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LINC01116 in the Progression of OSCC
Insights into the molecular mechanism underlying the progression of OSCC, which may lead to the development of novel therapeutic targets for OSCC treatment.
Oesophageal cancer (OC) is a significant threat to human health and is the eighth most common type of cancer worldwide. The most common type of OC is oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), accounting for around 85% of cases. Despite improvements in early screening and detection, access to effective therapy for advanced stages of the disease remains limited, resulting in OC being the sixth most common cause of cancer-related deaths.
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a type of RNA that does not have the ability to code for proteins and plays important roles in various disease processes. LncRNAs are involved in critical biological processes, including chromatin remodeling, transcriptional activation or silencing, and can affect transcription by binding with protein-coding genes. Antisense lincRNAs, which have no protein-coding counterparts, may also affect transcription through base-pair complimentary means. Aberrant expression and functions of lncRNAs have been linked to the development of several types of cancer, including OSCC, and provide potential avenues for diagnosis, prognosis, and targeted therapy.
Researchers uncover promising therapeutic target for oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC)
Now researchers from China have set out to investigate the role of a long non-coding RNA (LINC01116) in the progression of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). In vitro and in vivo experiments were conducted to explore the potential role of LINC01116 in OSCC. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was conducted to identify the gene sets with significant enrichment. In general, their study provides insight into the molecular mechanism underlying the progression of OSCC, which may lead to the development of novel therapeutic targets for OSCC treatment.
First, they found that LINC01116 was upregulated in OSCC tissues. Its expression also was positively correlated with tumor differentiation and more advanced T stage, suggesting that LINC01116 up-regulation was an early event in OSCC development. Functional studies demonstrated that LINC01116 promoted OSCC cell proliferation and migration in vitro. In general, their findings indicate that LINC01116 may serve as a promising therapeutic target for the treatment of OSCC.
So, LINC01116 was highly expressed in OSCC tissues and associated with poor prognosis in patients. What else did they notice? LINC01116 was also found to regulate epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and increase the migration and invasion of OSCC cells. Moreover, they determined that LINC01116 interacts with AGO1 mRNA and control its expression. Knockdown of AGO1 led to reduced cellular migration and invasion, similar to the effect observed when LINC01116 was silenced. These results suggested that LINC01116 may promote the progression of OSCC through the regulation of AGO1 and could be a potential therapeutic target for OSCC.
At a glance
- LINC01116 gene is more active in tissues affected by oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma and intraepithelial neoplasia. The gene’s activity was also found to be linked to certain clinical and pathological features. This suggests it could be a useful tool for early diagnosis and predicting outcomes.
- Furthermore, the study found that when the LIN01116 gene is active in OSCC tumor cells. It promotes the process of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which can contribute to the spread of cancer. This occurs through the gene’s interaction with AGO1, a protein involved in EMT.
- The researchers also found that inhibiting LINC01116 can prevent AGO1-mediated EMT. It can partially reverse the impact of LINC01116 on OSCC invasion and EMT.
- Overall, these findings suggest that LINC01116 is an important factor in the metastasis of OSCC. It could be a potential target for new therapies to prevent or treat cancer spread. | <urn:uuid:4fd9db7d-3c66-4bda-a1fb-f19737695c38> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://aimed-analytics.com/blog/oesophageal-cancer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.951904 | 864 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Redoshi was kidnapped when she was 12 years old, sold to an Alabama banker, and renamed Sally Smith.
American slavery officially ended with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but the nation’s history with the practice has undeniably impacted generations to come. Millions of lives, spanning centuries, were irrevocably altered.
According to The Washington Post, researchers at Newcastle University have just identified one of those countless lives as one of the last known African-born survivors of the transatlantic slave trade. Captured and kidnapped from West Africa at 12 years old, she died in Alabama in 1937.
Her name was Redoshi — but the Alabama banker and plantation owner who bought her named her Sally Smith. Forcibly transported aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the United States in 1860, she lived on an Alabama farm for over 70 years.
Previously, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade was Oluale Kossola (renamed Cudjo Lewis), who died two years earlier than Redoshi in 1935. Researchers have since discovered one survivor named Matilda McCrear who died even after Redoshi.
The discovery was published in a Newcastle University statement on Tuesday, with lecturer and researcher Hannah Durkin identifying the two-year gap between Kossola and Redoshi’s deaths.
Durkin said she first noticed references to Redoshi in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings — and was captivated by her story. HarperCollins published Hurton’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” in 2018 — 90 years after she wrote it.
The manuscript explored Kossola’s life. Captured in modern-day Benin as a teenager in 1860, she was taken aboard the Clotilda with more than 100 other Africans. The U.S. had already banned importing slaves in 1808, but looking to the law at this juncture in American history didn’t provide much recourse.
The former timber cargo ship thus illegally brought 110 Africans — including Redoshi — to Mobile, Alabama. For Durkin, her story offered invaluable insight into illegal slave trade during that period and its generally tragic nature.
“These materials add hugely to our understanding of transatlantic slavery as a lived experience,” said Durkin. “Now we know that its horrors endured in living memory until 1937, and they allow us to meaningfully consider slavery from a West African woman’s perspective for the first time.”
Redoshi was sold to and renamed by Washington Smith, the founder of the Bank of Selma. It was only last year that a reporter believed to have discovered the wreckage of the ship that brought her here.
Alas, they were mistaken — the Clotilda’s owners burned their ship in 1860 to hide evidence of their illegal operations.
During her time on the Bogue Chitto plantation in Dallas County, Alabama, Redoshi was forced to work for almost five years “in both the house and the fields.”
“Her husband, who was known as William or Billy, was kidnapped with her and died in the 1910s or 1920s,” Durkin explained, adding that she had found further detail on Redoshi’s life in an interview in the Montgomery Adviser, as well as Amelia Boynton Robinson’s memoir Bridge Across Jordan.
Redoshi lived on Bogue Chitto with her daughter and remained there until she died in 1937.
“She lived through tremendous trauma and separation,” said Durkin, “but there is also a sense of pride in these texts.”
“Her resistance, either through her effort to own her own land in America or in smaller acts like keeping her West African beliefs alive, taking care in her appearance and her home and the joy she took in meeting a fellow African in the 1930s, help to show who she was.”
After learning about Redoshi, read about Queen Nzinga, the West African leader who fought of slave traders. Then, learn about Yasuke, the African slave who became the first black samurai. | <urn:uuid:81c89dc6-35db-4322-a1d5-34ccc06d4121> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://allthatsinteresting.com/redoshi | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.979835 | 859 | 3.296875 | 3 |
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, simple sharp-barbed harpoons on long wooden shafts were used to “dart” or fasten to the whales from whaleboats. Two darts were thrown, in case one broke loose. Then, sometime in the early 19th century, the toggle iron was developed, possibly by African American blacksmith Lewis Temple in New Bedford, MA.
Once embedded in the whale’s flesh, the sharp point of a toggle iron rotated, or toggled sideways, making it harder to pull out. Normally, at least six sharp darting irons were carried aboard individual whaleboats to ensure that lost or broken ones could be replaced without returning to the mother ship.
Our collection database is a work in progress. We may update this record based on further research and review. Learn more about our approach to sharing our collection online. | <urn:uuid:32b32781-c76a-42d3-b473-492cd16a78b3> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_842515 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.955614 | 181 | 3.40625 | 3 |
Is COVID-19 making us all obsessive-compulsive?
Our daily habits have changed since the beginning of COVID-19. We are much more fixated on cleanliness and the need to disinfect what we touch. This in turn has made daily activities like grocery shopping extremely different: we are told we need to wear a mask, we must stand at a two-metre distance away from others and must wash or disinfect our hands when we enter an establishment and often times when we leave as well. Even outside of stores, we have developed this need to constantly use hand sanitizer the moment we might feel uncomfortable. Are these new habits a sign of being conscious of germs and microbes, or a sign of a developing mental illness? Is our constant handwashing a sign of developing obsessive-compulsive disorder?
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts (obsessions) that are followed by an action (compulsions) in order to diminish or remove the anxiety of the invasive thought. One of the most common obsessions includes a fear of being contaminated by germs and becoming sick. In turn, a common compulsion to ease the anxiety of this obsession is excessive washing of hands. Those who have OCD understand that the intrusive thoughts are illogical, but the need to carry out the obsessive act is too strong to ignore. Some examples of intrusive thoughts might look like this: “If I don’t wash my hands right now, I will die”, or “If I don’t take a scalding hot shower my whole family will contract an illness”. Irrational fears such as these are intrusive to the point that they affect the quality of life of an individual. They are irrational because there is no logical reason that the obsession will actually happen if a person does not carry out the compulsive act.
The important distinction between our increased need to wash our hands during the pandemic and someone living with OCD is that there is a virus circulating in the world and washing our hands can help us avoid catching it. Since it is easy to come into contact with germs in public settings, handwashing stations and hand sanitizer bottles are a rational preventative method. There is evidence that hand washing is effective, therefore the actions are justifiable. When it comes to someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the thought and action is irrational. There is no evidence that the compulsion will actually prevent the intrusive thought from happening.
It is normal to feel anxious and wash your hands more often than you used to during these stressful times, but when should you worry about obsessive-compulsive symptoms? You should be concerned if your handwashing becomes out of control. Excessive handwashing becomes detrimental if it is not allowing you to complete tasks that you were previously able to do without trouble. If you are having intrusive thoughts that are taking over your daily wellbeing, consider calling Info Santé (dial 811) to speak to a psychosocial worker. They can provide you with advice and resources should you desire to seek further help.
– Gabrielle Lesage
Click here for organizations that can help with OCD in yourself or a loved one.
AMI has a support group once a month for family, friends, and people living with Anxiety or OCD. Click here for more information.
Please click here for references. | <urn:uuid:ec00216c-825f-4a45-a433-5df53db5d0cd> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://amiquebec.org/covid-19-ocd/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.959651 | 689 | 2.859375 | 3 |
When manually downloading files over the internet, its always a good idea to check the integrity of these files.
Making sure no-one has modified them maliciously or just to check they have not become corrupted during the download process.
If you perform downloads with services such as the App Store, then this validation is performed for you automatically but when manually downloading a file from a web site we can perform this task ourselves.
When downloading a file from a website, you may have seen hashes ( a string of hexadecimal numbers) listed next to the downloads. For example this is a download from Line6:
What is a hash
So the first question is, what is a hash?
The idea behind hashing is to take an arbitrary block of data, which can be any size and run it through a cryptographic process, which then returns a fixed-size “hash” value. So there are a couple of key points. Firstly the input data can be any size but the result is always a fixed length hexadecimal number. Secondly the input data can vary by the smallest amount , but would result in the hash generated to be completely different. So no two pieces of unique data could result in the same hash.
As you can see, some data goes in, a cryptographic function then generates a unique hash for that data.
With the first two examples , the same data goes in, resulting in the same hash generated.
The other examples vary the data going in, thus generating different hashes. Even when we only change one character, as in the third example, the generated hash is completely different.
Validating a file
So how can we make use of this? Well a lot of websites will display the hash that was generated for the file you are about to download. After downloading the file, you can then create a hash on the version of the file you have. If it generates the same hash as published, then you can be assured the file is identical. If anything had happened to the file then the hashes would have been different.
Generating a hash from a file.
There are a number of different cryptographic schemes that are widely used including MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256. The vendor will tell you wish one they used.
Here are 3 examples that generate hashes using the more common methods, MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 , on a file called ‘myFile.dmg’
openssl dgst -md5 myFile.dmg
openssl dgst -sha1 myFile.dmg
openssl dgst -sha256 myFile.dmg
You can even use this to verify backups of your own files. After copying a file to a destination , you can generate hashes on the original and the copy. If they match you know you are good.
I hope you enjoyed this overview. | <urn:uuid:3b555350-cd94-47db-a831-7165508e6ce1> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://amsys.co.uk/validate-integrity-file | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.910664 | 593 | 3.3125 | 3 |
Head injuries can occur due to a variety of causes, including:
Falls: Falls are one of the most common causes of head injuries, especially in children and older adults.
Vehicular accidents: Motor vehicle accidents, including car, truck, motorcycle, and bicycle accidents, can result in head injuries.
Assault: Physical assault or violence can cause head injuries, including traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Sports injuries: High-impact sports, such as football, soccer, and boxing, can lead to head injuries.
Explosions: Explosions, such as those caused by fireworks or in combat zones, can cause head injuries.
Here are some general guidelines for treating head injuries:
First aid: If the person is unconscious, call for emergency medical help right away. If the person is conscious, keep them calm and still until medical help arrives. Do not move the person unless it is absolutely necessary, and do not remove any protective gear such as a helmet.
Imaging tests: The doctor may perform imaging tests, such as a CT scan or MRI, to evaluate the severity of the injury and determine the best course of treatment.
Medications: The doctor may prescribe medications to relieve pain or reduce swelling in the brain.
Observation: Depending on the severity of the injury, the person may need to be observed in a hospital for a period of time to ensure that there are no further complications.
Surgery: In severe cases, surgery may be necessary to relieve pressure on the brain or repair any damage.
Rehabilitation: Depending on the extent of the injury, rehabilitation may be necessary to help the person regain their cognitive and physical abilities.
It is important to follow the doctor's recommendations closely and to monitor the person for any changes in symptoms or behavior. | <urn:uuid:96d99b52-bb0a-4a1d-b8fa-d91ca37cd828> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://arunalaya.com/whatwedos/details/420/Head-injuries | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.938533 | 364 | 3.5 | 4 |
By Nemi Vora, edited by Ben Briston
The fourth annual “Imagine a Day Without Water” water awareness day took place on Wednesday, October 10, 2018. The Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Pittsburgh Section, once again joined the effort to raise awareness about how water is essential, invaluable, and worthy of investment.
The Pittsburgh region has been experiencing above average high-intensity rainfall events, so it may be difficult to imagine a day without water. Though our region may be water rich, we are using more water than we think, albeit indirectly. We consume water from all over the country and the world through the products and services we use. A standard (1.5 oz) chocolate bar requires on average 197 gallons of water to produce; a large egg requires around 52 gallons of water, and 1 lb of beef requires on average 1,847 gallons of water. [1, 2] In fact, an average American uses 750 thousand gallons of water as part of the goods and services consumed over a year, and, of the water we consume, 20% comes from products produced outside the U.S.A., mainly China.
Imaging a day without water can be difficult in Pittsburgh due to more frequent, intense rainfall events, but it is essential to recognize our reliance on water outside of this region. We are indeed connected to the world through the products we consume and should be conscious of the fact that the places that produce these goods face water scarcity. Next time you buy a product, look at the packaging to see where it's coming from. Doing so may help to reduce over-consumption and waste of water.
1. Mekonnen, M.M. and A.Y. Hoekstra, The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops and derived crop products. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2011. 15(5): p. 1577-1600.
2. Mekonnen, M. and A. Hoekstra, The green, blue and grey water footprint of farm animals and animal products. 2010.
3. Mekonnen, M. and A.Y. Hoekstra, National water footprint accounts: the green, blue and grey water footprint of production and consumption. 2011. | <urn:uuid:2281c8d2-ad42-40c9-8ad9-d328408f0ee6> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://asce-pgh.org/Blog/6884430 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.923552 | 467 | 3.34375 | 3 |
There is a growing realization that the traditional system design for American K-12 education is failing to adequately prepare students for the future. A strong K-12 public education system is essential for a democracy and civil society to thrive. It is time to build a system on the core principle that all students can succeed and be ready for the next step in their learning, the workforce, and citizenship and for lifelong health and prosperity.
Today, educators are beginning to build new competency-based learning models in which students are actively driving their learning while mastering the knowledge, habits and skills necessary to fulfill their dreams. These new learning models are competency-based, learner-centered, and highly personalized. They hold all students to the same high standards and high expectations, and open the doors to fulfill their potential by providing targeted supports and emphasizing continuous growth. With a focus on competency, high-quality supports and sufficient resources, all students can learn and succeed.
In the traditional one-size-fits-all model of education, schools batch students by age, and move them through the same content and courses at the same pace. Students are ranked and sorted based on variable outcomes, creating “winners” and “losers” and perpetuating patterns of inequality in society. Education systems must transform to align with the needs of learners and the skills and dispositions they will need to succeed beyond secondary school. According to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):
“In the past, education was about teaching people something. Now it is about making sure that individuals develop a reliable compass and the navigation skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile and ambiguous world. It will often be the mistakes and failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. Today, schools need to prepare students for more rapid economic and social change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve social problems that we do not yet know will arise.”
Even with high school graduation rates at an all-time national high of 82%, 37% of high school graduates are entering college requiring remediation in math and reading – thus, unprepared for the rigor of higher education. Graduates who enter the world of work directly after high school fare no better, with 62% of employers by one account indicating that “high schools aren’t doing enough to prepare their graduates to meet the expectations of the work place.” Students are not fully prepared for civic engagement to ensure a functioning democracy (only 30% of today’s young people believe it is “essential” to live in a country that is governed democratically). With these academic, workforce and civic readiness outcomes, it is clear that it is time to engage in a public dialog with communities and states around what the goal and role of our K-12 education system is. The very purpose of our education system has changed, but its design has not. Policymakers should be asking: are K-12 education systems fit for purpose?
iNACOL and CompetencyWorks released a new report titled, Fit for Purpose: Taking the Long View on Systems Change and Policy to Support Competency Education, to explore and reflect on the ideas that state policy needs to address in the long-term to support a transformation to competency-based education systems designed to ensure equity so all students can be truly ready for success. The publication explores some ways that state policy makers could approach tackling threshold concepts as part of a long-game strategy.
Our challenge is to catalyze the creation of a new, transformational theory of change for state policy to work toward over the long term. In doing so, we need to identify the blind spots – the things that we don’t even know that we don’t know – that are standing in the way of a system that is fit for purpose.
Our intent is to push current thinking beyond the assumptions that perpetuate root causes of educational inequity and the structural issues that perpetuate injustice. We are focusing on a strategy for policy to support K-12 systems change over the long haul toward competency-based systems that ensure mastery for all students and equity for all.
This new blog series: Fit for Purpose: Taking the Long View on Systems Change and Policy to Support Competency Education aims to inspire new ideas and launch dialogue among communities and state policy leaders.
The next few posts will examine four threshold concepts, which are “core concepts, that once understood, are needed to transform a given subject.”
The four threshold concepts that we will address in this blog series are:
- Certifying learning;
- Assessment literacy;
- Pedagogical innovations based on learning sciences; and
- Meeting students where they are.
These concepts hold potential to change our perspectives forever and are important to embracing a vision of personalized, competency-based learning. They help us to think differently about what is possible in an equitable, future education system where all students succeed, and how to address deep-seated systems design flaws across K-12 education.
The next few blogs will explore each one of these threshold concepts.
Learn more by through the report, Fit for Purpose: Taking the Long View on Systems Change and Policy to Support Competency Education. Stay tuned for a blog series diving deeper into key insights from this paper, and view the action steps state policymakers can take in Current to Future State: Issues and Action Steps for State Policy to Support Personalized, Competency-Based Learning.
- Report: Fit for Purpose: Taking the Long View on Systems Change and Policy to Support Competency Education
- Report: Current to Future State: Issues and Action Steps for State Policy to Support Personalized, Competency-Based Learning
- Issue Brief: Redefining Student Success: Profile of a Graduate
- Issue Brief: Redesigning Systems of Assessments for Student-Centered Learning
- Issue Brief: Rethinking State Accountability to Support Personalized, Competency-Based Learning in K-12 Education
- Issue Brief: State Strategies to Develop Teacher Capacity for Personalized, Competency-Based Learning
- Issue Brief: State Policy & K-12 Competency-Based Education
- National Summit on K-12 Competency-Based Education
- Blog: Assessment Literacy to Support Competency-based Education Systems and other Deeper Learning Efforts
- Report: Meeting the Every Student Succeeds Act’s Promise: State Policy to Support Personalized Learning | <urn:uuid:c8456d84-26e5-4390-a62d-fdb487512814> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://aurora-institute.org/blog/fit-for-purpose-taking-the-long-view-on-systems-change-and-policy-to-support-competency-based-education/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.947936 | 1,341 | 3.46875 | 3 |
João Baptista knows all about Non-Conventional Plant Foods (PANCs), vegetables with high nutritional value that many people believe to be weeds. Baptista, who is retired and lives in Chapéu Mangueira, a favela located on the south side of Rio de Janeiro, grows fruits, vegetables, and spices at home. “I have a 6 square meter vegetable garden, it’s not big,” he says. He shows off his crops: basil, coriander, lemongrass, lemon balm, PANCs such as serralha (Sonchus Oleraceus, also known as the sowthistle, is a type of dandelion found in northern Africa, Europe and Asia and South America), capuchinha (Tropaeolum Majusand is a South American edible flowering plant) and maria-sem-vergonha (Impatiens Walleriana is an African flower easily adaptable to the Brazilian soil). “Now,” Baptista interjects, “I’m about to reap a pumpkin.”
Baptista substitutes eggplant for red meat and makes salad with medicinal plants that he picks from the seedbed kept on his concrete rooftop. His close relationship with his small plantation makes the cultivating and harvesting of food seem affordable to anyone. And it is! The secret is to start small, with spices and vegetables, says biologist Danielle Souza.
Souza is an environmental education specialist and has learned much about traditional cultivations from João Baptista. She runs workshops with him for Favela Orgânica, an educational project promoting sustainable and affective cooking in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere.
According to Souza, the benefits of having a vegetable garden go beyond eating food that doesn’t poison oneself or the environment. “It’s a way of relieving stress, reducing the consumption of ultra-processed food, reducing the packaging waste that accompanies these products. The garden is also good for the household budget, because you don’t spend money on vegetables,” she says.
Cultivating a home garden also helps reduce food waste. Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This food that does not reach anyone’s table consumes 250 trillion liters of irrigated water and 1.4 billion hectares of land and still generates 4.4 tons of carbon dioxide, according to FAO. Food waste is also, of course, a waste of money, globally about US$900 billion in losses.
While you can also reduce food waste at the point of purchase, through conscious consumption, and in the food preparation process (by using stalks and peels in your cooking), the vegetable garden can also provide motivation for another vital way of curbing waste: composting inedibles into organic fertilizer.
The size and location of your seedbeds will depend on how much space you have, and what you would like to plant. You can start with some tea or spices in small pots, as Souza teaches.
Another option is to plant bigger vegetables, such as carrots and collard greens, in buckets, cans or crates, remembering to leave room for the roots to grow. “The most amazing thing about a home garden is always having what you most like at your fingertips,” says Danielle.
- Find out how much water it takes to produce various foods that we consume daily.
- This guide, created by the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN), recommends foods that are good for your health and less destructive to the environment.
- A study conducted in the United States detected the presence of pesticides in many foods consumed by Americans, even after washing and peeling. The complete list of 48 items can be seen here.
- Food waste is a complex problem with causes that vary according to country. For more information, take a close look at this FAO report here and here on losses incurred by food waste, its impact on nature and how to prevent it.
The Farmers’ Almanac offers extensive information on how to plant a home garden, including, if you live in the U.S. or Canada, an indispensable guide to planting times, which you can find here. | <urn:uuid:8131f24b-4e88-49a2-ba67-44373164b514> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://believe.earth/en/grow-your-own-vegetables/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.953967 | 898 | 3 | 3 |
Swap memory, also known as virtual memory, is a space on a hard disk that is used to supplement the physical memory (RAM) of a computer. The swap space is used when the system runs out of physical memory, and it moves less frequently accessed data from RAM to the hard disk, freeing up space in RAM for more frequently accessed data. But should swap memory be enabled on production systems and cloud-provided virtual machines (VMs)? Let's explore the pros and cons.
Pros of enabling swap memory
Enables the system to continue functioning when it runs out of physical memory by allowing less frequently accessed data to be moved to the swap space.
Allows the system to run more applications than it could with just physical memory alone.
Provides a safety net in case of memory leaks or runaway processes that consume all available physical memory.
Cons of enabling swap memory
Moving data between physical memory and swap space can be slower than accessing data directly from physical memory, which can result in performance degradation.
Excessive swapping can cause disk I/O bottlenecks, leading to poor overall system performance.
The system may become unresponsive or crash if the swap space is not sufficient to handle the amount of data being moved from physical memory.
Factors to consider enabling swap memory
Whether or not to enable swap memory on a production system depends on various factors, such as the amount of physical memory available, the nature of the workload, and the system's overall performance requirements.
For example, a system with a large amount of physical memory may not need swap memory at all. On the other hand, a system with only a few gigabytes of RAM running a workload that frequently exceeds that amount may benefit from having swap memory enabled. Certain workloads may be more memory-intensive than others, which can impact the need for swap memory. For instance, a server that frequently processes large datasets may benefit from having swap memory enabled, as it may need to keep more data in memory than is physically available.
If a production system requires high performance and low latency, enabling swap memory may not be desirable, as it can cause disk I/O bottlenecks and slow down the system. However, a batch processing system that doesn't require real-time responsiveness may benefit from having swap memory enabled, as it could allow it to process more data in parallel.
In the case of cloud-provided virtual machines (VMs), the decision to enable swap memory also depends on the specific requirements of the workload and the resources available in the VM. Most cloud providers offer VMs with a predefined amount of memory, and users can choose to add swap memory as needed. However, some cloud providers may not allow users to configure swap memory or may limit the amount of swap space that can be added.
Enabling swap memory on a cloud-provided VM can also have performance implications. If the VM is running on shared infrastructure, excessive swapping can impact the performance of other VMs running on the same physical server. It's important to carefully evaluate the specific requirements of the workload, the resources available in the VM, and the performance implications of enabling swap memory before making a decision.
In conclusion, whether or not to enable swap memory on a production system or cloud-provided VM depends on various factors, and it's essential to carefully evaluate these factors before making a decision. Monitoring the system's memory usage and swap usage regularly can also help ensure that the system is not excessively swapping and that enabling swap memory is not impacting overall system performance. | <urn:uuid:484ae29a-3542-42e4-bece-d19df36b857d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://blog.netdata.cloud/swap-memory-when-and-how-to-use-it-on-your-production-systems-or-cloud-provided-vms/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.910073 | 716 | 3.3125 | 3 |
This blog was written by Kelli Gladding, a biological scientist for the UF/IFAS Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants.
Invasive aquatic plants negatively impact the success of native plant populations. As a biological scientist, one of the systems I visit frequently is Lake Cypress, located in South Central Florida in Osceola County. Lake Cypress is part of the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes (KCOL) between Lake Tohopekaliga and Lake Hatchineha.
On October 24, 2023, I observed hydrilla (Hydrilla verticillata) that had been uprooted from the lake bottom and appeared to have been washed over the top of the native emergent plants, Southern bulrush (Schoenoplectus californicus) and the Kissimmee grass (aka- Knot grass, (Paspalidium geminatum). There was approximately a 12-foot-wide band of hydrilla over the top of the bulrush stretching >1,000 feet in length along the shoreline, pushing the tall reed-like leaves down into the water of the bulrush and smothering this beneficial native species.
Hydrilla is a non-native and invasive weed and has invaded Lake Cypress since the mid 1980’S. Hydrilla is mostly thought of as a weed that can outcompete native submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV- plants that grow entirely under the surface of the water). In the spring of 2023, the dominant SAV was the native Illinois Pondweed (aka- peppergrass, (Potamogeton illinoensis) with Eel grass (Vallisneria americana) over the summer, the hydrilla quickly grew and outcompeted the native SAV and has currently filled in the lake with over 3,000 acres across the lake.
This isn’t the only occasion when I have observed this phenomenon. In January of 2022, following a strong windstorm on Lake Apopka, the Orange County side of the lake, hydrilla was observed to have been uprooted and smothering several emergent native plants such as Bulrush, Kissimmee grass and Cattails for thousands of feet along the shoreline. While the hydrilla had been uprooted in Apopka, the native SAV, Eel grass was still rooted under the water’s surface near the Kissimmee grass. There is an obvious short-term impact on the native emergent plant species by thinning the overall abundance but the longer-term impacts of hydrilla smothering native emergent plants still needs to be researched.
It’s difficult to draw long-term conclusions from these observations but they are interesting, nonetheless. To see an invasive plant, that typically causes negative impacts from below the surface, be just as problematic above the waterline can be concerning. Have you seen something similar? Let us know!
This blog post was written by Kelli Gladding, UF/IFAS CAIP biological scientist. Questions or comments can be sent to the UF/IFAS CAIP communications manager at email@example.com. Follow UF/IFAS CAIP on Instagram. Subscribe for more blogs like this one.
UF/IFAS Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants. Turning Science Into Solutions.
Did you find this post helpful? Click the heart below! | <urn:uuid:884c20dc-80e1-42c5-920c-17117149e112> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/caip/2023/11/06/field-finds-biologist-observes-uprooted-hydrilla-washed-over-native-plants/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.943415 | 715 | 3.390625 | 3 |
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at that age when every man is, experimentally, something of a physician, he was enabled to turn to advantage the little knowledge in the healing art which he had casually picked up; and was sufficiently successful in two or three cases, to convince the simple Indians that report had not exaggerated his medical talents. The only patient that effectually baffled his skill, or rather discouraged any attempt at relief, was an antiquated squaw with a churchyard cough, and one leg in the grave; it being shrunk and rendered useless by a rheumatic affection. This was a case beyond his mark; however, he comforted the old woman with a promise that he would endeavor to procure something to relieve her, at the fort on the Wallah-Wallah, and would bring it on his return; with which assurance her husband was so well satisfied, that he presented the captain with a colt, to be killed as provisions for the journey: a medical fee which was thankfully accepted.
While among these Indians, Captain Bonneville unexpectedly found an owner for the horse which he had purchased from a Root Digger at the Big Wyer. The Indian satisfactorily proved that the horse had been stolen from him some time previous, by some unknown thief. "However," said the consider
ate savage, "you got him in fair trade-you are more in want of horses than I am: keep him; he is yours-he is a good horse; use him well."
Thus, in the continual experience of acts of kindness and generosity, which his destitute condition did not allow him to reciprocate, Captain Bonneville passed some short time among these good people, more and more impressed with the general excellence of their character.
Scenery of the Way-lee-way-A Substitute for Tobacco-Sublime Scenery of Snake River-The Garrulous old Chief and his Cousin-A Nez Percé Meeting A Stolen Skin-The Scapegoat DogMysterious Conferences - The Little Chief - His Hospitality-The Captain's Account of the United States-His Healing Skill.
N resuming his journey, Captain Bonneville was conducted by the same Nez Percé guide, whose knowledge of the country was important in choosing the routes and resting places. He also continued to be accompanied by the worthy old chief with the hard name, who seemed bent upon doing the honors of the country, and introducing him to every branch of his tribe. The Way-lee-way, down the banks of which Captain Bonneville and his companions were now travelling, is a considerable stream winding through a succession of bold and beautiful scenes. Sometimes the landscape towered into bold and mountain
ous heights that partook of sublimity; at other times, it stretched along the water-side in fresh smiling meadows, and graceful undulating valleys.
Frequently in their route they encountered small parties of the Nez Percés, with whom they invariably stopped to shake hands; and who, generally, evinced great curiosity concerning them and their adventures; a curiosity which never failed to be thoroughly satisfied by the replies of the worthy Yo-mus-ro-y-e-cut, who kindly took upon himself to be spokesman of the party.
The incessant smoking of pipes incident to the long talks of this excellent, but somewhat garrulous old chief, at length exhausted all his stock of tobacco, so that he had no longer a whiff with which to regale his white companions. In this emergency, he cut up the stem of his pipe into fine shavings, which he mixed with certain herbs, and thus manufactured a temporary succedaneum, to enable him to accompany his long colloquies and harangues with the customary fragrant cloud.
If the scenery of the Way-lee-way had charmed the travellers with its mingled amenity and grandeur, that which broke upon them on once more reaching Snake River, filled them with admiration and astonishment. At times
the river was overhung by dark and stupendous rocks, rising like gigantic walls and battlements; these would be rent by wide and yawning chasms, that seemed to speak of past convulsions of nature. Sometimes the river was of a glassy smoothness and placidity; at other times it roared along in impetuous rapids and foaming cascades. Here the rocks were piled in the most fantastic crags and precipices; and in another place, they were succeeded by delightful valleys carpeted with green-sward. The whole of this wild and varied scenery was dominated by immense mountains rearing their distant peaks into the clouds. "The grandeur and originality of the views presented on every side," says Captain Bonneville, "beggar both the pencil and the pen. Nothing we had ever gazed upon in any other region could for a moment compare in wild majesty and impressive sternness, with the series of scenes which here at every turn astonished our senses, and filled us with awe and delight."
Indeed, from all that we can gather from the journal before us, and the accounts of other travellers, who passed through these regions in the memorable enterprise of Astoria, we are inclined to think that Snake River must be one of the most remarkable for varied and striking scenery of all the rivers of this continent. From | <urn:uuid:8e9c943f-840e-4c81-aebc-3507a52f26bb> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://books.google.co.in/books?id=uXwTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA39&focus=viewport&vq=%22flourish+undisturbed+%3B+though,+by+cutting+them+down,+they+might+open+new+streets,+and+put+money+in+their+pockets.+In%22&dq=editions:LCCN01002996&lr=&output=html_text | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.981334 | 1,099 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Commentary: Democracy demands less time behind closed doors for local governments
Hear about something called “Democracy Day” and it’s easy to imagine it refers to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., the White House and the federal government. But democracy isn’t limited to the halls of Congress. Democracy plays just as big a role in the county courthouse and city hall.
The most common display of democracy at the local level can be found in the public meetings of school boards, city councils and county commissions. Those meetings, and public access to them, are an important part of the democratic process.
In the recent past there have been some favorable changes to the laws governing open meetings in South Dakota. One change determined that meeting times and agendas be posted far enough ahead of the meeting so that members of the public and the media could make plans to attend.
In the last legislative session, a provision that calls for a time for comment from the public was mandated for the agendas of almost all public meetings. Assuring that the public knows when their local boards will meet and that they’re assured of a chance to speak at that meeting are fine symbols of democracy in action. It’s when the door closes on the public that the threat to democracy grows.
The state’s laws governing executive sessions — those times when local boards and commissions can discuss issues behind closed doors — is an area of frequent complaint by reporters and editors. Often it’s left to journalists to raise the issue of open meetings violations because they are likely to be the only members of the public in attendance.
A local elected board can meet in executive session to consult with its attorney about a lawsuit or pending litigation or discuss personnel issues. There are some provisions in the law for discussing security matters and union negotiations. Schools can deal with student issues in closed session.
In too many cases the board will allow itself the luxury of closing out the prying eyes of the public simply by virtue of having their attorney in the room. Personnel issues discussed behind closed doors should be restricted to hiring and firing. Yet elected officials may take that broad category to mean that they can shut out the public while they discuss with the highway superintendent the awful job his crew did filling potholes — an item in which the public has a keen interest.
The often unspoken quality of the open meetings law is that it is written with permissive language. Boards and councils may go into executive session to discuss certain subjects, but there’s nothing in the law that says they have to close out the public.
One subject that’s routinely closed to the public but could be held in open session is school board negotiations with teachers. Traditionally, those talks are held away from public view. When successfully completed, the school offers a two- or three-line news release to say that all is well. The single largest line item in a school budget is teacher pay, yet when negotiations on a new salary package are finished, the public is left with no context as to how or why an agreement was reached. Clueless as to what just happened, the public’s only role is to pay.
A solution to executive session violations — which hasn’t gained any traction in the Legislature — is having local boards and commissions record and archive their closed meetings. Should a complaint be filed about the misuse of executive session, a judge could review the recording to determine if a violation took place.
While this seems like a common sense solution, it was beaten back by lobbyists for cities, counties and schools. They claimed such a provision would place a too big a burden on small local governmental bodies who wouldn’t have the funds or the technical know-how for such a system. That argument doesn’t hold much weight after the pandemic when local meetings were often available on Zoom. In today’s technological age, it’s not that great a leap from broadcasting on the internet to making and saving digital recordings.
One idea floating around about how to enhance the open meetings law wouldn’t cost local governments a cent. All it calls for is a small investment of time. In a perfect world the open meetings law would include a provision that whenever a new member joins a local board or commission, that group’s lawyer must take some time to review with all the elected officials the open meetings law and the provisions governing the proper use of executive session.
A provision like that could help keep violations from happening, and it would be an important step toward enhancing democracy at the local level.
About South Dakota Searchlight: We use our journalistic searchlight to illuminate critical issues facing South Dakota, dissect the decisions made by state leaders, and explain the consequences of their policies and the role of politics on South Dakotans. South Dakota Searchlight launched in 2022. We’re an affiliate of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by grants and a coalition of donors and readers. The staff of the Searchlight retains full editorial independence. | <urn:uuid:2dfd69b0-ed69-4b31-a119-813bff65bf52> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://brookingsregister.com/article/commentary-democracy-demands-less-time-behind-closed-doors-for-local-governments | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.961465 | 1,035 | 2.546875 | 3 |
John Tolley, March 28, 2018
When we say that this Penn State experiment is ?out of this world,? we?re not being hyperbolic. Set to launch next week from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket, named the Water Recovery X-ray rocket (WRX), will carry an X-ray spectrograph developed by a research team helmed by Penn State.
The rocket?s sub-orbital, parabolic flight will give the spectrograph roughly 5 minutes in space, enough time to test the device and to scan X-rays related to the Vela supernova.
Speaking with the Penn State News, Professor Randall McEntaffer explained the utility of testing the spectrograph on this rare celestial occurrence.
?Supernova remnants in our galaxy are good to study due to their proximity, which makes them large, bright targets on the sky,? said Randall McEntaffer, professor of astronomy and astrophysics and of physics at Penn State, and principal investigator of WRX. ?This mission gives us an opportunity to demonstrate the improved efficiency of the X-ray spectrograph that we designed and built, as well as learn about the supernova remnant.?
Supernovae occur when supermassive stars collapse under their own weight. The resulting explosion is veritable cosmic crucible, rocketing elements like oxygen, iron and silicon into space. Supernovae also produce high energy electromagnetic radiation, which scientists can probe to learn more about the event and its role in our universe?s constant cycle of reinvention.
The launch location in the southern hemisphere was chosen to give researchers the optimal vantage point for viewing the Vela supernova radiation. The launch will also be the first to use NASA?s newly-developed water recovery system.
To learn more about the launch and Penn State?s latest astronomic experiment, visit the link above. | <urn:uuid:736fc5cd-d838-4b75-9ef4-7b7ca81d19e2> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://btn.com/2018/03/28/a-penn-state-experiment-peers-into-the-cosmic-crucible-btn-livebig/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.92977 | 395 | 3.125 | 3 |
Professionals are upgrading their skills and education, thanks to these companies that pay for college.
Check out the companies creating the apps we use every day.
These B2B companies provide services ranging from analyzing customer feedback to facilitating employee collaboration.
Data wrangling is the process of transforming raw data into easily understandable formats and organizing sets into a single structure for further processing.
Data visualization is a method of displaying data in graphs, charts and maps to make data easy to understand for those unfamiliar with the data set.
Python is a popular programming language to use in machine learning because it offers developers exceptional versatility and power while integrating with other software.
Python algorithms provide a detailed set of instructions by which you can process data for a specific purpose. The most well-known are sorting and graph.
Python is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that’s popular in data science thanks to its rich libraries offering deep learning capabilities.
Cryptanalysis is the study and discovery of vulnerabilities within cryptographic algorithms that can be used to decrypt ciphertext without the secret key.
Python web scraping is an automated method used for collecting large amounts of data from websites and storing it in a structured form. | <urn:uuid:501a0c4d-6d2d-4267-a8bf-f470c7a347bc> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://builtin.com/authors/anthony-corbo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.909212 | 243 | 2.59375 | 3 |
The history of the lottery in the US dates back to the early 1700s, when newspaper advertisements suggest that there were hundreds of lotteries operating in the United States. New Hampshire became the first state to offer the lottery in 1964, and the US Virgin Islands joined the fray in 2021. There are 45 US states and the District of Columbia that operate lotteries, with Puerto Rico launching a lottery in 2021. Today, there are instant win games and drawing games, with different prize payouts in each.
Lottery products are divided into categories and can be offered in many different ways, including online or at retail outlets, where lottery operators must comply with local laws. Players can purchase tickets and subscribe for future drawings online. There are also a variety of payment methods for lottery programs. A popular method of offering subscriptions is via a sweep account, where lottery operators debit or credit retail accounts to collect payments for tickets. A sweepstakes, on the other hand, are games in which prizes are awarded without the need to purchase anything.
The marketing and advertising division is responsible for the Lottery’s public relations campaigns, promotional activities, and VIP Club initiatives. It also manages a variety of other operations and activities, including the production of newsletters, special publications, and annual reports. The finance division began as Administration, Finance and Operations in 1977, but was reorganized in 2015 into Administration, Information Technology, and Special Projects. The Finance Division has three main units: Administration, Financial Operations, and Special Projects.
Online lottery sales are also an option for expanding the lottery’s reach. Currently, only a few states offer online lottery sales, but more are expected to follow suit in the future. A lottery app or website can help people buy tickets, check results, and win big prizes. The internet has revolutionized the lottery industry, and many players enjoy playing the game from the convenience of their homes. While there are some pitfalls associated with using online lottery services, lottery players are increasingly embracing them, and are encouraging others to do the same.
Multi-state lotteries are also popular, especially if you’re looking for huge jackpots. Mega Millions and Powerball are two examples of multi-state lotteries. The Multi-State Lottery Association, or MUSL, governs these games, and consists of 33 states. These states share the proceeds of the tickets sold, and the jackpot prize increases if no one claims it. There are also four-digit lotteries, which are equivalent to the five-digit lottery, and there are even games that combine two digits, like Mega Millions.
Today, seven jurisdictions in the US offer their lottery products online. Eight jurisdictions had a similar program until 2015, when the state of Minnesota ended it. The Department of Justice clarified its position on the Wire Act in 2011, making online lottery sales legal. In 2012, the Georgia Lottery approved online ticket sales and began selling Powerball and Mega Millions tickets. But, despite the advantages of online lotteries, the federal court’s ruling has been far from favorable for online lottery sales. | <urn:uuid:fb21acf8-10f3-4ed8-b970-ce109d39bcc7> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://c3stats.com/the-us-lottery-administration/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.962378 | 630 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Water Heater Efficiency - Tankless vs Storage
Heating water accounts for up to 30 percent of the average home's energy budget. Tankless water heaters, also known as demand-type or instantaneous water heaters, provide hot water only as it is needed. They don't produce the standby energy losses associated with storage water heaters, which can save you money.
Tankless water heaters heat water directly without the use of a storage tank. When a hot water tap is turned on, cold water travels through a pipe into the unit. Either a gas burner or an electric element heats the water. As a result, tankless water heaters deliver a constant supply of hot water. You don't need to wait for a storage tank to fill up with enough hot water.
For homes that use 41 gallons or less of hot water daily, demand water heaters can be 24%–34% more energy efficient than conventional storage tank water heaters. They can be 8%–14% more energy efficient for homes that use a lot of hot water -- around 86 gallons per day. You can achieve even greater energy savings of 27%–50% if you install a demand water heater at each hot water outlet.
Tankless water heaters will typically last longer and have lower operating and energy costs.
Most tankless water heaters have a life expectancy of more than 20 years. They also have easily replaceable parts that extend their life by many more years. In contrast, storage water heaters last 10–15 years.
After your demand water heater is properly installed and maintained, try some additional energy-saving strategiesto help lower your water heating bills. Fixing leaks, choosing a shower head with a flow rate of less than 2.5 gallons per minute and purchasing energy-efficient dishwashers/clothes washers are just a few ideas. | <urn:uuid:e9d69546-5cd9-49a6-aa03-300ace1efd36> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ca.eccotemp.com/blog/water-heater-efficiency-tankless-vs-storage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.932591 | 379 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Is a computer able to learn how to read ? And if yes, would you know how to teach him Armenian alphabet ?
A team from Calfa is leading a learning lab at TUMO Center of Yerevan, from March 7th to 22nd 2019, in order to make the public aware of the topic of the character recognition (OCR/HTR).
The objectives for the students are to discover the stakes and needs of OCR/HTR systems, to try their hand at the latest technologies in this area (particularly with technologies involving Deep Learning), and to build their own recognition engine. For 15 days, the students will evolve as data scientists and will be invited to work on the different development steps of an intelligent system, from preparing the data to evaluating the results.
This learning lab will also be the opportunity to go deeper into more specific topics embraced by Calfa : how to combine Armenian Studies and Artificial Intelligence, and for which purposes ? How Artificial Intelligence can be a differentiator in heritage preservation ? How are working Calfa and its partners for Armenian manuscripts at digital age ? So the workshop is including :
The TUMO Center for Creative Technologies is an organization that offers to young Armenians from 12 to 18 years old the opportunity to develop their own projects and take free courses in computer science, programming, robotics, and many other fields of the digital and creative technologies, supervised by experts and professionals.
The lab will be led at the TUMO Center of Yerevan by Chahan and Thomas. Follow us on our Facebook page to get some news on the workshop and the works of the students !
The announcement of the lab is on the TUMO website (English and Armenian) | <urn:uuid:bdb92d44-3edf-4f69-85d0-6a282cbf47a2> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://calfa.fr/blog/11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.94897 | 350 | 2.8125 | 3 |
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In Memory Of
On Oct. 15, friends and family remember the life of the Rev. Dr. David J. Mussatti, Episcopal priest and a teacher at Incline High School and Sierra Nevada College.
Mountaineer Transit Company
Here's the story behind that new service, and the original 911 number.
California will soon be getting a new hotline number as an alternative to 911 for mental health crises.
United States Marine Corps / WIkimedia Commons
When two San Francisco police officers showed up at Sean Moore’s house in early January of 2017, responding to a complaint from a neighbor, they were not aware that the man they were about to confront suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Nor were the two cops trained in mental health crisis intervention. A fight ensued between Moore and the officers, which ended only when they shot him in the midsection and the groin.
Moore fortunately survived his wounds. But a few months later, in Sacramento County, Mikel McIntyre was not as fortunate. According to his mother, McIntyre’s mental health issues had surfaced only recently, brought on, she believed, by stress in his life. He exhibited strange behavior.
Sheriff’s deputies first came to McIntyre’s home when his family called 911. But they somehow decided that he was not a candidate for a mental health hold. Later, they showed up in response to a call of a man attacking a woman in a parking lot. The woman was McIntyre’s mother. McIntyre threw rocks at the sheriff’s deputies, then ran away.
They shot him in the back, killing him.
The Dangers of 911 for People in a Mental Health Crisis
Those terrible incidents were just two out of hundreds nationwide in which police have shot and in many cases killed people who were going through a mental health crisis. A 2016 report by the Los Angeles Police Department found that more than one of every three people shot by the LAPD the previous year—14 of 38—had a history of mental illness. And since 2015, police officers across the United States have shot dead almost 1,500 mentally ill individuals, according to the Washington Post database of police shootings.
A 2015 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center found that people who have untreated mental illnesses are a stunning 16 times more likely to be killed during any encounter with police, compared to other people pulled over or stopped by cops.
Numbers like that are why, especially in the aftermath of the 2020 protests against police violence, questions have been raised—including by some police departments themselves—about why cops respond to mental health incidents at all, rather than clinicians or social workers with training in how to evaluate and handle people in the midst of a mental health crisis.
While some police departments have already instituted programs under which 911 dispatchers send mental health professionals rather than or in addition to police in response to mental health calls, the California legislature in early September passed $20 million in new funding to support a new emergency call service that would be separate from 911. According to a CalMatters report by Jocelyn Wiener, the lawmakers allocated the cash to support in-state operations of the new service, which utilizes the telephone-dial numbers 988, and was approved on a bipartisan basis by the United States Congress in 2020.
911 May Have Been Pushed Forward by an Infamous Murder
The 988 number will be the first new emergency number in the United States since 1967. The United Kingdom’s emergency number, 999, has been in use since 1937. The idea for a dedicated emergency phone number in the United States was first proposed 20 years after that, in 1957, by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, who thought it would be a good idea for people to have a single number they could call to report fires. At that time, people had nowhere to call that was supposed to be just for emergencies. The telephone company's operator, or a nearby hospital, was on the receiving end of emergency calls. In 1921, New York City’s Bellevue Hospital answered 2,500 emergency calls every day.
It took another 10 years, until 1967, for the single-number idea to take hold. The idea was, at least according to a PBS report, propelled forward by a tragedy—the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, in New York City. The murder became a grimly iconic illustration of the supposed apathy of city dwellers who witnessed the attack but did nothing because they didn't want to “get involved.”
But if even one witness had a simple quick number to call, perhaps Geneovese could have been saved. That was reportedly the thinking at the time. Three years later, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice decided that there should be one, easy-to-remember number for all types of emergencies.
California Led the Nation With First Statewide 911 Law
The Federal Communications Commission then huddled with AT&T—at the time a government-sanctioned telephone monopoly—to come up with the number “911” for the new emergency service, for the simple reasons that it was easy to remember and easy to dial, at a time when the rotary dial phone was still the dominant model (touch-tone phones were introduced in 1963, but did not take over the market until the 1980s). The “911” combination had also never been used before as an area code or other type of service code.
In a country as vast and spread out as the U.S., somehow convincing every state, every city, and every person to rely on one single phone number was not going to be easy. It wasn’t until 1973 that California became the first state to pass a law mandating that 911 be used as the universal emergency number. Even then, there were hurdles to cross. Namely, Gov. Ronald Reagan who needed some impassioned persuasion from Assemblymember Charles Hugh Warren (not related to California’s earlier governor, Earl Warren), who sponsored the 911 bill and proposed paying for it with a new tax, something the hardcore conservative Reagan generally frowned upon.
The tax came in the form of a surcharge on customers’ phone bills. The persistent Warren managed to get Reagan to sign off, and his bill unified the 911 system for the state—where previously each city managed its own emergency phone system—setting off a wave of similar legislation across the country.
New Surcharge Was Obstacle to 988 Bill’s Passage
The new federal law authorizes states to add new fees to consumer phone bills, in order to cover the cost of the new 988 service, which state officials described as a “robust” call system for acute mental health issues. The 988 number would connect callers with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL), which has 13 call centers in California. (The NSPH uses a standard, 10-digit phone number—1-800-273-8255—which could be difficult for a person going through a crisis to remember.) Those centers will likely see a surge in calls once the simpler, three-digit number goes into effect.
But the added phone bill fees were a sticking point in the legislature. California phone customers already have 30 cents added to their monthly bill to support 911 service. The legislation that would have added the new fee, appropriately numbered AB988, died in the state senate in June of 2021.
The bill would have allowed the 988 surcharge to run as high as 80 cents, though for the first two years it could be no higher than the 911 charge. The telecommunications industry lobbied hard against the bill, saying that if any new fee was added at all, it should cap out at 10 cents. The $20 million allocated by the state is intended to cover initial costs of the hotline, but advocates say that more funding will soon be necessary to keep the service running.
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We can't subscribe you with the submitted email address. Please try another. | <urn:uuid:135dffd1-26ec-43c9-9b06-63016ed6b989> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://californialocal.com/localnews/tahoe-truckee/ca/article/show/621-988-911-emergency-number-explained/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.969392 | 1,805 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Agricultural Production Through Fallow Land Reversion with Numerous Interventions
Radhi, popularly known as “the rice bowl of eastern Bhutan,” is Trashigang’s most abundant rice producing geog. Radhipas also cultivate vegetables and are self-sufficient. Despite having suitable land for vegetable production, the farmers of Radhi have been producing vegetables solely for household consumption. During the lean season, some farmers depended on imported vegetables while leaving their farmland fallow due to insufficient irrigation water, human wild life conflict and rugged terrain with stones. In this regard, Dzongkhag and Gewog Agriculture Sector initiated numerous development initiatives such as training and awareness on vegetable growing techniques, land development, electric fencing, seed supply, and many others with the goal of increasing local vegetable production while minimizing the dependence on imported commodities. The establishment of Chuthawong Commercial Vegetable Farming is one of the gewog’s exemplars of vegetable intensification among different projects.
Chuthawoong Commercial Vegetable Farming
A total of 27 acres of dry land belonging to the Pakaling village in Radhi Gewog, Trashigang, was converted into a commercial vegetable intensification site with funding from CARLEP-IFAD and technical assistance from ARDC Wengkhar and the Dzongkhag Agriculture Sector.
Prior to two decades ago, the village primarily grew maize and pulses on that fallow land, which they frequently traded for butter and cheese. With the rising population of wild animals, crop infestation and depreciation became more severe in the ensuing years, thus the land was left fallow. In 2007, the community attempted to revitalize fallow land by developing an integrated agricultural system using Sustainable Land Management Project (SLMP) funding, however the initiative failed owing to water constraint.
In 2019, Chuthawoong Commercial Vegetable Farming group was formed and the bushes were cleared. Subsequently, land development began on 24th March 2020 with fund support from CARLEP. Chuthawoong Commercial Vegetable Group constitutes of 27 members, of which 10 are females. The group is further divided into three sub-groups namely Khudumpang Detshen, Tsamang Detshen, Aumtsu Detshen and each group is allocated a specific plot for higher productions. Two of the three subgroups are heterogeneous (men and women) while one is homogeneous (women).
CARLEP provided a package of programs including land development, water pump irrigation, solar fence, 20 sets of drip irrigation, 16 numbers of fabricated greenhouses, vegetable seeds, and need-based training while the group contributed labor and local raw materials for the establishment of commercial farm. CARLEP and RGoB amounting to Nu.7.54 million.
Vegetable Production and Income Generation
The group cultivates a variety of vegetables on developed land, including potato, chili, cabbage, tomato, cauliflower, broccoli, beans, eggplant, and leafy vegetables, while chili and tomatoes are extensively produced within the greenhouse, particularly during the winter months. In addition, to avoid soil erosion, the organization has planted over 10,000 Napier slips on bunds and in unproductive fields.
As of March 2021, the group had produced 3.445 tons of vegetables, including 366 kilograms of Indian chili, 123 kilograms of local chili, 559 kilograms of tomato, 440 kilograms of cabbage, 280 kilograms of broccoli, 245 kilograms of cauliflower, 419 kilograms of radish, and 1.3 MT of other commodities, and had earned more than Nu. 0.2 million.
|Name of Group||Vegetable Production (Kg)||Income (Nu.)|
The group has market links with three schools, including Rangjung Central School, Radhi Middle Secondary School, and Pakaling Primary School, and also sells its produces at the Trashigang, Rangjung, and Kanglung markets.
“We feel satisfied and contented as we were able to supply chili and tomato worth Nu.100,000 within the Dzongkhags during the national lockdowns, when the nation required ample of veggies”, says, Kinzang, a member of the group.
Reported by:Pema Wangchen, Sr. ES III, Radhi Gewog
Edited by: Chhimi Lhamo, GKMO,OPM | <urn:uuid:fb8491f5-32fb-43e5-9d2b-cd0f109da88b> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://carlep.gov.bt/agricultural-production-through-fallow-land-reversion-with-numerous-interventions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.926614 | 914 | 2.578125 | 3 |
General Cooperative Resources
UWCC provides original research, holds an annual conference on cooperatives, and gives background information on different sectors.
Outlines different arguments for the promotion of cooperatives in the fight to develop jobs and promote equality in America. Contains several case studies about different types of cooperatives.
A consolidation of the economic data collected by the Cooperative Center related to the economic activity performed by cooperatives in the United States.
A list of papers available for download or purchase.
Resources for cooperatives in the Northeast. Includes a Q&A style navigation.
A training organization for members of cooperatives. The Shared Resource Library includes member-produced documents.
Definition, values, and principles of the cooperatives.
Provides graduate level curricula on cooperatives in a wiki-format.
The European region of the International Cooperative Alliance.
Supports the development of cooperatives by providing literature about successful cooperatives and help for those looking to start cooperatives, and conducts research on the cooperative movement. Offers a map with links to cooperative development centers located across the country.
Provides help and information for people who want to develop cooperatives in rural areas, as well as information about potential funding and links to research about the cooperative movement.
A summary of the way the cooperative movement has moved throughout the Aboriginal communities in North and South Quebec, and discusses the cooperative movement and its connection to Aboriginal desires for independence.
Food and Producer Cooperatives
See also: Food and Agriculture
“The Coop Directory Service is an online source of information about natural food co-ops.”
The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives is a national grassroots membership organization of and for worker cooperatives, democratic workplaces, and organizations that support the growth and development of worker cooperatives.
“This paper argues that worker cooperatives are prone to redistribution among members, and that this redistribution distorts incentives.”
Includes cooperatives, non-cooperative businesses, and other bodies.
The Evergreen Cooperative Initiative uses anchor institutions as a basis for development of worker cooperatives.
Describes the form and distinguishing aspects of worker cooperatives and discusses their presence in the United States. Includes a short literature review about the impact of employee-ownership on firms, employees, and communities, and suggests reasons for the rarity of worker cooperatives. Concludes with a discussion of the implications for employee-owned cooperative development in Iowa and provides suggestions for future research.
A resource guide for immigrants and potential immigrant coop developers. Gives background on worker cooperatives and principles, integrates many case studies throughout, and provides analysis and advice on the following topics: methods of organizing worker coops; legal icorporation forms and their advantages/drawbacks; different structural arrangements; management and governance; funding; and developing financial sustainability.
Analyzes the advantages of worker cooperatives for immigrants and refugees, as well as the limitations that this population faces when attempting to develop coops. Discusses strategies for immigrant worker coop development.
Discusses three pathways for developing effective management of immigrant worker coops: internal promotion of immigrant coop members, recruiting recent immigrant college graduates, and encouraging participant-developers. Reviews the author’s own experience as founder/ participant-developer of TeamWorks Cooperatives.
Motivating principles for the Asian Arts Initiative.
History of a Philadelphia artist cooperative.
About a Philadelphia artist cooperative.
Background on the Vox Populi artist cooperative.
About “a women’s co-operative founded in 1984 for the welfare of disadvantaged women and children.”
Child and Healthcare Cooperatives
The paper aims “to characterize the impact of the Coop de solidarité en soins et services de Saint-Camille’s activities on the community using the five dimensions pertaining to social cohesion — territoriality, accessibility of services, employability, democracy, and connectivity.”
“This case study looks at how a small rural community in Québec has aimed to reverse the trend of rural de-population, and rebuild services and economic opportunities for local people.”
History and background on healthcare cooperatives.
Links to healthcare cooperative information.
Cooperatives and Public Policy
A prominent organization related to the cooperative movement located in the Washington, DC area. Contains information about cooperative funding opportunities in the United States and around the world.
Text of the ILO’s Recommendation concerning Promotion of Cooperatives, which seeks to advise labour organizations on the promotion of cooperative development in their countries. | <urn:uuid:73b77daf-e116-44e5-ac5a-88a49f65242d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://cborowiak.haverford.edu/solidarityeconomy/resources-for-researchers/cooperatives/links/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.921207 | 930 | 2.953125 | 3 |
4+ had a brilliant visit from the Explorer Dome. The children were all dressed up in fabulous space costumes and loved clambering into the dome and seeing huge projected images of the moon, astronauts, planets and stars. They were told some wonderful stories about the stars they could see in the night sky and they learnt how to join the stars together like a dot-to-dot to make pictures. They particularly liked the story about Orion and Sirus. The children had a go at using their own imaginations to look up into the dome to create pictures from the stars. | <urn:uuid:79182103-e3e5-453c-aa98-7f20722ba7af> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://churchlangton.leics.sch.uk/explorer-dome/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.977096 | 115 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Since time immemorial, the concept of money has constantly evolved. We transitioned from the ancient barter system, adopted coins, embraced paper money, and then leapfrogged to plastic cards. The digital age has ushered in a fresh wave—central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), with China’s digital yuan leading the charge. Additionally, you can also start inversing the national cryptocurrency of Chian, the digital Yuan by visiting https://yuanprofit.io/
Table of Contents
Understanding the Digital Yuan
- Definition: The digital yuan, also known as Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), isn’t merely another cryptocurrency. It’s a CBDC, meaning it’s state-sanctioned, centrally regulated, and enjoys the backing of China’s central bank.
- Implementation: To appreciate its revolutionary nature, one only needs to look at the advanced trials in major cities like Beijing, Shenzhen, and Suzhou. Here, citizens have used digital yuan for everyday purchases, emphasizing its practicality.
- Mechanism: The digital yuan operates seamlessly, both online and offline. A unique feature, distinguishing it from many digital assets, is the ability to conduct transactions offline using a system of digital wallets and unique transactional codes.
The Rise of Cashless Economies Globally
- The Nordic Example: Sweden is nearing a tipping point. Over half its population already relies on Swish, a mobile payment system. Physical cash transactions are dwindling rapidly, demonstrating the feasibility of a fully cashless economy.
- Africa’s Mobile Money: In regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, platforms like M-Pesa have revolutionized money transfers, indicating a possible future where banknotes become obsolete.
- The Crypto Surge: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and their kin have stirred global financial waters, illustrating a demand for decentralized digital assets.
Advantages of the Digital Yuan for China
- Economic Monitoring: With the digital yuan, the Chinese government has a sharper tool against corruption and illicit financial activities. Every transaction leaves a trace, ensuring transparency and accountability.
- Policy Implementation: Monetary policy becomes more streamlined. In a scenario where interest rates are negative, CBDCs can directly influence consumer spending and saving habits.
- Reduced Reliance on Western Financial Systems: Currently, many international transactions run through the SWIFT system, headquartered in Belgium. With the digital yuan, China potentially bypasses such systems, reinforcing its economic independence.
International Implications of the Digital Yuan
- Trade and Commerce: BRI countries, heavily invested in trade with China, might find it economically viable to transact in digital yuan, promoting its use across Asia, Europe, and even Africa.
- Geopolitical Influence: If more countries lean towards the digital yuan for international settlements, it might challenge the U.S. dollar’s global dominance, altering the geopolitical power balance.
- Risks and Opportunities: While nations might find benefits in faster, cheaper cross-border transactions, there’s unease about China’s increasing influence over global trade dynamics.
Challenges and Concerns
- Privacy Issues: A fully traceable currency raises red flags for personal privacy. The degree of oversight the Chinese government holds over transactions becomes a contentious topic.
- Economic Disruptions: Rapid adoption of the digital yuan could challenge existing banking systems. Plus, like any digital system, there’s always a risk of hacks or failures, although such vulnerabilities would be rigorously addressed.
- Global Acceptance: While China’s economic partners might be inclined to adopt the digital yuan, Western countries, especially those in the EU and the U.S., might be more hesitant, owing to geopolitical and economic concerns.
The Future: What Comes Next?
- Beyond China: Other countries are closely monitoring China’s experiment. Nations like Japan, South Korea, and even the European Central Bank have expressed interest in launching their own CBDCs.
- Integration with Global Finance: As the digital yuan matures, we might witness its integration with global financial systems, either as a partner or a disruptor.
- The Role of Private Players: Giants like Alipay and WeChat Pay, which have already revolutionized digital payments in China, will undoubtedly play a pivotal role. The question is whether they’ll complement the digital yuan or compete against it.
The global movement towards diminishing the use of tangible currency is becoming increasingly prominent. At the heart of this evolution is the digital yuan, poised to significantly influence the framework of international finance. As the world navigates the intricacies of this financial metamorphosis, the eventual role and influence of the digital yuan will be closely watched, marking it either as a transformative milestone or a reference for subsequent financial innovations. | <urn:uuid:d7e75590-7074-4413-b687-e551864cb834> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://cinejoia.tv/how-digital-yuan-paves-the-way/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.88767 | 980 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Activity 1. - The y intercept: Understanding theConcept.
Use the StraightLineEqn.xls tool, which displays a graph ofan equation of the form:
y = mx + b.
Using the tool, first change the coefficient of xrepresented by “m” to 2. Then change the constant term represented by “b” inthe equation, and note the exact differences in the graph. As you do so, try todiscover a relationship between the constant term and the graph. NOTE: Tocomplete a change press the enter key after typing the new value.
Here are some examples. Below each equation note thedifference in the graph.
y = 2x
y = 2x + 4
y = 2x – 5
You may try some of your own. When you get the connection,proceed.
Answer these questions:
(a) What relationship do you notice between the y-interceptand the graph? Explain.
(ii) Say what is unique about thegraph of y = x and explain why.
This lesson incorporates the following teaching strategiesbases on the NCTM standards.
In addition the lesson meets the following technologyguidelines specified by | <urn:uuid:de5b5928-360b-4c4a-85e6-8b3c87436357> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://citejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/v6i2cp1Activity1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.877521 | 255 | 4.28125 | 4 |
The following is by Dennis Shea (NCAR)
Taylor diagrams provide "a concise statistical summary of how well patterns match each other in terms of their correlation, their root-mean-square difference and the ratio of their variances." Additional information such as percent bias can be added to the conventional Taylor diagram (see below). The Taylor diagram provides a graphical framework that allows a suite of variables from a variety of (say) one or more models or reanalyses to be compared to reference data. The reference data can be observationally based (eg, reanalysis) or to another model or a control run. All variables must be on the same grid so regridding may be necessary. The official reference is Taylor, K. E. (2001), Summarizing multiple aspects of model performance in a single diagram, J. Geophys. Res., 106(D7), 7183–7192, http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2000JD900719. Karl Taylor provides an excellent simple description of the diagram and how to interpret the plotted points at http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/about/staff/Taylor/CV/Taylor_diagram_primer.htm. The primer contains a link to a large suite of Taylor diagram examples.
Cite this page
National Center for Atmospheric Research Staff (Eds). Last modified 23 Jul 2013. "The Climate Data Guide: Taylor Diagrams." Retrieved from https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data-tools-and-analysis/taylor-diagrams.
Acknowledgement of any material taken from this page is appreciated. On behalf of experts who have contributed data, advice, and/or figures, please cite their work as well. | <urn:uuid:e346caf3-755a-4297-8cb5-59c01d4f09fd> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-tools/taylor-diagrams | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.819991 | 366 | 3.640625 | 4 |
AI Development with MATLAB: From Data Analysis to AI Models
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a transformative technology across various industries, driving innovation and automation. MATLAB, a powerful programming environment, provides a comprehensive platform for developing AI solutions. In this blog, we will delve into the exciting journey of AI development with MATLAB, covering the crucial steps from data analysis and preprocessing to building sophisticated AI models.
1. Understanding the Foundation: Data Analysis and Preprocessing
Before diving into AI model development, it’s essential to understand the foundational steps of data analysis and preprocessing. These steps lay the groundwork for building accurate and reliable AI models.
1.1. Importing and Exploring Data
MATLAB offers versatile tools for importing and exploring data. You can read data from various sources, such as CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, or databases, using functions like readtable and xlsread. Once imported, you can visualize and gain insights from your data using plotting functions like plot and scatter.
matlab data = readtable('dataset.csv'); summary(data); scatter(data.Age, data.Income); xlabel('Age'); ylabel('Income'); title('Age vs. Income');
1.2. Data Cleaning and Preprocessing
Data often requires cleaning and preprocessing to address missing values, outliers, and noise. MATLAB provides functions to handle these tasks effectively. For instance, the fillmissing function can impute missing values, and the zscore function can standardize data for modeling.
matlab cleanedData = fillmissing(data, 'linear'); standardizedData = zscore(cleanedData);
2. Building Machine Learning Models
With clean and preprocessed data, you can start building machine learning models using MATLAB’s rich set of functions and toolboxes.
2.1. Supervised Learning: Regression and Classification
For regression tasks, where the goal is to predict a continuous outcome, MATLAB offers algorithms like linear regression, support vector regression, and decision trees. For classification tasks, which involve assigning data to categories, you can use algorithms like logistic regression, support vector machines, and random forests.
matlab % Linear Regression model = fitlm(standardizedData, 'Income ~ Age + Education'); % Support Vector Machine svmModel = fitcsvm(standardizedData(:,1:2), standardizedData.Label, 'KernelFunction', 'rbf'); % Decision Tree Classification treeModel = fitctree(standardizedData(:,1:2), standardizedData.Label);
2.2. Unsupervised Learning: Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction
Unsupervised learning techniques are used when there are no predefined labels in the data. MATLAB supports clustering algorithms such as k-means and hierarchical clustering, as well as dimensionality reduction techniques like principal component analysis (PCA) and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE).
matlab % K-Means Clustering idx = kmeans(standardizedData(:,1:2), 3); % Principal Component Analysis coeff = pca(standardizedData); reducedData = standardizedData * coeff(:,1:2); % t-SNE tsneData = tsne(standardizedData);
3. Deep Learning and Neural Networks
As AI evolves, deep learning and neural networks have gained significant attention for their ability to model complex patterns in data. MATLAB provides an extensive deep learning toolbox that simplifies the process of creating and training neural networks.
3.1. Designing Neural Architectures
MATLAB’s deep learning toolbox allows you to design neural architectures using either a high-level approach with the layerGraph object or a simple sequential model using layer functions.
matlab layers = [ imageInputLayer([28 28 1]) convolution2dLayer(3, 16, 'Padding', 'same') reluLayer() maxPooling2dLayer(2, 'Stride', 2) fullyConnectedLayer(10) softmaxLayer() classificationLayer() ];
3.2. Transfer Learning and Pretrained Models
Transfer learning enables you to leverage pretrained neural networks for tasks with limited data. MATLAB supports transfer learning by fine-tuning existing models like AlexNet, ResNet, and VGG.
matlab net = resnet50; % Pretrained ResNet-50 newLayers = [ fullyConnectedLayer(128) reluLayer() fullyConnectedLayer(10) softmaxLayer() classificationLayer() ]; combinedLayers = [net.Layers(1:end-3); newLayers];
3.3. Training and Evaluation
Training a neural network involves feeding it with data and adjusting its weights based on the error. MATLAB provides tools to manage training settings, data augmentation, and validation.
matlab options = trainingOptions('adam', ... 'MaxEpochs', 10, ... 'MiniBatchSize', 64, ... 'ValidationData', valData, ... 'ValidationFrequency', 100, ... 'Plots', 'training-progress'); trainedNet = trainNetwork(trainData, layers, options);
4. Deployment and Beyond
Once you’ve developed and fine-tuned your AI model, it’s time to deploy it for practical use.
4.1. Deployment Options
MATLAB supports various deployment options, including generating standalone executables, deploying to cloud platforms, and integration into mobile and web applications.
matlab % Deploy to MATLAB Production Server compiler = mcc('-m', 'yourScript.m', '-d', 'outputDir'); % Deploy to Cloud deployToCloud(myModel, 'ModelName', 'MyCloudModel'); % Integration with Web Application MATLAB Web App Designer allows seamless integration.
4.2. Continuous Improvement and Monitoring
AI models require continuous improvement and monitoring. MATLAB enables you to monitor model performance, retrain models with new data, and fine-tune hyperparameters to maintain accuracy over time.
MATLAB provides a comprehensive environment for AI development, encompassing data analysis, preprocessing, machine learning, deep learning, deployment, and ongoing improvement. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, MATLAB’s user-friendly interface and powerful capabilities make it a valuable tool for transforming your AI ideas into reality. Start your journey today and unlock the potential of AI with MATLAB.
In this blog, we explored the journey of AI development with MATLAB, covering key steps from data analysis and preprocessing to building advanced AI models. We looked at code samples and explanations for importing data, cleaning data, building machine learning models, delving into deep learning and neural networks, and deploying AI models for real-world applications. With MATLAB’s versatile tools and rich functionalities, you can embark on an exciting AI development journey and contribute to the forefront of technological innovation.
Table of Contents | <urn:uuid:6f62ccab-d28f-40e0-940b-60ad7862a5e4> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://clouddevs.com/ai/development-with-matlab/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.790261 | 1,461 | 2.78125 | 3 |
In this free Medical Spanish lesson you will learn two easy rules for making sure you’re pronouncing medical Spanish words properly. These 2 medical Spanish pronunciation rules apply to all Spanish words as well, and they’re especially great for all of you learners who are learning new vocabulary through self-study with your own books and resources.
Here is the Medical Spanish lesson about Spanish Pronunciation Rules I taught to the Facebook group:
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel to see all of our lessons and get the latest videos right away!
El Problema – ¿Dónde poner énfasis?
One of the most common confusions when learning a new language is where to put emphasis and which vowels or syllables to stress in a word as you pronounce it. However, once you get a hang of pronunciation and natural stress on words, you’re able to comprehend the people you’re speaking to much easier and you are able to be more easily understood.
Regla número 1 : Palabras que terminan en una vocal (a, e, i, o, u), la letra N o la letra S:
In Spanish, all words that end in a vowel (a, e, i, o, u), N or S have the natural stress on the 2nd to last syllable. The bold syllables below are the natural stress of the word
|La doc-to-ra||The doctor|
|Los ra-yos e-quis||The X-Ray|
|Las es-tu-dian-tes||The Students|
Regla # 2: Todas las otras palabras:
If a word doesn’t end in a VOWEL, N or S, then the natural stress is on the final syllable. See the examples below with the final syllable highlighted.
|El hos-pi-tal||The hospital|
|El do-lor||The pain|
|Ha-blar||To speak (v)|
|Co-mer||To eat (v)|
|Vi-vir||To live (v)|
¿Qué pasa con los acentos? Los acentos rompen las 2 reglas:
When you see written accents on a word, that usually means the word’s pronunciation is breaking one of the natural pronunciation rules. In rare cases, it just distinguishes one word from another like: si = if, sí = yes. However, more often than not, a written accent means that a word may end in a vowel, n or s, but the stress isn’t on the 2nd to last syllable. See below how the words break the natural accentuation rules…
|La mé-di-ca||The doctor|
|El car-dió-lo-go||The cardiologist|
|La Hin-cha-zón||The swelling|
|La In-fec-ción||The infection|
¿Cómo se pronuncian estas palabras?
|La enfermera||The nurse|
|El órgano||The organ|
|La infección||The infection|
For a more thorough discussion on medical Spanish pronunciation, consider this online course I put together for you to practice your pronunciation!
I packaged all of this into easily downloadable .pdf notes –
Keep up the good work speaking responsible Spanish to your patients!
*If the link isn’t working for you, you may need to unblock pop-ups in your browser settings | <urn:uuid:8afbe2c8-89c1-486d-9fa2-c1d4559ff6d7> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://commongroundinternational.com/medical-spanish/2-medical-spanish-pronunciation-rules/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.746726 | 763 | 3.640625 | 4 |
The drastic increasing demand for energy aggravates the shortage of energy state. Using green renewable energy paves a way to solve the above problem, however, how to access and control these types of intermittent energy faces more challenges. Energy Internet (or Internet of energy), differentiated from the Internet of only transferring and sharing information, has been forecasted as a typical representative of the coming industry revolution. Comparing with the Internet, energy Internet must have the ability of efficiently managing the energy lifecycle including energy production, energy transmission and distribution, and energy consumption. Its objective contains conveniently switching in and switching out, efficiently dispatching energy and dedicatedly fulfilling all consumers' demand etc. In this paper, we analyze the potential requirements of the future energy system, state the related concepts and characters of energy Internet, survey all results with respect to the information technology in energy Internet，and conclude an energy Internet infrastructure and its support technologies. In addition, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of information technology during developing the energy Internet. | <urn:uuid:d2840b55-21d7-4e64-8e6a-54e0fcb7bd3c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://crad.ict.ac.cn/cn/article/doi/10.7544/issn1000-1239.2015.20131592 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.914344 | 202 | 2.96875 | 3 |
You can smile with confidence when your teeth and gums are healthy. Some dental tips can help you achieve and maintain oral health.
Improve Your Diet. There are some products you should avoid for healthy gums and teeth. Some of the most common examples include sugary products, sticky foods, and acidic foods and beverages.
For healthy teeth and gums, fresh crunchy vegetables make excellent snacks. Make sure your diet contains plenty of calcium from dairy products and other calcium-rich foods.
Take Care of Your Dental Health. Visit your dentist at least twice each year for a thorough examination and professional cleaning. Contact your dentist immediately if you experience any dental emergency.
Never skip your home oral care routines. You should floss, brush, and use a good mouthwash at least twice each day.
More Dental Tips For Healthy Gums And Teeth:
If you participate in any sport or other physical activity, talk to your dentist about a mouth guard. A mouth guard can prevent serious injuries to your teeth and gums.
A mouth guard is also useful if you grind your teeth. Grinding can wear down tooth enamel, and can increase your risk of temporomandibular joint disorder.
Whether you use a mouth guard for sports or to prevent grinding, it is easy to use and comfortable to wear when you choose one that fits properly. You can enjoy your favorite sports, and have restful sleep every night, when you wear an appropriate mouth guard.
These dental tips can help you avoid many unnecessary problems. It will be easier for you to enjoy your life when you have healthy teeth and gums. You will be less likely to develop oral health problems, and you will always look your best. Every time you talk and smile, you can do so with complete confidence. | <urn:uuid:70470396-2ba8-4c12-97ca-0607dcf4c126> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://danawaltersdds.com/blog/tips-keep-teeth-gums-healthy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.923851 | 366 | 2.796875 | 3 |
In computer programming, digraphs and trigraphs are sequences of two and three characters, respectively, that appear in source code and, according to a programming language specification, should be treated as if they were single characters.
Why Digraphs and Trigraphs exist?
Various reasons exist for using digraphs and trigraphs: keyboards may not have keys to cover the entire character set of the language, input of special characters may be difficult, text editors may reserve some characters for special use and so on.
The C preprocessor replaces all occurrences of the following nine trigraph sequences by their single-character equivalents before any other processing.
??? is not itself a trigraph sequence, but when followed by a character such as
- it will be interpreted as
Unlike trigraphs, digraphs are handled during tokenization, and any digraph must always represent a full token by itself, or compose the token
%:%: replacing the preprocessor concatenation token
##. If a digraph sequence occurs inside another token, for example a quoted string, or a character constant, it will not be replaced.
C++ introduces tokens. The C++ Standard makes this comment with regards to the term "digraph":
The term digraph (token consisting of two characters) is not perfectly descriptive, since one of the alternative preprocessing-tokens is
%:%: and of course several primary tokens contain two characters. Nonetheless, those alternative tokens that aren’t lexical keywords are colloquially known as digraphs.
As a note,
%:%: is treated as a single token, rather than two occurrences of %:. | <urn:uuid:d75ad585-2660-482b-b477-3d04b3e93fda> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://developerinsider.co/what-is-digraphs-trigraphs-and-tokens-c-cpp-programming-language/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.867033 | 340 | 4.3125 | 4 |
Destructive wildland fires in 2002 were a catalyst for Congress to pass the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) in 2003.
The intent of the HFRA was to provide funding and guidance for better forest management practices throughout wildland areas and the wildland urban interface.
One of the key outcomes of the HFRA was to incentivize communities to create a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, simply known as a CWPP.
An approved CWPP can influence and prioritize future funding for hazardous fuel reduction projects, including where and how federal agencies implement fuel reduction projects on federal lands.
More information on CWPPs can be found on the national Forests and Rangelands website.
Three Basic Criteria for CWPPs
- Collaboration: A CWPP must be collaboratively developed by local and state government representatives, in consultation with federal agencies and other interested parties.
- Prioritized Fuel Reduction: A CWPP must identify and prioritize areas for hazardous fuel reduction treatments and recommend the types and methods of treatment that will protect one or more at-risk communities and essential infrastructure.
- Treatment of Structural Ignitability: A CWPP must recommend measures that homeowners and communities can take to reduce the ignitability of structures throughout the area addressed by the plan.
CWPP Guidance Requirements
Every year, the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management analyzes communities across the state to determine which ones are at risk for a catastrophic wildfire. To see the list of communities at risk, please visit our Arizona At Risk Community page.
However, through programs, such as Firewise USA, we work with communities, HOAs, and municipalities to evaluate their risk factors, and if necessary, take the imperative steps of working to reduce the chances of devastating wildfires burning through their communities.
We also provide grant funding to help communities pay for fuels mitigation work in their area. The Department of Forestry and Fire Management also develops and implements project work across the state to reduce hazardous fuels and maintain the health of our forests.
*The Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management is currently in the process of revising the CWPP process and developing new minimum standards. For immediate information or assistance please contact Karl Gehrke | <urn:uuid:390779a5-dcc3-48e7-981a-8e842d702923> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://dffm.az.gov/fire/prevention/plans | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.934436 | 446 | 2.5625 | 3 |
we will explain what are the basic concepts for you to understand what Bitcoin is, a cryptocurrency that everyone has been talking about for a few years. This explanation will also help you to know what exactly cryptocurrencies are and how they work, so that you can have a non-technical notion of how it all works and what we mean by each term.
It is a guide with which we want explain everything as simply as possible, trying not to resort to technicalities or words. We will start by telling you what Bitcoin is, and we will continue to explain what cryptocurrencies are in general so that you understand it better. Then, we will tell you what the Blockchain on which it is based is, and how you can get them.
what is bitcoin
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency or virtual currency, specifically the first that was developed. It is the cryptocurrency that has paved the way for all others who came later using their technology. This technology is the chain of blocks or blockchain, which is also used for other things.
The first of the cryptocurrencies was created “Satoshi Nakamoto”, which is the pseudonym that corresponds to a person who nobody knows exactly who he is, although there have been many theories. This person published an article in 2009 in which he described a P2P payment system that he called Bitcoin. After a few months, he himself published the first version of the software that allows managing the currency network, and begins to interact with the first interested parties in forums.
The total amount of bitcoins issued each year is determined by its algorithm, and the same goes for other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is developed so that every four years its production is reduced by two, and so that only a total of 21 million Bitcoins are issued. After that, they will simply stop being created.
This is a fundamental difference with conventional currencies, since banks modify their value at their free will. Therefore, the currencies can be devalued, while bitcoin wants to offer a little more stability.
What exactly is a cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrencies, also called cryptocurrencies or cryptoassets, are a digital medium of exchange. Many times it can fulfill the function of a coin, and hence they are known by that name. However, it can also be used as a financial asset, people buy them and when their value rises they sell them.
We can consider them as a decentralized alternative to digital currencies. Come on, that a euro or another currency with which you pay online is organized and controlled by entities and banks. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies are not controlled by anyone, there are simply a series of connected computers in which their movements are replicated so that it is a secure method.
The value of each cryptocurrency is variable, just as if they were stock market assets, and in recent years there have been a lot of changes in their value. Sometimes it rises like foam, and other times it plummets. Despite this, its value as a financial asset has gradually become its main attraction, although it can still be used as a payment method on sites that allow it.
Each cryptocurrency has its own algorithm, which is the one that manages the number of new units that are issued each year. As we have said, Bitcoin has been developed so that only a total of 21 million are issued, but each cryptocurrency will have its own algorithm determining the maximum number of units that will be generated.
Finally, we emphasize that it is a system totally virtual. Just as with one euro you can pay online or in physical format, there is no physical version of Bitcoins with which you can pay in stores. You may see photos or images of Bitcoin coins on some sites, but they are decorations that have nothing to do with the actual product.
How cryptocurrencies work
To understand how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies work, you must understand that they work through the blockchain, also known as[blockchain]. It is a decentralized computer network, where each computer is a node, and these are distributed throughout the world. In them, exact copies of all the transactions that are carried out are made, so that the network is capable of supporting itself when saving the changes. [cadenadebloques)SetratadeunareddeordenadoresdescentralizadadondecadaordenadoresunnodoyestosestánrepartidosentodoelmundoEnellosserealizancopiasexactasdetodaslastransaccionesqueserealizandeformaquelaredseacapazderespaldarseasimismaalahoradeguardarloscambios
Come on, Bitcoins are not based on servers that may be within a company and that can be turned off. If one of the Blockchain nodes goes down, nothing will happensince the rest will continue to have a copy of all transactions.
In addition, the information travels through this network of computers protected by cryptography. To this we must add that each block links to a previous block, as well as a date and transaction data, and by design they are resistant to data modification. By only having information from the previous block, the nodes do not know where exactly the information comes fromeach link in the chain only knows the previous one, which also improves your privacy.
Therefore, it is as if this network or chain of blocks were an open and public free in which all the transactions made by two users are recorded. When you make a transaction, its data is recorded in a block, and automatically it is replicated in the rest. This means that the data cannot be modified or manipulated without modifying the rest of the blocks, something extremely complicated.
How can you get Bitcoins
If you do not have computer skills or the money to be part of the nodes mining cryptocurrencies, the easiest way to obtain them is buying them in specialized services. These are great platforms with a good user base, and that simplify the procedure as much as possible.
They are called Wallets or portfolios, because they do that function. You create an account and put real money from your credit card. And through these platforms, you can use your money to buy Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. These Bitcoin are linked to your account within this cryptocurrency, and you will be able to see its evolution.
These online services they take a commission for each transaction you make, and it is through them that they earn their share of money and stay online. Each wallet can have its features, and some can be used to pay on some websites, or have a different catalog of cryptocurrencies that you can buy.
What you should know is that your Bitcoins will be linked to your profile within each wallet, and although in many cases you can send them from one wallet to another, you should never forget your password of the service, since this may mean that you will no longer be able to access your wallet and your cryptocurrencies.
If you want to buy bitcoins, some of the most popular services to do so are Coinbase, Binance, and various other platforms. You have all of them explained in this article so you can choose the one you want to use.
Are Bitcoins safe?
Today, as a payment method, Bitcoin is safe and private, although it is not yet accepted on most major platforms. Therefore, if you want to buy some Bitcoin to make a private purchase with them, we could say that yes, they are safe.
But if you want to use them to make a fortune by buying them cheap and selling them high, then no, it is not a safe financial asset. It is not convenient to play its sale if you do not fully understand how it works this game, as its value can plummet without warning at any time, and you can lose almost all of your money… or you may have to wait months or years for the sale value to be the same as the purchase value.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism | <urn:uuid:9a96de45-67d5-4962-86a4-4f13058f7324> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://digismak.com/bitcoin-in-depth-guide-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-how-to-get-it/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.969177 | 1,602 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Date of this Version
Report # MATC-UI: 472 Final Report 25-1121-0001-472
The goal of this study was to evaluate the performance of Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors able to detect impacts with different frequencies on a bridge pier. The FBG technology was evaluated under controlled conditions in a laboratory flume set-up to mimic the flow, sediment, and design characteristics of a pier structure. The system was calibrated using site-specific properties to relate strain to a known magnitude force for different bridge pier designs, different scour depths, and structural impacts. The FBGs proved a reliable measure of strain and displacement for key components of bridge structures, such as piers, during varying flow magnitudes. Additionally, the FBGs were used to assess the impacts of different flow-altering countermeasures on the displacement of a bridge structure. Sacrificial piers that were approximately three pier diameters from the bridge proved to minimize the strain at the top end of the pier significantly. Practical guidelines were developed on how the FBGs can be used to provide real-time state awareness information for making decisions on down time, repair cost, and functionality of bridges. The research will pave the way for inexpensive, bridge automated monitoring, while providing an open framework to expedite the development of similar systems for other critical infrastructure, such as roads, highways, dams, levees, and prevent catastrophic events such as the Minnesota bridge collapse in 2007. | <urn:uuid:694ffad9-5bfc-4218-a9d5-270e20c84546> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/matcreports/83/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.93574 | 298 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Hydrosalpinx or Blocked Fallopian Tubes is the blockage of a woman’s fallopian tube caused by a fluid buildup and dilation of the tube at its end. Most often it occurs at the fimbrial end of the tube next to the ovary, but it can also occur at the other end of the tube that attaches to the uterus. The term hydrosalpinx comes from Greek, with hydro meaning water and salpinx meaning tube.
Blocked fallopian tubes are one form of tubal factor infertility. When the fallopian tube is blocked, the cells inside the tube secret fluid that can’t escape, dilating the tube. This prevents fertilization – and thus pregnancy – by blocking an ovulated egg from moving from the ovary to the fallopian tube for fertilization by the sperm. If an ovulated egg is somehow able to connect with a sperm for fertilization, the hydrosalpinx would still likely block the resulting embryo from traveling to the uterus for implantation and pregnancy. It can also potentially cause a dangerous ectopic pregnancy, in which the embryo implants outside the uterus, most often inside the fallopian tube, and results in a life-threatening situation.
Types of Blocked Fallopian Tubes
The types of blocked Fallopian tubes are normally categorized depending on the location of the tube affected. They are;
Midsegment tubal obstruction
This occurs in the ampullary and it normally results from tubal ligation damage. Tubal ligation is a surgical procedure to prevent future pregnancies. The procedure has its own risks, but many women who opt for it end up requiring a correction when they change their minds
Proximal Tubal Occlusion
This involves the Isthmus and normally results from infections after an abortion, miscarriage, PID, caesarean section and some birth control procedures can block the tubes
Distal Tubal Occlusion
This type affects the end part near the ovary and hydrosalpinx is the major cause of the blockage.
Damage to fallopian tubes can result in infertility without any obvious signs or symptoms. Your risk for having a hydrosalpinx or blocked tubes increases with each of the following:
- Previous pelvic surgery
- Sexually transmitted disease
- Pelvic Adhesions
The diagnosis changes to hydrosalpinges when both tubes are damaged. If you have experienced trouble getting pregnant, or have pelvic pain and unusual vaginal discharge, Dr. Douglas will want to rule out the possibility of hydrosalpinx or hydrosalpinges.
Causes of Blocked Fallopian Tubes
The most common cause of blocked fallopian tubes is a pelvic inflammatory disease (PID). PID is the result of a sexually transmitted disease, but not all pelvic infections are related to STDs. Also, even if PID is no longer present, a history of PID or pelvic infection increases the risk of blocked tubes.
Other potential causes of blocked fallopian tubes include:
- Current or history of an STD infection, specifically chlamydia or gonorrhea
- History of uterine infection caused by an abortion or miscarriage
- History of a ruptured appendix
- History of abdominal surgery
- Previous ectopic pregnancy
- Prior surgery involving the fallopian tubes
Symptoms of Blocked Fallopian Tubes
Blocked fallopian tubes symptoms are very rare. The symptoms include
- Strong to mild abdominal pain
- Painful periods
- Strange looking or smelling vaginal discharge
- Feeling pain while having sex or passing urine, but because many women ovulate, fallopian tube blockage can go ignored until a woman wants to get pregnant.
Surgery to open the fallopian tubes carries the same potential complications as any surgery. These include:
- Creation of more scar tissue
- Damage to organs
One risk of pregnancy after surgery is an ectopic pregnancy, meaning that a fertilized egg gets stuck outside of the womb, often in a fallopian tube. The egg will not develop, and there can be a risk to a woman’s health.
Diagnosis of Blocked Fallopian Tubes
There really are no outward signs that will let you know if you are suffering from blocked fallopian tubes. If you have ever suffered from the pelvic inflammatory disease, there is a 15% -50% chance that your tubes are blocked.
The primary indicator that there is a blockage is an inability to conceive. Fortunately, there are diagnostic tests that can detect any abnormalities or blockages if there is evidence of some type of blockage to the tubes. Here are details on how blocked fallopian tubes are diagnosed…
Hysterosalpingogram is an X-ray test, using a contrast dye to view any obstruction in the fallopian tubes. The dye is inserted through a thin tube that is placed up through the vagina, into the uterus. Filling the uterus with this dye will then spill into the fallopian tubes. X-rays are then taken to determine if there is an injury or abnormal shape of the uterus and fallopian tubes, including obstruction in the tubes. This test is the number one test performed to determine if there is a blockage in the fallopian tubes.
This test is similar to hysterosalpingogram because chromotubation includes dye being passed into the uterus and fallopian tubes as well. This test is performed during laparoscopy so that doctors can see the dye spilling from the fallopian tube. The dye used for this procedure cannot be seen on an X-ray, it is blue in color. This test is considered the most reliable way to determine fallopian tube blockage but does require surgery. It is not the initial test performed unless there is another reason to perform surgery such as chronic pelvic pain.
This is a non-invasive procedure where ultrasound imaging is used to determine if there are any abnormalities of the reproductive organs. This type of test is not always a reliable way to determine fallopian tube blockage since the tubes are so small and spillage of the fluid cannot always be seen on ultrasound. This test may help to determine hydrosalpinx or other issues such as uterine fibroids.
Treatment of Blocked Fallopian Tubes
For Single Tubal Blockage: This is not difficult to cure. It does not include complex process. Fertility specialists normally recommend powerful fertility drugs to patients to improve their probabilities of ovulating on whichever side the tube is open without blockage.
For Both Tubes Blockage: Here generally the fertility drugs are not satisfactory when both tubes are blocked. Here, laparoscopic surgery is the greatest desirable choice to overcome the problem. The chances of success depend on the age of the women if younger then better. Laparoscopic surgery either clears the blockage or splits out tissue that is affecting the issues.
Common laparoscopic procedures include:
- Tubal ligation reversal involves surgically reopening, untying or reconnecting a woman’s fallopian tubes that have been intentionally tied off or closed from a tubal ligation. Tubal ligation reversal can enable a woman to become pregnant again and is generally performed through minimally invasive robotic surgery.
- Salpingectomy is a surgery to address hydrosalpinx (a buildup of fluid in the fallopian tubes) by removing scar tissue around the tube or removing the damaged part of the tube that is causing the fluid buildup.
- Tubal removal may also be the best option to treat infertility. Although removing a fallopian tube sounds drastic, the inflammation from a damaged tube is a constant irritation in the pelvic cavity that can interfere with fertility. By removing the damaged tube causing inflammation, there is a better chance of getting pregnant through the remaining healthy fallopian tube.
- Adhesiolysis is the simultaneous use of laparoscopy and hysteroscopy to remove adhesions or blockages from the origin of the fallopian tube, where it exits the uterus. A fertility surgeon inserts imaging die into the woman’s fallopian tubes to visualize the blockage and then taps the blockage away from the end of the tube using a wire guide through a slender tube.
IVF: IVF is the most effective modality treatment for blocked fallopian tubes and frequently the last option for patients who wish to get over this sickness and become pregnant
Prevention of Blocked Fallopian Tubes
Preventive measures that you could take:
- Avoid drinking and smoking.
- Practice some meditation. This can help lower your stress levels.
- Sign up for yoga classes, or do it at home. A few poses that can help boost the health of your reproductive organs are the butterfly pose and bridge pose.
- Avoid excessive consumption of junk foods. Include foods like fresh fruits, green leafy vegetables, and coconut oils. These are rich in antioxidants. Citrus foods, eggs, mangoes, zucchini, and spinach are rich in carotenoids, which help your enzymes and circulation as well.
- Increase your intake of Vitamin C – it helps ease out inflammation.
- Use herbal tampons. These contain herbs like goldenseal and Dong Quai, which can help clear out your fallopian tubes. | <urn:uuid:a2949745-2688-4348-9e4b-ca2fc7a86ff5> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://diseasesdic.com/blocked-fallopian-tubes-or-hydrosalpinx-types-symptoms-and-treatment/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.925046 | 1,896 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Image Creative Commons licensed by charlene mcbride
Reusing Food Scraps
This week’s STEM challenge is playing around with food! Would you normally throw out carrot peelings or the bottom of the head of celery? You don’t have to! We’re going to challenge you to use fruits and vegetables that you would normally just throw away. Not only is this good for your family (it doesn’t cost you extra money), it’s also good for the planet (less food waste!).
You have two options with this food:
- Regrow: use part of the food to grow more food (or at least an interesting plant).
- Use up: find a recipe to use up a part of the food you’d usually throw away.
Here is more information about those options.
Regrowing Food (Kitchen Scrap Gardening)
My kids are always wanting to plant the seeds they find in tomatoes or peppers, and it turns out they were on to something! There are many foods you can regrow from kitchen scraps. What’s so cool about this is it doesn’t cost you any money.
Here are some great foods you can regrow using pieces or seeds from your original:
- Green onions
Want some instructions? Here is a great website with more ideas and instructions for each of the ones I just listed: https://foodrevolution.org/blog/reduce-food-waste-regrow-from-scraps/. I can’t wait to try the celery one!
Using Up Food (Kitchen Scrap Cooking)
It may seem like a weird idea to cook with carrot peelings or watermelon rinds. But four students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison knew that people could actually cook with these things, not just throw them away! Will, Astrid, Hannah, and Halie created an online, free cookbook (cookbook here) to help people make yummy parsley stem smoothies or baked potato peel chips.
Here are a few of the recipes that looked very easy and delicious to me!
Overripe Banana Ice Cream
- Overripe Bananas
- Cocoa Powder
Directions 1. Slice the bananas and freeze. 2. Blend the frozen bananas until they reach ice cream-like consistency. 3. Add cocoa powder.
Baked Parsnip and Carrot Peel Chips
- Carrot peelings
- Parsnip peelings (optional)
- Olive Oil
- Spices of choice
Directions 1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees 2. Coat peelings with olive oil and desired spices 3. Place on a lined baking sheet in a single layer 4. Bake for 8-10 minutes until browned and crispy.
Let us know if you try to regrow or use up any food in your house. We’d love to see pictures of what the results were! You can post your results on the Facebook post about this challenge. | <urn:uuid:a00199de-650b-43d4-974a-78909c0f7042> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://dkpl.org/stem-challenge-4/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.917422 | 628 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Last month the Information Commissioner’s Office opened consultation on 16 standards that online services must meet to protect children’s privacy in.
Age appropriate design: a code of practice for online services sets out the standards expected of those responsible for designing, developing or providing online services likely to be accessed by children and which process their data.
When finalised, it will be the first of its kind and become an international benchmark.
Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner, said:
“This is the connected generation. The internet and all its wonders are hardwired into their everyday lives. We shouldn’t have to prevent our children from being able to use it, but we must demand that they are protected when they do. This code does that.”
Introduced by the Data Protection Act 2018, the draft code sets out 16 standards of age appropriate design for online services like apps, connected toys, social media platforms, online games, educational websites and streaming services. It is not restricted to services specifically directed at children.
The draft code says that the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration when designing and developing online services. It says that privacy must be built in and not bolted on.
Settings must be “high privacy” by default (unless there’s a compelling reason not to); only the minimum amount of personal data should be collected and retained; children’s data should not usually be shared; and geolocation services should be switched off by default in most circumstances. So-called “nudge techniques” should not be used to encourage children to provide unnecessary personal data, to weaken their privacy settings or carry on using the service longer than they had intended. It also addresses issues of parental control and profiling.
Ms Denham said:
“The ICO’s Code of Practice is a significant step, but it’s just part of the solution to online harms. We see our work as complementary to the current focus on online harms, and look forward to participating in discussions regarding the Government’s white paper.”
The code gives practical guidance on data protection safeguards that ensure online services are appropriate for use by children. It leaves online service providers in no doubt about what is expected of them when it comes to looking after children’s personal data. It helps create an open, transparent and safer place for children to play, explore and learn online.
The standards in the code are rooted in existing data protection laws that are regulated by the ICO. Organisations should follow the code and demonstrate that their services use children’s data fairly and in compliance with data protection law. Those that don’t, could face enforcement action including fines of up to £17 million or 4% of global turnover or orders to stop processing data.
Baroness Kidron, who led the parliamentary debate about the creation of the code, said:
“I welcome the draft code released today which represents the beginning of a new deal between children and the tech sector.
“For too long we have failed to recognise children’s rights and needs online, with tragic outcomes.
“I firmly believe in the power of technology to transform lives, be a force for good and rise to the challenge of promoting the rights and safety of our children. But in order to fulfil that role it must consider the best interests of children, not simply its own commercial interests. That is what the code will require online services to do. This is a systemic change.”
The code is out for consultation until 31 May. The final version will be laid before Parliament and is expected to come into effect before the end of the year.
The code was informed by initial views and evidence gathered from designers, app developers, academics and civil society. You can read the responses here.
The ICO also sought views from parents and children by working with research company Revealing Reality. The findings from that work have been published for the first time. | <urn:uuid:dfa707de-999e-4d89-b332-67dd9411b4dc> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://dolocal.co.uk/gdpr/ico-launches-consultation-code-practice-help-protect-children-online/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.948228 | 815 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Posted on November 17, 2020
In an article of the November 6 Falmouth Enterprise, Harbormaster Fraser rightly points out that annual dredging of the Eel Pond channel would be expensive and wasteful. Perhaps it’s time to consider a longer-term solution that could also help address a few additional issues like nitrogen loading and climate change.
Consider a flood gate installed across the channel that, during the winter months, is opened on falling tides and closed on rising ones. The net outflow current would tend to carry sand from the shallower Eel Pond into the deeper open sound. And during storms from the southwest, the gate could be closed to retard the deposition of sand in the channel from wave action. During summer months the gate could remain open during daylight hours for the convenience of boaters.
A secondary effect of this use of a flood gate would be to create a net slow current around Washburn Island. Instead of tidal water flowing in and back out, Waquoit Bay and Eel Pond would be flushed with fresh replacement water from the sound to reduce the nitrogen load—admittedly with somewhat less effect on the inland rivers connected to them.
As part of a long-term solution, installing a second flood gate across the channel at the mouth of Waquoit Bay should be considered. Operating in complementary fashion, opened on rising tides and closed on falling ones, a second gate would greatly increase the net current flow around Washburn Island with corresponding increase in flushing of nitrogen and dredging of the Eel Pond channel. Again, during summer daylight hours, both gates could remain open for boaters during which time the current flow rate would return to normal—as caused by the tides now.
With both gates installed, a third useful feature is achieved. On an anticipated storm surge, both gates could be closed at the lowest prior tide and could remain closed through the storm. Even if the storm surge were to overtop the dunes, the filling of Waquoit Bay might take considerable time, hopefully outlasting the surge. The resulting protection of properties along the whole inland water connected to Waquoit Bay could go a long way in justifying the high cost of floodgate installation—possibly including a reduction in the cost of flood insurance.
For those who think such use of floodgates to be overkill, I’d recommend examining the Fairhaven Hurricane Barrier that protects New Bedford Harbor. We have for centuries been adversely affecting our waterways through innumerable uncoordinated acts that cannot be simply reversed. Carefully considered action on a larger scale may now be warranted.
Wendell E. Bishop
Antlers Shore Drive | <urn:uuid:f78647a0-0378-4094-a7f8-8c642621562a> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://dredgewire.com/eel-pond-dredging-alternative-letter/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.959514 | 536 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Species that are marvelous and extraordinary flourish in our natural environment! All animals seem to have a unique feature that distinguishes them from others. As we glance at or study animals, we can notice several of these features, and meanwhile, we easily overlook other fascinating aspects of the animal realm.
Several traits in such intriguing organisms may appear weird to us, but they are crucial for the animal’s survival.
Here, we have assembled an inventory of 50 astonishing facts about animals. Just hang back, breathe, and indulge in a few intriguing, terrifying, unexpected, and entertaining animal tales that you won’t be forgetting!
- While feeding, sea otters constantly swim on their backsides. They hunt for mussels, sea urchins, and mollusks while gliding through the water. The thick fur coat shelters them from the freezing water as animals feed.
- The eyesight of moose is terrible. And many have attempted to breed with automobiles.
- The pistol shrimp surprises its target by making a loud hammering sound with its claws. The target is stunned or killed by the boom, which is quite intense. These shrimp can produce a bang of up to 210 decibels, which is more significant than gunshots.
- Squirrels deposit nuts in the soil and usually forget where they stashed the edibles. Hence, they plant thousands of trees inadvertently.
- When food gets scarce, certain Australian Flower Spiders consume their mothers. The mother spider makes self-sacrifice by urging her tiny ones to strike, shred her inner parts, and feast on her flesh. Cannibalism has been observed in various spider species, and it is commonly associated with sexual relations.
- Koala fingerprints are remarkably similar to human prints. What is shocking is that they have been misidentified during criminal investigations.
- The sense of smell in canines is 100,000 times more potent than that of humans. They do, unfortunately, possess only one-sixth of human taste senses.
- Pigeons can perform numerical computations at around the same degree as chimps. During one research, pigeons were encouraged to compare and evaluate nine photos, each with various items. Experts observed that the birds could rank the photos according to how many items they contained.
- The blue-eyed lemur is one of only two non-human species with a true blue iris.
- The Australian Koala Foundation estimates that the adorable creatures, Koalas sleep around 18 and 22 hours every day. Because koalas’ food needs a burst of power to metabolize, they have to slumber frequently. No wonder they are sleepier than your cats!
- Kangaroos are unable to leap if their tails are lifted from the surface. Why? Well, they rely on their tail for balance and movement.
- Wild chimps in Guinea have been observed drinking fermented palm juice, which comprises around 3% alcohol by volume.
- As per animal behaviorists, cats do not purr or meow to interact with one another. It is indeed a technique they employ to attract attention from people.
- Female bats bear children while suspended upside down, collecting their babies in their wings as they fall.
- Have you ever thought about why flamingos stand on a single leg? It is to control the temperature. Heat is conserved by maintaining one leg nearer to the body.
- Buffalo populations in Africa are democratic and feminist. Only mature females can “vote” about which direction to move. They show their preference by standing up, staring at one location, then bending down again.
- Hippos can create their personal sunscreen. This plant-eating mammal shields itself from the scorching African heat by secreting a pinkish-reddish fluid through its epidermis.
- Within minutes, a school of piranhas can devour a living creature the size of a sheep. Fortunately, sheep and piranhas do not, however, tend to congregate in the same places.
- Sharks have two more sensory stimuli than humans. They can detect even the tiniest electrical currents in the seawater, such as those caused by muscle spasms, and notice pressure and motion fluctuations in the sea. These traits aid the shark’s navigation and hunting in low-light situations and when the eyesight is hindered.
- Even though polar bears have a typical core body heat of 37°C, they do not emit any measurable heat and do not appear in infrared images.
- Appearance-wise, penguins are cute, but they are a nightmare. Epithelial tissue in the form of spike-like projections is present in their throats. Were you aware that after the dinosaurs died, certain ancient penguin varieties, including the Kupoupoupou stilwelli, dominated the planet?
- The tongue-eating louse will consume its owner’s tongue and substitute it with its own. The louse penetrates a fish’s gills and proceeds to the back of the tongue, where it rips off the blood flow. Eventually, the tongue dies and falls out. As a newfound tongue, it finds home in the fish’s mouth.
- The sound a turtle produces can reveal its sexuality. Females hiss, whereas males grunt.
- Reindeer have lovely baby blue hues in the eyes in the winter season. The irises of Arctic reindeer vary from golden to blue throughout the year, adjusting to dramatic fluctuations in light conditions in their surroundings. The shift in hue affects how radiation is scattered through the retina, helping them see better.
- African gray parrots willingly assist one another in obtaining yummy treats and engage in compassionate behavior. These parrots were inherently aimed at helping others, even when the other person was not a buddy, and thus acted in a somewhat “prosocial” manner.
- Frogs are unable to puke. If it is genuinely unavoidable, they will puke their entire gut.
- Crabs can terrify smaller species with sharp blades, and if that is not sufficient, ghost crabs snarl like a hound at their foes. Crabs generate these terrifying groans with fangs in their bellies.
- Whenever capuchin monkeys are sexually aroused, they pee on their feet and hands. The alpha males are thought to utilize urine-washing to send friendly, warm sentiments to females, implying that their solicitation is effective and, therefore, they do not have to flee.
- A tarantula spider can go without nourishment for further than two years.
- Humpback whales band together to grab the meal and employ a “bubble-net” strategy. The whales will periodically move in an upward loop while blowing bubbles underneath, forming a spiral ‘net’ of bubbles that makes it difficult for fish to flee.
- A dolphin’s brain naps in halves at a period. The other conscious half forces the organism to come up for air when necessary to keep the dolphin from sinking.
- As for these drowsy creatures, life moves at a snail’s pace. Several sloths only make bowel movements weekly, and a leaf might require up to a month for them to process.
- Octopuses have two different hearts. Their blood is pumped to the gills by two hearts, while the remaining blood is pumped to the entire body by the third. They also possess nine brains to add up to their complexity.
- Wombats utilize their excrement to warn other creatures not to enter their territory. Fortunately, wombats’ cube-shaped feces makes it simpler to recognize a wombat-controlled area, as the small squares generally remain in place better than cylindrical fecal matter.
- Flamingos do not have pink feathers. Their plumage appears pink because they feed brine shrimp plus blue-green algae, which carry a natural pink dye termed canthaxanthin. Flamingos in zoos and under protection frequently lose their colors due to unsuitable diets.
- Hoatzin is the only bird built with a ruminant digestive tract, such as cows, sheep, and deer. Furthermore, they have a cow-dung-like odor.
- As a defense technique, dolphins intentionally handle pufferfish, prompting them to emit poisons. These poisons are lethal in high amounts, but they also have a narcotic effect. Furthermore, they are a potent psychedelic that dolphins seem to love.
- The mayfly is the planet’s shortest lifeform. It only has a 24-hour lifecycle, with several mayfly species existing only for only 8-10 hours.
- The horned lizard can fire blood out of its eyeballs up to 3 feet distant. The odd and repulsive behavior is a defense technique used to confound attackers.
- Roosters protect them from becoming deaf due to their rackety trumpeting by leaning their heads back whenever they croak, covering their ear canal, and acting as an ear cork.
- Cows defecate up to 15 times each day, resulting in 115 pounds of dung daily, or around 21 tons per year.
- The tongue of a Blue Whale can be as large as an automobile or a small adult elephant. And they can weigh up to 2.7 tons.
- The Grey-headed Albatross can fly around the world in 46 days. The bird completes a remarkable round-the-world trip and travels 14,000 miles at a constant speed of 13mph. They accomplish this movement by stopping at several locations all along the journey.
- The dementor wasp paralyzes cockroaches with the help of poison on the forehead, converting roaches into zombies. The chemicals cause the cockroach to lose track of its motions, causing it to crawl into the wasp’s nest and die unintentionally.
- Great white sharks can recognize a drop of blood in 25 gallons of water and identify minor quantities of blood from a distance of three miles.
- The tiger’s hind legs are so robust that some remain upright even after their demise.
- The Alpine Swift can fly in the sky for more than six months without coming to the ground.
- Snowballs are a delightful game for Japanese Macaque monkeys. These snow monkeys have been seen carrying snowballs up the hills and then tossing them downward.
- Tardigrades can live in space for over ten years without feeding.
- Dogs cool themselves by sweating via their paw pads. They also maintain their body temperature by panting.
To Wrap Up
There you have it, 50 of the most fascinating, bizarre, and entertaining animal discoveries. Hopefully, the collection was engaging and thought-provoking. Shoot all of these intriguing animal facts at the dinner table during the next family gathering and be the talk of the town!
(Last Updated on May 13, 2022 by Sadrish Dabadi) | <urn:uuid:9ebb8e6d-e48d-49de-9d27-bd915baea003> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://earthandhuman.org/facts-about-animals/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.9429 | 2,253 | 3.203125 | 3 |
In recent years, Electronic Muscle Stimulation (EMS) has garnered attention as an innovative approach to enhancing muscle strength and achieving fitness goals. While the popularity of EMS continues to rise, questions about its safety have also emerged. This comprehensive article seeks insight into the safety aspects of EMS training, addressing the crucial question: Is electronic muscle stimulation safe? We will delve into the advantages of EMS and offer essential safety precautions to empower you to make informed decisions.
Understanding Electronic Muscle Stimulation (EMS)
Electronic Muscle Stimulation, also known as neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), entails the application of controlled electrical impulses to muscles, causing them to contract and relax. This technology has found applications as a complement to training regimens, a tool for physical therapy, and a means of aiding muscle recovery.
Safely Harnessing the Power of Electronic Muscle Stimulation
- Utilize Proper Equipment:
- Opt for certified EMS devices from reputable sources bearing essential certifications (such as CE for Europe or FDA for the US).
- Adhere strictly to manufacturer guidelines and consult a healthcare professional to alleviate safety concerns.
- Embrace Correct Exercise Form:
- As with any workout, correct form is pivotal. Enlisting professional guidance is essential to avoid improper execution and potential injuries.
- The Pepper training app offers expert-designed EMS workouts that guide users through exercises to prevent exercise-related injuries.
- Tailored Intensity Settings:
- Adjust EMS device intensity levels to match your fitness level and comfort.
- Gradually progress intensity and duration to prevent muscle soreness or discomfort.
- Adhere to Safety Guidelines:
- Individuals with pacemakers, severe heart conditions, or other contraindications should avoid EMS training.
- Consult a physician for certain health conditions, such as severe muscle strain, joint problems, or cardiovascular diseases.
- Manage Duration and Frequency:
- Limit EMS strength training to a maximum of 50 minutes per week, with each session lasting no more than 25 minutes.
- Include rest days and gradually increase duration and frequency for optimal results and safety.
The Role of Creatine Kinase (CK)
When assessing the safety of EMS training, understanding its impact on Creatine Kinase (CK) levels is crucial. CK is an enzyme present in various tissues, including skeletal muscles, the heart, and the brain. It plays a vital role in energy metabolism, facilitating the conversion of creatine to phosphorescing for readily available energy during muscle contractions.
EMS and Creatine Kinase Levels:
- Temporary Elevation: EMS sessions may temporarily increase CK levels, mainly after High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). This elevation is typically transient and does not signify injury.
- Muscle Damage Indicators: Elevated CK levels can indicate muscle damage, but EMS-induced increases are usually post-exercise effects, differing from sustained elevation in muscle injuries.
- Adaptation and Recovery: Consistent EMS training can reduce muscle damage indicators over time, aided by proper rest intervals and adaptation.
Electronic Muscle Stimulation is generally considered safe when employed correctly, adhering to established guidelines, and evaluating individual health factors. By following expert guidance, using reputable equipment, and customizing settings, you can minimize potential risks associated with EMS training. While temporary CK level increases may occur, they differ from sustained elevation linked to muscle injuries. However, consulting a healthcare professional before commencing any new training regimen is prudent, especially for individuals with underlying health conditions.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Is EMS training safe for everyone?
EMS training is generally safe, but certain individuals, such as those with pacemakers, severe heart conditions, or specific health conditions, should avoid it. Consult your physician before starting an EMS program, especially if you have underlying medical concerns.
- Can I do EMS training if I’ve never worked out?
Absolutely! EMS training can be adapted to various fitness levels. Certified trainers can guide beginners through tailored workouts to ensure a safe and effective experience.
- How often should I do EMS training for optimal results?
For optimal results, limit EMS strength training to 50 minutes per week, with each session lasting no more than 25 minutes. Gradually increase duration and frequency over time, considering rest days for recovery.
- What is the role of Creatine Kinase (CK) in EMS training?
Creatine Kinase (CK) is an enzyme that plays a role in energy metabolism during muscle contractions. EMS sessions may result in temporary CK level increases, but these differ from sustained elevation in muscle injuries. With proper adaptation and rest, CK levels can stabilize.
- Can EMS training aid in muscle recovery?
Yes, EMS training can assist in muscle recovery by promoting blood flow and facilitating muscle contractions. Properly executed EMS sessions and rest and recovery techniques can contribute to enhanced muscle recuperation. | <urn:uuid:5283ee18-4f0a-42b9-b76e-4eac980d1857> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://emssuithub.com/benefits-and-safety-precautions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.920833 | 1,005 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Most of us know that urban densification is crucial to city health in Canada. Denser cities lead to more effective infrastructure, less transportation by car, and therefore fewer carbon emissions, shorter travel times, and less energy consumption. But what about suburban densification? How can this help fight climate change and improve our mental health?
What is Suburban Densification?
Suburban densification is the concentration of infrastructure, shops, and housing within suburbs. When we hear “densification,” we often think of making the downtown of our cities bigger and taller, but the same benefits can come from making suburbs denser. In reality, high-rise buildings tend to emit much more carbon throughout their life than dense, mid-rise buildings. Suburban densification involves:
- Increasing job opportunities within the suburbs.
- Increasing the density of shops and restaurants.
- Integrating residential and commercial areas.
- Fitting more housing into a smaller space.
The Benefits of Denser Suburbs
Part of the appeal of suburban living is being able to live in a quiet and calm neighbourhood, away from the bustling city. However, this often requires long commutes to the city center, where more jobs are located. In 2022, the average Canadian spent 54 minutes commuting to work daily. If jobs were to be more concentrated in the suburbs, then travel times would drastically decrease amongst commuters.
But work isn’t the only place we drive to. People often take their vehicle for ‘short’ trips to the grocery store, our kids’ schools, restaurants, friends’ houses, and recreation activities. A family’s yearly gas consumption decreases by 400 litres every time density doubles. This statistic has particular significance to suburban planning, as it is much easier to double the density of a suburb than a city center.
In many suburbs, it takes a while to escape the rows of houses and reach the commercial world. Forgetting milk at the grocery store can cost an extra 20 minutes of driving for one item. Shops must be more easily accessible from the suburbs to reduce driving time and incentivize alternative transportation methods. This doesn’t mean there should be a Walmart at every street corner, or that housing will be put on top of stores. It just means that individual residential zones need to be smaller and allow commercial areas to fit in between them.
Densification leads to less time spent in cars. The first main advantage of this is reduced emissions, helping fight the climate crisis as well as having healthier air in cities. The second factor is that driving is taxing on people’s health. When we walk or bike instead of driving, our physical and mental health improve, partly due to the benefits of physical exercise and spending time outside. When our suburbs are denser, walking or biking is much easier. Taking public transportation can remove the stress of driving and make our days overall less taxing. With denser suburbs, public transportation will be more concentrated and therefore more accessible.
Densifying Existing Suburbs
Obviously, we can’t just squish entire suburbs closer together to increase density. But, we can ensure more tightly-packed suburbs in the future.
We can start finding empty spaces between suburbs and filling them instead of always spreading outwards. There are often vacant plots of land between residential developments because these plots aren’t large enough for entire new developments. But, by incentivizing development in these so-called “nooks and crannies,” suburbs will become much denser and, therefore, more sustainable and accessible. Developers will not simply choose these places in a vacuum, but subsidies for development in these smaller areas and stricter limits to outward expansion can ensure that these spaces do not go to waste.
Planning for the Future
Unfortunately, suburban expansion is nearly inevitable as the population increases and more and more people move to these urban centres. When we have no choice but to create new developments, we must plan them to be denser. This densification includes more townhouses and multiple-story housing, packing single homes closer together, and having much denser storefronts.
Much as there is a glorification of single-family homes, they are a direct cause of urban sprawl, losing all of the benefits of a denser suburb. Once one family may decide they are better off living in a single-family home, others start to do the same, threatening the health of everyone living in these suburbs. Single-family homes also use more energy and emit more carbon.
But, there will always be a demand for this minimum-density housing, so we must encourage the minimisation of wasted space between them. Large yards lack any ecological benefit, and the same social benefit can be obtained through enlarging communal parks and green spaces. This will result in a net density increase and support more biodiversity. Most Canadians aren’t using their backyards at all times, while parks are rarely overcrowded, especially if we increase their size and accessibility.
With all this housing, people will need to buy personal items. In Canadian suburbs, these areas are often free-standing or in strip malls. This style takes up more space with little benefit for the consumer over two-to-three-story shopping areas. While it may be easy for companies to expand outwards during the development of these commercial areas, regulations could ensure their densification. In addition, as residential density increases, residents will demand more stores in a smaller area, leading to a natural densification of storefronts. We can get more compact commercial areas by building upwards, minimising spaces between stores, or going underground, as in many urban centers. This can be done by simply building them this way, to begin with, or by ensuring structural support of single-story stores are sound enough to allow for expansion upwards once demand increases.
Suburbia has as important a role in densification as urban centres do. The changes outlined here can be easily implemented with government regulation and social pressure. Densification won’t change the calm appeal of suburbs; they aren’t going to turn into lower Manhattan. All we need to do to increase urban health and decrease carbon emissions is have a dense plan for future developments and find ways to densify our current ones.
AuArchitecture. “Medium Density Development.” ArchitectureMagazine, 31 May 2017, www.architectmagazine.com/project-gallery/medium-density-development. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.
Authors, Race to a Cure. “The 5 W’s of Urban Sprawl.” Race to a Cure, 13 Apr. 2021, www.racetoacure.org/post/the-5-ws-of-urban-sprawl. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.
Gielen, Christoph. “Urban Sprawl in the United States: 10 Incredible Aerials.” TwistedSifter, 22 July 2010, twistedsifter.com/2010/07/urban-sprawl-aerials-christoph-gielen/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.
Glaeser, Ed. “The Benefits of Density.” Lsecities.net, Dec. 2020, urbanage.lsecities.net/essays/the-benefits-of-density. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.
Karpinska, Lilia, and Sławomir Śmiech. “Shadow of Single-Family Homes: Analysis of the Determinants of Polish Households’ Energy-Related CO2 Emissions.” Energy and Buildings, vol. 277, 15 Dec. 2022, p. 112550, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778822007216, 10.1016/j.enbuild.2022.112550. Accessed 2 Feb. 2023.
Mallach, Alan. “Densifying Suburbs Is the Better Path to Housing Affordability.” Shelterforce, 10 Aug. 2020, shelterforce.org/2020/08/10/densifying-suburbs-is-the-better-path-to-housing-affordability/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.
ThinkInsure. “Commuting in Canada | Commuting Stats, Times, Facts, Tips.” Www.thinkinsure.ca, 2 Dec. 2022, www.thinkinsure.ca/insurance-help-centre/commuting-times-and-facts-in-canada.html. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.West, Ed. “Suburban Street after Densification.” UnHerd, 29 Jan. 2020, unherd.com/2020/01/roger-scrutons-solution-to-the-housing-crisis/suburban-street-after-densification/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.
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- Key Concepts to Understanding Climate Change Simplified - October 13, 2023 | <urn:uuid:c4520a36-f56f-41cb-bec3-c3ebed1baa33> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://environbuzz.com/the-need-for-suburban-densification-improving-health-and-reducing-emissions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.922634 | 1,922 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Table of Contents
Since ancient times the practice of various martial arts prevails. Martial arts are not mere a self-defense technique, but it is a way of self-discipline. Indeed, it helps the practitioner to evolve in his life, raising the life’s quality. So considering the deeper dimensions of martial arts, it happens to develop in most cultures. Especially the eastern civilizations and societies made a considerable contribution to the evolution of such powerful skills. Karate is one such martial art that originated in Japan. There are many stages of this, represented by karate belt levels. However, Each belt has its unique significance and meaning. Let’s have a look at the broader aspects and dimensions of karate belt levels.
Origin of Karate and Belt Levels
Karate belt is mostly made out of thick cotton that the practitioners wear with their martial art outfit. The origin of Karate can get trace back to 14th-century Japanese and Chinese provinces. In the later phase of the 19th century, it was more relevant in Japan. Indeed, it is the reason why the origin of Karate is expressly said to be Japan—looking at the etymology, Karate meaning empty hand in kanji. In the starting quarter of the 20th century, the systematic teachings of Karate began in Japan.
Moreover, The government took a keen interest in promoting the martial art. In the global context, Karate gained popularity in the 1960s and ’70s. Several movies played a crucial role in wide the acceptance of Karate across the world. The philosophical aspect of Karate links more with Shingon Buddhism. Indeed, it is symbolically reflected in the colors of the karate belt.
Major Types of Karate
Due to the course of time, few types of karate styles have come up. However, there are four significant types of Karate, which are authentic and genuine.
- Shotokan: It is one of the popular karate styles. Indeed, it is the oldest type too.
- Goju Ryu: This type of karate style comprises of both hard and soft techniques.
- Wado-Ryu: It is similar to the Shotokan type karate. But Wado-Ryu techniques are more soft movements.
- Shito Ryu: The shito-Ryu style came to practice in the first quarter of the 20th century. The steps and movements of this type are more aggressive. Also, there are about fifty katas in this variety of styles.
Karate Belt Levels
The karate belt levels exhibit the position of the practitioner in context with the martial art. In general, the ten kyu level belt system is followed in Karate consisting of 9 colors. Indeed, each of these colors represents a deep meaning. Also, the belt can be considered as a grade of progress in Karate.
Karate Belt Levels Based on Colors
A white belt is the first belt that is hand over to a karate practitioner. As a beginner, the student needs to grow and progress in the area of martial arts. The white color in the belt indicates the snow that covers a seed in the winter. A student must show excellent progress and exhibit more receptivity while learning the art of self-defense. Indeed, the color white gets links in this aspect of Karate.
It is the second belt given to a karate student as a sign of progress in his practice. The yellow color in the belt represents the bright sun. Indeed, it symbolically represents the practitioner’s capability to receive the teachings of his master/sensei. The white snow will melt and disappear slowly, replacing the active sun. Also, during this karate belt levels, a student will get introduced to katas.
When a karate practitioner’s practice gets more intensify like an electrifying sun, he is getting into the level of orange belt. At this level, the student will become more receptive and will learn more from his master. Also, the necessary fundamental steps of Karate will get clear in this phase. At this stage, a student learns to have more grip and control over his efforts and actions. However, the color orange in the belt represents a fully active sun.
It is like an accelerating mode for a student in a green belt. Moreover, the students enter into a deeper aspect of Karate and learn intermediate steps. The green belt only gets awarded if the practitioner is good at necessary steps and clears his eligibility to go further. The color green represents the sprouting of the seed. Indeed, it is a symbolic representation of healthy progress and endurance in student life.
A karate student receives a blue belt as a recognition of strong perseverance in his practice. The blue color indicates the sky, as the practitioner vibrantly grows more. Indeed, from green to blue, a student is open to learning more tactics and steps of Karate. Unlike the other earlier phases, sensei will teach more intense and challenging karate techniques in the blue belt period. So one needs to acquire more focus and calmness during this period.
As a sincere practitioner, if one completes the blue level purple belt gets awarded. The sky turns purple when it turns to dawn. Indeed, it is a symbolic way that a karate student enters into the more advanced practice level. Also, it is a reminder that to appreciate the upcoming black belt levels.
The brown belt level represents a mature phase of a student. He is ready to go into the next dimension of Karate, which is a black belt. Indeed, the practitioner is in a position to reap the result of all his practices. In this phase, a student makes a concrete base of all his techniques and tactics.
Red belt in Karate symbolically represents sunset. Besides, This phase also represents the dedication, patience, and practice of a student. Now he has mastery over his steps and techniques. Moreover, in this stage, a student will have a much broader and more profound aspect of his martial art. One also learns perfect control and discipline. The color red also exhibits the sign of danger that a practitioner can be against his opponent or enemy. However, a student must have a balance over his self-control.
A black belt is the final level of achievement that a karate student receives. The black represents the finish/end. As the seed now is all set to harvest and one can enjoy the result. However, the black belt is not the end for a practitioner; it’s just a beginning. The real and more profound journey towards the philosophical and spiritual aspects of martial arts begins here.
Moreover, the knowledge and techniques that one has acquired in life can be shared. Indeed, in the teachings lies the totality of the martial arts. A black belt is also a reminder this great Karate technology that can transform one’s life should be taught to others.
Karate is not merely just a defensive martial art. Indeed, it is a technology or tool that can transform one’s life. With total dedication and sincerity, one can touch the core dimension of life. Indeed, this makes a person’s life more beautiful. Karate belts levels with different colors ad meaning exhibits a more excellent vision. Besides, in the summer Olympics, 2021 karate is a newly added sport. | <urn:uuid:c735f58d-7ad6-43e4-be65-0ecf02407d70> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://espbr.com/karate-belt-levels/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.95571 | 1,497 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Selecting Food For Your Temperament
The following two food charts illustrate foods that will increase heat or coolness. The first chart shows foods that will increase heat with dryness and moistness, and the second chart shows foods that will increase coolness with moistness and dryness. Therefore, if you have a Choleric Temperament (hot and dry), you will need to be choosing foods from the second list of cooling and moist foods. If you are a mixture of Phlegmatic and Sanguine Temperaments (hot damp/ moist), you will need to be choosing foods that are cooling and drying. It is therefore important to understand your individual Temperament. A Choleric Temperament will be affected adversely by hot and dry foods, and least affected by cold and damp foods. During summertime, a Choleric Temperament needs to be eating cooling foods, as they will become quickly imbalanced if they are eating hot foods. | <urn:uuid:cfdfde1d-e4e8-4a14-a9c2-b5a6807eb218> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://etwlife.com/selecting-food-for-your-temperament/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.964166 | 191 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Be single-use free.
In recent years, the climate change problem has escalated to the climate change crisis. Today, the world produces about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year. About half of that plastic produced is for single-use items. Single-use plastics account for 50% of all plastic produced every year worldwide*. About half of that plastic produced is for single-use items. We currently use up to 5 trillion plastic bags per year**. That’s 160,000 a second!
For decades, the single-use plastic bag has reigned as the dominant design solution for getting a purchase home. But that has come with a cost; almost all plastic bags either end up in landfills, are incinerated, or leak into the environment as trash.
Put one after another, they would go around the world 7 times... every hour. And it takes up to 1,000 years for a plastic bag to degrade. On average, a plastic shopping bag is used just 12 minutes..
By 2050, the world’s oceans could contain more plastics than fish measured by weight. Think about this.
* source: www.nrdc.org
** source: www.theworldcount.com
Our goal is to help change the single use system to a zero waste, circular model, by creating smart design products that empower consumers and companies to kick their single use habit.
The SmartBag is our launching product and is made to transform the single use plastic bag system into a zero waste circular one. | <urn:uuid:6ee9859f-54fa-435b-a324-7de32b665482> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://everless.com/pages/our-mission | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.943037 | 315 | 3.25 | 3 |
As technology advances, so does cybercrime. What was once considered a crime limited to computer nerds and hackers is now a problem faced by businesses of all sizes. Cybercrime costs the global economy an estimated $445 billion every year. That’s more than the GDP of countries like Ireland or Chile!
It’s important to be aware of the different types of cybercrime that could affect you, and take steps to protect yourself from them. In this blog post, we’ll give you a brief overview of some of the most common types of cybercrime, and explain how you can protect yourself from them.
What Is Cybercrime and Why Should You Be Concerned About It
Cybercrime is any illegal activity that takes place online. This can include anything from identity theft and fraud to cyberbullying and child pornography. Cybercriminals often exploit technology to take advantage of victims, and they can operate from anywhere in the world. As a result, cybercrime can be extremely difficult to detect and prosecute.
Why should you be concerned about cybercrime? For one thing, it can have a devastating impact on victims. In addition, cybercriminals are constantly finding new ways to exploit technology, which means that everyone is at risk of becoming a victim of cybercrime. Finally, cybercrime can be extremely lucrative for criminals, which means that it is likely to continue to grow in the future. Protecting yourself from cybercrime requires vigilance and awareness, but it is essential for keeping yourself and your family safe online.
How Does the Law Deal With Cybercrime
Cybercrime is a relatively new phenomenon, and the law is still playing catch up. Several different laws deal with different aspects of cybercrime, but there is no single law that covers all aspects of this type of crime. One of the main challenges in dealing with cybercrime is that it often crosses international borders, making it difficult to prosecute. Another challenge is that many cybercriminals are highly skilled and use sophisticated methods to avoid detection.
As a result, the law enforcement community has had to adapt and become more tech-savvy to investigate and prosecute these types of crimes. While the law is still evolving, there have been some significant successes in bringing cybercriminals to justice. And as awareness of cybercrime grows, the law will likely continue to evolve to better deal with this growing problem.
What Are Some of the Challenges Faced by Law Enforcement When Investigating Cybercrime?
One of the biggest challenges faced by law enforcement when investigating cybercrime is the fact that criminals can operate from anywhere in the world. With the internet, it is easy for people to access sensitive information and commit crimes without ever having to leave their homes. This makes it very difficult for law enforcement to identify and track down suspects. In addition, many cyber crimes are highly technical, making them difficult to investigate without the help of experts. Finally, the anonymous nature of the internet makes it hard to gather evidence against suspects. All of these factors make it extremely challenging for law enforcement to effectively investigate and prosecute cybercriminals.
What Are Some of the Potential Penalties for Convicted Cybercriminals?
Penalties for cybercrime can vary depending on the nature and severity of the offense. In some cases, a convicted cybercriminal may face a fine, jail time, or both. More serious offenses can result in stiffer penalties, including longer prison sentences and larger fines. In addition, a convicted cybercriminal may also be required to pay restitution to the victims of their crime. In some cases, they may also be subject to court-ordered monitoring or have their computer equipment seized. Regardless of the specific penalty, a conviction for cybercrime can have significant consequences for the offender.
How Can You Protect Yourself From Becoming a Victim of Cybercrime?
In today’s digital world, it’s important to be aware of the dangers of cybercrime. With so much of our personal information being stored online, criminals have more opportunities than ever to access our private data. There are a few steps you can take to protect yourself from becoming a victim of cybercrime. First, be aware of the types of information that criminals are looking for. This includes things like your Social Security number, credit card information, and online account passwords. Second, make sure that you’re only sharing your personal information with trusted websites and businesses. Third, keep your computer and other devices up to date with the latest security patches. By following these simple steps, you can help protect yourself from becoming a victim of cybercrime.
Cybercrime is a real and growing problem. The potential penalties for convicted cybercriminals are significant, and the consequences of becoming a victim can be devastating. There are things you can do to protect yourself from becoming a victim of cybercrime, including using strong passwords, installing anti-virus software, and being aware of scam emails and websites. If you think you have been the victim of cybercrime, please contact your local law enforcement agency immediately. | <urn:uuid:0e9930d8-4b65-47ed-8f26-910dde197f85> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://federalcrime.us/what-is-cybercrime | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.953384 | 1,016 | 2.84375 | 3 |
You are aware that your immune system is what protects your body from diseases by fighting off disease-causing microorganisms. Our poor lifestyle choices often leave our immune system in weakened states allowing the germs to overcome our body’s defense mechanisms.
There are several things you can do to strengthen your immune system. The following 9 healthy living strategies are simple to incorporate into your daily lives and they give a tremendous boost to your immune system.
- Exercise, especially outdoors: Strengthens immune system, improves blood circulation, enhances heart and lung health, and is great for mind-body balance and mental health.
- Get Sunlight: Enjoy dalight as much as possible. Sunlight boosts the immune system, releases endorphins, makes you feel lighter and brighter. Avoid extreme heat and peak suntime, instead enjoy the early morning sunrays, late afternoons and evenings before sunset.
- Drink Fluids: Staying hydrated is vital for the immune system. Plain water is best. Have herbal teas, warm water with lemon and sugar-free electrolyte drinks.
- Immune Boosting Foods: Citrus fruits, berries, water melon, ginger, garlic, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, broccoli, spinach, nuts and seeds such as sunflower seeds and flax seeds.
- Shower: Switch between warm and cold showers to stimulate immune sytem.
- Sauna: Using a sauna is also a way to warm up and then switch to cold temperatures.
- Aromatic oils: Take warm baths with aromatic oils, such as thyme, added to bath water.
- Reduce Stress/Relax: Stress damages the immune system. Extremely stressful or traumatic events can trigger autoimmune disorders.
- Sleep: Deep sleep is regenerative and strengthens the immune sytem. So don’t skimp on thise Zzz’s. | <urn:uuid:67d39c28-9683-4f25-992b-2652b8717e96> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://fitnesshacks.org/health/9-simple-and-natural-ways-to-strengthen-your-immune-system/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.889694 | 387 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Poker is a card game in which players bet during one round and then reveal their hands. The highest hand wins. There are many variants of poker and the game is often played in a casino setting with a dealer. It is a game of chance and strategy, with elements of psychology and probability. The game also teaches players to read their opponents and recognize tells.
Generally, players have five cards to work with: the two that are in their own hand and the four community cards on the table. In most games there are also wild cards that can be used for any purpose (deuces and one-eye jacks in the standard 52-card pack).
Players take turns betting during each poker deal. A player may call, raise or fold a hand. When a player calls, they must put in chips equal to the amount raised by the previous player. They can also “raise” their bet by putting in more than the previous raise. The player can also choose to “fold” their hand, allowing them to drop out of the betting and lose any chips that they have already placed in the pot.
By learning to play poker, students can develop a range of important skills, including teamwork, communication and critical thinking. They will learn to be aware of their emotions and how to manage them in stressful situations. They will also improve their concentration and focus on the task at hand. | <urn:uuid:b56780ca-f6b9-42c7-b6b3-1fd6b9bbedeb> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://fostartech.com/index.php/2023/10/11/learning-to-play-poker/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.988342 | 284 | 2.578125 | 3 |
What is sustainable agriculture?
Sustainable agriculture is a way of carrying out agriculture with full regards towards the ecosystem. Sustainable agriculture focuses on keeping the ecosystem intact while carrying out agriculture. It means that care is taken to ensure proper care for the soil, the water and all the other elements while farming.
Traditional methods of farming without the use of machinery, or chemicals was a way that helped control the carbon footprint of the agricultural practice. However, with the modern techniques focusing on automation of almost all the techniques used in farming, the carbon emissions have increased leading to a number of ill effects on the environment.
Let us take a quick look on some features of sustainable farming:
1. Crop Rotation: This is the most effective way to do sustainable farming. With crop rotation one can sow several different varieties of crops over the year. This has multiple benefits for the farmer as well as the ecosystem. The soil is replenished during the crop rotation thus allowing for better yields. This also helps cut the pests’ cycles. The pests are known to affect one kind of crops and get used to the terrain over a period of time. With crop rotation, this pest cycle can be broken.
2. Cover Crops- These also help in sustainable agriculture as cover crops help save the soil from being eroded and washed away. Farmers prefer to keep the fields covered and never leave it barren even in between crop rotations. This helps keep the plant cover all year long and also helps increase the yield.
3. Soil Enrichment- Rich and healthy soil is the most essential part of an ecosystem. Having healthy soil also guarantees better produce all through the year. Soil enrichment can be managed by adding only organic manure and natural compost to make the soil feel fresh and healthy.
4. Natural pest control- There are some kind of pests that can very well be controlled with the use of other organisms and animals that help keep the pests in check. This makes the use of chemical pesticides unnecessary and this also adds a lot of goodness to the ecosystem in general.
5. Bio Intensive Integrated Pest management- This approach is a system of pest management and control through biological methods and not through chemical techniques. In this method, the use of chemicals is disapproved and is allowed only as a last resort.
Let us now take a look at a few benefits of sustainable farming:
1. Environmental Conservation- This is the most important benefit of sustainable agriculture. It results in environmental conservation which is very important for the whole ecosystem in general.
2. Public safety- When fruits and vegetables are grown without the use of chemical based pesticides and insecticides then it is safer for the public to consume the same. Thus it also contributes to public safety.
3. Prevents Pollution- Sustainable Framing helps keep pollution in check with lesser chemicals being used in farming and lesser toxic waste being emitted in the environment.
4. Reduction in Cost- Sustainable agriculture is known to reduce the need of fossil fuels thus making it a cost effective method of farming.
5. Popularity- Organic farming is very popular these days and anyone using techniques of sustainable farming will get benefit of popularity among buyers.
If you are looking for a farm where you can carry out sustainable farming, then consider the amazing Chilliwack farms for sale that will be made available to you by http://fraservalleyfarm.ca/. Get your dream house with farm with Fraser Valley Farms and use it for sustainable farming to get good profits while benefitting the environment too. | <urn:uuid:1954fa43-4de6-4639-b331-89373ecf4658> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://fraservalleyfarm.ca/blog.html/some-in-depth-and-significant-features-of-sustainable-farming-5139323 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.948992 | 716 | 3.90625 | 4 |
As parents seek to engage their high school-age children in early discussions about their ambitions for pursuing a higher education – including at traditionally four-year institutions, as well as community colleges – we recommend they consider using a simple, decidedly low-tech device to begin recording their initial thinking: an old-fashioned index card.
In our book, The College Conversation: A Practical Companion for Parent to Guide Their Children Along the Path to Higher Education, Eric J. Furda, the former dean of admissions of the University of Pennsylvania, and I provide more than a dozen exercises and activities for families to undertake together. In the first, we suggest using a handful of index cards – whether 3×5, 4×6 or any other size of your choosing – to help you and your child to begin the process of looking inward at the specific attributes of a college or university experience and environment that might have the most appeal.
Index card exercise for you and your teen
For this first exercise, you and your teen might each grab a card and sit apart from each other, with the expectation that you will come back together to compare notes and to see where your respective visions for the ideal college experience align and diverge. Assuming your child is game, provide them with a series of instructions drawn from the suggestions that follow but adapted for your child’s own personality and priorities.
Remind them that their card should reflect their ideas and acknowledge that the college experience is ultimately theirs, not yours. If despite your prodding they’re resistant, this will still be a worthy process for you to engage in alone, or perhaps with a spouse or other partner, as it will provide you with valuable insights into your own thinking, with the possibility that you may be able to coax your child to the table at another time.
On your card, spend a few minutes writing a handful of words and phrases that describe the college environment that you believe might best suit your child. Don’t cite the names of individual schools or describe a school in a way that is so specific that its identity is obvious. There will be opportunities later in your extended conversation for you to share with your child particular institutions that you feel could be a good fit.
What we’re advocating here as a starting point is reducing the college experience to its barest essentials. Is there a particular subject (or subjects) that your child might enjoy studying? How about a particular setting—rural, urban, or something in between? Is athletics, varsity or intramural, a priority?
You might also consider a few attributes that are less tangible: Do you see your child as thriving in a college environment with a lot of energy, which could be inherent in the size of the institution, such as on a big football Saturday? Or will your child thrive in a less frenzied setting, as is typical on a smaller campus? Be aware that there are many schools that fall between these extremes, and that your child could well thrive in a range of environments.
Finally, identify any aspects of the college process that could be a source of anxiety. For example, if you have concerns about your child’s prospects for admission, particularly at a highly selective institution, as well as your family’s ability to pay for that education, include that.
The point of this exercise is to lay the groundwork for a mature conversation that may involve some discomfort but provide a beneficial amount of transparency.
At this initial stage, don’t overthink things. Free-associate a bit, with the goal of coming up with a half dozen partially formed ideas. This is the roughest of rough drafts, and it will undergo any number of rewrites over time. But keep these cards close by, to the point that they become dog-eared as you test your initial assumptions throughout all phases of the College Conversation.
For those who are doing this exercise on the earlier side of the admissions process, such as during your child’s sophomore year of high school, take a broader, more flexible approach, as you’ll be refining your initial thoughts multiple times over the next few years. But if it’s the fall of your child’s senior year of high school, by necessity you’ll have to be more focused and precise, as time is now of the essence.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume your child has been willing to play along with the exercise. After you’ve each retreated to your respective corners for five minutes or so, come back together, exchange cards, and spend some time reviewing and reflecting on what the other has written. If both parents or another adult is involved, this could be a three-way exchange.
A good way to begin a dialogue is by identifying areas in which you concur, such as if you both agree that an optimal distance from home ranges from a one-hour to a four-hour drive. But what about those topics where you and your child are not in agreement, whether it’s an intended major or an anxiety you or they have? This is not the time to craft solutions or seek to forge common ground, as the mere raising of these issues—perhaps for the first time in your relationship—is the objective at this point. Take note of each other’s thinking—the goal at this early stage is simply to notice, to listen, and to begin to learn.
Be mindful of topics that might trigger strong emotions, whether yours or your child’s. Your preference may be for a campus less than a few hours’ drive from home, while your child dreams of being a continent away. Take note of your child’s body language and expressions. If they are retreating inward or obviously anxious, don’t press the issue but reassure them that discomfort in such discussions is natural, and essential to growth, and that you are in this together.
Before you bring your conversation to a close, highlight for your child the various points that you’ll be likely to return to in future talks, as they’ll become more important as your child begins to assemble a college list and then sets out to learn more about these institutions.
One last bit of advice: Work with your teen (and your partner or spouse, as appropriate) to establish some basic guardrails and boundaries that will govern how and when you engage in the College Conversation, as well as when you should take a breather.
If another adult is taking part in the conversation, you both might establish your own rules of engagement. Whether that person is a spouse (married or divorced), step-parent, grandparent, or family friend, spend some time thinking about how you will work together in support of your child. This may involve setting up a division of labor—is one of you, for example, more comfortable with research or logistics?
You should also agree upon ways of managing the differences and disagreements that are inevitable in a process like this. To the extent that you and another adult have different points of view, you might want to consider how to convey them to your child in the most constructive way.
We consider these broader rules of the road important enough that it is probably worth your writing them down or tapping them into a computer so that they can serve as a reference.
Eric J. Furda is the former dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania and the former executive director of admissions at Columbia University.
Jacques Steinberg is the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers and You Are an Ironman, and is a former New York Times education journalist. He has served as a senior executive at Say Yes to Education and is on the board of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He appears periodically as a college admissions expert on NBC’s Today show. | <urn:uuid:f4815d67-f08a-4e47-90d4-0b6680a50a1d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://grownandflown.com/college-conversation-eric-j-furda-jacques-steinberg/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.966284 | 1,606 | 2.765625 | 3 |
I didn’t wanted to struggle very much with a RTC and since I had a previous MCU project that was generating a 1s pulse, I thought I use that as a master circuit for my clock. I could have used the tmr modules of the same MCU, but then I realized I had to use another external CLC chip just to increase the number of pins because I wanted to build the binary LED display for the seconds. Since I found that these China MCUs are cheaper than many other 74’s, I decided that I was going to use this configuration of two microcontrollers. So I came up with this twisted-head schematic eventually. The master circuit also controls the seconds display and after it finishes displaying all the LEDs and measuring exactly one second, it outputs a single pulse from the pin D7 of the PortB. This pulse is the increment signal for the slave chip and the chip knows exactly what to do with it.
The code on the master MCU is really minimalist and with some small exceptions regarding the order of the instructions and without the conversion procedures, it could be described like this:
The slave MCU then picks up the square wave from the master and increments the rest of the clock... and without trying to be too boring, I will place a simplified flowchart of that too:
The Master MCU code is only 113 words and the Slave MCu code is 263 so the entire code is 376 x 14 bits. | <urn:uuid:1345951d-fe9b-42f1-809d-c67660c06fe6> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://hackaday.io/project/18657-jar-clock | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.958692 | 299 | 2.75 | 3 |
Bronchial asthma is a very common chronic (lengthy-term) lung disease where the lungs’ bronchial tubes, or airways, become inflamed.
This inflammation causes the airways to get responsive to ecological triggers, for example dust, smoke, pet dander, or cold air.up arrow
Responding to those triggers, an bronchial asthma attack can happen. Your muscle mass round the bronchial tubes tighten, the liner from the airways becomes inflamed, and also the airways overproduce mucus, which makes it hard to breathe.up arrow
Need to know much more about bronchial asthma? Continue reading to determine what experts learn about this breathing disorder, why many people develop it yet others don’t, changes in lifestyle to help you manage bronchial asthma, and the way to avoid complications from the condition.
What Happens Kind of Bronchial asthma You’ve?
Bronchial asthma is really a ailment that affects your airways, which carry air interior and exterior your lung area. The kind of bronchial asthma you’ve depends upon your particular triggers.
Because of advances in bronchial asthma research, doctors have had the ability to identify the different sorts of bronchial asthma. The 5 most typical kinds of bronchial asthma are: exercise-caused bronchospasm (EIB), allergic bronchial asthma, cough-variant bronchial asthma, work-related bronchial asthma, and nocturnal or night time bronchial asthma. EIB occurs after physical effort. It isn’t easy to find out which kind of bronchial asthma you’ve. Proper diagnosis and regular communication together with your physician can assist you to determine the very best plan of action.
Bronchial asthma is really a chronic lung disease, so it’s vital that you receive treatment as quickly as possible to make sure that your problem doesn’t worsen.
How you can Know if Your Bronchial asthma Is Severe
Doctors differentiate severe bronchial asthma using their company, milder types of bronchial asthma based on the frequency and concentration of an individual’s signs and symptoms.
To begin with, severe bronchial asthma is persistent, which doctors define as bronchial asthma that triggers signs and symptoms greater than two times per week, explains Patricia Takach, MD, an affiliate professor of clinical medicine within the portion of allergy and immunology in the College of Pennsylvania’s Perelman Med school in Philadelphia. For a lot of severe bronchial asthma sufferers, signs and symptoms occur daily.
Also, individuals with severe bronchial asthma require a combination of medications which includes a high-dose inhaled corticosteroid or perhaps a systemic (dental) corticosteroid.up arrow Roughly 4 % of people that have bronchial asthma have severe bronchial asthma.up arrow
Also, and somewhat confusingly, severe bronchial asthma is totally different from a “severe acute asthma” attack or episode. This term describes an bronchial asthma attack that’s so severe required immediate medical assistance.up arrow
Signs and Signs and symptoms of Bronchial asthma
Coughing? Wheezing? Chest discomfort? If these signs and symptoms seem familiar, it may be bronchial asthma, a chronic ailment that inflames the airways (bronchial tubes) that carry air interior and exterior the lung area.
When something triggers your bronchial asthma signs and symptoms, the membrane lining your airways swells, your muscle mass round the tubes tighten, and also the airways fill with mucus. Because these tubes narrow it might be harder to breathe, causing signs and symptoms for example wheezing and coughing, congestion, difficulty breathing, and chest tightness or discomfort. For those who have bronchial asthma, performing normal day to day activities could be strenuous, and it will take more time to recuperate from the respiratory system infection, like a cold or flu.
An bronchial asthma attack or flare-up is really a sudden worsening of those signs and symptoms, including severe wheezing, unmanageable coughing, rapid breathing, sweating, and anxiety. These signs and symptoms require immediate medical assistance.
Although not everybody encounters bronchial asthma in the same manner. Signs and symptoms vary for every person, can alter as we grow older, differ between attacks and could intensify during exercise, having a cold, or under periods of elevated stress.
Causes and Risks of Bronchial asthma and Bronchial asthma Attacks
It’s unknown just what causes bronchial asthma, but scientists think that both genetic and ecological factors lead to the introduction of the condition.
Why Have You Got Bronchial asthma?
Bronchial asthma has a tendency to run in families, suggesting likely to inherited aspect of the condition.up arrow You are more prone to have bronchial asthma in case your parents get it.
You are also more prone to have bronchial asthma for those who have atopic syndrome, or atopy – a predisposition toward certain allergic hypersensitivity reactions, for example atopic eczema and hay fever (allergic rhinitis).up arrow Bronchial asthma and allergic reactions frequently go hands in hands.
Getting bronchial asthma causes the membrane lining within the airways to swell. Throughout an bronchial asthma attack, the swelling increases, your muscle mass round the airways tighten, mucus fills the airways, and breathing gets to be more difficult.Shutterstock
Getting respiratory system infections during infancy or early childhood is yet another risk factor for bronchial asthma. These infections may cause inflammation within the lung area and may damage lung tissue, affecting breathing later in existence.
Similarly, studies suggest that early connection with airborne allergens, irritants, and certain infections – in infancy or early childhood, prior to the defense mechanisms is full-grown – raises your chance of developing bronchial asthma.up arrow up arrow
What Triggers an Bronchial asthma Attack?
Numerous triggers may cause bronchial asthma attacks, including:
Cigarettes While smoking is unhealthy for anybody, it’s particularly harmful for those who have bronchial asthma. Should you smoke, you need to quit.
Secondhand smoke may also trigger an bronchial asthma attack. Avoid situations by which people surrounding you smoke. Also don’t allow people smoke somewhere in which you spend considerable time, just like your home or vehicle – even when you are not present once they smoke.
Smoke from wood or grass Though it may appear “natural,” smoke from all of these sources contains dangerous gases and particles.
Avoid burning wood in your house. If you reside in a place where wildfires occur, monitor quality of air forecasts and then try to stay inside when particle levels are in their worst.
Outside polluting of the environment Emissions from factories, cars, buses, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and snow blowers all can trigger an bronchial asthma attack. Avoid contact with these sources whenever you can.up arrow
It is also smart to check quality of air measurements associated with pollution in your town, for example ozone and small particles, and also to stay inside whenever possible when they’re elevated.up arrow
Particular foods and food additives While just about any food may cause a hypersensitive reaction, a couple of additives (like sulfites along with other preservatives) are broadly thought to cause side effects in certain people.
Acidity reflux may also trigger an bronchial asthma attack in certain people, so any food that aggravates this problem can also be accountable for signs and symptoms.
Respiratory system infections Included in this are influenza (flu), the most popular cold, respiratory system syncytial virus (RSV), and sinus infections.
Strong emotional states Negative feelings like stress, anxiety, depression, or fear may cause a panic attack, frequently by causing breathlessness (heavy, fast breathing).up arrow
Certain medications While differing people have different triggers, common culprits include aspirin along with other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) for example ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) and naproxen (Aleve).up arrow
Time period of Bronchial asthma
For adults with bronchial asthma, the problem is generally chronic – meaning they’re going to have it throughout their existence. Research printed in 2015 within the European Respiratory system Journal found only 3 % of adults who’d developed bronchial asthma possessed a remission of the signs and symptoms during 12 many years of follow-up.up arrow
The prognosis for bronchial asthma differs for kids compared to adults.
Some kids who develop bronchial asthma “lose” it as being they get older.up arrow While bronchial asthma may return later in existence for a number of them, many not have an bronchial asthma recurrence.
However for others, especially youngsters with severe bronchial asthma, the problem might not ever disappear.
For those these reasons, the lengthy-term prognosis for somebody with bronchial asthma varies a great deal. Many people improve with time – though their signs and symptoms never fully disappear – while some worsen, states Emily Pennington, MD, a pulmonologist and bronchial asthma specialist in the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
Fortunately, by working carefully having a physician to handle signs and symptoms – with medication, and through staying away from bronchial asthma triggers – many people with bronchial asthma can live an ordinary, healthy existence free from bronchial asthma-related complications.up arrow | <urn:uuid:dc73fdab-2709-4ebd-ae91-dc154c742b04> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://healthcarthub.com/asthma-guide/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.922412 | 2,023 | 3.03125 | 3 |
High blood pressure is also known as the silent killer.
Unless you reduce high blood pressure on time,
it may cause heart attacks, strokes, heart disease, organ failure, and death.
What Causes High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a common condition in which the blood pressure on the artery walls is so high that it causes health problems such as heart disease.
Blood pressure is determined by the amount of blood the heart pumps and the amount of resistance the blood flow has in the arteries.
The more blood the heart pumps, and the narrower the arteries, the higher the blood pressure will be.
Your doctor will prescribe high blood pressure medications,
However, did you know that there are natural solutions available in your own kitchen that you can use instead?
* For those taking medications to lower blood pressure, do not stop taking them or change their quantity, without consulting a doctor.
Basic Recommendation to Reduce Blood Pressure
Lose Weight and Prefer Olive Oil
- Studies show that there is a direct link between obesity, especially hip obesity, and an increase in blood pressure.
- Prefer olive oil as a source of fat.
Olive oil helps dilate blood vessels and thereby reduce blood pressure and even makes the arteries more resistant to high blood pressure.
Eat More Vegetables and Fruits
Vegetables and fruits contain bioflavonoids,
these herbal chemicals that act as powerful antioxidants and maintain the strength and flexibility of the blood vessel walls.
In addition, they contain dietary fiber that also contributes to reducing blood pressure by reducing sodium absorption, as well as by giving a feeling of satiety that helps to lose weight.
Less Salt and More Green Tea
- Limit salt intake. The link between salt intake and hypertension has been proven in hundreds of studies.
- Drink cocoa or green tea. Similar to vegetables and fruits, cocoa beans and green tea contain flavonoids, which improve the condition of blood vessels and reduce blood pressure.
Add Potassium-Rich Foods to Your Diet
Like dietary fiber, potassium has a beneficial effect on sodium concentration,
thus helps balance blood pressure.
Therefore it is recommended to eat legumes, bananas, and dried fruits.
However, chronic kidney patients, diabetics, and patients treated with potassium-raising drugs should avoid foods rich in this mineral.
Enrich Your Diet With Magnesium
Deficient conditions cause blood vessels to become less resistant to damage from hypertension.
The magnesium mineral is essential for the function of the endothelium, the inner layer of the blood vessels,
which is responsible for the secretion of substances that dilate the blood vessels.
You can find magnesium in nuts, leafy green vegetables and lentils.
Also in whole grains, soybeans, and chocolate.
Reduce Alcohol Consumption
While moderate wine drinking, especially red wine which contains polyphenols, natural antioxidants that protect the heart, helps reducing blood pressure, increased alcohol consumption can have the opposite effect.
What is moderate consumption?
No more than 300 milliliters of red wine a day for men and about half of that for women.
Increase Calcium Intake
This mineral balances blood pressure by increasing the excretion of sodium in the urine.
Moreover, people who don’t include enough calcium in their diet have a clear tendency to hypertension,
While high calcium intake can reduce blood pressure in both hypertensive and healthy people.
Prefer calcium derived from tahini, leafy vegetables, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and dried fruits.
The Noni Fruit
Noni is a fruit that grows in the southern hemisphere, from India through Hawaii to Costa Rica,
It has a shape similar to that of the pineapple.
Noni raises serotonin levels and thereby soothes and reduces anxiety, depression, and stress,
In addition, it dilates blood vessels, two effects that lead to a drop in blood pressure.
You can find them In health stores, or you can find syrup or capsules extracted from the fruit.
Dosage: 3-5 tablespoons of the syrup mixed with water or juice on an empty stomach,
or 2-3 capsules twice a day on an empty stomach.
Allicin, The active ingredient found in garlic and the one responsible for its odor is the reason why garlic may be helpful in reducing blood pressure.
Garlic is effective in slowing the development of atherosclerosis and also slightly reducing blood pressure.
Natural Treatment for High Blood Pressure
Two very essential recommendations that are not related to dietary recommendations but are necessary for the success of the treatment:
The first is to reduce the level of tension and stress through breathing exercises, contact therapies, meditation, yoga, walking on the beach, and any other activity that can help you reduce the level of stress in your life.
It is important that at least one of these steps will be done routinely and regularly,
since without these steps, the nutritional treatment is incomplete.
The second recommendation is to practice regular and constant exercise which improves blood circulation in the blood vessels and improves the feeling of the person.
More Foods That Can Reduce Blood Pressure
- Drink Carrots and Spinach Juice twice a day to reduce blood pressure.
- Beetroot juice is very healthy and some consider it an excellent method of reducing blood pressure.
It is recommended to drink the juice twice a day.
- Boil olive leaves for a few minutes and drink 3 glasses a day.
- Eat artichokes, it regulates blood pressure.
- Drink 2-3 glasses of papaya juice a day.
- Basil contributes to improving blood circulation in the body and thus balance the blood pressure.
- Parsley is rich in folic acid that helps reduce the risk of heart disease, as well as potassium and magnesium that help reduce blood pressure.
- Asphodels contain allicin, which you may also find in onions and garlic.
Allicin contributes to reducing cholesterol levels and blood pressure.
- Dill is rich in potassium, vitamin C, and magnesium. | <urn:uuid:52780e9a-0cda-4b42-ae5f-60e887dfd8dd> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://herbalismcourse.com/natural-remedies/high-blood-pressure/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.917114 | 1,241 | 3.21875 | 3 |
There is no denying the fact that plastic is just about everywhere that you look. As a matter of fact, it is likely that you’ll find plastic just about everywhere around you, even right next to you at this very moment. Plastic, after all, can be used in the creation of many different things, of this there is no doubt.
For one thing, plastic packaging is commonplace for everything from food – perishables and non perishables alike – to toys to video games to common household items. Plastic packaging is cheap to manufacture as well as very durable, helping to protect many different types of goods from damage as they are shipped around the country and even all throughout the world. For many people, buying something in plastic has become a clear indicator that this product is a safe one to consume and utilize.
Of course, plastic is used far beyond packaging and can be found in the actual products themselves. Consider, for instance, the products that we buy for our children. Plastic is widely used for children’s toys (and infant toys) for a number of different reasons. For one thing, it’s inexpensive. Kids outgrow things so quickly (from clothes to toys to likes and dislikes) that you’ll want to be buying affordable products as much as you are able to do so. In many cases, plastic toys will be, by and large, the most affordable options around. And still there are more reasons to buy plastic toys. They are also easy to clean, making them a part of a hassle-free life for just about any parent. They’re durable as well, something that again makes them highly desirable.
And plastic even plays an important role in the medical field. Step inside just about any given hospital and you’ll find a plethora of high quality plastic products around. From the beds to the packaging that is used for various medical instruments, it is clear to see how plastic plays a hugely important role for many aspects of hospital life and living. Therefore, plastic is important for the health and safety of a great many people here in the United States, of this there is no doubt.
Plastic manufacturing, therefore, has only continued to climb not only here in the United States but all throughout the world as we know it. Through plastic manufacturing, we have been able to improve our usage of plastic and even expand upon it. Plastic manufacturing has also been fantastic for the overall economy of the United States, as it is now the third largest industry in the entirety of the country, something that is very impressive indeed, of this there is no doubt. Though China’s manufacturing industry is the largest of all, contributing up to one full quarter of all plastic production on a global scale, the United States comes in a respectable third on a worldwide scale.
And our prowess as plastic manufacturers is most certainly on the rise. Here in the United States alone, there are as many as 16,000 injection molding facilities within the scope and scale of this one country alone – meaning that there is at least one in every single state. In order for these facilities to be fully functioning, however, they must include a number of important components. Sprue bushings provide just one example, as do valve gate systems, valve gating in general, and two material hot valves. Sprue bushings can vary, as sprue bushings actually come in a number of different sizes. But sprue bushings will likely always be important in the average plastic manufacturing plant. And when sprue bushings are used, something like sprue bar shut off devices will be essential as well, going hand in hand with the usage of sprue bushings in the first place.
Of course, sprue bushings and machine nozzles and a dual stage filter and everything else should only be handled by skilled and trained professionals of the field. Fortunately, with as many as one million people working in this field of plastic manufacturing, finding such professionals is not likely to be overly difficult. | <urn:uuid:729fc0d2-7609-44ca-a4ee-2233f4a9943c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://hertechknowledgy.com/a-look-into-the-important-world-of-plastic-molding-and-other-aspects-of-the-plastics-manufacturing-world/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.971326 | 813 | 2.765625 | 3 |
§ 291 Fifth Edition
Even those organs which have lost their peculiar sense, e.g., a tongue and palate that have lost the faculty of tasting, or a nose that has lost the faculty of smelling, communicate the power of the medicine that acts first on them alone not less perfectly to all the other organs of the body.
§ 291 Sixth Edition
Baths of pure water prove themselves partly palliative, partly as homoeopathic serviceable aids in restoring health in acute diseases as well as in convalescence of cured chronic patients with proper consideration of the conditions of the convalescent and the temperature of the bath, its duration and repetition. But even if well applied, they may bring only physically beneficial changes in the sick body, in themselves they are no true medicine. The lukewarm baths at 25 to 27? serve to arouse the slumbering sensibility of fibre in the apparent dead (frozen, drowned, suffocated) which benumbed the sensation of the nerves. Though only palliative, still they often prove themselves sufficiently active, especially when given in conjunction with coffee and rubbing with the hands. They may give homoeopathic aid in cases where the irritability is very unevenly distributed and accumulated too unevenly in some organs as is the case in certain hysteric spasms and infantile convulsions. In the same way, cold baths 10 to 6? in persons cured medically of chronic diseases and with deficiency of vital heat, act as an homoeopathic aid. By instantaneous and later with repeated immersions they act as a palliative restorative of the tone of the exhausted fibre. For this purpose, such baths are to be used for more than momentary duration, rather for minutes and of gradually lowered temperature, they are a palliative, which, since it acts only physically has no connection with the disadvantage of a reverse action to be feared afterwards, as takes place with dynamic medicinal palliatives.
§ 292 Fifth Edition
Even the external surface of the body, covered as it is with skin and epidermis, is not insusceptible of the powers of medicines, especially those in a liquid form, but the most sensitive parts are also the most susceptible.1
1 Rubbing-in appears to favour the action of the medicines only in this way, that the friction makes the skin more sensitive, and the living fibres thereby more capable of feeling, as it were, the medicinal power and of communicating to the whole organism this health-affecting sensation. The previous employment of friction to the inside of the thigh makes the mere laying on the mercurial ointment afterwards quite as powerfully medicinal as if the ointment itself had been rubbed upon that part, a process which is termed rubbing-in, but it is very doubtful whether the mental itself can penetrate in substance into the interior of the body, or be taken up by the absorbent vessels by means of this so-called rubbing-in. Homoeopathy, however, hardly ever requires for its cures the rubbing-in of any medication, nor does it need any mercurial ointment.
§ 293 Fifth Edition
I find it necessary to allude here to animal magnetism, as it is termed, or rather mesmerism (as it should be called, out of gratitude to Mesmer, its first founder), which differs so much in its nature from all other therapeutic agents. This curative power, often so stupidly denied, which streams upon a patient by the contact of a well-intentioned person powerfully exerting his will, either acts homoeopathically, by the production of symptoms similar to those of the diseased state to be cured; and for this purpose a single pass made, without much exertion of the will, with the palms of the hands not too slowly from the top of the head downwards over the body to the tips of the toes,1 is serviceable in, for instance, uterine haemorrhages, even in the last stage when death seems approaching; or it is useful by distributing the vital force uniformly throughout the organism, when it is in abnormal excess in one part and deficient in other parts, for example, in rush of blood to the head and sleepless, anxious restlessness of weakly persons, etc., by means of a similar, single, but somewhat stronger pass; or for the immediate communication and restoration of the vital force to some one weakened part or to the whole organism, – an object that cannot be attained so certainly and with so little interference with the other medicinal treatment by any other agent besides mesmerism. If it is wished to supply a particular part with the vital force, this is effected by concentrating a very powerful and well-intentioned will for the purpose, and placing the hands or tips of the fingers on the chronically weakened parts, whither an internal chronic dyscrasia has transferred its important local symptom, as, for example, in the case of old ulcers, amaurosis, paralysis of certain limbs, etc.2 Many rapid apparent cures performed in all ages, by mesmerizers endowed with great natural power, belong to this class. The effect of communicated human power upon the whole human organism was most brilliantly shown, in the resuscitation of persons who had lain some time apparently dead, by the most powerful sympathetic will of a man in full vigor of vital force,3 and of this kind of resurrection history records many undeniable examples.
1 The smallest homoeopathic dose, which however, often effects wonders when used on proper occasions. Imperfect homoeopathists, who think themselves monstrously clever, not infrequently deluge their patients in difficult diseases with doses of different medicines, given rapidly one after the other, which, although they may have been homoeopathically selected and given in highly potentized attenuation, bring the patients into such an over-excited state that life and death are struggling for the mastery, and the least additional quantity of medicine would infallibly kill them. In such cases a mere gentle mesmeric pass and the frequent application, for a short time of the hand of a well-intentioned person to the part that is particularly affected, produce the harmonious uniform distribution of the vital force throughout the organism, and therewith rest, sleep and recovery.
2 Although by this restoration of the vital force, which ought to be repeated from time to time, no permanent cure can be effected in cases where, as has been taught above, a general internal dyscrasia lies at the root of the old local affection, as it always does, yet this positive strengthening and immediate saturation with the vital force (which no more belongs to the category of palliatives than does eating and drinking when hunger and thirst are present) is no mean auxiliary to the actual treatment of the whole disease by homoeopathic medicines.
3 Especially of one of those persons, of whom there are not many who, along with great kindness of disposition and perfect bodily powers, possesses but a very moderate desire for sexual intercourse, which it would give him very little trouble to suppress, in whom, consequently, all the fine vital spirits that would otherwise be employed in the preparation of the semen, are ready to be communicated to others, by touching them and powerfully exerting the will. Some powerful mesmerisers, with whom I have become acquainted, has all this peculiar character.
§ 294 Fifth Edition*
All the above-mentioned methods of practicing mesmerism depend upon an influx of more or less vital force into the patient, and hence are termed positive mesmerism.1 An opposite mode of employing mesmerism, however, as it produces just the contrary effect, deserves to be termed negative mesmerism. To this belong the passes which are used to rouse from the somnambulic sleep, as also all the manual processes known by the names of soothing and ventilating. This discharge by means of negative mesmerism of the vital force accumulated to excess in individual parts of the system of undebiliated persons is most surely and simply performed by making a very rapid motion of the flat extended hand, held parallel to, and about an inch distant from the body, from the top of the head to the tips of the toes.2 The more rapidly this pass is made, so much the more effectually will the discharge be effected. Thus, for instance, in the case where a previously healthy woman,3 from the sudden suppression of her catamenia by a violent mental shock, lies to all appearance dead, the vital force which is probably accumulated in the precordial region, will by such a rapid negative pass, be discharged and its equilibrium throughout the whole organism restored, so that the resuscitation generally follows immediately.4 In like manner, a gentle, less rapid, negative pass diminishes the excessive restlessness and sleeplessness accompanied with anxiety sometimes produced in very irritable persons by a too powerful positive pass, etc.
* This Section corresponds to § 289 of the Sixth Edition.
1 When I here speak of the decided and certain curative power of positive mesmerism, I most assuredly do not mean the abuse of it, where, by repeated passes of this kind, continued for half an hour or a whole hour at a time, and, even day after day, performed on weak, nervous patients, that monstrous revolution of the whole human system is effected which is termed somnambulism, wherein the human being is ravished from the world of sense and seems to belong more to the world of spirits – a highly unnatural and dangerous state, by means of which it has not infrequently been attempted to cure chronic diseases.
2 It is a well known rule that a person who is either to be positively or negatively mesmerised, should not wear silk on any part of the body.
3 Hence a negative pass, especially if it be very rapid, is extremely injurious to a delicate person affected with a chronic ailment and deficient in vital force.
4 A strong country lad, ten years of age, received in the morning, on account of slight indisposition, from a professed female mesmeriser, several very powerful passes with the points of both thumbs, from the pit of the stomach along the lower edge of the ribs, and he instantly grew pale, and fell into such a state of unconsciousness and immobility that no effort could arouse him, and he was almost given up for dead. I made his eldest brother give him a very rapid negative pass from the crown of the head over the body to the feet, and in one instant he recovered his consciousness and became lively and well. | <urn:uuid:841f55c6-7305-4937-bd2f-5750afd1b286> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://homeopathyplus.com/the-organon-30/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.962736 | 2,154 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Siphon Coffee Maker: Brewing the Best Cup of Coffee
Most have never heard of siphon brewing, or vacuum pot brewing, as it fell out of favor as a method for home brewed coffee during the 1960’s, but it remains as one of the best ways to create a wonderful cup of coffee. Its recent resurgence in coffee culture hasn’t been unwarranted to say the least. The cup it produces is clean, crisp and rich, as it fully extracts the many flavor nuances of various regional coffee beans. For those who take pride in producing the best result possible, it affords a very visual, and tactile brewing process. Not to mention, it’s just really cool. The entire siphon coffee apparatus borders on being a science project, and you get to be a “Mad Coffee Scientist”!
Vacuum Pot Brewers: How do they work?
Some will wonder about the “magic” behind a siphon brewer, but for those of you who don’t, feel free to skip down to the step by step segment. So, how does a siphon brewer work to produce a great cup? I’ll attempt to explain it here as simply as possible. There are basically four components to a siphon coffee maker. First, a lower glass (borosilicate) vessel, which holds the water to be heated initially and the brewed coffee after. The second piece is an upper glass vessel with the siphon tube extending from the bottom with a rubber gasket, which seals the upper and lower vessels and helps create the vacuum. The top vessel is where the grounds are placed and the “brewing” happens. Finally, there is the filter and heating element, which, I’ll get into the various types later. On to the process. First, water is placed into the bottom vessel, then the top vessel is placed carefully onto the bottom vessel, where the water is being heated. As some of the heated water is evaporated, it is converted into water vapor; this expanding gas(water vapor) forces the remaining heated water up into the top vessel via the siphon tube. Heat is maintained as the brewing progresses to keep the water up top, and within the ideal temperature range for brewing coffee of 190*F-205*F. Temperature is an important detail when it comes to good coffee, and a siphon brewer readily keeps you with the proper range. Once the coffee is steeped, or brewed for the preferred time, the heat is then removed to reverse the entire process. The vapor contracts in the bottom vessel and the resulting vacuum “pulls” the water back down into the bottom vessel and through the filter, so you are left with a clean, delicious cup of coffee.
Moving past the ad hoc science lesson.Here is the step by step guide to brewing with a siphon coffee maker. I want to add here that, there are certain keys to brewing a great cup of coffee as with any coffee brewing method. Those are to always use freshly roasted beans, to always grind your beans right before brewing and to maintain the proper brew temperature at all times during the brewing process. With regards to grinding, a good burr grinder that produces consistent coffee grounds is just as essential to good coffee as the way you choose to brew it. If you aren't already using one, you really want to step up from a blade grinder. This isn’t the end all be all way to brew with a vacuum pot either as steep times, stirring and when to add the coffee grounds can be adjusted to your own method or tastes. For me, I’ve found that this approach results in a consistently good cup.
Siphon Coffee Maker Filters
The three predominate filter types for vacuum brewers are cloth, paper or a glass rod. A cloth filter is usually the de facto choice, as it is the type of filter that accompanies most modern day siphon coffee makers such as those from Yama. Many prefer this type of filter as it does an excellent job of filtering fine coffee grinds while still allowing the flavorful oils from the coffee through. Hario Glass, from Japan, produces a siphon paper filter, which is sold separately or included with some models. I find these easiest to clean and maintain, though, some debate that flavor is lost as some of the aforementioned volatile oils will be absorbed by the paper filter. Glass rods are also available if you can find them on eBay. Do a search for "Cory glass rod." A glass filter will give you the best of both a cloth and paper filter, but it doesn’t do the best job of filtering finer coffee grounds. It will allow coffee oils through and is very easy to clean, but some fine grounds will seep into the final product since the small nubs on the globe portion of the “filter” don’t do a fantastic job of actually filtering. Glass rods are also prone to clogging if you’re not careful. This is where the kick down phase of brewing is stalled due to too many fine grinds. You really need to be precise and have a good grinder to have consistent success with a glass rod filter.
Every stand-alone siphon coffee maker is supplied with an alcohol wick burner, but they are slow to heat and not very capable. I'd recommend that you purchase a butane burner, as they provide a quick and effective heating source. You can find them on Amazon or woodworking tool websites. Butane refill canisters are also easily acquired at home improvement stores and other home retailers. Some siphon brewers are also made to be used on your stovetop. These are easily indicated by either their product description, or visually by looking for a flat-bottomed lower glass vessel. | <urn:uuid:e2f7b97d-58ad-4908-9535-c3a047fb3661> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://hubpages.com/food/Brew-the-Best-Coffee-with-a-Siphon-Brewer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.958667 | 1,188 | 2.578125 | 3 |
What does the FADS1 gene do?
In our Western diet we tend to have too much omega 6 which increases inflammation and too little omega 3.
Although things are not as quite as simple as that, some omega 6's are good, the FADS1 gene is associated with a higher (less healthy) ratio.
Basically, FADS1 variations affects the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 circulating in the blood stream.
CC variants tend to have a higher ratio than CT or TT variants. Omega 6 is important but a high omega 6:3 ration with lead to increased levels of inflammation by increasing a chemical called “arachidonic acid”.
The FADS1 gene codes for a very important enzyme called delta 5 desaturase. CC are associated with enhanced conversion of the omega 6 GLA with the inflammatory messenger “arachidonic acid”.
This is associated with systemic inflammation and inflammatory disorders. High levels of omega 3, in particular EPA will inhibit this enzyme reducing the production of arachidonic acid and reducing inflammation in the body.
In the modern western diet the increased consumption of cooking oils and processed food has led to the three-fold increase of dietary levels of omega 6 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), broken down into linoleic acid (LA). In our current diet, linoleic acid contributes to more than 90% our PUFA intake.
Linoleic acid is then metabolised in three other steps (LA > GLA. DHGLA>AA) into a long chain PUFA, known as arachidonic acid (AA). AA plays a major role in inflammation and immunity.
These have mainly pro-inflammatory effects. Fats derived from omega 3 oils such as fish oils, are less inflammatory. The AA impacts the immune responses through a variety of mechanisms.
The FADS gene family variants determine the levels of circulating fats in cells and tissues. FADS 1 gene variants are likely to be a contributor in different levels of fat found in fat cells in the blood and the red blood cell membranes.
The TT genotype, tend to have lower level of pro-inflammatory chemicals, in comparison to a GG result. The T allele is associated with lower risk of heart disease. If you have the CC genotype, it has been linked with higher levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol levels compared to TT genotype so this should be checked regularly.
The GG genotype is mainly observed in African American at 87%, in Europeans 41% and Asians at 31%. Due to this variant dietary guidelines regarding the type of dietary fat eaten is important on.
Remember your genes are only a tendency. Check your lipid levels and omega 6:3 ration to see how you are doing. You can check your genes by taking a DNA test at humanpeople. References:
Desaturase and elongase-limiting endogenous long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid biosynthesis | <urn:uuid:5cf48de5-3875-41ef-aff6-13b78a9e9a05> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://humanpeople.co/blogs/blog/fads1-and-its-effects-on-omega-fatty-acids | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.929558 | 602 | 3.34375 | 3 |
The journey of a child’s early literacy is a foundational path, brimming with potential and wonder. From the first story read in a parent’s comforting voice, these initial experiences with words and books lay a vital groundwork for future success.
Parents play a pivotal role in nurturing this journey, unlocking a world of imagination and understanding for their little ones. This guide helps new parents foster language and literacy skills in their children. It ensures a strong and delightful beginning in their reading and learning journey.
1. Creating A Literate Environment
Creating a literate environment at home is crucial for fostering early literacy in children. LittleScribblers exemplifies this principle by providing a stimulating, healthy, and caring environment. They encourage children to explore their natural sense of curiosity, vital for literacy development.
In your home, consider establishing a cozy reading corner with age-appropriate books. This could be inspired by environments that feature a library and technology corner to engage children in diverse learning experiences. This setup invites exploration and discovery, essential for early literacy.
By mirroring these practices at home, you create a literate environment that not only educates but also excites and engages your child in the world of reading and learning.
2. Read Aloud Daily
Reading aloud to children is more than just a bedtime ritual; it’s a gateway to linguistic and emotional development. When you read to your child, you’re not just sharing a story; you’re cultivating a bond and igniting a love for words. This interaction enhances vocabulary, comprehension, and listening skills.
To make reading aloud a more engaging experience, vary your voice to bring characters to life. This not only captures your child’s attention but also helps them understand character emotions and story dynamics. Encourage participation by pausing to ask questions or predict what might happen next. Such interactive storytelling not only enriches the experience but also encourages critical thinking and imagination.
3. Incorporate Technology Mindfully
Incorporating technology into your child’s literacy journey can be a modern and effective approach. Educational apps and e-books offer interactive and vibrant ways to engage with language and stories. These digital tools can make learning to read a more dynamic and engaging experience.
However, it’s essential to balance screen time with traditional reading. While technology can be a valuable aid, nothing quite replaces the tactile and personal experience of a physical book. Set aside dedicated time for reading books in their traditional form. This balance ensures that your child benefits from the best of both worlds—the classic charm of paper books and the interactive appeal of digital media.
4. Interactive Reading Activities
Interactive reading activities transform the act of reading into an active learning adventure for your child. Engage them by asking questions about the story, which encourages critical thinking and comprehension. For example, ask them what they think will happen next or why a character made a certain choice.
Also, inspire them to narrate their own stories. This not only fosters creativity but also helps them understand narrative structure. They can start by altering endings of familiar tales or creating entirely new stories based on pictures in a book. These activities make reading a two-way interaction, fueling both imagination and a deeper understanding of storytelling.
5. Play-Based Literacy Learning
Play-based literacy learning is a delightful and effective way to enhance reading skills in young children. Educational games, like alphabet puzzles, word-matching activities, or board games, make learning to read fun and interactive. These games help children recognize letters, form words, and understand basic grammar in a playful setting.
Play also plays a crucial role in language development. It allows children to experiment with words and sounds in a low-pressure environment. Through role-playing games and storytelling, children practice new vocabulary and language structures. This type of learning is not only enjoyable but also crucial for building a solid foundation in language and literacy.
6. Everyday Literacy Opportunities
Everyday activities offer valuable opportunities to nurture literacy. Involve your child in writing grocery lists, turning a mundane task into a learning moment. As they write down ‘apples’ or ‘bread,’ they connect words with their daily life.
During outings, read signs and labels together. At the store, encourage them to identify the names of their favorite cereals or snacks. These simple yet effective practices embed reading and writing into their daily life, making literacy both a practical skill and a natural part of their everyday experiences.
7. Early Writing Skills
Developing early writing skills can begin with the simple joy of drawing and scribbling. Provide your child with crayons and paper, and let them freely express themselves. This activity is not just about creating art; it’s a fundamental step toward writing. As they draw shapes and lines, they develop the motor skills needed for writing letters and words later on.
Introduce letters and words through playful activities. Use alphabet blocks to build simple words, or create letter-shaped cookies together. These engaging and tactile experiences make learning letters and words exciting and memorable, laying a solid foundation for writing skills in a fun, stress-free way.
8. Monitoring And Encouraging Progress
Monitoring and encouraging your child’s literacy progress is a nurturing process. Celebrate each milestone, whether it’s recognizing their first letter or finishing a new book. These achievements are stepping stones in their literacy journey.
Use positive reinforcement to acknowledge their efforts and achievements. Tailor your support to match their pace, understanding that each child’s learning journey is unique. Adapting to their individual pace fosters a comfortable learning environment, where your child feels supported and motivated to explore the world of words and stories.
Embarking on the journey of nurturing early literacy in your child is a voyage filled with joy and discovery. Each word they learn, every story they embrace, adds another brushstroke to the canvas of their imagination and understanding.
As parents, you have the power to make this journey rich and rewarding. Remember, every page turned, every letter learned, is a step toward a lifelong love of reading and learning. Cherish these moments of growth and exploration, for they are the building blocks of your child’s future. | <urn:uuid:60359fa0-e2a2-4871-9c04-c57ff07db329> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://hyderabadboss.com/promoting-early-literacy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.920634 | 1,285 | 3.421875 | 3 |
A common language
Typcally, the proto-language is not known directly. It is by definition a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics. The tree is a statement of similarity and a hypothesis that the similarity results from descent from a common language.
The comparative method, a process of deduction, begins from a set of characteristics, or characters, found in the attested languages. If the entire set can be accounted for by descent from the proto-language, which must contain the proto-forms of them all, the tree, or phylogeny, is regarded as a complete explanation and by Occam’s razor, is given credibility. More recently such a tree has been termed “perfect” and the characters labeled “compatible.”
The hypotheses of highest compatibility
No trees but the smallest branches are ever found to be perfect. Typically credibility is given to the hypotheses of highest compatibility. The differences in compatibility must be explained by various applications of the Wave model. The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the formulation of the characters by the linguists working on it. Not all characters are suitable for the comparative method. For example, lexical items that are loans from a different language do not reflect the phylogeny to be tested, and if used will detract from the compatibility. Getting the right dataset for the comparative method is a major task in historical linguistics.
Some universally accepted proto-languages are Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Dravidian. In rare instances compared to the hundreds of proto languages, scant evidence may be found that increases the probability of a proto-language having existed. For example, the limited vocabulary of the Elder Futhark, the language of ancient runic inscriptions, can be reconstructed from the writing system to support the Proto-Germanic hypothesis.
In a few fortuitous instances, which have been used to verify the method and the model, a literary history exists from as early as a few millenia ago. The descent can be traced in detail. The daughter languages are attested in surviving texts. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. Likewise, Proto-Norse, the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in the Younger Futhark. Although there are no very early Indo-Aryan inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to Vedic Sanskrit (or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries.
The first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language was August Schleicher. He did so for Proto-Indo-European in 1861. | <urn:uuid:d1286e33-7a1d-4f89-992c-6ae64a8d191d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://hydrogen2oxygen.net/en/2012/02/07/proto-language/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.938522 | 610 | 4.0625 | 4 |
Preventive measures started against Shigellosis in Kerala
Part of: GS Prelims and GS-II – Health
- Health officials in Kozhikode district of Kerala began preventive measures after 6 cases of shigella infection and nearly 24 suspected cases were detected.
Important value additions
- Shigellosis, or shigella infection, is a contagious intestinal infection caused by a genus of bacteria known as shigella.
- The bacteria is one of the prime pathogens responsible for causing diarrhoea, fluctuating between moderate and severe symptoms, especially in children in African and South Asian regions.
- The bacteria, after entering the body through ingestion, attacks the epithelial lining of the colon resulting in inflammation of the cells and subsequently the destruction of the cells in severe cases.
- Symptoms: Diarrhoea (often bloody and painful), stomach pain, fever, nausea and vomiting.
- Transmission: It spreads person-to-person when the bacteria is swallowed accidentally.
- Spread through contaminated food and water is the most common form of transmission across the world.
- Prevention: Wash hands with soap especially after dealing with a child’s diaper and before preparing/eating food. | <urn:uuid:36e5181a-dabe-49ea-a471-7365ede74f7b> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://iasbaba.com/2020/12/preventive-measures-started-against-shigellosis-in-kerala/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.936423 | 247 | 3.765625 | 4 |
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We all know the feeling of getting behind the wheel and hitting the open road. The wind in your hair, the sun in your face, and the open road ahead of you. But, as much as we all love driving, it’s important to remember that it can be a dangerous activity if you’re not careful.
Here are 8 safety tips to consider when taking driving lessons for teenagers to drive smart and stay safe on the road:
1. Pay attention to the road
This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many accidents happen because drivers aren’t paying attention to the road. It’s important to keep your eyes on the road at all times and be aware of your surroundings. If you’re looking at your phone, changing the radio, or fiddling with anything else in the car, you’re not paying attention to the road and could cause an accident.
2. Follow the speed limit
Speed limits are there for a reason. They’re designed to keep traffic flowing smoothly and safely. If you’re speeding, you’re more likely to lose control of your car, and you’re more likely to cause an accident. Speeding also increases the severity of an accident if one does occur. So, it’s always best to follow the posted speed limit.
3. Don’t drink and drive
This should go without saying, but don’t drink and drive. Alcohol and drugs impair your ability to drive. They slow your reflexes and make it difficult to focus. If you’re going to drink, hand over the keys to someone else. It’s not worth the risk.
4. Don’t text and drive
Texting and driving are just as dangerous as drinking and driving. Your sole focus should be on the road when you’re behind the wheel. Texting takes your eyes off the road and your hands off the wheel, and it’s a recipe for disaster. If you need to send a text, pull over to the side of the road first.
5. Wear your seatbelt
Wearing a seatbelt is one of the simplest and most effective ways to stay safe on the road. Seatbelts keep you restrained in your seat in the event of a collision, and they can help to prevent serious injuries. So, always make sure you and your passengers are wearing seatbelts before you start driving.
6. Don’t drive when tired
Fatigued driving is just as dangerous as drunk driving. When you’re tired, your reflexes are slowed, your judgment is impaired, and you’re more likely to fall asleep at the wheel. If you’re feeling tired, pull over and take a break. It’s better to arrive late than not at all.
7. Drive in good weather conditions
Bad weather conditions can make driving more difficult and dangerous. Avoid driving in heavy rain, snow, or fog if you can. If you must drive in bad weather, go slow and be extra cautious.
8. Regularly maintain your car
Make sure to regularly check your car’s oil level, tire pressure, and other fluid levels. A well-maintained car is less likely to break down, and it’s also safer to drive.
Following these safety tips when taking teenage driving courses online can help you to avoid accidents and stay safe on the road. But accidents can still happen, even if you’re being careful. If you’re ever involved in an accident, make sure to call the police and seek medical attention if necessary. | <urn:uuid:e7df7bf1-6b76-4e32-bbae-15ab5a8425a1> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://ihowtoarticle.com/safety-tips-for-drivers-to-drive-smart/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.941777 | 765 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Sac and Fox Treaties
The first recognition by our government of the Sacs and Foxes was in the treaty made at Ft. Harmar, January 9, 1789, which guaranteed: “The individuals of said nations shall be at liberty to hunt within the territory ceded to the United States, without hindrance or molestation, so long as they demean them-selves peaceably and offer no injury or annoyance to any of the subjects or citizens of the said United States.” In 1804 William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, and afterwards President of the United States, was instructed by President Jefferson to institute negotiations with the Sacs and Foxes to purchase their lands. At this time, Black Hawk had risen to the position of war chief of the Sac tribe. Four chiefs or headmen of the Sacs and two chiefs of the Foxes went to St. Louis, and November 3, 1804, made a treaty with Govern-or Harrison. By this treaty the Indians ceded all their lands, comprising the eastern third of the present State of Missouri and the territory lying between the Wisconsin River on the north, the Fox River of Illinois on the east, the Illinois on the southeast, and the Mississippi on the west, in all fifty million acres. For this grant the United States guaranteed to the Indians “friendship and protection,” paid them $2,234.50 in goods, and guaranteed them goods each year there-after to the amount of $1,000, $600 of which was to be paid to the Sacs and $400 to the Foxes. By this treaty it was provided in Article 7: “As long as the lands which are now ceded to the United States remain their property, the Indians belonging to the said tribes shall enjoy the privilege of living and hunting upon them.” This article in the treaty caused much trouble between the government and the Sacs and Foxes, and was the main cause of the Black Hawk War. Black Hawk was not present at its making, and always denied the right of the headmen of the Sac tribe to sign such a treaty for his people. In the spring of 1804 a white person (a man or boy) was killed in Cuivre settlement by a Sauk (Sac) Indian. A party of United States troops was sent from St. Louis to the Rock River village to demand the murderer. The Sacs surrendered and delivered him to the soldiers and he was conveyed to St. Louis and turned over to the civil authorities. During the latter part of October, 1804, Quashquame, one of the Sac chiefs, together with others of his tribe and some of the Foxes, went to St. Louis to try and secure the release of the Sac murderer who was a relative of Quash-quame. It is an Indian custom and usage that if one Indian kills another, the matter is generally compromised with the murdered man’s relatives for a property consideration, as Black Hawk said: “The only means with us for saving a person who killed another was by paying for the person killed, thus covering the blood and satisfying the relatives of the murdered man,” and the Sacs believed that by the giving of ponies and peltries to the whites they could secure the Indian’s release. Thomas Forsyth, for many years an Indian trader, and from 1816 until 1830 the agent of the Sacs and Foxes, in a manuscript written in 1832 says of this matter: “Quash-quame, a Sauk chief, who was the headman of this party, has repeatedly said, `Mr. Pierre Choteau, Sen., came several times to my camp, offering that if I would sell the lands on the east side of the Mississippi River, Governor Harrison would liberate my relation (meaning the Sauk Indian then in prison as above related), to which I at last agreed, and sold the lands from the mouth of the Illinois River up the Mississippi River as high as the mouth of Rocky River (now Rock River), and east to the ridge that divides the waters of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, and I never sold any more lands.’ Quash-quame also said to Governor Edwards, Governor Clark and Mr. Auguste Chouteau, commissioners appointed to treat with the Chippewas, Ottawas and Pottawattomies of Illinois River, in the summer of 1816, for lands on the west side of Illinois River, `You white men may put on paper what you please, but again I tell you, I never sold my lands higher up the Mississippi than the mouth of Rock River.'” It is claimed that the Indians were drunk most of the time they were in St. Louis, a thing not unlikely. Forsyth said the Indians always believed the annuities they received, were presents, and when he in 181.8 informed them it was a part of the purchase price of their lands, “they were astonished, and refused to accept of the goods, denying that they ever sold the lands as stated by me, their agent. The Black Hawk in particular, who was present at the time, made a great noise about this land, and would never receive any part of the annuities from that time forward.” When it became known that certain chiefs and headmen had without authority sold their lands, Quash-quame and his companions were degraded from their ranks, Tiama, the son-in-law of Quash-quame, being elected to his father-in-law’s place. In 1815 a part of the Sacs and Foxes had migrated to the Missouri River; and September 13, 1815, these Indians sent representatives to the Portage des Sioux, where each tribe made a separate treaty with the government, agreeing to ratify the treaty of November 3, 1804, and to remain separate from, and render no assistance to, the Sacs and Foxes then living on Rock River. On the 13th day of May, 1816, another treaty was entered into at St. Louis. This treaty was between the “Sacs of Rock River” and the government. It reaffirmed the treaty of 1804 and all other contracts heretofore made between the parties. To this treaty is attached the mark of Ma-Ka-tai-me-She-Kia-Kiak, or “Black Sparrow Hawk,” as Black Hawk was also called. Yet Black Hawk said in 1832: “Here, for the first time, I touched the goose quill to the treaty not knowing, however, that by the act I consented to give away my village. Had they explained to me I should have opposed it and never would have signed their treaty as my recent conduct will clearly prove.”
In the treaty of 1804 the government had agreed, in order to put a stop to the abuses and impositions practiced upon the Indians by private traders, to establish a trading house or factory where these Indians could be supplied with goods cheaper and better than from private traders. This the government concluded it was best not to continue, and a new treaty was made by which the United States paid the Indians $1,000 to be relieved from this obligation. Black Hawk signed this treaty. Another treaty was made August 4, 1824, which reaffirmed and recognized all former treaties. Each treaty left the Sacs and Foxes with less land and fewer rights. For years there had existed a bitter feeling between the Sioux and the Sacs and Foxes, and August 19, 1825, William Clark and Lewis Case on behalf of the government assembled these tribes, together with the Chippewas, Menominees, Winnebagoes, Iowas, Ottawas and Pottawattomies at Prairie du Chien, and entered into a treaty whose object was to end the wars between these nations. In this treaty it was agreed that the United States should run a boundary line between the Sioux and the Sacs and Foxes. It seems that this treaty proved unsatisfactory to the Indians, for July 30, 1830, another treaty was entered into at Prairie du Chien in which the Sacs and Foxes ceded to the United States a tract of land twenty miles in width lying south of the line established by the treaty of August 19, 1825. The Sioux also ceded a strip twenty miles wide along the north line of said boundary. This forty mile strip was neutral territory, open to all for hunting and fishing, and was along the Iowa River.
Source: Historic Rock Island County, pub. Kramer & Company, Rock Island, Illinois, 1908 | <urn:uuid:75f090f1-cac2-42bc-9a40-e5d108713f7e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://illinoisgenealogy.org/rock-island/sac_and_fox_treaties.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.979926 | 1,785 | 3.71875 | 4 |
Things like search engines and self-driving cars are based on artificial intelligence. Behind them are complex neural networks. Until now, the underlying mathematical models could only be implemented with enormous computing power and are difficult for humans to comprehend. Professor Radu Grosu, head of the Cyber Physical Systems research group at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, has been thinking for years about how models from biological nervous systems could make artificial networks better and more comprehensible.
Neural networks – like the brains of living creatures – consist of many individual cells. When a certain task needs to be solved, an active cell sends a signal to other cells. The sum of the signals received by the respective cell determines whether the cell also becomes active. How cells influence the activity of other cells in this way is at first unclear. The parameters are adjusted in an automatic learning process until the neural network can solve the task.
The learning process is hardly visible to humans from the outside and often incomprehensible, which is why it is referred to as a black box. To strengthen trust in artificial intelligence, systems that can be verified by humans are required.
Most recently, Professor Grosu tried to solve the problem in an international research project, together with researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, U.S.; the Technical University of Vienna and the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) in Austria. The biological model was provided by Caenorhabditis elegans, the nematode worm, one of the most important model organisms in biology. It is small, transparent, frugal and needs only three days for its development. Although it has only a few nerve cells, it shows amazing, interesting behavioral patterns. This is due to the efficient and harmonious way in which its nervous system processes information, explains Professor Grosu.
The basis for neural networks
Nevertheless, “compared to the structure of deep neural networks (DNNs), the nervous system of C. elegans seems chaotic at first sight,” says Mathias Lechner, a PhD student in the Henzinger Group at IST. The researchers found the basis for a novel neural network in the functions of the neurons. Lechner says: “Neuroscientists divide the neurons of the system into the groups sensory, inter and motor. In the inter neurons, there is also the subgroup of command neurons in which important signaling pathways are concentrated. “For example, in the C. elegans nervous system, there are command neurons for forward and backward crawling in which the signaling pathways of movement control are concentrated. However, forward and backward movements are themselves much more complex and require the cooperation of multiple neurons and muscles.”
To get at the efficiency and harmony of the C. elegans nervous system, the research team developed new mathematical models for neurons and synapses. Also, the processing of signals within individual cells follows different mathematical rules than those in existing deep learning models. Another simplifying factor was that not every cell was connected to every other cell.
The test scenario was the way cars adhere to a lane in autonomous driving. Based on a camera image of the road, the neural network automatically decides whether to steer to the right or to the left. In existing deep learning models, this task requires millions of parameters. The research group’s new model, however, manages with only 75,000 trainable parameters.
In preparation for the test, large amounts of video of human-driven cars in the Boston area were collected. These were input into the network, along with information on how the car should be controlled in each situation. This training process continues until the system has learned the correct link between the image and the steering direction and can also handle new situations on its own.
The artificial intelligence model consists of two parts, a convolutional network and a control system. Both subsystems are initially trained together. The convolutional network has the task of recognizing structural image features in the visual data from the camera. It passes on the relevant parts of the camera image in the form of signals to the control system, which steers the vehicle.
The neural network control system (called “neural circuit policy,” or NCP), which translates the data from the visual network into a steering command, consists of only 19 cells. This makes it three orders of magnitude smaller than existing state-of-the-art models.
Interpretable neural networks
This model makes it possible to examine exactly where the neural network focuses its attention during driving. It focuses on very specific areas of the camera image: the roadside and the horizon. This behavior is highly desirable and is unique to artificial intelligence-based systems, he said.
“Classic deep neural networks (DNNs) can also learn correct foci, but the focus can only be determined after the training process and it cannot be determined which elements will be learned before training. Our C. elegans-inspired model implicitly influenced the training process to focus on the horizon. Why and how the model influenced the training process to deliver this result is not answered in the research, so it is still an open research area.” Mathias Lechner, PhD Student, IST, Vienna, Austria.
In addition, he said, the role of each individual cell in each individual decision can be identified. The function of the cells would be understandable and their behavior explainable. This level of interpretability has so far been impossible in larger Deep Learning models, the researchers said.
One shortcoming of existing deep learning models is also that they are incapable of dealing with poor image quality. Experts refer to this as image noise. This property could also be improved in the novel system, as was shown by an analysis in which the neural network was confronted with artificially damaged images. This robustness is a direct consequence of the concept and architecture of the innovation, according to the researchers.
The methods used also reduce the training time. As a result, artificial intelligence can be implemented even in relatively simple systems. The Deep Learning model developed by the international research team makes imitative learning possible in a wide range of applications, from automated work in warehouses to robot motion control.
The research results were published in nature.com:
M. Lechner, R. Hasani, A. Amini, T. Henzinger, D. Rus, R. Grosu. 2020. neural circuit policies enabling auditable autonomy. Nature Machine Intelligence. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-020-00237-3
Also interesting: “It’s utopian to think that people can make infallible AI” | <urn:uuid:68f791a4-69d0-4a08-8b37-eed90a042ec1> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://innovationorigins.com/en/threadworm-provides-a-model-for-simpler-and-smarter-neural-networks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.947273 | 1,358 | 3.859375 | 4 |
St. Patrick’s Day was an important occasion for all the Irish regiments in the Union Army, and those in the Army of the Potomac were no different. The fighting of 1862 had turned these Irish volunteers into veterans, and many had fallen at battles such as Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill and Antietam. Memories of the defeat at Fredericksburg and the trials of the ‘Mud March’ were still fresh in their minds as the Spring of 1863 arrived. Despite this, there was the prospect of enjoyment on the horizon, and as St. Patrick’s Day approached the men’s spirits began to lift.
The Irish units took the celebration of their national day seriously, and as 17th March neared nothing was left to chance. The Irish Brigade was at this point in the war made up of the 63rd, 69th and 88th New York together with the 28th Massachusetts and 116th Pennsylvania regiments. They set to work preparing and marking out an elaborate race-course, and posted an announcement for the benefit of their colleagues in the Army of the Potomac:
GRAND IRISH BRIGADE STEEPLE-CHASE
To come off the 17th March, rain or shine, by horses, the property of, and to be ridden by, commissioned officers of that Brigade. The prizes are a purse of $500; second horse to save his stakes; two and a half mile heat, best two in three, over four hurdles four and a half feet high, and five ditch fences, including two artificial rivers fifteen feet wide and six deep; hurdles to be made of forest pine, and braced with hoops.
The Brigade Quartermaster had been sent to Washington in advance to secure all the necessaries for the post race banquet, and his haul included no less than 35 hams, a side of roasted ox, a pig stuffed with boiled turkeys and countless chickens, ducks and small game. Alcohol was not forgotten, and to be safe 8 baskets of champagne, 10 gallons of rum and 10 gallons of whiskey were stockpiled. A bower was erected that could hold hundreds of guests, and a general invitation was issued to all officers in the Army of the Potomac. Determined to leave nothing to chance, a committee convened on 16th March to decide who was the best qualified to mix the punch. Captain Gosson and Captain Hogan were selected, and worked so hard at their task that they ‘both felt overpowered by their labors and had to be relived from duty’; no doubt partly a result of frequent tests to ensure the concoction tasted just right. (1)
Another green flag regiment, the 9th Massachusetts, were not left wanting when it came to their own preparations. Adjutant M.W. Phalen and Quartermaster Mooney were assigned by Colonel Guiney to make ready for the day, and they secured ‘goodies’ from Washington for the occasion, which the entire division was invited to attend. A week before St. Patrick’s Day the two men announced the schedule of events for the regiment:
Race for a Greased Pig
Climbing a Greased Pole
Horse Racing (afternoon)
Mock Dress Parade
There was to be small amounts of money for the winners of each event, apart from the winner of the greased pig race, who instead got to keep the pig. In addition whoever managed to climb the fifteen foot greased pole would find at the top a pass for ten days leave. A green area opposite the regiment’s camping ground was prepared, and the camp itself decorated with evergreens and mottoes. (2)
When St. Patrick’s Day finally arrived the men were graced with fine sunny weather. The Irish Brigade started their day with religious ceremonies, after which the horse racing commenced. Each rider had dressed for the occasion, including one Galway native who was clad in scarlet with a green-velvet smoking cap, harking back to the colours of the Galway Blazers Club. Thousands of officers and men, including the army commander Major-General Joseph Hooker, were in attendance as the designated start time for the first race at 11am approached. A crack of a whip and note from the bugler and the six runners and riders were off. Appropriately enough the winner was Brigadier-General Meagher’s grey horse, Jack Hinton, ridden by Captain John Gosson (it would seem he was feeling none the worse for his ‘diligence’ in preparing the punch the night before). After lunch there was more sport, the line up being as follows:
1st. A foot-race, one half mile distance, best of heats; open to all non-commissioned officers and privates, the winner to receive $7, and the second $3
2d. Casting weights, the weights to weigh from ten to fourteen pounds; the winner to receive $3
3d. Running after the soaped pig- to be the prize of the man who holds it
4th. A hurdle-race, one-half mile distance, open to all non-commissioned officers and privates; the winner to receive $7, the second $3
5th. The wheelbarrow-race- the contestants to be blindfolded, and limited to six soldiers of the Irish Brigade; the winner to receive $5; distance to be decided on the ground
6th. Jumping in sacks to the distance of five hundred yards; the winner to receive $5
7th. A contest on the light fantastic toe, consisting of Irish reels, jigs, and hornpipes; the best dancer to receive $5, the second best $3, to be decided by a judge appointed by the chairman (3)
Meanwhile back at the 9th Massachusetts the games were also in full swing. The greased pole, erected opposite the regimental headquarters, proved especially popular, no doubt a result of the prize to be gained at the top. Attempts to secure the pass commenced at 10am: ‘One tall, stout fellow made a desperate effort to lift himself from the ground, and, after trying for about half an hour, was reluctantly compelled to give up, having in that time only achieved about an inch; he looked wistfully at the paper fluttering above him, and then turned away to give room to an ambitious youngster, who succeeded in getting half way up, when, coming to a spot greasier than the rest, he began to slip, and did not pause until he came to the ground, amid the roars of the crowd.’ Try as they might, no-one succeeded in reaching the top of the pole. This disappointment was tempered somewhat at 11am when each man was issued with a gill of whiskey, which was shared with comrades from the 62nd Pennsylvania Regiment. Tragedy struck in the afternoon horse race when Quartermaster Mooney collided with Dr. Faxon of the 32nd Massachusetts while both were riding at full speed, with Mooney being knocked unconscious. The unfortunate Lieutenant died of his injuries a few days later. The final event was the mock dress parade, which had become something of a tradition for the 9th Massachusetts, having also been carried out the previous year. For the occasion the men were allowed to elect their own officers, and thus the enlisted soldiers had full control over proceedings. The manual of arms was parodied, and one of the men in Company G, who was elected ‘Colonel’, managed to reduce everyone to laughter with his accurate imitation of Colonel Guiney’s voice. (4)
The evenings at both celebrations were spent in drinking and general merriment. Poems were read and songs sung, and for a day and a night the worries of the war were left behind. The day was long remembered by all who were present, especially the horse races put on by the Irish Brigade, which would pass into legend in the Army of the Potomac. We are fortunate that one of the men who was in attendance was Edwin Forbes, a Special Artist with Frank Leslie’s Magazine; his pictorial record of some of the activities that day hint at what a spectacle it was. With the festivities at an end camp life returned to normal, and the men prepared for what promised to be a tough campaign. The battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg lay ahead for them, and for many the 17th March 1863 was their last St. Patrick’s Day.
(1) Conyngham 1867: 372-373; (2) MacNamara D.G. 1899: 278, MacNamara M.H. 1867: 178-179; (3) Conyngham 1867: 373- 379; (4) MacNamara D.G. 1899: 278-279, MacNamaraM.H. :1867: 179-180;
Conyngham, David Power 1867. The Irish Brigade and its Campaigns
MacNamara, M.H. 1867. The Irish Ninth in Bivouac and Battle; or Virginia and Maryland Campaigns | <urn:uuid:36b4a713-97e6-445e-9215-480444f66479> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://irishamericancivilwar.com/2011/03/16/st-patricks-day-in-the-army-of-the-potomac-1863/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.982697 | 1,908 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Banco do Brasil, the country’s largest public bank, apologized on Saturday (November 18) for its role during the period of slavery, as Brazil celebrates November 20 black consciousness day “. A group of historians filed a complaint against the financial institution two months ago.
Published on :
“ Banco do Brasil apologizes to black people for its past behavior and is now actively working to combat structural racism in the country. » The message is signed Tarciana Medeiros, the president of Brazil’s first public bank, Banco do Brasil known as “BB”, founded in 1808, in the midst of slavery.
This mea culpa, published in an official press release of the institution, responds to a complaint filed by a group of historiansunderlines our correspondent in São Paulo, Martin Bernard. They claim the bank’s founders participated in and profited from the slave trade. On September 27, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office announced the opening of a civil investigation into the relations between one of the country’s main financial institutions and the slave trade in the 19th century.
The civil action, revealed by BBC News Brazil, results from a petition from a group of 14 historians who researched precisely this question. Clearly, according to these historians, it is “ the entire financial system » of the era which rested » on slavery. For example, the French weekly International mail indicates that among the founders and shareholders of the bank were “ some of the most famous slave traders of the time “. Among them was José Bernardino de Sá, one of the richest men in Brazil at the time, and who is said to have personally organized the trafficking of 20,000 Africans between 1825 and 1851.
In early October, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation told BBC News Brasil that it could “ be the starting point for discussions about historical reparations » in Brazil. “ The bank cannot hide its face », Now assures Tarciana Medeiros, even if she affirms that it is the whole of society which must ask forgiveness from black people because of this period in history.
Appointed by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva earlier this year, she emphasizes that racial issues are a priority today. This translates into positive discrimination policies in entrance exams at Banco do Brasil and in promotions granted to black or mixed-race employees, not to mention the numerous cultural actions to combat racism. | <urn:uuid:324a25c5-8961-406e-bd1e-9f803e8af51c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://jaunenglish.com/index.php/2023/11/20/banco-do-brasil-asks-for-forgiveness-for-its-role-in-slavery/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.953576 | 512 | 3.0625 | 3 |
When Daniel was well over 80 years old, he was still living in captivity in Babylon, which by that time had been overthrown by the Medes and the Persians. King Nebuchadnezzar and all the royal family had been killed, and King Darius of the Medes sat on the throne. In order to try to bring some continuity and stability to his government, Darius kept on his court a lot of Nebuchadnezzar’s wise men, including Daniel.
One thing that is consistent about Daniel is that, no matter where he is or what circumstance he is in or how he got there, or how unfair his situation is, Daniel stays positive, upbeat even, believing that even in difficult circumstances, God has a plan. That attitude created new opportunities for Daniel wherever he went.
“Then Daniel became distinguished above all the other high officials and satraps, because an excellent spirit was in him. And the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom” (Daniel 6:3 ESV).
I’ve heard it said that attitude determines altitude. At multiple points in his life, when everybody else would have said, “Hey, bud, your life is over,” Daniel said, “I bet God still has something for me yet.” That remained true for Daniel until he was in his 80s!
Let me put the point more bluntly since this has gotten to be counter-cultural today: Older people can still do awesome things. And, Daniel is not the only old person in history to do so:
- At 83, William Gladstone became prime minister of Great Britain for the fourth time.
- At 85, John Wesley still preached with almost undiminished eloquence, up to two to three times a day, closing out a career in which he traveled more than a quarter-million miles on horseback to preach more than 40,000 sermons.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder was 64 when she published her first book, which became the first of seven in the series Little House on the Prairie.
- At 89, Michelangelo painted his “Last Judgment,” which is now one of the most famous paintings in the world.
- Harland Sanders (yes, that’s “Colonel Sanders” to you) was 65 when he opened Kentucky Fried Chicken after getting fired from about a dozen of his previous jobs.
- At age 79, Barbara Hillary, a breast and lung cancer survivor, became the first Black woman to reach both the North Pole and the South Pole.
- Winston Churchill won his first election at age 62 after losing every single election up to that point.
If you consider yourself “seasoned,” don’t let anyone tell you that you’re done. This list only mentions a few of the many people throughout history who found great purpose in the years we’re told we’re supposed to kick back and relax.
You will never reach the age when there is not a good work for you to do for God’s kingdom. Don’t let others tell you that your best days are behind you. Don’t buy the lie that the rest of your life is an extended vacation. God still has something for you yet. | <urn:uuid:56d59097-5d9c-42e1-b7f3-ba0288ea0032> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://jdgreear.com/no-matter-your-age-gods-still-got-a-mission-for-you/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.978655 | 680 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.
For years video games have been criticised for making people more antisocial, overweight or depressed. But now researchers are finding that games can actually change us for the better and improve both our body and mind.
Games can help to develop physical skills. Pre-school children who played interactive games have been shown to have improved motor skills, for example, they can kick, catch and throw a ball better than children who don’t play video games. Vision is also improved, particularly telling the difference between shades of grey. This is useful for driving at night, piloting a plane or reading X-rays. Interestingly, games also benefit a variety of brain functions, including decision-making. People who play action-based games make decisions 25 per cent faster than others and are no less accurate.
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You are considering going on safari and now you’d like to get more information. In 1.5 minutes you are to ask four direct questions to find out about the following:
- recommended currency for exchange
- footwear and clothing
- accommodation options
You have 20 seconds to ask each question.
You are going to give an interview. You have to answer five questions. Give full answers to the questions (2–3 sentences). Remember that you have 40 seconds to answer each question.
Tapescript for Task 3
Interviewer: Hello everybody! It’s Teenagers Round the World Channel. Our guest today is a teenager from Russia and we are going to discuss volunteer work. We’d like to know our guest’s point of view on this issue. Please answer five questions. So, let’s get started.
Interviewer: Have you ever been involved in volunteer work or community service? Do you think volunteering can help gain valuable skills or experiences?
Interviewer: What do you think motivates young people to engage in volunteer work?
Interviewer: How do you think volunteering can benefit your community or society as a whole? Are there any disadvantages to volunteering that you’re aware of?
Interviewer: What good volunteer opportunities for teenagers are there in Russia?
Interviewer: What do you think are some motivating reasons for young people to consider volunteering abroad?
Interviewer: Thank you very much for your interview.
Imagine that you and your friend are doing a school project “Traditional hobbies”. You have found some photos to illustrate it but for technical reasons you cannot send them now. Leave a voice message to your friend explaining your choice of the photos and sharing some ideas about the project. In 2.5 minutes be ready to:
- explain the choice of the illustrations for the project by briefly describing them and noting the differences;
- mention the advantages (1–2) of the two hobbies;
- mention the disadvantages (1–2) of the two hobbies;
- express your opinion on the subject of the project – which of the hobbies presented in the pictures you’d prefer and why.
You will speak for not more than 3 minutes (12–15 sentences). You have to talk continuously. | <urn:uuid:77325746-b437-46b0-8c1e-38ddd2a6bd5c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://langart.ru/ege/speaking/speaking-part-variant-58/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.941894 | 720 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Financial literacy is the ability to understand and effectively use various financial skills, including personal financial management, budgeting, and investing.
It involves being able to make informed decisions about financial matters and being able to understand and manage one's own financial situation. Achieving financial literacy can be a difficult process, but it is an important step towards financial stability and security.
Here are the 6 Main Skills Needed For Financial Literacy:
- Understand Your Personal Financial Scenario
- Create A Sustainable Financial Plan
- Understand How To Read Financial Statements
- Learn How To Pick Stocks
- Study The Style of Great Investors
- Learn Investing Best Practices
Understand Your Personal Financial Scenario
There are several key steps that can be taken to achieve financial literacy:
- Learn About Money: The first step towards achieving financial literacy is to educate yourself about personal finance and money management. This can be done through reading books, taking classes, or seeking out other resources such as financial planning websites or educational seminars.
- Set Financial Goals: It is important to have a clear understanding of your financial goals and what you want to achieve. This could include saving for retirement, paying off debt, or building up an emergency fund. Setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals can help to make your financial plan more concrete and easier to follow.
- Create A Budget: A budget is a tool that can help you to manage your money and reach your financial goals. It involves tracking your income and expenses and making adjustments as necessary to ensure that you are spending within your means. There are many resources available to help you create a budget, including budgeting apps and online tools.
- Save & Invest: Building up your savings and investing for the future is an important aspect of financial literacy. There are many different options available for saving and investing, including traditional savings accounts, certificates of deposit (CDs), and individual retirement accounts (IRAs). It is important to do your research and choose the options that are best suited to your needs and risk tolerance.
- Manage Debt: Debt can be a major roadblock to achieving financial literacy. It is important to understand the different types of debt and the terms associated with them, as well as to develop a plan for paying off debt. This may involve consolidating debt, negotiating lower interest rates, or developing a budget that allows for debt repayment.
- Protect Your Assets: Financial literacy also involves protecting your assets and planning for the unexpected. This could involve purchasing insurance, creating an estate plan, or setting up a power of attorney.
Create A Sustainable Financial Plan
Creating a financial budget is an important step towards achieving financial stability and security. A budget is a tool that can help you to manage your money and reach your financial goals. Here are some steps you can take to create a financial budget:
- Determine Your Total Income: The first step in creating a budget is to determine your total income, including any salary, wages, or other sources of income. It is important to be as accurate as possible when determining your income, as this will form the foundation of your budget.
- Identify Your Expenses: Next, you will need to identify your expenses. This may include fixed expenses, such as rent or mortgage payments, as well as variable expenses, such as groceries or entertainment. Be sure to include all of your expenses, even small ones, in order to get an accurate picture of your spending.
- Determine Your Net Income: Once you have identified your income and expenses, you can determine your net income by subtracting your expenses from your income. Your net income is the amount of money that you have left over after paying your expenses.
- Create A Monthly Budget: Based on your net income and financial goals, you can create a budget plan that outlines how you will allocate your money. This may involve setting aside a certain amount of money for savings, paying off debt, or covering your expenses.
- Monitor & Adjust: It is important to monitor your budget regularly and make adjustments as necessary. This may involve reviewing your expenses and finding ways to cut back, or adjusting your financial goals as your circumstances change.
By following these steps, you can create a financial budget that will help you to manage your money and reach your financial goals.
Understand How To Read Financial Statements
Reading financial statements is an important aspect of financial literacy. Financial statements are documents that provide information about a company's financial performance, including its income, expenses, assets, and liabilities. There are several types of financial statements that are commonly used, including the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows.
Here are some tips for reading financial statements:
- The Purpose of Financial Statements: It is important to understand the purpose of the financial statement you are reading. This will help you to know what to look for and how to interpret the information.
- Understand Key Financial Terms: Financial statements use a specific set of terms and jargon that may be unfamiliar to those who are not familiar with finance. It is important to understand these terms in order to accurately interpret the financial statement.
- See The Bigger Picture: Financial statements provide a snapshot of a company's financial performance over a specific period of time. It is important to look at the overall trends and patterns rather than focusing on individual numbers.
- Compare To Previous Periods: Comparing financial statements from different periods can provide valuable insights into a company's financial performance. This may involve comparing the current year's financial statement to the previous year's statement or comparing the current quarter to the same quarter in the previous year.
- Use Financial Ratios: Financial ratios are mathematical calculations that provide additional insights into a company's financial performance. There are many different financial ratios that can be used, such as the price-to-earnings ratio (P/E ratio) or the debt-to-equity ratio.
By understanding the purpose of financial statements, knowing the key terms, looking at the big picture, comparing to previous periods, and using financial ratios, you can gain a better understanding of a company's financial performance.
Learn How To Pick Stocks
Investing in stocks can be a good way to grow your wealth over time, but it is important to understand the risks involved and to do your research before making any investment decisions. Here are some steps you can take to invest in stocks:
- Determine Your Investment Goals: It is important to have a clear understanding of your investment goals before you begin investing in stocks. This may include considerations such as your time horizon (how long you plan to hold the investment), your risk tolerance (how much risk you are comfortable with), and your financial situation.
- Establish Investing Discipline: Investing in stocks requires a certain level of knowledge and understanding of the financial markets. You can learn exactly what to look for by subscribing to our newsletter and checking out our Blueprint Investing Formula which has been beating the market consistently for the last 5 years!
- Open A Brokerage Account: In order to invest in stocks, you will need to open a brokerage account. A brokerage account is a type of account that allows you to buy and sell securities, such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. There are many different brokerage firms to choose from, so it is important to do your research and find one that meets your needs.
- Model Different Portfolios: There are many different factors to consider when choosing stocks to invest in. Some things to consider include the company's financial performance, its management team, and the industry in which it operates. It is also important to diversify your portfolio, which means investing in a variety of different stocks rather than putting all of your money into one stock.
- Set Price Targets: Once you have invested in stocks, it is important to monitor your investments regularly. This may involve tracking the performance of your stocks, reviewing your portfolio to ensure that it is still in line with your investment goals, and making changes as necessary.
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It is important to keep in mind that investing in stocks carries risks and there is no guarantee of a profit. It is always a good idea to consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Study The Style of Great Investors
There are many successful investors who have made a significant impact on the financial world and whose strategies and philosophies can be studied and learned from. Here are a few notable investors who are often cited as some of the best to study:
Warren Buffet - Warren Buffet is a well-known investor and the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is known for his value investing philosophy, which involves buying undervalued stocks and holding them for the long-term.
Peter Lynch - Peter Lynch is a former mutual fund manager who is known for his strong track record of outperforming the market. He is the author of several books on investing, including "One Up on Wall Street," which is considered a classic in the field.
Benjamin Graham - Benjamin Graham is often referred to as the "father of value investing" and is known for his influential book, "The Intelligent Investor." Graham's approach to investing involves finding undervalued stocks and buying them at a discount.
Ray Dalio - Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, a successful investment firm. He is known for his "all-weather" investment strategy, which involves diversifying investments to mitigate risk.
David Swensen - David Swensen is the chief investment officer at Yale University and is known for his innovative investment strategies, including his use of alternative investments such as real estate and private equity.
These are just a few examples of successful investors who have made a significant impact in the financial world. There are many other investors whose strategies and philosophies can also be studied and learned from.
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And a chance to win free shares of stock. | <urn:uuid:4db03133-fc66-44e2-9af5-907d81935200> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://learn.synvestable.com/financial-education-financial-literacy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.952167 | 2,086 | 3.921875 | 4 |
To combine two lists element-wise in Python, you can use the
zip() function along with a list comprehension. The
zip() function pairs up corresponding elements from the two lists, and the list comprehension allows you to create a new list by combining those pairs. Here’s an example:
list1 = [1, 2, 3] list2 = [4, 5, 6] combined_list = [x + y for x, y in zip(list1, list2)] print(combined_list)
In this example, we have
list2, each containing numeric elements. We use
zip(list1, list2) to pair up corresponding elements from both lists. The list comprehension
[x + y for x, y in zip(list1, list2)] creates a new list by summing up each pair of elements obtained from
zip(). The resulting
combined_list will contain the combined values
[5, 7, 9].
Note that the lists provided to
zip() should have the same length. If the lists have different lengths, the resulting combined list will have a length equal to the shortest list. Any remaining elements in the longer list will be ignored.
By using the
zip() function and a list comprehension, you can efficiently combine two lists element-wise to create a new list based on a specific operation or logic. | <urn:uuid:2d721657-2b99-4136-aa4e-081c8748832b> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://learninfinite.com/how-to-combine-two-lists-element-wise-in-python/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.744285 | 287 | 3.671875 | 4 |
It may be hard to believe but something as basic as listening could just be the answer to creating a supportive and respectful work environment.
At work, many people spend a great deal of time talking and wanting to be heard. Some of us are on the phone all day. Others make a career out of giving presentations at conferences. The talkers often expect to be heard. And what happens when they’re ignored?
Most often, people who are not being heard, or listened to will talk even more. Sometimes they will even shout just so that they can make themselves heard. Children often exhibit this behavior when their parents are too busy to pay attention to them. You’ll notice that they stop crying and screaming when they get the attention they need.
The reason why this happens is that human beings require a two-way conversation in order to achieve a meaningful relationship. It has nothing to do with acting like an infant. People talking without listening are often at the root of a volatile workplace dynamic whereas a happy workforce is all about good relationships. How many marriages have ended as a result of spouses not listening to what the other has to say?
Whether you’re a boss or subordinate, all anyone wants is a few minutes to be heard and listened to. Co-workers may approach others if they sense that their troubles are not being heard. They may approach a boss or their human resource department if they feel the conflicts escalating. If bosses feel ignored, they too will act in ways that could potentially create discord in the workplace.
The key to a thriving workforce absolutely depends on employees taking turns listening to one another. It doesn’t always mean you have to agree but just the act of listening makes people feel valued and an important member of the team.
So the next time you’re in a meeting in which a colleague has something to say listen and advise accordingly. Without a doubt, they will reciprocate and isn’t this what a meaningful relationship is all about? | <urn:uuid:28c63f69-23cc-4c55-bc6f-74d1fdcae8aa> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://legacycultures.com/listening-is-key-to-a-respectful-work-environment/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.976079 | 406 | 2.625 | 3 |
Celebrate The Hero In Each Of Us, That Voice That Is Brave Enough To Say “Enough” And “No More”
“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t” – Rikki Rogers
Life in a Jar . . . a play written by school children in Kansas. Tells the story of Irena Sendlerowa who saved around 2,500 Jewish babies from Nazi death camps. Saying that what she did was nothing special, she said “I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality. The term hero irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”
She was captured by the Gestapo and beaten, breaking and crushing her legs and feet, and then driven away to be executed. On the way, she was rescued. She was never able to walk without crutches afterwards.
I think that most of us wonder if we would have had the strength and courage to do what Irena did. Risk our lives for children that we didn’t know. To survive that kind of beating. To have the attitude of thinking that we could have done more than rescue 2,500 children. She is a special kind of hero.
As brave as Irena was, think for a moment of being the mother who had to decide if she could give up her child.
What guarantee was there that this would in fact save her child? Where did such inner strength come from? Most of the parents who gave up their children did not survive the war and lost their lives in the death camps.
Put yourself in that place for just a moment, could you have given your child to Irena? Their story is told in the PBS program, “Irena Sandler: In the Name of Their Mothers”.
Harriet Tubman is another amazing woman. Born a slave, she ran away leaving her husband and children to escape slavery. Walking almost 90 miles to Philadelphia with no map, directions or help. She returned to the South at least 19 times and lead her family and hundreds of other slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad. She was very intuitive and had dreams that would tell her when to leave the road, or that a particular way was not safe.
A movie about her life was made, called “A Woman Called Moses“. She is an inspiration again, for standing up for what is right with bravery and courageous action. After rescuing her family, the fact that she went back again and again, with a large bounty on her head for over 10 years makes her a monument to courage and determination. She was also involved in helping women get the vote, working with Susan B Anthony.
“Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle” – Christian D. Larson
You could write story after story about amazing people who showed tremendous resilience and courage. Who dug down deep within themselves to find their inner strength to live through trials and tribulations. Who fought through the inner and outer darkness of their lives.
In fact, all of us have such stories within our own lives. You may think that what you have done in your life doesn’t compare to the stories you have heard, the ones that you have labeled as heroes. I am sure that if you were to talk with Malala Yousufzai, she would insist that what she did standing up in defiance to those who wanted to prevent her being educated, was nothing notable. We are all Irena’s, and Harriet’s, and Malala’s.
Maya Angelou is another courageous woman, my hero. Her writing and her wisdom are so inspiring. One of my favorite quotes of hers, “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it”. We all face in our lives numerous times that test us. Things can happen that can shatter you, that can pierce your soul. But nothing that happens can reduce you to something less that you are.
“A strong woman knows she has strength enough for the journey, but a woman of strength knows it is in the journey where she will become strong” – Unknown
Like the water in a lake. Something can cause large ripples that disturb your peace, that shatters your emotions. The cause of the disturbance, like a large rock, might sink to the bottom of your lake, your soul. It might forever change you, but it does not reduce you.
You still have the power to return to your inner and outer peace. To continue to learn, grow, and transform your life. To be curious as to what else is possible in your life. To be an intelligent, courageous, loving woman who teaches others by being her best possible self.
- What are your dreams, visions, your life purpose?
- Are you on track to bring them into reality and complete them?
- Have you allowed distractions to sidetrack you?
- Are you unclear on what your life purpose is or how to bring it into reality? | <urn:uuid:0a2ab938-889b-4c7b-8da7-73f9d05b8007> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://lemonademakers.org/5224/transformation/5224/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.979053 | 1,091 | 3.15625 | 3 |
In the era of technological innovation, where sustainability is a paramount concern, understanding the environmental impact of blockchain technology is crucial. While it has brought numerous advancements, it has also raised concerns regarding energy consumption and ecological footprint.
Energy Consumption in Blockchain
Blockchain’s decentralized nature relies on a network of computers, or nodes, to validate and record transactions. This process, known as mining, requires substantial computational power and consumes significant amounts of energy. Proof of Work (PoW), the consensus mechanism employed by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, is particularly energy-intensive.
As a result, the energy consumption associated with Decentralized ledger has become a subject of concern, especially given the global push for sustainability.
Alternative Consensus Mechanisms
Alternative consensus mechanisms like Proof of Stake (PoS) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) have emerged as a response to high energy consumption. PoS involves validators staking cryptocurrency as collateral for network security, while DPoS relies on selected delegates for transaction validation. These mechanisms cut energy use and enhance scalability and efficiency.
Carbon Footprint and E-Waste
Its carbon footprint is a direct consequence of its energy consumption. The increased use of fossil fuels to power mining operations contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the rapid evolution of Decentralized ledger technology leads to electronic waste (e-waste) concerns. As hardware becomes obsolete, it is often discarded, adding to environmental issues.
Mitigation Strategies and Future Sustainability
Addressing Decentralized ledger’s environmental impact requires a multi-faceted approach. First and foremost, transitioning from PoW to more energy-efficient consensus mechanisms like PoS and DPoS can significantly reduce energy consumption. Additionally, using renewable energy sources for mining operations can mitigate the carbon footprint associated with Decentralized ledger.
Efforts to extend the hardware lifecycle through upgrades and recycling initiatives can combat e-waste concerns. Blockchain projects can also implement sustainability-focused initiatives, such as carbon offset programs and eco-friendly mining practices.
The future of decentralized ledger relies on its ability to become sustainable. This means making it more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. Collaboration between the Decentralized ledger community, policymakers, and environmental advocates is crucial for this balance.
Blockchain technology, while transformative, poses environmental challenges that demand attention. Understanding its energy consumption, exploring alternative consensus mechanisms, addressing its carbon footprint, and mitigating e-waste are essential steps toward a more sustainable blockchain ecosystem. By implementing responsible practices and embracing innovation, we can envision a future where blockchain contributes to technological advancement and environmental preservation. | <urn:uuid:54c4646d-a6dc-4732-8389-53ec6221c52b> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://leonardorender.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Leo_WP_050718.pdf | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.913928 | 542 | 3.515625 | 4 |
Editor Jenny Krueger shares makerspace takeaways from a library field trip.Read More...
At the National Association of School Librarian’s Conference in November, I had the pleasure of meeting Lorena Swetnam and Cynthia Johnson, middle school librarians at Blythwood Middle School and Longleaf Middle School in Columbia, South Carolina. They presented on how they’ve introduced computational thinking in their libraries. They’ve pulled together their story with some great example activities and photos. Check it out!—School and Library Publishing Director Jenny Krueger
Working in a middle school means every day with our students is unique and full of surprises. In the last year, we have worked together to create opportunities for our students and teachers to tinker, create, and collaborate. These makerspace activities allow us to see computational thinking skills in action: logics, algorithms, decomposition, patterns abstraction, and evaluation.
This post originally appeared on the Maker Ed blog on June 6, 2017.
“Okay, you two. You have to leave. Your 5th hour teacher will blame me if you’re late class,” I urged Jake and Karina.
“Just one more minute. I have to glue on this last truss,” replied Karina with hot glue gun in hand and surrounded by a pile of spaghetti as her drawbridge slowly took shape.
As a physics teacher at Harding Senior High, the largest Title I high school in Minnesota, I typically stand in the hall between classes trying to get kids to class on time. I never thought I’d have to kick my students out of class or tell them they had to go home by 5 p.m., three hours after school ended. But as my colleagues in physics and engineering and I moved towards building projects with our students, this “problem” grew as well. Read More | <urn:uuid:a5e66b62-27a0-4cbe-8417-d824849ab76d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://lernerbooks.blog/tag/maker-education | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.962288 | 390 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Bitcoin ATMs have been gaining popularity across the world as they offer a convenient and accessible way for people to buy and sell Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But beyond just providing access to digital assets, Bitcoin ATMs also have a significant role in promoting financial inclusion and economic empowerment, particularly in underserved communities.
Financial inclusion refers to the access to affordable and reliable financial services, such as banking, credit, and insurance. Unfortunately, millions of people around the world remain unbanked or underbanked, meaning they lack access to basic financial services. This is especially prevalent in low-income areas, where traditional financial institutions are often absent or unaffordable. Bitcoin ATMs, on the other hand, offer a solution for people who want to participate in the cryptocurrency market without relying on traditional financial institutions.
Bitcoin ATMs are often located in areas that are underserved by banks and other financial institutions. They can be found in convenience stores, gas stations, and other retail locations, making them easily accessible to people who might not have access to traditional financial services. This accessibility allows people to buy and sell Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which can be used as a store of value or a means of exchange.
Additionally, Bitcoin ATMs have lower barriers to entry than traditional financial institutions. They do not require a credit check or a minimum account balance, making them an attractive option for those who do not qualify for traditional banking services. This is particularly important for people who live in low-income communities, where financial institutions often require higher minimum account balances and charge higher fees.
Bitcoin ATMs also provide an opportunity for economic empowerment. By allowing people to participate in the cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin ATMs provide a means for people to generate income and build wealth. This is especially important for people who live in areas where job opportunities are limited. With Bitcoin ATM Bellflower, people can buy and sell cryptocurrencies and potentially generate income through trading or investing.
Furthermore, Bitcoin ATMs can help people who face financial exclusion due to their immigration status. For people who do not have a social security number or a government-issued ID, accessing traditional financial services can be difficult. Bitcoin ATMs, however, only require a valid phone number to use their services, making them a more inclusive option for undocumented immigrants.
Bitcoin ATMs have the potential to promote financial inclusion and economic empowerment. They provide a convenient and accessible way for people to participate in the cryptocurrency market, particularly in underserved communities. As the adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continues to grow, Bitcoin ATMs can help bridge the gap between traditional financial institutions and the unbanked and underbanked population. By providing a means for people to generate income and build wealth, Bitcoin ATMs have the potential to be a catalyst for economic empowerment. | <urn:uuid:6f83f9d1-ed4f-4845-96a2-818494605964> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://liveskye.com/the-role-of-bitcoin-atms-in-promoting-financial-inclusion-and-economic-empowerment/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.950801 | 554 | 2.625 | 3 |
Scientists began to examine the element because of its omnipresence in the environment, even though it’s toxic. It is good to remember that aluminum doesn’t pose a significant threat to human health because it is primarily nontoxic, meaning few concerns are associated with aluminum bottles.
One concern is that being exposed to this element is dangerous. The increased exposure to dietary aluminum could result in several consequences, including the neurotoxicity of the brain’s barrier.
Is it safe to use?
BPA is found in several things, such as plastics, and people are more worried about it than aluminum itself. Before buying them, make sure to read the labels of reusable bottles thoroughly and confirm that they are BPA-free and suitable for drinking water.
Bottles made of metal include an inside lining that limits the amount of chemical residue and leakage the bottle gets. While some companies say that their products are BPA-free and can be validated by examination, it is impossible to tell whether the manufacturers are honest because they refuse to give details about the kind of materials that they employ. Illustration of a Nontoxic Plastic BPA Bisphenol-A and Phthalates Free Label Isolated on White Background
What is BPA, and what are the health dangers of avoiding it?
BPA is a type of chemical that is used to create food packaging. Many people have allergies to fragrances. Therefore, they end up buying things without scents to avoid any adverse reactions. This exposes the users to more hazards. The primary reason people use BPA is that it makes for aluminum dropper bottles.
To create epoxy resins for metal water bottles, BPA is commonly employed. Food cans’ inner linings are utilized to manufacture several other items. Resins offer durability to the can, preventing metal from rusting inside of it.
There are several medical discussions on whether or not BPA is dangerous to the human body. BPA is suspected of acting like estrogen, and it has been theorized that it can affect several biological processes, including growth and cell repair. BPA’s impact on hormone levels is causing major worry since it affects how the body handles other hormonal imbalances.
Why Aluminum Water Bottles are Worth for money?
Although a discussion about whether aluminum water bottles are safe or not has been ongoing, these products nonetheless provide several advantages if you know how to purchase one properly.
Aluminum lotion bottles provide environmental benefits. Plus, in the society we inhabit, it is critical to show you are a good citizen by recycling. No matter which plastic-related number you look at, it’s distressing. To make the planet a better place, it is essential to limit the use of plastic you buy even if you recycle what you’ve already used. Aluminum water bottles are incredibly long-lasting and environmentally beneficial containers that are worth the investment.
You save money by utilizing an aluminum water bottle. Drinking the appropriate amount of water will help you save $100 every month. This can be done by carrying a reusable aluminum bottle. It’s $1,200 or more cash in your pocket every year. With that extra hundred bucks a month, what would you do?
Up until now, you may not have been aware that metal water bottles might positively affect the flavor of liquid within. Polyethylene and polypropylene bottle types might give off a strong odor that impacts the taste of the water you drink. When did a liquid ever smell downright foul to you?
Aluminum water bottles are capable of standing up to a lot of use. An aluminum water bottle is a lot more shock-resistant, so it won’t break even if it falls and has a minor dent.
Aluminum bottles are known for their solid tops. When you drop your bottle, you have a lower likelihood of having the contents pour out, and juices and drinks keep fresh longer | <urn:uuid:226844b3-cb24-4f98-8cd8-baf917f816d7> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://malluweb.info/the-application-of-aluminum-mist-sprays/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.95298 | 804 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Whereami is a playful, wayfinding sign rising 16-feet into the air and featuring 37 student-designed arrows all pointing in different directions. It was a collaboration with sixth through twelfth graders at the Bruce Randolph School located in the Cole neighborhood. Walczak & Heiss visited the school and challenged students to create their own arrow designs that pointed to sites meaningful to them.
Each of the arrows selected for the project points to a unique location—everywhere from as close as downtown Denver and nearby playing fields to locals as far and diverse as Germany and that of the Sand Creek Massacre, a site 252 miles away that marks the murder of Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. Local history is also represented as one arrow nods to Daddy Bruce Randolph, the namesake of the school, by pointing to Daddy Bruce Barb B Que Ribs.
To go from the students’ 2-dimensional drawings to the 3-dimensional metal artwork, the drawings were scanned and traced in a CAD program. From there, Allentown-based DiBello Metal Designs made the stainless-steel and orange powder coated arrows. All of the arrows are carefully balanced on a singular pole, which proved to be an engineering feat as each one needed to remain clearly legible. The artists explained that, “it makes this kind of prickly looking, confusing, jumbled wayfinding sign. The piece is not really about letting it be pointedly about a location that somebody knows, but about a kind of personal connection to a place.”
Images by Wes Magyar | <urn:uuid:f32f0933-6969-4cf8-b2dd-6e46388a4f4d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://markers.civic.space/whereami/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.970547 | 316 | 2.640625 | 3 |
(MENAFN- PR Newswire) These phosphates present the highest-record adsorption for cesium, higher than any other standard adsorbent
BUSAN, South Korea, May 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Removal of the toxic radionuclide Cs+ from nuclear power-plant wastes is a huge challenge. Thus, there is an urgent need to remove Cs+, possibly using a phosphate-based adsorbent. To this end, researchers have synthesized dittmarite-type phosphates, KMP (KMgPO4 ⋅ H2O) and NMP (NH4MgPO4 ⋅ H2O), that contain readily exchangeable ions owing to their layered structure. The continue reading
ion exchange and dissolution-precipitation enabled record-high adsorption capabilities of KMP and NMP for Cs+ that are higher than those of standard adsorbents.
Pusan National University researchers have developed high-adsorption capacity magnesium phosphates for highly efficient capture of radionuclide cesium.
Nuclear energy is crucial for producing cleaner energy, but the associated radioactive pollution requires strategic solutions. Cesium (Cs+) is a toxic radionuclide generated from nuclear power plants that demands immobilization and high adsorption methods to prevent environmental pollution. Although phosphate-based adsorbents are excellent candidates for cleanup, their inefficient ion exchange leads to limited adsorption capacity. The high theoretical adsorption of phosphate adsorbents does not match their experimental adsorption capacities.
To remove harmful Cs+ from radioactive wastewater, Pusan National University researchers led by Professor Kuk Cho from the Department of Environmental Engineering have synthesized dittmarite-type phosphates with a layered structure, ideal for easy ion exchange. The team found that their magnesium phosphates had record-high adsorption capacities for Cs+, surpassing standard adsorbents due to exchangeable ions and dissolution-precipitation. Prof. Cho surmises, "The presence of exchangeable ions and dissolution-precipitation enabled record-high adsorption capacities for Cs+ that are higher than those of standard adsorbents."
The study, which was made available online on april 7, 2023, will be published in volume 453 of the journal of hazardous materials on 5 july 2023 . Using a one-pot hydrothermal method, the team synthesized KMgPO4⋅H2O (KMP) and NH4MgPO4⋅H2O (NMP), both of which are dittmarite-type compounds, having a high theoretical adsorption capacity of 754 mg g− 1 and 856 mg g− 1 for Cs+, respectively. The synthesized KMP and NMP had remarkable adsorption capacities of 630 mg g−1 and 711 mg g−1, respectively, which were 84% of their theoretical adsorption capacities. These experimentally measured adsorption capacity values are the highest among all reported adsorbents for Cs+.
Next, the team characterized and analyzed the physical and chemical properties of the phosphates. Based on the Cs+ adsorption performance of KMP and NMP, they showed that these phosphates are not best suited for use in water with high divalent ion concentrations. However, they can still be used in Cs+ readsorption processes, following desorption processes, to concentrate Cs+ and reduce waste volume. Emphasizing the importance of this, Prof. Cho says, "Cs+ is a popular radionuclide generated from nuclear power plants, and the volume of its waste must be minimized for disposal. To minimize the volume, the adsorbent with higher adsorption capacity is advantageous."
The study found that the new phosphates efficiently adsorb Cs+, providing a cost-effective method for radioactive waste disposal. This is particularly important in a world where nuclear power plants are expected to increase in number, and proper storage with appropriate adsorbents will become crucial for sustainability.
In conclusion, the high adsorption capacities and stability of the synthesized phosphates make them promising candidates to deal with the radioactive waste disposal challenge.
Zeqiu Li, Chenyang Yang, and Kuk Cho
Title of original paper: Dittmarite-type magnesium phosphates for highly efficient capture of Cs+
Journal of Hazardous Materials
Department of Environmental Engineering, Pusan National University, Geumjeong-gu, Busan, Republic of Korea
*Corresponding author Professor Kuk Cho's email: [email protected]
About Pusan National University
82 51 510 7928
SOURCE Pusan National University | <urn:uuid:ab834bec-808a-4e1c-9cec-169726d89409> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://menafn.com/1106186429/Pusan-National-University-Researchers-Develop-High-Adsorption-Phosphates-For-Radionuclide-Cesium-Ion-Capture | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.899942 | 990 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Emily Murphy was a writer and activist for women’s rights in Canada. She later became the first woman judge in Canada and the British Empire. Emily Murphy was one of the “Valiant Five” or “Famous Five,” a group of Canadian activists that included other well-known activists like Henrietta Muir Edwards, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney, and Nellie McClung. She was known for her contributions to feminism in her country. She is known as one of the few women in her time who led the way in getting rid of laws that treated women unfairly. Emily Murphy was born into a liberal family with a lot of ties to politics and the law. Her father believed that sons and daughters should be treated the same. Her maternal grandfather was a politician, and two of her uncles were Supreme Court justices and senators. This is how she was raised, and it helped her understand and talk about issues that hurt women and children in public as an adult. “Nothing ever happens by chance; everything is pushed from behind,” is one of her most famous sayings.
Childhood & Early Life
Emily Murphy was born in Cookstown, Canada, on March 14, 1868, to Isaac Ferguson and Emily Ferguson. She was the couple’s third child. Her older brothers were named Thomas and Gowan. Emily’s dad worked in business.
Emily Murphy went to the Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, which is a private school for girls. People say that her private formal education did a lot to shape her ideas and give her a broad view of life.
Emily Murphy’s Career
Emily Murphy was born into a family with a lot of power in politics and law, so she became a lawyer and teacher at a very young age. Her goal was to help women and children become more powerful.
Between 1900 and 1906, Emily Murphy started writing and used the pen name Janey Canunk to publish her travel sketches.
In 1907, she moved to Edmonton, Alberta, with her family. Here, she put together groups of women and met with them regularly to talk about different problems related to gender inequality.
Emily Murphy started a campaign to protect married women’s property rights after hearing about a woman in Alberta who lost all of her lands when her husband sold their farm. In 1916, the Alberta legislature passed the Dower Act, which gave married women the right to one-third of their husband’s property. This win made her more well-known in the public eye.
Emily Murphy and other activists wanted to see the trials of some women who were accused of prostitution in 1916. But Murphy and other female activists were not allowed to watch the trial because it was thought to be inappropriate. Murphy thought it was unfair that women who worked as prostitutes were only tried in front of men.
She told the provincial Attorney General that this was wrong and made a strong case that women should be tried by a woman judge. Her request was granted, and in the same year, she became the first woman in the British Empire to be a police magistrate.
Emily Murphy then joined the Equal Franchise League and started a group for rural women called the Federated Women’s Institute. She also worked to get women the right to vote. All provinces except Newfoundland and Quebec gave women the right to vote in provincial elections between 1916 and 1922, except for Newfoundland and Quebec.
In 1917, she started a strong campaign to get women in Canada recognized as “persons” and given the right to be in the Senate. She worked on this campaign with Henrietta Muir Edwards, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney, and Nellie McClung. Together, they were called the “Famous Five.”
This fight went on for 12 years, and in 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada said that women could not be senators. The “Famous Five” tried to get help from Britain’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. On October 18, 1929, the Privy Council said that under the British North America Act, women were considered “persons” and could run for Senate seats.
Emily Murphy wrote about drug abuse in Canada in her book “The Black Candle,” which came out in 1922. She saw it as a problem for law enforcement and changed the way people thought about fighting drugs.
At the beginning of the 20th century, she was a strong supporter of forcing mentally ill people to get sterilized. She thought that mentally ill children were a threat to society and that this was the only way to stop them.
Awards & Achievements
In 2004, Emily Murphy and the other “Famous Five” members were shown on the back of 50 Canadian $50 bills.
In 2009, she and the other members of the “Famous Five” were named “Canada’s first honorary senators” by the Senate.
Personal History and Legacies
Emily Murphy married Arthur Murphy in 1887, and they had four girls: Madeliene, Evelyn, Doris, and Kathleen. Her daughter Doris died young from diphtheria.
Emily Murphy died in Edmonton, Alberta, on October 17, 1933, when she was 65 years old.
Estimated Net worth
Emily Murphy is one of the wealthiest civil rights leaders and is on the list of the most well-known civil rights leaders. Based on what we’ve found on Wikipedia, Forbes, and Business Insider, Emily Murphy’s net worth is about $4 million. | <urn:uuid:147addd0-b255-46eb-b7cb-0f2c8ef34624> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://metaunfolded.com/emily-murphy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.989329 | 1,155 | 3.46875 | 3 |
Health and Wellness
When it comes to discussing health and wellness, it can become confusing to distinguish between the two. Health and wellness are terms that are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. To truly understand the difference between health and wellness, we need to explore each term separately.
- Health is a continuous balancing of the physical, emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual components of an individual to produce happiness and a higher quality of existence.
- Wellness means engaging in attitudes and behaviors that enhance quality of life and maximize personal potential.
What Is Health?
Health relates to physical well-being and includes the absence of illnesses or diseases. It is the state of being free from physical impairment or pain caused by injury or illness. Good health involves caring for your body and understanding how different lifestyle decisions affect your physical well-being.
What Is Wellness?
Wellness, on the other hand, refers to a holistic approach to physical and emotional wellbeing. It goes beyond just the absence of disease or infirmity; it also involves taking proactive steps to maintain a healthy balance in all areas of life. This includes emotional, spiritual, social, and physical aspects of life.
The Difference Between Health and Wellness
The key difference between health and wellness is that health focuses more on medical treatment while wellness encourages preventive care. By taking a holistic approach to well-being, wellness promotes overall health, making it easier to identify any potential problems before they develop into something more serious. Additionally, wellness emphasizes the importance of taking an active role in improving one’s quality of life through healthy habits such as exercise, proper diet, adequate sleep, stress management techniques, and preventative medical visits.
By understanding the distinction between health and wellness, we can start taking active steps towards achieving our maximum potential for both physical and mental wellbeing. With the knowledge and resources available today, we can make informed decisions about our own health and look after ourselves better than ever before. | <urn:uuid:9e843e9d-765f-41f7-b8b7-96686ad925ba> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://midsouthbariatrics.com/health-and-wellness-definitions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.94453 | 399 | 3.078125 | 3 |
1. Electricity Efficiency:
– Improve to energy-efficient appliances, these kinds of as fridges, washing equipment, and air conditioners.
– Exchange regular incandescent light bulbs with power-preserving LED bulbs.
– Insulate your dwelling thoroughly to lower heating and cooling needs.
– Set up programmable thermostats to improve electrical power utilization.
nine. Global Cooperation:
– Foster world-wide collaboration and agreements to handle local weather adjust collectively, this kind of as the Paris Settlement.
– Help worldwide endeavours to reduce emissions, transfer thoroughly clean technologies, and supply local weather funding to building nations around the world.
one. Transition to Renewable Electrical power: The most significant supply of greenhouse gasoline emissions is the burning of fossil fuels for electric power generation and transportation. Transitioning to renewable electrical power resources this kind of as photo voltaic, wind, and hydropower can drastically decrease greenhouse fuel emissions.
two. Vitality Effectiveness: Selling electrical power performance actions in buildings, industries, and transportation can lead to significant reductions in China greenhouse reducer fuel emissions. This features bettering insulation, working with electrical power-successful appliances and automobiles, and adopting power-conserving techniques.
Lessening greenhouse gas emissions involves a extensive and multi-faceted technique involving folks, companies, communities, and governments. By utilizing these methods and embracing sustainable tactics, we can make considerable progress in mitigating local weather adjust and generating a far more sustainable upcoming.
Install photo voltaic panels on your home if possible.
Decide on power companies that give renewable electricity possibilities.
Take part in neighborhood renewable vitality tasks.
Plant Trees and Help Conservation:
To lessen the greenhouse impact and mitigate local weather change, it is crucial to target on minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and boosting pure processes that assist regulate the Earth’s climate. Here are some key procedures to accomplish this:
6. Squander Administration: Correct waste administration, which includes recycling, composting, and methane capture from landfills, China greenhouse reducer can drastically cut down greenhouse gasoline emissions. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and its capture and utilization can enable mitigate its affect.
nine. Federal government Policies and Global Cooperation: Governments participate in a essential position in implementing insurance policies and regulations that incentivize greenhouse gas reductions. Applying carbon pricing, location emission reduction targets, and supporting renewable energy development are illustrations of effective coverage measures. International cooperation and agreements, these types of as the Paris Agreement, help coordinate international attempts to combat local weather modify.
5. Mitigate Industrial Processes:
– Employ cleaner manufacturing methods and technologies in industries to minimize emissions of greenhouse gases.
– Inspire the adoption of carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems to capture and retailer carbon dioxide emissions from industrial procedures.
seven. Waste Administration:
– Endorse recycling, composting, and squander reduction to reduce methane emissions from landfills.
– Inspire the use of squander-to-vitality technologies to seize and make the most of methane emissions from natural waste.
six. Waste Management: Applying suitable squander administration methods, this kind of as recycling, composting, and lowering squander technology, can lessen methane emissions from landfills. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gasoline, and reducing its release is critical.
seven. Conscious Use:
– Make informed alternatives as a shopper by supporting environmentally responsible models and items.
– Lessen food squander by arranging foods, purchasing only what is wanted, and appropriately storing perishable things.
– Decide on products with a extended lifespan and prioritize sturdiness over disposability.
4. Forest Conservation and Reforestation: Forests act as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide from the ambiance. Defending existing forests from deforestation and utilizing reforestation systems can help seize and keep more carbon, decreasing greenhouse fuel concentrations.
ten. Study and Development:
– Make investments in analysis and progress of innovative systems and procedures for cleanse electricity, sustainable agriculture, and emission reduction throughout sectors.
4. Sustainable Agriculture: Utilizing sustainable agricultural procedures can lessen greenhouse gas emissions from the sector. This contains selling natural and organic farming, lowering the use of synthetic fertilizers, implementing efficient irrigation programs, and taking care of livestock to decrease methane emissions. | <urn:uuid:1890cd80-2388-47ac-baea-e4d575b2e36e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://millchains.com/how-to-cut-down-greenhouse-gases/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.870994 | 883 | 2.921875 | 3 |
The Declaration of Independence states that "All men are created equal." While that holds true for the actual male gender, it doesn't apply to the rest of humanity. More than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed, women earn 77 cents for every dollar for men. Equality in the workplace still has not been reached. However, that doesn't lessen the need for fair pay among men and women.
Gender discrimination throughout history
Prior to the 1960s, the U.S. felt that women didn't deserve to earn as much as men since they were not the breadwinners in the family. They made 59 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. Then, in 1963, the Equal Pay Act was passed, requiring men and women to be paid equivalent salaries, benefits, bonuses and overtime for performing the same job responsibilities. Despite this legislation, men and women are still unequal in the workplace.
By the time women reach age 65, they'll each have lost $431,000 because of the wage gap, despite more than 50 percent of households having female breadwinners, according to the U.S. Government. Along with earning less money, women also face stunted job growth. They were less likely to be promoted than men, regardless of whether their job performance was actually better, Bloomberg explained.
Closing the gender gap
While women are in a significantly better place job-wise than they were in 1963, there is still a ways to go until complete equality. As a small business owner, you can do your part to level the playing field. Ensuring your financial plan is set to pay men and women the equal salaries for the same job responsibilities is a good place to start.
The qualities you look for in potential employees should also be the same despite gender. The bold, confident and intense characteristics that employers seek in men aren't what they look for in women, according to Bloomberg. Businesses also view women with children as more likely to drop their work obligations for their families, while fathers are perceived as responsible. To erase the gender gap in the workplace, one must start with eliminating stereotypical boundaries.
The road to gender equality in the workplace is a long one. However, the U.S. is gradually getting there. One study shows that the U.S. gross domestic product could actually increase by 9 percent if women worked at the same rates as men, according to FastCompany. By providing the same wages for both genders, everyone can benefit. | <urn:uuid:b77466cb-6cad-4c05-a24c-e8db5faa6be2> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://mybank.com/blog/creating-gender-equality-in-the-workplace/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.986074 | 502 | 3.859375 | 4 |
What are the five layers of the vocal folds?
The vocal fold comprises five layers (deep to superficial layers as follows): thyroarytenoid muscle, deep lamina propria, intermediate lamina propria, superficial lamina propria, and the squamous epithelium. The deep and intermediate lamina propria both are grouped to form the vocal ligament mentioned above.
What are the three layers of the vocal folds?
Mechanically, the vocal fold structures act more like three layers consisting of the cover (epithelium and superficial layer of the lamina propria), transition (intermediate and deep layers of the lamina propria), and body (the vocalis muscle).
What is vocal Hyperfunction?
Hyperfunctional dysphonia is one of the most common conditions associated with the voice. Also referred to as muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) or vocal hyper function, hyperfunctional dysphonia is the constriction and overexertion of the muscles around the larynx (voice box).
What is the deepest layer of the vocal folds?
The deeper layers of the vocal fold are muscles – the vocalis and thyroarytenoid muscles make up the deepest portion of the vocal fold.
How many vocal folds do we have?
The larynx itself consists of 2 glistening white vocal folds, which form a V-shaped structure. The glottic airway is between the vocal folds. Just superior to the vocal folds are the false vocal folds. The posterior aspect of the larynx is lined by the arytenoids.
What are the false vocal folds called?
False vocal folds, also called ventricular (or vestibular) folds are a pair of thick folds of mucous membrane that are located in the supra-glottal space in the larynx (see Figure 1).
What is Hyperadduction of vocal folds?
The squeezing together (hyperadduction) of the vocal folds that is the hallmark of muscle tension dysphonia is very similar to that of SD. SD is, by definition, spasmodic, meaning that squeezing is irregular; with dysphonia, however, squeezing is generally sustained in muscle tension.
What are the 4 systems of the human vocal mechanism?
Voice box closes the glottis to build up pressure, then opens it for the forceful expelling of air during cough….Three Voice Subsystems.
|Subsystem||Voice Organs||Role in Sound Production|
|Resonating system||Vocal tract: throat (pharynx), oral cavity, nasal cavities||Changes the “buzzy sound” into a person’s recognizable voice|
What is the space between the vocal folds called?
Glottis – This is the space between the two vocal folds.
Which part of the vocal folds vibrate the most?
The vocalis muscle
pp 679-98. Aug 2000. The vocalis muscle is by far the most viscous (harder to set into motion, vibration). This portion of the vocal folds is necessary to change the vibratory patterns of the entire system.
Do humans have 2 vocal chords?
There are 2 vocal cords, which produce sound in humans. There are, in fact, 2 other cords but they do not contribute in producing voice. Those are silent vocal cords.
Why does my voice vibrate when I talk?
When you speak, your vocal cords naturally close to create vibrations as air passes between them. Like a piano or guitar string, these vibrations produce sound (your voice). When you breathe, your vocal cords are relaxed and open to let air pass through freely, which doesn’t produce any sound.
What is the aryepiglottic fold?
The aryepiglottic folds extend between the arytenoid cartilage and the lateral margin of the epiglottis on each side and constitute the lateral borders of the laryngeal inlet. They are involved in physiologic closure mechanisms of the larynx and in pathologic conditions such as inspiratory stridor.
What is vestibular fold?
The vestibular folds, or false vocal cords, are formed by the superior layer of infolded membrane; the vocal folds, or true vocal cords, are formed from the inferior layer of infolded membrane. The laryngeal ventricles extend laterally and are located between the vestibular and vocal folds.
What does Dysphonic mean?
(dis-FOH-nee-uh) Trouble with the voice when trying to talk, including hoarseness and change in pitch or quality or voice.
What causes diplophonia?
It has been established that diplophonia can be caused by various vocal fold pathologies, such as vocal folds polyp, vocal fold nodule, recurrent laryngeal nerve paralysis or vestibular fold hypertrophy. The Voice Quality Symbol for diplophonia is V̬‼.
What is PVFM disorder?
Paradoxical Vocal Fold Motion Disorder (PVFMD) PVFMD is a breathing disorder that is caused by the abnormal movement of the vocal folds during breathing. | <urn:uuid:6a1d305c-1de4-4614-97ab-517fca4a6c41> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://mystylit.com/writing-guides/what-are-the-five-layers-of-the-vocal-folds/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.911533 | 1,078 | 3.6875 | 4 |
We have listed below Old Norse character crossword clue answers based on our database. This clue was last seen on January 16 2023 in the NYT crossword puzzle.
|Old Norse character||RUNE||4 letters|
We update our website regularly with the latest clues, so whenever we find a new solution, we add it to the answers box below including length and definition.
Crossword Answer for Old Norse character
Old Norse character NYT crossword clue answer with 4 letters is:
Why this answer? Meaning: Rune is an alphabet used by the Vikings of Old Norse. It is composed of 24 letters, usually carved in stone or wood, and was used for writing, divination, and magical purposes. Rune means "secret" or "whisper" and is believed to be a powerful form of communication.
Other solutions or synonyms
Are you looking for a different answer? If you are playing another crossword puzzle game (not NYT), other (less) possible solutions to Old Norse character crossword or RUNE synonyms are: Glyph (2%), Yule (4%), Wane (6%), Saga (17%), Odin (67%)
For additional solutions to the NYT clues, be sure to visit our website. You can check our daily article for all NYT Crossword Answers January 16 2023 or browse the previous answers using the tool on the sidebar. | <urn:uuid:ce04b240-5edb-49b1-b1b6-f5adfdc11f06> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://nytcrosswordtoday.com/old-norse-character-crossword-clue/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.905333 | 281 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Studying water forms is a big part of geography, so we have created a water forms activity that will surely help your children remember the different water forms!
The templates are already created for you, just print, and have your children stitch around them. You can use thread, yarn, or jute – whichever is handy and convenient. You may need to thread the needle for young children. What we also like about this water form activity is that our kids get exposure to a valuable life skill -threading a needle and doing some simple sewing!
Use this water form activity with our landforms printable!
Water Form Activity – Stitch the Water Forms
List of Supplies:
- Printed templates
- Cardstock paper
- Blue thread or yarn
- The cut-out sheet that is here.
Instructions for the Water Form Stitching Activity
Print and cut out the water form activity patterns. Select cardstock paper and cut them into square shapes. Trace the water form template shapes on the square cardstock papers. I’m using a blue marker to trace the outlines nicely.
Prepare a needle with blue thread. Tie a knot at the open end of the attached thread.
Step – 3:
Take any one of the traced cardstock pieces and draw the needle from the backside of the traced paper. Draw the needle along any one point of the water form outline. Draw the needle to the backside through the opposite point of its current position. Draw the needle to the front again by keeping a cm or less space with the previous point along the same side.
Step – 4:
Continue to repeat the same process and keep even gaps between every 2 strand while stitching the straight lines.
Step – 5:
Fill the pattern with stitches nicely.
Step – 6:
Similarly, stitch and fill the rest of the water forms with straight line stitches. | <urn:uuid:56a3bce0-d022-4cbe-ad6d-3976d7a88687> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://onlypassionatecuriosity.com/water-form-activity/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.916629 | 386 | 3.625 | 4 |
Class imbalance is common in real-world datasets. For example, a dataset with examples of credit card fraud will often have exponentially more records of non-fraudulent activity than those of fraudulent cases. In many applications, training your model on imbalanced classes can inhibit model functionality if predictive accuracy for minority classes is of interest. By training your model on imbalanced classes, the model is often much more likely to predict the majority class simply because it has seen far more examples of that class. We’ll explore this phenomenon and demonstrate common techniques for addressing class imbalance including oversampling, undersampling, and synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) in Python.
The barplot below illustrates an example of a typical class imbalance within a training data set. In this application, say we want to predict all classes with equal capacity. A little background, we have 64 features that offer predictive capacity for where the fish samples came from (Gulf, West, or East).When we run a random forest classifier on this training dataset we get an overall accuracy of 75% on the test set (test set has balanced classes). Let’s look at the confusion matrix.
With imbalanced classes, the class-specific accuracy is highly variable; not surprisingly, it is highest for the majority class, Gulf. We can also see the model erroneously predicted Gulf origin for many East samples. To address this issue, there are a few techniques we can apply.
One method is to randomly resample from the minority classes (West and East) in our training dataset to meet the highest class-specific sample size, essentially copying random minority records. We’ll use the module “imbalanced-learn” that has some useful functions for this purpose. We’re going to randomly resample our training dataset with the response and features labeled “train_y” and “train_X” respectively.
We now have an equal number of samples per class.After training the model on this new dataset, we got 76% accuracy, a marginal improvement. The class-specific accuracy for East group increased a bit, but accuracy for the West class decreased.
Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE)
SMOTE is a way to oversample our minority classes in a manner that does not simply duplicate random records. The technique described in more detail here uses the k nearest neighbors algorithm to find samples among the minority class that are similar, and creates synthetic data points at a random interval between a given data point and its nearest neighbor.
The advantage is that we can synthesize some variation in the resampled data to reduce overfitting. We can apply this technique using imbalanced-learn again to resample our training set.
Instead of resampling minority records, we can instead randomly undersample the majority class to create a balanced dataset.
Class-specific accuracy increased by 31% for the East group, and was marginally reduced for the remaining classes. Interestingly, we built a more accurate model by reducing the amount of data we trained it on. This speaks to the critical nature of having balanced classes.
There are additional methods for addressing class imbalance; these three are simply a few common approaches. The code for this exercise can be found here. | <urn:uuid:a0306851-bdf5-4a38-8f5a-fa1665d0907c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://opendatascience.com/strategies-for-addressing-class-imbalance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.932415 | 671 | 3.078125 | 3 |
The villancico was the most popular musical genre in the Spanish colonies of New Spain and Peru, dominating the cathedral radio waves from the 16th century through the end of the 18th. A somewhat ambiguous term, villancicos are best understood as folk tunes and texts formalized into a Renaissance or Baroque style and performed by cathedral musicians on feast days and holidays, especially the feasts of Immaculate Conception, Corpus Christi, and Christmas. There was a wide variety of texts and instrumentations used to compose these villancicos; especially in the colonies, they would also take on the dialect or “style” of an ethnic group, particularly that of Aztecs and enslaved Africans in the form of tocotines and negrillos, respectively.1
It isn’t difficult to see the parallels throughout the history of the Americas; as they say, history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The ubiquity of villancicos negros is just an early iteration of the same general trend of Europeans appropriating dialect associated with enslaved Africans and their descendants for views, just like 19th century minstrelsy and 21st century white TikTokers. In New Spain and Peru, villancicos negros were extremely popular and can be found in almost every major cathedral archive.2 Beyond being labeled as such, negrillos can best be identified by the use of onomatopoetic syllables and dialectic speech in the text, and syncopation in the music; besides these elements, they tended to be composed much the same as other villancicos.3
“Tarará, qui yo soy Antón,” by Música Temprana
The above audio is a recording by Música Temprana, a Netherlands-based Early Music group specializing in Latin American Baroque, of a villancico negro by 17th century composer and chapel master Antonio de Salazar. The refrain (estribillo) “Tarará, qui yo soy Antón” is repeated between short verses (coplas); the elements of a typical negrillo, onomatopoeia and strong syncopation, are quite apparent in this piece, especially in the refrains. The large majority of chapel masters, who were composing the most music, had either immigrated from Europe or were descended from Europeans; in modern lingo their use of dialectic styles in these villancicos negros, whether “accurate” or not, would be considered cultural appropriation.
1 Pope, Isabel, and Paul R. Laird. “Villancico.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 14 Dec. 2021. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000029375.
2 Stevenson, Robert. “Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas” Washington: General Secretariat, Organization of American States, 1970.
3 Stevenson, Robert. “Ethnological Impulses in the Baroque Villancico.”. 1994 Inter-American Music Review 14, no. 1: 67-106, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/ethnological-impulses-baroque-villancico/docview/1309815/se-2?accountid=351. | <urn:uuid:f7a5637c-759b-4ab6-8a94-095654db3dbb> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pages.stolaf.edu/americanmusic/2021/12/15/new-spanish-villancicos-and-cultural-appropriation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.908549 | 747 | 4.125 | 4 |
The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Mr John Gormley TD made regulations under the European Communities Acts to regulate recreational activities in nature sites and other areas where they are likely to disturb or damage species protected under EU law.
The Regulations are to address the increased pressures and instances of serious damage and disturbance being caused to nature sites and wildlife by activities such as quad biking, scrambling and jet-skiing. Examples of damage include the destruction of upland vegetation leading to erosion, the disturbance of ground-nesting birds and destruction of their nests, the swamping of the nests of water birds, and damage to sand dune systems leading to blow-outs and loss of dunes. In 2007 the European Court found that Ireland had not dealt adequately with the problem and will impose fines on Ireland if the damage continues.
The Regulations give the Minister power to restrict or to prohibit particular recreational activities in specified places where the protection of the nature sites or species requires, especially those sites or species protected under the Birds and Habitats Directives. The Minister will also have power to prepare threat response plans to address threats to sites and species posed by recreational and other activities. These plans and any restrictions will be published.
The Regulations are not aimed at agricultural or other occupational use of quads or other off-road vehicles or their use by the security or emergency services. Landowners will have the right to object to, or seek review of, a Ministerial direction affecting their land, and to seek exemption from the general application of a direction that affects their land where the Minister is satisfied that the scale and nature of the recreational activity that they propose to undertake will not damage a European nature site or pose a threat to protected species. | <urn:uuid:eb57f970-cd4e-4ef4-b1b8-24c3f7d90d30> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pai.ie/472-minister-gormley-makes-regulations-to-protect-nature-sites-from-recreational-damage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.95361 | 348 | 2.828125 | 3 |
TEACHING CHILDREN WITH DEAF/HARD-OF-HEARING
World Hearing Day is an annual advocacy event held on
3rd March by the World Health Organization (WHO)
Prof. Dr. Nasir Sulman
Department of Special Education
University of Karachi
Curriculum for the deaf has developed within residential schools of the 19th and 20th centuries. Throughout this time period, controversy surrounded the development of a curriculum for the deaf. Debate centered on whether to maintain an emphasis on teaching sign language in the curriculum for deaf students or to follow an oral approach focused on lip-reading and listening skills as well as on how to speak. Today, this controversy continues at the language level—the core of human communication. On one side is the position that deafness is a difference and not a disability; Deafness is a culture with its own native language—Sign Language (SL). On the other side is the position that deafness is a disability, creating in an individual significant limitations in communicative competence; measures must be taken in order to compensate for these limitations. (For example, cochlear implants provide access to the stimulus for hearing speech sounds and establish conditions for learning to speak and to use amplification [hearing aids].)
Crucial curricular content for deaf students include language, reading, and writing; Deaf culture, speech development, and aural habilitation. A curriculum in language often consists of teaching students sentence patterns, starting with basic patterns and moving to increasingly complex structures. A curriculum in reading regularly involves using books with relatively simple grammatical structures or basal reading material that is designed so that sentence patterns increase in difficulty from book to book. A typical writing curriculum requires students to learn the rules of different types of discourse and the rules of grammar. Curriculum in language, reading, and writing today can be best described as a balance of analytical and holistic methods.
Learning about Deaf culture is an important curricular goal for all students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, regardless of educational setting. One goal of instruction about Deaf culture is to help students develop understanding of the culture of the Deaf community so that they can participate to whatever extent they wish. A second goal is to help transmit Deaf culture to the next generation of individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.
Curriculum regarding speech development is aimed at helping children develop breath control, vocalization, voice patterns, and sound production. This curriculum focuses both on producing spoken language and on improving speech. Aural habilitation curriculum involves helping students use their remaining hearing effectively. Depending on a student’s capability, learning goals might include awareness of sound, localization of sound, discrimination of sound differences, or recognition of sound. For some it may be recognition of speech used by others. In order to be effective, curriculum must be instituted early.
In deaf education, three distinct communication approaches are identified for teaching the deaf and hard-of-hearing. These approaches are the bilingual-bicultural approach, the auditory-oral approach, and the total communication approach.
The position of the bilingual-bicultural approach is that sign language (SL) is the natural language of Deaf culture and that SL should be the primary language choice for deaf students. When using this approach, the objective is to provide a foundation in the use of SL, with its unique vocabulary and syntax rules. With this approach, SL is the method of communication in the classroom.
It is important to discuss here the difficulty of learning SL and the misperception that it may be learned easily. Like all complex and subtle languages, mastery beyond a basic level requires extensive exposure and practice. Sign language should be approached with respect and with the understanding that mastery will occur only over time. Also, there are differences in sign complexity by three to nine years of age between native signing deaf children of deaf parents and early signing (before five years of age) deaf children of hearing parents. A whole-language approach to literacy and bilingual-bicultural (bi-bi) education complement each other.
The position of the auditory-oral approach is that students with hearing impairments can develop listening/receptive language and oral language expression skills. It emphasizes the use of residual hearing, amplification, and speech/language training. When using this approach, the objective is to facilitate the development of oral (spoken) language.
Research on teaching practices related to this method has thus far been inconclusive. It does appear, however, that hearing-impaired infants born to Deaf parents using SL may exhibit significantly improved language development. Parents who use a total communication approach, including manual signs, fingerspelling, and spoken language with their child and with each other enhance their child’s acquisition of language. There is a great need for families to have access to comprehensive information about educational options for their children. The debate between manualism or oralism continues to be a heavily charged issue.
Total Communication Approach
The position of the total communication approach is that simultaneous use of multiple communication techniques enhances an individual’s ability to communicate, comprehend, and learn. When using this approach, the basic objective is to provide a multifaceted approach to communication in order to facilitate whichever method works best for each individual. The method of communication used by a student should be a combination of sign language, fingerspelling, and speech-reading.
Inclusion of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children
There are many strategies for teaching students with hearing impairments. It is important to promote acceptance of these students, and to provide an environment where students feel accepted and where modifications can be made without causing undue attention to be focused on individual students. This can be aided by efforts to welcome a student to their new classroom, by discussing the student’s hearing loss with him/her and letting him/her know his/her teacher is willing to help, by having the student or another person—with the student’s approval—explain about the student’s hearing loss to the entire class if appropriate, by making modifications seem as natural as possible so that the student is not singled out, by accepting the student as an individual and being aware of his/her assets and limitations, and by encouraging the student’s special abilities or interests. Adapted from Turnbull (et al., 2002), several factors that appear to contribute to effective placement in general education settings are listed below:
- Classroom teachers need time to learn about their student and deafness. A student’s team, usually including their general education teacher, interpreter, and speech language pathologist need time to share information and plan instruction.
- Professional staff and a student’s parents must be committed to making placement successful and feel confident about a student’s ability to be successful.
- School leadership must provide the kinds of support that promote positive outcomes, such as providing adequate professional staff, paraprofessional staff, computers, and an adequate budget for the purchasing of materials and equipment.
- Professional staff must provide information about the needs of students who are deaf/hard-of-hearing and must be engaged in activities that enable them to understand program design, clarify their roles and activities, and identify appropriate instructional strategies.
- Parents need to be involved on a daily basis and not relegated merely to IEP planning.
- Teachers of the deaf must have occasional opportunities to teach a whole class or to team teach with a general education teacher.
- A school must offer structured and supportive extracurricular activities.
Another important suggestion for teachers of hearing impaired students is to provide them with preferential seating in their classroom. A hearing-impaired student should have a seat near where the teacher usually teaches. The student should be able to see the face of the teacher without straining. The student should be seated away from noise sources, including hallways, radiators, and pencil sharpeners. The student should sit where light is on the teacher’s face and not in their eyes. If the student has a better ear, that ear should be turned toward the teacher. The student should also be allowed to move when necessary for demonstrations or other classroom activities.
Teachers should also increase visual information made available, since the student will use lip-reading and other visual information to supplement what he or she hears. The student will need to see the teacher’s face in order to lip-read. The teacher should use visual aids whenever possible and should demonstrate what the student is supposed to understand whenever possible. A chalkboard should be used for assignments, new vocabulary words, and key phrases.
Other suggestions for classroom teachers are to minimize classroom noise, modify teaching procedures, and have realistic expectations of students. Teaching modifications allow a student to benefit from instruction and decreases the need for repetition. Teachers can aid these efforts by being sure a student is watching and listening when others are talking to him/her, by being sure a student understands what is being said and having him/her repeat information or answer questions, by rephrasing (rather than repeating) questions, by repeating or rephrasing things said by other students when appropriate, and by introducing new vocabulary to a student in advance prior to a lesson.
Adapted Educational Methods
Instructional interventions for students with hearing impairments include adapted methods of communication as well as the use of audiologists and interpreters. Different instructional interventions may be required depending on the severity of hearing loss. These include hearing aids, personal FM systems, favorable seating, medical management, auditory skill-building, help with self-esteem, sound-field FM systems in the classroom, and/or special educational support.
There are four basic types of hearing aids available: 1) in-the-ear aids, 2) behind-the-ear aids, 3) body aids, and 4) bone-conduction aids. Assistive listening devices (ALDs) can also be used to enhance participation and responsiveness of people with hearing loss. In addition, students sometimes use auditory trainers—specifically, FM systems—in their educational settings. These amplification systems are easy to use, enhance signal-to-noise ratio, and are often more effective than hearing aids in managing acoustical problems inherent in many classrooms.
It is also important that teachers ensure that hearing aids and other amplification devices are used when recommended. Teachers should understand that most hearing aids make sounds louder but not necessarily clearer. Students’ hearing devices should be checked daily to ensure that they are always in proper working order. Students should be encouraged to and trained to care for their own hearing device.
Everyday alerting devices can be adapted to meet the needs of hard-of-hearing students. These include wristwatches, doorbells, flashing-light clocks, flashing lamps, pillow vibrators, and specially-designed smoke detectors. Captioning is available on many television programs to make entertainment more accessible to people with hearing impairments. In addition, a telecommunication device for the deaf (TDD) can be used by individuals with severe hearing impairments to help them communicate by telephone. (A TDD is a small keyboard with an electronic display screen and a modem attached.) Amplified telephones are also available in a wide range of models and capabilities.
A teacher’s role in implant use warrants more attention and that all factors should be considered before advocating or choosing this “financially, emotionally, and therapeutically challenging option”.
Computers have many possible applications for students with hearing impairments. Special programs offer the opportunity for students to learn at their own comfort level and pace, and special programs are available for speech drill, auditory training, speech-reading, sign language instruction, and supplemental reading and language instruction. Web sites related to hearing impairment include:
- The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (http://agbell.org), The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center (http://clerccenter.gallaudet.edu),
- The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (http://www.asha.org), and
- Self-Help for Hard of Hearing people (http://www.shhh.org).
There is a need to encourage reflection upon teacher practice and to promote increased application of computer technology in educational curricula. To achieve this goal, a greater understanding of the relationship between teacher variables and teacher adoption of computer use is needed. This information may be used to help teachers become familiar with how computers work in the classroom and how they can be used for instruction.
For technology to work in schools, it is critical that teachers support the concept of instruction with computers and use them constructively with students. In enhancing teacher technology training programs, the three primary means of support are equipment budget, access to equipment, and support personnel. Teachers need more than just access to resources of hardware and software. They also need “opportunities to discover what the technologies can do, [to] learn how to operate them, and [to] experiment with ways to best apply them in the classrooms. | <urn:uuid:adb6a02c-a1c3-44d9-a48d-3454325ad74e> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pakspecial.org/2023/05/30/teaching-children-with-deaf-hard-of-hearing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.947359 | 2,679 | 4.15625 | 4 |
Efficiency of Solar Panels
Solar panels are instrumental in harnessing the sun's power and converting it into usable electricity. This process's effectiveness is largely determined by the efficiency of the solar panels. Thus, understanding the concept of solar panel efficiency becomes crucial for anyone considering implementing a solar energy system.
Understanding Solar Panel Efficiency
Solar panel efficiency refers to how well a panel can convert sunlight into electricity. It's usually expressed as a percentage representing the amount of solar energy converted into electrical power under standard testing conditions.
Factors Affecting Solar Panel Efficiency:
- Temperature: Higher temperatures can reduce solar panel efficiency. Most panels are tested at 25°C, and their performance may decrease as the temperature rises above this point.
- Shading: Shadows on the panel can significantly reduce its efficiency, as it blocks the sunlight.
- Angle of Incidence: The angle at which sunlight hits the panels influences their efficiency. Typically, panels are mounted at the angle of latitude of their location.
- Dust and Debris: Accumulated dust or other obstructions can limit the amount of sunlight reaching the panel, thus reducing its efficiency.
Types of Solar Panels and Their Efficiency
There are three primary types of solar panels:
- Monocrystalline solar panels are made from a single crystal structure, offering the highest efficiency rates because they are made out of the highest-grade silicon.
- Polycrystalline solar panels involve melting multiple silicon fragments together. They have slightly lower efficiency rates but come at a lower price point.
- Thin-film solar panels have the lowest efficiency of all panel types but are also the most affordable.
- Bifacial solar panels are capable of harnessing sunlight on both the front and the back of the panel. These panels typically offer a higher efficiency than monofacial panels. Bifacial panels are typically manufactured with monocrystalline cells.
Importance of High Solar Panel Efficiency
High solar panel efficiency offers several benefits:
- Improved energy production: High-efficiency panels generate more electricity per unit area, which is particularly beneficial for limited spaces.
- Lower Temperature Coefficient: With a lower temperature coefficient, high efficiency panels are able to produce more electricity than standard panels when it is hot out.
- Reduced installation costs: Efficient panels can produce the same amount of power as larger, less efficient panels, reducing installation costs.
- Environmental benefits: More efficient panels produce more electricity from the same amount of sunlight, maximizing renewable energy use.
- Better return on investment: High-efficiency panels often yield a higher return on investment by generating more energy over the lifespan of your solar system.
Maximizing Solar Panel Efficiency
Optimizing solar panel efficiency involves a combination of:
- Proper installation and orientation: Panels should be installed in a way that they receive maximum sunlight throughout the day.
- Regular cleaning and maintenance: Keeping panels clean and free of debris ensures they can operate at their full potential.
- Performance monitoring: Regular monitoring can help identify issues early and keep your system operating efficiently.
- Component upgrading: Updating components like inverters or adding solar optimizers can improve your system's overall efficiency.
The Future of Solar Panel Efficiency
Advancements in technology continue to drive the efficiency of solar panels upwards. Additionally, government incentives and policies encourage the adoption of these increasingly efficient systems. It is anticipated that the trend of increasing solar panel efficiency will continue into the foreseeable future.
Understanding and prioritizing solar panel efficiency is key to maximizing the benefits of your solar energy system. High-efficiency panels can yield substantial returns over time, both financially and environmentally. By choosing efficient solar panels and ensuring they're well-maintained, you can boost the output of your solar array system. | <urn:uuid:6ae64a20-8adc-4bb5-9d46-5f8fa56ededf> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://peninsula-solar.com/learn-solar/mechanics/solar-panel-efficiency/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.914619 | 764 | 4 | 4 |
A seat belt (also known as a safety belt, or spelled seatbelt) is a vehicle safety device designed to secure the driver or a passenger of a vehicle against harmful movement that may result during a collision or a sudden stop. A seat belt reduces the likelihood of death or serious injury in a traffic collision by reducing the force of secondary impacts with interior strike hazards, keeping occupants positioned correctly for maximum effectiveness of the airbag (if equipped), and preventing occupants from being ejected from the vehicle in a crash or if the vehicle rolls over. A safety harness is a form of protective equipment designed to safeguard the user from injury or death from falling. The core item of a fall arrest system, the harness is usually fabricated from the rope, braided wire cable, or synthetic webbing. It is attached securely to a stationary object directly by a locking device or indirectly via a rope, cable, or webbing and one or more locking devices. | <urn:uuid:2e67b62a-3905-4471-b058-59d504c3f6e2> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://performanceguaranteedparts.com/collections/seat-belts-harnesses | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.940382 | 187 | 3.125 | 3 |
Bed bug bite with pus is a common complaint of many infected patients. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to understand the exact nature of this condition until you have actually experienced such case. Therefore, please read the following article carefully to find more information on how to cure bed bug bites with pus. Pimples and acne can be embarrassing. But if you’re like most people, it probably isn’t a topic you discuss on a regular basis. And when bed bugs bite, they are just as painful. However, there is nothing to be embarrassed about because many other people have dealt with it too. This is a hand photo of an adult bed bug bite with pus on the skin. These are images of a recent bed bug infestation in my office building. The bugs were primarily found on the ends of suede leather behind desks. This is why regular vacuuming and sealing of all joints, along with regular inspection and early detection is important to keep these critters out, and to prevent them from establishing themselves. Other articles about inspecting for bed bugs can be found on this site.
Bed Bug Bite With Pus
Bed Bugs Bites Overview
If you suspect that you have been bitten by a bed bug, it is important to identify the bite and seek medical attention.
Bed bugs are small, flat insects that live in warm places like beds and couches. They feed on human blood, usually at night when people are sleeping. Bed bug bites often appear as red bumps or welts on the skin’s surface. However, some people can be allergic to bed bug saliva and experience severe reactions such as swelling and itching of the area after being bitten. There may also be an open wound where they bit you and pus-filled blisters will form as well.
Bed Bug Bites Facts
Bed bugs are small insects that live off of the blood of humans and animals. They can be found in mattresses, bedding, couches, and other areas where people sleep or sit for long periods of time. They are not dangerous to humans, but their bites can cause irritation to the skin. Bed bugs do not spread diseases like many other pests do; however, if you have an allergy to them or have already been bitten by one before (even if it was just a slight bite), then your body may react differently when another bite happens.
Signs and Symptoms of Bed Bug Bites
Bed bugs are small insects that feed on the blood of humans and animals. A bed bug bite can be tiny, red and itchy. There may be a small amount of swelling or there may be no sign at all. Some people will have several bites in a row while others develop only one or two. The bites appear in a zigzag pattern, but they can also appear in straight lines across your skin.
If you have a bed bug infestation and suspect you were bitten by one, there is no specific test for identifying bed bug bites. However, if you see live bugs or tiny remains of them in your bed linters, it’s likely that an infestation has occurred. If this is the case, it’s best to contact a pest control expert who can treat the issue.
Treatment of Bed Bug Bites
- Wash the bites with soap and water.
- Apply calamine lotion or hydrocortisone cream to reduce itching.
- Take an antihistamine medication (such as diphenhydramine) if you have one available, as this may alleviate some of the symptoms. However, it is important to note that antihistamines can cause drowsiness and dry mouth, so only take them if you are not driving or operating heavy machinery at the time. If your bites are accompanied by intense itching or swelling around them, seek medical attention immediately!
Bed bugs are small, annoying insects that hide in bedding, mattresses and other areas. These pests can leave behind itchy bites and welts but usually don’t cause serious health concerns. If you think you have a bug infestation in your home or hotel room, check for the presence of live bugs or tiny remains. If you find signs of an infestation, contact a pest control expert to help you treat the issue.
Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are small, wingless insects that feed on the blood of humans and animals. Bed bugs primarily live in mattresses and bedding and can leave itchy bites on their victims. Though they don’t cause serious health concerns, they are a nuisance to deal with. Many people want to know how to find bed bugs so they can eliminate them from their homes or hotel rooms.
If you suspect that you have an infestation in your home or hotel room, check for signs of these nocturnal pests before contacting a pest control expert for assistance treating the issue. While spotting live bugs is one way to identify an infestation, it’s not always easy because many times there aren’t any visible signs of bed bug activity at all! Look for dark spots on sheets or pillowcases; these are fecal stains left behind by adult female bedbugs after feeding (females lay eggs only after feeding). These stains may also appear in seams where linens meet each other; this happens when males crawl into crevices during mating season (which occurs year-round).
- 3.5-ounce tube of Benadryl Extra-Strength Cooling Itch Stopping Anti-Itch Gel for fast cooling relief from skin pain and itching from most outdoor itches
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- ALL IN ONE REPELLENT AND ANTI-ITCH: “No-Bite-Me” DOES IT ALL! Forgot to apply “No-Bite-Me” and got some bug bites? No problem: it’s an anti-itch cream too! Other creams make you choose between repelling bugs and treating uncomfortable bug bites, but “No-Bite-Me” prevents and repairs bug-bombed skin. Effective on black flies, mosquitoes, fleas, and ticks.
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Additional Info : | <urn:uuid:8d09d832-f722-45cd-95fb-d34367014744> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pestphobia.com/bed-bug-bite-with-pus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.912029 | 2,028 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Even if they look like dangerous, primeval reptiles: spiny-tailed monitor lizards are considered peaceful and are among the monitor lizards most commonly kept in our country.
What does the spiny-tailed monitor lizard look like?
The spiny-tailed monitor belongs to the Odatria subgenus of the monitor lizard family. It is a medium-sized monitor lizard and is about 60 to 80 centimeters long including the tail. It is particularly striking because of its decorative coloring and its pattern: The back is covered with a dark brown mesh pattern with yellow spots.
The head is brown in color and also has yellow spots of different sizes, which merge into yellow stripes towards the neck. The spiny-tailed monitor lizard is colored beige to white on the belly. The tail is ringed brown-yellow, round, and only slightly flattened at the sides. It is about 35 to 55 centimeters long – and is therefore significantly longer than the head and body. There are spike-like appendages on the tail. Hence the German name of the animals. The males differ from the females in having two spiked scales at the base of the tail.
Where do spiny-tailed monitor lizards live?
Spiny-tailed monitors are only found in northern, western, and central Australia and on a few islands off Australia’s north coast. Spiny-tailed monitors are mainly found on the ground in rocky areas and in semi-deserts. There they find shelter in the crevices between the rocks or under stone slabs and in caves.
What types of spiny-tailed monitors are there?
There are three subspecies of the spiny-tailed monitor. In addition, it has numerous relatives such as the emerald monitor lizard, the rust-headed monitor lizard, the tail monitor lizard, the sorrow monitor lizard, the short-tailed monitor lizard, and the dwarf monitor lizard. They are all found in Australia, New Guinea, and some islands between these two countries.
How old do spiny-tailed monitor lizards get?
When kept in captivity, spiny-tailed monitor lizards can live to be ten years or more.
How do spiny-tailed monitors live?
Spiny-tailed monitor lizards spend the day foraging for food. In between, they take extensive sunbaths on the rocks. At night they sleep sheltered in crevices or caves. It is not exactly known whether the animals live together in colonies or alone in nature.
Spiny-tailed monitors go dormant once a year during the Australian winter. It lasts about one to two months. While animals originating from Australia usually keep their usual resting time with us, animals bred by us usually get used to our seasons. During the rest period, the temperature in the terrarium should be around 14°C. At the end of the rest period, the lighting time and temperature in the enclosure are increased and the animals begin to eat again.
Like all reptiles, spiny-tailed monitor lizards shed their skin periodically as they grow. In a cave padded with moist moss, the animals can skin themselves better due to the higher humidity. The cave also serves as a hiding place for the animals.
Friends and foes of the spiny-tailed monitor lizard
When spiny-tailed monitors feel threatened by enemies such as birds of prey, they hide in crevices. There they wedge themselves with their long tails and seal the entrance to the hiding place. So they cannot be pulled out by enemies.
How do spiny-tailed monitor lizards reproduce?
When spiny-tailed monitors are in a mating mood, the male pursues the female and constantly tongues his tongue. When mating, the male can be quite rough with the female and sometimes even injure her. Four weeks after mating, the female is getting fatter. Eventually, it lays between five and 12 eggs, sometimes as many as 18. They are about an inch long. If the animals are bred, the eggs are hatched at 27° to 30° C.
The young hatch after about 120 days. They are just six centimeters long and weigh three and a half grams. They become sexually mature at about 15 months. In the terrarium, a female spiny-tailed monitor can lay eggs two to three times a year.
What do spiny-tailed monitor lizards eat?
Spiny-tailed monitors mainly eat insects such as grasshoppers and beetles. However, they sometimes prey on other small reptiles such as lizards and even small birds. Young spiny-tailed monitor lizards are fed with crickets and cockroaches in the terrarium.
A special vitamin powder ensures that they are adequately supplied with vitamins and minerals. The animals always need a bowl of freshwater to drink.
Keeping of spiny-tailed monitor lizards
Spiny-tailed monitor lizards are among the most frequently kept monitor lizards because they are usually very peaceful. Often a male and a female are kept. But sometimes a male with several females together. Then, however, it can come to quarrels between the females during the mating season. Males should never be kept together – they don’t get along.
How do you care for spiny-tailed monitor lizards?
Because spiny-tailed monitors grow relatively large and should be kept in pairs, they need a fairly large terrarium. The floor is sprinkled with sand and decorated with rocks between which the animals can climb around. This is how they feel safe because they are well camouflaged.
If you place wooden boxes with moist sand in the terrarium, the monitor lizards like to hide in them. They also lay their eggs there. Because spiny-tailed monitors come from very warm regions, the terrarium must be heated to over 30 °C. At night the temperature should be at least 22 °C. Since the animals need light for ten to twelve hours a day, you also have to install a lamp. | <urn:uuid:d19d3480-1da1-4d16-80e8-f8f4f5ff53fe> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://petreader.net/spiny-tailed-monitor/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.966793 | 1,220 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Here is yet another Biblical story recast and retold in the Qur’an, and like the overwhelming majority of Biblical stories in the Qur’an, employed to make the same point: Muhammad is a true prophet, he is being mistreated like all other prophets, and those who are ridiculing and rejecting him will be severely punished.
Sura 12, “Joseph,” is another late Meccan sura. It was revealed, says Maududi, “when the Quraish” — the pagan Arabs of Mecca, and the tribe of which Muhammad was a member — “were considering the question of killing or exiling or imprisoning him.” It tells the story of the patriarch Joseph, again — as we saw in Sura 11 with the stories of other prophets — with a clear message relating to Muhammad and his opponents.
Allah begins in verses 1-3 with another panegyric to the Qur’an. Ibn Kathir expresses the mainstream Islamic view when he says:
The Arabic language is the most eloquent, plain, deep and expressive of the meanings that might arise in one’s mind. Therefore, the most honorable Book, was revealed in the most honorable language, to the most honorable Prophet and Messenger, delivered by the most honorable angel, in the most honorable land on earth, and its revelation started during the most honorable month of the year, Ramadan. Therefore, the Qur’an is perfect in every respect.
This is not, of course, a perspective that tends to be welcoming of critical examination of the book — as was in the news in 2008 with the discovery of 450 rolls of film of ancient manuscripts of the Qur’an that had been concealed, apparently to avoid offending delicate Muslim sensibilities.
Then, Allah tells the story of Joseph (vv. 4-101). According to Maududi, one of the principal purposes of this account was — yet again — to warn people not to reject Muhammad.
Its aim, he said, was to apply the story of Joseph being rejected by his brothers to Muhammad’s tribe that rejected him, the Quraysh:
… and warn them that ultimately the conflict between them and the Holy Prophet would end in his victory over them. As they were then persecuting their brother, the Holy Prophet, in the same way the brothers of Prophet Joseph had treated him … And just as the brothers of Prophet Joseph had to humble themselves before him, so one day the Quraish shall have to beg forgiveness from their brother whom they were then trying to crush down.
He points to verse 7, “Certainly were there in Joseph and his brothers signs for those who ask,” as referring to the Quraysh, who should heed the warning given them in this sura.
The Qur’anic tale of Joseph is an abbreviated version of the story in Genesis 37-50, with some notable differences from the Biblical account. Joseph has a dream that eleven stars and the sun and the moon prostrate themselves to him (v. 4) — that is, his parents and brothers.
Dreams are to be taken seriously: according to Abdullah bin Abbas, “the dreams of Prophets are revelations from Allah.” Muhammad himself explained this as not applying just to the prophets, but as a general principle:
A good dream is from Allah, and a bad dream is from Satan. So whoever has seen (in a dream) something he dislike, then he should spit without saliva, thrice on his left and seek refuge with Allah from Satan, for it will not harm him, and Satan cannot appear in my shape. (Bukhari 9.87.124)
The brothers, jealous, want to kill him (v. 9), but finally decide to throw him down a well and tell their father, Jacob, that he is dead (vv. 15-18). In a departure from the Biblical account, Jacob doesn’t believe them (v. 18). The Tanwir al-Miqbas min Tafsir Ibn Abbas says “he did not believe them because in another occasion they said that Joseph was killed by thieves.”
Anyway, then Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt, is the target of an attempted seduction by the ruler’s wife (v. 30). Another detail not contained in the Biblical account is that Joseph “would have inclined to her had he not seen the proof of his Lord,” and Allah warded him off “from him evil and immorality. Indeed, he was of Our chosen servants” (v. 24). The sharp dualism in Islam appears as Maududi sees a lesson in this:
Contrast the former characters [Jacob and Joseph] molded by Islam on the bedrock of the worship of Allah and accountability in the Hereafter with the latter molded by kufr [unbelief] and “ignorance” on the worship of the world and disregard of Allah and the Hereafter.
She accuses him of impropriety (v. 25), but Joseph’s innocence is established when it is found that his cloak is torn in the back, not in the front — he was, in other words, fleeing from her (vv. 27-28). Her husband laments: “Indeed, it is of the women’s plan. Indeed, your plan is great.” (v. 28)
The wife then holds a banquet for the women of the city, who are so awed by Joseph’s good looks that they begin cutting their hands (v. 31). Ibn Kathir explains:
They thought highly of him and were astonished at what they saw. They started cutting their hands in amazement at his beauty, while thinking that they were cutting the citron with their knives.
The ruler’s wife felt exonerated:
When they felt the pain, they started screaming and she said to them, “You did all this from one look at him, so how can I be blamed?”
Joseph is ultimately imprisoned (v. 35). When two fellow prisoners ask him to interpret their dreams (v. 36), he first tells them that he is a good Muslim: “I have left the religion of a people who do not believe in Allah, and they, in the Hereafter, are disbelievers” (v. 37). He follows the religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and “it was not for us to associate anything with Allah” (v. 38).
He languishes in prison for awhile longer, but ultimately gets a chance to interpret the king’s dream (vv. 46-49). The ruler’s wife confesses her wrongdoing (v. 51) and so Joseph is freed and rewarded (vv. 54-56). Joseph’s brothers come to him for help during the famine, not recognizing him (v. 58); Joseph demands that they bring their youngest brother (v. 60).
Muhammad Asad explains how the story then unfolds: “Joseph had wanted to keep Benjamin with himself, but under the law of Egypt he could not do this without the consent of his half-brothers.” But when the goblet is discovered in his brother’s bag, “Benjamin appeared to be guilty of theft, and under the law of the land Joseph was entitled to claim him as his slave, and thus to keep him in his house.”
The point of the Qur’anic story is that Allah orders all events, and none can thwart his will: “Thus did We plan for Joseph. He could not have taken his brother within the religion of the king except that Allah willed” (v. 76).
Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers (v. 90), who beg Allah’s forgiveness (v. 91) and receive it (v. 92, 98). Jacob and his brothers go live with Joseph in Egypt (vv. 99-100).
Allah emphasizes that all of this is a warning (vv. 102-111). Allah tells Muhammad that he revealed the story of Joseph to him “by inspiration,” for Muhammad was not present when Joseph’s brothers plotted against him, so how could he know how it happened unless he is a true prophet (v. 102)? Still, most will not believe (vv. 103, 105, 106), although this is not an invented tale, but a confirmation of existing Scripture (v. 111) — which Scriptures, of course, to Muhammad’s great vexation, did not actually confirm his message.
(Revised July 2015) | <urn:uuid:cdf19ab1-8e2e-4ae8-875d-c92805500a14> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2015/08/03/in-the-quran-joseph-flees-judaism-robert-spencers-blogging-the-quran-sura-12-joseph-n6130 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.97687 | 1,794 | 2.578125 | 3 |
The number of Covid-19 cases registered in the US since the start of the pandemic in early 2020 exceeded a staggering 100 million, Johns Hopkins University has said, amid a sharp spike in caseloads globally and the WHO making a strong pitch for vaccination.
Japan, the US, the Republic of Korea, Brazil and China have witnessed a sudden spike in coronavirus cases over the last week.
US-based Johns Hopkins University in its latest update said that 100,003,837 coronavirus cases were reported in the country so far.
The virus has also claimed the lives of 1,088,236 people in the US, it added.
Meanwhile, close to 8,000 and 10,000 people die of COVID-19 every week, said Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist who serves as the technical lead for the COVID-19 response team at the World Health Organisation (WHO).
She told ‘Science in 5’ that the WHO target of vaccinating 70 per cent of the population in every country has not been achieved so far.
Vaccination against COVID-19 was “fundamental,” she said.
According to health officials in China, Chinese cities are currently hit by the highly transmissible Omicron strains, mainly BA.5.2 and BF.7.
The novel coronavirus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. | <urn:uuid:87c77b9a-f3f9-45e2-a49f-bc1f7a825d35> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://preetnews.com/covid-19-cases-in-us-surpass-100-million-report/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.949458 | 300 | 2.609375 | 3 |
From Concept to Launch: Exploring the Journey of Aerospace Engineering
Aerospace engineering is a fascinating field that involves the design, development, and construction of aircraft and spacecraft. It encompasses a wide range of disciplines, including aerodynamics, materials science, propulsion systems, avionics, and more. The journey from concept to launch in aerospace engineering is a complex and intricate one, which requires the collaboration of teams of experts and cutting-edge technology.
The process begins with the conceptualization phase, where engineers brainstorm and develop ideas for new aircraft or spacecraft. This involves studying existing designs, researching new technologies, and considering the feasibility and market demand for the proposed concept. The ultimate goal at this stage is to create a concept that meets the needs of the industry or addresses a specific problem.
Once a concept is finalized, the design phase begins. This involves creating detailed and comprehensive blueprints for the aircraft or spacecraft. Engineers use computer-aided design (CAD) software to develop three-dimensional models and simulate various scenarios. They must consider factors such as weight, strength, stability, and aerodynamics to ensure the design is both safe and efficient.
Simultaneously, materials scientists and engineers work on identifying the most suitable materials for the construction of the vehicle. The materials used must be lightweight yet durable, able to withstand extreme conditions such as high temperatures and pressures. Extensive testing is conducted to ensure the chosen materials meet the required standards.
After the design phase, the production phase commences. This involves the construction and manufacturing of the aircraft or spacecraft components. Teams of engineers and technicians work together to assemble and integrate the various parts, paying close attention to quality control and precision. This phase requires the use of specialized machinery and advanced manufacturing techniques to bring the design to life.
Once the vehicle is assembled, it undergoes a series of rigorous tests to ensure its safety, reliability, and performance. These tests include ground tests, where the vehicle is subjected to simulated flight conditions, and flight tests, where it is flown under controlled conditions. Data is collected at each stage to evaluate and improve the vehicle’s design and capabilities.
Once all the necessary tests are completed successfully, the final phase of the journey can begin: the launch. This is a pivotal moment for aerospace engineers, as it represents the culmination of their efforts. Whether it’s a commercial airliner taking off into the sky or a satellite being deployed into space, the launch is a thrilling and rewarding experience.
Aerospace engineering is a field that continuously evolves, with new technologies, materials, and design concepts emerging regularly. As a result, the journey from concept to launch is far from a linear process. It involves constant innovation, adaptation, and problem-solving.
The field of aerospace engineering has transformed the way we travel, communicate, and explore our universe. It has given us the ability to reach new heights and expand our understanding of the world beyond our own. The journey from concept to launch in aerospace engineering is an incredible adventure, driven by the passion and dedication of countless brilliant minds. | <urn:uuid:ad1793db-7d64-41b3-9104-e84c5269185c> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://promidiafoto.com.br/from-concept-to-launch-exploring-the-journey-of-aerospace-engineering/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.940267 | 620 | 3.6875 | 4 |
British Columbia, located in the western part of Canada, boasts a diverse landscape of natural beauty, from lush forests to rugged mountain ranges and stunning coastlines. This varied terrain necessitates a robust and well-maintained road network to connect communities and facilitate economic growth. The construction and maintenance of these roads rely heavily on a wide range of aggregates that are essential for building safe and durable transportation infrastructure. In this comprehensive guide, we explain the aggregates used on British Columbia roads, their applications, and their significance in the construction industry.
The Role of Aggregates in Road Construction
Aggregates, which include materials like sand, gravel, rocks, and more, are the fundamental building blocks of road construction. These materials serve various critical functions in the creation and maintenance of roadways, from providing stability to offering a durable and cost-effective surface for traffic. In British Columbia, where a vast network of highways, access roads, and cycle paths crisscross the province, the importance of high-quality aggregates cannot be overstated.
Common Types of Aggregate Material Used in BC
Sand is a crucial component in road construction, particularly in the formation of a stable road base. It provides a granular material that enhances drainage and load-bearing capacity. Sand can be found in various forms, including masonry sand, bedding sand, and concrete sand, each tailored to specific road construction needs. Concrete sand, for example, is an essential ingredient in the production of concrete slabs, which are often used for pavement construction.
Gravel, often sourced from gravel pits, is another indispensable aggregate in British Columbia road construction. It is widely used in various applications, including the creation of road bases, pavements, and as a surfacing material for access roads and cycle tracks. The versatility of traditional gravel and pea gravel makes it a cornerstone of the construction industry, and its availability in the province ensures the seamless development of transportation infrastructure.
Rocks, in different sizes and types, play a significant role in road construction in British Columbia thanks to their wide availability. Rocks such as drain rock and river rock are employed in creating durable road bases and as an essential component in the production of concrete. The application of rocks in road construction provides the necessary strength and stability to withstand the challenges posed by freeze-thaw cycles, traffic loads, and pavement conditions.
Hot Mix Asphalt
Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) is a popular choice for road surfacing due to its durability and resistance to harsh weather conditions. HMA contains a mixture of aggregates, including sand, gravel, and rocks, bound together with asphalt cement. The use of HMA in road construction ensures a longer service life, particularly under high traffic loads and freeze-thaw cycles.
Applications of Aggregates in Road Construction
Aggregates find applications in various aspects of road construction in British Columbia, ranging from the foundation to the surface of the road. Understanding these applications is crucial for building and maintaining high-quality road infrastructure.
The road base serves as the foundation of any road. It provides stability and load-bearing capacity, which are essential for sustaining vehicles. Aggregates, particularly gravel and rocks, are the primary components used in creating a solid road base. These materials ensure that the road can withstand the stresses it experiences throughout its lifecycle, from the effects of freeze-thaw cycles to the weight of passing vehicles.
Pavements, such as those used in highways and access roads, require a durable surface material that can withstand the rigors of constant traffic. Aggregates are an integral part of pavement construction, providing the necessary strength and resistance to wear and tear. Different types of aggregates, including gravel and rocks, are utilized in the composition of road surfaces, contributing to the longevity and functionality of the pavement.
Cycle Paths and Cycle Tracks
In an era of increasing environmental consciousness and a growing interest in cycling, the construction of cycle paths and tracks is on the rise. Aggregates play a crucial role in these projects, providing a durable and smooth surface for cyclists to navigate safely. The natural materials found in British Columbia, such as gravel and rocks, offer the ideal components for creating cycle paths and tracks that can endure a wide range of weather conditions and foot traffic.
Aggregate Application Process
In British Columbia, the application process for aggregates in road construction typically involves mixing various types of aggregates, such as sand, gravel, and rocks, with binding materials like asphalt or cement. Conventional asphalt applications are common, and the ease of application is an important consideration, ensuring that the mixture is spread evenly and efficiently.
Chip seals, a widely used surface treatment, involve the application of a thin layer of asphalt over an existing road, followed by the placement of aggregate chips. The choice of chip seal type depends on factors like traffic load and environmental conditions. For driveway chips and other road applications, the aggregate industry plays a crucial role, supplying the necessary materials for a durable and safe road surface.
How Do Aggregates Affect Vehicles?
Aggregates, which often include small chips and stones, can have negative effects for road users, potentially leading to damage and incurring additional costs for car owners.
Windshield and Paint Damage
Aggregates, especially sharp and small chips, can pose a threat to vehicles on the road. When vehicles travel over roads surfaced with aggregates, such chips may become dislodged, creating various problems for drivers. One common issue is damage to windshields and the exterior paint of vehicles. Chips propelled by passing vehicles can strike windshields, leading to cracks or chips in the glass. Additionally, chips striking the car’s body can cause paint chipping and scratches.
Small stones and chips can be flung onto the road surface by the tires of other vehicles, potentially causing punctures or damage to a car’s tires. Tire damage can be costly and may lead to additional expenses for car owners.
Undercarriage and Suspension Damage
Aggregates can also pose a risk to a vehicle’s undercarriage, including the exhaust system, suspension components, and even the chassis. In some cases, rough and uneven road surfaces with loose aggregates can lead to more substantial damage if the vehicle’s suspension is not properly maintained.
How To Protect Your Car From Aggregates
Protecting your car from the potential damage caused by loose aggregates on the road is essential for maintaining its appearance and avoiding costly repairs. Here are some effective ways to protect your car from aggregates:
- Protective Paint Coatings: PPF is a transparent, self-healing film that can be professionally applied to the exterior of your car. It provides an additional layer of protection against chips, scratches, and small debris. PPF is virtually invisible and can be applied to vulnerable areas like the front bumper, hood, mirrors, and fenders.
- Maintain a Safe Following Distance: When driving behind other vehicles, especially large trucks or those carrying heavy loads, maintain a safe following distance. This will reduce the chances of your car being pelted by debris thrown up by the vehicle in front of you.
- Regular Vehicle Maintenance: Keeping your car in good condition, including properly inflated tires and well-maintained suspension components, can reduce the risk of damage when driving over uneven or gravel-covered road surfaces.
Invest in Paint Protection Film for Your Vehicle
Protex Canada offers XPEL paint protection film, a cutting-edge solution designed to safeguard your vehicle’s paint from chips, scratches, and other forms of damage. This high-quality, transparent film is virtually invisible once applied to your car, preserving the original appearance. XPEL PPF features self-healing properties, allowing minor scratches to disappear over time.
We offer professional installation to ensure a seamless, custom fit to your vehicle’s vulnerable areas, such as the front bumper, hood, fenders, and mirrors. With XPEL PPF, you can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your vehicle’s paint is shielded from road debris and environmental elements while maintaining a pristine and factory-fresh look.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can the appearance of brick pavement be maintained, and what role do aggregates play in achieving this aesthetic?
Maintaining the appearance of brick-paved roads is crucial for both functionality and visual appeal. Aggregates, such as the type and quality of sand and gravel used in the underlying layers, play a significant role in ensuring the long-lasting and attractive appearance of brick pavement.
What are the advantages of using composite pavements, and how do they differ from conventional pavement types such as concrete and asphalt?
Composite pavements combine various materials, including aggregates, to create road surfaces that offer a balance of durability and cost-effectiveness. Understanding the advantages of composite pavements, how they withstand pavement deterioration, and their suitability for different pavement users is essential for informed road construction decisions. | <urn:uuid:91fb904d-6ee2-4bb8-85cb-30931359a9be> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://protexcanada.com/en/blog/what-are-the-aggregates-found-on-bc-roads/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.934359 | 1,833 | 3.390625 | 3 |
The Power of Latin Food in Culture: The Story Behind Rancheritos
Latin Culture is a magnificent combination of many different customs that originated in ancient indigenous cultures. We tend to be very playful, happy, noisy, and most of all affective. Colombian cuisine, for example, is one of the most popular Latin dishes. Colombian food is considered to be some of the best and tastiest in the world! Colombian people are also very affectionate and love to show their emotions by giving hugs, kisses, and laughter. We also enjoy sharing food with our family members to express our love for them and have fun while doing it. Our culture has many traditions connected with food; we often share meals with loved ones or prepare meals for those who need comfort because they have been through something difficult or emotional.
Why foods in Latin America are so important to the culture
Latin people are very affectionate, and food is a large part of our culture. Our childhood memories are strongly connected to the food we ate as kids. From breakfast to daily meals, Latin food has a very distinct flavor. The food we eat also varies depending on the region of Latin America that you are in.
It is hard to talk about Latin food without mentioning Colombian food. As a tropical country, Colombian cuisine is one of the most popular Latin dishes. Colombian food is considered to be some of the best and tastiest in the world! Colombian food is a specific type of cuisine that has its roots in the European, African, and indigenous cultures of South America. Colombian dishes are known for being hearty, flavorful, and colorful. Authentic Colombian food reflects our culture’s diversity and creativity–from the rich mixture of spices to the unique ingredients we use like corn, potatoes, white rice, red beans, or yucca root. Colombian cooking techniques combine traditional methods with modern ones as well as adding some international influences such as rice from Asia or wheat from Europe.
How does food bring people together?
We also enjoy sharing food with our family members to express our love for them and have fun while doing it. Our culture has many traditions connected with food; we often share meals with loved ones or prepare meals for those who need comfort because they have been through something difficult or emotional. Love and food go hand in hand for Latin people. We express our love by the way we serve a plate to our family, as all families around South America have their traditional ways of cooking meals that are passed down from generation to generation.
Colombian people are also very affectionate and love to show their emotions by giving hugs, kisses, laughter, and sharing food. Delicious Colombian food has to be accompanied by fried sweet plantains, a fried egg, maybe a fresh juice made with tropical fruits, and the best Colombian coffee after all of it. Good food can help us feel loved by our family, make friends, and even find love.
Rancheritos is a Latin restaurant in Miami
Rancheritos has been serving typical Colombian food since 2009 as well as dishes from other regions for those who want to enjoy the taste and flavor of Mexican dishes like tacos, burritos, and quesadillas with their family and friends. We are an authentic Colombian restaurant offering the best Colombian food you can find all around Miami. We offer a variety of Colombian food as it can be the bandeja paisa, Colombian ajiaco, empanadas, and much more! We especially recommend you to taste the traditional Colombian dish Bandeja paisa, served with the best-fried plantains, fresh red beans, ground beef, fried eggs, Colombian sausage, and fried pork belly. To liven up your meals we offer delicious hot chocolate, lime juice, Colombian coffee, or sweet juices made with fresh tropical fruits.
The best Colombian restaurant for your delight
From breakfast to dinner and even dessert, the Latin culture is very closely intertwined with food. Rancheritos has been serving traditional Colombian dishes since 2009 as well as other regional Mexican favorites like tacos, burritos, and quesadillas for those looking to try something new. We are an authentic Colombian restaurant that offers a unique experience in Miami’s food scene; come visit us today and eat the best bandeja paisa you can ever taste!
I hope you enjoyed this blog post about Latin food. I’ll leave a list of some other posts on Latin American and Colombian culture that are worth reading below! | <urn:uuid:ee073021-9d2b-49e0-9f57-5ceaa9b91821> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://rancheritosdeboca.com/archives/3668 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.969281 | 910 | 3.015625 | 3 |
|Style over substance|
Dream interpretation refers to a collection of "therapies" or methods by which a person's dreams are supposedly interpreted.
Dreams have long held a special place in religion, mysticism, and pseudoscience. Since ancient times, enterprising imaginations have regularly interpreted dreams as communication between humans and the divine, as messages from the great beyond or from spirits still walking the Earth, and as prophecies. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods could speak to mortals through dreams. Sleeping and dreaming in temples dedicated to the god of medicine and healing, Asklepios, was thought to be able to cure illness. (The temples were called Asklepeions and the process was known as "incubating".) Aristotle was the first person known to dismiss claims of predictions made in dreams as coincidences.
Similar ideas as those of the Greeks about dreaming have been documented in ancient Egypt, China, and the Middle East. The Chinese (who had systems involving two or ten souls per person) believed that a soul literally left the body during sleep. The Bible famously contains a failed prophecy involving the interpretation of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Dreams play an important role in the Zoroastrian religion.
Native Americans strongly believed in the dream world. They regarded dreams as alternate realities giving them much value in their lives. They applied the information learned about medicine and rituals from their dreams in their waking lives.
Freud and Jung
Dream interpretation played a large role in Sigmund Freud's writings on psychological therapy. Freud (1856-1939) regarded dreams as a form of wish-fulfillment which contained both "manifest" and "latent" content. The manifest content was the literal portion of the dream, which consisted of various coded symbols that represented the latent content. The latent content was the true desire or emotion that was being repressed and kept in the unconscious mind. Freud initially called this act of repression "the censor" in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), but later referred to the censor as the work of the ego and super-ego after he developed his three-part system of consciousness. He believed nightmares were the product of the censor repressing this wish-fulfillment. For this reason, Freud made heavy use of dream interpretation in his psychoanalytic therapy.
Carl Jung (1875-1961) grafted his own ideas onto Freud's, modifying them to fit into his concept of archetypes. Jung believed that dreams were not simply wish-fulfillment, but the expression of a person's archetype and shadow forms (these are similar to Platonic ideals). He also believed that one could access the "collective unconscious", or humanity's collective memory, through dreams. He renamed "manifest" and "latent" content to "objective" and "subjective" respectively.
Calvin Hall developed a "cognitive" theory of dreaming in the 1950s. However, he based his work on Freud and Jung, viewing dreams as similarly having symbols that must be decoded in some way to be understood - this idea is not currently accepted within cognitive psychology.
The big problem with Freudian ideas (and their derivatives) about dream interpretation is that they lack the ability to be falsified or replicated (much like the rest of Freudian psychoanalysis). Freud and his followers based their work on specialized case-studies and a good amount of theorizing.
The activation-synthesis hypothesis was first put forth by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley in 1977. This hypothesis claims that dreams are essentially interpretations of neuronal activity in the brainstem (specifically the pons) during rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, and thus they are largely a meaningless jumble of fake sensory experiences. Mark Solms has claimed that, based on his own research, REM sleep is not necessary for dreaming and that the forebrain (cerebrum) does play a large role in dreaming, lending credibility to the notion that there is some deeper meaning in dreams. The Hobson-Solms debate has spanned over multiple decades and still rages on today.
Threat simulation theory
The threat simulation theory (TST) proposed by Antti Revonsuo attempted to take an evolutionary approach to dreams. Revonsuo has postulated that dreaming served an adaptive purpose in allowing humans to "simulate" predatory threats during their sleep and practice escaping them. Mark Solms has criticized TST because threat-related dreams make up only a fraction of total dreams and because TST lacks explanatory and predictive value in a number of other areas.
Difficulties with dream research
There are a number of apparent difficulties in conducting research on dreams that have led to a lack of consensus and mountains of contradictory research in the field. Dreams are quickly and easily forgotten (which is why the use of dream logs is common) and memories of dreams may be created from nothing through the process of confabulation. In fact, some research has shown that people forget 95% of their dreams. It is also difficult to generate hypotheses that are falsifiable, testable, and able to be replicated due to the limited ability to observe dreaming under controlled conditions. It's likely that more powerful and accurate brain scanning technology will be required before a consensus can begin to develop on the nature of dreams. There are numerous other hypotheses than the ones mentioned here with their own relevant bodies of supportive and critical research.
Woo and quackery
As has been true throughout history, massive amounts of woo surrounds dreams. Dream interpretation as used in therapy ranges from your run-of-the-mill quackery in which therapists claim that dream interpretation is based on "scientifically sound evidence" and attempt to use it in their therapy sessions, to the even more quacky amalgams of dream interpretation and hypnotherapy, and the really out there woo of things like using dream interpretation in past life regression therapy.
You can also go down to your local bookstore and find various "dream dictionaries" for sale claiming to be a reference guide for symbols in dreams so that you can perform dream interpretation on yourself. The fact that the meanings of the symbols can vary wildly from book to book demonstrates the quality and accuracy of these dictionaries.
- Example of a bogus dream dictionary.
- Dreams entry at The Skeptic's Dictionary
- The 17 Most Common Dreams and What They Mean - The Meaning Behind The Most Common Dreams and Nightmares
- Asklepieion at Epidaurus, Greek Ministry of Culture
- Dream History, Think Quest
- Maspero, Henri (1981). Taoism and Chinese Religion. University of Massachusetts Press. p. 255. ISBN 9780870233081. Retrieved 2017-06-17. "Man has no fewer than ten souls, three rational souls (hun) and seven vegetative souls (p'o), which are separated after death into two groups [...]."
- Dreams in History, Dream Moods
- Compare: Maciocia, Giovanni (2009). "The Ethereal Soul (Hun)". The Psyche in Chinese Medicine E-Book: Treatment of Emotional and Mental Disharmonies with Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs. Elsevier Health Sciences. ISBN 9780702047770. Retrieved 2017-06-17. "Dreams derive from the wandering of the Ethereal Soul at night; when the Ethereal Soul goes to the eyes in daytime, we see; when it goes to the eyes at night, we dream."
- History of Dreams, World Of Dream Symbols
- The Interpretation of Dreams (Third Ed.) by Sigmund Freud
- Dream interpretations, Carl-Jung.net
- Hall, C. S. (1953).A cognitive theory of dreams. The Journal of General Psychology, 49, 273-282. Abridged version in M. F. DeMartino (Ed.). (1959). Dreams and Personality Dynamics (pp. 123-134). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
- Domhoff, G. W. (2005).Refocusing the neurocognitive approach to dreams: A critique of the Hobson versus Solms debate. Dreaming, 15, 3-20.
- Valli, Katja, Antti Revonsuo, Outi Palkas, et al. The threat simulation theory of the evolutionary function of dreaming: Evidence from dreams of traumatized children. Consciousness and Cognition. 2005, vol. 14, no 1 (232 p.) [Document : 31 p.] (2 p.1/4), pp. 188-218
- Malcolm-Smith, Susan, Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull, and Colin Tredoux.Threat in dreams: An adaptation? Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008) 1281–129 | <urn:uuid:c9b0e80a-a97d-44ff-a048-72970592ea13> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dream | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.927406 | 1,810 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Cape Canaveral, FL, December 6, 2017 – Next week, Made In Space, Inc. (MIS) will send its third manufacturing device to the International Space Station since 2014, a landmark achievement the company hopes will usher in a new wave of commercial in-space manufacturing. The payload – named Made In Space Fiber Optics – will launch on SpaceX’s CRS-13. Once installed on the International Space Station (ISS), the device will manufacture ZBLAN optical fiber for several weeks before returning to Earth for materials evaluation and testing prior to final delivery to partners and customers.
MIS has been working with the Center For Advancement of Science In Space (CASIS) for the past few years to install a FIber Optics device on the ISS National Laboratory to demonstrate ZBLAN production. The technology was developed in partnership with Thorlabs, who will provide the raw material preforms for the optical fiber. Additionally, Space Florida facilitated financing to Made In Space in support of fiber optics research and development.
“We believe Fiber Optics is one of the best terrestrial use-cases for a space-enabled material,” said Andrew Rush, President & CEO of Made In Space, Inc. “ZBLAN optical fiber has the potential to serve as the first product created in space on an industrial scale. With great support from Thorlabs, Space Florida, and working with CASIS for access to the ISS National Lab, we’re confident that this device will manufacture an optical fiber that’s superior to current terrestrially-produced versions.”
MIS expects that manufacturing this material in a microgravity environment will provide significant quality improvements over versions produced on Earth. When this optical fiber is created on Earth, small crystals form in the material which increase signal loss. In transcontinental telecommunication lines, expensive repeaters have to be installed to make up for lost signal. An optical fiber without these crystals would improve transmission efficiency, reducing the need for expensive repeaters. ZBLAN optical fiber could also be used in medical lasers and for various defense applications.
About Made In Space:
Made In Space, Inc. (MIS) is the world’s most experienced space manufacturing company. Established in 2010 and with offices in Florida, California, Alabama and Ohio, MIS leverages the unique properties of the space environment to develop manufacturing solutions to commercial, industrial, research and defense challenges. The company’s vision is to enable the future of space exploration by offering off-Earth manufacturing capabilities. For more information about MIS, visit www.madeinspace.us.
The Center for Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) is the non-profit organization selected to manage the ISS National Laboratory with a focus on enabling a new era of space research to improve life on Earth. In this innovative role, CASIS promotes and brokers a diverse range of research in life sciences, physical sciences, remote sensing, technology development, and education.
About Space Florida:
Space Florida was created to strengthen Florida’s position as the global leader in aerospace research, investment, exploration and commerce. As Florida’s aerospace and spaceport development authority, we are committed to attracting and expanding the next generation of space industry businesses. With its highly trained workforce, proven infrastructure and unparalleled record of achievement, Florida is the ideal location for aerospace businesses to thrive – and Space Florida is the perfect partner to help them succeed. www.spaceflorida.gov
Bryan Culbert Communications | <urn:uuid:be5b173e-1ba0-4e31-8449-8040cf2a2ca3> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://redwirespace.com/newsroom/made-in-space-%E2%80%8Bto-%E2%80%8Blaunch-optical-fiber-payload-early-december/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.905512 | 720 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Clay boggart sticks are a fun twist on the perennial Forest School favourite activity that turns the old ‘face on a tree’ task into a take-homeable craft.
This is such a simple activity that it doesn’t really need a tutorial. But here are a few tips and inspiration to get you started.
Not got much time or just want the bullet points on how to make these? Click here for the Quick Read Instructions.
What is a boggart?
A boggart is a mischievous creature from British folklore that people blamed for all sorts of naughtiness. While not traditionally associated with tree spirits, the name has come to be used for the quintessential forest school activity of decorating trees with clay faces.
As long as you don’t use air-dry clay (which contains non-biodegradable nylon strands to help strengthen it as it dries) or add any non-natural decorations, you can often leave your boggart in place, to eventually crumble harmlessly away.
But sometimes you can’t leave your boggarts behind. Maybe the landowner doesn’t permit it, or the woodland is a particularly sensitive place such as a Site of Specific Scientific Interest. Or perhaps it’s just that the children want to keep them. So don’t mould your clay face onto the bark of a tree; if you make your boggart on a stick, you’ve got a jester’s marotte that can go home with you instead.
How to make clay boggart sticks
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You don’t need very much at all to make these boggarts, and ideally most if not everything will be found in the area that you are carrying out the activity.
If you are leaving your boggarts in place in a natural environment, you should use clay that requires kiln-firing. You might see this type of clay under different names, such as school or potter’s clay, for instance. But the important detail to look for that it is 100% natural clay (or mud) and is not self-hardening.
If you are making your boggart on sticks and will be taking them away with you, then you can use air dry clay.
The reason for this is that air dry/self-hardening clay contains fine strands of nylon. The nylon helps give the clay strength as it hardens, to compensate for not going through the firing process. Nylon is a type of plastic, and therefore is not only non-biodegradable but can also be dangerous to flora and fauna.
Potter’s clay, on the other hand, is pure mud. Nothing added, and without firing at high heat in a kiln (a domestic oven isn’t hot enough), it will stay soft and eventually wash back into the soil around it. You can get potter’s clay in a range of colours (mud from different places!). So be aware that red and darker colours can stain clothes and skin.
Of course, the best clay of all to use, is clay that the children dig up in the local area. Whether you can do this depends on where you live – clay soil isn’t found everywhere. But all your mud needs to be is thick and sticky, so if you’ve got that, you are golden!
To make a clay head on a stick, you need sticks! Get the children looking for ones that are big and strong enough to support a ball of clay at one end, and nicely shaped for holding in your hand.
Once they’ve found their main stick, they will need to roll a ball of clay and pop it on the top. Then they can gather up any bits they might want to use for decorations or embellishments.
You can just shape your clay to make a boggart head, of course, but it’s great fun to go foraging for natural bits that can be used to enhance it. Leaves, twigs, and grasses for hair and arms, and really long nose hair; or berries, nuts, and seeds for eyes, ornaments, and freckles. Children come up with the most amazing ideas for their boggarts, so let them go nuts!
Even if we are taking our boggart marottes home with us, I avoid using artificial embellishments such as plastic googly-eyes, wool, or anything non-natural that’s not found in the area around us. I also avoid using natural but non-native things that could disrupt the local ecology, most notably seeds or things that local creatures might try to eat. Making these clay boggart sticks is a chance to connect with nature, so we want to avoid anything that might harm it!
Once you’ve made your boggart, what you do with it is up to you! They make great puppets, and a lovely follow-up activity is to make a woodland puppet theatre and put on a performance.
- Find a stick
- Make a ball of clay and stick it onto one end of your stick
- Shape it into a face
- Find leaves, nuts, seeds, flowers, bits of bark or any other natural items found around you to decorate your boggart head.
- Give it a name and take it home!
More from Rhubarb and Wren!
Looking for more fun things to make and do with the kids? Check out these great activities from Rhubarb and Wren!
Pin these clay boggart sticks for later!
Want to bookmark this for later? Save this post to Pinterest! | <urn:uuid:2f22cc40-6bc1-4c14-b4e3-ce47bf720e40> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://rhubarbandwren.co.uk/how-to-make-clay-boggart-sticks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.944263 | 1,224 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Degenerative joint disease, or osteoarthritis, is the most common form of joint disorder. It can occur in any joint, but usually it affects hands, knees, hips or spine. According to the World Health Organization, degenerative joint disease is one of the ten most disabling diseases in developed countries. It is estimated that more than 25 million Americans are affected.
If cartilage breaks down, or degenerates, the bones lose their cushioning and the exposed bone surfaces can rub together. The joint area can become inflamed and painful, resulting in reduced motion in the joints. In addition, bone spurs, or extra bone, may form around the afflicted joint, and the ligaments, or fibrous connective tissue, and the muscles around the joint may then become both weaker and stiffer.
Common Symptoms of Degenerative Joint Disease
- Indications of possible degenerative joint disease include:
- joint stiffness when standing up from a seated position or getting out of bed
- swelling in one or more joints
- a feeling, or even sounds, of bones “crunching” or rubbing together
- difficulty sleeping
- limping while walking, a common symptom of hip arthritis
Treatment Options for Degenerative Joint Disease
Rothman Orthopaedic Institute’s internationally renowned orthopedic specialists offer a wide range of care for degenerative joint disease, including cutting edge surgical procedures in spine, knee, and hip treatment, joint replacement, back pain surgery, ligament injury treatment, and other interventions for osteoarthritis. | <urn:uuid:12571619-d3e3-4a9b-8e94-a8c6a5592d74> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://rothmanortho.com/stories/blog/what-is-degenerative-joint-disease | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.923794 | 323 | 3.125 | 3 |
Prominent Russians: Andrey Gromyko
Andrey Gromyko was the Soviet Union’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and top diplomat for almost three decades. In all, he served for 48 years as a diplomatic or government official with the USSR and was regarded as a prodigiously capable negotiator in the Soviet Union as well as in the West. Gromyko played a central role in negotiations with foreign powers spanning from the Second World War up until the beginning of the perestroika era. He served under five separate Soviet Union leaders, from Stalin to Gorbachev.
Andrey Andreevich Gromyko was born on 18 July (5 July, according to the Orthodox Julian calendar in use at the time) in a Belorussian village called Stariy Gromyki. It was traditional for residents of the village to adopt its name as their surname, so Andrey’s family was Gromyko. Belarus was then part of the Russian Empire. Soon after the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia, most of the country became part of the newly formed USSR. Gromyko was an active member of the Communist Party in school and in college. He studied in a technical college in the nearby city of Gomel, and then in Borisov, an industrial city in Belarus. After graduation, he continued his education in the Minsk Economic Institute, where he specialized in agricultural economics. He attended college part-time, so that he could teach in a local village school, where he became principal while he was still in his early 20s. Gromyko was offered a place in a post-graduate degree course in Moscow. There, he began to learn English, which he was to master as a
diplomat, though he always used a translator to allow him breaks to think during negotiations. His university dissertation was on American agriculture; though he might not have known it at the time, his knowledge of America would allow him to get his foot in the door of the diplomatic corps.
As a result of Stalin’s purges of government and Communist Party officials, the Foreign Ministry was stripped of some of its finest staff. A young, well-educated son of a peasant family, Gromyko ticked a lot of boxes in the ideology of the Stalin era. Even though he lacked any diplomatic experience, in the spring of 1939 he was appointed the head of the Americas section of the Foreign Ministry and suddenly became responsible for diplomatic relations with the countries of the American continent. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. Gromyko was instrumental in managing the edgy co-operation between the U.S. and the USSR during the War. In August 1943 he became the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Washington.
Gromyko took part in all the major negotiations of the Second World War and its immediate
aftermath, such as those in Potsdam and Yalta over military co-operation and post-war planning as well as those in Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco which resulted in the creation of the United Nations.
In 1949 Gromyko became the First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. The Foreign Minister at the time was Vyshinsky, a close ally of Stalin and a key organizer of the purges. Vyshinsky, fearing Gromyko might replace him as the top diplomat, stripped him of his First Deputy title in 1952, and made him the Soviet Ambassador to the UK, a lower ranked, yet still prestigious, position. After Stalin’s death in 1953, many of the Communist old guard were denounced and lost their positions when the extent of his repressions and purges became clear. Vyacheslav Molotov, of the famous “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” of non-aggression between the Soviet Union and Germany, again became Foreign Minister, and appointed Gromyko as his First Deputy. The two men had worked together closely during the Second World War.
Gromyko became Foreign Minister in 1957, a position he was to hold for almost thirty years, until
1985. The Foreign Minister’s negotiating style was legendary. In the West he was known as “Comrade Nyet,” apparently for his stubborn demeanor and refusal to give concessions. He would wear down his negotiating partners by arguing for hours over the most trivial of details, before tackling the meat of the issue, teasing out small victories, which he would trade for larger concessions later in the negotiations. He had an impressive memory, which allowed him to draw on countless legal and diplomatic arguments, names, dates and facts during discussions. Gromyko later commented on this style: “Better ten years of negotiations than one day of war.”
Gromyko kept aloof from his foreign counterparts. His son later wrote that his father advised him to never make friends with foreigners – it is only a hindrance to a diplomat. The British Foreign
Minister George Brown, in an attempt to get closer to the Soviet diplomat, once addressed him as Andryusha – an informal form of Andrey – but he was quickly rebuffed by “Comrade Nyet” who asked to be addressed only as Andrey Andreevich.
The near thirty years that Gromyko held the position of Soviet Foreign Minister were among the most tense in modern diplomatic history. The U.S.
In 1985, Gromyko nominated Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the USSR. When later asked if he had made a mistake in nominating the reformer who presided over the dismantling of Communism, Gromyko replied that he did not regret the decision. He was replaced as Foreign Minister that year by Eduard Shevardnadze. After a few years as a Supreme Soviet Deputy, Gromyko retired in 1988.
Gromyko received five Orders of Lenin and was twice awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor medal. He and his wife Lidiya had a son Anatoli, and a daughter Emiliya, who were both academics.
Andrey Gromyko died on 2 July 1989 and is buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.
Written by Aaron Mulvihill, RT | <urn:uuid:6df6247f-a69b-4ff4-9964-e7c627c384e1> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/politics-and-society/andrey-gromyko/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100800.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209040008-20231209070008-00899.warc.gz | en | 0.988702 | 1,272 | 3.125 | 3 |
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