TOKYO — At a high school graduation ceremony in Japan's Hiroshima Prefecture, each student received a diploma and then walked over to a small humanoid robot, paused, and bowed deeply. The robot waved its small arms in response. It was the embodied presence of Takanobu Nagaoka, a 55-year-old teacher at the school who was diagnosed with ALS two years ago. Unable to travel due to deteriorating motor skills, he "attended" the event as OriHime, a simple tabletop droid with a camera, microphone and speaker. It's the creation of Tokyo start-up Ory Laboratory and one of a new breed of machines known as "avatar robots" that could change the way people interact and work.
"OriHime can be used not only by hospitalized people but students who refuse to go to school and even mothers who cannot go to work because they're taking care of kids," says Kentaro Yoshifuji, CEO of Ory, which has rented out about 260 units. "This technology could help redistribute manpower so the right person can work in the right place in a more smooth fashion."
Aside from giving disabled people a new level of empowerment, avatar robots present myriad possibilities for work with concomitant economic benefits. If you're a doctor, for instance, you could log into a robot in Antarctica or on a space station to tend to a critically ill person. Robots as a whole are beneficial for economies. According to a 2017 study by the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research, robotics investments have "contributed around 10 percent of GDP per capita growth in OECD countries from 1993 to 2016" and offer "better long-run value for money than investments in financial services, real estate or transportation."
Avatar robots are still experimental, but if the market for collaborative robots is any indication, there could be significant demand. Also known as cobots, collaborative robots are covered with soft materials and can work alongside people in assembly and other jobs. The market for cobots is expected to grow to $12 billion by 2025, according to Barclays Equity Research. Remote operation of robots for work outside the factory, however, is already well established. Intuitive Surgical, for instance, has sold over 4,200 of its da Vinci surgical robots, which reproduce a surgeon's hand motions through small incisions in a patient's body during operations such as hysterectomies; benefits may include shorter recoveries.
Many workers around the world may be concerned about losing their jobs to automation, but the risk varies from country to country. A recent OECD study estimates that 33 percent of jobs in Slovakia are "highly automatable", but only 6 percent in Norway, though the authors caution that "the actual risk of automation is subject to significant variation." Nonetheless, unions are protesting encroaching machines. Earlier this year, Unifor, Canada's largest private-sector union, decried a decision by Canadian energy company Suncor to introduce driverless ore-hauling trucks in the Alberta oil sands; the move could replace hundreds of heavy machinery operators.
Japan has embraced automation in the factory and elsewhere. It has long held a leading position in the development of humanoid robots, with machines like Honda's Asimo exhibiting remarkable abilities in locomotion and dexterity. It's now integrating that technology with user interfaces to project human abilities into mobile machines.
Late last year, Toyota Motor unveiled a new humanoid robot and master-slave control device that it describes as the world's first system that allows operators to intuitively control the robot's entire body. Weighing 75 kg (165 pounds), and standing 154 cm (5 feet) tall, the T-HR3 has 32 joints, each equipped with a new type of torque sensor that has a high degree of sensitivity, giving the robot flexibility, balance and the ability to recover from collisions.
During a demonstration at the iRex 2017 robot trade show in Tokyo, held in November and December 2017, the T-HR3 went through some pre-programmed and live-controlled motions. It balanced on one foot and then pivoted into a Tai chi-style pose. It then synchronized with its Master Maneuvering System, which is basically a seat for a human operator with arm sensors for motion tracking. It works with a head-mounted display and sensor glove to convey a sense of sight and touch. During the demo, the robot immediately reproduced all of the operator's movements, deftly opening and closing its fingers, manipulating plastic blocks and grasping a rubber ball.
The T-HR3 is the automaker's third humanoid platform, following a trumpet-playing robot in 2005 and a violinist droid in 2010. While those machines showcased manual dexterity, Toyota is imagining more practical uses for the T-HR3, including everything from childcare to work in construction, disasters and outer space, that would give robots human-like motor skills while keeping people out of harm's way.
"In the near future, robots will start doing simple household chores and nursing care work, allowing people to make effective use of their time," says Tomohisa Moridaira, a manager in Toyota's Partner Robot Division. "In contrast to industrial robots that operate in isolated environments, we want to create robots that can coexist safely with people. I think T-HR3 will evolve into a more robust, but lightweight robot that is not easily broken."
Toyota built the T-HR3 as partly as a showcase for its torque sensors, but one Japanese start-up is focused purely on the idea of avatar robots. Telexistence Inc. envisions a future in which people can log onto ubiquitous humanoid robots. The idea is the brainchild of Susumu Tachi, an emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo. In 1980, he imagined being virtually embodied in a robot that could be anywhere in the world. He called the concept "telexistence," and built a series of prototype robots named TELESAR (for Telexistence Surrogate Anthropomorphic Robot).
Telesar V, one of the latest prototypes, transmits tactile, vibration and thermal sensations to the operator via a haptic glove, so he or she can "feel" objects the robot is handling, such as marbles being poured into a cup. The technology goes beyond the many telepresence robots that have been because it allows operators to affect the world remotely rather than just being present in a faraway place.
Tachi also believes it will be an important tool for the Japanese workforce as it struggles with dwindling manpower and an aging population. For instance, convenience stores or factories could be staffed by humanoid robots that are controlled around the clock by workers in different countries and time zones. Companies could benefit by hiring operators in developing countries, saving on wages.
"If a telexistence society that can delegate physical functions is realized,
the relationship between people and industry and the nature of society would fundamentally change," says Tachi. "No matter where a factory is located, workers would be assembled from the entire country or the entire world, so the conditions for locating factories will see revolutionary changes compared to the past, and population concentration in metropolitan areas can be avoided."
Tachi has also done research at Japan's Keio University, where Takahiro Nozaki, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology, has been working with the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to develop an avatar robot that can transmit audio, imagery, motion and haptic sensations to remote users in real time with its General Purpose Arm (GPA). Nozaki has launched a company called Motion Lib to commercialize haptics technology and is working with dozens of companies to undertake proof of concept projects.
"We have succeeded in developing a new technology called Real-Haptics," says Nozaki. "Human motion data acquired through operations can be stored and reproduced. Stored motions can be reused anytime, anywhere. We call the concept the "Internet of Actions." It's like a motion version of YouTube."
Even Japan's largest air carrier is pushing avatars. All Nippon Airlines (ANA) partnered with XPrize to launch a $10 million award aimed at developing multipurpose avatar robots that will "more rapidly and efficiently distribute skill and hands-on expertise to distant geographic locations where they are needed, bridging the gap between distance, time and cultures," Xprize founder Peter Diamandis says on the contest website. Potential applications include caregiving and disaster relief operations. Japan's space agency, major Japanese telecoms, and local governments are backing the contest, which will involve competitions in 2020 and 2021. In collaboration with ANA, Oita Prefecture in southern Japan will be an avatar testing ground, with trials of avatar robot fishing, agriculture and travel in the works.
"When email and video conferencing were first introduced into the market, there was a concern in the aviation industry that it would negatively impact air demand, especially business demand. However, we now know they helped more people around the world meet, collaborate, and innovate which has sparked new businesses and new needs and desires to travel," says Yuko Yoshimura, a spokeswoman for ANA.
"We believe that there is no technology that can replace real human presence. However, Avatars will allow the world to physically collaborate and share experiences at an unprecedented level which we believe will help the world come closer than ever."


A brief (?) history of photography and photojournalism, a bit on methods, and the current state of things.
The story of photojournalism began with the invention of photography. Thomas Wedgwood’s camera obscura was taking faint (and very shadowy) pictures in 1800, but the images deteriorated. French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce continued Wedgwood’s work, and took what’s considered the first photograph by coating a pewter plate with a bitumen solution and placing the plate into a camera that was looking out from an upstairs window of his house at Le Gras.
After an exposure of at least eight hours (some say it may have been days), the plate was washed with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum, dissolving away the parts of the bitumen that had not been hardened by light. It renders a view of the outbuildings, courtyard, trees, and landscape as seen from that upstairs window.
Now that they’d figured out that whole permanence thing, Niépce went into partnership with Louis Daguerre, but he died of a stroke before they could further perfect the process. Daguerre was interested in using silver based solutions, working with the chemical interaction that produced silver iodide, but the long exposure time made the process useless. Then Daguerre discovered a practically invisible latent image left on a plate after a much short exposure could be “developed” by mercury fumes. A strong solution of common salt “fixed” the image by removing the remaining silver iodide. The daguerreotype was born!
Photography is one of the few technologies that was immediately shared as a “gift to the world” by the French government who bought the technology for a pension for Daguerre and Niépce’s son. Paper prints were soon developed as well as glass, and photographers began experimenting with lighting and retouching. People even began some early photoshopping, taking portraits where the subject appeared twice in different clothes.
As soon as cameras were manufacturable, a strange kind of photojournalism began, with photographers staging events, the way painters staged paintings. Take the case of Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner from The Washington Post:
Thirty years earlier, when Gardner and his assistants Timothy O’Sullivan and James F. Gibson reached Gettysburg shortly after the terrible battle there, most of the dead soldiers were either buried or decomposing.
So when the photographers spotted the intact corpse of a young Confederate near a part of the battlefield called the Devil’s Den, they took full advantage. After shooting photos of the soldier where he had fallen, they appear to have put his body on a blanket, and lugged it to a more photogenic location, according to historian William A. Frassanito.
The photographers placed the soldier against the backdrop of a stone fortification, probably turned his head toward the camera, and leaned a rifle beside him for maximum effect.
The resulting picture, one of the war’s most memorable, was largely accepted at face value until Frassanito, in his groundbreaking 1975 study “Gettysburg: A Journey in Time,” unearthed what probably happened.
In 1888, Kodak developed photographic film that replaced the heavy plates and dangerous chemicals photography was known for. In 1901, they released the Kodak Brownie, and amateur photography took off, leaving the developing process to the Kodak company and their affiliates. Point and click photography was here.
Capturing War in Real Time
The Leica camera, the first camera to offer both portability and professional quality, effectively created the field of photojournalism as we know it today, the beautiful candid shots that make “time stand still,” to quote a certain play.
Just as the Leica originated in Germany, so did the idea of photo magazines. A photographer and editor collaborated together to produce a story using photographs and captioned text (called “cutlines.”) A theme setting photo would be printed larger and other photos would follow. Cutline text was spare, orienting the reader but focusing on the power of the visual. Photos were selected from the photographer’s “contact sheets,” a grouping of tiny photos all on one page that the editor examined with a magnifier.
The rise of Hitler led to the persecution of many photographers and photo editors and many fled to the United States, just in time for magnate Henry Luce to conceive of his weekly photo magazine, Life, which launched in 1936. Life‘s coverage of World War II is still iconic today, but its first feature was more domestic, a study of the building of a dam by Margaret Bourke-White. I could pick one photo but the whole thing’s really breathtaking. Click and see!
W. Eugene Smith and Robert Capa were Life‘s go to war correspondents, and both men paid heavy prices for their beautiful pictures. Smith was injured on assignment in Japan and Capa was died after stepping on a landmine during the First Indochina War.
On the domestic side, the Farmer’s Security Administration hired photographers to survey their work during the Great Depression, including Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange, who took the iconic “Migrant Mother” image you see on the cover of so many copies of Grapes of Wrath. You can read more about their work here at the Library of Congress site.
Rise and Decline
The “Golden Age” of photojournalism is often said to last between 1935 to 1975. This was the era of the glossy spread and photomagazine, before “legacy media” (newspapers and magazines) had been overtaken by the more populist new media. By the 1980s, photo spreads were replaced by articles that used photos, text, graphs, and other drawings to tell their stories. (Life suspended publication in 1972, returned in 1978 as a monthly, and went out of business in 2001. Its sister magazine, Time, is still running, but when you look in its pages you see a lot more than photographs. National Geographic is in similar straits.)
The photospread has been reborn as the online photo gallery, run by the web arms of periodicals like The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time. While shooting a high quality color image costs virtually nothing in the age of digital photography, printing said image is more expensive than ever in an era where print media is being rapidly outpaced by its competitors.
Today, the average salary for a successful photojournalist is usually between just under $30,000 and $43,000. The profession was ranked as one of the most stressful jobs in America by the CNBC. Photogs can work for publications as correspondents, either as freelancers or embedded with the military with the proper credentials, or they can sell their photos to stock agencies like Getty Images after the fact.
This topic will eventually get a full page but I must leave you with this quote from noted photographer Susan Sontag in her book On Photography:
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
Check out this amazing feature from Time Magazine of photojournalists’ most moving pictures of the Iraq War here. And though I don’t usually find myself linking to Buzzfeed for research purposes, this feature with war photogs telling how they got their shots is a great primer. This brief blog post on how to write a cutline is an interesting view behind the scenes.


The kilogram or kilogramme (symbol: kg) is the SI base unit of mass. It is defined as being equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.
Please select weight unit to convert Kilograms to.
To convert Kilograms to other units just select an other weight unit from the list or your can search from the search form above.
Follow us on Google+ +Conversion-metricOrg.


A New Book For Kids of All Ages!
Written and illustrated by young Maker Movement sensation “Super-Awesome” Sylvia, Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Project Book: Super-Simple Arduino shares the power of Arduino microcontroller programming with learners of all ages through exciting engineering projects. Sylvia’s whimsical graphics and clever explanations make powerful STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) concepts accessible and fun.
Super-Awesome Sylvia is a kid who loves making, tinkering, and art. Her online video series, Super-Awesome Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show, has millions of views. In this super fun book, Sylvia teaches kids to understand Arduino microcontroller programming by inventing an adjustable strobe and two digital musical instruments you can play! Along the way, they will learn a lot about electronics, coding, science, and engineering.
- Buy the book at Amazon
- More about “Super-Awesome” Sylvia
- Code and project information
- Buy the companion hardware kit
- For bulk order or reseller information
Title: Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Project Book (Volume 2): Super-Simple Arduino
Author and Illustrator: Sylvia “Super-Awesome” Todd
Publisher: Constructing Modern Knowledge Press
BISAC: Juvenile Nonfiction / Technology / Electricity & Electronics
Full color inside
Price: $14.95 US (MSRP)
Availability: Worldwide at Amazon.com


Burning off carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to provide cheap electricity may have affected the climate, but the benefits of a carbonized economy far outweigh the costs, according to a new study.
The pro-coal American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) released a study showing that the benefits of carbonized fuel, like coal, to society are 50 to 500 times greater than the costs. Over the past two-and-a-half centuries increased fossil fuel energy production has helped more than double global life expectancy and increase global incomes 11-fold.
The study was released as a rebuttal to the Obama administration’s social cost of carbon estimate, which was quietly updated last year. The Federal Interagency Working Group (IWG) said the social cost of carbon (SCC) about $36 per ton.
Fossil fuels are the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., with coal-fired power plants being a major contributor. The $36 per ton SCC estimate will be used by regulatory agencies to justify more costly regulations on the coal industry, according to ACCCE.
“Even the most conservative estimates peg the social benefit of carbon-based fuels as 50 times greater than its supposed social cost,” said Dr. Roger Bezdek, the study’s lead author. “And the benefits are actual fact; founded on more than two centuries of empirical data, not theoretical summaries based on questionable assumptions, dubious forecasts, and flawed models.”
The Obama administration is making a concerted effort to steer the U.S. away from coal power since it emits much more carbon than other fuel sources, like natural gas or renewables. The Environmental Protection Agency proposed a rule to ban the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless they use costly, unproven emissions control technology. (RELATED: UN: Global prosperity is causing global warming)
“If this Administration attempts to calculate the future costs of carbon, it’s imperative that policymakers also consider the actual and potential benefits of our carbon-based economy,” said ACCCE president Mike Duncan. “Fossil-based energy has powered three industrial revolutions, including today’s technology revolution. It has increased life expectancy, improved the quality of life, supported the cause of liberty, and brought hope to every civilization that has used it.”
Coal is the leading source of electricity in the world and international efforts to ban coal in the name of fighting global warming would harms the world’s poor. Coal power, like other fossil fuels, has given billions of people cheap electricity which allow factories to produce lots of goods, hospitals to keep the lights on and for people to heat their homes in the winter. As economies grow they tend to use more energy, meaning that government efforts to supplant coal and other fossil fuels with renewable energy could harm economic growth.
Environmentalists, however, see coal power as a major driver of global warming. U.S. activists argue that coal power is on the wane and the government should use this opportunity to make sure coal plants are taken offline.
“Coal-fired generation is getting increasingly expensive compared with cleaner power sources,” said Jeff Deyette, assistant director of energy research at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This shift in economics is a historic opportunity to modernize our electric sector and gain the economic, health and climate benefits that come with it.”
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected]


In my December diary I posed the following brain-teaser.
I have a circular disk, radius one unit. I pick two points at random on the disk and measure the distance d between them. I repeat this process some large number of times. What's the average value of d?
Here we are in the tiny but fascinating realm of Geometric Probability, which was launched when Georges Buffon posed his famous Needle Problem in 1733. Subsequent key names in the topic are Morgan Crofton (19th century) and Luis Santaló (20th). The textbook I own is Herbert Solomon's 1978 production; but people tell me there are better ones now. The main drawback of Solomon's book is that it has no exercises. It explains things pretty well, though.
Geometric probability is also well covered on the internet. In fact Wolfram's MathWorld has the solution to this puzzle. Answer: 128/(45π), which is 0.905414787367226799 …
• 1: For random points inside the disk, coordinates x = r cos θ, y = r sin θ won't do. You need the square roots of random r's in the coordinates. This is explained here.
• 2: Having picked your first random point, you can wolog rotate the disk so that this first point is on the positive x-axis at (√r1, 0).
• 3: Writing the second point as (√r2, θ), the distance d between the two points is given by the cosine rule:
d 2 = r1 + r2 − 2√r1r2 cos θ
• 4: Now you just have to add up all possible values of d and divide by their number. True, numerator and denominator are both uncountable infinities … but that's what integration's for! Hence Weisstein's formula (3) for the average on that MathWorld page, and the result follows.


Financial crisis: Different this time?
By Matthew McClearn
Irving Fisher couldn’t have been more wrong. Even as other observers fretted that a market bubble was about to burst, he confidently predicted that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau.” Fisher was one of the leading economists of his generation, a professor at Yale University and one of the most quotable prognosticators on Wall Street. He wasn’t just selling this Kool-Aid — he drank deeply, investing heavily in the stock market, and had assembled a fortune of $10 million from virtually nothing.
Too bad it was October 1929. The subsequent crash not only exposed his folly; it wiped out his net worth and left him in hock $1 million to his sister-in-law. As the economy collapsed around him, Fisher continued to insist for the next two years that an imminent recovery of stock prices was just around the corner.
Caught flat-footed by the Depression, Fisher eventually concluded that existing economic theory couldn’t explain the pervasive misery he was witnessing. He began scrutinizing the Depression’s macabre mechanics, and those of major crises from the 19th century. In 1933, he published a groundbreaking new theory. Entitled The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions, it sought to isolate and explain which factors determine whether an economy enters a destructive tailspin. Don’t peruse Fisher’s work before going to bed: it presents uncomfortable parallels to the modern era, and thus might provoke insomnia.
In the 1930s, as now, it was fashionable to talk of the “business cycle.” Ask that great oracle of our times, Google, to define the concept, and you’ll get plenty of competing explanations but no consensus; the term, it seems, is virtually meaningless. To Fisher, it suggested that the overall economy oscillates in a reasonably predictable manner, entering phases of growth and contraction with regularity. (The Guardian, a British newspaper, claims fluctuations occur at five-year intervals.) Fisher rejected this view as bunkum. He saw multiple cycles working concurrently. “There are always innumerable cycles, long and short, big and little,” he wrote, “any historical event being the resultant of all the tendencies then at work.”
But just when it seemed Fisher had a gift for stating the obvious, he isolated a mere two ingredients in all this noise — burgeoning debt and falling prices — as being prerequisites for economic disaster. In his view, excessive investment and speculation just weren’t dangerous enough — unless, that is, they were done using borrowed money. And swaggering overconfidence wouldn’t do either, unless it drove people to take on too much debt. “Disturbances in these two factors — debt and the purchasing power of the monetary unit — will set up serious disturbances in all, or nearly all, other economic variables,” he wrote. “In short, the big bad actors are debt disturbances and price-level disturbances.”
His own brushes with insolvency notwithstanding, Fisher was no debt-dreading fearmonger. He understood that debt need not be the result of frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality, nor the wanton surrender to depraved human appetites. In fact, it can be a sensible response to low interest rates. “Easy money is the great cause of over-borrowing,” Fisher wrote. “When an investor thinks he can make over 100% per annum by borrowing at 6%, he will be tempted to borrow, and to invest or speculate with borrowed money.” Fisher also understood that debt must always be considered in relation to wealth, income and the gold supply (the latter being particularly important in Fisher’s day, because exchange rates were locked to the gold standard).
The problem with debt, Fisher believed, is that once there’s too much of it, it leaves both borrowers and lenders in precarious situations. In a heavily indebted system, even a minor shock (such as falling share prices) can undermine confidence, provoking borrowers to begin selling assets to pay down debt to a more manageable level. A first wave of distress selling ensues. Deposit currency contracts as loans are paid off, slowing the circulation of money through the system. And that, in turn, causes deflation.
Deflation means that prices are in general decline. Note the emphasis on “general” — falling prices in one sector of the economy, such as personal computers or automobiles, might cause difficulties for those sectors, but that’s different from falling prices across the board. The current chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, has explained that “deflation is in almost all cases a side effect of a collapse of aggregate demand — a drop in spending so severe that producers must cut prices on an ongoing basis in order to find buyers.”
Deflation is often feared more than its destructive sibling, inflation. It sends bankers into a tizzy; if the value of a loan’s collateral implodes, the principal is no longer safe. They become averse to providing financing, and credit dries up. Meanwhile, potential buyers have little incentive to make purchases when they anticipate falling prices.
Once deflation takes hold, Fisher posited, a nasty cycle ensues. As prices fall, the dollar gains purchasing power — meaning that each dollar of outstanding debt becomes a greater burden. “The liquidation of debts cannot keep up with the fall of prices which it causes,” Fisher explained. “The liquidation defeats itself….The very effort of individuals to lessen their burden of debts increases it, because of the mass effect of the stampede to liquidate in swelling each dollar owed.” Businesses watch their net worth and profits plummet. Some go bankrupt. Survivors cut output and fire workers. People begin hoarding currency, which further slows the flow of money.
Fisher posited that a sufficiently over-indebted economy acts much like a capsizing ship. Under normal conditions, a ship is designed to right itself following a disturbance. Once tipped beyond a certain point, however, it has a tendency to depart further from equilibrium. In the economy’s case, capsizing stops only after nearly everyone is bankrupt. “This is the so-called ‘natural’ way out of a depression, via needless and cruel bankruptcy, unemployment and starvation,” he wrote.
All this, Fisher believed, neatly explained the Depression. He claimed that the low interest rates of the 1920s spurred investors to borrow, and to invest or speculate with the proceeds. By 1929, debts had risen to unprecedented levels — so great that they capsized the boat. In the weeks following Oct. 29, 1929 — or Black Tuesday, as it came immediately to be known — waves of margin calls provoked distress-selling of investments. So began the debt-deflation. By 1933, Fisher observed, liquidation had succeeded in reducing outstanding debt by 20%, but it had also increased the value of a dollar by 75%. In real terms, debt had actually increased 40%. The more debtors paid, the more they owed.
Such was the greatest economic disaster in memory. J. Bradford DeLong, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote: “At its nadir, the Depression was collective insanity. Workers were idle because firms would not hire them to work their machines; firms would not hire workers to work machines because they saw no market for goods; and there was no market for goods because workers had no incomes to spend.”
Confronted by the Depression, the first instinct of governments and central banks was to do nothing. Fisher deemed this a terrible mistake; he believed it was always possible to reflate price levels back to equilibrium — by lowering interest rates, for example. Fisher argued that once President Franklin Roosevelt embarked on reflation in 1933, the Depression reversed itself: “Had no artificial respiration been applied, we would soon have seen general bankruptcies of the mortgage guarantee companies, savings banks, life insurance companies, railways, municipalities, and states.” The Depression, in other words, could have been far worse.
Fisher was noted for giving unsolicited advice, but his new theory was widely ignored. “If he’d been hit by a bus in the middle of 1929, he would have had a reputation as an academic who nonetheless managed to make a great fortune from nothing,” says Robert Dimand, a professor of economics at Brock University who co-edited a book about Fisher’s legacy. “By 1933, Irving Fisher was a figure of fun. At the time, the response was: ‘That’s the guy who said stocks had reached a permanently high plateau. He’s just trying to come up with an alibi for why he was wrong.’”
Fisher died in 1947. A decade later, famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith was still ridiculing him. But after a half-century of abuse, he was somewhat rehabilitated in the 1970s as theorists such as noted American economists Hyman Minsky and James Tobin began fretting about the stability of the financial system. Debt-deflation theory was trundled out once again, and some of its proponents have since gained considerable influence. Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, wrote about it as an academic. And a sharp young Stanford economics professor updated Fisher’s theory in 1983. His name was Ben Bernanke.
Though still widely ignored in times of growth and stability, Fisher’s theory has attracted new devotees during virtually every credit disturbance of the past 30 years. “We’ve seen a recent resurgence in interest in debt-deflation in recent months,” says Dimand. “I suspect it will resurface every time there’s a financial crisis.”
Ben Bernanke couldn’t have been more wrong. The veteran economist and newly minted Federal Reserve chairman predicted that troubles in America’s sub-prime market would not prove contagious. “We believe the effect of the troubles in the sub-prime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited,” he proclaimed during a speech, “and we do not expect significant spillovers…to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.”
Too bad it was May 2007. Though Bernanke’s follies are not nearly so quotable as Fisher’s, they are no less evident. The sub-prime crisis did indeed spill over to the broader housing market, the financial system, the whole damned economy. Many lenders are now bracing for mounting defaults in auto loans and credit cards. Some fear a sudden collapse of opaque, highly leveraged hedge funds. And amid the feverish chatter about the probability of a recession, an ugly word has surfaced.
“Today we have insolvency problems,” Nouriel Roubini, a bearish economics professor at New York University, declared recently. “It is much worse than the tech bust of 2000 and 2001, when most of the problems were confined to the tech sector and we had a mild recession. You have to go back to the Great Depression for something comparable.”
The D-word should not be invoked lightly. Nevertheless, there are some uncomfortable similarities between 1929 and today. We’ve already witnessed the near-failure of storied Wall Street investment dealer Bear Stearns, which the Fed had to bail out using extraordinary powers it hadn’t exercised since the Depression. And as with the 1929 stock crash, our current situation was built on a foundation of easy money. The ready availability of house-backed credit allowed Americans to embark on a spending orgy. Consumption rose faster than incomes. That’s true in Canada, too: a report released by the Vanier Institute of the Family in February says that debt rose seven times faster than incomes in Canadian households since 1990, moving above $80,000 last year for the first time. “The U.S. and other western economies have shown remarkable ability to leverage themselves up over the past several decades,” BCA Research, a Montreal-based investment advisory firm, observed in a recent note.
Does debt-deflation theory have any relevance in our current situation? “Every so often one hears that such credit crunches can’t happen again, and that financial institutions are very sophisticated in how they value assets,” says Dimand. “It would seem that even very large and sophisticated financial institutions can lose large amounts of money in situations that turn out to be much riskier than they thought. So I think it’s very relevant.”
What we’re seeing in America’s housing market seems a classic microcosm of a debt-deflation. Mortgage debt spiralled out of control, and house prices have now been falling for two years. According to the National Association of Realtors, the average median price of existing U.S. homes fell by 1.4% last year — the first such decline since the Depression. Even that relatively benign decrease has driven the rate of mortgage delinquencies to their highest level in decades. (Other factors, such as the notorious resetting of interest rates characteristic of adjustable-rate mortgages, are also at play.) Many recent homebuyers find themselves “under water” — that is, their outstanding mortgage debt is greater than the value of the property that serves as collateral. We now hear stories of homeowners handing their keys to bankers and walking away. Banks are repossessing homes and dumping them on the market at cut-rate prices. With prices falling, potential homebuyers are delaying purchases. Meanwhile, economists now observe an increase in defaults among homeowners with previously unblemished credit ratings. “This collapse in housing value is sucking in all borrowers,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, recently told the New York Times.
Well, that’s housing. But falling home prices do not equal deflation. In fact, we remain in an inflationary economy. At the end of last year, annualized inflation stood at 3.3% in the OECD area. Pundits fret that rising food and energy prices will provoke higher inflation; some even predict stagflation — a stagnant economy and surging prices. In sum, we’ve got mountains of debt but none of the other stuff. So for Fisher’s bastards — those who adhere to modernized versions of his debt-deflation theory — the question is: Could America’s falling house prices trigger a collapse in aggregate demand?
For years, U.S. consumer spending has been the great bulwark of the global economy. According to RBC Capital Markets, consumer spending drives 70% of the American economy. And America remains the world’s dominant economy. Growth in consumer spending has not yet deteriorated markedly.
But it could. Homes have long been esteemed as a sacrosanct ingredient in American middle-class wealth, and more recently have become piggy banks for many consumers. Now that prices are falling (however marginally), many homeowners find themselves in precarious situations. They have steadily reduced their savings rate since the late 1980s — it has withered to almost nothing. Many Americans now must turn their attention to paying down debt and saving for the future.
Imagine what would happen if home prices fell appreciably — as some observers predict. David Rosenberg, Merrill Lynch’s chief economist for North America, says they could slide another 25%–30% over the next two years. Roubini says 20%–30%. Any such decline would crush many homeowners, and cause survivors to dramatically reduce their spending — in other words, a great collapse in aggregate demand.
Some think that it’s all over but the crying. Eric Janszen, founder of the bearish Internet newsletter iTulip.com, recently wrote in Harper’s magazine that the American economy “is in serious trouble.” The finance, insurance and real estate sectors all know “that a debt-deflation Armageddon is nigh,” Janszen wrote, and are “praying for a timely miracle, a new bubble to keep the economy from slipping into a depression.” Jan Kregel, an academic and scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in New York state, also recently predicted a debt-deflation disaster. “Lending to households…is likely to decline dramatically,” he warned in a paper released in December. “If the availability of household finance collapses, it is also likely that the long predicted, but never realized, retrenchment of consumer spending may become a reality.” Fisher’s bastards are marching.
They remain in a minority, however. In a recent column in the Financial Times, writer Wolfgang Munchau pooh-poohed the idea that any major economies were at risk of experiencing deflation. BCA Research, meanwhile, sees two possibilities: “Either efforts to stop debt-deflation fail and the U.S. slides into some version of Japan circa 1990–2008 (and counting); or conditions eventually calm and the economy muddles forward.” It predicts the latter. If Wall Street was expecting a debt-deflation, distressed bankers would likely already be exiting skyscraper windows at an alarming rate.
In 2002, Bernanke himself opined that it was extremely unlikely America would experience deflation in the near future. For one thing, he said, the U.S. economy has demonstrated a remarkable ability to absorb shocks. For another, the Federal Reserve would never permit a debt-deflation to take hold. Now top dog at the Fed, Bernanke is doing his best to make good on that promise. The Fed has slashed interest rates aggressively. Most G8 nations have followed suit, albeit less desperately. The Bush administration announced a flurry of tax cuts and more spending.
As for Brock’s Dimand, he acknowledges that the debt-deflation theory suggests today’s debt-laden financial system is precarious. “But there’s this one thing that’s very different from the 1930s,” he says. “Today you have central bankers who are very conscious of the dangers associated with debt-deflation.” Dimand believes central bankers will avoid deflation at all costs.
Plenty else besides has changed since the Depression. Wealthy countries abandoned the gold standard — often cited as a primary culprit for the disaster — long ago. And thanks largely to the Depression, we now have so-called “automatic stabilizers” like unemployment and deposit insurance designed to cushion society from massive economic disruptions. (Critics argue, however, that many of these stabilizers have been watered down or repealed in various deregulations since the 1970s.) These changes make direct comparisons between now and 1929 difficult.
There’s one element, however, that hasn’t changed: We have not yet conquered folly. So watch out for deflation — and try not to say anything quotable.


MidasThe name Midas was probably dynastic, alternating in Phrygia with Gordieus. Both names are perpetuated in those of towns near the upper Sangarius, “Midas city” (Midaeion, or Midaeum) being about 60 miles (97 km) west of the more famous Gordium.
PhrygiaBy the 8th century the Phrygians had formed a centrally organized kingdom in the west with its centres at Gordium and Midas City. Their three main areas of settlement were the hilly country between modern Eskişehir and Afyon; the central regions around their capital, Gordium; and the region around Ancyra (modern Ankara), where Phrygian tombs and architectural remains of the 8th–6th...
Simply begin typing or use the editing tools above to add to this article.
Once you are finished and click submit, your modifications will be sent to our editors for review.


This native plant is an annual vine up to 25' long that develops multiple lanky stems. This vine can climb over adjacent vegetation and fences using its branched tendrils, otherwise it sprawls across the ground. The stems are light green, round or furrowed, and quite hairy. The alternate leaves are up to 8" long and across (excluding the petioles). They are orbicular-angular with 3-5 shallow lobes and their margins are slightly serrated. The upper surface of each leaf is relatively hairless, while the lower surface is finely pubescent, especially along the lower veins. The petiole of each leaf is up to 5" long; it is light green, rather stout, and quite hairy. The leaf blade is strongly indented at the base where it is connected to the petiole. Occasionally, branched tendrils and racemes of flowers occur oppositely from the alternate leaves along the vine. Bur Cucumber is usually monoecious and produces both staminate (male) and pistillate (female) flowers on the same plant. Each staminate flower has a green calyx with 5 teeth, a greenish white corolla with 5 spreading lobes, and a central column of stamens that is knobby at its apex. The teeth of the calyx are short and broad with recurved tips. The lobes of the corolla have a network of green lines on a white background. The staminate flowers are individually about 1/3" across and they tend to bloom in small clusters toward the apex of the raceme. Each pistillate flower has a large ovary that is enclosed within an ovoid fruit about ½" long. The surface of this fruit is covered with sharp spines and long white hairs; it is initially green, but later turns brown. A single style is exerted from the terminal end of this fruit. The pistillate flowers are bunched together in a short raceme; a typical raceme has 3-10 pistillate flowers. The peduncles and pedicels of both staminate and pistillate racemes are green and pubescent. The blooming period occurs from late summer to early fall and lasts about 3 weeks. There is no noticeable floral scent. Each bur-like fruit contains a single large seed that is brown and flattened; this seed is tapered at one end more than the other and it has a rough surface. The root system consists of a shallow branched taproot. This plant spreads by reseeding itself.


Imagine you are the chief of a small, relatively peaceful, ancient tribe. You have not yet discovered many things that a modern child would know (for instance, that the earth is round and rotates on its axis and around the sun), but you are highly inquisitive and intend to figure out the world around you as best you can. Not out of idle curiosity so much as out of necessity for the survival of your tribe. The more you learn, the safer you and your tribe will be.
You are particularly interested in the sky, for several reasons. One is that your tribe, and it appears, all life, is dependent on the sun. When the sun is visible in the sky, the whole world is illuminated and is considerably warmer than when it is not. It is true that at night there is some comfort from the moon and stars, but in general you are much more interested in the sun. You know that the sun is made of fire, because when you build a fire, it too provides light and warmth, although not nearly as much as the sun.
Your tribe also depends on rain, water from the sky. For whatever reason, there is a quality to the sky water that the sea water does not have – unfortunately, the water of the sea, although vast in quantity, is not life-sustaining. You also notice that water in large quantities (that is, the sea) is blue, and so is the sky. You surmise from this that the sky is actually made of water.
Two things puzzle you, however. Water tends to fall to the ground. How is it that the sky is made of water, but the water is not continuously falling to the ground? What is holding all that water up? The other puzzle is that everyone knows that fire and water cannot coexist together. But the sun, which is made is of fire, is in the sky, which is made of water. Again, how is this possible?
You come to a brilliant conclusion that answers both puzzles. There must be an invisible barrier separating the water above and the earth below. The sun, moon, and stars are all moving around, nice and dry, inside that barrier. Occasionally, small holes (you think of them as windows) appear in that barrier, and water falls through them, resulting in rain on the earth. At times, they open wider than others, resulting in harder, possibly dangerous, rain.
But what is keeping the barrier up? You decide that the barrier is actually a giant dome that covers the whole earth. Floating within the ethereal material of the dome are the celestial bodies. Above the dome is immeasurable amounts of water, as big as the sea. It is frightening to imagine that there is this massive amount of water above the whole world, and the only thing keeping it from crashing down on us is the barrier! If the windows in the barrier were to open up completely, there could be a massive flood. On the other hand, the sky is also the source of all life, since it is the source of all potable water.
You continue to ponder the structure of the world. Maybe at one point there was no barrier, and the entire world was filled with water. It’s amazing to think about, but it’s possible. Maybe something built the barrier, drained most of the water off of the earth, revealing dry land below (but leaving some of the water there, which became the sea). The sun, being made of fire, could not have existed yet if the world was filled with water – it would only make sense for the sun to have been put in place after the barrier was created.
You are getting excited. You are slowly but surely figuring out the steps involved in the formation of the world! You have more details to figure out, such as when in this process plants, animals, trees, and most importantly, man came into the picture. Perhaps one day your tribe can explore the edges of the earth and actually find where the dome of the barrier meets the earth. Or even more ambitiously, to build a tower and actually touch the sky! But even without those accomplishments, you’re pretty sure you’re on to something. You are advancing the knowledge of your tribe, and are coming closer to a more accurate explanation of the world and its origins. You had better write this down, for posterity and the sake of the tribe…
Slashdot reports that scientists use performance-enhancing drugs, too. Instead of extra brawn, they’re going for extra brains.
I can see where this is going – incredibly smart super-nerds, getting massive amounts of sand kicked at them on the beach by steroid-enhanced bullies four times their size. Better start working on that personal robot bodyguard!


Harry S. Truman was one of the leaders of the "Good Roads" movement. He inherited this interest from his father John, who was road overseer in Washington Township Missouri in 1913. Harry Truman later became county judge in Jackson County, and was in charge of appointing road overseers. After losing re-election in 1924, he sold memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club and then became President of the National Old Trails Road Association. After being re-elected in 1926, he helped get Jackson County out of the mud, with one of the largest local road-building programs in the US ensuring an all-weather (i.e. paved) road served every farm.
Ultimately as President, he could have been father to the Interstate System, which was planned, but not funded during his administration, had the Korean War not intervened and made funding scarce.


What Is a Five-Paragraph Essay?
A five-paragraph essay is the basic essay form, consisting of an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. If your assignment doesn’t tell you specifically how to write an essay you need to come up with, it is implied that you are expected to write a 5 paragraph essay. This staple essay is most often found in high-school and junior college years, and as an academic complexity of studies goes up, essay writing assignments get more sophisticated too.
Why are five paragraph essays important?
It has been conventionally agreed that a five paragraph essay is a basic essay format. Its simple structure allows students to practice effective and organized writing by following an invariant logical pattern, which eventually results in increased ability to explain a problem or a phenomenon. The ability to write logically following a set essay format will on later stages evolve in clear and logical research and academic writing. Therefore the skills for writing a five-paragraph essay are essential for your academic success.
Our writers guarantee the premium quality content, complete reference, and zero plagiarism. Place your order here and enjoy the result!
What is the basic essay structure?
Generally speaking, five paragraph essays have a fixed structure. As its name suggests, a five-paragraph essay will contain five logical sections: introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The introduction is always the opening paragraph in your essay and you will need to include such elements as the thesis statement and the three sub-topics which are called ‘body’ paragraphs. The last paragraph is the conclusion and you will have to sum up the ideas expressed in previous paragraphs.
A good introduction has the ultimate power in either grabbing the readers’ attention or losing it. With thousands of essays out there, your reader will make a reading decision by reading the first couple of sentences and skimming through the body of the paper. Consequently, writing a good, eye-catching introduction is of ultimate importance to an effective composition.
Tips for writing an effective essay introduction
Make a general statement and then narrow it down. Generally, the way of starting an essay is the least interesting for the reader; however, it’s a proven technique that is effective. This would be the most appropriate beginning for most academic essays that do not allow starting an essay otherwise.
Use a quote that is relevant to the topic. This is generally a good and a powerful beginning for an essay that is written during high school and early college years. A quote from someone who is respected in a society will add weight to your paper and will provoke readers’ interest in the paper. However, you should bear in mind that subsequent text needs to be straight to the point and support the initial claim.
Use a rhetoric question. A rhetoric question is, in essence, a disguised statement that requires no response; however, it will set your reader wondering about an issue. All you need to do is elaborate on the topic and provide convincing examples. Initial readers’ interest won’t last long if the text that follows doesn’t support the initial claim. Again, this type of starting your essay is not universally acceptable, and you will need to take into account the kind of essay you are working on and its purpose.
Start with an example: use statistics or another example relevant to the topic. This is the opposite of the technique that’s been mentioned first – in this case, you go from the specific to the general. Provide an example and try to establish a general pattern based on that example. Ideally, you would need several such examples to make a generalization, otherwise, you can make a false conclusion (this is called a sample, generally the more examples you have, the better the sampling, and the more accurate is the conclusion.
The list of good and catchy ways of introducing your thoughts in an essay isn’t limited to the ones mentioned above. You can you any of them or any combination thereof – anything that is interesting to the reader will work. Remember that your goal is to catch your reader’s attention and retain it during the next several paragraphs, which will convey the main points to your reader. Once you have started with a strong introduction, it is high time to write the body paragraphs themselves.
Writing body paragraphs can be quite a straightforward process if one bears in mind their basic structure. Most writing experts suggest that a typical body paragraph should take the following format:
Topic sentence. This is the first sentence that introduces the main idea of the paragraph. This idea is going to be further elaborated within the same paragraph.
Details or examples supporting the idea from the topic sentence. The topic sentence should be supported with some piece of evidence that would get your essay more ‘weight’ and will sound more convincing. In a case of an academic paper, you will need to mention the source of the information.
Comments/Analysis. Add two or more sentences with a commentary of the idea expressed in your main essay. If this is an essay that requires your evaluation, this can be your thoughts, ideas, impressions, judgments etc. If this is an academic essay, you will need to base your judgment on previous research to gain credibility.
Conclusion. Paragraph conclusion recaps the main paragraph idea. It also serves the purpose of connecting the previous paragraph with the next one.
Essay conclusion should be the logical finale of your writing. Once you are done writing your body paragraphs, look at the ideas expressed in the introduction and body paragraphs, you will need to restate each of them individually and then relate to the thesis statement. In this part of your essay, you will need to pay special attention to the initial requirement and see if it needs you to summarize your key elements or analyze them. Whenever you are required to do an analytical part, you are expected to dig in a bit deeper, not just merely restate the items mentioned previously.
Whatever the case, OZessay will be glad to assist you with any of the essay types, we will be happy to assist. Feel free to contact any of our writing professionals, who are always willing to provide a top quality paper that will get you a high score. Here, at www.OZessay.com.au we are available 24/7 to help you! www.OZessay.com.au is the essay writing service you can trust.
Our state standards spell it out pretty clearly. My third graders need to be able to write opinion pieces on topics or texts that state an opinion within a framework of an organizational structure that provides reasons that support the opinion and provides a concluding statement. Oh, and they better use transitional words and phrases throughout. These would be the same 8-year-olds who still can't figure out it's not a good idea to put your boots on before your snow pants.
With all this in mind, meeting those standards seemed like a huge mountain to climb when I was planning out my persuasive writing unit a few weeks ago. I have students who still haven't mastered capitalization and punctuation, so I knew I would have to break down the mechanics of writing an opinion statement into a step-by-step process for them. This week I am happy to share with you a few tips along with the graphic organizers I created to help get my students writing opinion pieces that showed me that my students, while not quite there yet, were fully capable of making it to the top of that mountain.
Introduce the Language of Opinion Writing
The very first thing we did during a writing mini-lesson was go over the language of opinion writing and how certain words, like fun and pretty are opinion clues because while they may be true for some people, they are not true for everyone. We also discuss how other words, called transitions, are signals to your reader as to where you are in your writing: the beginning, middle or end.
After the initial vocabulary is introduced, I challenged my third graders to look for examples of these types of words in their everyday reading. Over the next couple of days, students used sticky notes to add opinion or transition words they found to an anchor chart posted on a classroom wall. Next, I took the words and put them into a chart that I copied for students to glue into their writer's notebooks. You can see our chart below. If you would like to print your own copy, just click on the image.
Introduce Easy-to-Read Opinion Pieces
Most of my third graders have read a wide variety of genres by this point in third grade, but when asked if they had ever read the "opinion genre," they answered with a resounding, "No!" I pointed out to them that they actually read opinion articles nearly every week in our Scholastic News magazine. At that point, I let them dive into the archives of old articles online and they were quickly able to find opinion pieces in several of the issues we had read this year. Students also used the debate section of the online issues.
On the board we listed some of the articles students found in Scholastic News that contained opinions:
Many Scholastic news articles are perfect to use because they are short, and for the most part have a structure that is similar to how I want my students to write. The articles often include:
- Both sides of the argument
- Clearly stated opinions
- Reasons for holding that opinion
- Examples to support the reasons
- Conclusions that are restated with enthusiasm
In the image below, you can see below how easy it was for my students to find the opinions, supporting reasons and examples in the "Debate It" feature we read together on whether the U.S. Mint should stop making pennies.
Model, Model, Model!
Once students read the article about pennies, they were ready to form an opinion. After discussing the pros and cons with partners, the class took sides. With students divided into two groups, they took part in a spirited Visible Thinking debate called Tug of War. After hearing many of their classmates voice their reasoning for keeping or retiring the penny, the students were ready to get started putting their thoughts on paper.
At this time, I introduced our OREO graphic writing organizer. Using the name of a popular cookie is a mnemonic device that helps my students remember the structural order their paragraphs need to take: Opinion, Reason, Example, Opinion. In our class, we say our writing is double-stuffed, because two reasons and two examples are expected instead of one.
Because this was our first foray into example writing, we worked through the organizer together.
My students did pretty well with the initial organizer and we used it again to plan out opinion pieces on whether sledding should be banned in city parks.
Once students had planned out two different opinions, they selected one to turn into a full paragraph in their writer's notebooks. The organizers made putting their thoughts into a clear paragraph with supporting reasons and examples very easy for most students.
With each practice we did, my students got stronger and I introduced different organizers to help them and to keep interest high. Giving each student one sandwich cookie to munch on while they worked on these organizers helped keep them excited about the whole process.
After we worked our way through several of the Scholastic News opinion pieces, my third graders also thought of issues pertinent to their own lives and school experiences they wanted to write about, including:
- Should birthday treats and bagel sales be banned at school?
- Should all peanut products be banned?
- Should we be allowed to download our own apps on the iPads the school gave us?
As we continued to practice, different organizers were introduced. Those are shown below. Simply click on each image to download and print your own copy.
The organizer below is my favorite to use once the students are more familiar with the structure of opinion paragraphs. It establishes the structure, but also helps students remember to use opinion-based sentence starters along with transition words.
Below is a simple organizer some of my students can also choose to use.
Other Resources I Have Used
Scholastic offers many different resources for helping your students become better with their opinion writing, or for younger writers, understanding the difference between fact and opinion. A great one to have in your classroom is: 12 Write-On/Wipe-Off Graphic Organizers That Build Early Writing Skills.
Click on the images below to download and print. There are many more sheets like these in Scholastic Teachables.
A couple weeks into our persuasive writing unit and I have already seen a lot of progress from our very first efforts. We may not have mastered this writing yet, but we are definitely on our way and that mountain doesn't seem quite so high anymore. I hope you find a few of these tips and my graphic organizers helpful! I'd love to hear your tips for elementary writing in the comment section below.
I'd love to connect with you on Twitter and Pinterest!
Teacher Store Resources
I love using the graphic organizers in my Grade 3 Writing Lessons to Meet the Common Core. Other teachers in my building use the resources for their grade level as well. They make them for grades 1-6.


When Constantine established the city on the hill as the capital of the Roman Empire, one of his first projects was the construction of a forum, built just outside the then-city walls. The forum was circular with two monumental gates, and at its center Constantine erected a monumental column carved of red porphyry stone and topped by a Corinthian capital bearing his own likeness. A drawing by Melchior Lorick (1561) contains an illustration of the column showing a relief on the north, Senate-facing side of the base.
The Forum of Constantine is said to have been the inspiration for Bernini in his conception of St. Peter's Square in Rome. The column has been a victim of earthquakes and elements: In A.D. 418, part of the base cracked, prompting its reinforcement via the use of a ringed metal brace (additional braces were added later), and in 1106, the statue of Constantine was toppled by a hurricane. Manuel Komnenos presided over the first restoration of the monument, placing a simple cross atop the column in place of the destroyed statue of the emperor. Since then, periodic repairs have been done to cracks in the marble, and in 2003 a full-fledged, comprehensive restoration was begun.


Samantha Carter (assisted)
110,000 miles per second
Earth targeting systems
Computer navigational systems
Like its predecessor, the X-302 hyperspace fighter, the X-303 is exclusively of Tau'ri construction. Like the 302, it has Inertial dampeners, artificial gravity and an antigravity system that allows the vessel to hover in midair. Its Sublight engines are capable of boosting it from the surface into orbit in less than thirty seconds, and it also possesses a Naquadria-based hyperdrive. (SG1: "Prometheus", "Memento")
Unlike the 302, which is designed as a fighter-interceptor, the 303 was developed as a response to the Goa'uld Ha'tak, which is a mothership. It is the United States Air Force's first capital ship. However, it is still far smaller in scale than the Ha'tak. Its span consists of 17+ decks and is capable of carrying more than a hundred personnel, as well as eight 302s within its hangar bay. (SG1: "Grace")
The X-303 was built using both Earth-based and alien technology. Its design is based on that of an Earth naval aircraft carrier, having a long nose with a visible bridge area near the rear of the vessel.
The X-303 was capable of both sublight and hyperspace travel. It could reach up to half the speed of light at sublight speeds. Its hyperdrive, however, was unstable and thus unreliable, being based on Naquadria. The first test ended with the vessel stranded in an unknown area of space, and on the second attempt it overloaded and had to be ejected to save the ship.
Prometheus had a variety of means to communicate within and between ships. There were traditional telephones located in corridors and rooms throughout the ship for intra-ship communications. There was also the capacity to integrate the system to wireless radio headsets. The ship also has an intercom system for ship wide messages. It could be activated on the bridge by one of the stations and could also be triggered directly from the commander's chair. (SG1: "Prometheus", "Beachhead", "Prometheus Unbound")
The Prometheus was equipped for both audio and video communications outside the ship as well. Despite communications satellites being down, Prometheus was able to establish a secure video transmission directly to the Oval Office, which displayed on monitors above the main window/viewer display. A side viewer also displayed video communications that integrated with alien ships, such as the Asgard and Goa'uld. The ship could also broadcast audio-only messages on multiple frequencies, and included the additional feature of translating the broadcast into Goa'uld. The communications, however, couldn't penetrate Ancient shielding, as was evidenced upon the discovery of the caves of Avalon in the Glastonbury Tor. The Prometheus had two communications arrays symmetrically placed on the rear section of the ship. (SG1: "Memento", "Lost City, Part 2", "New Order, Part 2", "Avalon, Part 1", "Beachhead")
Inertial Dampeners and Artificial GravityEdit
The Prometheus had Inertial dampeners and artificial gravity technology, which gave its passengers a smooth ride, much like that taken within a fast elevator. When Julia Donovan's filming crew turned out to be rogue NID agents who stole the ship, Major Samantha Carter was trapped on a level which didn't have the artificial gravity systems in place and she experienced zero gravity when the ship was taken into space. (SG1: "Prometheus")
The Tau'ri do not possess shields of their own design, instead utilizing reverse engineered Goa'uld shields, however, these shields were replaced with shields of Asgard origin, which were donated to them in thanks for the help the Tau'ri had provided the Asgard in their conflict against the Replicators. Asgard shielding was first equipped to the Prometheus and eventually the Daedalus-class, allowing the Tau'ri to better confront the warships of the Goa'uld. However, with the invasion of the Ori, the shields of the Prometheus proved virtually ineffective against the powerful weapons of the Ori. (SG1: "Disclosure", "Memento", "Ethon")
The Anti-Gravity Pod was housed in the lower portion of the rear of the ship, as labeled on the Venting Sequence display. The Prometheus most likely used this feature in entering and exiting its subterranean bay on Earth, in softening an off-world landing, and in hovering or maintaining a stationary position above the ground as it did in Antarctica in order to protect SG-1's Tel'tak during Anubis's attack. (SG1: "Lost City, Part 2", "Grace")
Deceleration thrusters were used to slow the Prometheus down. They were situated on the front side of the large rectangular hyperdrive engine sections and were seen being used by SG-1 when they landed on the planet Hala. (SG1: "Unnatural Selection")
The hyperdrive engines were first powered by the powerful, but highly unstable, mineral called Naquadria in the form of a Naquadria reactor core. A buffer was installed to prevent the reactor from going critical due to Naquadria's inherent instability. Later, new hyperdrive technology was installed by the Asgard. Between that time, however, the ship operated on a temporary adaptation of a hyperdrive engine from an Al'kesh. The rectangular hyperdrive nacelles were seen on either side of the ship's rear section. The hyperdrive engines glowed blue when activated. (SG1: "Memento", "Grace", "Covenant", "Endgame", "Gemini", "Prometheus Unbound")
Hyperdrive control systems were protected with codes, but these codes could be overridden by someone who was familiar with the crystals used in these control systems. An engine coolant system ran through the length of the slender midsection of the ship and into the rear where the engines were located. Spatial gases could interfere with the even flow of power to the hyperdrive emitters and thus prevent a hyperspace window from becoming fully formed. When the power to the hyperdrive emitter was reduced, it was possible to create a partial shift into hyperspace which could take the ship out of the surrounding space-time temporarily. (SG1: "Prometheus", "Grace", "Prometheus Unbound")
If the Prometheus were ever called upon to take a trip to the Pegasus galaxy using its Asgard hyperdrive engines, it would take approximately 18 days, as this is the amount of time that Daedalus-class ships are able to make the trip with their Asgard hyperdrive engines. (SGA: "The Intruder") (SG1: "Ripple Effect")
Sublight engines enabled the Prometheus to accelerate to 110,000 miles per second, which was over half the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). An ignition module had to have been calibrated to within a 1% margin of error in order for the engines to start. If outside this margin, the module would burn out, and the engines would fail to start. Sublight engines placed the Prometheus in Earth's orbit in less than 30 seconds. (SG1: "Prometheus")
The control relay for the sublight engines was located on Deck 8. Sublight engines have varying output, which is controlled through the ship's helm. One such output was referred to as "emergency thrust" and was used when the Prometheus left Antarctica to meet Anubis's fleet in Earth's orbit. (SG1: "Lost City, Part 2")
The Prometheus had a tripodal landing gear system with one leg in the front of the ship and two in the rear. The slender midsection of the ship had no support. The ship needed to engage the deceleration thrusters in order to obtain a stationary point above the planet surface before landing. Most likely, the anti-gravity pod assisted in the landing process. The landing gear operated just like that on a jet airplane and could be retracted back into the body of the ship. (SG1: "Unnatural Selection", "Memento", "Prometheus Unbound")
Prometheus-class ships contain an array of powerful conventional weapons.
The 303s have 16 Railguns, which have become standard on F-302 fighter-interceptors and all Daedalus-class vessels for ship-to-ship combat. Just a few shots are able to take out a Death Glider relatively quickly and deal damage to Al'kesh and Ha'taks. (SG1: "Prometheus Unbound", "Ethon")
The 303s have 12 missile batteries and Naquadah enhanced Nuclear warheads. These missiles are able to take out a Death Glider relatively quickly and deal a large amount of damage to Al'kesh and Ha'taks. However, Ori shields are significantly more difficult, practically impossible, to pierce. (SG1: "Prometheus Unbound", "Ethon")
The X-303 was constructed in an underground hangar facility designated Area 37-92/NV, under the project name "Prometheus". Its development was so large an undertaking that maintaining its secrecy proved impossible, with information leaking to reporter Julia Donovan with the !nside Access news program. In an attempt to minimize the potential damage of the project's disclosure, the President of the United States agreed to give Donovan, her producer, and a camera crew a tour of the X-303, claiming the alien technology it incorporated was in fact salvaged from a UFO that crashed near Fairbanks, Alaska in 1978.
During the tour, the ship was taken over by the camera crew, actually rogue NID agents working at the behest of Colonel Frank Simmons. The agents successfully managed to steal the ship and take it into hyperspace before being overpowered by SG-1. However, the hyperdrive, which was configured for Simmons by the Goa'uld inhabiting Adrian Conrad, malfunctioned and transported the ship instead to an unknown destination. (SG1: "Prometheus")
In what came to be the ship's first mission, the Asgard took the X-303 to the Othala in the hope that it could be used to trap the Replicators inside a time dilation field. During this mission, the Asgard also modified the ship's shields and engines to their maximum potential. After the successful completion of this mission, the Asgard provided shields for the ship in advance of its formal shakedown cruise as a gesture of gratitude. (SG1: "Unnatural Selection", "Disclosure")
Ultimately, the X-303 entered active service, taking the designator BC-303 and the name Prometheus. In this capacity, it served as the flagship of the Tau'ri fleet under the auspices of the Office of Homeworld Security, and received additional upgrades from the Asgard.
After nearly being in service for four years, Prometheus was eventually destroyed in the Battle of Tegalus which occurred in February 2006. Though plans were later made to construct an entire fleet of BC-303s, the introduction of the Daedalus-class battlecruisers rendered the craft obsolete, leaving the Prometheus as the sole vessel in its class. (SG1: "Enemy Mine", "Ethon", "Moebius, Part 1")
The design plans for the X-303 (without the Asgard upgrades) were provided to the Russian Federation in 2002 along with those for the X-302 hyperspace fighter; however, the Russians have apparently not constructed any such vessels.
References and notesEdit
|Tau'ri spaceship classes|
|Fighters||( X-301 ) · ( X-302 ) · F-302|
|Battlecruisers||( X-303 ) · BC-303 · BC-304|


Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.
Cross-curricular series centred on sustainability and climate change, with hands-on projects linking science and design and technology. What are the problems and challenges we face around the world when it comes to farming and growing crops? How can we farm without habitat destruction and damage to food chains? Interactive ‘Solve It!’ design challenges give readers the information they need to develop sustainable solutions to the problems discussed, and step-by-step ‘Test It!’ activities encourage them to explore putting principles into practice.
Get recommended reads, deals, and more from Hachette


Origin: Gaulish; Roman ; Latin
Meaning: “Alder; Man; True.”
Details: It is probable that this name could derive from a Norman surname, which was itself derived from a Gaulish word meaning “alder”.
It is also possible that the name originated from the Roman name Virilius “man”, but this is not confirmed.
It could also be connected to the medieval name Ver, derived from the Latin Verus “True”. Ver enjoyed some popularity with this usage in medieval England to honor a 4th century bishop. Thus, the exact lineage of the name is unknown, but could come from any one of these roots.


The media keeps telling us that skilled workers are hard to find so it must be true. In this article, “Can’t find skilled workers? Try this American strategy from World War II” operations strategist Rebecca Morgan suggest that corporations implement a Rosie the Riveter Strategy for finding workers:
Manufacturers fret about a skills shortage and the loss of powerful knowledge as baby boomers retire. Instead of fretting, I suggest looking back to the beginning of World War II as an easily available and proven response to both concerns.
At the beginning of WWII, millions of American men left jobs in manufacturing to fight the war. Those departures happened as the need for manufacturing to build war materials was skyrocketing.
American industry did a great job of bringing women in from homemaker duties and developing “Rosie the Riveter,” a productive manufacturing worker. How?
CONTINUE READING –>
While I love the idea of getting more women working in manufacturing jobs (or any jobs) Morgan fails to recognize some of the key components of that strategy that are not available to American Industry today.
First, the Office of War Information (OWI) which promoted the war effort from 1942 to 1945 ran an unrelenting well-coordinated PR campaign to disseminate information about the war consistently. The OWI produced radio programs and films, distributed magazine publishing guides with story ideas and top quality photos, and printed up those recruitment posters we all love.
Even prior to the US entry into World War II the National Youth Administration, a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program, fostered employment for young men and women and brought a lot of new workers to the trades. While production levels had not yet ramped up for the war effort, there was increasing need for skilled workers just prior to WWII because of WPA projects like the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 which provided government funding for shipyards and for shipbuilding contracts to improve our maritime capabilities. And American Industry was producing war related products (including ships) for the British.
Once war was declared, many factories converted to provide wartime products. For example, Ford stopped manufacturing automobiles and began manufacturing armored vehicles for the military. In fact, for a couple of years new cars were banned by the War Production Board, the government agency tasked with managing wartime production of goods. Other factory conversions included a sparkplug factory that switched to producing machine guns, a stove manufacturer that began making lifeboats, a merry-go-round factory made gun mounts; a toy company made compasses; a corset manufacturer produced grenade belts; and a pinball machine plant began to make armor-piercing shells.****
The government also allocated funds for childcare centers between 1943 and 1946 through the Lanham Act, figuring if women were going to work outside the home they may need help with the important job of raising children (the children are our future, right?).
From a Congressional Research Report, Child Care: The Federal Role During World War II: “During World War II, the federal government supported a nationwide program of child care centers, intended to boost war production by freeing mothers to work. Labor force participation of women grew significantly during the war, and children of working mothers were eligible for the child care service. The centers had a peak enrollment near 130,000 children in 1944.”
Another component of the World War II era “Rosie the Riveter” campaign was less strategy and more the “luck” of history itself and the state of the economy. Many of the women taking on these jobs came out of the Depression desperate for jobs, they came from the Dustbowl and from failed farms in the Midwest with a need to provide for themselves and their families. These jobs were attractive because they paid well.
Rose Barquist, for example, travelled to California in June of 1941 in search of a better life. “My future in Iowa would have been to go to work in someone’s house for three dollars a week maybe, and be seduced by somebody and be a farmer’s wife, the rest of my life, if I was lucky,” she said. ** At the Kaiser Shipyards she’d earn $1 per hour, $1.20 if she worked graveyard shift. (doesn’t sound like much by today’s standards, but compared to $3 per week, Rose would be flush with cash).
And there was also patriotism brought on by the war. It was time when Americans were supportive of the war and willing to sacrifice in ways that just don’t happen in today’s war.
Bottom line: the idea of a Rosie the Riveter strategy is cute, but until the U.S. government decides that it wants to support THIS country, OUR workers, OUR industries, it’ll never happen.
* * * *
**Rose Barquist, “Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project” conducted by Samuel J. Redman in 2011, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2012.
****Source: Boundless. “Economic Conversion and Business in WWII.” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 10 Jun. 2015. Retrieved 10 Jun. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/from-isolation-to-world-war-ii-1930-1943-26/mobilization-in-the-u-s-205/economic-conversion-and-business-in-wwii-1121-8785/
Learn more here:
“Here’s What Happened The One Time When The U.S. Had Universal Childcare”
Automobile Factories Switched to War Production As America Entered World War II


Argentina is known for (among many other things) being the country with the most psychologists per capita in the world. This unusually high concentration of therapists is highest in its capital city, where there is such an abundance of therapists in one particular pocket of Buenos Aires the area has earned the nickname Villa Freud.
Located near the beautiful Plaza Güemes, Villa Freud, also known as Guadalupe, is a micro-neighborhood within Palermo, the largest neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Aside from having an extremely high number of therapists’ offices in the area, analysis has seeped into the culture in Villa Freud. Local bookstores and newspapers regularly offer plenty of reading material on the subject, and you can find Freud-themed cafes and bars.
Though a range of psychology disciplines like cognitive and behavioral therapy are also practiced, Argentinians remain partial to psychoanalysis, the method invented by Sigmund Freud. There are various theories as to why the practice took such strong hold in the country. Some point to the fact that it’s an introspective and open culture, and doesn’t stigmatize mental health in the same way as other parts of the world.
The therapy boom began in the 1940s, when a Spanish immigrant named Angel Garma, who had studied psychoanalysis with people who had studied with Freud himself, came to Argentina to investigate the death of his father. He brought his education with him, and it started to spread. Recent estimates suggest that, today, there are nearly 200 practicing psychologists in Argentina for every 100,000 people, and nearly half of them are based in Buenos Aires.


Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania
(location of the three Yankee Pennamite Wars)
Crospey Francis Jasper, 1823-1900
We began and fought the War of Independence as a nation founded not by the US Constitution but by the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. That perpetual Union did not last all that long, ending in 1786, when it was replaced by the current, much modified United States Constitution which went into effect in 1789. The Declaration of Independence almost presciently anticipated that change to our current form of government.
From the official web site of the US Senate:
Written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and in operation since 1789, the United States Constitution is the world's longest surviving written charter of government. Its first three words –– "We the People" –– affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens.
Sadly few of my fellow Americans, and then mostly newly naturalized immigrant citizen, are knowledgeable about our history. When you look at the original foundation of this country, founded in bloody revolution, and then look again at what amounts to a second bloodless revolution with the replacement of the Articles with the Constitution, changing profoundly who we are today and how we became our modern nation.
There were middling better known events, like Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, that contributed to the need to create a better, stronger, and very different founding document. Less well known but perhaps more indicative of those stresses were the Yankee Pennamite Wars, aka the Pennamite Yankee Wars, of which there were three. The wars primarily involved Pennsylvania and Connecticut, but other states involved themselves as well. The final resolution came in 1799, when the disputed Wyoming Valley became part of Pennsylvania.
Because of the vagaries of early cartography, there was a part of what is now Pennsylvania that was awarded in colonial land grant days to more than one claimant colony, subsequently involving multiple states in this series of conflicts. In brief summary, the first Pennamite 'war' ran from 1769-70, the second in 1774, and the final conflict, which the more limited federal government of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was inadequate to address --- and the distant government of the UK which had created the problem was inadequate and impotent to do so as well.
The two important elements to take away from this relatively obscure bit of our history are the need for a strong and adequately large federal government, in part to resolve conflicts between the states and between local jurisdictions as well, in order to have a strong and functional nation. Another element is that any such federal government must exist not to serve special interests, but must exist to serve the people of this country --- and corporations are not people. But the most important lesson, one that had to be relearned only a little more than a half century after the resolution to the third Yankee Pennamite War, was that we CAN resolve the challenges to this nation peacefully, without bloody revolution, without shooting our fellow Americans.
I wish all of our readers and their friends and families a happy and safe celebration of our Independence Day, and I hope this humble post will contribute to any thought you give the topic today and going forward.
If this leads you to browse a little history, I hope you consider checking out the Yankee (Connecticut) and Pennamites (Pennsylvanians) conflict.


- Word Explorer, Word Parts
|part of speech:
||deceived, deceives, deceiving
||to cause someone to believe something that is not true; lie to.
He deceived us about his age.
- cheat, fool, trick
||deceivingly (adv.), deceivability (n.), deceiver (n.)


Daniel Mach, director of ACLU’s program on freedom of religion and belief, is quoted in a recent USA Today article about Sarah Palin’s new book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas:
“Culture warriors have spread the myth of a fanciful ‘war on Christmas’ for years. This is largely a manufactured controversy. Christmas celebrations in this country are alive and well.”
Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia adds,
“There is no war on Christmas.”
I have lived through 82 Christmases, and the celebration of Christ’s birth has changed substantially since the Thirties when:
- “Merry Christmas,” not “Happy Holidays” was the standard greeting.
- Schools offered Christmas Concerts, not Winter Concerts.
- Christmas carols were sung in schools.
- Christmas cards outnumbered Holiday cards.
- People decorated Christmas trees, not Holiday Trees.
- Store clerks were permitted to wish customers a "Merry Christmas."
In the past 100 years, Christmas practices have changed dramatically, but the fact remains December 25 is not simply a “holiday.” It continues to be a celebration of the birth of Christ, and no amount of semantic manipulation can change that fact!