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We have all along suspected it. But now, we have research findings to confirm our suspicions: female college students spend an average of 10 hours a day on their cellphones and male students spend nearly eight, with excessive use posing potential risks for academic performance. The study — based on an online survey of 164 college students — examined 24 cellphone activities and found that time spent on 11 of those activities differed significantly across the sexes. Some functions — among them Pinterest and Instagram — are associated significantly with cellphone addiction. But others that might logically seem to be addictive – Internet use and gaming — are not. Of the top activities, respondents overall reported spending the most time texting (an average of 94.6 minutes a day), followed by sending emails (48.5 minutes), checking Facebook (38.6 minutes), surfing the Internet (34.4 minutes) and listening to their iPods. (26.9 minutes). Men send about the same number of emails but spend less time on each. “That may suggest that they’re sending shorter, more utilitarian messages than their female counterparts,” Roberts said. The men, while more occupied with using their cellphones for utilitarian or entertainment purposes, “are not immune to the allure of social media,” Roberts said. They spent time visiting such social networking sites as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Among reasons they used Twitter were to follow sports figures, catch up on the news — “or, as one male student explained it, ‘waste time,’” Roberts said.

(Greek: Αρχάγγελος) is a town and a former municipality on the island of Rhodes, in the Dodecanese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Rhodes, of which it is a municipal unit. Archangelos is located about 30 kilometers south of the town of Rhodes on the island’s east coast at an elevation of 160 meters. Its population according to the 2011 census was 5,384 making it the fifth largest town of the island (after the capital Rhodes, and the town of Trianta (Ialysos), Kremasti and Afantou. The town’s name derives from Archangel Michael who is also considered its patron.

Common guests to FindLaw have most likely encountered the expression, frequent regulation”, in some capability, and a few readers may be pondering to themselves: ‘What on earth is frequent law?’ Well, it is a good query, and it is price exploring the meaning behind the expression. Frequent law is a 3rd branch of regulation, in contrast to and on equal footing with statutes that are adopted via the legislative process, and regulations that are promulgated by the manager branch. Moreover, common regulation (case regulation) has been a significant factor of state legislation from the very beginning. As it was a maxim of common legislation that nothing in opposition to reason was lawful, the common law was thought by its advocates to sift out abandoned customs. The common legislation courts additionally moved slowly; that would imply that justice delayed was justice denied. However notice that in each case, the statute sets the general principles, but the interstitial common regulation process determines the scope and software of the statute. The actions of trespass and disseisin (dispossession; see antagonistic possession ) had Roman analogies , as did the liabilities of these following the so-called frequent callings” of innkeeper, provider of goods, and steady keeper. The next definitive historic treatise on the frequent legislation is Commentaries on the Legal guidelines of England , written by Sir William Blackstone and first published in 1765-1769. If the widespread home is leased property, provide for who stays on whenever you half company. Before 1938, the federal courts, like almost all different frequent regulation courts, decided the regulation on any subject the place the related legislature (both the U.S. Congress or state legislature, depending on the problem), had not acted, by seeking to courts in the identical system, that is, other federal courts, even on issues of state law, and even where there was no categorical grant of authority from Congress or the Structure.

Gaining control of your finances might look impossible, especially if you find yourself swimming in debt or without a high paying job. Financial freedom is never attained overnight, however, so keeping things in perspective and sticking to a plan is very important. By learning what successful investors do to maximize each dollar, you can quickly put yourself on the right financial path. There is no point in creating a budget if there is no way that you can stick to it. If you always spend $200 to commute back and forth to work, do not allot only $150 of your budget towards this, as you will never meet your goals. All of your goals should be reasonable and based on what you have spent in the past, as this will give you a better chance of reaching them. Most consumers have no idea what healthy spending looks like. As a general rule, go by the 50/30/20 plan, which means that 50 percent of your monthly income goes towards needs, 30 percent goes towards wants and 20 percent goes towards your savings. This plan can help you to avoid financial mistakes and will build your savings quite quickly. Perhaps the largest financial mistake that people make is classifying wants as needs. Many of the items that you spend money on each month are luxuries, rather than necessities. If you can survive without an item, it should be labeled as a luxury and, therefore, you should not spend money on it unless you have money after you have purchased your necessities. Some people make the mistake of spending money before it arrives in their back accounts, such as relying on a bonus that is not guaranteed to come. This is always a gamble because a bonus is never a sure thing. Choose your spending based on your current financial state, rather than your projected financial state, as this can prevent some serious problems in the future and leave extra money for investments. Overusing credit cards usually leads to financial problems. If 20 percent or more of your monthly income goes towards paying off your credit cards, it is a sign that you have a problem that could escalate in the future. If you are unable to pay off your entire credit card balance each month, you end up paying more for all of your purchases. This limits the amount of money that goes into your savings and will prevent you from reaching your financial goals. Many people do not even think about retirement until it is too late. The main reason to start putting money away for retirement right away is the compounding of your earnings. Basically, the earlier you begin putting money away, the faster this money will grow, since it compounds monthly. Starting earlier also means that you can put less money in your retirement fund each month and still end up with the same payouts once you retire. It might seem pointless to put a few dollars into an account each month, but this money really does add up. It is always a good idea to save something, rather than nothing, as this money will grow over the years. Even if your lifestyle has made it so your bills and loans are high in relation to your salary, if you can invest some money while you are in your 20s, it could grow to something significant by the time you reach your 60s. Countless young people make the mistake of changing their lifestyle too greatly once they start making money. While it is a good idea to reward yourself for working hard, make sure that this money is spent in a short-term manner, rather than one that you could pay for down the line. For example, it is perfectly fine to take a vacation or buy yourself a new computer, but you should avoid buying a fancy car or moving into a new apartment just because you have a little extra income. Purchasing these things commits you to higher spending in the future, which limits your ability to invest. Simply put, investing in a number of different things lessens your risk. While a diverse portfolio is also less likely to outperform the market, it allows your more successful investments to float any investments that do not work out for you. When starting out, this is the best way to prevent yourself from taking a massive hit. When looking for investment ideas, United States Treasury bonds are about as risk free as you can get. This is because the government is highly unlikely to ever default and high interest rates are the only thing that can hurt your return. If you are looking for a place to start investing, this is as good as any.

There are some universal truths about human language whose understanding can greatly facilitate the learning of a second language. There are also important grammatical principles that make the English language similar, but different from other spoken languages. Without a solid understanding of the vocabulary of grammar it is nearly impossible to discuss the rules of any language. With a good understanding you can ask intelligent questions, perform effective internet searches, and utilize well-organized on- and offline reference materials to solve your own problems. With the vocabulary of grammar dictionaries and grammar books begin to make sense. This is where you come to learn the rules of the English language: how to assemble the words of the language in meaningful messages that others can understand on the one hand, and how to separate the sense from the nonsense of your own and other people's messages on the other. We speak and write one word at a time. This said, we tend to think in phrases. The order in which these words and phrases appear in our thoughts form the content of our message. How we order these words and phrases is determined by the rules of grammar and the logic of our own message. At the end of each word or phrase is a set of limited options from which we must choose. Upon the completion of each new phrase there are a different set of options. The better we understand these options and how to select from among them, the better we are able to express ourselves in a clear and precise manner that others can easily understand. Once a message has been created and expressed, it must be understood by our target audience -- the person or people who read or listen to our message. If the words and phrases of our message are well-ordered, others will understand it easily. The more complex or more poorly ordered our message becomes, the more difficult it is for others to understand it. Dividing each message into its logical parts, not only insures that we understand it, but also that we understand in the message what is missing or not yet understood. This is true for both the sender and receiver of the message. Every meaningful word or phrase in a message must answer a question. If it does not, its question should be discovered, or alternatively, the word or phrase should be eliminated. Learning how to ask the proper questions is an important skill that insures proper understanding. Then too, a lot of people speak and write nonsense. Learning to ask the proper questions helps us to separate the sense of what we say and write from the nonsense of what is heard, uttered, read, and written. Under this heading you can find any podcast ever posted by Grammar Captive in the order that it was published. If you are assiduous and listen regularly, you will be able to take good advantage of this method of categorization. Indeed, events over time tell a story, and with each new event there is the potential to learn and grow. As our knowledge grows so too does our thought and behavior. And, if we watch our past carefully, we can not only predict the future, but we can develop it.

While there are some real gold nuggets in this book, there is also a lot of fluff. Do yourself a favour and skip all the “Teaching Tales”, noted by grey boxes: they’re strange narratives written and a level far below the quality of the rest of the book. Anxiety is a biological and psychological signal of danger, alerting us to the fact that something might be wrong. However, it in the present day it is often not an accurate signal, as we are not usually in any real danger. We attempt to defend ourselves against the experience of anxiety rather than examining and handling the threat. By doing so we lose our ability to see what’s provoking the anxiety and our ability to rid ourselves of the threat. Rather than prevent yourself from taking the kind of risks that the creative process demands, accept that anxiety is part of your early-warning system and your genetic inheritance rather than avoiding it. Strive to acquire a more detached, philosophical attitude, work to get a grip on your mind so that you create less anxiety and master the anxiety management tools that work best for you. (1) Our self-talk tends to let us down rather than support us, providing us with thoughts like ‘I have no idea what I’m doing’. (2) We doubt the quality of our work as we measure it against the very high standards of the art we love and as we strive to make it excellent. (3) The very nature of the creative process causes our work to morph before our eyes and comes with no guarantees whatsoever. (pp.108). “Incorrectly appraising situations as more important, more dangerous, or more negative than they in fact are raises your anxiety level…. The first step is to remember that you get to do the appraising. Life does not come with built-in threat levels… it is exactly as safe or dangerous as you feel it to be” (pp.56). “Do not let your mind move from some casual thought to the creation of fright without intervening and asking yourself, ‘what is the actual threat level here?’ ...Understand why [that think makes] you anxious and appraise whether your reasons amount to good ones” (pp.56). Change your mind about the threat level of things! If you are used to alarm bells going off all the time, stop and think about why and dial it back. Learn to assess the situation and teach them to go off only when the threat is real or significant (pp.57). “...Love rather than plot revenge… meet deadlines step-by-step, not at the last minute... organize your space, your life, your mind. You know what supports calmness and what maintains chaos. Make the choices that support calmness and, logically enough, you will reduce your experience of anxiety.” (pp.78). “Typically artists are unaware of how much the anxiety of choosing is affecting them and causing them to flee the encounter… when it comes to creating it is all too easy to get away by not showing up at the blank page or the blank canvas.” (pp.80). “Accept that you have a million choices to make as a creative person, one after another after another, and that all this choosing is bound to provoke a real and significant anxiety. The answer is not to avoid choosing!” (pp.80). “The activity of choosing provokes real anxiety, and a creative person is by necessity and by definition someone who must make one choice after another. If you are not aware of this dynamic and if you are not careful, you will avoid your work or leave it too soon so as to avoid the anxiety brought on by choosing.” (pp.80). “Explain to yourself that you are obliged to choose and that while you would love to make the right choice each time, what matters more is that you commit to choosing. The only other choice is to not create!” (pp.80). People waste enormous amounts of time avoiding things that make them anxious — sometimes a lifetime. “Human beings engage in too many behaviors to name in pursuit of reducing their experience of anxiety.” (pp.87). “Always consider how you behave to be one of your primary anxiety-management tools. Ultimately you will reduce your anxiety more by showing up, getting creative work done, building a body of work, and learning from your efforts than by drinking, avoiding your work, moving every few months, living chaotically, and so on.” (pp.87). “Our self-talk, our desire for excellence, and the process itself all make us anxious” (pp.108). “When you run into difficulties while creating, say ‘I’m trusting the process’. You gain nothing when you get ahead of yourself and predict the worst" (pp.129). “Banish the word failure from your vocabulary” (pp.141). “...You remind yourself that you are larger than and different from all the stray, temporal events that seem so important in the moment”. (pp.156). When you are having thoughts like, ‘Maybe this body of work isn’t cohesive’ or ‘Maybe people won’t like or accept it’, you are over-investing in the event or situation. Instead, detach yourself and disidentify using a statements like ‘I will keep this exhibition in perspective, I am more than this work, and more is yet to come’. In fact, “one of your best ways to reduce your anxiety is by learning to bring a calm, detached perspective to [your] life…” (pp.157). Quoting Ann Seagrave in Free from Fears, “Instead of imagining that a catastrophe will befall you, imagine that you will feel comfortable and secure in the situation. Rest assured that you will reach the point of being about to think through or imagine a fear situation without having an anxiety reaction.” (pp.196). “Worry less about looking good to yourself and more about honouring your commitments to yourself and fulfilling your goals and realizing your dreams. ...See where you need to grow, change, and do more.” (pp.170). “The most useful tool for self-exploration is writing an autobiography from twelve to fifteen pages long. If you do that writing, you are almost certain to learn a great deal about who you are. Focus on going deep and being real, not on beautiful memoir writing. Try to arrive at a sense of what motivates you, what subverts you, and why you react in the idiosyncratic ways you do. If you are brave enough to appraise your personality and arrive at some conclusions about what changes you want to make, you will still be faced with the enormous challenge of changing your personality. To do so, you must take three steps: you must state a clear goal with namable behaviours, you must practice those behaviours in you mind’s eye, and you must adopt those behaviours in real-life situations.” (pp.44).

Entrepreneur Magazine has awarded the lofty title to hardware hacker Limor "Ladyada" Fried. It's significant for her -- and proof that open source is big business. The founder of Adafruit Industries was chosen among thousands of nominations the magazine received. She was the only female finalist when the nominations were whittled down to five for the main category in the early fall. Fried's company has humble beginnings and has grown into a sprawling educational resource and one-stop shop for electronics hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and experienced hackers alike. Remarkably, in a highly competitive marketplace where businesses closely guard code, schematics, and most everything they can, Adafruit is a pro-DIY company built entirely on an open-source business model where everything is made freely available and sharing is encouraged. Adafruit is also no stranger to controversy, having made big waves and earning public disapproval from Microsoft in 20101 with Adafruit's Open Kinect/Xbox hacking contest, which offered an "X Prize"-style bounty for the first person to hack Kinect for Xbox 360. Fried is featured in the January 2013 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. I visited Adafruit Industries in New York City and asked Fried what she thinks the award means for hackers, engineers, and open source. And she reveals what's cool about entrepreneurship. Question: What do you feel that being named "Entrepreneur of the Year" represents? Limor Fried: I think being named "Entrepreneur of the Year" represents opportunity for more makers and hackers to see it's possible to be a good cause and a good business. Adafruit wants to help make the world a better place through sharing and good engineering. One of my favorite quotes is from Dean Kamen, "We are what we celebrate" -- anyone who wants to help teach people electronics and make things can [make] a business out of it. If there's one thing I'd like to see from this, it would be for some kid say to themselves "I could do that" and start the journey to becoming an engineer and entrepreneur. What do you think it means that a hacker who has built an entirely open-source business now holds this title? Facebook has a "hacker" past too. Mark Zuckerberg hacked private accounts when he was 19 to make TheFacebook. I'm not on Facebook -- not my type of hacking I want to celebrate -- but you get the point. As far a building a company on open source, it's always been hard to convince people that this can be a great business model. I give away what's usually considered the most valuable (intellectual property) all for free. We've never taken funding or loans of any type, we built Adafruit one kit at a time and invested everything back in to the company. Giving away my designs for others to make, learn and build upon has created a community of makers and hackers that support what we do. The new trend we're seeing is when people are considering a company to buy stuff from they look at how many public open-source repos the company has. We'll be at over 200 shortly! () Good repos is good business. Open-source works for software and for hardware. The thing about hardware that we've always known from the start is that there really [aren't] any "protections" that make sense for a small company to move fast and innovate. There are patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Hardware generally isn't copyright, and we all see companies copying each other even if they have patents and teams of lawyers. So we decided to work on great hardware that benefits our community. There's a group of open-source hardware companies, and we all "grew up together." We could clone the hell out of each other, but we don't. We work together in various ways and innovate. In the end it's not the physical bits that will matter the most to our customers. It's the service, support, tutorials, videos, and community we're part of. Limor Fried: Freedom, the ability to do great work with great people for great customers. It really is possible to help people all while running a business. These are not at odds with one another; they complement each other. It's hard to do this if you're working for someone else. But [if] the DNA of your own company from the start is about trying to do good, you can do it! In the years of running Adafruit Industries, what took you most by surprise? Limor Fried: Success is a lot like panic. When things really started to take off, it got harder (mentally and physically) as opposed to when the company was smaller and it was unclear if we were going to make it. We want to have great quality designs and products and keep the teams top-notch, all while meeting demand. So the thing that surprised me the most is how challenging it is to not give in to getting big too fast, hiring too many people, taking on funding, etc. -- so we decided to take a more methodical approach and build the business slow compared to others. Each time we add someone to the team, it's a big deal. Each time we release a product, we go the extra mile to make sure it's the best quality and best value. The biggest competitors we have are ourselves, and time. What are you doing with Adafruit Industries that makes you different from other entrepreneurs? A year or so ago, we reverse-engineered the Kinect when it came out and published the protocols used so someone could make an open-source driver. We created a bounty and Microsoft basically threatened to sue us, so we raised the bounty. This happened a couple times and then after thousands of makers and hackers created an entire ecosystem of amazing projects. Microsoft backed down and embraced the hackers. And now there is a thriving market for Microsoft for Kinect "hacks." Doing something like this had nothing to do with our products. We didn't sell Kinects or anything that would benefit us, but we knew a low-cost commodity piece of hardware like the Kinect could fuel tons of innovation if it was set free. We wanted to see this in the world so we helped facilitate it. All that being said, some of our best sales days were during the Kinect hacking. Our community really rewarded us! What's next for Adafruit Industries? Limor Fried: We tend to think in terms of ideas and products we want to see flourish in the world. We're really interested in getting wearable electronics in the hands of more people -- we just released FLORA, our wearable electronics platform. You will be able to "wear a movie" -- our smart pixels can be woven in fabric with our special conductive thread. There are of course a ton of sensors we're releasing, so the applications for medical, environmental, and more are happening as well. We're interested in the 3D space. In 60 days or less we'll have a really big announcements. Our learning system is something we're going to continue to expand and enhance. We think it's the best learning and tutorial system in the world and our customers are delighted, we're making it part of each product with hundreds of tutorials. We've also been working on our Linux Distro for the Raspberry Pi. It's called Occidentalis v0.2. Rubus Occidentalis -- the black raspberry. It's an out-of-the-box way to get up and running and making things with a Raspberry Pi, a low-cost computer for education. This is part of our WebIDE that teaches young people how to program. We want every kid to be able to learn computer science, all with open-source hardware and software. We're trying to reach a younger and younger group, so we're also working on a kid's show (which is really for adults to watch with their kids) called "Circuit Playground" -- we worked with someone who designs muppets for Sesame Street. Our goal is spark the young minds out there to show how fun it is to be a maker, hacker, artist, and engineer. Imagine if Disney was an open-source company. Most of all, we want to keep doing good work and good business with our team. People are not buying electronic parts from some random company. They're becoming part of something that was made with actual heart and soul -- every day we want to be able to say that's what we've put out in the world.

The Bundeswehr reform – what does Germany need a professional army for? On 18 May the German defence minister, Thomas de Maizičre presented a new document issued by the Ministry of Defence, entitled “Defence Policy Guidelines”, and the main premises of the reform of Bundeswehr, which represents another stage in the transformation process of the German army ongoing since 2000. The reform is aimed at professionalising the Bundeswehr and developing its expeditionary capacities and at the same time reducing the number of armed forces personnel and making savings. According to the Ministry of Defence, Germany should become more involved in foreign military operations in order to consolidate Germany's position in the world, in relations with its NATO allies and the EU. While making decisions to send the army on overseas missions, German interests should be taken into account to a larger extent than at present. The position of the Ministry of Defence is important but one of many stances in the discussion over German security policy and the Bundeswehr's role in it, including decisions where, when and in what operations the army should participate. The present reform is another stage in the transformation of the Bundeswehr, which consists in switching from an army focused on defending German territory to an expeditionary army that participates in foreign operations. The transformation has been ongoing since the end of the 1990s and has been initiated, among other factors, thanks to the conclusions drawn from Bundeswehr's involvement in operations in the Balkans and the analysis of asymmetrical threats to Germany's security (including the consequences of collapsing countries, combating international terrorism, threats posed to trading routes etc.). As shown by the Bundeswehr's experiences during the operation in Afghanistan, the transformation of the German army to date has not brought the expected results. The Bundeswehr's mission in Afghanistan revealed the ill-adjustment of the army to performing irregular actions (in soldiers' preparedness, equipment and partly command of operations). In summer 2010 the economic crisis and budget cuts became a pretext for putting forward the concept of the reform aimed in part at reducing the number of army personnel, orders for arms and an earlier withdrawal of older military equipment (in 2011-2015 the Ministry of Defence plans to save EUR 8.3 billion). The reform's essence lay in a profound change aiming at professionalising the Bundeswehr and increasing its expedition capacities. The unexpected resignation of Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (CSU), who initiated the current step of the transformation of the army, in March this year prolonged the decision making process but did not change the orientation the reform. Under Guttenberg's supervision, in the Ministry of Defence work has been launched on a new strategic document intended to set the objectives and long-term interests of German security and defence policy and to define the role and tasks of the Bundeswehr. “Defence policy guidelines” and more detailed white papers geared towards public opinion are the main documents in Germany that define the country's security and defence policy and the Bundeswehr's role and mission, as in Germany there are no governmental strategies of national security. In 2003 the Ministry of Defence issued the penultimate guidelines which formed the basis for the reform of the Bundeswehr initiated by the then defence minister, Peter Struck (SPD). Under current guidelines the Ministry of Defence still assesses an armed attack on German territory as quite unlikely and focuses on the analysis of asymmetrical threats while broadly defining the notion of Germany's security and interests (see Appendix 1). According to the guidelines, Germany's interests result from its location in the centre of Europe, its international political and economic interdependencies and – a new element – the German economy's dependence on the stable supply of natural resources. The UN, NATO and the EU remain the organisations within which Germany implements its policy of security and defence with the use of military force – in line with the Constitution and the verdict of the Federal Constitutional Court of 1994 which enable the Bundeswehr to run foreign operations. The Bundeswehr above all is set to defend the country and to support its NATO allies, to prevent international crises and conflicts and manage them and participate in military operations (Appendix 2). The guidelines feature quite contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, there is Germany's growing assertiveness towards its allies. For the first time a document of this type states that decisions whether Germany should or should not participate in foreign (allied) military operations should be in the future considered from the angle of German interests. Furthermore, such decisions should be better advocated in the international arena so that German policy is not so severely criticised as it was the case of Germany's position on the intervention in Libya. On the other hand, it still seems important for the Ministry of Defence to strengthen trans-Atlantic and European partnership and security. If the foreseen political costs of Germany's refusal to take part in an allied operation were too high, the Bundeswehr should participate in such missions even despite the lack of their direct link with German interests. It also appears that these are the conclusions drawn from the analysis of the negative consequences on Germany's position at NATO after the Libyan crisis. At the same time, the Ministry of Defence is calling for a heightening of Germany's international profile by active involvement in crisis and conflict management also with the use of military force. The debate over the Bundeswehr's deployment overseas has been ongoing in the German political elite for over ten years. It is likely to be intensified by the next stage of the army's reform introduced now and recent discussions about the military intervention in Libya and Germany's stance on this. The Bundeswehr's more frequent involvement in foreign operations is being championed mainly by Christian Democratic circles as they aim to strengthen Germany's position in the world and in relations with its NATO and EU allies and a more offensive pressing for the realisation of German interests. Part of the Green party and SPD environment also believe that Germany's commitment – also in the military dimension – to global security policy should be larger. However, they justify it by the necessity of increasing Germany's involvement in stabilising conflicts and crises in the world within the framework of UN peace-keeping and stabilisation missions. Another section of the political elite argues that due to a dense network of international economic interdependencies, it is not in Germany's interests to use military force and that political and economic diplomacy are sufficient to secure German interests. In this context the reform and new guidelines of the Ministry of Defence constitute an important element of the discussion about German security policy. After the reform the Bundeswehr will become an army largely oriented towards foreign operations, with increased expeditionary and intervention capacities, which is the result of the modifications introduced since the end of the 1990s. The question however remains open as to where, when and in what overseas operations it will take part as it is still the Bundestag that decides about the Bundeswehr's involvement in foreign missions. In German political culture, so far each government has deemed it necessary to reach a political consensus in parliament above party divisions in order to make such decisions. Reaching this consensus is also difficult due to the attitude of German society which is averse to German military involvement abroad. Nevertheless, it cannot be ruled out that the reform will become a vehicle for strategic and political changes which will enable the government to use the army more easily as an important element of foreign and security policies. The reform is set to improve preparedness of the German armed forces for combating asymmetrical threats and undertaking actions of varied intensity. Despite the reduction in army personnel from 250,000 to 170,000-185,000 soldiers, the Ministry of Defence is determined to increase the possibilities of deploying the Bundeswehr outside the country from the current 7,000 to approximately 10,000 soldiers. The armed forces will consist of approximately 170,000 contracted and professional soldiers and an unspecified number (from 5,000 to 15,000) of volunteer soldiers that serve from 12 to 23 months. The earlier decision about a total suspension of conscription from 1 July 2011 has been upheld. Changes have been announced in the training system and command structures (duplicating command headquarters will be scrapped) and in the organisation of the armed services. Furthermore, the Ministry of Defence will be reorganised – the number of departments and personnel will be reduced and current command headquarters will be incorporated into Bundeswehr structures. The ministry will focus on strategic and political tasks. The competences of the Bundeswehr’s General Inspector will be expanded and his rank elevated to the rank of the commander of the armed forces who has the right to give orders to commanders of the armed services and the military aide to the federal government. The equipment purchase policy will be revised as it does not comply with the army's current needs. Risks and threats to Germany's security: the consequences of failed and failing states, international terrorism, threats to critical and information infrastructure, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change and related phenomena (migrations, lack of access to water etc.), threats to the free access to trade routes and the supply of raw materials. The objectives of German security policy: the security and protection of German citizens, the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Germany and its allies, the fulfilment of international responsibilities. The interests of German security policy: preventing, mitigating and managing crises and conflitcts that endanger the security of Germany and its allies, advocating and implementing positions on foreign and security policy in an asservite and credible way, strengthening transatlantic and European security and partnership, advocating the universality of human rights and principles of democracy, facilitating free and unrestricted world trade as well as free access to the high seas and to natural resources. The Bundeswehr's mission: the protection of Germany and its citizens, securing Germany’s capability to act in the field of foreign policy, contributing to the defence of allies, contributing to stability and partnership at an international level, supporting multinational cooperation and European integration. The Bundeswehr's tasks: territorial defence as collective defence within NATO, the prevention of international conflicts and crisis management, including countering international terrorism, participation in military tasks within the EU Common Security and Defence Policy, homeland security contributions, rescue and evacuation operations, partnership and cooperation as a part of multinational integration and global security cooperation, humanitarian relief abroad.

All sports aim to help kids to flourish, to form friendships, to experience loss or rejection within a safe space. In addition, they experience many physical and psychological health benefits which encourages them to grow up to become the best versions of themselves. While the GAA dilutes competitiveness in juvenile age ranks through the promotion of Go-Games, it remains evident that team sports create competitive environments where one's abilities may become a tool to differentiate the weak versus the strong, the hard versus the soft, the big against the small. Of course, such differentiation is not exclusive to sport, it can be seen in all walks of life from academia to business to social situations. Difference is to be celebrated, indeed difference is vital. Take football as an example – tall full-forwards such as Kieran Donaghy were every bit as pivotal as the small skilful full-forwards such as Peter Canavan. Would Down have won in 1994 without the arrogance of wee James McCartan or the drive and determination of DJ Kane, both of whom were important cogs in their system? Or would the current Dublin team be anywhere near as good without the quiet man and talisman James McCarthy or their numerous dynamic super-subs? In business, some employees struggle to work within a team environment and they can often become a negative influence. This can lead to domineering, strong-arm behaviours. Managing such staff can be a nightmare. It is no different in a sporting context, although the intimidating behaviours are rarely confined to the playing fields. Being different offers some people opportunities to turn a positive into a negative. Young men and women socialise in similar circles and they are educated together, they communicate through the same social networks. So it is not a huge stretch to realise that these negative behaviours can profoundly affect all aspects of one's life? What I am referring to is peer-on-peer bullying. We often forget that coaches can be bullies too. Some coaches perceive shouting at kids or targeting them as examples of what not to do as a form of motivation. Those coaches would do better than to check out the novelist Zack W. Van, the author of Inanimate Heroes, the story of a gay teenager trying to defend himself from bullying. The attrition rate in GAA is massive and the reasons for high percentage of player loss at the different age ranges require more in-depth analysis. If intimidation by coaching staff, however subtle, is a contributory factor then the organisation ought to dedicate resources to address this concern. On their website www.ulster.gaa.ie they outline the theme for this year's campaign which is ‘respect'. It looks at how we can encourage children and young people to think about what respect means to them what it feels like to be respected and how they show respect to others. I like the approach Ulster GAA has adopted here, but I feel they could have gone a step further. I'd like to have seen their statement say that in response to Anti-Bullying Week Ulster GAA has taken action to ensure every club has formally adopted the anti-bullying policy and that they are rolling out an anti-bullying training programme to all clubs within the province. My fear is that some clubs may ignore the advice and the important lessons will not become embedded. via the most commonly used social media platforms or even included in the local papers or Mass bulletin. It is imperative that the topic of anti-bullying gets maximum coverage. As strange as this may seem, the bully may not always be aware of his actions. This may be particularly true of juvenile ranks where the actions are peer-on-peer bullying. What kids do not realise is that their actions have consequences beyond that one moment in time. Kids do not need to be labelled a victim or a bully. They do not want to be intimidated, nor do they want their friends to become distant because of their behaviours. This is where the coach must step in and defuse a situation and help the kids to understand their actions in a language that is pitted at their level. During this Anti-Bullying Week we can all make a conscious effort to talk to our kids about what respect means. Explore with them how they like to be treated, how they like to be spoken to and what it feels like when a team-mate or a coach speaks to them harshly or treats them differently.

What is an example of the use of the Subjunctive in Spanish? The Subjunctive tense may be used in Spanish in "If clauses," or in Spanish, clauses that begin with "Sí" and propose a hypothetical situation like: "Sí tenía viente dolares..." What is the best way to learn vocabulary in a foreign language? Practice, practice, practice! And use flashcards and mnemonic devices to help you remember new words! Which of the following aspects is the most important to consider when anaylzing a work of art for its historical importance: Cultural Context, Genre, Work as Exemplary, or Tradition/ Innovation? All four of these are extremely important to understanding a work of art and its relation to the history and development of art worldwide!

A while ago I was fortunate to find a piece of unusual BCal memorabilia, and it gave rise to the idea for this page. I happened across a Pitot tube, from a Boeing 707, this particular 707 was both ex-Caledonian and ex-British Caledonian, G-AWWD. It got me thinking about Whisky Delta, and the history of this aircraft, where she had been and what she had done while in service with the Lion Rampant on her tail. So here follows some of the highlights of her years in service. Anyway, back to the Pitot tube to start with. The Pitot tube is mounted on the outside of the fuselage in the airstream and used to measure air pressure, and by comparing this to a static pressure, it is possible to derive the aircraft’s air speed. Being outside in the airstream at high altitude, they could freeze up, so they have a heater to prevent this. There are two pitot tubes, one either side of the fuselage, and these are mounted below the cockpit on a 707. So if one becomes faulty there is a second one still in service. The one shown here is G-AWWD’s starboard Pitot tube. It was removed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the heater had become faulty. A new one was borrowed from Lufthansa and flown across South America from Santiago, Chile. The work was undertaken on 21st June 1974. So we know Whisky Delta flew the long-haul routes to South America. Okay, back to the very beginning. Boeing 707, construction number 19355, made her first flight in 1966 and entered service with US carrier Flying Tigers in February 1967 as N325F, she then headed off for a lease to Israel’s El Al in 1968. Late on in 1968 she joined the Caledonian Airways fleet. G-AWWD was a convertible 707-349C, so could be configured for passenger or freighter use and she had a large freight door to allow main deck cargo to be carried. It was Engineering’s task to configure the aircraft for service and they had the job of removing / refitting the aircraft’s cabin seating, panels, overhead lockers and galleys. Not too long after entering service, WD was the first 707 ever to attend the Biggin Hill Air Show in May 1969. It was a quick visit, a fly past flown by Captain George Bellamy; WD flew along the runway, just 50ft off the ground, before heading to Prestwick. No passengers on board for this one, it was a positioning flight. After being re-liveried into Caledonian//BUA titles following the merger between Caledonian and British United, WD was off to Santiago in November 1970. This time there were 162,000 small passengers on board. They were all one-day old chicks to help increase poultry production in Chile. As well as the usual cabin configuration changes for this cargo flight, the air conditioning had to be altered to cope with the extra heat generated by all the chicks. We next find WD starring in a television commercial for BCal’s new scheduled transatlantic services. She was busy being filmed at Gatwick in January 1973, first emerging from a hangar, taxiing and taking-off, all with the Let’s Go British Caledonian jingle playing over her appearance. So it was fitting, having helped promote the new US services, that Whisky Delta, was the aircraft chosen to fly BCal’s inaugural service to New York on 1st April 1973. Onboard were many invited guests including Mountbatten. They all got to enjoy the newly refurbished cabin onboard; WD had been fitted with a new wide-look interior for her transatlantic services. Though BCal's scheduled transatlantic services did not last long, the 707 fleet was kept busy with increased transatlantic charters and of course cargo flights. As an inaugural services veteran, WD departed for Bogota via Caracas in October 1976 flying the first BCal scheduled service to Colombia in South America. The arrival of the DC10s in 1977 saw two 707s sold, but G-AWWD continued in service and she was soon engaged flying some of the children helped by the Golden Lion Children’s Trust. WD was off to Le Touquet in June 1977, the flight time was just over 20 minutes, and the kids had a day out in France. With plans to add more DC10’s to the fleet, a number of 707s were to be sold, and this time G-AWWD was to be one of them. She changed owners on St. Andrews Day, 30th November 1977 and headed off to Angola Airlines. G-AWWD was re-registered D2-TAD, then later D2-TOC and finally D2-TOJ. She continued in service with Angola Airlines until 20th February 1992 when she suffered a nose-gear failure while taxiing and was written off; now beyond economic repair. The crew of four on this cargo charter all escaped without injury. I am certain that over the 26 years of service this 707 dutifully provided, she had flown the equivalent of hundreds of times around the world, while carrying countless passengers and huge quantities of cargo, all this and still finding the time to star in a TV commercial too! In 1976, when I was BCAL’s Manager in Seychelles G-AWWD routed via SEZ en route from EBB to HKG with a cargo of Baby Elephants. The aircraft landed in SEZ for refuelling and importantly for watering the elephants who were quite thirsty after the heat of EBB. This caused quite a bit of interest locally and the Seychelles Gazette carried the headline caption the following day – “BCAL lands first JUMBO in the Seychelles”. At that time BA were also operating to SEZ and the local BA Manager was not amused at the time with the press implication that BCAL had landed the first Jumbo jet, until he actually read the article.

On July 21, 1974, five years after making history as the first men to set foot on the moon, Apollo 11 astronauts Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin presented the Washington National Cathedral with a small memento from their voyage. In the four years preceding the moon rock’s arrival at the cathedral, NASA administrator Dr. Thomas Pain worked closely with St. Louis artist Rodney Winfield to design and construct the window that would house the stone. Known to most as the Space Window, the stained glass creation depicts stars and orbiting planets in hues of blue, green, white, orange, and red, inspired by photos taken from the Apollo 11 mission. Particular care was taken to install the rock, which was placed at the center of a planet (or perhaps a moon?) in the upper half of the window. The sample is encased in a small, air-tight, nitrogen-filled capsule to prevent deterioration. Sealing was conducted in a nitrogen environment to prevent air from entering the capsule during the process. The rock itself weighs a mere 7.18 grams and is estimated to be around 3.6 billion years old. It was collected from the moon’s Sea of Tranquility and is composed primarily of basalt, believed to be the result of lava flow. Pyroxferroite, a mineral unknown on Earth, was also found in the sample. The rock was jointly presented to the National Cathedral by the Apollo 11 crew, the window’s benefactor, Dr. Pain, and Dr. James Fletcher, the presiding NASA administrator at the time. The ceremony commemorated the fifth anniversary of the first lunar landing. President Nixon approved the gift earlier that year. The Space Window is located on the south side of the cathedral. Nearby atop the cathedral’s West Tower, a Darth Vader grotesque introduces an unexpected sci-fi element to the space motif.

With the price of gold continuing to climb and currently selling for $1,125.70 per ounce, it’s no surprise a student like Chase Calvin struck gold locally, especially when he has access to an ideal spot in his own backyard— Feather River in Oroville. According to Discover California, there were over 25 million ounces of gold found in the Sierra Nevada foothills during the Gold Rush. Calvin found the precious metal at Bear River, which flows down from the Sacramento valley and merges into Feather River. His find was worth about $150 which he found while panning. Panning is the process of shaking a pan filled with rocks and metals, causing the heavy gold to settle at the bottom. Simultaneously, the lighter materials will rise to the surface to be tossed. Distinguished people have also found gold along the Feather River. John Bidwell was one of the first to discover gold there. His findings occurred at Middle Fork on Feather River, known today as Bidwell’s Bar. During the beginning of the Gold Rush, Bidwell’s discovery of gold on Feather River attracted thousands of miners who established communities where prospectors came to strike it rich, and often did. In July 2013, Bob Van Camp of Paradise found a five-pound nugget in the Butte Foothills, worth a quarter of a million dollars. The gold, about the size of the palm of a hand, was found with a metal detector. According to the Gold Prospectors Association of America, big nuggets of gold were found on the ground and every rock during the Gold Rush. Since the Gold Rush, there has been gold discovered throughout Chico, Sacramento, Shasta and El Dorado counties. Feather River, located between Oroville and Quincy, was one of the most successful locations for miners during the rush, with an established community of miners that lived along the river. Calvin has been panning for gold since a young age, and has been to Feather River as well as other locations in the area including the American River, Mineral Bar and Bear River, which are both closer to Auburn. The California Department of Parks and Recreation concluded that the Auburn State Recreation Area includes 40 miles of north and middle forks of the American River. This spot was also filed with gold and miners during the Gold Rush. Study the river, as well as the topography. The gold settles in certain places so knowing the topography and the way the river flows can help those interested in gold panning know where to look, he said. Come prepared with the proper tools. A shovel, a few five gallon buckets and a gold pan are essential when gold panning.

Here is the list of most significant and incredible findings of 2016 in the genetic area. Scientists from California have found “klotho” protein and KL-VS gene which is responsible for its production. This gene instantly got the nickname “intelligence gene” because klotho protein can improve IQ of a person by 6 points. Moreover, this protein can be synthesized artificially and it doesn’t matter how old is this person. That means in the nearest future scientists would be able to make people smarter with scientific methods, no matter how naturally intelligent they are. Of course, you can create a genius out of an ordinary person with this klotho protein. But what is more important – it would be possible to help people with mental disorders and those who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. By the way, speaking about Alzheimer’s. It was almost impossible to determine the nature of this disease, since it was officially described in 1906. Why it occurs in one people and not in others? But recently there was a real significant break-through in this area. Japanese researchers from Osaka University found the gene, which develops Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. During this research a new gene klc1 was found, that promotes accumulation of beta-amyloidal protein in brain tissues, which is the most important precursor for Alzeheimer’s development. The mechanism of this process was known a long time ago, but until now nobody could explain its nature. Tests have shown that with klc1 gene blocking, the amount of beta-amyloidal protein forming in brain reduces by 45%. Scientists hope that in the nearest future their researches would help battling the Alzheimer’s – a dangerous disease that affects millions of elder people around the world. Turns out there are not only “intelligence gene”, but also “stupidity gene”. At least it’s what researchers from Emory University, Texas, think. They’ve found genetic mutation RGS14, neutralizing of which can significantly improve intellectual abilities of lab mice. As it happens to be, blocking of RGS14 gene makes CA2 are in hippocampus more active – this is the area of the brain that is responsible for accumulation of knowledge and memory storage. Without this genetic mutation, lab mice have started to remember objects and mover around the labyrinth much better, as well as much better adapting for changes in environmental conditions. The scientists from Texas hope that in the future they would be able to create a drug that can block RGS14 gene in already living person. That would have given people intellectual abilities never seen before, as well as cognitive abilities. But more than one decade is needed for us to see the realization of this idea. As many people have already predicted – obesity also has genetic reasons. In different years scientists have found genes that were responsible for excessive weight and big amount of fat gain in our body. But today the “meanest” one is IRX3. Turns out this gene affects the BMI index. During the lab tests, researchers have found that mice with damaged IRX3 the amount of fat in their bodies is 2-times lower than in the control group. And this is despite the fact that they’ve been fed with the same amount of high-calorie food. Further study of IRX3 genetic mutation and mechanisms of their impact on the body can create effective medicines from diabetes and obesity. And the most important break-through, in our opinion – the scientists from the London School of Public Health have found 5-HTTLPR, also called “happiness gene”. It is that gene that is responsible for serotonin distribution in neural cells. Serotonin is considered the most important factor that affects the mood of person – it makes us happy or sad, depending on the external conditions. Those who have the low level of this hormone are subjected to frequent anxiety break-downs and depressions, as well as pessimism and unrest. British scientists have also found out that so called “long” variation of 5-HTTLPR gene contributes to the better transportation of serotonin to the brain, which makes person feeling 2-times happier than the rest of the people.

Fenner Brockway, in full Baron Archibald Fenner Brockway, (born November 1, 1888, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died April 28, 1988, Watford, Hertfordshire, England), British politician and passionate socialist who devoted his life to such prominent 20th-century causes as world peace, anticolonialism, and nuclear disarmament. Brockway was the son of missionaries and espoused liberal beliefs from an early age, notably in his support for the Boers in the South African War (1899–1902). He became a convert to socialism in 1907 after interviewing the founder of the Labour Party, J. Keir Hardie, for a London newspaper, and by 1912 Brockway was editor of the weekly Labour Leader. After being jailed as a pacifist and draft resister during World War I, Brockway fought for prison reform and served as chairman (1923–28) of the No More War Movement and War Resisters’ International. Brockway joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP; Labour’s left-wing offshoot) and served as ILP general secretary (1923–26 and 1933–39), chairman (1931–33), and political secretary (1939–46), but he returned to the Labour Party in 1946. He represented Labour in Parliament (1929–31 and 1950–64), where his fight for independence for British African colonies earned him the nickname “the member for Africa.” After reluctantly accepting a life peerage in 1964, Brockway continued to crusade for various causes in the House of Lords, an institution he tried to have abolished. His many books include a defense of Indian nationalism, The Indian Crisis (1930); a study of race relations, This Shrinking Explosive World (1967); and four autobiographical volumes, the last of which, 98 Not Out, was published in 1986.

The nature of radioactivity was discovered in 1896 byAntoine Henri Becquerel, who studied minerals that incorporate uranium and other radioactive elements. He placed some of these samples in a drawer of his desk along with an uneposed photographic plate and a metal coin. When he developed the photographic plate later, the sihouette of the coin was clearly visible. From this photograph he concluded that some unknown form of radiation that got around the coin and reached the plate deliverted enough energy to cause the chemical reactions that normally go into photographic development. Becquerel knew that whatever had exposed the plate must have originated in the minerals and travelled at least as fast as that plate. Later on, many scientist worked hard to get the answer and one of the most famous one is Marie Sklodowska Curie.

Dwarf, spreading shrub. Pretty white flowers in profusion from May to September. Ideal as a front of border plant. Plant in full sun and in well drained soil. A dwarf, spreading shrub, with silvery leaves and saucer - shaped flowers of a pale yellow with a maroon centre in early summer. Dwarf shrub ideal for dry banks with silver-grey leaves and masses of buttercup yellow flowers in summer. An attractive spiny, silvery leaved shrub of small - medium size. Masses of purplish pea - like flowers in mid-summer. An ideal sea side plant from the salt fields of Siberia and SE Russia. A handsome, slow growing shrub with clusters of sweetly fragrant pale yellow flowers Dec-Mar. Even in severe weather the flowers are produced in profusion. Yellow foliage in autumn. Protect from late frost. One of the best red flowered winter shrubs. A large shrub with scented flowers from December to March. Superb red, autumn foliage. Superb vigorous, spreading, shrub. Dense clusters of large yellow flowers suffused rich coppery-red. Good autumn foliage of orange - red and scarlet. A handsome, slow growing shrub with clusters of sweetly fragrant, ruby flowers from Dec-Mar. Even in severe weather the flowers are produced in profusion along the branches. Yellow foliage in autumn. A vigorous upright, large shrub. Large, light yellow scented flowers appear during winter and spring. A handsome, slow growing shrub with clusters of sweetly fragrant, yellow flowers Dec-Mar. Yellow foliage in autumn. Still one of the best forms for scent and flower. A handsome, slow growing large shrub. Clusters of larger, sweetly fragrant sulphur flowers Dec-Mar. Yellow foliage in autumn. Deservedly one of the most popular forms. A dwarf, compact Hebe with glossy, bronze tinged leaves. Intense violet - blue flowers June to October. Dwarf hebe with spear shaped dark green leaves and violet flower spikes in summer. Low growing evergreen with narrow leaves and violet blue spikes in early summer. Compact evergreen with mid green leaves and spikes of white flowers in late spring. Dwarf hebe with emerald green leaves in a neat dome, a non-flowering variety. Compact narrow leaved hebe with bright pink flowers fading to white all summer and autumn. Small hebe with narrow, cream edged leaves tinged pink in winter and mauve flowers in summer. Medium hebe with variegated green and white foliage and dark pink flower spikes in summer. Medium spreading evergreen with glossy green leaves and pale mauve flowers. Medium shrub with long, narrow leaves tinged purple when young and lilac-mauve flowers over a long period in summer. Small dark green leaves and small violet-blue flower spikes in summer and autumn on a neat hebe. Small hebe with green leaves that become purple tinged in winter and pale pink flowers that fade to white . Flowers continuously from early summer to autumn. Mid green leaves with fat flowering racemes that are pink in bud and open to white. Flowers all summer, a very pretty plant. Low growing hebe with grey green leaves edged in cream, blushing pink in winter. White flowers in summer. An upright hebe with dark purple stems and leaves flushed purple with rich violet flowers summer and autumn. Small shrub with blue grey leaves edged in red in winter and pale mauve flower spikes in summer. Upright hebe with mid green leaves tinged with red and purple flowers in summer. Characterful hebe with narrow, spear shaped leaves bearing white racemes of flowers all summer. Compact hebe with glossy, dark green leaves and pure white flower spikes. Compact shrub with spear shaped green leaves and deep pink verging on purple flowering spikes in summer. A dwarf hebe with dense glaucous foliage and spikes of white flowers in early summer. Dwarf evergreen with erect habit and tiny, scale like leaves terminating in spikes of white flowers in summer. Upright hebe with box like leaves and white flowers in summer. Dense dark green foliage on a hebe with light mauve spikes from summer to autumn. Dwarf hebe with silvery grey foliage and small white flower spikes in spring and summer. Low growing hebe with pale grey green leaves and white flower spikes in early summer. Cream edged green leaves tinged purple when they first open and pink flowers all summer and autumn. Rounded shrub with glossy, bright green leaves and large racemes of white flowers. An aromatic, dwarf shrub with long silvery leaves. Long stalked yellow flowers in summer. A dense, dwarf shrub with narrow sage green leaves that have a strong smell of curry. Yellow flowers in summer. Vigorous and very hardy large shrub with masses of scented, snow - white flowers in late summer. Peeling bark and conspicuous, veined leaves with good autumn colour. Large shrub with beautiful single flowers, reminiscent of a hollyhock. Pale pink with deeper eye. Needs a sheltered spot. Attractive shrub bearing large single blush - pink flowers with crimson eye August to September. Important to plant in the hottest situation in the garden to encourage the summer flowering before the early autumn frosts. A medium - sized shrub with single violet - blue flowers with dark eye July to October. Important to plant in the hottest situation in the garden to encourage the summer flowering before the early autumn frosts. Medium to large sized shrub with clear pink flowers with a red eye. A medium - sized shrub with large white flowers with a red eye are produced from August to October. A medium - sized shrub with large single rose - pink flowers with carmine eye from July to October. A picturesque, medium - sized shrub with narrow, silvery leaves. Orange - yellow berries in winter on female plants. Ideal for coastal planting. An elegant shrub with long feathery panicles of creamy - white flowers in July. Greyish - green foliage. White flowers and lime green foliage. A beautiful, late flowering shrub which is not susceptible to frost. Hydrangea with large, velvety leaves and heads of lace-cap flowers in shades of blue and purple. An exotic - looking, medium sized shrub with large handsome, velvety leaves. Flat heads of lilac - pink flowers shaded white in June and July. Plant in a sheltered site. A lovely, medium sized shrub with lacey, lilac - blue flowers. Foliage and stems are hairy. Lacy flowers have serrated edges. Requires a sheltered site. Bright hydrangea blue lace-cap with lighter eye. Mop headed hydrangea with deep blue flowers in late summer. Small lace-cap with blue florets in summer and shiny, green leaves. White mop-headed flowers that are pink tinged when fading. A handsome plant. Pale pink lace-cap with variegates leaves of grey, green and yellow. The well known mop headed hydrangea from Japan whose colour is either blue or pink depending upon the acidity of the soil. A most distinct and unusual hydrangea. The rather flattened, dense heads are comprised of thick petalled, cup - shaped florets, resembling a large lilac. Greyish lilac or pink flowers that have a faint but distinct scent. The best Hydrangea for a frost pocket. Medium - sized with large panicles of white flowers which fade attractively to pink. Bright green, lush foliage with panicles of white flowers from July into autumn. Easy to grow in sun or shade. One of the showiest of large, hardy shrubs. Huge panicles of small, white, sterile florets appear from summer to autumn and gradually turn pink with age. Good autumn foliage. A self clinging, useful, climber which thrives in a shady position. Large, white flowers in May. A showy, large leaved, medium - sized shrub with oak - like foliage and erect terminal panicles of white flowers in July. Spectular, red autumn foliage. Superb blue lace-cap flowers in late summer and early autumn. A handsome, small shrub with lace cap, blue flowers from Aug-Oct. Superb autumn foliage. Good, shade bearing shrub with continuous, small yellow flowers, over the summer, followed by red, finally black berries. Excellent, dwarf, suckering ground cover plant. Large buttercup - yellow flowers from July to October. A popular, easy to grow semi - evergreen, low shrub with large saucer shaped yellow flowers July to September. Suitable for any situation. A semi-evergreen, small shrub which produces large yellow flowers August to October. Brilliant salmon - red fruits in autumn. A dwarf shrub with arching reddish stems. Yellow flowers in clusters June to October. Flowers have conspicuous red anthers. A very pretty shrub with variegated pink, white and green foliage. Yellow flowers with red anthers from July to October. A dwarf, hardy, perennial sub - shrub. Lemon flowers with greyish - green leaves.

Are You Ready for an Online Graduate Degree? Students that earned a bachelor’s degree have made a significant start in their career because of the knowledge gained, related to their degree choice, during the process. Many students have also found that a bachelor’s degree is a pre-requisite for a number of jobs. As you progress in your career there may be a time when you will consider an online graduate education, either as a result of your interest in learning or as a means of advancing your career. I’ve made that academic journey; earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees – and there are several important aspects you should consider before you make the decision to pursue an advanced degree. One of the reasons that students choose to pursue a graduate degree is the belief that doing so will increase their earnings potential. From a general view of the job market, this is true. A 2011 report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce: The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings, presents the following statistics from 2009: those holding bachelor's degrees earn about $2.27 million over their lifetime, while those with master's, doctoral, and professional degrees earn $2.67 million, $3.25 million, and $3.65 million, respectively. The caveat is that this does not apply to all careers, which means it is necessary for you to research the field you are interested in to assess the average earnings and better understand what you can expect. In addition to evaluating your career options, there are academic requirements to consider. As an online instructor I can attest to the fact that there are significant differences in undergraduate and graduate level work. There is a shift in thinking that is required for the graduate level and a new set of expectations regarding the quality of your work when you make a transition from an undergraduate degree program to a graduate degree program. You need to be prepared for graduate work. The bachelor’s degree used to be the most sought after degree, but according to Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, “the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree” and “the number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s.” Let’s examine the most important factors necessary for making a decision about obtaining a master’s degree. 1. Overview: Most programs take an average of two years, although some online schools offer master’s programs than can be completed at an accelerated rate – within 18 months. When you choose a master’s degree you will typically find courses that address a general focus (education, business, etc.) with a core curriculum, and a specialization or concentration (business administration, post-secondary education, etc.) based upon electives you will choose. As a general average, a master’s degree can range anywhere from 30-60 credit hours – there isn’t a set standard for all schools to follow. 2. Program Costs: According to a 2003-2004 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study the estimated cost of a master’s degree (on an average) is $37,000 – for all schools. For online schools, you need to look at the total number of credit hours per class and the per credit cost. For example, Ashford University lists a per credit hour cost of $390. 3. Earning Potential: From a general perspective, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, utilizing 2009 statistics, Select Findings from What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors, determined that the average earnings for 15 fields of study had a 38.3% higher income with graduate degree. As an example, for a business degree the median earnings were $60,000 with a bachelor’s degree and $80,000 for a graduate degree. Career Builder.com also provides salary data and another example, for a degree in human resources management the average earnings with a bachelor's degree were $37,874 and a master’s degree was $56,094. Students that choose a master’s degree are often focused on career development and online schools market these programs as being especially applicable for management and leadership positions. That’s the reason why I chose a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) program – I had aspirations to start a small business and also advance my current career in business management. Another option that’s available once a master’s degree is completed is teaching – with a master’s degree you can often teach college courses at the undergraduate level. That’s how I began my teaching career – I started teaching as an adjunct at the local community college. 4. Academic Expectations: What you’ll find at the master’s level is a focus on specific subjects related to your degree specialization. It is a significant investment of time because the amount of work involved and the expectation for the quality of work increases when compared to undergraduate work. At this level you will be expected to provide well-written papers that are properly formatted and supported with scholarly research. You will be developing subject matter knowledge and the conclusion of a graduate level degree program often requires a thesis, culminating project, or final comprehensive exam. If you decide to pursue a doctoral program you need to understand that this is going to be one of the most demanding, challenging, and ultimately rewarding degree programs possible. It is a rigorous program, one that requires a significant investment of time, because of the additional time required to meet the objectives of this advanced degree. You should also know that 50 to 60 percent of doctoral candidates never complete their programs, according to a report by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service titled The Path Forward. 1. Overview: On an average, a doctoral program may require up to 120 credit hours; however, there is a possibility that some of the credit hours from your master’s degree program may transfer, so be sure to check with the admissions advisor to review your transcripts. • University of Phoenix: the average cost (depending upon degree specialization) is $41,665 – $67,835. • Walden University: the cost is $4600 per quarter, up to three classes per quarter, with a total of 96 quarter credit hours required. • Capella University: the cost is $4566 per quarter. • Doctoral programs also have residency requirements (in-person seminars or classes) and there are additional fees involved. 3. Earning Potential: This is an aspect of doctoral degree programs that is difficult to measure because there isn’t a clearly defined career path for all academic disciplines. Indeed.com provides an average annual salary of $93,000, with possible jobs that include clinical statistician, academic writer, scientific director, and many others. What is known is that a doctoral degree can help extend your career development potential, depending upon your field of study. For example, you may be interested in academic work – from teaching to researching and publishing. A doctorate in business may be advantageous for advanced leadership or consulting roles. It is important that you research your career options before beginning this type of program. I chose to pursue a Ph.D. with a personal and professional goal of teaching at the graduate level and I was interested in research and publishing, which are typical work expectations in academic settings. 4. Academic Expectations: If there are so many doctoral students that do not complete their degree, why do students stay in the doctoral program? The answer according to The Princeton Review: people stay in doctorate programs because they enjoy learning for learning's sake. They love intellectual stimulation, and they find academic work fun. I stayed in the program as I had a specific career goal in mind. At the doctoral level schools often refer to you as a "scholar practitioner" and that is the most advanced form of thinking required for any degree program. Instead of just acquiring knowledge, as a graduate student you will also be involved in the process of contributing knowledge to your chosen field. You’ll begin the program with coursework and once that phase is completed you’ll have a comprehensive exam to complete – which is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your subject matter expertise. Following the exam is a lengthy process of research necessary to complete your dissertation. Completing a doctoral degree is a very time consuming process that may require four or more years to complete. Also of importance, you are working through a very demanding online program and need to have a strong sense of self-motivation and determination. The most important point I can make is that earning a graduate degree does not automatically guarantee a higher income or a particular job. A 2010 report summarized in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?, cites information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree. Before you decide to make an investment in an online graduate degree, clearly define your career goals, the personal motivators for earning another degree, and a comparison of the potential expenses measured against the potential earnings. Ask yourself if you are willing to devote the time and effort necessary to complete a master’s or doctoral degree and be certain to thoroughly explore the schools and career paths that you are interested in pursuing.

The snow leopard lives recluse in Himalaya, in the Altai, in Mongolia, in the Tibet, in Bouthan, in Siberia. His thick fur is a mixture of white, pale grey and golden bistre decorated with dark tasks assuring him an ideal camouflage in the snowy landscapes of its natural environment. In summer he lives between 2 500 and 6000 m on height. The winter he can come down until 1000 m. His middleweight is around 50kg and its size goes of 90 in 120cm. His tail is at least 75 % of the length of its body, from 90cm to 1m. He use it as a pendulum to keep the balance on steep rocks along the vertiginous ledges. He can jump up to fifteen meters in length and six meters in height. It is a feline extremely rare and difficult to observe in the nature because of the inaccessibility of its housing environment. We call him the mountain's ghost. His summer diet is mainly constituted by ungulates of high mountains: mouflons, ibexes, tahrs, makhors. The winter, the leopard goes down more low in valleys and forests and hunts the deer, the wild boar but also preys more modest as the marmot or the hare. Contrary to his cousins pantherides, he hums as the small big cats what makes it an exception of its species. His decline is mainly the result of illegal hunting for its fur very appreciated in Central Asia, in Russia and in the Eastern Europe, but also for the bones and various parts of its body in great demand in the Chinese medicine.

For centuries, the Cơ Tu were wearing costumes made out of tree bark. They used 5 types of trees for their solid fiber. After removing the fresh bark, it was rigorously beaten to make it firmer, then soaked in a odoriferous mixture of water & spices for about 10 days, to both give it an aromatic fragrance and protect it from insects and finally let to dry for a month. In march 2017, M. Bh’riu Liếc, representative of 94 Cơ Tu villages in Quảng Nam province came to my museum. After his visit, he admitted “being stunned that a foreigner is willing to preserve the heritage of Vietnam’s ethnic groups and very proud to have his culture represented at the Precious Heritage”. That day, he offered me a bark costume ; but it is only the following week, when I visited the Cơ Tu highland in Tây Giang district, that I found out that he gave me the last one available, making it a meaningful and priceless piece of the museum. Mr. Clâu Nâm, who posed in it, is 87 year old and the last person able to produce it, a knowledge passed on by his own father.

Mental health issues like anxiety, depression and others can affect many aspects of a person’s daily life. This may include doing household chores, performing tasks at work and attending college classes. Committing to a healthier diet and having fitness goals can significantly change mental health symptoms for the better. It can be difficult to maintain a healthy weight without paying attention to what you eat. It’s okay to make mistakes and eat an extra cookie or piece of pie once in a while. Just remember to go back to your diet and you’ll be fine. Slowly make small diet changes each day. You can start by exchanging a brownie for a piece of fruit. Instead of eating fatty, fried meats, you might want to try a vegan substitute. You may gain additional benefits from adopting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. Taking meat and dairy out can make losing weight a lot simpler. Unhealthy eating habits can contribute to cancer, heart disease and many other harmful ailments. Superfoods to consider adding to your diet include broccoli, avocado, kale and blueberry. You can try adding them to salads, sandwiches or use your own ideas to create amazing meals. Having a diet plan gives a person rules to refer to on a daily basis. Being physically fit benefits a person’s body, mind and spirit. Having a plan can help you stay on the right path for success. Doing some light exercise three or more times a week can make having a mental illness more bearable each day. Try activities such as lifting light weights, going for a walk outdoors for a few minutes or riding a bike to work. Yoga is a spiritual technique that calms the mind and body while improving flexibility. Le-Vel Thrive is a premium lifestyle system that can help you reach optimum mental and physical levels to improve your overall lifestyle. More rigorous exercises include running, jumping rope or taking up a sport. Heading to the gym or purchasing expensive exercise equipment isn’t necessary to improve your mental health. Mental health issues like depression can make a person quit feeling motivated to do the things they enjoy. Taking action can help a person live a normal, productive life again. Instead of letting life get you down, get up and do something, even if it’s a small activity. Exercise gives the body energy, strength and improved focus. Many foods contain artificial ingredients that can affect your ability to think clearly. Fresh fruits and vegetables invigorate you since they contain essential vitamins and minerals your body needs. Being active each day also gives a person something to do besides feeling down. Without getting the required amount of sleep each night, the simplest tasks can become frustrating. Eating healthy and exercising regularly can help a person sleep longer and deeper. This improves concentration, focus and energy levels. Have control over your mood to maintain healthier relationships with loved ones. Think more clearly to achieve career goals, pursue new hobbies and live a more positive life again. Being confident in yourself is vital to healthy socialization, wanting to try new things and having the strength to endure tough times. Exercising and eating the right foods can improve your appearance and make you feel better about yourself so you can be excited for life. Perform better at almost anything you attempt with a higher self-esteem. You’ll feel energized and better prepared to start your day with a smile and a splash of confidence. You can write fitness and diet goals in a daily journal to keep track of details. A friend or family member may also remind you to keep going. Taking small steps each day towards progress can make it easier to improve your mental health.

How to open file with .BTS extension? If the .BTS file is known to your system, it is possible to open it by double clicking the mouse or pressing ENTER. This operation will start applications associated with the .BTS file installed on your system. If the system encounters a file for the first time and there are no relevant associations, the action will end with a system’s proposal to find the appropriate software on your computer or in the Internet. Sometimes it happens that the files of the .BTS type a wrong program is assigned. This can sometimes be the result of the action of hostile programs such as viruses and malware, but most often it is the result of an incorrect association of an application with the .BTS file extension. If, during the operation of a new type of .BTS files, we will indicate to the system a wrong program, the system will erroneously suggest its use every time it encounters this type of file. In this case, try to re-select the appropriate application. Right-click on the .BTS file, and then select from the menu the option "Open With ..." and "Choose default program" . Now select one of the installed application from the list above and try again. If our system cannot cope with the .BTS extension and all the automatic and semi-automatic methods to teach it have failed, we can only manually edit the Windows registry. This register stores all information about the operation of your operating system, including file extension associations with programs to support them. The REGEDIT entered in the window "search for programs and files" or "run" for older versions of the operating system, gives the access to the registry of the operating system. All operations performed in the registry (even those little complicated for the .BTS file extension) have a significant impact on the operation of our system, therefore, before any modifications, make sure that you have a copy of the current registry. The section important for us is the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT . This manual shows step by step how to modify the registry, specifically the entry in the registry that contains information about .BTS file. Using the keyboard shortcut ctr + F or the Edit menu and by selecting "Find" look for the .BTS extension you are interested in by typing it in the search window. Confirm by clicking OK or by using the ENTER key. The value you are interested in concerning the extension can be edited by making manual changes in the keys assigned to the .BTS extension found. Here you can also create your own entry with the .BTS extension if there is no such in the registry. All available options are listed in the context menu (right mouse button) or in the "Edit" menu after placing the cursor in the appropriate place on the screen. After finishing editing an entry for the .BTS extension, close the system registry. The changes made will come into effect after rebooting the operating system.

Styles and designs of connectors are limited to an engineer’s imagination. Generally connectors are made from steel or brass with zinc or nickel plating. Stainless steel, certain high strength or corrosion resistant materials, and even plastic connectors are available.

Face validity refers to the degree to which a measurement or piece of research is relevant - i.e. does it actually cover the concept or variable that is is trying to measure. Generally, face validity refers to whether a test 'looks like' it will work, as opposed to validity, which accurately shows whether the actual purpose of the research was fulfilled.

Tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain once said that the main job of an instrumentalist is to accompany the vocalist. He also mentioned that regardless of how well known the instrumentalist is, when he/she is set to perform with a classical singer or musician, the instrumentalist must serve as his “subordinate”. Indian classical music has a bright future. According to the Pamda Bhushan recipient, youngsters can learn the art and make a wonderful career out of it. The idea is to help musicians give better exposure through the best music academies. This will help them grow up learning Indian classical music traditions combined with world traditions. Practice is plays a crucial role to emerge as a good Tabla player. Zakir believes that ‘Perfect practice makes man perfect’. So he advices youngsters to learn certain techniques with the instrument and smartly deploy them while practicing them to catch up with speeds. This is an important part of learning, playing, and mastering table. The strength should come from fingers. Power coming from arms may restrict the high speed one can attain. Additionally, with age, the power in arms gets reduced naturally. Fingers possess some power within naturally. However, this requires being enhanced in a fashion that the fingers are able to create the desired sound on the table on their own. Little help can be taken from shoulder and or arm part. Experts believe that it is similar to a muscle building exercise wherein fingers need to be strengthened using some small weights just as you would strengthen arms at the gym. Once the strength is gained, it is possible to reach higher speeds. The part of the fingers you use while playing the instrument also matter. The artist should be touching the right surface of the instrument. Experts feel only the top third part of finger should touch the surface. Although the power applied is not much, the overall impact and the sound produced will be perfect. Position of the Instrument – The instrument must be placed in a fashion way that your hands do not end up being in an uncomfortable position. The daaya or right piece of Tabla must be kept slightly away from the body. On the other hand the baaya or left piece of the instrument must be kept closer. Placing the left piece closer ensures a position that allows you to apply pressure on the palm surface to generate diverse bass sounds. Some of the prominent players use a baby finger on the left piece. This allows them four fingers to play the left piece while some of these may also slide the left thumb on the baaya occasionally. This is done for adding impact to performance and variety (not a standard practice). This also ensures an added combination of pressure points to the palm once you learn to use the baby and index finger for the left piece. Creativity – Good musicians focus on a lot more than clarity and speed. Learning to play table and mastering it combined with adding a style of one’s own is tough. You would require ample practice to be able to reach the level of table maestros. Experts feel that playing table is about the music quality one generates. The player should also be able to decide what to play in a specific circumstance. Hard work and dedication will make you a unique, expert and renowned tabla player. You may not be able to emulate Zakir Hussain, but will certainly create your own unique style people will adore you for. Practice to perfection requires devotion towards music and the instrument. Devotion, being the epitome of all emotions obviously can’t be attained easily. The only way apparent to me is being constantly motivated by listening to the legends and their recordings and the history and research the instrument deserving your devotion has already lived through. It takes many hours of pure practice to emerge as a proficient table player. Giving ample time to the activity will allow brain brain adapts itself to the finger movements. Exercising patience and discipline is important too! Riyaaz or practice is about enjoying the music while playing and disciplining one’s mind.

Are California nail salons safe for workers? So how safe are working conditions at nail salons in California? Some are asking that question after much-discussed stories in the New York Times this week examining working conditions and safety at New York nail salons. California activists and health officials have been examining the chemicals used in nail salons for nearly a decade. A 2012 California Department of Toxic Substances Control study found toxic chemicals in several nail products that had claimed to be toxic-free. The study, based on a small sample of products from Bay Area distributors, focused on three chemicals known as the "toxic trio": formaldehyde, toluene and dibutyl phthalate. Exposure to the chemicals has been linked to cancer and birth defects, according to the state. There are roughly 120,000 licensed nail technicians in 48,000 salons across the state. About four in five are Vietnamese women. Their health has long been an important issue for advocates, who say salon employees work long hours in hazardous conditions and suffer health problems as a result. Workers have more headaches, respiratory problems and skin irritations than the general population and are exposed to chemicals at higher than recommended levels, according to research in scientific journals. Now, safety issues in nail salons are attracting closer attention from state officials. That same year, San Francisco adopted an ordinance that gave official city recognition to salons that use toxic-free products. Last year, Alameda County created a program that recognized nail salons that used healthier products. The state also agreed to review a host of consumer products that contain chemicals, and nail polish is one. But some activists have sought more aggressive regulations, which some nail salon owners have opposed. * Dibutyl phthalate (DBP), (nail polish): nausea and irritated eyes, skin, nose, mouth and throat. Long-term exposures to high concentrations may cause other serious effects. * Ethyl acetate (nail polish, nail polish remover, fingernail glue): irritated eyes, stomach, skin, nose, mouth and throat. High levels can cause fainting. * Ethyl methacrylate (EMA), (artificial nail liquid): asthma; irritated eyes, skin, nose and mouth; difficulty concentrating. Exposures while pregnant may affect the fetus. * Formaldehyde (nail polish, nail hardener): difficulty breathing, including coughing, asthma-like attacks and wheezing; allergic reactions; irritated eyes, skin and throat. Formaldehyde can cause cancer. * Methacrylic acid (nail primer): skin burns and irritated eyes, skin, nose, mouth and throat. At higher concentrations, this chemical can cause difficulty breathing. * Toluene (nail polish, fingernail glue): dry or cracked skin; headaches, dizziness and numbness; irritated eyes, nose, throat and lungs; damage to liver and kidneys; and harm to fetuses during pregnancy.

What about data from simulation? AdaNet is a lightweight and scalable TensorFlow AutoML framework for training and deploying adaptive neural networks using the AdaNet algorithm [Cortes et al. ICML 2017]. AdaNet combines several learned subnetworks in order to mitigate the complexity inherent in designing effective neural networks. This is not an official Google product. This looks like it’s based deeply the cloud AI and Machine Learning products, including cloud-based hyperparameter tuning. In this blog post we show how to build a forecast-generating model using TensorFlow’s DNNRegressor class. The objective of the model is the following: Given FX rates in the last 10 minutes, predict FX rate one minute later. Let’s say we want to train a machine learning model to complete poems. Given one line of verse, the model should generate the next line. This is a hard problem—poetry is a sophisticated form of composition and wordplay. It seems harder than translation because there is no one-to-one relationship between the input (first line of a poem) and the output (the second line of the poem). It is somewhat similar to a model that provides answers to questions, except that we’re asking the model to be a lot more creative. Codelab: Google Developers Codelabs provide a guided, tutorial, hands-on coding experience. Most codelabs will step you through the process of building a small application, or adding a new feature to an existing application. They cover a wide range of topics such as Android Wear, Google Compute Engine, Project Tango, and Google APIs on iOS. Read Open Source, Open Science, and the Replication Crisis in HCI. Broadly, it seems true, but trying to piggyback on GitHub seems like a shallow solution that repurposes something for coding – an ephemeral activity, to science, which is archival for a reason. Thought needs to be given to an integrated (collection, raw data, cleaned data, analysis, raw results, paper (with reviews?), slides, and possibly a recording of the talk with questions. What would it take to make this work across all science, from critical ethnographies to particle physics? How will it be accessible in 100 years? 500? 1,000? This is very much an HCI problem. It is about designing a useful socio-cultural interface. Some really good questions would be “how do we use our HCI tools to solve this problem?”, and, “does this point out the need for new/different tools?”. NASA AIMS meeting. Demo in 2 weeks. AIMS is “time series prediction”, A2P is “unstructured data”. Proove that we can actually do ML, as opposed to saying things. How about cross-point correlation? Could show in a sim? The search results are densely connected. That’s how PageRank works. Even latent connections matter. The relationships of the returned links both to each other and to the broader information landscape in general is hidden. AI can use these maps to understand the shape of human belief space, and where the positive regions and dangerous sinks are. Two measures for maps are the concepts or Range and length. Range is the distance that a trajectory can be placed on the map and remain contiguous. Length is the total distance that a trajectory travels, independent of the map its placed on. Generate an N-dimensional coordinate frame that best preserves length over the greatest range. What is used as the basis for the trajectory may matter. The range (at a minimum), can go from letters to high-level topics. I think any map reconstruction based on letters would be a tangle, with clumps around TH, ER, ON, and AN. At the other end, an all-encompassing meta-topic, like WORDS would be a single, accurate, but useless single point. So the map reconstruction will become possible somewhere between these two extremes. The Nietzsche text is pretty good. In particular, check out the way the sentences form based on the seed “s when one is being cursed. In this case, the first 2-3 words are the same, and random, semi-structured text. That’s promising, since the compare would be on the seed plus the generated text. Today, see how fast a “Shining” (All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.) text can be learned and then try each keyword as a start. As we move through the sentence, the probability of the next words should change. dull boy all work and no play" Rewrite the last part of the code to generate text based on each word in the sentence. Based on this result and the ensuing chat with Aaron, we’re going to revisit the whole LSTM with numbers and build out a process that will support words instead of characters. Graph laplacians could model “othering” by having negative weights. It looks like these are known as signed laplacians, and useful to denote difference. The trick is to discover the equations of motion. How do you model a “social particle”? Swarm Intelligence is the principal peer reviewed publication dedicated to reporting research and new developments in this multidisciplinary field. The journal publishes original research articles and occasional reviews on theoretical, experimental, and practical aspects of swarm intelligence. It offers readers reports on advances in the understanding and utilization of systems that are based on the principles of swarm intelligence. Emphasis is given to such topics as the modeling and analysis of collective biological systems; application of biological swarm intelligence models to real-world problems; and theoretical and empirical research in ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, swarm robotics, and other swarm intelligence algorithms. Articles often combine experimental and theoretical work. Updated my home box to tensorflow 1.11.0. Testing to see if it still works using the Deep Learning with Keras simple_nueral_net.py example. Hasn’t broken (yet…), but is taking a long time… Worked! And it’s much faster the second time. Don’t know why that is and can’t find anything online that talks to that. Trying it out. This may be a overnight run… But it is running. Had a good discussion with Aaron about how mapmaking could be framed as an ML problem. More writeup tomorrow. This entry was posted in Lit Review, Paper, Phil, proposals, Simulation on October 29, 2018 by pgfeldman. We know from the House Intelligence Committee report that the Russians were pushing a Syrian message among the other more “organic” messages. But this seems to indicate that they did get traction. This entry was posted in Lit Review, Phil, research on October 28, 2018 by pgfeldman. So the BAA is only for academic work, which means partnering with UMD/UMBC. Need to talk to Don about setting this up. Some email this morning about how an NDA would be needed. I’m thinking that it would be restricted to A2P. On June 23rd, 2016, we deployed Moral Machine. The website was intended to be a mere companion survey to a paper being published that day. Thirty minutes later, it crashed. This network of character co-occurence in Les Misérables is positioned by constraint-based optimization using WebCoLa. Compare to d3-force. This should be better than mass-spring-damper systems for building maps. This entry was posted in Paper, Phil, research on October 24, 2018 by pgfeldman. Finished Meltdown. Need to write up some notes. Think about using a CMAC or Deep CMAC for function learning, because NIST. Also, can it be used for multi-dimensional learning? This entry was posted in Lit Review, Machine Learning, Phil on October 21, 2018 by pgfeldman. Jamieson argues that the impact of the Russian cyberwar was likely enhanced by its consistency with messaging from Trump’s campaign, and by its strategic alignment with the campaign’s geographic and demographic objectives. Had the Kremlin tried to push voters in a new direction, its effort might have failed. But, Jamieson concluded, the Russian saboteurs nimbly amplified Trump’s divisive rhetoric on immigrants, minorities, and Muslims, among other signature topics, and targeted constituencies that he needed to reach. Waste to food grade to living (is there a difference between algae and cattle? Pets? Show horses? It also occurs to me that there could be some kind of peer-to-peer or mesh network for degraded modes. A degraded mode implies a certain level of emergency, which would affect the (now small-scale) allocation of resources. How can PSC help make the government a “smarter buyer” when it comes to AI/ML? How are agencies effectively using AI/ML today? In what other areas could these technologies be deployed in government today? What is the current federal market and potential future market for AI/ML? Kevin – SmartForm? What are the main gvt concerns? Is it worry about False positives? Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Security, Compliancy, and adoption. Compliancy testing. Data trust. Humans make errors. When ML makes the same errors, it’s worse. A system that takes time to get accurate watching people perform is not the kind of system that the government can buy. This implies that there has to be immediate benefit, and can have the possibility of downstream benefit. Fedramp-like compliance mechanism for AI. It is a requirement if it is a cloud service. What does it mean to be reskilled and retrained in an AI context? The killer app is cost savings, particularly when one part of government is getting a better price than another part. Using the title as a scholar search, I found Addressing deep uncertainty using adaptive policies: Introduction to section 2, which looks interesting. Would Kaufman’s patches apply here to localize markets? Certainly the idea of long jumps on the fitness landscapes initially (between patches), then short jumps on a single patch could make a lot of sense. For example, it might make sense to fly from BWI to dulles for an important meeting if traffic is very bad. This is why Sao Paulo and Mexico City have helicopters. Can A* be applied to create a “best path” through a set of resources (based on time, money, etc) to get to a destination? Some interesting belief space work: “Plotto”: Generating Truly Offensive Stories Since 1928. “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots” (Amazon title!) was written by William Cook in 1928. I have had the physical book for years, which is a gorgeous object, but I have always wanted a digital database of the contents. With respect to the maps themselves, we can determine quality in four ways. The mechanism for making this comparison will be bootstrap sampling ()), which is an extremely effective way of comparing two unknown distributions. In our case, the distribution will be the coordinate of each topic in the embedding space. Repeatability: Can multiple maps generated on the same data set be made to align? Embedding algorithms often start with random values. As such embeddings that are similar may appear different because they have different orientations. To determine similarity we would apply a least-squares transformation of one map with respect to the other. Once complete, we would expect a greater than 90% match between the two maps in success. Resolution: What is the smallest level of detail that can be rendered accurately? We will be converting words into topics and then placing the topics in an embedding space. As described in the document, we expect to do this with Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). If we factor the all discussions down to a single topic (i.e. “words”), then we will have a single point map that can always be rendered with 100% repeatability, but it has 0% precision. If, on the other hand, we can place every word in every discussion on the map, but the relationships are different every time, then we can have 100% precision, but 0% repeatability. As we cluster terms together, we need to compare repeated runs to see that we get similar clusters each time. We need to find the level of abstraction that will give us a high level of repeatability. A 90% match is our expectation. Responsiveness: Maps change over time. A common example is a weather map, though political maps shift borders and physical maps reflect geographic activity like shoreline erosion. This duration may reflect the accuracy of the map, with slow change happening across large scales while rapid changes are visible at higher resolutions. A change at the limit of resolution should ideally be reflected immediately in the map and not adjust the surrounding areas. More frantic flailing to meet the deadline. DONE!!! This entry was posted in Lit Review, Phil, proposals on October 16, 2018 by pgfeldman.

Andy Meeker says the Canada goose in the fields of the Green Ridge Farm just outside Coombs has to be André. This particular goose spent its infancy with the rabbits in a shelter at the World Parrot Refuge, and survived an attack on the rabbits last month. It was later sent to Wild Arc — an SPCA program in Metchosin outside Victoria — where it could grow and be returned to the wild. André, as the goose came to be known in Coombs, was released at Florence Lake July 26. A few days later, Meeker said he — or a goose like him — turned up at the farm he caretakes. The goose shows little fear of humans, Meeker said, and often follows him around the farm. “Wild geese just aren’t going to do this,” he said. While Meeker is convinced this is André, others aren’t so sure. Susan Vickery, who takes care of the rabbits — which came from the grounds of the University of Victoria — said while it’s possible André flew back, she doubts it. When Andre left her care, she said he couldn’t fly. Yet, Vickery is amused at the thought André might have returned. Kari Marks, manager of Wild Arc, said André was on the verge of flying when he was released. She added geese can often lose their fear of people if they are fed, so the bird at Green Ridge Farm could be another goose. However, she added, since geese are migratory animals, it is possible André flew home.

For the past several days, a place I’ve never visited has been on my mind. It’s a place called Moore, Oklahoma. You know what happened there: a monster tornado, two miles wide, cut a swath of destruction 20 miles long through a heavily-populated suburb. For the last six months or so, whenever I heard words like “disaster” or “destruction” or “devastation,” I didn’t have to struggle to find a mental image of what they mean. All I had to do was imagine what the drive through Mantoloking looked like — and still looks like — or the piles of furniture and sodden insulation that once lined the street where I live, just 3 or 4 blocks from our house. Now, I’ve got a new image to add to my mental collection: those piles of splintered lumber in Oklahoma, with people grimly picking through them, hoping to discover some fragments of their shattered lives. I don’t know about you, but the news out of Oklahoma hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I’ve seen news reports of disasters before, as you have; but this time, it felt different. I felt different. Those pictures caused the whole experience of Sandy to come roaring back, for me. I saw another thing this past week that caused a similar reaction. It was a news report, saying that the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season is going to be more severe than usual, and advising that we take all appropriate precautions. “I don’t need this,” I thought to myself. “We don’t need this. If it should happen that the Jersey Shore experiences another direct hit from a hurricane, I wonder if the people of these communities could stand it? Lots of folks around here are feeling like they’re at their wits’ end already. Can you imagine what another hurricane would do to them? What I’m talking about — those more-intense-than-usual feelings of dread, at the mere thought of another natural disaster — is just a whiff of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). There’s plenty of that going around these days, both among those who lost much during the hurricane, and those who didn’t, but who care deeply about their neighbors. If you’ve found it unexpectedly hard to look at those pictures from Oklahoma, or to process the news that the National Weather Service will soon be tracking hurricanes again, you’re not cracking up. You’re in good company: because plenty of other folks are feeling exactly the same way. If another hurricane were to come barreling up the coast, threatening once again all you and I hold dear, then who’s to blame for it? There’s a part of us — isn’t there? — that yearns to assign blame. There are some, for instance, who are quick to blame natural disasters on human sin. TV evangelists like Pat Robertson are famous for this sort of thing. Remember Hurricane Katrina? Ol’ Pat was just sure God targeted New Orleans because of the gay community there. Curiously, though, when another hurricane was threatening Virginia Beach, where the headquarters of his Christian Broadcasting Network are located, Pat was strangely silent. The insurance companies think they know who’s responsible for hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. They point the finger squarely at God. Consider the theology behind that phrase, “Act of God.” The assumption seems to be that the normal state of affairs, here on planet earth, is all sweetness and sunshine. It’s a picture-perfect Memorial Day weekend: slather on a little sunscreen, and all is right with the world. Yet, should that idyllic scene be interrupted by fifty-mile-an-hour winds, pelting rain and a storm surge that threatens to set everything on the first floor afloat — why, that would be God’s doing, then, wouldn’t it? The assumption seems to be that we’re all entitled to a lifetime of uninterrupted health and happiness. Should things turn out otherwise, somebody’s got to be the scapegoat. That convenient somebody is none other than the lighting-bolt-slinging Supreme Being, who sure knows how to rain on a parade! Now, it may seem like this portrayal of God as storm-bringer is a fearsome one — were it not for the fact that there’s something more fearsome yet. That something is the frightful thought that God’s not behind hurricanes and tornadoes at all: that prayers for protection will do us no good whatsoever, because it’s all a matter of blind chance. Some communities get smitten, big time, while the closest most others get to such an experience is watching Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel getting blown around by the gale. Over the course of human history, there’s been an evolution of the ways people think of God, with respect to the forces of nature. Back in the earliest days, God’s people were itinerant nomads, who tended to think of God as a sky-god, the bringer of wind. That, in fact, is the earliest conception of God laid out in the Bible. In those ancient stories of the Exodus, when the Lord leads the people out of Egypt as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, the rushing desert wind is the tool God uses to work such wonders. Later on, as the chosen people settle down in the Land of Milk and Honey and most of them become farmers, they encounter other conceptions of God. This is the God who sends the rain to water the fertile earth, to bring forth fruit in due season. The most important aspect of God, in that era of history, is to make the soil fertile, and to send sunlight and rain in equal measure, so as to yield a bountiful harvest. Some of the peoples round about the land of Israel take this conception of God one step further, declaring that the Supreme Being is not a god at all, but a goddess — for, don’t you know, it’s women whose bodies are fertile, so worshiping a goddess is the best way to ensure a full granary. Those Hebrew people, though, cling tenaciously to their self-image as nomadic herders of animals, even centuries after most of them have settled down to farm the land. Their most important holiday is Passover, which requires them to subsist on traveling rations like matzoh, which they eat with their loins girded for the journey. Every other nation around them may have gone to worshiping the Asherahs, but through observances like Passover, they hang onto their mighty desert God. Centuries pass, and the growth of scientific knowledge causes further changes in the ways the Jewish people — and the Christians as well — regard the natural world. The more geologists study the earth, and astronomers the heavens, human beings come to know more and more about the processes of the natural world. A competing narrative rises up, alongside the traditional one that has an angry deity flinging thunderbolts and dispatching hurricanes. “Acts of God,” in other words. This narrative is the one cherished by the meteorologists in our own day, who feed their intricate measurements into a computer model that declares where the hurricane will make landfall. Ground zero for a modern hurricane has a lot more to do with ocean temperature and atmospheric pressure that it does with whether or not the people who live in beachfront communities deserve to be smitten. After living with the tension between the scientific worldview and that of traditional religion, some of the best and brightest among us come to see God in a slightly different way. The Creator-God, to them, is like the most skilled watchmaker who ever lived — for is the world not a vast machine, bigger and more intricate than any pocket-watch you’ve ever seen? God is the divine watchmaker, who set the clockworks of nature in motion. Creation’s been humming along ever since, with little need for a Supreme Being to tinker with the machinery. Some of these scientifically-minded believers have come to see little or no role for God in the unfolding wonder of creation. These people, who call themselves Deists, believe God created, then wound up, the great pocket-watch of Creation — but after doing that, walked off, leaving the world pretty much to its own devices. Deism was a very popular belief among many of the founders of our country — especially Franklin, Washington and Jefferson — and quietly continues today, the way a great many people look at the spiritual basis of the world. According to the Deist way of thinking, a hurricane or tornado can only be seen to be an Act of God in the most indirect sense. While such catastrophes may be long-term consequences of that great watch-movement God wound up before leaving for parts unknown, God can hardly be said to be micro-managing the storm track. Finally, as today’s theoretical physicists delve more deeply into the mysteries of the universe, they’re coming to see that the natural order looks a lot less like a giant watch, and a lot more like a wild dance of atomic and sub-atomic particles. Such theories are too mind-boggling for most people to take in, but those people of faith who do take the time to understand their basic tenets come away with a deeper appreciation of the ways the Creator continues to be deeply involved in the future of the planet, and even the universe. If, as Einstein says, time is relative, and space actually bends, then God can be said to be outside both space and time. That changes everything, when it comes to us trying to discern what in this world is an Act of God, and what is not. This is an action-passage: God is “able to accomplish abundantly far more than we could ask or imagine.” This is no Deist watchmaker-God. It’s a God who’s actively engaged in the ongoing work of Creation. The acts in which God is engaged move towards the goal of abundance: God wishes for the world to be a place of plenty for all. Yet, there are some things you and I still don’t fully understand, and probably never will. The acts of God are swathed in mystery. How it happens that a tornado drops from the clouds on one particular day and not another — why it leaves one home in ruins and the one across the street untouched — are things no scientist can explain. Oh, they can pick apart and analyze many of the physical forces that birth such superstorms, but they can’t explain the big picture. Nor can they explain how the Lord continues to exercise influence on Creation and its inhabitants. The letter to the Ephesians can, though. It’s right there in today’s passage. Ephesians 3:20 explains where, in the world, God is most active, accomplishing abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine. It says God “who by the power at work within us” is able to accomplish these things. Then, the passage goes on to speak of “glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations.” It’s not so much the human race as a whole who may be said to be co-workers with God the Creator, as those believers who are attuned to the deepest rhythms of the universe through influence of the Holy Spirit. It’s not that God is somehow unable to act in the world. This is not a poem about a weak or impotent deity. Rather, it’s that God chooses to hold back, giving us the freedom to act in the world in ways God intends. We do this most faithfully through the church, which is the living Body of Christ in this world. Think of the implications of that, for our understanding of God as Creator. The book of Genesis tells us, in glorious poetry, how God says “Let there be light,” and there was light; how God separates the sea from dry land, and all the rest. That was then: a time when God was actively involved in the creative process. But, this is now: and now is the time when, as Ephesians chapter 3 puts it, the power to accomplish abundantly is the power within us, as followers of Jesus Christ. God holds back from exercising the power in order to give us the power. And so it is that God’s most telling response to the reality of Hurricane Sandy, or to the Oklahoma tornado, is the relief workers who come streaming to the site of the damage — and to churches like ours, who convert their buildings into a place for them to sleep, and eat, and regroup after a long day. Such are the Acts of God for this place and time: acts of compassion and caring and most of all, love. Friends, there are miracles happening all around us, in these days of recovery. They are nothing less than the acts of God for our time: and the most amazing thing of all is that you and I can have a part in them!

The teens on this panel share what it’s like to be educated without going to a traditional school. These teens represent different styles of home education, from Christian homeschoolers, unschoolers, worldschoolers, self directed learners and some, with a mix of all of the above. They will share their experiences, challenges and greatest successes. Have questions for them? Be sure to log in to the youtube chat during the show time to ask your questions too! Erin Azcona-Beam is a World/Unschooler who has been traveling her whole life. She is a citizen of both the United States and Mexico and has spent time in 13 different countries so far. After home-schooling as a young child, she went on to attend six schools in 3 different countries. While these schools included both public and private schools with different educational philosophies, each presented its own set of problems. She started unschooling shortly after turning 14, a year and a half ago and she says she has become much happier since leaving the school system. Erin is based in Mexico City. Earlier this year she attended the Project World School Mexico Teen Retreat. She will be attending the Project World School Retreat in Perú next month and hopes to go on more in the future. Harmony is 15 year old girl who is passionate about many facets of Performing Arts. She played the role or Mary Poppins in our homeschool group’s play this year. She loves fashion, make-up, singing and plays ukulele. She is also involved in Jazz dancing and some ballet. She likes the flexibility that a homeschooled life offers, and the community of friends she has with it. CHRISTIAN is a 16 year old world traveler, photographer, and online personality. He has been living a fulltime traveling lifestyle with his family for almost 10 years. Together they have visited 49 states in America with plans to go to his 50th state – Hawaii – this fall. Christian has backpacked through Europe twice and has explored countless locations throughout the world. When he isn’t busy traveling, Christian likes to make videos for his YouTube Channel – Christian’s Crazy Life. He loves attending Concerts, Meet n’ Greets, Unschool Conferences and Industry Events. He considers himself a “Pentaholic” due to his passion for his favorite accapella group, Pentatonix. Christian and his twin brother, Dylan, are lifelong Worldschoolers that easily adapt to new environments and learn from each unique experience they encounter. DYLAN is a 16 year old who travels the world with his family. He has been to 49 states and over 19 countries. He and his twin brother, Christian, are lifelong Worldschoolers. Dylan is very adventurous and always ready to lead his family’s next big adventure. He is curious by nature and enjoys learning about the many things his travels bring him. He will ask all the questions he has and won’t stop until he finds an answer. Dylan is passionate about travel and would enjoy a career in that field when he is older. He loves seeing the world and trying many new things from that culture. Benjamin Echols is a homeschooler. He was born and raised in Florida, but his family and himself love to travel and see the world. They embrace the ideology of worldschooling. His passions include linguistics, (one of his goals is to become a polyglot) music, herpetology and zoology, photography, history, and culture. Benjamin loves to see through the foreign peoples’ eyes and their worldviews; he feel that language is one of the greatest tools to achieving this. Worldschooling and un-schooling have given him experiences and opportunities that he would never have dreamed imaginable, as well as allowing him to exercise his passions. He think that exposing oneself to the outside world and the beauty of it’s culture is one of the most amazing things that you can do. Scout Fynn is a 16 year old unschooler. She is an avid reader and loves creating both fine and abstract art. She is passionate about music and in particular the piano, in which she has a grade 4 pass. Presently she is teaching herself popular tunes by watching YouTube tutorials. Her interest in the creative arts led her to the Centre for Fine Art, Animation and Design (CFAD), a tertiary that accepts homeschoolers without formal school leaving qualifications. She is currently doing her first year of study, part time, and is interested in graphic design. She is an accomplished karateka, and has her purple belt in Shotokan Karate. Scout is a self confessed tree-hugger and yoga fundi. Katie is an 18 year old Worldschooler who has been in and out of the traditional school system since the 2nd grade. She is attending Colorado State University next year after traveling the world with Project World School for over half of 2016. She loves travel and finding community wherever she goes! Joey was born in Tallahassee, Florida, and has lived in various places in the United States until he was nine years old, when his father got an opportunity to work in Doha, Qatar. He spent the next seven years living in Doha, and the past three splitting his time between Doha and the United States. He’s never been to a traditional school; in fact, he didn’t start any sort of intentional education until he was around fourteen. His parents have always allowed him to choose what path he wanted to take, and he finally decided he wanted to start high school. He enrolled in Florida Virtual School and now, four years later, he’s close to finishing his high school education and moving on to his career, and eventually university. Seraya is a 14 year old who lives off the grid in rural Colorado. She spent her childhood going on crazy adventures with her dad and the unschooled teens he ran programs for while pursuing her passion in preforming arts with her mom. She is currently trying to figure out what to do for her highschool years while attending public school, although she is still an unschooler at heart. Justin Widen is 15 year old homeschooler from Chicago, IL currently living in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. He attended public school until 5th grade and began home schooling/road schooling approximately four years ago. His interests include travel, chemistry, physics, astronomy, electronics, computers, coding, video games, building/tinkering and anything related to technology or science. He enjoys self directed projects like building his own computer, electric long board, and blue tooth speaker. He enjoys Jiu Jitsu, skiing, is a certified scuba diver, a Boy Scout currently pursuing his Eagle Scout rank, a delegate and staff member of the Chicago Model United Nations Club and volunteers as an English Tutor. He has road schooled in Paris, the Yucatan Pennisula, and throughout the United States including the Civil War and Civil Rights Trails, Smokey Mountains, National Parks, Space Camp in Huntsville, AL and the Kennedy Space Center. He intends to pursue a degree in Electrical Engineering. Miro is an intrepid 17 year old who is indefinitely traveling and experiencing what the world has to offer with his mom. After traveling for almost 7 years, he’s been gifted with the opportunity of learning about the countless cultures that dot this planet with color. Miro has been worldschooling for almost a half of his life, and would have it no other way.

June 15, 1904: The sidewheel steamer General Slocum burned on New York's East River. The steamer was taking some 1,400 (mostly German-Americans) to Locust Point for a picnic sponsored by St. Mark's German Lutheran Church. The ship departed around 9am from the third street pier and was proceeding up the river when a fire broke out. It is not clear how or exactly where the fire started, but soon it was clear that it was out of control. The fire protection equipment was inadequate or inoperable all together. The captain, William van Schaick, decided to beach the ship on Brother Island instead of heading to Manhattan Island, which was only 1,000 feet away, this action doomed many of the passengers. Driven by the wind this allowed more time for the fire to spread. Hundreds of passengers who had gathered on the stern on the General Slocum were now trapped by the flames. The final nail in the coffin was the fact that the life preservers were so old they had rotted and were useless, some had even been filled with metal rods to bring them up to the proper weight standard. The General Slocum was grounded on Brother Island, but the stern was still in 30 feet of water. Tugs arrived and began rescuing survivors. The captain and some members of the crew were later criticized for their alleged failure to help rescue passengers, however three crewmen, Everett Brandow, George Conklin and William Trembly were cited for bravery in the face of great danger. Trembly rescued several women and children and Conklin paid with his life, following this the ship burned to the water line. Four hundred and seven people were rescued from the General Slocum, but the death toll was huge, one thousand and twenty-one were killed. Making this the second worst ship disaster in U.S. history, the worst being the fire that consumed the sidewheel steamer Sultana on April 26, 1865 in which 1,547 were killed. Captain van Schaick was charged and convicted of manslaughter and failing to give his crew proper training. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was pardoned in 1908. The last known survivor, Adella Liebenow Wotherspoon, died in January 2004 at the age of 100. Her two sisters, two cousins and two aunts died on the General Slocum.

Various researchers have hypothesized that the thickening of the vascular wall plays an important role in the maintenance of hypertension. Such an alteration can increase the vascular resistance by exerting two effects. A thickened vascular wall could occlude the lumen of the blood vessel and (or) cause the artery to hyperreact to contractile stimuli. Until recently, it has been a general conclusion that such alterations were a secondary adaptation produced by the elevation of blood pressure. Consistent with this view, certain classes of larger arteries do exhibit a thickened vascular wall late during hypertension development and such changes can be prevented from occurring by antihypertensive treatment. However, recent studies involving the mesenteric and renal arteries of Wistar-Kyoto spontaneously hypertensive rats have shown that wall thickening of the vasculature occurs prior to hypertension development and is present even under conditions where the blood pressure has been normalized throughout the animal's life. These latter observations suggest that some structural alterations in the blood vessels observed in hypertension are pressure independent and could be of etiological importance in the initiation of hypertension.

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Where can I find good breastfeeding information? La Leche League International (LLLI) is a great source for just about anything you want to know about breastfeeding. As the oldest breastfeeding organization around they have decades of experience and information. They are mothers helping other mothers — carrying on the tradition that has been happening informally for all of history. They have on-line help forms, on-line forums , and information about breastfeeding research. Another general resource is Diane Weissinger. She is a LLL leader and lactation consultant that writes about breastfeeding in ways that provide new perspectives on breastfeeding problems and the social aspects of breastfeeding. Lactation consulting is a fairly new profession. Ruth and Adria are International Board Certified Lactation Consultants. This credential requires background education (in biology, physiology, nutrition, sociology, psychology, and medical terminology), lactation-specific education, hands-on breastfeeding counselling experience, and a passing score on a board exam. You can learn more about the IBCLC credential at IBLCE. Our professional organization is the International Lactation Consultant Association (ILCA). The ILCA website lists IBCLC’s around the world so families can find a local lactation consultant.

It has always been a bother for most individuals to manually open their garage entrance by getting out of their car, opening the gates, and parking the car inside, before finally closing the gates. But thanks to modern technology, garage door remotes were introduces as a hassle-free way in opening your gateway. This modern tool's concept was basically patterned to the electric garage opener wherein a button is located near the entrance of the garage gate. Historically this electrically operated device was invented way back in the early 1900's but did not become well known up until the end of the Second World War. The sole purpose of garage door remotes is to open and close the entrance from a certain distance without the need of the driver to get out of the vehicle. This wireless device may be utilised in opening the gate both from the inside and from the outside of the garage. Remote controlled openers are basically composed of a transmitter and a receiver; the transmitter of which is the remote while the receiver is a motor attached to the gate. This device works with the fundamental concept of the remote transmitting a radio signal to the receiver to block or unblock the gateway. During the earlier years of the wireless garage openers, these tools came with only a single button which is essentially for signaling the receiver to pull the doors open or push them close. However, in this present generation, garage gate remotes appear with multiple buttons that have various functions. Nowadays, remote controls of garages can now have command in the opening and closing speed of the gates. Apart from that, there are also some remotes that have specific buttons that could only send a signal to a particular those gates with multiple openers. Moreover, there are also remotes that have a certain button that functions as a wireless switch of the garage lights. Since this device is on the whole controlled by radio signals, there is a growing concern in relation to the security of the piece of equipment. This is because of the huge possibility that door openers may open a different gate because they work on the same frequency level. It is a good thing that this problem was overcame by giving each garage transmitter and receiver a specific code by which they will only respond. An even more high tech and modern way of reducing security threats is having a sensor installed as a garage remote. However, this type of up to date safety device is very impractical since it costs a lot of money.

We are complicated people. Raising children is a complicated task. The book of Proverbs was given so that we might have an instruction manual for life. For us to understand other proverbs, sayings, riddles, and the words of the wise. What an essential and important book we hold in our hands. Verse 7 tells us that the kick off of our learning and growing in wisdom is the fear of the Lord. It is the beginning of knowledge. Being an HVAC service technician, I read quite a number of instruction manuals. Without these manuals, I find myself fumbling through the equipment and not really understand what I am doing. After I read the manual, I typically gain a deeper understanding of the unit I am servicing. I understand the principles behind the pieces, and it makes it much easier to fix the problems. Proverbs is an instruction manual for life. We are complicated folks, and it is hard to figure out how we can be fixed without having the proper literature.

Another reason to invest in the perfect carpet cleaner is to improve your home's indoor air quality. Carpets usually tend to trap airborne pollutants that can pollute the air that you you breathe, which can cause signs to act up or additional breathing problems to occur. These pollution must be removed in order to equally protect your carpeted areas and maintain air quality indoors. Rug cleaning products will help solve this troublesome problem. Clean carpets and rugs also mean easier maintenance, which translates to shorter carpet cleaning sessions. When you let your carpet go, trying to get it back to its like-new condition will be harder and take longer to do than if you kept plan regular carpet cleaning duties. Nevertheless the biggest reason to keep your carpets clean is really so that they enhance the appearance of any room. Well-maintained, tidy carpets can speak databases about the cleanliness of any home and room. Areas, stains and other spoils on carpets are eye sores, which is why it's imperative that you have got effective carpet cleaning products on hand so when your carpets get stains or spots. In this manner you can immediately clean these people so that your carpet looks as though it were still innovative!

During the heyday of the named auto trails era, there were four routes which traversed east to west across Ohio that were parts of coast-to-coast routes. The boosters of the Lincoln Highway and the National Old Trails Road were the first to chart their chosen paths, and the wisdom of their choices in the early 1910s was certainly made evident when the important federal numbers 30 and 40 were assigned in 1926 to long sections of those popular routes. By the middle 1910s, the Yellowstone Trail had been extended across the northern part of the state, through Toledo and Cleveland, in a corridor roughly followed by either U.S. Route 20 or State Route 2. The poor stepchild of the foursome was the Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway, which began life in Ohio by sharing the historic route of the National Old Trails Road before finding an unlikely path of its own. The Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway Association was formally organized in Missouri in 1914, and like the Lincoln Highway, was dedicated to promoting the improvement and use of a road from New York City to San Francisco. However, west of Philadelphia, the PP-OO (as the highway will hereafter be abbreviated) dipped south to meet the National Old Trails Road at Washington, D.C., tracing that historic road westward through several states before diverging again in Illinois. The Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway Association based its name on the fact that the route passed within sight of Pikes Peak in Colorado, perhaps the most famous mountain in the country—although it is not even the highest point in that state, let alone the contiguous forty-eight. The highway was ambitiously promoted as "The Appian Way of America," recalling the most famous route of the Roman Empire. However, highway historian Richard F. Weingroff (www.fhwa.dot.gov) may have attached a more accurate label when he refers to the PP-OO as "a highway that couldn't make up its mind." According to Weingroff, the first revision of the PP-OO in Ohio was made in 1916, when the highway was changed to pass through Eaton and Dayton before rejoining the National Old Trails Road at Springfield. This recalled a popular variation of the old Cumberland Road/National Pike of horse and wagon days, which also passed through the Dayton metropolis at the expense of much smaller towns like Vandalia. A second revision was made at some time before 1921, when a new route was charted east of Columbus. Following Broad Street all the way through the state capital, this version passed through Newark and Coshocton (compare to State Route 16 of today), then continued east to Uhrichsville (see U.S. 36), Cadiz (see U.S. 250), and Steubenville (see U.S. 22). By 1926, the final version of the PP-OO would appear on the last auto trails maps of the day. The route through Dayton, Springfield, and Columbus was shifted north by one tier of counties, putting six modestly sized county seats on a seemingly unlikely transcontinental route—Greenville, Piqua, Urbana, Marysville, Delaware, and Mount Vernon. Most of that route can be followed today by tracing the route of U.S. 36, with two major exceptions—west of Greenville, the PP-OO ran northwesterly (not westerly) to enter Indiana at Union City (see today's State Route 571); and between Coshocton and Mount Vernon, part of an obsolete routing of U.S. 36 is now designated as State Route 715. It is significant to note that U.S. Route 36 was one of the last federal routes designated in Ohio, first appearing on the state highway map of 1932. East of Indianapolis, it was not part of the original scheme of federal highways drawn up in the 1920s, and probably came about only as a result of the PP-OO, whose boosters had merely cobbled together several Ohio state routes to form one named trail across the state. However, the route apparently became important enough on a regional basis that it was assigned a federal number of its own. At the time of U.S. 36 being extended into Ohio, the red and white symbol signs of the PP-OO were probably long gone. At least two versions of the signs were apparently in popular use—one variation I particularly like is a simple red over white sign with PP over OO lettered boldly in black on the white field (right); a second more complex sign featured the white silhouette of the namesake mountain among the six elements of the highway's wordy name. Given the impermanence of the overall route selection, it comes as no surprise that in Ohio, the PP-OO has largely been forgotten by everyone except highway historians and map collectors. However, according to the Martins, the fourth transcontinental highway is remembered in several Missouri towns where the route had its roots, and an Ocean Trail has managed to survive as a street name in Decatur, Illinois. The Martins had no similar information for the cities and towns of Ohio, leaving this author with a potential project for the future. It also comes as no surprise that very little of the final route of the PP-OO in Ohio has been upgraded to a four-lane highway. This is very much unlike the successor routes of the first three transcontinental routes to cross the state, which are now approximated by completed interstate highways I-70 (The National Old Trails Road) and I-90 (On the Road to Yellowstone) and an incomplete U.S. 30 (Lincoln Highway). The most significant sections of relocated routes in the PP-OO corridor are near Steubenville and near Coshocton, with snippets of other modernized roadway near Uhrichsville and Delaware. Otherwise, the alignment consists of localized improvements on the two-lane versions of U.S. 36—a statement not only true in Ohio, but also in states such as Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. Thus, "the highway that couldn't make up its mind" fell quickly into obscurity in Ohio, and is likely unknown in the corridor of its final alignment. Although the Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway claimed to be the "superlative scenic route...leading to places of beauty and grandeur...[binding] together the work shops of the industrial centers with the treasure chests of the mountains," it is probable that most Ohioans would have used one of the three more historic transcontinental routes on their journeys to the west. Nonetheless, the final route across Ohio would provide a wonderful cross-section of small towns that help define America. This 112-page map guide booklet (right) for the Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway, published in 1927, recently sold for over $50 on eBay. The Roman architecture on the cover helps recall the highway's motto as "The Appian Way of America." Also on the cover in two corners is one of at least two symbol signs posted by the boosters of the highway.

The International Monetary Fund in its Global Financial Stability Report said that World financial markets have strengthened but cyclical challenges are emerging from the prospect of higher interest rates and an unwinding of global imbalances. In its latest Global Financial stability Report the IMF stated in its 2005 assessment of the world financial system gathering resilience had been validated but new challenges required a more nuanced view of the financial outlook for the remainder of 2006 and beyond. Major cyclical risks that lay ahead for financial markets stemmed from higher interest rates and / or higher inflation, worsening credit quality of various debtors and a sudden unwinding of global imbalances, according to the report. The Fund’s top capital markets official cautioned a human flu pandemic which may be unlikely but if takes place posed a nastier risk that could spark a sharp and deep recession. He also urged countries to ensure they can cope with an avian flu outbreak and provide suitable funds to overcome the financial and health problems. The IMF capital markets director Gred Haeusler presenting the stability report said that coming from a position of strength, financial systems should be able to cope up with any risks internationally. The director told a news conference in London that from a financial stability perspective, the near term outlook is as good as it gets, or even better than that. The report noted that in recent years, low interest rates and abundant liquidity had supported a solid global economic recovery. Banks and firms had cut costs, allowing corporate earnings to rebound strongly and balance sheets to improve. Household balance sheets had also strengthened in the last few years thanks to rising house process and a stock market recovery. This scenario of healthier banks, firms and households created financial cushions against shocks. But the IMF warned the favorable conditions supporting that would no longer persist. It cited uncertainties over how fast cyclical conditions would alter the impact on asset reallocations and price corrections. The report has also cautioned on the ability of how well financial systems were cushioned against the changes. Examining the chances of an unwinding of global imbalances, the IMF said the expected narrowing of favorable growth and interest rate differentials for the US was likely to mean a slower pace of foreign accumulation of US assets.

I damaged my enamel badly with hydrogen peroxide. My enamel was deficient to begin with. Do you think your teef powder could help me? Any problems shipping to Canada? No problem shipping to Canada, just make sure to select the correct shipping method. I think it should help but can't guarantee anything. Just study the ingredients and you should be able to make an educated guess to the safety and possibility of helping. Thanks for replying. I understand that there's no guarantees. Ingredients seem pretty great to me. I had no idea you can damage tooth enamel by swishing with hydrogen peroxide. I learned the hard way. My question about problems shipping to Canada was mostly because I was concerned about customs. I know a lot of products get stopped at the border. Yes you can damage enamel with any type of acid including citric, hydrogen peroxide (which is also an acid of sorts), and yes even baking soda. Fluoride also damages enamel (causes fluorosis). I invented teef because I knew that real remineralization is possible using real fundamental natural chemistry. After using TEEF this last time for 6 months in between dental visits, the hygienist could not get floss in between my teeth for the first time- it had always been tight but possible- I have been using TEEF for about 2 years. The dentist & hygienist both thot I was doing massive grinding to my teeth,especially this time, even though I had been wearing a plastic dental guard every nite. They even thot my enamel was wearing, but I told them I had no sensitivities, and that my teeth felt sturdier than ever. I speculate that the dentist and hygienist both think grinding because this adds on a rough coating to the teeth. They can not even tell it is an additional coating. As far as, not being able to get floss in between my teeth, likely I should lay off for awhile- use only when feel sensitivities. It is good that there no big gaps in between teeth that food particles get caught, but not being able to floss in between is too much most likely. What are your thots on this? What is the history of longer term user of TEEF? Any idea if the enamel will smooth out again if I lay off the TEEF? I never dreamed that the effects from this where so obvious to dental personnel. Hello Spartan. Sorry for the late reply. TEEF Powder should NOT replace using floss. Make sure you floss after each session with TEEF Powder. If normal floss isn't working, try using those plastic "flossers". Hope this helps! In old batches of teef (1.0) I was getting buildup too. I had to take a dental hygenist pick and clean between my teeth and gumline. Since 2.0 I have not noticed any of this, but if you skip the dentist like me, I think it would be a good idea for me to take the dental picj to my gumline once a year at least. Hi, do you think this powder could be combined with some kind of electrict current to make the components stick to natural enamel? It's designed to be the way the body makes calcium ions stick to the enamel which is with tetracalcium phosphate and peroxide. I don't think electric current will enhance it. I only see one size to order currently, but saw a refill larger size listed on your older formula. Is there only one size now? Or also a larger refill size as well? Didn't see one listed on order form. So happy to have found your product & you on YouTube, you really seem to know your stuff! Thank you in advance! There is just one size currently. I just lowered the price to $12 from $14 due to updated packing method. Thank you for your support! 2.0 Do you believe any sensitivity is due to the addition of peroxide to the formula??? I need this product and am concerned about getting it and having the same problem.Did naturehacker have sensitivity from teef before the change to peroxide? So you have noticed teeth sensitivity? To what? Also, that is my current problem. Would it be smart for me to use this tooth powder if I already have teeth sensitivity to cold/sweets? Good questions. I did experience sensitivity along the way in perfecting the formula before the introduction ofnpeppermind and cinnamon essential oils. Now with the current recipies (from 2.0 and onwards) I have zero sensitivity. The peroxide is a very tiby amount and I added it just to help the TTCP stick to the enamel. Can you ship to UK? What are the exact directions? Obviously flossing I know now, but how long do you leave it on? Do you even wash it off? There were no directions on flossing with my little jar, now I can not get floss between my molars. I am using toothpicks and my fingernails, I thinking I am making some progress but I extremely tight teeth to begin with- I could get the floss in but would often break even beforehand. Anyway, what is your advice on this- other than flossers. Hello Spartan, please refer to the instructions in this post If flossers aren't working well for you, use regular floss. Do you rinse with water afterwards? Is it wise to leave it on your teeth all nite? How many times max should you use it per day? Reading other post, sounds like you leave it on a certain amount of time? rinse, then floss is that correct? These are basic questions, so anyone of you who use it regularly, including TEEF 2.0, feel free to reply. The way I use it is little water on the brush, good amount of teef powder, and just brush like normal. I just use it as a replacement for toothpaste. Do you have an vague idea whether TEEF Powder can impregnate into dental bonded resin material on teeth, whether be as an extending long a tooth or binding 2 teeth together in the case of closing 2-front-teeth gap(or diastima) and make it stronger? If so, what would be that idea or view. Have you ever tried or heard of mixing dental bonded 2-part epoxy resin with TEEF powder right before one puts it on the teeth? If so, did the dental bonding material last longer? First I would suggest against epoxy in the mouth as contains ultra high bpa levels. Secondly teeth gaps are natural and work with the way the gums are. Secondly hydroxyapatite cement is made mixing the proper porportions of dicalcium phospgate and tetracalcium phosphate (about 3:1 like in teef powder).

The access to energy is a strategic priority in all regions of the world. Without energy, countries cannot power their economies. Unfortunately, the current situation is not very positive. In fact, about 1.2 billion people in the world still experience energy poverty with an 80% concentration in rural areas. The lack of access to reliable forms of energy is an obstacle to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. and therefore a brake on harmonious human and economic development. What is the current situation in Africa? Unfortunately, some regions of the country, especially sub-Saharan areas, are struggling to access to reliable energy and experience at least 20 hours of power outages a month as stated by the World Bank Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer Sri Mulyani Indrawati at the International Student Energy Summit in Bali, Indonesia, on June 10, 2015. What hinders sub-Saharan Africa from a full access to reliable energy? There are many critical factors which are holding Africa back. Inadequate infrastructure remains a major obstacle towards Africa achieving its full economic growth potential, followed by the lack appropriate and comprehensive institutional framework. Limited financing also hampers the development of many regions. The projects in the renewable energy sector require massive investments, whose value varies between $ 33.4 billion to $ 63 billion. The situation in Africa is different and in the last 10 years, the average annual spending has not exceeded $ 12 billion. Outdated business model is another aspect to take into account together with the high cost of renewable energy technology. However, the situation in North Africa appears much more promising and dynamic. Large investments in renewable energy projects have been able to mobilize the sector in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt. Solar energy is, in fact, an obvious solution for the 600 million Africans living without electricity. Solar energy is a great emerging opportunity, with a high potential and great ability to create new business opportunities. Amongst the most auspicious projects, it is possible to consider the huge solar park in the Sahara which could soon export electricity to Europe if the Tunisian government approves the energy company’s request to build it. The 4.5GW mega-project designed by TuNur would lead electricity to Malta, Italy, and France using submarine cables. It is also expected to complete the construction of Noor Ouarzazate in Morocco – the largest solar plant in the world by the end of this year and for a total cost of $9 billion. In this scenario, a key role is played by alliances between public bodies and private actors (Public-Private Partnerships). Private organizations can apply their expertise and experience to deliver efficient and cost-effective infrastructure and services. But from the other side transparent and quick political decisions are crucial for the correct management and implementation of a PPP. Mustapha Bakkoury, chairman of the board of Morocco’s Solar Energy Agency, affirms that “believing that is feasible is not enough”, underlining the attitude of skepticism that still characterizes some governments in some African countries.

After attending an event to mark Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, Rotherham MP Sarah Champion has encouraged women in South Yorkshire to sit down and talk openly about their health problems. Ovarian cancer is the fifth biggest killer of women in the UK and accounts for more deaths than all gynaecological cancers combined. However, if diagnosed in its early stages, the five year survival rate jumps from 45 per cent to 90 per cent. Currently, there is a problem with a lack of women spotting symptoms and coming forward early enough. Early signs of ovarian cancer are persistent pelvic and abdominal pain, increased bloating, difficulty eating and feeling full quickly and needing to pass water more often than usual. Throughout March, The Eve Appeal, run by Gynaecological charity Eve has been running an ovarian cancer fundraising and awareness campaign called Make Time for Tea, which encourages people to hold tea parties with family, friends and work colleagues. It's incredibly important that we continue to raise awareness of ovarian cancer, a disease that continues to kill lots of women. Encouraging all women to talk openly about their health issues is essential in catching these diseases early and treating them. I want all women in South Yorkshire to feel empowered to not only spot the symptoms of ovarian cancer but feel confident enough to come forward when they do.

You’re going about your business on your way to work. You stop at a stop sign and check to make sure no cars are coming. You slowly cross the intersection and are crashed into by a truck going about 75 mph. He didn’t stop at his stop sign and clearly didn’t check to see if anybody was in the road. Your car is totaled and you suffer a broken leg and traumatic brain injury. You’re rushed to the hospital in an ambulance and don’t remember a whole lot after that. While you’re in the hospital, your family comes to visit. They want to make sure that you’re okay. What they also need to do is contact a Forest Park car accident attorney. You are going to have a long and painful recovery. You won’t be able to work for a while. You’re going to need to find a way to pay your bills and take care of your family. This is why you need an experienced car accident lawyer. If you’ve been hurt in an accident and it’s not your fault, somebody needs to pay. Whoever was driving that other car needs to compensate you for your injuries. The easiest way to do this is to file a claim with their car insurance policy. Their policy should cover your injuries and out of pocket expenses. The problem is when their insurance company denies your claim. Or, if they don’t have insurance and you are left out to dry. What Type of Car Accidents does Forest Park Car Accident Lawyers Handle? There are dozens of types of car accidents. Some are more common than others. Thankfully, your local Forest Park car accident lawyers handle all types of car accidents. Some are just fender benders and you’ll only have to worry about repairs to your vehicle. Others are more serious and leave you in the hospital suffering from some pretty significant injuries. These are the accidents where you need a car accident attorney. Head-On Collisions – These types of accidents can leave the drivers of both cars in really bad shape. Because both cars are driving at pretty high speeds, the impact can be extreme. Head-on collisions can cause serious head and brain injuries. They can also lead to back, neck and internal injuries. All of these can be life-threatening if not treated immediately. All of these cause small distractions that can lead to major accidents. Truck accidents – Whether we like it or not, we share the road with a lot of commercial vehicles. A lot of these are tractor-trailers hauling products from one end of the country to another. They are large, powerful machines. When these trucks hit a passenger vehicle, the damage is extensive. In most of these accidents, the passengers in the car don’t survive the crash. If they do, they are left with very serious and life-threatening injuries. Rear-End accidents – A lot of car accidents are minor. Rear-end car accidents usually only result in minor injuries such as whiplash or a few scrapes and bruises. However, the damage to your car can be extensive. You will want an attorney to handle your case if the insurance company refuses to pay your claim. No matter what type of accident you are in, your Forest Park car accident attorney can help you. They will deal with the insurance company and make sure you get the settlement you deserve. What do You Do if the Insurance Company Denies Your Claim? If you’ve been in a car accident, there are two things you need to do. First, you need to seek medical treatment immediately. You want to make sure you haven’t been seriously injured. Even if you don’t think you’re hurt, you could have suffered internal injuries or a concussion. The other reason you want to get medical treatment is to document your injuries. If the insurance company refuses to pay your claim, your Forest Park car accident lawyer is going to need to prove you were hurt. They will use this information to try to settle your claim. They can also present your medical documentation in court if you have to file a lawsuit. The other driver let his policy lapse or cancel because of non-payment. They don’t believe you were hurt. You didn’t file the proper paperwork when you submitted your claim. They don’t think their driver was at fault. You have a history of filing accident claims to collect damages. If the other driver did not carry a valid insurance policy, there is nothing your lawyer can do to get it paid. If this is the case, you will have no choice but to file a lawsuit against the other driver. However, if your claim was denied for any other of the reasons above, your lawyer may be able to help. He can contact the insurance company and try to get your claim reopened. He can talk to the adjuster and come to a reasonable settlement. If none of these tactics work, you may have no choice but to file a suit. Nobody wants to do this. Lawsuits can be expensive and time consuming. However, if it is your only recourse, you have to do it. Your lawyer will explain how the case will proceed. He will contact the defendant’s attorney and again try to settle the matter Settlements are always in your best interest. They lead to immediate money and are resolved a lot faster than a prolonged lawsuit. Medical Bills – Any bills that you have accrued due to your injuries will be included in your lawsuit. This includes past and present bills. It also includes any future medical bills you may incur. It’s hard to estimate this last type of medical damages. Your lawyer may have to rely on a medical expert to testify as to what your future medical care will be. He then has to determine how much this care may cost. Your lawyer will demand that you be compensated for these bills. Lost Wages – If you have been in a car accident, you will likely have missed some time from work. This could have been days, weeks or even months. You are going to want to provide your car accident attorney with copies of payroll records showing your missed time. If you used personal time or vacation time, your attorney can try to get you compensation for this. Either way, once you prove your lost wages, they will be listed amongst your damages. Future Income – If you are going to be permanently disabled, or won’t be able to return to your prior job, you will have a claim for damages. Your lawyer is going to demand that you be compensated for any future earnings you have lost. Essentially, he will calculate the difference between what you would have earned (had the accident not happen) and what you will now earn. He will include this amount in your damages. How severe were your injuries? The more severe your injuries, the more money your Forest Park car accident lawyer will demand. He can demonstrate how much pain you were actually in and will prove how much pain you are still in. He will have to rely on expert witnesses to accomplish this. You may need to testify. You may have to submit an affidavit. If the case does settle, you may not have to do any of this. Remember, though, not all cases settle. Some do actually go to trial. What are the chances that your injuries will last? Your Georgia car accident lawyer will show that your injuries are permanent. He can prove this using medical and case research. He will also rely on medical testimony. There are cases that show what your injuries are worth. How old are you? The younger you are, the greater your amount of pain and suffering. The court considers the income you would have earned in your entire life. It will document how much longer you’ll have to suffer. This is why large settlements often involve younger people. The same is true for trial verdicts. Did you have a pre-existing condition? If you had neck or head injuries prior, the other driver’s attorney will argue for lower compensation. He will claim you were hurt long before the accident. He will say the accident didn’t cause your injuries. The insurance company will probably try the same tactic. How much were your economic losses? Your economic losses will be taken into account. To calculate your pain and suffering, the court will ask what you actually lost. Did you lose your retirement or savings? Did you work thirty years to save that money? Have you exhausted all insurance coverage? Whatever damages you have suffered, your Forest Park car accident lawyer will fight to get you every dime you deserve. No matter how minor or serious your injuries, your car accident attorney is going to work hard to get you paid. You will have to document your injuries. This is why it’s so important that you seek medical treatment after the accident. You don’t want the insurance company to argue that you got hurt sometime between the accident and the court date. Head Injuries: Some of the most severe injuries are head injuries. You can certainly suffer from broken bones, cuts, and bruises. You may suffer burns or lacerations to your face. However, the most serious type of head injury is a traumatic brain injury. Neck Injuries: One of the most common types of injuries is whiplash. This is when your neck is stretched too far in one direction. You can suffer a muscle strain in your neck such as whiplash. It causes pain and limited motion. You won’t be able to do normal things like drive and turn your head. You will probably have to wear a neck brace for a few days or weeks. The issue with whiplash is that it’s impossible to prove. There is no test or x-ray a doctor can show to prove you suffered whiplash. It really comes down to your statement and the testimony of your doctor or chiropractor. Juries and insurance companies are suspicious of whiplash claims. Courts understand that whiplash is a common injury. They don’t typically award more than a few thousand dollars in damages for whiplash. This is because it heals itself with time and is not that serious an injury. However, when you’re the one suffering from it, this can be little comfort. Back Injuries: If you injure your back in a car accident, you may be in for quite the ordeal. These injuries can last a long, long time. Back injuries like herniated discs and bulging discs are painful. They require years of treatment. You will need surgery and physical therapy. With back injuries, you need to make sure you have an auto accident lawyer in Falls Church. Insurance companies are going to claim that you had back issues prior to the accident. By the time many of us reach a certain age, this could be true. If they can prove that you had a pre-existing condition, it may affect your compensation. Make sure you have a good car accident lawyer by your side to prove that your injuries are related to the car accident. Internal Injuries: Internal injuries are not uncommon in serious car accidents. The scary part is, they are hard to detect. You may not feel bad at all after the accident. Then, hours or days later, you start to feel terrible. You may suffer from headaches, nausea, and pain. If this is the case, you need to seek immediate medical care. The hospital will have to do a series of tests to check for internal injuries. The big problem with internal injuries is left untreated, they can kill you. Doctors know what the signs and symptoms are for internal injuries. This is why it’s so important that you go to the hospital after an accident no matter what. Remember, you pay nothing until you win your case. You have nothing to lose by visiting with a car accident attorney. You will get the peace of mind you need at a time like this.

The more risk factors for osteoporosis that a person has, the greater the chance of fracture. Women with small body frames, a family history of osteoporosis, and early onset of menopause are at the highest risk. After age 65, osteoporosis damages both trabecular and cortical bone, making sites besides the hip, wrist, and vertebrae vulnerable to fracture. In the most severe cases, the disease also affects teeth and jawbones, resulting in periodontal disease and tooth loss. Hormones regulate bone remodeling, which affects bone mass. After age 50, the rapid and severe decrease in estrogen production that occurs during and after menopause increases the risk for osteoporosis. Although optimal bone mass is determined mostly by genetics, other factors are involved. The amount of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D in the diet affects bone formation. Additionally, regular exercise, which increases bone mass, helps determine whether a person obtains optimal bone mass. Cigarette smoking decreases estrogen production. Excessive alcohol use inhibits osteoblast activity and increases risk for falling. High caffeine intake increases loss of calcium in urine. Inactive, sedentary lifestyle eliminates physical activity that stimulates bone remodeling. Calcium and phosphorus deficiencies decrease formation of hydroxyapatite, the major mineral in bone. Lack of vitamin D reduces intestinal absorption of calcium and phosphorus. Excessive amounts of antacids containing aluminum (e.g., Maalox, Mylanta) may increase the risk for osteoporosis in certain people. Diseases caused by hormone imbalances (e.g., hyperthyroidism, hyperparathyroidism, Cushing's syndrome) may increase the risk for osteoporosis because they interfere with the regulation of the hormones that regulate remodeling. Gastrointestinal disorders (e.g., celiac disease, Crohn's disease) that affect absorption of calcium and vitamin D also increase the risk. Early onset menopause brought on by the removal of the uterus (hysterectomy) and the complete removal of the ovaries (oophorectomy) is associated with osteoporosis. Results of a study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and released in June 2012 indicate young men between the ages of 14 and 25 who are undergoing treatment for HIV infection may have an increased risk for low bone mass. Participants in the study had been diagnosed with HIV an average of two years earlier and, according to researchers, also had several other risk factors for osteoporosis, including smoking, alcohol use and low dietary intake of calcium and vitamin D. More research is needed to determine how HIV treatment might affect bone density. People being treated for HIV should be monitored for bone loss, should exercise regularly and should get recommended amounts of calcium and vitamin D through diet and supplements.

Abstract: The talk, based on Bierman’s book,The Girl Who Survived (Scholastic Inc.), is the touching yet harrowing story of Bronia, a 12-year-old girl who survived Auschwitz Concentration Camp during WWII. It is a firsthand account of the horrors of this period written as an introduction to the Holocaust for children. About the Speaker: Carol Bierman, adjunct faculty, English, is an author who teaches History of the Holocaust at RCC. A gifted story teller, Bierman has spoken on a variety of subjects to audiences of all ages throughout the United States. Her books are stories from the heart, allowing her audiences to connect easily with the information. Her first book, Journey to Ellis Island (Hyperion/Madison Press Books), is about how her father came to America. Her second book, The Girl Who Survived (Scholastic Inc.), is the touching yet harrowing story of Bronia, a 12-year-old girl who survived Auschwitz Concentration Camp during WWII. Bierman earned a BA in Psychology from Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY; and an MEd in Special Education, Blind & Visually Impaired from University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

It would be easy to write off the lesbian pulp novels of the ‘40s and ‘50s as dated, exploitative works. After all, most have tragic endings in which the lovers are separated by death, institutionalization, or compulsory heterosexuality. On the surface, they’re simply bad representation. It takes digging into the history of the pulp novel to understand why these books should have importance in the LGBT canon. Many lesbian pulp novels were written by lesbian and bisexual women, or by women who found themselves identifying more with the young ingénue who falls for the older, more experienced woman. Perhaps most importantly, these novels were gateways for young women who lived in rural areas without the thriving urban gay scene, and who therefore had no other way of finding others like themselves. The tragic endings were only a means to an end, as most censors wouldn’t allow publication of lesbian pulps unless they had a tragic ending. The tragic endings are even empowering, from a certain point of view. These women did not try to make the tragedies seem like actual happy endings. A return to heteronormativity is not seen as a victory but rather as a tragedy, a repression of these women’s true nature and happiness. They become statements against a society that demonized them and showed that an ending where a woman becomes Donna Reed is not always a happy one. In celebration of LGBT history month, here are five important lesbian pulp novels to read that showcase the importance of the pulp for modern lesbian and bisexual readers. Published in 1950, Torres’s “frank autobiography of a French girls soldier” kickstarted the lesbian pulp sub-genre with it’s depiction of the romance between the shy Ursula and the promiscuous, older Claude. Many of the tropes in pulp novels can be dated back to Torres’s work – the predatory older woman who seduces a younger woman, the younger realizing their love isn’t as real as her love for a man, and the tragic ending. No matter the author’s thoughts on the matter, Women’s Barracks stands as the first text in the canon. It was the success of this novel that opened the doors for other pulps to be published. Despite being a slow read, it’s worth a look just for the fact that we owe the creation of an entire sub-genre to it’s publication. Film lovers will most likely be familiar with the film adaption of the novel – 2015’s Carol starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Highsmith’s 1952 novel broke new ground, as it was one of the rare pulp novels that had a happy ending. Instead of ending in tragedy, Therese and Carol get to have the happiness long denied to the other characters in their canon. The Price of Salt also marks a shift in Highsmith’s career. Originally, she made a name for herself writing suspense novels; most famously, she penned Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith also had numerous relationships with women during the course of her life. However not wanting to be pinned down as “the lesbian-book writer,” and as she drew inspiration from her own experiences, she originally published The Price of Salt under a pseudonym. It is her only novel that contains an explicit lesbian relationship. The Price of Salt took a place in the spotlight during the Academy Awards last year when Carol was nominated for six awards. It’s only fitting to read the book to judge the adaptation, as well as enjoy one of the rare novels that has a happy ending rather than tragedy. This love triangle set in 1958 is famous for one very tragic ending. March Hastings even re-wrote part of the ending in the 80’s so that it would be somewhat less depressing. As it still stands, the novel is a hard read. The plot is as pulpy as it comes. A young woman named Paula, engaged to a man she’s not in love with, falls for his older, seductive aunt Byrne. However, her paramour is hiding a dark secret from her past. With a plot like this, it’s hard to imagine that the novel would have a happy ending. What’s so striking is that the ending’s bleakness doesn’t come from the tragedies that befall Paula and Byrne but the looming threat of losing oneself to a heteronormative culture. That specter is far more frightening than any secret or act of violence in the novel, which makes it a groundbreaking work for the time it was published. If you can stomach a tragic ending – and indeed, why would you be reading lesbian pulps if you can’t – Three Women presents a sobering look at 50’s cultural norms as well as all the pulpy goodness you could ask for. This might be the most uplifting novel on the list – and that is saying something, considering this novel tackles sexual assault, drug use, workplace sexism, and unwanted pregnancies. Still, this novel is less about the dangers of alternative lifestyles and more a celebration of women breaking gender norms, a sign of the changing times (the novel was published in 1959). Three best friends – Annice, Barby, and Pat – move from a small town to the big city of Chicago, where all three immediately struggle to break free from the patriarchy and establish their own identities. The lesbian subplot in the novel is not the center of attention but is ultimately uplifting, where Barby learns to overcome past trauma and move forward with her life thanks to her relationship with an older woman. It’s an interesting spin on the predatory lesbian trope, and an empowering arc in a time when queer women rarely were uplifted by their relationships with other women. The novel’s ending is sad for one of the characters, but if you’re looking for a lesbian pulp that places a microscope on society and empowers all three of the leading ladies featured in it, this is your best bet. I’m cheating a little with this novel – it was published in the 2000’s. Still, if you’re looking for a noir centered around gay women, you’ll find it all in this book. Dames and danger populate the Candy Box Club in Greenwich Village, where emcee Blackie Cole must investigate the murder of socialite Didi’s brother. The novel was written by long-time Greenwich Village resident Lisa E. Davis, who researched the novel meticulously. She drew from interviews with lesbian and bisexual women who lived through the 40s and 50s nightclub scene, and her novel shows the pre-Stonewall history of the Village and gives voices to these women’s stories and experiences while still drawing readers in with a pitch-perfect example of the noir. Of course, this is one of the more recent entries into the canon. If you’re looking for a classic, there are novels such as Odd Girl Out, Spring Fire, Another Kind of Love, and Lesbo Lodge. However, if you’re looking for some history mixed in with your pulpy goodness, then by all means pick up this novel.

(Lat. unhappy), a term formerly used in reference to a person in wretchedness or calamity; but it now denotes a parsimonious person, or one who is covetous to extremity; who denies himself even the comforts of life to accumulate wealth. "Avarice," says Saurin, "may be considered in two different points of light. It may be considered in those men, or rather those public bloodsuckers, or, as the officers of the Roman emperor Vespasian were called, those sponges of society, who, infatuated with this passion, seek after riches as the supreme good, determine to acquire it by any methods, and consider the ways that lead to wealth, legal or illegal, as the only road for them to travel. Avarice, however, must be considered in a second point of light. It not only consists in committing bold crimes, but in entertaining mean ideas and practicing low methods, incompatible .with such magnanimity as our condition ought to inspire. It consists not only in omitting to serve God, but in trying to associate the service of God with that of mammon. How many forms doth avarice take to disguise itself from the man who is guilty of it, and who will be drenched in the guilt of it till the day he dies! Sometimes it is prudence, which requires him to provide not only for his present wants, but for such as he may have in future. Sometimes it is charity, which requires him not to give society examples of prodigality and parade. Sometimes it is parental love, obliging him to save something for his children. Sometimes it is circumspection, which requires him not to supply people who make ill use of what they get. Sometimes it is necessity, which obliges him to repel artifice by artifice. Sometimes it is conscience, which convinces him, good man, that he hath already exceeded in compassion and alms-giving, and done too much. Sometimes it is equity, for justice requires that every one should enjoy the fruit of his own labors and those of his ancestors. Such, alas! are the awful pretexts and subterfuges of the miser" (Sermuons, volume 5, ser. 12). SEE AVARICE; SEE COVETOUSNESS.

Icelandic national costume has enjoyed various levels of popularity since the term was coined in Iceland in the 19th century, during the fight for independence. Since 2001 the national costume is regulated by The National Costume Authority, which preserves the correct techniques of making them. Five types of costume are all recognized as Icelandic National costumes. Some were designed in the 18th century from scratch as ceremonial costumes, while other is traditional daily wear of Icelandic women in olden days. The men costume exists in three or four radically different versions. The men national costume is the only direct descendant of traditional daily wear of Icelandic men, while the other were designed from the start as ceremonial costume. Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir or Gingó, which is her artist name, is a painter and a ceramic artist. Gingó has learned design course, studied at Reykjavík art academy where she studied ceramic specialization, clay course and also studied painting. Lately she has been designing and working on souvenirs. She uses the nature and surroundings to inspire her. She for example designs and produces sand-candles, the material are all form the county and she has also designed candles that look like the Northern lights, which you can see her in Höfn. Arfleifð specializes in high quality handcrafted clothing and accessories made from materials such as animal and fish leather, horn, wool and horse hair. All of the mat erials are Icelandic and processed using traditional methods. The products are designed from the natural shape of the materials and carefully handcrafted with focus on details and difference which makes each piece absolutely unique. The founder, Ágústa is from Höfn. She is a shoe and an accessory designer. Millibör is run by Ragnheiður who is designer and a tailor. Millibör is specialized in designing and manufacturing beautiful and stylish woman's clothing made of high quality materials. Ragnheiður uses the nature and environment around her as inspiration. Svavar Guðnason was an Icelandic artist who worked for many years in Denmark. He is considered one of the most known artists of Iceland in the late 20th century. His paintings are in many museums in Denmark and also in many private museums in Europe.

Q: My husband is a firefighter who was recently injured on the job while fighting a fire. He doesn’t think he is entitled to any monetary compensation because he assumes the risk of the job and is trained to deal with danger. Is he entitled to sue for his personal injuries? A: Firefighters and police officers provide vital, life-saving services to New Yorkers every day. Their job is replete with dangers and threats that they confront on a daily basis. As seen in recent events, first responders, firefighters and police officers run towards danger to protect the public with little regard for their own safety. When firefighters and police officers are injured in the line of duty, there are legal mechanisms to insure that they can be made whole and compensated for their injuries. The legal architecture is not without hurdles, however. Traditionally, New York courts followed the "Firefighter's Rule" which bars recovery in negligence for injuries sustained by a firefighter (or police officer) while in the line of duty. The rule, which has its origins in the common law, was initially premised on the idea that firefighters responding to a fire were licensees and thus took the property as they found it. Another rationale for the rule was that firefighters assumed the risk of suffering the kinds of injuries that go along with being employed in that profession. More recently, courts have justified the rule on the ground that firefighters are well-trained professionals who are hired and compensated specifically to confront dangerous situations that are frequently caused by someone's negligence. and must be precluded from recovering damages for the very situations that create a need for their services. This harsh rule has far reaching implications that could prevent a firefighter or police officer who sustained terrible injuries as a result of someone’s negligence from receiving compensation for his or her loss. To ameliorate the effects of the Firefighter’s Rule, the state legislature enacted a series of laws designed to protect firefighters and police officers.

Collier dedicated Poetic Effusions (1835, 2nd ed) to Scarsdale and describes this as a "distinguished and illustrious patronage"; the frontispiece is a "sketch of the antique Church adjoining your Lordship's magnificent mansion" Sewell pub. An Essay in Rhyme, in two parts (Halsted: M. King, 1834), which contains "To Burns" Tannahill wrote dialect poems inspired by Burns from approximately 1800-1810. He addressed several odes in Burns' memory for Burns Suppers, and helped found and was the first secretary of the Paisley Burns Club. Tatersal wrote The bricklayer’s miscellany: or, poems on several subjects: written by Robert Tatersal, A poor Country Bricklayer, of Kingston upon Thames, in Allusion to Stephen Duck (1734) after Duck's success with "The Thresher's Labour." Tatersal's sense of debt to Duck for making it possible for laborers to aspire to a literary career is made explicit in a poem addressed to Duck: “The Bricklayers Labours” charts his working life in the sort of vivid detail Duck had used in describing his work as a thresher (Blackwell).

What did Jesus mean when He said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6)? Question: "What did Jesus mean when He said, 'I am the way and the truth and the life' (John 14:6)?" Answer: “I am the way and the truth and the life” is one of the seven “I Am” statements of Jesus. On the last night before His betrayal and death, Jesus was preparing His disciples for the days ahead. For over three years, these men had been following Jesus and learning from His teaching and example. They had placed their hopes in Him as the Messiah, the promised deliverer, yet they still didn’t understand how He was going to accomplish that deliverance. After the Last Supper, Jesus began speaking about His departure, which led to questions from His disciples.

Last week countries agreed to a new emissions reduction target for the shipping sector, as part of a wider climate deal. The headline target, agreed at an International Maritime Organization (IMO) meeting in London, is to peak and then reduce greenhouse gas emissions “at least 50%” by 2050, compared to 2008 levels. This is the first-ever international climate goal for the shipping sector. Carbon Brief highlights the main things to know about the the new deal. Most significant is the fact that the new climate deal includes an absolute emissions reduction target for shipping. It also calls for emissions to be phased out completely, though without any timeline. This is shown in the third point from the agreed strategy, below. Extract from the initial strategy on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from ships, adopted on 13 April 2018 at IMO headquarters in London. Many countries were pushing for more ambitious targets, arguing that the 50% goal is not in line with the Paris Agreement. However, other countries wanted to avoid any kind of absolute goal, setting only a carbon intensity target. Therefore, many were happy that an absolute goal had been set. However, several countries, including Brazil, the US and Saudi Arabia, “reserved their positions” on endorsing this part of the deal, arguing it is still too early to set an emissions reduction goal for the shipping sector. Their reservations will be included as an annex to the deal. It is also significant that the language targets all GHGs, not just CO2, as some countries had been pushing for. Countries also agreed to reduce the carbon intensity per tonne of goods shipped by at least 40% by 2030, compared to 2008 levels, and to continue implementation of a previously agreed mandatory energy efficiency design index (EEDI) for new ships. The inclusion of the words ”at least” in the emissions reduction goal was crucial for getting Pacific island states on board with the deal. This is because it leaves the door open for a ratcheting up in future to be in line with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C goal. The strategy states that the goal is “subject to amendment depending on reviews”. These reviews will take into account future reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the strategy says. This would include the IPCC special report on the impacts of 1.5C warming, set to be released later this year. Another important point of contention was the inclusion in the strategy of the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR). This is a central principle enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which says that developed and developing nations have different levels of responsibility in some aspects of the effort to fight climate change. Inclusion of this in the deal was seen by some to be at odds with the IMO’s principle of “no more favourable treatment’, which says every ship from every nation should be treated the same. In the end, both guiding principles were included in the climate strategy. However, it remains to be seen how they will be reconciled. The US delegation – which opposed the resolution, but did not stop it going through – refused to endorse the inclusion of the principle of CBDR in the agreement, along with several other elements of the strategy. While an overall target was agreed last week at the IMO, many details remain to be negotiated. Therefore, the IMO agreed for an additional intersessional working group session to take place before its next environmental committee meeting in six months time. There is still much to be decided: the initial strategy proposes a host of measures which could be implemented in future, including a programme to help promote uptake of alternative low-carbon fuels, market-based measures (MBMs) to cut emissions, and enhanced energy efficiency measures. The IMO is also set to adopt a “revised” GHG strategy in 2023. This is set to include short-, mid- and long-term “further measures” for reducing emissions, along with an implementation schedule. The final publicly available version of the IMO’s new strategy is published in full below. The full and final version of the agreed “Initial IMO strategy on reduction of GHG emissions from ships” was initially not publicly available, but uploaded to this article when it became public as part of the UNFCCC's Talanoa Dialogue.

Experienced radio producer Mohammad Dikko Abdullahi (pictured) is using the power of the airwaves to spread tolerance and love for stigmatised Boko Haram survivors. A popular local radio station in northeast Nigeria called PEACE FM is changing perceptions of women and girls returning from Boko Haram captivity, who often face stigma and rejection in their communities. With support from International Alert and UNICEF, PEACE FM aired call-in shows on the importance of tolerance and forgiveness for these returning women and girls, and their children born out of Boko Haram sexual violence. By bringing on guests from a range of backgrounds including educators, community leaders and human rights advocates, the shows helped to ignite conversations about these sensitive issues with listeners. They inspired new ways of thinking – and talking – about how communities terrorised by Boko Haram can best move forward together. Mohammad is the show’s host and has worked as a radio producer for over 13 years. He has seen his homeland of Borno State transform into Boko Haram’s heartland, and is now determined to use his skills to help reclaim peace. For me, this programme has been an eye opener. Prior to it, I used to present just for humour - only to entertain listeners. But with this, I have been exposed to the nitty gritty of my job. Being a journalist is far beyond just humour. I am glad that my work has positively impacted people’s lives. With thousands of women and young girls returning to their villages following months - or in some cases years - of Boko Haram captivity, reintegration has not always been easy. Mohammed’s shows have spread awareness about better ways to help those returning to overcome trauma and become accepted by their friends and family. I speak three languages: English, Hausa and Kanuri. This has enabled me to communicate well and get the message across to many listeners… discussing the dangers of stigmatising victims of sexual violence and children born out of sexual violence as they return back, as well as promoting tolerance and accepting them. Using a radio is a great idea as almost everyone in the community owns one. We receive numerous calls from listeners who appreciate our work. These radio conversations served as constant reminders that acceptance of others means willingness to show them love and care. And Mohammed is now inspiring others to use radio to inspire positive change in Borno State. “International Alert was the first non-governmental organisation to air a programme on such sensitive issues, and due to the positive feedback and the impact it had on the listeners, other nongovernmental organisations have followed suit”, according to PEACE FM.

Two key ideas guided the construction of Pura Tanjung Sabtu. The first was to salvage and reassemble a number of traditional Malay houses as a unified structure, based on the layout of an 18th-century Malay royal dwelling. The second was to provide a focal point for the revival and teaching of traditional arts and cottage-industries, particularly weaving. The 11 timber dwellings in the complex are elevated three metres above ground, for better air circulation and protection against flooding and wildlife. They have steep, tiered, clay-tiled roofs with curved gable ends. All were assembled using wood plugs rather than nails.

Continuing our celebration of Women’s History Month, today I thought I’d give readers a chance to test their knowledge of the great contributions and progress women have made through the centuries. These questions were compiled from the National Women’s History Project website and I mostly included questions to which I already knew the answers so I can say, “I can’t believe you didn’t know that!” when you share your results. Just kidding, but, as I teach early American literature, that will explain the disproportionate number of literary and early American history questions. Quiz questions are after the jump. Check back on Monday for the answers. 1. Who took over management of Columbia Sportswear Company in the late 1930’s, when it was near bankruptcy, and turned it into the largest American ski apparel company worth $4 billion in 1972? 2. Who is considered the first American woman to be ordained by full denominational authority in 1864, and who also campaigned vigorously for full woman suffrage? 3. Who was the free-thinking woman who was forced out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and sought sanctuary in Roger Williams’ Rhode Island in 1637? 4. What woman met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 and worked with her for women’s equality for the next half century? 5. What woman has won a total of 56 Grand Slam tennis competitions events and 9 Wimbledon women’s singles titles? 6. Who was the first black prima donna soprano at the Metropolitan Opera, starring from 1961 to 2007, the first black singer to earn the top fee of $2750 for each performance (second only to Birgit Nilsson who got $3000), and winner of 19 Grammy awards? 7. Who introduced America to French cooking in her books and television series from 1963 through the 1990’s? 8. Who was the United States delegate to the United Nations who championed and won approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948? 9. Who earned a graduate degree from Oberlin College in 1888, was the first black woman to serve on a Board of Education (in D.C.), sued to integrate restaurants in the 1950’s, integrated the American Association of University Women at age 85, and was a founding member of NAACP? 10. Who became the first female Secretary of State of the United States, appointed by President Clinton in 1997? 11. Who was the first American woman poet whose poetry was published in London in 1650? 12. Who was the first black woman and the youngest poet laureate in American history when she was appointed in 1993? 13. Who wrote “The Feminine Mystique” in 1968 and became a leading figure in the Women’s Movement? 14. Who was imprisoned and then hanged for her Quaker faith in Boston in 1660, and 400 years later her statue was placed in front of the state House? 15. Who was a Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy credited with developing the COBOL computer language, and with coining the phrase “debugging” to fix a computer?

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of writing a piece for Knife World magazine in which I discussed the bowie knives used by John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators. The article, entitled, “Cloak and Daggers: Cutting Through the Confusion of the Lincoln Assassination Knives“, highlighted my conclusion that the knife currently on display at Ford’s Theatre as “Booth’s knife” is not the one taken from John Wilkes Booth’s body at the Garrett farm. I am still working on convincing and motivating those in charge of the Ford’s Theatre museum to correct this mistake. Using resources such as my article for Knife World, Mark has created a nice display about the knives used by the conspirators. In it, he has been kind enough to give my conclusion regarding Booth’s knife further press and attention. The rightmost knife above is identical to the “Liberty knife” currently on display at Ford’s Theatre as Booth’s knife. From my research I do not believe this knife was retrieved from Booth’s body as it claimed to have been by the display at Ford’s. Though I am not 100% certain of its origin, my hypothesis is that it came from Mary Surratt’s boarding house in D.C. The middle knife is identical to the knife found in George Atzerodt’s rented room at the Kirkwood House hotel. David Herold was seen carrying this long knife in his boot during the day of the assassination and probably removed it when visiting in George’s room on that day. It’s counterpart is on display at Ford’s Theatre. The leftmost knife is identical to the knife Lewis Powell used to stab Secretary Seward and the knife retrieved from John Wilkes Booth when he was shot at the Garret farm. Powell’s knife is in the Huntington Library in California. Booth’s knife is in storage at the NPS’ Museum Resource Ceneter in Landover, Maryland. I’m working on getting this knife out of storage and properly displayed at the Ford’s Theatre Museum. It is also with a deal of pride that I state that the leftmost knife and sheath in the above picture, belong to me. I bought the knife a few years ago, wanting a duplicate of the knife Booth used to stab Major Rathbone. According to Mark, these “smaller” Rio Grand Camp knives are harder to find as most people want the big ones like the one in the middle. During the course of our collaboration on the Knife World article, I told him I had an identical knife to Booth’s and he asked if I would consider lending it to the Historic Arkansas Museum for the exhibition. Though I’m not sure if I will be able to, I’m hoping to find the time to make the journey to Arkansas to see my knife along with over 200 other bowie knives. For anyone who may live around, or are planning a trip near Little Rock, the exhibit, “A Sure Defense: The Bowie Knife in America” runs from December 13th, 2013 until June 22nd, 2014 at the Historic Arkansas Museum. The Historic Arkansas Museum is open 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 1 – 5 p.m. on Sunday and admission to the galleries and parking are free. For those who can’t make it to the museum, a full color catalog documenting this historic exhibit is planned, and will be available from the museum’s gift shop and online store some time in the near future. I hope those of you in the area will check out the exhibit at the Historic Arkansas Museum. You can learn all about the fascinating history of the bowie knife and say “hi” to my knife and sheath while you are there.

One of the tools authoritarian churches use to control people is the mislabelling of gossip. They instruct people not to speak critical things about the church or its leadership to each other. This is considered gossip. If someone were to observe the pastor lying and were to tell someone other than the pastor it would be considered “gossip.” Does this really meet the criteria of “gossip” as mentioned in Proverbs and 1Corinthians. Pro 20:19 He who goes about as a slanderer reveals secrets, Therefore do not associate with a gossip. The Greek word used in the 2Co 12:20 is psithurismos which literally means “whisperer” but it implies slander. The hebrew word used in Proverbs is rakil and it also carries the meaning of slander. If a church member observed a pastor lying and told someone else, it can’t be considered gossip.

A measure of the curvature in the relationship between bond prices and bond yields that demonstrates how the duration of a bond changes as the interest rate changes. Convexity is used as a risk-management tool, and helps to measure and manage the amount of market risk to which a portfolio of bonds is exposed. In the example above, Bond A has a higher convexity than Bond B, which means that all else being equal, Bond A will always have a higher price than Bond B as interest rates rise or fall. As convexity increases, the systemic risk to which the portfolio is exposed increases. As convexity decreases, the exposure to market interest rates decreases and the bond portfolio can be considered hedged. In general, the higher the coupon rate, the lower the convexity (or market risk) of a bond. This is because market rates would have to increase greatly to surpass the coupon on the bond, meaning there is less risk to the investor.

One such place is Ulgundahi Island. Comprising a mere 45 acres, Ulgundahi lies a few hundred metres off the mainland of Maclean in the Clarence River. It’s an important heritage site for the Yaegl aborigines, who were forced there – from as early as 1904 – to be contained. The Yaegl lived in huts and were taught the white missionaries’ ways in the island’s school and church. Gradually, Ulgundahi’s population expanded until floods forced the families to leave permanently in 1961. However, the island continues to remain at the heart of the Yaegl people. I chatted briefly with local Maclean artist and Yaegl woman Frances Belle Parker, whose mother grew up on Ulgundahi. She tells me the island is off limits to anyone without a permit from the Yaegl Aboriginal Land Council. It’s now heritage-listed land. Frances remains deeply inspired by Ulgundahi, which is captured in her beautiful artwork here. Even though I didn’t reach the island, knowing where it was and what it signified gave me a whole new perspective on the area. It also made me realise the Clarence River has a lot of islands, many of which are just waiting to be explored…. The Woombah midden was a fun place to explore, particularly as it’s not signposted. After receiving a map of the Lower Clarence Aboriginal Tourist Site Drive from the Clarence Coast Visitor Centre, I was off. Heading north from Ulgundahi towards the pretty bushland village of Woombah, I had to guess my way to the site, as its location is marked only roughly past the Goodwood Island turn-off. After several stops and riverside rambles, I wandered along an old, rough track past a property (which looked private), down a handsome field of sward and bingo! I reached the ancient midden site. The site, which was used by the Yaegl tribe to prepare and eat food, particularly seafood, is the largest found on the east coast of Australia. The midden contained kangaroo, wallaby and dingo bones, with the dingo bone estimated to be over 3,000 years old. It’s allegedly the oldest recording of a dingo found in Australia. When my ancestors first came to the Clarence River in the mid 1800’s, they eventually settled on what is now called Ulgundahi Island as it was on the wrong side of the river for the local Aborigines and Bad Spirits were there. They fished and collected shells which were crushed and sent to Sydney for lime mortar. They then moved to other locations around the lower river. Around the turn of the century, the area where the shells were crushed was discovered and assumed to be a Midden and now a historical site. The reality is that the Philp family were the original occupants of Ulgundahi Island. Very interesting, thanks for your input!

To combat the effects of Parkinson's disease, Upper Saddle River resident Howie Kule trains in non-contact boxing. It’s early on a Monday morning at Westwood Health & Fitness, and 74-year-old Howie Kule is wrapping up an intense training session with boxing instructor Ron O'Neill. “Hit with power. Hit with everything you’ve got,” O’Neill shouts, the slap of Kule’s forceful strikes against his trainer’s mitts reverberating throughout the workout studio. Outfitted in patriotic boxing gloves, Kule responds steadily to O'Neill's direction as he prompts different boxing combinations. "One, one, two," O'Neill yells, as Kule performs the matching jab, jab, cross. From the outside, it might seem like an ordinary tableau. But these sessions with O'Neill are more than just a retired man's effort to fight off advancing old age. For Kule, they are a means of survival. It was more than nine years ago when Kule's wife, Linda, first noticed a change in her husband, to whom she has been married for 52 years. Always a big personality, friendly and warm with a booming voice, Kule became quiet. He lost his sense of smell and was easily confused. Then one day, Linda noticed a tremor in her husband’s finger — a common sign of Parkinson's disease, a degenerative nervous system disorder that affects movement. "I kept watching him, and as the shakes got more significant, I said to Howie, 'You've got Parkinson's. You better go to a neurologist,' " she said. "He was a pretty clear-cut case." When Kule was diagnosed with Parkinson's, Linda said, she and the Kules' daughter, Elyse Zitomer, decided they would do everything in their power to fight the disease. The first step was finding Dr. Fiona Gupta, a neurologist specializing in movement disorders at the North Jersey Brain & Spine Center in Oradell. Although Parkinson’s patients present in different ways, said Gupta, their symptoms are caused by a deficiency in dopamine, a chemical in the brain that controls how people move and how they feel emotionally. Until the past decade, the doctor said the medical community was focused on Parkinson’s being “motor, motor, motor” — causing stiffness, slowness and tremors — but non-motor symptoms such as depression, lack of motivation, anxiety, sleep disturbance and cognitive issues are just as important to address. Gupta recommends that patients adopt lifestyle changes such as healthy eating, sleeping well, maintaining a social life and, perhaps most important, exercising. An exercise regimen is vital for Parkinson’s patients, says Gupta, because of something called “neuroprotection.” Exercise floods the brain with good things, such as dopamine, antioxidants and amino acids, she explained, which help restore the brain and allow patients to function on a day-to-day basis. Flexibility, gait, balance and fluidity of movement improve with exercise, Gupta said, and so does mood. Since his diagnosis, Kule, who lives in Upper Saddle River, has been motivated to do everything he can to prevent his symptoms from worsening. “I want to stay alive,” he says. When he first wakes around 6 a.m., Linda Kule says, his movements are slow and shuffling. By the time they arrive at the gym at 7:30 a.m., his medication has kicked in and he confidently strides inside, she said. But it’s not just the medicine — Kule says a sense of euphoria comes over him as he walks into the building. Westwood Health & Fitness is not just a workout facility for Kule. He's found camaraderie there. Pal Ron Starace makes sure Kule takes his medicine at 9 a.m. each day. Burton Hall will call Kule's home if he doesn't show up. Then there’s O’Neill, whom Kule met just a few years ago. O’Neill, 51, said he mostly kept to himself at the gym. Kule approached him one day when he noticed the NYPD boxing T-shirt the former undercover police officer was wearing. After thanking O’Neill for his service, Kule asked if he had seen a “60 Minutes” special that touted the benefits of non-contact boxing for Parkinson’s patients. Kule was already involved in a program called Rock Steady Boxing for those battling the disease, but hoped to pick up more skills. O’Neill agreed to train Kule, and they "hit the ground running," he said. O’Neill said he sees Kule not as a Parkinson's patient but as an improving fighter whom he would ask to perform any kind of movement or combination that he would ask a professional fighter to try. And Kule gets it done. “He’s one of the best fighters that I’ve ever had the privilege of training with, because he doesn’t have the quit gear,” said O’Neill, who has trained in boxing since he was 18. “You can teach a jab and an uppercut and a hook, but you can’t teach heart — this kid’s all heart." James Beck, vice president of scientific affairs at the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, a division of the Parkinson’s Foundation, said exercise like boxing requires participants to think about how to move their feet and interact with a partner, helping with cognitive problems Parkinson's patients can experience. But perhaps most important is the social aspect, which "keeps the mind limber," Beck said. "Interacting with people helps combat something that people with Parkinson's often feel, and that's a sense of isolation," Beck said. Kule’s booming laugh, less frequent since he became ill, makes an appearance with the ribbing that O’Neill offers up after their session. The pair spar with ease in and out of the ring. But when training, both are serious about the progress being made.

If a friend invited you to “the Nash,” would you know where to go? You would if you grew up in the Haughville area west of White River and happened to be of Slovenian descent. The Nash is the in-the-know nickname for the Slovenian National Home. It has been located in its current building at the corner of 10th and Warman streets since 1940, but the organization is just coming off a year when it celebrated its 100th birthday. The birth of the Nash came about because a large number of the residents of the west side area centered around White River came from Slovenia near the end of the last century. According to an 1893 publication, Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Indianapolis, in 1875 Benjamin Haugh established the Haugh & Co. Ironworks at Michigan Street and Belleview Place. That same year, just a few blocks away, Cleveland Malleable Iron Co. expanded to the city’s west side, opening the National Malleable Castings Co. at Michigan Street and Holmes Avenue. By 1883, 30 or so residents living around the two foundries incorporated the area as the town of Haughville. In 1884, William Dana Ewart moved his chain link factory (later called Link Belt) to Haughville – completing a triumvirate of heavy manufacturing in the town that had grown to about 70 residents. Haughville needed iron workers to fill manufacturing positions at these plants. So, in the 1890s, National Malleable’s salesman, George “Jurij” Lampert, a native of Slovenia, cooked up a plan. He would recruit his fellow countrymen, known for their metal-working abilities. Lambert returned to his homeland, according to washie.com, a website about Slovenian life in Indianapolis, and offered free ship’s passage to America to able-bodied men willing to work for a preset amount of time at National Malleable. The men who came often brought their wives and families with them, and a community of Slovenians formed in Haughville. The immigrants retained their familiar customs and culture in their new land, but were also eager to become Americans. Once their contracts were worked off at National Malleable, the men continued to work there or left to find better-paying jobs at Haugh, Ketcham & Co., Link Belt or the meat-packing plant, Kingan & Co., in Haughville. These home-loving Slovenians took to the streets in 1908 in a jubilant parade celebrating the construction of the Slovenian Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, dedicated that year on Holmes Avenue. In an era when immigrants were derided as dangerous job-stealers and were often the target of racism, the Slovenian community took extra care to show their America-first enthusiasm, even when celebrating a community win. The Indianapolis Star noted that “the American colors were the most prevalent” at the parade. When the US entered World War I, many young men from the Slovenian community entered the service of their new country. But the war heightened anti-immigrant hostilities and increased efforts on the part of do-good societies in Indianapolis, and across the nation, to Americanize immigrants as quickly as possible. When organizers hosted the annual Fourth of July parade in 1918, stating that it was the chance for “loyal citizens . . . to show their Americanism and patriotism,” according to the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, members of the Slovenian community grabbed the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty. This must have seemed crucial considering that their country was fighting with the Austro-Hungarian Empire – America’s enemy in the war. At war’s end, the Slovenian community of Indianapolis did something that many other Slovenian groups were doing across the state, forming Slovenian social clubs. The Indianapolis Star noted a number of such groups incorporating in the years during and just after WWI. These groups saw the official formation of these clubs as a way to preserve their own heritage in an America increasingly focused on washing away ethnic differences through Americanization. The Indianapolis community incorporated the Slovenian National Home in Indianapolis in 1918 and that year constructed their first building at 729 North Holmes Ave. The founding members, with Frank Jonta, Joseph Pushner, Louis Fon and Frank Luzar as directors, intended the National Home to be a social club, offering concerts, sports teams, cards games and dances for members of their community. Two decades later, just before the U.S. entered another World War, the group decided it was time to upgrade its facility. They purchased land on the south side of 10th Street on the corner of Warman Avenue, still in the Haughville neighborhood, for a new building. Smartly thoughtful of the optics of an organization dedicated to a particular ethnic group, the president of the association said at its dedication, “We are American people now and we want our children to enjoy the benefits of American life.” The organization boasted 220 members when the new building opened. The dedication program was printed in English and Slovenian, the latter welcoming members to the new Slovenski Narodni Dom.

Today Generation Squeeze is back in court, leading the Intergenerational Climate Coalition. This time we’re in Ontario, where the provincial Court of Appeal is hearing the Government of Ontario challenge the federal Pricing Pollution Act. Premier Doug Ford claims it hurts hockey moms, commuters, and office workers. As an organization that represents thousands of average Canadians, Generation Squeeze disagrees. While many of us face serious affordability challenges, our organization knows pricing pollution is not the source of that problem. The source is high costs for housing, child care, postsecondary, transit, etc. — especially since young people’s earnings have stagnated over the last four decades. The more we reduce these costs, the better we position younger Canadians to afford the adaptations required to reduce climate change. But there’s a bigger principle at play. Failure to price pollution abuses children and future generations by putting their health in jeopardy. In court the Ontario government will invoke federalism in its fight against a minimum national price on pollution (claiming it contravenes “the division of powers” between Ottawa and the provinces), and the principle of “no taxation without representation”. But this principle must be considered alongside the commitment to protect the generations that will suffer the effects of our decisions to pollute today without having the right to participate in them. The reality is that youth and future generations are legally disabled from participating in politics because they are prohibited from voting. While they have no say in the decisions that determine our greenhouse gas emissions, science shows they will be bear the heaviest environmental, economic, and health burdens from those decisions. The very act of making a constitution presumes future generations: they must exist to inherit, and in turn, maintain a way of life anchored by the values and principles adopted by their predecessors. Alas, climate change puts that future in serious jeopardy. The World Health Organization identifies climate change as the greatest risk to human health, threatening the conditions required for today’s youth and future generations to thrive. It would be perverse if our Constitution is now used 150 years later to defeat that deep and founding concern for future generations, by frustrating efforts to combat climate change. Alas, we fail to put children’s health concerns at the centre of our plans so long as pollution is free. Rather than resist pricing pollution, we should embrace pricing it with pride, because it will mark our commitment to end unwarranted environmental abuse of children and future generations. The economics are clear. Price signals matter to almost all of us, so pricing pollution can shape our behaviour and attitudes, incentivizing us to pollute less. There is also serious money to be saved or made as we adapt, especially for individuals and companies who adapt early and innovatively. But regardless of costs or the amount of money to be made, Canada is not a country that tolerates abuse of children. It’s time to recognize pollution is now among the greatest harm we can inflict on children and future generations — and that abuse will only grow so long as we tolerate pollution being free.

Günther Wirth has been working in Somaliland since 2001. In 2011, he initiated a project component focusing on the illegal wildlife trade and has meanwhile documented numerous cases of Cheetahs being smuggled from Ethiopia and Kenya through Somaliland. Based on his findings he estimates that around 300 Cheetah cubs are smuggled annually through Somaliland alone, of which more than two third die before they reach customers in the Gulf States. Mohamed Amin is environmental officer of the project and particularly engaged in combating the illegal wildlife trade. In August 2012, a Leopard was shot in northern Somaliland. The circumstances of this incident are as usual somewhat unclear, but Mohamed's following account summarizes events taken place on 26 August 2012 about 20 km northeast of Borama. A male Leopard attacks a flock of sheep and allegedly kills four of them. Shortly afterwards two men approach the scene. The Leopard attacks and injures them. More people gather, and a group of about ten armed men try to hunt the Leopard down using about 60 (!!) rounds of bullets to shoot him. Another person is slightly injured during the course of events and taken to hospital together with his injured friends. When Mohamed visits the location he does not see any carcass of the sheep, which are usually guarded by children only. The remaining men are in the process of skinning the Leopard, and everything is back to normal, i.e. to business: they ask Mohamed how much he would pay for the skin. Somalia is a signatories of CITES since 1986. Günther wrote that Leopards are usually not traded alive in the country. Earlier in 2012, a subadult Leopard was offered for sale in the area of Hargeisa, the country's capital. But the illegal trade in Leopard skins may far exceed the trade in live animals.

Natural remedies are in rising demand - especially among pet owners. Alternative treatment for our beloved pets are more and more sought after. Homeopathy and other alternative forms of therapy offer both excellent possibilities of keeping our pets healthy naturally as well as cure the underlying causes of sickness. SUPRA-CELL, the family-owned company was formed in 1986. It has established itself in a special field of animal medicine: production and distribution of biological remedies. The company founder, Dr. Bertold Schell, devoted himself in the 1960s as one of the first veterinarians to homeopathy and had great success. His daughter, Christine Schell, continues the development of the product range and the continuous expansion of the company together with her employees. The company is located in Rastatt (near Karlsruhe) and produces products for carrier pigeons, birds, small rodents, dogs and cats and has been offering Bach flower remedies for pets since 2003. If a pet becomes seriously ill, the same applies to a pet as to a person: The entire animal is always sick. Therefore the entire animal must be treated and not only its symptoms. Body, psyche and soul are one entity. If the balance of the pet is impaired and particularly if it has a chronic illness, the background is an unresolved conflict. The illness is a cry for help of the body, psyche and soul that something is out of balance; that a deficit, a weakness and a blockage exists. For the pet owner it is important to be able to do something when he notices: My animal is sick, it is depressed, inexplicably aggressive, fearful or it mourns somebody. These originally psychological problems may develop into physical problems. The idea to select seven items from the Bach flower therapy is based on the experience that these seven emotional conditions appear often in pets. It is new to produce a Bach flower blend in globule form for each subject. This makes it possible to take care of even the most sensitive pets if they get into emotional despair. The advantage of the blends is that the individual remedies strengthen each other and thus result in a higher whole. Homeopathy is the administration of minute quantities of medicines that, in much greater concentration, actually cause symptoms similar to those being treated. This concept is often summarised in the phrase “let like be treated by like”. Perhaps the most important feature of homeopathy is its holistic approach to healing. This means that practitioners base their choice of remedy on all aspects of a patient’s health, rather than just on the symptoms alone. Biochemical healing is a substitutional healing process where the organism lacking mineral salts is provided with these substances. These minerals are of structural nature and are processed homoeopathically according to Dr. Schüssler. They are diluted and potentiated to enable penetration of the cellular wall. Potentiation generates ionised, i.e. electrically charged molecules. They provide cells, tissue or liquids with information needed to function in their specific way. In this sense they are means of function.

The purpose of this module is to supply a steady voltage to vehicle electronics by boosting during voltage droop events such as engine crank. The design is based on the C2000 Real-Time Microcontroller, and will provide up to 400 Watts of power from a 12V automotive battery system. This solution supports continuous operational input voltage of 6V-16V with protection against 36V load dump to provide a stable 12V output supply with reverse battery protection.

Anecdote: The writer described her lifelong obsession with the color yellow using descriptive images of various yellow items in her life over the years—from her dresses to bedroom wallpaper to her Beetle car. Large theme: She explored how yellow expressed her positive outlook, but also how yellow illustrates her “insightful” side and ability to shine light on tough subjects. Anecdote: The writer—who was about 6’7” and about 300 pounds—described “the time” he sat around a restaurant table with sports teammates and how some players avoided him. Larger theme: He wrote about how he dealt with people thinking he was a “mean guy” because of his size, and the nature of assumptions and stereotypes. Anecdote: The writer described “the time” he was riding around town with friends and spotted a trampoline someone was giving away for free, and the humorous lengths he went to to bring it home. Larger theme: He wrote about how he loved old stuff and reclaiming discarded items, and expanded upon how and why he finds value in things that others don’t. Anecdote: The writer described some of the landmarks she saw during the weekly half hour car trip between her divorced parents homes over the years. Larger theme: She used this image to talk about how she had changed and grown during these trying years, and how her perspective of the journey also changed. You might notice how all these examples took a simple moment or “time” and then developed it into something more abstract, metaphorical or figurative (ie, it stood for something deeper). The trick is to start with something specific, like an anecdote, and then explain, reflect and analyze what it means to you. This way you get both a highly readable essay that also reveals how you think and what you care about.

Prior to the 1920s it was believed that by entering into a contract with the employer, an employee accepted the risks involved in the employment and therefore could not hold the employer liable if he suffered from any injury or disease related to his work. Since the 1920s, however, when the Employers Liability Act was enacted, it was recognised that because of the unequal relationship between employer and employee, no such presumption could be made. Four laws have been enacted that deal with healthcare for workers. The Factories Act 1948 prescribes safety conditions for workers in manufacturing processes; the Workmen's Compensation Act deals with compensation to workers who suffer injuries at the workplace, and who suffer from specified occupational diseases; the Employees State Insurance Act 1948, which apart from dealing with compensation is also concerned with access to free medical care for employees (this includes the setting up of dispensaries, hospitals and a panel of doctors whom employees can approach); and the Maternity Benefit Act which is concerned with providing paid medical leave to pregnant women workers, coupled with certain other benefits. Apart from these general laws, certain specific Acts too have been passed which, to a limited extent, also deal with workers' healthcare. These include the Beedi and Cigar Workers Act, the Mines Act and others. All these laws recognise that it is the responsibility of the employer to provide a safe work environment for his employees. Over the years, these laws have been amended to bring in more and more detailed safety provisions for employees, though most, especially the safety laws, are implemented more in the breach. Many of the enactments are over 50 years old and obviously a lot of litigation has taken place on these issues. The Workmen's Compensation Act and the ESI Act especially have been regularly used by employees who suffer from employment-related injuries and diseases. There is an overwhelming amount of litigation concerning whether a particular injury or disease is employment-related or not. This article will look at other aspects, mainly those flowing from the Supreme Court's assertion that workers have a fundamental right to work in a healthy environment. In Consumer Education and Research Centre v Union of India (1), the Supreme Court was concerned with the rights of employees in the asbestos manufacturing industry. This was a public interest litigation on the work conditions and their health effects on workers. The Supreme Court held that the right to health of a worker is an integral facet of a meaningful right to life, to have not only a meaningful existence but also robust health and vigour without which a worker would lead a life of misery. Lack of health denudes his livelihood. The compelling economic need to work in an industry should not be at the cost of the health and vigour of the worker. Facilities and opportunities, as enjoined in Article 38, should be provided to protect the health of the worker. Provisions for medical tests and treatment improve a worker's health, increasing production and making service more efficient. The court further held that continued treatment, while in service or after retirement, is a moral, legal and constitutional concomitant duty of the employer and the State. Therefore, it must be held that the right to health and medical care is a fundamental right under 21 read with Article 39 (c), 41 and 43 of the Constitution to make life of the workman meaningful and purposeful with dignity of person. Right to life includes protection of a worker's health and strength and is a minimum requirement enabling a person to live with dignity. The State (central and state) government or an industry, public or private, is enjoined to take all such action which will promote health, strength and vigour of the workman during the period of employment and leisure and health even after retirement as basic essentials to live the life of health and happiness. The Supreme Court went on to observe that the right to human dignity, development of responsibility, social protection, right to rest and leisure are a worker's fundamental human rights, as assured by the Charter of Human Rights, in the Preamble and Articles 38 and 39 of the Constitution. Health enables a worker to enjoy the fruits of his labour, keeping him physically fit and mentally alert, and leading a successful life, economically, socially and culturally. Medical facilities to protect the health of workers are, therefore, the fundamental and human rights of the workman. The Employees State Insurance Act and Workmen's Compensation Act provide for payment of mandatory compensation for injury or death caused to the workman while in employment. Since the Act does not provide for payment of compensation after cessation of employment, it becomes necessary to protect such persons from the respective dates of cessation of their employment till date. Liquidated damages by way of compensation are accepted principles of compensation. the appropriate inspector of factories in particular of the State of Gujarat, is directed to send all the workers, examined by the ESI hospital concerned, for re-examination by the National Institute of Occupational Health to detect whether all or any of them are suffering from asbestosis. In case of a positive finding, that all or any of them are suffering from occupational health hazards, each such worker shall be entitled to compensation in a sum of Rs 1 lakh payable by the factory or industry or establishment concerned within a period of three months from the date of certification by the National Institute of Occupational Health. In Rajangam, Secretary, Dist Beedi Worker's Union v State of Tamil Nadu (2), the issue concerned the work conditions of employees in beedi manufacturing and allied industries. A large number of children are employed in this occupation. In view of the health hazard involved in the manufacturing process, every worker including children, if employed, should be insured for a minimum amount of Rs 50,000 and the premium should be paid by the employer and the incidence should not be passed on to the workman. Bandhua Mukti Morcha v Union of India (3) concerned the issue of release of bonded labourers especially from stone quarries in Haryana. The Supreme Court appointed a committee to look into work conditions in stone quarries. The committee's report stated that due to a large number of stone-crushing machines operating at the site, the air was laden with dust making it difficult to breathe. Workers were forced to work and were not allowed to leave the quarries. They did not even have clean water to drink and were living in jhuggies with stones piled one on top of the other as walls, and straw covering the top, which did not afford them any protection against the sun and the rain and which were so low that a person could hardly stand inside them. A few workers were suffering from tuberculosis. Workers were not paid compensation for injuries caused in accidents arising in the course of employment. There were no facilities for medical treatment or schooling for children. It is the fundamental right of everyone under Article 21 to live with human dignity, free from exploitation. This right to live with human dignity enshrined in Article 21 derives its life and breath from the Directive Principles of State Policy and particularly Clauses (e) and (f) of Article 39 and Articles 41 and 42 and at least, therefore, it must include protection of the health and strength of workers, men and women, and children of tender age, against abuse, opportunities and facilities for children to develop in a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity, educational facilities, just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief. These are the minimum requirements which must exist in order to enable a person to live with human dignity and neither the central nor the state government has the right to take any action which will deprive a person of the enjoyment of these basic essentials. Since the Directive Principles of State Policy contained in Clause (e) and (f) of Articles 39, 41 and 42 are not enforceable in a court of law, it may not be possible to compel the State through the judicial process to make provisions by statutory enactment or executive fiat for ensuring these basic essentials which go to make up a life of human dignity but where legislation is already enacted by the State providing these basic requirements to the persons, particularly belonging to weaker sections of the community and thus investing their right to live with basic human dignity, the State can certainly be obligated to ensure observance of such legislation, for inaction on the part of the State in securing implementation of such legislation would amount to denial of protection under Article 21, more so in the context of Article 256 which provides that the executive power of every state shall be so exercised as to ensure compliance with laws made by Parliament and any existing laws which apply in that state. In the Asiad Construction Workers case (4), another bench of the Supreme Court had expressed that the State is under a constitutional obligation to see that there is no violation of the fundamental right of any person, particularly when he belongs to the weaker section of the community and is unable to wage a legal battle against a strong and powerful opponent who is exploiting him. The central government is therefore bound to ensure observance of various social welfare and labour laws enacted by Parliament for the purpose of securing to the workmen a life of basic human dignity in compliance with the Directive Principles of State Policy. The State of Haryana must therefore ensure that mine leasees or contractors, to whom it is giving its mines for stone quarrying operations, observe various social welfare and labour laws enacted for the benefit of the workmen. This is a constitutional obligation which can be enforced against the central government and the State of Haryana by a writ petition under Article 32 (5). The central government and the government of Haryana will immediately ensure that mine leasees and stone-crusher owners start supplying clean drinking water to workers on a scale of at least two litres for every worker, by keeping suitable vessels in a shaded place at conveniently accessible points. Such vessels shall be kept in a clean and hygienic condition and shall be emptied, cleaned and refilled every day. The appropriate authorities of the central government and the government of Haryana will strictly supervise the enforcement of this direction and initiate necessary action if there are any defaults. The central government and state government will ensure that conservancy facilities in the form of latrines and urinals, in accordance with the provisions contained in Section 20 of the Mines Act, 1950 and Rules 33 to 36 of the Mines Rules, 1955 are provided. The central government and state government will take steps to immediately ensure that appropriate and adequate medical and first-aid facilities, as required by Section 21 of the Mines Act, 1952 and Rules 40 to 45-A of the Mines Rules, 1955 are provided to workers. The central government and government of Haryana will ensure that every worker who is required to carry out blasting with explosives is not only trained under the Mines Vocational Training Rules, 1966 but also holds first-aid qualification and carries a first-aid outfit whilst on duty, as required by Rule 45 of the Mines Rules, 1955. The central government and the state government will immediately take steps to ensure that proper and adequate medical treatment is provided by the mine leasees and owners of the stone-crushers to workers employed by them as also to members of their families, free of cost, and such medical assistance shall be made available to them without any cost of transportation or otherwise, and the doctor's fees as also the cost of medicines prescribed by the doctors, including hospitalisation charges, if any, shall also be reimbursed to them. The central government and state government will ensure that the provisions of the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, the Maternity Benefit (Mines and Circus) Rules, 1963 and the Mines Creche Rules, 1966, where applicable in any particular stone quarry or stone-crusher unit, are given effect to by the mine leasees and stone-crusher owners. As soon as a worker employed in a stone quarry or stone-crusher unit receives an injury or contracts a disease in the course of his employment, the concerned mine leasee or stone-crusher unit owner shall immediately report this fact to the chief inspector or inspecting officers of the central government and/or the state government, and such inspecting officers shall immediately provide legal assistance to the worker with a view to enabling him to file a claim for compensation before the appropriate court or authority. They shall also ensure that such claims are pursued vigorously and the amount of compensation awarded to the worker is secured by him. Inspecting officers of the central government, as also of the state government, will visit every stone quarry and stone-crusher unit at least once a fortnight and ascertain whether any worker has been injured or is suffering from a disease or illness. If so, they will immediately take all necessary steps to provide medical and legal assistance. If the central government and government of Haryana fail to meet any of the obligations set out in Clauses 11, 13, 14 and 15 by the mine leasees and stone-crusher owners within the period specified in those respective clauses, such obligation or obligations to the extent to which they are not performed shall be carried out by the central government and the government of Haryana. In the case of Mangesh Salodkar vs Monsanto Chemicals of India Ltd (Writ Petition No 2820 of 2003, decided by the Bombay High Court on July 13, 2006), the issue concerned conditions of work at plants run by Monsanto Ltd. The company manufactures pesticides and it was alleged that a particular worker had suffered a brain haemorrhage because of the work environment. He survived but suffered major after-effects. He was paid Rs 3 lakh by the company towards medical expenses, but he filed a petition in the high court. The court initially appointed a commission headed by a retired judge of the high court. The commission, in turn, summoned documents from the factory inspectorate and asked certain experts to go into the conditions of work at the factory. A medical examination was also carried out on some of the other workers. During the pendency of the matter, the dispute between the workers and the employer was resolved as the employer agreed to pay an additional Rs 17.80 lakh to the concerned employee and Rs 7.40 lakh to other employees who had been affected. The commission accordingly filed a report with the high court. Since the dispute between employer and employees had been resolved, the court was not called upon to determine that aspect. However, it did go into other aspects concerning the right of employees to a safe workplace, etc. As this case demonstrates, the absence of updated medical records results in a virtual denial of access to justice. In the absence of information, factory workers and all those who espouse the cause of workers cannot realistically attempt to redress the systemic failure on the part of the regulated industry to maintain regulatory standards. (vi) In respect of factories involved in hazardous processes, safety and occupational health surveys as required by Section 91 A should invariably be carried out at the time of renewal of licences, apart from other times. The right to a safe working environment has been recognised for nearly 80 years, although over the years it has expanded to include newer areas. In the beginning it was only recognition in principle. This was followed by the recognition that if a worker suffers an injury in the workplace, the employer is liable for compensation. Subsequently, this was expanded to occupational diseases too. Over time, the modalities and procedures required to fulfil this right have been recognised, including regular medical examinations, handing over medical reports to workers, frequent inspections of work premises. Apart from health, certain healthcare aspects too have been recognised. These include provisions under the ESI Act for free medical treatment to registered employees, and, under the Factories Act, for regular check-ups, first-aid kits and, in certain circumstances, ambulance rooms and vans. On paper these laws appear very effective. Even otherwise, to a limited extent and for the organised workforce, they do provide a certain security: government employees have a number of schemes and provisions relating to medical benefits and healthcare. But by and large they have not been effective in dealing with the unorganised sector. To begin with, these laws do not apply to small-scale industries. Also, their implementation in many establishments to which they apply is difficult. For instance, if an employer has not deducted or deposited his ESI contribution, the employee is not entitled to avail of the benefits. Similarly, many occupational diseases are not covered by the Act and sometimes it is difficult to prove in court that a disease has occurred because of employment at a particular workplace. The court's role, especially in recent times, has also not been very commendable. For instance, in 2006, the Supreme Court held, in Central Mine Planning and Design Institute Ltd (2006 1 SCC 377), that a casual worker was not entitled to benefits under the Workmen's Compensation Act. In the case of Jyothi Adema (2006 5 SCC 513), a worker had a heart attack in the workplace and died. The Supreme Court, relying on the company doctor's certificate, held that since the job did not involve any stress or strain the worker was not entitled to compensation. In the case of Shakuntala Shreshti (2007 11 SCC 668) too a worker died of a heart attack in the workplace. The Supreme Court held that the onus was on the worker's heir to prove that the heart attack had been caused by the work. In many cases this would be extremely difficult! Therefore it can be said that whilst doing an excellent job passing broad directions (which most often are not implementable), the Supreme Court has been restricting the scope of various legislations when it deals with individual cases.

School refusal comes from emotional distress and anxiety that could be associated with a variety of issues either in your own home, school or both. Research conducted recently reveals that one in five British children experience fear or school refusal that has proven to become more widespread in children’s age ranges aged five to six and 10 – 11 years. The study also says many parents were unaware of the circumstances and individuals who have been conscious of it, possessed a major insufficient information. From the behavioural perspective, the signs and symptoms appear as: tantrums, threats of self harm, crying or angry outbursts. These signs and symptoms will probably subside when the child feels safe and sound, generally in your home atmosphere and/or once they have been permitted to stay home. School refusal might be triggered by a few reasons, children of all ages might be refusing to visit school for anxiety about losing their last remaining parent (or primary care giver). Their parents might have separated or they could be a bereaved child and also the anxiety about much more loss, keeps them both at home and inside a ‘protective role’ with stress and anxiety. In addition to anxiety, other linked to stress situations in your own home, school or with peers can also be a trigger for college refusal. From your emotional perspective, signs and symptoms of faculty refusal include anxiety attacks, fearfulness, depression and occurs with genders. Certainly one of my sons were built with a change of primary schools and also the new primary school he gone to live in would be a trigger for his school refusal from the very first day of faculty. He was obviously emotionally distressed by visiting that college, was crying and wouldn’t get outfitted every morning. He stated the school was too large, that we did not understand but his deep reaction and distress to attending that college was ample that i can take heed. Inside a week he’d moved all over again to a different primary school and it was obviously more happy, better with smiles over-all, which introduced concerning the quick finish to his short-resided school refusal. School refusal and a variety of other behaviours from kids and youthful people is just a kind of communication that something is wrong. This implies school staff and fogeys to appear more carefully at what’s not stated. What’s their conduct suggesting? There’s always grounds for children’s conduct which is invaluable bit of communication for adults. How Will You Help Kids With School Refusal Conduct? Doctors, Parents, Educators, along with other professionals all can help in supporting a young child or youthful person to school, individually or together. Identify if the conduct pertains to school refusal for reasons for example individuals above or if it requires truancy. The excellence backward and forward generally depends on the youngsters focus and/or curiosity about their assignment work once their anxiety or anxiety about school attendance and other associated signs and symptoms have subsided. That’s, how can they behave after they feel safe and sound in your own home? Will they concentrate on their assignment work or what is the total dis-interest and general negative attitude towards school? Another distinction may be the extent of the emotional distress associated with while attending college versus being indifferent about school attendance. Explore best possible options of moving the kid towards re-entering the college atmosphere as rapidly as you possibly can, yet inside a supportive manner. This might include making changes, where possible, to conditions in your own home which can be triggering the college refusal and engendering collaborative approach between parents, physician, school and mental medical expertOrcounselor. As a few of the presenting signs and symptoms are physical, you should involve physicians who might also cover the cost of referrals to relevant therapists. Studies have proven cognitive conduct therapy to become particularly advantageous and effective in assisting pupils to handle their mindsets, depression and coming back to college. Parental participation to enhance school attendance has additionally proven to become useful. Promote on-going parent-school communication, collaboration and joint support from the child. Positive reinforcements associated with school atmosphere and attendance. Have you got pupils who won’t attend school? Which of the aforementioned strategies works on their behalf? Which strategies have you ever yet to test or try out?

Cardiac arrest is an emergent condition in which the heart completely stops. The chances of survival are low, even with CPR. Over 200,000 people per year experience an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the United States. Survival rates are low, and even those who survive often have significant brain injury. Unfortunately there are no medicines available to treat this condition. Our prior work suggests that a simple vitamin (Vitamin B1, or thiamine) may help improve outcomes in these patients. Based on our work, the National Institutes of Health has funded a study to test whether thiamine decreases lactate (a chemical that increases in the blood when a patient is in shock from lack of blood flow or inability to process oxygen). We will also test whether thiamine improves the ability of patient’s cells to use oxygen normally, and other blood tests that are markers for brain and other organ injury. This is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. This means that when a patient starts the study neither the patient, family nor the research team will know if the patient is getting thiamine or a placebo (an inactive substance, in this case simple salt water). Who is eligible to be in this study? We will include adult patients who are brought to the hospital after a cardiac arrest requiring CPR. How is this study different from many research studies? Because of the importance of administering Vitamin B1 (Thiamine) as soon as possible after cardiac arrest in order to maximize the chance of finding a benefit, this study will be conducted under exception from informed consent (EFIC) in accordance with the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. EFIC is allowed only when testing possible treatments for life-threatening conditions for which there is no alternative proven treatment, when obtaining consent is not possible because the study treatment must be administered quickly and family or healthcare proxy is not reachable. When someone is reachable to provide consent, research staff will obtain consent prior to enrollment. For participants enrolled under EFIC, they or their representatives will be notified of enrollment as soon as possible and asked if they would like to continue participation, with the option to withdraw from the study at any time. All patients will receive standard post-cardiac arrest care per their clinical team, whether or not they enroll in the study. When research is done under EFIC, the study must conduct outreach to the surrounding community to inform them of the study, get feedback on the proposed study and EFIC, and provide a way for individuals to opt out of the study. Based on this response, the IRB has determined that we can move forward. We will continue to take feedback and questions from anyone in the community leading up to and during the trial. Opting out: Any member of the community has the right to opt out if they do not wish to be enrolled in the event that they suffer a cardiac arrest. In order to opt out, a person simply needs to contact our team at [email protected], or (617) 754-2885, and provide their name and date of birth. A bracelet indicating their wish to opt out of the BIDMC THACA trial will be provided either by being mailed to their home or picked up at the medical center, according to their preference. The study will include all adult out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) survivors admitted to a BIDMC ICU with a lactate above 3 mmol/L. Our overall hypothesis is that the administration of thiamine in post-arrest patients will mitigate lactate acidosis, improve cellular oxygen consumption, and improve clinical outcomes. Lactate change will serve as the primary endpoint for this study. Specific Aim 1: To determine whether thiamine attenuates lactic acidosis, improves cellular oxygen consumption, and increases pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) activity in post-arrest patients. Specific Aim 3: To determine whether intravenous thiamine improves clinical outcomes in post-arrest patients. Cardiac arrest is an emergent condition in which the heart completely stops and the chances of survival are low. Over 200,000 people per year experience an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the United States. Survival rates are low, and even those who survive often have significant brain injury. Unfortunately, despite the high mortality, there are no medicines available to treat this condition. Our prior work suggests that a simple vitamin (Vitamin B1, or thiamine) may help improve outcomes in these patients. Based on our work, the National Institutes of Health has approved funding for a clinical trial to test whether thiamine decreases lactate and improves other outcomes after cardiac arrest. Thiamine is a co-factor of PDH. Inadequate PDH function and/or thiamine deficiency limits pyruvate from entering the Krebs Cycle and results in lactic acidosis (anaerobic metabolism). We have shown that PDH is inhibited in post-cardiac arrest patients. Lactic acidosis is common, and failure to clear lactate is associated with worse outcome. While we anticipate the benefit of thiamine will be greater in cardiac arrest because of neuroprotection, we note that in a randomized trial in septic shock, thiamine decreased lactate over time compared to placebo and survival over time was improved for those with thiamine deficiency. Thiamine also improved survival and neurologic function in a mouse model of cardiac arrest. We hypothesize that the administration of thiamine in post-cardiac arrest patients will mitigate lactic acidosis, improve cellular oxygen consumption, and improve clinical outcome. This phase II prospective, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled single-center trial will investigate the effect of thiamine vs placebo on lactic acidosis and PDH in patients who achieve ROSC after OHCA. An attempt to consent a patient’s legally authorized representative will always be made by our study team. Clinical trials for cardiac arrest are very difficult to conduct since patients are too ill to be able to consent for themselves, and it is not always possible to reach family members immediately. To address this problem and allow for ongoing studies to potentially help individuals and communities, the FDA developed a mechanism to conduct research in these types of scenarios. This mechanism, termed “Exception From Informed Consent (EFIC)” allows the study to proceed if the investigators are unable to reach family members for consent. If no one can be reached for consent and a patient is enrolled, repeated attempts to contact family will be made. If the patient becomes able to consent or family is reached after enrollment, they have the option of withdrawing from the study at any time. EFIC requires not only approval from the BIDMC Institutional Review Board (IRB) as standard for all research studies but also requires input from the community through focus groups, surveys, and other community meetings. We have done this community outreach and received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Based on this response, the IRB has determined that we can move forward. The final phase of the process is public disclosure and this is currently being performed through both traditional media and social media outreach. We will continue to take feedback and questions from anyone in the community leading up to and during the trial. All patients will receive standard post-cardiac arrest care per their clinical team, whether or not they enroll in the study. After consent/enrollment, patients will have baseline labs drawn, and will be administered the study drug (placebo or 500mg thiamine) twice daily for 2 days. Blood sample collection: All patients will have blood samples collected at 0, 6, 12, 24, 72 and 168 hours, with testing as detailed below. Primary Outcome: The primary outcome will be the difference in lactate between the thiamine and placebo group. PDH activity: We will compare PDH quantity and activity between groups. Cellular metabolism measurements: we will compare quantitative, real-time, tissue specific cellular metabolism and mitochondrial function between groups, using the XFe96 instrument (Seahorse Biosciences). Measurements of neuron specific enolase (NSE) and S-100B: Serum NSE levels and plasma S100 levels (both markers of neurologic injury) will be compared between groups at various time points. Global VO2 measurements: VO2 will be measured using a General Electric VO2 monitor with gas exchange module, which will be connected to the ventilator tubing via a ventilator adapter with an attached gas sampling line. CPC-E score: The Cerebral Performance Category-Extended (CPC-E) score is a validated, clinically-feasible robust assessment of function and disability, providing more granular detail than the original CPC score. We hypothesize that the provision of beta blockade to tachycardic patients in vasopressor-dependent septic shock will lower the heart rate, thereby improving diastolic filling time and improving cardiac output, resulting in a reduction in need for vasopressor support. To test our hypothesis, we propose a Phase II randomized trial to determine if esmolol decreases vasopressor requirements (primary endpoint) and alters the inflammatory cascade as well as oxygen consumption in patients with septic shock. Given that the compelling finding of a 30% reduction in mortality was the result of a single center European study, we submit that a Phase II pilot study is needed in a U.S. critical care environment, to validate this concept, before a larger, multicenter U.S. trial could be justified. If we find that esmolol does allow for more rapid decrease of vasopressor need over time, without evidence of harm, we will have the necessary and sufficient data upon which to design a larger Phase III investigation aimed at addressing clinical patient-related outcomes. Specific Aim #1: To determine if continuous infusion of esmolol improves the hemodynamic profile in septic shock by decreasing the need for vasopressor support. Specific Aim #2: To characterize the effects of esmolol infusion on the pathophysiology of septic shock. Specific Aim #2a: To characterize the effects of esmolol infusion on total body oxygen consumption (VO2) in patients with vasopressor-dependent septic shock. Specific Aim #2b: To characterize the effects of esmolol on inflammatory markers in patients with vasopressor-dependent septic shock. Severe sepsis and septic shock are the cause of significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. An estimated 751,000 cases (3.0 per 1,000 population) of severe sepsis occur in the U.S. each year, resulting in approximately 215,000 deaths. Septic shock is characterized by cardiovascular dysfunction (most typically systemic arterial hypotension), a hypermetabolic state, and lactic acidosis, potentially leading to death. In addition, the economic burden on the health care system for patients suffering from severe sepsis is striking. Weycker et al. report that patients suffering from severe sepsis will require an average of $45,000 dollars of medical care cost on their index admission and up to $78,500 dollars in the first year post-diagnosis. These figures rival such entities as acute myocardial infarction, trauma, and stroke. Despite advances in critical care and increased awareness of the need for early identification and aggressive treatment of sepsis, morbidity and mortality for septic shock remains unacceptably high. The downstream cardiovascular effects of septic shock, beyond the shock period itself, are not trivial: myocardial depression, tachycardia-induced cardiomyopathy, and direct myocyte toxicity. Novel therapies for septic shock are continually being sought, with a long history of agents which have failed to improve outcomes for these patients, and in some cases, have actually conferred harm. Currently, there is no adjunctive therapy for the treatment of septic shock that has adequately demonstrated an ability to reduce morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, beyond the use of vasopressors and inotropes to support failing hemodynamics, there is currently no specific therapy targeted at the cardiovascular effects of septic shock. Identification of a therapy which could improve outcomes for patients with septic shock, specifically related to cardiovascular dysfunction, would be a major advancement in a field plagued by a history of therapeutic failures. While a recent single-center European trial has shown promise for the use of beta blockade in septic shock, further evaluation is necessary before widespread application of this therapy could be safely and responsibly advocated. However, there are reasonable existing data available to justify moving forward with this line of investigation. Prospective, randomized, double-blind, human clinical trial. Known allergy/sensitivity to esmolol or history of asthma/COPD that would preclude administration of a beta blocker medication; this would be determined by the clinical team caring for the patient so as to not create a conflict of interest. For example, a patient may have a history of COPD but is already on a beta blocker medication as an outpatient; that patient should not be excluded for consideration of enrollment in this trial. The randomization will be done in a 1:1 ratio between treatment and control groups in varying blocks of two to six using SAS software. This main list of group assignment will be maintained in the hospital research pharmacy. After randomization as described above, patients will be assigned to one of the following two arms: esmolol for 24 hours or standard care (no esmolol). The primary endpoint will be improvement in the hemodynamic profile as measured by a decrease in the need for norepinephrine support. This will be defined as the difference in norepinephrine dose between groups at 6 hours after onset of study drug. Hemodynamics: Heart rate and blood pressure will be measured hourly for all patients for the full study period. Cardiac index and stroke volume will be measured continuously with the use of the Non-invasive Cardiac Output Monitor (NICOM) (Cheetah Medical, Oregon, USA) which is a validated tool for hemodynamic measurements in the critically ill. Vasopressors: Vasopressor doses will be recorded hourly for the full study period. Additional measurements: At baseline we will collect pertinent variables such as demographics and past medical history. At baseline, 6, 12 and 24 hours after, trained research assistants will collect information on laboratory values and interventions performed by the clinical team (including but not limited to fluid administration, procedures, pharmacological intervention etc.), ventilator settings, results of cultures, etc. Patients will be followed to hospital discharge and time on mechanical ventilation, length of ICU stay, length of hospital stay and mortality will be recorded. SOFA scores will be calculated at all time points. In a subset of patients who are mechanically ventilated, we will also continuously measure oxygen consumption for these patients via continuous VO2 monitor connected to the ventilator circuit. The study includes all adults resuscitated successfully with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after an in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA), who have a lactate above 3 mmol/L and are on a mechanical ventilator after the arrest. Our overall hypothesis is that the administration of thiamine in post-arrest patients will increase global oxygen consumption and mitigate lactate acidosis. Change in oxygen consumption, as measured by a noninvasive monitor, is the primary outcome of this study. Specific Aim 1: To determine whether thiamine improves cellular oxygen consumption, attenuates lactic acidosis and increases private dehydrogenase (PDH) activity in post-arrest patients. Specific Aim 3: To determine whether intravenous thiamine improves clinical outcomes such as incidence of renal injury in post-arrest patients. In-hospital cardiac arrest is a major public health problem, afflicting over 200,000 persons in North America each year. Less than 50% of patients experiencing in-hospital cardiac arrest survive, and there is currently no medicinal intervention demonstrated to have a beneficial effect on post-arrest outcome. Thus, new therapies aimed at reducing the mortality and morbidity in post-cardiac arrest patients are essential. Low oxygen consumption is associated with worse outcomes in many critically ill states, and is thought to be due to dysfunction of aerobic metabolism. Pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) is a key gatekeeper to the Krebs Cycle, and thus aerobic metabolism, and thiamine is a co-factor of PDH. Inadequate PDH results in lactic acidosis (anaerobic metabolism) and an inability to metabolize oxygen effectively. We have shown that thiamine deficiency is common after cardiac arrest and that PDH is substantially inhibited in post-cardiac arrest patients, while lactic acidosis predominates – and failure to clear lactate is associated with worse outcome. In a randomized trial in septic shock, thiamine decreased lactate over time compared to placebo and survival over time was improved for those with thiamine deficiency. We hypothesize that the administration of thiamine in post-cardiac arrest patients will improve oxygen consumption and mitigate lactic acidosis. This phase II prospective, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled single-center trial will investigate the effect of thiamine vs placebo on oxygen consumption, lactate and PDH in patients who achieve return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) after IHCA. All patients will receive standard post-cardiac arrest care per their clinical team, whether or not they enroll in the study. Written informed consent will be obtained from the legally authorized representative. After consent and enrollment, the research assistant will inform the pharmacy of the enrollment and fax them a form with basic patient information and an indication of which lactate strata that the patient is in. After randomization and the initial blood draw, patients will be administered the study drug (placebo or 500mg thiamine) and will receive two daily dosages for 2 days. Blood sample collection: All patients will have blood samples collected at 0, 6, 12, 24 and 48 hours. Samples for lactate will be sent to on-site clinical laboratories for immediate analysis. Some blood will be analyzed using fresh samples. The remaining blood will be immediately centrifuged to separate serum and plasma. All samples will be aliquoted into light-protected cryotubes and will be frozen at -80ºC for future analysis. The 24-hour thiamine check will be used to verify correct randomization designation prior to data analysis. All blood will be drawn by ICU nursing from an existing line when present. In the unlikely event that a post-arrest patient does not have a central venous catheter or arterial line in place, trained research personnel (or the nurse) will perform a venipuncture for blood collection. Any surplus blood will be frozen and stored for future biomarker analysis that will include but not necessarily be limited to comparison of inflammatory biomarkers, metabolic biomarkers, and proteomic biomarkers. This blood analysis will not include genetic analyses. Global VO2 measurement: VO2 will be measured using a General Electric VO2 monitor with gas exchange module, which will be connected to the ventilator tubing via a ventilator adapter with an attached gas sampling line. The primary endpoint for this study is the difference in the change in VO2 over time between the thiamine and placebo groups. Lactate: We will check lactate at baseline, 6, 12, 24 and 48 hours, and compare the change in lactate over time between the two groups. PDH activity: We will measure PDH activity and quantity in PBMCs using a customized PDH activity and quantity microplate assay as previously described by our group. Thiamine Measurements: Thiamine levels will be checked at 0 and 24 hours to allow for a subgroup analysis of the thiamine deficient patients, and to ensure that thiamine levels rise as expected in the thiamine group. CPC-E score: The Cerebral Performance Category-Extended (CPC-E) score is a validated, clinically-feasible robust assessment of function and disability, providing more granular detail than the original CPC score. This will be done on each patient to assess for functional disability prior to hospital discharge. Description: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of ascorbic acid, hydrocortisone, and thiamine to improve outcomes in septic shock. Our overall hypothesis is that the administration of ascorbic acid, hydrocortisone, and thiamine in septic shock patients will mitigate organ injury through improvement in free radical reduction, immune function, endothelial integrity, and mitochondrial energy production. Specific Aim – To determine whether the combination of thiamine/ascorbic acid/hydrocortisone administered to patients with shock septic mitigates organ dyfunction as compared to placebo. Septic shock is a common and highly morbid condition affecting over 200,000 patients in the United States each year and resulting in upwards of 40,000 deaths. In-hospital mortality for patients admitted with septic shock has been has been estimated to be as high as 40%. While there is presently no recommended pharmacologic therapy specifically targeted at attenuating organ injury in septic shock, recent observational studies have found promising results using the combination of ascorbic acid (vitamin C), corticosteroids, and thiamine (vitamin B1). This medication combination has gained traction in the lay-media and is already being used by some hospitals to treat patients with sepsis and septic shock. Prospective testing in a randomized controlled trial, however, is needed prior to the widespread implementation of this therapy for victims of septic shock. This prospective, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled multi-center trial will investigate the effect of ascorbic acid, hydrocortisone, and thiamine vs placebo on organ function in patients with septic shock. We will also evaluate other outcomes including mortality. Receiving vasopressor support (norepinephrine, phenylephrine, epinephrine, dopamine, or vasopressin)*Sepsis/Infection should be the suspected precipitant of hypotension requiring vasopressor support. All patients will receive standard septic shock care per their clinical team, whether or not they enroll in the study. After consent/enrollment, patients will have baseline labs drawn, and will be administered the study drug or placebo four times daily for four days (or until they leave the ICU). Blood and Urine sample collection: All patients will have blood samples collected at 0, 24, 72, and 120 hours, with testing as detailed below. Primary Outcome: The primary outcome will be the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score. The SOFA score is a measure of organ dysfunction. The overall aim of this study is to determine whether the continuous use of neuromuscular blockade (NMB) can improve lactate clearance and clinical outcomes in comatose patients following in-hospital and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). Aim #1: Determine whether 24 hours of continuous use of NMB will attenuate 24 hour lactate levels in post-OHCA patients. Aim #2: Determine whether 24 hours of continuous use of NMB will improve clinical outcomes (length of stay, neurological outcome and in-hospital survival) in post-OHCA patients. Aim #3: Determine the effect 24 hours of continuous use of NMB has on global and cellular oxygen consumption as well as hemodynamics parameters. Aim #4: Determine the effect 24 hours of continuous use of NMB has on markers of systemic inflammation. Cardiac Arrest (CA) is a devastating disease process with high mortality and neurological morbidity. Unfortunately, we currently have little to offer other than supportive care. Specific to this proposal, the use of neuromuscular blockade (NMB) remains controversial and additional data is desperately needed to inform practice. The current study will provide necessary preliminary data for a larger phase III trial aimed at reducing mortality in post-CA patients. This intervention is already used in clinical practice and therefore the findings will be highly translatable and could easily be incorporated into clinical practice. Recently Nielsen et al. evaluated patients cooled to 33 °C vs. 36 °C and found no difference in survival or neurological outcome. This contradicted findings from two widely implemented 2002 trials showing an improvement in outcome in OCHA patients treated with 32-34 °C. The use of NMB was minimized in both arms of the Nielsen et al. study, (verbal communication with author) while NMB was used as boluses or infusions in both of the 2002 trials that found a benefit from therapeutic hypothermia TH. Thus, differences in NMB use in the treatment compared to control arms may have contributed to overall outcome differences. Newer studies provide evidence for a benefit of NMB, which will be clarified further by the current trial. Papazian et al. recently published a trial in which they randomized heavily sedated patients with early severe Acute Respiratory Disease Syndrome (ARDS) to cisatracurium vs. placebo for 48 hrs. The cisatracurium group had improved adjusted survival (41% vs. 32%) and more ventilator-free days (p < 0.05) without an increase in intensive care unit (ICU)-acquired myopathy. Alhazzani et al. conducted a meta-analysis of three trials using cisatracurium early in ARDS, and found an overall mortality benefit and no increase in ICU-acquired myopathy. Furthermore, the use of NMB has been associated with a decrease in pulmonary and systemic inflammation. In severe sepsis, Steingrub et al. found that administration of NMB was associated with lower hospital mortality in a retrospective cohort study of 7,864 patients on mechanical ventilation where 1,818 (23%) were treated with NMB. Based on this emerging evidence as well as our preliminary data we hypothesize that NMB will be beneficial in post-CA patients. Prospective, randomized, human clinical trial. 1) NMB for 24 hours: Patients in this arm of the study will have NMB for 24 hours utilizing rocuronium as described below. At present clinicians at BIDMC arbitrarily sometimes use NMB and other times do not. Thus, the provision of NMB does not fall outside of current practice. 2) “Usual Care”: Patients will receive 100 mL of normal saline over 5-10 minutes at the beginning of the study in addition to usual care. When patients are enrolled in a clinical trial there is a time period from consent to study drug administration that depends on the investigative team, the research pharmacy, and the available nursing staff. In order to guarantee that this time interval is similar between the two groups the control arm will receive a small bolus of saline at the beginning of the trial. This will ensure that “time zero” is similar between the two groups which is essential in a trial evaluating a metabolic marker (lactate) that may change rapidly. Patients in this arm of the study will not be mandated to have NMB and the choice of whether to utilize will be per usual care. The decision for a “usual care” arm as opposed to mandated lack of NMB is for patient safety reasons. We do not wish to have a clinical scenario arise in which a patient should receive NMB but cannot because of being entered into this study. Therefore, while we anticipate the majority of patients in this arm will not have NMB, we recognize that some conditions may require NMB and they will receive them. Research blood will be used in the isolation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from blood: Plasma will be separated by centrifugation at 800g for 15min at 4°C and saved without disturbing the buffy coat. Then plasma will be replaced with the same volume of phosphate buffered saline (PBS). The cell pellets will then be mixed by gently pipetting up and down several times to disperse the cells. Next, PBMCs will be isolated from the PBS substitute blood samples using density gradient, Ficoll-Paque premium (GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences Corp). The isolated PBMCs will be used in the cellular metabolism and mitochondrial function analysis. Using the XF24 Extracellular Flux Analyzer (Seahorse Bioscience) we will simultaneously measure the oxygen consumption rate (an indicator of mitochondrial respiration), and the extracellular acidification rate (an indicator of the lactate produced e.g. anaerobic metabolism). First, PBMCs will be re-suspended in Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium and seeded in a 24-well assay plate pre-coated with CellTak (BD Biosciences) and incubated at 37°C for 30 min to allow cells to attach to the bottom of the plate. Then the wells will be washed and 675uL of fresh XF assay buffer will be added to each well. The plate will be incubated at 37°C without Carbon Dioxide (CO2) for 1 hour prior to assay start. VO2 (volume oxygen or oxygen consumption) monitoring: VO2 will be measured using the General Electric Compact Anesthesia monitor with gas exchange module, which will be connected to the ventilator tubing via a ventilator adapter with an attached gas sampling line. This device measures VO2 continuously on a breath-by-breath basis, using an incorporated pneumotachograph to measure the volume of gas being exchanged and a paramagnetic analyzer to detect differences in inspired and expired oxygen. The patient’s ventilator settings with not be changed by our team, and a respiratory therapist will be present to connect and disconnect the monitor from the ventilator for the research physician or research assistant. Measurements will be carried out in the ICU where the patient is located. We will also measure cardiac output through the Cheetah Reliant Bioreactance-based non-invasive cardiac output monitor. Neurological outcome: We will use the modified Rankin scale to assess neurological outcome at discharge as recommended per recent American Heart Association (AHA) outcome guidelines. This is a validated scale, ranging from 0 to 6, commonly used in CA. Good and bad neurological outcome will be defined as a score of 0-3 and 4-6. Cardiac arrest (CA) occurs in more than 400,000 patients in the United States each year with an estimated mortality of greater than 90%. The majority of patients who are resuscitated from CA will succumb to the neurologic morbidity associated with the post-CA syndrome and ischemic-reperfusion injury. Currently, there are no pharmacologic agents known to offer survival benefit or to prevent devastating neurologic injury in post-CA patients. A potential therapeutic target following ischemia-reperfusion injury is mitochondrial function in the injured cell and/or reduction of oxygen free radicals. Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is an essential mitochondrial co-factor and free radical scavenger that has been proposed as a neuroprotective agent in various neurodegenerative disorders as well as a cardioprotective agent. CoQ10 have furthermore shown exciting preliminary results as a potential therapy in post-CA. Prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II human clinical trial. Patients will be administered the study drug (placebo or 300 mg ubiquinol) and will receive two daily doses for one (1) week, the remainder of the in-hospital course, or until the patient has a normal neurologic examination. Neurological status will be assessed using the CPC-E score by the Principal Investigator and may be performed at any time prior to hospital discharge. Normal neurological examination is defined by a perfect CPC-E score of 30. The placebo will be pure Ensure (food/dietary supplement commonly provided to critically ill patients) and the ubiquinol will be mixed with Ensure for delivery and to allow for matching groups. The primary outcome will be blood CoQ10 parameters (total CoQ10, reduced CoQ10 and CoQ10 /cholesterol). Secondary outcomes will include biomarker measurements including but not limited to: cytokines, vascular endothelial markers, markers of neurological injury (NSE, S100B), oxygen consumption rates, and metabolomics markers. We will measure oxygen consumption and utilize in vitro inhibitors and stimulators of metabolism to further characterize samples including additional ubiquinol for the placebo arm samples. All patients enrolled in the study will have blood drawn at time 0 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, and 72 hours. We will measure lactate at each time point through the clinical lab. In addition, blood samples will be analyzed for CoQ10 parameters either locally or by sending to an outside commercial lab likely the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (Cincinnati, Ohio, USA) using high-performance liquid chromatography. TRPPS: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of thiamine to improve renal outcomes in septic shock. Our overall hypothesis is that the administration of thiamine in septic shock patients will mitigate renal injury through improvement in mitochondrial energy production. Specific Aim #1 – To determine whether thiamine administered to patients with shock septic mitigates renal injury as compared to placebo. Specific Aim #2 – To evaluate the effect of thiamine on mitochondrial respiration during septic shock and to evaluate the relationship between mitochondrial respiration and biomarkers of renal injury. Septic shock is a common and highly morbid syndrome that affects over 200,000 patients in the United States annually and results in over 40,000 deaths. Renal failure is a frequent sequela of septic shock that is associated with notably worse outcomes. Thiamine (vitamin B1) is a critical component of aerobic respiration that may attenuate renal injury during septic shock. In a randomized trial, our research group has previously shown that thiamine deficiency is common in septic shock (35% of patients) and that the administration of thiamine to thiamine deficient patients with septic shock leads to reduced lactate at 24-hours. In a post-hoc analysis of that study, we have demonstrated that patients (both thiamine replete and thiamine deficient) who received thiamine had lower creatinine levels and were less likely to require renal replacement therapy. Thiamine, a key cofactor of pyruvate dehydrogenase, is a critical component of mitochondrial respiration without which a shift towards anaerobic energy production occurs. Thiamine is also a necessary component of the pentose phosphate pathway, which plays a role in reducing oxidative stress. Given the above, we hypothesize that the administration of thiamine to patients with septic shock will mitigate renal injury through resuscitation of mitochondrial function. This phase II prospective, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled single-center trial will investigate the effect of thiamine vs placebo on renal function in patients with septic shock. All patients will receive standard septic shock care per their clinical team, whether or not they enroll in the study. After consent/enrollment, patients will have baseline labs drawn, and will be administered the study drug (placebo or 200mg thiamine) twice daily for 3 days. Blood sample collection: All patients will have blood samples collected at 0, 24, 48, and 72 hours, with testing as detailed below. Primary Outcome: The primary outcome will be the difference in creatinine (a marker of renal function) between the thiamine and placebo group. To study if vitamin B1 (thiamine) is able to more rapidly reverse diabetic ketoacidosis. Diabetic Ketoacidosis (DKA) is a potentially life-threatening disorder that may also expose patients to overt or sub-clinical morbidity. Even with optimal preventative strategies, a subset of patients will inevitably continue to develop DKA. Thiamine is an essential co-factor for several key enzymes of metabolism including pyruvate dehydrogenase (gatekeeper for Krebs Cycle). Thiamine deficiency is well known to result in lactic acidosis secondary to impaired aerobic metabolism and is a causal component of neurological and memory disorders, specifically the Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome. Moreover, glucose loading has been described as a precipitant of thiamine deficiency and we have demonstrated that metabolic stress can deplete thiamine levels over time. We hypothesize that the provision of intravenous thiamine to patients with DKA will serve as adjunctive measure to more rapidly reverse acidosis and will improve cellular oxygen consumption. Patients will be administered the study drug intravenously (placebo or 200 mg thiamine in normal saline) and will receive a dose every 12 hours for two days. The primary outcome is the change in bicarbonate over the 24 hours following enrollment. Secondary outcomes will include change in anion gap, change in lactate, ICU length of stay, hospital length of stay, and hospital resource utilization. Additionally, measurement of oxygen consumption in circulating mononuclear cells will be obtained as an index of whole body oxidative glucose metabolism. All patients enrolled in the study will have blood drawn at time 0 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 18 hours and 24 hours. We will measure bicarbonate at each time point through the clinical lab. In addition, blood samples will be analyzed for lactate, anion gap, albumin, and thiamine level. Overview: The purpose of this study is to see if mind-body approaches will help to reduce pain and suffering in people with chronic back pain. Mind-body approaches are behavioral treatments focused on breaking the pain-generating cycle between the mind and body. We are doing this study because people with chronic pain often continue to suffer after traditional interventions such as medications, surgery, and/or physical therapy. Other researchers have tried various approaches to teach those suffering from chronic pain how to break this vicious connection between the mind and body, with varying degrees of success. We intend to see if new approaches using a mind-body intervention will improve pain symptoms particularly when other therapies have not worked.

Division is the fourth mathematical operation to separate between two or more groups. Division is written using cross symbol ÷ between two or more numbers; 50 ÷ 25 = 2, 500 ÷ 250 = 2, 1000 ÷ 100 = 10. Students can generate 41 to 50 Division TimeTables chart and worksheet for learning and practice basic math timetables. This page is full of Division time tables worksheets from 1 to 100 times table that are suitable for all students.Click on below Icons to see other Division tables.

5 effective Astrological Remedies for foreign settlement. Since the dawn of 21st century, we are in the world of globalization. Boundaries hardly matter between counties and there is an easy movement of people and their services. Our country, India too benefited from this move. Over the last 2 decades, many Indians have moved aboard with the boom of the Information Technology sector. They move to a foreign country and then permanently settle abroad. Hence today, we see many CEO and VP’s of Indian origin heading large organizations, abroad. Some of them have even started their own business and leading a luxurious life. Therefore, the reason for better living or aspiring a better career, they would move to settle abroad. Also, with the advancement of global education system, people have been pursuing education in a foreign country of their choice and then even settling down in that country. By this they even attain citizenship over a period of time. They earn through various means in a foreign land and financially progress. We have come across many such examples. In the olden days, any one leaving his home country was considered taboo. There was a social stigma which would hang around. However, in the today’s world, the social status of a native is also analysed through his ability to travel abroad or even settle. With the eagerness to see how life is in a foreign country and how one would experience life, abroad is very much fascinating. Therefore, the urge is ever increasing and today many aspire to settle abroad. Astrology, as a Vedic science has been helping mankind with various methods to analyse their future and decide accordingly. Some native consults an astrologer on several issues, including on the possibility of traveling and settling abroad. They consult an astrologer on the various combination in a native’s horoscope/ Kundli which would indicate whether one would travel abroad or no? Thankfully, our Vedic studies of astrology has answers to such a query. In the study of astrology, the planets: Rahu, Ketu and Saturn are given the importance to check if one would travel abroad and settle. Along with them, the house of bhava of 3rd, 9th and 12th is studied in detail to analyse the possibilities to travel abroad. The placement of Rau, Ketu and Saturn in a native’s chart is connected to the above houses, then one is certain to travel or even settle abroad. For this, one would need the help of an expert astrologer. Since, this would need greater study to analyse the various combination and possibilities. If there is any connect of the planets and houses mentioned above, then one is certain to travel abroad. There is another method in Vedic astrology, using Sarvashtak table. In this, the total points scored in the 3rd, 9th and 12th house is analysed. If the exceed, 28 points, then there is a good chance to travel abroad or settle abroad. In case if the native enjoys the possibility of travelling abroad with the above-mentioned combinations, then there are remedies which can expedite the matters for them. Following are some of them mentioned below. Rahu or Shani Stotra: In case if a native has a strong connection of Rahu or Saturn or both with the houses of 3rd, 9th and 12th house, then one can chant Rahu or Shani Stotra to please them. This will help to expedite the matter and they can easily travel abroad at the right time. Gemstone: Every planet in the Vedic astrology represents a gemstone. These gemstones are designed in such a way that they capture the Sun light from the sky and would transmit on the body of the native wearing the same. This is a very powerful way to keep the planet a the native in sync and reap all the necessary benefit in one’s native. Thus, if Rahu, Ketu or Saturn has any influence in a native’s horoscope to travel abroad, then the following gem can be considered to enhance their strength. Gomad or Hessonite stone for Rahu, Cat- eyes for Ketu and Blue Sapphire for Saturn. These stone will help the native to travel abroad easily. Help any poor: A native desiring to travel abroad can plan to help the poor. One can distribute a full coconut or Urad daal on Saturday’s to the poor and needy. This will please lord Saturn, Rahu and Ketu to uplift ones deeds and help them to satiate their desires. Offering Pooja to lord Shiva and Ganesha: In Hindu mythology, lord Shiva is given special importance. Since, he is considered to the father of universe, Hindu’s do not start any pooja or offerings to lord Shiva or to his decedents. Since, the deity of Rahu is lord Shiva and Deity of Ketu is lord Ganesha, one has to offer pooja to them to seek their blessings. Again, since Lord Saturn is an ardent devote of lord Shiva and has promised not to disturb those who worship lord Ganesha, whole heartedly, this is a very important method of seek the blessings of lord Saturn. Hence, offering your worship to lord Shiva and Ganesha, will automatically please lord Saturn. Wearing Rudraksha:Rudraksha mala has a very significant importance in Hindu dharma. These are a special seed which is from a plant grown around the Himalayas and contain a vibrant energy. It is believed that a Rudraksha is the water drops from the eyes of lord Shiva. Rudra-Aksha is a conjunction of two words joint as one i.e Rudra means, Lord Shiva and aksha in Sanskrit means Eyes. This is mainly recommended for any one suffer from any ailment and unable to recover from the same. Therefore, one can easily seek the blessings of lord Saturn and Rahu by wearing Rudraksha mala.

The genus ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma’ comprises wall-less bacteria colonizing the phloem of plants and insect tissues. Phytoplasmas are associated with diseases in over 1000 plant species worldwide, including many important crops as well as forest trees. Alder yellows (AldY) phytoplasma, which frequently infects Alnus spp., is closely related to the economically important phytoplasma causing Flavescence doréee (FD) in grapevines. In a natural habitat (Spreewald, Brandenburg, Germany), 57 Alnus glutinosa (black alder) trees were examined for phytoplasma infection in summer 2013. No phytoplasma typical infection-associated symptoms such as yellowing and decline were observable in this natural swamp-alder area. Amplification followed by a restriction fragment length polymorphism, and a sequence analysis of the 16S rDNA, allowed for the detection of AldY phytoplasmas in all examined trees and their assignment to the taxonomic group 16SrV-C. Additional analyses of the non-ribosomal marker gene methionine aminopeptidase (map) revealed diverse strains as well as mixed infections with closely related AldY strains, and the strains were assigned to phylogenetic clusters closely related to German Palatinate grapevine yellows, AldY or FD strains. The results confirmed that AldY phytoplasmas infection in A. glutinosa is prevalent. The results also indicate a presence of an established phytoplasma population in chronically infected black alder.

Provides antioxidants for the maintenance of good health. Helps to maintain eyesight in conditions associated with sunlight damage such as cataracts and age-related macular degeneration. Lutein, also known as the “eye protective nutrient”, is a carotenoid (antioxidant) found in dark green leafy vegetables like spinach, kale and broccoli. This nutrient has been found helpful in the treatment and prevention of cataracts and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in older adults. As some find it challenging to obtain sufficient lutein through diet, supplements can be beneficial – but not all are created equal. Insist on FloraGLO® Lutein, recognized by nutritional supplement companies worldwide as a quality product that will maintain its stability and potency. Extracted from marigold flower petals, FloraGLO® Lutein has a unique and innovative purification process that has earned it patent protection in the United States, Canada and other countries. It is used in more clinical trials than any other lutein. The Alive Lutein Eye Formula also contains blueberry and bilberry, both of which contain antioxidant compounds. In addition, bilberry improves blood flow to the retina. Lutein promotes clear vision in several ways. It absorbs the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays and also blue light. In addition, lutein neutralizes free radicals in the retina which is the light-sensitive part of the eye. In the centre of the retina, directly behind the lens, is the macula. The cells in this area help produce the clarity of vision needed to read and see objects. A key measurement of eye health is the density of macular pigment because macular pigment protects the retina. Lutein and its co-existing molecule zeaxanthin (found in FloraGLO® Lutein) are the main antioxidant pigments and the only carotenoids found in the macula and lens. Lutein fights against free radicals and is also believed to absorb blue light as it penetrates skin layers. In studies, lutein has been shown to increase skin hydration and elasticity and to decrease skin lipid peroxidation. Lipids are oily components in the skin that provide a barrier inhibiting loss of moisture from the skin. Does not contain: citrus, corn, dairy, eggs, fish, gluten, lactose, shellfish, soy, wheat, yeast or pork.

A simple definition of honor is integrity, respect, dignity. A person who has honor has integrity, that is, doing the right thing even if no one is looking. A person who has honor treats others with respect; that is, manners and kindness. A person with honor has dignity and I believe this is the hardest part of honor to define. Dignity is defined as being formal, being worthy of honor, or title. The word honor is used in many different ways. The Bible commands its followers to “honor thy father and mother.” Meaning to show respect and to obey. If you honor someone you uphold them in high esteem. You value their opinion and deem them worthy of giving good council. In law, we refer to our judges as “honorable.” That is a person of high moral character. Some people claim to “defend their honor.” But I believe these people misunderstand the word honor. What they mean is ego, or pride. They have been insulted and feel the need for retaliation. This is not honor, this is ego or pride. A person with honor would ignore the insult, seek no retaliation, and be civil to the offender. That person would have integrity, respect, and dignity- in other words, honor. It is important that am ATA person have honor. Honor as in integrity- following the rules and traditions of the ATA. Honor as in respect- treating juniors and seniors with respect. Finally, honor as in dignity- we should strive to be worthy of the title of Master, a person of high moral character. If we, as Masters- or leaders of the organization strive to live with honor, it will pass down from the leaders to the students which is what Eternal Grand Master dreamed of.

A discussion on addictive drugs and issues thereof with friends delved into identifying various drugs. From cannabis to Heroine to marijuana to meth. I found it difficult to differentiate between various drugs. I have put together a quick Drug 101 tutorial after a bit of research. Heroine: Synthesized from from latex of the plant. White crystalline compound. Snorted or injected. Charas/Hashish: Resin from flower/leaves of female plant. Run on hands and Collect the resin stuck to hand. Resin cake. Smoked with tobacco. Also prepared by sieving leaves/flowers into silk cloth and then baking. Cocaine/Coke: Chemically synthesized From leaves of Coca plant. Powder is Snorted, injected into veins. Meth: Man made chemical. Not from plants like other 3. Methamphetamine. Manufactured in illegal laboratories called meth labs. White crystalline. Snorted, Smoked, Injected. Smack: Another name of Heroine Marijunana/Pot: Dried flowers, leaves, stem of both female plant. Smoked and used in brownies. Crack: Form of cocaine. Cooking Cocaine with baking powder. Becomes cheaper in cost. Weed: Slang for Marijuana/Cannabis/or Ganja. Both, worlds’ oldest and biggest democracies are gripped with discussion around Freedom of Speech (FoS). From JNU to Chicago, people have been made to sit up and take sides. Right wing is always blamed for rhetoric of dividing the society. Liberals and Lefts are the ones insinuating. But I see some issue here. If liberals and lefts preach FoS they should honor the FoS of Right wing too. What we are seeing now and over the years, Left Liberals trying to Trample FoS of whoever disagrees with them. When Baba Ramdev is invited, JNU people scuttled his FoS. He is not allowed to speak. When Trump does a rally, protestors disguise themselves among his supporters and disrupt the proceedings, provoke supporters. Both sides have their right. JNU should have let Ramdev speak; same for Chicago protestors. They could have shown black flags and symbolically protested outside the venues. I don’t have any issues with protests as such. I advocate FoS. But I don’t like to see other people’s FoS stifled under the garb of defending own FoS. Moreover I despise people trying to take moral high ground and being felicitated for it. AAP did it by giving ticket to the guy who threw shoe at Chidambaram. Liberal media did it by giving ample airtime to person who tried to attack Trump in one of his rally. If Kejriwal or Clinton was attacked the same way, Left Liberals would have raised a lot of hue and cry. Let’s be consistent is all I ask. Just for the sake of argument. A lot of times we feel that we are losing an argument. That the other side is winning. It can happen due to number of reasons. The other party may have better points to put forward. We might be lacking the depth on the issue and not able to give supporting literature. What to do in such a situation? Some people would concede and back off, lose the argument. What if we don’t want to? Well, if it does not seem possible to win, best is not let the other side win. This may not be an outright win for you, but if you puncture holes in opposite argument, you have pretty much nailed it. I remember a scene from movie, where a lobbyist father (whose whole livelihood depend on gift of the gab), explains to his son. He said, it’s not important that you are right, to win an argument. You just have to prove the other person wrong. He went ahead giving an example. If you say Chocolate ice-cream is better and your friend says Vanilla is better. There is no clear way to win the argument. You can attack the other side of being a racist for not liking dark colored chocolate. By proving him bad, you become right. I agree it might not look an honorable approach. But since not being politically correct is in vogue these days, this might just pass through. Attack the person if not the argument. And believe me you will win every single time. If such a win satisfies you, that is. The Fat Cherry: I don’t have a reservation in train. What should I do? The Constant: Don’t worry; you can still board the train. Pay something. The Protégé: Take a bike ride. The Constant: My leather shoes are good. The Fat Cherry: Are you sure they are leather. The Protégé: Hush Puppies are leather. These are not Hush Puppies. The Protégé: Ola has started cheaper ride. The Constant: Why don’t you buy a car? The Fat Cherry: You can give me a ride then. The Dreamer: It’s hot. Did you turn off AC? The Protégé: I don’t feel hot. The Fat Cherry: Someone get it on. The point that I want to address today is Freedom of Expression in India. Under the raging debate lately, this expression has been mixed with Freedom to Hate Speech. People wanting right to hate speech put forward the argument that it is a non violent protest and they have every right to do it. I agree with argument but it not in sync with the stage which it is set in. Let me explain. Is hate speech non-violent? Yes. Is hate speech allowed in other democracies? Yes. In developed countries it is much worse. So why the issue in India? The issue is, India is not yet ready for this. “Not ready in what sense”, would be the next question. Well in the sense of law enforcement. We are a country still way back in policing and enforcement of the law. Security personnel to population ratio is way too low. Arrest rates, Conviction rates are very less. We as a country are working towards betterment but when compared with developed countries, we have a long way to go. What happens is, due to shortcomings in law enforcement, people feel free to take matters in their own hands which leads to mob justice and mob violence. It cannot be justified and neither am I trying to do that. But we have accept the sad reality. Thus for the age our country is in, Hate Speech can’t be clubbed with Freedom of Speech. It has and it would lead to friction among groups and eventual violence. Onus is on all of us to keep the fragile peace going. As the law enforcement, conviction rates and fear of law improves, Freedom of Speech automatically will expand to allow Hate Speech. Just because we are born in globalized age, we should not forget the reality of our Geography. Till then don’t blame the nation for any aggressive reaction against hate speech. You are yourself to be blamed for that.

Darren Jermyn, Northeastern Ontario Stroke Network regional director, speaks with stroke survivor John Luszka at a celebration of the Community Navigator program for stroke survivors at Sault Area Hospital, May 12, 2016. Darren Taylor/SooToday. The Sault's John Luszka credits a recently-expanded program with helping him in his ongoing recovery from a major stroke he suffered March 20, 2015. The stroke led to a five-month hospital stay. Since then, Luszka has been helped by the Post-Stroke Transitional Care Program, which includes a stroke navigator and support services delivered by the Northern Ontario Independent Living Association (NILA) and its Sault partner, the March of Dimes. A stroke navigator (or community navigator) works with stroke survivors and their caregivers in helping the survivor transition back to life in the community after being discharged from hospital. Between 2012 and 2015, a study was led by the Northeastern Ontario Stroke Network involving over 250 participants and over 100 stroke survivors. It found that with the help of a community navigator, stroke patients had significant improvement in their Return to Normal Living Index (RNLI) compared to patients without the services of a navigator. Since 2011, the Post-Stroke Transitional Care Program has expanded beyond Sudbury to other Northern communities, including the Sault, North Bay, Timmins, Temiskaming Shores and Parry Sound, thanks to $1.2 million in additional funding from the Northeast LHIN. From April 2015 to March 2016, the program, administered in the Sault by the March of Dimes, has served 76 local people with over 600 navigator visits and over 1,700 rehabilitation sessions. "At the conclusion of my hospital care my wife Heather was visited personally by the March of Dimes post stroke community navigator…to discuss the services available through the program," Luszka told an audience which gathered to celebrate the Community Navigator program's success at Sault Area Hospital's auditorium Thursday. "The Community Care Access Centre visited our home to determine how our home environment would be suitable to my needs at that time. Recommendations were provided to make modifications to facilitate safe improvements in our day-to-day living." "It should be understood my mobility was very limited post-hospital release and there was a high risk of serious injury from potential falls," Luszka said. Through the navigator program, Luszka started visiting the March of Dimes for a recovery program twice a week, consisting of a series of mobility exercises, and has continued to work out in a gym in his home. Gains in his mobility have been noticeable. Luszka's speech is perfectly clear, and he is able to walk with a cane, also regaining arm mobility over the past few weeks. "A stroke not only affects the individual but the whole family," said Luszka, who has maintained a positive attitude and sense of humour. Luszka thanked the March of Dimes for "thinking outside the box" in his ongoing recovery. Caregivers may refer stroke survivors to support and services offered by the navigator program themselves or through a physician, said Talia Papi-Grant, March of Dimes stroke community navigator and a Registered Practical Nurse, speaking to SooToday. "There's not a really long waiting list actually, we get individuals in very quickly, what they do have to do first is complete their outpatient therapy first, at the hospital or the Community Care Access Centre," Papi-Grant said. "Once they've completed their outpatient therapy they can come to us…our wait list is a few short weeks, a couple of months at the very most." The March of Dimes has an occupational therapist and physiotherapist on board to help develop individualized programs for stroke-surviving patients. "With our program it's phenomenal because we can take on individuals for physical and cognitive needs with peer support and we don't have a discharge date, if they are still making gains they are welcome to stay with us and access our programs, we don't say 'it's been 12 weeks, the program's over.'" "We think outside the box, just like John said." "I have witnessed individuals being able to move from wheelchair to walking without assistive devices, returning to drive, riding a bike again, travelling, and to an extra heartwarming day with their daughter on their wedding day and holding a grandchild for the first time." Post-stroke gym facilities and one-on-one physical or cognitive therapy sessions are available at the March of Dimes office at 550 Queen Street West, Suite 103. The program also offers aquafitness sessions once a week at the John Rhodes Centre pool, if so desired. In addition, the program offers a fully accessible, two-bedroom transitional unit on Old Garden River Road which recovering stroke patients can use if they do not feel quite ready to go home after being discharged from hospital.

Despite rising food prices, Kyrgyzstan is able to feed itself and avoid a crisis, Arstanbek Nogoyev, Kyrgyz Minister of Agriculture, said in a recent interview with the Reporter-Bishkek newspaper. The Minister also believes high world food prices might stimulate further development of the agricultural sector. “Our hard-working people are able to feed the country, they just need substantial support from the government,” Nogoyev said. “I want to emphasise, one more time, that Kyrgyzstan's food security is under control. Speculation on the market does not necessarily translate into a crisis,” he added. An international food crisis resulted in speculation on the Kyrgyz food market, many experts say. However, local farmers have said they will cooperate with the government in the event all their production is needed only for the domestic market. In 2006, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation listed Kyrgyzstan as among those countries well provided with food. The Kyrgyz Ministry of Agriculture hopes to receive the same listing in 2008. Nogoyev thinks one of the ways to revive agriculture, which used to be highly developed in Soviet times, is supporting food processing industries by exempting them from taxes and minimizing red-tape. “I've worked in processing industries and know that a well-functioning agricultural sector is impossible without processing plants. We have no right to only remain a supplier of raw goods,” Nogoyev noted. Minister of Agriculture Arstanbek Nogoyev speaking with the Reporter Bishkek Newspaper" Another way of boosting agricultural production is to create voluntary farmers’ unions that will be merged into larger Agricultural Food Corporations. As selling land to individual farmers proved to be ineffective, Nogoyev now hopes that farmers’ unions will pursue larger goals and introduce better management. “Self-governing on two or three hectares cannot be a stable foundation for agriculture. This situation might only be fixed through voluntary unification of small farms,” Nogoyev said. He said he hopes such unions will also do a better job in agricultural planning and attracting investors.

Bluffton and Hilton Head Island middle school students are trading textbooks for a 45-foot catamaran this week as they explore the ecology of local estuaries. Eighth- and ninth-graders from H.E. McCracken Middle School caught shrimp, squid, a blue crab and several species of fish in a trawl net Monday while aboard the S.C. Department of Natural Resource's Education Vessel Discovery. They caught spadefish, flounder and Atlantic bumper, but no fish impressed students more than the striped burrfish -- a puffer fish that inflated when caught. "I'd never seen one in real life," said student Haley Kohler. Susan Dee, who teaches environmental studies and biology at McCracken Middle School, said she's tried to bring the program to Bluffton for years. "Getting the kids out on the water, it's a different perspective," she said. "I try to teach them this with pictures and things, but it's nothing like being here." McMillan talked to students Monday about local wildlife, saying the area's estuaries are second only to the rain forest in biodiversity. She pointed out oyster beds, pelicans and bald eagles and gave fun facts about the different species. Oysters, she said, keep local waters healthy by filtering 50 gallons per day. Pelicans, she said, always dive for food on the same side -- like humans, they are either right-sided or left-sided. Bald eagles, she said, have such great eyesight they could read a newspaper headline from a mile away. "I like being out on the water," said ninth-grader Thea Smith. "It's an escape from school."

The City Centre is a hub for learning about the square mile, championing its meaning and value. The exhibitions and events programmes are inspired by the unique history, heritage and culture of the City. Introduce your class to the world of the built environment by visiting the home of a fascinating 1:500 scale architectural model of the square mile. A detailed record of the fabric of London, it includes every existing building as well revealing a glimpse into the future showing new developments that will be added to London’s skyline. Taught sessions use the model as a starting point for learning about the City in relation to history, geography, art, citizenship and STEM. The City Centre offers model-making and digital design workshops and industry insight days with the chance to meet professionals working as architects, engineers, urban planners, surveyors, property lawyers and project managers. The model is accompanied by a well-equipped workshop space and days of architectural discovery, exploring new and emerging buildings in the City, are also available.

of differently coloured vitrified paste." It was common then to refer to any glassy items as paste, due to the lack of understanding how the beads were made. There is little information about the appearance of the other 140 beads, but we will keep looking.

The Iberian wolf's diet will greatly vary depending on exactly where they are. Wolves of Cantabria may feed on red deer, roe deer, and wild boar while the wolves of Galicia will feed partially on remains from chicken and pig farms. The wolves of Castilla y Len are believed to feed largely on rabbits. Overall, their main source of nuitrition comes from livestock. Much of this livestock used to be carrion. However, since the banning of leaving dead animals in the field because of the fear of mad cow's disease, the wolves have turned to killing more sheep and cows. BREEDING Like most other gray wolves, Iberian wolves breed only the alpha male and female in order to maintain the strength of the pack. Female wolves can usually begin breeding at one year, but don't fully mature until they reach 5 years. Breeding season is at the end of winter. The liter is usually 5 or 6 pups that are looked after by the entire pack until autumn when they join in with the others. They must be protected from eagle owls and golden eagles for the first few weeks. Hunting of wolves has since been banned in Portugal and many parts of Spain. Their number has been estimated at about 2,000 in Spain and another 400 in Portugal. Their overall state has upgraded from endangered to vulnerable. However, the wolves of Sierra Morena are classified as critically endangered, and the Extremaduran populations are believed to be extinct. Wolves have over the years become very wary of people, and actual sightings of wolves in the wild are, therefore, rare.

This study focuses on the features of co-experiencing in adolescence. The main objective of the study was to explore and describe the specifics of co-experiencing in adolescence in general as well as at different stages of this age. Currently co-experiencing in teenagers is underexplored both in Russia and abroad. We would like to introduce a new approach to understanding and researching co-experiencing in adolescence. The following goals were set and achieved in our study: gathering information about the concept of co-experiencing through the literature review; finding an appropriate definition of co-experiencing necessary for our study; analysing features of adolescent age described in literature; carrying out an overview of foreign research on empathy in adolescence; conducting the study on the specifics of co-experiencing at different stages of adolescence. The new data obtained in our research may be of interest to various specialists working with adolescents (counselors, therapists and others). stages of this age. Currently co-experiencing in teenagers is underexplored both in Russia and abroad. We would like to introduce a new approach to understanding and researching co-experiencing in adolescence. The following goals were set and achieved in our study: gathering information about the concept of co-experiencing through the literature review; finding an appropriate definition of co-experiencing necessary for our study; analysing features of adolescent age described in literature; carrying out an overview of foreign research on empathy in adolescence; conducting the study on the specifics of co-experiencing at different stages of adolescence. The new data obtained in our research may be of interest to various specialists working with adolescents (counselors, therapists and others). Arkhangel’skaya V.V. Perezhivanie i soperezhivanie v psikhologicheskom konsul’tirovanii i sisteme K.S. Stanislavskogo [Experiencing and co-experiencing in psychological counseling in the K.S. Stanislavsky’system]. Psikhologiya i psikhoterapiya: metodologiya, issledovaniya, praktika [Psychology and psychotherapy: methodology, research, practice]. Moscow, 2018, pp. 57—80. Bakhtin M.M. Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [Aesthetic of verbal art]. Moscow: publ. Iskusstvo, 1979. 423 p. Berezhkovskaya E.L., Radinskaya N.G. Kul’turno-istoricheskaya i gumanisticheskaya psikhologiya: vozmozhnye tochki skhoda (empatiya kak vysshaya psikhicheskaya funktsiya) [Cultural-historical and humanistic psychology: possible vanishing points (empathy as the higher psychic function)]. Vestnik RGGU [Bulletin RSUH], 2006, no. 1, pp. 126—145. Bodalev A.A. Psikhologiya obshcheniya [Psychology of communication]. Moscow: MPSI; Voronezh: NPO «MODEK», 1996. 328 p. Bozhovich L.I. 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In the past Strakonice was a town founded by a feudal lord and its history is thus linked to the House of Bavors, who were replaced by the Knights of Malta in the early 15th century. The first written mention of Strakonice dates from 1243, when Bolemila, the wife of Bavor I, donated the villages around Strakonice to the Knights of Malta, and mentioned St. Wenceslas’ Church, where she publicly announced this donation. The document is antedated, which means that it was drafted some time after the donation took place. Unlike nowadays, it was not common to validate a legal deed in writing immediately. A written legal deed then did not enjoy as great evidence value as a century later. The first written documents do not contain much information about Strakonice. We only know that there was a church and the oldest part of the castle was occupied by the Knights of Malta. Not until 1318 do the documents allow us to gain an idea of what Strakonice looked like at that time. This is because Vilém Bavor presents a comprehensive overview of the possessions of the Knights of Malta, so we know that there was a school where the Knights would teach, several bridges over the river, it also mentions several citizens’ names, which indicates that Strakonice was already a town in the full sense of the word. Statements made by members of the order of the Knights of Malta in 1373 describe the size of the local commandry. It was the second largest, after the Prague commandry. It consisted of 16 brothers between 24 and 53 years of age; we are also told that one of them was ill and suffered from a heart condition and shaky hands. It is impossible to say what particular disease he had, though. The school provided instruction and boarding to 17 learners, which is an enormous number in the medieval context. Fire was a disaster for every town. And Strakonice too has been faced with its destructive power. The first mention of a fire is from 1357 and the next one took place two centuries later in 1520. However, floods have been no exception either and some documents by Grand Priors mention “high water” which “destroys, undermines and spoils bridges, banks and walls”. The frequent floods were probably the reason why the Bavors, the first owners of the town, did not believe in the sustainable existence of the town. They seem to have favoured the settlement of Lom with the oldest chapel: St. Wenceslas’ Church. Ironically enough, unlike Strakonice, the village of Lom was destined to perish. Strakonice was a typical river town with bridges, foot bridges and mills. We even know the name of an owner of the castle mill: Kosma. There were certainly far more mills in the area, but their names have been forgotten. Bavor IV, one of the last generations of the Bavor family paid more attention to the town than his predecessors. By then, the owners of the town had taken care of the Order rather than the town. At the dawn of the Hussite era Strakonice lost its founders: the House of Bavor died out and the entire castle with the town was gained by the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. The last mention of the Bavor family dates from 1402 and is soon followed by a purchase contract concluded by Jindřich of Hradec, a representative of the Order, who bought the castle from Vikéř of Jenišovice, the then deputy burgrave of Prague Castle. It is disputable what the history of the town might have looked like had the House of Bavor remained a part of Czech history. This question is intriguing because Strakonice was a Catholic stronghold in the time of the Hussite Wars and fought against the Chalice a long time after the defeat at the Battle of Lipany. Nearby Sudoměř witnessed a failure of the crusade waged by the knights with the red cross of Malta and the demise of Jindřich of Hradec, the master of the Priory. However, Strakonice was a place of refuge for all opponents of the Chalice in the entire course of the unrest which shattered the whole kingdom. The Order’s archive was moved from Prague to Strakonice, which even became the main seat of the Priory. After the death of Jindřich of Hradec, his position was occupied by warlord Václav of Michalovice. While he held the office, the Union of Strakonice was founded as a counterpart to the Union of Poděbrady. When he passed away, Jošt of Rožmberk became the Prior; he was a diplomat rather than a warrior like his predecessor. As a representative of a Catholic order, Jošt was certainly far from favouring George of Poděbrady, but did not express any open renunciation of the king until the last days of his life when he entered the ranks of the Union of Zelená Hora. It is not generally known that Jošt had long helped his lord George seek acknowledgment by the Catholics and mainly at the Pope’s court. He believed that George would eventually give up his Utraquist confession. Jošt himself was faced with political and religious troubles in Wroclaw, where he served as a bishop, for his loyalty to the state and hence also his respect to the Utraquist ruler. His life was in danger many times. When Jošt was not present at the Castle of Strakonice, his younger brother Jan of Rožmberk would take care of the castle. The Knights of Malta would often accommodate and entertain papal legates on their way to Wroclaw or back to Rome. Similarly, the Priors of Strakonice would frequently travel to Wroclaw or Nisa and then on diplomatic missions to Rome and the Pope. After the demise of Jošt, Jan of Švamberk became the administrator of the Strakonice property, but had to put up with the adverse economic situation of the Order and the property of the Strakonice commandry. When he died, the office of the Order’s head in Bohemia, Moravia and other lands of the crown passed on to another of the House of Rožmberk, Jan III of Rožmberk. Although he did not win a nation-wide reputation, he deserves credit for the fact that Strakonice flourished at the dawn of modern times. Fortification, the right to use a red wax seal and a reconstruction of the castle is, in short, his contribution to the town. His era was marked by the struggle for the Rožmberk legacy with the mighty Zdeněk of Rožmitál and also the clash between him and his brothers in relation to control over the Rožmberk property. He was not very self-confident or ambitious, but the lack of these qualities affected the management of the family’s property rather than that of the Order and the economy of the Strakonice region. At the dawn of the modern age, the appearance of the town and its immediate vicinity changed, too. Fishponds and the development of guilds are reflected in the number of privileges granted to the town or individual guilds. Many of them influenced the production of the town, which focused on drapery and clothing production as there were numerous tanners, hatters and cutters in the town. This was also the era when the local Jewish community began to assert itself. The Jews took over the clothing industry in the 19th century, the development of which reached its climax with the manufacturing of fezzes at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, this development was hindered by the Thirty Years War. In 1619 Mansfeld’s troops looted the town and the castle. The Grand Priory’s property was disintegrated. Only 46 citizens and 36 new settlers remained in the town after the war. Grand Prior Rudolf Colloredo of Wallsee (1637-1657) issued a regulation on 5 December 1645 whereby he relieved the town of warfare taxes and allowed the citizens to sell beer in surrounding villages. After the Thirty Years War the castle decayed and the Grand Priors lost their interest in Strakonice and their stays there grew scarcer as they preferred Prague. Also, the Jesuits appeared in the nearby chateau of Střela and remained there until 1773, when their order fell into disgrace. The controversies between the town and its feudal lords intensified. The citizens sought emancipation. This is proved by the numerous disputes between the Grand Priors and the citizens which often ended with the imprisonment of the town council. This antagonism lasted until the 18th century, when the situation calmed down as the Grand Priors concentrated on reconstructing the castle rather than managing the town. Grand Prior Ferdinand Leopold Dubský of Třebomyslice had a new palace built. However, this edifice never served as a permanent residence. In the following centuries the Knights of Malta returned to their original mission – setting up hospitals and foundations for the poor and sick as well as building churches. For instance, Grand Prior Michael Ferdinand of Althan had the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows built in Podsrp in 1771-1772 and provided the town with a financial contribution for the building of a school. This school also featured teacher training. However, the Grand Priory and the town often quarrelled over the position of the teacher of the catechist and the headmaster. In 1784 the Order gave up the distribution of honey porridge as this charitable activity was no longer in touch with the requirements of the period. Instead, the Order donated a significant amount of money to the accounts allotted to the poor and the interest was used to support the less affluent inhabitants of Strakonice. In the 19th century Strakonice earned a reputation for its production of fezzes, i.e. types of hats, which also gave their name to the production plants, which were called fez factories. Since the production of fezzes had no tradition in this country, the producers focused on export. This spurred the development of transport and mainly railway. First, the connection between České Budějovice and Plzeň was built in the 1860s and Strakonice was one of the stations on its route. Then the local line Březnice – Blatná – Strakonice was built with a branch line to Nepomuk. These local lines were nationalised in the 1920s. The Knights of Malta also used this new means of transport; in the 19th century the Order committed itself to operating emergency and ambulance service in battlefields. The Order began to establish military hospitals and set up emergency and ambulance trains, according to designs by magistrate knight MUDr. Jaromír Mundy. The town, like the entire country, would soon be hit hard by World War I. Numerous families of Strakonice inhabitants lost their members in the war. As the war was drawing to a close, there was a lack of food, which gave rise to a growing dissatisfaction among the population of Strakonice and all of Austria-Hungary. The monarchy was approaching its disintegration. Influenced by the October news about the Austrian troops’ defeats the town’s policeman Karel Kraus heralded the formation of Czechoslovakia as early as 14 October. He was imprisoned for this act in Písek, but did not remain there long as this news soon came true on 28 October and Austria-Hungary ceased to exist. The formation of the new republic brought an end to the almost seven centuries of the Knights of Malta and their control over the town. This change was caused by the land reform of the 1920s. The Order’s property was seized, the Order decided to abandon the town and Strakonice lost their feudal lords. In the so-called First Republic, Strakonice often welcomed leading politicians such as MP Rudolf Beran, Alois Švehla, and Dr. Edvard Beneš. This period witnessed the establishment of another important factory – the ČZ motorcycle manufacturer, which has operated to this day. This abbreviation originally stood for Czech Arms Factory, for it made arms, from pistols up to aircraft cannons (the production continued during WWII, but the arms were intended for the German troops). In the 1930s the town suffered from the global economic crisis followed by the rise of Fascism, which meant the end of the Strakonice Jewish population. In November 1942, Strakonice Jews were deported to Klatovy and then to Terezín, where they were held before being sent to extermination camps. The assassination of Heydrich also cost several local people their lives: MUDr. Karel Hradecký, František Kohout, Miroslav Píša, Václav Raba and MUDr. Miloš Rektořík. Two resistance movement units formed in the town in WWII: Prokop Holý and Niva. Their members cooperated with other groups such as Předvoj, Rudý bod and others. The underground movement involved people working at the post office, railway workers, fez factory staff and, above all, workers from ČZ. At the end of the war these disparate groups were united under a single name: Niva (30 April 1945). On 4 May 1945 the Czechoslovak flag was raised in Kuřidlo and arms were seized in the ČZ plant. The German troops did not resist. On the following day a signal – four short siren hoots – was sounded to indicate the beginning of the liberation of the town. However, the Strakonice population death toll rose by 9 more people that day. These were shot dead near Masarykova liga, where they assaulted a German train transport passing by. A Local National Committee was formed on the same day with Jan Vondrys as the Chairman. The following day witnessed the arrival of four units of General Patton’s tank division, which protected the town. The American troops remained in the town until 23 November 1945. After World War II, life returned to normal. Niva ceased to exist on 30 June 1945 and its arms and mission were taken over by the newly formed 47th infantry regiment. The ČZ production once again focused on motorcycles and fez factories were allowed to stop manufacturing uniforms and start producing hats and fezzes. The town started to take its present shape. However, the local Jewish community has never been restored in the town. The last traces of the Jewish congregation disappeared in the large urban reconstruction project in the 1970s which involved the demolition of the synagogue. However, the new development swallowed many more nooks of old and nostalgic Strakonice, such as the house where F. L. Čelakovský was born, the chateau mill, the romantic weir, etc.

Multifunctional enzyme type 2 (MFE-2) catalyses the second and the third reactions in the eukaryotic peroxisomal β-oxidation cycle, which degrades fatty acids by removing a two-carbon unit per each cycle. In addition to the 2-enoyl-CoA hydratase 2 and (3R)-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase activities, mammalian MFE-2 has also a sterol carrier protein type 2-like (SCP-2L) domain. In contrast, yeast MFE-2 has two (3R)-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenases, one 2-enoyl-CoA hydratase 2 and no SCP-2L domain. The physiological roles of yeast (3R)-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenases (A and B) were tested by inactivating them in turn by site-directed mutagenesis and testing the complementation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae fox-2 cells (devoid of endogenous MFE-2) with mutated variants of Sc MFE-2. Growth rates were lower for fox-2 cells expressing only a single functional domain than for those expressing the Sc MFE-2. Kinetic studies with purified Candida tropicalis MFE-2 and its mutated variants show that dehydrogenase A catalyzes the reaction more efficiently with the medium- and long-chain substrates than dehydrogenase B, which in turn is the only one active with the short chain fatty acids. The structural basis of the substrate specificity difference of these two dehydrogenases was solved by X-ray crystallography together with docking studies. Protein engineering was used to produce a stabile, homogenous recombinant protein of C. tropicalis dehydrogenases in one polypeptide. The heterodimeric structure contains the typical fold of the short-chain alcohol dehydrogenase/reductase (SDR) family. Docking studies suggest that dehydrogenase A binds medium chain-length substrates as bended, whereas short chain substrates are dislocated, because they do not reach the hydrophobic contacts needed for anchoring the substrate to the active site, but are instead attracted by L44. Dehydrogenase B has a more shallow binding pocket and thus locates the short chain-length substrates correctly for catalysis. Thus the data provide clues for structural basis of the different substrate specificities. The molecular basis of the patient mutations of MFE-2 (DBP deficiency) was studied using the recently solved crystal structures of rat (3R)-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase, human 2-enoyl-CoA hydratase and SCP-2L. The predicted effect of the mutations on protein structure could in several cases be explained, and these data supported the conclusion that a genotype-phenotype correlation exists for DBP deficiency.

C# is a programming language, designed by Microsoft, and described by some as similar to Java . An open source implementation of C# is provided by the Mono project. ISO/IEC 23270:2006 — Information technology – Programming languages – C#. GLPK for C#/CLI provides a C# and common language interface (CLI) binding for GLPK. It is licensed under GPL V3. The coding is generated using SWIG. C# can call C library functions directly using marshalling. The following program invokes glp_version() to output the version of the GLPK library. * This program demonstrates calling the GLPK library with C#. When GLPK is compiled with Visual Studio C++, both .dll and .lib files are created. The easiest (usual) way to the use GLPK in a Visual Studio C# project in this case is to make the C++ GLPK project a dependency for the C# project and include the .lib file. GLPK# (GLPK Sharp) provides a C# language binding for GLPK and is licensed under CeCILL version 2. GLPK# is written in C++/CLI and would normally be statically linked to GLPK. As at July 2012, GLPK# supports most of the GLPK 4.45 API, including terminal callbacks and branch-and-cut callbacks. See the dual French/English project website for details.

Located in California's East Bay, the John Muir Chapter of Trout Unlimited strives to provide information that is relevant to our members and anyone interested in the conservation issues that concern our watersheds. How many Chinook Salmon runs are there anyway? California streams support the southern-most Chinook salmon runs on the west coast. Chinook salmon in California display a wide array of life history patterns that allow them to take advantage of the diverse and variable riverine and ocean environments. Chinook salmon are “anadromous” fish, migrating upstream as adults to spawn in freshwater streams, and migrating as juveniles downstream to the ocean to grow and mature. The time spent in the ocean and freshwater varies greatly among the various runs. At least seventeen distinct runs of Chinook salmon are recognized in California . These runs have been classified into six major groups, or Evolutionarily Significant Units. The Southern Oregon and Northern California Coastal Chinook salmon ESU includes fall-run Chinook salmon in coastal streams from Cape Blanco in Oregon south to the Klamath River. Southern Oregon and Northern California Coastal Chinook salmon were proposed for federal listing in 1999, but listing was determined to be not warranted. The California Coastal Chinook salmon ESU includes all; naturally spawned populations of Chinook salmon from rivers and streams south of the Klamath River to the Russian River, California, as well as seven artificial propagation programs: the Humboldt Fish Action Council (Freshwater Creek), Yager Creek, Redwood Creek, Hollow Tree, Van Arsdale Fish Station, Mattole Salmon Group, and Mad River Hatchery fall-run Chinook hatchery programs. Due to concern over depressed population sizes relative to historical abundance, California Coastal Chinook salmon were federally listed as threatened in 1999. Fall, late-fall, and spring-run Chinook spawn and rear in the Trinity River and in the Klamath River upstream of the mouth of the Trinity River. In the Trinity River, Chinook salmon spawn in the mainstem (with their upstream distribution limited by Lewiston Dam), the north and south forks, Hayfork Creek, New River, and Canyon Creek. In the Klamath River, Chinook salmon once ascended into Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon, to spawn in the major tributaries to the lake (Williamson, Sprague, and Wood Rivers), but access to this region was blocked by Copco Dam, built in 1917. Today Chinook are known to spawn in the mainstem Klamath River, Bogus Creek, Shasta River, Scott River, Indian Creek, Elk Creek, Clear Creek, Salmon River, Bluff Creek, Blue Creek, and the lower reaches of some of the other smaller tributaries to the mainstem river. Upper Klamath – Trinity River Chinook salmon were proposed for federal listing in 1998, but listing was determined to be not warranted. Four distinct runs of Chinook salmon spawn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system, named for the season when the majority of the run enters freshwater as adults. Fall-run Chinook migrate upstream as adults from July through December and spawn from early October through late December. The timing of runs varies from stream to stream. Late fall-run Chinook migrate into the rivers from mid-October through December and spawn from January through mid-April. The majority of young salmon of these races migrate to the ocean during the first few months following emergence, although some may remain in freshwater and migrate as yearlings. Fall-run Chinook are currently the most abundant of the Central Valley races, contributing to large commercial and recreational fisheries in the ocean and popular sportfisheries in the freshwater streams. Fall-run Chinook are raised at five major Central Valley hatcheries which release more than 32 million smolts each year. Due to concerns over population size and hatchery influence, Central Valley fall/late fall-run Chinook salmon are a Species of Concern under the federal Endangered Species Act. Four distinct runs of Chinook salmon spawn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system, named for the season when the majority of the run enters freshwater as adults. Spring-run Chinook enter the Sacramento River from late March through September. Adults hold in cool water habitats through the summer, then spawn in the fall from mid-August through early October. Spring-run juveniles migrate soon after emergence as young-of-the-year, or remain in freshwater and migrate as yearlings. Spring-run Chinook were historically the most abundant race in the Central Valley. Now only remnant runs remain in Butte, Mill, Deer, Antelope, and Beegum Creeks, tributaries to the Sacramento River. In the mainstem Sacramento River and the Feather River, early-running Chinook salmon occur, but significant hybridization with fall-run has occurred. Due to the small number of non-hybridized populations remaining and low population sizes, Central Valley spring-run were listed as threatened under both the state and federal endangered species acts in 1999. Four distinct runs of Chinook salmon spawn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system, named for the season when the majority of the run enters freshwater as adults. Adult winter-run pass under the Golden Gate Bridge from November through May, and pass into the Sacramento River from December through early August. Winter-run Chinook spawn in the upper mainstem Sacramento River from mid-April through August. Fry and smolts emigrate downstream from July through March through the Sacramento River, reaching the Delta from September through June. What's the Plan to Save Winter-run Chinook in the Sacramento River? NOAA has developed a "Priority Actions 2016-2020" document outlining their plans to try and recover this rapidly dwindling population. risk species because it is composed of just one small population that is currently under severe stress caused by one of California’s worst droughts on record. Over the last 10 years of available data (2003-2013), the abundance of spawning winter - run Chinook adults ranged from a low of 738 in 2011 to a high of 17,197 in 2007, with an average of 6,298. The population subsists in large part due to agency managed cold water releases from Shasta Reservoir during the summer and artificial propagation from Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery’s winter-run Chinook salmon conservation program. Winter-run Chinook salmon are dependent on sufficient cold water storage in Shasta Reservoir, and it has long been recognized that a prolonged drought could have devastating impacts, possibly leading to the species’ extinction. Salmon in the McCloud River? Efforts to reintroduce winter-run Sacramento River Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) to the McCloud River and Battle Creek are underway. On the McCloud River, a pilot reintroduction feasibility plan is being developed by Bureau of Reclamation in collaboration with the USFWS, NMFS, CDFW, and DWR. This pilot plan will inform decision making for a possible long-term reintroduction upstream of Shasta Dam to the McCloud River. This is an excellent source of detailed information published by NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region on their website documenting the historic status and potential for Salmon and Steelhead recovery in the key watersheds throughout the Central Valley. Three years ago, only eight salmon were recorded in the creek. This year, an estimated 1,000 to 1,600 salmon are believed to be spawning in local Putah Creek waters below Solano Dam. Wild Klamath Mountain Province steelhead. CDFW photo by Jeff Weaver. According to a report published by PPIC, the best documented indicators of declining aquatic environments in California are fish (Moyle and Williams 1990; Moyle 2002; Howard and Revenga 2009). Of 129 kinds of native fish in California, 5 percent are extinct, 24 percent are listed as threatened or endangered species, 13 percent are eligible for listing today, and another 40 percent are in decline (Figure B). In other words, over 80 percent of the native fishes are extinct or imperiled to a greater or lesser degree. The number of imperiled species is increasing rapidly. Since the first state - wide assessment in 1985, fish species have been listed under state and federal Endangered Species Acts (ESAs) at a rate of about one species per year, with 31 listed by 2010. Most native fishes are endemic only to California (60 percent) or to the interstate waters of California, Nevada, and Oregon (19 percent). Thus, their decline is largely due to factors in California, mostly related to human water and land management. Clearly, environmental management actions in recent decades have been far from sufficient to reverse these declines. An analysis by Richter et al. (1997b) indicates that the loss of freshwater biodiversity in the western United States primarily results from altered hydro - logic regimes, pollution (especially nonpoint source pollution), and invasions of alien species. have naturally small populations exhibiting high susceptibility to risk from stressors that, if realized, could lead to declines that would qualify them for listing as threatened or endangered. Species accounts were prepared for the 62 taxa determined to be of special concern to address the following: overall status, description, taxonomic relationships, life history, habitat requirements, distribution, trends in abundance, nature and degree of threats, effects of climate change, status determination (scoring) and management recommendations. Maps showing current and historic range accompany each account. In many gold-mining areas where mercury was used, it is still relatively easy to find quantities of liquid elemental mercury in sediments and stream channels. Of even greater environmental concern is the presence of methylmercury, an organic form of mercury that is a potent neurotoxin and is especially detrimental to developing fetuses and children. Methylmercury accumulates and biomagnifies in the food chain, reaching highest concentrations in predatory fish such as bass and other species which are prized by anglers. Numerous water bodies in California have fish-consumption advisories because of mercury contamination from historical mining. Several of these advisories are based on data collected by the USGS, including those in Trinity County, and in the Bear, Yuba, and American River watersheds in the Sierra Nevada. For information on these advisories, see the web site of the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The Cache Creek watershed drains eastward from the north-central part of the California Coast Range. It includes Clear Lake, the largest and oldest natural lake located entirely in California. There are several historical gold and mercury mines in the Cache Creek watershed, including the Sulphur Bank Mercury Mine, which is a USEPA Superfund site, and the Abbott and Turkey Run mines which were recently remediated by the private sector. There is a mercury TMDL in place for Cache Creek and some of its tributaries, developed by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board - Central Valley Region. According to the USGS, Californians withdrew an estimated total of 38 billion gallons of water per day in 2010 (the most recent data year of their study), compared with 46 billion gallons per day in 2005. Surface water withdrawals in California were 25 billion gallons per day (67%), compared with 35 billion gallons per day (76%) in 2005. Groundwater withdrawals accounted for 13 billion gallons per day (33%), compared with 11 billion gallons per day (24%) in 2005. About 82% of all California water withdrawals were from fresh-water sources, compared with 72% in 2005. In both 2005 and 2010, about 74% of all fresh water withdrawals were for irrigation. 95% of all saline water withdrawals were for thermoelectric power generation, compared with 98% in 2005. Public supply: 16.6% (6,307 million gallons per day). Average daily gross per capita use was 181 gallons (total Public Supply withdrawals divided by population served). Self-supply domestic: 0.5% (172 million gallons per day). Average daily per capita use was 69 gallons. The 58 counties in California use differing proportions of water sources in the 8 (or less) categories. The United States is likely to see a continuation of the recent dam removal trend. An emerging need is to provide relevant scientific information about the physical, biological, and ecological responses of rivers and reservoirs to dam removal. Retaining specific details about removed dams will provide valuable information to those researching and making decisions on future dam removals. USGS has been tracking dam removal across the country. The interactive tool at this link allows you to zoom in to a particular site and scroll over for detailed information on the dam that was removed. Here's a great site to check out on recent and current water flow conditions on your favorite river before you drive those 5 hours to go fishing. Scroll over the dot marking the location that you're interested in and the local river name and flow data (graphed and current versus historical) will display. The "Real-time streamflow" map tracks short-term changes (over several hours) in rivers and streams. Although the general appearance of the map changes very little from one hour to the next, individual sites may change rapidly in response to major rain events or to reservoir releases. The map depicts streamflow conditions as computed at USGS streamgages. The colors represent real-time streamflow compared to percentiles of historical daily streamflow for the day of the year. This map represents conditions relative to those that have historically occurred at this time of year. Only streamgages having at least 30 years of record are used. WaterWatch () is a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) World Wide Web site that displays maps, graphs, and tables describing real-time, recent, and past streamflow conditions for the United States. The real-time information generally is updated on an hourly basis. WaterWatch provides streamgage-based maps that show the location of more than 3,000 long-term (30 years or more) USGS streamgages; use colors to represent streamflow conditions compared to historical streamflow; feature a point-and-click interface allowing users to retrieve graphs of stream stage (water elevation) and flow; and highlight locations where extreme hydrologic events, such as floods and droughts, are occurring. The streamgage-based maps show streamflow conditions for real-time, average daily, and 7-day average streamflow. The real-time streamflow maps highlight flood and high flow conditions. The 7-day average streamflow maps highlight below-normal and drought conditions. WaterWatch also provides hydrologic unit code (HUC) maps. HUC-based maps are derived from the streamgage-based maps and illustrate streamflow conditions in hydrologic regions. These maps show average streamflow conditions for 1-, 7-, 14-, and 28-day periods, and for monthly average streamflow; highlight regions of low flow or hydrologic drought; and provide historical runoff and streamflow conditions beginning in 1901. WaterWatch summarizes streamflow conditions in a region (state or hydrologic unit) in terms of the long-term typical condition at streamgages in the region. Summary tables are provided along with time-series plots that depict variations through time. WaterWatch also includes tables of current streamflow information and locations of flooding. California has built a water delivery infrastructure that is likely the most extensive anywhere on earth, capable of moving a drop of water that originates near the northern border all the way down south to the Mexican border. Through the development of this infrastructure, man has rearranged California's natural assets to meet societal needs, making the state unrecognizable from its pre-settlement history in the process. California's climate and hydrology are unlike any other in the nation, with variability and uncertainty the main characteristics. In an average year, the total amount of precipitation is about 200 million acre-feet; however, the actual precipitation can vary anywhere from 100 million acre-feet to 300 million acre-feet, depending on whether it is a wet year, a dry year, or something in between. About half of the precipitation will evaporate, be used by vegetation, or sink into the subsurface, salt sinks, or flow to the ocean; the remaining half, known as ‘dedicated water' is what is available for use in cities, on farms, for the environment, or to be put in storage. California has more than 1,400 named dams and 1,300 reservoirs that help with flood management, water storage and water transport. Hydropower from dams also provides a major source of electricity throughout the state and a source of revenue. Dams are owned, maintained and operated by federal, state and local agencies. Groundwater is also an important part of the state's water supplies, comprising about 40% of water used in an average year, and 60% or more in a drought year. But groundwater is very much location dependent: some communities have no groundwater and rely solely on surface water while other communities may have only groundwater; other communities rely on a mix of imported water and groundwater, and even some rely solely on imported water. California has been identified as the heaviest groundwater user in the United States, with approximately 16% of the nation's groundwater supplies being extracted from the state's aquifers. After studying the water flows needed for the recovery of chinook salmon and steelhead spawning runs in the central valley rivers for several years, the Water Board is recommending increasing flow on the San Joaquin River and its tributaries to a range of 30 to 50 percent, with a starting point of 40 percent of unimpaired flow from February through June. This is less than the 60 percent of unimpaired flow recommended by their scientific advisory panel. Unimpaired flow represents the water production of a river basin, unaltered by upstream diversions, storage, or by export or import of water to or from other watersheds. Historical median February through June flows from 1984–2009 in the Merced, Tuolumne, and Stanislaus Rivers were, respectively, 26, 21, and 40 percent of unimpaired flow. In other words, half of the time more than 60 or 70 percent of each river’s flow is diverted out of the river during these months.  Scientific studies show that flow is a major factor in the survival of fish like salmon and that current flows are inadequate to protect many endangered and threatened species, as well as species relied upon by the commercial fisheries. The Draft SED recognizes that other factors, like predation and loss of habitat, affect fish populations, and those factors are also addressed in the Draft SED.  The unimpaired flow requirement is designed to mimic the cues of nature that species have evolved to respond to, but is not intended to be a rigid and fixed percent of unimpaired flow. It is intended to provide a quantity of water as a baseline, but the proposal provides for, and encourages, collaboration to use the flows as a block of water that can be “shaped” or shifted in time to provide more functionally useful flows that provide increased habitat, more optimal temperatures, or a migration cue. This type of targeted effort can provide more timely and efficient use of flows than a set regime.  The Draft SED recognizes the financial and operational challenges to local economies of reduced diversions. The flow requirement considers the needs for fish and wildlife along with the needs of agriculture and local economies.

Flowers - their scent, beauty, daintiness - what's not to like? Here's more about the different places in the world that are famous for the sheer presence of beautiful flowers. Without a doubt, flowers look better and ravishing in their natural surroundings, rather than in a vase. It does not come as a surprise why poets and authors never fail to mention these delicate creations in their work. Come spring, and many enthusiastic travelers around the globe flock to certain destinations to garner an experience of a lifetime. The world always seems a better place to live in when you witness scores of flowers, stretching as far as you can see. Any place that invites with such stunning flowers is nothing less than a Shangri-la. Even the driest of deserts do not shy away from embracing the riot of colors that various flowers display. Wondering where on earth you would possibly find places marked by a sea of beautiful flowers? The following destinations are hot favorites, especially if you want to witness how nature celebrates the arrival of spring. Note: The flowering season depends on the amount of rainfall taking place in that particular year, and is subject to variance. Haarlem (or Harlem) has been the most sought-after tulip destination since the 1630s, and is a major trading center even today. It is not just Haarlem, but most of Holland is world-famous for its tulip expo and festivals. With around 7 million flower bulbs blooming each season, Keukenhof is the main attraction when it comes to visiting tulip fields. Since ages, lavender has been used as a scent for linens and bathing water. These sprawling landscapes of lavender are seen in the Sault area, covering the base of Mont Ventoux. The color of these beautifully-scented flowers vary from violet to indigo. If you prefer seeing a dash of yellow too, do visit Luberon, where you'll witness sunflowers growing alongside the elegantly-textured lavenders. Daffodils in England help spring to arrive in style with their canary-yellow trumpets and slender appearance. Apart from Cornwall, you can visit Cotswolds too for the pleasant experience of seeing hundreds of daffodils. Go ahead, bring out the William Wordsworth in you. 'Hanami', the age-old tradition of having a picnic under a cherry blossom tree is practiced and enjoyed even today. These white- and pink-flowers are seen in thousands in the Yasukuni Shrine of Tokyo. With numerous flowers lining the streets of Japan in spring, this destination should not miss your bucket list! There is no better way to describe summer than a vibrant yellow sea of sunflowers; and if that is what you're looking for, Tuscany is the place to be. Although native to North America and South America, the sunflower has almost become synonymous to the sultry summer Italy offers. The state flower of Texas, bluebonnets make this area feature on the list of places to visit, not only for humans, but also for bees. Such is the number of these flowers, that the entire state of Texas is painted with blue during spring. The next time you drive or ride through this state, do capture the picturesque panorama. The effect of spring is such that even the driest of deserts can come to life; the Mojave Desert is one such example. The Antelope Valley of the Mojave desert in California is particularly famous for the pretty picture it paints with blooming orange-colored peppy poppies spreading across the horizon. Now, this is one destination that is a heaven on Earth for all photographers. The stunning yellow rapeseed flowers put up quite a show in the small Luoping County of China. Despite its puzzling weather, which can vary each day, these continuous stretches of fields never fail to impress its audience. Only a handful of places offer the kind of visual treat Lake Tekapo provides with its aquamarine-colored water, lined with Russell lupines. The hues of purple of the lupines act as a piece of puzzle that fits perfectly in the backdrop of a crystal clear lake and the Southern Alps. Take the road less traveled and go for a safari in the semi-arid region of South Africa. The vivacious display of wild flowers is bound to leave you flabbergasted. Here, around 4,000 different species of flowering plants have been recorded so far; and I am pretty sure none of them will let you down!

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) is the writer who represents the entire epoch known as the jazz age. He rose to prominence at the age of 24 just after his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was printed. But most of the acclaim came to him in the 1950s when his third book got international popularity. In the opinion of another prominent American writer Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald and other artists who went through World War I belonged to the Lost Generation. The writer was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to wealthy and religious upper-class parents of Irish origin. Most of his childhood he spent in New York as his father was working there at Procter & Gamble till 1908. He was a former furniture manufacturer who achieved no success if that field. The boy got all the privileges his origin demanded including the best education possible. Before enrolling into the Princeton University in 1913, he was sent to an acclaimed preparation school in New Jersey. The family had just moved back to Minnesota when Fitzgerald’s father lost his job in The Big Apple. At university Fitzgerald aimed at establishing himself as a football star plus a reporter for the newspaper. He wasn’t qualified enough to play football but found relief at writing for the Princeton Triangle Club, a famous theatrical troupe which specialized in musicals and comedies. Fitzgerald never officially graduated Princeton due to a combination of laziness and illnesses. In 1917 he joined the American Army. Fitzgerald came back home after the war and met his life-long muse – Zelda Sayre. Coming from a wealthy family, Zelda had her doubts about whether Fitzgerald would be able to support the family and dumped him after an engagement. In fact, Fitzgerald wrote his earliest novel, This Side of Paradise, to prove Zelda his ability to provide a steady income. This semi-autobiographic book about the writer’s experience in Princeton was finished in 1920 and enjoyed enormous success. A week later the couple got married. This novel launched Fitzgerald’s writing career. The reaction of the public to The Beautiful and the Damned, his next novel, wasn’t that positive. Even his third novel, The Great Gatsby, that is a well-known and admired masterpiece nowadays, didn’t get much recognition during his lifetime. Fitzgerald spent the 1920s in Paris, the literary capital of those times. He met and befriended a lot of outstanding personalities like Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque. Plus, he created short stories and sent them to different magazines – that was the main source of their income. Unfortunately, due to constant financial troubles and debts he got involved in alcohol and his drinking became even more legendary than his books. One of the reasons was the mental disorder of his wife. At some point, the writer had no other choice than to send her to a special facility to receive necessary treatment. Forgotten and in despair, he moved to Hollywood to produce screenplays for different film companies. In 1937 Fitzgerald signed an agreement with the company with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The writer finally made enough money to support himself and pay Zelda’s medical bills. He was distracted from concentrating on his fourth novel, Tender is the Night. From 1939 the writer issued a series of short stories where he parodied himself, The Pat Hobby Stories, that turned out pretty successful. His life ended unexpectedly – the heart attack took Fitzgerald’s life in his flat in New York. The writer was in the process of creating his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, about a Hollywood film director. It was published after his death.

It’s your 18th birthday and the notice just arrived: you have four years to decide how you’d like to perform your year of mandatory national service. It could be the military, volunteering in rural schools or hospitals, job retraining in regions with low employment, working in prisons, urban development, building community gardens, or environmental cleanup. There are dozens of options. You can do it after high school, during a college gap year, or upon graduating. You can do it near home or in another state. But you do have to do it. You have to live in communal housing, with people you don’t know, who might be very different from you. You’ll receive a small stipend for expenses. You will, like your friends did, come out of it with a new perspective on life. Which is precisely what this country needs. People have been talking about a year of mandatory national service for generations. Aside from the draft, we’ve always found a way to prevent it. Perhaps it wasn’t needed as much as it is now. But today we live in a world where ideas like duty and service have fallen so far out of favor they seem quaint and anachronistic. Prejudice and self-centeredness are on the rise. Political and ideological divisions have us in rigid camps that don’t allow for dialogue. Some of us struggle every day with discrimination, poverty, and unemployment, while others live in a world of privilege and rarely have to experience anything that isn’t of our choosing. Our reality is defined by our community, and the information and entertainment that confirms our ideas about the world. As a result, we have developed inbred thinking. We all live in an echo chamber of our own beliefs, which is the intellectual equivalent of marrying your cousin. We have lost the ability to empathize and compromise. We need to fix that–not by getting conservatives to think more like liberals or by getting liberals to stop whining, but by getting a diverse group of people together who have to work out their differences to solve common problems. We have developed inbred thinking. We all live in an echo chamber of our own beliefs, which is the intellectual equivalent of marrying your cousin. That means mandatory service. Why mandatory? First, think of people who have gone through difficult situations where they had to adapt and grow, work hard and overcome adversity—and perhaps learn to see through another’s eyes. Most people describe these as the experiences that were both the most memorable and the most crucial to their development. And yet, almost everyone would have bailed on those difficult scenarios if they had the choice. Few of us willingly choose to struggle, and we generally try to avoid things that are going to be hard for us. Secondly, even if we choose the difficult path, figuring out how to get there can be hard. It takes a lot of effort to set up your life so that you can spend a year serving and still be able to feed and house yourself. You have to really want it. And most people don’t. Mandatory service would make it much easier. You wouldn’t have to figure out how you’re going to pay your bills that year, you’d just have to figure out how you’re going to serve. We’ve already started building the infrastructure. Retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal noted in a piece he wrote in Time magazine that, in addition to AmeriCorps, YouthBuild, Peace Corps, Service Year Alliance, and state-run programs, many universities now have service-oriented components within their degree programs. “In coal country in Kentucky, fifty Volunteers in Service to America helped put unemployed coal miners back to work in computer coding and telework jobs and connected more than 25,000 unemployed workers to job training and placement services, he noted. In Detroit, 150 national service members in an Urban Safety Corps are reducing crime and increasing public safety by engaging residents in boarding up vacant homes, expanding neighborhood watch groups, ensuring students get to school safely, and conducting home safety audits to protect residents from violence. Crime has declined in these neighborhoods and saved taxpayers millions of dollars… States like Iowa and Virginia are using existing resources… to boost literacy and alleviate child hunger." Gen. McChrystal likened it to military service, where diverse people are forced to overcome their prejudices and rethink their assumptions in order to work as a team and fulfill the mission. Of course, it’s not a perfect system. Some people choose their biases over everything. But as humans, we have the tendency to adapt and make the best of situations in order to survive them, which means we’re likely to grow in ways we wouldn’t otherwise. There has been extensive research on how to overcome prejudice. The American Psychological Association has identified strategies that succeed, all of which could be accomplished through a year of service among diverse people, like making friendships and doing projects with people who are different from you. The onus, however, is on the participant to actively work to change their perspective and see things from someone else’s viewpoint. As humans, we have the tendency to adapt and make the best of situations in order to survive them, which means we’re likely to grow in ways we wouldn’t otherwise. Another reason it has to be mandatory is that there are inherent rewards to serving others that you can’t perceive until you’ve done it. Most of us would assume that we would reach our greatest happiness by doing exactly what we want for ourselves. It takes experience to learn otherwise. If you don’t have a habit of exercising, it seems counterintuitive to want to get off the sofa and go for a run. It’s not until you’ve experienced the rush of endorphins after a few miles that you really understand why people get out and do it every day. Research has revealed tons of health benefits that come from serving others—reduced stress and lowered blood pressure, just to name a few. But until you have that experience and have the dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin rush it gives you, you may never think of giving as rewarding. Just like you’ll never understand why it feels good to work out hard until you do it, you’ll never understand how putting others first can feel amazing until you do that. In a 2002 article from Washington research group and think tank Brookings Institution, they urged Congress to create a year of national service. They were making the point that people don’t seem to see it as their responsibility to preserve a free and healthy democracy. That they don’t owe the country anything. This idea that we all need to take responsibility for the success of freedom, of the republic, seems to have faded. We need to bring it back, and the best way to do it is by requiring people do something productive in the service of a greater cause. When we’re little, somebody makes us eat our vegetables, brush our teeth, do our homework and chores—because we’d never make ourselves do it. We’d eat candy and watch videos or go jump in the pool before we learned how to swim. The selfish bickering in our nation shows that we need a little external motivation to work on our emotional maturity now, the way a kid needs to be told to brush their teeth. There’s a level of maturity, wisdom, courage, that only comes when you step into that place of being the one with something to give. As evidence, McChrystal pointed out that the volunteers who had been helping through various programs were being snapped up as full-time employees by the states where they worked because they have built skills in leadership, problem-solving, and teamwork. We’ve reached this intractable place of negativity in a system designed to keep us at odds with each other. There are a lot of people who benefit from this, and none of them have the country’s best interests at heart. We need leaders who can cross cultures, who can serve others. In the past, these leaders were inspired to make a difference by war, by The Great Depression. We need something drastic to push people into the role of leadership. There should be no more whining about adulting. We’re the only adults there are. If we don’t step up, we’ll be crushed by our own selfishness and divisions. It might be hard, and it might not work at first, but in the long run, it will make this country a better place.

Sports massage is primarily used before, during and after sporting events to help the individual achieve peak performance. However, over exertion during training or competing, can lead to an increased risk of injury or musclo-skeletal problems. These can range from overworked, tight and sore muscles, strains and mild sprains to muscular pain, both acute and chronic. The deeper, more intense techniques of sports massage will help the body to overcome these problems. It can also benefit those people whose work puts their body under stress or creates postural problems and muscle soreness.

A historic meeting between several government agencies was held to discuss approaches to addiction medicine. The White House held a landmark symposium at the end of September to mark the crucial developments in addiction medicine. Called “Medicine Responds to Addiction,” the symposium was led by Michael Botticelli, the Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and Dr. Patrick O’Connor, president of the American Board of Addiction Medicine (ABAM) Foundation. The goal was to address the epidemic of opioid addiction by highlighting advances in medical training and practice. The historic meeting brought together leaders from several federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, SAMHSA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The event also featured U.S. Surgeon General Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy. In addition, representatives from graduate medical training programs, medical boards, public and private health care systems, and foundations from across the country. The participating medical leaders represented the boards of disciplines as wide ranging as internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, emergency medicine, preventive medicine, and pediatrics. A major focus of the symposium was to advance addiction medicine. The goal was to identify ways to accelerate training and certification of medical providers in addiction prevention and treatment.

The Digital Skills Toolkit provides policymakers and other stakeholders with practical information, examples, and step-by-step guidance to develop a national digital skills strategy. Topics in the toolkit include: engaging the right stakeholders, inventorying and assessing existing policies, developing strategies for varied proficiency levels, creating strategies for under-represented groups such as women and persons with disabilities, organizing campaigns and joining regional or international initiatives, and monitoring and updating the strategy. The toolkit converts complexity into manageable tasks and includes examples of programs and frameworks from around the world to serve as models and inspiration. TASCHA developed the toolkit under the supervision of Susan Schorr, Head Digital Inclusion Division (DID) ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT). The Digital Skills Toolkit supports ITU's work as the leader of the "digital skills for youth" thematic area for the Decent Jobs for Youth Initiative. The Toolkit is available in PDF, e-Pub and Kindle versions. Additionally, an an editable Word version of all the tools is accessible in the PDF version - just click on the paperclip icon to open.

Vector graphic images are defined as paths that are filled or outlined with colour. Each path follows a series of anchor points. Each anchor point has a location and two handles. The handles are defined as vectors with two values: magnitude and direction. Creating vector images is different from traditional drawing. When students are first introduced to VG they often become frustrated, but after a few hours of practice the new skills take hold. With a few days of experience graphic artists will create without frustration. Creating vector graphic images can be enjoyable and very rewarding. A pixel is a dot on the screen. Computer monitor pixels are bigger than smart phone pixels. TV pixels are rectangular. Images are built from pixels, but the image pixels are rarely shown on the screen at one to one. Almost all images are scaled before they are displayed. Mesh model data defines vertices, edges, faces, textures and materials. Vector graphics and mesh modells can both be rendered to an image of any size from a relatively small file size.

Uravakonda (Anantapur): The State government is coming up with a novel idea of establishing a 100 MW floating solar power plant in the PABR Reservoir. Details are being worked out in this regard. The idea not only saves space but also reduces water evaporation losses as the solar floats give a cover to the water in the reservoir from Sun. New and Renewable Energy Development Corporation (NREDCAP) is also in the process of meeting its target to complete 1,000 mega watts of wind power generation by March 31, 2017. Already 400 megawatts of wind power generation has been commissioned and another 600 megawatts are in the execution stage and expected to be commissioned by March 2017. Dubbed as green corridor, Rayalaseema particularly Kurnool and Anantapur will have a total power generation of 3,000 megawatts - 1,000 MW in Kurnool and 2000 MW in Anantapur district. The expansion of existing power plants is taking place in various mandals including Axis Wind Farm by 100 MW in Kuderu, Green Co at Saipuram by 100 MW, Skiron Energy at Polthuru by 226 MW, Ostro Energy by 200 MW in Kambaduru and Future Energy at Chennanpalle by 100 MW and also two other projects contributing to another 200 MW. AP Genco has plans to set up a 500 MW solar power plant at N P Kunta in the district sometime in 2017. These projects altogether would contribute to expansion of non-conventional projects – with further increase in wind power generation by more than 1,000 MW and solar energy production by another 500 MW. Presently, National Renewable Energy Development Corporation of Andhra Pradesh (NREDCAP) is engaged in overseeing establishment of Power Pooling Stations (PPS) at Kambaduru, Madancheruvu, Borampalle and other places to facilitate grid connection so that the power pooled from the sub-station areas could be transferred to the 220 KV sub-station at Borampalle and from there to the 400 KV sub-station at Uravakonda. These pooling stations will be completed by the end of March. NREDCAP District Manager Kodandarama Murthy told The Hans India that 30 years ago AP was brushed aside as a ‘No wind State’ but today it is producing 2000 MW of wind power out of the union government’s national target of 10,000 megawatts. Normally the minimum specification is 150 watts of wind power density per square metre area. “Modern machinery has enabled us to tap wind power even at 150 watts per square metre, a proposition not considered in the past on grounds of ‘not feasible’,” he said. What the power producers generated 10 lakh units in Ramagiri area is now able to almost double to 18 lakh units with latest equipment. Latest equipment enabled power producers to capture wind power even in low density wind power areas. Among the several players, Suzlon group, Gamesha, Inox, Wind World, Regen Power Tech, General Engineering, Tata and BHEL are major ones. Two companies Suzlon and Regen group are into manufacturing of wind fans to bring down transportation and import costs. The district is producing more than 1000 MW of power including old and new solar and wind projects in Kalyandurg, Uravakonda, Kadiri and Ramagiri regions. The wind power projects commissioned up to March 2015 were producing wind energy to the order of 792.94 MW capacity and subsequently another 401.10 MW have been added. The wind projects commissioned post 2015 are located at Atmakur, Beluguppa, Honnuru, Kalyandurg, Kudair, Pottipadu, Singanamala, Talaricheruvu, Tallimadugula and Vajrakaruru. Andhra Sugars of Mullapudi Harischandra Prasad was the first to set up a 3 MW wind power project at Ramagiri, followed by many others groups including BHEL, APSRTC, Navabharath Group, Deccan Cements, Rayalaseema Paper Mills, BSM Spinning Mills, Priyadarshini and ILFS setting up the plants and producing altogether 51.74 MW of power and supplying the same to the Power Grid.

Most of these caregivers are mid-life baby boomers who are still in the paid workforce and inching toward their pre-retirement years. Many of them find themselves curtailing their paid work in various ways, such as working fewer hours or leaving paid work earlier than planned in order to attend to unpaid caregiving responsibilities. As a result, however, such caregivers will have less financial security in their retirement than they may have expected. The financial vulnerability of these caregivers will be exacerbated by the recent increase in the age of the Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) benefits from age 65 to 67. Women’s pensionable earnings are already stretched due to their caregiving roles in their younger years, and now they will have to work two years longer before qualifying for OAS and GIS. The trends do not look good for women, according to Dr. Janet Fast, a professor in the department of human ecology at the University of Alberta. Canadian women live to 83 years on average, while men live to 78 years. Women in Japan already reach 86 years on average, and Canadian women are expected to do so by 2031. Longevity can cut both ways, allowing women to live longer while raising the necessity of caring for aging parents who are also living longer. These factors increase the threat to women’s late-life financial security. Retirement and other feminist issues tend to coincide with life stages. Younger women tend to be concerned with wage equity, affordable daycare and reproductive rights. Mid-life women face ageism, getting suitable jobs and breaking glass ceilings. With boomers reaching retirement, it is now time for the issues facing older women to get greater attention from feminists. The first boomers reached 65 in 2011, and, since women live longer and provide most unpaid care, unpaid caregiving is certainly a women’s issue. Canada has one of the highest numbers of baby boomers in the world, after the U.S.—some nine million people born between 1946 and 1964, who are almost equally divided by gender. Keefe of Mount St. Vincent University reported in a 2011 study, “Supporting Caregivers and Caregiving in an Aging Canada,” that the number of elderly Canadians needing assistance will double in the next 30 years. Informal caregivers, Keefe explains, “are family members, friends or neighbours, most frequently women, who provide unpaid care to a person who needs support … sometimes for an extended period.” Of the more than 2.3 million employed family or friend caregivers in Canada, three quarters undertake caregiving simultaneously with being in the paid workforce. Over one third of employed women and one quarter of employed men aged 45 and older provide care to a family member or friend. Gerontologist Dr. Neena Chappell, of the University of Victoria, observed in a 2011 article, “Population Aging and the Evolving Care Needs of Older Canadians, “the baby boomer generation is at present providing most of the necessary care.” What is insufficiently emphasized in caregiving studies is the socio-economic connection between their caring and late-life poverty. Employed women caregivers were much more likely to incur employment penalties because of their responsibilities than their male counterparts. Thirty percent missed full days of work, 6.4 percent retired early, quit or lost their paid job, and 4.7 percent say they turned down a job offer or promotion as a result of their caregiving responsibilities. In the same article, Chappell notes that the value to the Canadian economy of this unpaid work is estimated to be in the range of $25 billion to $31 billion annually. In the U.S., a MetLife study in 2011, “Caregiving Costs to Working Caregivers,” found that women caregivers over 50 who were also in the workforce had forgone an average of $324,044 in lost salary and social security income over their lifetimes (which included previous child-rearing caregiving duties). Male caregivers over 50 and still in the workforce were calculated to have lost $238,716 in salary and social security income over their lifetimes. Myrna is typical. At 62, she has looked after both parents. When her mother was widowed, Myrna, who had a nursing degree, continued caregiving. She describes herself as a “serial caregiver.” When asked her how she managed both to work and to provide care, Myrna replies, “My corporate career came to a smashing end.” She switched to lower-paid jobs because she couldn’t meet the shift work demands of nursing. “I can now never retire, because all my resources have dwindled,” adds Myrna, who was recently laid off from her clerical position. low pay, these jobs afford few benefits, such as pensions. In other words, most women can ill afford to give up their economic security to look after aging parents or other needy family members. The trend towards smaller families is also a factor. It means a shrinking pool of caregivers. Women are, by and large, not financially equipped to look after their elders, especially given the inequities faced by senior women. The cold hard fact is that 17 percent of single Canadian women 65 years and older and living alone are at or below the poverty line. In Canada, approximately 1.8 million low-income seniors get the GIS, and just over half (54 percent) of GIS recipients are women. And the older they get, the more they will rely on the means-tested GIS. For example, 62 percent of women aged 70 to74 are recipients. A look at the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) reveals the gender difference in the receipt of plan benefits. In 2011, Canadian men’s average monthly retirement benefit from the CPP was $603.51. For women it was a paltry $420.06. The gap has remained constant for many years. These benefits clearly represent a culmination of the inequities women suffer, both in the paid and unpaid work they do. What is to be done? Often mentioned is more respite care, drop-out arrangements, tax credits or extended leaves. It’s been a decade since Roy Romanow’s 2002 Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada recommended a national home care policy to replace the patchwork quilt of caregiving services, federally and provincially. Numerous experts concur with the need for such a policy, appropriate to current requirements. In 2009, the Senate called for a national caregiving strategy. One solution is to make pensionable benefits available to caregivers for their unpaid work. A study paper in April 2010 on family caregiving, published by the Canadian Centre for Elder Law, found that “the pension regime currently provides little or no recognition to the unpaid family caregiving of adults.” It suggested the creation of a caregiver-specific pension. There are already programs addressing such pensionable benefits in Australia and Norway. For Canadian women, this is now even more urgent, given that future unpaid caregivers will be without the OAS and GIS for two years longer. It is not only the invisibility of unpaid work that demands recognition. On a larger economic scale, the many productive contributions of older Canadians are ignored due to the ageist belief that older people take from the economy, rather than give to it. And yet, the reality is that seniors are among the largest groups of Canadian volunteers. They give generously to charities. They pay taxes on their income, including most of their pension income. Seniors also help to provide for their financially strapped adult children, especially in times of unemployment and recessions. Many grandparents also provide child care for their grandchildren, and many financially support their grandchildren’s educational and sports fees. Demographic changes affecting aging women make it imperative that social policy-makers recognize that ageism and sexism are a destructive combination. The four million Canadian female baby boomers have enough collective political clout to make policy-makers listen. A vibrant women’s revolution, led by boomer activism, is what it will take to force policy developers to address the current and future needs of women as they age. As Dr. Carroll Estes, a professor at the University of California, says, it is time for the “missing feminist revolution”—that of older women.

Renewable Energy Has a Good Side and a Bad Side... Evaluate Both All energy sources affect the environment in which we live. While fossil fuels may essentially do more harm, renewable energy sources can also pose a threat to the environment. Allowing for the various renewable energy sources: solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and geothermal, Environmental Impacts of Renewable Energy examines the environmental effects of all available renewable or alternative sources, as they increasingly play a large part in our energy supply, and provides a counterargument about the benefits of renewable energy. This book discusses both the merits and the physical, mechanical, electrical, and environmental limitations of renewable sources of energy. It discusses the pros and cons of renewable energy, addresses environmental issues and concerns, and determines ways to avoid or minimize these impacts. This text contains nine chapters reviewing in depth: Renewable energy impact on the environment Major renewable energy types Environmental health, safety, and ecological impacts Impact on tribal sacrosanct areas Environmental Impacts of Renewable Energy covers the adverse effects of major renewable energy sources. Environmental engineers working with renewable energy, environmental consultants/managers working with municipalities regarding environmental impact and land use, and undergraduate students taking related courses in environmental college programs can greatly benefit from this text. This book presents the methods of quantitative determination of solar irradiation incident amount on a surface on the Earth. It brings together information not found elsewhere in a single source, and includes an innovative exposition of expert system methodologies used in the domain of solar irradiation and energy. The book provides a background to the underlying physical principles of solar irradiation and energy, with explanations as to how these can be modelled and applied. Renewable Energy Resources is a numerate and quantitative text covering the full range of renewable energy technologies and their implementation worldwide. Energy supplies from renewables (such as from biofuels, solar heat, photovoltaics, wind, hydro, wave, tidal, geothermal, and ocean-thermal) are essential components of every nation’s energy strategy, not least because of concerns for the local and global environment, for energy security and for sustainability. Thus in the years between the first and this third edition, most renewable energy technologies have grown from fledgling impact to significant importance because they make good sense, good policy and good business. This Third Edition is extensively updated in light of these developments, while maintaining the book’s emphasis on fundamentals, complemented by analysis of applications. Renewable energy helps secure national resources, mitigates pollution and climate change, and provides cost effective services. These benefits are analysed and illustrated with case studies and worked examples. The book recognises the importance of cost effectiveness and efficiency of end-use. Each chapter begins with fundamental scientific theory, and then considers applications, environmental impact and socio-economic aspects before concluding with Quick Questions for self-revision and Set Problems. The book includes Reviews of basic theory underlying renewable energy technologies, such as electrical power, fluid dynamics, heat transfer and solid-state physics. Common symbols and cross-referencing apply throughout; essential data are tabulated in appendices. An associated eResource provides supplementary material on particular topics, plus a solutions guide to Set Problems. Renewable Energy Resources supports multi-disciplinary master degrees in science and engineering, and specialist modules in first degrees. Practising scientists and engineers who have not had a comprehensive training in renewable energy will find it a useful introductory text and a reference book. This book is an ideal reference text for teaching renewable energy to engineering and science students, as well as a reference book for scientists and professionals doing self study on the subject. The book has twelve chapters and starts with the definition and classification of renewable and non renewable energy and their status at global level. This chapter also contains the basic heat transfer mechanisms and laws of thermodynamics. It then deals with availability of solar radiation at different latitudes and energy and exergy analysis of flat plate collector, solar air collector, solar concentrator, evacuated tube collector, solar water heating system, solar distillation and solar cooker. The following chapter discusses the basics of semiconductor, its characteristics, working, characteristics of solar cell in dark and daylight situation, fundamentals of characteristic curves of semiconductor, fundamentals of PV module and array and some PVT systems. Detailed discussion on biomass, bio-fuels and biogas and their applications and the power produced by them, namely bio-power, is covered in the following chapters. Other renewable energy sources like hydropower, wind and geothermal are then covered as well as a chapter dealing with the working principle, basic theory and the capability to produce power from ocean thermal, tidal, wave and animal energy conversion systems. Subsequently, net CO2 mitigation, carbon credit, climate change and environmental impacts of all renewable energy resources are all covered followed by a discussion on the techno-economic feasibility of any energy sources as the backbone of its success and hence energy and economic analysis. The chapters deal the overall exergy of renewable energy sources by using the thermal and mechanical power and electrical energy as output. SI units are used throughout the book in solving various exercises in each chapter and conversion units of various physical and chemical parameters of metals and non-metals are also given in appendices.

Variety of 5 hp electric motor single phase wiring diagram. A wiring diagram is a simplified conventional photographic representation of an electric circuit. It reveals the components of the circuit as simplified shapes, and the power as well as signal connections in between the tools. A wiring diagram normally gives info concerning the loved one position and also plan of tools and also terminals on the devices, in order to help in building or servicing the gadget. This is unlike a schematic layout, where the arrangement of the parts’ interconnections on the diagram generally does not correspond to the parts’ physical locations in the ended up gadget. A pictorial layout would show much more information of the physical look, whereas a wiring diagram uses a more symbolic symbols to highlight interconnections over physical look. A wiring diagram is usually used to repair issues and making sure that all the links have actually been made which every little thing is present. A wiring diagram is a kind of schematic which makes use of abstract photographic icons to show all the affiliations of components in a system. Wiring diagrams are made up of 2 things: symbols that stand for the elements in the circuit, and lines that represent the connections between them. Therefore, from circuitry representations, you know the loved one place of the parts and also just how they are attached. It’s a language engineers have to learn when they function on electronic devices jobs. It’s simple to obtain confused about wiring diagrams and also schematics. Electrical wiring layouts mostly reveals the physical placement of components as well as links in the developed circuit, however not necessarily in reasoning order. It minimizes integrated circuits right into sub-components to make the system’s practical reasonings less complicated to understand. To check out a wiring diagram, initially you need to understand exactly what fundamental aspects are consisted of in a wiring diagram, and also which pictorial symbols are used to represent them. The typical aspects in a wiring diagram are ground, power supply, wire and link, output tools, switches, resistors, reasoning entrance, lights, and so on. A checklist of electric icons and summaries can be found on the “electric icon” page. A line stands for a cable. Cords are utilized to connect the elements with each other. All points along the wire are similar and linked. Wires on some areas need to go across each various other, but that does not necessarily imply that they connect. A black dot is used to show the injunction of two lines. Main lines are stood for by L1, L2, and so on. Generally various colors are made use of to identify the cables. There must be a tale on the wiring diagram to tell you just what each shade suggests. Generally circuits with even more than two parts have 2 standard kinds of links: series and parallel. A collection circuit is a circuit where parts are connected along a single path, so the current flows through one part to get to the following one. In a series circuit, voltages build up for all parts attached in the circuit, as well as currents are the very same via all parts. In a parallel circuit, each tool is straight connected to the power source, so each gadget receives the very same voltage. The present in a parallel circuit flows along each parallel branch and also re-combines when the branches satisfy again.

My 8 year old son really wants to join the football team this year. I am concerned about the risk of traumatic head injuries. But on the other hand I am not sure if kids that are 8 and 9 years old can really hit hard enough to do any real damage to risk head injury. Hockey to me seems much more dangerous, just because of the higher speeds and risk of head and ice contact. Do you think a child at 8 years of age has to worry about traumatic brain injury from football, or is this just something that you start seeing as the players get bigger and faster and stronger? Your question is part of a increasing wave of concern among parents, pediatricians and mental health professionals due, in large part, to the significant issues raised by current and retired NFL players who have seen weird, atypical emotional and behavioral acting out. While it's typically very difficult to determine cause-and-effect, there is mounting evidence that head trauma, even slight and seemingly mild, can have long lasting effects that are not immediately noticeable. Many high schools and pro teams now have strict protocols regarding any player that suffers a concussion, heat exhaustion or head trauma. Interestingly, having your brain heat up to 104 degrees or higher can cause major problems and death. Normally, I would refer you to a physician but in this case, I'm more interested in how you make your decision. Let's compare your options: 1) Allow your son to play football and risk head trauma or 2) Disallow your son to play football and guarantee he has no head trauma (from football, at least). Basically, does your family value your son playing football enough to risk short or long term medical/mental health issues? Does your family value a more conservative approach with less risk? This is an important way to reframe your question. Some of the issues we've seen correlated (...can't really prove that it was head trauma) with a possible head injury include poor executive functioning (front brain stuff). Behaviorally, this looks like poor impulse control, acting-out, and general ADHD-looking symptoms. We've also seen clients that had what's called chemical TBI (traumatic brain injury) caused by overdosing on drugs. Essentially, the brain is amazingly resilient and, paradoxically, very sensitive sometimes. Because of that, I refer back to our little conversation about your values. Life is full of risks and rewards. Identifying and using your family's values as a compass heading to make decisions will serve you best when you have a tough decision to make.

One of the characters, on finding a stash of stolen art, tracks down the Parisian address of its rightful owners. The house he arrives at is abandoned, its Jewish occupants long since fled or taken. “They aren’t coming back,” his companion says. But nonetheless, he leaves the portrait of a woman hanging on the bare wall, staring out sadly, defiantly. The questions raised about the value of culture and the importance of safeguarding it during armed conflicts resonate beyond the film, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Cultural objects often become a part of conflict as aggressors and defenders seek to control their history and identity, and that of their enemies. This can take the form of controlling living artists through censorship and any resistance to this. For example, Emil Nolde, a German-Danish expressionist, painted miniature landscapes so he could hide his work when the Nazis searched his home for what they described as degenerate art. It also takes the form of looting. There have recently been a number of high profile recoveries of stolen art. The Tate has just agreed to return Constable’s Beaching a Boat, Brighton, which was looted and smuggled out of wartime Hungary. There is also, of course, the destruction of buildings and archaeological sites. Since 2003 the British Museum has been involved in providing conservation and archaeological assistance to the Iraqis after the second Gulf war, and in 2008 alongside the British Army it carried out a survey of sites across southern Iraq with a view to preserving the cultural heritage. The Hague convention for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict, originally drawn up in 1954 and amended in 1999, is an international treaty that stemmed from the destruction and appropriation of cultural objects in the second world war. The convention provides protection for cultural heritage in international law, prohibiting looting, theft, vandalism and reprisals against cultural property and barring the use of cultural property for military purposes except in exceptional circumstances. Importantly, it also forbids the export of cultural property from occupied territories and makes provision for the return of objects deposited with third-party territories for safekeeping during conflict. Yet the UK is one of the only western powers not to have ratified the convention. I am calling on the new culture secretary, Sajid Javid, to introduce legislation in the next Queen’s speech to ratify the convention, and have asked a parliamentary question that will be addressed after Easter. Labour will back such a move if he agrees to this. There can be no excuse: the legislation was prepared by the last Labour government; the coalition has run out of ideas. Let’s use the final year of this parliament to do something really useful on a cross-party basis.

CRO includes various processes used to increase the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action or convert into customers. IN THIS GUIDE, WE WILL REVIEW VARIOUS METHODS YOU CAN PUT TO WORK TO INCREASE CONVERSIONS AND PROVIDE A BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. Make sure you set up a way to measure your conversion rate and keep track of changes. You can track conversions on Google Analytics or on most marketing platforms. Go to your Standard Reports section in Google Analytics. Click “+ Goal” to set up a new goal. Enter into “Goal URL” the link of your thank you page or confirmation page where a visitor is directed to after completing a purchase or download. Enter only what comes after the domain. If the full URL is www.testwebsite.com/thank-you, enter only “/thank-you”. Each time a visitor reaches the page specified, they will trigger the goal to be recorded. Using the goal you set above, find the number of total conversions on your site. Go to Google Analytics > Audience > Overview to find “Users” for total visitors to your site. Calculate (Total Conversions / Total Visitors ) * 100 = Conversion Rate. If you want to calculate conversions over a specific time period, make sure you change the dates at the top right of the reports screen in Google Analytics. Gather and analyze data about your visitors to foresee what information they need. Tailor your site for visitors to provide information that is useful to them. Clearly define your unique selling proposition and how you can meet and exceed customer needs. Customer reviews, testimonials and accreditation badges go a long way to increase buyer confidence. Identify what strategies work best when engaging customers and incorporate lessons learned into your site. If you know where to look, you can gather a lot of information about your audience just by exploring your analytics. You can use Google Analytics to get a great overview of your audience or utilize a marketing platform that allows you to dig deeper and track individual customers and their activity on your site. How Can You Use Analytics to Personalize Your Site? Find out location, age, demographics and interests from Google Analytics’ Audience Reports (Age and Gender pictured left). Find out what devices used on the Google Analytics Audience Technology Report and browsers used on the Audience Mobile Report. Optimize your site to display properly for the majority of your visitors. Go to Google Analytics > Acquisition Reports > All Traffic > Channels to explore your website traffic. You’ll be able to see how your visitors found your site between Organic, Direct, Email, Referral and Social Traffic. Each channel drills down to provide more in-depth information. Go to Google Analytics > Behavior Reports > Behavior Flow to indicate the most popular pages visited and the flow of how visitors explore your site past the first page. If certain pages are more popular than others, you can examine it to see what might make it more appealing than other pages. Go to Google Analytics > Behavior Reports > Behavior Flow to see where your visitors dropped off your site. Doing so will indicate potential areas of improvement. If visitors are frequently leaving on a certain page, it may be because the form is too long or the images are too large making load time too slow. If they leave at checkout, you might reinforce site security. Now that you’ve gathered customer data, you can update your website according to their behavior and preferences. Use your analytics to personalize customer experience and provide the most relevant information as quickly as possible to maintain their interest in your products and services. What Can You Learn From Your Analytics? Ensure that your site is responsive and renders properly on all devices, especially the ones most commonly used by your audience. You can test your site using Google Search Console’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Create variations of your site pages that update based on visitor location. If you provide the information they need as quickly as possible, you’ll be more likely to close the sale. Ask us how we make this possible. You can identify helpful partnerships and know where to advertise your products by knowing the tangential interests of customers from the Google Analytics Audience > Interests Report. See other sites they like to visit from the Google Analytics Acquisition > Channels > Referrals Report. Make the checkout process as quick and convenient as possible, only requesting the information needed to complete the purchase. Also be sure to offer multiple options to pay, incorporating payment processing platforms like PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay which some customers prefer. A customer should immediately (within seconds) know what you do and why you’re better than your competition. Placing your unique selling proposition front and center on your website is imperative to capture the attention of your visitors. Your USP should include your product offering but it may also extend to your amazing customer service or various options for ordering products. Remember, you are not just selling a product or service, you are selling your brand. When writing your unique selling proposition, do your research. Ask your sales team how customers describe your products or what terms they might search to find you. Look at what terms competitors use on their site. Getting your site to rank high on search engines can help you increase exposure and visitors. Organize product details and specifications on a bulleted list and provide an image that tells the story of your USP. The faster visitors can find the information they need, the more likely you’ll attract their attention and avoid having them turn to a more organized competitor. Improving conversion rates is not a one-size-fits-all plan. What works for one company may not work for another. When talking about your products throughout your copy, use appropriate tone and language to represent your brand. For example, while it may be appropriate for a pop culture brand to use memes and slang, a financial services website risks losing credibility by doing so. Show customers they’re making the right decision with visual reinforcement of your unique selling proposition (USP). Provide that extra push visitors may need to convert to customers by showcasing satisfied customers with reviews and testimonials, as well as displaying rewards earned for great products and services. Don’t be afraid to add other media formats like images and video along with your text to boost its value. Demonstrate responsibility and earn trust. Show visitors they’re working with a legitimate and ethical company recognized by well-known industry authorities. Do you service B2B clients? It is influential to show other brands who have benefitted from your products and are pleased with their experience. Showing testimonials and reviews from real customers can remove skepticism. If the review highlights a specific product or feature, place it on the appropriate page to boost its persuasiveness. Add social media feeds for your active accounts to reinforce relationships with customers and provide great customer service no matter where they choose to engage. Create urgency using time or supply. Show a limited duration of time to secure an offer or show product quantity when items have sold out or have a limited quantity still available. Be honest to maintain trust with customers. Link to your policies at the bottom of your website and at checkout. Be sure that all service representatives know how you care for customers to provide a consistent experience on chats, calls, on your site and in stores (privacy, shipping, returns, payment processing, and FAQs). To truly uncover your opportunity for growth, you’ll have to test various elements on your website. Only through testing you’ll discover that your visitors will react to small changes that make a big difference. You may see changes in how visitors react to content variants on your site. First, look over your analytics and form a few hypotheses about what could be improved to increase conversions. Then, test those hypotheses out. Suggested forms of testing include A/B testing and multivariate tests, landing page tests, software tests, user testing, and also by conducting surveys and polls to gather real feedback from visitors. Make sure you change only one element from variation to variation to isolate the element being tested. Say you want to test font A vs. font B on a landing page. You would show half of your traffic font A and the other half would be presented with font B. If font B performs better (you know this because it shows a higher conversion rate), you’ll implement this change permanently on relevant pages throughout your site to increase conversion rates from then on. What Elements Can You Test? Google Analytics is an outstanding tool that provides an overview of insights on how your site responds to traffic and generally what types of visitors are coming to your site. These metrics include bounce rate, time spent on site and what the users are doing on your site. You can configure it in a way that will let you compare a few traffic sources and how each affect your site. You can also configure Google Analytics to track conversions, but you must do so for each campaign. Unless you modify it to do so, Google Analytics will only track site traffic and will not aggregate analytics with those from your other marketing tools. Google Analytics can be somewhat overwhelming in its entirety and can be time-consuming to configure to generate the metrics needed to prove ROI from your marketing campaigns. However, it is a tool that provides a good start for small businesses looking to improve their site. A Paid Insights Platform enables you to customize your dashboard with ROI analytics at the top as well access more targeted analytics that dig deeper into specific customer behavior. Aggregate and align site analytics with campaign analytics from various channels and automated marketing tools. Evaluate traffic to your site through a variety of viewpoints such as on a campaign level, or by the individual visitor to see how specific customers respond to your content and behave on your site. Use collected customer data to trigger and personalize content by unlimited saved data points such as location or industry. You can also track customer journeys, specific funnels, call to actions, ROI rates and more. All data is connected and initiated through your marketing platform so you never overlook important details that can make or break campaigns - and your customers never miss out on your content. Once installed, your campaign analytics are automatically tracked in line with your site data.