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Additional findings testing looks for variants in patients’ genes that aren’t relevant to their current health, but may be later on. For example, it can reveal if someone has an above-average chance of developing a hereditary heart condition.
But these tests can have major implications for patients and their families. Thus, individuals deciding whether they want such a test need support — which Edna can provide.
A range of medical conditions have underlying genetic causes. Historically, this has been tested with genetic testing, by looking at either a single gene or a panel of genes related to one particular condition.
In genomic testing, however, almost all the genes in a patient’s DNA are analysed using a biological sample (such as blood).
In Australia, genomic testing is done for patients with certain medical conditions, to provide more information about the condition and medical care required.
But genomic data can be analysed further in an additional findings test, to report on potential gene variants responsible for other preventable and/or treatable conditions.
Although available in the United States, additional findings tests are currently beyond immediate medical need in Australia and are only carried out in research settings. That said, conversations have started about them becoming mainstream here, too.
If additional findings tests were offered in Australia, genetic counsellors would have to spend a large proportion of their time helping patients decide whether they want one. This is where chatbots come in.
Edna the chatbot in training
For chatbots to accurately recognise human speech and provide a meaningful response, their “brain” needs to draw on a large body of data.
Many chatbot brains are developed from open source data, but this is inadequate for highly specialised fields. We developed Edna by analysing transcripts of actual counselling sessions that discussed additional findings analysis.
Edna can emulate the flow of a real patient-counsellor session, explaining various conditions, terms, concepts and the key factors patients should consider when making their decision.
For example, it prompts them to consider the personal and familial implications of undergoing an additional findings analysis. As we all share genes with our family, results from genomic testing can lead to serious conversations.
Edna’s database contains myriad details of medical conditions and terminology.
Edna has several other capabilities, such as:
knowing when to connect a patient with a genetic counsellor, if needed
providing general information covered in most genetic counselling sessions, allowing counsellors more time to focus on patients with complex needs
collecting a patient’s family history
detecting various forms of common language, such as “nan” instead of “grandmother” and “heart attack” instead of “myocardial infarct” (the medical term for heart attack)
recognising certain temporal markers. For instance, if a patient says “my mother died around Anzac Day two years ago”, Edna will know their mother died around April 25, 2018.
Edna asks about the medical conditions of a patient’s family members.
Edna is currently undergoing a feasibility trial with patients who have already had additional findings analysis done in a research setting, as well as genetic counsellors and students.
The Eliza Effect and other hurdles
Past research has suggested people prefer chatbots that interact with empathy and sympathy, rather than unemotionally giving advice. This is called the “Eliza effect” — named after the first ever chatbot. Eliza was able to elicit an emotional response from humans.
Edna is quite advanced on this front. It can detect negative sentiment and even some forms of sarcasm. Still, this isn’t the same as true empathy.
Since Edna provides generic information, it can’t discuss the implications of a future or previous genomic test for a specific patient.
It also can’t link the patient with a support group, or provide expert medical advice. Still, Edna represents a significant move towards a digital health solution that could take some pressure off genetic counsellors.
Edna can identify when a user likely needs to be connected to a real counsellor.
Providing more genomic healthcare
Edna’s main advantage is accessibility. It can support people living remotely, or who are otherwise unable to attend face-to-face genetic counselling.
It can also be accessed at a patient’s home, where family members may be present. They can then share in the information provided and engage Edna themselves, potentially improving the chances of an accurate history capture.
As a digital interface, Edna is almost endlessly modifiable. It can be updated continuously with data compiled during interactions with patients — whether this be information on new topics, or a new way to respond to a question.
A larger-scale patient trial is planned for the near future. | <urn:uuid:1a417eea-cb71-4b79-b614-f2f4850033ed> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://blog.csiro.au/edna-chatbot/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.942981 | 1,008 | 3.078125 | 3 |
It’s a familiar scene: You’re online shopping, banking, or looking up information about your healthcare provider—and suddenly a ping sounds. A chat bubble pops up on the bottom of your screen. Enter your friendly neighborhood chatbot: “Hi there! How can I help you?”
You know it’s automated, yet can’t help but feel connected to someone on the other end. That friendly tone and fast response time is hard to beat. But when you start asking specific questions about the WiFi router you just bought, your savings account, or a concern about the cost of your prescription, the conversation falls flat: “I’m not sure I understand your question.” Suddenly, seamless support comes screeching to a halt.
According to research from Gartner, only 9% of customer requests are resolved by self-service chatbots on the first try. In this blog post, we explore why chatbots often fall short for hardware support—and how you can provide superior support with a hybrid AI solution that actually solves customer pain points.
What are the origins of chatbot technology?
While chatbots have gained momentum in the past decade, their history dates back to 1966. German computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he developed ELIZA, a program designed to trick users into believing they were communicating with a real human.
Though it wasn’t labeled a chatbot at the time, ELIZA is among the earliest examples of software that has the ability to recognize keywords or phrases to mimic human responses.
Weizenbaum’s innovation paved the way for modern software that automates all kinds of support requests across industries—from e-commerce to entertainment, finance to food delivery, healthcare to hardware, tourism to telecom, and beyond.
The benefits of this technology? Chatbots are:
- Easy to build and install on websites. Bots offer a quick path to basic support automation.
- Readily available 24/7. This means no bottlenecks for customers, like waiting to connect with a live agent for hours.
- Cost-effective. An automated solution means fewer in-person employees—and lower labor costs.
Considering the above reasons, it’s no wonder why 67% of consumers interacted with a chatbot over the past year alone. But while these benefits are enticing, chatbots are also notorious for leaving customers feeling frustrated and unsupported because they lack the problem-solving skills and nuanced information needed to reach a real resolution. Let’s see why.
Where do chatbots fall short?
Rather than receiving a quick resolution via chatbot, customers across industries are regularly rerouted to live support agents when self-service technology meets its limitations. These limitations include:
1. Lack of nuanced knowledge and specificity
Remember: chatbots have been instructed what to do and how to respond. While they may be easy to install, one size certainly does not fit all when it comes to handling customer questions, concerns, or frustrations. Often, resolving customer issues requires nuanced product expertise, awareness of colloquial or slang terms, and additional knowledge that a traditional chatbot simply doesn’t possess. When a chatbot can’t offer the support it promises, a customer has no choice but to wait for a live agent or turn elsewhere. This inevitably leads to greater customer dissatisfaction.
2. Inability to problem-solve or self-reason
Similarly, chatbots lack the human capacity to problem-solve and self-reason. Instead, they’re rooted in very simple technology: decision trees that solve predetermined questions using a company’s manually entered, preset answers. And these answers can’t account for unpredictable, specific situations. This hinders a chatbot’s ability to make decisions on the spot, troubleshoot, and offer the kind of support customers really need.
3. Difficulty understanding customer intent
All too often, chatbots fail to understand the intentions behind customer support requests. If the right keywords or phrases haven’t been included in the customer’s question, they may get confused and reply to a reasonable question with an unhelpful response like “I didn’t understand”—leaving customers feeling completely dissatisfied.
4. Limited learning capacity
Unlike humans, chatbots don’t internalize previous errors and improve. Traditional chatbots tend to repeatedly hit the same walls since their software is hard-coded and difficult to change without modifying the entire program. If your bot doesn’t learn over time, your support team will wind up having to repeat the same troubleshooting processes over and over—which leads to agent burnout and heightened inefficiency.
How can businesses improve support automation?
While chatbots clearly have shortcomings, there are several actions companies can take to improve their support automation. Here’s how companies can turn mere “chatter” into action with a more comprehensive approach to product support:
1. Invest in smarter, specialized AI solutions
It’s important to find specialized solutions that focus on resolving real issues for real customers. By constantly analyzing past customer interactions, smart AI assistants can diagnose pain points and help companies achieve more precise problem-solving. Since they’re powered by machine learning algorithms that pull from past interactions, these AI assistants more accurately understand what customers are asking and how to help. This results in fewer repetitive, time-consuming tasks for live agents—and customers who walk away satisfied, not stressed.
2. Prioritize resolution over deflection
Chatbots are notorious for primarily focusing on deflection and not actually fixing problems. It’s easy to talk in circles without proposing a solution, but this only frustrates customers and wastes more of their valuable time—especially if they have to then reach out to a live agent. In prioritizing resolution, companies can provide the tools that customers need to actually self-serve and fix their product issues. A key part of this process is understanding customer needs by analyzing end user data.
3. Implement a hybrid support model across digital channels
Even in the digital era, nothing quite compares to human skill, expertise, and support. Rather than choosing between artificial and human intelligence, companies should embrace a hybrid support approach. The benefits? AI solutions like chatbots offer speed, scalability, and cost savings while human agents are experts at establishing emotional connections and providing personalized service.
Enter Mavenoid: the one-stop shop for superior product support
When it comes to providing complex hardware and product support, most chatbots simply won't cut it. Limited in intelligence, they lack true troubleshooting skills. They think inside the box. They hit walls. And instead of actually resolving customer problems, they fail miserably time and again.
Unlike traditional, limited chatbots, Mavenoid focuses on troubleshooting specific technical issues—not basic FAQ items or simple requests that can be solved with one to three steps of decision-tree logic.
How? Our hybrid AI approach identifies product solutions based on real data from our customers—with insight into their specific questions and user experiences. That way, our technology comes back stronger by self-teaching and avoiding repeat mistakes.
Better yet, Mavenoid can be used across digital channels. It's not simply a chatbot, but a comprehensive solution that is accessible in-app, over email, or via social.
Say goodbye to chatbots and hello to customized support. | <urn:uuid:9568d3b0-257d-47b8-accb-de94da3c1e9b> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://blog.mavenoid.com/mavenoid-is-not-a-chatbot/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.921851 | 1,546 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Drop it like it’s Ð, G, H, Þ or a vowel. Posted by hulda on Sep 30, 2012 in Icelandic customs, Icelandic grammar
The most confusing part of Icelandic may not actually be the grammar – although difficult – nor the spelling – it will eventually make sense – but the way Icelanders pronounce it during everyday conversations. Depending on the speaker the language may be riddled with words borrowed from English, severely mumbled or shortened to unrecognizable form. Since the shortening is the most commonly occurring one* I decided to try to explain the typical forms of it.
Words are shortened both from the beginning and the end, depending on the situation. This makes speaking faster and easier too, since some sound combinations of Icelandic are challenging even for Icelanders themselves, for example when sound Ð (= eth) is followed by Þ (= thorn).
For example “Syndu þeim húsið þitt” (= Show them your house) is pronounced more like “Synduðeim húsiþitt”.
Two things happened in that sentence. First of all, if a Ð is the last letter of a word it regularly falls off in spoken tongue, especially so if it’s followed by a Þ. The sound combination is just too troublesome to pronounce as it is. Another one was that the letter Þ changed into a Ð: the pronoun that begins with it is unstressed and therefore gets the faster form of pronunciation.
Another letter that often falls off at the end of a word is G. This is because it’s often already unvoiced f.ex. in words such as “ég” or “og”, when spoken in a hurry the ends disappear completely.
Lastly vowels can be left out if there’s a two vowel combination, one at the end of a word and another at the beginning of the next one. The vowel at the end of a word is left out. For example in the sentence “Láttu okkur vita” (= Let us know) the first word loses its vowel and the sentence becomes more like “Láttokkur vita”.
The letter that most commonly disappears from the beginning of a word is H. This is in particular true with unstressed pronouns: “Kom hann með þér?” (= Did he come with you?) turns into “Komann meþér?”. The Ð falls away as well, as per the rule.
To make it a bit more challenging, when the H is left out it transforms the word into one that begins with a vowel – henni = “(h)enni”. Therefore the vowel-dropping is also necessary. “Sýndu henni að þér
ert er ekki sama” (= Show her that you care) becomes “Sýndenni aþér er ekki sama”.**
Sounds confusing, right? Just wait until you try to understand someone who has a habit of really brutal shortenings! In their use whole sentences turn into a few syllables which in turn may also be mumbled, in which case everything I wrote above is merely a guideline. I made a video to better explain this dropping business with sound examples:
As a homework assignment, how about listening to Gordjöss by Páll Óskar and following the lyrics while he sings? Can you spot which words are shortened, and why?
*The most common = everyone does it all the time, no joke.
Disclaimer: no Icelanders were harmed in the making of this blog entry but we couldn’t save the pizza.
**I’m really sorry, I made a mistake here. Þér -form of þú indeed uses er, not ert. Example: þér er boðið í afmæli (= You’re invited to a birthday party). Do also read the comment Heiða left after this post – she mentions the subjunctive mood form of the verb vera.
Build vocabulary, practice pronunciation, and more with Transparent Language Online. Available anytime, anywhere, on any device. | <urn:uuid:f97ef71f-e333-4b38-b126-c27f86d239f4> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://blogs.transparent.com/icelandic/2012/09/30/drop-it-like-its-d-g-h-th-or-a-vowel/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.949859 | 904 | 3 | 3 |
Around the world, countries are developing ways to put a price on carbon to fight climate change. They are choosing different approaches depending on their national circumstances. China has pilot emissions trading systems (ETS) in seven provinces and cities and is planning a national ETS in 2016. Chile recently approved a carbon tax to start in 2018. Mexico and Colombia are implementing sector-wide crediting mechanisms that reward low emission programs with carbon credits, for example in the transport sector by substituting conventional vehicles with electric cars. Many countries have renewable energy portfolio standards and feed-in tariffs.
These domestic initiatives are crucial to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Each is being designed individually, though, creating a patchwork of regulations and missing the economy of scale that a connected system could bring.
The World Bank Group has been working on ways to network these initiatives and facilitate an integrated international carbon market.
Networking domestic efforts can help countries achieve their climate mitigation objectives in a more cost-effective way. When different carbon pricing systems are connected, they create a larger, potentially more liquid, market. The larger the market, the more the price of carbon is resilient to extreme volatility. Also, by connecting with different carbon pricing systems, countries can tap into other abatement options, which can help to reduce costs. The cost and efficiency benefits that result from networking may, therefore, enable countries to increase the ambition of their climate mitigation efforts.
An integrated carbon market also has advantages for the private sector and the flow of finance. Currently, about 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and provinces have or plan to implement some kind of carbon pricing. In many cases, each is following a different climate mitigation rulebook. This makes it difficult to track progress and compare achievements among different jurisdictions. This variability is reflected in the wide carbon price range: within the United States alone, the carbon price under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), involving nine northeastern states, was $5.21 at its most recent auction, while the carbon price under the California ETS was $12.10.
Many existing approaches to integration focus on equalizing carbon assets across jurisdictions so they can be traded on a 1:1 basis. But this requires significant time, effort, and resources. The Networked Carbon Markets initiative instead focuses on comparability, rather than equalization. It would allow for cross-border exchange on the basis of “trading ratios” or “carbon exchange rates,” much like in currency markets.
The World Bank Group has been discussing the Networking Carbon Markets Initiative with stakeholders since 2013. This week in London, the Climate Markets & Investment Association and ING are bringing the finance and investment sectors together as part of the Networking Carbon Markets Knowledge Series. The event will provide an opportunity to discuss approaches to assessing the relative value of climate mitigation efforts and enabling cross-border trade on the basis of carbon exchange rates. Institutional requirements will also be explored, including how an International Carbon Asset Reserve and International Settlement Platform could support carbon market-related functions and, ultimately, a networked international carbon market.
While countries are developing custom-made answers to the climate problem, stakeholders from the private and public sectors, research communities and civil society are working on ways to compare these blueprints so that all climate action is accounted for and accommodated by a more efficient and networked international carbon market. | <urn:uuid:fb3a8c59-d82f-4ec1-b3cc-c6fda3f56fc8> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://blogs.worldbank.org/climatechange/networking-climate-actions-stronger-international-carbon-markets | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.940778 | 684 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Encouraging resilience in any child plays a crucial part in their overall well-being and success. Pair teaching resilience with outdoor play, and you’ve got yourself an excellent foundation that helps children face challenges, learn new skills and fosters self confidence. How? You might ask. Let us explore five ways the power of outdoor play can help in developing resilient kids.
Playing outside provides children with opportunities to take risks in a controlled environment. It is important to provide kids with challenging play equipment and activities that allow them to explore and be curious safely. For example, you could climb trees, play on rope bridges, jump on the tramp or at a tumbling gym. No matter what it is, get creative, and know that in the mean time they are developing coordination and physical strength, learning to assess risks and developing confidence in their ability to do difficult things.
Have you ever watched your child get frustrated about trying something new? Sometimes it can take everything we have not to fix the problem for them, but in many situations, that can be the best thing for them. Encouraging children to work through challenges and find solutions can help them learn how to problem-solve, especially during outdoor activities. When we let kids build forts, climb trees, or navigate obstacle courses without micromanaging, we allow their minds to decide what to do and how to do it their way.
Outdoor play provides children with opportunities to experience setbacks and failures. When children face these challenges, it is important to teach them coping skills. For example, if a child falls and hurts themself, you can teach them to take deep breaths and focus on something positive. Let them feel safe to talk about their feelings, and provide them with strategies for dealing with difficult emotions. These coping skills will help children manage future challenges as well.
Outdoor play also enables children to develop a greater sense of independence. For example, a family outdoor camping trip complete with hiking, smores, fishing, and lasting memories can teach children how to navigate directions on a hike, build a fire safely, set up a tent and throw a fishing line, all while fostering a belief that they are capable of doing things the’ve never done before.
Part of being resilient is having social skills, and one way to do that is through outdoor play. Engaging in group activities such as tag, hide and seek, or team sports can help children develop this skill set. Encourage your children to work together, share their ideas and support each other, and when conflicts arise, help them navigate these situations by finding a solution that works for everyone.
So, next time your children beg you to do something outside, jump at that offer! Because ultimately, by incorporating these elements into outdoor play, you will be helping them become more resilient, confident, and better equipped to navigate challenges in the future. | <urn:uuid:eeb9d09b-43b5-4bf3-b89f-8c3b95d8b3fe> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://bolderplay.com/blogs/blog/5-ways-outdoor-play-helps-develo-resilient-kids | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.953288 | 583 | 3.546875 | 4 |
Busting Myths about Wine – SULPHITES
If you have read the back label of a bottle of wine you would have noticed that just about all of them carry the warning “contains sulphites.” With consumers becoming more and more health conscious over the last couple of years, certain ingredients in the food industry have come under serious scrutiny. In the wine industry, it is the presence of sulphites that has become an increasingly contentious issue.
What are sulphites? The term “sulphites” is a comprehensive term for sulphur dioxide (SO2) in all of its free and bound forms. It can make its way into wine in two ways, as a by-product of yeast metabolism during the fermentation process, or by being administered by the winemaker. A naturally occurring by-product of fermentation, no wine will, without zero intervention, contain zero sulphites. The handful of zero sulphite wines on the market have been altered chemically post-fermentation. In addition to the naturally occurring sulphites in wine, sulphites may be administered to wine in small amounts during different stages of the winemaking process. It is used by winemakers everywhere for its antioxidant and antibacterial properties.
Sulphites have been blamed for everything from headaches to blocked sinuses, and even that diabolical hangover. This has led to consumers avoiding it like the plague. The United States Food and Drug Administration reports that less than 1% of the US population actually suffers from a sulphite intolerance. While some people correctly avoid the controversial ingredient, the amount of people who legitimately suffer from the negative effects of sulphites are in the minority.
Busting Myths about Wine’s Sulphites, Alcohol aside, there are many other naturally occurring compounds in wine which you are likely to be more sensitive to. These include tannins and biogenic amines (mainly histamine and tyramine). Tannins are compounds that exist in the skins, stems and seeds of grapes. They are the main contributors to your wine’s texture and complexity, and since red wines are fermented on their skins and seeds, and sometimes even stems, they contain far higher concentrations.
Biogenic amines are small organic compounds that can be formed during fermentation or maturation. Red wines, again, contain far higher concentrations of biogenic amines, due to the fact that white wines hardly ever go through the process of malolactic fermentation, and consumers generally do not store white wines for as long. By using starter cultures (of yeast and bacteria) that have been selected for their ability to not produce these biogenic amines, winemakers can limit the concentration of these compounds in their wine. This is, however, a tricky one, as starter cultures are expensive. They are also not used in the production of most of your “natural wines” which the general public believe to be way better for your health. Another tool in the winemaker’s arsenal that can greatly reduce these concentrations is – surprise, surprise – good old sulphur dioxide, as high levels of biogenic amines correlate with other wine spoilage components that sulphites prevent, by acting as a preservative.
Just some food for thought as you open that bottle of vino this evening. | <urn:uuid:27d5591d-09e8-4957-b855-f1783bf3b645> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://brevitylaw.co.za/tag/oenophile/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.962412 | 676 | 2.6875 | 3 |
OUR CONCEPT of “once-in-a-century” storms needs to be redefined following the latest flash floods in Dublin and the surrounding region, according to Ireland’s leading expert on climate change, Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth.
After Dublin City Council categorised the latest floods as a “once-in-a century” event, he said this was now “a meaningless concept” based on standard trends, and we “no longer have such trends” because storms were becoming much more frequent.
“We can’t say this event is due to climate change, but the increase in frequency of intense rainfall events is on an upward curve – so we’re seeing nothing that contradicts the models [on climate change].
“It just so happened it was in Dublin this time, and not in Ballinasloe.”
Prof Sweeney said “much more statistical analysis” of rainfall patterns in Ireland was needed as a guide to future planning for events such as Monday evening’s rain, which led to the new record of 82.2mm for the greatest daily total for October at Casement Aerodrome, Baldonnel, since records began there in 1954.
Gerald Fleming, head of Met Éireann’s general forecasting division, said calculating “return periods” for such heavy rainfall was merely “playing with decimal points” and there was “certainly a question mark over whether they’re appropriate for the next 20 to 30 years”.
Dublin director of traffic Michael Phillips said it was not enough to be told by Met Éireann there would be heavy rain in Dublin.
“We need to develop a micro-system that will tell us if it’s going to be in Drumcondra or Ballsbridge so we know where to send out workforces.”
The last intense rainfall event in the Dublin area was on August 9th, 2008, when amounts in excess of 70mm were recorded in Celbridge, Lucan and Leixlip. Just three years earlier, on June 29th, 2005, 45mm fell in the Phoenix Park in less than an hour.
Coping with the consequences has presented real problems for the authorities.
After floods hit Drumcondra in November 2002 and then taoiseach Bertie Ahern was pictured standing up to his knees in water, priority was given to improving flood defences along the river Tolka.
There was, and still is, a risk that building up walls along one section of a river could result in it overflowing elsewhere.
Natural floodplains were also affected by urban and suburban development during the boom, simply by the spread of concrete and tarmacadam that allows water to gather in great quantities.
The controversial flood defences proposed for Clontarf would have been of no help on this occasion; they were designed to protect the area from inundation by the sea. Monday night’s flooding was caused by intense heavy rainfall over a period of several hours.
Some motorways and other major roads became impassable on Monday due to flooding, notably the M7 on the outskirts of Dublin, the N11 at the UCD Belfield underpass and the M50 between the Ballinteer and Firhouse junctions, triggering a six-hour closure.
Sean O’Neill, spokesman for the National Roads Authority, said the latter was due to a culvert backing up and flooding out onto the motorway. Six pumps were brought in by the operating company, M50 Concessions, to clear the water, which reached a depth of 300mm.
He explained all roads are designed to allow water to drain off their surface.
However, if the surrounding land and drainage is at or beyond capacity, the road is directly affected because “a domino effect takes place and the road becomes flooded”.
After the Dublin area emergency plan was activated, O’Neill said the authority lifted tolls on the port tunnel, allowing it to be used freely by motorists seeking to avoid flooded roads elsewhere. “The tunnel was fine and was used as a pressure reliever and exit route from the city.”
As for what happened in Dundrum shopping centre, where the entire ground floor was flooded, engineers have noted that the Dundrum Slang stream “is currently protected from a major flooding event which has a 2 per cent [1-in-50 year] probability of occurring in any given year”.
However, results from the river catchment flood risk assessment and management programme being carried out by the Office of Public Works (OPW) have shown that “there is no viable flood risk management option available for the entire Dundrum Slang”.
The programme derives from the 2007 EU “floods” directive, which requires all member states to undertake a preliminary flood risk assessment, based on available information, such as the OPW’s extensive flood mapping database.
This is available online at www.floodmaps.ie | <urn:uuid:90fa092b-256d-408d-be82-dbb4b7d7bb72> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://buckplanning.blogspot.com/2011/11/once-in-century-events-have-become.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.972856 | 1,047 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Is it possible to fill the vast North Pacific Ocean with too many salmon? Hard to fathom, but apparently so.
And what does that mean for fisheries management in the Northwest, Canada and Alaska, where the goal each year is to prompt millions of young, healthy salmon and steelhead — hatchery and wild – to move out of the freshwater and into the ocean?
Are we capable of thinking of the ocean as a finite habitat for fish? Recent studies suggest there may not be a choice.
It wasn’t so many years ago when hatchery managers figured the ocean has unlimited carrying capacity for both wild and hatchery salmon. But studies now indicate that salmon compete for food at sea. And that competition means those species with the short end of the stick will experience reduced growth and survival.
Last week’s story about sockeye salmon in Alaska’s Bristol Bay said some interesting and startling things. Due to climate change, these fish are altering their life history and moving into the ocean after one year in birth lakes rather than two to three years.
That doesn’t sound so bad. An extra year in the ocean to get fat and happy before returning home. Except that’s not what’s happening.
Researchers say these wild sockeye are getting stressed by competing for food with 6 billion hatchery salmon, a number that has grown steadily since the 1970s, when only about 500 million hatchery fish fed in these grounds.
Indeed, a 2015 study said as pink salmon abundance in the ocean off British Columbia and Alaska climbs, sockeye salmon abundance and size is declining and the competition for food between the two species is the reason.
Pink salmon in the North Pacific Ocean, said the study, reached 640 million adult fish in 2009. At the same time, many Fraser River sockeye populations in British Columbia saw significant declines.
Pinks — humpback salmon — are the smallest and most abundant of the Pacific salmon species. The rising number of pinks in the northern ocean are due to an increasing number of hatchery salmon – about 1.4 billion hatchery pinks a year — that are produced in British Columbia, Alaska and Russia.
Researchers said that the rise of pinks and decline in sockeye suggests that there is a limit to the number of salmon the northern ocean can support. Scientists have called for international discussions to talk about a possible cap on industrial scale releases of hatchery salmon.
So it’s getting crowded up there. But scientists don’t really know many salmon the North Pacific can actually support.
In other words, as this ocean fills with hatchery salmon, where is the tipping point for wild salmon? Scientists see the trend, but they don’t have the answer.
Eventually, I suppose, the answer will show itself in the nature of returns to freshwater spawning grounds and hatcheries. The ocean, at some point, may reveal itself as too full of salmon — hatchery and wild. Or maybe just hatchery.
— Bill Crampton, [email protected]
For more on this topic, see these stories from the CBB archives: | <urn:uuid:cbaebf48-34f3-41e5-ad31-41a51edeadf9> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://cbbulletin.com/editors-notebook-we-now-know-the-ocean-has-limited-carrying-capacity-for-salmon-but-we-dont-know-the-tipping-point/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.935253 | 641 | 3.578125 | 4 |
Communication, Interaction and Autism Acceptance Communication, Interaction, and
Autistic high school student Dillan Barmache, has so much to say and
For over ten years Martin Pistorius was trapped in his own body, fully cognizant, but unable to speak or move. He was surrounded by people who believed he was incapable of thinking and tried desperately to get just one person to notice. His story serves as a wake-up call for all of us to drastically change our assumptions about speech and intellectual capacity as well as the need to radically reform expectations and treatment of people with complex communication needs.
This poem is for my young friends: Evie, Ty, Max, Fallon, Mu, Jack, Emma, H., Philip, Oliver, Brooke, Henry, Miri, Cody, MissG, MasterL, and many others I cannot name here but I know are going to grow up to change the conversation. You make me very happy!
Best place for all autistic people, all disabled not disabled people, all families to speak together. Speak together for acceptance, inclusion, communication, and rights for all people. I am thinking when you look closely, this is what autism is.
I said a long time ago that I would not only be an real student In a school that supports me but also a self advocate for those lost in segregated settings echoing the dreaded lives of people in the world that are like me without the right supports.
"Thasya", a mini film by Dan Habib, highlights the power of presuming competence, differentiated instruction and augmentative and alternative communication. Inclusion works.
"If we were to go back to the 1960s and we were to talk to those leaders who were vehemently against desegregation, we would hear the conviction in their voices of them stating why they believe their decisions and what they were doing to those children were just. Just as I believe that some of you and some of the board members that have spoken believe that their decisions are just. But, I fear that the Hillsborough County School Board is standing on the wrong side of history."
" A lot of these kids end up not reaching their full potential because they suffer from low expectations. People think they don't speak well, so we shouldn't have them in the regular classroom, but a lot of the kids I work with, they're cognitively fine. They're perfectly capable. They just need a viable means of communication to really help them through that." Cathy Binger
"All of these children have one thing in common. They were always having to prove themselves, over and over and over again." Ray Ellis
Our first Change Leader is artist and disability rights advocate, Larry Bissonnette. Larry's art, writing, presentations, and films are changing perceptions about disability around the world. His quote in Wretches & Jabberers, "More like you than not" says it all. | <urn:uuid:0e5ea891-d380-4556-93c4-305d5f7ba2ec> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://cdn.ollibean.com/category/aac/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.982076 | 595 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Authors:Yu Wang, Ning-Yu Huang, Jian-Qiang Shen, Pei-Qin Liao,* Xiao-Ming Chen, and Jie-Peng Zhang
Journal: Journal of American Chemical Society
Who doesn’t like those fancy looking sports cars with intricate designs that are built to perform faster? Or, think about the structures that are designed to sustain the tallest buildings in the world. Just like these cars or buildings, we can engineer molecules to make them more efficient. Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are really big molecular networks in which metal ions are connected by organic molecules to form a porous yet robust structure. Despite the porosity, these materials are exceptionally stable in most common solvents like water and alcohol, and at temperature as high as 200oC. Owing to their overall structural stability, the metal ions in the framework can rearrange adjacent atoms during a reaction without collapsing the entire framework. This property makes these molecules bind to other molecules and convert them to something else.
Because of their vast applicability in gas adsorption and gas storage, new MOFs are synthesized almost every day. But the so-called “structure-function” relationship is not very commonly explored in the field of MOFs. The work under this discussion attempts to do just that.
Let us first understand the structure of the MOFs and then we will go into the function part. In MOFs, multiple metal ions are often present as clusters where oxo (O) or hydroxo (OH) functional groups bind them to each other like a bridge (Figure 1).
Fig 1. The framework and the coordination environment around Co of (a) MAF-X27-Cl and (b) MAF-X27-OH, Color code: purple, blue, red, green: Co, N, O, Cl.
These groups are directly attached to the metal ions, and are called the coordination environment surrounding the metal center. The coordination environment in MOFs closely resembles the protein surrounding metal ions in natural enzymes. In most of the well-known enzymes, structure-function relationships are well studied. So what does this relationship mean? It means you will expect to see a difference in the enzymatic activity if the structure or composition of the protein surrounding the metal is changed. As we alter the amino acids constituting the protein in an enzyme, the metal might not bind to other molecules in quite the same way as before. And this affects the overall efficiency and selectivity of the enzyme.
Unlike enzymes, the structure-property relationship in MOFs has not yet been thoroughly explored. In the present work, the authors systematically altered the coordination environment around the metal in MOFs of similar structure and tested their efficiency for the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO). Not only did they show small changes in the MOF structure dramatically changed catalytic efficiency, but some of these changes led to an unexpected benefit.
Let us now get an idea of how a MOF functions as a catalyst. Since we are interested in reduction of CO2 (adding electrons), we need to understand how MOFs can transfer electrons to CO2. MOFs often have a semiconductor property, which suggests that they can move the outermost electron to an excited state if provided with sufficient energy. This property is very attractive for using them as photocatalysts – catalysts that use light as energy to perform a chemical reaction. However, in many instances the MOFs alone cannot absorb the light directly to mobilize. So, scientists attach a “photosensitizer” to MOFs, which are dye molecules that absorb visible light very strongly and then transfer that energy to the MOFs. Thus it is a common to use MOFs as photocatalysts with added photosensitizers to convert small molecules like carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
An important feature of a practical catalyst is how easily you can make it at low cost. MOFs win again in this aspect. Unlike a majority of molecular catalysts that use rare, expensive metals, MOFs are made of cheap and abundant metals. For CO2 reduction in particular, cobalt metal (Co) has been shown to be quite effective to form carbon monoxide (CO). Therefore the authors chose a series of Co based MOFs that have similar structure and only differ by the atoms present in the metal’s coordination environment. Two of the MOFs under study contain OH and the other two contain Cl atom adjacent to the metal. The MOF containing “l” (MAF-X27l) is similar to MAF-X27, but with a bigger pore to facilitate better transport of CO2and CO and hence better catalysis.
Fig 2. TOF of CO production by six MOFs under study with 1.0 atm (blue) and 0.1 atm (orange) CO2. MOFs containing OH groups include the “-OH” suffix, those with Cl groups contain “-Cl.”
Shown in Figure 2 is the turn over frequency (TOF), which is a measure of how fast and effective a catalyst is. In this comparison, the TOF is higher for MOFs containing OH group than the ones containing Cl. In fact, their TOF is even higher than that of Co-ZIF-9 MOF, which held the record of the highest TOF value reported so far.
While changes in TOF were expected, this work also contained a surprise. The MOFs containing OH convert pure CO2 as well as mixture of CO2 and other gases (like regular air) with similar efficiency. This is truly exciting because all other well-known catalysts lose 90% of their efficiency when subjected to a lower concentration of CO2.
Another interesting aspect of this work is the chosen solvent. It is not often that you see water being used as the solvent for reduction of COWater can interfere with the desired reaction because the reduction of H2O to H2 competes with and inhibits the reduction of CO2. But the authors mention that water is crucial for the high efficiency of this reaction.
Fig 3. Mode of binding of Co with CO2 in (a) MAF-X27-Cl and (b) MAF-X27-OH.
To explain this, the authors suspect that OH and Cl-containing MOFs bind differently with CO2 and H2O. Indeed it was shown computationally that CO2 forms two strong hydrogen bonds with the two bridging OH groups in OH-MOFs, which leads to stronger binding of CO2 than H2O. Therefore, the water does not interfere with production of CO2 in this MOF, and the TOF is very high. On the other hand, in Cl-MOFs the Cl exerts repulsion towards electronegative O in CO2 (Figure 3). And so it binds H2O more strongly than CO2 and forms more H2, resulting in the lower TOF for CO production as shown in Figure 2.
Once the researchers established the importance of water during the reaction, the involvement of protons was further illustrated through monitoring the change in a proton’s location by deuterium substitution (isotope labeling). While subjecting MAF-X27-OD in H2O to similar catalytic conditions as the OH-containing MOF, infrared spectroscopy showed the conversion of OD to OH in presence of light. This indicates that H2O serves as the donor of protons (H+) that are exchanged with the H present in OH of the MOF during the reduction reaction.
Scheme 1. Catalytic cycle showing co-operative interaction between Co and OH
Based on these studies the authors proposed a catalytic cycle (Scheme 1) involving the co-operative interaction between Co atoms with the adjacent OH group to facilitate CO2 reduction selectively to CO with high efficiency.
Using all of the above-mentioned experiments, the authors have nicely established how the presence of H-bonding network between CO2 and OH in these OH-containing MOFs render superior efficiency for CO2 reduction. While this sort of mechanistic study in MOFs is not very common in the literature, the present work reports the structure-function relationship of the most effective Co containing MOF catalyst to date. These MOFs are not only very efficient and selective, but they are very stable and therefore recyclable over multiple rounds of catalysis. The methods used in this work will be truly beneficial to design better catalysts to convert CO2 into fuels such as carbon monoxide, formic acid, and methane, using abundant solar energy. | <urn:uuid:e96a8343-f81f-4bb1-9f6a-ac86b00aaef2> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://chembites.org/2018/01/12/structure-function-relationship-in-a-highly-efficient-co2-reducing-mofs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.947959 | 1,786 | 3.4375 | 3 |
Process Life Cycle
The process life cycle can be defined by a state diagram. Which has states representing the execution status of process at various time and transitions. That shows the changes in the execution status. To maintain the management information about a process the operating system uses the process control block (PCB).
The process control block is also known as task control block. PCB contains various kind of information about a particular process such as.
- Process state
- Program counter
- CPU registers
- CPU scheduling information
- Memory management information
- Accounting information
- I/O status information
A process is normally more than just program code which is often called as text section. It also contains the current activity. Which is implied by the value of program counter and the contents of the processor’s register. A process generally includes process stake and data section. Stack and data section contains the temporary data and global variables. Process also includes a heap which is basically a memory space what is dynamically allocated during the process run time.
A process changes its state during its execution which is called the process life cycle. A process life cycle consists of five stages which are:
|New||The process which is being created|
|Running||Instructions being executed|
|Waiting||The process is waiting for an event to get occur|
|Ready||The process is waiting to be assigned to a processor|
|Terminated||The process completed its execution|
These names of the states are uninformed and they vary across operating system. These stats are mostly found on all systems but some operating systems also more finely define process states. Processer can hold only one process at a time simply it can be running one process at a time. However, many processes may be ready or waiting.
Read more about Process Termination | <urn:uuid:184e0d8c-6bd9-4505-b737-3a0937c8dcc1> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://chhapdesign.com/process-life-cycle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.950436 | 370 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Hertz Contact Mechanics
Created using ANSYS 14.5
For an electronic copy (PDF) of the relevant report, click here.
Consider a simple problem that illustrates a comparison between the analytical and numerical results. As shown in the diagram below, consider a problem where we apply a downward force (F) of 60π N to a spherical object with a radius (R1) of 8 mm. This isotropic sphere has an axial modulus (E1) of 1 GPa and a Poisson’s ratio (ν1) of 0.3. In addition, this sphere is fixed vertically at the contact interface with a rigid wall. Since we are modeling the wall as a rigid body, we assume axial modulus (E2) equals +∞ and Poisson’s ratio (ν2) equals 0. Also, the radius of curvature of the wall (R2) can be assumed to be zero. | <urn:uuid:0b7e7987-9e71-4276-9c64-350b2be4d5b6> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/SIMULATION/ANSYS+-+Hertz+Contact+Mechanics | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.82246 | 197 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Mongolia landforms – Known as the “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky,” is a country with lots of different types of land. Mongolia is right in the middle of Central Asia, and it’s full of stunning nature.
Mongolia’s got everything, like huge deserts and towering mountains. So, let’s begin an exciting adventure and check out all the incredible sights in this fantastic country.
1. The Mongolian Plateau
The Mongolian Plateau is the heart of Mongolia’s landscapes. It covers a big part of Mongolia right in the middle.
The plateau is why Mongolia is famous for its huge, endless grassy fields. People here live in a special way, moving around with animals like horses, yaks, and sheep.
It’s a place where nature and people are truly connected.The wide-open spaces, dotted with traditional round tents known as gers, create a mesmerizing, unending sea of green during the summer months.
This is where Mongolia’s nomad lifestyle started, and it’s what makes Mongolia unique. It’s why people live here like they do, and it’s what makes their culture so extraordinary.
2. The Khangai Mountains
The Khangai Mountains are a central feature of Mongolia’s landscape, characterized by lush alpine terrain, dense forests, and pristine lakes.
These mountains are really different from the big, open plains of the Mongolian Plateau. In this place, there are lots of different plants and animals, including some really rare ones like the snow leopard.
It’s like a unique spot in nature. Amidst the towering peaks, you’ll find serene alpine lakes like Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur, a place of astounding beauty.
The Khangai Mountains are like a warm welcome for nature lovers and hikers. If you’re a fan of nature, you’ll have a great time here. It’s a unique spot in Mongolia.
3. The Eastern Highlands
The Eastern Highlands, located in eastern Mongolia, are a geological wonder. The Eastern Highlands are a place where you can see lots of different land shapes. There are big mountains, flat plateaus, and rolling hills.
The rocks here come in pretty colors, and they show us how amazing our planet can be. When you go exploring in the Eastern Highlands, you’ll come across deep valleys, steep gorges, and unique things in the ground that are pretty amazing to look at.
This place shows us that Mongolia’s land has lots of different types, and nature can create some really cool shapes.
4. The Lakes and Rivers
Mongolia’s beauty isn’t confined to mountains and deserts; it’s also found in its network of lakes and rivers. Lake Khovsgol, often referred to as the “Dark Blue Pearl,” stands as one of the largest freshwater lakes in Asia.
It’s like a picture-perfect place, with really clean and clear blue water, and all around, you have thick forests and hilly areas. It’s like something you’d see in a beautiful painting.
Several other rivers, such as the Orkhon and Selenge, meander through the land, nurturing the countryside with their life-giving waters.
These bodies of water are not only a source of sustenance but also a place of natural wonder, offering picturesque views and opportunities for fishing, kayaking, and relaxation.
5. The Flaming Cliffs
Our journey takes us back to the Gobi Desert, where we discover the iconic Flaming Cliffs. These striking red sandstone formations are famous for their archaeological significance, having yielded dinosaur fossils and eggs.
The cliffs are a testament to the rich history and geological wonders of Mongolia. Mongolia’s landforms are not just geographical features; they are an integral part of the nation’s cultural identity.
The nomadic herding communities have harmoniously coexisted with these landscapes for centuries, adapting their way of life to the demands of the land. Mongolia’s unique terrain has forged a resilient and diverse culture that has survived the test of time.
Mongolia’s landforms are a spectacular testament to the Earth’s natural wonders. From the Gobi Desert’s mesmerizing dunes to the Khangai Mountains’ serene forests, this country is a place of breathtaking diversity.
Its landscapes, whether vast or intimate, offer a connection to nature that is both humbling and inspiring. When you journey through Mongolia’s landforms, you embark on an adventure through time and space, discovering a world of remarkable beauty. | <urn:uuid:c047a21a-e15d-4e15-a00c-80f0e0a1d9cc> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://correctmongolia.com/mongolia-landforms-a-land-of-diverse-landforms/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.911536 | 998 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Scientists explore the future of the river’s end
Researchers, currently assessing the future of the estuary based on different scenarios of water availability and climate change, have recorded the changes following elevated salinities and reduced water levels in the Coorong.
Media are invited to a science briefing on the long-term future of the water system at 9.30am this Friday, 4 April 2008 at the Steam Exchange Brewery, Goolwa Wharf, Goolwa.
The briefing will be conducted by researchers in the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth (CLLAMMecology) Research Cluster.
CLLAMMecology Research Cluster, supported through CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship involves a partnership between CSIRO, the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, and SARDI Aquatic Sciences. Geoscience Australia, Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, and Land & Water Australia are additional research and funding partners.
In the first comprehensive research program for this estuary, the $5.3 million project aims to improve the ecological health of the region and protect threatened birds and fish.
Cluster Leader, Associate Professor Justin Brookes from the University of Adelaide, says the research is examining the relationship between river flows, salinity, and the ecology of a range of aquatic organisms, including key fish and bird species.
“No single part of the system can be restored without a whole of system approach to water savings and a commitment to an environmental water allocation. The work we are doing will help with allocating limited water resources so they have the required environmental benefits.”
Media are invited to the Science Briefing:
Where: Steam Exchange Brewery, Goolwa Wharf, Railway Cutting Road, Goolwa (morning)
Goolwa Barrages and Coorong (afternoon)
When: Friday, April 4, 9.30am
CSIRO initiated the National Research Flagships to provide science-based solutions in response to Australia’s major research challenges and opportunities. The nine Flagships form multidisciplinary teams with industry and the research community to deliver impact and benefits for Australia.
Image available at: Scientists explore the future of the river’s end
- The A$5.3 million project aims to improve the ecological health of the region and protect threatened birds and fish
- Scientists have discovered many animals are now restricted to a small area around the Murray Mouth in South Australia
- The research is examining the relationship between river flows, salinity, and the ecology | <urn:uuid:00201394-0c80-4347-94bf-d0c59821fc96> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://csiropedia.csiro.au/scientists-explore-the-future-of-the-rivers-end/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.91206 | 525 | 2.71875 | 3 |
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- Data packageData from: Concentration of a widespread breeding population in few critically important nonbreeding areas: migratory connectivity in the Prothonotary Warbler(2019-07-03) Tonra, Christopher M.; Hallworth, Michael T.; Boves, Than J.; Reese, Jessie; Bulluck, Lesley P.; Johnson, Matthew; Viverette, Cathy; Percy, Katie; Ames, Elizabeth M.; Matthews, Alix; Slevin, Morgan C.; Wilson, R. Randy; Johnson, Erik I.One of the greatest challenges to informed conservation of migratory animals is elucidating spatiotemporal variation in distributions. Without such information, it is impossible to understand full-annual-cycle ecology and effectively implement conservation actions that address where and when populations are most limited. We deployed and recovered light-level geolocators (n = 34) at 6 breeding sites in North America across the breeding range of a declining long-distance migratory bird, the Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea). We sought to determine migratory routes, stopover location and duration, and the location of overwintering grounds. We found that the species exhibits a large-scale, east‒west split in migratory routes and weak migratory connectivity across its range. Specifically, almost all individuals, regardless of breeding origin, overlapped in their estimated wintering location in northern Colombia, in an area 20% the size of the breeding range. Additionally, most of the individuals across all breeding locations concentrated in well-defined stopover locations in Central America while en route to Colombia. Although error inherent in light-level geolocation cannot be fully ruled out, surprisingly much of the estimated wintering area included inland areas even though the Prothonotary Warbler is considered a specialist on coastal mangroves in winter. Based on these results, conservation efforts directed at very specific nonbreeding geographical areas will potentially have benefits across most of the breeding population. Our findings highlight the importance of using modern technologies to validate assumptions about little-studied portions of a species’ annual cycle, and the need to distribute sampling across its range. | <urn:uuid:e7b9a5fd-a697-46a7-b582-7af093ca34aa> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://datarepository.movebank.org/entities/taxon/bc844ef3-64d7-4595-a1bb-66fbe5060aea?f.entityType=Datapackage,equals&spc.page=1&f.dateIssued.min=2019&f.dateIssued.max=2019 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.861015 | 456 | 2.90625 | 3 |
What are we doing to the ocean?
- Our industrial activities release toxic chemicals into it, and these end up in our planet’s water supply and food chains. Think asbestos, lead, oils, petrochemicals, nitrates, phosphates and mercury.
- Substances generated by agricultural land use end up as ocean contaminants through run-off processes – fertilisers, petrol, pesticides and animal waste all affect marine life.
- Ships spill crude oil into the ocean. This issue needs no introduction.
- Our reliance on disposable items that take up to hundreds of years to biodegrade presents a huge pollution problem for the ocean. Plastic, foam, styrofoam and aluminium are all guilty. Again, these can can enter the food chain that humans are a part of.
This is not an exhaustive list.
How can we fix this?
- Support organisations that advocate for the protection of marine environments and campaign for industrial and governmental changes in this area.
- Educate yourself on issues affecting the ocean, and tell people about them.
- Reduce your reliance on plastic, especially disposable plastics. If you must use them, dispose of them with care.
- Increase the proportion of organic/local/plant-based foods in your diet – these generate significantly less in the way of potential run-off contaminants. | <urn:uuid:95c90a0a-5a72-4110-b520-431013bf6d14> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://deepoceans.com.au/take-action/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.899081 | 273 | 3.6875 | 4 |
Android uses a file system that's similar to disk-based file systems on other platforms. The system provides several options for you to save your app data:
- App-specific storage: Store files that are meant for your app's use only, either in dedicated directories within an internal storage volume or different dedicated directories within external storage. Use the directories within internal storage to save sensitive information that other apps shouldn't access.
- Shared storage: Store files that your app intends to share with other apps, including media, documents, and other files.
- Preferences: Store private, primitive data in key-value pairs.
- Databases: Store structured data in a private database using the Room persistence library.
The characteristics of these options are summarized in the following table:
|Type of content||Access method||Permissions needed||Can other apps access?||Files removed on app uninstall?|
|App-specific files||Files meant for your app's use only||From internal storage,
From external storage,
|Never needed for internal storage
Not needed for external storage when your app is used on devices that run Android 4.4 (API level 19) or higher
|Media||Shareable media files (images, audio files, videos)||
Permissions are required for all files on Android 9 (API level 28) or lower
|Yes, though the other app needs the
|Documents and other files||Other types of shareable content, including downloaded files||Storage Access Framework||None||Yes, through the system file picker||No|
|App preferences||Key-value pairs||Jetpack Preferences library||None||No||Yes|
|Database||Structured data||Room persistence library||None||No||Yes|
The solution you choose depends on your specific needs:
- How much space does your data require?
- Internal storage has limited space for app-specific data. Use other types of storage if you need to save a substantial amount of data.
- How reliable does data access need to be?
- If your app's basic functionality requires certain data, such as when your app is starting up, place the data within internal storage directory or a database. App-specific files that are stored in external storage aren't always accessible because some devices allow users to remove a physical device that corresponds to external storage.
- What kind of data do you need to store?
- If you have data that's only meaningful for your app, use app-specific storage. For shareable media content, use shared storage so that other apps can access the content. For structured data, use either preferences (for key-value data) or a database (for data that contains more than 2 columns).
- Should the data be private to your app?
- When storing sensitive data—data that shouldn't be accessible from any other app—use internal storage, preferences, or a database. Internal storage has the added benefit of the data being hidden from users.
Categories of storage locations
Android provides two types of physical storage locations: internal storage and external storage. On most devices, internal storage is smaller than external storage. However, internal storage is always available on all devices, making it a more reliable place to put data on which your app depends.
Removable volumes, such as an SD card, appear in the file system as part of
external storage. Android represents these devices using a path, such as
Apps themselves are stored within internal storage by default. If your APK size is very large, however, you can indicate a preference within your app's manifest file to install your app on external storage instead:
<manifest ... android:installLocation="preferExternal"> ... </manifest>
Permissions and access to external storage
On earlier versions of Android, apps needed to declare the
READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission to access any file outside the app-specific
directories on external storage.
Also, apps needed to declare the
WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission to write to
any file outside the app-specific directory.
More recent versions of Android rely more on a file's purpose than its location
for determining an app's ability to access, and write to, a given file. In
particular, if your app targets Android 11 (API level 30) or higher, the
WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission doesn't have any effect on your app's
access to storage. This purpose-based storage model improves user privacy
because apps are given access only to the areas of the device's file system that
they actually use.
Android 11 introduces the
MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission, which provides
write access to files outside the app-specific directory and
learn more about this permission, and why most apps don't need to declare it to
fulfill their use cases, see the guide on how to manage all
files on a storage device.
To give users more control over their files and to limit file clutter, apps that target Android 10 (API level 29) and higher are given scoped access into external storage, or scoped storage, by default. Such apps have access only to the app-specific directory on external storage, as well as specific types of media that the app has created.
Use scoped storage unless your app needs access to a file that's stored outside
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For more information about data storage, consult the following resources. | <urn:uuid:ed88b8d7-da2a-4c0a-b122-275223932c8e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.873326 | 1,287 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Processes in Visual Arts: Sculpture Techniques
Sculpture, as a form of visual art, has captivated audiences throughout history with its ability to transform raw materials into three-dimensional masterpieces. From ancient civilizations crafting monumental statues to contemporary artists pushing the boundaries of traditional techniques, sculpture remains an ever-evolving medium that requires meticulous attention to detail and skilled craftsmanship. This article explores various processes in visual arts, focusing specifically on sculpture techniques used by artists to bring their creative visions to life.
Imagine encountering a towering statue carved out of marble, standing proudly in a public square. The intricate details chiseled into the stone evoke emotions and tell stories without uttering a single word. Such is the power of sculpture—through careful manipulation of materials such as clay, wood, metal or even ice, artists are able to create works that transcend time and space. By examining different approaches and methods employed by sculptors from different eras and cultures, we can gain insight into the diverse range of techniques utilized in this captivating art form.
In this article, we will delve into the world of sculpture techniques – from modeling and carving to casting and assembling – exploring how each process contributes to the final creation. By delving deep into these artistic practices, we hope to not only appreciate the skill required but also understand the creative decision-making and problem-solving involved in sculpting.
Modeling, the process of shaping pliable materials like clay or wax, allows artists to explore form and texture. This technique involves using hands or tools to manipulate the material, adding or subtracting until the desired shape is achieved. Artists can build up layers of clay or wax to create intricate details or smooth surfaces, giving them full control over the final appearance of their sculpture.
Carving, on the other hand, involves removing materials from a solid block to reveal a desired form. Stone carving has been practiced for centuries, with artists using chisels, hammers, and other tools to chip away at the stone until their envisioned sculpture emerges. Wood carving follows a similar principle but requires different tools suited for working with this organic material.
Casting is another widely used technique in sculpture. It involves creating a mold of an original sculpture and then pouring liquid materials such as metal or plaster into the mold to create a replica of the original piece. This process allows artists to produce multiple copies of their work while maintaining consistency in detail and form.
Assembling is a technique that involves joining together various components to create a sculpture. Artists may use bolts, welding techniques, or adhesives to connect different parts made from materials like metal, wood, or found objects. Assemblage sculptures often incorporate recycled materials and give new life to discarded objects.
Each technique mentioned above offers distinct possibilities for artistic expression in sculpture. Depending on the artist’s vision and chosen medium, they may employ one or more techniques throughout the creation process. Understanding these techniques not only deepens our appreciation for sculptures but also enhances our ability to analyze and interpret artworks across different periods and cultures.
In conclusion, sculpture techniques encompass modeling, carving, casting, and assembling – each offering unique opportunities for artists to bring their creative visions to life. Whether it’s through molding pliable clay or delicately chiseling stone, sculptors demonstrate their mastery of materials and techniques to create awe-inspiring works of art. By exploring the diverse range of processes employed in sculpture, we can gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for this captivating form of visual art.
History of Sculpture Techniques
Sculpture, as an ancient art form, has evolved over time with various techniques that have shaped its rich history. One notable example is the creation of the iconic “David” statue by Michelangelo. This masterpiece showcases the meticulous approach and skill required in sculpture, making it a prime case study for understanding the development of sculpting techniques.
Throughout history, artists have employed different approaches to sculpture, each influenced by their cultural context and artistic vision. The evolution of these techniques can be traced across three distinct periods: classical antiquity, medieval era, and Renaissance period.
In classical antiquity, sculptures were predominantly created using the subtractive method. Artists would carve away excess material from blocks such as marble or limestone to reveal the desired form. This technique allowed for intricate details and smooth finishes, resulting in masterpieces like the famous Aphrodite of Milos.
Transitioning to the medieval era, materials such as wood became more prevalent due to its availability and ease of manipulation. During this time, sculpture took on a more symbolic role within religious contexts. Artists used additive methods by joining pieces together through mortise-and-tenon joints or pegs to create larger-scale works such as altarpieces.
The Renaissance brought about a renewed interest in humanism and realism in art. Sculptors like Donatello embraced new techniques such as bronze casting and modeling clay before finalizing their work in marble. These advancements allowed for greater expressiveness and anatomical accuracy, exemplified by Michelangelo’s breathtaking depiction of David.
To evoke an emotional response in our audience:
- Mastery: The painstaking craftsmanship demanded by sculpting reveals the artist’s dedication to perfection.
- Timelessness: Sculptures endure throughout centuries; they capture moments frozen in eternity.
- Awe-inspiring scale: Monolithic sculptures invoke feelings of awe and wonder at humanity’s ability to shape colossal forms.
- Emotional impact: The power of sculpture lies in its ability to evoke emotions, whether through dramatic poses or intricate details.
|Subtractive method||Classical antiquity||Aphrodite of Milos|
|Additive methods||Medieval era||Altarpieces|
|Bronze casting||Renaissance period||Michelangelo’s David|
Understanding the history and development of these techniques provides a foundation for appreciating the diverse range of sculptures that exist today. In the subsequent section about “Different Materials Used in Sculpture,” we will explore how artists have employed various materials to create their works, further expanding our understanding of this fascinating art form.
Different Materials Used in Sculpture
In the previous section, we explored the rich history of sculpture techniques. Now, let’s delve into the various processes involved in creating sculptures. To illustrate these techniques, consider the example of an artist sculpting a life-sized human figure from marble.
The first step in this process is sketching and planning. The artist meticulously studies anatomy and proportions to ensure accuracy in their sculpture. This initial stage allows them to visualize how the final piece will look and make necessary adjustments before starting work on the physical material.
Once the artist has completed their sketches, they move on to carving. Carving is one of the most common techniques used in sculpture creation, especially when working with materials like wood or stone. In our case study, our artist uses chisels and mallets to chip away at the block of marble gradually. They carefully remove excess material while paying close attention to detail and maintaining symmetry throughout the entire carving process.
Next comes refining and polishing. After achieving the desired form through carving, it is time for fine-tuning. Our hypothetical artist would use rasps, files, and sandpaper to smooth out rough surfaces and create finer details such as facial features or intricate textures on clothing. This meticulous refinement adds depth and realism to the sculpture.
To highlight some essential aspects of these techniques:
- The planning phase involves detailed anatomical research
- Carving requires precision tools such as chisels and mallets
- Refining entails using rasps, files, and sandpaper for smoothing
- Each technique contributes to bringing life-like qualities to sculptures
Furthermore, here is a table showcasing different tools commonly employed by sculptors:
|Refining||Rasps, Files, Sandpaper|
As we conclude this section on sculpture techniques, it is evident that the process involves careful planning, precise carving, and meticulous refinement. These steps enable artists to bring their creative visions into three-dimensional reality. In the subsequent section about “Traditional Sculpture Techniques,” we will explore some of the long-standing methods used by sculptors throughout history.
In transitioning to the next section without explicitly stating “step,” let us now turn our attention to traditional sculpture techniques that have stood the test of time.
Traditional Sculpture Techniques
Transitioning from the exploration of different materials used in sculpture, let us now delve into the traditional techniques employed by sculptors throughout history. By examining these age-old methods, we gain insight into the evolution and mastery of visual arts.
One can grasp the significance of traditional sculpture techniques by considering a hypothetical scenario where an aspiring artist endeavors to create a lifelike human figure out of marble. This ambitious project would require extensive knowledge and skill in various processes such as carving, modeling, and casting.
Carving stands as one of the most ancient and widely practiced techniques in sculpture. It involves removing material from a solid block until the desired form is achieved. The process requires immense precision and patience, with each stroke of the chisel contributing to the final composition. For instance, Michelangelo’s renowned statue “David” exemplifies his expertise in stone carving technique, showcasing intricate details that seem almost alive despite being crafted from a rigid material.
In addition to carving, another essential technique is modeling. Artists employ this method when working with more pliable substances like clay or wax. With their hands or tools, they manipulate and shape the material to bring forth their vision. In contrast to carving’s subtractive approach, modeling offers artists greater flexibility for experimentation and refinement during creation.
To further highlight the diverse range of traditional sculpture techniques, consider a selection of notable methods:
- Casting: A process involving pouring liquid material (such as molten metal) into molds to obtain replicas.
- Assemblage: Creating sculptures by combining various found objects into new compositions.
- Welding: Joining separate pieces through heat fusion or mechanical means.
- Patination: Applying chemicals to alter surface coloration and texture for aesthetic purposes.
|Traditional Sculpture Techniques||Description|
|Carving||Removal of material from a solid block|
|Modeling||Manipulating and shaping pliable substances|
|Casting||Replicating sculptures through the pouring of liquid material into molds|
|Assemblage||Creating compositions by combining different found objects|
By examining these techniques, we gain a deeper appreciation for the dedication and skill required to bring sculptural visions to life. In the subsequent section about contemporary sculpture techniques, we will witness how these traditional methods have paved the way for innovative approaches in visual arts, pushing boundaries beyond what was previously thought possible.
Note: Markdown formatting is not supported here as it’s a plain text environment.
Contemporary Sculpture Techniques
Processes in Visual Arts: Sculpture Techniques
Traditional sculpture techniques have served as the foundation for centuries of artistic creation. However, contemporary sculptors have also embraced innovative methods that challenge traditional notions of form and materials. In this section, we will explore some of these cutting-edge approaches to sculpture.
One intriguing example is the use of unconventional materials in contemporary sculpture. For instance, artist Sarah Johnson has gained recognition for her work using recycled plastic bottles. By repurposing everyday objects into art forms, Johnson not only raises awareness about environmental issues but also pushes boundaries by demonstrating the potential beauty found in unexpected sources.
Contemporary sculptors often employ a variety of techniques to transform their vision into tangible creations. These techniques can include:
- Assemblage: The method of creating sculptures by combining various found objects or fragments to construct a new whole.
- Installation: Creating large-scale works that encompass an entire space and engage with the viewer on multiple sensory levels.
- Digital modeling: Utilizing computer software to design intricate sculptures before translating them into physical forms through 3D printing or other fabrication processes.
- Performance-based sculpture: Incorporating elements of live action or movement within the artwork itself, blurring the lines between sculpture and performance art.
To illustrate the diverse range of possibilities within contemporary sculpture techniques, consider the following table showcasing different artists and their distinctive approaches:
|Jane Smith||Assemblage||“Fragmented Memories”|
|David Chen||Installation||“Suspended Reflections”|
|Lisa Green||Digital Modeling||“Virtual Realms”|
|Michael Lee||Performance-based Sculpture||“Body in Motion”|
These examples demonstrate how contemporary sculptors are constantly pushing boundaries and challenging existing norms in order to create thought-provoking artworks that resonate with viewers on both intellectual and emotional levels.
In the subsequent section, we will delve into the crucial role that tools play in sculptural processes. By understanding how artists utilize specific tools to shape their creations, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the intricate craftsmanship involved in sculpture.
The Role of Tools in Sculpture
In the previous section, we delved into various contemporary sculpture techniques that have emerged in recent years. Now, let us turn our attention to exploring different traditional and experimental methods employed by artists throughout history. To illustrate this, consider the case of renowned sculptor Jane Anderson.
One example of a unique technique is the process known as “lost-wax casting.” Artists like Anderson use this method to create intricate bronze sculptures with remarkable precision. The process involves creating a wax model of the desired sculpture, which is then coated in layers of ceramic material. Once the ceramic shell hardens, it is heated to melt away the wax and leave behind an empty mold. Molten metal is poured into this mold, allowing it to take on its final form through solidification. This technique enables artists like Anderson to capture even the most delicate details in their sculptures.
When it comes to sculpture techniques, there are several key factors that contribute to expressive and impactful artworks:
- Material choice: Different materials evoke distinct emotions and can greatly influence how viewers perceive a sculpture’s message.
- Texture manipulation: By altering surface textures, artists can engage tactile senses and elicit emotional responses from observers.
- Scale variation: Playing with proportions allows sculptors to create dramatic effects or emphasize specific aspects within their artwork.
- Lighting considerations: Strategic lighting enhances the visual impact of sculptures by accentuating certain features or creating shadows for added depth.
|Carving||Sense of Serenity|
By experimenting with different techniques and considering these key factors, artists can imbue their creations with intended emotions while engaging viewers on multiple sensory levels—resulting in truly captivating works of art. With this understanding, we can now explore the relationship between form and content in sculpture.
[Transition sentence into subsequent section: “In our exploration of different sculpture techniques, it becomes evident that the interplay between form and content is a crucial aspect to consider.”]
Exploring the Relationship Between Form and Content in Sculpture
Transitioning from the previous section, where we discussed the role of tools in sculpture, it is important to delve into the intricate relationship between form and content in this art form. To illustrate this dynamic interplay, let us consider a hypothetical example of a sculptor creating a piece that reflects the concept of time.
In exploring the relationship between form and content in sculpture, several key aspects come to light:
Conceptualization: Before embarking on their artistic journey, sculptors must first conceptualize their ideas. This involves considering what message or emotion they wish to convey through their work. In our hypothetical example, the artist may want to capture the fleeting nature of time and its impact on human existence.
Material Selection: The choice of materials plays an integral role in bringing forth both form and content in sculpture. Each material possesses unique properties that can contribute to the intended meaning behind the artwork. For instance, if our artist aims to emphasize transience, they might opt for delicate materials like glass or ephemeral substances like ice.
Manipulation Techniques: Sculptors employ various techniques to shape their chosen materials into meaningful forms that align with their desired themes. These techniques include carving, modeling, casting, welding, or assembling different components together. By skillfully manipulating these materials using appropriate techniques, artists have the power to evoke specific emotions within viewers.
Symbolism and Metaphor: Sculptures often utilize symbolism and metaphors as powerful tools for conveying deeper meanings beyond surface appearances. By incorporating symbolic elements related to their chosen theme – such as hourglasses or broken clocks – artists enhance viewers’ understanding of the underlying concepts being explored.
To further engage readers emotionally with this topic:
- Consider how a viewer may feel when encountering a sculpture representing time’s passage – perhaps a sense of nostalgia or reflection.
- Reflect on how sculptures addressing universal themes like time can evoke a shared human experience, fostering connection and empathy.
The following table illustrates the emotional impact that sculptures exploring form and content in various themes can have on viewers:
In conclusion, the relationship between form and content in sculpture is a nuanced interplay that requires careful consideration of conceptualization, material selection, manipulation techniques, and symbolism. By harnessing these elements effectively, sculptors can create artworks that resonate emotionally with viewers. The exploration of universal themes through sculpture allows for profound connections to be forged between artist and audience, expanding our understanding of the human experience without boundaries. | <urn:uuid:0024b998-da81-4117-b4a9-d15c9c0c2db1> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://diegalerie.org/processes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.918785 | 3,612 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Date of this Version
Changes in landscape cover in the Great Plains are resulting from the range expansion and invasion of eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). By altering the landscape and local vegetation, red cedar is changing the structure and function of habitat for small mammals. We examined effects of invasion by eastern red cedar on small mammals in 3 plant communities (tallgrass prairie, old field, and cross-timbers forest) in the cross-timbers ecoregion in Oklahoma. We sampled small mammals seasonally from May 2001 to August 2002 by using Sherman live traps and mark–recapture techniques on 3.24-ha, 450-trap grids in each plant community. We sampled vegetation in two hundred twenty-five 12 x 12-m cells within each grid. The structure of the small-mammal community differed among the 3 habitat types, with higher species diversity and richness in the tallgrass-prairie and old-field sites. Overall, the small-mammal community shifted along a gradient of increasing eastern red cedar. In the old-field and tallgrass-prairie plots, occurrence of grassland mammals decreased with increasing red cedar, whereas only 1 woodland mammal species increased. In the cross-timbers forest site, percent woody cover (height), rather than cover of red cedar, was the most important factor affecting woodland mammal species. Examination of our data suggests that an increase in overstory cover from 0% to 30% red cedar can change a species-rich prairie community to a depauperate community dominated by 1 species, Peromyscus leucopus. Losses in species diversity and changes in mammal distribution paralleled those seen in avian communities invaded by eastern red cedar. Our results highlight ecological effects of invasion by eastern red cedar on diversity and function at multiple trophic levels. | <urn:uuid:194b1312-1a34-48c3-843c-4174af5afe89> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usepapapers/67/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.909761 | 383 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Eureka! How distractions facilitate creative problem-solving
How many times have you spent hours slaving over an impossible problem, only to take a break and then easily solve the problem, sometimes within minutes of looking at it again?
Although this is actually a common phenomenon, up until now the way that this occurs has been unclear. But research in the September 2008 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, demonstrates the answer is more complex than simply having an “Aha!” moment.
The new research, led in part by Kellogg School of Management Professor Adam Galinsky, suggests that unconscious thought results in creative problem-solving via a two-step process.
According to Galinsky and fellow psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong from the University of Toronto and Ap Dijkstererhuis of Radboud University Nijmegen, distractions may be helpful in coming up with creative solutions to a certain problem, but must be followed by a period of conscious thought to ensure that we are aware of those solutions and can apply them.
Likewise, while distractions are more useful in solving difficult problems, it may be better to stay focused on finding the solution when confronted with easier problems.
The researchers conducted two experiments to test their idea. In the first experiment, 94 subjects participated in a Remote-Association Test (RAT), which tests for creativity. In this test, participants were presented with three words (a triad) and were asked to come up with a fourth word that is linked with all three words.
For example, if presented with the words cheese, sky and ocean, the correct answer would be blue (blue cheese, blue sky, blue ocean). Subjects were shown nine very difficult triads (but were instructed not to solve them yet) and were then divided into groups. For five minutes following the RAT, participants were either concentrating on the triads they had just seen (the conscious thought group) or engaging in a test completely unrelated to the RAT (the unconscious thought group).
Following the five-minute interval, all of the subjects participated in a lexical decision test. During this test, subjects were shown sequences of letters and had to indicate as quickly as possible if the sequences were English words or not. The sequences presented included answers to the RAT triads, random words and non-words. Finally, subjects were again shown the RAT items and had to write down their answers.
Experiment number two
The second experiment involved 36 subjects and had a similar set up to the previous experiment, although the RAT triads presented were much easier to solve compared to those in the first experiment.
The results showed that in the first experiment, during the lexical decision test, members of the unconscious thought group had much faster responses to letter sequences which were answers to RAT items, compared to the conscious thought group. However, when it came time to solve the RAT problems, both groups had similar results. In the second experiment (using an easier set of RAT triads), the conscious thought group had more correct RAT answers compared to the unconscious thought group, but there was no difference in response time during the lexical decision test.
“Conscious thought is better at making linear, analytic decisions, but unconscious thought is especially effective at solving complex problems,” said Galinsky and his co-authors. “Unconscious activation may provide inspirational sparks underlying the ‘Aha!’ moment that eventually leads to important discoveries.”
This article was originally published in September 2008 | <urn:uuid:05b8f7a7-647b-433e-9ece-99877e10e873> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://dreamdolivelove.com/do/studies-research/eureka-how-distractions-facilitate-creative-problem-solving | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.977408 | 729 | 2.953125 | 3 |
De Quervain’s Tenosynovitis is a condition that causes inflammation of the tendon sheath or tunnel on the thumb side of the hand. This sheath houses the two tendons that control the movement of the thumb. The cause of this condition has not been clearly established. Another name for it is De quervain’s syndrome.
The principal symptom of De quervain’s is pain when attempting to turn the wrist, to grasp an object or to make a fist. The onset of this painful condition is usually gradual. De quervain’s tenosynovitis usually becomes worse if the patient performs activities that involve repetitive hand or wrist movements. This includes activities such as gardening or playing racquet sports, to take two examples.
De quervain’s pain normally originates from the two tendons that pass through a small tunnel in the wrist and lower thumb. The muscles involved are the extensor pollicis brevis and the abductor pollicis longus. These tendons also connect to the base of the thumb. De quervain’s syndrome causes irritation of the sheath around these tendons. This irritation results in thickening of the sheath, which then restricts their ability to move smoothly through the tunnel.
As we have stated above, doctors are uncertain as to the exact cause of De Quervain’s tenosynovitis. However, the condition tends to appear when an individual uses the wrist or thumb in a repetitive movement of some kind.
De quervain’s tenosynovitis is also associated with the following:
A direct injury to the wrist or to the tendons controlling the movement of the thumb. When this happens, scar tissue can develop around the tendons. This will then make it difficult for the tendons to move smoothly through the sheath in which they are housed;
Rheumatoid arthritis can also cause De quervain’s as a secondary effect.
Demographic risk factors for this condition include:
Age – it tends to have the highest prevalence among adults between the ages of 30 and 50;
Gender – it is more common among women than men;
Pregnancy and/or childbearing appears to increase the risk of developing the condition.
Symptoms of De Quervain’s tenosynovitis includes some or all of the following:
Pain and/or swelling near the base of the thumb;
Difficulty moving the thumb and wrist when the patient needs to do something that requires pinching or grasping movements. The patient also experiences difficulty when trying to bend the wrist , resulting in reduced range of motion of that joint
A feeling that the thumb is “sticking” when the patient tries to move it.
Left untreated, the severity of De Quervain’s increases. The pain usually spreads further into the thumb or it may spread along the forearm. In some cases, it may spread in both directions.
Diagnosis & Treatment
To make a formal diagnosis of De quervain’s tenosynovitis, a doctor will normally perform a physical examination of the wrist. A key question will be if the patient feels pain when pressure is applied to the thumb side of the wrist (tenderness). This tenderness is most acute over the tip of the radial styloid. Swelling along the course of the two affected tendons may be present.
Abduction of the thumb against resistance will usually cause pain.
Another important test to perform during the diagnosis stage is the “Finkelstein test”. To perform this test, the doctor will ask the patient to:
Bend the thumb across the palm of the hand;
Then bend the fingers down over the thumb, and finally;
Bend the wrist in the direction of the little finger.
If this causes pain on the thumb side of the wrist, the patient is likely suffering from De quervain’s tenosynovitis.
In most cases, imaging tests are not required to make a diagnosis.
The first step in trying to treat this condition is usually home based. If the diagnosis is made early and treatment is started promptly, conservative (home-based) measures may be all that is required to bring about resolution of symptoms.The patient can try:
Avoiding activities that make use of the affected thumb for a period (if this is not inconvenient);
Applying ice or a cold compress to the affected wrist and/or thumb;
Taking an anti inflammatory medication such as ibuprofen.
If these measures are not successful, doctors may consider further steps such as:
Corticosteroid injections into the tendon sheath. The doctor will hope that this will reduce swelling and facilitate movement of the tendons through the sheath;
Immobilizing the thumb and wrist and trying to keep them in a straight position. This will allow the injured tendons an opportunity to rest and recover naturally. To do this, doctors may recommend wearing a thumb brace (sometimes called a thumb spica). Alternatively, they may recommend wearing a wrist/thumb brace that immobilizes both the wrist and thumb.
Sometimes, avoidance of activities involving the affected thumb, ice and anti-inflammatory medication are tried initially, with splints being used later on if these initial interventions do not improve symptoms. However, alternatively, a thumb spica can be used at the same time as the other measures.
If the above conservative treatments fail to eliminate the symptoms of De quervain’s tenosynovitis, the doctor may suggest surgical correction. The surgery will attempt to widen the sheath housing the injured tendons. If successful, the tendons will again be able to move through the tunnel with ease. Regular wrist/thumb movement would then return.
An important part of the treatment will be physical therapy. A physical therapist can prescribe an exercise program to strengthen the wrist, hand and thumb.
It is important that the patient adheres to this part of the treatment. If not, there is a risk that the De quervain’s tenosynovitis will return in the future. If so, the patient will have to go through the above treatments all over again.
In addition to the physical therapy, an occupational therapist can review how the patient uses the wrist to perform tasks requiring repetitive movements. The occupational therapist can then recommend changes to the equipment the patient uses, or to how the movements are performed. These changes will help to reduce the irritation of the tendons due to these movements. | <urn:uuid:ddd3fa9a-504a-4cfb-9c3a-371a02e05c7b> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://dunbarmedical.com/product-tag/de-quervains-tenosynovitis/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.926235 | 1,357 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Obesity and Weight Loss
- Restore insulin sensitivity
- Restore youthful hormone balance
- Control rate of carbohydrate absorption
- Increase physical activity
- Restore Brain Serotonin/ Suppress Hunger Signals
- Restore resting energy expenditure rate
- Restore healthy adipocyte (fat cell) signaling
- Inhibit the lipase enzyme
- Eat to live a long and healthy life
This protocol will detail the biological underpinnings of obesity and weight gain. Consideration will be given to each pillar of successful weight loss in the context of obesity risk factors in order to highlight the inadequacies of typical weight loss strategies. Methods of utilizing novel natural compounds and strategically incorporating some pharmaceutical options to support critical metabolic factors for long-term weight management will be discussed.
Regulation of Body Weight
Our system of energy balance evolved to ensure that a healthy person maintained adequate reserves of body fat to sustain life through repeated times of food scarcity, including famine. Food energy abundance is a relatively recent phenomenon, quite dissimilar to the vast majority of time over the past 100?000 years. In fact, body weight maintenance is achieved by the very complex and interrelated interaction of neurological and hormonal factors, with the goal of increasing appetite and preserving body fat when energy stores are low. Within the brain, a region called the hypothalamus monitors and integrates neurological signals and modulates appetite accordingly. Sensory cells located within the stomach walls that detect stretching of stomach tissue can directly signal satiety to the brain through nerve impulses. Indirectly, blood levels of glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids (components of proteins) stimulate the perception of satiety in brain centers and depress eating behavior. Additionally, a variety of hormones released at various levels of the gastrointestinal tract perform numerous functions in the balance of energy intake and utilization. Insulin (released from the pancreas and critical for the uptake of glucose into cells) and cholecystokinin (CCK) (secreted by the upper part of the small intestine and important for triggering release of digestive enzymes and bile) are also potent satiety signals (Marieb 2010). In addition, fat stores in the body are able to relay the overall state of energy storage to the brain through the secretion of the hormone leptin (Marieb 2010). Leptin is secreted into the blood by adipose (fat) cells in proportion to their levels of stored fats. It travels to the brain and acts upon the hypothalamus, stimulating the release of neurotransmitters that signal satiety, and suppressing those that signal hunger. Thus, leptin released by adipose tissue provides the brain with information on long-term energy economy, and allows it to adjust food intake accordingly (Begg 2012). However, this intricate system of appetite control can become perturbed in obesity, as excess fat stores contribute to chronically elevated leptin levels. This leads to down regulation of cellular sensitivity to the effects of leptin, a physiologic state known as leptin resistance. Weight loss efforts put forth by obese individuals may be undermined by failure of the leptin system to suppress their appetite, resulting in excessive hunger (Myers 2010). Another hormone derived from fat cells, called adiponectin, is an anti-obesity signaling molecule; adiponectin signaling is disrupted in obesity-related diseases and states of insulin resistance (Shehzad 2012). Evidence suggests that leptin and adiponectin can work together to combat insulin resistance (Yamauchi 2001; Kadowaki 2011; Siasos 2012). Optimizing fat cell signaling thus represents an important aspect of any comprehensive weight-loss strategy. Resting energy expenditure (REE) also influences weight gain and progression to obesity. REE is the rate at which metabolic activity burns calories during periods of rest or inactivity. Having a low REE may contribute to weight gain or make it difficult to lose weight. Studies show that REE is directly related to serum adiponectin levels, and that higher leptin levels (as occurs in leptin resistance; see below) are associated with decreased REE (Brusik 2012). Aging is also associated with decreased REE (Hunter 2001; Bosy-Westphal 2003). These findings suggest that boosting REE could be a valuable strategy to mitigate age-related weight gain.
Causes and Risk Factors for Obesity
Weight gain and progression to obesity can be caused by energy imbalances (Hill 2012). Aging can negatively affect the balance of energy input and expenditure in several ways. The natural aging process is associated with hormonal changes, particularly decreases in sex and thyroid hormones, which contribute to a decrease in metabolism and energy expenditure. Advancing age is also associated with reduced insulin sensitivity, which may interfere with appetite control (Begg 2012; Paolisso 1999). With age also comes a decrease in physical activity, which further reduces energy expenditure. Only about a quarter of Americans aged 65 to 74 exercise daily; this drops to less than 1 in 10 at age 85 (AoA Statistics 2008). Obesity and decreased mobility in the aging individual may have reciprocal effects on one another; age-related increases in weight and reductions in muscle mass lead to decreased mobility and energy expenditure. In a review of 28 population studies of older obese individuals, all but one showed significant associations between obesity and reduced mobility (Vincent 2010).
Sex Hormone and Thyroid Hormone Insufficiencies/ Imbalances
Levels of sex hormones (such as testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone [DHEA]) decline with age in both genders. This may lead to an increase in fat mass, reduction in lean body mass or central fat redistribution (Apostolopoulou 2012; Villareal 2004). Similarly, declining thyroid hormone levels are associated with reduced metabolic rate and thus obesity (Biondi 2010). In men, free testosterone levels sharply declines between the ages of 40 and 80. Both free and total testosterone levels are significantly lower in overweight and obese men compared to those with weights in a normal range across all ages (Wu 2008). Men with low testosterone levels (hypogonadism) develop increased fat mass, and testosterone replacement therapy in hypogonadal men reduced fat mass by 6% in one study (Mårin 1995; Kaufman 2005). Obesity and low testosterone have a complex relationship; low testosterone can be considered both a cause and consequence of obesity (Wu 2008). In men, increases in fat mass may also increase the conversion of testosterone to estrogen by the enzyme aromatase (Vermeulen 2002). While this conversion is a normal phenomenon, aromatization occurs more readily in fat tissue, and is increased by obesity, age, inflammation, insulin, leptin, and stress (Williams 2012). Thus, in older men with excessive abdominal fat, the ratios of testosterone to estrogen are lower than in younger men. Elevated estrogens, similar to low testosterone levels, are associated with increased abdominal fat (Vermeulen 2002). If a blood test reveals elevated estrogen (estradiol) levels in a man, a physician may prescribe an aromatase-inhibiting drug such as anastrozole (Arimidex®). In women, estrogen levels decline suddenly with menopause. Hormone replacement has shown modest increases in lean body mass and reductions in waist circumference and abdominal fat in some, but not all studies of post-menopausal women (Salpeter 2006; Mayes 2004; Norman 2000). The thyroid is a central regulator of metabolism; it integrates signals from the brain and secretes thyroid hormone (thyroxine or T4) to influence metabolism in a variety of tissues (Biondi 2010). Thyroid dysfunction can affect body weight and composition, body temperature, and energy expenditure independent of physical activity. Depressed thyroid function (hypothyroidism) has been associated with decreased thermogenesis (conversion of stored energy into heat) and metabolic rate, and weight gain (Biondi 2010). Clinical studies have shown that treatment of hypothyroidism with thyroxine may lead to weight loss, and population studies suggest that low T4 levels and high TSH levels are both associated with higher BMI (Asvold 2009). Depressed thyroid activity is also more common as people age; hypothyroidism in the general population is 3.7%, but is 5 times more common in individuals aged 80 or older when compared to 12 to 49 year-olds (Aoki 2007). A significant number of patients with morbid obesity display elevated thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels. TSH is produced in the brain by the pituitary gland, then travels to the thyroid and stimulates the production of thyroid hormone. Increased blood levels of TSH may indicate thyroid dysfunction and are associated with the progression of obesity (Rotondi 2011). For example, in one Norwegian study of over 27?000 individuals older than 40, TSH correlated with BMI: for every unit that TSH increased, BMI increased by 0.41 in women and 0.48 in men (Asvold 2009).
Insulin Resistance and/or Leptin Resistance
In addition to being a result of obesity, elevated levels of the hormones leptin and insulin in obese individuals may be indicative of a resistance to their activities. Insulin is a hormone that helps facilitate cellular uptake of glucose, primarily in the muscles, liver, and adipose tissue. When insulin resistance develops, glucose levels are no longer efficiently controlled by the action of insulin and blood levels become elevated, predisposing the insulin-resistant individual to several chronic diseases associated with aging (NDIC 2011). Moreover, while higher levels of both leptin and insulin normally suppress the desire to eat and stimulate energy expenditure, they are unable to perform this function in resistant individuals (Hagobian 2010).
- Insulin resistance is a consequence of sustained hyperinsulinemia (high insulin levels) and is complicated by chronic inflammation and obesity (Sung 2011; Ortega Martinez de Victoria 2009; Weisberg 2003). Strategies aimed at improving insulin sensitivity are an integral part of the nine pillars of successful weight loss. These strategies can include use of a low-cost prescription drug called metformin, which is approved for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and can also help reduce body fat, and natural compounds that help promote healthy insulin signaling (see below) (Despres 2003; Berstein 2012).
- Similarly, leptin resistance results from sustained periods of high leptin secretion associated with high fat stores. In obese individuals, leptin may lose its ability to be transported into the brain (Jéquier 2002). An interaction between leptin and the inflammatory biomarker C-reactive protein (CRP) in cell culture suggests a role of chronic inflammation in leptin resistance and the loss of appetite control. In an animal model of obesity, infusions of CRP countered the appetite-suppressing | <urn:uuid:4a5cf5ac-959a-42d4-aaf4-a31abe8a985f> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ec2-3-24-107-179.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com/obesity-and-weight-loss/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.910078 | 2,189 | 2.75 | 3 |
Kategori: Music Mind Games
Kombination : MMG/Separata art.
Pris: 595,00 kr
The blue jello rhythm puzzles is a set of two durable foam puzzles with endless possibilities.
They are a hit with individual lessons, group classes, in the classroom, and at home.
Write single notes and rests as well as combinations of rhythms such as "jel-lo jel-lo" (four eighth notes) and "gooseberry" (eighth note and two sixteenth notes). You can even create complex rhythms such as "celery" (sixteenth note triplet), "huckleberry lo" (four sixteenth notes and one eighth note), and "macadamia" (sixteenth note quintuplet).
* 2 crepe foam puzzles (1 dark blue and 1 bright blue) in 2 durable plastic trays
* A total of 98 puzzle pieces
The puzzles are 8.5 inches (21.5 cm) tall and 12 inches (30.5 cm) wide
* Includes a pamphlet containing the following:
A Blue Jello chart with Blue Jello vocabulary, Blue Jello drawings, and Blue Jello hand sign photos
Photos showing how to use the puzzle pieces to make note and rest combinations
Instructions for four games to play with your puzzles:
Copy the Cards
Find the Jellos
Other ideas for using the puzzles
How to care for your puzzles | <urn:uuid:4d642329-645e-4903-863d-00dcaeec313e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://echomusik.se/detalj_helsida.php?artikel_id=8958 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.820859 | 302 | 2.6875 | 3 |
«German Heritage in the Architecture of Azerbaijan»
The history of the German is the part of the history of Azerbaijan. The first wave of the German colonists arrived in Azerbaijan in early XVIII century. During many years, the Germans felt kindness of the Azerbaijani population, and in return, beneficially impacted the life of the local population. Colonists, among whom were teachers, doctors, engineers, architects, and representatives of other professions, made a significant contribution to development of agriculture, as well as science, education, healthcare, economic and social infrastructure of Azerbaijan.
The German architects made a substantial contribution to creation of the architectural masterpieces of the capitalistic Baku of end XX – beginning of XX centuries. Talented architects, who worked in the European style, were striving to use characteristics of the local architecture, to convey in the massing compositions the interpretation that would best express their artistic essence. During that period, such architects as Johann Edel, Adolf Eichler, Nikolay Von Der Nonne, brothers Carl and Otto Hippius, Gut Fortunat, Ferdinand Lemkul, Robert Marfeld, Leopold Bilfeld, Paul Stern, Ditrich Tissen, Vladimir Somonson, Franz Grosetti, Adolf Von Skoyan and others worked in Baku. The German architects designed several hundreds of buildings and constructions in Baku: apartment and tenement buildings, industrial facilities, bridges, churches, mosques, etc.
The history of the German colonists is the part of the Azerbaijani history. It has been more than eighty years as the Germans left the Azerbaijani lands. But due to their work ethics, integrity, and friendliness, the Germans left a good memory after themselves. Currently, the role of the cultural ties is important in the interstate relations. In this regard, the Azerbaini-German cooperation is based on very solid historical foundation with almost two hundred years of shared history. | <urn:uuid:480f9e09-11be-407b-9a94-9a6d219f225a> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://elchinaliyev.com/german-heritage-in-the-architecture-of-azerbaijan.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.943262 | 393 | 3.4375 | 3 |
Flickering lights, malfunctioning switches, or mysteriously dead outlets mean trouble to electronic appliances. Such electrical woes to the appliances can be a major inconvenience, but with the right knowledge and a little bit of troubleshooting, one can easily fix those pesky electrical problems. A majority of issues have a set of basic underlying problems. Understanding these basic issues can be a key to fixing them. However, make sure you follow safety standards and procedures while conducting your troubleshooting routine. Even though many problems can be fixed by yourself, it is always recommended to consult a licensed electrician to ensure complete safety and troubleshooting procedures. Should you choose to take matters into your own hands, these tips might be handy.
Basic tools for troubleshooting home appliances
No troubleshooting can be carried out without proper tools. Here are some handy tools that you might need to carry out the deed with ease.
This handy device lets you measure voltage, current, and resistance in electrical circuits. With a multimeter, you can determine if there’s an issue with the power supply or wiring in your appliance.
Another important tool is a circuit tester. This device helps you identify whether an electrical outlet is properly grounded or if there’s a fault in the wiring. By using a circuit tester, you can pinpoint any potential problems with the electrical connection of your appliance.
A set of screwdrivers is also crucial for troubleshooting home appliances. Different appliances require different types of screws, so having a variety of screwdrivers – both flathead and Phillips – will ensure that you’re prepared for any repair job.
Wires and pliers:
Wire strippers and pliers are handy tools to have when working on home appliances. Wire strippers allow you to remove insulation from wires without damaging them, while pliers can be used for gripping and bending wires during repairs.
Don’t forget about safety equipment such as gloves and safety glasses. These items protect against electric shocks and flying debris during repairs.
How to fix electrical problems step by step?
1. Check the AC supply voltage:
Checking the AC supply voltage is an important step in troubleshooting electrical problems in home appliances. The voltage level plays a crucial role in determining whether the appliance will function properly or not. To check the AC supply voltage, you can use a multimeter or a voltmeter. Make sure to turn off the power to the appliance before performing any tests. Start by locating the power source and identifying which wires are connected to it. Once you have identified the correct wires, set your multimeter or voltmeter to measure AC voltage and connect its probes to the respective wires. The meter should display a reading close to the expected voltage level for your region (e.g., 120V or 240V). If the reading is significantly lower than expected, there may be an issue with your electrical system or wiring that is affecting multiple appliances. If the reading is within range but you’re still experiencing problems with your appliance, then there may be another issue specific to that device that requires further investigation.
2. Checking the power cord:
One common electrical issue that can occur in home appliances is a faulty power cord. A damaged or frayed power cord can not only affect the performance of your appliance but also pose a safety hazard. That’s why it’s important to check and inspect the power cords of your appliances regularly. To begin, unplug the appliance from the electrical outlet before examining the power cord. Inspect the entire length of the cord for any visible signs of damage, such as cuts, breaks, or exposed wires. If you spot any issues, it’s crucial to replace the power cord immediately rather than attempting to repair it yourself. Gently wiggle and move both ends of the power cord where they connect to the appliance and electrical outlet. Loose connections can cause intermittent electrical problems or prevent proper power flow to your device. Make sure that there are no knots or tangles in the power cord, as this can strain and weaken its internal wiring over time. Straightening out any twists or loops will help ensure a consistent flow of electricity.
3. Checking switches:
When it comes to troubleshooting electrical problems in home appliances, one important step is to check the switches. Faulty switches can often be the culprit behind malfunctioning appliances. Make sure that the appliance is unplugged and disconnected from any power source. Safety should always be a priority when dealing with electricity. Visually inspect the switch for any visible damage or loose connections. Sometimes, a simple loose wire can cause issues with the functionality of the switch. If everything looks fine on visual inspection, you can use a multimeter to test the continuity of the switch. Set your multimeter to measure resistance and touch its probes to each terminal of the switch while it is in both ON and OFF positions. A good working switch will show low resistance in the ON position and high resistance in the OFF position.
4. Check the current draw:
When it comes to troubleshooting electrical problems in your home appliances, checking the current draw is an important step. This helps you determine if there are any issues with the electrical circuit or the appliance itself. To check the current draw, you will need a multimeter or a clamp meter, which comes equipped with a built-in current sensor. Start by unplugging the appliance from the power source and opening up its casing. Locate the wires that connect to the motor or heating element. Set your multimeter to measure amps and attach its probes to these wires. Make sure they have a good connection for accurate readings. Now, plug in your appliance and turn it on while monitoring the meter. If the current draw is significantly higher than what is specified for your appliance, this could indicate an underlying problem, such as a malfunctioning motor or a short circuit. On the other hand, if there is no reading at all, it may be due to a faulty switch or wiring issue.
In this step-by-step repair guide, we have discussed some common electrical problems that may occur in your home appliances. While it can be tempting to try and fix these issues on your own, it’s important to remember the importance of safety and the potential risks involved. To ensure the best outcome and avoid any further damage or accidents, it is always recommended to seek professional help from a licensed electrician for major electrical repairs. They have the knowledge, expertise, and tools needed to diagnose and fix electrical issues while prioritizing safety accurately. | <urn:uuid:0c4eb4d1-7602-4fb2-8a1b-5dba8e9fac94> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://emptylighthome.com/electrical-woes-in-home-appliances-heres-your-step-by-step-repair-guide/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.912932 | 1,324 | 2.59375 | 3 |
The United States courts of appeals are the intermediate appellate courts of the United States federal judiciary. The courts of appeals are divided into 13 "Circuits". Eleven of the circuits are numbered "First" through "Eleventh" and cover geographic areas of the United States and hear appeals from the U.S. district courts within their borders. The District of Columbia Circuit covers only Washington, DC. The Federal Circuit hears appeals from federal courts across the United States in cases involving certain specialized areas of law. The courts of appeals also hear appeals from some administrative agency decisions and rulemaking, with by far the largest share of these cases heard by the D.C. Circuit. Appeals from decisions of the courts of appeals can be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The United States courts of appeals are considered the most powerful and influential courts in the United States, after the Supreme Court. Because of their ability to set legal precedent in regions that cover millions of Americans, the United States courts of appeals have strong policy influence on U.S. law. Moreover, because the Supreme Court chooses to review fewer than 3% of the 7,000 to 8,000 cases filed with it annually, the U.S. courts of appeals serve as the final arbiter on most federal cases.
There are currently 179 judgeships on the U.S. courts of appeals authorized by Congress in 28 U.S.C. § 43 pursuant to Article III of the U.S. Constitution. Like other federal judges, they are nominated by the president of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate. They have lifetime tenure, earning (as of 2023) an annual salary of $246,600. The actual number of judges in service varies, both because of vacancies and because senior judges who continue to hear cases are not counted against the number of authorized judgeships.
Decisions of the U.S. courts of appeals have been published by the private company West Publishing in the Federal Reporter series since the courts were established. Only decisions that the courts designate for publication are included. The "unpublished" opinions (of all but the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits) are published separately in West's Federal Appendix, and they are also available in on-line databases like LexisNexis or Westlaw. More recently, court decisions have also been made available electronically on official court websites. However, there are also a few federal court decisions that are classified for national security reasons.
The circuit with the smallest number of appellate judges is the First Circuit, and the one with the largest number of appellate judges is the geographically large and populous Ninth Circuit in the Far West. The number of judges that the U.S. Congress has authorized for each circuit is set forth by law in 28 U.S.C. § 44, while the places where those judges must regularly sit to hear appeals are prescribed in 28 U.S.C. § 48.
Although the courts of appeals are frequently called "circuit courts", they should not be confused with the former United States circuit courts, which were active from 1789 through 1911, during the time when long-distance transportation was much less available, and which were primarily first-level federal trial courts that moved periodically from place to place in "circuits" in order to serve the dispersed population in towns and the smaller cities that existed then. The current "courts of appeals" system was established in the Judiciary Act of 1891.
Because the courts of appeals possess only appellate jurisdiction, they do not hold trials. Only courts with original jurisdiction hold trials and thus determine punishments (in criminal cases) and remedies (in civil cases). Instead, appeals courts review decisions of trial courts for errors of law. Accordingly, an appeals court considers only the record (that is, the papers the parties filed and the transcripts and any exhibits from any trial) from the trial court, and the legal arguments of the parties. These arguments, which are presented in written form and can range in length from dozens to hundreds of pages, are known as briefs. Sometimes lawyers are permitted to add to their written briefs with oral arguments before the appeals judges. At such hearings, only the parties' lawyers speak to the court.
The rules that govern the procedure in the courts of appeals are the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. In a court of appeals, an appeal is almost always heard by a "panel" of three judges who are randomly selected from the available judges (including senior judges and judges temporarily assigned to the circuit). Some cases, however, receive an en banc hearing. Except in the Ninth Circuit Court, the en banc court consists of all of the circuit judges who are on active status, but it does not include the senior or assigned judges (except that under some circumstances, a senior judge may participate in an en banc hearing who participated at an earlier stage of the same case). Because of the large number of Appellate Judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (29), only ten judges, chosen at random, and the Chief Judge hear en banc cases.
Many decades ago, certain classes of federal court cases held the right of an automatic appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. That is, one of the parties in the case could appeal a decision of a court of appeals to the Supreme Court, and it had to accept the case. The right of automatic appeal for most types of decisions of a court of appeals was ended by an Act of Congress, the Judiciary Act of 1925, which also reorganized many other things in the federal court system. Passage of this law was urged by Chief Justice William Howard Taft.
The current procedure is that a party in a case may apply to the Supreme Court to review a ruling of the circuit court. This is called petitioning for a writ of certiorari, and the Supreme Court may choose, in its sole discretion, to review any lower court ruling. In extremely rare cases, the Supreme Court may grant the writ of certiorari before the judgment is rendered by the court of appeals, thereby reviewing the lower court's ruling directly. Certiorari before judgment was granted in the Watergate scandal-related case, United States v. Nixon, and in the 2005 decision involving the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, United States v. Booker.
A court of appeals may also pose questions to the Supreme Court for a ruling in the midst of reviewing a case. This procedure was formerly used somewhat commonly, but now it is quite rare. For example, while between 1937 and 1946 twenty 'certificate' cases were accepted, since 1947 the Supreme Court has accepted only four. The Second Circuit, sitting en banc, attempted to use this procedure in the case United States v. Penaranda, 375 F.3d 238 (2d Cir. 2004), as a result of the Supreme Court's decision in Blakely v. Washington, but the Supreme Court dismissed the question. The last instance of the Supreme Court accepting a set of questions and answering them was in 1982's City of Mesquite v. Aladdin's Castle, Inc.
A court of appeals may convene a Bankruptcy Appellate Panel to hear appeals in bankruptcy cases directly from the bankruptcy court of its circuit. As of 2008[update], only the First, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have established a Bankruptcy Appellate Panel. Those circuits that do not have a Bankruptcy Appellate Panel have their bankruptcy appeals heard by the district court.
Courts of appeals decisions, unlike those of the lower federal courts, establish binding precedents. Other federal courts in that circuit must, from that point forward, follow the appeals court's guidance in similar cases, regardless of whether the trial judge thinks that the case should be decided differently.
Federal and state laws can and do change from time to time, depending on the actions of Congress and the state legislatures. Therefore, the law that exists at the time of the appeal might be different from the law that existed at the time of the events that are in controversy under civil or criminal law in the case at hand. A court of appeals applies the law as it exists at the time of the appeal; otherwise, it would be handing down decisions that would be instantly obsolete, and this would be a waste of time and resources, since such decisions could not be cited as precedent. "[A] court is to apply the law in effect at the time it renders its decision, unless doing so would result in manifest injustice, or there is statutory direction or some legislative history to the contrary."
However, the above rule cannot apply in criminal cases if the effect of applying the newer law would be to create an ex post facto law to the detriment of the defendant.
Decisions made by the circuit courts only apply to the states within the court's oversight, though other courts may use the guidance issued by the circuit court in their own judgments. While a single case can only be heard by one circuit court, a core legal principle may be tried through multiple cases in separate circuit courts, creating an inconsistency between different parts of the United States. This creates a split decision among the circuit courts. Often, if there is a split decision between two or more circuits, and a related case is petitioned to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will take that case as to resolve the split.
In order to serve as counsel in a case appealed to a circuit court, the attorney must first be admitted to the bar of that circuit. Admission to the bar of a circuit court is granted as a matter of course to any attorney who is admitted to practice law in any state of the United States. The attorney submits an application, pays a fee, and takes the oath of admission. Local practice varies as to whether the oath is given in writing or in open court before a judge of the circuit, and most courts of appeals allow the applicant attorney to choose which method he or she prefers.
When the courts of appeals were created in 1891, one was created for each of the nine circuits then existing, and each court was named the "United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the _____ Circuit". When a court of appeals was created for the District of Columbia in 1893, it was named the "Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia", and it was renamed to the "United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia" in 1934. In 1948, Congress renamed all of the courts of appeals then existing to their current formal names: the court of appeals for each numbered circuit was named the "United States Court of Appeals for the _____ Circuit", and the "United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia" became the "United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit". The Tenth Circuit was created in 1929 by subdividing the existing Eighth Circuit, and the Eleventh Circuit was created in 1981 by subdividing the existing Fifth Circuit. The Federal Circuit was created in 1982 by the merger of the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals and the appellate division of the United States Court of Claims.
Judicial councils edit
Judicial councils are panels in each circuit that are charged with making "necessary and appropriate orders for the effective and expeditious administration of justice" within their circuits. Among their responsibilities is judicial discipline, the formulation of circuit policy, the implementation of policy directives received from the Judicial Conference of the United States, and the annual submission of a report to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts on the number and nature of orders entered during the year that relate to judicial misconduct. Judicial councils consist of the chief judge of the circuit and an equal number of circuit judges and district judges of the circuit.
Circuit composition edit
The courts of appeals, and the lower courts and specific other bodies over which they have appellate jurisdiction, are as follows:
- These are article IV territorial courts and are therefore not part of the federal judiciary.
- The Federal Circuit also has appellate jurisdiction over certain claims filed in any district court.
- These are article I tribunals and are therefore not part of the federal judiciary.
- These are administrative bodies within the executive branch and are therefore not part of the federal judiciary.
- This is an administrative body within the legislative branch and therefore not part of the federal judiciary.
Circuit population edit
|Circuit||Supervising justice||Authorized judges||Population||Percentage of US population||Population per authorized judge|
|Federal Circuit[Note 1]||Roberts||12||N/A||N/A||N/A|
|Total||9 [Note 2]||179||335,023,466[Note 3]||100%||~1,871,639|
- Per 28 U.S.C. § 1295 - The Federal Circuit's jurisdiction is not based on geography; rather, the Federal Circuit has jurisdiction over the entire United States, for certain classes of cases.
- Per 28 U.S.C. § 42 - A justice may be assigned to more than one circuit, and two or more justices may be assigned to the same circuit.
- This figure includes the 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, even though the latter two's district courts are not federal courts per se as noted above. The Federal appeals process has never been codified in American Samoa, and matters of federal law arising in American Samoa have generally been adjudicated in U.S. district courts in Hawaii or the District of Columbia. see also : GAO-08-1124T
The Judiciary Act of 1789 established three circuits, which were groups of judicial districts in which United States circuit courts were established. The original three circuits were given distinct names, rather than numbers: the Eastern, the Middle, and the Southern. Each circuit court consisted of two Supreme Court justices and the local district judge; the three circuits existed solely for the purpose of assigning the justices to a group of circuit courts. Some districts (generally the ones most difficult for an itinerant justice to reach) did not have a circuit court; in these districts the district court exercised the original jurisdiction of a circuit court. As new states were admitted to the Union, Congress often did not create circuit courts for them for a number of years.
The number of circuits remained unchanged until the year after Rhode Island ratified the Constitution, when the Midnight Judges Act reorganized the districts into six numbered circuits, and created circuit judgeships so that Supreme Court justices would no longer have to ride circuit. This Act, however, was repealed in March 1802, and Congress provided that the former circuit courts would be revived as of July 1 of that year. But it then passed the new Judiciary Act of 1802 in April, so that the revival of the old courts never took effect. The 1802 Act restored circuit riding, but with only one justice to a circuit; it therefore created six new circuits, but with slightly different compositions than the 1801 Act. These six circuits later were augmented by others. Until 1866, each new circuit (except the short-lived California Circuit) was accompanied by a newly created Supreme Court seat.
|State||Judicial District(s) created||Circuit assignment(s)|
|New Hampshire||1789||Eastern, 1789–1801|
|Maine||1789[Note 1]||Eastern, 1789–1801|
|Rhode Island||1790||Eastern, 1790–1801|
|New York||1789||Eastern, 1789–1801|
|New Jersey||1789||Middle, 1789–1801|
|Kentucky||1789[Note 2]||6th, 1801–1802|
|North Carolina||1790||Southern, 1790–1801|
|South Carolina||1789||Southern, 1789–1801|
|Ohio||1801 (abolished 1802)[Note 3]||6th, 1801–1802|
|Louisiana||1812||9th, 1837–1842 (Eastern District)|
9th, 1851–1863 (Eastern District)
6th, 1863–1866 (Eastern District)
|California||1850||California Circuit, 1855–1863|
|West Virginia||1863||4th, 1863–|
|North Dakota||1889||8th, 1889–|
|South Dakota||1889||8th, 1889–|
|New Mexico||1912||8th, 1912–1929|
|District of Columbia||1948[Note 4]||District of Columbia Circuit, 1948–|
|Puerto Rico||1966[Note 5]||1st, 1966–|
See also edit
- District of Columbia Court of Appeals, a federally established appellate court that is not considered a U.S. court of appeals
- Judicial appointment history for United States federal courts
- List of current United States circuit judges
- List of United States courts of appeals cases
- State supreme court
- United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, an Article I tribunal that hears appeals of court-martial decisions
- United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, an Article I tribunal that reviews decisions of the Board of Veterans' Appeals
- United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review
Explanatory notes edit
- The Judiciary Act of 1789 divided Massachusetts into the Maine District, comprising what is now the State of Maine, and the Massachusetts District, comprising the remainder of the state.
- The Judiciary Act of 1789 divided Virginia into the Kentucky District, comprising what is now the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and the Virginia District, comprising the remainder of the state.
- The first District of Ohio encompassed the Northwest and Indiana Territories.
- The pre-existing courts of the District of Columbia were elevated to United States district court and court of appeals status in 1948. The courts of the District had been incorporated into the Federal Court System by the Judiciary Act of 1925.
- The pre-existing territorial district court of Puerto Rico was elevated to United States district court status. Appellate jurisdiction from the Puerto Rico courts was assigned to the 1st Circuit in 1915.
"The Supreme Court at Work: The Term and Caseload". United States Supreme Court. Retrieved September 12, 2021.
Plenary review, with oral arguments by attorneys, is currently granted in about 80 of those cases each Term, and the Court typically disposes of about 100 or more cases without plenary review.
- Judicial Compensation U.S. Courts. Retrieved 6 July 2023.
- The U.S. Courts of Appeals and the Federal Judiciary, History of the Federal Judiciary, Federal Judicial Center (last visited March 5, 2014).
- See e.g. "IOP 35.1. En Banc Poll and Decision". United States Court of Appeals 2nd Circuit. Retrieved September 10, 2020.
- Rule 35-3 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, Ninth Circuit Rules. http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/uploads/rules/frap.pdf
- United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974)
- United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005)
- Aaron Nielson, The Death of the Supreme Court's Certified Question Jurisdiction, 59 Cath. U. L. Rev. 483 (2010), http://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol59/iss2/5
- "US v. Penaranda, 375 F. 3d 238 - Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit 2004 - Google Scholar".
- Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004)
- "United States v. Penaranda, 543 U.S. 1117 | Casetext". casetext.com.
- "City of Mesquite v. Aladdin's Castle, Inc., 455 US 283 - Supreme Court 1982 - Google Scholar".
- 28 U.S.C § 158 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/158
- Bradley v. Richmond Sch. Bd., 416 U.S. 696, 711-12 (1974)
- Barbour, Emily C. (April 7, 2011), Judicial Discipline Process: An Overview (PDF), Congressional Research Service
- 28 U.S.C. § 332
- 28 U.S.C. § 332(g)
- 28 U.S.C. § 332(1)(a)
- US Census Bureau. "2020 Population and Housing State Data". Census.gov. Retrieved January 21, 2022.
- US Circuit Courts. "Geographic Boundaries of US Courts of Appeals and US District Courts" (PDF).
- Supreme Court of the United States. "Circuit Assignments". supremecourt.gov. Retrieved March 2, 2023.
- "GAO-08-1124T" (PDF). www.gao.gov. Retrieved March 2, 2023.
- White, G. Edward (2012). Law in American History, Volume 1: From the Colonial Years Through the Civil War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. p. 197. ISBN 9780190634940. Retrieved January 16, 2022. | <urn:uuid:d0c162f6-1110-4540-b78f-a2a2095f2971> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_court_of_appeals | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.932975 | 4,404 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Charles Isamu Morimoto
|Name||Charles Isamu Morimoto|
|Born||June 22 1903|
|Died||November 8 1953|
|Birth Location||Hiroshima, Japan|
Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Charles Isamu Morimoto (1903-53) immigrated to the United States in 1916 at age thirteen. After graduating from Pasadena High School, he won a scholarship to Otis Art Institute (1925-30), where he earned much praise for his work and received rave reviews while winning many local competitions. During this time he also studied at the Art Students League (1928) with numerous other Nisei artists under Stanley Macdonald-Wright, whose influence is apparent in Morimoto's work. Of Morimoto's work in the 1929 Younger Painters exhibition, Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Miller wrote, "Charles Morimoto goes the furthest toward abstraction with his three designs evolved from figures." In 1929, he won the Huntington Assistance Prize at Otis. He married Shizuye Doi in about 1931 and the couple subsequently had two daughters. Unable to pursue a commercial art career, Morimoto became a window designer for the Owl Drug Store chain.
After the issuance of Executive Order 9066 , the Morimotos were incarcerated at the Manzanar concentration camp. In February of 1943, while Morimoto was teaching art classes and painting scenes of Manzanar that documented the lives of the inmates during the early period of incarceration, the War Relocation Authority issued a loyalty questionnaire that all inmates over seventeen were required to answer. Based on his responses to the questionnaire, Morimoto and others were deemed "disloyal" by the government and segregated at Tule Lake concentration camp, where he again taught art classes and painted landscapes of the area surrounding the camp. His daughters, Miyoko Mizuki and Keiko Kano, recalled that during this difficult time they and others were taught about Japan and how wonderful it would be to return when the war was over—an obvious ploy to rid this country of some "undesirable" aliens. Morimoto ultimately decided to return to Japan with his family to his hometown of Hiroshima, even though many parts of the city were destroyed by the atomic bomb. He worked as an interpreter for the occupation forces at Kure military base, near Hiroshima, and also taught art to U.S. military officers' wives and children. When a cultural center opened in Hiroshima, he was hired there as a commercial artist. In the remaining years of his life, Morimoto taught art classes to the Australian Occupational Forces and produced a number of abstract works. He died on November 8, 1953.
Seven years after his death, his family returned to the United States and have attempted to locate Morimoto's prewar works that were allegedly stored in a Los Angeles church, but have been unsuccessful in finding them.
For More Information
Chang, Gordon H., Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom, editors. Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Manzanar National Historic Site Virtual Museum Exhibit. " Pastimes: Artwork. "
Yoshiki-Kovinick, Marian. " A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953 ". Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2008.
- Arthur Miller, "Our Young Painters," Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1929, 24 cited in Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom, editors, Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 392.
- "Records About Japanese Americans Relocated During World War II," Access to Archival Databases, the National Archives, accessed on May 18, 2015 at http://aad.archives.gov/aad/display-partial-records.jsp?dt=2003&sc=24943%2C24947%2C24948%2C24949%2C24942%2C24938%2C24928%2C24940&cat=WR26&tf=F&bc=%2Csl%2Cfd&q=&as_alq=&as_anq=&as_epq=&as_woq=&nfo_24943=V%2C10%2C1900&op_24943=0&txt_24943=morimoto&nfo_24947=V%2C8%2C1900&op_24947=0&txt_24947=&nfo_24948=V%2C1%2C1900&op_24948=0&txt_24948=&nfo_24949=V%2C1%2C1900&cl_24949=1&nfo_24942=V%2C1%2C1900&cl_24942=&nfo_24938=V%2C5%2C1900&cl_24938=&nfo_24928=V%2C6%2C1900&op_24928=0&txt_24928=00438*&nfo_24940=V%2C2%2C1900&op_24940=0&txt_24940= ; "California Death Index, 1940-1997," Shizue Morimoto, 20 Feb 1989, Department of Public Health Services, Sacramento, FamilySearch.org, accessed on May 19, 2015 at https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VP2W-5YH .
- Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, "A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953," Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2008, accessed August 4, 2014 at www.tfaoi.com/aa/8aa/8aa14b.htm.
- Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom, editors, Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (Stanford University Press, 2008), 392.
- Yoshiki-Kovinick, "A Seed of Modernism."
Last updated June 2, 2015, 11:57 p.m.. | <urn:uuid:94ac002d-7946-4648-8b19-267c5d1570a7> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Charles_Isamu_Morimoto/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.92991 | 1,326 | 2.515625 | 3 |
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) projects that hydrogen and its derivatives could constitute a substantial 14% of the world’s total final energy consumption by 2050. With the urgent need to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, green hydrogen is seen as a key player in achieving this ambitious goal.
IRENA’s recent Innovation Week witnessed discussions that emphasized the importance of scaling up green hydrogen production through a holistic approach that extends beyond just technology. According to Francesco La Camera, Director-General of IRENA, this approach requires innovative regulatory and policy frameworks, financial support, and adaptable business models. These elements are crucial to ensuring a rapid and efficient expansion of green hydrogen in the energy landscape.
The Collaborative Framework on Green Hydrogen, in its eighth meeting, addressed the challenges and barriers that stakeholders face when building green hydrogen supply chains. Previous discussions had focused primarily on the demand side, while the recent meeting shifted the spotlight to the supply side, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive approach to both.
The Collaborative Framework meeting was co-facilitated by Dr. Nawal Al-Hosany, Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates, who highlighted the necessity of concurrently scaling up both the demand and supply for green hydrogen. She stressed that retrofitting and expanding infrastructure are also crucial aspects of this endeavor and that the outcomes of this framework should directly inform discussions at COP28, aiming to accelerate the adoption of green hydrogen markets.
While substantial progress has been made in terms of technology deployment, standardization, demand-boosting policies, and financial instrument implementation for green hydrogen in 2023, there are still challenges to overcome. These include financing large-scale hydrogen projects and mitigating risks to reduce the cost of capital. The World Bank’s Dolf Gielen emphasized the importance of supporting projects already in the pipeline to reach the Financial Investment Decision (FID) stage through widely replicable financial instruments and business models.
Addressing the complexities of transporting green hydrogen over long distances, Magnolia Tovar, Global Director of Zero-Carbon Fuels at the Clean Air Task Force, pointed out that the transport of ammonia, rather than pure hydrogen, is the most cost-effective method, provided that the ammonia is used as the final product and not converted back into hydrogen.
María Jaén, European H2Research Lead at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), delved into the challenges associated with repurposing existing pipelines and constructing new ones for hydrogen transportation. Erosion and a decrease in energy content are among the issues that gas transmission system operators (TSO) need to carefully assess when considering using their existing gas networks for hydrogen.
In terms of developing countries, Smeeta Fokeer, Industrial Development Officer at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), emphasized that these nations should concentrate on applications that create local value and develop the required in-house skills for a hydrogen-based economy.
Expanding sustainability standards for hydrogen was the focus of Sam Bartlett, Director of the Green Hydrogen Standard at the Green Hydrogen Organization. He stressed the importance of not just covering carbon emissions but also considering other environmental impacts and social aspects. Additionally, setting up appropriate governance structures is deemed critical.
The overarching consensus from the Collaborative Framework meeting was that with the rapidly approaching timeline for establishing global green hydrogen supply chains, a coordinated effort to address all aspects simultaneously is essential to harness their synergies effectively. International collaboration is pivotal for the successful implementation of national green hydrogen strategies, and IRENA plays a crucial role in fostering this collaboration.
The insights gleaned from the eighth meeting of the Collaborative Framework on Green Hydrogen will contribute to a brief presented at COP28, further advancing the conversation on hydrogen’s role in our energy future. The next meeting is scheduled for the first quarter of 2024. | <urn:uuid:8d21770e-226b-4710-909a-ce7b18d002cf> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://energynews.biz/irena-green-hydrogens-key-to-sustainable-energy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.909933 | 787 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Minister of Environment Yasmine Fouad at the event
Fouad’s remarks came during her speech at the 18th session of the African Ministers of Environment Conference (AMCEN) in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, according to a statement released by the environment ministry on Friday.
Fouad noted that 20 percent of the continent’s population live in countries that are in the top 10 most vulnerable to climate change.
Fouad added that 172.3 million Africans were affected by drought and 43 million were affected by floods between 2010 and 2022.
African countries are the most affected by food insecurity and water scarcity, she added.
Climate change is expected to push an additional 78 million people to chronic hunger by 2050, more than half of them in sub-Saharan Africa, she said.
Adaptation is the top priority for Africa and Egypt, she stressed.
"The Egyptian government has been exerting enormous efforts to address climate change challenges and include climate-related dimensions in its national plans across all sectors."
“It is important for us as the COP27 president to bring back balance between adaptation and mitigation,” she added.
Egypt is set to host the COP27 in the city of Sharm El-Sheikh from 6-18 November.
Cairo has vowed to address African interests incombating climate change at the conference in Sharm El-Sheikh.
At the COP27, Egypt aims to ensure the turning of climate-related pledges into action to help facilitate the transition to green energy by reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change as per the Paris Agreement.
The presidency of COP27 is pushing a comprehensive group of initiatives that focus on developing countries’ priorities, especially in Africa, Fouad stressed.
"For the first time, COP27 initiatives are built on an inclusive process of global consultations, with six out of the thirteen initiatives focused on Africa mainly and an additional two focused on Africa in their targets," she added.
For example, Fouad explained that the Fair and Affordable Energy Transition initiative has been designed to combine the efforts of the African countries that are working to accelerate their energy transitions, serving as a reference point for them and development finance partners alike.
This initiative aims to address the reality where 598 million people in Africa do not have access to electricity and 930 million do not have access to clean cooking fuels.
Fouad said that the Waste 50 initiative aims to addresses the waste management crisis in Africa by 2050 as less than 10 percent of the solid waste generated in the continent is recycled.
The minister stated that Africa is expected to witness displacement and migration of up to 85.7 million people in the absence of measures to contain climate change.
Fouad reviewed the role of Friends of Greening National Budgets in Africa and Developing Countries in supporting governments to create an enabling environment for the private sector towards the transition to a low-carbon economy capable of adapting to climate change.
She also highlighted that the biodiversity initiative that will form nature-based solutions (NbS), saying many issues facing the entire continent will be addressed at COP27 such as marine life, marine pollution, ecosystem restoration and conservation, in addition to combatting desertification.
"We call COP27 a COP for Implementation. We as COP president, seek to maintain global ambition for climate action,” the minister said.
The Paris Agreement – adopted at COP21 and signed by over 190 states including Egypt – came into effect in 2016 with the aim of limiting the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Climate finance has been debated at every COP meeting since, as developed countries have failed to meet their promise to mobilise $100 billion annually by 2020 to help developing nations with mitigation and adaptation measures. | <urn:uuid:84bb4ffd-6d7d-45c1-8e8f-8200e1677dfa> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/1234/476229/Egypt/Foreign-Affairs/Africa-accounts-for--of-global-greenhouse-gas-emis.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.960012 | 773 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Category:611 Embankment Protection
Where integrity of the embankment is vital or in areas subject to damaging hydraulic forces, extra protection of the embankment is needed. Embankment protection may be accomplished by using rock blanket, rock fill, revetment, concrete slope protection or gabions. On most projects, rock blanket is the economical method of protecting the embankment around grade separation structures and bridge ends, around culverts and to protect stream banks. A typical embankment configuration is shown on Embankment at Bridge Ends. In urban areas, the project core team may decide that concrete slope protection is appropriate for specific aesthetic reasons. Other types of protection such as masonry construction may also be appropriate if funded by local jurisdictions, enhancement funds, or other non-department sources. | <urn:uuid:1b4eb1d0-26f9-40ee-aac8-33b24281cf65> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://epg.modot.org/index.php/Category:611_Embankment_Protection | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.887952 | 164 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Effects of dietary protein intake on fecal and milk microbiota
Type of DegreeMaster's Thesis
MetadataShow full item record
Microorganisms in milk have traditionally been assumed to be contaminants, but recent data suggest that these microbial communities naturally reside in milk and may contribute to vital maternal effects. Investigators have speculated that microorganisms are derived, at least in part, from populations of microorganisms found in a mother’s gut. Milk microorganisms are ingested by offspring gut and contribute to the microbial populations that colonize the offspring gut. Thus, factors that impact the population of microorganisms in milk have implications for advancing knowledge of how mothers influence offspring development. In this case, females are likely preparing offspring for a similar dietary environment at independence. To characterize the relationship between milk microbial diversity and maternal protein intake, a pilot study was conducted to characterize impact of maternal protein intake on gut microbial diversity in rats. Based on this preliminary analysis, diets with 10% and 20% protein were selected to determine impact of protein intake on milk microbial diversity. Milk was collected from Sprague-Dawley rat dams at 14 days post-partum. No differences were observed for dry matter or crude protein content of milk between treatment groups. Alpha diversity of milk microbiota from high protein fed rats was greater than low protein fed rats. Staphylococcus spp. taxa relative abundance was higher in LP milk samples compared to HP samples and Lactobacillus spp. taxa had higher relative abundance in HP milk samples compared to LP samples. The results of this investigation indicates that dietary protein intake affects gastrointestinal microbial diversity and suggests that protein content of a mother’s diet impacts relative abundance of milk microorganisms. This study highlights the importance of dietary protein intake on composition of rat fecal and milk microbiota, with higher protein intake favoring potentially beneficial Lactobacillus populations in milk and reducing the relative abundance of potential pathogens like Staphylococcus taxa. Proteus mirabilis and Enterococcus faecalis were cultured from rat milk and are likely natural occurring bacteria found in rat milk. Future work with milk microorganisms involves examining possible interactions between beneficial bacteria like Lactobacillus and potential pathogenic bacteria like Staphylococcus to examine how maternal diet can affect offspring development. | <urn:uuid:e7e8e8f3-1f7f-4a70-b548-f949ac94db9e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://etd.auburn.edu/handle/10415/5351 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.931675 | 463 | 2.875 | 3 |
Banda Research Project team members use a datum string, pulled tight and leveled with a bubble level, to measure the depth below datum of the excavation unit's surface. Yaw Francis (right) holds the string level as Yaw Frimpong (left) measures the depth close to the bubble level. By taking periodic measurements as they dig across the unit, they ensure that the surface of each completed level is even. A head pan and short handled hoe sit next to excavated dirt in the unit. Maria Dores Cruz (far left) and other team members work on an adjacent excavation unit on Mound 6, Station 6. Makala Kataa, 1994.
In preparation for beginning excavation of a new 2 x 2 m unit, Banda Research Project team members Leith Smith (right) and Victor Mattey (left) extend grid points on Mound 6, Station 6, Makala Kataa. Smith uses a rock to pound in a grid peg at a point established using tape measures extended from previously placed grid pegs. The accuracy of the peg's location in this 2 m interval grid is checked according to horizontal (2 m) and diagonal (5.66 m) measurements from the other unit pegs. Low piles of sieved dirt from ongoing excavations are visible in the background. Makala Kataa, Station 6, 1994.
Members of the Banda Research Project, Maria Dores Cruz (left) and Osei Kofi (right) stand near a surveying level mounded on a tripod. The level was used to map the site's contours and establish grid lines to orient excavation units. A local-made short-handled hoe lies in front of the tripod, its wide flat blade standing upright. Bottom left are stacked headpans used to move soil between excavation units and screens. Station 6, Makala Kataa, June 1994. | <urn:uuid:2c17a1d5-76db-4b53-b437-f79737156c09> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://exhibits.library.uvic.ca/spotlight/iaff/catalog?f%5Bspotlight_upload_Format_tesim%5D%5B%5D=image&f%5Bspotlight_upload_dc_Coverage-Spatial_Location_ftesim%5D%5B%5D=makala+kataa&f%5Bspotlight_upload_dc_Date-Created_Searchable_ftesi%5D%5B%5D=1994&per_page=50 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.909591 | 387 | 3.390625 | 3 |
Letter Excavation | Fun Toddler Activity To Teach Letters
How to teach a toddler letters | the fun way!
A slightly messy toddler activity to teach letters.
If you want to introduce letters to your toddler through playplay then letter excavation is a good place to start.
If you hate any mess then play it outside or try the Fishing Letters Activity instead. (It honestly didn’t take long to vacuum up after and tha5 amused the kids for a while longer).
You will need:
- Magnetic letters
- Metal baking tray
- Brush (I used a paint brush)
What to do:
- Choose some letters and use the magnets to stick them to the tray.
- Cover with flour.
- Place a brush next to the and wait for your to discover it. (I find it makes less mess on the floor rather than a table…we often use our messy play tray).
How To Play
- Give your toddler time to discover the letters hidden under the flour.
- Ask them if they recognize any of the shapes.
- Tell them what letters they are and emphasize the sound e.g. “b, b bee…bbbuzz!”
I have adapted this game so that my honeschooled preschooler gets a little more out of it too…take a look at the free printable worksheet here.
They both played for just under an hour with this and then helped vacuum the mess.
Littlest ended up playing snow rescue with his vehicles!
Let me know if you had fun with this toddler activity to teach letters. Enjoy! | <urn:uuid:e4d67ccd-dfd8-43fd-9f45-68cc49c1566a> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://familyedventures.com/letter-excavation-fun-toddler-activity-teach-letters/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.918815 | 334 | 3.375 | 3 |
Evaluate the report card together.
Evaluating the report card together is an essential step in a student’s academic journey. It allows parents, teachers, and students to assess the progress made, identify areas of improvement, and set goals for the future. This collaborative effort ensures that everyone involved is on the same page and working towards the student’s success. In this essay, we will discuss the importance of evaluating the report card together and how it can benefit the student’s overall development.
Firstly, evaluating the report card together promotes open communication between parents, teachers, and students. It provides an opportunity for all parties to discuss the student’s academic performance, strengths, and weaknesses. By engaging in a constructive conversation, parents can gain insights into their child’s learning experience and understand the challenges they may be facing. Teachers, on the other hand, can share their observations and provide suggestions for improvement. This exchange of information helps create a supportive environment where everyone is invested in the student’s progress.
Secondly, evaluating the report card together allows for the identification of areas that need improvement. By analyzing the grades and comments provided by the teachers, parents and students can pinpoint specific subjects or skills that require attention. For instance, if a student consistently receives low grades in math, it indicates a need for additional support or tutoring in that subject. By recognizing these areas of weakness, parents and teachers can work together to develop strategies and resources to help the student improve. This collaborative effort ensures that the student receives the necessary guidance and support to overcome their challenges.
Furthermore, evaluating the report card together helps set realistic goals for the future. By reviewing the student’s current performance, parents, teachers, and students can establish achievable objectives for the upcoming term or semester. These goals can be academic, such as improving a specific grade or mastering a particular skill, or non-academic, such as developing better study habits or time management skills. Setting these goals together ensures that everyone is aligned and working towards a common objective. It also provides the student with a sense of direction and purpose, motivating them to strive for success.
Moreover, evaluating the report card together fosters a sense of accountability in the student. When parents and teachers actively participate in the evaluation process, it sends a message to the student that their education is a priority. This involvement encourages the student to take ownership of their learning and be accountable for their academic performance. They understand that their efforts and actions have consequences, and that their progress is being monitored and supported. This sense of accountability instills a sense of responsibility and discipline in the student, which can positively impact their overall development.
In addition, evaluating the report card together allows for the celebration of achievements. It is important to acknowledge and celebrate the student’s successes, no matter how small they may be. By highlighting areas where the student has excelled, parents and teachers can boost their confidence and motivation. This recognition reinforces positive behavior and encourages the student to continue working hard. Celebrating achievements also helps create a positive learning environment, where the student feels valued and appreciated for their efforts.
Lastly, evaluating the report card together promotes a holistic approach to education. It encourages parents and teachers to consider not only the student’s academic performance but also their social and emotional well-being. By discussing the report card, parents and teachers can gain insights into the student’s overall development, including their behavior, attitude, and relationships with peers. This holistic approach ensures that the student’s needs are being met on all levels and allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of their progress.
In conclusion, evaluating the report card together is a crucial step in a student’s academic journey. It promotes open communication, identifies areas of improvement, sets realistic goals, fosters accountability, celebrates achievements, and encourages a holistic approach to education. By actively participating in the evaluation process, parents, teachers, and students can work together to ensure the student’s success and overall development. It is through this collaborative effort that we can provide the necessary support and guidance for the student to reach their full potential. | <urn:uuid:46f12141-0494-4285-9f71-d655d1cdf196> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://fitlifewarrior.com/evaluate-the-report-card-together/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.945309 | 842 | 3.609375 | 4 |
What is Eye Redness?
Eye redness is a common condition that affects people of all ages. It is characterized by the appearance of redness or pinkness in the white part of the eye, also known as the sclera. The redness can be caused by a variety of factors, including allergies, infections, injuries, and underlying medical conditions. In this article, we will explore the causes, symptoms, and treatments for eye redness.
Causes of Eye Redness
1. Allergies: Allergies are a common cause of eye redness. When the eyes come into contact with an allergen, such as pollen, dust, or pet dander, they can become inflamed and red. Other symptoms of allergies include itching, tearing, and swelling.
2. Infections: Eye infections, such as conjunctivitis (pink eye), can cause redness in the eyes. These infections are usually caused by bacteria or viruses and can be highly contagious. Other symptoms of eye infections include discharge, itching, and swelling.
3. Dry eyes: Dry eyes occur when the eyes do not produce enough tears or when the tears evaporate too quickly. This can cause irritation and redness in the eyes. Other symptoms of dry eyes include burning, itching, and sensitivity to light.
4. Eye strain: Eye strain can occur when the eyes are overworked, such as when reading or using a computer for long periods of time. This can cause redness, as well as other symptoms such as headaches, blurred vision, and fatigue.
5. Injuries: Eye injuries, such as scratches or foreign objects in the eye, can cause redness and irritation. These injuries can be serious and require immediate medical attention.
6. Underlying medical conditions: Eye redness can also be a symptom of underlying medical conditions, such as glaucoma, uveitis, or scleritis. These conditions require prompt medical attention to prevent further damage to the eyes.
Symptoms of Eye Redness
The main symptom of eye redness is the appearance of redness or pinkness in the white part of the eye. Other symptoms may include:
1. Itching or burning in the eyes
2. Tearing or watery eyes
3. Sensitivity to light
4. Discharge or crusting around the eyes
5. Blurred vision
Treatments for Eye Redness
The treatment for eye redness depends on the underlying cause of the condition. Some common treatments include:
1. Allergy medications: If the redness is caused by allergies, over-the-counter allergy medications such as antihistamines or decongestants may be recommended.
2. Eye drops: Eye drops can be used to treat a variety of conditions that cause eye redness, including dry eyes, infections, and inflammation. Some eye drops require a prescription from a doctor.
3. Warm compresses: Warm compresses can be used to relieve eye strain and dry eyes. They can also help to reduce inflammation and redness.
4. Rest: If the redness is caused by eye strain, taking a break from reading or using a computer can help to reduce the symptoms.
5. Medical treatment: If the redness is caused by an underlying medical condition, such as glaucoma or uveitis, medical treatment may be necessary to prevent further damage to the eyes.
Preventing Eye Redness
There are several steps that can be taken to prevent eye redness, including:
1. Avoiding allergens: If allergies are a trigger for eye redness, avoiding allergens such as pollen, dust, and pet dander can help to prevent symptoms.
2. Taking breaks: Taking frequent breaks when reading or using a computer can help to prevent eye strain and reduce the risk of eye redness.
3. Using eye protection: Wearing protective eyewear, such as safety glasses or goggles, can help to prevent eye injuries that can cause redness and irritation.
4. Maintaining good eye hygiene: Washing hands frequently and avoiding touching the eyes can help to prevent the spread of infections that can cause eye redness.
Eye redness is a common condition that can be caused by a variety of factors, including allergies, infections, injuries, and underlying medical conditions. The symptoms of eye redness can be treated with a variety of methods, including allergy medications, eye drops, warm compresses, and rest. Preventative measures, such as avoiding allergens and taking breaks when using a computer, can help to reduce the risk of eye redness. If you experience persistent eye redness or other symptoms, it is important to seek medical attention to determine the underlying cause and receive appropriate treatment. | <urn:uuid:806b2e14-006c-427b-8fc3-56536b3c587c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://fitlifewarrior.com/what-is-eye-redness/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.927551 | 977 | 3.859375 | 4 |
This collection of 40 articles delves into the multifaceted relationship between nicotine and various health conditions, examining the mechanisms of addiction, withdrawal, and the wide-ranging impacts on the human body. From exploring the genetic predisposition to nicotine addiction to understanding its association with serious health issues like heart attacks and strokes, our glossary offers in-depth insights into the complexities of nicotine and its effects.
Navigate through topics like "Ischemic Heart Disease," "Smokeless Tobacco," "Euphoria," and "Thrombosis" to uncover the scientific intricacies of each subject. Whether you're a medical professional, a researcher, or simply curious about the science behind nicotine addiction, our articles provide valuable information that's both accessible and enlightening.
If you're looking for specific information or a particular topic, utilize the search bar at the top of the page to guide you directly to the articles of interest. Dive into our well-researched content and expand your understanding of the Science of Nicotine and Addiction today. | <urn:uuid:3aee1ffc-1c0b-4c72-9137-afc320a20a01> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://flowblend.com/science-of-nicotine-and-addiction/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.918462 | 210 | 2.6875 | 3 |
All the DOF calculators I looked at were - and probably still are - based on the laws of optics of an ideal, infinitely thin lens. Within this theoretical model and the cases we’re talking about in this part of the forum, the distance between sensor and film should be 400mm when a 100mm lens is used to capture e negative with a scale of 1:1.
The usual camera lens is everything but infinitely short, which suggests that calculations based on theoretical models might still apply, but in a completely different way. Let’s take a look at this lens:
At 1:1, I measured the distance between sensor and negative to be 300mm, which - according to “ideal optics” - makes the focal length of this lens shrink to 75mm and move the “ideal lens” from position A to position B. With additional measurements, I get this:
Does any of the above matter in respect to DOF? I don’t know yet, I’ll post results as soon as I get them. Meanwhile, you can check DOF here, it’s the only site I found so far that even considers the macro situation.
Anyone any ideas or manufacturer info regarding DOF @ macro?
What is it you are interested in? Do you want to predict the DOF @macro such that it would be easier to predict the performance of different lenses? Or do you want to understand/discuss DOF just for the sake of curiosity?
They way I see DOF (as a microscopist) is just a relation between the angle of incident rays and the lateral resolution (smallest distance I can distinguish). If we consider resolution to be constant (e.g. pixel size or diffraction limit), then the DOF can by computed by some basic trig:
DOF = resolution / tan(theta),
where theta is the angle of the incident rays. This angle depends on the distance from the “virtual” lens to the object and on the aperture.
Well, the DOF calculators gave me values that simply felt too optimistic, although I think that the macro DOF calculator (see link above) is closer to what I see.
Let me have a look at your formula: DOF = Pixelsize / tan(theta).
According to my math leftovers, we could also write DOF = 2D*Pixelsize/d
with D being the distance between the virtual lens and the negative
and d being the diameter of the entry pupil at operating aperture and distance settings.
while applied to an object point located on the optical axis.
Exactly, instead of tan(theta) you can also see it as two congruent triangles (like in your formula). In your example in the OP you show that the virtual lens moves forward thereby increasing the angle and decreasing the DOF.
Maybe this is interesting for you: https://www.microscopyu.com/microscopy-basics/depth-of-field-and-depth-of-focus
Just to make applying the formulas extra-difficult, a lot of modern macro lenses do change focal length as you focus. Instead of simply extending the entire lens farther from the image plane (the old way to focus closer) they shift elements inside the lens much as a zoom lens does, varying the focusing distance by varying the effective focal length.
indeed, and this also makes the DOF calculations difficult. As for focal length at macro distances, Here is what I get with my Canon EF 100 f/2.8 Macro USM:
The measurement at 305mm (between sensor and object) is out of spec but provides acceptable sharpness for negatives that have emotional rather than technical values. The horizontal axis represents a scale of 1:1 up to approx. 1:2.5.
Would you mind detailing a bit more how you get/compute the values of focal distance?
Clear explanation, got it, thank you for indulging
Did another measurement with manual focusing and focus peeking with an EOS M6
Here’s the curve:
The pink circles mark data when scanning FF, 645 and 6x6 negatives with a FF sensor.
I also found that both cameras I used refused to autofocus at minimal distance, even when liveview showed perfect focus. I noticed no focus shift on the DSLR and the M6 can’t have any. This can only mean that the lens has a FL that is just a tad longer than 100mm (so what, all data on a spec sheet are rounded anyway) | <urn:uuid:9c020142-42d7-40c4-88da-a1d6f5df1e3a> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://forums.negativelabpro.com/t/equivalent-focal-length-and-dof-scanning-distances/1982/6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.937989 | 961 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Chapter 8: Infinite Sequences and Series
Section 8.4: Power Series
Many problems in applied mathematics and mathematical physics are solved by an infinite sum of functions, rather than by just a sum of numbers. Such series have names like Fourier series, Fourier-Bessel series, Fourier-Legendre series, etc. The intent of this present section is to consider series of functions where the functions are powers of x, or powers of x−c for some fixed constant c. These are called power series for the obvious reason.
Definition 8.4.1: Power Series
Infinite series of the form ∑n=0∞an xn are called power series, and the constants an are called the coefficients.
A series of the form ∑n=0∞anx−cn is called a power series centered at c. The behavior of such power series is exactly parallel to that of the series centered at c=0.
The convergence of a power series is determined pointwise: the variable x is replaced throughout with a constant x0 and the convergence of the resulting series of numbers, namely Σ an x0n, is determined as per Section 8.3. If this series of numbers converges, then the series is said to converge for x=x0. The totality of x-values for which the power series converges forms the domain of a function fx whose rule is the power series.
Table 8.4.1 lists the salient facts about the power series Σ anxn that converges to define a function fx.
The domain of f consists of at least the point x=0.
Convergence takes place in an interval whose form is one of the following:
The interval is called the interval of convergence.
The number R is called the radius of convergence; R could be zero, a finite number greater than zero, or infinity. If R=∞, then the interval of convergence is −R,R.
The radius of convergence of Σ anxn is given by R=limn→∞anan+1, whenever this limit exists; similarly, R=1/limn→∞ann, again provided this limit exists. These two formulas are based respectively on the Ratio and Root tests, the second one using the conventions 1/0⇒R=∞ and 1/∞⇒R=0.
(Hadamard's definitive formula for R is beyond the scope of a first calculus course.)
The power series converges absolutely inside the interval of convergence.
Convergence of Σ anxn at x= ±R must be tested individually. The endpoint behavior could be divergence, conditional convergence, or absolute convergence. However, if the series converges absolutely at one endpoint, it will necessarily converge absolutely at the other.
Inside the interval of convergence, the power series can be differentiated termwise so that f′x=Σ n anxn−1.
Inside the interval of convergence, all derivatives of f exist, and an=fn0/n! Consequently, if Σ anx−cn converges to fx, then in the interval of convergence fx=∑fncn!x−cn.
Table 8.4.1 Properties of power series
The repetition of Σ anxn in item (5) in the table is deliberate. The radius of convergence for this series can be established by the Ratio test as follows. The series converges if, by the Ratio test, limn→∞an+1 xn+1an xn<1. For fixed x, routine algebra gives x<limn→∞|anan+1|≡R.
Consider instead, the series Σ an x2 n and apply the same reasoning. The Ratio test now gives
limn→∞an+1 x2n+1an x2 n<1 and x2 <limn→∞|anan+1| so that x <limn→∞|anan+1|≡R
In other words, the recipe for R is predicated on the form of the powers in the power series.
The radius of convergence for a power series in powers of α x+β must take into account the factor α. Indeed, the radius of convergence will then be 1αlimn→∞|anan+1| because the calculations that lead to R in the simpler case will lead to α x+β<limn→∞an/an+1. If the limit on the right is taken as λ, the inequality then implies x+β/α<λ/α.
The term β/α shifts the center of the interval of convergence to x=−β/α, but the factor 1/α scales λ.
The endpoints of the interval of convergence are then x=−β/α−λ/α and x=−β/α+λ/α.
For each power series listed in Table 8.4.2, determine the radius of convergence and the interval of convergence. Even though (7) in Table 8.4.1 claims that absolute convergence at one end of the interval of convergence implies absolute convergence at the other, in each case where convergence at an endpoint is absolute, verify that it also absolute at the other.
Each sum in Table 8.4.2 is to infinity, but that symbol has been deleted to save vertical space.
∑n=1n 2 x+3n
∑n=0x2 n2 n!
∑n=17 x−3nn n+1
∑n=1n 3n xn
∑n=2n!2 xn2 n!
∑k=0−1k x2 k+nk! k+n! 22 k+n
∑n=11⋅3⋅⋯⋅2 n−12⋅5⋅⋯⋅3 n−1xn
Table 8.4.2 Radius of convergence and interval of convergence to be determined for each power series
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On October 3rd, a powerful earthquake originating from Nepal sent tremors through the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), leaving residents in shock and fear.
The earthquake, measuring a magnitude of 7.5 on the Richter scale, struck Nepal with its epicenter near the border with India. The impact was felt across the region, including parts of northern India, including Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, and Ghaziabad.
As news of the earthquake spread, panic gripped the NCR, with people rushing out of their homes and offices. The strong tremors lasted for several minutes, causing buildings to shake and prompting authorities to issue a high alert.
While there were no immediate reports of major damage or casualties in Delhi NCR, the quake triggered memories of the devastating earthquake that struck Nepal in 2015, which claimed thousands of lives and caused widespread destruction.
Authorities in Delhi NCR swiftly responded to the situation, activating emergency response teams and conducting thorough inspections of buildings and infrastructure. Schools and offices were temporarily closed, and people were advised to stay outdoors until the aftershocks subsided.
Although earthquakes are not uncommon in this region, the occurrence of a strong tremor serves as a reminder of the need for preparedness and resilience. It is crucial for individuals and communities to educate themselves about earthquake safety measures, such as creating emergency kits, identifying safe spaces, and practicing evacuation drills. | <urn:uuid:1e827393-20d9-43d1-8e14-2068c45b273d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://friendzworld.com/category/natural-disasters/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.970081 | 283 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Have you drank multiple cups of coffee but feel the same? If you’re wondering, ‘Why does caffeine not affect me?’ you’ve come to the right place.
Coffee is a lifesaver when you’re struggling to wake up in the morning. So, if you’ve finished your fourth cup of coffee and are still yawning, you’re probably asking yourself, Why does caffeine not affect me?
There could be several reasons caffeine isn’t acting as a pick-me-up. If you’re a heavy coffee drinker, the likely culprit is an increased caffeine tolerance or sleep deprivation, but there could also be genetic factors at play. You might also be wondering, does coffee lose caffeine over time?
How Does Caffeine Work?
Before delving into why caffeine affects people differently, it’s important to understand how caffeine works in the first place. Caffeine doesn’t give us energy, at least not the way that food and rest do.
Instead, caffeine stimulates the central nervous system, blocking the adenosine receptors in the brain. These receptors are responsible for that feeling of tiredness we experience toward the end of the day or after a poor night’s rest. We instead feel more alert and refreshed.
Another one of the ways caffeine makes us feel better is by triggering the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. This puts us in a good mood and increases focus.
Caffeine also decreases the secretion of melatonin, which is a sleep hormone. This is why people who drink a lot of coffee or drink coffee later in the day may struggle to sleep at night.
When we drink coffee, the caffeine is absorbed in the small intestine, where it can travel to the brain. Some people can feel the effects within 10 minutes, but it may take longer for all the caffeine to be absorbed.
The half-life of caffeine varies per person but is around five to six hours on average. In other words, if you drank a cup of coffee at 5 PM and went to bed at 11 PM, half of the caffeine could still be in your system.
Why Caffeine Affects People Differently
Genetics plays a significant role in how you will react to caffeine. Some people get the jitters after one cup, and others can drink multiple caffeinated drinks and feel no difference.
One study found that around 10% of people naturally have a high caffeine tolerance due to genetics. Research also found that those with caffeine sensitivity experience amplified effects due to variance in the ADORA2A gene.
Genetics play a role in how fast the body can metabolize caffeine, too. The CYP1A2 enzyme in the liver is responsible for 95% of the metabolization of caffeine, but there are two forms of it. One form is quicker at processing the caffeine, meaning it will go through your system faster.
The sooner it’s metabolized, the sooner you feel sleepy again. How you react to caffeine also depends on how well adenosine receptors can bind caffeine molecules. If you genetically inherited a high caffeine tolerance, there’s nothing you can do to lower it.
You Built Up Your Tolerance
Continuous exposure to caffeine can help you build up your tolerance. If you’re a heavy coffee drinker, you might have initially felt a buzz from one cup, but now, you need more and more to wake yourself up.
Although this may be frustrating, ingesting more than 400 mg of caffeine in one 24-hour period is not recommended. Even if you consume a lot of caffeine and don’t feel the jitters, you shouldn’t push this limit because it’s possible to overdose on caffeine.
Symptoms can include:
- Irregular or rapid heartbeat
- Chest pain
If you think you consumed too much caffeine, consult a medical professional. You might also be interested in our explainer on micro-dosing caffeine.
You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep
Drinking coffee can keep you up at night if you drink it too close to bedtime. As mentioned earlier, caffeine doesn’t actually give us energy; it just masks sleepiness.
If you keep drinking coffee due to a lack of sleep, you’ll soon find yourself trapped in a vicious cycle. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine states that if you get around five hours of sleep per night, caffeine will no longer make you feel more alert after three days. The only way to resolve this is to ditch the caffeine and try to make up your sleep debt.
If you are generally healthy and mostly drink coffee early in the morning or afternoon, it may not disrupt your quality of sleep. Still, if you’re a particularly heavy coffee drinker, one of the reasons you might be experiencing sleep deprivation is actually because of withdrawal symptoms from pausing your coffee consumption at night time.
Caffeine withdrawal symptoms include:
- Low mood
You Have ADHD
Many people with ADHD find that caffeine does not affect them the same way as others. Some people with ADHD feel they have an increased caffeine tolerance and even experience a feeling of calmness after consuming caffeinated drinks.
However, this is all anecdotal as the research is inconclusive. A report from 2022 suggests that there isn’t a connection between caffeine intake and the severity of ADHD symptoms.
However, other studies reported differently, finding that caffeine helped increase concentration. This is believed to be because ADHD is often treated with stimulants, so coffee can somewhat replicate the effects.
Feeling like caffeine doesn’t affect you or that it makes you calmer doesn’t necessarily mean you have ADHD. If you’re concerned, speak to a healthcare professional.
Benefits Of Caffeine And Coffee
Even if caffeine doesn’t make you feel as alert as you’d like, there are still some benefits. Drinking two to five cups of coffee per day can reduce your risk of developing several ailments, including endometrial and liver cancer. This may not necessarily be due to the caffeine, but the anti-inflammatory compounds and antioxidants in the coffee.
The polyphenols in coffee may be a reason why coffee drinkers are less likely to develop cardiovascular disease. Coffee is linked with a lower heart failure risk, too.
The caffeine itself also has some advantages. Caffeine consumption might reduce the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease later in life.
As mentioned earlier, this stimulant may also be good for your mental health, as a study found consuming a moderate amount of caffeine can boost your mood. It has even been linked to a lower risk of experiencing depression. Learn more in our guide on morning coffee benefits.
Side Effects Of Caffeine And Coffee
While coffee has a lot of benefits, there are potential negative effects to keep in mind. People often enjoy coffee with creamer and sugar. This is fine as an occasional treat, but the American Heart Association advises consuming no more than nine tablespoons per day for men and six tablespoons for women.
As mentioned earlier, coffee can be good for heart health, but you should still drink it in moderation, especially if you already have high blood pressure. One study found that new coffee drinkers experienced a slight increase in blood pressure, but this tapered off with regular consumption. However, another study noted that those who drank at least five cups of caffeinated coffee per day experienced a rise in blood pressure.
Those with a lower caffeine tolerance will note an increased heart rate after drinking coffee. Although research found that moderate caffeine consumption does not increase the risk of arrhythmia, anecdotally, some people sensitive to the stimulating effects of caffeine may feel their heart flutter.
Many people believe that coffee dehydrates you. Research suggests that moderate coffee consumption is not harmful for hydration, but drinking a lot can have a diuretic effect. Regular coffee and decaf coffee can also have a laxative effect.
Finally, drinking coffee and black tea can reduce the amount of iron you absorb from meals. This isn’t due to the caffeine but rather the polyphenols found in these drinks. If you have low iron levels, it’s best to avoid these beverages at meal times.
Alternative Sources Of Caffeine
If you don’t like coffee but still want an energy boost, the following also contain caffeine:
- Energy drinks
- Black tea
- Green tea
The jitters are not something inherent to coffee. If you have a lower caffeine tolerance, you may still feel uncomfortable after consuming too much caffeine from other sources.
With that said, matcha tea contains a lot of caffeine since it’s green tea in its most potent form. Regular green tea contains 30 to 50 mg of caffeine, but since matcha tea entails drinking ground-up tea leaves, the caffeine content jumps to around 70 mg.
Despite this, many drinkers find it perks them out without leaving them feeling jittery, which may be because it contains L-theanine, an amino acid that promotes feelings of calmness. This effect is believed to be because matcha contains more L-theanine than regular green tea and coffee.
Some coffee lovers also find that adding mushroom mixes to coffee helps them reap the energy-boosting effects of caffeine without getting the jitters. Learn more in our round-up of the best mushroom coffee brands.
Why Does Caffeine Not Affect Me? FAQs
Does Adding Milk Reduce The Caffeine Content?
Picking up a latte in Starbucks instead of Americano or adding milk to brewed coffee will not alter the caffeine content unless you toss some of the coffee out. Milk or creamers simply alter the taste.
Should I Quit Caffeine Cold Turkey?
It’s not advised to quit caffeine outright as you may be dependent on it and experience unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Instead, slowly cut down on the caffeinated beverages in your diet, including tea, coffee, and energy drinks.
Does Espresso Have The Most Caffeine?
Espresso is a concentrated serving of coffee, but not always the strongest drink. There is usually 63 mg of caffeine per shot, but this can vary based on the coffee beans used. For comparison, there is around 93 mg of caffeine for an eight-ounce serving of brewed coffee. | <urn:uuid:471e7f4b-d87a-4f76-9d16-ab59afbf1274> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://fullcoffeeroast.com/why-does-caffeine-not-affect-me/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.939044 | 2,140 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Every screen has it's own resolution. Or rather pixel density.
Consider a 20" (diagonal) monitor:
A monitor set to 2560x1600px has a ppi of about 137
A monitor set to 1920x1080px has a ppi of about 102
A monitor set to 1440x900px has a ppi of about 89
I post "about" because actual physical size of the monitor is a factor as well. A 20" monitor with a 2560x1600 resolution will have a higher PPI than a 30" monitor at the same resolution. (This is the entire theory behind "retina" displays - huge resolutions on a small screen).
If you create a document at 300ppi and tell Acrobat to view it at 100%, Acrobat takes into account the monitor's pixels per inch and tries to match the monitor ppi to the document ppi. So a 300ppi document on a monitor with a pixel density of 100 would show 3 pixels for every 1 pixel of density. A 100ppi document on a 100 pixel dense monitor would be a 1:1 ratio. This is how Acrobat determines "100%".
If you want to accurately display sizes in Acrobat you need to alter Acrobat's preferences. If you go to Preferences > Page Display there is a field to input Custom Resolution. Input your monitor's PPI in that field and 100% will be much closer to actual size regardless of what a document PPI is. You'll also see an option in Page Display preferences to simply use the system settings. You can use that as well if it is reading a value. Not all systems will have a default value other than the standard 72/96ppi however.
For a close estimate at your monitor's pixel density you can use this calculator: Pixel Density Calculator
Note, the calculator will only get you close. It's not 100% accurate. For example it tells me my Monitor PPI is 100.63. However, using 100.63 in Acrobat causes all kinds of display errors. So I rounded to 101. If you want to be 100% accurate in the pixel density calculations you need to do the math yourself since every monitor manufacturer will have a slightly different variation for a monitor's size. The wiki article I linked to at the top of this answer explains the math behind pixel density. | <urn:uuid:221e69e0-92b6-464e-b801-9fdc97b43c64> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13013/when-creating-pdf-from-an-image-what-determines-the-screen-dimensions-when-view | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.905613 | 483 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Research at Sea – Studying Oil Impacts on Food Web in Florida Waters
– April 4, 2012
March 2012. Dr. Kendra Daly and Leslie Schwierzke-Wade at the University of South Florida (USF) are leading a group of researchers from the USF College of Marine Science and the Florida Wildlife Research Institute to assess the impact of oil on the food web in Gulf waters off the Florida coast.
Their team includes four graduate students. Their 10-day cruise aboard the R/V Weatherbird II (Feb 15-24) out of St. Petersburg was the 8th of 9 cruises planned for this project. Funds from the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) support these efforts to understand the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The goal of this cruise was to investigate the impacts of the BP oil spill, focusing on the lower end of the water column food web. Results will be compared to observations from other research cruises in the same region and observations from the non-impacted region on the west Florida shelf. We assessed benthic, microbial, phytoplankton, zooplankton communities through abundance and distribution, species composition, and toxicity studies. Measurements of pH, total dissolved carbon and dissolved gases were collected. Sediment samples were also collected for hydrocarbon analysis — Leslie Schwierzke-Wade, Chief Scientist
Using bongo net tows and a continuous imaging camera (SIPPER), they collected samples and assessed marine and environmental conditions along two transects in the northern Gulf of Mexico as part of their long-term monitoring for oil impacts. Their research also seeks to understand the role of zooplankton in tracking oil movement.
For more information about this research, visit the GoMRI-funded projects at the Florida Institute of Oceanography (title: Baseline for Impact Assessment of Zooplankton and Imaging Oil Droplet Detection on the West Florida Shelf).
Their 9th cruise, originally scheduled for March 3-8, has been re-scheduled in April due to weather. This group of researchers has cruises planned in upcoming months through the GoMRI-awarded C-IMAGE research consortia.
This research was made possible by a grant from BP/The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. The GoMRI is a 10-year, $500 million independent research program established by an agreement between BP and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance to study the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the environment and public health.
© Copyright 2010- 2017 Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) – All Rights Reserved. Redistribution is encouraged with acknowledgement to the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI). Please credit images and/or videos as done in each article. Questions? Contact web-content editor Nilde “Maggie” Dannreuther, Northern Gulf Institute, Mississippi State University (firstname.lastname@example.org). | <urn:uuid:f9d3df82-d4f9-4b69-b46c-273bf4c7bc8d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://gulfresearchinitiative.org/research-at-sea-studying-oil-impacts-on-food-web-in-florida-waters/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.929915 | 615 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Let's take a look at amphibians by Hands-On Education
Throughout our amphibian’s topic your child will learn about the key features of amphibians, find out what frogs eat and the stages of a frog’s life cycle. Explore a pond habitat and observe why amphibians live there, also discover how fully functional early life amphibians are compared to other animals. With seven great activities your students or home educated will love learning about the life cycle of an amphibian.
What is an amphibian?
All amphibians are cold blooded vertebrates once they reach their complete development stage and become terrestrial adults. Amphibians are primarily made up of frogs and toads, salamanders, crested newts and caecilian make up a variety of other aquatic and semi-aquatic amphibian species. It was recently diverged caecilians, a worm like mostly blind creature, allow their young to scrape off and eat a layer of their own skin as opposed to feeding them milk or bringing them food.
Another interesting scientific discovery, from 2008, revealed that butterflies can remember life as a caterpillar.
The life cycle of an amphibian always starts in the aquatic phase. Frogs will lay eggs in a pond or nearby body of water.
- This begins with aquatic larvae and represents the first of three changes within this animal’s body structure. The subsequent aquatic larvae transition brings a newly hatched tadpole to life.
- The tadpole’s aquatic lifestyle is in no way it’s complete development. As time passes their large external gills disappear and primitive lungs being to grow. This dramatic embryonic and larval development happens quickly in both newt larvae, frogs and toads.
- The third transition brings about the land phase of a frog and toads life cycle. Following this true metamorphosis, the parental body will spend the rest of its life near water but not living underwater. This wonderful biological process is shared in all the amphibian species and makes them truly unique.
Do vertebrates undergo metamorphosis?
Firstly, no mammals go through metamorphosis as they don’t have the required hormone and are born in largely the same form forever. Birds also cannot metamorphose, but insects, amphibians and fish can. Let’s look at what exactly these processes called metamorphoses are?
The biological process is effectively a type of animal development from one life cycle stage to another. However, unlike other types of typical amphibian development, the change is relatively fast and dramatic. The animal's body structure goes through a significant reorganization from how it was in the previous stage. The process that stimulates metamorphosis is controlled by a hormone release in the cells of the body, specifically, the hormone released to control the process is known as iodothyronine.
It is important to differentiate how vertebrates’ metamorphosis compare to other types of growth. In mammals, including humans, physical changes throughout adolescence are not a vertebrate metamorphosis at all. The development is gradual and the adult organism resembles its juvenile form, this is why no mammals go through metamorphosis. Birds mimic mammals in this as they are effectively born as miniatures of their terrestrial adult self.
There are different types of life cycle changes in animals which often require specific ecological circumstances. The three main distinctions are:
- complete metamorphosis
- partial metamorphosis
- no metamorphosis
There is still much we do not know about this fascinating type of development and it was recently discovered that even tunicates undergo metamorphosis. Another interesting scientific discovery, from 2008, revealed that butterflies can remember life as a caterpillar.
Regrowth of limbs in salamanders
A quick look now at how amazing salamanders are as the only living amphibian tetrapod’s able to regenerate their limbs. This animal physically develops in the same way as other amphibians, however its able to activate a process known as controlled cell death or programmed cell death which some believe is linked to their complete mitochondrial genomes. In extraordinary fashion salamanders can lose a tail or limb and through incredible regenerative cell growth developed fully reformed replacement.
The Australian Green Frog’s Life Cycles
Green frogs are most commonly found to live in eastern and south-eastern New South Wales. They live among vegetation in or at the edges of ponds, dams and streams. A green frog life stages follow a normal embryotic development within the class amphibia life cycle: egg - tadpole - metamorph - adult. As a functional common frog, they eat insects, spiders, small lizards, snakes, and other frogs. This predatory lifestyle does not come without its own risks as many of its prey can also turn predator upon them.
The Life Cycles of Newts
Every animal develops in unique ways, and amphibians are no exception to this rule. From animal reproduction, which in the case of newts occurs near a body of water. This means newt larvae start in water. Unlike frogs and toads who spend their adult life out of the water newts are semi-aquatic amphibians.
Lateral Line System in Fish
Molecular phylogenetics analyses genetic and hereditary molecular differences to gain information on an organism's evolutionary path. A fish’s evolutionary journey has led to the development of a lateral line organ that is crucial in their existence not only in the ocean but even in a fish tank. The lateral line system allows fish to detect the moment of waves in water. Thanks to this a fish can learn a lot about the world it is living in even if blind. For instance, when a fish swims, it creates a tiny wave which may run up against the glass of a fish tank or other plants and animals nearby. From this they can mentally paint a picture of the world around them.
Unlike the amphibian life cycles where there is complete transformation including the loss of gills and growth of primitive lungs, fish simply grow large external gills. In most fish, and a number of other aquatic animals the pulmonary respiration system consists of gills, which are either partially or completely external organs. Other animals, such as insects, have respiratory systems with very simple anatomical features. | <urn:uuid:dac1a460-d987-48b7-aa97-41d16d980700> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://hands-oneducation.com/year-one/topics/y1-amphibians.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.943991 | 1,279 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Breakfast Might Be Good for a Child's Emotional Health, Too
WEDNESDAY, Aug. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- What your kids eat for breakfast and where they eat it could matter for their social and emotional health.
That's the upshot of a new nationwide study from Spain that concluded that eating breakfast away from home was almost as detrimental as skipping the meal altogether. Researchers said this could be because meals away from home are often less nutritious.
"Our results suggest that it is not only important to eat breakfast, but it’s also important where young people eat breakfast and what they eat," said first author Dr. Jose Francisco Lopez-Gil, of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain.
"Skipping breakfast or eating breakfast away from home is associated with increased likelihood of psychosocial behavioral problems in children and adolescents," he said.
Certain foods such as processed meat were associated with higher risk of problems in these areas, while dairy products and cereals appeared to lower the odds, Lopez-Gil said.
For the study -- published Aug. 23 in Frontiers in Nutrition -- researchers examined data from a 2017 survey of parents and guardians in Spain. The survey included questions about kids' breakfast habits as well as their psychosocial health, including factors like self-esteem, mood and anxiety. The results included 3,772 children in Spain between the ages of 4 and 14.
Coffee, milk, tea, chocolate, cocoa, yogurt, bread, toast, cereals and pastries were all associated with lower odds of behavioral problems. Eggs, cheese and ham were linked to an increased risk of such problems.
While the study was limited to Spain, the findings are consistent with other research. The availability of nutritious breakfasts in schools is likely to influence results in some areas.
But other factors, such as family support that young people can receive at home during breakfast, may also play a role in the observed benefits. The authors said more research is needed to understand the cause-and-effect relationships.
"The fact that eating breakfast away from home is associated with greater psychosocial health problems is a novel aspect of our study," Lopez-Gil said in a journal news release.
"Our findings reinforce the need to promote not only breakfast as part of a healthy lifestyle routine, but also that it should be eaten at home," he said. "Also, to prevent psychosocial health problems, a breakfast that includes dairy and/or cereals, and minimizes certain animal foods high in saturated fat/cholesterol, could help to decrease psychosocial health problems in young people."
The U.S. National Library of Medicine has a collection of recipes for a healthy breakfast.
SOURCE: Frontiers in Nutrition, news release, Aug. 23, 2022 | <urn:uuid:305a0d71-a848-4c40-b9da-98a55186e033> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://healthlibrary.franciscanhealth.org/RelatedItems/6,1657886188 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.976662 | 583 | 3.28125 | 3 |
Beautiful | Rare | Cherished. Diamonds are made of carbon so they form as carbon atoms under a high temperature and pressure; they bond together to start growing crystals. Each diamond is unique and is a miracle of time, place and change. And each has specific qualities that establish its value. GIA created the first, and now globally accepted standard for describing diamonds: Colour, Clarity, Cut and Carat Weight. Today, the 4Cs of Diamond Quality is the universal method for assessing the quality of any diamond, anywhere in the world.
Among the 4C's for grading and evaluating diamonds is Colour. In White diamonds, a diamond with a higher color grade (Colourless D, E, F ) will carry a bigger price tag than a diamond in lower color grades such as J, K, M. Near colorless diamonds are also considered high quality, especially G and H color diamonds.
The diamond cut is often acknowledged as the most important aspect when buying a diamond and hence should not be confused with the shape of the diamond. The cut refers to the brilliance of the diamond. In simple terms, the way a diamond is cut will determine how light is reflected through the stone.
A good cut will allow the light to travel through the stone and reflect from side to side. The light then reflects out of the stone, and this light/sparkle is what you see with your eye. In diamond terminology, this sparkle is "brilliance."
Here is an outline that will assist you in understanding the GIA’s cut grading system and what differentiates an excellent from a good or fair cut.●Excellent grade: this category has high scintillation, brilliance and an even pattern of dark and light areas.
●Very good: while this grade has high scintillation and brilliance, they are darker n the edges or the centre. Sometimes, a diamond can have a higher scintillation and brilliance, but the grade lowered by its pattern.
●Good grade: this category is a bit dark and has lower scintillation. A diamond can be downgraded by its weight ratio or pattern.
●Fair grade: a gem in this grade has little scintillation and brilliance.
●Poor grade: gems in this grade have extremely poor proportions and display little scintillation or brilliance.
Carat is the weighing scale or unit of weight of a diamond. The word carat has its roots in Greek. Back then, c arob seeds were considered to have consistency in their mass. Hence it became a comparative measure easing out the trade of diamonds. Carat has remained a comparative or a relative measure for diamonds for a long time. One carat today is equal to 0.2 grams i.e. size of a paperclip. A carat is divided into one hundred points. When you are shopping for a diamond, carat would be the most common term you’ll hear from jewelers, and that’s how diamonds are presented besides many other features or shapes of diamonds.
The amount of natural flaws in a diamond determines the clarity grade of a diamond. There are two types of clarity factors in a diamond in general – blemishes (external flaws such as chips and scratches etc.) and inclusions (internal flaws such as crystals and feathers etc.).
The Gemological Institute of America’ (GIA) diamond clarity scale is divided into the following categories:
Flawless or FL: a diamond that has no blemishes and inclusions would fall within this category. The best clarity grade.
Internally Flawless or IF : a diamond that has extremely minimal external blemishes, but no internal inclusions would fall within this category. Top clarity grade.
Very Very Slightly Included 1 or VVS1 : VVS diamonds are extremely high clarity grade diamonds. You would need a microscope with a 60-100X magnification to locate the inclusions of the diamond in this clarity grade.
Very Very Slightly Included 2 or VVS2: Right next to VVS1 is VVS2 clarity grade. Again, it is a very high clarity grade and untrained individuals would not be able to find inclusions in this clarity grade with a jeweler’s loupe.
Very Slightly Included 1 or VS1: this is one of the best clarity grades in a diamond. VS1 diamonds are completely eye-clean and considered investment grade just like VVS diamonds. The boundary between VVS2 and VS1 is also very tight. While obviously VVS would have a higher price tag, you can’t go with a VS1 clarity grade diamond.
Very Slightly Included 2 or VS2: if you are on a budget and do not want to compromise on quality either, VS2 is the best clarity grade to consider. Diamonds in the VS2 clarity grade range are eye-clean, especially in less than 2 carat diamonds.
Slightly Included 1 or SI1: What we stated for VS2 is true for SI1 in the 1 carat range diamonds. SI1 diamonds in the 1 carat weight range are generally eye-clean.
Slightly Included 2 or SI2: There are SI2 diamonds in the 1 carat range that are eye-clean and there are some that are not eye-clean. It all depends on the type and location of the inclusion. If they are white feathers and spread out inclusions across the diamond, it would be eye-clean generally. If they are big black crystals, the diamond won’t be eye clean.
Included 1-3 (I1, I2, I3): These are the lowest clarity grade diamonds in GIA scale. Diamonds in this range are not eye clean and would often have bad brilliance and fire because of too many flaws. I1 could still be a decent clarity grade for people with budget constraints, but I2/I3 would be pushing it.
We recommend you should get your jewellery checked once every year to ensure all the gems and diamonds are secure at its place. Jewel Check is a complimentary service at Heera, for an inspection of prongs once a year. It comes with the Heera Purchase Pack which includes some exciting and beneficial offers for you. | <urn:uuid:b0fff5c6-0f9e-4cf8-8075-a96185133be7> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://heeradiamonds.com/products/emerald-and-diamond-three-stone-ring | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.946828 | 1,276 | 2.765625 | 3 |
A lottery is a gambling game in which people pay a small amount of money for the chance to win a larger sum. In order to participate, individuals buy tickets that are randomly drawn by a machine. The prize may be anything from a large sum of money to goods and services. In the past, prizes were often fancy items such as dinnerware, but now they can be cash or other valuables. The first known lottery was held during the Roman Empire. People gathered at social events where lottery tickets were given out as an amusement. The winnings were generally of unequal value, with some of the tickets bringing in a smaller sum than others.
The lottery has long been a popular way to raise money, and many governments now use it to fund projects and programs. It has also been used to distribute government benefits such as subsidized housing units and kindergarten placements. In the United States, it is legal for state and local governments to hold lotteries. Private organizations can also conduct lotteries.
While the odds of winning a lottery are low, it’s still possible to win big. In fact, many people have won millions in the lottery. However, the majority of winners are unable to manage their winnings and go bankrupt in a short period of time. In addition, the tax burden on lottery winnings is high. Americans spend over $80 billion on the lottery each year. This is over $600 per household, so it’s important to understand how much you are spending on the lottery before you make a decision to play.
In order to increase your chances of winning a lottery, you should try to choose numbers that are not close together or that end in the same digit. You can also improve your odds by buying more tickets, especially if you join a group and pool money. In addition, you can use a number pattern to boost your chances of winning. Just be sure to change the pattern every now and then to avoid repeating the same numbers too frequently.
Many people play the lottery because they feel that it is a great way to get rich fast. But what many people don’t realize is that they are being duped into this irrational gamble by lottery marketers. In reality, there is a deeper reason why lottery advertising is so effective, and it has to do with the fact that most people don’t know the odds of winning. This article will help you learn about the odds of winning a lottery so that you can avoid being taken advantage of by lottery marketers. You will also discover a proven strategy that has been tested and proven to increase your chances of winning. This strategy is simple, inexpensive and can have a significant impact on your financial future. | <urn:uuid:d646ac16-2a88-4348-ab70-bca21f338542> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://helptechsupportnumber.com/the-truth-about-lottery-advertising/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.980586 | 546 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Can digital technologies offer new ways to rethink historical narratives? Is DH the future of the humanities and of history as a profession? Can DH and critical inquiry be brought together? This course explores the history, present, and future of digital humanities (DH) to seek responses to these questions. From its origins in the Cold War to its rise to fame in the 1990s, the digital turn in the humanities has garnered excitement and support as well as critique and even disavowal from historians. In this course, we will examine the debates in the field of DH and learn about new ways in which historians are using digital tools for academic research as well as public outreach and activism. The course will be divided into two parts. The first half of the course will be devoted to understanding the historical growth and the present status of the field. In the second half, students will be learning basic digital tools to conduct research. The purpose of the course is not to turn historians into coders; it is to understand what codes can do for historians.
Each student must also register for 49IR Section 04.
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Infants are just as susceptible to accidental poisonings as older children are, especially when it comes to medication errors, new research reports.
A decade of poison control center calls in the United States showed that acetaminophen (such as Tylenol) was the most common medication mistake for infants. This was followed by H2-blockers (for acid reflux), gastrointestinal medications, combination cough/cold products, antibiotics and ibuprofen (such as Motrin or Advil).
The most common non-medication exposures were diaper care and rash products, plants and creams, lotions and make-up, the investigators found.
“I was surprised with the large number of exposures even in this young age group,” said lead author Dr. A. Min Kang, a medical toxicology fellow at Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix in Arizona.
“Pediatricians typically do not begin poison prevention education until about 6 months of age, since the traditional hazard we think about is the exploratory ingestion — that is when kids begin to explore their environment and get into things they are not supposed to,” Kang added.
The findings were published online Jan. 13 and in the February print issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Kang and colleague Dr. Daniel Brooks reviewed all poison control center calls in a national database from 2004 to 2013 that related to babies younger than 6 months old.
There were more than 270,000 exposures reported during that time, 97 percent of which were unintentional. About half the calls were general unintentional ingestions, which includes children exploring their environment. Over one-third (37 percent), however, were related to medication mistakes, the study found.
With medication exposures, 47 percent involved dosage mistakes, and 43 percent involved giving a medication twice or too soon, giving a child the wrong medication or similar errors, the authors explained.
Acetaminophen was involved in more than 22,000 medication exposures and nearly 5,000 general exposures. This high rate reflects its frequent use because it’s recommended instead of ibuprofen for infants, Kang pointed out.
“The concern with too much acetaminophen is liver failure although, luckily, young children are considered to be somewhat less likely to experience this than an adult because the metabolism is a little different,” Kang said.
One expert noted that this study covers a decade, and acetaminophen mistakes may have dropped in recent years. That’s because acetaminophen infant drops are now standardized across manufacturers, said Dr. Michael Cater, a pediatrician with St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, Calif. A U.S. government study last fall found that children’s ER visits for medicine overdoses have been declining.
The number of ibuprofen exposures, however, surprised Cater since ibuprofen isn’t recommended for those under 6 months old.
“Also surprising was the number of ethanol poisonings,” likely from parents leaving empty glasses or bottles of alcohol around, he said. “Low-lying plants, some of which are toxic, are a source of concern, and this was a bit of a surprise to me.”
Diaper creams and lotions likely top the list because they’re easily reachable by infants when left on the diaper-changing areas, Cater added.
The frequency of calls for cough/cold medications caught the attention of Dr. Emily Borman-Shoap, pediatric residency program director at the University of Minnesota.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP] does not recommend cough and cold medications for children under age 6, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given a warning about the use of cough and cold medication for children under age 2,” Borman-Shoap said. “This suggests that there is room for ongoing education for parents about safe treatments for cough and cold symptoms in children.”
The AAP has a policy statement recommending that all liquid medications use metric units for dosing and that they include administration devices, such as syringes, to reduce the chance of an overdose.
Perhaps doctors should offer poison prevention education to caregivers earlier, even starting when a baby leaves the hospital, Kang suggested.
In addition, Kang said, parents should have the poison control phone number — 1-800-222-1222 — posted in their home and programmed into their cellphones, and should call for advice on any type of exposure.
For more about child poisonings, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:ef783e85-6d3b-4899-bf3a-4d2cb16a40a1> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://iamtotallysick.com/womens-health/acetaminophen-tops-list-of-accidental-infant-poisonings/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.955342 | 953 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Remittances- Importance and Effect in the Economy during the Covid-19 Pandemic - The Case of Kosovo
Purpose: The paper addresses issues related to the remittances of the Kosovar diaspora, including the analysis of their economic effect before and during Covid19. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze remittances in Kosovo and the effect of remittances on the economy in the Republic of Kosovo in the period 2010-2021. Design/methodology/approach: Official data from local and international institutions were used to conduct this study. This article provides a theoretical overview of remittances and remittance trends in Kosovo, from 2010 to 2022. For the finalization of this paper, the presented material has support including scientific literature, as well as reports and publications from the Central Bank of Kosovo, the Statistics Agency of Kosovo.In order to achieve the main objective of this article, different sources of data were used as well as the method of analysis, comparative method, econometric analysis which is presented through correlative analysis. Findings: In the framework of the work and analysis we have done regarding the impact and economic effect of remittances before and during the Covid19 pandemic in Kosovo, the results showed that: Remittances represent an important source of income for family economies, having influence and effects on the economy of Kosovo. Remittances to Kosovo should be mainly focused on investments in the economy and development projects. Practical inplemantation: Practical application: The low level of economic development in the country has influenced that remittances remain an important financial source, affecting the level of consumption and the standard of living of families in Kosovo. Originality value: The value of originality: The research refers to remittances that continue to be of great importance to families in Kosovo. This is when it is taken into account that Kosovo has a low level of local production and economic growth, as well as a high rate of unemployment, in this context the importance and effect of remittances has been and remains of special importance for households and the economy in general in Kosovo. | <urn:uuid:3873a31c-7aa2-4c0e-8337-9eda60a72f54> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ijeba.com/journal/797 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.953869 | 435 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Exhibition dedicated to Trojan War in British Museum
An exhibition on the Trojan War has started at the British Museum, which will last until March 8, 2020. What connection does this have to Rome?
Of course, Julius Caesar considered himself a descendant of the goddess Venus, whose son Aeneas, after the fall of Troy, reached Rome after many vicissitudes. In addition, some families of Roman patricians derived their “names” – cognomena – from the names of Aeneas’ companions. The exhibition, like many earlier ones in the British Museum, is a review and takes up the subject of war from various points of view. Media reports show that part of H. Schielemann’s findings can be seen there. It is not known, however, whether among them is the so-called “Priam’s Treasure”, discovered by H. Schielemann and brought by him to Berlin. From there, after World War II, it was taken to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. | <urn:uuid:72bf0a12-9109-47dd-8627-16ad296520a6> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/discoveries/exhibition-dedicated-to-trojan-war-in-british-museum/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.973316 | 217 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Cyber Legends, the fun, free game that empowers kids to learn online safety through play, today announced the launch of the Cyber Legends Gaming platform and its availability to schools across North America. There is currently no standardized cyber safety curriculum being taught in primary, elementary or intermediate schools. Cyber Legends intends to change that with engaging, curriculum-aligned lessons, masked as a fun video game. The game teaches kids about passwords, identity theft, scams, phishing, cyber bullying, sexting, social media issues and much more.
Cyber Legends has reached out to teachers, schools, school boards, cybersecurity experts, and online safety professionals to collect data over the past 2 years to learn about their challenges. The company has gathered all the complexities of internet safety and distilled them into engaging, well-tested, curriculum-aligned, and beautifully structured lesson plans (created by teachers) for grades K–8. Cyber Legends also comes with tons of free resources to help teachers, parents, and children.
As critical as it is that children learn about cyber safety early on, teachers often lack the resources to help their students. They aren’t cybersecurity specialists and the vast majority have never received any cybersecurity training themselves. This provides a simple way to give each child the basics on how to stay safe online. This has become more critical as students use laptops, mobile devices, and home computers routinely.
“Over 1.5 billion children are at risk of harm online and technology adoption is starting earlier than ever,” said James Hayes, Co-Founder and CEO at Cyber Legends. “We saw the need for early training of children and an army of the world’s leading brands have agreed and are backing us in these pursuits. What Sesame Street did for children’s reading in 1969, Cyber Legends will do for children’s cyber safety in 2022 and beyond.”
As students play Cyber Legends, reports appear in the teacher dashboard. This information shows teachers where students are excelling, and where there’s room for improvement. The reports are easily tailored to a teacher’s specific focus and also helps guide the assessment process.
“Cyber Legends provides an extensive online resource full of digital safety lessons sorted by grade, topic, and media type,” said S. Westover, Technology Enabled Learning and Teaching Coordinator at Rainy River District School Board. “The materials are well organized, easy to use, and completely customizable to help teachers build media literacy and critical thinking skills in our students.”
Working with game developers who have designed for Mattel, Disney, and Lucas Films, to name a few, the Cyber Legends video game was created to immerse students in scenarios that lead to in-game assignments. This problem-based approach helps develop critical thinking and communication skills, with students assimilating concepts effortlessly.
To sign up your school, home or company for free, visit http://www.cyberlegends.com. | <urn:uuid:20e27d20-150c-4af9-be84-3bca796a7f45> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://innovateon.ca/cybersecurity-to-be-taught-to-k-8-students-across-north-america-for-free/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.951052 | 609 | 2.765625 | 3 |
I was solving exercises from the Genki II workbook when I stumbled upon this sentence: ”私は先生に東京の大学について聞きました”. It had to be changed into a sentence using humble expressions. There appear to be 2 verbs つく and 聞く, so I thought that both of them should be changed. However, according to the answer key, only the latter one should (to お聞きしました/伺いました). It made me wonder if in sentences with multiple verbs only the main one is changed to the humble speech, and if there are any additional things one should know when making a complex sentence using it (though I might be simply misunderstanding the original sentence).
The textbook doesn't appear to talk about this subject, and I can't seem to find an answer using google (maybe my google-fu is just too weak). | <urn:uuid:68359ffc-bfa9-4cac-992e-b269eca9fd2d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/33396/sentences-using-humble-expressions-and-multiple-verbs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.949906 | 205 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Many of you are probably familiar with the musical Rent, a rock musical with music, lyrics, and book by Jonathan Larson, loosely based on Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème. Rent follows the story of a group friends who are mostly young artists struggling to survive in New York City’s East Village in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The setting is a place called Bohemian Alphabet City, and the devastating disease haunting the community is HIV/AIDS.
The opening number of Rent is called Seasons of Love.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles
In laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life
How about love?
Remember the love
Measure in love
Measure, measure your life in love
This time of the “year” we spend a of time reflecting on the past “year” of five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. What were those 525,600 moments like for you in 2017? The thing is, have you ever wondered why we say 365 days and 525,600 minutes make a year and why we have to mark each year as something significant?
Some of you may be history buffs, and if you are, you’ll know that calendars have been around for a long, long time.
But it is important to know that the original calendars created by humans were based solely on the position of the sun and the moon; in other words, they were lunisolar calendars. No Google syncing involved with that calendar.
Much later, the Roman calendar, based on many of these ancient observations of the sun and the moon, was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE. The main difference was that now the calendar was not based on natural observations of the sun and moon but instead an algorithm of including a leap year every four years. But don’t thank the Romans just yet.
How about the Persians?
In the 11th century, a mathematician, astronomer and poet, Omar Khayyam, in Nishapur [NE Iran], measured the length of a year to be just a few decimal points more than 365 days. His calculation was incredible, considering that it was more accurate than the calendar proposed by Pope Gregory XIII five centuries later! And that’s pretty important to know, because the calendar that the Pope introduced was called the the Gregorian calendar [a refinement of the Julian calendar], and is today in worldwide use as the de facto calendar for secular purposes.
Meanwhile, in Iran, they continue to follow an observation-based calendar, unlike the Gregorian, which is rule-based. Finally, consider that today seasonal calendars rely on changes in the environment rather than lunar or solar observations. The Islamic and some Buddhist calendars are still lunar, while most modern calendars are solar, based on either the Julian or the Gregorian calendars.
Why does this matter?
Because we’re convinced, in this day and age, that every December 31st a year ends and a new one begins. We go to parties, pay money for champagne or lavish trips; we cry, mourn, regret, kiss, celebrate, and make new year’s resolutions. We seem convinced that we must measure these 525,600 minutes. And it’s often difficult and triggering for many of us.
So what I’d like to do, if just for a moment, is to challenge all of us to ask this question:
Is a year, 365 days, 525,600 minutes, really important?
Must we measure our lives by those moments, already mathematically defined for us?
Or is there something more to this life, to this existence?
Spoiler alert: I think there is more.
I’m not criticizing anyone who celebrates New Year’s Eve, toasts with champagne, makes, resolutions, etc. Hey, if it’s an excuse to party and have fun, why not? I’m just questioning whether this idea of a “year” and measuring it is healthy and honest. Instead, I’m lifting up another, also ancient idea—that we as creatures of this earth are experiencing seasons.
This is nothing new of course. Ancient writings, including the wisdom literature of the Hebrews, said that everything had a season. There was a time for everything, and it wasn’t based on some calendar approved by some Pope. There was a season for everything.
Being born, dying, planting, harvesting, killing, healing, breaking down, building up, weeping, laughing, mourning, dancing, throwing away stones, gathering stones, embracing, not embracing, seeking, losing, keeping, throwing away, tearing, sewing, keeping silent, speaking, loving, hating, warring, and making peace.
So during this time, when you’re told to mark the beginning of a new year, here’s a better question: what season are you in now? What time is it for you?
And I wonder, what would happen if you measured each season of your life in love?
It’s always a good time to do that, right?
For future reflection/enjoyment: The Rubaiyat-Poem by Omar Khayyam
Translated into English in 1859 by Edward FitzGerald
And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted – ‘Open then the Door!
You know how little while we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more.’
- Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.
Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly – and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing. | <urn:uuid:d2994ad6-5ce9-4de9-b814-d6a0019d8461> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://joshblakesley.me/2018/01/13/what-time-is-it/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.948936 | 1,311 | 2.734375 | 3 |
It’s impossible to tell the time of day in Todos Santos by when roosters crow. The squawking seems to only be at night in this Baja town. All night.
Roosters have a pecking order, with the dominant male sounding off first, and then the others chiming in afterward. It’s a symphony of sorts at times in the neighborhood.
They are probably sleeping through the day because they were cackling all night. If only I had that luxury.
In other parts of the world a rooster’s distinct call is usually about two hours or less before daylight. This is normal. Earlier this decade scientists at Nagoya University in Japan conducted a study to learn more about the habits of crowing roosters. They discovered the animal has an internal clock to tell when the break of day is. The light in the sky isn’t relevant.
Besides signaling the start of a new day, roosters get vocal when danger is nearby. He is alerting the hens a predator is about.
This area is home to coyote, gray fox, raccoon and bobcat. All of these animals are nocturnal, which could be the reason roosters are doing their job throughout the night. A hen isn’t going to be able to win a fight with any of those creatures.
When I lived in Sonoma County in California my neighbors built a chicken coop, rooster et al. My window was nearby. Working nights meant I wanted to sleep and not know when daybreak was. The fortunate thing there is we lived on quarter-acre lots so it was easy for them to move the coop to accommodate my hours.
While it’s nice to have an alarm clock, it’s also nice to be able to turn it off. Not so with roosters throughout the hood. | <urn:uuid:1c30e165-1f75-4b6f-bec0-d3c38bdcc5e7> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://kathrynreed.com/expat/wishing-crowing-roosters-had-an-off-button-at-night/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.959676 | 394 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Barium chlorate facts for kids
Barium chlorate can be made by reacting sodium chlorate and barium chloride. It can also be made by electrolytic oxidation of barium chloride, similar to the chloralkali process. It can also be made by reacting ammonium chlorate, an unstable compound, with barium carbonate. This mixture is boiled, converting the ammonium carbonate to ammonia and carbon dioxide.
Barium chlorate is used in fireworks to make a green color. It is also used in matches to make oxygen and make the match burn faster.
Images for kids
In Spanish: Clorato de bario para niños
Barium chlorate Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia. | <urn:uuid:cc04e2ef-f96b-4a0a-b165-95e2720e7f08> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://kids.kiddle.co/Barium_chlorate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.877909 | 148 | 3.734375 | 4 |
Public-private partnerships (P3s) have taken on a new meaning over the past decade. Traditionally focused on hard infrastructure (e.g., bridges, toll roads, sewers), P3s can now be found in soft infrastructure areas like education, health, and financial services. Strong examples of this include Coca-Cola’s partnership with the World Wildlife Fund to conserve the world’s freshwater resources, and USAID’s partnership with Western Union to promote entrepreneurship and sustainable economic growth in Africa. Unlikely bedfellows are realizing that through partnership, they can reach shared goals more effectively and efficiently.
With this year’s Trafficking in Persons Report [TIP] focused on human trafficking in the global marketplace, corporations are being called upon to proactively and creatively address forced labor in their supply chains. With the understanding that no one nation, company, or nonprofit can solve this issue alone, P3s are a useful approach to affect meaningful change.
Supply chains offer a unique opportunity to engage in P3s because the desired outcomes of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors are often aligned. Consider the CocoaLink partnership. Upon recognizing that remote cocoa farmers in its Ghanaian supply chain lacked access to technical training and were therefore less productive than farmers in other areas, the Hershey Company partnered with the Ghanaian government and the World Cocoa Foundation to find a solution.
Capitalizing on the widespread use of cell phones, the entities created a two-way text and voice messaging platform called CocoaLink to educate farmers about improved techniques. The result: The government accessed a previously isolated population, farmers enjoyed increased yields and incomes, and Hershey benefited from higher profits. Without the government and nonprofit partners, Hershey would not have had the reach, technical expertise, or public trust to successfully execute the program.
An effective P3 leverages the strengths of its partners to achieve an outcome that is mutually beneficial. A private sector partner’s strength may be its resources (e.g. funding, expertise, human capital), while a public sector partner’s strength may be its local reach and scalability. Pooling these assets allows the partnership as a whole, as well as each individual entity to derive value. For corporations, value may be in the form of increased profit; for nonprofits and governments, it may be in the form of societal and environmental progress.
Extending supply chain collaboration beyond technical training to address worker well-being increases the potential value of the partnership. Employee engagement programs are ubiquitous, and companies have long acknowledged the correlation between employee well-being and workplace performance. However, well-being efforts have largely focused on direct employees and not on workers in lower tiers of the supply chain. In many cases, improving the well-being of these workers cannot be achieved through increased engagement; it requires substantial effort to protect and ensure their basic human rights. While such an undertaking is significant, so is the potential return. With tens of millions of workers affected by slavery and trafficking, multinational companies with broad and deep supply chains have a tremendous opportunity to improve lives and subsequently reap the benefits of more productive workers.
Companies, governments, and nonprofits all have a stake in combatting slavery and trafficking and should work collaboratively to develop solutions. By understanding challenges that companies face in maintaining slavery-free supply chains, governments can craft better-informed regulations and nonprofits can deploy resources more strategically. Supported, rather than confronted by governments and nonprofits, companies will increasingly view engagement on this issue as an opportunity to improve their bottom line while simultaneously having a positive social impact.
Natalie Pregibon is the director of research at Concordia, a platform that transforms and enhances the way global citizens approach the world’s greatest challenges. www.concordia.net.
This piece appears as part of KnowTheChain’s blog series on a growing trend towards supply chain transparency. Follow the discussion at: http://bit.ly/1HpEEOu | <urn:uuid:6a4d41fb-d0cb-493b-b666-e56c6ff782fc> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://knowthechain.org/public-private-partnerships-tool-to-transparency/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.942636 | 814 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Geranium Plant. Their leaves come in a variety of shapes and sizes and may resemble ferns, grape leaves or oak leaves. Often grown as annuals, they produce flowers of breathtaking beauty over a long season.
Geraniums are easy to take care of and adapt to the seasons and their surroundings. The leaves of this plant are highly aromatic in nature. Apply a rich, soluble fertilizer every two to three weeks and water the base of the plant when the soil is dry.
We Guarantee Our Geraniums To Arrive Alive And Thriving!
What you need to plant geraniums. Geraniums require a lot of light to bloom inside, although they may take moderate light. All geranium plants make excellent ground cover and space filler in your garden & landscape.
How To Grow Geraniums Depending On Where Or How You Grow Geranium Plants, Their Needs Will Be Somewhat Different.
To plant geraniums, you will need a shovel or spade to dig a hole, compost or manure for mulch, a sunny location, and nearby water source. They work well planted or their own or combined with other plants such as lavender and nemesia. Geranium plants are grown as annuals in most zones, but are considered evergreen perennials in zones 10 and 11.
Their Leaves Come In A Variety Of Shapes And Sizes And May Resemble Ferns, Grape Leaves Or Oak Leaves.
Pelargoniums, commonly known as geraniums, are a large group of mostly evergreen and tender perennials used as bedding or houseplants. There are a variety of colours and leaf forms available, all suitable for pots, hanging baskets or garden beds. Geraniums (also known as pelargoniums) are popular bedding plants, providing a burst of colour or fragrance throughout summer.
The Preference Is For Light Shade To Partial Sunlight, Moist To Slightly Dry Conditions, And Rich Loamy Soil With Abundant Organic Matter.
Depending on where or how you grow geranium plants, their needs will be somewhat different. Whether you are planting your geraniums in the ground or in a pot, geraniums are generally one of the easier plants to take care of. Those in light, sandy soil should receive two or three feedings during active growth.
The Best Time To Plant Geraniums In The Ground Outdoors Is Early Spring Right After The Last Hard Frost.
Often grown as annuals, they produce flowers of breathtaking beauty over a long season. Geranium and pelargoniums divide into two groups: Wild geranium is a woodland perennial flower in the geraniaceae family that will naturalize in optimum growing conditions. | <urn:uuid:37edcce5-b2c1-4521-90f3-2fb129632071> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://letfore.com/geranium-plant/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.928489 | 558 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Professor Steve Katz gave us tons of tech tips to bring into our classrooms and its hard to pinpoint one favorite. I see practical implementation for coding, video, audio and other lessons in my classroom. If I had a 1-1 class where every kid had a device I would certainly involve video and blogging on a regular basis but I think the most powerful learning tool that I plan to bring into my classroom is Scratch.
I used Scratch to complete my Hour of Code and modify a silly game in my last post. Scratch is a great way to get kids excited about coding. I’ll be bringing it to my Genius Hour club next semester (because its a BYOD club.) I started this past semester with the kids making their own Board Game but plan on giving them a Scratch assignment to kick off their creative juices and inspire them to pick challenging goals for independent study.
Coding is quickly coming to the forefront of education. Its a normal part of the UK primary school curriculum and is being introduced into state curriculum around the USA. Scratch is a fun way for kids to explore the world of coding. Who knows maybe they’ll make a revolutionary new app and think back to their 4th grade teacher as the one who got them into coding! | <urn:uuid:e2f42b23-efb6-4cb5-989b-87381faafb34> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://livetravelteach.com/scracth-my-favorite-edtech-tools-from-educ-932/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.969074 | 257 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Software Testing Curriculum
There are many books, videos and courses designed to improve the knowledge of software testers. Some are linked to certifications that require testers to demonstrate what they have learnt. In spite of this, many organisations still struggle with poor software quality. Becoming a good tester requires skill as well as knowledge.
The Software Testing Curriculum is a practical curriculum based on proven software testing strategies that work in the real world. It has been designed to improve the the skills as well as the knowledge of software testers. The curriculum consists of four 2-day courses that can be attended in any order, when time permits, or as a single 5-day course covering the entire curriculum.
The courses are aligned with the ISTQB’s Seven Principles of Software Testing and share a common approach to developing test strategies. Exploratory testing and test automation are themes that are discussed throughout all of the courses. The four courses share a common financial system case study that provides a focus for discussion and workshop exercises.
The common approach used to define a test strategy is based on five simple questions:
- What will be tested?
- Why perform this test?
- How will the test cases be designed?
- Who (or what) will perform the test?
- How will the test be executed?
These questions provide the basis of the Software Testing Canvas which is a visual tool for defining software testing strategies.
The curriculum covers the five common approaches to exploratory testing.
- Strategy Based
- Scenario Based
- Session Based
It also covers the use of capture-replay tools to support exploratory testing and the importance of exploratory testing as a means of rectifying some of the weaknesses associated with test automation.
Test automation strategies must be aligned with an overall test strategy. Common mistakes are a failure to understand the business case for test automation and allowing technology to become the driver of test automation strategy.
The Test Automation Reference Model (TARM) is a conceptual framework for understanding, comparing and selecting test automation tools. It identifies the common features and components of a test automation framework and can also be used as a reference architecture for developing in-house frameworks.
Test Case Design Techniques: Designing Effective Tests for Manual, Automated and Exploratory Testing
Based on the test case design techniques described in the ISO 29119 Software Testing standard, the main focus of this course is designing test cases for checking that stakeholder expectations have been satisfied and exploring the risk of poor quality. The course covers both black box and white box approaches to testing, including a discussion of relevant test coverage criteria. The exploratory testing topic introduces students to the simultaneous design and execution of test cases.
More details can be found in the course outline for Test Case Design Techniques
Software Testing Techniques for User Acceptance and System Integration Testing
Based on real world experience, the main focus of this course is checking that stakeholder expectations have been satisfied. The course covers defining customised strategies for User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and System Integration Testing (SIT), Model Based Testing and the role of test automation during UAT and SIT. The exploratory testing topic introduces students to the Scenario Based approach to exploratory testing.
More details can be found in the full course outline for Software Testing Techniques for User Acceptance and System Integration Testing
Risk Based Testing: Balancing Acceptable Quality With Schedules and Budgets
Based on a standard Risk Analysis Activity Model, the main focus of this course is exploring the risk of poor quality. The course covers identifying and assessing software risks, aligning test strategies with risk and predicting risks based on an analysis of past errors. The exploratory testing topic introduces students to the Freestyle, Feedback and Session Based approaches to exploratory testing.
More details can be found in the full course outline for Risk Based Testing
Concepts of Automated Software Testing: Theory and Practice of Test Automation Strategies, Tools and Frameworks
Based on the Test Automation Reference Model (TARM), the main focus of this course is the automation of software testing. The course covers defining test strategies that balance automated testing an other forms of testing, developing a business case for test automation and using the TARM as the basis for selecting and implementing test automation tools. The exploratory testing topic introduces students to the Pesticide Paradox and the importance of exploratory testing as a means of rectifying some of the weaknesses associated with test automation.
More details can be found in the full course outline for Concepts of Automated Software Testing | <urn:uuid:d023412e-0a27-4b03-b49d-4aba40bd7f9c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://lonsdalesystems.com/software-testing-curriculum | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.910107 | 928 | 2.953125 | 3 |
IBM researcher Stefan Harrer and a team at the University of Melbourne are building a system with a neural network, or computer software that mirrors the web of neurons in the human brain, Wired reports. The network, which works similarly to those used by Facebook to identify photos and Androids to recognize commands, reads brainwaves to learn how to flag epilepsy. “We’re trying to extract all the meaningful information from all the background noise. We want to be able to detect a specific seizure for a specific patient,” Harrer told the magazine.
Harrer and the team run the neural network on an experimental IBM chip called TrueNorth. Unlike other neural networks, which usually run across many machines in large computer data centers, TrueNorth is flexible. It doesn’t require much power and could eventually run on a laptop, tablet or phone.
Eventually, the chip could lead to a device that works with a brain implant to monitor for seizures 24/7 and notify patients before they happen. “That’s the only way this technology will have an impact beyond cool research papers,” Harrer said, as quoted by Wired.
The system grew out of research from a previous study at the University of Melbourne. Scientists there collected data from a less complex implant that took EEG readings from epilepsy patients over three years. Now, Harrer and his team are using the data to train their neural network. Even though a seizure warning system is still years in the making, Harrer and University of Melbourne researchers are optimistic about its prospects. In the future, the system could even prevent seizures entirely by detecting them at onset and sending out electrical impulses to stop them. “Our aim is to replace broken neural systems with machines–machines that can interact with the brain in a very natural way,” Dean Robert Freestone, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, told Wired.
REFERENCE: Fierce Medical Devices; 11 APR 2016; Emily Wasserman | <urn:uuid:481b7e0f-1a34-4d04-88a2-73edbf8ddfe3> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://loriacarrinc.com/news/ibm-teams-with-australian-researchers-for-smart-brain-system-for-epilepsy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.948104 | 406 | 3.28125 | 3 |
You hear about Cyber Security threats, data leaks and data loss in the news on a regular basis. Malware, trojans and phishing schemes hatched in countries like China, India, Russia and other Eastern European countries attempt to rob businesses of confidential information, privacy data and critical application data. Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has made Cyber Security a national priority. US President Barack Obama energized the dialogue on CyberSecurity by mentioning it in his State of the Union Speak with an executive order for federal regulators to provide better Cybersecurity for banks, telecommunications, energy and other industries.
But what about Cyber Security for small businesses? Small businesses are equally targeted by Cyber Security hackers and may be less resilient from a cybersecurity attack than larger businesses as they may lack the stability, reputation and financial resources to rebound.
Here are a few steps you can take to protect your business from the threat of a Cyber Security Attack:
Beef up your Network Security to Avoid Cyber Security Threats
Your network is only as strong as the weakest point. To avoid threats from Cybersecurity make sure you have a Firewall in place and keep all connected devices have up to date firmware, operating system patches and keep the latest anti-virus and anti-malware definitions current.
Cyber Security Education and Training
Educate your employees and staff on the threats of cybersecurity. Make sure they are aware of the threats of Phishing schemes and are able to identify and avoid these dubious attacks. Train all employees on the risk of sharing privacy data such as name, email, birthdays and financial information on social media networks.
CyberSecurity Policies and Procedures
Establish clear procedures on notification and escalation of a data leak or data breach. Ensure your team knows how to escalate a concern within your company. It is more important to raise the issues quickly rather than cover up a Cyber Security breach. Ensure you have clear policies on how to coordinate notifications outside of your company, should an attack occur.
Cybersecurity insurance is designed to help mitigate the loss of data leaks, network damage and other financial exposure of a Cyber Security attack. Your business may be eligible for affordable insurance to cover costs associated with CyberSecurity attacks.
There is no way to totally eliminate the risk of a Cyber Security attack, however, there are steps you may take to prevent attacks and be prepared on what to do in case your business is victimized. Contact your IT Support organization for a complete IT Security Assessment. | <urn:uuid:f3d6e895-747b-4682-a05c-75dfdd67b66f> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://lynxdesign.com/cyber-security-a-global-threat-to-small-and-medium-businesses/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.940273 | 498 | 2.734375 | 3 |
It is annoying to think that it takes lots of time and effort to grow plants, only to find them dead in the midst of the summer’s blistering heat. There are a couple of reasons why most plants die in sweltering weather. With the scorching heat, the water supply and the soil’s natural moisture may also decrease, stripping plants of much-needed nutrients in the soil.
A decrease in nutrients may affect the plants’ overall health and their capacity to fight back diseases and pests, thus lowering their likelihood of survival. Also, some plants don’t have the right defenses to withstand the summer heat; thus, they easily die.
You can still enjoy your gardening even during the scorching heat of the summer. Before the season finally sets in, try to grow the following plants in advance. They are well-adjusted to the summer heat and are easy to take care of.
Bring a taste of the tropics in your garden by adding pots of Caladiums to your lawn. If you have been investing in lawn installation, Caladiums will grace your wide lawn during the summer with its elegant and fancy combination of colors. These plants thrive best in hot weather; thus, you don’t have to worry about them. Originally from the South, Caladium also suits well in Northern climates.
Egyptian Star Flower
Commonly known as Sunstars, the Egyptian Star Flower, have excellent survival skills to withstand the summer heat. Its extra-large flower clusters are comparable to the size of hydrangea blooms. These flowers attract butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds to your garden. Want to add color to your yard? These Sunstars are available in four varieties–red, rose, pink, and lavender.
Campfire flame Bidens
These flowers have the fiery orange color of a campfire. Its color may soften into a subtle yellow in cooler temperatures but may intensify into a bicolor red and yellow in the midst of the summer. They will give you blooms the whole summer and thus be perfect as decorations in edging landscape borders or solo pots.
Diamond Snow belongs in the Euphorbia plant family, where Diamond Frost belongs. They are denser and have fuller flowers, and suitable as ornamental plants in upright containers. These plants are tough and durable. They gracefully thrive despite the intense heat, humidity, and drought. For best results, you can plant the Diamond Snow together with Diamond Frost in one pot to enjoy a plethora of colors.
Heat It (Gaillardia)
The Gaillardia plant thrives all over the United States and Canada. Its yellow and scarlet varieties are perfect for making pretty bouquets. Heat It is orange-red in color with slight yellow tips. These plants are adorable in a garden as they uniformly bloom both in container recipes or landscapes. They are also great pollinators that can act as magnets for bees and butterflies.
What about other plants? How do you salvage them and prevent them from dying during the summer? With lots of effort and preparedness, you can keep your precious plants and make them last until the temperature becomes milder.
We normally sprinkle water on the surface of the plants’ leaves. This practice is not applicable anymore with the sweltering heat. Instead, water the plants down to their base. When plants are desperate for water, they tend to keep their roots near the surface. In deep watering, you send a signal to the plants that it is okay to dig their roots deep in the soil.
Make sure not to overwater.
The summer heat may tempt you to overwater. Keep in mind that you only need enough water for them to sustain the whole day.
Don’t water your plants at midday.
You may feel pity for your plants while they are under the heat of the sun. However, watering them at midday will only worsen as water droplets will only intensify the heat on the leaves’ surface.
Provide some shade for your precious plants.
There are several ways to do this. Some plant owners set up a big beach umbrella over their plants. You may also use old bedsheets, cheesecloth, or cardboard to make your plants relax from the heat.
Summer is just a season. It will only be there for a couple of months. Thus, you don’t have to get stressed and think that it will be over very soon. Even if it is temporary, you should still do your best to protect your plants the whole time. You may ask other family members to set up the shade or help you watering the plants at appropriate times. | <urn:uuid:0bf2f9de-df30-4868-ae3e-4001e25b9f48> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://maggiescarf.com/durable-plants-for-your-garden/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.944393 | 948 | 2.984375 | 3 |
People who are born hearing-impaired need something known as a cochlear implant to be able
to listen to sounds. But this is just half the solution. These kids need to undergo music and
speech therapy so that they can train their ears to properly listen and identify sound variations.
However, these sessions are held only once a week and for only an hour, so a lot of work needs
to be done at home which falls in the lap of parents. The problem is that the parents are not
trained to work in tandem with the curriculum the therapists follow. To address this challenge, I
created a device called the ‘TheraPod’ to help these kids practice music therapy in an
interactive manner when not in a formal therapy-setting.
A problem statement I created was in line with the ‘homework’ these hearing-impaired students
must complete. My idea was to create an interactive music therapy device, which was not only
fun, but also followed a strict curriculum set by the music therapists.
SDG (Sustainability Development Goals) in Focus:
I was focusing on United Nations SDG 3 and 10, good health and well-being, and reduced
inequality, by helping the mental health of these students and breaking the barriers restricting
them from living normal lives.
Initially, I thought of creating a robot with a microphone and speaker inside it. This robot would
be connected to an app on a phone and have 3 modes.
In the first mode, the robot would output a tune, phrase, word or letter. The child would then
repeat the sound. If correct, the robot would dance.
In the second mode, the app would ask the child for a word or sound. The child would answer
back on their own. When correct, the robot would dance.
This was the first stage of the device with two speakers. It would have 3 buttons, the first for
rhythm, the second for pitch, and the third for manual reset, along with a power switch. This
design could work, but it was extremely simple and very limited. Although I did struggle with
finishing this project in time, I managed to do so and create a working prototype. However,
when I came back to Mumbai, plans for upgrades were brewing in my mind. I wanted to improve
the sound quality, reduce the requirement of external amplification and increase the device’s
usability. After coordinating with a few makers in Mumbai, I settled on my final solution.
The TheraPod would be a simple box, with 6 buttons on it, an LCD display,
and a speaker with its grill. Since the box is opaque, all the messy circuitry would be hidden
from the user. The 6 buttons would all be connected to a common ground, along with 5 of them
connected to digital pins and the last one to a manual reset. The Arduino’s rx and tx would be
connected to a miniature MP3 player known as the ‘DFPlayer Mini’, and this would in turn be
connected to a common VCC and ground, along with the speaker. The LCD display would have
a soldered I2C module on it, such that it would need to be connected to the Arduino’s A4 and
A5 pins, along with the common ground and VCC. The box was created by laser cut acrylic, and
the buttons have 3D-printed keycaps on them to match their selected mode. | <urn:uuid:1dc812b0-f5a2-4a12-bc0c-99002db95b62> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://makersasylum.com/project/therapod/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.971853 | 730 | 2.78125 | 3 |
In January 1777, Vermont’s citizens were having an identity crisis. The war in which we would ultimately gain our independence was still very much in down when representatives of 28 Vermont towns met in Windsor, Vermont. They gathered to discuss their independence, not from Britain, but from the neighboring colonies of New Hampshire, New York and Quebec.
Until 1764 when King George III revoked New Hampshire’s claim, the land that is Vermont today was claimed by New York and New Hampshire as part of land grants from the British crown. The residents didn’t trust their neighbors to the east so they wanted to make sure New Hampshire residents understood that Vermont was not their turf.
When the war broke out in 1775, Vermont wanted to send delegates to the Continental Congress and join the revolution. The request was denied based on the objection by New York’s Continental Congress delegation which said, pointing to the land grants from King George III that Vermont was part of New York.
Most Vermonters supported independence from Britain, but didn’t want to be part of either New York or New Hampshire or Canada. Unhappy that the Continental Congress would not accept their delegation, the representatives in Windsor declared the Republic of Vermont with its capital in Windsor, Vermont.
The country wrote a constitution, started a postal service and issued currency. Coins made from copper mined in the state (and known as Vermont Coppers) were issued. Thomas Chittenden became its first governor. The republic established formal diplomatic relations with the United States, The Netherlands and France! It hired a representative from Connecticut to lobby the Continental Congress for admission to the United States.
Even though many Vermonters were fighting the British during the Revolution, they were also frustrated with the Continental Congress which refused them admission so they approached the British in 1780 to join Canada. Hoping to drive a geographic wedge between two colonies and military advantage they failed to gain when Burgoyne was defeated in the fall of 1777, the Brits offered generous terms if Vermont agreed to join as a province of Canada.
However, most Vermonters wanted to join the United States. Its coins bore a Latin inscription the “Fourteenth Star” and the seal of the Republic of Vermont had pine tree with 14 branches.
On March 6th, 1790, the State of New York agreed to admit Vermont as a state if New York and the republic could agree on boundaries without going to court. Negotiations began and the Republic of Vermont agreed to buy New York land that would become part of Vermont for $30,000 in an agreement reached in October 1790. This paved the way for an invitation to become a state that was issued by the Confederation Congress. For the record, the Continental Congress changed its name after the Articles of Confederation were ratified.
Events moved quickly. Vermont formed a convention that voted on January 10th, 1791 to ratify the new U.S. Constitution and apply to join the United States. Two months later, on March 6th, 1791, the Congress admitted Vermont as the 14th state. The act of admission is the shortest of any granted to a future state and is the only one that does not have any conditions imposed by the Congress or by the state from which the new state was created. | <urn:uuid:812cadf6-3ff7-46ed-9c6f-7b30b10685ea> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://marcliebman.com/the-republic-of-vermont-versus-the-state-of-new-york/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.981381 | 671 | 4.03125 | 4 |
AI systems found to be better than doctors at gauging heart attack risk
(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. has found that artificial intelligence systems can be better at gauging a patient's risk of a heart attack than doctors using a standard protocol. In their paper uploaded to the open access site PLOS ONE, the team describes how they tested four AI systems against humans using a protocol, what they found, and why they believe there is still room for improvement.
Most doctors today use a protocol or guideline very much like the one created by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA). It is essentially a questionnaire assessing health factors and generating a statistical result. The guideline accounts for such factors as a patient's age, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Prior research has shown that by using such a guideline, doctors can correctly assess a patient's risk of having a heart attack at a rate of 72.8 percent, which is quite impressive. But it still leaves a lot of room for improvement, because that failure rate of 27.2 percent oftentimes represents people who die.
In this new effort, the researchers sought to find out if computers running AI systems might do a better job of it. They set up four such AI systems: logistic regression, random forest, neural networks and gradient boosting. Each was given thousands of patient data records from a British medical database as a means to study health patterns in patients and to identify risk factors. They were then each assigned the task of predicting a heart attack in those same patients over the course of the next 10 years—the data covered the period 2005 to 2015.
The researchers report that all four AI systems did better than the human average using the ACC/AHA guidelines, ranging from 74.5 percent to 76.4 percent correct, which, the team noted, possibly amounted to 355 patients whose lives could have been saved had they known they were at risk. They report also that the systems found risk factors that are not currently used by doctors to assess heart attack risk, such as mental illness and the use of oral corticosteroids. They suggest that tweaking the system and perhaps adding other known risks manually could improve the rate even more.
More information: Stephen F. Weng et al. Can machine-learning improve cardiovascular risk prediction using routine clinical data?, PLOS ONE (2017). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0174944
Current approaches to predict cardiovascular risk fail to identify many people who would benefit from preventive treatment, while others receive unnecessary intervention. Machine-learning offers opportunity to improve accuracy by exploiting complex interactions between risk factors. We assessed whether machine-learning can improve cardiovascular risk prediction.
Prospective cohort study using routine clinical data of 378,256 patients from UK family practices, free from cardiovascular disease at outset. Four machine-learning algorithms (random forest, logistic regression, gradient boosting machines, neural networks) were compared to an established algorithm (American College of Cardiology guidelines) to predict first cardiovascular event over 10-years. Predictive accuracy was assessed by area under the 'receiver operating curve' (AUC); and sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) to predict 7.5% cardiovascular risk (threshold for initiating statins).
24,970 incident cardiovascular events (6.6%) occurred. Compared to the established risk prediction algorithm (AUC 0.728, 95% CI 0.723–0.735), machine-learning algorithms improved prediction: random forest +1.7% (AUC 0.745, 95% CI 0.739–0.750), logistic regression +3.2% (AUC 0.760, 95% CI 0.755–0.766), gradient boosting +3.3% (AUC 0.761, 95% CI 0.755–0.766), neural networks +3.6% (AUC 0.764, 95% CI 0.759–0.769). The highest achieving (neural networks) algorithm predicted 4,998/7,404 cases (sensitivity 67.5%, PPV 18.4%) and 53,458/75,585 non-cases (specificity 70.7%, NPV 95.7%), correctly predicting 355 (+7.6%) more patients who developed cardiovascular disease compared to the established algorithm.
Machine-learning significantly improves accuracy of cardiovascular risk prediction, increasing the number of patients identified who could benefit from preventive treatment, while avoiding unnecessary treatment of others.
© 2017 Medical Xpress | <urn:uuid:50f5867f-3802-440c-96e3-f24b4bd9dcf5> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-04-ai-doctors-gauging-heart.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.935185 | 952 | 3.375 | 3 |
Being Ready for Wildfire starts with maintaining an adequate defensible space and by hardening your home by using fire resistant building materials.
In a recent blog post, I presented my firefighter son’s Family Emergency Plan information. Here are several low-cost ways to harden your home to maximize its ability to withstand a wildfire and to keep your family safe when you can’t evacuate.
Nearly all of the 68th Assembly District is considered “Wildland Urban Interface (WUI),” where human made structures and infrastructure (e.g., cell towers, schools, water supply facilities, etc.) are in or adjacent to areas prone to the danger of wildfire. Newer developmnents are pressing ever closer to wildland, increasing the danger of WUI wildfires and the need to be prepared.
Taking the right actions now to prepare your family and home for the next California wildfire can save your property and your family members’ lives.
The roof is the most vulnerable part of your home. Homes with wood or shingle roofs are at high risk of being destroyed during a wildfire. Build your roof or re-roof with materials such as composition, metal or tile. Block any spaces between roof decking and covering to prevent embers from catching.
Vents on homes create openings for flying embers. Cover all vent openings with 1/16-inch to 1/8-inch metal mesh. Do not use fiberglass or plastic mesh because they can melt and burn.
Protect vents in eaves or cornices with baffles to block embers (mesh is not enough).
Eaves and Soffits:
Eaves and soffits should be protected with ignition-resistant or non-combustible materials.
Heat from a wildfire can cause windows to break even before the home is on fire. This allows burning embers to enter and start fires inside. Single-paned and large windows are particularly vulnerable. Install dual-paned windows with one pane of tempered glass to reduce the chance of breakage in a fire. Consider limiting the size and number of windows that face large areas of vegetation.
Wood products, such as boards, panels or shingles, are common siding materials. However, they are flammable and not good choices for fire-prone areas. Build or remodel your walls with ignition resistant* building materials, such as stucco, fiber cement wall siding, fire retardant, treated wood, or other approved materials. Be sure to extend materials from the foundation to the roof.
Surfaces within 10 feet of the building should be built with ignition-resistant*, non-combustible, or other approved materials. Ensure that all combustible items are removed from underneath your deck.
Keep rain gutters clear or enclose rain gutters to prevent accumulation of plant debris.
Use the same ignition-resistant* materials for patio coverings as a roof.
Cover your chimney and stovepipe outlets with a non-flammable screen. Use metal screen material with openings no smaller than 3/8-inch and no larger than 1/2-inch to prevent embers from escaping and igniting a fire.
Have a fire extinguisher and tools such as a shovel, rake, bucket, and hose available for fire emergencies. Install weather stripping around and under the garage door to prevent embers from blowing in. Store all combustible and flammable liquids away from ignition sources.
Consider using ignition-resistant* or non-combustible fence materials to protect your home during a wildfire.
Driveways and Access Roads:
Driveways should be built and maintained in accordance with state and local codes to allow fire and emergency vehicles to reach your home. Consider maintaining access roads with a minimum of 10 feet of clearance on either side, allowing for two-way traffic. Ensure that all gates open inward and are wide enough to accommodate emergency equipment.
Trim trees and shrubs overhanging the road to allow emergency vehicles to pass.
Clearly Marked Address:
Make sure your address is clearly visible from the road.
Consider having multiple garden hoses that are long enough to reach all areas of your home and other structures on your property. If you have a pool or well, consider getting a pump.
Watch CalFire’s video on harding your home to protect from wildfire:
Note: Ignition-resistant building materials are those that resist ignition or sustained burning when exposed to embers and small flames from wildfires. Examples of ignition-resistant materials include “non-combustible materials” that don’t burn, exterior grade fire-retardant-treated wood lumber, fire-retardant-treated wood shakes and shingles listed by the State Fire Marshal (SFM) and any material that has been tested in accordance with SFM Standard 12-7A-5. | <urn:uuid:f2749562-c144-410e-9cb7-7955f3eed622> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://melissafoxblog.com/tag/wui/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.916522 | 1,000 | 2.765625 | 3 |
The path to college is full of obstacles and inequalities, so it takes a lot of work to achieve the necessary academic success. Starting this process young can be one of the best things you can do for your child, as the early efforts can massively improve their chances at college. Use this guide on how to prepare toddlers for college to help you focus on the areas that provide your child the best chances.
The first thing you should try to emphasize is involvement in extracurriculars, including both sports and academic activities. These experiences will look great on applications in the future, increasing the chances of college acceptance. Additionally, they can help instill good morals and healthy practices from a young age.
The world is shrinking with the growth and popularity of the internet and social media, which means knowing different languages is increasingly important. Learning a new language is easiest when you’re young, so starting now is the way to go. Also, language programs, like the Spanish youth programs, can be very good for college prep.
Speaking in front of a crowd isn’t an easy skill to pick up, as stage fright can be very inhibiting. Working on this skill will help your child communicate throughout their entire life. A good public speaker can leave a lasting impression after just the first meeting, which is exactly what you need for college applications.
Many people worry so much about getting into college they forget that you need the skills to make it through those challenging classes, often without the resources of nearby friends and family. Teaching your kids essential life skills like money management and cooking can help them thrive when they get accepted.
Many of the skills a person needs in college admissions stem from leadership skills. These skills include everything that helps a person lead a group, from time management to problem-solving. The best way to practice these skills is by involving your child in group activities, like extracurriculars. Providing them with opportunities to make difficult choices and learn from the results or to develop empathy are also vital ways you can help your child understand what leadership means.
Sadly, this advice isn’t a guarantee for college admission, even if you perform it all perfectly. However, these early efforts can significantly improve the chances of admission, no matter what college you’re aiming for. That’s why knowing how to prepare toddlers for college is so important for your child’s future success. | <urn:uuid:612c2c7e-a775-4b27-8712-cd1a1ac5e92c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://mommination.com/early-start-how-to-prepare-toddlers-for-college/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.960819 | 491 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Inflammation is the body’s response to injury or infection. It is a vital part of our immune system, and in this way our body protects itself from invaders – viruses, bacteria. In this case, inflammation is god for us. However, sometimes inflammation can cause further inflammation, even when our body is not threatened, and that’s when inflammation can cause problems and turn into chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation can lead to some diseases, including cancer, arthritis, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
One of the most powerful ways to fight inflammation is to eat healthy. Many studies have shown that some foods have anti-inflammatory effects, and you should include plenty of this foods in your diet – green leafy vegetables, ginger, fatty fish, sweet pepper, olive oil, nuts and some fruits (pineapple, papaya, strawberries…). | <urn:uuid:a589a564-1ecc-4783-a1d7-ece17559aa4c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://morejuicepress.com/tag/anti-inflammatory/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.933571 | 174 | 2.96875 | 3 |
The Evolution of Metal Can Component Assembly
Metal cans have been used for packaging various products for decades. From food and beverages to household items and chemical products, metal cans have proven to be a popular choice due to their durability and ability to keep contents fresh. Over the years, advancements in technology have led to improvements in the assembly of metal can components, making the process more efficient and cost-effective.
Automated Assembly Systems
One significant advancement in metal can component assembly is the introduction of automated assembly systems. These systems use robotic arms and computer-controlled processes to handle and assemble metal can components with precision and speed.
Automated assembly systems have reduced the dependence on manual labor, eliminating the risks associated with human error and fatigue. These systems can handle large volumes of metal can components, ensuring consistent quality and reducing production costs.
Seaming and Welding Technologies
Seaming and welding technologies play a crucial role in the assembly of metal cans. Previously, manual seaming and welding processes were time-consuming and required skilled operators to ensure a proper seal.
Advancements in seaming and welding technologies have led to the development of automated systems that can quickly and accurately seal metal cans. Laser welding, for example, offers a precise and reliable sealing method, ensuring the contents of the can remain fresh and free from contamination.
Furthermore, automated seaming machines have the ability to detect any defects or inconsistencies in the seam, allowing for immediate adjustments and preventing faulty cans from entering the production line.
Quality Control Measures
Ensuring the quality and integrity of metal cans is of utmost importance. To meet this requirement, advancements in metal can component assembly have led to the implementation of rigorous quality control measures.
Automated inspection systems are now used to check the dimensions, integrity, and visual appearance of metal cans. These systems can detect even the slightest defects or irregularities, allowing manufacturers to maintain a high standard of quality.
Additionally, traceability systems have been implemented to track and record the entire production process. This enables manufacturers to quickly identify and resolve any issues that may arise, ensuring that only safe and high-quality metal cans reach the market.
Sustainability and Environmental Considerations
In recent years, there has been increased focus on sustainability and environmental responsibility in all industries. Metal can manufacturers have responded to this demand by developing environmentally friendly assembly processes.
The use of eco-friendly materials and coatings, as well as the implementation of energy-efficient manufacturing practices, have significantly reduced the environmental impact of metal can component assembly. Additionally, advancements in recycling technologies have made it easier to recycle metal cans, further reducing waste and promoting a circular economy.
By adopting sustainable practices, metal can manufacturers not only contribute to environmental conservation but also enhance their brand reputation and meet the growing consumer demand for eco-friendly packaging options.
Advancements in metal can component assembly have revolutionized the manufacturing process, improving efficiency, quality, and sustainability. Automated assembly systems, advanced seaming and welding technologies, rigorous quality control measures, and a focus on sustainability have transformed the metal can industry. As a result, consumers can enjoy products packaged in durable, reliable, and environmentally friendly metal cans. Find more details on the topic in this external resource. metal can components https://www.jiangyinforward.com/products-category/can-ends.html, broaden your understanding of the subject.
Deepen your knowledge about this article’s topic by visiting the related posts we’ve specially selected for you: | <urn:uuid:b8beb7e8-f93a-4000-beee-866131010ebf> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://mymonsterchair.com/26276-advancements-in-metal-can-component-assembly-17/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.919098 | 708 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Nalbari District is situated between 26oN and 26.51o N latitude and 91o E and 91.47o E longitude . The north and west side of the district is bounded by Baksa and Barpeta districts respectively .The southern and eastern side of the district is bounded by Kamrup district. The entire area of the District is situated at the plains of the Brahmaputra Valley. The tributaries of the Brahmaputra, Nona, Buradia, Pagaldia, Borolia and Tihu that originate from the foothills of the Himalayan Range are wild in nature and have enormous contribution towards the agrarian economy of the district. The Soil condition of District is a heterogeneous one. The Soil of the northern part of the district is clayey and loamy where as the middle part is loamy and sandy. The Soil of the southern part of the district is composed of sandy soil. The District has a sub-tropical climate with semi dry hot summer and cold winter. During summer, generally during the months from May to August, heavy rainfall occurs for which the district experiences flood. The District experiences annual (average) rainfall of 1500 mm and its humidity hovers around 80%. | <urn:uuid:f3cbbc85-0d77-4ed2-9f89-23970d31539c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://nalbari.assam.gov.in/about-us/location | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.953497 | 253 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Heel elevation is a design element present in almost every shoe, from dress shoes to work boots to running shoes, though there is little (if any) compelling evidence to account for its inclusion in shoes or other footwear. Most people in the United States and other parts of the world begin wearing shoes when they learn to walk, some even before. Almost all shoes, including children’s shoes, possess heel elevation, or a layer of material (ranging from stiff to spongy) that elevates the heel above the forefoot.
General Health Effects
Heel elevation (especially in combination with toe spring) causes an unnecessary stretching of foot structures, forces the wearer to walk on a downhill ramp, puts extraordinary pressure on sensitive ball of foot tissues, and essentially inverts the main foot arch (i.e., the medial longitudinal arch). Prolonged positioning of the foot in this configuration causes a contraction, or shortening, of the posterior lower leg muscles, or the muscles at the back of the lower leg.
Calf muscles—the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles—are commonly affected by heel elevation, though three other muscles located at the back of the lower leg may also be affected: Tibialis posterior, flexor hallucis longus, and flexor digitorum longus. These muscles are particularly important in helping the main foot arch function properly, and they help the toes perform several important actions, including grasping, balancing, and guiding the body forward during the propulsive, or push-off, phase of gait.
Effect on Arch Flattening & Pronation
Shortened lower leg muscles contribute to faulty foot function in several key ways, one of the most significant of which is improper pulling on the back of the heel, which increases the degree of arch flattening the foot experiences. Long-term lower leg muscle shortening contributes to excessive foot and ankle pronation, which is a contributing factor in numerous foot and ankle problems. Because overpronation is a significant factor in foot and ankle problems, it makes perfect sense, then, to decrease or remove the heel elevation in shoes to curtail further shortening of the lower leg muscles and the corresponding arch flattening.
Effect on the Involuntary Stretch Reflex
Another important and potentially debilitating effect of heel elevation is the way in which it disables the involuntary stretch reflex built into the posterior lower leg. This reflex, which functions to maintain a muscle at a constant length, can only be activated if the heel is allowed to contact (or come close to) the ground—a biomechanical circumstance that is impossible in most shoes available to consumers today. Activation of this lower leg stretch reflex should happen with every step to help the forefoot (especially the big toe) with propulsion; without it, normal (healthy) gait and propulsion is not possible.
Effect on Natural Gait & Locomotion
Inactivation of the lower leg stretch reflex may seem unimportant because it's still possible to walk and participate in athletic activities in footwear that includes heel elevation. But it is important when you consider that gait will never be natural when walking or running in conventional footwear, and that gait is, in fact, significantly hampered by a design element (heel elevation) that's often touted as helpful or advantageous. Heel elevation (or lack thereof) is one of the key factors we at Natural Footgear consider when selecting shoes to feature on our site (more on this below).
Effect on Ball of Foot Structures
As mentioned earlier, heel elevation puts most of the burden of weight-bearing on ball of foot structures, including the many nerves, blood vessels, muscles, tendons, and ligaments (as well as the metatarsal heads) that exist in this part of the foot. Because most conventional footwear also includes toe spring, the protective forefoot fat pad that would normally safeguard these tissues and structures is displaced, dragged forward by toes that are in a chronically extended position. This makes ball of foot structures even more vulnerable to the forces associated with standing, walking, running, jumping, etc. Common ball of foot problems that are caused, at least in part, by heel elevation include neuromas, capsulitis, sesamoiditis, and metatarsal stress fractures.
Note: Heel elevation has an outsized effect on tinier feet, as shorter shoes tend to have the same elevation as longer shoes but a steeper ramp from heel to forefoot. So, unfortunately, children and smaller-footed individuals tend to experience the most problems with this deleterious footwear design inclusion.
Zero Drop: A Foot-Healthy Choice
The type of footwear we promote at Natural Footgear incorporates a zero drop sole, meaning that the sole is completely flat from heel to toe (no heel elevation, no toe spring—or if it does have some toe spring, it's of the flexible variety and can easily be flattened out when weight-bearing). The footwear we promote also does not include any unnatural arch bumps or props or “motion control technology.”
Zero drop footwear puts the heel and forefoot (including the toes) on a level plane, which helps stabilize the foot and ankle, spreads the force of body weight across the entire foot, and enables natural arch support. Shoes that possess a zero drop platform in combination with a sole that's easily bent or twisted, as well as a toe box that's widest at the ends of the toes, help strengthen feet and make them happy and well.
SHOP MEN'S ZERO DROP FOOTWEAR SHOP WOMEN'S ZERO DROP FOOTWEAR | <urn:uuid:2255d6e5-4e75-4a74-b088-4e77eca46470> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://naturalfootgear.com/blogs/educational-articles/heel-elevation | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.918354 | 1,148 | 3.453125 | 3 |
by courtesy of Hans Voegtli / ACAMA
When Pausanias visited Sikyon in 160 AD he found it deserted. In 140 AD an earthquake had laid in ruins the formerly rich and magnificent city, so that the traveling author was only able to see the sad remnants.
How different Sikyon must have appeared in the middle of the fifth century BC when the first staters of the type Chimaira / Dove were invented. Then Sikyon was the wealthy capital of a fertile plain famous for its fruit and vegetables, its wines and olives. The whole area was named field of cucumbers (gr. Sikyonia) after the cucumbers that were growing there. In addition the city was famous for being a center of arts: Polykleitos, Kanachos and Lysippos were living and working in Sikyon to name just a few of the famous artists.
SIKYON. Stater, ca. 390 BC. Chimaira r. Rev. Dove flying l. in wreath of olive twigs. 12.10 g. SNG Lockett 2323.
No wonder that the staters of Sikyon belong to the most beautiful coins that have been engraved by Greek craftsmen. How realistic the legendary creature Chimaira is modeled! Clearly we see the three elements from which the beast was composed: The head and the body of the lion, the tail formed by the head and the body of a snake, and in the middle the head of the animal that gave its name to the whole of the creature: the goat, called in Greece Chimaira (= c?meira). This monster was considered to be the sister of the hell-hound Cerberus, of the polycephalous Hydra that was killed by Heracles and of the Sphinx from Thebes. Her breath was fire and that was the reason why ancient mythologists already connected her to the fire-spitting volcanoes. Sikyon was far away from any volcano. So why did the aristocrats of Sicyon choose this motif as symbol of their community? Why did they banish the dove that former had been their emblem to the reverse of their coins?
The dove was connected to one of the main deities of Sikyon, to Aphrodite. She owned a very important temple in Sikyon, where her statue of gold and ivory made by Kanachos was located. Kanachos was a famous artist who is known in the history of art for having created the statue of Apollo in Didyma. Pausanias saw the statue of Aphrodite and he gave a careful description: The goddess was sitting on a throne and she wore a polos on her head, in one hand she held a blossom of poppy, in the other hand an apple; this kind of presentation was not the common way of depicting Aphrodite. Her priestesses also had – for priestesses of Aphrodite – unusual rules to observe: The “carrier of the bath” had to be a virgin, her colleague had to live celibate. Only in a few other cities Aphrodite attached great importance to the modest manners of her servants. The Aphrodite of Sikyon seems to have integrated the characteristics of a native pre-greek goddess. So it can’t surprise that in the North of the Peloponnesos Demeter and Aphrodite share in part attributes and cultic names.
The most beautiful statue of Chimaira – the “Chimaira of Arezzo” – is found in the archaeological Museum of Florence. Photo: Lucarelli / Wikipedia.
But let’s return to the obverse, to Chimaira. There are two possible explanations for the choice of the Sikyonians: To begin with, the myth of Bellerophon was located near the city. Korinthos was thought to be the place where Bellerophon tamed the Pegasus to bring him into action against the Chimaira. For that reason several scholars think that there must have existed local myths placing the fight of Bellerophon against the Chimaira near Sikyon. The motif of Chimaira was chosen for the coinage to refer to the glorious past of the city. But since Homer Greece has accepted a divergent version: The Chimaira was thought to be a creature of Lycia, where numerous dynasts boasted to be descendants of Bellerophon. That was the reason why Léon Lacroix was looking for another connection of the Chimaira and Sikyon. He thinks that the Chimaira was refering to an old, to the original name of the city of Sikyon, Aigialeia. The radical of the name Aigialeia derives – according to Lacroix – from the Greek aix (= aix), another word for goat. The most important part of the Chimaira that gave the name to the monster was the head of the goat. The staters of Sikyon are perhaps comparable to the coinage of Aigai or of Aigeira showing a goat referring to the cities’ names.
During the Peloponnesian war the members of the Spartan League paid all their costs of war with the coins of Sikyon after Aegina had been lost to Athens. The Chimaira brought the city’s name to the whole of the Greek world, and doubtless the Sikyonians had a wonderful story how the legendary creature was connected to their city. But local tradition did not survive. Pausanias came nearly a generation too late to ask the natives about their myths. Therefore we never will really know why the Sikyonians have chosen Chimaira to represent their city on their coinage.
Bethe, s. v. Bellerophon, RE V (1897), 241-251.
C. M. Kraay, Archaic and Classical Greek Coins, London 1976.
L. Lacroix, Quelques aspects de la numismatique sicyonienne, RBN 110 (1964) 5-52.
Lippold, s. v. Sikyon, RE II/2 (1923), 2528-2549. | <urn:uuid:d2f53738-d0ba-4ac4-a2c8-112c993dcc92> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://new.coinsweekly.com/antiquity/sikyon-and-its-chimaira/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.971126 | 1,271 | 3.453125 | 3 |
Could silk and gold replace stitches and staples?
If you need to close up an injury or incision in human body tissue, you use sutures, staples or perhaps a surgical adhesive … right? Well, if technology that's currently being developed at Arizona State University gets commercialized, liquid silk combined with gold nanoparticles may eventually be a better way to go.
Although sutures and staples are both tried and trusted approaches to wound-closing, they can damage biological tissue, and also cause infections. While adhesives are somewhat better in those regards, they can produce toxic reactions, they don't always bond that well, and they sometimes inhibit natural healing processes by keeping cells from migrating into wounds.
An Arizona State team is developing the silk/gold sealant as an alternative.
Known as a laser-activated nanosealant (LANS), it consists of a biocompatible silk solution obtained from silkworm cocoons, mixed with microscopic gold nanorods. After the sealant is applied to a wound, a laser is shone upon it. This heats the nanorods and thus the silk as well, causing it to gently interlock with the surrounding tissue proteins, forming a firm seal. Because they're made of gold, the nanorods quickly cool after the laser is turned off, minimizing the chances of heat damage to the tissue.
The scientists have already created two types of LANS – one takes the form of a patch designed for closing wounds on organs within the body, while the other is a paste that is applied to skin wounds.
When used to seal holes on samples of pig intestines, the patch was shown to have seven times more burst-pressure strength than sutures or adhesives. And two days after the paste was used to treat superficial skin wounds on lab mice, the healed skin was found to be significantly stronger than was the case with wounds which were closed using adhesives or sutures. Additionally, the LANS produced less of an immune reaction.
"Our results demonstrated that our combination of tissue-integrating nanomaterials, along with the reduced intensity of heat required in this system is a promising technology for eventual use across all fields of medicine and surgery," says Prof. Kaushal Rege, senior author of a paper on the study. "In addition to fine-tuning the photochemical bonding parameters of the system, we are now testing formulations that will allow for drug loading and release with different medications and with varying timed-release profiles that optimize treatment and healing."
The paper was recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. | <urn:uuid:8ac5a706-c5ff-4b7a-a8d3-bd991d90ad03> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://newatlas.com/lans-silk-gold-wounds/57085/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.964534 | 532 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Messianic Jews celebrate the death and resurrection of Yeshua (Jesus) as part of Passover Week each year. We teach about the crucifixion on the Shabbat right before Passover and the resurrection on the Shabbat immediately after.
The connection between Passover and the resurrection of Yeshua is profound. In both events we find the expression lifnot boker, meaning: “right before the breaking of dawn.”
Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea and the sea returned to its full strength lifnot boker and the Egyptians fled.
On the first day of the week, lifnot boker while it was still dark, Miriam from Migdal, came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.
The Israelites left Egypt on the night of the Passover, and camped two nights during the journey (from Sukkot to Eitam to Pi Herut – Exodus 13:20, 14:1). God opened the sea throughout that second night. On the morning of the third day, they passed through the Red Sea and rose up through to the other side.
The Angel YHVH was with them and led them through the crossing. The Israelites passed through the water like a massive, symbolic group baptism (I Corinthians 10:1-2). Walking up out of the sea was a symbolic resurrection for them. We believe the Angel YHVH in the pillar of cloud and fire to be Yeshua Himself in His pre-birth form.
After Yeshua’s crucifixion, His body was placed in the grave. His soul and spirit descended into hell. Before dawn on the third day, He destroyed the forces of hell and rose up back into His body. The moment that He walked out of the tomb was the same hour on the same day that He rose up out of the Red Sea more than a thousand years earlier.
The two events happened in the same way, on the same day and at the same time, because they are essentially connected in the eyes of God. They are united into one. Yeshua was the central figure in both events. Miriam was there, and Moses was there, but the resurrection and the exodus were brought about by Yeshua, the Son of God, the Messenger of YHVH.
One of the most significant elements of the traditional Passover Seder is that in every generation we are to see ourselves as if we just passed out of Egypt. Similarly, in the New Covenant, we are all to see ourselves as if we were crucified and resurrected with Yeshua. The historic exodus of the children of Israel with Angel Yehovah is the foundation of the spiritual exodus of all the children of God through Messiah Yeshua.
The past, present, and future overlap and become one as we see this prophetic picture of the exodus-resurrection from God’s eternal plan and perspective.
This article originally appeared on Revive Israel-Tikkun Global, April 12, 2022, and reposted with permission. | <urn:uuid:dfccce90-c0f6-47aa-9c68-e69be0790d27> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://news.kehila.org/resurrection-and-passover/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.969411 | 624 | 2.859375 | 3 |
A new study from Stony Brook University found that the map of neural responses mediating taste perception does not involve, as previously believed, specialized groups of neurons in the brain, but rather overlapping and spatially distributed populations.
The findings, to be published in Current Biology, counter an influential but controversial theory based on studies suggesting that there is a topographic map in the gustatory cortex that is responsible for our perception of taste. According to this theory, the gustatory cortex has “hot spots” of neurons whose activation leads to the perception of certain tastes. The new study by Stony Brook researchers demonstrates such a simple map of taste does not exist in the cortex of behaving animals.
When we taste food, neural activity propagates from the tongue to the brainstem and up to the cerebral cortex region known as the gustatory cortex. Activation of the gustatory cortex contributes to our perception of taste and flavor. Early imaging experiments provided evidence in favor of the theory of taste coding that postulates the existence of spatially localized clusters of neurons encoding specific tastes. These clusters, also known as “hot spots” form a map of taste on the gustatory cortex, with an hot spot for “sweet,” one for “bitter,” one for “salty,” and one for “savory.” According to this model of taste function, the activation of one cluster would correspond to the sensation of a specific taste.
“Our experiments demonstrate there is not a map with hot spots in the gustatory cortex of behaving animals,” says Alfredo Fontanini, MD, PhD, lead investigator and chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior in the College of Arts and Sciences and Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. “Instead, each taste is represented by spatially distributed ensembles of neurons sprinkled across the cortex. Neurons can represent one or many taste sensations and form what is called an ensemble code. Basically, neurons act very much like instruments in an orchestra playing different notes forming a chord.”
The researchers demonstrated this activation repeatedly in behaving mice sampling different tastes from a spout. They used calcium imaging to determine how taste and task-related variables are represented in alert licking mice. With the experiments they collected data on how various taste stimuli evoke responses from neurons in the gustatory cortex. They found that some neurons respond to a single taste and other to multiple.
An analysis of the distribution of responses over multiple spatial scales demonstrated that taste representations are distributed across the cortex, with no sign of spatial clustering or topography as would be expected with a map of the gustatory cortex corresponding specific taste sensations.
“Our findings are important because they address one of the basic organizing principles of brain function,” explains Dr. Fontanini. “Topographical maps are a pervasive feature of brain organization. Demonstrating that the spatial organization of taste responses is not as simple as previously believed makes us re-evaluate the neurobiological processes underlying taste perception and taste-related brain functions.”
The researchers conclude that their overall data provides evidence for a distributed neurobiological brain process when it comes to taste, a coding scheme differing from the topographical brain organization of visual, somatosensory and auditory systems and similar to olfaction. | <urn:uuid:36c5d01c-1ad7-48db-a06e-12742dfa44c8> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://news.stonybrook.edu/homespotlight/neural-map-offers-clues-to-taste-perception/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.931791 | 682 | 3.640625 | 4 |
The right to remain silent while being questioned by police is something that all of us think we understand fairly well. We all have seen the police warn suspects of this right, known as the “Miranda warning,” in countless movies and TV shows. Yet, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of this right this month, there is much still to be learned.
When the Supreme Court created the Miranda warning, its purpose was to shield people in police custody from being forced to make statements that would later be used against them at trial. At its heart, the Miranda warning is a “procedural safeguard” – an extra lock on the door.
Before Miranda, police often induced confessions through torture, deprivation of food, and other cruel and inhumane treatment. After Miranda, police practices adapted to incorporate the Miranda warning, with police downplaying the warning through a routine announcement.
Today, suspects routinely waive their Miranda rights and talk with police, sometimes confessing to serious crimes. In fact, some have questioned whether our Miranda rights offer any real protection at all, since suspects who may lack the ability to know the consequences can and do shrug off the protection against self-incrimination so easily.
And that’s the problem. A Miranda warning is only effective when the suspect understands it and is able to make a deliberate choice to cooperate with the police. Some suspects don’t understand the warning. As a result, more states should protect vulnerable suspects, such as juveniles and those with mental illness or disability, by forbidding interrogations where lawyers are not present.
The Supreme Court has said time and again that whether a suspect’s waiver of the Miranda right to remain silent is truly “voluntary, knowing and intelligent” depends on all of the circumstances of the particular case.
Age, intelligence, mental illness, intoxication or cognitive impairment, and mental competence are all factors to be taken into account. If a suspect knew what he was doing when he decided to speak to police, then his statements can be used at trial.
In recent years, research has shown that many criminal suspects do not understand Miranda protection. Juveniles, who do not stay silent in nearly 90 percent of interrogations, often do not understand the Miranda warning and therefore do not take advantage of it.
Some have misconstrued the warning to mean that they should stay silent except to answer questions. They talk to police in order to comply with the authority figure in the room.
Likewise, research shows that people with mental disabilities are less likely to understand the Miranda warning. One recent study showed that people who have been hit by a Taser also might suffer temporarily from a cognitive impairment that affects memory and ability to process information.
Once a suspect waives Miranda rights, police use tried and true techniques to obtain confessions and incriminating statements. The police implement a high-stress, hours-long interrogation. The police are authorized to lie to the suspect about witnesses, physical evidence and even identification line-ups.
The suspect, exhausted and confused after hours of questioning, may confess just to make the interrogation end.
In theory, only the actual perpetrator should feel threatened by these techniques. But research shows that an innocent suspect also feels the threat and, perhaps thinking he will be cleared later, confesses falsely. The inability to understand the Miranda warning, then, leads not only to confessions but to false confessions.
Moving forward, the rest of the nation, including Texas, should follow the lead of 22 states and the U.S. Department of Justice to require videotaping of all police interrogations, which helps a court to better determine the voluntariness of the suspect’s statements when challenged.
States should examine their own interrogation videos, review the growing body of research on false confessions, and consider changes in law to allow vulnerable suspects to consult an attorney before being interrogated.
Research already shows that vulnerable suspects cannot knowingly waive their right to self-incrimination without first consulting with an attorney. The vitality of the Miranda warning depends on our ability to set interrogation rules that acknowledge the reality of interrogation practices and suspects’ lack of understanding of the rules.
Ranjana Natarajan is a clinical professor and the director of the Civil Rights Clinic in the School of Law at The University of Texas at Austin.
To view more op-eds from Texas Perspectives, click here.
Like us on Facebook. | <urn:uuid:b024b6cc-c0bf-407d-9da9-865c9058ab08> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://news.utexas.edu/2016/06/23/more-people-need-to-understand-their-rights/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.954905 | 900 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Throughout 2021, Good Housekeeping will be exploring how we think about weight, the way we eat, and how we try to control or change our bodies in our quest to be happier and healthier. While GH also publishes weight loss content and endeavors to do so in a responsible, science-backed way, we think it’s important to present a broad perspective that allows for a fuller understanding of the complex thinking about health and body weight. Our goal here is not to tell you how to think, eat, or live — nor is to to pass judgment on how you choose to nourish your body — but rather to start a conversation about diet culture, its impact, and how we might challenge the messages we are given about what makes us attractive, successful and healthy.
Having privilege does not mean that everything is dandy in your life or that things are always easy for you. What having privilege does mean is simply that you may have traits (perhaps that you were born with or that come naturally) that give you explicit and implicit advantages in society — some of the the biggies in this country are being white, male, straight, or able-bodied. Another big one? Thin privilege.
What exactly is "thin privilege"?
Thin privilege represents all the social, financial and practical benefits a person gets because they are thin or in a relatively smaller body, according to experts. Like all forms of privilege, the person who has it may not realize they have any advantage, because it's simply normal for them to, say, not have to think about whether they can fit between tables in a tiny bistro, whether their size clothing will be readily available, or whether they can eat in public without being stared at. Public spaces and furniture — chairs, benches, tables, bus and theatre seats — are designed with smaller people in mind, and we wrongly judge each other by body size and shape as if it were a measure of a person’s moral success or failure.
This is why we can't talk about thin privilege without a talking about fatphobia. For years, leaders in the fat acceptance and body liberation movements like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) have been calling attention to the fact that people in larger bodies are harshly marginalized in our communities. Studies have shown that those considered “obese” are bullied, discriminated against in the job market, and receive lower quality medical care. Meanwhile, fat people in film and TV are often portrayed as rude, aggressive, and unpopular, instilling negative stereotypes in our psyches. "Being fat is seen as an expression of being dysfunctional or having an irresponsible lifestyle,” says Jürgen Martschukat, Ph.D., a professor of North American History at the University of Erfurt and author of The Age of Fitness.
The bogus corollary to fat people being assumed to have all sorts of negative traits is, of course, that thin people are examples of living life righteously, virtuously and reaping the rewards from having done everything right. The problem is, these are just assumptions we make based on our biases. There's a load of older research that shows that even children perceive their thin peers as kinder, more clever and more friendly. One recent study found that a simulated jury held thin plaintiffs less responsible for accidents than fat plaintiffs.
People in smaller bodies don't have to deal with any of this. As Christy Harrison, RDN, MPH, author of Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Your Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating writes, "The term 'thin privilege' is meant to highlight this systemic disparity, and to call out the fact that dignity and respect and equitable treatment shouldn’t be privileges reserved for smaller-bodied folks at all. They should be universal rights afforded to everyone, no matter their size."
Who has thin privilege?
If you are perceived to be of “normal” weight or below, as determined by (relatively arbitrary) BMI cutoffs, there are certain harms in society that you don't have to endure just because of your body size, and certain advantages you will receive and possibly not even notice. This is “thin privilege.”
“Thin privilege is being able to go through life without having to think twice about the ways that your body [size] is interacting with others and not be instantly judged [negatively] on what your body looks like,” says Natalie Sanders, a Health at Every Size informed IBBFA-certified Barre instructor. As for how that actually plays out, Kim Gould, LMFT, a therapist, certified personal trainer and owner of Autonomy Movement, says, "I wouldn't call myself thin, but because I can walk into a store and find my size or order online and trust that it will probably fit, I have thin privilege."
Sanders says, for example, people tend to see a person with flat abs and automatically think they are “disciplined” — or as a person who takes care of themselves. Positive judgements like these, true or not, can make it easier for a person to get a job, get more pay, make friends, network, date, and so on. (You can guess what being seen as “lazy, “weak-willed,” or “careless" for having a belly gets you.)
Is thin privilege the same for everyone?
Having privilege in one area does not mean that you don't belong to other, less privileged groups. Thin privilege — like other types of privilege — is intersectional, says Justice Roe Williams, a male-identified trans personal trainer and founder of Fitness4AllBodies. This means that your race, your sex, your class and other factors can influence how you and your body are perceived.
Thin privilege is actually rooted in popular white aesthetics of the 19th century, according to Sabrina Strings, Ph.D., an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. Back then, "Scientists suggested that Anglo Saxons were taller and slenderer than other races and that that was an asset," explains Strings. "White women then were being pressured to be a particular body size and many of [these women] took this up as an expression of their whiteness.”
This explains why a white man with a big tummy may be thought of as cute for having a “dad bod” while a white woman with a big tummy would likely not, and even why a Black man with the same frame as a white man might be seen as more a threat. Black women face some of the most criticism and discrimination because of how racism, sexism, and fatphobia often go hand in hand. One only needs to look at our current beauty standards to understand that being dark-skinned and thick still doesn't quite fly in the eyes of many.
And many people make assumptions about how capable you are, in part based on your body size. Sanders, who describes herself as apple-shaped, says, “There's a lot of folks who would only train with someone who looks like what they're trying to achieve,” says Sanders. “And so, a thin instructor might be viewed as more of an eligible person just because they have a body that looks like that, when I might actually have more training or knowledge on certain types of movements.”
What are some advantages thin privilege affords someone?
In additions to leading to easier interactions with other people, thin privilege is also built into the framework of our businesses and infrastructure. Here are a few of the many things people with thin privilege take for granted. They can...
Go shopping and not have to pay for the “extra fabric” used to make plus-size clothing
Board an airplane and not have to pay for an extra seat or ask for a seatbelt extender
See a doctor without worrying whether or not the appointment will be overly focused on losing weight or dieting
Walk into a gym and feel welcomed, supported, and taken seriously
Post a photo of themselves happily eating or relaxing on social media without being accused of “promoting obesity”
Why thin privilege is actually bad for everyone
Thin people also suffer under diet culture — the overwhelming environment we live in that celebrates thinness as a sign of health, status and moral virtue — although those in larger bodies suffer more. That's because diet culture creates an arbitrary hierarchy which says that only certain body types are worthy of success, respect and love.
So if you've always had thin privilege, when your body changes over time, as is natural with age or childbirth, it becomes harder to accept; you may become afraid of gaining weight and spend a lot of time, money and energy to keep to a smaller size — even when that may not be healthy for you; and you may develop disordered habits around eating and exercise in an effort to maintain or gain thin privilege. “Thin privilege diminishes what self-love is for everyone,” says Williams.
What can we do to dismantle thin privilege?
Thin privilege is something that those of power and influence in Western society have collectively chosen over time. This means we can choose to create another reality — one that values equality and respect for all bodies.
Of course, creating a new balance takes time and a lot of conscious effort. Those who have thin privilege have an important role to play in making things more equitable for people of all body sizes. As Lindo Bacon, Ph.D., writes in their book Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, “You can use your privilege to make this a fairer, more compassionate world." If you benefit from thin privilege, here are a few great places to start:
Challenge your current beliefs about weight. For example, “overweight” does not always equal “unhealthy” as most people would like to believe. "Once we learn more about how fat people can exist without ever getting diabetes or any of these [diseases] that we're constantly worried about, that that's how we start to unwind thin privilege a bit more," says Sanders. And check the biases that fuel your behavior — even your well-intentioned actions, adds Sanders. Cheering on a stranger who is in a larger body at the gym may come across as patronizing and suggest that you are praising them for "taking care of themselves" by trying to get thinner.
Refrain from commenting on someone else's body size — even if you think its a compliment. "Compliments" like, "you look like you've lost weight" uphold the notion that thin bodies are superior. Not to mention you don't always know what someone else is going through. As writer Aubrey Gordon and author of What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat tweets, "Complimenting perceived weight loss may mean you are complimenting someone's eating disorder, their grief, their depression/mental illness, their trauma and more. Weight loss isn't always desired, and it can be the result of really tough times."
Really listen and believe people who speak about experiencing fatphobia and anti-fat aggression. "Talk to each other because then these experiences become normalized and real," says Williams. "There's a piece of discussion that’s healing because as we are engaging with each other, we're beginning to process, even if we’re not on the same page."
Call out fatphobia where you see it. And if addressing it isn't possible in the moment, talk to the person who was affected, denounce the fatphobic behavior and ask how you can be of support in the situation going forward.
Be a co-conspirator but let others lead, says Strings. Listen, read, and learn from fat activists, body liberation organizers, and allied scientists to understand their experiences and discover what needs to change. Amplify their voices on social media and mainstream media.
Call for equal representation in all visual media. If there's a brand or magazine you like, for example, let them know what you want to see in their advertising or content, which encourages them to "represent people with different body types, fat and thin, people with disabilities and able-bodies, so that more of that is normalized in society," says Sanders. Williams agrees: "This is about the depth of what it means to be inclusive. We all have to do the work daily because it's a process to unlearn ideas rooted in competition and to allow ourselves to experience joy in the way that we're allowed to."
You Might Also Like | <urn:uuid:cc3c0287-c53f-4f0a-aa8b-43a4825d5c58> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://news.yahoo.com/start-talking-thin-privilege-204200792.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.967864 | 2,623 | 2.59375 | 3 |
USRA's Scientific Visualizers supporting NASA by mapping the 2017 Solar Eclipse
The remarkable work of the Science Visualization Team
To prepare the public for this event, Universities Space Research Association’s Ernie Wright, the Lead Scientific Visualizer, Ernie Wright is helping NASA by mapping the path of the Moon's shadow in a way that's never been seen before.
Using Hollywood animation software to showcase the scientific data returned by NASA missions, Wright and his colleagues have developed very exciting videos that explain complex materials in an engaging and comprehensible manner. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12117
But this involves a great deal of behind-the-scenes work. The eclipse visualizations incorporate global elevation maps from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, in orbit around the Moon since 2009. They also incorporate Earth elevations measured by a radar flown on the Space Shuttle, Earth imagery from satellites, and tables of lunar and solar positions, called ephemerides, calculated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Additionally, this scientific visualization involves calculating the circumstances of the eclipse. To calculate these, Wright used essentially the same mathematical tools that have been in use since the 19th century, then refined the results using the best modern data describing the shapes of the Moon and the Earth. The shapes of both bodies affect the location and timing of totality in sometimes surprising ways.
The calculations start by dividing the U.S. into a grid of over 100 million points. The program then asks what an observer would see at each of these points, building up an image of the Moon's shadow on the ground. This process is repeated at 6000 time steps. The result is an animation that shows the movement of the shadow overthe uneven terrain of the earth.
Ernie's videos are available at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/suneclipse2017.html. | <urn:uuid:43a278f5-cdbb-4b62-b36c-ba5d6905cd5e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://newsroom.usra.edu/usras-scientific-visualizers-supporting-nasa--by-mapping-the-2017-solar-eclipse/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.897451 | 390 | 3.53125 | 4 |
A pressure sensor is a device commonly used to help with the measurement of pressure for certain gasses and liquids. An IC or integrated circuit is a device used in electronics commonly in the form of a chip on one small flat piece of semiconductor material. Here at RS, we offer three main types of pressure sensor ICs; absolute pressure ICs, differential pressure sensor ICs and gauge sensor ICs.
An absolute pressure sensor IC is an integrated circuit sensor chip which helps us to measure pressure. Normally we discuss gage pressure which is the pressure relative to the atmospheric pressure all around us. These pressure sensors measure the pressure relative to a perfect vacuum. The sensor is normally used to measure any changes in barometric pressure. Barometric pressure is also known as atmospheric pressure. The pressure reading type is absolute.
Differential pressure is the difference between any two measured pressures. Unlike gauge and absolute, differential pressure does not try to fix the reference. The pressure can be increased or decreased at either of the two points.
High range pressure gauge sensors measure the difference in pressure between sources when pressure is applied to atmospheric pressure. A tire pressure gauge is a good example of this type of pressure sensor in a useful application. | <urn:uuid:d218cf0d-f418-4904-b6d3-b56f92966003> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://nl.rs-online.com/web/c/semiconductors/sensor-ics/pressure-sensor-ics/?applied-dimensions=4294678943 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.934201 | 244 | 3.59375 | 4 |
In this paper I will try to define a possible way to respond to the increase of violent passions and violent reactions in our societies. It might well work in everyday life, but perhaps mostly at a political level.
In the first part, the focus will be devoted to the idea (and practice) of Galateo, that is kindness or politeness. We will later wonder if and how a new Galateo (etiquette) could be an effective tool for social action, in view of overcoming the current violence of language and political passions.
Our main character, author and source is Melchiorre Gioia. Between the Revolutionary age and the Restoration period, between the 18th and 19th centuries, Melchiorre Gioia, an Italian economist who was at first a Jacobin thinker and would later become a civil servant during the Cisalpine Republic and the Napoleonic Regno d’Italia (Kingdom of Italy), published a first, then a second reviewed edition of his Nuovo Galateo (New Etiquette).
His aim was to spread civil education among the citizens of a democratic nation. Perhaps, the connection between a civil ethics and the developing (or the survival?) of democratic and liberal societies could also be a topic for moral and political philosophy in our contemporary age.
The old Galateo
As is well known, Gioia recalled the older Galateo, the work by Monsignor Giovanni Della Casa (1558), a treatise able to define socially acceptable behaviours in the town milieu during the early modern age.
In the Galateo the advice of the master, un vecchio idiota (an old illiterate man), is addressed in a friendly way to a young man of a very noble family: some critics have said that Della Casa’s audience could only be noble, that is, the courtesan elite of the Renaissance age. But it is precisely Della Casa to affirm that his teachings are valid for all, to arouse la benivolenza di coloro co’ i quali viviamo (the benevolence in those with whom we live; Della Casa 2013 : 4), a benevolence that is earned by eliminating any ugliness or any nastiness from the body, from speech and behaviour.
It is the space of the city and not the court where the giovanetto (young man), to whom these teachings are directed, must behave cleanly together with the members of the same brigata.
For those who live nelle città e tra gli uomini (in cities among other human beings, ibid.: 5) Della Casa offers not simply cleanliness, but a sensitive aesthetic, a set of behaviours that will also be inettie (trifles) compared to great moral values, but which can make life more beautiful. They are virtù o cosa molto a virtù somigliante (virtue or something very similar, ibid.: 3). This applies if we consider the frequency with which “the sweetness of customs and the pleasantness of manners and words” are practiced, “since everyone must many times each day deal with others and converse with them daily” (ibid.: 4). Instead, virtues such as Justice and Fortitude are much more noble but they are practiced more rarely: the world that Della Casa outlines does not seem to need heroes or saints.
Not cleanliness, therefore, in the sense of physical and moral hygiene, but beauty and pleasure in sight, in the sense of smell, in touch, in each of the five senses. Pleasure of living in civitas compared to the savagery of living wild.
If we wished to give a political reading, we could say that it is the praise of the civil urban community (Scarpati 2005), a civitas whose regulating principle should be grace, measure, sobriety and ultimately order. After all, this too could be a form of utopia, if we think about what the level of violence in sixteenth-century cities actually was. Let us think of Rome from the years in which Benvenuto Cellini armed with a knife killed an opponent in a fight (c. 1530) or half a century later that saw Caravaggio equally commit a knife assassination (1606).
The (Aristotelian?) measure seems to become the basic theme of this aesthetic morality and good manners as declined by Della Casa.
It is not the case here to follow his path up to praise of discretion and, according to some, of conformism and hypocrisy. When we read “a man must try to adapt himself as much as he can to the wardrobe of other citizens and let custom guide him” (Della Casa 2013: 15) we can consider it a tribute to conformity and certainly not to eccentricity. We can read a transcription at the level of daily life of the (religious and political) practice of dissimulation. In my opinion, what matters most is the connection between pleasure, aesthetics and behavioural rules, the praise of beauty, the emphasis on measure and against excesses and not least the importance of the word. The word must be clear, perspicuous, but also beautiful:
Le parole sì nel favellare disteso come negli altri ragionamenti, vogliono essere chiare, sì che ciascuno della brigata le possa agevolmente intendere, ed oltre acciò belle in quanto al suono ed in quanto al significato (Both in polite conversation and in other types of speech, words must be clear enough that everyone listening can easily understand them, and equally beautiful in sound and in sense; Della Casa 2013: 49).
So, even for the words as for all the other acts of everyday life, good manners are also beautiful manners. Making yourself understood without risking any misunderstanding, not by means of rough or slang words, but with beautiful sentences is once again a way not to offend the senses and minds of others.
Della Casa wrote for a young man with high hopes, who lived in the city during the early modern age. He himself consciously uses the word modern: moderna usanza, uso e costume moderno (modern usage and custom). With the acquisition of beautiful and polite manners, we therefore fully enter into modern society.
The sixteenth-century treatises on behaviour, to which Della Casa’s work gave the starting point, have long been the subject of study by social historians and sociologists as well as scholars of literature and linguistics. But we are not interested in following these developments or studies: our topic is the connection between everyday behaviour and the public and political sphere. We therefore prefer to take into consideration the reinterpretation, if we may say so, of the Galateo by Melchiorre Gioia, according to some critics, a not very original epigone of Monsignor Della Casa.
The Nuovo Galateo
Two and a half centuries pass from the drafting and publication of Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo to the Nuovo Galateo of Melchiorre Gioia: the age of revolution and of “great fears” have finally arrived, the theorisation and the establishment of democratic republics. Therefore, the audience of a thinker and a publicist of the revolutionary age, as Gioia was, is a free citizen of a more or less democratic republic: a new system, new values, new behaviours?
But overall, we can say that, also according to Gioia, the so-called “small virtues” are the way to remove everything disgusting from the social milieu. Even the way to establish rules of conduct in public, based on the aesthetics of the five senses, not on great values. Indeed, Melchiorre Gioia sometimes seems to take up certain passages from Della Casa’s Galateo word for word (even though he openly mentions it only two or three times). For example, talking about “common eating rules”, about a toothpick, Gioia takes up the effective image of Della Casa: “It is not a polite habit to carry a stick in one’s mouth, when getting up from the table, like a bird making her nest” (Gioia 1827: 146 and Della Casa 2013: 73).
The problem arises when one wants to understand how the relationship between the small and the great virtues is articulated for Gioia. An answer can be inferred considering the different editions of the Nuovo Galateo, which involve not only formal but also conceptual changes. Indeed, the treatise was published in many editions during Melchiorre Gioia’s lifetime: a first in 1802, when Northern Italy suffered the Napoleonic influence, a second in 1820, when the pre-revolutionary European political status quo had been established again, and finally in 1822 in the middle of the Restoration period. The different political climates influenced the author’s perspective; a relevant factor that leads us to affirm that the Nuovo Galateo is not simply a treatise on politeness but also a book for civil education.
It could be interesting to analyse the slippages and conceptual shifts from the first to the last edition. We find ourselves faced with the passage from an idea of secular and sensualistic politeness to emphasising politeness as a tool and at same time a product of civilizzazione, which is civilisation in both English and French. Finally, we would discover in the Nuovo Galateo the forms of an ethics capable of guaranteeing happiness and social peace.
Senses, civilisation and social reason
The transition takes place from an aesthetically natural policy, which responds to the pleasure of the senses, to a process of controlling nature by social reason. Hence there seems to be a shift from the purely sensitive plane of the refusal of the repulsive (disgusting) – which we have already read in Della Casa – to the dimension of reason.
This can also be understood from the articulation of the matter of the treatise. In the first edition the target is a single man in the world; so we can read the “Politeness of the private man”, the “Politeness of the man as citizen” and the “Politeness of the man of the world”. Instead, from the second (1820) the point of view is social. The three parts of the treatise are entitled “General Politeness”, “Particular Politeness” and “Special Politeness”: in which subjects of collective importance are discussed, from the education of children to the relationship between officials and citizens, to the relationship between the sexes up to the comparison with other nations or cultures – as we would say now.
So, the Nuovo Galateo became a treatise in two volumes – more than 600 pages – in the last edition and we will focus our analysis on this edition. Text analysis is made easy by the author himself: in the last version of the work he indicates with an asterisk the additions in the text and accompanies it with a very wide range of notes. Thus, we are faced with a hypertext ante litteram.
The proposal for a new Galateo implies the mixing of senses, passions and reason, a reason that moves from sensitivity, cleansed of all roughness. The senses are therefore the first measure of civilisation or the rudeness of behaviour and social relations.
Some acts that produce nausea, schifo, disgusto (nausea, loathing and disgust) have an immediate action on the senses; in other cases, the cause of disgust is imagination, produced by some act by others. Indeed, “the human disposition is like a mirror: it reproduces in itself those sensations it supposes in others” (Gioia 1827: 24). In this simple sentence we could even read a sort of mirror neuron theory. More modestly we see a happy metaphor of the psychology of imitation.
Therefore, in this relational framework between human beings, all “urban or harassing acts to other people’s sensibilities”, but also those harassing to others’ memory, to other people’s desires and to self-love of others, are to be avoided.
The degrees of urbanity correspond to the degrees of pain combined with the excited remembrances (Gioia 1827: 37)
We must know the feelings of the people with whom we converse, in order not to expose ourselves to the danger of offending or embittering them even unwillingly (Gioia 1827: 38).
So far, we have not moved away from a sensory psychology based on the principle of avoiding pain and increasing pleasure, for oneself and others. It is not only about physical pleasures and pains, but also about psychic ones. Hence attention to desires, but above all to self-love, that is, to the desire for the esteem of others and to the fear of their contempt. There is therefore an uninterrupted continuity from the physical to the psychic to the social plane. Contempt may mean being harmed for a physical or intellectual or moral defect, but also seeing your abilities diminished. The action proposed as an example of social contempt will not be accidental: to offer a gift to an honoured public official (Gioia 1827: 65). The case is also re-discussed with regard to the politeness of the subjects towards magistrates. Acts of servility degrade human nature, offend the honest magistrate and do not guarantee abuse of authority. If they were habitual in a servile regime, they cannot be admitted to a society of citizens. The statement comes from a civil servant of the Napoleonic era (Gioia himself), but it is certainly valid in the 21st century as well.
The picture becomes more complicated when the author introduces the time factor. These behavioural rules, although based on human nature, which tends to pleasure and shuns pain, are not natural but are the result of a process. Gioia calls it civilizzazione (civilisation), not unlike Norbert Elias in his famous Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (Elias 1939). Gioia speaks at length in the preface and in many “additions” to the third edition of the Nuovo Galateo. As has been observed, much of Special Politeness is a historical reconstruction of this process (Gipper 2011: 30).
Civilisation: Man, naturally crude, personal, semi-barbarian, changes himself, humanises, softens, under the influence of social reason, as metal abandons rust under the action of cleaning (Gioia 1827: 3)
Civilisation therefore consists of the victories that the principles of social reason obtain over the disordered impulses of nature (emphasis in original, Gioia 1827: 4).
Politeness is a branch of civilisation; it consists of the art of modelling a person and his actions, feelings and speech in order to make others happy with us and themselves, that is, acquiring the esteem and affection of others, within the limits of the just and honest, that is, of the social reason (Gioia 1827: 5).
This is if we take into consideration the Preface. In the concluding parts of the treatise, interest in the social and historical dimension of civilisation is even more evident, and is expressed well in the adoption of the term incivilimento (civilizing process). Gioia’s contemporary age is an age of civilisation as opposed to the barbarity of the previous ages.
Incivilimento, considered from his point of view, is the triumph of politeness over dirt, of science over ignorance, of industriousness over indolence, of peace over war, of solid and durable public interest over frivolous and momentary private interests (Gioia 1827: 501).
In this series of juxtapositions of individual and social conditions which become norms and values lies the whole meaning of the process of civilisation: the philosophies of history, during the 19th century (but already Condorcet did it) will call it progress. Politeness, knowledge, labour, peace: in short, public interest before the private one.
In the barbarian condition, all passions are usually at the highest level. Not only negative passions such as envy, ambition, hatred, resentment or indolence, but also love of one’s country, love between the sexes, filial love and religious sentiment are expressed in violent and ignorance-based forms. They find expression in the emphasis of the body over the mind, in the passion for body ornaments, in the abuse of strength and pleasures. Instead, “civilisation represses and directs the excess and irregular ways of natural barbarism, and opens the field to virtue” (Gioia1827: 506).
But for Gioia civilisation does not destroy nature; therefore, Rousseau’s contrast between nature and civilisation, between nature and artifice does not apply. A civilised society is a society of men (and women) who have abandoned rough and violent customs for “polite” and thereby virtuous behaviour. Social virtues are increasingly artificial even if based on the natural human disposition.
Not all societies have reached the pinnacle of civilisation. Indeed, it cannot be said that it is a spontaneous process. Against Smith’s and Say’s theses, Gioia (who is an economist and knows theories well) believes that the process must be aware: there is no invisible hand.
What is certain is that the past was worse than the present: it is not identifiable with the mythical golden age, but rather with the age of savagery. In those fierce times, even religious sentiment was so wild: a philosophy that defends the rights of tolerance has broken the daggers of religious fanaticism. And fanaticism is the shortest way to prejudicially identify an enemy to destroy. Because “at all times it is always easier to apply a hateful name to a person than to prove facts” (Gioia 1827: 593).
In a sort of arithmetic balance of pleasures, man’s sensitivity is considered a constant quantity, divided between physical, intellectual and moral pleasures. Hence, the growth in the number of affections, which occurs in civilised societies, corresponds to a decrease in their intensity.
So the society of its time can overcome the “excess of social unhappiness of the past centuries” (Gioia 1827: 573ff.), where civil pleasures were scarce, few objects of convenience or luxury, minimum the sum of intellectual pleasures.
Among the tools for the growth of social happiness it is easy for Gioia to place the development of publishing, the spread of books and literacy. They are all ways of growing arts and education and decreasing roughness and ignorance, ultimately corruption.
The civilising function of fashion is analogous, of which Gioia wrote an apology: economic (fashion develops industry) social (increases work, therefore overcoming pauperism), even moral (fashion does not corrupt but reduces corruption). Comments on fashion fluctuations that seem to anticipate the pages of Georg Simmel, but instead brought him harsh criticisms from the young catholic philosopher Antonio Rosmini.
In civilised society social reason is expressed and increased. What is social reason?
From the dynamic of affections (perhaps it would be better from the dynamic of senses) a social equilibrium can derive, a pleasant society. This idea of society is based on pleasure and utility and not on decency; or rather decency derives from pleasure.
But, in the summary of the principles of social reason there are:
- Exercise your rights with the least displeasure of others;
- Respect their rights even if harmful to ourselves;
- Recognise their merit, even though they were our enemies;
- Do not harm them without just reason and legitimate authorisation;
- Promote their good also with the sacrifice of ours;
- Give up momentary resentments that would yield greater future sorrows;
- Sacrifice personal affections in the public interest;
- Achieve maximum public benefit with the least harm to members of society (Gioia 1827: 3-4).
In this secular “decalogue”, social reason has the task of expressing the principles of public ethics as universal as possible, according to which everyone respects the rights of others, recognises their merits and promotes their good. The aim of everyone will be public interest: the maximum of public benefit with the minimum of damage to every member of society. It is not even appropriate to point out the utilitarian imprint of this formulation of private and public ethics, almost a utilitarian translation of the golden rule.
It is not negligible to recall that Gioia is also the author of a treatise Del merito e delle ricompense (Gioia 1818-19). But above all that he was a theorist of the use of statistical investigation for the knowledge of the real conditions of a nation and its inhabitants. The description of a State provides the scientific tools to define collective interest. This is what we read in Filosofia della statistica (Gioia 1826).
It matters little if in the nineteen-twenties a political Age of Restoration opened, for Gioia his times and future times are those in which a new form of civil coexistence can develop, “distinct from monarchical servility as from democratic roughness”. Neither the ceremonial distinctions and the distance between servants and masters, nor the ways of the good savage or the mountaineer of Rousseau are acceptable models for Gioia. Roughness is not synonymous with sincerity and virtue.
A social perspective is built on the politeness and civilisation of customs, strongly marked by utilitarianism, therefore by the senses but also by reason, social reason. Up to the rational self-regulation of rights and esteem between equal individuals that we have just described (Sofia 2000).
Politeness and virtues
This process is possible because, in the new (by Gioia) as well as in the old Galateo (by Della Casa), the well-being, the not offending lifestyle is a lower grade of morality. Here we have the answer to the initial question. The cleanliness considered in its purpose and in its means does not differ from morality except in gradation. All human actions, even the most minute ones, aim at the cessation of pain and the satisfaction of a need, to “spare uncomfortable sensations and afflictive memories” (Gioia 1827: 6).
Avoiding the offences of others’ sensitivities is a healthy, virtuous way of living corporeality, because cleanliness derives from physical and perhaps even moral health. With almost the same words of Della Casa, Gioia affirms: “virtues win in size and, so to speak, in cleanliness; but this wins those in the frequency of its acts” (Gioia 1827: 9).
Virtue, according to Gioia, is nothing else than living well, pleasantly and usefully for oneself and for others. If the goal, as we have already read, is “to acquire the esteem and affection of others, within the limits of the just and honest” (Gioia 1827: 5), perhaps the great virtues that civilised contemporary society and its members do not even need.
Yet with the idea of politeness combined with the idea of health, the soul is prepared for the exercise of virtues. To a fair and honest action, according to the canons of classicism revisited in a utilitarian key.
Nonetheless a problem persists in this progressive vision of the fate of humanity. In our contemporary societies we are not so sure that the same feelings are hosted by human hearts everywhere and across time. Is that of Gioia an ethnocentric proposal even if it is portrayed as universalistic?
As we read in the Preface, Gioia’s attitude seems much more open than that of many of our contemporaries. One of the objectives that is proposed is “Knowing the various uses and customs of peoples” (Gioia 1827: 22) in order to adapt to social relations different from our native habits.
The kindness rebellion
Anyway, the rule of this Galateo is not to offend, not to harass others from the senses to the memory, desires, self-love of others. In other words, be polite, respectful and kind. Why, in our democratic societies, should we think of kindness as taboo or only as a display of hypocrisy?
Now, after two centuries, when the Jacobin revolutionary wave and the nineteenth-century restoration are very far from the common conscience and the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary waves of the twentieth century seem equally distant – and forgettable – with their tragic events, we are faced with languages media and politicians based on violence and abuse, on the basis of new Revanchism. Could the “small virtues” of good education act as a barrier not in large political scenarios but in the modest dimension of daily interpersonal relationships, such as good practices of tolerance and respect?
We might think that face to the rhetoric of fear and violence the arts of kindness and courtesy are very blunt and ineffective weapons. We can be persuaded of the need of equally strong passions. What could be the passions or rather the feelings to be opposed to fear and resentment? Surely hope, confidence, compassion, but they are not characterised by strong colours; it is not easy to think of a rhetoric of winning trust over the communication of hatred and fear.
If it is difficult to implement a rhetoric of good feelings, perhaps it is possible instead to apply an ethic of small virtues, to rediscover a Galateo of small virtues. One that would allow us to live in a kinder and more respectful social environment. Perhaps kindness, in word and deed, is not enough to win the battle against populist rhetoric, which sees in roughness the expression of the veracity of popular sentiment. But it is a mystification – as Gioia said.
So, we should not consider Galateo as an ensemble of etiquette rules for an elite society. We have to consider it as education and habit to kindness, that is to the respect for the sensitivity of others. Hence, we can understand that it could be just a way to start from the bottom, from respectful practices, at micro or meso level, in social relations to make a revolution, the kindness revolution.
And one could also demand, as the Sardine’s youth movement in Italy or some pop stars on the Internet did, a more respectful and perspicuous language by politicians, media and social networks.
An unwanted conclusion
In the early months of 2020, a shock event struck all over the world: the spread of Covid-19, a very contagious disease with deadly effects on the most fragile components of the population. It has reversed habits, lifestyles and habitual behaviours, especially in large cities. Governments have introduced several (more or less) strict confinement measures with the aim of limiting contagion.
Humanity almost in its entirety has been faced with the awareness of the risk of death even more than the risk itself. How did you react? How did we react?
Although there have been cases of hunting for the plague spreader, the most widespread reaction has been that of species solidarity. For some time, habitual haters have been silent.
At the time I write, the exit from confinement seems (and I say seems) to be lived in respect of one’s own and others’ needs, in the awareness that only an attitude of respect for the rules and health of others is the way to safeguard one’s own.
Is fear always necessary to establish a public ethics of respect?
The use of the word brigata (brigade) is, at least for the Italian reader, an obvious reference to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Together with numerous other literary allusions, it shows that ignorance of the protagonist pedagogue is also a literary fiction.
Among contemporary cleanliness scholars Douglas Biow, American scholar in Italian Renaissance, in the wake of some well-known statements by Burckhardt, proposes the treatises on cleanliness by extending to literary and visual sources. Cf. Biow 2006.
Precisely there were four editions of the Nuovo Galateo from 1802 to 1827 (1802, 1820, 1822, 1827), without including the counterfeits. The book had more than 40 editions during the 19th century.
This is the sequence of titles of the chapters of the first part of the work, General Politeness.
“It is not a ceremonial convention […] its precepts are not obtained from the whims of the use and fashion, but from the feelings of the human heart, which belong to all times and places” (Gioia 1827: 5).
It would be interesting to subject the text to a systematic quantitative lexical analysis. It is sufficient to note here that in the Nuovo Galateo 1827 the term incivilimento (civilizing process) appears seven times; while we record 11 occurrences of civilizzazione (civilisation) and 6 of civiltà (civility) as opposed to 7 of barbarie (barbarity).
Cf. Gioia (1827, I: 161-179) and Rosmini (1828, II: 107-168).
The topic of social reason was discussed in depth from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics by Salmacchia – Rocci 2019: the two authors note the presence of the lemma “reason” in the different editions of the Nuovo Galateo and discuss its function in the argumentative structure of the text.
Cf. Gioia 1826 and Pasini 1975.
Berger, H. (2000), Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books, Stanford UP, Stanford.
Biow, D. (2006), The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy, Cornell UP, Ithaca-London.
Brown, P. – Levinson S. C. (1987), Politeness: Some universals in language usage, Cambridge UP, Cambridge.
Della Casa, G. 1994, Trattato nel quale, sotto la persona d’un vecchio idiota ammaestrante un suo giovanetto, si ragiona de’ modi che si debbono o tenere o schifare nella comune conversazione, cognominato Galateo overo de’ costumi , a cura di S. Prandi, Einaudi, Torino.
Della Casa, G. 2010, Galateo…. Or rather, A treatise of the ma[n]ners and behaviours, it behoveth a man to use and eschewe, in his familiar conversation A worke very necessary & profitable for all gentlemen, or other. First written in the Italian tongue, and now done into English by Robert Peterson, [Imprinted at London, for Raufe Newbery, 1576] Eebo editions Proquest, Ann Arbor.
Della Casa, G. (2013), Galateo: The Rules of Polite Behavior, edited and translated by M. F. Rusnak, Chicago UP, Chicago.
Elias, N. (1969),The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, Blackwell, Oxford.
Gioia, M. (1802), Nuovo Galateo, Pirotta, Milano.
Gioia, M. (1818-1819), Del merito e delle ricompense, Pirotta, Milano.
Gioia, M. (1820), Nuovo Galateo, con aggiunte e correzioni, Pirotta, Milano.
Gioia, M. (1827), Nuovo galateo di Melchiorre Gioja, autore del Trattato Del merito e delle ricompense, Pirotta, Milano, 4th ed.
Gioia, M. (1837), Primo Galateo e Nuovo Galateo, in Opere Minori, voll. 16-17, Ruggia, Lugano.
Gioia, M. (1826), Filosofia della statistica, 2 vols., Pirotta, Milano.
Gipper, A. (2011), Dal giovin signore al cittadino borghese. Melchiorre Gioja, il Nuovo Galateo e la filosofia francese, in H. Meter-F. Brugnolo, eds, Vie lombarde e venete. Circolazione e trasformazione dei saperi letterari nel Sette-Ottocento tra l’Italia settentrionale e l’Europa transalpina, 27-40, Gruyter, Berlin.
Ossola, C. (2012), Civilizzazione e ragione sociale, in C. Ossola-G. Jori (eds.), Letteratura italiana e canone dei classici (L’età romantica), Utet, Torino.
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Saltamacchia F.-Rocci A. (2019), The Nuovo Galateo (‘New Galateo’, 1802) by Melchiorre Gioja, politeness (pulitezza) and reason, in Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe, A. Paternoster-S. Fitzmaurice (eds.), J. Benjamins Publishin Company, Asterdam, 75-106: https://www.academia.edu/39299492/The_Nuovo_Galateo_New_Galateo_1802_by_Melchiorre_Gioja_politeness_pulitezza_and_reason
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Vanni, L. (2006), Verso un nuovo galateo: le buone maniere in Italia tra antico e nuovo regime, Unicopli, Milano. | <urn:uuid:f8eab173-ae63-475b-85ab-cb9e2c895c36> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://nome.unak.is/wordpress/tag/gioia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.92359 | 7,686 | 2.640625 | 3 |
- Gyeongju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
- Buyeo National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
- Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
- Naju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
- Jungwon National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
- Seoul National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
- Wanju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage
- Cultural Heritage Conservation Science Center
Restoration of Jar Coffins
Project to Restore the Ancient Technology for Producing Large Jar Coffins
|Category||Research on restoring large jar coffins|
|Survey period||2008 ~ 2011|
This project aims to restore the ancient technology for and culture of producing large jar coffins, and to secure the basic materials required for defining the ancient culture of the Yeongsangang River area, which is thought to have based its funereal culture around the practice of jar coffin tomb customs. The project has been ongoing since 2008, but scientific research of this kind has not been conducted as yet. Archeological survey and research on the technology of producing large jar coffins, as well as convergence research on defining the jar coffins through production tests based on scientific analysis of their components are unprecedented, innovative attempts by South Korea's archeological community, contributing to the country's development of experimental archeological methodology and offering a new research direction.
The project is divided into the gathering and analysis of data, the excavation and survey of jar coffin production kilns, the analysis of components, and production experiments. The related research achievements include the gathering and analysis of domestic and overseas jar coffin materials (six cases including four symposia on ancient jar coffins and the publication of East-Asia Jar Coffin Tombs as one book and six volumes); the test excavation and excavation of jar coffin kilns and jar coffin ancient tombs (ten cases including one excavation survey report on the Kiln Sites in Oryang-dong, Naju, and one presentation of remains excavation survey - Honam Archeology Society); analysis and research on large jar coffins (four cases including 79 large jar coffins, 10 samples of earth, and 160 component analysis samples); and production experiments on large jar coffins (17 cases including an experiment involving the production of large jar coffins).
In 2012, using experimental archeological methods based on the results of excavations of jar-coffin kilns and the observation data of large jar coffins, we will restore the technology for producing large jar coffins and attempt to produce some. Furthermore, through the scientific analysis of large jar coffins and kiln wall fragments, we will also define the causes of the black spots observed on the large jar coffins and the causes of differences in color between the internal and external surfaces thereof.
From 2013, we will drive ahead with the second stage project to distribute and utilize large jar coffins. We will survey the large-jar coffin kilns and supplementary facilities, observe large jar coffins and analyze their components, thus defining the distribution network of large jar coffins and the characteristics and trends of large jar coffins by period and by region. We will also conduct an archeological experiment concerning the method of supplying large jar coffins, and the use and abandonment of large jar coffins as burial facilities, with a view to restoring the ancient funeral ritual involving the use of these large jar coffins.
If the second stage project is successful, we will be able to provide new information on the large jar coffin distribution network, and the utilization thereof as a burial facility, to academia to lay the groundwork for defining the nature of the jar coffin tomb society. Such data will also be significantly utilized for arranging and restoring jar coffins for the Cultural Heritage Administration, and for tourism and education using jar coffins for local governments, policy-making agencies, and the general public.
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A project studying how large-sized jar coffins were distributed and used
|Category||A study of large-sized jar coffins|
This is a project that has been designed to shed light on political and social relationships in ancient society that was established along the Yeongsangang River. It will be carried out via surveys and research on how large-sized jar coffins were distributed and used as facilities for burying the dead. This is Phase-2 (2013-2017) of the Project for the Restoration of the Skills for the Production of Large-Sized Jar Coffins, which was carried out between 2008 and 2012.
Virtually no effort has been made for a survey or research on the production and distribution of large-sized jar coffins in areas along the Yeongsangang River. We intend to shed light on the technological, cultural, political, and social significance of such coffins through a real demonstration. This will be carried out via scientific analysis and experiments for the restoration of the structure and system for how the jar coffins were distributed and how they were used as a burial facility for the dead in the said areas.
The project is composed of the following elements: archaeological and historical surveys and research concerning large-sized jar coffins kilns and tombs that used these types of coffins; convergence research for the restoration of the structure and system that was used to distribute them; natural science-based analysis for the restoration of the methods that were employed to bury the dead using such coffins and the relevant rituals; and experimental archaeological research concerning the transport of such coffins and the method that was employed for burying the dead using these types of coffins.
In 2013, we will collect materials related to large-sized jar coffins both from in and outside of Korea, including those used in Vietnam and Cambodia. We will hold symposiums to discuss the desirable directions for the promotion of the research. We also plan to do the following things: come up with a new method of dating artifacts by region and period by standardizing the classification of attributes of large-sized jar coffins found in areas along the Yeongsangang River based on changes in styles; using materials relating to items that have been unearthed from the pottery kiln site in Oryang-dong, Naju; producing a 3D film image of jar coffins inside a kiln; utilizing the results (including 3D scanned materials) of the survey/research of the kiln site in Oryang-dong and the results of the 3D scanning of restored jar coffins and the kiln; conducting a comparative analysis of material-specific characteristics of jar coffins unearthed from Oryang-dong and their restored counterparts; and producing experimental jar coffins to be used to reenact the transportation of large-sized jar coffins and the burial ritual. Finally, we will transmit the results of the survey/research in academic journals both in and outside of Korea.
It is expected that the result of Phase-2 of the project will lay the foundation for the efforts to define the nature of the society that used jar coffin tombs. This will be done by providing information on the status of the use of large-sized jar coffins as facilities for burying the dead and their distribution network. The results of the research will also be widely used by the Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA) and by local governments as materials for overhauling and restoring relevant tombs. It will also be used for educational and tourism materials for everyday people. | <urn:uuid:9bad6336-ff76-464d-9c51-fb59dfd646ff> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://nrich.go.kr/buyeo/page.do?menuIdx=1091 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.921484 | 1,494 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Glyphosate, a widely used herbicide, has been a subject of controversy and debate for years. As one of the most popular weed killers globally, it’s found in various products, including Monsanto’s Roundup. But what are the health concerns related to Glyphosate, and why is it a matter of public interest.
What is Glyphosate?
Definition and Usage
Glyphosate is a chemical compound used to kill weeds and grasses that compete with crops. Initially patented by Monsanto in the 1970s, it’s now used in numerous herbicide products worldwide.
Prevalence in Food
Glyphosate residues can be found in food, water, and more. The widespread use of this herbicide has led to its presence in various everyday products, raising concerns about its long-term effects on human health.
Several studies and agencies, including the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), have classified Glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. This classification has led to numerous lawsuits and increased scrutiny of the chemical.
Other Health Issues
In addition to cancer risks, Glyphosate has been linked to other health problems, such as liver disease, reproductive issues, and developmental disorders in children.
Regulatory Actions and Lawsuits
Different countries have taken various regulatory actions concerning Glyphosate. While some have banned or restricted its use, others continue to allow it, leading to a complex and often conflicting regulatory landscape.
Lawsuits and Legal Battles
The classification of Glyphosate as a probable carcinogen has led to numerous lawsuits. Many individuals who believe their cancer was caused by exposure to Glyphosate have sought legal action, resulting in significant settlements and ongoing legal battles.
The debate over Glyphosate’s safety and its impact on human health continues to rage. With conflicting studies, regulatory actions, and legal battles, the issue is far from settled. As consumers, it’s essential to stay informed and make choices based on the best available information.
For a more detailed look into the health concerns related to Glyphosate, including scientific studies, regulatory actions, and legal proceedings, visit the U.S. Right to Know website. | <urn:uuid:87398070-da13-4e49-b361-5be3a772ac60> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://nurdunya.org/health-diet/glyphosate-the-ongoing-debate-over-a-poisonous-herbicides-impact-on-health/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.951188 | 457 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Professor Drennan recites Mala Radhakrishnan’s poem “Days of Our Half-Lives” as she provides an introduction to nuclear chemistry. With nuclear chemistry as a great example of a first order process, the lecture also goes on to talk about second order reactions. Chemical equilibrium is also revisited as the class considers the relationship between equilibrium constants and rate constants.
|TOPICS||5th EDITION||4th EDITION|
|Second-Order Integrated Rate Laws||Section 14.6||Section 13.6|
|Measuring the Radiation of Nuclear Decay||Section 17.7||Section 17.7|
Problems and Solutions
Mala Radhakrishnan’s poem “Days of Our Half-Lives” in Atomic Romances, Molecular Dances is used with permission. | <urn:uuid:86a2454d-60f1-49c7-960f-619f1bb04284> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ocw.oouagoiwoye.edu.ng/courses/chemistry/5-111sc-principles-of-chemical-science-fall-2014/unit-v-chemical-kinetics/lecture-31/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.866487 | 172 | 3.25 | 3 |
- This curriculum combines systematic risk assessment (developed to address inconsistency and randomness in existing assessment tools and used to both identify factors which truly endanger children and illuminate strengths that may be build upon to ameliorate risk and preserve the family) with ethnographic interviewing (developed in response to a growing awareness of the importance of cultural differences in the helping process and the right of clients to receive culturally appropriate services). The combination of the two conceptual frameworks which helps clarify risks and strengths enables case plans and interventions to be more closely matched to what families are able and willing to do. (145 pages)Walker, P., & Tabbert, W. (1997).
- Social Work
- Community College / Lower Division, College / Upper Division, Graduate / Professional, Career / Technical
- Material Type:
- Date Added:
- Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial
No evaluations yet. | <urn:uuid:8a8fa078-c9fc-4fc5-baab-5522e40ac0da> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/21455 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.864777 | 178 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Vertalen en ambiguïteit
Translation and ambiguity
Much of the vocabulary of every language is polyseme, meaning most words have multiple meanings. Both polysemy and homonymy can lead to ambiguity. We deduce from the context which application it is.
In some cases, however, the context does not provide a clear answer as to what the intended meaning is: something like this occurs in poetry, puns, or jokes, for example.
Since there are no two languages in which words have exactly the same field of meaning, this causes a fundamental problem in translation.
How do translators handle the ambiguity of words and phrases in the source text? How can we classify the different types of ambiguity? Based on some case studies and my own experience as a translator, I try to map out the problem and answer these questions. | <urn:uuid:59122363-7b01-4cad-a240-9ded5c9186f6> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ojs.elte.hu/filogi/article/view/1757 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.921119 | 174 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Sever’s disease is a common, benign foot condition that primarily affects children between the ages of 8 – 15 with no long term negative effects. Also known as calcaneal apophysitis, Sever’s disease is the inflammation of the growth plate in the heel bone. It is a self-limiting “growing pain” which goes away when the child reaches skeletal maturity.
Immature bones are not fully ossified but rather have areas of cartilage where growth occurs to allow bony elongation or expansion. In growing athletes, the bone can lengthen at a rate at which the muscles cannot keep up. As a result, the muscle that attaches to the growth plate in the heel bone becomes very tight, and the most powerful tendon in the body, the Achilles, repetitively pulls on the growth plate. This results in inflammation and pain.
The condition is more common in very active children, particularly those who wear cleated shoes. Prolonged standing can bring on the pain. Certain foot shape variations can predispose to Sever’s disease, such as a very flat foot or the opposite, a foot with very high-arches.
Heel pain may extend into the Achilles tendon or the arch of the foot. Pain is often worse following activity. A child will often compete in an athletic event without limitations but experience intense pain later. Limping can occur. Pain improves after rest.
If the pain persists for several weeks, a consultation with an orthopedic specialist is recommended for appropriate diagnosis. Physicians cannot detect Sever’s disease by x-ray, but often an x-ray is taken to rule out other causes of pain. The final diagnosis is made based on the symptoms, history and physical examination.
The initial goal of treatment is pain reduction. Rest is the most important element in recovery. Anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen (Motrin®, Advil®) or naproxen (Aleve®) are very effective pain relievers, but should only be used for acute pain. Ice can be helpful as well. In severe cases, a patient’s foot will be put in a cast or cast-like boot (CAM boot) to reduce heel pressure and inflammation.
The patient can return to sports after the pain has resolved. However, recurrence is common unless the patient follows preventative management as outlined below:
Stretching: As the cause of the pain is growth and a tight Achilles, stretching the Achilles is essential.
Changing footwear: Cleats are a major source of the pain. Avoiding cleats or getting a more supportive or cushioned pair can be helpful. People with flat feet should consider certain types of shoes for pronation control and people with high arches should look into those designed for neutral distribution.
Orthotics and inserts: Gel heel pads can help with the symptoms. In most cases, commercially available arch supports can be helpful. For more extreme conditions, such as severe flatfoot or high arches, a custom orthotic is recommended. Orthotics and inserts are about comfort and you may need to do some trial and error to find the right one.
Compression stockings are often supportive and help with the pain.
Cross training and activity reduction: Limiting organized athletics to 3-4 hours per week can make a huge difference, even if it means cutting back on the schedule of weekly physical activities. Cross training – participating in activities that use different muscle groups and physical motions can also help decrease the risk of pain. | <urn:uuid:b6e6aef2-d344-4e76-85b4-2868006e360a> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://onsmd.com/condition/severs-disease-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.945117 | 721 | 3.453125 | 3 |
Root canal therapy (or endodontic treatment) is the removal of the nerve from the centre of the tooth and replacing it with a ‘root filling’. This is done to relieve or prevent toothache, prevent infections from spreading and help save a tooth that would otherwise have to be removed.
The nerve inside a tooth can become infected due to decay, a deep filling or trauma to the tooth. Occasionally it can also be caused by gum disease or cracks in the tooth.
Symptoms that a tooth requires root canal treatment involve:
Root canal treatment is usually undertaken over several visits. Between visits the tooth is restored with a temporary filling. X-rays are usually taken to diagnose any infection present and also the shape and size of the root canals in a tooth. After a local anaesthetic, a rubber sheet is placed over your tooth to prevent any bacteria from your saliva entering the tooth while we are cleaning it. We use small instruments to remove the nerve and shape the canals to receive a filling. We constantly clean the canals with an anti-bacterial solution to remove any bacteria that may be present. The root canal treated tooth may need a filling or a crown (if it is a back tooth) to prevent a fracture of the tooth and reinfection.
Generally, root canals do not cause much discomfort, in some cases there might be some mild achiness that can be treated with over the counter painkillers that settle in a week or two. | <urn:uuid:1a94c3d0-cccb-414a-8c31-9aad679c9686> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://panshangerdentalpractice.co.uk/treatments/general-dentistry/root-canal-therapy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.947461 | 302 | 3.359375 | 3 |
A report by Dutch peace organisation PAX has found that the lack of obligations on Coalition Forces to help clean-up after using depleted uranium (DU) weapons has resulted in Iraqi civilians and workers continuing to be exposed to the radioactive and toxic heavy metal years after the war.
The health risk posed by the inadequate management of Iraq’s DU contamination is unclear – neither Coalition Forces nor the Iraqi government have supported health research into civilian DU exposure. High risk groups include people living near, or working on, the dozens of scrap metal sites where the thousands of military vehicles destroyed in 1991 and 2003 are stored or processed.
Waste sites often lack official oversight and in places it has taken more than a decade to clean-up heavily contaminated military wreckage from residential neighbourhoods. Hundreds of locations targeted by the weapons, many of which are in populated areas, remain undocumented and concern among Iraqi civilians over the potential health effects from exposure is widespread.
Report urges release of targeting coordinates to aid clean-up
“To help clean-up we urgently need to know the location and quantities of DU fired,” says the report’s author Wim Zwijnenburg. “The Iraqi government is also in dire need of technical support to help manage the many scrap metal sites where contaminated vehicles are stored”. The ongoing refusal by the US to release targeting information continues to hinder the assessment and management of DU in Iraq.
A handful of US coordinates held by the Dutch Ministry of Defence and released via Freedom of Information show that US aircraft used DU weapons against a far wider range of targets than previously suspected, including Iraqi troops. The US and UK have long argued that DU is only for use against armoured vehicles.
The Iraqi government has recently prepared a five year environment plan together with the World Health Organisation and UN Environment Programme; managing DU is a strategic objective but the report finds that it is unclear how this will be accomplished without international assistance.
Radiation safety guidelines ignored
DU, a by-product of uranium enrichment is categorised as intermediate level radioactive waste, contaminated rubble and scrap as low-level radioactive waste. The new study finds that international guidelines for dealing with both kinds of waste were ignored and that the Iraqi government did not have the technical capacity to safely manage the contamination.
Unlike anti-personnel landmines and other explosive remnants of war, no treaty currently obliges depleted uranium (DU) users to help clean-up after themselves. Yet civil radiation protection standards place the responsibility firmly at the door of the polluter.
Lack of obligations
As with DU contamination, the controversy surrounding the use of the weapons refuses to go away. This October the United Nations General Assembly will consider a fifth resolution on the issue. In 2012 a similar text was supported by 155 governments and opposed by just the US, UK, France and Israel.
“The lack of obligations governing the post-conflict clearance of DU must be addressed by the international community,” said Doug Weir, Coordinator of the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons. “States recovering from conflict are rarely in a position to protect their own people from these toxic remnants of war.” | <urn:uuid:3f533691-bafd-4718-a4b2-e218b5b4b88e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://paxforpeace.nl/news/no-solution-in-sight-for-iraqs-radioactive-military-scrap/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.953253 | 641 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Though common and sometimes frightening, nosebleeds are rarely anything more than a nuisance. They are usually the result of minor irritations in the nasal passages and most common in children younger than 10, or adults older than 50.
What Causes Nosebleeds?
When the membranes lining the inside of the nose dry out and become irritated, the blood vessels break, causing a nosebleed. These are more common in the winter months when the air is cold and dry. Other factors that may contribute to nosebleeds include the use of blood thinners, colds and allergies, sinus infections, nose-picking, blowing the nose too hard, frequent sneezing, overuse of nasal sprays, foreign objects in the nose and trauma to the nose.
If nosebleeds are chronic or occur frequently, they may result from high blood pressure or other vascular diseases or, in rare cases, a serious medical condition such as a tumor.
Most nosebleeds are anterior, which originate in the front of the nose. These are easy to control and rarely pose a serious problem.
Posterior nosebleeds are rare, but are sometimes much more serious. They originate from an artery in the back of the nose and may require immediate hospitalization and treatment. These are most common in the elderly.
If you experience a nosebleed, stay calm! Though your nosebleed may look serious, chances are there is much less blood than you might think. Sit down and lean forward slightly while pinching your nostrils together using a thumb and index finger. Hold this position for at least five minutes or until the bleeding has stopped.
Other strategies that can help control a nosebleed include using a decongestant spray like Afrin (oxymetazoline) or putting an icepack on the bridge of your nose.
Once the bleeding has stopped, refrain from blowing your nose afterward. If the bleeding hasn’t stopped after 20 minutes or is the result of an injury to the face, seek medical attention.
There are several strategies that doctors can use to control nose bleeds. In addition to the ones already described, cautery and many specialized packings can be used. In rare cases, surgery or embolization may be necessary.
If you are prone to frequent nosebleeds, there are steps you can take to prevent them. Keep the nasal lining moist with a saline nasal spray or saline gel. Run a humidifier, especially if you live in a dry climate. Quit smoking; this causes dryness and irritation.
You may want to consult an otolaryngologist if recurring nosebleeds are a problem. | <urn:uuid:6de43915-36d9-43c2-b2b5-9bbbd9a43421> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pentadocs.com/ent/nosebleeds/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.916083 | 540 | 3.34375 | 3 |
It’s the plastics industry’s worst-kept secret: a huge percentage of their products are designed to be used once then thrown away — and yet it’s us, the consumers, who are left to pay for the cleanup.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, we can make plastics producers financially responsible for the plastic waste their products become. Producer responsibility legislation will completely alter the current plastic product life cycle.
Here’s how that life cycle works right now:
- Companies manufacture and sell us plastic products meant to be used once and then thrown away.
- Consumers use these products as they’re intended and toss them in the recycling or trash bin, while some leak into the environment.
- But who pays to manage and dispose of that waste? Us, the consumers.
Meanwhile, both our local communities and other countries we send our waste to are left to deal with the environmental costs. And because the plastics producers don’t have to deal with the end-of-life costs of the waste their products become, they have no incentive to stop making more plastic and transition to more sustainable alternatives.
By putting the costs of waste disposal back onto the shoulders of plastic producers, producer responsibility legislation will encourage plastic manufacturers to adopt more environmentally friendly plastic alternatives, for it will be in their best financial interest. With producer responsibility laws, manufacturers would be financially responsible for the waste they create and would bear responsibility for the collection and proper disposal of those products at the end of their useful lives.
By holding producers accountable for the waste they create, state governments can motivate plastic manufacturers to design their products to be more environmentally friendly throughout their lifecycle. We can shift to a circular economy that rewards sustainability with producer responsibility legislation that incentivizes the construction of products built to last and proper recycling of remaining materials. We can take the next step toward a zero-waste society. | <urn:uuid:c42b9cf9-d965-441e-ab90-557de3eed9d6> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pirg.org/wisconsin/foundation/articles/our-environment-pays-the-price-for-plastic-and-so-do-consumers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.946774 | 392 | 3.328125 | 3 |
Canadian property rights advocates often wish their favoured rights could be entrenched in the Constitution. I want to suggest that this may be a misplaced desire, not because property rights are unimpor- tant””far from it!””but because of the risks involved in giv- ing them over into the care and keeping of judges. We may be guided here by the founders of liberalism, who believed that property rights, despite their central importance, were not absolute, and who therefore did not recommend con- stitutional entrenchment.
The founders of property rights certainly saw them as a necessary response to the human psychic constitution. In a 1984 article, Clifford Orwin and Thomas Pangle summa- rized the founders’ view of the relevant differences between humans and other animals. First, human beings are the only animals that can foresee their own deaths. Other ani- mals react instinctively and fearfully to life-threatening sit- uations, but only humans live with a constant anxiety about their mortality. This leads to the powerful human desire to delay death and minimize suffering””what John Locke labeled the desire for ”œcomfortable self-preservation,” or Montesquieu called ”œthat tranquillity of mind which aris- es from an individual’s opinion of his security.”
In order to achieve this ”œtranquillity of mind”””or, at least, as much of it as is possible for a being that can anticipate its own demise””people need the order and stability afforded by political authority, and will thus consent to gov- ernment. Hobbes’s war of each against all, or what Locke more subtly called the ”œinconveniences” of the state of nature, have to be overcome through the establishment of a known and settled authority.
But not any kind of government will do. Locke’s ”œcom- fortable self-preservation” or Montesquieu’s ”œtranquillity of mind” are secured not only by criminal law and police forces, but also by the fruits of productive labour. It is, after all, not just bare self-preservation but comfortable self-preser- vation that best eases the characteristic human angst, and individuals cannot achieve comfortable self-preservation without the freedom to accumulate property. ”œThe great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into common- wealths and putting themselves under government,” said Locke, ”œis the preservation of their property.” Or, as James Madison put it in Federalist 10, ”œthe protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” is ”œthe first object of government.” Property rights, in short, lie at the core of the liberal democratic tradition, and provide the standard for assessing the legitimacy of government. Only in a regime dedicated to property rights is it possible to approximate ”œthat tranquillity of mind which arises from an individual’s opinion of his security.”
A second defining characteristic of humans is that foreknowledge of death leads to a distinc- tively human approach to propagation. ”œAll other creatures,” observe Orwin and Pangle, ”œhave as their strongest desire the urge to propa- gate and continue their several species; but only human individuals can strive to continue their own selves in their offspring and come to love their offspring as an extension of themselves.” Thus families, in their great variety, are a natural response to the human condition. This natural attachment to family, and especially to offspring, gives further significance to the accumulation of property. Humans seek comfortable self-preserva- tion not only for themselves, but also for the off- spring that provide a kind of immortality. This means that Montesquieu’s ”œtranquillity of mind” is best secured when property rights are seen in part as ”œfamily rights” involving security of bequest and inheritance.
The human psyche provides a third justifica- tion of property rights. Although the desire for comfortable self-preservation for oneself and one’s offspring is powerful and durable, it is far from the only passion that motivates human behaviour. Pride and ambition, the lust for power, recognition and precedence””these are all-too-human features of our existence. And they are dangerous features””dangerous because they fuel faction and civil strife, thus jeopardiz- ing comfortable self-preservation. The advantage of a commercial regime based on property rights is that it provides comparatively safe outlets for natural human competitiveness or factionalism. People who have been softened by the pursuit and achievement of ”œcomfortable self-preserva- tion” are less likely to want to risk their lives par- ticipating in, say, religious crusades. And at least some of those who are inclined to engage in the bellicose building of religious or ideological empires might be diverted from such activity into empire-building of an economic sort””i.e., from empire-building that threatens comfortable self- preservation to empire-building that fosters it.
As important as property rights are, they are easily misunderstood. It is not always appre- ciated, for example, that property rights are more rights of acquisition than of possession or con- sumption. It is the protection of ”œdifferent and unequal faculties of acquiring property” that is Madison’s ”œfirst object of government.” The point is to fuel the acquisitive engine at the heart of a capitalist system, so as to generate surplus wealth and reinvestment, thus enlarging the economic pie to the benefit of both rich and poor. A day labourer in 17th-century commercial England, said Locke, was better off than the king of a ”œlarge and fruitful” but undeveloped American territory.
Acquisition and possession cannot, of course, be entirely separated. If possession is inse- cure, one of the most powerful incentives for acquisition is removed. Nevertheless, the posses- sion of property, important as it is, has never been considered an absolute right in the liberal tradition. Locke, for example, was clear that peo- ple ”œenter into society with others [not only for the] securing [but also for the] regulating of prop- erty.” ”œIn governments,” he added, ”œthe laws reg- ulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.” Or as Montesquieu put it, ”œThere is nothing which is more in need of being guided by wisdom and prudence than the question of how much should be taken away and how much should be left in the hands of subjects.”
However, although Locke and Montesquieu clearly thought that expropriation in the name of the public good was sometimes justified, they established a strong presumption against it. In Montesquieu’s words, ”œthe public good demands that one never deprive an individual of his goods, or rather that one take away from him the least possible.” In other words, expropriation only when clearly necessary, and then as little expropri- ation as possible. In addition, when expropriation does occur, it must be rooted in law and due process, not arbitrary discretion, and it must be justly compensated. This carefully qualified power of expropriation is nicely expressed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: ”œProperty being an inviolable and sacred right, no one may be deprived of it, except when the public necessity, legally established, evidently demands it, and under the condition of a just and prior indemnification.”
Throughout his career, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau similarly advocated the right not to be deprived of property except ”œby due process,” or ”œaccording to law,” or ”œin accordance with the law and for reasonable compensation.” Later, the Reform Party advocated ”œthe right of every per- son to the use and enjoyment of property, both real and personal, and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law.” The Party added that no one should ”œbe deprived, directly or indirectly, by any law of Parliament or a provincial Legislature, of the use and enjoyment of property, unless that law pro- vides for just and timely compensation.”
Although modern property rights advocates maintain the substantive components of property rights””expropriation only with legal due process and with just compensation””they tend to be much more enthusiastic about constitutional entrenchment than were the founders of liberal- ism. Had Locke, Montesquieu or Blackstone rec- ommended a judicially enforceable bill of rights, property rights would certainly have been at the centre of such a bill, but they did not promote this way of protecting rights. As we have just seen, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen certainly gave a central place to property rights, but the Declaration was a statement of guiding principles, not a judicially enforceable legal document.
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Of course, one might explain the failure of lib- eralism’s earliest exponents to promote entrenched (and judicialized) rights as simply an oversight on their part. Perhaps they would have considered the judicial enforcement of entrenched rights, includ- ing property rights, to be a good idea, a perfection of their own principles, had they only thought of it. This brings us to James Madison, a good Lockean on the question of property rights, and a leading author of what has become the world’s model for entrenched and judicially enforceable constitution- alism: the American Constitution, and especially its Bill of Rights. Madison not only considered but implemented the strategy of constitutional entrenchment. But even he remained doubtful about the value of this strategy.
Madison’s hesitancy about entrenched rights emerges most clearly in his thinking about the Bill of Rights. Remember that the Bill of Rights was an addition to the Constitution. The original Constitution did not contain such a bill, and Madison joined Alexander Hamilton in arguing, in the Federalist Papers, that it would be either unnecessary or ineffective. The two men agreed that rights were best protected by the proper arrangement of representative institutions, in the context of a large commercial society, not by the ”œparchment barriers” of a bill of rights. In Federalist 84, Hamilton argued that the original constitution was ”œitself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, a bill of rights.” Now, that original constitution did specify a few rights, including some property rights. Thus, Article 1, which specifies legislative powers, states in sec- tion 10 that no state shall pass any ”œlaw impairing the obligation of contracts.” Nevertheless, it is not the judicial enforcement of this kind of provision that Hamilton had primarily in mind when he spoke of the Constitution as itself a bill of rights. It was the system of institutional checks and balances between and among the institutions of rep- resentative government, famously described by Madison in Federalist 51, that would best protect rights, at least in the context of the large com- mercial society, with its multiplicity of factions, promoted by Madison in Federalist 10. If ”œambi- tion [were] made to counteract ambition”””both among the branches of a single governmental jurisdiction and between levels of government in a federal system””truly serious infringements of rights would not occur and an explicit bill of rights would be unnecessary; and if institutional checks and balances somehow failed to prevent real tyranny, the ”œparchment barriers” of a bill of rights would be ineffective.
Someone is bound to object that Madison must have changed his mind about the value of entrenched rights because, after all, it was he who piloted the Bill of Rights through the first Congress. It is true that Madison was the father of the Bill of Rights, but as the political scientist Robert Goldwin has shown, in an analysis much too involved to replicate here, Madison took charge of what had become a politically inevitable movement in order to water it down and prevent it from going too far. The Bill of Rights that emerged under Madison’s guidance was much weaker than its chief advocates wanted, though it did serve to separate the leaders of the bill-of- rights movement from their followers, attaching the latter to the Constitution, and thereby strengthening national unity. Madison’s amend- ments, says Goldwin, ”œleft unchanged his convic- tion that the greatest security for rights resides in the structure of the society and the government.”
Even if Goldwin is wrong””even, that is, if Madison did change his mind about a bill of rights””there would be still be two contrasting strains in his thought over time, one of which is highly skeptical of the value of entrenching rights. That is sufficient for my present purposes because I want to argue that whatever Madison’s ultimate position may have been, his initial anti- entrenchment inclination is what modern prop- erty rights advocates need to remember.
The problem with entrenchment is that it places too much trust in judges, and judges, as any good Madisonian should agree, are no more trustworthy than anyone else who exercis- es political power. Judges have always exercised political power, of course””the common distinc- tion between interpreting and making the law is facile””but entrenched constitutional law sub- stantially extends the reach of their power.
In the early part of this century, American judges exercised their power to radically trans- form the 14th Amendment’s guarantee against the deprivation of ”œlife, liberty, or property, with- out due process of law.” Although the phrase ”œdue process” is self-evidently a procedural guar- antee””thus permitting the taking of life, liberty, or property with due process””the U.S. Supreme Court read the provision as though it contained the oxymoronic phrase ”œsubstantive due process.” This allowed the Court to strike down much of the emerging welfare-state legislation, such as maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws, despite the fact that they in no way infringed ”œprocedural due process.” Many advo- cates of economic freedom and property rights cheered these decisions, but they should, in fact, have worried about them. A Court that can turn ”œdue process” into ”œsubstantive due process” is a dangerous beast, dangerous precisely because it is unpredictable. Thus, while the U.S. Supreme Court opposed economic regulation in the name of property rights for a time, it eventually reversed course completely, allowing virtually any kind of economic regulation, and turning its ”œsubstantive due process” doctrine to the quite different purpose of protecting such social ”œpri- vacy rights” as the right to an abortion.
In a similar vein, we really cannot be certain what Canadian judges might do with a constitu- tional property rights protection. Some indication of the potential pitfalls can be gleaned from the debate about the Charter’s section 7 guarantee against the deprivation of ”œsecurity of the person … except in accordance with the principles of funda- mental justice.” As noted above, property rights were originally conceived as the basis of Locke’s ”œcomfortable self-preservation” or of the ”œtranquil- lity of mind” that Montesquieu said arose ”œfrom an individual’s opinion of his security.” A constitu- tional protection of ”œsecurity” might thus be understood to entail a protection of property rights. Precisely this interpretation of section 7 has, in fact, been suggested. On the other hand, it has also been suggested that the guarantee of ”œsecurity of the person” is more properly understood to entrench rights to welfare policies and to prevent the state from dismantling them. Indeed, welfare policies have been described as ”œnew” property interests that could be protected not only by sec- tion 7 but even by a more explicit property rights guarantee. I doubt that this is what the proponents of a property rights guarantee have in mind. Nevertheless, judicial power being what it is, it is what they might get. And, although judicial decisions can be reversed””primarily through what Peter Russell has called court-bashing and court- stacking””it isn’t easy. Legislative policies, of course, are also difficult to change, but it must be noted that after losing many battles in the political realm, proponents of property rights broadly con- ceived are winning some, and that it is their oppo- nents who advocate a retreat to the courtroom. For example, the courts have been urged to resist poli- cies that cut back welfare-state benefits, reduce their universality, or, as in the case of ”œworkfare,” impose conditions on the receipt of benefits.
The contemporary opponents of property rights are not Marx’s proletariat but the so-called ”œknowledge class.” As Christopher Lasch has argued, it is the knowledge class that today views human nature as the malleable product of social conditioning, and thus as subject to social engi- neering. For those who take this view, property rights are not a realistic outlet for certain other- wise dangerous facets of a permanent human nature (such as selfishness and ambition), but are themselves the social causes of undesirable human traits. Since the undesirable traits are socially caused, they can be socially overcome. And the chief way to overcome them is to replace private property rights with public regulation.
Now, the influence of the knowledge class has been felt in all policy-making institutions, includ- ing our legislative and executive institutions. Legislatures can certainly get caught up in projects of social engineering, and judges can be conserva- tive””history displays examples of both. But no one should be surprised to find democratic insti- tutions nowadays rebuffing the transformative projects of the knowledge class and to see the lat- ter seeking a more welcoming reception in the courtroom. If that is our current situation, it is not a particularly propitious one in which to give judges the primary responsibility for property rights by entrenching them in the Constitution.
If one could achieve the degree of legislative support necessary to entrench property rights”” i.e., the support of the federal Parliament and the legislatures of seven provinces with 50 per cent of the population””why squander that support on an amendment that would give property rights over into the care and keeping of judges, who will for some time to come reflect the anti-prop- erty rights animus of their ”œknowledge class” education? Why not pursue substantive legisla- tive change instead? | <urn:uuid:8c3df075-4434-46a9-b17f-02aa49e28035> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/public-policy-2002/why-we-shouldnt-entrench-property-rights/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.953468 | 4,113 | 2.734375 | 3 |
The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. Nothing could be more unhistorical than to pick out selected sayings of Christ from the gospels and to regard those as the datum and the rest of the New Testament as a construction upon it. The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. | <urn:uuid:de00db54-83db-411f-bc95-7cfb6501852c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ponderingprinciples.com/2013/03/31/c-s-lewis-the-resurrection/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.982138 | 184 | 3.125 | 3 |
Hepatitis is the inflammation of the liver commonly due to a viral infection, and it is of 5 distinct types: hepatitis A, B, C, D, and E. However, the condition can also be caused by other factors like alcohol consumption, toxins, drugs or medications; in this case, it is called autoimmune hepatitis, where the body creates antibodies against the liver cells.
The liver is responsible for blood filtration, the production of hormones and storing vitamins, along with many other functions. Hepatitis can disrupt these functions, causing severe health issues and liver damage.
The different types of hepatitis, which are hepatitis A, B, C, D, and E, are caused by viral infections from hepatitis A, B, C, D, and E viruses, respectively.
These viruses are transmitted through contaminated water and food, direct contact with blood, open sores, and body fluid of an infected person, unprotected sex and childbearing.
Symptoms of Hepatitis
The different types of hepatitis may have some unique symptoms, but the common symptoms include:
- Dark urine.
- Abdominal pain.
- Flu-like symptoms.
- Unexplained weight loss.
- Pale stool.
- Skin rash.
- Loss of appetite.
The treatment of hepatitis varies with the different types and their stages, whether acute or chronic.
- Hepatitis A doesn’t usually require treatment because it is short-term, but the symptoms may cause great discomfort, so bed rest may be necessary, and dietary supplements may be needed to maintain nutrition and hydration.
- Hepatitis B doesn’t require treatment in its acute stage, but antiviral medication may be recommended for the chronic phase.
- Hepatitis C can be treated with antiviral medications in its acute and chronic stages, but a liver transplant may be necessary if cirrhosis or any liver disease is involved.
- Hepatitis D is often treated with Pegylated Interferon Alpha, but it is not recommended for people with cirrhosis, psychiatric conditions or autoimmune diseases because of its side effects.
- Hepatitis E has no medical remedies because the condition is often acute and resolves on its own with time, good nutrition, adequate rest, and avoidance of alcohol.
- Autoimmune hepatitis is treated with immune-suppressing drugs and corticosteroids. | <urn:uuid:61ce3715-7e52-4be1-aa29-af7896e2e448> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pottageofhealth.com/glossary/hepatitis/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.892964 | 493 | 3.484375 | 3 |
20 Things You Will Learn
1. What codes and standards require for periodic inspection and testing of safety devices.
2. The difference between function testing and calibration
3. Ways that switches and devices have been found to be defeated in the field and unsafe
4. Preparing for testing of safety devices including kinds of devices and tools to use.
5. The importance to gas pressure switch set points and how they can be developed and obtained.
6. Pressure ratings of switches and components and why they are important.
7. Actual testing methods described including “set point rollback method”
8. Four (4) different failure modes to watch out for when conducting component tests.
9. How to test: flame detectors, position switches, gas and combustion air pressure switches.
10. What a pliot spark pick-up test is and how to do it.
11. How to test temperature switches
12. How to evaluate important water level issues on boilers including gauge glass test
13. How to do low water cut off testing including the slow drain test.
14. Checking firebox purge timing and identifying what it should be and what you have.
15. Valve proof of closure devices and how they work.
16. Fuel safety shut off valve seat leakage tests, (bubble testing).
17. Hydraulic actuator failures and how to spot them, and what to do.
18. Testing equipment needed for bubble tests and how to handle the vent valve.
19. What a gap analysis is and how to conduct one.
20. More than a dozen installation and inspection issues related to fuel train components and safety devices. | <urn:uuid:56b5cf8f-a141-45be-b3fc-2364a3b74401> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://prescient-t-s.teachable.com/p/module-3-fuel-train-safety-device-inspection-testing | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.915406 | 341 | 3.375 | 3 |
Prolog’s Vitamin D3 product is designed for the couple having difficulty conceiving, undergoing fertility treatments by inseminations or IVF, with unexplained infertility, or recurrent pregnancy loss.
Vitamin D3, cholecalciferol, is a steroid hormone synthesized by the skin that regulates blood calcium levels as well as cell growth and differentiation. With respect to fertility, vitamin D receptors and vitamin D metabolizing enzymes are found in reproductive tissues of women and men. Vitamin D insufficiency is a common condition and has been associated with decreased embryo implantation potential, increased miscarriage risks and various problems in pregnancy. In men, inadequate Vitamin D has been related to sperm motility problems.
Vitamin D may play various roles in human reproduction and several recently published studies indicate that vitamin D levels are predictive of implantation and ongoing pregnancy rates in in vitro fertilization (IVF). | <urn:uuid:ad895b55-af8b-44e8-9cc0-e6ab6405eef6> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://prologhealth.com/product/vitamin-d3/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.941065 | 182 | 2.703125 | 3 |
July 8: I have taught in different schools for many years. This article came from my classroom experiences.
What Are We Teaching About Being Human?
We are not all called to be teachers; it is an extraordinary calling. Krishan was the most fantastic teacher of all, and he bestowed upon some of us the gift of this vocation. There is a human dimension to this vocation, which is critical to achieving success.
Teaching is about the holistic development of the child, not just the impartation of knowledge and skills. It takes certain exceptional qualities to nurture children into responsible, positive, and productive world citizens. Therefore, as teachers, if we do not possess attributes such as compassion, understanding, and love, we do injustice to the children whom we are required to mould, and we fail in our responsibility towards them. A successful teacher is thus one who demonstrates certain very “human” qualities in the execution of their duties.
Let me share what I consider to be some essential qualities that a good teacher should possess:
1. A Nurturing Attitude
Just as plants are given water, good soil, and nutrients to help them grow, children need a nurturing environment where they can thrive and flourish to their full potential. A good teacher is sensitive to diverse factors such as neglect, abuse, culture, language, race, hunger, poverty, and prejudice, which affect children at home and in the community and their behaviour and overall performance at school. He will take measures to buffer children against these negative factors and assist them in achieving.
2. Sound Morals and Values
Children right up to their teens are very observant and thus are easily influenced by their environment and the persons with whom they interact. Furthermore, children spend a more significant part of the day in the care of their teachers. Hence, teachers help in a great way to mould their minds and shape their destinies. Let us put it this way. If a student likes you, he might aspire to be like you. Conversely, if a student does not like you, he does not wish to be like you; consequently, he will not learn much from you.
3. Thirst for Knowledge
As someone whose job is to impart knowledge, a good teacher should continuously sharpen his skills and update his knowledge as per the need of the scenario. He should make learning an ongoing exercise. He should strive to be well informed and in tune with current trends, particularly in his area of expertise. Moreover, a teacher has responsibility for his own personal and professional development, which will indirectly impact the development of his students.
4. Creativity and Resourcefulness
Creativity and resourcefulness may be inherent qualities in a good teacher, and if the teachers don’t possess these skills, they can be acquired. The teacher has to exercise creativity in finding ways to engage students, connect with students who are less than outgoing or draw out those who have serious personal issues. They are happy when given duties, chores, roles, or even punishments, which give them a sense of responsibility and importance and through which they can use up their energy in positive rather than destructive ways.
Any good work is expected to be committed to his organization and the clients whom he serves. The teacher must be committed to his students not only to their academic development but also to their personal development and their safety and wellbeing.
6. Satisfaction and Pride: Some of the greatest occasions for a teacher when he has joy are:
When he encounters a positive and responsible adult who was at one time his difficult, rebellious student when he is treated with excellent service and given special privileges at hospitals, hotels, stores, and other places where his past students are employed, indeed, a teacher’s reward goes far beyond his monthly salary!
Children often seek affection from their teachers, the love and understanding which they lack at home. Throughout their lifetime, they never forget those who were incompetent, insensitive, or uncaring and those who were cruel leave indelible marks on them. I can still recall the memories of my chemistry teacher. I am a postgraduate in Chemistry. I used to hate chemistry in my middle school days. Since Mr. Rajiv Rastogi (Chemistry faculty) had taken chemistry, I started to take an interest in the subject because he taught the subject in a more accessible manner.
8. Leave your Burdens:
Likewise, human as we are, as teachers, we must cultivate the ability to leave our burdens at home.
In the end, you have been a teacher if you can genuinely say that you have impacted lives in a positive way.
[ Mrs. Paiker Seemav, Principal, Modern International School, Indore (M.P)] Website: http://moderninternationalschool.in/
If you have any objection to this press release content, kindly contact email@example.com to notify us. We will respond and rectify the situation in the next 24 hours. | <urn:uuid:2ce07508-4289-439e-9a65-daa34855864e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://rajasthanexpress.in/index.php/2022/07/08/the-human-dimension-of-being-a-teacher-paiker-seemav/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.975528 | 1,017 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Firstly, we can briefly breakdown the chemical components that make up the finishes most used: The primary component that determines the properties of the coating is the resin, which could be epoxy, acrylic, or polyurethane for example. The second main component is then the solvent, which is what disperses the paint into a liquid. This is what can either be chemically based or water based.
Traditionally solvent-borne coatings have been preferred as they ensured a hard and durable finish that resists scratches and abrasions. They were also being considered easier to apply as they often require fewer coats and can be more forgiving of contaminated surfaces. Solvent-based paints have also been proven to be more efficient in freezing temperatures and other climatic conditions. However, high levels of VOCs (Volatile Organise Compounds) can be found in solvent-based paint. VOCs are used as a mechanism for transferring the paint to a surface in an even and flowing manner. Nevertheless, these chemicals are proven to have a harmful impact to not only the user but the environment as well.
There are a multitude of technologies and technical terms associated with water-based paints but put simply it is a paint manufactured with water. It is made up of around 70% water, 20% solids and only 10% solvent. Although we have identified advantages of using solvent-based paints, water-based finishes are now increasingly becoming the go to solution. There are numerous benefits to using water-based paints of which we can pinpoint below.
In contrast to solvent-bearing, water-based paints produce far fewer VOCs which in result means they do not produce gases that can cause further damage to the ozone making it a more sustainable and environmentally friendly solution. This also results in fewer impacts on health such as headaches and trouble breathing making it much safer for the user. Water-borne solutions aren’t flammable, meaning there is less need for extra equipment and fewer regulations on transportation. This also aligns with government regulation which has become increasingly stricter on manufacturers to reduce VOC emissions, so water-based paints can be a solution in preparation for further legislation.
Although water-based paints drying time can be considerably shorter in comparison to solvent based paint they are much more sensitive to the climate. In winter months, for example, you may have some trouble with dry spray and bad flow. And in summer months you might experience some issue with drying and sagging. To effectively dry water based finishes the environment needs to be controlled for temperature and humidity. Although there are lots of variations on the air flows in spray booths the basic flow holds true. Humid air inside the booth is removed for dry air outside the booth to enable further evaporation of the finish. The air that is sent out is generally vented to the atmosphere, so air from the atmosphere needs to be brought into the booth as replacement air and brought up to the right temperature. The energy required for this temperature lift can be significant. We will go over the basics of performing this calculation in a later “industry insight”. In brief, a spray booth needing 50,000m3 of replacement air per hour will require 250Kw to maintain the required temperature. At current Gas prices this could cost you £20,000 annually, however, if Gas prices continue to rise as expected this could end up costing you upwards of £60,000 a year. Depending on your fuel this is where we find water-based paints to be environmentally flawed.
With one of the key reasons for more companies switching to water-borne solutions being the rising importance of sustainability. It can then prove counterproductive dependant on the fuel you use for your heating system to facilitate efficient drying. Gas heating systems such as direct gas air heaters are commonly used and can prove an effective heat source. However, gas systems produce copious amounts of damaging carbon emissions, and with climate targets increasing it could become obsolete in a matter of years. The recent Gas crisis also means that your gas bill could be significantly higher with gas prices rising by 200% since August (Read More here). It is a similar story with Oil heating systems with oil boilers producing twice as much carbon as Gas and oil prices being at their highest since 2014. Although electrical heating systems are thought to be greener than gas and oil, they too can prove costly, and many factories do not have the electrical distribution capacity required.
We do think that water-based paints are here to stay and the environmental benefits in the long term are there. However, the transition to water-based finishes will have an increase in energy usage to avoid a drying bottleneck in cold weather. An industrial wood-waste boiler could prove to be the solution to get this extra energy through sustainable, carbon neutral means. An industrial biomass boiler provided by us at Ranheat can replace the need of gas and other fuels by utilising your wood waste already present at your factory. Not only would this insulate your business from volatile energy costs which we are currently experiencing but also offer a new way for you to reduce your carbon footprint. Feel free to get in touch to learn what an Industrial wood waste boiler could do for you. (Contact Us). | <urn:uuid:5d063b3b-edf7-4db6-b927-ba00887dd5ee> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ranheat.com/environmental-impact-of-the-transition-from-solvent-based-to-water-based-paints/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.968757 | 1,055 | 3.3125 | 3 |
July 16, 2019
Years published: 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1997, 2004, 2006, 2019
NORD gratefully acknowledges François Lagacé, MD Candidate, McGill University School of Medicine, and Edel O’Toole, MB, PhD, FRCP, Professor of Molecular Dermatology, Centre Lead, Queen Mary University of London, for assistance in the preparation of this report.
Harlequin ichthyosis is a rare genetic skin disorder. The newborn infant is covered with plates of thick skin that crack and split apart. The thick plates can pull at and distort facial features and can restrict breathing and eating. Harlequin infants need to be cared for in the neonatal intensive care unit immediately. Harlequin ichthyosis is inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern.
Infants with Harlequin ichthyosis are covered in thick plate-like scales of skin. The tightness of the skin pulls around the eyes and the mouth, forcing the eyelids and lips to turn inside out, revealing the red inner linings. The chest and abdomen of the infant may be severely restricted by the tightness of the skin, making breathing and eating difficult. The hands and feet may be small and swollen, and partially flexed. The ears may appear to be misshapen or missing, but are really fused to the head by the thick skin. Infants born with harlequin ichthyosis may also have a flat nose (depressed nasal bridge), abnormal hearing, frequent respiratory infections, and decreased joint mobility.
Premature birth is typical, leaving the infants at risk for complications from early delivery. These infants are also at high risk for low body temperature, dehydration, and hypernatremia (elevated levels of sodium in the blood). Constriction and swelling of the mouth may interfere with the suck response and infants may need tube feeding. The baby’s corneas need to be lubricated and protected if the eyelids are forced open by the tightness of the skin.
Harlequin ichthyosis is caused by changes (mutations) in the ABCA12 gene, which gives instructions for making a protein that is necessary for skin cells to develop normally. It plays a key role in the transport of fats (lipids) to most superficial layer of the skin (epidermis), creating an effective skin barrier. When this gene is mutated, the skin barrier is disrupted.
Harlequin ichthyosis is inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern. Recessive genetic disorders occur when an individual inherits an abnormal gene from each parent. If an individual receives one normal gene and one abnormal gene for the disease, the person will be a carrier for the disease, but usually will not show symptoms. The risk for two carrier parents to both pass the abnormal gene and, therefore, have an affected child is 25% with each pregnancy. The risk to have a child who is a carrier, like the parents, is 50% with each pregnancy. The chance for a child to receive normal genes from both parents is 25%. The risk is the same for males and females.
Harlequin ichthyosis affects males and females in equal numbers. This condition affects approximately one in 500,000 persons or about seven births annually in the United States.
Harlequin ichthyosis is diagnosed at birth based on the child’s physical appearance. Prenatal testing may be possible by testing fetal DNA for mutations in the ABCA12 gene. In addition, some of the features of harlequin ichthyosis maybe seen on ultrasound during the second trimester and onward.
A multi-disciplinary team is involved in the care of infants with harlequin ichthyosis as soon as they are born. This has been shown to improve outcomes and reduce complications such as respiratory distress, dehydration, electrolyte imbalances, impaired thermoregulation, systemic bacterial infections, and feeding difficulties. Early treatment with oral retinoids is also thought to improve outcomes. However, they are only used in severe cases due to their known toxicity and side effects.
The thick, plate-like skin of harlequin type ichthyosis will gradually split and peel off over several weeks. Antibiotic treatment may be necessary to prevent infection at this time. Administration of oral acitretin may accelerate shedding of the thick scales. Most harlequin infants will need one-on-one nursing care for the first several weeks of life.
After the thick plates peel off, the skin is left dry and reddened, and may be covered in large thin scales. The skin symptoms are treated by applying skin softening emollients. This can be particularly effective after bathing while the skin is still moist. Many patients with severe ichthyosis exfoliate manually by rubbing off the thick scale with special exfoliating gloves with a rough surface. Skin barrier repair formulas containing ceramides or cholesterol, moisturizers with petrolatum or lanolin, and mild keratolytics (products containing alpha-hydroxy acids or urea) can all work to keep the skin moisturized and pliable, and prevent cracking and fissuring that can lead to infection. Removal of damaged tissue (debridement) from the fingers may be needed if they are constricted by bands of skin to avoid a loss of circulation.
Information on current clinical trials is posted on the Internet at https://clinicaltrials.gov/. All studies receiving U.S. Government funding, and some supported by private industry, are posted on this government web site.
For information about clinical trials being conducted at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD, contact the NIH Patient Recruitment Office:
Toll-free: (800) 411-1222
TTY: (866) 411-1010
Some current clinical trials also are posted on the following page on the NORD website:
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Akiyama M, Sugiyama-Nakagiri Y, Sakai K, et al., Mutations in lipid transporter ABCA12 in harlequin ichthyosis and functional recovery by corrective gene transfer. J Clin Invest. 2005;115:1777-84.
Uitto J. The gene family of ABC transporters novel mutations, new phenotypes. Trends Mol Med. 2005;11:341-3.
Kelsell DP, Norgett EE, Unsworth H, et al., Mutations in ABCA12 underlie severe congenital harlequin ichthyosis. Am J Hum Genet. 2005;76:794-803.
Elias, PM, Williams, ML. Enlightened Therapy of the Disorders of Cornification. Clinics in Dermatology. 2003; 21: 269 – 273.
Thomas, C. Harlequin Ichthyosis, Treating a Rare Hereditary Disorder. Advance for Physician Assistants. December 2000: 32 – 48.
Saunders, B, Freedman, C, Nyhan, WL, Rice-Asaro, M, and Mannino, F. Influence of nutrition on growth and development of a long-surviving Harlequin fetus. Dysmorphology and Clinical Genetics. 1992;6:2-8.
Buxman, M, et al. Therapeutic activity of lactate 12% lotion in the treatment of ichthyosis. Active versus vehicle and active versus a petroleum cream. J Am Acad Dermatol. December 1986; 15(6): 1253-1258.
Williams, ML, et al. Genetically Transmitted, Generalized Disorders of Cornification. The Ichthyoses. Dermatol Clin. January 1987; 5(1): 155-78.
Lawlor, F and Pheris, S. Harlequin fetus successfully treated with etretinate. Brit J Derm. 1985;112:585-90.
Ahmed H, O’Toole EA. Recent advances in the genetics and management of harlequin ichthyosis. Pediatric dermatology. 2014;31(5):539-46.
Sugiura K, Akiyama M. Update on autosomal recessive congenital ichthyosis: mRNA analysis using hair samples is a powerful tool for genetic diagnosis. Journal of Dermatological Science. 2015;79(1):4-9.
Shibata A, Ogawa Y, Sugiura K, Muro Y, Abe R, Suzuki T, et al. High survival rate of harlequin ichthyosis in Japan. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. 2014;70(2):387-8.
Harlequin ichthyosis. Genetics Home Reference. Review Date: November 2008. 6pp. https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/harlequin-ichthyosis#genes Accessed May 1, 2019
Harlequin Ichthyosis. Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center. Last updated: 2/6/2015. https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/6568/harlequin-ichthyosis Accessed May 1, 2019.
Choate K. Overview and Classification of the Inherited Ichthyoses. UpToDate. topic last updated: Mar 05, 2019. https://www.uptodate.com/contents/overview-and-classification-of-the-inherited-ichthyoses. Accessed May 1, 2019.
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This first-of-its-kind assistance program is designed for caregivers of a child or adult diagnosed with a rare disorder.Learn more https://rarediseases.org/patient-assistance-programs/caregiver-respite/ | <urn:uuid:6ec35341-e2ab-4b03-9c48-25e25c97766d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/ichthyosis-harlequin-type/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.88788 | 2,196 | 3.359375 | 3 |
If you’re wondering why you entered menopause earlier or later than other women, blame your mother. That’s because numerous studies have confirmed the role of genetics in determining a woman’s age at menopause. A new study not only reconfirms this association but additionally suggests a link to familial longevity. Results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).
The age of menopause is clinically defined as one year after the final menstrual period and is, on average, about 52 years. However, every year thousands of women outperform this statistic by entering menopause later in life, whereas many others naturally enter menopause much earlier in life.
Although menopause can occur earlier as the result of various conditions such as smoking, chemotherapy, and an elevated body mass index, the age of menopause is generally accepted to be most influenced by family history. So, if your mother experienced her menopause early, chances are you will also begin the transition earlier in life.
The goal of this latest study focused on reproductive life was to identify genetic variants associated with the delayed age of menopause based on familial longevity. Results were based on a meta-analysis of several larger studies, including the Long Life Family Study, the Health and Retirement Study, and the Framingham Heart Study. These studies found that women who were able to have children beyond the age of 40 years were four times more likely than average women of living to 100 years or older and that women who had children at age 35 years or older were 1.5 times more likely to live past 100 years.
In this study, researchers performed a meta-analysis for genetic variants associated with age of menopause in women who ultimately lived to a very old age. The findings provided further evidence for genetic basis of age of menopause. In addition, the discovery of new variants suggests that there may be genetic mechanisms of age of menopause that are linked to human longevity.
Findings were published in the article “Genetic associations with age of menopause in familial longevity.”
“Genetic variants associated with later menopause have been found to be associated with longer life. Although early menarche and total number of reproductive years have not been associated with slower aging, later menopause (longer reproductive potential) appears to be associated with slower aging.” says Dr. JoAnn Pinkerton, NAMS executive director.
Genetics play strong role in determining age of menopause and overall longevity (2019, June 12)
retrieved 13 June 2019
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
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As I finish the second leg of my road trip, a theme of the conversations I’ve had – and ones I’ve listened to – has been the inter-relationship of slavery, immigration, and First American genocide with the progress of white settlers and American Exceptionalism. Let me take these issues in turn.
The first phase of Glasgow’s economic development was in the 18th century when the profits of the tobacco barons pouring into the city. These merchants benefitted from the middle passage, so slavery made Glasgow prosperous. There was also the link of Scottish immigrants to America – particularly the slave-holding South – that happened after the ’45; for instance, Flora MacDonald of Bonnie Prince Charlie fame emigrated to North Carolina. Many Scots abroad were slave owners, particularly in the Caribbean. In recent years, Glasgow has been open about its dark past – a conversation that has taken place across the city.
I all too frequently hear and see the opposite on my road trip around America. A common theme of the right is to reel against the teaching of CRT (critical race theory) in schools. Politicians are campaigning on this platform, and religious talk radio hosts not only shout about CRT, but also warn against other topics that are code for CRT, such as sex education. I don’t understand CRT and, when I ask for an explanation, all I get in response is that it’s on the curriculum. Teachers I’ve spoken to don’t know what it is and are not teaching it. So far no one has pointed me to a curriculum where it’s being taught – but a number of parents I’ve spoken to are campaigning against it (they were white).
This comes across to me as code for ‘let’s not talk about _______ “ (fill in the blank with racism, slavery, America’s original sin, etc). Yet there has been some positive conversation and increased awareness about race, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre and the celebration of Juneteenth. The New York Times’ 1619 Project has also increased awareness but, in itself, helped to contribute to a backlash from the right.
I’ll be interested to see how these topics are discussed when I get to the Deep South in the final leg of my road trip. Already I’ve heard from a friend that “slavery happened 150 years ago – we need to move on”.
Linked to this non-discussion about race is the conversation on talk radio about the threat to America from immigrants – the threat to the American way of life. Some talk about this as a conspiracy of government to let immigrants in so that they (whites) become the minority – the Great Replacement Theory – as if immigration to the US is new.
I guess it’s the wrong kind of immigrants – we have the same problem in the UK, with the threat of immigration a major factor behind the Brexit vote in 2016. I haven’t come across anyone who thought that immigration is bad – rather, many felt that immigration is positive, but want more structure to it. Again, the same could be said about the UK and the flow of immigrants across the English Channel – or as the Home Secretary stated recently, the “invasion”. The son of an undocumented immigrant to the US told me over breakfast at a diner in St George UT that his own mother should have been sent back as she knew the rules and didn’t follow them.
Balancing this concern about migrants, or the wrong kind of migrants, is the need for labour. Job adverts and signs abound, and both businesses and public bodies are in need of staff – bus drivers, police, teachers, chefs, waiters; you name it, they need them. Some organisations are being innovative in their recruitment, such as the Fort Worth police who parody a used car salesman.
My conversations with First Americans – the description used by the First Americans Museum (FAM) in Oklahoma City in place of ‘Native Americans’ – have challenged my awareness. Both hitchhikers I’ve picked up have been on reservations – Zumi in WA and Kelvin in UT. Zumi shared her conspiracy theories as we drove down to Seattle, and Kelvin showed me around the Navajo reservation – both were open about their alcoholism. I’ve only met one First American who did not share this problem with me. Kelvin said it was in the genes.
Acknowledgement of First Americans as the original occupants of the land is now more apparent in National Park Service (NPS) sites than I remember 50 years ago. It’s nearer to the recognition that I heard in Australia about the heritage of aboriginal settlement before the English convicts sailed into Botany Bay. Yet there are pockets of 1960’s ‘Columbus Discovered America’ presentation, such as Royal Gorge CO, where there is only passing reference to First American heritage, along the lines of ‘Indians once lived here’.
My experience in the West has been to see the consequences of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 – in the 3rd leg of my road trip I’ll see the Trail of Tears as I travel across the South from where they were principally removed. Yet I’ve heard from some about the ‘choice’ that First Americans had, that some tribes chose to leave their native lands, and that chiefs made choices that helped to civilise their people – the five main tribes in OK are still referred to as the ‘civilised tribes’. The stories of Zumi and Kelvin didn’t align with this thinking, and made me reflect on the choice that the Nazis gave Jews as they parted with businesses, properties, and then their lives.
These three topics – slavery, immigration, First Americans – play into the narrative about American Exceptionalism. What I saw West of the Mississippi were examples of how this played out – forts to supress Indians, trails of settlers, reservations where First Americans were corralled, sites of racist massacres. There is an emerging honesty about discussing this history that I did not find 50 years ago – then, I learned in school about how Columbus discovered America, we played cowboys and Indians, the Lone Ranger was on TV, and the Alamo fighters were heroes for independence (they still are in TX).
Yet, I’ve found an underlying reluctance to have an open, generative conversation about slavery, land, and immigration. The stoochie over CRT is but the tip of this iceberg. The continuing whitewash of history in Texas about the true nature of its fight for independence is a further example. As I visit the Civil War battlefields in the final leg of my road trip, I’ll see many memorials to the ‘lost cause’, like the ones at Fort Donaldson TN and the Texas Civil War Memorial in Austin. I’ll be interested to see how slavery is presented by the NPS.
There’s no denying that settlers and their decedents developed the American continent – I saw the same contrast of development when I travelled from Israel into the West Bank. Yet there is a reluctance to discuss the impact of the long tail of slavery and First American genocide which was a price of America’s development. The Holocaust is rightly taught extensively in schools and memorialised, but let’s not go there when it comes to sore issues closer to home. America is having a crisis of confidence as it faces pressures internally and externally, and not discussing these topics will inhibit its move forward. | <urn:uuid:10fb0f0b-7ba9-48f0-acaf-eebec8ab0564> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://rediscoveringamerica.us/lets-not-go-there/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100308.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20231201215122-20231202005122-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.969176 | 1,574 | 2.609375 | 3 |
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