Barrie. Block by block burned until one of the original business buildings remained. Bradford suffered the same fate in May 1871 when its entire business section burned down, as did most of the houses in the community.
Edmanson’s 1916 obituary mentions that it was this misfortune that led the baker to move his family and business to Barrie. The ad did not mention how the Bradford fire started, but more details can be found in an account published in the magazine Northern Progress May 25, 1871.
“This morning around seven, the men who work at the Edmanson bakery on Holland street, filled the oven with fuel, preparing to start the hot day’s work, and went to breakfast. About half an hour after they left, they saw smoke and flames coming out of the building, and they sounded the alarm.”
By the spring of 1872, William Edmanson had opened the Edmanson & Son Confectionary Establishment on Dunlop Street. His first store was on the north side of the street between Five Points and Owen Street.
Edmanson moved before the 1875 fire that destroyed the entire block. The bakery later operated out of the fireproof “Sheriff’s Brick Block”, otherwise known as the McConkey Building, at 86-88 Dunlop St. E.
The business eventually expanded to include biscuit manufacturing, groceries, restaurant facilities and event catering.
William Edmonson’s decorated cakes were legendary about town, but none compared to the large fruitcake displayed in the bakery’s window at Christmas 1872.
“Men. Edmanson & Son are putting on the best ice cake show we’ve ever seen in this latitude. The father of cakes, as Mr. Edmanson calls it, is a magnificent six-story cake, three meters high and surrounded by a beautiful basket of artificial flowers in the frosting process. The cake measures six feet in circumference at its base and weighs 120 pounds. He is so beautifully raised that he would be sorry if they put a knife in.’
The Northern Progress The December 19, 1872 article said smaller cakes of the same style sold for seventy-five cents. However, the “king of them all” would cost roughly fifty dollars, which translates to twelve hundred dollars in today’s currency. Now, that’s fruitcake!
Each week, the Barrie Historical Archives provides BarrieToday readers with a glimpse into the city’s past. This special column features photos and stories from years past and is sure to appeal to the historian in all of us. | https://activeapk.com/remember-this-fruit-cake-and-the-english-baker/ |
This building was built in 1835 to supply bread for the village since most homes did not have bake ovens. It takes several hours to get the bake oven to heat. A fire is started in the oven and the heat is absorbed into the brick. When the oven reaches about 500 degrees fahrenheit the coals are raked out through a metal door near the front of the oven. The bread is then added to the oven and bakes with the radiant heat. As the temperature falls, cakes and pies could also have been baked. At the coolest temperature fruit could have been dried. It is unknown whether there was a full time baker or if the bakery was communally run.
It also served as a residence for the various Boy Scout troops during the Camp Burton era of the 1920s. They carved their initials on the third floor door.
Today all of the retail items sold in the Bakery are made off site by local bakers. During some special events hearth cooking demonstrations may be done. | https://www.youraudiotour.com/tours/639/stops/2614 |
After graduating from business school in 2007, Jenna worked in marketing, before she rediscovered her childhood passion for baking. She began making cakes and other goodies for friends and family before she decided to leave the business world and begin working in a small bakery. While working at the bakery, she signed up for the Baking and Pastry Arts program at George Brown College. After graduating with honours in 2011, Jenna continued to work in a bakery, before deciding to open up her own shop! Her desire for business but passion for baking is what The Investment Baker is all about!
Fill out the form below or call or email us today! | http://www.theinvestmentbaker.ca/about-us--ordering.html |
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Assistant Baker - PAK'nSAVE Northlands
Do you have a passion for baking? If so we have the job for you!
Northlands PAK’nSAVE is looking for an Assistant Baker to join our Bakery team. This is a great opportunity to develop your bakery skills in a fast paced, supportive environment.
Reporting to the Bakery Manager you will be responsible for helping to ensure the department runs smoothly and all appropriate targets are met or exceeded. Key tasks for the role will include, icing and creaming, packing the bread and cakes, making sure the department is merchandised to the desired standards, general housekeeping duties and dealing with customer enquiries. For the right candidate, this role also has the potential to lead to a Bakery Apprenticeship.
The right candidate will:
- Have a passion for baking and ideally a bakery qualification (this is not essential but advantageous)
- Have a high degree of self-motivation and initiative
- Have high presentation standards
- Enjoy working both as part of a team and independently
- Be physically fit – some heavy lifting is involved
You will also need to have an understanding of Food Safety requirements and importance of traceability, cleaning and compliance issues.
This role is full time Sunday – Thursday 8.30 – 5pm.
If you are looking for an opportunity to join a team that focuses on providing great service, advancing your skills, and working in a fun and supportive team environment then we would like to hear from you.
Applicants must have the legal right to work in New Zealand to be considered.
Applications close 24 May 2021. | https://foodstuffs.careercentre.net.nz/job/assistant-baker-paknsave-northlands/christchurch/36326 |
Those are the words Glenda Moore uses to describe her daily life. The emotions that whirl inside her while countless volunteers traipse through her home each day are vast. In fact, during the course of this interview there were no less than four, and at times eight, volunteers in her home.
“Always vulnerable.”
Allowing oneself to have “no shame” and be “always vulnerable” are necessary traits for her to have in order to fulfill the higher calling placed on her life.
It was a warm, early-December day when I met with Glenda and some of her volunteers. Each one was bustling around the house with a specific task. One was sweeping and mopping, one organizing kitchen cabinets, two braiding edge pieces for soon-to-bake pies, and still another baking those pies.
Each one smiled graciously as they worked and described their place in this bakery. You see, Kind House Ukraine Bakery is uniquely different. “This bakery is not me – it is a huge
community effort – it is bigger than all of us,” Glenda says. This sentiment is tangibly felt the moment you walk in her front door.
After returning home from a trip to Ukraine in 2013 with Eastern European Missions, Glenda’s heart was broken. Glenda not only met orphan after orphan, but also the young Ukrainian men and women who serve the orphans by investing in their lives and helping them navigate life into adulthood. With over 100,000 orphans in Ukraine, much help is needed.
Many of these children and teens are considered “social orphans.” They remain in touch with their families, seeing them on weekends and holidays, when possible, yet on weekdays they live in orphanages in order to be fed and educated. Sadly, many of these children will repeat this pattern when they become adults. Additionally, it is estimated that greater than 80% of these orphans will prostitute, sell drugs, be imprisoned, or die before reaching the age of 25.
At the end of 2013, the Russo-Ukraine war began. Glenda was already in love with Ukraine and its people, but the war “sealed the deal.” She knew that the call to help Ukraine would be for the rest of her days.
Dmitry Pashchenko, the co-founder of Kind House, lives in one of the cities that was involved heavily in the war. He daily wrote Glenda sharing stories of buildings and lives being destroyed. It was during these moments when Glenda began to bake. She began by baking cinnamon rolls. The money she made from selling these went to Ukraine each month. Initially, baking started with a couple of Saturdays a month, then every weekend, then early each morning before heading off to work as a teacher or assistant principal, until she was baking daily from 4:00 am – 6:00 am and 5:30 pm- 10:00 pm, before and after her full-time job.
When she first began baking, it did not come easy, but then Glenda began to pray and ask God to use her baked goods to help save the people of Ukraine. As she continued in steadfast prayer, the bakery began to grow. And that growth continued as the community began to rally around her and show their support. In fact, the bakery grew so much that in 2020 Glenda left Amarillo Independent School District to work full time for the bakery. At Kind House, Glenda bakes cakes, along with many more items, and those cakes save lives. Kind House is operated with one full-time employee and over 50 volunteers. Someone in the neighborhood picks up flour and sugar and prepares cake mixes. Another picks up those
cake mixes and bakes cakes to be frozen until needed. There are church youth groups, college organizations, and many other groups who help in a variety of ways. Then there is Shona Rose and her mother Donna; they bake bread – daily. And still others who volunteer their time to work with social media, print media, and formatting the menu. It is a well-oiled machine.
Yet, this machine is different than most. When pulling up in front of this cottage-industry bakery, one will find several large baker’s racks on the front porch. Each morning the racks are lined with warm cinnamon rolls or fresh baked bread, or perhaps a cake that was ordered for a special occasion. It, too, will find its home on the racks with a name attached.
At Kind House, there are no prices for baked goods. There are no suggested dollar amounts. Each customer is encouraged to donate whatever they would like for their baked goods. A check or cash can be left in a safe by the door or there is a link to pay by card through the Kind House site. And with over 7,000 social media followers, there is sure to be an empty baker’s rack at the end of each day. However, one might also find the baker’s racks loaded
with “porch presents.” These so-called porch presents are contributions left daily, such as flour, sugar, evaporated milk, and other necessary baking items.
Over 98% of the items made at Kind House come from these donated ingredients. Baking cakes and filling a baker’s rack requires much more than just Glenda’s dedication though. Watching Glenda’s face beam as she introduced her mom was a highlight of my time spent with her. Her mother, Glenda “Sue” Hobson, who has since passed away, is, recalled Glenda, “why I am who I am today.” The special bond the two shared was very apparent. To “give and
serve others is our job,” she stated as she gave her mom a hug.
Then there is Glenda’s husband, Cody. He daily helps break things down and return their home to normal, giving his time sacrificially until the day Kind House has a separate store-front location. Daughters Faith, 26, and Hope, 18, have given much as well. The love this family
has for others is very apparent, which is what makes the focus of Kind House so understandable.
The goal of this not-for-profit bakery is to help people fall in love with helping others – to
love neighbors, and care for the elderly and orphans. Funds are currently being raised to build a simple storefront nestled close to a neighborhood. To help fulfill that mission will require the acts of many. Order baked goods from Kind House. Stop by for a cinnamon roll on your way to work. Volunteer to bake a pie or cake. Leave a bag of flour on the porch rack. Become a monthly financial donor. Perhaps, come again for another cinnamon roll! | https://www.theupbeatreporter.com/post/kind-bakery |
JonJohn's Bakery is a family-owned artisan bakery whose specialty deserts may be purchased at the Westside Farmers' Market, the South Wedge Farmers Market, the Brighton Farmers Market, the University Farmers Market, and Boulder Coffee Co.. Products include oatmeal craisin cookies, locally famous chocolate peanut butter balls, chocolate cakes, fresh local fruit pies and cobblers, as well as some less obvious items like fresh squeezed lemonade, sweet potato tarts, and corn bread.
Like many Market vendors, their selection changes weekly. Please call ahead to order. They also offer delivery. Jonathan and John are two people.
Comments: | https://rocwiki.org/JonJohn%27s_Bakery_and_Specialty_Foods |
The case of “Julie” from Carlisle in the United Kingdom is an intriguing one not only because it unfolded over many years, but because it appears to straddle the line between apparent reptilian entities and paranormal activity.
From an apparent encounter with a reptilian entity to a possible case of alien abduction, to regularly seeing ghostly manifestations and even shadow people, the experiences of Julie are indeed some of the most remarkable and thought-provoking on record.
Just what happened to Julie, and why, over a two-decade timespan remains unknown. Her encounters and experiences, though, made provide large missing pieces of the puzzle that will show what some researchers suggest is a clear connection between UFO and alien encounters and the paranormal.
The case comes to us from the research files of Dave Hodrien of the Birmingham UFO Group. He saw a report from the witness on social media and contacted her in January 2022. He would interview her at length over the period of several weeks.
Contents
- 1 A Suddenly Appearing Reptilian Arm!
- 2 Many Matching Details To Other Reptilian Encounters
- 3 Strange Paranormal Incidents Increase
- 4 The Many Experiences Of Steve
- 5 Bizarre Experiences At The Nursing Home
- 6 Further Unsettling Encounters As A Young Woman
- 7 Experiences Still Continue Today
- 8 Just What Did Julie And Her Family Encounter?
A Suddenly Appearing Reptilian Arm!
It would appear events began at some point in 2000 when Julie (not her real name) was only 12 years old. Julie was at home in her bedroom at around 9 pm. As usual, she was reading a book, something she often did until quite late into the night, partly because she struggled to sleep, and partly because she had a fear of the dark and would often leave the light on in her room.
On this particular evening, as she was lying on her bed, she noticed a sudden movement at the bottom of the bed and instinctively peered over the top of her book. To her shock and horror, from the corner of the bed came a black, scaly arm with claws with white talons where the hand should have been. In fact, she noticed that there was no actual wrist between this claw and the arm, which was much more muscular than a human arm.
She stared at the arm for a moment longer, contemplating whether she was imagining it. However, she knew she wasn’t and she knew whatever it was, it was very real. What’s more, although she didn’t dare look, she had the impression that the creature the arm belonged to was at the foot of her bed.
The arm continued to move across the bed moving left to right. Then, right before her eyes, it simply vanished. She remained still, not daring to move in case the strange arm returned. After several moments, convinced had indeed gone, she let out a breath of sir. Although the arm had startled her, she was not frightened. In fact, she simply went back to reading her book as if nothing had happened. She estimated the entire episode had lasted no longer than seven seconds.
In the days that followed, however, Julie began to sense an increasing feeling that there was a strange presence outside her room – a presence that could announce itself at any moment. This feeling became so strong that she even repositioned her bed so that she faced the door.
Many Matching Details To Other Reptilian Encounters
Hodrien highlighted some intriguing details of the encounter. For example, after speaking to her at length about the encounter it was his impression that she truly did see something and that it wasn’t a case of her simply imagining it. As he points out, this was not a “fleeting glimpse”, she stared at the arm clearly for several seconds.
He also highlights how the seemingly bizarre positioning of the reptilian matches other similar accounts. For example, some people who have reported similar encounters often state that these strange entities are often crouched or laid down, reaching upwards to the witness. They often, as Hodrien writes, “position themselves in unusual ways”.
Even the color of the reptilians with black, scaly skin has been reported more than we might think, just like in this case (although many reports state the skin to be green or a bizarre off-white color).
There is also the possibility that Julie can’t remember the entire incident – in fact, she may actually recall very little of it. In short, it is possible that what she recalled was the end of a reptilian abduction encounter. The fact that she was surprisingly calm despite the truly surreal nature of the incident perhaps also suggests this. What’s more, many people who experience repeated abductions and strange encounters do so from an early age, similar to Julie.
Hodrien points out that the constant feeling that something was waiting outside her room about to enter may have been much more than a feeling. It could have been repressed memories of the encounter – when the reptilian entity entered her room.
Whatever the truth of the matter, this was just the first of many years of strange encounters and experiences.
Strange Paranormal Incidents Increase
The following year in 2001 Julie began experiencing many strange episodes that resonate with typically paranormal encounters, although they are also details that show up in cases of repeated alien abduction.
For example, Julie began hearing strange footsteps in various parts of the house, even though there was clearly no one there. Doors would often open of their own accord and she would often hear loud, clattering noises. On one occasion, while she was looking straight at it, a photo frame turned itself around as if being guided by an invisible hand. Many poltergeist cases have similar details.
Even more alarming, she would often see shadowy figures out of the corner of her eye. However, by the time she had turned around, there was nothing there. What’s more, these shadowy figures often appeared to be extraordinarily tall – much like many reptilians are reported to be.
The more time went on, the more other people would also witness these strange incidents. Furthermore, they appeared not to be limited to the house itself. On one occasion when her mother – who worked at a nursing home – could not find childcare for Julie and her brother, Steve, she was forced to take her children to work with her. She would make a bed for them on the staff sofa and then go about her duties.
However, in the middle of the night, Julie awoke to the sound of her mother comforting her crying brother. When she asked what had happened, she was told that her brother had woken up to see the tube of a hoover that was in the room moving by itself. More than scared by what he was seeing he screamed out for his mother. When she entered the room, she too saw the hoover tube moving. She walked over to it and pushed the hoover with her foot, at which point it lost its animation and the tube fell to the ground.
Another bizarre incident around the same time had an unsettling connection to the nursing home. One of the residents with who both Julie and her brother were familiar – Dorothy – had passed away. However, several days later, while on his way to use the bathroom, Steve claimed to have seen Dorothy sitting at their dining room table in the kitchen.
Following this, Julie also began seeing strange moving entities in the kitchen. So much so, that she became afraid to walk into the room, or even past it.
These were just several of the strange incidents witnessed by Julie and Steve. She would inform Hodrien of many more encounters.
The Many Experiences Of Steve
Julie would hand over a long text exchange between her and her brother regarding some of the incidents they experienced over the years of their childhood. He would recall that he used to see his late grandfather often in the house. Even more alarming, he would often see a large, shadowy creature. He couldn’t recall precisely what it looked at, but he remembered that it was “huge” and wore a “hat or a hood”. He would also hear strange footsteps around the house, particularly on the stairs as if people were running up and down them. He even claimed to have seen the black, clawed arm that Julie had seen.
Even more intriguing, Steve would recall an experience their father had that Julie had previously been unaware of. He recalled how he had awoken one morning to her their father speaking to someone downstairs. After around 10 minutes when the conversation had ended, Steve decided to make his way downstairs. When he did so, his father looked at him strangely. He would ask his son why he was there, claiming he had only just had a 20-minute conversation with him.
This is an interesting account, not least as many researchers suggest that reptilian creatures have the ability to shapeshift and, essentially, take on the form of other people. Had this been the case here, and might that same shapeshifting reptilian be responsible for the sightings of Dorothy and the children’s grandfather?
Steve would recall another bizarre and unsettling incident that occurred one evening while their father sat at the home computer, and he was watching television from the sofa. He claimed that he, at first believed their father was throwing items at him to annoy him, and also started whispering his name. When Steve told him to stop it, their father had no idea what he was talking about. Steve didn’t believe him at first. However, when their father suddenly turned white with fright, he realized he too had heard the strange voice.
Bizarre Experiences At The Nursing Home
What is perhaps interesting, though, is that despite the strange events that happened outside of the home, the house itself would appear to be at least a partial key to unlocking the reason behind these strange events.
Julie recalled that when she worked in one of the local pubs, she learned from someone who used to live there years before, that his brother was one of the “thalidomide babies” and had sadly passed away in the house. What’s more, there was always “strange goings-on” during their time living there.
She also recalled another friend, Timothy, whose mother used to live in the property. She too experienced a string of bizarre activities and happenings. She too saw a strange, shadowy entity in the bedroom one evening. Whatever it was, she didn’t dare get a clear look at it, but she knew it simply watched her for a considerable amount of time.
Julie and Steve also recalled further strange incidents involving a family friend – Rob – who had recently died. In the weeks that followed, Julie began to have strange dreams of Rob walking into her room and sitting on her bed. The more she had these dreams, the more Julie began to contemplate if they were more than that.
She would ask Steve to sit in her room one evening while she slept to see if he too saw the ghostly form of their friend. Much to his amazement, he did, although he didn’t feel scared and just went back to the computer.
Things would take an even stranger and more ominous turn for Julie in the summer of 2002. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she suddenly began to have very unsettling but very real dreams. And what’s more, they always involved two young girls. Often, the girls would be in what appeared to be a warehouse, tied to a radiator. Other times she would have horrific dreams where the girls were on fire.
When she spoke to her mother about the dreams, she began to make a potential connection to the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, who at the time were still missing. It is important to note that this is pure speculation on Julie’s mother’s part and that Julie was fully aware of the girls’ disappearance at the time. Nevertheless, given the other strange goings-on, it is worth mentioning.
Further Unsettling Encounters As A Young Woman
By the time Julie was a young woman, she worked at a local hospital as a senior staff nurse. And the strange activity would follow her there on the night in 2016. Julie would recall that one of the patients at the hospital had died that night. When family members who had been at the bedside had left, at around 2 am, Julie and another nurse went about wrapping the body for collection to the morgue.
As they were doing so Julie happened to glance up at the window. To her horror, in the reflection, she could see a tall shadowy figure moving behind her from one side to the other. She further noticed a “shuffling sound” coming from the floor as if something was physically moving.
Instinctively, Julie moved back in shock. When she did so, the other nurse looked in her direction. The look on her face told Julie that she too could see the shadowy form. Both of them left what they were doing and ran out of the room.
They remained in the corridor for around 15 minutes before returning to the room. Much to their relief, when they did so, the ghostly presence was gone. They cautiously finished preparing the body and left the room in order to fill out the necessary paperwork. When they went to do so, though, they realized that the form they needed had been left in the room with the deceased patient in their rush to get away.
Julie returned to retrieve it. When she arrived in the room, she was stunned to find that the wrapping around the patient’s body had been ripped away leaving the dead man’s head fully exposed.
Although both nurses were beyond shocked and frightened by the events, they proceeded to rewrap the body and then left the room. No further incidents occurred, at least that night.
Experiences Still Continue Today
Much more recently in 2021, Julie encountered another truly bizarre encounter while performing her duties at work. On this particular evening, at about 1 am, she was transferring a patient from one ward to another. As she was doing so, however, she suddenly noticed the shadowy form of a young woman that appeared to have very blond hair (relative to her black form). This form was moving toward a sink in the room.
To begin with, she thought it was patient with a similar appearance who would often leave her bed at night. She turned around expecting to see her and to escort her back to her bed. However, to her utter shock, there was no one there. She spun her head back around and saw the faces of the other nurses. They too had clearly seen the shadowy figure also.
The nurses left the ward they were on, confused as to what they had just witnessed. Each of the other nurses recognized the similarity to the patient Julie initially thought she had seen. Realizing that it was impossible for the patient to have been there are disappeared, they began to contemplate whether the patient might have passed away and they had witnessed her spirit. However, a quick check confirmed this not to have been the case.
Just what it was the three nurses witnessed that evening remains unknown. Might this have been another case of whatever potential shapeshifting entity that has plagued Julie throughout her life taking the form of someone she would know?
Just What Did Julie And Her Family Encounter?
So, just what did Julie, as well as her brother and several work colleagues, experience over a 20-year period? That they – particularly Julie – were at the center of something truly strange is without a doubt.
Might it be that Julie herself is some kind of conduit, one that attracts these otherworldly entities to her and those around her? Might that be why other people sometimes witnessed these strange entities also?
Many of the details of Julie’s accounts appear very much like those of a typical poltergeist encounter. The appearance of shadowy figures, the strange banging, photos, and other objects moving by themselves, as well as doors opening and closing of their own accord. Is this merely a straightforward poltergeist case?
It would appear not. Firstly, there were several encounters that took place outside of the family home. And while this is not unheard of in poltergeist cases, it is rare. Furthermore, many other families also experienced strange activity in the house. And again, while this does happen with cases of haunted houses, many poltergeist cases tend to revolve around one person, admittedly often a child or teenager.
Or might many of these incidents be connected to alien abduction, much like the first one when she was a young child? It would be interesting to note whether or not there had been other occasions of missing time similar to the account of the reptilian arm? Or perhaps this reptilian abduction – if that was indeed what it was – was a one-off occurrence, but one that, intentionally or not, have Julie the ability to see creatures and entities that most of us can’t?
Perhaps the house, for reasons unknown, might be the catalyst, almost as if it contains some kind of portal or gateway that allows this torrent of paranormal entities into our world? This might possibly explain the bizarre mixture of alien abduction and poltergeist activity.
As always, the questions outnumber the answers. Whether these encounters continue and whether Julie and those who might investigate them gain a better understanding of why they are happening remains to be seen.
The short video below looks at the reptilian conspiracy a little further.
ReferencesReferences
|↑1||Carlisle Contact Case – Reptilian Visitation, Paranormal Activity, Psychic Abilities, Birmingham UFO Group https://www.bufog.com/post/carlisle-contact-case-reptilian-visitation-paranormal-activity-psychic-abilities|
Fact Checking/Disclaimer
The stories, accounts, and discussions in this article may go against currently accepted science and common beliefs. The details included in the article are based on the reports, accounts and documentation available as provided by witnesses and publications - sources/references are published above.
We do not aim to prove nor disprove any of the theories, cases, or reports. You should read this article with an open mind and come to a conclusion yourself. Our motto always is, "you make up your own mind". Read more about how we fact-check content here.
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You may republish short quotes from this article with a reference back to the original UFO Insight article here as the source. You may not republish the article in its entirety. | https://www.ufoinsight.com/aliens/reptilians/encounters-of-julie |
Pirates of the Caribbean casting: Is Davy Jones still alive? ‘Through his son’
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN will continue with another film despite questions about the final cast - but is the character Davy Jones still alive in the franchise?
Johnny Depp discusses Pirates of the Caribbean in 2017
Pirates of the Caribbean is a film franchise which has been under much scrutiny of late. There have been questions about whether the main character, Captain Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp, will make his return. But another question plaguing fans is whether the enemy Davy Jones is still alive.
Fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise will remember there was a moment at the end of the fifth film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, where Davy Jones made a terrifying return.
Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann are reunited in bed together, when a horrific form seems to enter their room.
Will sees Davy’s arm looking to strike them, but as he awakens the room is empty, so Will believes it was a nightmare.
However, Davy has left his signature mark as barnacles and seawater are on the floor, suggesting he is still alive and kicking, despite being apparently dead.
READ MORE: Motley Crue members: How many band members have been in Motley Crue?
Pirates of the Caribbean - is Davy Jones alive?
At the end of At World’s End, it looked as though Davy died as he fell into a powerful whirlpool, while Captain Jack and Will pierced his heart as he fell.
This would suggest he did die, however his presence at the end of the film has most fans convinced he is definitely still alive.
But one theory suggests he may not be alive in the way we first knew him, and it could be he lives through a son.
In the third film, At World’s End, some of Davy’s past is shown and makes clear why he cut out his heart and buried it in the Dead Man’s Chest.
It is shown how Davy, then a human, fell in love with sea goddess Calypso, and vowed to meet her every 10 years after completing his task of guiding souls to the next world.
However, on one occasion she failed to appear, and Davy was cursed to become a monster after he neglected his duties.
Tia Dalma, Calypso’s human form, told this story, as Davy brought up forces against her and trapped her that way forever.
One theory from some fans is that perhaps Davy and Calypso had a child, meaning this could be the spawn of Davy seeking revenge on the man who killed his father.
READ MORE
However, Will has gone through a great deal of torment throughout the films, being under curses of his own which he has been forced to bear.
Because he pierced Davy’s heart and his own heart was placed in the Dead Man’s Chest, he was forced to captain The Flying Dutchman and ferry souls.
However, in Dead Man’s Chest, he is seen covered in barnacles and scales, showing how he is failing at his duties on the ship.
He meets with Elizabeth and their son, Henry, every 10 years, as was the deal with Calypso.
But the toll of being this ship’s captain, and being an immortal separated from his love, is incredibly difficult on him.
As a result, some have suggested it may be he is imagining the image of Davy, almost wishing to have him back so he may be set free from his task.
While none of these theories can be certain, the shadowy figure which appeared seems to have been made shadowy on purpose, so as to add an element of mystery to the upcoming film.
The sixth film in the series will hopefully give fans answers, if it definitely comes to the big screen. | https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/1395476/Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-casting-is-Davy-Jones-still-alive-son-evg |
Keith is the monster in the sixty-first Goosebumps book, I Live in Your Basement!.
History
I Live in Your Basement!
Keith is a monster with the ability to warp realities and transform into anything. Keith's goal was to make Marco his slave. But in the end, it turns out he is a normal human-like monster who wishes not to be seen by Marco.
Download and Die!
Keith appears in the second arc the Goosebumps comic series, Download and Die!. According to concept art, Keith would appear in both his human form and blob form.
Throughout the second and third issues of the miniseries, Keith exclusively appears in his human form, but he can be seen turning into a blob in one panel. Whenever he's talking to the main character, Mitra, a dark yellow substance can be seen oozing from Keith's mouth, which hints at his blob form.
General Information
Physical appearance
In his original form, Keith looks like a yellow blob of human organs connected by webs of purple veins. However, in other instances, he appears as a normal boy.
In concept art for the Goosebumps comic series, Keith's hair is black. In the actual series, Keith's hair is light blond. His eyes are a pale cyan.
Powers
He had the power to go into Marco's dreams and change his mind. | http://goosebumps.wikia.com/wiki/Keith |
Antique 18 carat gold ring , ca 1800 Grand Tour probably Italian. The very high quality of the three layered “agate” glass cameo is of Morpheus god of dreams.
Measurement of bezel: 27 x 25 mm
Ring size : H+1/2=US4+1/4
Morpheus is the Ancient Greek god of dreams who appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Morpheus has the ability to mimic any human form and appear in dreams. His true semblance is that of a winged daemon, imagery shared with many of his siblings. Robert Burton, in Anatomy of Melancholy, refers to Classical depictions of Morpheus, saying “Philostaratus paints (Morpheus) in a white and black coat, with a horn and ivory box full of dreams, of the same colours, to signify good and bad”. In myth, Morpheus was also said to send dreams through one of two gates, one of ivory, and the other of horn. Starting in the medieval period, the name Morpheus began to stand generally for the god of dreams or of sleep. | https://www.peterszuhay.com/ads/glass-cameo-ring-of-morpheus/ |
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor’s eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capasity for wonder.
We are all Gatsby to some extent; or, if we are not, then we have buried those dreams so deep within us that we don’t know they exist anymore.
Those who have learned not to expect too much–those who have stopped dreaming–have stopped trying so they are not disappointed when they fail. If they didn’t want it in the first place, then it doesn’t hurt as much.
But what about those of us who, like Gatsby, refuse to give up, even in the face of failure? Should we smile at the contempt in others’ eyes? Should we pretend we don’t see how they pity us? Even as we see the future receding before us, even as we see our hopes and dreams wash away like sandcastles with the tide, should we live the life we have and forget about the life we want?
This entry was posted in Must-Read Books, The Great Gatsby and tagged Great Gatsby, Literature, poetic prose. Bookmark the permalink. | https://paulinehawkins.com/2013/05/16/the-great-gatsby-chapter-9/ |
Where do I even begin? I guess I can start by introducing myself; My name is Vanessa, I'm an 18-year-old college student and I'm pretty sure I've inherited some sort of psychic ability.
Ever since I was a little girl, I would often come in contact with spirits and a lot of it has to do with my mother's side of the family- which is heavily involved with spirits and all things supernatural. My Aunt has a certain degree of psychic abilities: She is able to communicate with spirits through her dreams and this played into attracting the spirits I would see as a child. However, like most children, my ability to see the manifestation of spirits eventually diminished and I was left with only being able to sense a spirits' presence through the subtle differences in the environment and its energy. Although my ability to see spirits faded, I may have developed another ability: Precognitive dreaming.
Now, most people at least have had one precognitive dream in their lifetime and because it might be a little too common, it might not seem like anything too special but I've had these dreams ever since I was at least 10-years-old. Some of these dreams can predict major events happening, like getting into a car accident or it will predict something insignificant like a conversation or location I end up in. These dreams didn't start getting odd until I hit the age of 13; that's when a young guy started appearing in them. Now, this might not be too strange to others because random strangers appear in dreams all the time (either from people they've seen on the street or T.V./whatever) but to see this guy appear in every precognitive dream I've had since I was 13, is definitely a whole other level of strange. This guy is at least 18 or in his early 20's and he's been that age for as long as I've dreamt those precognitive dreams. He's Caucasian and has jet black hair, which he keeps slicked back and he's got these eccentric blue eyes. This dude looks like he literally came out of the 1950's, he looks like a total greaser and I have never met anybody or a seen a stranger who looks anything like this guy that decides to consistently appear in my precognitive dreams.
Although he appears in the dreams, I have yet to actually meet him and believe me, it is beyond confusing and frustrating to dream about someone you haven't met-especially if they're consistently in them. I know this isn't just some random image of a guy that's stuck in my brain because I've had dreams where I've talked to this guy and heard him answer back (I later stumbled upon out that his accent is similar to Brooklyn/Jersey kind and I've never heard that kind of accent until I researched it later on.) I've also have had dreams where I can feel him touching my arm or grabbing my hand and I've even had dreams where I can smell his cologne (I don't have a boyfriend and my brother doesn't wear cologne.)
So, this has left me to wonder if this guy I've been seeing in my dreams is someone I will meet in the future or if he's already dead and has somehow been able to manifest himself into my dreams. Either way, an answer to all of this would really help to put me at ease.
If anyone has any opinions, advice, or similar experiences-just let me know in the comments. I would really appreciate it! | https://www.psychic-experiences.com/real-psychic-story.php?story=13299 |
Summary/Abstract: The text explores the connection between Descartes’ life conversions and the reason why in the Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy he utilizes a confessional tone to his writing. Such an endeavour exposes a specific role of the mask under which the philosopher intends to present himself to the public for the first time. Although the mask is already mentioned in his Private thoughts, Descartes gives it a form of persona only after the discovery of cogito, as he is writing the Discourse. The mask of persona, conceived as a pure reason, allows him to confess his philosophical conversions as a paradigm of intellectual conversion of humanity, transforming his confession into a sermon. However, in the Meditations, Descartes takes a step further. His ability to utilize the mask, combined with his experience in dreams with a malicious demon and God, enable him to appear in this work as a multi-faced actor: as »I«, as a malicious genius and as a truthful God. Behind all three masks is evidently Descartes’ ratio, however it is important to recognize that the malicious genius is not only the mask the philosopher uses to hide the sins of the sceptical activity in which he involves the reader. On the basis of Descartes’ dreams, we can argue that there is one more malicious genius in the Meditations, this time a real one, standing opposite the meditating subject. This one is the embodiment of widely accepted opinions, prejudices and laziness of human intellect. | https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=91703 |
Josie Byrne's life is spiraling out of control. Her parents are divorcing, her boyfriend Nick has grown distant, and her physics teacher has it in for her. When she's betrayed by the two people she trusts most, Josie thinks things can't get worse.
Until she starts having dreams about a girl named Jo. Every night at the same time—3:59 a.m.
Jo's life is everything Josie wants: she's popular, her parents are happily married, and Nick adores her. It all seems real, but they're just dreams, right? Josie thinks so, until she wakes one night to a shadowy image of herself in the bedroom mirror – Jo.
Josie and Jo realize that they are doppelgängers living in parallel universes that overlap every twelve hours at exactly 3:59. Fascinated by Jo's perfect world, Josie jumps at the chance to jump through the portal and switch places for a day.
But Jo’s world is far from perfect. Not only is Nick not Jo's boyfriend, he hates her. Jo's mom is missing, possibly insane. And at night, shadowy creatures feed on human flesh.
By the end of the day, Josie is desperate to return to her own life. But there’s a problem: Jo has sealed the portal, trapping Josie in this dangerous world. Can she figure out a way home before it’s too late?
From master of suspense Gretchen McNeil comes a riveting and deliciously eerie story about the lives we wish we had – and how they just might kill you. (Goodreads)
I must admit... I have never read anything by Gretchen McNeil.
Gasp!
Hanging head in shame.
However, I am SUPER intrigued by her books.
They sound so amazingly creepy!
And it seems like they just get creepier and creepier.
I can't wait to check out 3:59, as well as McNeils other books!
What are you Waiting for this week??? | http://www.thereaderbee.com/2013/04/waiting-on-wednesday-102-359-by.html?showComment=1366200721289 |
Known Aliases: "Nightmare", "The Boogeyman" "The Shadow Man"
Age: Unknown, (speculated 350+ yrs)
Hometown:Unknown
Affiliation: Team Umbra
Contents
Background
The origins of the Darkrai known simply as Jet are clouded in mystery, even to himself. If one were to ask him, all he could honestly say is that he just appeared one day, born from brilliant flash of light much like other pokemon of his particular grouping. But from the moment that glowing cyan eye opened, the Darkrai knew one thing for certain - he was hungry.
Most of Jet's early life was spent trying to determine what it was in the world that successfully staved off his hunger and, much to his delight, he found that the dreams of the sleeping, particularly nightmares, were the most filling of meals. Having learned this, Jet spent most of following months innocently feeding on the dreams of unsuspecting sleepers, as was the case with most Darkrai. His actions were innocuous at best, but he soon found that it took more and more dreams to satisfy his hunger, and less time would pass before those hunger pangs roiled up inside him again.
Concerned, he was forced to feed more frequently, searching out more terrifying dreams to dine on. This was no easy task, and it often left him feeling actually sick to his stomach when he'd come up empty-handed. This desperation forced Jet to become more proactive in his hunting, resorting to secretly causing minor stressful situations for his targets that would leave them frustrated, stressed, or uneasy in order to enhance the potency of their nightmares. For a time, Jet was content with himself and the trouble he caused.
Some time later, Jet caught wind of a phenomenon called fusion, though all he took away from it was how it was said to improve a pokemon's natural abilities by sharing a body with a human. The idea initially disgusted the Darkrai, but his opinion changed when he thought of how he could use fusion as a means to create stronger nightmares to feast upon. Unsure of how to go about fusion with a human, Jet decided to test it on one of his more frequently-visited targets, an older man who was prone to bouts of sleepwalking at night.
As night crept over the land, Jet wormed his way into the man's dreams and waited for his time to strike. Much to his surprise, he had little difficulty fusing with the sleeper. The Darkrai turned parasite reveled in the control he had over his sleeping host and more importantly how much more powerful he felt. Returning the slumbering man to his bed, Jet left him, intent on finding a more long-term host to facilitate his feedings.
Many months passed, and Jet had refined his craft to something of an art. Realizing that he couldn't keep a permanently sleeping host, he went on to coerce willing targets to join with him, enticed by the 'promise' that they would be granted access to the Darkrai's abilities in exchange for a simple ride. What Jet had come to learn, but keep secret from his hosts, was that prolonged fusion with the parasitic Darkrai resulted in a rapid deterioration of one's mental state. Once a host's usefulness expired, Jet would simply leave them to wallow in their madness as he flew off to find another "ride."
Having spent so much time floating about within the minds of his hosts, Jet has learned that, while nightmares born of terror are tasty, a Darkrai can obtain a much more filling meal by going straight for the source of said dreams; negative emotion itself. So, as of recently, Jet has taken a more aggressive approach in his feedings with actively antagonizing populations and committing major criminal activities with the Kasei Underground tipping off the proverbial iceberg of "organized chaos." To this day, Jet still continues to feed his hunger and search for the perfect meal.
Beliefs
Jet concerns himself with his own hunger for fear and nightmares above all e lse. This isn't to suggest that this is his singular motivation; it simply means that maintaining control over it is paramount. The Darkrai-fusion truly believe s that those weaker or useless are meerly prey for him to feed upon. His ultimat e dream would be to leave the Kasei, no.. Leave the world in a state of peaceles s, nightmarish darkness so that he may feast on their fears.
Current Events
Jet had been devising creative ways to satisfy his hunger for fear, concocting schemes of varying involution to achieve this goal. Additionally, the Darkrai-fusion has been known to engage in various criminal activities with the Kasei Underground, resulting in numerous brushes with the authorities and occasional run-ins with his nemesis of sorts, Drake.
More recently, since the Typhoon Carracosta incident, many believe that Jet has fled Kasei altogether, considering no word has been heard from or mention made of the creature in criminal circles. However, many rumors have swirled, stating that Jet has some kind of shadowy connection to the organization known as Team Umbra.
In recent months, he made his affiliation with the organization known to the public and revealed himself to be the leader of the group. After a veritable swath of chaos and destruction, he was sealed away in the Dreamworld, doomed to slumber within his crystalline confines until he manages to break few from his prison, and begin a tour of unholy revenge.
Known Hosts
As a parasitic-fusion, Jet has acquired the services of two 'willing' hosts, which he's prone to switch with for his own purposes. Both hosts have two varying appearances, which Jet uses as his needs call for:
A. Normal State: In this state, the host looks completely unassuming, bearing no physical differentiation to suggest that he/she is under the control of the Darkrai aside from the occasional odd movement of the host's shadow. Also, in this state, Jet's abilities are limited, so he uses this form to move freely in public.
B. Full Possession: The form Jet prefers. Uninhibited both physically and mentally, the Darkrai-parasite is able to express the full extent of his shadow manipulation.
Iketani Kazuya- Weavile-fusion, Age: 23. Hometown: Sapporo, Japan.
A Sneasel-fusion born into the Iketani Clan of Sapporo, Japan. Ishikari Prefrecture. Most of his youth was spent training in his family's traditional customs that dated back to the Warring States era of feudal Japan. The arts of silence motion infiltration and ninja-esque combat were passed down through the generations of his family, though at this date in age they were suited for use as paid enforcers and information brokers for the Yakuza. The payments of contracts completed by the clan were the prime source of income, making the Iketani family one of the more wealthy groups in Sapporo.
Jet came to Kazuya the night of his first contract. It was simple shakedown/intimidation run for one of the lesser crime bosses. Jet promised that if he agreed to the Darkrai's help, Kazuya would be allowed the power to eventually take over the criminal element of Sapporo, and ensure that his clan was taken care of without any risk to those he cared for..
Sophia Hale- Human, Age 25. Hometown: Cardiff, Wales. UK.
Sophia was raised in a financially-disadvantaged home on the outskirts of Cardiff. Her school life was tumultuous due to her circumstances with her fellow students constantly berating and teasing her and her family. The following years didn't see her difficulties lessened. Rather, her tormentors grew more creative in their abuse, and their jeers and barbs turned into physical attacks against her person.
Over time, the abuse made having a life outside of home extremely difficult. Fear of being assaulted by her long-term botherations continually plagued her thoughts, leaving her paranoid and suspicious of everyone around her. Her pain and frustration was delicious enough to draw Jet to her. The Darkrai proceeded to promise her the power to exact her revenge on those who had wronged her as well as build the life she's wanted....by force if necessary.
Personality
Jet is a difficult individual to lock down emotionally. To those who work with/for him, he can come off a cold and distant, focusing on completing the task at hand. While, a moment later he can appear almost jovial, with an eerie, almost sadistic, sense of humor. If one were to ask him, he would say that this personality trait is to mask his truly diabolical nature. Beneath the quirky exterior, lies a cruel, villainous soul that feeds on fear and negativity, and would to great lengths to ensure their persistence.
He also exhibits a near-Machiavellian level of ambition, not hesitating to sacrifice "dead weight" to accomplish his goals however, he is also able to recognize talent in those in his company and will do what is necessary to cultivate those skills as they suit his needs. Additionally, he is a masterful and charismatic wordsmith with the keen ability to manipulate friend and foe alike to accomplish his goals. It is also important to note that he seems to enjoy toying with his opponents, reveling in their dismay for his own twisted sense of satisfaction. Paramount to all of this, he exhibits extreme narcissism. He has an exceptionally high opinion of himself, and sees himself as an apex predator in relation to other Darkrai, whom he tends to look down on as his lessers. | http://pokemonfusion.servegame.org/index.php?title=Jet&oldid=1428 |
The Hidden Hand: Alien Contact and the Government Cover-Up
The Hidden Hand is a controversial EBE Award winning documentary that explores the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence here on Earth. The film takes a keen look at a range of topics like alien abduction, human/alien hybridization, the military’s reverse-engineering of alien technology and the government cover-up of anything related to extraterrestrials. Is preoccupation with the extraterrestrial a form of cultural madness or is something really going on? How would E. T. contact change the religious and political institutions of our society? The shadowy world of UFOs is suddenly brought to light. | https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-hidden-hand-alien-contact-and-the-government-cover-up/umc.cmc.x8u77m6rb5xg7ia0wpuah5b3 |
The following lists of terms are not meant to educate fellow paranormal investigators. It is a simple list of terms meant to assist those individuals that may be experiencing paranormal activity and are not educated in the field therein. Our hope is that it give any lay person the basic understanding of what the paranormal field entails.
- Anomaly: Something that cannot be explained or is difficult to classify.
- Apparition: A supernatural manifestation of a spiritual body of a deceased person or animal. They may appear in photographs or may be seen with the naked eye. An apparition may be solid in appearance or just faint images, streaks, or balls of light.
- Clairvoyance: The ability to have mental perceptions and insight about people or their situations. A clairvoyant may see clear mental images or pictures to see into the past, present , or future. This ability is also sometimes called second sight.
- Cold Spot: An area in which an apparition’s energy is said to have manifested itself. This usually results in a temperature change.
- Collective Apparition: The witnessing of an apparition by two or more people.
- Deja’vu: The experience of having the feeling that you have experienced a situation or event before.
- Dematerialization: The disappearance of or fading of a physical object.
- Discarnate: Having no physical form or body.
- Divining Rods: A metal or copper wand used to detect water, apparitions, or energy areas.
- Ectoplasm: A product of a psychic energy that usually forms like a fog, mist or solid mass. The ectoplasm also can take a vortex shape.
- Electromagnetic Field Meter (EMF): This tool is widely used by paranormal investigators to detect changes in the electromagnetic field. These units will read everything from TV and cell phones, to power lines. It has been suggested that a normal reading for paranormal activity is between 2.0 and 8.0 milligauss, anything above that is usually man made.
- ESP: Extrasensory perception is the knowledge of external events with the aid of senses. Some people have experienced dreams, visions, or unexplained feelings where the could predict future events, sense a spiritual energy, or feel the presence of something unseen.
- EVP: Electronic Voice Phenomena is the recoding of a spirit voice or sound on tape or a digital recorder. It is common to report that nothing may be heard at the initial time of the recording but is later discovered upon review of the playback. Listen to EVP’s
- Ghost: Usually this is the visual appearance of a spirit energy or soul of a deceased person or animal. A ghost may make their presence known through strange smells, noises, cool breezes or even the movement of objects.
- Ghost Light: An unexplainable light that is visible to the naked eye.
- Ghost Mist / Fog: Not usually physically seen with the naked eye, but more often captured in photographs.
- Haunting: Paranormal experience occurring over a period of time in a specific location.
- Intelligent Haunting: A spirit that seems to live in a specific area and acts with it s own free will while showing some type of intelligence. This type of spirit is aware of your presence and on occasion will interact with you in some fashion. The spirit my respond to direct questions either through EVPs, knocking on a surface when asked, or possibly a disembodied voice heard with the naked ear.
- Intuition: The act of knowing something or having information without knowing where it came from.
- Manifestation: If a spirit or entity actually takes form and makes its presence known. This can result in a constant outbreak of paranormal activity.
- Materialization: The deliberate, though usually temporary, visible formation of a spirit or energy.
- Orb: An orb is a round sphere shaped object that is most often captured on photographs, although they can show movement in video. Orbs are suggested to be a soul or the spirit of a deceased person or animal. This type of paranormal evidence is very controversial and is often dismissed as dust particles.
- Ouija Board: A board with the alphabet and other symbols on it which is used to communicate with the deceased. The operator uses a planchette, which in turn moves across the board spelling out messages to the operator. ****This method of communicating with the deceased is very dangerous and should not be used in any paranormal investigation. We do not use or condone the use of this device!****
- Paranormal: Something that is beyond the range of normal human experience or scientific explanation.
- Paranormal Researcher: Any person that investigates unexplained phenomena of the supernatural kind. This individual or group of individuals makes a valiant attempt to prove or disprove paranormal occurrences through various research methods.
- Paranormal Investigation: The act of visiting an alleged “haunted” location to gater data such as pictures, video, audio, recordings, and electromagnetic field and temperature readings and summarizes the data.
- Parapsychology: The scientific study of paranormal phenomena.
- Poltergeist: Poltergeist is a German word that means “noisy ghost”. Poltergeists have been blamed for violent actions such as throwing things, attacking people, and even setting fires. Such events are said to be sporadic, unpredictable, and happen often. This poltergeist activity sometimes can target a particular family or family member. It is often said when a stranger is present the activity may temporarily cease. This type of haunting is one of the most dangerous, but also one of the most rare types.
- Possession: When a person’s mind and/or body is believed to be taken over by ghosts, spirits or other supernatural entities.
- Precognition: Knowing something in advance of the situation. To know the future.
- Precognitive Dreams: Having a dream about an event or situation that is about to happen.
- Physic: A person that uses or appears to be gifted with a sixth sense. The ability to be able to tap into the past, present or future.
- Radio Voice Phenomenon: To receive the voices of the deceased over a regular radio frequency.
- Residual Haunting: This type of haunting can occur at the same time every time or during the same conditions every time. It is often thought of as if you were watching the same movie clip over and over. It could be considered an imprint on the walls of time. With this type of haunting, the spirit has no idea that you or anyone else is there. This imprint can be caused be a past traumatic event and can often involve a visual sighting. This type of haunting is not an interactive one and the spirit will not respond to you.
- Séance: This involves communicating with the dead. A medium is usually the contact person for the spirit world.
- Shadow People: Theses ghosts usually appear as a shadow and are very quick. They are normally the type of spirits that are seen out of the corner of your eye or maybe in a mirror.
- Sixth Sense: See ESP
- Spirit: A force within a living being. The soul or supernatural gentility.
- Supernatural: This is something that exists or happens through some means other than any known force in nature. As opposed to paranormal, the term, supernatural, oftens denotes divine or demonic intervention.
- Telekinesis: The ability to move objects with your mind just by the thought process. One may be able to knock an object over or move the object by concentrating on the matter.
- Telepathy: To know what others are thinking. To read one’s mind.
- Vortex: In photography, this is the appearance of an unexplained object such as an unexplained line, swirl, twist of light, striped rope, or tube shaped object.
- White Noise: A hiss like sound formed by combining all audible frequencies. This is often used as back ground for EVP recordings. | http://pittsburghparanormalresearch.com/?cat=2 |
Yesterday, we read about how Joseph became the overseer of Potiphar’s house. We also read how Potiphar’s wife lied about Joseph’s behavior and this innocent man found himself in the royal prison. Today, we will stay in the prison with Joseph to encounter Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker.
Senusert II is most likely the Pharaoh of Egypt at the time. Pharaoh uses this royal prison to hold his disobedient staff while they are awaiting sentence. Joseph is in charge of the prisoners and has been so for a long time; he looks over their wellbeing (He is a spiritual shepherd). Pharaoh’s cupbearer (the person who brings Pharaoh his food and drink; he tastes them in the presence of Pharaoh to make sure nothing is poisonous) and baker (the person who makes Pharaoh his food) somehow offend their master and they find themselves in the royal prison under Joseph’s watch. They have proven themselves untrustworthy in some way. While they are in prison these two men have dreams they cannot interpret for themselves. In ancient Egypt, dreams are perceived as vehicles to provide insight about the future.
Joseph stops by to check on the prisoners and finds the cupbearer and the baker unsettled by their dreams. Wow, dreams are what brought about Joseph’s slavery in the first place. He has to deal with more dreams? Is God really going to send Joseph to extend himself to interpret the dreams of others before his very own dreams become clear? Yes, God is calling Joseph to grow to a new level of compassion and service for Him. Joseph quickly reminds these two men only God can interpret dreams, because God has made the human mind. Joseph does not take credit for what only God can do and in a pagan culture Joseph points to the Most High God. Then, Joseph invites the cupbearer and the baker to reveal their dreams to him while he listens.
Joseph is given the interpretation for the two dreams: In three days, the cupbearer will be restored to honor in Pharaoh’s service [an image of spiritual life], and in three days, Pharaoh will decapitate the baker and demand his body be impaled on a pole [an image of spiritual death] where the birds will peck at his flesh. Egyptian thought at the time is if a body is left outside and not buried it will prevent the spirit of the dead from resting in the afterlife. Well, I certainly choose the cupbearer’s future, don’t you? Joseph asks the cupbearer to put in a good word for him to Pharaoh when he is reinstated into royal service.
Three days later it is time to celebrate Pharaoh’s birthday. It is the custom at the time to show favor to some prisoners on this special day. The cupbearer is restored and the baker is executed. Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams to the cupbearer and the baker affirms Joseph’s ability as a prophet. It must have given him greater hope in thinking that one day his dreams might actually be fulfilled, as well. Joseph is hoping the cupbearer will be so appreciative he will speak to Pharaoh about Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams. Our reading tells us though the cupbearer does not speak to Pharaoh; rather, he simply goes on with his life…and two more years go by. Honestly, God’s timing can be a challenge for our faith! | https://connect2christchurch.com/devotionals/genesis-the-beginning-2016/708-joseph-interprets-dreams-2-5-16 |
- "You took part in the War of Time! You took over New Ninjago City and drove out all the inhabitants! You tried to kill Fox! What makes you think I'll trust you when I was told about what you did during the War!?"
- —Boulder the Lycanroc raging to Mephiles, The Dusk Wolf
Mephiles the Dark is a major antagonist in The Legend of Fox the Brave who first appeared in the infamous 2006 Xbox 360/PlayStation 3(PS3) video game Sonic the Hedgehog(better known as Sonic '06). In The Legend of Fox the Brave, he is the instigator of the Battle for New Ninjago City during the War of Time in the story of the same name. Mephiles makes a minor appearance in both The Dusk Wolf and its sequel Return of Evil, and is the main antagonist of the third story, Shadows of Vengeance. He returns as a posthumous(of sorts) antagonist in the story Storm of Darkness, and as a major villain in Storm of Warriors.
Shadow the Hedgehog
Time travel
Appearance
Mephiles retains his appearance from the Sonic series.
Overall, Mephiles greatly resembles Shadow the Hedgehog (Archie) due to taking his form during the latter's mission in Kingdom Valley, but with a few key differences.
Personality
Similar to Sonic.EXE, and later Infinite, Mephiles is cruel and sadistic, taking great pleasure in tormenting and constantly taunting those he targets. However, if he views someone as useful, he will try to convince them to join him; so far, he's only done this to Shadow the Hedgehog and Boulder the Lycanroc, both of which refused for their own reasons(Shadow understood Mephiles' true motives, while Boulder had been told of the being's atrocities during the War of Time).
History
Before the Series: Unknown, but most likely the same as in the Sonic series.
Shadows of the Past: While vaguely unnamed, Mephiles appears in a couple nightmares of Ferrell's, and Mega Force members Sceptile and Lucario argue over whether or not to tell the scarred fox about him.
Return of the Werehog: Mephiles appears in a vision E.J. has while in Kingdom Valley. E.J. sees finds himself protecting Austin Smith(as a human) from the strange being, whom the young boy recognizes and is terrified of; the blue hedgehog is nearly overwhelmed by the darkness he senses. E.J. protects the boy until the vision ends, and he speeds off back to Soleanna Forest, unsure of what to make of his vision.
The War of Time(story): Mephiles first appears in a nightmare Fox the Brave has. Fox begins to feel like he's suffocating, as if his lungs themselves are being squeezed while Mephiles laughs at him all the while. After Fox is viciously beaten by Shadow the Hedgehog (Sonic Boom), Mephiles surprises the leader fox while he's exercising in a storage room by moving things around. Liam the Chesnaught bursts into the room, and Mephiles leaves when the Spiny Armor Pokemon enters. Later, Mephiles takes over New Ninjago City, driving out the civilians, and Fox leads a patrol to interfere. Fox becomes Fire Fox, and easily beats Mephiles, but when the Storm Fighter leader reverts to normal after the fight, the being practically stabs Fox in the back, effectively killing him. However, Tai the Charizard visits Fox and helps him return to his body and achieve his Feral Fox form for the first time. After this, Feral Fox easily beats Mephiles.
The Dusk Wolf: Mephiles appears in a dream Boulder the Lycanroc has. The young Dusk Lycanroc dreams himself into Flame Core(unnamed), and encounters Mephiles there. Mephiles attempts to get Boulder to join him, but the young warrior is unconvinced; when the Megastone Rogue puts two and two together, he rants that he will never trust Mephiles because of what he did during the War. Mephiles asks Boulder if he'd rather live knowing he cannot stop the disasters he sees in his visions, and Boulder insists that if he has these powers, then it is to help his Teammates prepare for them. Mephiles then calls Boulder a fool before changing appearance and summoning a swarm of strange, shadowy creatures(the same ones from Shadow's second Flame Core Boss). Boulder starts singing Warriors, then uses Stone Edge on Mephiles, before waking up, silently hoping that after that, he will be left alone.
Return of Evil: After Boulder fails Continental Crush, he has a terrifying vision of Mephiles, and remembers what the shadowy being told him when he failed to convince the young Lycanroc to join him. Later, in the Epilogue, Mephiles viciously taunts Boulder, who howls at him that the Worlds will never be his.
Shadows of Vengeance: Mephiles returns as the main antagonist in this story.
Storm of Warriors: Mephiles first appears in the Prologue, where he taunts Austin, making him sink into darkness, though the warrior wakes up. He later taunts Austin while the German Shepherd is held captive by Dark Enerjak in Dark Mobius. Austin struggles with his fear at first, but overcomes this and wakes up from the nightmare. Later, during the Final Battle, while Chaos Fox battles Dark Enerjak in the sky, the warriors on the ground notice their shadows lengthening and detaching, swarming to the side of the battle, where Mephiles taunts and then engages Austin Smith and Boulder, who soon gain help from Locke. He is then defeated by the living pair's new Z-Move, Splintered Stormshards, which also simultaneously weakens Dark Enerjak enough for Chaos Fox to finish him off. Mephiles' last physical appearance is when he appears to Boulder in a vision after the Lycanroc grabs the Scepter of Darkness in his jaws. He tells Boulder he's not finished with the Worlds, but recieves a furious growl in reply. The Scepter is then buried far from the Base.
The Warrior's Quest: Mephiles does not appear, but is mentioned a few times, as the War of Darkness is ongoing during Alex's flight from Downunda and his quest to find the Storming Base. His first mention is when Alex's father Turner is telling him a story of the War of Darkness, and mentions that after the Battle of Shadows, many people were afraid that Mephiles would return. The same subject is mentioned by an old grizzly bear named Jared when Alex overhears him talking about the War of Darkness.
After the Blackout: In the Prologue, Boulder and Austin check where they buried the Scepter of Darkness after the Lamarkie Standoff, and are relieved to find it untouched. Boulder remembers the War of Darkness with a shudder, feeling cold when he realizes he can still sense Mephiles' dark presence inside it, digging his claws into the ground. Later, Infinite uses a clone of Mephiles to torment a group of refugees from Red Gate City that he recently found, as the group had never seen Mephiles before, and Markus uneasily notes the resemblance to Shadow and his references to past events. As the warriors rebuild Red Gate, Infinite uses a clone of Mephiles and one of Dark Enerjak to try to stop them, but only succeeds in confusing the warriors that fought in the War.
Powers
Largely the same as in Sonic '06, Mephiles is capable of several things, most notably teleportation and time-travel at will. He can also send others through time for various reasons(this was given a brief mention in The Dusk Wolf).
Abilities
Unknown
Skills
Unknown
Weaknesses
Unknown
Gallery
Trivia
Dr. Eggman, Enerjak, Sonic.EXE, Dr. Finitevus, Infinite and Mephiles are all major antagonists in the series who are not original characters. | https://sonicfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Mephiles_the_Dark_(Burpy%27s_Dream) |
A sinister corollary to Dewart’s homespun truism might be that the greatest fear a man can experience is that of losing the good life he has. It is this anxiety, which afflicts Curtis in especially virulent form, that defines the mood of Take Shelter (2011), Jeff Nichols’s remarkable new film. It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.
We like to think that individually and collectively, we have it pretty good, but it is harder and harder to allay the suspicion that a looming disaster — economic or environmental, human or divine — might come along and destroy it all. Normalcy can feel awfully precarious, like a comforting dream blotting out a nightmarish reality.
What if everything that Curtis values were to be suddenly swept away? We are not talking about a life of luxury and ease, but about modest comforts and reasonable expectations: a decent job with health benefits and vacation time, a loving family, a house of your own. Curtis has all of this. He works in heavy construction and comes home to the tidy home he shares with his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and their daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), who is deaf.
Without being a hokey paragon of proletarian virtue — Mr. Shannon’s scarecrow frame and sharply angled features seem designed to repel sentimentality — Curtis is clearly a dedicated employee, a loyal friend, a doting husband and a gentle father. This makes the intensity of his terror, and his helpless, potentially destructive reactions to it, all the more alarming.
Curtis, who lives in a stretch of northern Ohio susceptible to tornadoes, has recurring nightmares of a huge, apocalyptic storm. A viscous, brownish rain falls from the sky (“like fresh motor oil,” he says), as funnel clouds gather on the horizon. Shadowy, zombielike figures appear at his windows and rattle his doors, and in one especially scary episode his living room furniture rises into the air and comes crashing to the ground, as he and Hannah cower against a wall.
Are these dreams projections or premonitions? If Take Shelter were “Inception” or an M. Night Shyamalan brainteaser, it might turn this question into a cinematic puzzle. But while Mr. Nichols employs a handful of tried-and-true (and therefore always persuasive) shock effects to blur the viewer’s sense of reality, there is something at stake beyond formal cleverness. The ambiguity that is so unbearable to Curtis — the sense that he might be losing his mind and also receiving omens of impending disaster — is crucial to the film’s logic.
Curtis is a practical, thoughtful type of guy, and his two-fold response to his bad dreams reflects this aspect of his temperament. (Dewart is much more of a hothead, and if you met them both at a bar, you would think he was the crazy one, not Curtis). Troubled by a family history of mental illness — his mother (Kathy Baker) was institutionalized in her 30s and now lives in an assisted-living center — Curtis checks psychology books out of the library and presents a therapist with a plausible self-diagnosis.
But at the same time, he goes to great expense to expand the storm shelter in his backyard, borrowing heavy equipment from work and a lot of money from the bank. Curtis believes that he is delusional, but he also believes in his visions. At a certain level of realism — assuming, that is, that you interpret Take Shelter as a film about a man struggling with a psychological disorder — this is an important insight into a painful paradox of mental illness that rarely shows up in movies. Curtis suspects that he is sick, and is both ashamed of his condition and determined to seek treatment. But at the same time he cannot shake the conviction that his fears have meaning.
He is hardly a wild-eyed prophet on the street corner, screaming that the end is near. His diffidence makes his desperation especially painful, and his increasingly strange behavior is made more unsettling by his generally calm demeanor. Mr. Shannon’s taciturn, haunted performance manages to be both heartbreaking and terrifying. You feel sorry for this guy, even as you want to run in the other direction.
In trying to protect himself and his family from whatever it is that he believes is coming, Curtis risks making his fears come true, putting his job, his marriage and his daughter’s well-being in jeopardy. And in showing the potential dispossession of a working-class family, Mr. Nichols, without banging a topical drum, points toward a social catastrophe that is all too real.
Is Curtis mad, or is he prescient? You can debate this question when the movie is over — the brilliant final scene invites as much — but you are unlikely to find a comfortable answer. The real question is what difference it makes. Mr. Nichols, who scrutinized a different kind of masculine anxiety in his first film, Shotgun Stories (also starring Mr. Shannon), is too smart and too sober a filmmaker for that, and in Take Shelter he has made a perfect allegory for a panicky time. There is no shortage of delusion and paranoia out there in the world. There is also a lot to be afraid of. | https://www.riotmaterial.com/take-shelter/ |
From German geist or Dutch geest ("spirit"). The supposed life-essence or consciousness of a person, surviving bodily death and still present in some way in the physical world. The belief assumes that the physical body and the soul, or life-principle, are separate entities and that the soul survives physical death. ("Ghost" in this case is defined as a disembodied spirit able to physically manifest, rather than as just another term for "spirit.").
Belief in ghosts is among the most ancient and universal of all paranormal beliefs, although there are innumerable cultural variations on exactly what ghosts are and why they appear. In traditional European belief, a ghost is the conscious spirit-essence of someone who has died. The spirit may be unable to go on to spiritual realms because of unfinished tasks on Earth or his refusal to accept his own death.
In Chinese and other Oriental belief, a human being has two souls, the divine soul or true living essence, which returns to the spiritual realm after death, and the kwei or earth-soul, which remains on earth and eventually fades. The earth-soul isn't the essence of the person but a sort of crude copy or mimic. It may become a hungry ghost and prey upon the living.
Some parapsychologists postulate that at least some ghosts aren't spirits but "impressions" left behind by a person while alive or at the time of death, especially a traumatic death. Most ghost phenomena, these researchers note, are repetitious and purposeless, more like video or audio recordings.
Ghosts, according to the belief, can manifest to any and all the senses. A ghost may present itself as an image, sounds, odors, tactile, feelings of cold, a feeling of intruding presence, or any combination of impressions. Or the ghost may move physical objects and be called a poltergeist ("prankish spirit"). Some parapsychologists consider ghosts and poltergeists separate phenomena.
Parapsychologists have hypothesized that ghosts may become temporarily visible by (1) absorbing matter or energy from their surroundings, often from a living person, who may complain of feelings of cold as the ghost drains heat energy from him, or (2) "appear" to the viewer by stimulating the visual centers of the brain in some unknown fashion. In this case the viewer experiences what amounts to an hallucination, but its ultimate source is outside him. Animals, with senses more acute than man's, are supposed to be able to see or sense the presence of ghosts, even if humans on the scene sense nothing unusual.
Folklorists generally distinguish two types of mythical ghost, the spectre-ghost or apparition, frightening but harmless, and the hungry ghost, which actively preys upon the living. Vampires are a form of the hungry ghost.
Even today in the industrialized world, belief in
ghosts and hauntings, or at least allowing their
possibility, is widespread and held by many people,
including the educated.
The problem with ghosts is similar to that with UFOs: thousands of testimonials but no proof or even reliable evidence of their existence. Proving or disproving the existence of ghosts as true paranormal entities is difficult, amounting to trying to show the existence or non-existence of things that may or may not exist in a material sense.
Psychical researchers have offered what they consider evidence in the form of photographs, videos and sound recordings, but none of these are convincing and all would be easy to fake. Other known phenomena can explain ghosts. People may hallucinate or misidentify, influenced by wishful thinking, grief and loneliness. Who hasn't wanted a departed loved one to show in some way that he/she is still alive and conscious in some way?
Someone who vividly dreams of a departed person can be convinced that he has indeed been visited by the soul of a loved one. Another possibility here is hypnagogic or hypnopompic "dreams," or "lucid dreams," so vivid and lifelike that the dreamer may not be able to distinguish them from the objectively real. There is also the phenomenon of what could be called the construct hallucination or dramatized hallucination wherein a person, often under extreme stress, hallucinates a vision of an encounter from a departed loved one or some other supernatural being, often comforting or giving advice. These experiences are loosely called "visions" and seem to be elaborate dramatizations concocted by the unconscious mind of a traumatized person to lend him or her reassurance and a sense of validity in order to help resolve a major difficulty.
The numerous accounts of ghost encounters, the vast amount of literature on the subject, and the difficulty in proving or disproving the individual accounts help keep the belief alive. | http://skepdigest.awardspace.us/Ghosts_NESS.html |
Enhance – Inclusion and Diversity Management (IDM)
The Yerevan communiqué (2015) as well as subsequent national strategies on the social dimension encourage European Higher Educations Institutions (HEIs) to provide inclusive systems for previously under-represented student groups. The aim is to widen access to university and to improve the outcomes for a more diverse range of applicants (e.g. disabled students, students with different national/ethnic/cultural/ linguistic backgrounds, and students with differing levels of maturity or prior work experience).
In response an Erasmus + consortium of four European Universities is currently working on training and development materials to promote more inclusive practices amongst Programme Leaders. The objectives of the project are twofold. Firstly, the project aims to raise awareness among this key staff group in HEIs by enhancing their competences in relation to inclusion and diversity management (IDM). Programme Leaders play a vital role in ensuring the quality of the student experience and are usually right at the heart of that experience. Secondly, the project aims to foster an enhanced learning and teaching experience for all students by helping to reduce drop-out rates and boosting student success.
The project’s target group of Programme Leaders (PLs) are the main decision-makers in their own courses and have the capacity to adapt their curricula to contemporary needs. Additionally, they dispose of formal and/or informal authority locally as well being able to seek out and secure support for the implementation of diversity-sensitive practices at a faculty or institutional level. They have influence on their colleagues (both teaching staff and administrative / support personnel) and can highlight the benefits of an inclusive approach. As Programme Leaders are accountable for the academic health of their programmes they have a keen interest in articulating and delivering effective inclusion and diversity management strategies in the interests of all those involved (tutors, students, central teams) as well as for their university as a whole. More inclusive institutions are likely to reap competitive advantages as a result from marketing and reputational perspectives.
In many European HEIs historically PLs have been poorly prepared and supported in ensuring student success for our ever more diverse student populations. In addition, some study programmes and curricula do not always meet inclusivity demands. The PLs involved in this project will be trained to design and deliver more inclusive curricula and classroom settings that manage diversity from a more holistic angle (incorporating demographic, cognitive, disciplinary, functional and institutional diversity) to improve student attainment for all. The project also aims to support PLs in their developing leadership capability by providing diversity management tools and web-based scenario training to help them to become better equipped at handling the challenges and realising the opportunities presented by their increasingly diverse student cohorts.
The four partner HEIs involved in the ‘Enhance: IDM’ project are:
University of Applied Sciences, Upper Austria brings in core values of inter-functional team work as well as the means to facilitate cooperation among the 4 partner HEIs.
Birmingham City University (UK) brings in extensive working knowledge in demographic diversity, particularly in relation to disabled students, ethnic/religious/linguistic backgrounds, age and social mobility.
Technische Hochschule Köln (Germany) contributes extensive working knowledge in disciplinary diversity due to their wide range of differing disciplines and their numerous interdisciplinary projects.
Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland) is well suited to addressing the theme of cognitive diversity as a result of its specially designed teaching model, “Learning by Developing” which allows flexible and appreciative ways for students to study.
The project was launched in September 2017 and its final report is due in autumn 2020. For EAIR colleagues interested in the progress of the project and its interim outcomes please direct any enquiries to the following e-mail address: Silke.Preymann@fh-ooe.at. | http://www.eairweb.org/enhance-inclusion-and-diversity-management-idm/ |
Marin Country Day School is an independent K-8 coed day school enrolling 600 students at a 35-acre campus in Corte Madera, California.
Our school's mission is to create an inclusive community of learning that inspires curiosity, empathy and action.
Founded in 1956 by an adventurous group of parents and educators who believed that learning is a joyous and lifelong process, MCDS provides a distinguished education based on distinctive values, aspirations and practices. Students at MCDS enjoy the benefits of innovative teaching, enhanced understanding of how children learn, tools for clear and creative expression and an increasingly diverse student body.
Our rich and well-considered core curriculum includes a rigorous grounding in traditional academic disciplines: English, Mandarin, Spanish, mathematics, science and social studies. Art, athletics, drama, music and outdoor education are integral parts of the program. In addition, Aikido/Energy Time, developmental physical education and age-appropriate curricula covering nutrition, human sexuality and substance abuse promote health and wellness.
We strive as well to prepare our students to participate thoughtfully and meaningfully for a changing world and to give them flexible skill sets that will serve them in a world that is more competitive and technologically integrated. Woven into the program are initiatives promoting ecoliteracy, global awareness and engagement and facility in the use of technology. Ongoing review of the core program assures that the curriculum is dynamic, incorporates current pedagogy and best practices, and is well-aligned through the nine grade levels. | https://www.mcds.org/about-us |
LAHORE: Recognizing the youth as vital agents for social change, economic growth and technological progress, the Punjab government and the United Nations have entered into a partnership to enhance outreach to the Pakistani youth .
Minister for School Education, Higher Education, Youth Affairs Rana Mashhood Ahmad and Director UN Information Centre Vittorio Cammarota signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Thursday to enhance dissemination of values and core messages of the United Nations through the educational institutions based in Punjab.
The partnership aims at actively engaging youth in promoting the values of the United Nations in their educational institutions and among their communities. In fact, through the UN Wall campaign, schools and universities will have the opportunity to share core values of the United Nations on a dedicated wall on their premises. All participating institutions would be listed in an interactive map and the information would be shared globally.
In addition, the collaboration between the Government of Punjab and the United Nations Information Centre aims at strengthening collaboration between Pakistani universities and the United Nations System by establishing the UN Corner, which would provide students with access to publications, reports and campaigns released by the UN Secretariat and by agencies, funds and programmes of the UN System on national, regional and global issues.
Education Minister Rana Mashhood assured his full support for promoting the UN’s ideals and values through the network of the schools and colleges in the Punjab and said: “I hope this MOU will be fruitful both for the awareness about activities of UN and the development of young citizens of Punjab. In fact, a good liaison with UNIC will also help them get good exposure at global level and, consequently, an increased number of opportunities for their future.”
Cammarota thanked the honourable Minister for his valuable support and noted that empowering youth has been essential for promoting peace and harmony in the country. He said: “The 70th anniversary of the United Nations is a great opportunity for having youth of Pakistan to showcase a positive image of their country through their active contribution as messengers of the core values of the United Nations in their schools and communities.”
The UN Wall and UN Corner campaigns have been part of a large series of initiatives organized this year to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations. | https://staging.nation.com.pk/11-Jun-2015/punjab-government-and-un-partner-to-facilitate-pakistani-youth |
By: Kate Muntzner ’24 (she/her), Staff Writer
In an effort to further conversations surrounding the college’s history of racial injustice and address gaps in curricula, Davidson started the Justice, Equality, and Community (JEC) Initiative in 2017.
As stated on the E.H. Little Library website, “The Justice, Equality, Community (JEC) grant was a three-year, campus-wide initiative to support increased transdisciplinary engagement with issues of race, gender, religion, and social justice across the humanities at Davidson College between 2017 and 2020.” Although the grant was intended to end in 2020, the college provided a one-year extension to tie up loose ends and finish events that were cancelled due to the pandemic.
A core component of the grant’s initiatives is curricular development. JEC Archivist Jessica Cottle explained that this aspect of the initiative is designed to help faculty access training and redesign their courses, as well as to recognize courses embodying justice, equality, and community that already exist. This is perhaps the most visible aspect of the JEC initiative because students are required to take a JEC course before they graduate.
According to Davidson’s website, “Courses meeting [the JEC] requirement will address justice and equality as they appear in various communities in local, regional, national, and/or global dimensions, and focuses on methods […] that have been used to foster awareness of or to remedy inequalities and injustice.”
While there are no official requirements for the curricula in a JEC course, professors must submit a proposal to designate a course as fulfilling the JEC requirement. That justification then goes through a review process by the Education Policy Committee, which oversees course proposals and reviews schedules for athletic and other college-sponsored extracurricular activities.
Although the JEC grant is geared towards the Humanities, several STEM courses fulfill the requirement. Cottle said, “[A subject like] statistics certainly plays a part in the way things are reported and recorded. There are politics involved in that process, “ Cottle said.
Although there may be differences between JEC in the Humanities and STEM courses, the initiative has one overarching goal: inclusive pedagogy. Cottle stated, “I think where JEC and inclusive pedagogy intersect is understanding that how you teach has just as much value as what you teach, so [there are] courses that might not be designated as JEC or whose topics may not appear to address issues of justice, equality, and community.”
Cottle elaborated on teaching a course to include an inclusive curriculum. “Part of that process is understanding who you are teaching to. It’s not just about content, but [asking,] ‘how do I need to teach that content to folks with different lived experiences?’ Or ‘how do I need to change the way I give this lecture or design this project so that a multiplicity of voices can be heard and there can be a direct engagement?’”
Because there is not a strict set of requirements for the curricula, the values of justice, equality, and community look different to every professor. James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy Isaac Bailey ‘95 is teaching two JEC courses this semester: COM 207: Media, Empathy, Justice and COM 311: Trump, Race, US Media. “I have focused on the racial justice aspect and trying to honor and respect differences. Other classes might take a different angle on all those issues,” Bailey said.
Environmental Studies Professor Dr. Jessica Worl, who is teaching Environmental Studies JEC classes ENV 242: Political Ecology and ENV 345: Politics of Waste this semester, explained the relevance of the JEC Initiative in 2020.
“In this particular moment when there are and have been so many social issues that are coming to the floor — I think COVID-19 has revealed for many many structural inequalities — I think that JEC is poised in some ways to provide a forum for students’ understanding where a lot of these inequalities are and how even our accepted notions of justice have their limits,” Dr. Worl said.
She expanded on the importance of incorporating marginalized voices into her classes, stating, “My class is all about thinking about whose voices have been left out, how do we bring them in, what might that look like, and how might that come to matter.” In the long-term, the goal for her class is to explore the question: “How do we create social and global orders that allow us to value certain kinds of objects, people, places, and meanings over others?”
Both Dr. Worl and Prof. Bailey emphasized the impact that learning about ethics has for Davidson students specifically.
Prof. Bailey said, “I think that it is always scary to have really smart people who have a lot of influence but don’t actually have a grounding in ethics. For me, that is why this is so vital to Davidson, and it is going to make sure that everyone who comes to these classes will have this ethical framework.”
While JEC classes have only been a graduation requirement for the past three years, starting with the class of 2021, the initiative has received its fair share of criticism. | http://www.davidsonian.com/justice-equality-and-community-building-an-ethical-framework-for-davidson-students-beyond-graduation/ |
Over recent years there has been better recognition of the economic and social costs of poor mental health among the population. Improving mental health has also become an increasing political priority, illustrated for example by the recent appointment of a Minister for Mental Health to the full Shadow Cabinet. At the same time, public attitudes have been changing for the better, leading to a more open culture in relation to mental health.
IES has a long track record of researching mental health at work and recently undertook research for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to investigate how higher education institutions provided support for students with mental health problems and/or other impairments with intensive support need. The research, conducted with research partners at Lancaster University, involved a literature review and case study visits to 12 institutions.
The number of disabled students in higher education has been rising rapidly over the past five years, and the number declaring a mental health problem has more than doubled (see Figure 1). Across all institutions, the proportion of students who declared a mental health problem was 1.4 per cent in 2012/13, although this was felt to be only a small proportion of the number of students actually experiencing mental health problems.
Figure 1: Number of disabled students in higher education
A key challenge for institutions has been encouraging disclosure of problems by students, and particularly early disclosure, so that the institutions can plan support effectively; late disclosure could result in students not having support in place, which could in turn affect their academic performance and retention. Case study institutions stressed that disclosure of a disability or mental health problem was separated from the admissions process, but recognised that students may be anxious about declaring a problem for fear that it may act against them. They had generally taken various steps to encourage disclosure, including awareness-raising campaigns, involving disability and mental health advisers in open days and Freshers’ Week and peer mentoring/support, and had numerous ways for students to disclose before and during their studies.
Common features of support approaches
In supporting students who were known to have a mental health problem, there was a commonality of approaches across the institutions visited. There was generally a disability support team located within student services, with a number of disability advisers who supported students; in some institutions there were specialist mental health advisers while in others, advisers dealt with students across the range of impairments that may lead to a support need. Disability or mental health advisers would be involved in a range of support activities, including:
- Pre-admission support for applicants who had disclosed an impairment on their application, or more general outreach work.
- Induction support and awareness-raising for new students, and triaging of new students.
- Assisting with applications for Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA), which gives financial help to students who have extra costs while studying because of their disability.
- Developing specialist responsive support packages and ensuring that they are implemented.
- Crisis prevention and management.
- Wider wellbeing activity.
Where students were in receipt of DSA in relation to mental health problems, DSA generally paid for one-to-one specialist mentor support, provided either by in-house mentors or an external agency, and typically for one hour per week during the academic year.
In addition to specific and individual support through the disability support team, there was also wider, more general support provision. All institutions visited had a counselling service available to all students, which provided time-limited counselling support with onward referral to appropriate statutory services if necessary. It was noted that counselling services were seeing more students with severe and enduring mental health problems, whereas in the past the services had been dealing more with transition, homesickness and relationship issues. Some had introduced programmes aimed at preventing issues arising in the first place, through improving general health and wellbeing among students and building resilience.
There was a recognition that some support needs could be anticipated through course design, and a number of institutions had introduced inclusive curricula methods such as placing materials into the virtual learning environment before classes and audio/video recording lectures.
Introducing, or further developing, inclusive curricula was seen as a key challenge facing institutions. In the face of future funding changes, and with increasing demands placing additional pressure on resources, developing inclusive curricula can help institutions provide more support using fewer resources. Furthermore, introducing or further developing proactive measures to reduce demand for support, such as wellbeing and resilience initiatives, can also assist in making limited resources stretch further.
Key role of academic staf
Outside of the specialist provision from disability advisers and counselling services, wider university services had an important role to play. Academic staff were seen to have a key role in supporting students with mental health problems or other impairments. They could have important roles around communication, education and guidance, as well as involvement in pre-entry activities and attendance monitoring to help spot any emerging problems. Estate departments and accommodation teams had a significant role, for example placing students with mental health problems in quiet accommodation blocks and ensuring hall wardens are alert to any particular needs. Similarly, library support could include quiet work spaces or separate
rooms to help reduce stress. Chaplaincy staff played a role as a first point of contact and provider of informal support, and Students’ Unions and local Student Minds also played an active role in supporting students through buddy initiatives and wellbeing campaigns, and may have involvement in the development of institutional policies and strategies.
The involvement of academic staff varied both across and within institutions. In some institutions there were members of staff with a specific remit to work with disabled students, either academic staff with additional support responsibilities, or disability
advisers assigned to and located in particular departments or faculties. Improving internal links between academics and support staff was seen as a key issue; there was often a disparity between the understanding and knowledge around disability issues of academics compared with staff from the disability support teams, and improving the relationship could increase the
holistic nature of support for students. Disability awareness training for academic staff may also be effective.
Support networks
Universities do not operate in isolation and their support activity is complemented by that from the NHS and other statutory services. All case study institutions were working with external agencies such as GP practices, NHS mental health services and voluntary organisations, and this was felt to be an important part of the support network. Some institutions were more strategic in their relationship with external agencies, for example having services present on campus or being involved in wider steering groups, while others relied on more ad hoc individual-level relationships which were at the mercy of staff changes on both sides.
Developing more systematic relationships with external agencies could bring benefits through facilitating access to more specialist and expert support for students, and allowing both parties to gain a better understanding of each other; some institutions felt that statutory services could lack awareness of student life. While developing relationships and increasing partnership working could have time and resources implications for institutions, the costs may be more than outweighed by the resulting savings in other support areas. | https://www.employment-studies.co.uk/news/supporting-students-mental-health-issues |
AbstractNumerous institutions of higher education throughout the United States are dedicated to providing education that seeks as its goal a more socially just and ecologically sustainable world. Progressive curricula challenging ecological and human exploitation and promoting alternatives is being taught in classes throughout the nation. However, a gap exists between curricula and management in most educational institutions that diminish the teaching goals. Administrative and governance structures to which academic programs are tied for students services and overall college functions lag behind the progressive thinking in classrooms and often lack systems and structures that embody the mission of the institution. Administrative and governance systems can do more to support academic goals directly in terms of effective, mission-based management as well as indirectly by modeling the progressive society envisioned in classrooms in the administrative and governance systems and, thus, extend the learning of the classroom to an integrated totality of the college experience. A sociologist at heart, Mahatma Gandhi advocated, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” The purpose of this paper is: 1) to analyze the hidden socializing impacts of organizational systems and structures in formal education on students; 2) to place the purpose of modern education into an ecological and social context; and, 3) to promote ecological and community based organizational systems that may serve in to bridge the gap between teaching and governing in higher education. I have been working for seven years with a group of committed staff and faculty at New College’s North Bay Campus (NBC) to “bridge the gap” and create an organization that embodies its mission in every aspect of the organization from curricular content to toilet bowl cleaners. Examples of the work that has been implemented at New College will be given at the end of the paper. I hope that the governance work being done at the NBC will inspire other progressive institutions of higher education (and perhaps other institutions as well) to work toward diminishing the gap between their mission and operating structures in order to strengthen the impact of their educational goals. | https://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings50th/article/view/269 |
One Day Retreat
Sound Body Wisdom is a balance of energetic play and subtle listening that invigorates, and empowers while deepening our understanding of the wisdom of our bodies. It draws upon the research and wisdom of mind body techniques, creative expression and neuroscience to offer practical insight into one’s own experience of body, mind and spirit.
The event is a space for creative exploration and personal development through:
• Sound, vibration, pulse and rhythm
• Expressive movement and voice
• Improvisation and structured exercises
• Reflection and witnessing techniques
This is the practice…to deepen our awareness into our own wisdom, wherever we are in life.
In this day retreat we will engage tools and techniques to deepen our understanding of mind body science and interplay.
Participants will be led through group, partnered and individual exercises in:
Mindfulness
Guided meditation, group/individual reflection, focused mindfulness as continuous foundation for all tools and techniques explored.
Movement
Physical expression, weight exchange, touch, visualisation, pre-movement impulse, non-verbal communication, authentic movement
Voice
Toning, vocal jam, body resonance, sound healing, rhythm, pulse.
Breath
Visualization, focused meditation, energy.
Personal Growth
Reframing and training of emotional patterns, thought habits, conditioning, biases. | https://soundbodywisdom.com/event/day-retreat/ |
What Do Animals Sound Like In Different Languages?
It's reasonable to assume that American dogs can communicate perfectly well with Japanese dogs, but try using "bark bark" to describe the sound that dogs make to a Japanese person, who would say "wan wan," and you might have trouble. That's because different languages represent the sounds of animals in different ways, even though in most cases they qualify as onomatopoeia.
This video, by Vimeo user properniceinnit, features speakers of English, Mandarin, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Canadian-French, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, Bengali, Brazilian-Portuguese, Colombian-Spanish, Swahili and Mongolian.
What's interesting is which animal sounds have more linguistic variation than others. For example, it seems as if there are more variations for the sound that dogs make than for cats.
Meanwhile, "moo" is pretty universally understood to represent the sound that cows make - even accounting for slight differences in the way the vowels are pronounced ("moo" vs "meuh" vs "muu") - but when the consonant sound differs, at first it's pretty surprising ("boe").
But if you stop and consider the articulatory phonetics - the way that your mouth and vocal tract actually produce the sounds - it actually makes quite a bit of sense. Both the M and B sounds, after all, are bilabial, sounds produced by bringing the lips together.
There you go: an afternoon lesson in linguistics, brought to you by animal noises. | https://gizmodo.com/what-do-animals-sound-like-in-different-languages-1548328237 |
The Phonetics Laboratory is located in Boylston 334 at the Department of Linguistics. The lab contains a PC with a Kay Computer Speech Lab (CSL) which is used both to teach and to do speech analysis in tutorials and courses. Course sections often meet in the lab so that students can do hands-on phonetics work. Students also receive keys to the lab so they can carry out individual projects and explore topics covered in class. With CSL, we can make pitch tracks, spectrograms and spectra to check hypotheses and carry out experiments. Students in our phonetics courses regularly carry out projects describing the sound system of an unfamiliar language. Students also measure vowel formants. The equipment is particularly useful for understanding the monophthongal and diphthongal qualities of certain vowels of English and other languages. Students have carried out acoustic analysis of languages such as Arabic and Polish for their honors theses.
The department has a portable DAT (digital audio) recorder which can be used to record elicitation sessions. This recorder can be used with a head-mounted noise-cancelling microphone which ensures consistent volume of recording and consistently high quality.
In addition to the CSL, we also have a Polaroid Macro 5 camera to do static palatography. This is a very high-quality instant camera designed for law enforcement work and other kinds of legal and medical documentation. The camera comes with dental mirrors that allow us to photograph evidence of lingual articulation on the palate. Images that we photograph are produced by applying a charcoal and olive oil emulsion to the speaker's tongue prior to articulation of a sound. Students have used this camera to study groups of similar fricatives in Mandarin Chinese and Polish, as well as some of the phonemes of Swedish. The camera is available to trained students carrying out research projects.
The phonetics lab also has a variety of computer resources to aid in the teaching of phonetics. The Sounds of the World's Languages database is available to all students, as are the computer files that accompany Ladefoged's book 'A Course in Phonetics.' We also have several CD-ROMs with audio data to exemplify phonemic contrasts and allophones. | https://linguistics.fas.harvard.edu/pages/phonetics-lab |
a. what sounds are in the language,
b. how they are strung together, and
c. what these different sound sequences mean.
B. Although some sounds in one language are not in another, the sounds of all the languages of the world together constitute a limited set.
1. Sound Segments
The study of the speech sounds that are utilized by all human languages to represent meanings is called phonetics. To describe these sounds it is necessary to decide what an "individual sound" is and how each sound differs from all others.
1.1. Individual Sounds
A. Segment
A speaker of English knows that there are three sounds in the word cat. But physically the word is just one continuous sound. You can segment the one sound into parts because you know English.
B. If you hear a man clearing his throat, you would be unable to segment the sound into a sequence of discrete units because the sounds produced are not sounds in the language.
참고 자료
Chapter 2 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language|작성자 dollti
태그
#phonology
#The Sounds of Langua
#phonetics
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Bilabial consonants are made by using both lips, labiodental consonants by using your top lip and your teeth. Some learners have problems recognizing the difference between labial and labiodental consonants. Spanish speakers, for example, have problems with /v/ and /b/.
What is labiodental in English?
adjective. articulated with the lower lip touching the upper front teeth, as f or v, or, rarely, with the upper lip touching the lower front teeth. noun. a labiodental speech sound.
Where are labiodental sounds produced?
A labiodental sound is produced by placing the upper teeth on the lower lip. There are two labiodental sounds in English: [f] voiceless. [v] voiced.
Is f bilabial or labiodental?
The voiceless labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in a number of spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨f⟩. Some scholars also posit the voiceless labiodental approximant distinct from the fricative.
What are the 7 articulators?
The main articulators are the tongue, the upper lip, the lower lip, the upper teeth, the upper gum ridge (alveolar ridge), the hard palate, the velum (soft palate), the uvula (free-hanging end of the soft palate), the pharyngeal wall, and the glottis (space between the vocal cords).
What is the f sound called?
The /f/ is a sound from the 'Consonants Pairs' group and it is called the 'Voiceless labiodental fricative'. This means that you create friction between the bottom lip and top teeth.
What is Labiodental example?
Labiodental sound: A sound that requires the involvement of the teeth and lips, such as "v," which involves the upper teeth and lower lip.
What are Bilabials sounds?
Bilabials or Bilabial consonants are a type of sound in the group of labial consonants that are made with both lips (bilabial) and by partially stopping the air coming from the mouth when the sound is pronounced (consonant). There are eight bilabial consonants used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). IPA.
What is the sound made by teeth?
Chatter is the word you are looking for: Chatter (teeth): If your teeth chatter, they knock together repeatedly because you are very cold or frightened: I could hardly talk, my teeth were chattering so much.
What does fricative mean in English?
Fricative, in phonetics, a consonant sound, such as English f or v, produced by bringing the mouth into position to block the passage of the airstream, but not making complete closure, so that air moving through the mouth generates audible friction.
What is meant by Labiodental Fricative?
The voiced labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. ... The presence of [v] and absence of [w], is a very distinctive areal feature of European languages and those of adjacent areas of Siberia and Central Asia.
Which is the voiceless sound?
A voiceless sound is one that just uses air to make the sound and not the voice. You can tell if a sound is voiced or not by putting your hand gently on your throat. When you say a sound, if you can feel a vibration it is a voiced sound. ... Pet /pet/ - the /p/ sound is voiceless.
Which sound is a voiced bilabial stop?
In phonetics and phonology, a bilabial stop is a type of consonantal sound, made with both lips (hence bilabial), held tightly enough to block the passage of air (hence a stop consonant). The most common sounds are the stops [p] and [b], as in English pit and bit, and the voiced nasal [m].
Which is a diphthong?
A diphthong is a vowel in which the speaker's tongue changes position while it is being pronounced, so that the vowel sounds like a combination of two other vowels. The vowel sound in ' tail' is a diphthong.
Which is bilabial plosive?
In phonetic terminology the sounds associated with p, b are called bilabial plosives because their pronunciation requires bringing the two lips together; the sounds associated with t, d are called dental or alveolar plosives because the tongue closes against the upper teeth or the skin covering the roots (alveoli) of ...
What are minimal pairs with examples?
A minimal pair or close pair consists of two words with sounds that are very similar but have different meanings. For example, rot and lot may sound similar, especially to some non-native English speakers. Below are ten other examples of minimal pairs, in the each sentence choose the correct word.
What kind of sound is K?
The voiceless velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨k⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is k . The [k] sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically.
Why does ph sound like F?
The Romans. They translated Greek phi (φ) as "ph" and pronounced it closer to "p" than "f". Native Latin words were spelled with the "f". Ironically, a lot of Latin p-words became f-words (e.g., pedis became "foot").
Which letters are Fricatives?
Fricatives are the kinds of sounds usually associated with letters such as f, s; v, z, in which the air passes through a narrow constriction that causes the air to flow turbulently and thus create a noisy sound.
How do you make an F sound?
In order to make the /f/ sound, all that is required is to rest your front teeth lightly on your bottom lip and blow. The /f/ sound is a voiceless sound, so you are simply passing air through your mouth. You do not need to vibrate your vocal cords at all.
What is the most frequently used articulator?
As these articulators are only as accurate as the recordings used to program them and are usually reserved for the most complex of restorative procedures, the semi-adjustable articulator is the articulator of choice for the vast majority of clinical situations.
Are voice and speech one and the same thing?
Voice (or vocalization) is the sound produced by humans and other vertebrates using the lungs and the vocal folds in the larynx, or voice box. Voice is not always produced as speech, however. Pitch is the highness or lowness of a sound based on the frequency of the sound waves. ... | https://classmonkeys.com/what-is-the-difference-between-bilabial-and-labiodental |
Significancy and clinical use of cardiac biomarkers
The substances which serum levels may be measured to estimate the condition of the heart muscle and therefore commonly used to diagnose the heart attack (myocardial infarction) and congestive heart failure are known as cardiac biomarkers.
So the cardiac biomarkers are used to:
- detect cardiac diseases;
- detect the risk of developing cardiac disorders;
- monitor the disorder;
- predict the response of a disorder to treatment.
Troponin
Troponin complex includes 3 proteins or subunits – troponin C (TnC), troponin I (TnI), troponin T (TnT). Tests that estimate the level of troponin I and T are used for diagnostics of myocardial infarction.
The level of troponin in the serum <0.01 ng/mL is considered to be normal.
Troponin T increases 2 to 4 hours after the onset of myocardial necrosis, with a peak at about 24 hours, later the level of troponin decreases up to 14 days. When the level of troponin is lower than 0.2 ng/mL the test should be repeated at 3 and 6 hours to distinguish an acute and chronic elevation.
If the levels of troponin appear to be normal during 12 hours after the onset of chest pain the diagnosis of myocardial infarction is unlikely.
Creatine kinase MB fraction
CK is a dimeric molecule, composed of M and B subunits.
The 2 subunits can form 3 isozymes:
- CK-MM mainly found in the skeletal muscles;
- CK-MB found in the myocardium;
- CK-BB found in the neuronal tissue and the lungs.
The normal value for CK-MB is 3-5% of total CK, but peak CK-MB level can range from 15-30% of total CK in post-myocardial infarction, although a CK-MB fraction more than 6% of the total CK activity is regarded diagnostic for a heart attack.
CK – MB levels increase significantly 4–6 hours after myocardial infarction and peak at about 12-24 hours after the heart attack. If there is no further damage to the heart muscle, the CK-MB levels return to normal after 24 to 48 hours.
Myoglobin
Myoglobin (MB) is an iron-containing cytoplasmic oxygen-binding protein, which is found in the cardiac muscle cells and skeletal/striated muscles.
The normal range of serum myoglobin is 0 to 85 ng/mL.
The level of myoglobin in the blood starts increasing within 2-3 hours after the heart attack and within 8-12 hours the level appears to reach its highest. Within one day the level returns back to normal.
The test is nonspecific for myocardial infarction. However, the level of myoglobin increases sooner than creatine kinase MB fraction after the heart attack. If the myoglobin level does not increase within 12 hours after the chest pain occurred, an infarction is very unlikely.
C-reactive protein
C-reactive protein (CRP) is produced by the liver. The protein may also be synthesized by cells in the vascular wall by the endothelium (the lining of the vessels), smooth muscle cells. The level of CRP increases when there is inflammation somewhere in the body. It was established that in atherosclerosis the concentration of the CRP rises, although it doesn’t reach the values seen in patients with infection/inflammation. Therefore thigh-sensitivity CPR test may be used as a cardiac biomarker.
The reference range for C-reactive protein is:
- High-sensitivity CRP (hs-CRP): < 3 mg/L;
Lactate dehydrogenase
Lactate dehydrogenase (LD) is a protein that catalyzes the oxidation of lactate to pyruvate. There are 5 different types of LD. LD-1 (H4) and LD-2 (H3M) are found in the heart muscle and their increased concentrations may be detected in myocardial infarction. LD-1 is elevated in the serum about 24 to 48 hours after the heart attack. The so-called flip in the LD-1/LD-2 from less than 1 to greater than 1 is seen after a severe heart attack.
Brain natriuretic peptide
Brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) is a hormone and N-terminal-pro-BNP (NT-pro-BNP) in a non-active prohormone, which is synthesized by the heart. The measurement of their level in the serum is used to detect, evaluate the heart failure and the response to treatment as the pressure within the heart chambers and the stretch of the heart muscle affect the production of the BNP and NT-pro-BNP. NT-pro-BNP concentration correlates with heart failure severity.
A normal level of the BNP reference range is:
- < 100 pg/mL for patients aged 0-74 years
- somewhat above 100 pg/mL, but under 400 pg/mL for patients aged 75-99 years
A normal level of NT-proBNP reference range is: | https://www.medigoo.com/articles/cardiac-biomarkers/ |
Allelopathy is understood to mean the influence exerted by vegetable products (fruits) on other plants or plants of the same species through the gases they give off, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), ethylene (ethene, C2H4) and aromatic substances, which reach their peak in particular at the climacteric (=time of maximum respiration). A concentration of 0.02% of ethylene in air may accelerate the ripening process by 4 – 10 times. It is therefore essential that unripe fruit at the preclimacteric stage is not stowed together with ripe fruit. If one item of fruit begins to excrete ethylene, a whole cargo of fruit may begin the increase in respiration associated with the climacteric. Allelopathy is not only observable in fruits of the same species, but also when different species are stored together. For example, apples excrete large amounts of ethylene, which may cause potatoes to sprout prematurely. Cucumbers turn yellow on exposure to ethylene from apples or tomatoes. The reason for this is that the fruit and vegetable species produce different amounts of ethylene and exhibit different levels of sensitivity to other ethylene producers, as is clear from the tables below. On the other hand, allelopathy may be used to advantage in ripening warehouses to bring about ripening at the desired time by exposure to ethylene. | https://www.tis-gdv.de/tis_e/misc/allelo.htm/ |