Stewart & Kantrud Classification System
The formerly glaciated prairie region includes parts of the northern prairies in the Central Lowland and Great Plains, which were covered with glacial drift deposits during the past Ice Age. The regions is characterized by numerous undrained depressions throughout southern Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, extreme southwestern Manitoba, extreme northeastern Montana, northern and east-central North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, and small portions of western Minnesota and northwestern Iowa.
Wetland vegetation in prairie ponds and lakes can be grouped into zones each characterized by a different community structure or life form and a distinct assemblage of plant species. These vegetation zones are designated as follows:
- Wetland-low-prairie zone;
- Wet-meadow zone;
- Shallow-marsh zone;
- Deep-marsh zone;
- Permanent-open-water zone;
- Intermittent-alkali zone; and
- Fen (alkaline bog) zone.
In each zone, characteristic plants may be found as a general mixture or may be represented by one or more distinct associations, each composed of one or more species. These zones are closely related to differences in water permanence, modified by permeability of bottom soils and influence of ground water. Certain wetlands contain only one zone, while others contain two, three, or more zones. In wetlands with two or more zones, one zone usually occupies the central, deeper part of the pond basin, while the others occur as concentric peripheral bands. The presence or absence and the distributional pattern of the zones are the primary factors used in distinguishing the seven major classes of wetlands as detailed below. The wetland class is determined by the vegetation zone occupying the central 5% or more of the total wetland area.
Class I - Ephemeral Wetlands typically have free surface water for only a short period of time after snowmelt or storm events in early spring. Because of the porous condition of the soils, the rate of water seepage from ephemeral wetlands is very rapid after thawing of the underlying frost seal. They may be periodically covered by standing or slow moving water. Water is retained long enough to establish some wetland or aquatic processes. They are typically dominated by Kentucky bluegrass, goldenrod and other wetland or low prairie species.
Class II - Temporary Wetlands are periodically covered by standing or slow moving water. They typically have open water for only a few weeks after snowmelt or several days after heavy storm events. Water seepage is fairly rapid, but surface water usually lingers for a few weeks after spring snowmelt and for several days after heavy rainstorms at other times of the year. Water is retained long enough to establish wetland or aquatic processes. They are dominated by wet meadow vegetation such as fine-stemmed grasses, sedges and associated forbs.
Class III - Seasonal Ponds and Lakes are characterized by shallow marsh vegetation, which generally occurs in the deepest zone (usually dry by midsummer). These wetlands are typically dominated by emergent wetland grasses, sedges and rushes.
Class IV - Semi-permanent Ponds and Lakes are characterized by marsh vegetation, which dominates the central zone of the wetland, as well as coarse emergent plants or submerged aquatics, including cattails, bulrushes and pondweeds. These wetlands frequently maintain surface water throughout the growing season, i.e., from May to September.
Class V - Permanent Ponds and Lakes have permanent open water in central zone that is generally devoid of vegetation. Submerged plants may be present in the deepest zone, while emergent plants are found along the edges. Plants commonly present in these wetlands include cattails, red swampfire and spiral ditchgrass.
Class VI - Alkali Ponds and Lakes are wetlands where deep water is typically not permanently present. Alkali wetlands are characterized by a pH above 7 and a high concentration of salts. The dominant plants are generally salt tolerant and include red swampfire and spiral ditchgrass. These wetlands are especially attractive for shore birds.
Class VII - Fen Ponds are wetlands in which fen vegetation dominates the deepest portion of the wetland area. This wetland type often has wet meadow and low prairie vegetation present on the periphery. The soils are normally saturated by alkaline groundwater seepage. Fen ponds often have quaking or floating mats of emergent vegetation, which includes sedges, grasses and other herbaceous plants.
A more detailed description of the seven wetland classes can be found in:
Stewart, R.E. and H.A. Kantrud. 1971. Classification of Natural Ponds and Lakes in the Glaciated Prairie Region. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C., USA. Resource Publication 92. 57 pp.


Atlanta Center for the Visually Impaired serves some 5000 Georgians a year! They believe "Every person with vision loss should be able to live with independence and dignity." CVI is a fully accredited private facility providing rehabilitation services for the blind and visually impaired."
from International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness
- Approximately 285 million people worldwide live with low vision and blindness
- Of these, 39 million people are blind and 246 million have moderate or severe visual impairment
- 90% of blind people live in low-income countries
- Yet 80% of visual impairment is avoidable - i.e. readily treatable and/or preventable
- Restorations of sight, and blindness prevention strategies are among the most cost-effective interventions in health care
- The number of people blind from infectious causes has greatly reduced in the past 20 years
- An estimated 19 million children are visually impaired
- About 65 % of all people who are visually impaired are aged 50 and older, while this age group comprises only 20% of the world's population
- Increasing elderly populations in many countries mean that more people will be at risk of age-related visual impairment.


The disease we now call COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is actually made up of two respiratory illnesses, emphysema and chronic bronchitis. They tend to occur together as a result of long-term exposure to irritants. In emphysema, the tiny air sacs in the lungs weaken and stiffen, losing their ability to exhale properly and expel carbon dioxide. With chronic bronchitis, the muscles that line the airways tighten and become inflamed, making it harder for air to get through. The inflammation may lead to overproduction of mucus, which is why one of the first signs of COPD is often a chronic phlegmy cough that won't go away.
How to prevent this damage from occurring? Smoking is certainly a primary risk factor for COPD, but nonsmokers need to be on the alert as well. With COPD now the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., it's important to know how to protect yourself. Here are the top seven ways to prevent COPD.
1. Stop smoking.
There's no way around it: The majority of cases of COPD are caused by smoking, and quitting is by far the most effective thing you can do to halt the damage. Inhaling cigarette smoke (and, to some extent, other types of smoke, including pot smoke) damages the elastic fibers that allow the tiny air sacs in the lungs to expand and contract. Somewhere between one in five and one in two smokers will develop COPD; one 2003 study tested older smokers for COPD and found that 50 percent of them had the condition, but many didn't know it yet.
Byron Thomashow, professor at Columbia University Medical School and chairman of the board of the COPD Foundation, says he finds himself wishing he could fast-forward the clock "just temporarily, like in a sci-fi movie" and let smokers experience what it's going to feel like once their lungs begin exhibiting symptoms and they have irreversible damage from COPD. "I believe they'd quit immediately if they knew what was in store."
Take steps to quit and the healing begins almost immediately. Research has shown that quitting smoking halts the progressive lung damage that leads to COPD. And if you quit early enough, studies show that your lung function can stabilize and eventually resemble that of a nonsmoker of the same age.
2. Don't stop exercising, even if you can't catch your breath.
According to Thomashow, the biggest mistake he sees people make is to cut back on exercise when it's difficult for any reason, when in fact they should do just the opposite. "It's counterintuitive; you feel like you should rest and not push yourself because it's not comfortable," he says. "But it turns out that exerting yourself and getting the air into the lungs is the best thing you can do."
If you have any physical issues such as excess weight or asthma, or if you're concerned about your breathing because you're a smoker or former smoker, it's that much more important to exercise to keep your lungs strong and healthy. If you notice that you're having trouble climbing hills or increasing your speed, pay attention to those trouble spots and work up to them gradually. If you suffer from asthma, talk to your doctor about using a "rescue" inhaler just prior to or during exercise to make it easier. Over time, continuing to exercise will help you build tolerance and lung strength.
3. Be proactive about workplace safety.
While smoking gets most of the attention as the cause of COPD, other lung irritants play a significant role as well. One study found that occupational exposure to workplace dust and chemical fumes may be responsible for as many as 20 percent of all COPD cases. Lung irritants known to put someone at risk for COPD include coal dust, fibrous dust from cotton and grain, concrete dust, chemical fumes, and mineral dust associated with mining, such as cadmium and gold. Most states have strict regulations regarding air quality and workplace protection, but they aren't always enforced. Demand protection for yourself, family members, and coworkers in the form of respirators, masks, filters, and other protective equipment.
More ways to protect yourself from COPD
4. Step away from the smokers.
One night in a smoky bar probably won't put you at risk, but long-term exposure to secondhand smoke primes your lungs for COPD. In fact, the World Health Organization has estimated that 10 percent of all smoking-related deaths are due to secondhand smoke. Several convincing studies have shown that people who were exposed to secondhand smoke as children are more likely to get emphysema, one of the conditions that makes up COPD. Other studies have shown that people who are exposed to secondhand smoke over a long period of time have a higher risk of all respiratory illnesses.
Ask smokers to smoke outside the home and don't permit smoking in the car. At work, avoid lunch breaks with smoking coworkers, and if designated smoking areas aren't at an effective distance from your workspace, bring the issue up anonymously with your supervisor.
5. Spare your lungs on spare-the-air days.
Exposure to air pollution and smog have been linked with COPD. Try not to go outside any more than necessary when air pollution levels are high (designated "spare-the-air" days in some areas), and don't exercise outdoors on smoggy days. Also, avoid driving with the windows open; one study of California commuters found that they received almost half of their daily exposure to air pollution just while driving to work in the morning, even though that constituted just 6 percent of their day.
Indoor air pollution is an issue, too. Beware of smoke from fireplaces (clean flues and chimneys, and avoid burning smoky wood); the World Health Organization has documented a rising incidence in COPD among women who cook over wood-fired or otherwise smoky indoor fires. Avoid, too, breathing the fumes from paint thinner, hair spray, insecticides, and other products labeled with warnings about lung irritation.
6. Do deep-breathing exercises.
When it comes to the lungs, there's definitely a "use them or lose them" component, experts say. Do breathing exercises to help keep the air sacs in your lungs elastic and to keep airways clear. There are two types of breathing exercises recommended for COPD patients, and they can benefit those at risk as well.
The first is called pursed-lips breathing. Take a normal breath, preferably through your nose, then puff out your cheeks, purse your lips, and blow the air out slowly. Your exhale should be four times longer than your inhale, so count one while you inhale, four while you exhale.
The second type of breathing, diaphragm breathing, is easiest to practice lying on your back with your knees bent. Put one hand on your abdomen, the other on your upper chest. Inhale through your nose, feeling your abdomen move outward, then exhale while feeling it fall inward. The goal is to feel your abdomen move while your upper chest stays still.
7. Boost your intake of fish and fish oil.
Several recent studies have shown that fish oil, which is high in omega-3 fatty acids, may be valuable in healing the lung damage that leads to COPD. The most conclusive research, conducted in Japan, found that people who ate a diet enriched in omega-3s from fish and fish oil had a significant drop in lung inflammation and were able to walk further than a control group, as measured by a six-minute walking test. On the basis of this study, many pulmonologists now recommend that patients with asthma or a history of frequent respiratory illnesses eat fish several times a week or take a fish oil supplement.


Observe & Record
Watch your child for 3-5 days. Write a list of all the things he or she wants over the course of each day and how he or she gets access to those items. At the end of the 3-5 days, look at the list and pick the items or actions that are most frequent and most motivating for your child. Also, choose items that he or she does not have an appropriate way to ask for those items or actions yet.
Here is a data sheet you can use –> Observe & Record Mands
Target specific actions and items. Do not target words like yes, no, please, thank you, more, again, break at first. Target words like carrot, ball, iPad, cookie, spinner, jump, bounce, swing, etc. It is ideal to teach your child many specific words at first so that as soon as he or she talks, you can reinforce with an item or action, specific to what they mean. If your child says “more” out of the blue and you do not know what he or she is talking about, you would not be able to reinforce that spontaneous communication! We want to teach our children to say exactly what they mean.
Here is a link to another resource explaining why not to target “more” initially when a child is first learning to mand.
Variety of Categories
Pick items from a variety of categories. For example, do not target only food items or only toys you play with in the water. Also, when initially targeting foods, try to target foods that taste very different. For example, target cookie (sweet) and cracker (salty) rather than cracker (salty) and pretzel (salty).
Appropriate Level of Difficulty
If your child does not have at least 50 single items and 25-50 single actions mastered in the mand operant, you should be targeting single words. Do not target more than one word at a time until the pre-requisite skills are met. Also, it is not recommended to target carrier phrases “I want …” when your child does not have a sufficient verbal repertoire of single words.
Here is a link to a great workshop by Dr. Vincent Carbone, talking about increasing length of utterance in children with autism.


Social perception theories and investigations deal with the nature, causes, and consequences of perceptions of social entities, including one’s self, other individuals, social categories, and aggregates or groups to which one may or may not belong. The content of a perception can be virtually any property. Individual attributes may include personality traits, behavioral dispositions, physical characteristics, and ability evaluations. Group attributes can include properties such as size, cohesiveness, cultural traits, stratification patterns, network patterns, legitimacy, and historical elements. With some notable exceptions, however, the field of social perception traditionally has emphasized the micro side, focusing on individual inferences regarding one individual or a very small number of other individuals.
Social perception is best viewed as an umbrella label that covers a range of loosely related and usually loosely formulated theoretical conjectures and associated research. Today ‘‘social cognition’’ may be the more popular label, subsuming theory and research indexed under numerous other headings: person perception, social judgment, social representation, schema theory, reference group theory, impression formation, attribution theory, and more. Little of this work will be discussed here, although most of it is easy to access. Reference lists in books, chapters, and articles under the various headings tend to intersect rather than be isolated. Review articles have appeared with regularity, and so it is relatively easy to locate the seminal, general, or esoteric references one seeks.
This article provides an introduction and selective overview of the social perception area, with additional attention to some threads that have been or could be of particular interest within sociology. First there is a brief discussion of perception in general, followed by sections that divide the field into three major realms: self-perception, person perception, and group perception.
Social perception is only one manifestation of the general phenomenon of human perception. All perceptions begin with energy-producing events, either inside people or from the environment. Each of the senses operates as a ‘‘transducer,’’ encoding a particular form of energy (e.g., radiant, kinetic, chemical) into neurological signals that are carried to the brain as complex, parallel streams of bioelectrical impulses. In the brain, these streams of information are filtered and transformed through several stages, producing dynamic neural representations almost instantaneously. Depending on anatomic factors, prior experiences, and the nature of the signals, these representations may or may not reach the level of conscious awareness. When sensations survive this elaborate preprocessing and exceed sensory thresholds, however, they break through into a person’s conscious awareness,appearing as coherent and meaningful perceptions: hunger pangs, one’s reflection in the mirror, a smile from a friend. These perceptions seem to capture all the essential properties of the events that instigated them.
Roughly speaking, then, people acquire energetic impulses from internal and external environments that, in turn, impinge on the sensory apparatuses as sensations and are transformed by the brain into perceptions. This suggests a close relationship between the perceptions that are formed and the subsequent actions taken on their behalf. For instance, on the basis of perceptions of the personal qualities of others (and perceptions of others’ perceptions of those qualities), people make judgments about those qualities (e.g., good or bad); on the basis of those judgments, people formulate intentions about how they will behave toward others (e.g., plan to engage with them or avoid them); on the basis of those intentions, the actions of others, the prevailing context, and so on, people enact their impressions and intentions in social interactions.
Three qualities of perceptions bear further elaboration: Structure, stability, and meaning are definitive subjective properties (Schneider et al. 1979). A fourth quality—accuracy—is best understood as an objective property of perceptions, at least in principle. Accuracy and bias in social perception are addressed later in this article.
Humans experience the world as structured. Rather than seeming chaotic and unpredictable, elements and events generally appear to correspond to one another in patterned ways. Things seem to happen for reasons. Much of this patterning is imposed, however, and one person’s perceptions may be very different from those of others, even under identical conditions. This is especially relevant in regard to the interpretations people impose on complex phenomena. For instance, people tend not to be aware of how differences in the expectations they bring to a situation color their perceptions. People cannot take in information on everything around them and those expectations direct a person to attend selectively to the available stimuli in a situation. This biasing of attention can have a tremendous influence on interpretations of the situation. Moreover, each person may impose a unique subjective structure on the same objective reality. Every sports fan has experienced the perception that compared to the opponent, his or her favored team is consistently the victim of ‘‘bad calls’’ by the officials. Supporters of the opponent generally disagree, and rarely does one perceive the opposition to have been treated unfairly by officials. What fans actually ‘‘see’’ are slices of reality unconsciously chosen to conform with their beliefs and expectations.
Different sports fans may see different things, but if pressed, they probably could identify broad areas of the game they agree about and take for granted. They would agree that there were no sudden changes in the sport they were watching; they would profess not to have seen players on the field dematerializing in one place and rematerializing elsewhere; the ball appears to stay the same size and shape even as it moves nearer to and farther from the fans’ points of view. In general, while observers may disagree on some points, most of what is observed has an underlying sense of continuity. Indeed, among the myriad sensations to which one might attend in a given situation, the bias is toward those which engender a sense of stability—a sense of the temporal endurance of these patterned sensations.
If structure and stability were the only properties of experience, the world would appear merely as successions of discrete, insignificant objects and events, each with no particular import transcending the moment. In contrast, most perceptions seem meaningful. That is, perceptions are conceived of as threads in a larger fabric. Through their interconnections and the patterns they form, they seem to have significance, purpose, causes, and consequences beyond their own existence. With cognitive development comes the ability to recognize and select impressions and events that are significant in terms of the information they convey. As will be discussed below, meaningfulness and significance do not imply accuracy. Perceptions—especially social perceptions—are imperfect representations that can be highly misleading.
Among the variety of ways in which one could organize the social perception literature, one of the simplest and most useful proceeds from the individual perceiver, to perceptions of other individuals, and finally to group perceptions. These categories define the three sections below, which are followed by some remarks about future directions.
Self-perception is social perception with the self as the object. Through introspection and information from others, people develop beliefs about their many qualities: personality, physical appearance, behavioral tendencies, moral stature, athletic prowess, and the like. ‘‘Self-concept’’ is the general term for the system of beliefs about the self. Although introspection is a source of selfknowledge (Andersen and Williams 1985), mounting evidence suggests that it is not the predominant source that people used to believe it is and that it is generally biased and inaccurate (Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Wilson et al. 1981).
One major branch of self-perception research focuses on inaccuracies in self-knowledge, and a second on how information from others shapes the self-concept. An example of work in the first branch is a review by Greenwald (1980) of evidence of three types of self-conceptual biases:
Bem’s influential self-perception theory (1972) asserts that in conditions of uncertainty, people use their own behavior as a guide to inferences about their inner selves. Later approaches to the self-concept focus on structures such as category systems, conceptual networks, and complex schemas that can represent explicit connections and nonconnections among elements of the self-concept (Greenwald and Pratkanis  provide a review).
The early insights of Cooley (1964) and Mead (1934) still guide sociological theory and research on the social origins of the self-concept, the second branch mentioned above. Cooley described the ‘‘looking-glass self’’ as the use of others’ appraisals as mirrors of the ‘‘true’’ self. Mead noted that the images people form of themselves are greatly affected by how they imagine significant others would respond to and evaluate them. Social comparison theory (Festinger 1954; Suls and Miller 1977) deals with, among other issues, the question of whom one refers to when seeking comparative self-knowledge and the effects of the various available social referents on one’s selfconcept and behavior.
Under the rubric of self-perception also are found topics such as self-efficacy, self-evaluation, self-esteem, and self-identity. Self-efficacy is the perception of one’s competence with respect to specific tasks (Bandura 1986; Cervone and Peake 1986). Self-esteem is the extent to which one thinks positively about oneself (Rosenberg 1979). The concept of self-evaluation, when distinguished from efficacy and esteem, has been used in theory and research on how the characteristics of evaluators affect self-evaluations in specific, collective task situations (Webster and Sobieszek 1974). There are two major approaches to self-identity: identity theory (Stryker 1980; Burke 1991) and social identity theory (Hogg and Abrams 1988; Hogg et al. 1995). Although there are many shared concepts in these approaches, identity theory is distinguished by a greater emphasis on the performance of social roles as the source of self-definitions; in contrast, social identity theory emphasizes the ways in which self-categorizations hinge on salient properties of the groups with which individuals align themselves.
The more strongly a person’s identity is tied to a particular social role or category, the greater is the extent to which that individual empathizes with other occupants of that role or category. It is as if the boundary between self and others became blurred, and the individual empathizes with similar others to whom good things and bad things happen. For instance, an experiment by Markovsky (1985) subtly emphasized self-identification versus group identification and created unjust reward allocations to both individuals and groups. The subjects responded more strongly to the type of injustice that corresponded to their identification.
The core of social perception theory and research addresses how people formulate impressions about the inner qualities and outward behaviors of other individuals. The focal points for this work include the properties of the people who are perceived and the characteristics of the situations in which a perception is developed, the logic by which basic sensations are integrated to form complex social perceptions, and the way in which perceptions, once formed, are affected by new information.
Attribution theories are concerned with how people form inferences about the causes of others’ behaviors. The basic question in these approaches concerns the conditions under which another person’s behavior is attributed to an internal disposition or to aspects of the situation in which it occurred ( Jones et al. 1989). The so-called fundamental attribution error is the pervasive tendency for observers to underestimate the impact of situational factors on others’ behavior (Ross 1977). In fact, people tend to make personal attributions for others’ behavior and situational attributions for their own ( Jones and Nisbett 1972). Gilbert (1989) has modified this question in a fruitful way by asserting that personal attributions occur automatically; situational attributions occur only as the possible result of an effortful search for additional information (Gilbert et al. 1988).
Although schemas could be discussed under the ‘‘self-perception’’ and ‘‘group perception’’ headings, most often they are invoked in theory and research on person perception. Schemas are organized structures of cognitions pertaining to social objects such as the self, other persons, groups, roles, and events (Taylor and Crocker 1981). Thus, one’s schema for ‘‘college professor’’ may include beliefs such as ‘‘intelligent’’ and ‘‘scattered,’’ negative attitudes such as ‘‘inaccessible’’ and ‘‘too political,’’ and expectations for behaviors such as ‘‘lecturing’’ and ‘‘conducting research.’’ Schemas have a variety of effects on social perception. For instance, they induce people to attend to certain social and situational features, influence people’s judgments by inducing particular expectations for the consequences of their actions, and affect how people recollect social events by making some pieces of information more salient than others. Schemas also transcend individuals by becoming cultural elements that can be communicated among group members or from parent to child.
Other approaches to person perception focus on the integration of bits of information associated with particular others. Information integration theory (Anderson 1981) provides rigorous mathematical models of how an observer employs weighted combinations of another individual’s traits to form an overall impression. Social applications of psychophysics (Stevens 1975; Lodge 1981) apply a magnitude scaling technology first developed for expressing judgments of physical properties (e.g., weight, brightness, numerosity, sound pressure, saltiness) to the quantification and validation of judgments of personal or social properties (e.g., competence, fairness, attractiveness). Status characteristics theory (Berger et al. 1985) explains the emergence of status and influence hierarchies in collective, task-performing groups on the basis of individuals’ relative standings on combinations of salient characteristics that can order interaction whether or not they are explicitly relevant to a task.
The accuracy of social perceptions was an early research focus but languished for years because of conceptual and methodological roadblocks (Cronbach 1955; Zebrowitz 1990; Fiske 1993). One problem is that determining accuracy requires the existence of a criterion against which a social perception is judged. Often, however, there is no assurance that the criterion is accurate because it may be arbitrary, subjective, or biased. Research in this area has seen a resurgence in recent years, however, partly as a result of approaches like Kenny and Albright’s (1987) social relations model. That approach measures the accuracy of judgments of a given characteristic by using multiple observers and targets, permitting the researcher to control for observers’ response sets, targets’ attributes, and other aspects of the relationships between observers and targets. A mere recent trend is to attempt to disentangle the combined effects of observers’ expectancies and targets’ characteristics, specifying the conditions under which either set of factors predominates in determining social perceptions.
In a related vein, attributional and social perceptual biases constitute a vast field of inquiry. In recent years, a number of universal human perceptual inclinations have been cataloged that are capable of generating perceptual biases. Many perceptions depend on the ability to gauge one’s relevant behaviors and characteristics, yet people often have difficulty assessing their own qualities and properties in an absolute way (Bem 1972). Preconceived notions powerfully influence subsequent perceptions by inducing selective perceptions. Once an idea is accepted, falsifying information is discounted and verifying information is accepted uncritically. People not only are subject to such errors of perception, they also underestimate the degree to which this is so. They are overconfident in their judgments; employ useless, distracting, and unrepresentative information contained in anecdotes; and infer illusory covariations among social characteristics. In recent years, cognitive and social psychologists have begun to identify and systematically examine these and other types of social perceptual biases. (For some examples, see Taylor and Fiske 1978; Taylor et al. 1978; Nisbett and Ross 1980; Kahneman et al. 1982; and Goldstein and Hogarth 1997.)
Two sets of approaches to group perception predominate: those concerned with reference group choices and effects, and those addressing social categorization processes. A reference group is a set of individuals whose standing or perspective is taken into account by an actor in selecting a course of action or making a judgment about a specific issue (Farmer 1992).
Research on reference group phenomena represents one of the first and longest-lived attempts in sociology and social psychology to understand how individuals orient themselves to groups, which groups they choose, and the consequences of their choices. (See the early work of Newcomb  and Merton and Rossi  and the more recent review by Singer .) Among the functions of reference groups are providing sources for normative information and offering bases for social comparisons (Gecas 1982). Normative information dictates ostensibly correct and incorrect courses of action and positive and negative values. For example, people may adopt as their own the expressed values of respected members of the community or may assert a position opposite to that held by a disrespected group. In a similar way, social comparisons with reference groups provide bases for evaluating one’s beliefs, actions, and accomplishments. For instance, without making reference to the set of people with incomes comparable to one’s own, it is impossible to gauge one’s level of generosity in donating money to charitable organizations. Three hundred dollars donated in a year may seem high until one discovers that the average donation of people in one’s income bracket is ten times that amount.
Although virtually everyone makes use of reference groups, which reference groups one selects for one’s comparisons and what consequences follow from those selections are more complex issues. Reference group choices have been shown in both natural and experimental settings to be influenced by numerous factors, including attitude similarity, structural inducements, and normative prescriptions. The consequences of referential comparisons that have been studied include the treatment of social deviants and the emergence of negative social evaluations, changes in self-esteem, and feelings of relative deprivation, gratification, or inequity. Although a good deal of interesting research and many theoretical conjectures have been associated with this area of inquiry, as Singer (1981) noted, there is no reference group theory per se, and the explanatory promise of this area remains unfulfilled. However, many of the research lines spawned by interest in reference groups remain active.
The reference group literature takes as given the existence of groups and the issue of which people are and are not members. Social categorization approaches (Tajfel 1981; Wilder 1986; Abrams and Hogg 1999) are closely related to the social identification literature noted earlier and view the perception of membership versus nonmembership as problematic. In general, people say that they detest being categorized and avoid categorizing others. However, social categorization is a manifestation of a perceptual process that is fundamental to survival. Everyone does it, consciously or not. By learning to recognize and categorize elements of their environments, humans are able to distinguish nutriment from poison and ally from adversary.
Despite its indispensability, the categorization process has side effects in the social realm. The most important and robust of these effects is the tendency for people to overestimate differences between groups and underestimate differences among group members. ‘‘They’’ appear uniform, but ‘‘we’’ are individuals (Quattrone 1986). This phenomenon lies at the heart of stereotyping: the overgeneralization of perceived group attributes (Stangor and Lange 1994). Once formed, stereotypes are maintained by virtue of the types of perceptual biases previously noted, such as forming illusory correlations and relying on anecdotes. A classic finding in research on social identity (Tajfel 1982; Turner 1987) demonstrated that arbitrary we-they distinctions created by random assignments to groups in a laboratory setting were sufficient to produce in-group favoritism and a variety of negative attributions regarding the out-group.
Discrimination—the differential treatment of others solely on the basis of their group memberships— and prejudice—negative attitudes toward certain groups and their members—are common behavioral manifestations of perceptual stereotyping. In American society and in the social and behavioral sciences, gender- and race-based forms of discrimination and prejudice have received the most attention (Eagly 1987; Dovidio and Gaertner 1986, respectively), although the list of bases for discrimination is probably as long as the list of conceivable social characteristics.
Social perception theory and research embrace multiple levels of analysis: cognitive processing, individual and interpersonal behavior, perceptions of groups, and group behavior. The social perception theories that may hold the greatest promise for the future are those amenable to integrating explicit formulations developed within these different levels of analysis. Undoubtedly, much social perception research in the near term will be business as usual, identifying new theoretical contingencies and empirical patterns. However, social and behavioral scientists are developing new approaches to modeling social and social psychological phenomena that may prove fruitful in social perception research.
Burt (1982) integrated a psychophysical model of human perception with explicit models of social network structure. The result is a conceptualization of social groupings at any scale in which network members
The models show precisely how structural configurations of social relationships, in combination with individually based social perception and comparison processes, can theoretically account for a far broader class of phenomena than can either individual- level theories that do not consider structures or structural theories that do not consider individuals. Unfortunately, this formulation has not inspired a corresponding program of research, and the potential contributions of this innovative approach have not been tapped.
Significant progress has been made, however, using network models of a different sort. Within a broader class of approaches known as complexity theory (Eve et al. 1997), neural network models (Read and Miller 1998) and related alternatives (Carley and Svoboda 1996; Macy and Skvoretz 1998; Gilbert and Conte 1995) are beginning to account for social perception phenomena using parallel distributed processing models. This is a type of computer simulation in which numerous interconnected elements (e.g., neurons or agents) repeatedly receive, process, and respond to information from their environments, which may consist largely of similar elements. For example, using this approach, Smith and DeCoster (1998) devised a unified computational model that accomplishes several feats: It learns the social characteristics it ‘‘perceives’’ in individual cases and recognizes those characteristics from partial cues, learns stereotypes from exposure to multiple cases and recognizes those stereotypes from partial cues, and develops novel concepts from old ones. Although so-called connectionist approaches are relatively new, findings such as these bode well for further investigations.
There is no lack of good ideas in the social perception field, and this area may well play a central role in future attempts to integrate micro and macro sociology. Lacking, however, are concerted, programmatic efforts to develop and test explicit and rigorous social perception theories. Some exceptions were noted above. For the most part, however, the absence of explicitness and rigor has resulted in a minimal level of competition among different approaches, virtually no critical testing between formulations, and few timetested conceptual and methodological refinements. However, this area remains attractive to a large number of psychologists and sociologists, in part because of its many unanswered questions and the ubiquity of its phenomena.
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The joint winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008, Luc Montagnier, is claiming that DNA can send ‘electromagnetic imprints’ of itself into distant cells and fluids which can then be used by enzymes to create copies of the original DNA. You can read the original paper here [PDF]. (Source) Montagnier also filed for a U.S. patent on the technology of detecting phantom replica of DNA in water: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20110027774.pdf
The popular press and self-appointed blog experts, without bothering to investigate any further, have decided to misrepresent this important work as “teleportation” or “magic”. For example:
- Can Our DNA Electromagnetically ‘Teleport’ Itself? One Researcher Thinks So (popsci.com)
- The Nobel disease meets DNA teleportation and homeopathy [Respectful Insolence] (scienceblogs.com)
- Nobel Prize Winner Says DNA Performs Quantum Teleportation (science.slashdot.org)
- Scientists Debate Magical DNA Teleportation (escapistmagazine.com)
- Teleportation Magic Established By Science, At Last! (randi.org)
Characterizing Dr. Montagnier’s work as “teleportation” or “magic” is an obvious misrepresentation and creates ridiculous controversy. It appears to be intended to discredit Dr. Montagnier and his important work.
Read the rest of this blog post and decide for yourself if it is science or “magic”.
Inquiring minds might ask why recent work by a Nobel Scientist might need to be ridiculed?
DNA waves and water, Dec. 2010
L. Montagnier, J. Aissa2, E. Del Giudice, C. Lavallee2, A. Tedeschi, and G. Vitiello
Abstract. Some bacterial and viral DNA sequences have been found to induce low frequency electromagnetic waves in high aqueous dilutions. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency. We discuss this phenomenon in the framework of quantum field theory. A scheme able to account for the observations is proposed. The reported phenomenon could allow to develop highly sensitive detection systems for chronic bacterial and viral infections. (Source)
The “water” is NOT “just water”. It is a medium.
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique supplies building blocks to copy a DNA fragment. (See the description of the PCR process below.)
Normally, to replicate a DNA fragment, one prepares a PCR medium, then adds a DNA fragment into the PCR medium, and exact copies of that DNA fragment are thereby created.
Replication of DNA at a distance is accomplished using the PCR technique–but with one important difference.
Dr. Montagnier’s breakthrough is that he copies DNA fragments, at a distance, without adding the DNA fragment into the PCR medium. What Dr. Montagnier has shown is that the shadow of DNA, where that DNA is located at a short distance away, is enough to create copies of that DNA in a PCR medium.
Dr. Montagnier uses the PCR technique to multiply DNA in a PCR medium, not by adding DNA into the medium, but by using special light to cast a shadow of a DNA fragment onto the PCR medium. He calls it “imprinting” the PCR medium with a “phantom DNA” imprint. (See also Garaiev and Poponin’s “phantom DNA” imprint.)
The DNA fragment is not physically in the PCR medium. This is potentially a huge breakthrough.
According to Matti Pitkanen:
HIV Nobelist L. Montagnier’s group has published two articles challenging the standard views about genetic code and providing strong support for the notion of water memory. Already the results of the first article suggested implicitly the existence of a new kind nano-scale representation of genetic code and the the recent article makes this claim explicitly. . . The article “DNA waves and water” has created quite a furor even before its publication. . . The claim of Montagnier’s team is that the radiation generated by DNA affects water in such a manner that it behaves as if it contained the actual DNA. (Source)
As theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, points out:
“If the results are correct, these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry.” (Source)
Montagnier has just taken a new position at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China (this university is often referred to as “China’s MIT”), where he will work in a new institute bearing his name. This work focuses on a new scientific movement at the crossroads of physics, biology, and medicine: the phenomenon of electromagnetic waves produced by DNA in water. He and his team will study both the theoretical basis and the possible applications in medicine. (Source: French Nobelist Escapes “Intellectual Terror” to Pursue Radical Ideas in China. Science 24 December 2010: Vol. 330 no. 6012 p. 1732. DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6012.1732)
Remind me, please, why do so many in the US feel a need to ridicule Dr. Montagnier?
America’s loss is China’s gain.
Similar to “DNA Phantom Effect” Research in 1992 by Russian Scientists
There has been Russian research, by Garaiev and Poponin, in related areas with similar results (layman’s overview). Garaiev and Poponin’s original work was published in 1992:
P.P. Gariaev, K.V. Grigor’ev, A.A. Vasil’ev, V.P. Poponin and V.A. Shcheglov. “Investigation of the Fluctuation Dynamics of DNA Solutions by Laser Correlation Spectroscopy.” Bulletin of the Lebedev Physics Institute, n. 11-12, p. 23-30 (1992).
Vladimir Poponin, in his paper, “The DNA Phantom Effect: Direct Measurement of A New Field in the Vacuum Substructure” explains the experimental set up and procedures. (Source1, Source2) Garaiev and Poponin, if I understand correctly, used a laser light beamed through a DNA sample to create what they call a phantom DNA imprint pattern in a secondary medium at a distance. This phantom DNA imprint in the secondary medium was stable for up to a month. The Russian scientists speculated that the DNA phantom effect had something to do with the creation of an energy field. Garaiev and Poponin, provided additional follow-up comments in their 2002 paper, “Update on DNA Phantom Effect.” (Source).
Related work and/or commentaries include:
- Dr. Peter Gariaev: Wave Genetics
- Gariaev, P. P., Friedman, M. J., & Leonova-Gariaeva, E. A., “Principles of Linguistic-Wave Genetics“, DNA Decipher Journal, January 2011, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 011-024.
- Gariaev, P. P., Marcer, P. J., Leonova-Gariaeva, K. A., Kaempf, U. & Artjukh, V. D., “DNA as Basis for Quantum Biocomputer“, DNA Decipher Journal, January 2011, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 025-046.
- Gariaev P. and Pitk¨anen M., “A Model for the Findings about Hologram Generating Properties of DNA“, DNA Decipher Journal, January 2011, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 047-072.
- Decipherment of the Secrets of DNA, DNA Decipher Journal, January 2011, Vol 1, No 1 (2011)
- Grazyna Fosar and Franz Bludorf, DNA hyper-communication and group awareness, Nature goes online. (in German)
- Glen Rein, “EFFECT OF CONSCIOUS INTENTION ON HUMAN DNA,” Proceedings of the Int’l Forum on New Science, 1996.
- Tszyan Kanchgen: Microwave Transfer of Biological Information; “Tszyan Kanchgen lead a series of experiments, which have shown an opportunity of direct transfer of the information from one biological object to another by radio waves,” Сергей Демкин “Чудеса и приключения”, “ТМ” N4, 1996; Патент России №2044550, 1995 (Source)
- P. P. Garayev: Wave Genome; Телепортация? Элементарно! http://www.skyzone.al.ru/tech/garjaev07.html (Source)
- JIANG Kan G, Cheng Qian, Tang Binghuan, “Observation on Biological Effect of Bioelectromagnetic (BEM) Field>”, “Natural Science Research”, Vol.10, No2, April 2007 68-77 (Source)
- Discussion Forum: Biological journals Bulletin boards > Talk (in Russian)
- Commentaries and speculation: “DNA BioComputer Reprogramming“; “Groundbreaking Russian DNA Discoveries“; “Russian DNA Research“. One commentator says that that the work of Russian astrophysicist, Dr. Nikolai A. Kozyrev (1908-83) may also be relevant to understanding the phantom DNA effect.
- Russian DNA Discoveries Explain Human ‘Paranormal’ Events
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique supplies all the building blocks to multiply a DNA fragment:
PCR is used to amplify a specific region of a DNA strand (the DNA target). Most PCR methods typically amplify DNA fragments of up to ~10 kilo base pairs (kb), although some techniques allow for amplification of fragments up to 40 kb in size.
A basic PCR set up requires several components and reagents. These components include:
* DNA template that contains the DNA region (target) to be amplified.
* Two primers that are complementary to the 3′ (three prime) ends of each of the sense and anti-sense strand of the DNA target.
* Taq polymerase or another DNA polymerase with a temperature optimum at around 70 °C.
* Deoxynucleotide triphosphates (dNTPs), the building blocks from which the DNA polymerases synthesizes a new DNA strand.
* Buffer solution, providing a suitable chemical environment for optimum activity and stability of the DNA polymerase.
* Divalent cations, magnesium or manganese ions; generally Mg2+ is used, but Mn2+ can be utilized for PCR-mediated DNA mutagenesis, as higher Mn2+ concentration increases the error rate during DNA synthesis
* Monovalent cation potassium ions.
New Scientist reported the Luc Montagnier DNA Replication story as follows: (Source)
A Nobel prizewinner is reporting that DNA can be generated from its teleported “quantum imprint”
A STORM of scepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. “If the results are correct,” says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, “these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry.”
Luc Montagnier, who shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that HIV causes AIDS, says he has evidence that DNA can send spooky electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant cells and fluids. If that wasn’t heretical enough, he also suggests that enzymes can mistake the ghostly imprints for real DNA, and faithfully copy them to produce the real thing. In effect this would amount to a kind of quantum teleportation of the DNA.
Many researchers contacted for comment by New Scientist reacted with disbelief. Gary Schuster, who studies DNA conductance effects at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, compared it to “pathological science”. Jacqueline Barton, who does similar work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was equally sceptical. “There aren’t a lot of data given, and I don’t buy the explanation,” she says. One blogger has suggested Montagnier should be awarded an IgNobel prize.
Yet the results can’t be dismissed out of hand. “The experimental methods used appear comprehensive,” says Reimers. So what have Montagnier and his team actually found?
Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic set-up is as follows. Two adjacent but physically separate test tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The apparatus was isolated from Earth’s natural magnetic field to stop it interfering with the experiment. One tube contained a fragment of DNA around 100 bases long; the second tube contained pure water.
After 16 to 18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method routinely used to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the original material. The gene fragment was apparently recovered from both tubes, even though one should have contained just water (see diagram).
DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA – whose concentration has not been revealed – had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field. In each cycle it was diluted 10-fold, and “ghost” DNA was only recovered after between seven and 12 dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high dilutions used in homeopathy.
Physicists in Montagnier’s team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water. This structure, they claim, is preserved and amplified through quantum coherence effects, and because it mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process mistake it for DNA itself, and somehow use it as a template to make DNA matching that which “sent” the signal (arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166).
“The biological experiments do seem intriguing, and I wouldn’t dismiss them,” says Greg Scholes of the University of Toronto in Canada, who last year demonstrated that quantum effects occur in plants. Yet according to Klaus Gerwert, who studies interactions between water and biomolecules at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, “It is hard to understand how the information can be stored within water over a timescale longer than picoseconds.”
“The structure would be destroyed instantly,” agrees Felix Franks, a retired academic chemist in London who has studied water for many years. Franks was involved as a peer reviewer in the debunking of a controversial study in 1988 which claimed that water had a memory (see “How ‘ghost molecules’ were exorcised”). “Water has no ‘memory’,” he says now. “You can’t make an imprint in it and recover it later.”
Despite the scepticism over Montagnier’s explanation, the consensus was that the results deserve to be investigated further. Montagnier’s colleague, theoretical physicist Giuseppe Vitiello of the University of Salerno in Italy, is confident that the result is reliable. “I would exclude that it’s contamination,” he says. “It’s very important that other groups repeat it.”
In a paper last year (Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences, DOI: 10.1007/s12539-009-0036-7), Montagnier described how he discovered the apparent ability of DNA fragments and entire bacteria both to produce weak electromagnetic fields and to “regenerate” themselves in previously uninfected cells. Montagnier strained a solution of the bacterium Mycoplasma pirum through a filter with pores small enough to prevent the bacteria penetrating. The filtered water emitted the same frequency of electromagnetic signal as the bacteria themselves. He says he has evidence that many species of bacteria and many viruses give out the electromagnetic signals, as do some diseased human cells.
Montagnier says that the full details of his latest experiments will not be disclosed until the paper is accepted for publication. “Surely you are aware that investigators do not reveal the detailed content of their experimental work before its first appearance in peer-reviewed journals,” he says.
Popsci.com reported the story as follows:
DNA Teleportation Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier describes a phenomenon in which DNA emits electromagnetic signals of its own construction, “ghost DNA” that can be mistaken by enzymes as the real deal and replicated in another place. Essentially, it’s DNA teleportation. Montagnier, et al.
A Nobel prize winning scientist who shared the 2008 prize for medicine for his role in establishing the link between HIV and AIDS has stirred up a good deal of both interest and skepticism with his latest experimental results, which more or less show that DNA can teleport itself to distant cells via electromagnetic signals. If his results prove correct, they would shake up the foundations upon which modern chemistry rests. But plenty of Montagnier’s peers are far from convinced.
The full details of Montagnier’s experiments are not yet known, as his paper has not yet been accepted for publication. But he and his research partners have made a summary of his findings available. Essentially, they took two test tubes – one containing a fragment of DNA about 100 bases long, another containing pure water – and isolated them in a chamber that muted the earth’s natural electromagnetic field to keep it from muddying the results. The test tubes were housed within a copper coil emanating a weak electromagnetic field.
Montagnier and his team say this suggests DNA emits its own electromagnetic signals that imprint the DNA’s structure on other molecules (like water). Ostensibly this means DNA can project itself from one cell to the next, where copies could be made – something like quantum teleportation of genetic material, a notion that is spooky on multiple levels.
- Russian DNA Discoveries Explain Human Paranormal Events
- DNA ‘s Mysteries. Does DNA contain our Consciousness
Russian DNA Discoveries Explain Human Paranormal Events (Source)
Summarized by Baerbel
Edited and translated
Esoteric and spiritual teachers have known for ages that our body is programmable by language, words and thought. This has now been scientifically proven and explained.
- The human DNA is a biological Internet and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. The latest Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mindâ¬”s influence on weather patterns and much more.
- In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes. Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% are considered “junk DNA.”
- The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature was not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore that 90% of “junk DNA.” Their results, findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary!
- According to there findings, our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage and communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code – especially in the apparent “useless” 90% – follows the same rules as all our human languages.
- To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar. They found that the alkalines of our DNA follow a regular grammar and do have set rules just like our languages. Therefore, human languages did not appear coincidentally but are a reflection of our inherent DNA.
- The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues also explored the vibrational behavior of DNA. In brief the bottom line was: “Living chromosomes function just like a holographic computer using endogenous DNA laser radiation.” This means that they managed, for example, to modulate certain frequency patterns (sound) onto a laser-like ray which influenced DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself.
- Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) is of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary. One can simply use words and sentences of the human language! This, too, was experimentally proven!
- Living DNA substance (in living tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even to radio waves, if the proper frequencies (sound) are being used. This finally and scientifically explains why affirmations, hypnosis and the like can have such strong effects on humans and their bodies. It is entirely normal and natural for our DNA to react to language.
- While western researchers cut single genes from DNA strands and insert them elsewhere, the Russians enthusiastically created devices that influence cellular metabolism through modulated radio and light frequencies, thus repairing genetic defects.
- They even captured information patterns of a particular DNA and transmitted it onto another, thus reprogramming cells to another genome. So they successfully transformed, for example, frog embryos to salamander embryos simply by transmitting the DNA information patterns! This way the entire information was transmitted without any of the side effects or disharmonies encountered when cutting out and re-introducing single genes from the DNA.
- This represents an unbelievable, world-transforming revolution and sensation: by simply applying vibration (sound frequencies) and language instead of the archaic cutting-out procedure!
- This experiment points to the immense power of wave genetics, which obviously has a greater influence on the formation of organisms than the biochemical processes of alkaline sequences.
- Esoteric and spiritual teachers have known for ages that our body is programmable by language, words and thought. This has now been scientifically proven and explained.
- Of course the frequency has to be correct. And this is why not everybody is equally successful or can do it with always the same strength. The individual person must work on the inner processes and development in order to establish a conscious communication with the DNA.
- The Russian researchers work on a method that is not dependent on these factors but will ALWAYS work, provided one uses the correct frequency. But the higher developed an individual’s consciousness is, the less need is there for any type of device: one can achieve these results by oneself. Science will finally stop laughing at such ideas and will confirm and explain the results. And it doesn’t end there.
- The Russian scientists also found out that our DNA can cause disturbing patterns in a vacuum, thus producing magnetized wormholes! Wormholes are the microscopic equivalents of the so-called Einstein-Rosen bridges in the vicinity of black holes (left by burned-out stars).
- These are tunnel connections between entirely different areas in the universe through which information can be transmitted outside of space and time. The DNA attracts these bits of information and passes them on to our consciousness. This process of hyper-communication (telepathy, channeling) is most effective in a state of relaxation.
- Stress, worry or a hyperactive intellect prevent successful hyper-communication or the information will be totally distorted and useless. In nature, hyper-communication has been successfully applied for millions of years. The organized flow of life in insects proves this dramatically. Modern man knows it only on a much more subtle level as “intuition.” But we, too, can regain full use of it.
- As an example from nature, when a queen ant is separated from her colony, the remaining worker ants will continue building fervently according to plan. However, if the queen is killed, all work in the colony stops. No ant will know what to do. Apparently, the queen transmits the “building plans” even if far away – via the group consciousness with her subjects. She can be as far away as she wants, as long as she is alive.
- In humans, hyper-communication is most often encountered when one suddenly gains access to information that is outside one’s knowledge base. Such hyper-communication is then experienced as inspiration or intuition (also in trance channeling). The Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini, for instance, dreamt one night that a devil sat at his bedside playing the violin. The next morning Tartini was able to note down the piece exactly from memory. He called it the Devil’s Trill Sonata.
- For years, a 42-year old male nurse dreamt of a situation in which he was hooked up to a kind of knowledge CD-ROM. Verifiable knowledge from all imaginable fields was then transmitted to him that he was able to recall in the morning. There was such a flood of information that it seemed a whole encyclopedia was transmitted at night. The majorities of facts were outside his personal knowledge base and reached technical details of which he knew absolutely nothing. When hyper-communication occurs, one can observe in the DNA, as well as in the human, supernatural phenomena.
- The Russian scientists irradiated DNA samples with laser light. On screen, a typical wave pattern was formed. When they removed the DNA sample, the wave pattern did not disappear, it remained. Many controlled experiments showed that the pattern continued to come from the removed sample, whose energy field apparently remained by itself. This effect is now called phantom DNA effect. It is surmised that energy from outside of space and time still flows through the activated wormholes after the DNA was removed. The side effects encountered most often in hyper-communication in humans are inexplicable electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of the persons concerned.
- Electronic devices like CD players and the like can be irritated and cease to function for hours. When the electromagnetic field slowly dissipates, the devices function normally again. Many healers and psychics know this effect from their work: the better the atmosphere and energy, the more frustrating it can be for recording devices as they stop functioning at that exact moment. Often by next morning all is back to normal.
- Perhaps this is reassuring to read for many, as it has nothing to do with them being technically inept; it means they are good at hyper-communication.
- In their book Vernetzte Intelligenz, Grazyna Gosar and Franz Bludorf explain these connections precisely and clearly. The authors also quote sources presuming that in earlier times humanity had been just like the animals: very strongly connected to group consciousness and thereby acted as a group. In order to develop and experience individuality, however, we humans had to forget hyper-communication almost completely.
- Now that we are fairly stable in our individual consciousness, we can create a new form of group consciousness – namely one in which we attain access to all information via our DNA without being forced or remotely controlled about what to do with that information. We now know that just as we use the internet, our DNA can feed proper data into the network, can retrieve data from the network, and can establish contact with other participants in the network. Remote healing, telepathy or “remote sensing” about the state of another can thus be explained. Some animals know from afar when their owners plan to return home. This can be freshly interpreted and explained via the concepts of group consciousness and hyper-communication.
- Any collective consciousness cannot be sensibly used over any period of time without a distinctive individuality; otherwise we would revert to a primitive herd instinct that is easily manipulated. Hyper-communication in the new millennium means something quite different.
- Researchers think that if humans with full individuality would regain group consciousness, they would have a god-like power to create, alter and shape things on Earth! AND humanity is collectively moving toward such a group consciousness of the new kind.
- Fifty percent of children will become a problem as soon as they go to school, since the system lumps everyone together and demands adjustment. But the individuality of today’s children is so strong that they refuse this adjustment and resist giving up their idiosyncrasies in the most diverse ways.
- At the same time more and more clairvoyant children are born. Something in those children is striving more towards the group consciousness of the new kind, and it can no longer be suppressed.
- As a rule, weather for example is rather difficult to influence by a single individual. But it may be influenced by group consciousness (nothing new about this to some indigenous tribes). Weather is strongly influenced by Earth resonance frequencies (Schumann frequencies). But those same frequencies are also produced in our brains, and when many people synchronize their thinking or when individuals (spiritual masters, for instance) focus their thoughts in a laser-like fashion, then it is not at all surprising that they can influence the weather.
- A modern day civilization which develops group consciousness would have neither environmental problems nor scarcity of energy: for if it were to use such mental powers as a unified civilization, it would have control of the energies of its home planet as a natural consequence.
- When a great number of people become unified with higher intention as in meditating on peace – potentials of violence also dissolve.
- Apparently, DNA is also an organic superconductor that can work at normal body temperature, as opposed to artificial superconductors which require extremely low temperatures between 200 and 140Â°C to function. In addition, all superconductors are able to store light and thus information. This further explains how DNA can store information.
- There is another phenomenon linked to DNA and wormholes. Normally, these super-small wormholes are highly unstable and are maintained only for the tiniest fractions of a second. Under certain conditions stable wormholes can organize themselves, which then form distinctive vacuum domains in which for example, gravity can transform into electricity. Vacuum domains are self-radiant balls of ionized gas that contain considerable amounts of energy. There are regions in Russia where such radiant balls appear very often.
- Following the ensuing confusion the Russians started massive research programs leading finally to some of the discoveries mentions above. Many people know vacuum domains as shiny balls in the sky. The attentive look at them in wonder and ask themselves, what they could be.
- I thought once: “Hello up there. If you happen to be a UFO, fly in a triangle.” And suddenly, the light balls moved in a triangle. Or they shot across the sky like ice hockey pucks: they accelerated from zero to crazy speeds while sliding silently across the sky. One is left gawking and I have, as many others, too, thought them to be UFOs. Friendly ones, apparently, as they flew in triangles just to please me.
- Now, the Russians found – in the regions where vacuum domains often appear – that sometimes fly as balls of light from the ground upwards into the sky, and that these balls can be guided by thought. Since then it has been found that vacuum domains emit waves of low frequency that are also produced in our brains and because of this similarity of waves they are able to react to our thoughts. To run excitedly into one that is on ground level might not be such a great idea, because those balls of light can contain immense energies and are capable of mutating our genes.
- Many spiritual teachers also produce such visible balls or columns of light in deep meditation or during energy work, which trigger decidedly pleasant feelings and do not cause any harm. Apparently this is also dependent on some inner order, quality and origin of the vacuum domain. There are some spiritual teachers, like the young Englishman Ananda, for example, with whom nothing is seen at first, but when one tries to take a photograph while they sit and speak or meditate in hyper-communication, one gets only a picture of a white cloud on a chair.
- In certain Earth healing projects, such light effects also appear on photographs. Simply put, this phenomena has to do with gravity and anti-gravity forces that are ever more stable forms of wormholes and displays of hyper-communication with energies from outside our time and space structure. Earlier generations that experienced such hyper-communication and visible vacuum domains were convinced that an angel had appeared before them: and we cannot be too sure to what forms of consciousness we can get access when using hyper-communication.
- Not having scientific proof for their actual existence, people having had such experiences do NOT all suffer from hallucinations. We have simply made another giant step towards understanding our reality. Official science also knows of gravity anomalies on Earth that contribute to the formation of vacuum domains. Recently gravity anomalies have been found in Rocca di Papa, south of Rome.
- The full article can be viewed – in English – on the Kontext website
- All information is from the book “Vernetzte Intelligenz” von Grazyna Fosar und Franz Bludorf, ISBN 3930243237, summarized and commented by Baerbel. The book is unfortunately only available in German so far. You can reach the authors here:
- Kontext – Forum for Border Science
- Scientist Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed by Words and Frequencies
- The Source Field Investigations — Full Video
- Electromagnetic signals from bacterial DNA? (scienceroll.com)
- NASA Scientist Finds Extraterrestiral Microbial Life In Meteorite–where did the DNA come from?
- It almost makes me disbelieve that HIV causes AIDS! [Pharyngula] (scienceblogs.com)
- Making the Case For Microscopic Life In Meteorites (science.slashdot.org)
- Rovers spot strange shapes on Mars (MSNBC)


Ask an Explainer
Who was given credit for using the first rocket?
Rockets date as far back as 10th century, first invented by the Chinese. The design was improved over and over again over the next centuries, being used in the military in the 18th century. The modern rockets we know today are based on designs by Robert Goddard, though they were not the first rockets ever made.


The Men Who Would Be Kings
How Grand Plans for the Lowly Terrapin
. . . Went Somewhat Awry
MICHAEL W. FINCHAM
Talent, ambition, and terrapins brought fortune and fame to two residents of Crisfield, Albert LaVallette Jr. and "Curley" Byrd (above, from left). Photos: LaVallette, courtesy of Elsie Bluhm; Byrd, University of Maryland Special Collection.
THE MAN WHO FIRST MADE A LOT OF MONEY OFF TERRAPINS in Maryland arrived in Crisfield in 1887. Albert T. LaVallette Jr. moved to town with his new wife and began buying terrapins from local watermen and selling them to high-end restaurants in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. He set off the first great boom in terrapin fishing in the Chesapeake Bay, emerging as the "Terrapin King" of Crisfield and turning Crisfield into the terrapin capital of the east coast.
The man who made terrapins even more famous in the state grew up in Crisfield during that boom. Harry Clifton "Curley" Byrd, the son of an oysterman, was born in 1889 and left town in 1905, riding a steamboat across the Bay to enroll at College Park as a cadet at the tiny Maryland Agricultural College. He became a star athlete there, then the football coach, then the president of the University of Maryland. In the process he helped transform the College Park school into one of the largest and fastest growing universities in the country.
The king and the coach probably never met, but the two men had much in common. Both were ambitious, with big plans, flamboyant personalities, and colorful private lives. And both altered the fame and fate of diamondback terrapins in Maryland.
ALBERT LAVALLETTE JR. was probably born ambitious. His grandfather was a well-known admiral and his father a successful businessman, according to the family history unearthed by Eugene L. Meyer for
Chesapeake Bay Magazine. Grandfather Elie LaVallette VI had commanded the
U.S.S. Constitution, the warship famous in history as "Old Ironsides," and was eminent enough to have two naval destroyers and a town in New Jersey named after him. LaVallette's father, Albert Sr., worked in land development and was shrewd enough to talk some Philadelphia investors into forming the Manokin River Oyster Company near Crisfield.
LaVallette Jr. came to Crisfield with a clever plan. The town was already wildly busy with booming oyster businesses and a traditional blue crab fishery, so LaVallette focused his money-making schemes on the diamondback terrapin, an unexploited species that was prolific in the abundant shallows and marshlands of the lower Eastern Shore. Long seen as poor people's food, turtle meat had been eaten by early colonists, by soldiers in the Revolutionary army, by slaves on tidewater plantations — but seldom by the well-off in the high-end restaurants of the Northeast.
In an early example of niche marketing, LaVallette traveled to cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York and sold the best-known restaurant in each city on a secret recipe for terrapin soup that he had picked up in the Caribbean. According to Glenn Lawson's account in The Last Waterman, each sales pitch included an entertaining performance with LaVallette as chef whipping up his secret soup with considerable flair in the restaurant's kitchen. Under his original deal, one restaurant in each city would have exclusive license to use his recipe, but it would have to charge a high price for the dish. And he, of course, would be the only supplier. As these elite restaurants advertised their exclusive LaVallette's Diamondback Terrapin, they created a strong brand that LaVallette later capitalized on. When it came time to renew the contracts, he expanded the market, making his now well-known recipe available to other restaurants in each town. He also raised his prices. Back in Crisfield, the terrapin fishing boom was on.
Terrapins were so popular at the beginning of the 20th century that they were featured on this menu card for a 1902 banquet. The Hotel Rennert (below), located at the corners of Liberty and Saratoga streets in Baltimore, had a restaurant favored by local businessmen and politicians and journalists like H.L. Mencken. Known for fine Southern food and seafood, especially terrapin soup, the hotel kept hundreds of live terrapins penned in the basement. The Rennert shunned Carolina terrapins and served only Chesapeakes, which may have come from Albert LaVallette Jr. No record survives of the exclusive soup recipe that came with the terrapins, but the one listed below contains the basic ingredients included in more recent recipes.
Classic Terrapin or Mock Terrapin Soup
|1 quart chicken or veal stock
2 cups terrapin meat, chopped
(substitute lean beef or1 cup cream
dark chicken meat)
2 hard-boiled egg yolks
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon paprika
Dash of mace
1/2 cup sherry
Credits: menu courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society; hotel photos courtesy of Bygone Baltimore: A Historical Portrait by Jacques Kelly.
WHILE CRISFIELD WAS BECOMING — however briefly — the terrapin capital of the country, young Curley Byrd was making money for college by dip netting for crabs, according to a local historian, and could often be seen running barefoot on the tidal flats, training for the track team. After graduating from the local high school, he arrived in College Park with plans. At the Maryland Agricultural College he listed his goal — perhaps in jest — as "becoming a star athlete," and he achieved the feat in three sports. In football he was quarterback and captain, in baseball he was the top pitcher, in track he set long-standing sprint records. Byrd was also popular with his classmates, who thought him clever and — with his curly black hair — handsome. Under his photo in the 1908 yearbook, a phrase warned: "The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape."
After graduating in three years, he left College Park to play yet more football as a ringer at several other colleges and more baseball as a minor league pitcher for a farm team of the Chicago White Sox. By 1912 he was back in College Park as football coach, and under his leadership the Maryland Agricultural College defeated Johns Hopkins University that year for the first time in the school's history, a feat that established his popularity with a new generation of students and administrators.
By 1920 the coach had added two jobs — athletic director and special assistant to the president — and he spent a lot of his time in Annapolis successfully lobbying the state legislature to make his old aggie college the home campus for a
new University of Maryland. Like Albert LaVallette selling his terrapin soup, Byrd was able to sell the idea of a new university, largely through his immense personal flair. "What he was great at was his personality,'' says George Callcott, the historian who recounts the Byrd era in his two histories of the University of Maryland. "He made everybody love him," Callcott says. "He bent everybody to his will."
Curley Byrd now had big plans for his university and big problems to overcome. The university was new, it was small, and it did not yet have the loyalty and financial support of tens of thousands of alumni. To most Marylanders, the new state university was still the little aggie school that ranked well below long-established schools like the Naval Academy, Washington College, St. John's College, Georgetown, and the more recent, but well-funded Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. "There has indeed been a tradition for the socially proper people in Maryland and especially in Baltimore to go to Johns Hopkins or Princeton or the University of Virginia," explains Callcott. "And this was always derogatorily called the aggie college."
One of Byrd's strategies for building a new university was building winning teams, especially in football, the college sport that seized the public mind during the Jazz Age. The popularity of his teams helped him in his job as chief lobbyist before a legislature that had no alumni from the new university and few from the old aggie college. "Byrd believed very sincerely, and maybe he was right, that the way for a university to become a great university was for it to become known, for it to become loved by the people," explains Callcott. "And the best way for it to become known and to be loved by the people was to have winning teams."
Another way to become loved was to change the name of his winning teams. By 1923 coach Byrd, the son of Crisfield, was calling his team the Terrapins. Most of the newspapers followed Byrd's lead and gradually dropped old names like the Aggies, or the Farmers, or The Old Liners. It probably helped that Byrd — among his many jobs — was also a sportswriter with the
Washington Evening Star. And sports stories, then as now, put the university before the public more than any other form of journalism.
As branding, the new name was as brilliant as one of LaVallette's best tricks. The terrapin name jettisoned the old down-scale label as an ag and engineering school and rebranded the new university by linking it with a charismatic animal familiar to anybody who lived near or visited the many rivers and beaches of the Chesapeake Bay. Terrapins were known and loved, often as pets for children who grew up to be fans. Maybe the scrappy teams called Terrapins and the university they represented could also be loved.
Students, at least, clearly loved the terrapin connection. Eight years after Byrd renamed his teams the Terrapins, the student newspaper prodded the University into canonizing the terrapin as the school's official mascot. The Class of 1933 raised money for a large, 300-pound bronze statue and named it "Testudo." The live model for the statue came from Crisfield, of course, and the bronze Testudo stood for years in front of Ritchie Coliseum where it was the target of kidnappings by raiding bands from Hopkins, Loyola, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia.
Curley Byrd, the coach, began calling his football team the Terrapins back in 1923. When the class of 1933 created Testudo, a 300-lb bronze statue (shown at right at its unveiling), the terrapin became the school’s official mascot. The living terrapin that was the model for the statue crawls on the ground. She's probably headed back to Crisfield where she and the coach both came from. Byrd soon became president of the university and later hired football coach Jim Tatum (above) who brought home a national championship in 1953. Credits: 1934-1978, University of Maryland Special Collections; 1994 and 2003, University of Maryland.
THE TERRAPIN FISHING BOOM that Albert LaVallette had unleashed around Crisfield made him briefly rich and socially prominent. He built a new home for his wife and two children, a large bungalow on the fringes of town out on Hammock Point. Behind the house were the pens where he stored all the terrapins he bought from local watermen, feeding the animals scraps of crab waste collected from local crab houses.
The boom soon went bust, a classic case of fishing a resource with little or no knowledge of the basic biology of the target species. Terrapins, it turned out, are easy to overfish. The largest and most profitable terrapins are the females who lay only a dozen eggs at a time and don't start doing that until they are eight years old. When watermen quickly fished out most of the females, they drove down population levels in Maryland for decades. In 1891, the new boom had watermen harvesting more than 35,000 terrapins for sale to high-end restaurants. Ten years later, they were harvesting fewer than 70.
By then terrapin soup was still the rage and overfishing episodes were common in many states along the east coast, perhaps sparked by LaVallette's early success in marketing his recipe. Declines in supply, of course, kept the price high for what was becoming a rare delicacy, and the high price kept driving fishing pressure and lowering the supply even more. What finally broke the cycle, according to scientists, was Prohibition. It outlawed the sherry that went into diamondback soup.
As the harvest declined, LaVallette's economic fortunes began to sink. Competitors cut into his market, and some began importing terrapins from the Carolinas and passing them off as "Chesapeakes" (much as crabs are shipped in today for use in "Maryland-style" crabcakes).
His personal life took an even more dramatic turn when he began an affair with his children's governess, Mary Bussey. It cost him his family and his house and his life in Crisfield. According to Meyer's account in
Chesapeake Bay Magazine, LaVallette moved to Hampton, Virginia where he lived for decades on a houseboat with his new love. The local paper called him a "picturesque character" and a vivid story teller, once famous for breeding terrapins. He died a pauper in 1937 and was buried in the Hampton National Military Cemetery.
Terrapin populations in Maryland and many other states took decades to recover from the fishing frenzy LaVallette had helped unleash. Attempts to breed them in captivity were tried in several states, including North Carolina where scientists at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries Lab in Beaufort were describing the reproductive biology and growth rates that made terrapins so easy to overfish. After the commercial demand for terrapins dropped away, the lab released tens of thousands of hatchlings into the marshes and sounds of Atlantic and Gulf Coast states. More than 500 were released into Maryland waters.
CURLEY BRYD'S PROFESSIONAL LIFE also took a dramatic turn when the coach of the Maryland Terrapins was appointed president of the University of Maryland in 1935. It was, for the times, a bold decision to pick a football coach with no advanced degrees, a recent divorce, and a reputation for dating attractive women, but Byrd was able to turn both the Depression era and the Post World War II era into boom times for his school. He managed to raise huge amounts of money in these tough times, mostly through his personal charisma and his canny deal-making both in Annapolis and in Washington DC.
His best-laid plans for the Maryland Terrapins eventually backfired. To bring his university back into the public eye after World War II, Byrd began hiring coaches who would take his team to the top of the college football world. The best of them, Jim Tatum, took the team to a series of big-time bowl games and won a national championship in 1953 for Curley Byrd's Maryland Terrapins. The result, however, was a reputation, some say undeserved, that Maryland — at the time the third largest state university in the country — was more a football school than a highly ranked academic institution. When Byrd resigned to run for governor in 1954, his opponents brought the football-school charge into the partisan political debate, a tactic that played a big role in Byrd's greatest defeat.
Byrd later lost races for the Senate and the House of Representatives, but his life as a public official continued. In 1958, he was appointed chairman of the Maryland Tidewater Fisheries Commission, the state agency charged with managing all of Maryland's fisheries. It was an appropriate crown for the son of an oysterman. After he died in 1970, his body was buried in a churchyard back in Crisfield.
The real terrapins of Maryland, the diamondbacks that swam the state's shallow waters and plodded through its wetlands and woods, may have been the unexpected beneficiaries of Byrd's sports teams. As Maryland became more urbanized and suburbanized, fewer Marylanders actually saw many real terrapins. But nearly everyone knew they were there.
Their high profile helped terrapins survive when a new overfishing boom threatened. In the 1990s, China began importing turtles from across the globe, setting off heavy fishing that decimated turtle populations in a number of Asian countries and drove many species close to extinction. When the China trade reached into the Chesapeake Bay, the commercial harvest in Maryland began climbing dramatically: in just four years the estimated harvest jumped from 151 to 11,010 terrapins taken in 2006.
Conservationists had been warning that a new boom was ready to explode. Maryland watermen, another endangered species, were already struggling through declines in their commercial harvests of blue crabs and oysters. With rising prices from the growing China trade, watermen could start flooding into the terrapin fishery again, setting off a harvest frenzy that could rouse LaVallette's ghost from his grave.
In 2001, when conservation groups were banding together to campaign for a fishing ban, they found that the terrapin had a lot of fans in Maryland, thanks in part to Curley Byrd's university. By a fluke of timing, the University of Maryland in 2003 began republicizing its historic mascot, the diamondback terrapin, by launching a new, well-funded "Fear the Turtle" marketing campaign, complete with T-shirts and posters and television spots.
Through the wizardry of digital graphics, the campaign could move beyond cartoon terrapins to create dramatic, yet realistic versions of a handsome, charismatic, full-colored terrapin that could walk, talk, lift its head — and roar. The campaign boosted fundraising and student recruitment, and it probably helped the conservation campaign as well. According to one biologist, it showed millions of Marylanders what real terrapins look like.
The conservation campaign took several years of lobbying and a lot of planning by environmentalists, scientists and activists — but it finally won. Last year the legislature enacted a complete ban on the commercial harvesting of terrapins and a new governor signed it into law.
For terrapins, some well-laid plans finally worked out. Now the ghost of Albert LaVallette was back in his grave. And somewhere Curley Byrd was smiling.
Over more than 80 years, the terrapin has worn a few hats and odd clothes and smoked some pipes as the enduring mascot for a rising university. Credits: 1934-1978, University of Maryland Special Collections; 1994 and 2003, University of Maryland.


On this island, life evolved in surprising ways. In Madagascar in 1994, Captain Cousteau and his team discovered a land that had only been conquered by human beings for scarcely 2,000 years, but was already deeply scarred by the invasion.
Here, lemurs numbered thirty different species; 95 percent of reptile species and 98 percent of amphibian species, i.e. salamanders and frogs, on Madagascar were endemic. From aboard Alcyone, divers discovered the rich waters of the Mozambique Channel, crossing paths with great pelagic sharks. By helicopter, the Cousteau team filmed the progression of humpback whales coming to breed around Sainte-Marie Island.
Meeting the Malagasy people, who comprised 18 different ethnic groups, the Cousteau crew came to understand the threats that weighed on the country: deforestation, desertification, lack of potable water. People were being punished for their errors, past and present.
Nevertheless Madagascar was rich in natural resources. A future harmony between humans and Nature was still possible in this reservoir of unique living species that absolutely must be protected. In the films Island of Spirits I and JJ, the Cousteau team related with passion the story of this paradoxical place where humans are capable of the worst and the best.


Brown trout are powerful predatory fish. When young trout hatch, they live in their natal redds. They hatch with yolk sacs attached to them which supply the young fish with a food supply. When they grow to a few centimetres in length they become known as parr and they can travel further afield. As their name suggests, they are a brown colour but have attractive markings on their backs which tend to be pale ‘rings’ filled with dark spots. They have speckled dorsal fins and a long jaw filled with small teeth. Although similar in appearance to salmon, these fish only usually grow to between 30 and 50 cm’s.
Similar to chub, brown trout are opportunist feeders. They are equally as happy feeding on the surface, mid water or near the bottom, hunting out anything that passes within range. They will take both freshwater and terrestrial invertebrates including crustaceans and molluscs. As they grow they will hunt small fish. Anglers are usually successful catching brown trout when fly fishing and using mayfly imitation flies.


One area of great concern for Americans is the Pacific Northwest, and in particular, the Oregon coast.
This concern about an Oregon earthquake is not a new one for residents. More than 100 faults can be found running under Oregon and Washington. These faults are responsible for the 1,000 plus earthquakes that occur throughout the area each year.
Scientists have been concerned about the potential for a large earthquake beneath Portland for some time. They believe that it is only a matter of time that an Oregon earthquake similar to the 6.8 Nisqually earthquake that hit the Seattle area in 2001, will strike the Portland area.
As if a 6.8 earthquake is not enough, a 2008 study reveals that the region is somewhat overdue for a mega-earthquake as well.
Why an Oregon Mega-Earthquake?
Scientifically speaking, the mega-earthquake is actually a Mega-thrust Earthquake. This type of earthquake occurs at subduction zones along destructive plate boundaries. It is at these boundaries where one tectonic plate is forced under, or “subducts,” another. During the subduction process, large sections can get stuck. When these sections finally break free, there is a large release of energy causing some of the world’s largest earthquakes.
Only this type of tectonic activity is known to produce earthquakes of a magnitude of 9.0 or more. According to the study, all six earthquakes from the last century with a magnitude of 9.0 or greater have been mega-thrust earthquakes.
When the Nisqually earthquake hit Seattle, it caused more than $2 billion in damage. It is safe to estimate that if an earthquake of comparable size hit Portland, the residents there would see a comparable amount damage to their city. Also, if a 9.0 earthquake would hit the Oregon coast the results would be devastating.
Oregon is Not Prepared
Though it is nearly impossible to make a city “earthquake proof,” it is possible for precautions to be taken to mitigate the damages of an earthquake; even one with a magnitude of 9.0.
Unfortunately for Oregon residents, it appears that these types of precautions have not been taken. According to the Senate President, Peter Courtney, of the Oregon State Legislature, “We are not prepared.”
It is not like voters are not trying though. In 2002, they authorized the state to use bonds to seismically retrofit key buildings in the state’s infrastructure; such as schools, police stations and hospitals.
Nevertheless, the retrofitting is not happening as quickly as Courtney, and many others, had hoped. Courtney expressed his disappointment in a statement to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
“I’ve never understood this issue in terms of decision makers. There’s always something more important to them. And you know why, they just think, well they say it’s going to happen. But maybe it’ won’t happen. I know that’s what’s out there. All the evidence by all the scientists, world wide who’ve studied this thing for Oregon say you’re going to get hit. It could be as bad as 9.3. You’re going to get clobbered.”
Oregon’s Governor, John Kitzhaber, stated he liked that idea, “I think we can do seismic upgrades as well [meaning in tandem with already proposed efficiency upgrades], so I think there’s an opportunity to re-employ good trade jobs throughout the state. Make our schools safer and more energy efficient at the same time.”
However, experts say that it is not just the infrastructure that is lacking in earthquake preparedness, but the residents as well. Most of Oregon’s residents do not carry earthquake insurance, nor do they keep enough supplies on hand to be prepared for such a disaster. To be truly prepared, residents should have enough food, first aid, and water to last for at least two weeks.
If there is anything to be learned from the tragedy in Japan, it is that Mega-Earthquakes do happen and the only strategy available to survive them is to be prepared.Originally published on TopSecretWriters.com