By Paul R. Munford, Ph.D.
I remember a movie in which one of the characters went around asking people to define the word “irony.” Although most of them seemed to know what it meant, they were unable to put it into words. Not until the end of the movie did one of them give the definition. I’m reminded of this because the continuation and elimination of OCD symptoms are perfect examples of irony or the occurrence of outcomes that are opposite to those that were intended. You have probably been steering clear of triggers for your obsessions and doing compulsions after contact with those you couldn’t avoid. Ironically, instead of lessening your distress, what you have been doing is sustaining or even worsening your condition. To get out of this quagmire, you have to start doing the opposite of your strategy up until now. This means deliberately making contact with the triggers while refraining from doing compulsions. With enough exposure to the triggers, and for sufficient periods of time, you will notice that they become powerless to provoke distress, and the absence of distress eliminates the need for compulsions. See what I mean about OCD and irony? Exposure, ritual prevention, and awareness exercises are used to achieve this.
Exposure, Ritual Prevention, and Awareness Exercises
It is important that you understand how the exposure, ritual prevention, and awareness (ERPA) exercises are related to the way the symptoms work. So let’s review the series of events that takes place during a cycle of OCD symptoms, commonly called an OCD spike. First, there’s a trigger, something that is noticed in your physical, social or mental worlds. Second, it instantly activates an obsession — thoughts, feelings or impulses that are distressful. Almost simultaneously, you feel fear, guilt, apprehension, dread, anger or any number and combination of distressing emotions. These three events — exposure to a trigger, activation of an obsession, and feelings of distress — are sensed as happening together, as a single event. Therefore, the terms, “trigger,” “obsession,” and “distress” are used interchangeably to refer to this seemingly single event — the spike. Your natural reaction is to turn it off as quickly as possible. Finally, by trial and error, you find out that by repeating certain actions and/or mental gyrations you get temporary relief until the next obsession hits.
ERPA exercises address each one of these events. First, you select a trigger for a particular obsession-compulsion combination and then practice exposure to this trigger. During the exposure, the next step is to refrain from rituals and instead practice awareness of the distress. When this is successfully done the distress fades away. Because the obsessions that used to cause terrible anxiety no longer has that power, it becomes insignificant, making it intrusive and repetitive no more. With the absence of the obsessions, there is no need for compulsions. The exercises have changed the brain, which in turn changes behaviors and emotions. Desensitization has occurred. The exposure exercise is the vehicle, the Rolls Royce of treatments, which delivers this result.
By practicing the exercises at least one to two hours per day (including weekends and holidays), you should made good progress. When this schedule is adhered to, most people desensitize themselves to the particular trigger they’re working on within five to seven days. This success gives them a big dose of confidence that they can control their anxiety, and increases their motivation to pursue and eradicate it. They now truly believe they will become “scared fearless.”
To put together an exposure exercise, you’ll be following these steps: 1. Select a trigger, an obsession-compulsion combination for elimination. 2. Practice exposure: by bringing on the obsession in reality and in imagination. 3. Practice ritual prevention by refraining from doing compulsions and fear blocking behaviors. 4. Practice acceptance fully experiencing the triggered thoughts, images, impulses, emotions and physical sensations they set off.
I’ll explain each of the above activities as follows:
Selecting an Obsession-Compulsion Combination for Elimination
The best obsessions-compulsion combination to target is usually the obsession-compulsion combination that is the least distressful. Even though you may be eager to get rid of the most troublesome of your symptoms, it’s best to start with the one that provides the greatest chance for success. After all, nothing succeeds like success. Don’t worry; we will eventually deal with all of your triggers. As you are aware, there will be some stress associated with the exercises you are about to undertake. So start with the easiest one first to keep the distress at a minimum.
Exposure: Bringing on the Obsessions
The exposures involve making contact with triggers for obsessions in reality, which are in the outer, physical and social world, or in imaginary situations, which are in the inner, mental world because fear is the problem and fear is the solution. I realize that the idea of facing fear is quite scary, but it’s necessary. In case after case, patients have reported that once they start confronting fear, they find it not to be nearly as distressful as anticipated. More importantly, they discover that exposure works. The obsessions stop triggering fear and become just “thoughts.” Being neutral with no emotional impact, they are insignificant and gradually fade away.
Keep in mind that the exposure exercises are done in a most gradual way, moving toward a goal slowly. This gradual way of making progress is called shaping. Start with a situation that causes only minimal distress and stay with it until you have little or no reaction to it. Only then do you take on another situation, one that’s only slightly more difficult than the first one, and stick with it until the distress evaporates. This process is continued until you have been thoroughly exposed to all of your obsessions, including what you initially estimated to be the most frightening. By the time you get to it, you will have been desensitized by the exposure exercises leading up to it, so that the final step will be no more difficult than the first one. This process, moving toward a goal in small steps, is an important part of the recovery process.
For exposure to succeed in erasing the fear, there are two necessary conditions. First, rituals, and any other means of dodging the exposure, must be prevented. The use of false fear blockers will be fully discussed in the next section. For now let’s discuss the second of these conditions, the need for prolonged exposure. Exposure sessions must be long enough for you to experience a noticeable decline in your distress during the exposure. This means your sessions could be for an hour or more. What people typically feel during their sessions is a gradual rise in distress, which levels off after several minutes. Then it starts to decline. It is during this phase that you‘re receiving the benefits of the exercise. Whatever the trigger, it’s losing its power to provoke fear. With the next exposure session, and subsequent ones, you’ll find that the fear at the beginning is lower and falls away faster, until eventually you’ll feel little or no distress. You will have neutralized the trigger, and learned that exposure alone will free you from anxiety without resorting to the use of faulty fear blockers.
Keep your exposure sessions to no more than 90 minutes by selecting triggers that are in the mild to moderate range of difficulty. Exposure can be mentally and emotionally draining, so you don’t want to cause an unnecessary hardship by overdoing it. If you underestimate the power of a trigger and find that it’s taking more than 90 minutes for the distress to decrease, stop working on it and replace it with an easier exercise. You can return to the one you underestimated after the easier exercises have desensitized you.
As mentioned above, exposure exercises can be in reality or in imagination. Exposures in reality aim to eliminate obsessions triggered by situations in the real world, your physical and social environment. Exposure activities of this kind require being physically involved with situations that trigger obsessions. Exposures in imagination aim to eliminate obsessions triggered by thoughts and images of imaged dreaded future events that are impossible and improbable. Exposures of this kind, since they exist only in your mind’s eye, require contact with the imagined triggers. One of the best ways to do exposure in imagination is by writing down the content of your obsessions and recording this scenario on audiotape and listening to it repeatedly for as long as it takes to feel some relief. You can also practice exposure to this scenario by rewriting and rereading it for extended periods of time, again, until you feel your distressed lessening.
For both types of exposure exercises, it is of the utmost importance that you do not stop them while your anxiety is up. If you do, desensitization is prevented and you can even be further sensitized to the situation you’re trying to neutralize. With this in mind, schedule your exposure sessions at times when you have enough time to complete them, and know that you will not be interrupted, or distracted. The best results are obtained when you practice every day, including weekends and holidays. A momentum develops that makes the practice easier with faster results. I also recommend that you do the exercises early in the day. This way you’re less likely to put them off and the thought of doing them is not hanging over your head like the sword of Damocles for the bulk of the day.
Ritual Prevention: Refraining from False Fear-Blocking Behavior
A false fear-blocker is any action or thought immediately following an obsession that reduces the fear. I use the term “false” because the reduced fear is only temporary and returns with the next obsession. Its greatest harm is blocking exposure, which prevents recovery. The most common false fear blockers are: physical and mental compulsions; distraction; avoidance; and reassurance seeking.
Physical and mental compulsions are voluntary actions that are under your control. Just as you can control the movement of your muscles, you can control the performance of physical rituals. The same is true for mental rituals; they are willful words that you say to yourself and images that you purposely produce. The question isn’t, “Can I prevent rituals?” but, “Am I willing to prevent them?” If you wish to overcome OCD the answer must be “yes.” The price you’ll pay for giving them up — short-term, mild anxiety — is well worth the long-term benefit of freedom from OCD. The old saying, “it’s easier than you think”, has been found to be true by all the courageous people who have abandoned rituals and overcome their suffering. You can be one of them. Remember that by shaping your exposures you can control your anxiety level, which will make it easier to relinquish the rituals.
Distraction is probably one of the first false fear blockers people use to cope with obsessions. By trying to get their minds on something else, they hope to ignore obsessions with their attendant anxiety and distress. Really paying attention to what they’re doing, constantly being busy, and keeping on the move are ways those of a more energetic bent may use to compete with repetitive, intrusive thoughts and images. Listening to music, chattering incessantly and mindlessly are resorted to by others attempting to dampen the impact of obsessions. Those with the tendencies to worry may even concentrate on troublesome problems of everyday life in efforts to push their obsessions out of mind. The most drastic and decidedly dangerous distraction is inflicting self-injury, frequently to the head, as if to drive out demons, expiate guilt, or exchange physical pain for emotional anguish. Distractions, like their fear blocker cousin, compulsions, only offer a frequently unpredictable, short term let-up from the distress of inevitably recurring obsessions. Distractions must be abandoned so that the genuine fear blocker can’t work — exposure. Avoidance — as you know by now — is the opposite of exposure and prevents recovery. Prior to having this knowledge, however, you did what came naturally and stayed away from triggers that activated irrational thoughts, images and impulses. Now, you need to take the path to recovery, the one that follows the fear. If you stray from it and wander into the wasteland of avoidance, your journey will be without end. Or, as one of my patients said, “I get it. The idea is to be like a heat seeking missile, fix on the fear, follow it, and blow it up.”
Avoided situations can be your ally when you recognize that they are actually triggers for your obsessions, and as such, targets for desensitization. When they have been neutralized, and you are able to easily approach them, you will have demonstrated the ultimate proof of a successful treatment outcome.
Reasoning is probably the most commonly used fear blocker even though the person realizes, most of the time that their fears are unreasonable. However, during severe OCD spikes, this understanding weakens and doubts arise that the dreaded thoughts could be real. For example, could the thoughts really mean that “I have a major character defect or that I am crazy?” Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans abhor uncertainty. We deal with it by rationalizing, analyzing, intellectualizing, theorizing, and using all kinds of mental manipulations attempting to achieve certainty. This happens in OCD when the faulty fear blockers of reasoning, “thinking things through,” and challenging irrational thoughts are called into play. As you already know, these efforts at relief are futile. We have little direct control over our emotional reactions because emotions happen to us, they’re not things we will to happen. Our rational control of fear is weak; but fear can easily hijack rational control, doing so routinely in OCD. This is because the connections from the brain’s emotional systems to the rational systems are stronger than connections from the rational systems to the emotional systems (LeDoux, 1996). Philosophers, poets, and other sages have expressed this understanding over the centuries, and joining them today are neuroscientists reporting discoveries about how the brain works. Remember, with fear, what you think won’t help you, but what you do will.
Reassurance is one of the most powerful and unrecognized of these fear and recovery blockers. It’s a form of compulsion that are I’ve found in over 90 percent of the people I’ve worked with. Because so many compulsively seek reassurance to calm their OCD and anxiety, it deserves special attention.
People with OCD worry that their obsessions might come true. To ease this distress they ask other people, usually family members or close friends, over and over again to reassure them that their fears will not materialize. Because obsessions are always unrealistic, the family members or friends (and even therapists) tell them there is no need to worry; nothing bad is going to happen. For instance, it is quite common for people with fears of being irresponsible or careless to seek reassurance that they are neither. Typically they get the reassurance that they want, and temporary relief, but like other compulsions, reassurance blocks recovery. This is the first paradox. Reassurance is not helpful — it’s harmful. However, the short-term relief it provides is rewarding enough to keep the person repeatedly seeking more, which is the second paradox. The more reassurance received, the more reassurance wanted. Trying to satisfy the demand is like trying to fill a bottomless pit.
In addition to hindering recovery, incessant requests for reassurance can grow to be overbearing demands that lead to interpersonal strife. In one case, after her husband’s demands became so intense and frequent, one woman actually moved out and rented an apartment of her own. Her husband entered an intensive treatment program where both were helped and the reassurance stopped. This is an example of the third paradox. Once reassurance is eliminated, the reassured finds no further desire for it accompanied by a decrease in their obsessions and other compulsions. How, then, should you handle your urges to ask for reassurance?
First. Stop asking for reassurance. Identify your most frequent questions and do not ask them. Avoid subtle, indirect ways of getting reassurance. These may be unknown to the reassurers, but knowingly practiced by you. For example, one client I worked with would abruptly stop doing whatever she was doing, sit down and space out. Her husband learned that these behaviors signaled that she was caught up in obsessions, and unbeknownst to him, they became a nonverbal request for reassurance that he would immediately provide. It was his cue to begin telling her not to worry, that her fears were irrational, that it was only her OCD. So in addition to attending to the obvious requests, subtle, indirect ones also need to be stopped.
Second. Educate your significant others about the harmful effects of reassurance. Have them read this passage. Explain that providing reassurance interferes with recovery.
Third. Create a gentle refusal statement. At first, you will most likely continue to seek reassurance despite your efforts to abstain from them. Therefore, people from whom you typically get reassurance need to work with you to create a palatable way to say no. One way of doing this is for them to say, “I think you’re asking for reassurance. Remember, reassurance is not helpful; it’s harmful. Therefore I’m not going to respond.” However, if this doesn’t work, it’s possible that the agreed upon statement itself has become reassuring, or that you believe that nothing bad will happen because the reassurer would warn you. In this case, the best way to end it is for the parties to stop talking about OCD entirely.
I guess everybody’s heard that you must face your fears to overcome them. That is easy to say but hard to do. Our instinctive reaction in the face of threat is fight or flight. This reaction has survival value for dealing with true dangers, but not for the false dangers you fear with OCD. Survival for you is overcoming OCD, which requires experiencing the fear, sticking with it, immersing yourself in it, and subduing it. Reading this may stoke anticipatory fears, but keep in mind that you can control your fear levels by approaching the triggers gradually so that you feel only mild to moderate levels or of anxiety. On making contact, you might notice that the fear gradually rises but then levels off, and after a while it begins to decrease. It is during this last phase that you are getting the benefits of treatment. You are being desensitized.
While facing the fear, your task is to pay attention to your uncomfortable thoughts, and emotional and physical sensations. Dwell on the scary thoughts and images. Do the opposite of what you have been doing and accept the fears as being possible. Imagine the dreaded future events happening. Say to yourself, “So be it.” Concentrate on the prospect of living in a world of uncertainty, of never knowing if and when something bad is going to happen, of never getting over the anxious condition, and so forth and so on. Keep thinking about thoughts and calling up images to deliberately provoke fear. In this way you are using fear to fight fear. You can’t overcome fear by trying to go around it but only by going through it. Really be aware of the emotions you are experiencing.
Also notice your body’s physical reactions. Where do you feel the anxiety in your body? If your heart is beating faster and harder, tune in to it. If you have muscle tension, focus on that. If you’re breathing faster and harder notice it. Are your stomach and chest tight? Do you feel hot? Are you sweating? If the answer is yes, it means that you are on the right track because you’re feeling the fear and letting it burn itself out. By pursuing the fear, you are destroying it. Exposure is to obsessions and compulsions as sunlight is to vampires. All of these bad feelings are for the good. You’ll know this for yourself when, after several exposures, the fear no longer exists. You won’t be able to summon it even if you try.
However, you might be concerned that the obsessions will become stronger if you give up your efforts to stop blocking them or if you deliberately bring them on. Or you might worry that whatever you dread will happen. Paradoxically, neither of these outcomes occurs. Instead, the exact opposite happens; you will recover as a result of re-training your brain’s fear system to stop making false alarms about harmless events. You will be desensitized to the previous fear triggers and see them as they truly are — harmless thoughts and images that are simply part of the normal flow of your stream of consciousness. In other words, OCD is erased when the unwanted thoughts, images, and impulses are faced, and embraced.
You may ask, “If exposure to fear is all that’s required to get over OCD why hasn’t this already happened? I’ve had these obsessions for many years and they just keep coming.” The answer is that you have used futile fear-blockers to cut off distress from the obsessions. This means that your exposures to the fear haven’t been long enough for it to naturally drop, which it will, simply as a result of your feeling it. You will fully understand the truth of this after you’ve completed your first exposure exercise.
The above exercises may seem daunting. But keep in mind the benefits they offer:
- Changes in emotions from high anxiety too little or no anxiety
- Allowing rational thoughts to replace irrational ones
- Ability to maintain employment, volunteer activity, or pursue education or training goals
- Engaging in a normal interests and routines
- Enjoying satisfactory family and social activities and relationships
Good luck. You’ve got the power!
Reprinted with permission: New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Copyright 2004 by Paul R. Munford, excerpted from “Overcoming Compulsive Checking.” Paul R. Munford, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and director of the Cognitive Behavior Therapy Center for OCD and Anxiety, San Rafael, CA.


Our system of government operates under a set of largely unwritten conventions. But they're well established and they work surprisingly well, which is why the governor-general has not tried to second-guess the ALP caucus.
Like much else (think rabbits, foxes and gentlemen’s clubs), Australia’s system of government was given to us by the British. We have made various changes to account for an absentee monarch and a federal system, but the core structure of our constitution remains that of a Westminster system.
The punditry surrounding the return of Kevin Rudd – an admittedly strange occurrence – has served as a reminder of how poorly that system is understood. Although the official transition from Gillard to Rudd proceeded smoothly it didn’t stop a number of pundits from pontificating, and yesterday the hares were set running again by a hint from Greens leader Christine Milne that there was a limit to how long the Greens might support Rudd in parliament.
What follows is my attempt to explain the relevant features of our system – and why much of the commentary involves imagining difficulties that aren’t really there.
The basic idea of a Westminster system is that the executive is responsible to the legislature. The head of government and his or her ministers have seats in parliament and can be removed by it; the head of state (who doesn’t and can’t, except perhaps in exceptional circumstances) appoints the head of government but otherwise has little effective political power.
Within that general description, Westminster systems cover a wide range of cases, including many countries with an appointed or elected president as head of state. Such a person usually has a set of constitutionally defined powers that can be used as necessary to keep the machinery of government running but that generally keep them out of politics.
Australia, however, follows the Westminster model more strictly. Our head of state is a hereditary monarch, represented here by the governor-general. And her powers on paper are extremely broad, dating from a time when the monarch was head of government as well. A few key constitutional provisions and a web of conventions serve to limit those powers and render her functions mostly ceremonial.
The key convention is that the governor-general acts only on advice. Her only personal act is the appointment of a prime minister; once she has a government she follows its advice until she is willing to dispense with its services, and she can only do that when she has an alternative government willing to take responsibility for the dismissal of its predecessor.
That first convention is very old – it was already in place in the seventeenth century. More recent, but still predating the settlement of Australia, is the principle that a key criterion when appointing a new prime minister is their ability to command a majority in the lower house of parliament. A government that cannot control the House of Representatives must either resign or call an election.
Note that this principle is never directly stated in our constitution; the only explicit restriction is that the government must not levy taxes or appropriate money without parliamentary approval. But that’s enough: no-one doubts that a deliberate vote of no confidence is all that is required to force a government from office or to the polls.
The third convention, more recent still, is that the head of state must not become a political actor. She must not dismiss or frustrate a government simply because she disagrees with its policies; she may only reject advice if it appears to her illegal or in some way constitutionally improper.
It’s only in the last century that this principle has become firmly established. George V was the first monarch to consistently adhere to it; several of his predecessors had fought policy duels with their own prime ministers. George III once dismissed a government even after it had backed down on its policy advice (over removing disabilities for Catholics) because it refused to promise never to raise the matter again.
The net effect of these principles is that once a government is in place, the head of state recedes into the background. The government continues to do its thing until something happens to it: it resigns, it loses control of parliament, it loses an election, or some extraordinary event occurs that would require vice-regal intervention.
None of these things happened when Julia Gillard resigned. As her letter to the governor-general makes clear, the government remained in being; her resignation was only for herself, and she directly recommended her successor. In those circumstances it would have been grossly improper for the governor-general to reject that advice.
If the House of Representatives had a problem with the change it was open to it (as of course it still is) to express its lack of confidence in the new prime minister. If the government had tried to prorogue parliament to prevent such a vote then the governor-general might have felt the need to make further inquiries (this seems to be the sort of scenario that Anne Twomey had in mind) – but of course it didn’t.
Instead, Rudd at the first opportunity made an announcement in the House that he had been commissioned as prime minister. A hostile majority could at that point easily have demonstrated control of proceedings, just as it did against Malcolm Fraser in November 1975. But it didn’t, because there was no such hostile majority. If the House sits again and one develops, then the option of a no confidence vote is always there for it.
“Losing control of parliament” is not some abstract notion; it means what it says. The governor-general doesn’t have to investigate the numbers in parliament – as Graham Young, for example, tells us she should have* – because parliament has the power to express its view directly. Until it does, the government is perfectly entitled to carry on as normal.
Milne is now quoted as saying that the Greens “would only guarantee their support until the end of September.” If that’s really her position, then it’s a complete guarantee, since the House of Representatives expires on 27 September: parliamentary support beyond that date is meaningless.
In the meantime, if Rudd meets parliament again on 20 August and government business gets done, that will demonstrate that he enjoys parliamentary support. If he loses a vote of confidence, he will have to either resign (most unlikely) or announce an election forthwith.
* I should say that I agree with Young that “There does have to be a better way of appointing the head of state than the one we have now” – but I don’t see that recent events do anything to help that case.


September 20, 2017
The business competition that worked
Even in a recession, Nigeria’s higher employment and innovation persisted.
Businesses in Lagos, Nigeria during 2010
By satanoid from Austin, TX, USA (IMG_0560) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
In developing countries, governments typically encourage entrepreneurship by funding business trainings, associations, and other costly programs. However, there is another strategy: giving money directly to the people who can use it.
It sounds risky. People might use the cash to build businesses that create jobs and promote innovation, but even the best entrepreneurs can fail. David McKenzie, Lead Economist at the World Bank’s Development Research Group, wanted an answer: “Governments spend all this money...and it’s not always clear that they get the intended effects. If you just give money to promising people, can you get a better outcome?”
In a new paper in the August issue of the American Economic Review, McKenzie found that funding entrepreneurs is highly effective. He analyzed the Youth Enterprise With Innovation in Nigeria (YouWiN!) business plan competition, which attracted over 24,000 applications throughout Nigeria.
Successful applicants were invited to attend a business training where they learned how to develop a detailed business plan. A panel then scored their plans and awarded the prizes. Nearly 1,200 entrepreneurs won, and each business received an average of $50,000.
If you just give money to promising people, can you get a better outcome?
Top-scoring applicants won national merit prizes, and the next-highest-scoring applicants won merit prizes by region. Out of the remaining pool, a randomly selected group of applicants (called experimental winners) were also awarded grants. This randomization created an experimental setting in which McKenzie could evaluate YouWiN!’s effect on employment and innovation.
Winners included a woman who upgraded her paint manufacturing equipment to compete with imported paints, a catfish farmer who wanted to expand his production, and an entrepreneur who starting a dry cleaning business in an area without dry cleaners.
Three years after applying, the experimental winners with new businesses were thirty-seven percentage points more likely to be operating a business than the people who were not awarded any money. Experimental winners with existing businesses were twenty percentage points more likely to have survived. The average employment of the new businesses doubled that of those who did not win a grant, and the existing firms boosted employment by eighty percent. On the whole, the competition created 7,027 jobs.
Because moving from an economy based on self-employment toward one characterized by firms with many workers is a signal of economic development, another goal of the competition was to boost the number of workers per company. Here again, the competition was successful. Experimental winners were about twenty percentage points more likely to have ten or more workers than their counterparts — a result that is especially significant in Nigeria, where 99.6 percent of companies have fewer than ten employees.
Plus, these businesses were introducing new products, processes, pricing methods, quality control systems, and other innovations. Like the dry cleaners, much of this innovation, although not new to the world, was still impactful because it was new to parts of Nigeria.
McKenzie thought he had finished his paper when a recession hit, jeopardizing the businesses’ success. So, he went back to collect another year of data. “The main results were there,” McKenzie says, “but what happens when the country changes dramatically in terms of its economic conditions?”
As it turns out, the businesses were resilient to the economic downturn.
The experimental winners with new companies were still 24.1 percentage points more likely to still be in operation and 11.1 percentage points more likely to have ten or more workers than non-winners. Experimental winners with existing companies were 9.5 percentage points more likely to have survived and 12.7 percentage points more likely to have ten or more workers.
McKenzie also noted that the impact was not coming from increased confidence, mentoring, business connections, or outside financing. The grant alone was enough for entrepreneurs to create these positive changes by enabling them to buy land, buildings, and equipment. And, the cost of the competition per job created was only $8,538, which is a bargain compared to similar initiatives.
Given the success of the competition and its lasting effects, McKenzie would like to see more places try it. “This could be implemented quickly and at a large scale when forces are in motion,” he says, describing how smoothly this project came together. “There’s no reason it shouldn’t be done more often.”
"Identifying and Spurring High-Growth Entrepreneurship: Experimental Evidence from a Business Plan Competition" appears in the August issue of the American Economic Review.


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The first step in reducing waste is to measure and track the amount, type of, and the source of the food and packaging waste. A food and packaging waste audit serves as the foundation for reduction efforts. Information on the waste type (i.e., bell peppers or chicken breasts) and reason for loss (i.e., over-preparation or improper cooking) is critical to make meaningful changes. The tools included here will help you conduct a food and packaging waste audit.
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What is Blood Oxygen Level?
Blood oxygen level is the amount of oxygen circulating in the blood. Red blood cells carry most of the oxygen, collecting it from the lungs and delivering it to all parts of the body. A person’s blood oxygen level is an indicator of how well the body distributes oxygen from the lungs to the cells, and it can be important for people’s health.
Ways in measuring your blood oxygen level
There are two ways in measuring your blood oxygen level, arterial blood gas and a pulse oximeter. An arterial blood gas test is a blood test. It measures your blood’s oxygen level. The test also checks the balance of acids and bases, known as the pH balance, in your blood. An ABG is very accurate, but it’s invasive while the pulse oximeter is a noninvasive device that estimates the amount of oxygen in your blood. It does so by sending infrared light into capillaries in your finger, toe, or earlobe. Then it measures how much light is reflected off the gases. A reading indicates what percentage of your blood is saturated, known as the SpO2 level. This test has a 2 percent error window. That means the reading may be as much as 2 percent higher or lower than your actual blood oxygen level. This test may be slightly less accurate, but it’s very easy for doctors to perform. So doctors rely on it for fast readings.
How blood becomes oxygenated
Understanding how blood is saturated with oxygen begins with the alveoli or air sacs. There are millions of these microscopic air sacs in the lungs. They serve an important function to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules to and from the bloodstream. When oxygen molecules pass through the alveoli, they bind to hemoglobin which is a substance in the blood. As the hemoglobin circulates, oxygen essentially hitches a ride and gets dropped off to the body’s tissues. With this, hemoglobin picks up carbon dioxide from the tissues and transports it back to the alveoli so the cycle can begin all over again. The level of oxygen in your blood depends on several key factors, how much oxygen you breathe in, how well the alveoli swap carbon dioxide for oxygen, how much hemoglobin is concentrated in red blood cells, and how well hemoglobin attracts oxygen. Most of the time, hemoglobin contains enough oxygen to meet the body’s needs. But some diseases reduce their ability to bind to oxygen.
Measuring your blood oxygen levels
Generally speaking, an oxygen saturation level below 95% is considered abnormal and anything below 90% is an emergency. When this happens, oxygen therapy is needed, sometimes urgently. The brain is the most susceptible organ to hypoxia, and brain cells can begin to die within five minutes of oxygen deprivation. Should hypoxia last longer, coma, seizures, and brain death can occur. It is very important to determine the cause of low oxygen saturation in order to correct the problem. With chronic conditions, such as COPD and asthma, the root cause is usually low air exchange in the lungs and alveoli. In addition to oxygen therapy, steroids or bronchodilators may be needed to open the airways.
The treatment options for low blood oxygen levels include supplemental oxygen. Doctors can administer oxygen therapy in an office, or they can prescribe or recommend the use of home oxygen therapy. A range of devices is available for delivering and monitoring home oxygen therapy, but some require a prescription. People can make lifestyle adjustments to reduce the symptoms of low oxygen levels, as well as improve their general health and quality of life. Eating a healthy and balanced diet can also help improve blood oxygen saturation. Since iron deficiency is one of the major causes of low oxygen saturation, eating foods that are rich in iron, such as meat, fish, kidney beans, lentils, and cashew nuts, can be helpful.
The information, including but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material contained on this website are for informational purposes only. The purpose of this website is to promote broad consumer understanding and knowledge of various health topics. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment before undertaking a new health care regimen, and never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website.


This week we’re looking at our 9th pillar of health; sleep.
Sound, uninterrupted, beautiful sleep is crucial when it comes to maintaining our overall wellbeing. In fact, chronic under sleeping has been linked to type two diabetes, weight gain, depression and even early death.
As I’ve said previously, health is the combination of small factors you do consistently. In the hierarchy of health, I personally believe sleep and stress are at the top of the pyramid yet frequently get overlooked.
We spend a lot of time factoring in nutrition and exercise, but often at the expense of sleep.
There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture – it is horrendous in all senses of the word and messes with your physical, hormonal and mental health.
Here are four things you need to know about sleep.
It allows our bodies to recover and regenerate. Research has shown that without this recovery and regeneration, a sleep deficit can contribute to major illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and obesity. It can trigger anxiety and depression. It can also lead to impaired mental performance, memory loss and can lower our immunity making us more prone to bugs like the flu.
What some people don’t know is that even short-term sleep deficit has negative consequences.
One night of poor sleep can temporarily leave you as insulin resistant as a diabetic!
This is problematic as when we are tired we often reach for energy stimulants to get us through; such as sugar or caffeine.
On the flip side, good sleep improves our mood, mental ability, memory, immunity and physical performance.
This means that both hormonal and neurochemical (mental) changes take place during your sleeping hours.
Most healthy adults will experience the following three stages of sleep:
To understand how and why sleep has such a huge impact on our health, let’s look at how our sleep cycle works and how it affects our body.
Our internal body clock, known as the circadian rhythm, is naturally regulated by light, dark and by changes in body functions every 24 hours. This includes our body temperature, hormones, airways and kidneys.
This means levels of hormones such as the thyroid hormone, thyroxine and our sleep hormone, melatonin, are different by day than by night. Interrupted sleep can throw our hormone balance off whack and create health problems. For example, thyroxine regulates our metabolism, if this is affected it can lead to weight gain and sugar cravings.
Melatonin is especially important when it comes to bedtime. This hormone changes our core body temperature and lets us know when we’re tired. Melatonin is produced when it gets dark. Production speeds up from about 10pm onwards – which is why we feel more tired the later it gets. As sunrise looms, melatonin drops off and cortisol production kicks in - this wakes us up.
In today’s modern environment we’re constantly exposed to the bright light from electronic devices. This unnatural light disrupts the earth’s day-night cycle that regulates our sleep cycle and is the reason so many of us struggle to drift off to sleep.
A good guideline to stick to is 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night. However there are lots of factors that play into this. In winter when the days are shorter we benefit from extra sleep while it is dark. The amount of optimum sleep also varies between individuals. Some people function perfectly well on six or seven hours sleep, while others need nine. Infants, of course, need a lot more sleep as it allows their wee bodies develop. Elite athletes also need extra snooze time to allow their bodies to fully recover.
Regardless of your ‘personal best’ sleep time, one thing is for certain: No-one can survive on minimal sleep, long-term.
Research also shows us that when the body gets less than six hours sleep it will affect memory, especially short-term memory. Early studies into dementia have pinpointed 6 hours as the minimum requirement for disease prevention.
We can try and fill our days with exercise, healthy meals, social interaction and a fulfilling work life but if we aren’t sleeping we can potentially undo all this good work.
Low energy and elevated cortisol levels will damage our metabolism.
Sleep is vital for optimal health and wellbeing. It affects so much more than just our energy. For this week’s challenge we want you to aim for 8 hours uninterrupted sleep each night. This means sleeping from 10pm-6am.
Be sure to check out our other blogs this week on a nourishing wind-down routine for bed and tips for improving your sleep if you struggle to fall asleep.
Be sure to check in to our Facebook page as we will be posting helpful tips and inspiration for this challenge as well as a useful weekly prize.
We’d also love to see all your changes. Share your pics with us on Instagram using #bepurebenwarren or by tagging us @bepurebenwarren
This blog is part of our 10 pillars of health series. Each week we will deliver content, recipes and challenges relevant to each pillar of health that we believe are the foundations for living a healthier, happier, more energised life. The idea being that if we focus on making progress in one area each week it will be easier, and more sustainable, over the long-term.
Enjoy reading this? Sign up to BePure's weekly newsletter to receive our FREE e-book of 9 nutritious recipes and helpful information to support and empower you on your own health and wellbeing journey. Sign up here.
We are all unique. Our genetics, our environments, our lifestyles, our emotional wellbeing. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to health and wellness or a single solution to your health concerns. If you want to learn more about your personal health story, Ben is touring to 30 cities around NZ presenting his new, 'What's Your Health Story?' seminar now. Learn more here.
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Where do the migrant workers in the Gulf originate from, and what sort of jobs do they do?
Most migrant labourers come to the Gulf from other countries in the Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia. Men primarily from South Asia (including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Afghanistan) work in the construction sector, supplying the manpower responsible for the Gulf State’s rapid real estate and infrastructure boom. Their labor has fueled iconic projects including the UAE’s Palm and Burj Dubai, as well as the day-to-day foundations of the Gulf’s burgeoning cites.
Additionally, tens of thousands of women from countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines, Ethiopia and Indonesia work as housemaids for local families. Others work in low-paid jobs in factories and as cleaners. In Saudi Arabia, migrants are regularly employed as drivers, since women are not legally allowed to drive.
Why do migrant workers come to the Gulf and the wider Middle East?
The oil boom has created tens of thousands of jobs for labourers, maids, cleaners and drivers to fill a gap in the labour market. The Gulf’s rapid economic growth has generated millions of jobs that entail the recruitment of workers from all around the world, even in the current global economic downturn. Non-oil rich countries such as Jordan and Lebanon also attract a large number of migrant workers because of the high demand for domestic service.
The overwhelming majority of these migrant workers come from developing countries, and travel to the Middle East with the aim of earning enough money to send back to their families back home. The money that they send back (remittances) represent an extremely important source of foreign exchange for many developing countries, accounting for a high share of GDP in countries such as the Philippines and Nepal (11% and 17% respectively).
What kind of human rights abuses do migrant workers face in the Gulf and other countries in the Middle East?
For many workers, working abroad is a risky business. On arrival, many employers confiscate migrant’s passports for ‘safekeeping,’ that effectively prevents workers from leaving the country without their permission.
Construction workers are often subjected to overcrowded and unhygienic living conditions, and corrupt recruitment brokers may take a cut from their wages. They often work in unsafe conditions and extremely high temperatures. It is no coincidence that one of the most common causes of death among perfectly healthy young men is cardiac arrest. Accidents on construction sites are also a frequent cause of death and serious injury.
Many women working as domestics are overworked and underpaid, and are often not allowed a day off. Some women are beaten by their employers, and in extreme cases, raped or tortured. Domestic workers are often excluded from the labor laws govern migrants in other sectors.
What is the Kafala system?
All countries in the Gulf have a sponsorship system known as the kafala system. This means that a worker’s right to work and remain in the host country is tied to the sponsorship of his or her employer. They are not free to switch jobs and can end up being deported if they attempt leave their employer. This law has particularly serious implications for women working as maids, who are legally required to reside with their employer. The kafala system makes it extremely difficult for domestic workers to leave in situations where they are underpaid or abused. It also binds construction and factory workers to their employers. Bahrain will be the first country in the region to scrap the kafala system, as of August 1st 2009, and there are signs that other countries may follow suit in the coming years.
What help is there available to migrant workers if they run into trouble?
The nearest embassy or consulate are migrant workers’ main resource for support since host governments typically avoid taking responsibility for their welfare. A number of embassies offer shelter to workers who are fleeing abusive employers, and can help with their repatriation. However, many migrant workers do not have diplomatic representation in their host country, and have no-one to turn to for help in emergencies (for example, Nepal does not maintain embassies in Kuwait or Bahrain). Some countries in the Gulf declare ‘amnesties’ every couple of years, when they offer to repatriate any workers that have become ‘stranded’ without their papers, homeless or illegally employed.
There are several NGOs which offer help to migrant workers in distress throughout the Middle East, including the Migrant Workers Protection Society in Bahrain. MWPS provides temporary shelter for workers and helps them to access diplomatic and legal help. However, governments in the Gulf states are generally suspicious of NGO activities, and local laws can make it difficult or even impossible for civil societies to address migrant issues.
Community organisations run by expats to help nationals of their own countries, such as overseas Filipinos, Indians and Pakistanis, also help to fill the gap left by migrant-sending and receiving countries. They often lobby both governments to procure rights for migrant workers, and function as support mechanisms for their respective citizens.
What can concerned individuals do to help?
BREAK THE SILENCE! The first stage of Migrant Rights’ work is to raise awareness about the abuse of migrant workers in the Gulf and Middle East, both inside and outside the region. Currently, this issue is rarely discussed publicly. The deafening silence endures social and political passiveness to the problems migrant face. We must come to terms with the fact that thousands of migrant workers are living in squalid conditions in labour camps outside city limits, or are languishing in the households of abusive employers with broken spirits, their hope of ever seeing their families again fading with each day that passes – and we must realize that our silence is complicit.
Everyone can contribute to the procurement of fair, just conditions for migrant workers. Simply writing to your local paper, MP, government or embassy helps to break down the taboo surrounding the discussion of migrant’s rights. If you blog, write something about migrant abuse. If you’re a journalist and are in a position to do so, write about the situation of migrant workers in the local papers. We are here to help you if you need comment or contacts, and we are just an email away. If you are a lawyer (or know one), partner with local migrant rights advocates and accept cases of abuse on a pro-bono basis.
We have a collective responsibility to these workers and must amplify their voices and their struggles before it’s too late.
Donate, submit an article, translate content, or help spread the word.Learn More
Find organizations supporting migrants in origin and destination countries.Learn More
Learn more about the systematic abuses migrants face throughout the Middle East and what you can do to help.Learn More


“FACT: All money owed by a government or person to any bank is nothing more than a legal fiction.It does not exist. In fact, the word credit comes from the Latin word credere which means “to believe.” Debt, interest, IOU’s promises and money are all literal and legal figments of the imagination. Without belief (or ‘confidence’), then the system will die.” ~S Cundill
Welcome to a new world. A world where money does not exist and everyone lives in a Utopian society.
But not quite yet.
It will take time and an evolution of consciousness to get there. And, it will require us to open our minds to some important and startling facts about this thing called ‘money.’
1. Money does not exist
Money does not exist in the world today. Gold, silver and copper have been replaced by the promise to pay money. As strange as this may sound, a “promise to pay” made by a bank to you is termed money because these promises serve in effect as money. In other words, our global monetary system is made up of things like IOU’s, bonds and guarantees, but there is no actual money.
2. The ‘money’ in your bank account does not legally belong to you.
In legal terms, the ‘money’ in your account belongs to the bank, not to you. This is horrifying, but it is a legal fact in most countries. Instead, we enjoy a kind of rental agreement that grants us temporary permission to trade with a bank’s IOU… for a fee of course.
If I work for Vodafone and Vodafone runs out of money, then they could pay me with “airtime” instead. Airtime is a commodity that could be traded in effect as money. This is precisely how the banks work. The ‘air’ gets passed around as an exchange for goods and services.


The waves on the ocean are born from the ocean and fall back into it only to rise up again and return once more. The waves of the ocean are like human emotions and thoughts. Those arise out of the full potential of relatedness and of wisdom and then, after a few seconds (a fleeting thought), a few minutes (a craving), or a few years (a relational situation), dissipate. In reality, they are returning to their source – the ocean of potential of relatedness and wisdom. – This metaphor represents the exacting, contracting, and self-focused processes of emotions and mind.
The expanse of the waters of the ocean are a metaphor for the open, expansive, non-personal emotions and thoughts that a person has. Billions of creatures live in the vastness of the ocean, and they can because the ocean offers them space and place. In a person, the natural capacity for an open mind or open-ended emotions (such as kindness, caring, enthusiasm or gratitude) provide space and place to others as well as to their thoughts, concerns, ideas, or joys.
The depth of the ocean is like the natural emptiness of the mind and the natural limitlessness of the power of compassion. If one is in the deep blue darkness of the ocean, there is no up or down, right or left. Emptiness is directionless. There is only the purity of the water as it is, and whatever passes through seems to appear out of and then disappear back into the emptiness. The human sense of self does the same. It arises to meet a moment; it appears into existence uncounted times a day. This sense of self then dissolves back into the potency of Presence that is the wholeness of identity, not predicated on you/me, have/have not, take and keep. The proof of this description and analogy is the change of demeanor, tone of voice, mood, and attitude that each of us proceeds through throughout the each day. The potentials are limitless, yet a person typically reinstates a select few masks and calls these, in their synthesis, myself.
Step 9 says “understand the primary three qualities and tendencies of awareness.” Doing so gives us solid tools to use in our sitting practice whereby to ripen and refine as well as sustain any state of meditation. Recognizing these same qualities through the day releases us from robotic living. Live from the range of Beingness, instead! Downloadable podcast: Entry: Like waves of the sea


Signaling for Help
- If you can't continue on your outing and have to wait for rescue, prepare help signals as soon as possible.
- The international emergency sign for distress is three of any signal:
- Three fires evenly spaced
- Three blasts on a whistle
- Three flashes with a mirror
- If you're near an open space, walk a large X in the grass, sand, or snow. If possible, outline it with rocks or branches. Do whatever you can to make it easier to see from a distance.


Start an asynchronous send.
template< typename ConstBufferSequence, typename WriteHandler> void async_send( const ConstBufferSequence & buffers, socket_base::message_flags flags, WriteHandler handler);
This function is used to asynchronously send data on the stream socket. The function call always returns immediately.
One or more data buffers to be sent on the socket. Although the buffers object may be copied as necessary, ownership of the underlying memory blocks is retained by the caller, which must guarantee that they remain valid until the handler is called.
Flags specifying how the send call is to be made.
The handler to be called when the send operation completes. Copies will be made of the handler as required. The function signature of the handler must be:
void handler( const boost::system::error_code& error, // Result of operation. std::size_t bytes_transferred // Number of bytes sent. );
Regardless of whether the asynchronous operation completes immediately
or not, the handler will not be invoked from within this function.
Invocation of the handler will be performed in a manner equivalent
The send operation may not transmit all of the data to the peer. Consider
async_write function if you
need to ensure that all data is written before the asynchronous operation
To send a single data buffer use the
buffer function as follows:
socket.async_send(boost::asio::buffer(data, size), 0, handler);
documentation for information on sending multiple buffers in one go,
and how to use it with arrays, boost::array or std::vector.


Newberry Art Tutorials
Some Guidelines For Great Compositons
In my workshops students have plenty of time to compose the work, the line drawing set up before painting begins. The following tutorials show techniques you can focus on as you map out the painting’s composition.
The lesson in three words: Make interesting corners. In this tutorial I show how some of greatest artists of composition, Vermeer, Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Diebenkorn, and Velazquez make fascinating shapes and lighting in the corners. It is a very simple way to get the most out of your composition without having to remember a million rules!
Though this tutorial is not strictly about composition it will be helpful to see how one can organize abstract shapes in a compositional way. Using Rembrandt, Kline, and Monet I show how they group things into broader abstract shapes. This is an extremely powerful technique that gives the viewer an epic journey through the big picture.
A very surreal artist’s perspective but indispensable to give life to your painting is accenting the negative spaces of things. I go into detail showing how Monet, Rembrandt, Vermeer, myself, and William Wray manipulate negative space to create a sense of movement in the painting. If you can take a few seconds, while composing, to check the negative spaces it will add tremendously to making a powerful painting.
This is a very helpful article on how Picasso and Hefferlin arrange their compositions, and how Melissa manages to do so in a realistic way.
When you are taking a workshop with me you don’t have to hold all this info in your head, that is my job, but it is good to read up on these tutorials. I hope you enjoy them and I guarantee you that adding them to your technique will feel great and raise your art up a few levels.
For more about studying with me please introduce yourself and your work via email, mtnewberry at gmail dot com.
Effortless Complexity and Boundless Imagination
Decades ago, Melissa Hefferlin told me that growing up, whenever she did something wrong, her scientist dad would sit her down with paper and pen to make columns of pros, cons, and alternatives to her bad behavior. She dreaded these episodes (apparently they took place fairly often). But they served her artistic mind very well, especially in composition.
Challenge to Picasso and Vermeer
Art is very complex with many elements such as color, light, form, emotion, imagination, subject, etc. But composition is the granddaddy of fine art. Composition in painting and drawing is the arrangement of contours on a flat surface. Two important parts of it are groupings and the balance of the entire work. To try to create something new in composition is a daunting task and throws down a challenge to Vermeer and Picasso. It seems that Melissa is unfazed by the project.
In full disclosure, I mentored Melissa in the early 1990s, but I can’t claim any credit for her brilliance since then.
In Higher Hare, my photoshop markups below reveal the play of a triangular pattern in the cloth, table, and part of the wall. When an artist is composing they have some flexibility to accent patterns they see or sense, Melissa takes full advantage of utilizing these angles. Another artist might not see them and paint only what he/she literally sees, but that doesn’t create these almost music-like beats.Continue reading “Pushing the Composition Envelope, Melissa Hefferlin Still Lifes”
Newberry Art Tutorials
The Problem: A Bright Sky
In real life the daylight sky is bright, much brighter than the landscape’s trees, vegetation, mountains, and water. Think of it as a large lamp. But when you paint a landscape truthfully the effect backfires, the sky will be bright but the earth part will be dull and muddy. Light on the green trees, stone buildings, and red flowers can’t complete with the sky’s light. Even though you are seeing a sun filled landscape, your painting won’t feel that way, but you’ll feel disappointed with your skills.
Newberry Art Tutorials
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
With this tutorial I will show how to shape negative space by warping it, thereby creating a believable 3-D image on a 2-D surface.
Painting is made up of positive forms and negative spaces. Think of planets and the empty space between them. In this Rembrandt, one example of negative space is the dark triangular space between the bust, the back edge of the table, and the folds of the man’s sleeve.Continue reading “True Lies: Warp Negative Space”


Amanita muscaria, commonly known as the fly agaric, is a poisonous and psychoactive basidiomycete fungus, one of many in the genus Amanita. Native throughout the temperate and boreal regions of the Northern Hemisphere, Amanita muscaria has been unintentionally introduced to many countries in the southern hemisphere, generally as a symbiont with pine plantations, and is now a true cosmopolitan species. The quintessential toadstool, it is a large white-gilled, white-spotted, usually deep red mushroom, one of the most recognizable and widely encountered in popular culture. Although it is generally considered poisonous, deaths from its consumption are extremely rare, and it is eaten as a food in parts of Europe, Asia, and North America after parboiling. Amanita muscaria is noted for itshallucinogenic properties, with its main psychoactive constituent being the compound muscimol. It was used as an intoxicant and entheogen by the peoples of Siberia and has a religious significance in these cultures. There has been much speculation on traditional use of this mushroom as an intoxicant in places other than Siberia; however, such traditions are far less well documented.


About 100 University of Toledo students walked four miles Saturday around the main campus with gallon jugs of water in hand to raise awareness of the lack of access to drinkable water in underdeveloped countries and to raise money for a water purification unit for Haiti.
"The walk is four miles long because we want people to get a feel for how far someone in a developing country has to walk to get water," said Antonia Chavez, 19, a UT sophomore and the director of the Walk 4 Water event. "You can prevent suffering from countries around the globe."
Ms. Chavez coordinated the event, timed to coincide with Earth Day, that kicked off about 1 p.m. at UT's Centennial Mall, where participants assembled in front of a working electric water purification unit. Organizers hoped to sell at least enough $10 T-shirts to raise the $750 that such a purification unit costs, she said.
Drops of water trickled from the purifier as event participants bought the shirts and checked out the unit. Others picked up the plastic one-gallon water jugs or gathered brochures from Clean Water for the World, a nonprofit organization in Kalamazoo, Mich., whose representatives spoke with event volunteers over a deafening beat of rap music blaring from loudspeakers.
The brochures quoted World Health Organization estimates that one child death occurs worldwide every 15 seconds from water-related disease, including 1.8 million annual deaths from diarrhea. For children younger than 5, water-related diseases are the leading cause of death. At any given time, half the world's hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from water-related disease.
"I just care about people," Kelly Quarando, 21, a UT senior majoring in biology, said to explain her participation. "It's really unfortunate that people around the world don't have access to clean drinking water."
THE BLADE/JETTA FRASER Enlarge | Buy This Photo
The event's inspiration came from Western Michigan University, where such events began, Ms. Chavez said.
Chuck Dombrowski, 68, a retired Cleveland businessman who is a Clean Water for the World board member, said the first walk was held there three years ago and has become an annual event. The group seeks to provide simple, adaptable water purification systems, at no charge, to communities without access to drinkable water, the group's mission statement says.
The unit on display was destined for Haiti, Ms. Chavez said. Organizers chose the country to illustrate the need for potable water in underdeveloped countries, and photos and statistics were displayed on stands alongside the purification unit.
Just one such unit can supply clean drinking water to a village of 300 families, according to event organizers.
"Here [in the United States], we use 80 to 100 gallons of water each day," said Dr. Celia Regimbal, assistant professor in UT's department of early childhood, physical, and special education and the faculty adviser for the event. "In these third-world countries, they only use about 5 gallons per day. This event supports a noble cause."
The 90-minute event was hosted by UT's Christian Service Program and the Catholic Student Association.
Contact Mike Sigov at: firstname.lastname@example.org or 419-724-6089.


Derbyshire county is located in the East Midlands of England. It boasts of magnificent views and an amazing mix of landscapes and landforms. You have rugged mountains and hills, rolling farmlands, and underground caverns. You will even find moors, woodlands, and lakelands within the area. All of these make for a beautiful background for the busy towns and picturesque villages that still has the stone cottages of past generations.
About Derbyshire County
If you are looking for beautiful sceneries and magnificent views, you should head out to the county of Derbyshire. A big part of the Peak District National Park is within the area of Derbyshire county. Not only that, you will find the southern part of the Pennine range along the northern border of Derbyshire. Part of the National Forest also lies within the borders of this county.
Derbyshire is surrounded (in clockwise order) by the Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire, and Cheshire.
The highest point of the county is the Kinder Scout and the lowest point is the Trent Meadows that marks where the River Trent leaves the county. Running from north to south of the river is the River Derwent – which is the longest to be found in the area at 66 miles. This river and the River Dove join the River Trent towards the south of the county.
The whole of Derbyshire county is composed of 9 districts and 30 towns with a range of 10,000 to 100,000 residents.
About this website
This website will be dedicated to valuable information that you will need when you visit the county of Derbyshire. We will be giving you some facts about the history of this county and how it came to be what it is today.
There will also be an article that will focus on the city of Derby. This is the largest city in this county. We will give you tips on what you can do when you visit and the best places and activities to include in your itinerary. We will provide a special article for various entertainment options like the Genting Club and the sports activities in the county.
There are other cities that will be discussed on this website so you will know the options that you have in case you visit Derbyshire county. Among the other information that will be shared will include the schools that children usually go to within the county.


By Doug Ward
PALO ALTO, Calif. – Nearly all college faculty members want to teach well but few have both the pedagogical background to make their classes more student-centered and the incentive to do so, the Nobel laureate Carl Wieman said Monday.
Wieman, a physics professor at Stanford, has been a leader in promoting effective teaching practices in the sciences, primarily through his Science Education Initiative. He spoke Monday at a meeting of the Bay View Alliance, a consortium of North American research universities working toward much the same goal.
The Science Education Initiative has led to the transformation of dozens of courses at the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado, and Wieman drew on those experiences as he explained some of the successes and failures of his efforts.
The idea of “transformation” is elastic, but it generally means moving instructors and courses toward student-centered, evidence-based teaching practices that involve clear, measurable course goals, and effective means of assessment and reflection. Wieman said his work had also led to more interaction in the classroom as faculty members moved away from lecture; inspired more meaningful discussions of teaching within departments, and generated demands from students to change more courses.
“The dominant barrier to change is the incentive system,” Wieman said, adding that most faculty see anything that takes away from research time as penalizing their ability to succeed.
He and his colleagues countered that barrier primarily with what Wieman called an “artificial incentive system.” This involved spending $1 million to $2 million per department in two forms:
- Department-centered teaching grants. These were grants to individual faculty members to use for summer salaries, to buy out classes, to hire research and teaching assistants, and to buy materials for class development.
- Education specialists. These were mostly post-doctoral teaching fellows who had Ph.D.s in STEM disciplines and were willing to learn effective teaching practices. The initiative found almost no one who came in with the necessary expertise, so it created workshops to help the specialists learn about effective teaching. The specialists, in turn, provided guidance to faculty members, helped create course materials, and provided non-threatening coaching. That combination of disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge was critical in gaining the trust of faculty members and making the process work, Wieman said.
Wieman has found success with his model, but he has also run into barriers. For instance, all the faculty members in the targeted departments he worked with had the opportunity to change their approach to teaching, but many didn’t. Some tenure-track faculty members backed out because they said they were afraid that time spent on teaching would detract from their research and, ultimately, their ability to gain tenure. Others started but eventually gave up once they were left on their own. Math faculty were especially resistant to change, and only a small percentage joined the course redesign efforts.
Other snippets from Monday’s discussions with Wieman:
- Supportive chairs and deans are among the most important factors in effecting change, and leaders who wouldn’t support the initiative all but scuttled some departmental efforts.
- Faculty members who are considered “star” teachers in their departments are among the most resistant to change. These are often charismatic instructors who are popular among students and receive high teaching evaluations and even teaching awards as they give engaging performances in lecture but focus little on student learning. This group saw no reason to change and became passive resistors, Wieman said.
- One of the most common pitfalls in course redesign, he said, is a focus on what to teach rather than how to teach.
- Another problem is overreliance on student evaluations to gauge faculty effectiveness, something he elaborates on in an article in Change magazine. These evaluations aren’t related to learning or to best practices, he said, and evaluations tend to go down when faculty move toward new techniques.
One of Wieman’s initial goals was to see whether an infusion of money into the teaching process would lead to use of more effective teaching practices and to long-term change in department teaching cultures. In the short term, the answer is yes, but certainly not universally. It’s too early to tell whether the efforts will lead to long-term change, he said.
One thing that Wieman avoided addressing was the lack of effort in changing the incentive system, which he said was the largest barrier to change. That lack of an incentive system came up again and again during discussions at BVA meetings this week. There was broad agreement that universities must reward high-quality teaching in the promotion and tenure system to improve student learning, reduce failure rates, improve graduation rates, and to improve their long-term credibility and viability.
That won’t be easy, but like Wieman, the BVA has achieved meaningful steps in remaking courses, attracting faculty to student-centered practices, helping show meaningful ways of using class time, reducing failure rates in courses, and spreading a culture that values high-quality, innovative teaching.
As Wieman said, most faculty do see the value of high-quality teaching, and those who have shifted toward active learning and building teaching expertise within departments have found teaching much more personally satisfying, Wieman said.
“That’s the thing that keeps faculty members doing this,” he said.
KU continues to expand course transformation
KU began its own course transformation project in 2013 with a two-prong approach: creation of program for post-doctoral teaching fellows to help departments transform large undergraduate courses, and development of the C21 Course Redesign Consortium. Bob Goldstein, associate dean for the natural sciences and mathematics, was instrumental in development of the teaching fellows program after seeing the influence Wieman’s program had at the University of British Columbia.
But KU is testing an approach that requires a much smaller “artificial incentive system” (i.e., funds, and teaching specialists) than the UBC and CU programs, by building community around course transformation to amplify the catalyzing effects of the teaching specialists. To this end, Andrea Greenhoot, now CTE’s director, began C21, which has helped create a community among faculty and staff members, GTAs, and post-doctoral teaching fellows working to expand and improve student-centered teaching. The teaching fellows program, C21, and CTE’s Best Practices Institute have led to the transformation of dozens of courses at the university.
Greenhoot followed up on those successes in creating a seven-university network aimed at expanding the adoption of empirically validated teaching practices. That project, known as Transforming Education, Stimulating Teaching and Learning Excellence, or TRESTLE , received a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Each campus will hire teaching specialists to work with faculty members on transforming courses and build a community to share information across campuses. The project builds on the lessons learned in the Wieman Science Education Initiative but tests a model that could more feasibly promote sustained change at a wide range of institutions.
Virtual workshops on campus racism
The Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania is conducting a series of virtual sessions called Responding to Racism on College and University Campuses.
Two of the sessions have already taken place, but the next one, on Monday, looks especially relevant to faculty members. It is called “Race-Consciousness in Classrooms and Curricula: Strategies for College Faculty.”
Each session costs $25 and requires pre-registration.
Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.


Fennel (Mill. over doorways on Midsummer’s Eve to protect the household from evil spirits. Recently because of estragole carcinogenicity fennel has been charged to be dangerous for humans especially if used as decoction for babies. But this allegation do not consider the remedy is prepared like a matrix of substances and recent researches confirm that real estragole is definitely inactivated by many compound contained in the Ispinesib decoction. 1 Intro Fennel (Mill.) belongs to the family of Apiaceae and is an annual biennial or perennial herbaceous flower depending on the variety which grows in good soils from sunlit mild climatic areas and is a well-known aromatic flower species. offers two commercially important fennel types: bitter fennel Mill. subsp. vulgaresubsp. dulce.Several fennel parts are edible (bulbs leaves stalks and fruits). Mature fruit (commonly known as seeds) and essential oil of fennel are used as flavoring providers in food products such as liqueurs breads cheese and an ingredient of makeup products and pharmaceutical products. Moreover fennel infusions are the classical decoction for Ispinesib nursing babies to prevent flatulence and colic spasms [1-4]. Traditionally in Europe and Mediterranean areas fennel is used as antispasmodic diuretic anti-inflammatory analgesic secretomotor secretolytic galactagogue vision lotion and antioxidant remedy and integrator. It is therefore of intense importance the effectiveness quality and most of all toxicology of fennel centered remedies and preparations is assessed namely when estragole (Number 1) one of its constituents has been notoriously declared to be a carcinogen compound . Number 1 Estragole structure. The Western Food Safety Expert (EFSA) suggested the so-called Margin of Exposure (MOE) to be used to set priorities in risk management with respect to compounds that are both genotoxic and carcinogenic . MOE is definitely defined as the percentage between the lower confidence limit of the benchmark dose that CHK2 gives 10% extra malignancy incidence (BMDL10) and the estimated daily intake (EDI) for estragole is definitely estimated from different food sources 0.07?mg/kg bw/day time . The MOE for real estragole amounts to 129-471 and relating to EFSA a MOE lower than 10.000 can be considered a priority for human risk [6 8 We contend that study of estragole as a single compound can be misleading and misrepresents the activity of this compound when present in the form of a complex herbal draw out. This brings into query the validity of studies of real compoudns that are taken outside of the context of the normal food matrix which should serve as the benchmark for testing levels in human being Ispinesib carcinogenicity studies. 2 Chemical Constituents of Fennel According to the 2nd release of the Western Pharmacopoeia monograph nice fennel contains not less than 2.0%?v/m of essential oil calculated with reference to the anhydrous drug. The essential oil is constituted primarily by anethole (80%) (a compound with intended anticancer properties) it contains not more than 10% estragole and not more than 7.5% fenchone . Additional minor constituents may be present including: R-pinene limonene var. and var. and cultivar: and cultivars respectively while it accounted for only 5% in the cultivar. Estragole was the major compound in the oil of the cultivar having a concentration of 58% compared to 12% and 6% in the oils of and cultivars respectively . The essential oils of two of the fennel cultivars Ispinesib that is and cultivar . The three oils contain related concentrations of all other major compounds excluding trans-anethole and estragole suggesting that antioxidant activity is mostly related to the concentration of trans-anethole . One of the major differences between the chemical structure of estragole and anethole is the double bond of the propenyl part chain: in anethole is definitely conjugated with the aromatic ring while in estragole it is nonconjugated . 3 Estragole Carcinogenicity incubations with rat hepatocytes Ispinesib exposed to 1′-hydroxyestragole . The PBD model therefore acquired was validated by experimental data on DNA adducts formation in the liver of mice exposed to estragole since data from rat were not available ..