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warc | 201704 | Focus Point - Fast TrackCommentary by Pete du Pont
December 10, 2001
I'm Pete du Pont with the National Center for Policy Analysis. The house will soon begin a debate that should be a no-brainer: whether or not to give the president fast track authority on trade pacts.
Fast track lets the president expedite trade without deals getting bogged down by political bickering or special interest meddling. Every president from Richard Nixon had it, until it lapsed in 1994. Since then the rest of the world has been opening up to free trade, while we've been sitting on the sidelines.
With the economy lagging, trade becomes even more important. Exports accounted for about a third of all economic growth over the past decade. The economies of countries that are open to trade grow faster than those that aren't. When we get it right, as we did with the North American Free Trade Agreement, everybody prospers. In fact, Mexico has taken the lesson to heart far more than we have, and has turned into more of a free trading country than the U.S., making eight free trade agreements with more than 30 nations.
The house needs to get this right, and do it now.
Those are my ideas, and at the NCPA we know ideas can change the world. I'm Pete du Pont. Next time, historical dopes. |
warc | 201704 | Men who have a pregnant, HIV-infected partner are twice as likely to be infected with the virus as those whose partners are not pregnant, scientists have found.
Previous research has suggested that women are particularly susceptible to HIV when they are pregnant and the latest study indicates that men are also at greater risk when their partner is pregnant.
The findings were presented at the International Microbicides Conference in Pittsburgh by scientists from the University of Nairobi & Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi and the University of Washington in Seattle.
Their conclusion was based on a study involving 3,321 couples in which one partner was HIV-positive and suggests that pregnancy brings about biological changes that make women more infectious than usual.
Jason Warriner, clinical director for the Terrence Higgins Trust, told the BBC that the study highlights the importance of antenatal screening programmes for HIV.
'One of the biggest challenges we face in the UK is that one person in four with HIV doesn't even know they have the virus, because they haven't been tested,' he revealed. |
warc | 201704 | For the most part I am a huge fan of the Church’s counsel regarding finances, preparedness, and self-reliance. I love the counsel to stay out of debt and live within our means, and I need a steady diet of it. (From what I can tell you do too.) However, I find myself somewhat at odds with the counsel to keep a year’s supply of food.
If I were revising the counsel, I would tell everyone to store:
1. A one-month supply of food
2. A one-year supply of money
The purpose of food storage is to prepare us for the calamities that come along during life. Such calamities include: loss of employment, loss of income, a trucker strike, economic recession, economic depression, and the total collapse of our economic system with accompanying meltdown of society leading to the post-apocalyptic world of movies on the SciFi channel. If we had statistics on the actual occurrences of such calamities since the counsel on food storage became official in 1936, I think it is obvious that the vast majority of the calamities would fall in categories at the beginning of that list.
The beauty of money (as opposed to food) is that it is, well, money and not food. It is not perishable and it can be used to buy whatever you actually need for whatever crisis actually hits. If the calamity is a blown head-gasket in my car, money helps me out whereas my barrels of weevils and grain do not.
I am always hearing testimonials about the time someone’s family lost their job and had to live off that year’s supply of food. Such examples are wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but I have to bite my tongue to keep from pointing out that I would much rather have a year’s supply of money in such a situation. First, it could buy a kind of food my kids actually eat. Second, it could help to pay my mortgage while I’m unemployed. Third, back during the good times while I was waiting for the calamity to hit, it would have been earning interest instead of nourishing weevils.
Before anyone gets too upset with me, it is worth knowing a bit of history about the origin of the year’s supply counsel. Of course, self-sufficiency and food storage were taught going back to Brigham Young’s time. However, the current counsel dates back more specifically to the Great Depression. During the years immediately following the stock market crash in 1929 and the resulting depression, the Church took a number of steps in response. Most significantly, in 1935, Harold B. Lee (then Stake President) was called to formulate a Church-wide welfare program, which was launched the following year (1936) in April Conference. In 1937, J. Reuben Clark gave a talk in which he challenged the Saints to store a year’s supply of food, clothing, and, where possible, fuel. That counsel is still in effect today. Ezra Taft Benson wrote in his book
Come Unto Christ: “As families, we must strive to be self-reliant. Since 1936, members of the Church have been instructed to have in storage a one-year supply of food, clothing, and, where possible, fuel. This enables one to survive loss of employment, loss of income, or even calamity, as spoken of in the revelations.”
It is worth noting that the counsel was formulated during the Great Depression when thousands of banks had failed and fortunes had been lost in the stock market. It is no surprise that the focus would be on food instead of money. However, as President Benson said, the purpose of food storage is to prepare against all types of calamity, not just worldwide disasters, and personal disasters are much
much more common.
By the way, am I the only one who noticed that part about a year’s supply of fuel? Can I get a raise of hands on who has a year’s supply of fuel? As for the year’s supply of clothes, my wife has that covered for the whole ward, so don’t worry about that. If you’re in my ward, you are covered.
So what do you think, who’s ready to stuff some of those wheat barrels with some cold hard cash?
[Associated radio.blog song:
Echo and the Bunnymen – Stormy Weather] |
warc | 201704 | TORONTO, Jan. 27, 2016 /CNW/ - The Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) emphasizes the importance of education and ongoing dialogue as it commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The theme for 2016 is The Holocaust and Human Dignity.
"Education about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust is a key component of human rights education. Putting human rights into practice is, in turn, key to ensuring that the destruction of humans and human dignity as experienced throughout the Holocaust never happens again," said Anita Bromberg, Executive Director, Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF).
"Learning about the precursors, the ideology, the hatred that led to the Holocaust will help us recognize the conditions and context in which the seeds of such evil are allowed to fester", Bromberg continued. "The CRRF has a number of relevant educational initiatives. We are particularly proud to join with Voices into Action, an initiative of FAST (Fighting Antisemitism Together) to teach students about the strengths accruing from a greater appreciation of identity, belonging and human rights."
Voices into Action is an online curriculum-based educational resource dedicated to providing students with access to information on issues regarding human rights, prejudice and hatred. The CRRF unit, Our Canada: Exploring Canadian Values, available in French and English, is now set to be launched.
"It is the responsibility of all Canadians to ensure that the enduring lessons of the Holocaust are not forgotten and that the human dignity of all is honoured, " commented Albert Lo, Chairperson, CRRF. "The incredible and inspirational stories of Holocaust survivors must be preserved and shared with future generations."
Albert Lo was instrumental in the vision and development of the CRRF's Our Canada Project, which includes 150 Stories, a collection of stories – one story every week for 150 weeks – celebrating and leading up to Canada's sesquicentennial in 2017. The collection includes stories by and about Holocaust survivors who have made their home in Canada.
150 Stories: Holocaust Remembrance
Rachel Shtibel: Uncle Velvel's violin – a symbol of survival
Toni Silberman: With gratitude
Rubin Friedman: My name is…and I am Canadian!
Saul Shulman: Maintaining hope during dire circumstances
Irene Csillag: When will it be "never again"?
SOURCE Canadian Race Relations Foundation
For further information: CRRF Executive Director: Anita Bromberg, abromberg@crrf-fcrr.ca 416-508-9033
RELATED LINKS
http://www.crr.ca |
warc | 201704 | 464 pages, Figs, tabs
For many, Africa is regarded as a place of mystery and negative images, where reports of natural disasters and civil strife dominate media attention, with relatively little publicity given to any of the continent's more positive attributes. Africa has at last begun to receive the depth of interest it has long deserved, in the shape of debates about trade, aid and debt, the 'Make Poverty History' campaign, and the UK 'Commission on Africa'. But, behind the superficial media facade, Africa is a diverse, complex and dynamic place, with a rich history and a colonial engagement that, although short-lived, was fundamental in determining the long-term future of the continent. At the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, when the world is engulfed in a major financial crisis, Africa has the dubious distinction of being the world's poorest continent.
This book introduces and de-mystifies Africa's diversity and dynamism, and considers how its peoples and environments have interacted through time and space. The background and diversity of Africa's social, cultural, economic, political and environmental systems is examined as well as key development issues which have affected Africa in the past, and are likely to be significant in shaping the future of the continent. These include; the impact of HIV/AIDS, sources of conflict and post-conflict reconstruction, the state and governance, the nature of African economies in a global context, and future development trajectories. Africa:Diversity and Development is a refreshing interdisciplinary text which enhances understanding of the background to Africa's current position and clarifies possible future scenarios. It is richly illustrated throughout with diagrams and plates, and contains a wealth of detailed case studies and current data.
Chapter 1. Africa: Continuity and Change Chapter 2. Africa's People Chapter 3. African Environments Chapter 4. Rural Africa Chapter 5. Urban Africa Chapter 6. Health Chapter 7. Conflict and Post-conflict Chapter 8. African Economies Chapter 9. Developing Africa Chapter 10. What Future for Africa?
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Tony Binns is Ron Lister Professor of Geography at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Alan Dixon is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Worcester, UK. Etienne Nel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. |
warc | 201704 | What are the ethics of platform design? One of the reasons that Facebook study on user emotions was so controversial is that it touched on the kinds of ethics we expect — or don’t expect — from platform designers. The public debate was divided, right down to the words used to describe what happened: science, experimentation, customization, manipulation, effect, significance, consent, harm, algorithm, users, audiences. All these words mean different things to people depending on their experiences, training, values, and expectations. And the simple summary of ethics as the “study of what we ought to do” is often unsatisfying because it invokes hard questions about who is the “we” who does the deciding, what “oughts” are up for debate, and who bears responsibility. Journalists and news technology designers are increasingly finding themselves in the middle of this debate about how platforms should work.
Many people interested in journalism followed the Facebook study debate because it was, in part, about a new era of press ethics. The press’s freedom — its rights and obligations as a distinct institution — rests, in part, upon bearing responsibility to focus our attention, influence who we learn from, and affect change.
But the press doesn’t bear this responsibility alone. Today, press ethics are intertwined with platform design ethics, and press freedom is shared with software designers. The people at Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, Pulse and elsewhere have a new and significant role in how news circulates and what we see on our screens. We’re only just beginning to understand how these companies’ algorithms work and why they matter to the editorial calculations
shaping today’s news.
We recently conducted a study on designers of news apps and their work in this space between software design and news circulation [
Digital Journalism / SSRN].
When designers create a personalized news app, they aren’t just designing software. They are creating a platform that participates in constructing an
idea of news. An app can give you exactly the type of stories you’re interested in ( soccer and marmots only, please) or it can suggest and display stories that it suspects you should be reading. You can, if you want, design a personal service with a preference for positive news that also avoids negative terms, something which NPR reported Google was doing in its “experimental newsroom” during the World Cup.
A decision like this is significant, with wide-ranging and unanticipated effects, but it’s the latest moment in a long history of value driven news decisions. Newspaper publishers in the colonial United States were in a similar situation: “None of the early papers reached out to collect news; they printed what came to them.” Selection decisions gradually became norms of news production; they created expectations and responsibilities for journalists and publishers. Likewise, app designers are currently making choices that are reshaping our experience of everyday news reading.
Traffic data show that people are increasingly encountering news through smartphones and tablets; breaking news alerts are starting to be tailored to geographic locations; and online news organizations of various stripes are implementing “mobile-first” design strategies to make sure that their content and experiences are optimized for small screens. Emerging academic literature tells us that these mobile technologies are not simply smaller, more portable versions of desktop-era websites. Instead, they represent new news terrains that are “immersive, pervasive, and constantly updating” and may also be leaving us vulnerable to new forms of “data-mining and surveillance.”
These emerging mobile platforms are being made by designers who must make their own decisions about what is important for news delivery. What do they value? While some traditional news organizations are creating their own news apps, mobile news also emerges from a parallel industrial culture of start-ups and commercial software design, with a different inheritance of norms and values to those associated with the fourth estate.
With this in mind, we set out to understand how designers of these apps constitute what we call a “liminal press”: people and systems existing outside — but alongside — online news organizations that create the conditions under which mobile news circulates. To get a sense of how these designers understand themselves and their roles, we interviewed senior programmers, designers, and decision-makers at Storify, Zite, Google News, Emporia, AOL Editions, News.Me, Fluent News, and Scoopinion (leaders in mobile news experience design when we conducted our fieldwork in 2011 and 2012).
We conducted interviews in Palo Alto, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Cambridge U.K. For this paper in Digital Journalism, we focused on two questions: how these designers define journalism as a process and as a profession; and how they see themselves as like or unlike others in the field of online news. Here’s what we found.
Relationship to journalism as a profession and process
Four themes emerged in how news app designers understood their work in relation to journalism: organizing information; meeting user demands; strategic transparency, and, at times, distancing themselves from journalism.
Organizing Information: A senior leader at Storify described the company’s goal as essentially information organization — helping people pull out things they think are important and worth preserving “from the noise of all this social media.” A leading designer at AOL Editions agreed, saying that a key challenge they aimed to solve was information overload: “So you’ve got TweetDeck beeping at you, and Flipboard is always refreshing, and there’s always a new story…how do you keep up with all that?” Designers did not think that they were simply providing information but, rather, helping people “sense-make”: processing ambiguity, creating plausible meanings, and feeling in control of the surfeit of data. Meeting user demands: Part of organizing information means learning about users and delivering only the content they want to receive. For example, Zite’s co-founder says their app could teach editors what news should be: “No matter what an editor thinks is important, I’m never going to consider a story about Lindsay Lohan important, ever. I just don’t want to see that in my feed. So I think that how this transforms media is that it teaches reporters a lot more about what people are talking about, what they should be writing about.” And a senior Google News executive said that their sense of success comes not only from giving people what they want to see, but from “helping you discover things that might be of interest to you that aren’t resident in your social graph today.” For these designers, meeting user demand means not simply giving people what they say they want—it means delivering what they think users should want based on their previous behavior and the data patterns they produce. The data produced by a user is fed into a model that determines what news is seen — even when those signals conflict with what the user has asked for, or what judgments the editors might make. Strategic transparency: All the designers we spoke with wanted to tell users why they make content recommendations, with each having a slightly different understanding of “transparency.” The Google News executive aimed to highlight types of news expertise they value: “We’re starting to surface these authorship annotations to help you see who’s behind the news … to show expertise, which we believe strongly in.” This doesn’t mean Google News is going to tell you how its algorithm works but, rather, that its algorithm is going to favor reporting that it judges to be open and transparent. Distancing from journalism: Although all of our participants talked about themselves in relation to press practices and traditions, many of them also distanced themselves from journalism altogether, claiming little or no relationship to news work. “I don’t know if anyone is thinking about practical journalism as fair and balanced storytelling,” confessed a senior News.me designer. When asked about the kind of journalistic ideals motivating designers working on these types of products, a senior AOL designer said: “I don’t think that the people in this space who are doing this are familiar with these ideas of journalism that you’re talking about, except in the most cursory way. And even there, I don’t think that they believe they’re important. I think essentially, zero. I think there are no ideals being pursued.” His colleague agreed saying “You know, I’m building an entertainment product. I don’t even consider all the things that you guys are talking about.” How interstitial designers see themselves
Scholars of journalism have been increasingly interested in the kind of boundaries — organizational, technological, ideological — that divide and structure aspects of news work. Our goal was to better understand these “interstitial designers,” people who create news products that fall somewhere in between pure content and user experiences. Our aim was to describe the boundary work of these news app designers: How do they see similarities and differences in each other, or with journalists. Four themes emerged in this boundary work, in how they described their identities, their technologies, and their roles within the field of news technology design:
Heavy versus light infrastructure: Some participants described themselves as having a more open participatory framework than traditional news organizations, drawing on countless non-professionals who will contribute content to their service. One Storify co-founder contrasted his company against the Associated Press, but said that it raises a whole new set of questions: “What would you do if you wanted to recreate the AP [Associated Press] today? You know, would you build the news service by getting a bunch of offices all around the world and hire people and translators and assistants and drivers and create all this infrastructure for sending the reporters everywhere, which the AP has done?” Instead he aims to create a new kind of AP based on “curation of social media; building a platform where we enable journalists, bloggers or whoever wants to really to find the best of social media and use human intelligence.” They aim to resemble the AP’s reach and global power, but to do so without its heavy infrastructure. App designers versus mainstream media: News app designers mark their sector out as different, while defending themselves against perceived criticism from mainstream media. A senior Google News executive says that what they do is like what the press has always done: “on the one hand, I can look at some of those [aggregation] practices and easily say [it is] inappropriate leveraging of someone else’s work. On the other hand, news reporting is largely derivative work, right? I mean there are pieces of additive facts and value, but so much of news coverage, understandably, is building on prior news coverage.” Other designers described themselves as partners of news organizations, as a senior News.me developer did: “We wanted to figure out a way for publishers like the Times to get what they want, which is money for their content, which is information about the people that are consuming their content. So how do we set something up where people can consume New York Times content, outside of their walls, in a place that they enjoy, but also have The New York Times benefit, and not lose anything from it?… They can benefit from this ecosystem.” News app designers seemed to be trying to both differentiate themselves from the mainstream media (articulating the value they give them), while simultaneously describing their apps as consistent with the kind of news circulation practices the press has always relied upon. Curation versus aggregation: The dividing line between curation and aggregation emerged frequently, as a contested ground where some designers spoke passionately about why they were not “mere aggregators” and instead curating a series of complex signals, from social media and users reading patterns as expressed in metadata (time reading a story, what genres they clicked, what their friends were reading). For example, News.me distinguished itself from the basic RSS reader model: “A lot of people thought, ‘Okay, RSS is the future, RSS Reader.’ And it didn’t really go anywhere. People still use it that way. And now you see these apps coming to iPhone and iPad, particularly Flipboard and Pulse. They’re really just RSS aggregators. To this point, they’re not really doing anything behind the scenes other than like a different presentation.” The designers saw their algorithms as providing a kind of critical, signal-driven curation, a key distinction from a history of simple aggregation they saw their systems challenging. App designers versus gatekeepers: Finally, designers described their frustrations with not having final control over how their apps are published and distributed. Rather than seeing themselves as gatekeepers, they described their reliance on the gatekeepers who run app stores. A senior designer with AOL Editions said: “Yeah, well there’s another piece that I think is really lost in this which is that probably the most important player in this is Apple as the gatekeeper. Like, they’re the gatekeeper of news now, right? For instance, I’m still upset with them, you know, they wouldn’t let us into Newsstand even though our thing is the most episodic of all of them, okay, they wouldn’t let us into Newsstand because we were aggregating content.” Closing the divide between journalists and software designers
We continually heard designers invoke different traditions and ideologies. They talked about journalism as an information-focused practice and the need to give people individual, personalized views of the Internet’s surfeit of data. They described news consumers in customer-like ways, aiming to create designs that would meet their demands and desires. They judged success in terms of how large their audiences were. Some of them questioned their relationship to journalism altogether, distancing themselves from what they saw as the press’s outdated and complex infrastructures; instead, they aimed to create lightweight architectures that used crowd-sourced, participatory labor to do the work of news professionals. That is, instead of seeing simple divides between algorithms and editors, between curation and aggregation, between “old” or “new” journalism, we saw a complex mix of motivations and self-stated identities.
News app design seems to constitute an emerging organizational field: a “community of organizations that engage in common activities and are subject to similar reputational and regulatory pressures.” Our interviewees invoked and rejected the traditional press — sometimes differentiating themselves from it and other times aligning with it, while not always even agreeing on what “it” is.
Although this is an early step in characterizing this hybrid press of entrepreneurs and technology designers, much of what they do certainly resembles a kind of boundary work considered key to contemporary online journalism.
The Facebook study and the discussion emerging from it highlighted the need for journalists to understand how social media signals are interpreted, manipulated, or monetized by platforms like Facebook. But it also showed their need to have conversations with software designers outside of their own newsrooms — to talk across divides between algorithm and editorial that live beyond their organizations, to create new ethics of press responsibility.
Photo of an iPhone stencil by Robert Occhialini
used under a Creative Commons license. |
warc | 201704 | A fistula is an abnormal connection between an organ, vessel, or intestine and another structure. Fistulas are usually the result of injury or surgery. It can also result from infection or inflammation.
Inflammatory bowel disease, such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, is an example of a disease that leads to fistulas between one loop of intestine and another. Injury can lead to fistulas between arteries and veins.
Information
Fistulas may occur in many parts of the body. Some of these are:
Arteriovenous (between an artery and vein)
Biliary (created during gallbladder surgery, connecting bile ducts to the surface of the skin)
Cervical (either an abnormal opening into the cervix or in the neck)
Craniosinus (between the space inside the skull and a nasal sinus)
Townsend CM, Beauchamp RD, Evers BM, Mattox KL. Sabiston Textbook of Surgery. 17th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2006.
Review Date:8/12/2011Reviewed By:Linda Vorvick, MD, Medical Director, MEDEX Northwest Division of Physician Assistant Studies, University of Washington School of Medicine. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M., Inc. |
warc | 201704 | Almost all of Shakespeare’s plays begin with a state of order or stability, which gives way to
disorder or confusion.
That disruption could take place in individuals. Macbeth is told that he is going to be king and as a result of that becomes consumed by ambition; Othello believes his wife to be unfaithful and is overwhelmed by jealousy; Hamlet learns that his father has been murdered by his father’s brother and becomes obsessed with revenge. Other human causes of disruption are love, hatred, the lust for political power or any other strongly felt emotion. The disruption drives the dramatic action.
Disruption could also occur in society – for example civil war or rebellion. Sometimes disruption in an individual will lead to social disruption, and vice versa.
Disruption in individuals is often echoed by disruption in nature. For example, Lear’s madness is reflected in the storms and tempests that take place throughout; Macbeth’s unnatural killing of his king is reflected in unnatural happenings such as the horses in the stables going mad and biting the grooms, earthquakes, unusual downpours etc.
Order is restored in the end. The suffering individual is usually dead by the end of the play, but even in the plays that aren’t classical tragedies the disrupted individual comes to new understandings and a new outlook on humanity, even though that may be minutes before his or her death.
Although order may be restored it is seldom all perfect and harmonious. There are loose ends, such as the treatment of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. On the surface, it looks like the Christian community has triumphed in the face of an attack from an enemy and restored order to their community. As Shylock slinks away in defeat after he is humiliated in his court case against Antonio though, we are appalled by the nastiness of the Christian characters as they mock him, and we also see the seeds of an even worse disruption of Venetian society as its anti-Semitic character is affirmed. Most of the plays have such hanging threads in their show of order at the end. In real life order never lasts and new conditions lead to new threats. Shakespeare’s plays reflect that reality.
Some of the plays deal specifically with the theme of order and disorder, making it almost ‘what the play is about’ (although one can never say about a Shakespeare’s play that it’s ‘about’ one particular thing). A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of those. The social order of Athens demands that a father’s will should be enforced. That is also particularly true for the order of the family. Egeus’ family is threatened because his daughter refuses to marry the husband of his choice and insists on her own choice. When she runs away from the ordered, hierarchical society of Athens, followed by her lover and their friends, to the chaos of the woods, order is disrupted: in the woods the relationships are fragmented. There is also a row going on between the rulers of the forest, the Fairy King and Queen, and even the seasons are disrupted. It is only when Oberon and Titania are reconciled and the natural order of the fairy world is restored that the lovers’ relationships can become ordered once more and their return to human society can in turn restore its order. Egeus’ daughter gets her way regarding her choice of husband, however, and the drama ends with this threat to the social order.
Some of the plays begin with a significant measure of disorder, only to see the restoration of order, which then proves to be a mere illusion of order. Macbeth is one such play. It begins with battle raging between the Scots and the Norwegians, aided by Scottish traitors – extreme disorder and chaos everywhere, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Two great military captains, Macbeth and Banquo defeat the Norwegians and restore civil order. A scene in which the king punishes the traitors and rewards the loyal is all about the restoration of social order. Everything now seems ordered and harmonious, but the rest of the play is a demonstration of how disruption within an individual – Macbeth’s over-reaching ambition – can bring about disorder again, after which order has to be restored once again. This play can also be seen as being ‘about’ order and disorder, although we know that it is impossible to say what any Shakespeare play is ‘about.’ One can only explore some of its ideas, but the idea of order and disorder is central in Macbeth.
The centrality of the theme is reinforced by the language throughout. Macbeth’s comment,
‘so foul and fair a day I have not seen’ echoes the witches’ chant and links him with the chaos of their dark world. As Macbeth and Lady Macbeth talk they frequently invoke the darkness that allows evil and disorder to flourish – ‘come thick night and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell’; ‘stars hide your fires’ and so on.
The contrast between order and disorder is demonstrated in various places throughout the play. The banquet scene is probably the finest illustration of this theme in all of Shakespeare. Macbeth has just become king after murdering Duncan, and is holding a state banquet with noblemen of all degrees, each knowing his place in the seating order. The irony of his welcoming statement,
‘You know your own degrees, sit down’ is striking since he has just disrupted the order by killing his king. This is the scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears.
Macbeth’s guilt makes him lose control and the banquet ends in chaos as everyone runs for the door. Lady Macbeth’s urging,
‘stand not on the order of your going but go at once’ confirms the breakdown of order, and it is from this point that the disruption of Scottish society is worked through, to culminate in its restoration with the defeat and death of Macbeth and the restoration of the rightful king, Malcolm, to the throne.
Again, with the reminder that no Shakespeare play is ‘about’ any one thing, a central theme of The Tempest is the conflict between order and chaos, with order being a fragile thing, perpetually threatened by chaos. In the background of the text is the almost continuous interplay between stormy weather and music, graphically illustrating that wavering interaction. Prospero is like a gardener, tending his garden, continually trying to combat the weeds that keep springing up to disrupt the garden’s order. Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo, Antonio and Sebastian require constant watching and regulating as they attempt to overthrow the order that he has established on the island.
It’s notable that even here, on this magical island, tamed and ordered by Prospero’s arts as a magician, having restored order after the disruption brought about by the royal visitors from the real world of human politics, the resolution is not perfect. He has to return to that world and assume his old life there – a life that was disrupted by political ambition – with all its threats.
Every one of Shakespeare’s plays can be examined from the perspective of the conflict between order and disorder, whatever its other, and sometimes more dominant, themes are. |
warc | 201704 | The UN Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN) says fast-growing, low income urban populations are facing a nutritional
“double burden”. “While they continue to face undernutrition, cities are now experiencing a double burden of malnutrition with the additional presence of over nutrition and obesity, which is associated with non-communicable diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer,” the report says.
It will be presented at the UN Habitat 6th World Urban Forum in Naples, Italy, on September 4, 2012.
It says city dwellers have,
“limited time for shopping and cooking, and therefore rely on processed and convenience foods, which are widely available in urban environments.” “ This signifies less fiber, minerals and vitamins, and more sugar, salt and fat.”
UNSCN notes action taken by the likes of the UK Department of Health which has instigated a salt reduction campaign in processed foods.
A regional French government initiative called Program for Nutrition, Prevention and Health of Children and Adolescents has improved the availability of healthy food at schools.
Food deserts
But urban zones where healthy food was unavailable continued to rise – zones known as food deserts.
“ As a result of this expanding urbanisation and food supply chain, urban food deserts are becoming apparent,” UNSCN observes. “These are areas within city centres with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, causing people to rely on small grocery or convenience stores that are more expensive and lack all foods needed for a healthy diet.”
The problem has won the attention of the US government which has created the Healthy Food Financing Initiative to identify food deserts and,
“bring them more healthy food sources.”
UNSCN said zoning policies could help the problem by promoting healthy food outlets and grocery outlets and restricting fast food establishments in certain areas such as schools.
It concludes:
“Malnutrition in all its forms creates a burden on cities and national health systems as well as on the lives and wellbeing of humans. Capacity building and awareness within the public sector, the private sector and civil society can help to address these issues by promoting the right to adequate food, ultimately leading to health and nutrition for all .” |
warc | 201704 | The Techniques Development Laboratory (TDL) has developed linear regression equations to forecast surface wind speed and direction for Alaskan stations by using the Model Output Statistics (MOS) method (Glahn and Lowry 1972) on output from the Nested Grid Model (NGM) (Hoke et al. 1989). In the new NGM-based MOS system, forecasts are available for projections valid every 3 hours from 6 through 60 hours after the initial model time (0000 and 1200 UTC). This temporal resolution represents a substantial increase over the LFM-based MOS system in which forecasts were only available at 6-h intervals from 6 through 54 hours after initial model time (Maglaras 1983). The new wind guidance was implemented in December 1994 and is disseminated in the FOAK13 and FOAK14 messages (Dallavalle et al. 1995).
In the development, the predictands, namely the surface wind speed and u- and v-components, were related statistically to predictors such as variables interpolated from the NGM gridpoint fields, climatic variables, and observations. The relationship between the predictands and predictors was determined by multiple linear regression. The MOS approach selects predictors on the basis of their contribution to the reduction of variance. The variable chosen first is the one that produces the greatest reduction in variance in the predictand. Subsequent predictors are selected in an order determined by the amount of variance explained when combined in the equation with variables already chosen. Selection is terminated when no remaining predictor contributes greater than 0.75% to the reduction of variance or when a maximum of 12 predictors has been selected.
The developmental sample was divided into two seasons, cool (October through March) and warm (Aprilthrough September). The sample for the cool season contained data from October 1986 through March 1994,while the warm season consisted of data from April 1987 through September 1994. Two weeks of data wereadded to the developmental sample at the beginning and end of each season to enhance continuity betweenthe two seasonal sets of equations. Prior to the final development, test equations were created by reservingthe 1994 warm and 1993-94 cool seasons as independent data and using the remainder of the sample asdependent data. Forecasts from the test equations were made on the independent seasons. We then didcomparative verifications between the NGM and LFM MOS wind guidance (see Section 3.f).
b. Predictands
For predictands, we used the surface u- and v-wind components and the wind speed obtained from thehourly surface aviation observations. The wind observations represent a 1-minute average value. The u- andv-components are not reported directly, of course, but are computed from the speed and directionobservations. The u- and v- predictands are used to develop equations for the wind components from whichthe wind direction can be computed. The components are used because the wind direction is not easily dealtwith by linear regression. Wind speed forecasts are not computed from the forecast u- and v-componentsbecause forecasts generated from the components are less accurate than forecasts produced from anequation predicting the speed directly (Glahn 1970). Hence, three predictands are used to develop theequations required to forecast wind speed and direction.
c. Predictors
Predictors which could have been selected by the regression analysis included NGM gridpoint fields interpolated to stations and the sinusoidal functions of the day and twice the day of the year. For the 6-, 9-, and 12-h forecast equations, the wind speed and direction observations at 2 hours after the initial model times were also offered as possible predictors. Since observations were offered at the 6-, 9-, and 12-h projections as predictors, "backup" equations were also developed for these projections. The backup equations which do not have observations as predictors are used in case the wind reports are not available for the primary equations. The NGM variables were available every 6 hours from initial model time up to and including 48 hours. Wind forecast equations for the 6-, 12-, 18- ,..., and 48-h projections were developed by offering variables valid at their respective projection and before and after the projection to compensate for any possible time bias in the model. For example, the regression analysis for the 12-h projection was offered model variables at the 6-, 12-, and 18-h projections. For wind guidance forecast projections which did not have coincident model projections, we offered predictors from the projections immediately preceding and following the desired forecast time. We also averaged the NGM variables which preceded and followed the desired forecast time and offered the result as a predictor to the regression analysis. For example, the regression analysis for the 9-h projection was offered 6- and 12-h model fields along with the average of the model fields at the 6- and 12-h projections. For projections after 48 hours where no model data existed, model variables valid at 48 hours after initial model time were used as predictors.
Most model gridpoint data were smoothed before interpolation as potential predictors. The smoothing compensates for small-scale noise in the model fields. Smoothing increases with projection as the model's skill decreases; therefore, predictors for earlier projections are smoothed over 5 or 9 gridpoints while model predictors for projections after 42 hours are smoothed over 9 or 25 points.
NGM predictors which were commonly selected by the regression routine included the 10-meter u- andv-components and speed, 950- and 850-mb geostrophic u- and v-components and speed, 850-mb verticalvelocity, and 850- and 700-mb relative vorticities. The 0200 and 1400 UTC wind observations were oftenselected in the 6-, 9-, and 12-h equations, and for many projections, the sinusoidal functions of the day of theyear were used.
d. Equation Development
With one exception, all forecast equations were developed by using the single-station approach in which equations are derived for the individual sites. Due to a shortage of predictand data, a regional equation was developed for Cape Lisburne by using data from Kotzebue and Barrow. For all sites, equations were developed simultaneously for wind speed and the u- and the v-components. The simultaneous derivation produced three equations which use the same predictors, but with different coefficients. We developed a set of equations for each projection (6-, 9-, 12-,..., and 60-h), for both cycles, both seasons, and all stations. Backup equations were also developed for the 6-, 9-, and 12-h projections for both cycles, both seasons, and all stations.
The linear regression equation used to forecast wind speed 12 hours after 0000 UTC during the coolseason for Nome is shown in Table 1. The first column gives a description of each predictor. The predictorsare listed in the order they were chosen by the regression analysis. The projection of each predictor, or timeafter initial model time of an observation used as a predictor, is listed in the PROJ column in hours. TheCOEFF column lists the coefficient for each predictor.
e. Inflation of Wind Speed Forecasts
All wind speed forecasts in the operational messages go through an inflation routine which increases thestandard deviation of the distribution of wind speed forecasts (Carter and Schwartz 1985). This is done toincrease the frequency of higher-speed forecasts. The inflation procedure essentially increases the differencebetween the forecast wind speed and the mean wind speed observed during the developmental sample. Asa consequence, wind speeds greater than the mean are increased, while wind speeds less than the mean aredecreased.
f. Verification
As previously mentioned, test equations were generated for both seasons before final development. From the test equations, forecasts were made on independent data and compared to the then-operational LFM MOS forecasts. Again, the independent data used for the cool season ranged from October 1993 through March 1994 while the warm season extended from April 1994 through September 1994. Also, to compare the new NGM MOS forecasts with LFM MOS forecasts, only stations with available LFM MOS wind guidance were used. This limited the verifications to approximately 35 stations. Use of the LFM MOS also restricted the projections which could be verified to 6-, 12-, 18-,..., and 54-h after initial model times rather than the whole suite of NGM MOS projections.
The wind speed forecasts were verified in terms of the Heidke skill score (HSS), critical success index (CSI) or threat score, and mean absolute error (MAE). All wind speed forecasts were inflated (see Section 3.e) before verification. Typically, approximately 6000 cases were verified for each projection. Wind direction forecasts were verified in terms of the HSS and MAE. Wind direction forecasts were verified only when the wind speed observation valid at the time of the forecast was greater than or equal to 6 knots. This prevents direction forecasts associated with light and variable winds from degrading verification scores and reduces the number of cases to approximately 3500. Both the HSS and CSI were obtained from contingency tables of the wind speed and wind direction. The HSS measures the skill of the forecasts where a value of one indicates that all forecasts are correct. The CSI gauges the skill of the wind speed forecasts during a significant wind event, in this case, a wind in excess 22 kt. The CSI varies from 0 to 1, with a higher score being desirable. The MAE measures the average absolute difference between the forecasts and observations.
Figures 1 through 6 show wind speed verifications for 0000 UTC. Figures 1 and 2 compare the Heidke skill scores for the LFM and NGM MOS wind speed forecasts for the cool and warm seasons, respectively. For both seasons, the skill of the NGM MOS is higher at every projection. The CSI for the LFM and NGM MOS wind speed forecasts is shown for the cool season in Fig. 3 and for the warm season in Fig. 4. The NGM MOS showed improvement over the LFM MOS at nearly every projection and both seasons. Figures 5 and 6 are comparisons between the MAE for the LFM and NGM MOS wind speed forecasts for the cool and warm seasons, respectively. At every projection and both seasons, the NGM MOS had lower errors than the LFM MOS. Results for the 1200 UTC cycle were similar.
Figures 7 through 10 show verifications for the wind direction forecasts for 0000 UTC. The HSS for LFM and NGM MOS is shown for the cool season in Fig. 7 and the warm season in Fig. 8. As with the wind speed forecasts, the NGM MOS skill scores were higher for all projections and both seasons; however, wind direction scores generally show smaller improvements over the LFM MOS than the wind speed skill scores. Lastly, MAE values for LFM and NGM MOS wind direction forecasts are shown for the cool season in Fig. 9 and the warm season in Fig. 10. The cool season errors are less consistent than previous verifications. Although the NGM MOS shows improvement at the majority of projections, for the 30-, 36-, and 54-h projections, the LFM MOS had slightly lower errors. The warm season NGM MOS mean absolute errors (Fig. 10) are less than LFM MOS errors at every projection excluding 54 hours.
Warm season Heidke skill scores reveal a pattern where the score is a local minimum at the 24- and 48-h projections. These projections coincide with valid times in which, on average, maximum convective activity is occurring.
Forecasters should be aware that when predictor observations are not available for the 6-, 9-, and 12-h forecast equations forecasts will be made by using the backup equations. This may produce forecasts which are less skillful than forecasts based on the primary equations.
Since some Alaskan stations had no observational data for certain projections, equations could not be developed; therefore, these stations do not have complete sets of equations. Table 2 lists all the stations in the Alaskan wind guidance development and the projections for which forecasts are unavailable.
The inflation routine (see Section 3.e) increases the frequency of higher-speed forecasts and as a result increases the critical success index (see Section 3.f). However, when the Alaska wind speed guidance was examined operationally, some forecasts were noted as being "over-inflated" and probably represented wind gusts rather than sustained speeds. Miller (1993) also noted this overforecast tendency in the contiguous United States.
The cool season equations for Alaska generally had higher reductions of variance than the warm season equations. This difference is probably due to the large scale forcing mechanisms present during the cool season as opposed to the more local convective influences during the warm season (Miller 1993).
The wind guidance for Alaska is disseminated in the FOAK13 and FOAK14 message along with other weather elements. The surface wind speed is given in knots and the direction in degrees divided by ten. A sample message for Nome, Alaska, is shown in Fig. 11 with the wind speed and direction lines highlighted.
I would like to thank both Chad Southall and Brent Bower for their work with the Alaskan wind guidance development and Paul Dallavalle for his assistance throughout the project.
Carter, G. M., and B. E. Schwartz, 1985: The use of Model Output Statistics (MOS) for predicting surface wind. NWS Technical Procedures Bulletin No. 347, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 11 pp.
Dallavalle, J. P., S. A. Gilbert, and F. G. Meyer, 1995: NGM-based MOS guidance for Alaska - the FOAK13/FOAK14 messages. NWS Technical Procedures Bulletin No. 425, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 13 pp.
Glahn, H. R., 1970: A method for predicting surface winds. ESSA Technical Memorandum WBTM TDL 29, Environmental Science Services Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 18 pp.
, and D. A. Lowry, 1972: The use of Model Output Statistics (MOS) in objective weather forecasting. J. Appl. Meteor., 11, 1203-1211.
Hoke, J. E., N. A. Phillips, G. J. DiMego, J. J. Tuccillo, and J. G. Sela, 1989: The regional analysis and forecast system of the National Meteorological Center. Wea. Forecasting, 4, 323-334.
Maglaras, G., 1983: Alaskan temperature, surface wind, probability of precipitation, conditional probability of frozen precipitation, and cloud amount guidance (FMAK1 bulletin). NWS Technical Procedures Bulletin No. 329, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 16 pp.
Miller, D. T., 1993: NGM-based MOS wind guidance for the contiguous United States. NWS Technical Procedures Bulletin No. 399, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 19 pp. |
warc | 201704 | An ambitious Bloomberg administration plan to coordinate the city's so-called street furniture and, at long last, install public toilets is proving no easier than renovating a luxury penthouse for finicky clients.
The sometimes-competing concerns of money, design and pedestrian flow were among the issues raised at a City Council hearing yesterday, the first at which the public testified on the plan, a Council spokesman said. The proposal would grant a franchise to a single company to design, install and maintain bus shelters, newsstands, news racks, benches and automatic public toilets.
The city has long sought to fill the need for public toilets. During the Dinkins administration, officials installed experimental pay toilets but eventually abandoned their proposal. Later, under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, there was a plan to give one company the contract to build and maintain street furniture, but it was canceled. A subsequent Council plan to build toilets fell apart as well.
The city's most recent proposal is modeled on the Giuliani plan and is in some ways more sweeping than those in other cities.
Its supporters say that it would reduce clutter and coordinate the overall appearance of the city's streets, as well as provide a financial incentive for a private company to maintain the structures while generating revenue for the city.
The company granted the franchise would cover capital and maintenance costs by selling advertising space, and the city would get a fee from the company estimated to bring in $400 million over the 20-year life of the franchise.
But critics yesterday took on everything from what should be in the proposal to who should build the structures and how they should look.
The biggest obstacle to toilets these days may be newsstands. Currently, newsstand vendors own and operate their stands and pay a yearly licensing fee to the city, but they are not allowed to use the outside space for advertising. Under the street-furniture proposal, the company the city selects would replace the newsstands and have control over the outside to sell advertising.
''Newsstands are not the city's street furniture,'' said Robert S. Bookman, counsel to the New York City Newsstand Operators Association, a group of newsstand owners, employees and newspaper publishers. ''They are privately owned and paid-for businesses that hard-working people work in every day. On what legal theory is the city going to tear down our newsstands so as to maximize profits for the toilet companies?''
But city officials said that the big difference for the newsstand businesses under the proposal was that they would get a new stand provided by the private company. The entire franchise would also be more attractive to a potential company if the newsstands were included, because their locations make them attractive advertising outlets.
Some who testified yesterday raised concerns that if a single company created the designs, the particular flavors of individual communities could somehow be lost.
''Designers should be encouraged to provide multiple design schemes, be it the Asian elegance of Sunset Park, the brownstone splendor of Park Slope, Fort Greene or Bed-Stuy, or the neon pizazz of Coney Island,'' Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, told the Council.
Others argued that even more elements, including bicycle racks, public phones and sidewalk cafes, should be included, but cautioned against too much intrusive advertising.
Tony Avella, chairman of the subcommittee on zoning and franchises, said that although he would keep his promise to the administration to move the bill forward quickly, the Council still had to take into account both the resistance of the newsstand owners and the rising clamor for more bus shelters.
Nonetheless, he said he had always leaned toward the idea of toilets as an ''important public amenity that the city should provide.''Continue reading the main story |
warc | 201704 | Correction Appended
Better financial markets helped push endowments at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and some other colleges to record levels this year, according to preliminary fiscal 2003 year-end financial results that many colleges released last week.
Harvard, whose endowment was already the largest in the country, earned a 12.5 percent return on its investments in the 2003 fiscal year (which ended June 30) helping its endowment climb to $19.3 billion. Investment experts said the gain was not only one of the highest among colleges, but also among large financial funds generally.
At Yale, which has the second largest endowment, an 8.8 percent return helped push it to $11 billion. Princeton's endowment, also ranked among the top five, earned 8 percent and grew to $8.7 billion.
While many colleges earned lower returns than these three Ivy League giants, most showed gains this year, in contrast to the two previous years, when their endowments fell or stagnated.Continue reading the main story
''It has been a pretty good year,'' said John S. Griswold Jr., executive director of the Commonfund Institute, the research arm of the Commonfund, a nonprofit organization in Wilton, Conn. that manages money for colleges and other nonprofit institutions.
Mr. Griswold said the college returns were impressive in a period in which the Standard & Poor's 500 index was up less than 1 percent and returns on private capital investments were also small.
An institute survey this month found that the average return last year among 122 educational institutions was 2.9 percent. The average return for the six institutions in the survey with endowments of more than $1 billion was 2.3 percent.
The highest return in the survey group (which did not include Harvard) was 11.5 percent. But 15 of the 122 lost money last year, Mr. Griswold said, with the biggest loss nearly 9 percent. He declined to identify the institutions by name.
At the other Ivy universities, contacted on Friday, preliminary estimates of investment returns for the 2003 fiscal year ranged from 1.9 percent at Cornell to 6.5 percent at Brown. Columbia earned 5.3 percent, the University of Pennsylvania 4.7 percent and Dartmouth 2 percent.
Other universities reporting strong investment gains included Swarthmore (7 percent) Duke (6.6 percent) and New York University (6.2 percent). One university that reported a loss for last year was Emory (down 1.8 percent).
The investment return is not the only factor in determining the size of a college's endowment; it also depends on how much the college spends and how much it collects in donations. And at a time when state subsidies for colleges have fallen and tuition increases have provoked sharp criticism, endowments have become an increasingly important source of revenue.
Only a small number of the more than 3,500 colleges and universities have endowments of any significance. The Chronicle of Higher Education list for the 2002 fiscal year, published in January, showed only 39 with endowments greater than $1 billion, 290 with endowments of more than $100 million and 651 with more than $1 million.
For universities with sizable endowments, however, the income earned on them has come to represent an increasing share of their operating budgets. Harvard's endowment income last year provided 31 percent of its $2.4 billion operating budget, up from 19 percent in 1992.
Yale's endowment income now accounts for about 29 percent of its $1.6 billion budget -- a larger share than grants and contracts (26 percent) and student payments for tuition, room and board (20 percent).
But financial experts say that while the investment gains are likely to ease the financial pressures on colleges, they are not likely to lead to much relief on tuition.
''The reality is that for big research universities, the endowment influences the scope of the projects they feel they can undertake more than the prices they charge undergraduates,'' said Michael S. McPherson, an economist who is president of the Spencer Foundation in Chicago, which provides grants for higher education research. ''There is already more than adequate financial aid for the students who need it at the top Ivies. And institutions like Harvard, Princeton and Yale have a long list of things they want to do to help society. The ambition always exceeds the resources.''
Harvard has performed better than the market -- and better than many other fund managers -- for many years, thanks to the Harvard Management Company Inc., its in-house investment arm, which has its own trading room in Boston and 50 investment professionals. It manages 55 percent of its $19 billion endowment internally and oversees the investment of the remainder.
Although its return in 2002 was a negative 0.5 percent, and for 2001 was minus 2.7 percent, in 2000 its return was 32 percent. In all of those years it did markedly better than most other investment managers.
Jack R. Meyer, the company's president, said Harvard kept a diversified portfolio and had not significantly changed its asset allocation in the past year or so. Although he would not disclose how much Harvard had invested in specific areas, he said the ''policy portfolio'' that it had determined would best meet its goals was about 22 percent bonds (domestic, foreign and inflation-indexed) 43 percent equities (domestic, foreign, emerging markets and private) and the remainder in commodities, real estate and investments chosen for their absolute return or high yield.
Last year's investment strength, Mr. Meyer said, came from foreign and domestic bonds, which returned 52 percent and 30 percent. But he said that rather than betting on market movements, ''we look for mispricings among similar securities, arbitrage-type situations.''
''These aren't immediately obvious,'' he said. ''Typically they are very complex, and it takes experienced eyes to see them. We have those, and that has helped us, not just over the past year but over the past 5 or 10 years.''
He said that while a 12.5 return looked ''pretty good'' this year, it was still well below the returns of 20 percent or more earned in the mid-1990's.
''If you said everything is great now, you'd be wrong,'' he added, ''because the real value of our endowment after inflation is still down 11 percent from where it was in 2000.''
Continue reading the main story
Correction: October 5, 2003, Sunday An article last Sunday about increases in college endowment funds last year referred incompletely to a 2002 list published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January. It was compiled by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. |
warc | 201704 | Blanca Murillo’s morning routine, for the most part, would seem unremarkable to any woman: she washes her face, brushes her teeth, runs a comb through her hair and daubs on makeup. Then, as she has for the past seven years, she tugs on her girdle.
Known as a faja, from the Spanish word for wrap, it was imported from Colombia, one of the world’s cosmetic surgery centers, where until recently it was used mostly for postoperative wear by recovering liposuction patients to keep swelling to a minimum and ensure that the skin tightens properly. But it has been embraced by young Latinas — and increasingly by other women — as a shortcut to a curvaceous body.
For over 50 years, women in America have largely cast off such constrictive undergarments, which feminists criticized as symbols of repression. The nylon and Lycra underwear brand Spanx has been credited with reintroducing, and reacclimating, women to the concept of extra help for figure problems, but it may have also opened the door to a new generation of young women embracing the faja, which is far closer to the real thing — in all its organ-shifting, curve-exaggerating strength.
Such girdles are a resurgent fashion phenomenon to a growing number of women who wriggle into them each day without a thought of what Gloria Steinem might say. Their newfound popularity is very much in evidence — or at least, the results are — on the streets of Corona, Queens, where Reggaeton music accompanies the rumble of the elevated subway, and where many immigrants from Colombia live.Continue reading the main story
“You see the love handles?” asked Ms. Murillo, 33, a trim hairdresser who stands a doll-like 4 feet 3 inches tall, as she pinched a small fold of flesh at her midsection and lifted her shirt to reveal a well-worn faja. “With this, you hide it.”
The comeback of fajas has surprised even those in the business of selling them; they had fallen out of favor before they were adopted for medical use.
“I’m from the ’70s; we rejected it,” said Lisa Cipriani, 57, the proprietor of Caralinda Mis Fajas, one of the dozens of stores in Queens specializing in fajas.
“This is the new generation,” she said, “and this is an option.”
The demand has been soaring. Colfajas, which manufactures fajas and exports them from Colombia, raised its production by 47 percent last year and exported 60,000 items, thousands more than in past years, said Jean Pierre Velez, who helps run the family-owned company.
Y & K, a small clothing and lingerie shop on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, regularly sells out the roughly 4,000 fajas it ships in each year.
The fajas comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, from full-body jumpsuits to tight belly bands, for women as well as men. The effects depend on the fabric heft of the fajas; they come in Lycra, cotton, nylon and latex. The less forgiving the material, the more flattering the effect. Prices typically run from $20 to over $70, depending on the fabric and how much of the body it covers.
“There is a Spanish saying, you want to look ‘like a Coke bottle,’ ” said Lilliana Rios, 33, who reflects on the faja on her blog ThingsLatinosLoveorHate.com. “A lot of Spanish songs talk about women with shapes like a guitar, so that’s the curved look that Latina women want.”
Getting the look requires some grit. Tugging on a faja can become a desperate bout of woman versus fabric. Flesh must be coaxed inside, battened down by hooks and, finally, sealed with a zipper that can force the air out of your lungs.
“The first day you can’t stand it,” Ms. Murillo said. “But then it loosens it up.”
Hidden under clothes the results may be sexy, but fajas are not. Most are the color of an Ace bandage and resemble body casts. Some are configured to squeeze certain areas and leave others to jiggle.
Juan Lopez and his partner, Monica Arias, import the PonteBella brand of fajas from Colombia to Valley Stream, N.Y., on Long Island. Though they started out selling to medical spas and plastic surgeons, orders from the fashion market overtook medical sales about five years ago, Mr. Lopez said.
More recently, calls have been pouring in from unexpected places: retailers in Great Neck and Garden City, also on Long Island, where the Latino populations are small.
“In the beginning, it was almost only for Latinos and black women,” Ms. Arias said. “Now the white people are asking for fajas.”
Recognizing the changing market, Ms. Arias said, the company began selling softer versions to appeal to a wider audience: some women’s ideal body might not involve the roller-coaster curves favored in Latin America. Girdles, once de rigueur, mostly disappeared during the 1960s, said Valerie Steele, the author of “The Corset: A Cultural History” and the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“Clothing was showing more of the body, so it wasn’t good enough to just push the fat around,” she said. “The other reason was the thought that you shouldn’t have to rely on it, you were supposed to be healthy and in good shape already.”
The feminist movement, Ms. Steele added, rejected the girdle as a symbol of repression, even as it fell out of fashion.
The newfound popularity of fajas comes at a time when skyrocketing obesity rates crash into a body ideal that seems skinnier than ever. “There’s this radical disjunction between an ideal, which is slender and muscular, and a reality that more and more people are dramatically overweight,” Ms. Steele said.
At Aishti, his store in Jackson Heights, Queens, Moussa Balaghi has begun carrying girdles in size “extra small,” because, to his shock, so many teenagers and even younger girls were coming in to request them. “Only chubby fat girls used to use this; now, everybody is,” he said, shaking his head. “If she has the smallest little thing at her waist, she wants to use this.”
Ms. Rios, the blogger, said new fabrics had replaced the rubberized material of the old corsets, which were often reinforced with stiff struts called boning. And implicit celebrity endorsements helped popularize the new version for a new generation.
“Fajas to me were something my mother would wear,” Ms. Rios said. “Now Spanx came along and you see Eva Longoria wearing it, Jennifer Lopez wearing it. Now it’s at a comfort level that women at any size and any age are wearing them.”
At Caralinda Mis Fajas, clients ease their way into tighter and tighter fajas. A seamstress will resize the faja once or twice as a customer’s weight shifts downward. And it often does: a faja can hold the stomach so tight, Ms. Cipriani said, the wearer loses her appetite.Continue reading the main story |
warc | 201704 | According to the poll, 42 percent support same-sex marriage and 40 percent oppose it. The percentage saying they favor legal same-sex marriage in their state was down slightly from the 48 percent who said so in an April poll. In January, 44 percent were in favor. percent said they disapprove. "What the Supreme Court did is jeopardize our religious freedoms," said Michael Boehm, 61, an industrial controls engineer from the Detroit area who describes himself as a conservative-leaning independent. "You're going to see a conflict between civil law and people who want to live their lives according to their faiths," Boehm said. Boehm was among 59 percent of the poll respondents who said wedding-related businesses with religious objections should be allowed to refuse service to gay and lesbian couples. That compares with 52 percent in April. Also, 46 percent said businesses more generally should be allowed to refuse service to same-sex couples, while 51 percent said that should not be allowed. ... The poll found pronounced differences in viewpoints depending on political affiliation. For example, 65 percent of Democrats, but only 22 percent of Republicans favored allowing same-sex couples to legally marry in their state. And 72 percent of Republicans but just 31 percent of Democrats said local officials with religious objections should be exempt from issuing marriage licenses. By a 64-32 margin, most Democrats said it's more important to protect gay rights than religious liberties when the two are in conflict. Republicans said the opposite, by 82-17.When the battle over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act erupted in Indiana this spring, I warned that there would eventually be a political pushback. Not only would religious folks be better organized next time, there are a lot more of them out there voting on their issues than those supporting LGBT rights. But I also knew that those supporting LGBT rights would eventually go too far and begin bullying and harassing people and businesses who did not share their views. While that might win some short term political battles, that's not a prescription for long-term success.
A perfect example is LGBT rights organization Freedom Indiana's approach in 2014 compared to 2015. In 2014, the organization put together a very positive outreach campaign in support of same sex marriage and against an amendment to Indiana's Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman. When the 2015 legislative session rolled around though Freedom Indiana's approach had changed dramatically. The organization waited until the last days of the Indiana General Assembly to ambush religious rights supporters over RFRA, a bill that had been introduced months earlier. In opposing the bill, Freedom Indiana scrapped its positive approach of a year earlier and engaged in a campaign of bullying and intimidation against those who dared support RFRA. Freedom Indiana enlisted its corporate allies to make threats against legislators and the Governor if they dared support the legislation. RFRA opponents engaged in a campaign of deceit and demagoguery with the disingenuous claim that the law was a "license to discriminate" against the LGBT community. The media dutifully reported this mantra even though there was not one instance in the 30 other states that have RFRAs or at the national level in which a RFRA overturned the application of an anti-discrimination law.
While RFRAs are irrelevant to the application of anti-discrimination laws, states and communities that have those anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation are being used by LGBT extremists to bully and threaten Christian owners of businesses who don't share their views. The most recent example of that is the Oregon bakery known as Sweet Cakes by Melissa. The owners of that business, Aaron and Melissa Klein, were cited for violating Oregon's anti-discrimination law and hit with a judgment of $135,000 in emotional damages for a lesbian couple supposedly suffered when the Kleins told them that they had religious objections to same sex weddings and felt baking a cake for the ceremony would violate those beliefs. Worse yet, the Oregon Labor Commissioner found that the Kleins, by speaking out publicly about their opposition to same sex marriage as well as talking about the case, violated Oregon's anti-discrimination advertising law. The Commissioner, who is an attorney but apparently slept through Constitutional Law 101, also imposed a gag order on the Kleins.
The bottom line is that those who support LGBT rights need to be concerned that the most extreme members of their movement will turn the public sharply against their agenda. To their credit, some in the LGBT community have argued that LGBT rights supporters should try to win converts through education and persuasion, instead employing threats and intimidation to those who don't share their view. Those LGBT moderates have discussed the need to be tolerant of those folks who don't share their view because of religious or other objections and that LGBT community should not support driving small business owners into bankruptcy because the owners don't support same sex marriage.
Unfortunately for the LGBT community, those more reasonable folks are not driving the LGBT political bus. The LGBT moderates better get control of the steering wheel soon because that bus is heading for a political cliff. |
warc | 201704 | Polymorphism in opioid gene affects breast cancer survival
Polymorphism in Opioid Gene Affects Breast Cancer Survival
(HealthDay News) -- Genotype at the A118G polymorphism of the µ-opioid receptor gene is associated with breast cancer-specific mortality, according to a study published in the April issue of
Anesthesiology.
Preclinical studies suggest that opioids may have a tumor-promoting effect. To investigate the association between common polymorphisms, including the A118G polymorphism, in the µ-opioid receptor gene and breast cancer survival, Andrey V. Bortsov, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues followed 2,039 women diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 to 2001, through 2006. The women, aged 23 to 74 years, were genotyped using the TaqMan platform.
The researchers found that patient genotype at A118G correlated with breast cancer-specific mortality at 10 years. Significantly decreased breast cancer-specific mortality was seen for women with one or more copies of the G allele. The correlation was seen only for invasive cases and the effect size seemed to increase with clinical stage. Compared with the A/A genotype, significantly decreased mortality was seen for women with the A/G and G/G genotypes, after adjusting for age and ethnicity (hazard ratios 0.57 and 0.32, respectively).
"The results of this study provide support for the hypothesis that endogenous and/or exogenous opioids, acting via the µ-opioid receptor, may influence cancer outcomes," the authors write. |
warc | 201704 | To have an affordable hybrid car is now a great way to reduce your impact on the environment while saving money on a daily basis for yourself – owning a car that combines a classic engine with an electrical powered one gives you versatility and breaks the dependence on oil. Luckily, these wonderful machines have been on the market long enough to give you plenty of options to choose from without breaking the bank.
Honda Civic Hybrid
Honda Civic Hybrid uses the electrical and gas engines simultaneously while driving, so technically it is not a full hybrid, but combining the two efficiently gives you reduced consumption. The two engines are sandwiched together and work as one, the Honda efficiently recharging its battery while driving on gas. Overall, The Civic is reliable and efficient if you don’t have speed in mind. This car will not go fast, but it will definitely help you reduce the costs and impact on the environment at an affordable price.
Price: $25,555 Miles per gallon city: 44 Miles per gallon highway: 47
Toyota Prius Liftback
Toyota exceeds expectations even more with the Prius Liftback, maximizing the fuel economy levels and efficiency. The improvements are given by the reduced size and weights of the hybrid components and the increased cargo space achieved by moving the battery beneath the front seat. It is also so quiet that, when operating on the electric engine alone, the Prius Liftback emits a low warning tone that alerts pedestrians and cyclists of its approach.
Price: $25,025 Miles per gallon city: 51 Miles per gallon highway: 48
Ford C-MAX
The Ford C-MAX is a spacious car, especially for a hybrid, that balances the pretty large size with a low consumption meant to rival its competitors on the market. The improvements made by Ford to the previous model include a more aerodynamic shape, more horsepower which allows you to reach a reasonable speed and comfortable, good quality interior.
Price: $24,995 Miles per gallon city: 42 Miles per gallon highway: 37
Honda CR-Z
Honda CR-Z is the sporty car of our selection, aiming to appeal to motorists who want to feel a bit of excitement while keeping the advantages of a hybrid. While some may argue that the car is not as sporty as it looks, it has a feature that allows you to boost the speed temporarily with assistance from the electric engine only.This two-seater car is happily combining sportiness with eco friendliness and you can have a lot of fun driving it, as long as you keep in mind that it is not a sports car per se.
Price: $20,965 Miles per gallon city: 36 Miles per gallon highway: 39
Toyota Prius c
We saved one of the best for last, as the Prius stands in its own category on the hybrid market and the c model is the least expensive hybrid you can find at this moment. It is a roomy car that does not accelerate much but offers one of the best mpg on the market. One of the ways Toyota made this price possible was to use less sophisticated materials for the interior, which will be noticeable when compared to its rivals. However, the interior is spacious, suitable for families with dogs or large grocery trips.If you are interested in reducing fuel consumption (whether it is for economic or ecological purposes) and you don’t necessarily want a car that goes fast, the Toyota Prius c is one of the best options you have.
Price: $19,905 Miles per gallon city: 53 Miles per gallon highway: 46
Believe it or not, hybrid-powered vehicles can be cost-efficient too. The secret is to invest smart. Before spending any money, settle on some priorities. What are you looking for in a car? Do you want a fast ride, family ride, or are you looking for speed and high performance? Regardless of your choice, it is fundamental to have a budget first. Hustle and do your research properly before anything else, and then you can decide. Look under the hood, check Porsche wheels or any other parts that you’re familiar with, and make the most of your investment. |
warc | 201704 | Want to get rid of bloated belly? If yes, cut down calories from your meals to begin with your weight-loss plan. Besides, bringing the caloric value of your dish down makes it healthier as well. Here are 7 low-calorie cooking tips that will help you reduce calories in your plate. [Read: How to Cut Calories Gradually?]
You can also consult a nutritionist or dietician to know the best techniques to cut calories from your food items.
Read more articles on Weight Loss.
Related Questions
Even a diabetic can enjoy delicious yet healthful meals at home.read more
The fat gain on your body is tell tale signs of a bad lifestyle, but do you recognise the causes? Here are the causes for weight gain after 30.read more |
warc | 201704 | Gluten-free baking, when done well, is looked upon by some as art even finer than the Mona Lisa. Many of us have experienced the worst of it, from cupcakes with the density of a sponge to cookies with the flavor of sidewalk chalk.
Two ladies who seem to have mastered this art are Christine and Sandy Penney, co-owners of the gluten-free (GF) bakery Something Sweet Without Wheat. With many years of experience – starting with a lot of trial-and-error – these sisters have developed and perfected a knack for creating delicious GF desserts. Christine and Sandy recently sat down for a Q&A to share some of their secrets to successful GF baking, from knowledge of celiac disease and flour types to money-saving tips and tricks.
How would you define gluten-free?
A. When we’re asked what exactly it means, we explain that gluten is a protein found in wheat that can be problematic for many people. For people with celiac disease, gluten attacks the small intestine, disallowing the body to absorb certain nutrients. This can cause headaches, fatigue and stomachaches, but there are many ways wheat can affect people.
What did you first struggle with when you began GF baking?
A. When we first began baking with gluten-free flours, it was a disaster. A niece was the first to be diagnosed and she wasn’t taking the news well, so we tried [working with] some gluten-free white rice flour.
It was not edible. It took a lot of horrible cakes and cookies to figure out that we needed to mix about three different kinds of flours, add xanthan gum and figure out the right textures of the batters. Sometimes, you also need to figure out the exact amount of guar gum that’s necessary.
What kinds of flours do you use and for which pastries?
In our bakery, we use a mix of bean flours, with sorghum and brown rice flour. That way, you get some fiber from the beans. It’s really about mixing the right amounts of up to four different flours and “playing” until you get the consistency – and most of all, the taste – right. It can’t taste grainy or gummy. That’s the tricky part.
To make an easy GF brownie or cookie, try replacing traditional flour with a combination of three different flours, or use a multi/all-purpose GF flour (see these from Bob’s Red Mill and King Arthur). Using an all-purpose GF flour simplifies things by allowing you to follow old recipes. In fact, many of my recipes are the same ones I always used before; I just replaced the traditional flours and added xanthan gum.
Any money-saving tips for regular folks who want to try GF baking?
Unfortunately, GF flours can be more expensive, which is hard to avoid. But you can – and really have to – shop around. Some stores are very pricey compared to others. Ordering online, too, directly from your preferred flour company or a wholesaler, is often cheaper.
For more tips on gluten-free foods and lifestyles, check out these
6 Gluten-Free Foods To Live By. image: REL Waldman |
warc | 201704 | .
Moberg Osteotomy - Dorsiflexion Osteotomy of Proximal Phalanx. OrthopaedicsOne Articles. In: OrthopaedicsOne - The Orthopaedic Knowledge Network. Created Jun 03, 2010 21:17. Last modified Jul 25, 2012 04:15 ver.15. Retrieved 2017-01-22, from http://www.orthopaedicsone.com/x/dQYCAg. Indications
Dorsal closing wedge osteotomy of the proximal phalanx was popularized by Moberg in 1979. [1] Although it was initially recommended for young patients (under 18 years of age), Moberg extended the indications to include adults. The Moberg osteotomy is used for hallux rigidus, grades 2 and 3, and is usually performed in conjunction with a cheilectomy and not as a stand-alone procedure. It seems to be most helpful for younger or middle-aged patients who are still active.
Preoperative Planning
Preoperatively, three views of the foot are usually sufficient. Weight-bearing views are important; non-weight-bearing views often obscure the dorsal first metatarsal osteophyte. In non-weight-bearing views, the toes are usually in passive extension, which could block the dorsal osteophyte. Also, the AP view may over-estimate the degenerative change as osteophytes may overlie the joint, creating the impression that the joint is abnormally decreased (Figure 1). CT and MRI studies may be done to elucidate the presence of suspected chondral injuries.
Figure 1. AP weight-bearing view of the foot. Note slightly narrowed first MTP joint space. All radiographs and other imaging studies should be closely reviewed, with special attention to the lateral radiograph. This study will show the dorsal osteophytes from the distal metatarsal head and proximal phalanx (Figure 2). No specific physical examinations need to be done under anesthesia, but is important to document the passive range of motion (both dorsiflexion and plantarflexion) before the onset of the procedure. Figure 2. Lateral weight-bearing view of the foot: Note significant dorsal metatarsal flowing osteophyte, as well as dorsal joint space loose body. The surgeon should alert the patient that we are “stealing” motion from plantarflexion and giving it to dorsiflexion. Therefore, the motion in plantarflexion may be somewhat decreased postoperatively. Positioning
The patient is placed supine on the operating table. Occasionally, a small bump under the patient’s buttocks may be necessary if the patient’s hip has excessive external rotation.
A Martin-type tourniquet in applied to the supramalleolar region of the ankle. Some surgeons also favor a thigh tourniquet to avoid “tethering” the tendons about the ankle and to allow good evaluation of intra-operative range of motion. It should be noted that the thigh tourniquet is more painful for the awake, alert patient.
The procedure is usually done under ankle block anesthesia. A mini C-arm is also used during the procedure and should be available. Antibiotics are given before the procedure as per protocol.
Approach
Usually a dorsomedial approach to the first MTP joint is used. The extensor hallucis longus (EHL) is retracted laterally and the dorsomedial nerve is retracted medially (Figures 3-4). This will provide good access to both the medial and lateral sides of the MTP joint. A directly medial approach to the first MTP joint can be used as well, but this approach can limit access to the lateral side of the joint and is more difficult. If a prior medial approach has been used, a parallel incision can still be made safely on the dorsum of the foot.
Figure 3. Dorsal-medial approach to the first MTP joint. Note lines on the skin to allow exact skin re-approximation. Figure 4. In the dorsal medial approach, the EHL is retracted laterally with the dorsal capsule. Techniques Part One: Cheilectomy Make a dorsomedial incision, taking care to identify and protect the dorsomedial cutaneous nerve. Retract the EHL laterally. Make the MTP capsulotomy in line with the skin incision; the capsule edges can be tagged with a 2-0 Vicryl suture for ease of identification later (optional). Retract the capsular edges both plantarly and dorsally. Inspect the MTP joint closely (Figure 5). Examine the joint surfaces for osteochondral defects or chondral flaps (especially plantarly), as well as overall degeneration within the MTP joint. Use a reciprocating saw with irrigation to remove 1 to 2 mm of the medial eminence. (This is done to promote healing of the capsule to the bone.) If noted, osteochondral lesions are usually drilled with an 0.054-inch Kirshner-wire (K-wire) under cooling irrigation. Figure 5. hallux rigidus -Thirty-nine year-old female with hallux rigidus and near complete loss of cartilage from the dorsal third of the metatarsal head. EHL tendon is retracted laterally. Perform a dorsal cheilectomy of the metatarsal head, as described elsewhere. In moderate cases, bone is removed flush with the surface of the dorsum of the metatarsal neck. In more severe grades, we routinely remove up to 30% of the metatarsal head, but we try to limit our resection to only the degenerated areas of the metatarsal head. All bony cuts should be made with cooling irrigation. Access and inspect the lateral side of the MTP joint. If present, remove osteophytes or ossicles from the proximal phalanx with a rongeur. Part Two: Osteotomy
We now shift our attention to the proximal phalanx and the osteotomy.
Expose the plantar aspect of the proximal phalanx sufficiently to protect the flexor hallucis longus (FHL) tendon. Place a 0.062-inch smooth K-wire transversely from medial to lateral as a guide wire. It is placed parallel and as close to the articular surface of the proximal phalanx as possible without entering the joint. Use a mini C-arm to verify the proper extra-articular placement of the K-wire. Place the guide wire such that the osteotomy is made just distal to the guide pin (Figure 6). Figure 6. AP fluoroscopic image of K-wire placement to help ensure extra-articular osteotomy placement. Once the placement of the K- wire has been verified, the osteotomy can begin. To maximize the amount of dorsiflexion of the tip of the toe, make the osteotomy as close to the articular surface as feasible. However, if the proximal fragment is too small, sometimes it will fragment postoperatively. Furthermore, the osteotomy may be made more distally if the plans is to use internal fixation such a mini-plate or screw to allow more bone for fixation. If the plan is to use a plate, make sure the osteotomy is distal enough to allow for non-articular placement of the proximal screw. Use an oscillating saw with a 0.5-cm blade width to make the first cut in the phalanx just distal to the surface of the K-wire with cooling irrigation (Figure 7). Figure 7. First cut of the osteotomy. Note K-wire to demarcate and help ensure extra-articular osteotomy. The initial cut is incomplete, leaving the plantar cortex intact. This protects the FHL and maintains stability in the phalanx in preparation for the second cut. Make a second, oblique cut, measured about 3-5 mm distal to the first cut. In very mild cases of hallux rigidus, a 3-mm wedge is used (Figure 8). Figure 8. Angled cut to remove a dorsal wedge of bone. Keep this cut as parallel as possible to the first cut, looking at the dorsal surface. The width is measured with a sterile ruler. If the two cuts are not parallel, an angular deformity (hallux valgus or varus) can ensue. Attempt to angle the cut to meet at the plantar cortex. Be careful not to sever the EHL during the osteotomy, as non-vigilant retraction can lead to this complication and slow the postop recovery. If the EHL is compromised, be sure to repair it acutely. If there is significant preoperative abductus (lateral angulation), it may help the appearance of the toe to make the medial part of the wedge bigger than the lateral side. The so-called “Mo-Akin” or “Akin-berg,” depending on preference. As with the first cut, it is important not to finish the osteotomy completely. Weaken the remaining plantar cortex with multiple 0.062 K-wire drill holes (Figure 9). The osteotomy is then completed or “greensticked” manually with dorsally directed force. Again, the more irrigation used the better, to keep the bone cool and prevent thermal necrosis and potentially slower healing. Figure 9. Placement of 0.054-inch K-wire to perforate remaining plantar cortex to help "greenstick" osteotomy; cheilectomy has already been completed. Part Three: Fixation and Closure Various types of fixation have been described for this osteotomy. We initially used 28-G wire placed through drill holes. Although inexpensive, we were concerned about initial strength of fixation. We have also used two or three K-wires (usually 0.054”) placed from medial proximal to distal plantar. These were typically removed at 3-4 weeks and do work well, but possess downsides such as pin tract infections, patient dissatisfaction with appearance, and fears of a painful removal. Furthermore, internal fixation such as a partially threaded screws, in diameter of 2.0-3.0 mm, or staples have been used. Recently we have used the Plaple (Arthrex, Naples, Florida), which combines a plate with a staple (Figures 10-11). The staple aspect is used proximally and the 2.3-mm screw is used distally to allow good compression and initial strength (Figure 12). Fortunately, the postop biomechanics of weight bearing place the toe into dorsiflexion and compression, thus adding to the healing forces added to the construct. Figure 10. Low-lying Plaple in place. Figure 11. AP fluoroscopic image of the Plaple in place. Figure 12. Lateral view of foot 6 weeks from cheilectomy and Moberg osteotomy. Note generous cheilectomy and Plaple used to secure the proximal phalanx osteotomy. Close the deep capsule with nonabsorbable suture, usually 2-0 in diameter. Release the tourniquet after deep closure to ensure adequate hemostasis. Try to completely cover the osteotomy site with soft tissue. Sometimes this is not possible, given the limited amount of distal capsule and thin periosteum (Figure 13). Close the skin with 4-0 nylon type suture. Figure 13. First layer of closure. Note complete closure of deep capsule and covering of indwelling hardware. Apply a soft dressing consisting of a nonadherent dressing, 4x4 gauze, and 4-inch Kling. Apply a 2- or 3-inch elastic bandage over this, and place the patient in a hard-soled postoperative shoe. Pearls and Pitfalls Indications:If the MTP joint has end-stage degeneration, the patient may have residual postoperative pain and be better served with an arthrodesis. One good pr-operative question to ask is whether the patient has pain at rest. If the answer is yes, it may be better to consider an arthrodesis. Intra-articular osteotomy:Use of K-wire as a guide and a mini C-arm can decrease the incidence of an intra-articular placement of the proximal limb of the osteotomy. Angular deformity after surgery:Extreme care should be taken to make the second cut of the osteotomy as parallel as possible to the first. “Parallel” is from the perspective of looking at the dorsal surface of the proximal phalanx. It is important to visualize the medial and lateral aspect of the joint and the proximal phalanx. FHL injury:Careful exposure of the proximal phalanx is essential. Incomplete plantar osteotomy and “greensticking” the osteotomy after multiple drill holes. EHL injury:Careful and conscious retraction is very important during the creation of the osteotomy. If mindful of the EHL, laceration is unlikely. Also, plantarflexion of the toe during the osteotomy places undue tension on the EHL, making injury more common. Non-union:Rare, but bony apposition is important, as is solid fixation. Greensticking of the plantar cortex and a lot of irrigation during the bony cuts are also helpful. Proximal fragment fracture:Avoid making the osteotomy too close to the articular surface, let alone cutting into the articular surface. Postoperative Care
Postoperatively, patients are placed in a hard-soled shoe for 3-6 weeks. Weight-bearing as tolerated is allowed the day after surgery when blood coagulation is complete. We usually tell the patient to elevate the limb for the first 2-3 days.
Patients are initially seen 7-10 days after surgery. The patient is instructed to massage the operative site to desensitize the wound beginning 1 week postoperatively. Passive dorsiflexion exercises of the MTP joint are begun 1-2 weeks after surgery, depending on the fixation used.
Plantarflexion-type exercises are not started until 4 weeks postoperatively to avoid early tension on the fixation of the osteotomy site. Less emphasis is placed on plantarflexion unless the resting posture of the hallux is above ground.
Outcome
The use of a dorsal closing wedge osteotomy increases the space at the dorsal MTP joint. In effect, the osteotomy draws the dorsal aspect of the phalanx away from the dorsal aspect of the first metatarsal head. The osteotomy may reduce the joint compression force on the dorsum of the first MTP joint during the toe-off phase of gait.
In one long-term study, [2] eight women who had 10 toes treated for hallux rigidus by dorsal wedge osteotomy of the proximal phalanx were reviewed after an average follow-up of 22 years (no cheilectomies were done in this study). Five toes were symptom-free, four others did not restrict walking, and only one had required metatarsophalangeal fusion. The authors concluded that dorsal wedge osteotomy afforded long lasting benefits for hallux rigidus.
Thomas and Smith [3] reviewed 17 patients (24 feet) with radiographic Grade I or II changes at a median follow-up of 30 months. A 96% satisfaction rate was obtained without any reported complications. The authors concluded that the addition of a proximal phalanx osteotomy provided better results than cheilectomy by itself.
Blyth et al [4] reviewed 18 patients with Grade I to III hallux rigidus treated with these combined procedures. Fourteen patients demonstrated good or excellent results and a substantial improvement in motion of the MTP joint at mean follow-up of 4 years. One patient with a poor result went on to arthrodesis. Additional complications included transfer metatarsalgia and one injury of the dorsomedial cutaneous nerve.
Complications Intra-articular osteotomy FHL, EHL, and dorsomedial cutaneous nerve injury and/or laceration Angular deformity after surgery Fragmentation of the proximal fragment of the proximal phalanx Non-union Malunion, including rotational malunion Failure to improve, likely related to incorrect or expanded indications for this surgery References
1. Moberg E. A simple operation for hallux rigidus. Clin Orthop 1979;142:55-6.
2. Citron N, Neil M. Dorsal wedge osteotomy of the proximal phalanx for hallux rigidus. Long-term results. J Bone Joint Surg Br 1987;69(5):8357.
3. Thomas PJ, Smith RW. Proximal phalanx osteotomy for the surgical treatment of hallux rigidus. Foot Ankle Int 1999;20(1):3-12.
4. Blyth MJ, Mackay DC, Kinninmonth AW. Dorsal wedge osteotomy in the treatment of hallux rigidus. J Foot Ankle Surg 1998;37(1):8-10.
Additional Reading
Feldman R, Hutter J, Lapow L, et al. Cheilectomy and hallux rigidus. J Foot Surg 1983;22:170-4.
Frey CC, Jahss MJ, Kummer FJ. The Akin procedure: an analysis of results. Foot Ankle Int 1991;12:1-6.
Giannestras NJ. Foot Disorders: Medical and Surgical Management, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1973:400.
Gould N, Schneider W, Ashikaga T. Epidemiological survey of foot problems in the continental United States: 1978-1979. Foot Ankle Int 1980;1:8-10.
Mann RA, Clanton TO. Hallux rigidus: treatment by cheilectomy. J Bone Joint Surg Am 1988;70A:400-6.
McMaster MJ. The pathogenesis of hallux rigidus. J Bone Joint Surg Br 1978;60B:82-7.
Smith RW, Katchis SD, Ayson LC. Outcomes in hallux rigidus patients treated nonoperatively: a long-term follow-up study. Foot Ankle Int 2001;22:462-70. |
warc | 201704 | Taco Bell’s Fresco line of entrees didn’t add more variety to its menu, but it took some classic Taco Bell menu items (such as tacos and burritos), stripped them of some less-healthy ingredients, added a sprinkling of vegetables and reintroduced them as a healthier option.
Eat this: Taco Bell’s ½ pound Fresco Style Combo Burrito Not that: Taco Bell’s Grilled Stuft Beef Burrito Calories and Fat: The Grilled Stuft Beef Burrito has nearly twice the amount of both calories and total grams of fat, registering in at 700 calories to the Fresco Style Combo Burrito’s 430 and 30 grams total fat to the Fresco’s 16. Difference: The Grilled Stuft Burrito’s total fat count outweighs the Fresco burrito by 14 grams, with 10 grams of saturated fat. It also has 1 gram of trans fat, compared to the Fresco’s ½ gram. It has more cholesterol (60mg to 40mg), more carbohydrates (2110 to 1650) and more sugar (6 grams to 4 grams). The kicker – calorie count. For roughly the same portion, the Grilled Stuft Burrito has 270 more calories than the Fresco Style Burrito.
Taco Bell’s Fresco line offers healthier, less calorie- and fat-laden options by taking away some of the fat and calories and adding more tomatoes and lettuce. So next time you decide to “Think Outside the Bun,” take it a step further and go for one of Taco Bell’s healthier choices.
Check back weekly for more small changes you can make in your eating habits that may make big changes in your waistline. New Eat This, Not That features are posted each Saturday. |
warc | 201704 | Last summer, Bob Litan and Lesa Mitchell of the Kauffman Foundation sent a short memo to Esther Lee at the Dept. of Commerce entitled “Accelerating the Commercialization of Government-Funded University-Based Research.” Although the Foundation, based in Kansas City MO, has been interested in university tech transfer at least since 2003 when it issued a report “Accelerating Technology Transfer & Commercialization in the Life & Health Sciences” (PDF at end of posting), this memo attracted little attention until, in December, The Harvard Business Review named it as containing one of the “Ten Breakthrough Ideas for 2010.” The alleged breakthrough is the proposal in the memo that, while universities will continue to own inventions made with Federal funding, professors should be free to not use their university’s technology transfer office (TTO), but to have the option of licensing their inventions through whatever agency they prefer. The Kauffman premise, to put it bluntly, is that most TTOs are “suboptimal” and that professors would be better off, in many cases, shopping their technology to faster-moving licensing entities (of some sort). The stated goal is to speed up the commercialization of new technologies while allowing universities to collect the same royalties as under the current system.
So the Kauffman team feels that there are lots of professors with under-appreciated technologies who would benefit by being able to leave the corral of their institution’s TTO and ride off, if not into the sunset, into the arms of a third-party licensing entity who would make the translational connection needed to get the technology “from bench to bedside.” Really?
To begin with, it is difficult to see how this would work in practice. The Kauffman memo suggests that the professor might have the option to prevent the TTO from even trying to license the technology while he or she shops it. Or will we now have dueling TTOs trying to license the same technology? (The memo suggests that a professor with an automotive invention who lives in, say, Kansas might want to use a TTO in Detroit.) And what will prevent third-parties from taking most of the licensing royalties? The memo mentions ownership, but it does not seem to consider who will pay for the patent costs, especially if a statutory bar date looms. A system in which the professor’s TTO is paying the patent costs while the professor is out trying to license the IP portfolio via a different organization is difficult to imagine. And about conflicts of interest….
The Kauffman fellows seem to have no sense of the chaotic history of tech transfer prior to Bayh-Dole (BD) (or in its early years). When I was doing patent prosecution at a big IP firm, one client I was given was a professor from a prestigious university that did not have a tech transfer policy. Since he was free to do what he wanted with his new method of cancer treatment pre-BD, he had paid the firm to file applications on it, and eventually licensed them to big pharma for a lot of money (in those days). The university got nothing at all. The first talk I ever gave was about the BD Act and the audience was professors, not administrators.
Also, there were a number of “for-profit non-profit” entities gathering up loose technologies from universities without technology policies (let alone TTOs). Research Corp. Technologies (RCT) was one of the most successful. RCT would not take on a technology unless it could get an assignment (not a license) from the inventor(s) and institution(s) in question (if the university even asserted any ownership rights). RCT would then front all the patent costs and attempt to license the technology. If it was successful, the inventor(s), and sometimes the institution (if it cared), would get some of the royalties. Before the rise of TTOs that developed their own licensing expertise, RCT and other organizations like it scored some major tech transfer homeruns, but they could only handle so many proposals at once. BD has been referred to as an “unfunded mandate,” but it did motivate universities and other institutions getting NIH and other Federal funding to step up to the plate and swing, at least at the fat pitches.
There are still a few lone wolves out there trying to make it as “hired guns” (pardon the metaphors). Believe it or not, I am still approached by small companies that want to file on inventions brought to them by university professors who are either unaware that their universities have TTOs (or at least tech transfer policies) or think they can ignore them. They can’t. The present system is not “optimal,” but at least it is organized. A few years ago, a prominent researcher told me that his colleagues used to look down on him because he was patenting his discoveries and licensing them (often to start-ups). He was using a TTO, incidentally. He said that today it is the professors who are not patenting and licensing who are considered to be out of step. I don’t believe that there are hoards of break-through technologies languishing in dusty lab notebooks in academe and, if there are, I don’t believe that loosing professors trained in life sciences to bring them to market is going to change anything for the better.
TechTranPanel_Report.pdf |
warc | 201704 | As if tax season wasn’t stressful enough, now we have to worry about hackers, too. Tax time isn’t just busy for accountants — the bad guys know they can make a few extra dollars, too.
The Internet has made preparing and filing taxes much easier. In fact, the IRS even recommends filing your taxes via eFile, the electronic method for submitting your return. Easy! But great opportunity also brings great responsibility. We have to be on the lookout for scams. Let’s take a look at some of the things to keep in mind from now until April 15 (and beyond).
Don’t Threaten Me
While the IRS may be seen as bullies, they aren’t nearly as bad as the scammers. Fraud artists (to put it politely) will use scare tactics to get you to hand over information. They’ll tell you all sorts of things, including mentioning prison, to pry personal details from you. Take everything with a grain of salt. If you are minding your manners, the IRS won’t come threatening. And if they do, just be calm and double check everything —this is not time for rash decisions.
Too Good to be True
Scammers will also prey on your hope. They’ll tell you that you’re due for a big return, and that you just need to send over a few pieces of information. I don’t know much about the IRS, but I’m pretty sure they won’t go advertising returns without being solicited. Beware the false promise of money. Do your homework and check in with the real IRS to be sure.
The IRS is Old School
Even though they have implemented programs like eFile, the IRS still handles its communications the old way — with a letter. You won’t ever find an e-mail from the real IRS, for both security and privacy reasons. If you do receive an e-mail from the “IRS,” mark it as SPAM and delete. Don’t be tricked into clicking any links in their supposed e-mails.
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You
Don’t wait for the IRS to call you and confirm any correspondence. If you have a question about the legitimacy of any message from the IRS, give them a call. As long as you are putting effort forth, they won’t be upset that you didn’t immediately respond to a letter. Cover your bases in an expeditious manner — but make sure to cover all your bases.
If you have any questions about Internet scams or need to update your computer’s security features, give the Computer Guys USA a call at (928) 468-0000. Tax time doesn’t have to be stressful. Take these precautions and you’ll be just fine.
That will leave you with plenty of time to watch a baseball game or hit the golf course. Happy spring, everyone.
Daniel Taft is the senior network administrator and member/owner of Computer Problem Specialists, LLC and CEO of “The Computer Guys USA, Inc” with a degree in applied computer science. His career spans more than 20 years. |
warc | 201704 | Three northern European countries show the world's highest broadband penetration rates, with Denmark leading the pack, according to statistics released Friday by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Denmark had a broadband penetration rate of 29.3 subscribers per 100 inhabitants, followed by the Netherlands with 28.8 and Iceland with 27.3.
The number of broadband subscribers in OECD increased 33 percent to 181 million in June 2006 from 136 million in same period the year before. The penetration rate also increased to 15.5 from 11.7.
Long-time leader South Korea dropped to fourth place with a penetration rate of 13.2. While the country appears to have reached its saturation point, it and Japan are moving rapidly to the next step – FTTP (fibre to the premise), the OECD said.
Japan leads in FTTP connections with 6.3 million subscribers, outnumbering total broadband subscribers in 22 of the 30 OECD countries.
In Denmark, too, power companies are rolling out fibre to consumers as part of a programme to bury overhead power lines. Several network operators in Europe have begun to deploy FTTP, in addition to municipal broadband projects that are expanding across the Continent.
The US, with a penetration rate of eight subscribers per 100 population, has the largest number of broadband users at around 57 million, representing 36 percent of all broadband connections in the OECD, up from 31 percent in December 2005.
Greece was ranked at the bottom of the OECD list, with a penetration rate of 2.7 and a total number of users under 299,000.
The most used broadband technology in the period reviewed by the OECD was DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) at 63 percent, followed by cable at 29 percent. Other technologies, including satellite, fibre and fixed wireless, accounted for 8 percent. |
warc | 201704 | Average wages for North West workers are worth £2,500 less than in 2008 - that’s £47 a week - according to new TUC analysis
The figures confirm that, despite some strengthening of wages over 2014 to 2015, workers in the region still have a long way to go to restore all the earnings they lost following the longest squeeze on wages since records began in the 1850s.
The government must do the right thing for the economy, and the right thing by workersTUC
The average North West annual wage increased in real terms by £374 from 2014 to 2015 – the first annual increase for several years.
However, current indications suggest the wage recovery may already be stalling. Monthly data on average weekly earnings from the Office for National Statistics show wage growth slowed in the second half of 2015.
The TUC warns that the government’s plans to continue to hold back wages in the public sector will be a significant drag on average wage growth. And recent monthly surveys by employment information service XpertHR suggest private sector wage settlements remain well below their pre-crisis trend.
The TUC says that while forthcoming increases to the minimum wage have an important role to play in improving wages for some workers, this is not enough in itself. Concerted action from the government is needed to support stronger wage increases for all low and middle-income workers, not just those at the very bottom.
However, the TUC warns that the government’s Trade Union Bill will weaken the power of workers to negotiate a fair share of economic growth through decent pay rises. This could lead to slower wage growth becoming embedded as a longer-term problem, causing trouble not only for workers and their families, but also for businesses that rely on their spending.
Instead of attacking workers and their representatives, the TUC is calling on the government to engage with trade unions to improve both pay and productivity through stronger collective bargaining rights, modern wage councils to ensure pay increases follow productivity gains, and worker representation on remuneration committees.
TUC Regional Secretary Lynn Collins said: “Working people deserve a fair share of the wealth they create. But despite five years of economic growth, the pressure on their living standards has barely let up. The average annual wage in the North West is still worth nearly £2,500 less than it was back in 2008.
“The government must do the right thing for the economy, and the right thing by workers. They should invest more in the skills and infrastructure the UK needs for higher productivity. They should make sure that working people see productivity gains in their pay packets. And they should work positively with trade unions instead of attacking workers and their representatives with the Trade Union Bill.” |
warc | 201704 | The Pension Protection fund (PPF) has appointed seven farmland and timberland fund managers. Some managers will be funded immediately, while others are appointed for deferred investment.
The selected managers are Brookfield Asset Management, Dasos Capital Oy, GMO Renewable Resources, Hancock Timber Resource Group, Macquarie, New Forests Pty, and Stafford Timberland. The PPF said the decision is part of the development of its alternative investment portfolio so it can benefit from greater diversification and reduce its overall risk. The investments will be predominantly in land and the operations needed to cultivate and market agricultural produce or to grow and sell timber. PPF executive director for financial risk Martin Clarke said: “We now have an investment portfolio worth more than £12bn and the size of our assets means that we can take advantage of a broader range of investment opportunities. “Investing in farm and timberland will complement our existing alternative investment portfolio, allow us to diversify our investments more widely and make our portfolio more resilient. “But we do need to be aware that there are some risks in these asset classes, for instance land price risk. Therefore, our approach will be to invest conservatively – which is consistent with our overall low-risk strategy.” The proportion of PPF assets allocated to farm and timberland will vary over time and depend on the opportunities available now and in the future, the fund said. All managers are appointed for four years, with the flexibility for two extensions of up to two years. Farmland and timberland will be added to the list of permitted asset classes in the existing PPF Statement of Investment Principles.
Francesca Fabrizi meets Mark Adamson, director at JLT Employee Benefits, to discuss the current trends in pension scheme administration today
Laura Blows provides a summary of the big pensions stories to have hit the headlines this week |
warc | 201704 | Hi stranger! Signing up for MypetMD is easy, free and puts the most relevant content at your fingertips.
What is in a name?
When it comes to pet food, sometimes not a lot. The food name is the first part of the label noticed by a consumer and for that reason, fancy names are used to emphasize certain features of a food. AAFCO has established four rules about ingredients:
95% rule: at least 95% of the food must be the named ingredient. For example, "Chicken for Dogs" or "Beef Cat Food" must be 95% chicken or beef, respectively. If the food is "Chicken and Rice Dog Food", the chicken is the component that must be 95%. If there is a combination of ingredients such as "Chicken and Liver for Cats", the two together must make up 95% of the total weight and the first ingredient must be the one in higher percent in the food. 25% or "Dinner" rule: when the named product contains at least 25% but less than 95% of the total weight, the name must include a descriptive term such as "dinner". For example, "dinner", "entrée", "grill", "platter", "formula" are all terms that are used to describe this type of product. For example, "Chicken Dinner Dog Food" must contain at least 25% chicken. This food could contain beef and possibly even more beef than chicken. It is important to read the label and check what other meat sources the product contains. 3% or "With" rule: this one is tricky. Many times the "with" label identifies extra or special ingredients, such as "Beef Dinner for Dogs with Cheese" is a food containing at least 25% beef and at least 3% cheese. But beware of this type of "with" label: "Dog Food with Chicken". This dog food need only contain 3% chicken! Don't confuse that with "Chicken Dog Food" which must contain 95% chicken. Confusing, right? "Flavor" rule: in this situation, a specific percentage of meat is not required, but it must contain an amount of flavor sufficient to be detected. For example, "Chicken Flavor Dog Food" may contain a digest or enough chicken fat to flavor the food, but there will be no actual chicken meat added to the food. What are ingredients to avoid?
In addition to shunning food with "by-products" and "meals", there are many other food additives that should be avoided. Corn syrup, propylene glycol, and MSG are artificial flavors frequently used in pet food manufacturing to disguise inferior food quality and some of these additives give dampness and flexibility to semi-moist foods and treats. Many preservatives are known to be carcinogens in humans. When used in the production of pet food, they limit the growth of bacteria or inhibit oxidation of food. Examples of preservatives that should be avoided include BHA, BHT, sodium nitrite, and nitrate. Pets are smaller than humans and many of their foods have the same amount of preservatives as ours -- studies are inadequate to understand the consequences of chronic intake of these preservatives -- but they are best avoided. Artificial colorings are used in many pet products to entice owners into a purchase; however, they have no nutritional value and may be responsible for adverse or allergic reactions. Besides, your pet doesn’t care what food looks like -- just how it tastes.
What pet food ingredients sound healthful -- but aren't?
I think everyone would agree that "chicken meal" sounds like something wholesome and tasty that could be served in any USA household. In my house a chicken meal would include juicy grilled chicken breast served on a bed of steamed spinach and maybe a little quinoa. But, don't be fooled, in the pet food industry, "chicken meal" takes us back to the disgusting rendering plant.
Corn and rice. Although these foods are often thought of as staples of an American diet, they are considered "fillers" and are not healthful for your pet. Unfortunately, many pet food companies (even premium ones) use corn and rice as the main ingredients in their foods because they are a cheap way to fill up a bag and still meet basic nutritional requirements. This has led to industry-wide creation of pet foods which are high in carbohydrates, relatively low in meat protein and are a major factor in the pet obesity epidemic. Corn and rice contribute to obesity because they are carbohydrates with high glycemic index. This means they raise blood sugar levels rapidly and create hormonal signals that have negative long term effects on metabolism and weight gain. These corn and rice based diets are often responsible for chronic symptoms of maldigestion, such as gas, bloating, and diarrhea.
Benefits of Natural Ingredients
Natural diets do not contain preservatives or other potential carcinogens -- so they reduce the risk of adverse reactions. Choosing natural foods will eliminate "empty" calories that come from additives and flavorings and contribute to pet obesity. It has been well documented that dogs maintaining an ideal body weight live 15% longer, and with less disease (especially arthritis) than overweight dogs. Natural diets contain higher levels of quality protein sources (since there are no fillers, inferior by-products or meals) which better address nutritional requirements and may help prevent disease. Many natural diets also avoid the use of high glycemic index carbohydrates (those that raise blood sugar rapidly), such as corn and rice, due to the negative effects they have on the metabolism and weight gain.
It seems every day, all of us are becoming increasingly aware that harmful dietary preservatives and synthetic chemicals pose significant health hazards and can negatively affect our overall well-being. The same holds true for our pets. We have all heard anecdotes about the elimination of disease and improvement in energy by the adoption of a healthful diet and holistic lifestyle. The good news is there are more pet food options to help ensure the same principles of human nutrition are upheld for the four legged members of our families.
Originally published on www.halopets.com
Donna Spector, DVM, DACVIM, is a renowned, board-certified Veterinary Internal Medicine Specialist who has practiced at the Animal Medical Center in New York City and other leading institutions. She is an active member of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association. Dr. Spector has written and lectured extensively on topics including nutrition, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, kidney failure and respiratory disease. She is widely recognized for her role as consulting veterinarian to HALO, Purely for Pets, her TV appearances with Ellen DeGeneres and her widely-quoted pet health advice in print and on radio. She currently works in Chicago, performing independent internal medicine consultations for dogs and cats.
Image : laffy4k / via Flickr
Resources: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Veterinary Medicine ( www.fda.gov/cvm ), Interpreting Pet Food Labels by David A. Dzanis, DVM, Ph.D., DACVN Association of American Feed Control Officials ( www.aafco.org ), Pet Food Regulations
livestock
The term for domesticated farm animals that are raised for work, wool, milk, and other products and uses. May include pigs, cows, horses, and poultry.
inhibit
To slow something down or cause it to stop
metabolism
The group of processes that involve the use of nutrients by the body
oxidation
A chemical change that has to do with adding oxygen or something like it
synthetic
Something that is artificially created
inferior
Less important, below, toward the bottom or back
hoof
The hard outside of the feet of certain animals, like horses, cattle, goats, and pigs
epidemic
The outbreak of a disease inside of a group
by-product
Any product that is derived from but less in value than another product from the same source.
gastrointestinal
The digestive tract containing the stomach and intestine
grease
Fat or lanolin
arthritis
A medical condition in which the joints become inflamed and causes a great deal of pain.
index
A type of system that is used to compare animals within a given group to one another |
warc | 201704 | Surprising summertime pet health dangers
Posted on June 11, 2010 under Uncategorized
By: Dr. Jack Stephens, DVM
Pets Best Insurance President One of the most costly dangers and causes for dog health care in the summer may surprise you.
Grass Awns, most commonly called “Foxtails,” often become lodged in pets’ fur and can cause severe infection and other pricey pet health problems.
Foxtails, also known as “cheat grass,” come from tall grass that has gone to seed. They have sharp points and are difficult to extract given their barbed shape. They are also the same aggravating plants that get stuck in your socks when walking through high, dry grass and are usually found in vacant lots or overgrown areas.
Foxtails often get stuck in between pets’ toes, inside their ear canals, in their eyes and in extreme cases they can be inhaled through the nose. If this happens, a dog will suddenly have a violent repeated sneezing episode. When they become lodged in fur or other body parts they can cause abscesses which often require surgery and immediate dog health care. Generally, long-haired dogs and dogs with floppy ears are are at a higher risk.
Cats can also get Foxtail infections, but these are not nearly as common, likely because they groom themselves and are able to remove the Foxtails before they become problematic.
Foxtails can also become lodged deeper into the oral cavity, chest cavity or abdomen causing life- threatening pet health problems. Once they migrate into these cavities, major surgery, which can be very expensive without pet insurance, may be required.
Sometimes the Foxtail is so hard to find and has migrated into the pets’ body so deeply, it can require multiple surgeries to locate. The migration may also cause infected tracts that can go into the lungs.
Untreated, these migrations can result in serious pet health problems and even death.
The treatment costs depend on how complicated, how much infection and where the Foxtail ultimately lodges. But the bills can be upwards in the hundreds of dollars for surgery alone, and additional for aftercare and medications.
The ultimate key to preventing the pet health problems caused by Foxtails is brushing and inspecting your pet often and keeping grassy areas where your pet has access well-manicured so Foxtails don’t grow. |
warc | 201704 | There will be glitches when the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act are implemented starting Oct. 1. Huge glitches. Many glitches. Bet on it.
That is a prediction not only from those resolutely opposed to the ACA. Even those quite excited about President Barack Obama's federal health law have the same expectation: The rollout of the biggest new social program in nearly 50 years is not going to be pretty.
“When you're dealing with tens of millions of new clients, mistakes are inevitable,” said Henry Aaron, a health economist at the Brookings Institution. “You're going to have thousands of mistakes.”
It has been three years since Congress approved the ACA, but many policy experts say that is not much time to get a program of its size and complexity up and running, particularly when there are so many different federal and state agencies involved. On top of that, the country has been recovering from a recession that crippled the finances of state governments, which were responsible for much of the nuts and bolts work of preparing for the new law.
“Nothing like this has ever been done on this scale,” said Cheryl Smith, a senior practitioner at Deloitte, a research and consulting firm. “People can make comparisons to Medicare Part D and to Medicare itself, but nothing this big has ever been tried.”
In the simplest terms, the task at hand is to enroll 16 million currently uninsured Americans into health insurance plans or an expanded Medicaid. That process begins Oct. 1 with coverage starting Jan. 1.
More Complicated Than It Sounds
Oct. 1 is the day that health insurance exchanges open in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Seventeen states and the District will operate their own exchanges, seven will be in partnership with the federal government and 27 have elected to do neither, standing aside for federally-operated exchanges. All of them will have the same basic mission: to help individuals and small businesses select the most suitable health insurance plan from an extensive menu of options.
The task will be more complicated than it sounds. Many of the shoppers on the exchanges will be eligible for federal tax credits based on their income. Many others will be newly eligible for Medicaid benefits, also based on their income, in the 22 states plus the District of Columbia that have elected to expand Medicaid eligibility.
Although Americans have until the end of March to sign up for health insurance, a crush of demand at the very start could overwhelm exchange call-in centers, websites and personnel. No one will say this out loud, but administrators are hoping for a steady trickle rather than a flood, at least in the early going.
All of the eligibility determinations and subsidy calculations will require a seamless transfer of information. The exchanges will have to interact with the U.S. Treasury for income information. They will have to communicate with the Department of Homeland Security to verify citizenship. And all this information must be handled without violating the privacy of consumers.
“CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) has designed and tested a system that they think is going to work, and they know where the risks and vulnerabilities are,” said Charlene Frizzera, president of her consulting firm, CF Health Advisors, and a former acting administrator of CMS. “The question is, how will they deal with those vulnerabilities they anticipated and those they
haven't anticipated?” Scaring People Away
Dennis G. Smith, also a former head of what is now CMS, believes one weak point will be in the calculation of Medicaid eligibility. He believes it is likely that the exchanges and state Medicaid offices will use different formulas or time frames for determining eligibility, leading to frustration and confusion for many consumers.
“Exchanges will send a whole bunch of people to Medicaid and Medicaid will say ‘Nope, they don't qualify,' and send them back to the exchanges,” said Smith, now managing director in the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge.
Smith points to other possibilities for misfires. For example, although states with their own exchanges are spending a great deal of money to publicize the ACA's requirements, states with federal exchanges are doing no outreach at all, which raises the possibility that residents of those states will remain uninformed and do nothing.
Even people who get the message may arrive at the exchanges having never before purchased health insurance and unfamiliar with the way premiums, co-pays and deductibles work. Others may lack documentation proving citizenship, residency and income.
Phil Lebherz, founder of the nonprofit Foundation for Health Coverage Education, gives an example of the potential difficulties ahead.
“You've got a single woman with two kids at home and she's a waitress making less than $20,000 a year, and she couldn't afford to come the first time. She may not come back a second time. Then what?”
Will the Young Enroll?
Such situations, multiplied by the thousands, will be a severe test of the training received by the customer service representatives—called “navigators” or “assisters”—who will be charged with providing online and in-person assistance to applicants. “I think they are going to be overwhelmed,” Lebherz said.
Perhaps the question that causes the most trepidation in the Obama administration is whether healthy young people will sign up for health insurance as the ACA requires. Because young people tend to be healthy and file relatively few insurance claims, their premiums are supposed to help pay for claims of older, sicker people. If the only people buying insurance are old and the sick, insurance premiums will be prohibitively expensive.
Another unknown is the impact of those who want to obstruct Obamacare. Republicans in Missouri, for example, have barred state and local officials from assisting with the federal exchange. At least 14 states with federal exchanges have passed laws to regulate or restrict the activities of navigators.
“There exists at present a group of people who really hate the Affordable Care Act and have staked their political reputations on its failure and are going to do what they can to see that it fails,” said Aaron of Brookings.
Supporters of the ACA say it would be mistake to judge the law even after a year, let alone a few weeks. It will take time to assess its impact on public health, the pocketbooks of Americans, access to providers, growth in health care costs and the insurance industry. People shouldn't try to draw conclusions based on the first days or even months.
In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, that's about as likely as a glitch-free launch. |
warc | 201704 | Phnom Penh’s much-maligned waste-collection firm Cintri yesterday used a meeting with City Hall to ask for help in collecting between $10 million and $20 million in unpaid fees it says it’s owed by residents in the capital.
Speaking after the meeting – which was held to discuss the company’s performance – Cintri manager Ith Chenda said the municipality should push customers to pay and help find a solution, complaining many simply ignored the waste-management charge.
“According to the agreement, the company will collect, transport and clean, while the authority has the responsibility to encourage people to pay the fee,” Chenda said.
Chenda said the figure, which fluctuated regularly, included debt from the beginning of the firm’s service in September 2003 and comprises between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals and corporations – the latter, he said, were “most responsible” for the arrears.
“Some of them have not paid for 157 months, meaning from the beginning of our service,” Chenda said, saying staff constantly reminded residents about their debt.
“We cannot force them to pay.”
He added that the company was not considering legal action against households, but had pursued some companies in the courts.
The issue, born of vague contracts which do not stipulate which agency is ultimately responsible for collecting payment, according to an expert, is one of many challenges in a tumultuous relationship between authorities and the city’s sole garbage collector.
After years of threatening to cancel its contract over poor services, City Hall officials in July extended the firm’s contracts for four districts and gave it four new districts to service.
Coming after a review of the firm, the decision appeared to reflect improvements in Cintri’s performance, with Phnom Penh Governor Pa Socheatvong even vowing the city would cover losses the company incurred from households not paying, provided the “service is good and the capital is trash free”.
Reached yesterday, City Hall spokesman Mean Chanyada would not confirm the figure, saying “what the company says is up to them”.
Chanyada noted that some citizens, disputing their bill, refused to pay, but said the only solution the municipality could provide was to facilitate negotiations between customers and the company.
Daun Penh District Governor Kuoch Chamroeun also said it was not authorities’ responsibility to collect the cash.
“It is not our duty,” he said. Fees for garbage collection are tacked on to residents’ power bills, which are collected by state-run energy utility Electricite du Cambodge. Larger commercial operations, however, have direct contracts with Cintri.
EdC chief Keo Ratanak could not be reached yesterday. However, an employee who answered the agency’s phone said the group was not responsible for collecting waste-management fees listed on their bills.
“For waste, it depends on the customer; if they want to pay or not it is up to them; if they want to pay, we will accept it,” they said.
Phnom Penh-based waste-management consultant Jon Morales said that the problem was that contracts between the company and authorities did not stipulate exactly who was responsible for collecting unpaid fees.
“The contracts are just really, really vague in every direction,” Morales said, adding Cintri had long complained about unpaid fees. “There are no real enforcement mechanisms.”
Morales also added that Cintri’s calculation of the unpaid fees may also be off, as the company had been known to include areas that it didn’t service.
Additional reporting by Shaun Turton |
warc | 201704 | Proceedings of The Physiological Society
University of Manchester (2010)
Proc Physiol Soc 19, PC237
Poster Communications
Inflammation-induced increase in hyperpolarization-activated current (Ih) in C-fibre nociceptive dorsal root ganglion neurons in rats in vivo
X. Weng1, L. Djouhri1
1. Pharmacology, Univeristy of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Hypersensitivity to painful stimuli (hyperalgesia) and/or normally non-painful stimuli (allodynia) is a hallmark of inflammation. This hypersensitivity is partly due to peripheral sensitization, in which nociceptive dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons exhibit increased spontaneous activity (SA) and decreased activation threshold (Woolf & Ma, 2007). The underlying mechanisms of SA generation in these sensory neurons are poorly understood. However, this sensory neuron hyperexcitability is likely to result from alterations in expression and/or activation properties of certain ion channels during chronic inflammatory states. Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide gated (HCN) channels, which mediate Ih, are possible candidates, because they act to produce an inward current that slowly depolarizes the membrane potential influencing the threshold for action potential generation. Therefore, we examined whether after tissue inflammation, expression and/or activation properties of Ih changed in C-fibre nociceptive neurons, which exhibit SA after both nerve injury and tissue inflammation (Djouhri et al. 2006). Hindlimb inflammation was induced, under isoflurane anaesthesia (3% with O2 and N2O set at 2 l/min each), by a 150μl intradermal injection of complete Freund’s adjuvant (CFA) into the plantar surface of the left hindpaws of female Wistar rats (160-200g). Three to five days after CFA treatment, discontinuous current-clamp (DCC) and discontinuous single electrode voltage clamp (dSEVC) were performed in untreated (control) rats (n=24) and CFA treated rats (n=21) deeply anaesthetized with sodium pentobarbitone (60 mg/kg, i.p). C-fibre nociceptors were identified on the basis of their dorsal root conduction velocities (<1.0 m/s) and their responses to noxious mechanical and thermal stimuli. Ih was assessed with 1 second hyperpolarizing voltage steps from resting potential to -130 mV and was identified in vivo on the basis of its activation properties and reversal potential and by the presence of time-dependant rectification “sag” elicited by a series of depolarizing current pulses (200 ms duration). Ih was considered to be present in a C-neuron if its magnitude was >50 pA. Interestingly, not only did a significantly higher proportion of C-nociceptors in CFA rats express Ih compared to control (76% (38/50) vs. 48% (21/43), p<0.01, Chi2 test), but Ih was ≥ 100 pA in 64% of the C-nociceptors in CFA rats compared to 26% in control. Furthermore, CFA inflammation induced, in these neurons, significant increases in the mean Ih density (3.31 ± 0.65 nA (control) vs. 4.43 ± 0.72 (CFA), P<0.01, Mann Whitney test) and rate of Ih activation. These results suggest that Ih/HCN channels are involved in the hyperexcitability of C-nocicetive DRG neurons and the hypersensitivity associated with tissue inflammation.
Where applicable, experiments conform with Society ethical requirements |
warc | 201704 | It used to be at Wild Willies Ski Shop there was a set schedule of hours and a specific job description for employees.
That was when employees flocked to Whistler and workers were a dime a dozen.
Now Wild Willies owner Bill Lamond has to make a new work schedule every week to accommodate his employees. He tries to be more flexible with hours and moves workers among his three store locations to fill in the gaps in staffing.
He had just enough employees this winter to make it through the busy ski season but he admits it was touch and go at first. These days he finds himself working more, not less, to make up for staffing shortfalls.
"Every year we take on one more job ourselves," he said. "And that would be nice if that trend could stop."
That trend, by all accounts, looks like its only going to get worse.
The employment growth rate in the region for tourism related jobs is expected to grow between two and two and a half per cent on an annual basis, according to draft figures presented to go2, B.C.s tourism industry human resources association, this week.
Go2 commissioned the tourism labour study in the Sea to Sky corridor in December 2005. The draft report was presented this week.
"Its good to know because up until this report we didnt really have a handle on what was happening in the region," said John Leschyson, director industry human resource development with go2.
But the gap created by the growing job market is increasingly exacerbated by the rapidly shrinking labour pool.
The labour market is being affected by a variety of factors.
The baby boomer population is aging, with more people retiring than are able to fill their jobs. The Canadian economy is booming with unemployment levels lower than they have been in more than 30 years. And young mobile workers are being rapidly enticed to high-paying jobs, unbeatable benefit packages, and over-the-top signing bonues in Albertas oil sands.
In the last quarter of 2005, 17,000 Canadians moved to Alberta from other provinces.
While the lack of good employees is a familiar refrain in Whistler come shoulder season, for the first time ever employers are concerned with more than just the natural ebb and flow of workers in a resort town.
"If theres one thing I wake up thinking about and go to bed thinking about, its recruiting," said Whistler-Blackcombs Kirby Brown.
Labour shortages have been on Whistler-Blackcombs radar screen for the past six years but it wasnt until last year that the reality of the problem really set in.
January 22, 2017, 12:00 PM
While Whistler unlikely to follow suit, both communities looking to streamline enforcement efforts More...
January 21, 2017, 11:20 AM
Also, RMOW seeking feedback on proposed transportation plans More...
January 19, 2017, 1:03 AM
Whistler welcomes family of Syrian refugees More... |
warc | 201704 | Aerial Photos of Outer Banks Show Coastal Damage from Hurricane Irene
September 6, 2011
A series of before and after aerial photos of the Outer Banks show the impact of Hurricane Irene on the coastline, highlighting several breaches that severed a state highway and moved large volumes of sand inland.
The series features five photo pairs that show coastal change in areas from Cape Lookout to Oregon Inlet.
Hurricane Irene made direct landfall near Cape Lookout on August 27. Because of the right-angle shape of the Outer Banks, barrier islands facing southeast experienced different coastal changes than those islands facing east.
The southeast-facing coast, from Cape Lookout to Cape Hatteras, was exposed to waves and surge from the ocean. Photographs of Ocracoke Island show large volumes of sand removed from the beach system and deposited over roads and grass marshes. Flooding by storm surge in these areas was minimal however, as surge crested above dunes in only limited locations.
The east-facing coast, from Cape Hatteras to Oregon Inlet, also experienced waves and surge from the ocean, but surge was higher in the sound. Sections of Rodanthe and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge were exposed to storm surge in Pamlico Sound of roughly six feet that contributed to the carving of channels through the island that breached a state highway at several locations. A total of five breaches were cut through the coastal landscape between Cape Hatteras and Oregon Inlet.
"Such multiple breaches, or new inlets, cut through the Outer Banks could take weeks to months to close on their own," said Asbury (Abby) Sallenger, a U.S. Geological Survey oceanographer. "And without intervention like pumping sand, some could even persist indefinitely depending on the channel’s cross-section and the amount of water flushed through it on every tide."
Three days after the landfall of Hurricane Irene, USGS scientists acquired detailed information of coastal change through aerial photography and an airborne lidar survey mission conducted with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Lidar, light detection and ranging, is a remote-sensing tool attached to an aircraft that uses laser pulses to collect highly detailed ground elevation data. Information obtained from the surveys allow scientists to discern the degree of changes to beaches and coastal environments and determine how much the land has eroded and where new inlets have cut through. The photo and lidar information should be useful in mitigation and restoration efforts like rebuilding N.C. Highway 12, which was severed in several locations by breaches cut through the barrier islands by Hurricane Irene.
Data acquired will also be used to make more accurate predictive models of future coastal impacts from severe storms and identify areas vulnerable to extreme coastal change.
Before and after photographs illustrating coastal changes and damage from Hurricane Irene can be viewed online.
For more information on hurricane preparedness, visit www.ready.gov. |
warc | 201704 | Superstorm Sandy: The (Survey) Miracle of Route 35 A look back at how surveyors rallied in recovery efforts.
Superstorm Sandy—or, officially, Hurricane Sandy—was the deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane system and was, after the infamous Katrina, the second-costliest storm in United States’ history. Damage estimates exceed $70 billion. But those simple, stark metrics don’t capture the horror and dismay felt by the people of coastal New Jersey when they began to assess the damage on Oct. 30, the day after landfall. Surges from the storm had absolutely destroyed many familiar landmarks, and even whole islands had disappeared. Residents of Mantoloking, N.J., were shocked to find that a major interchange at Route 35 and County Route 528 had been essentially erased by seawater—Sandy had opened up a 400-foot wide breach between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay. This was more than an inconvenience; the interchange is the only practical connection to Mantoloking, New Jersey’s richest borough, and about 15 smaller communities in Ocean County, located on a long, narrow barrier island.
The missing interchange was just one of many disturbing images that fascinated TV viewers around the globe in the wake of Sandy. But to those who live in
Superstorm Sandy wiped out part of Route 35 in New Jersey. Photo from the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
Ocean County and to Chris Christie, New Jersey’s popular governor, the wiped-out intersection was a call to action, one of many obstacles that simply had to be surmounted in order to get New Jersey working again. And thus the stage was set for the reconstruction effort now known as “The Miracle of Route 35.”
According to an article in the Asbury Park Press, the reopening of the interchange “may be the ultimate transportation miracle.” Work that was done included:
Removal of mountains of debris-laden sand from the highway, some of which were 10 feet deep. Removal of 89 vehicles and 25 boats from the highway. Removal of 27 buildings. Repair of several washed-out sections of roadway, the longest being 200 feet. About 8,000 dump truck loads to cart out debris from Route 35 to landfills, at a cost of about $4.5 million. Reconstruction and replacement of all utilities. Assessment of bridge damage, and minor repairs.
All of this work took place over less than two months—Route 35 was open to Ocean County residents in time for Christmas.
The project was followed closely in New Jersey, and Gov. Christie visited the construction site several times. It’s a rare example of an infrastructure rehabilitation project capturing the public’s interest. But even with all the attention, one story hasn’t been adequately covered: Some of the first boots to hit the ground at Mantoloking belonged to surveyors, from multiple agencies and private firms, and without their coordinated work, the Miracle on Route 35 would never have happened. And amazingly, the very day they arrived on site for initial survey work, they had access to SmartNet, the real-time kinematic (RTK) network, thanks to foresighted planning.
Overwhelming and Scary
The bridge approaching Mantoloking was fairly new and survived the storm, so surveyors were at least able to
get to the site. The scene was apocalyptic; many surveyors said that the damage exceeded anything they expected to see in the United States. A force main had broken, so sewage was leaking… and that wasn’t even the worst smell; gas leaks were everywhere, and the stench (methyl mercaptan, the agent added to make odorless natural gas leaks obvious) was extremely strong. The gas company was keeping the gas main open, hoping to avoid collapse, so leaks were active and explosions were a real danger. Cars and boats were tossed around like litter, buildings were collapsed, and the sand that had washed over the intersection was covering over serious pitfalls. One surveyor abruptly realized that he was standing on sand that was on top of a pool cover, meaning that the pool cover was all that stood between him and a nasty fall (he was able to gingerly step away).
The first order of business was to find control, which should have been plentiful—a road redesign had been underway prior to the storm, and many control monuments had been set in the area. But sand was covering everything and, even worse, the swing ties provided were typically from power poles that had been snapped off by Sandy. Survey crews could find power pole bases, usually, but the pole tags were often gone. Without those, they didn’t know where to start.
Fortunately, another little known Sandy miracle was about to make itself known: a technological triumph that greatly amplified the efforts of surveyors and other first responders, and sped up recovery efforts dramatically.
The RTK Network Never Failed
Surveyors who arrived on site the second morning after Sandy’s devastation were pleasantly surprised to find that SmartNet was up and running; even cellular links were working. This made a big difference to survey work; for starters, crews were able to use state plane plan coordinates to locate existing monumentation and start digging. Most monuments were covered by three to four feet of sand.
Route 35 reopened to traffic after repair work. Photo from the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
SmartNet is a popular service in the New Jersey and New York region, and it provides more-or-less instant geolocation to GPS and GNSS receivers, via cellular links, without the need for base stations—most area survey firms subscribe. John White, Leica Geosystems’ territory manager in northern New Jersey, confirms that the service never failed, and explains why. “We started establishing the receiver network for SmartNet about 15 years ago,” he says, “and from the beginning we placed a priority on good locations.”
“Good locations” meant primarily government buildings; these sites were well maintained, secure, unlikely to change hands, and typically had emergency power backups. This last factor turned out to be absolutely crucial in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. “We didn’t lose a single receiver in the whole network,” White says. “The backup power kicked in, and coordinates were available.”
Locating receivers on government buildings wasn’t automatic or easy; White says that there was a lot of resistance at first. But as he steadily made his case, he says most agencies came to realize that the network served the public good and began to willingly cooperate.
White says he wasn’t especially surprised that the system kept working without interruption—“It’s a standalone system, and as long as power is available, it works”—but he was certainly pleased; a foresighted plan going back 15 years had proved itself dramatically and made a major contribution to post-Sandy recovery efforts.
Of all the stories coming out of Superstorm Sandy, this is one of the most remarkable; a sensitive and highly sophisticated system not only survived the storm of the century (one hopes); it actually never failed, and a location system that surveyors and other had come to rely on was immediately available for important—even lifesaving—work.
Getting Things Done
With control established and work underway—notwithstanding the Nov. 8 Nor’easter that set the project back to “square one”—survey crews turned their attention to topographic and stakeout surveying in order to keep reconstruction work moving as smoothly as possible. The schedule was rigorous—10 to 12 hour days, seven days a week, and most meals were from food trucks brought to the site.
On this project, it seemed like field crews led the way—meaning that conditions were changing so fast (topographic surveys, for example, had to be redone constantly as sand and debris was removed) and the pace of work was so rapid that field crews were unusually empowered to make decisions in the field. An early example was the ‘big meeting’ held early on with all the site’s surveyors. This was a meeting of all the surveyors from all the agencies trying to get work done in Ocean County. In a display of the esprit de corps and ‘can do’ attitude that prevailed in the recovery effort, the survey teams shared control schemes, recovered monuments and other information to minimize duplicated efforts and keep work moving efficiently.
This same attitude applied at the highest levels. Everyone involved says that the efforts of Gov. Christie were remarkable and inspiring. Indeed, the governor’s importance to this project can hardly be overstated; given the seaside location and the many agencies and jurisdictions affected by the reconstruction work, permitting alone could have taken 18 months. It was an impressive display of executive power put to use for the public good.
The efforts of Gov. Christie, IEW Construction Group (the state contractors) and hundreds of other stakeholders were successful; despite the intervening Nor’easter and many, many challenges a new steel-and-sand seawall was installed and the intersection was completely reconstructed and open to traffic by Tuesday, Dec. 18, well before the governor’s Christmas deadline. It was an outstanding surveying and construction achievement, and a genuine infrastructure miracle.
Angus W. Stocking, L.S. is a licensed land surveyor who has been writing fulltime on infrastructure topics since 2002. For more information about SmartNet, visit www.smartnetna.com . |
warc | 201704 | Opinion Contributor Health law boosts care, lowers cost
We’re creating Accountable Care Organizations and bundled payment programs that will reward doctors and hospitals for working together to provide higher quality care to patients rather than bill for each individual procedure or test.
The new Innovation Center will build and test models that will save money for both Medicare and the private sector, and then expand the use of the models that work.Continue Reading
And the law implements a Independent Payment Advisory Board. Some opponents have said IPAB will take all the power away from Congress, ration care and kill Medicare. Nothing could be further from the truth.
IPAB members will be experts who are appointed by the president after consultation with congressional leaders and confirmation by the Senate. The IPAB will make recommendations to Congress on ways to reduce Medicare cost growth. If costs exceed a certain threshold, and Congress fails to act, the board’s recommendations will be implemented. It’s an incentive for Congress to spend more time solving problems before we reach a crisis point, and in that regard, it’s similar to preventing an illness, rather than waiting until you have to go to the emergency room for treatment.
After serving on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission for six years and seeing our well-researched suggestions for controlling costs go unused and ignored, I don’t have much confidence in the old way of doing things. Prominent economists and experts, though, agree that the IPAB is an important way to control costs.
All of these provisions will take time to implement, but we are already making progress.
The new rules in the law and the spotlight we have placed on unreasonable premium increases are already helping to reduce costs for families and businesses. In North Carolina, Blue Cross and Blue Shield issued $156 million in refunds to more than 200,000 customers. Connecticut rejected plans from an insurer to raise premiums by 20 percent.
We have eliminated some of the worst insurance abuses. Insurance companies can no longer drop your coverage when you get sick or limit the amount of care you may receive in a lifetime.
And more than half of all states have taken steps to establish an affordable insurance exchange.
But there’s more work to be done to achieve the full potential of health reform, and we are moving forward, working to cut health care cost growth, not just pass the buck.
Nancy-Ann DeParle, deputy White House chief of staff for policy, previously served as director of the White House Office of Health Reform.
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Nancy-Ann DeParle |
warc | 201704 | Maybe it's time to sign off the social and start studying, hmm? A recent study examining the academic impact of Facebook has shown that people who use the site on a daily basis are more likely to earn lower grades than their peers — as much as whole letter grades!
The inevitable conclusion is that the site is a big time-waster (although I've noticed I spend less time on Facebook since its latest redesign, so thank you for that time back, FB), causing students to sacrifice the time they should have spent studying.
The Internet itself is an addictive place, but what is it about Facebook that sucks up our time so much? Are we just curious about other people, or are we all just narcissists? Either way, we could all use some Facebook breaks — after all, it'll all be there tomorrow. |
warc | 201704 | This week, Prevalent published an infographic developed by analyst firm EMA focused on vendor threat management.
The infographic starts with a simple question
‘Do We Need Vendor Threat Management?’ It highlights a senior executive speaking with a team member asking whether his organization is prepared to take on third-party risk. The team member answers that they are not, but neither are 92% of other organizations. The simple fact that EMA’s research identifies most companies are not prepared for 3rd party risk management is indicative of overall cyber risk preparedness given the trends in outsourcing, the use of the cloud, and managed services.
The next scene is set in the board room with the same executive asking about whether the company is monitoring vendors who have access to business resources. These vendors include: IT firms, accounting firms, law firms, insurance firms, and others. The team in the room starts to identify key statistics about the state of 3rd party risk management in an effort to help the executive understand where things stand. Some of the highlights include:
63% of breaches were tied to third-party IT providers. 38% of organizations prioritize security investments based on risk or impact to overall business strategy. 64% of organizations do not conduct regular security audits.
The third scene has the executive discussing how other organizations have been impacted by third-party breaches as well as whether this was a must for the business. In addition to the risks identified in the board room and detailing some recent breaches, the executive also identifies other reasons for vendor threat management:
Compliance with regulations like OCC, PCI, and HIPAA Maintaining vendor and client relationships Maintaining industry reputation Reducing financial risk
The goal of this infographic is to highlight the risk, business, and readiness most organizations are facing. It does not discuss a solution, but we know the old ways of inconsistent, non-standardized questionnaires managed manually without technical monitoring and threat intelligence is never going to help companies get the visibility and risk management they need to combat the growing threat.
It is clear that a model based on threat intelligence monitoring insights tied to automated assessments using standardized content like the
Shared Assessments SIG as well as continuous threat monitoring is necessary to help get the insight organizations of all sizes need to help reduce third-party risks. Prevalent is the first, purpose built unified platform for third-party threat management to offer these capabilities for enterprises of all sizes.
View the infographic
HERE. |
warc | 201704 | Today is Friday and we have a rather delicate message, in the form of the Three of Arrows. It carries the key word of “jealousy” and with it, a cautionary piece of advice.
Friday nights are often the start to the weekend and for some, that is where the problems can start. Remember, that Arrows in this deck are Swords in most RWS / WCS decks. From a wrong word said in a semi drunken state, to blaming going off with the wrong partner on drink to saying something out of turn or letting someone get under your skin for whatever reason, jealousy can hit at any time and its causes can be infinite. Social insecurity is something of a regular cause for it.
The trick, is not letting the negative feeling burn us, which is what might happen here if the fire in this heart is not extinguished soon. However, it is bleeding, so the fire is probably of lesser consequence to the bearer. But probably not to the tree supporting the heart in question.
Now, what to do about it? Usually, with a fire, you’d pour water onto it: can we do that here? In truth, this might not be any exception. Letting the emotions pour out so that they can be dealt with and discussed, rather than just with logic, which is what the Arrows hint at. Also, keeping things to yourself probably won’t help. The longer you keep negative thoughts in your head, the longer the fire might burn.
There will always be someone who has more, who are more gifted with good fortune. The book suggests that healing balm is humility, forgiveness and acceptance, even in the face of bitter rivalry and anger. And that is the hard part: refocusing your energy into a positive and creative momentum in your own life.
If you’d like some help in this regard, you can buy your reading here. |
warc | 201704 | Men in pink: The NFL goes to the defense of women with breast cancer By Steve Savant
Throughout much of the country, the fall colors in earth tones and hues paint a spectacular display of natural beauty during October. But there’s a color in October worn by a greater beauty than nature — the color of pink, worn by American women to draw attention to breast cancer. It’s October. It’s that time again. It’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, now synonymous with the fall.
The pink ribbon campaign started to surface around 1991 as a small grassroots movement. But today, breast cancer awareness is spotlighted on the largest televised stage in the country, bigger than any other crusade, larger than any media extravaganza. It’s now center stage with the National Football League. Welcome to team testosterone, as the NFL highlights their uniforms with pink shoes, pink hats and pink arm bands that stretch over the biceps of the biggest linemen in the league. Men in tights? OK in the day of Robin Hood. But pink? The most feminine color on the most macho of men? That’s the point! It just stands out. And it needs to stand out.
Just last year, the National Cancer Institute estimated 230,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed among women, as well as an estimated 57,000 additional cases of in situ breast cancer. Almost 39,000 women were expected to die from breast cancer.
Over 2.6 million U.S. women with a history of breast cancer were alive in January 2008. And more than half were diagnosed less than 10 years earlier. This is quite a leap from the Egyptian prognosis of death in 1600 B.C., where the Edwin Smith Papyrus refers to several tumor-like cases being treated with cauterization. But in the 17th century, physicians establish a link between breast cancer and lymph nodes because of a greater understanding of the circulatory system. This led to the surgical removal of lymph nodes, breast and muscle tissue. In 1882, William Stewart Halsted began performing radical mastectomies to prevent recurrences, a standard protocol until the 1970s, where a new understanding of systemic illness led to more “sparing” procedures.
Today, medical research and advancements combined with early detection have impacted tens of thousands of lives; even conservative life insurance companies have altered their underwriting offers based on new and improved mortality.
That’s why the October awareness campaign is so vital, because breast cancer typically has no symptoms when the tumor is small and most treatable. So it’s critical for women to follow recommended screening guidelines for detecting breast cancer at an early stage, before symptoms develop.
So when you watch your favorite NFL team this weekend and see them sporting the color pink, pin your pink ribbon on and join the country in supporting breast cancer awareness month. |
warc | 201704 | If you're looking for information about Maryland addiction treatment centers for you or someone you love, ProjectKnow.com is here to help. We have the largest national database of substance abuse treatment programs available online, and we can help you with finding the knowledge and help you need for rehab, detox and addiction therapy options. Whether you are looking for private inpatient facilities for substance abuse or behavioral addictions, we can help you locate the greatest treatment center to help you move away from addiction to Benzodiazepine, Narcotics or another drug or alcohol you crave and into a sober life.
Our featured listings offer some of the very best inpatient and outpatient drug abuse treatment centers you'll find in Maryland, including luxury and exclusive choices. You may call us without charge to talk to a professional advisor at 1-888-287-0471 anytime.
The process of addiction treatment consists of two stages: detox and rehabilitation. Throughout the detox stage, the primary focus is the physical side of drug, alcohol or behavior-related addiction. Medication may be administered during this stage to help the addict stay comfortable and safe during withdrawal before addressing any primary causes of addiction to Opiates, Painkillers::Pain Pills or some other drug.
Therapy for addiction must incorporate strategies which get at the root of the addiction to the drug being used, or figuring out the triggers for porn addiction or other behaviors. Many people find the ongoing support of aftercare help them remain drug-free.
If you’re seeking addiction treatment for yourself or a loved one, our ProjectKnow.com help line is a private and convenient solution. Caring advisors are available 24/7 to discuss treatment options with you.
Calls to any general help line (non-facility specific 1-8XX numbers) found on this site will be answered between the hours of 5:00am and 9:00pm Pacific by American Addiction Centers (AAC) and outside of those hours by one of our paid treatment center sponsors.
You can connect with non-sponsor facilities by browsing our listings and calling them directly. |
warc | 201704 | Important tips on dating, sex, love and life! (WWJD)
Pictured here are Sarah Smith and her mother Betty. In 1970, Betty tried to abort Sarah in Los Angeles. At the time, Betty did not know she was pregnant with twins. One baby was aborted, but miraculously, Sarah survived. Sarah has forgiven her mother -- and for five years they traveled the world speaking together about the pain and suffering caused by abortion. Below is Sarah's story, followed by the speech she gave in Rome in 1996.
Twins -- one aborted, one survives! Sarah tells her story . . .
"Twenty-nine years ago, my mother decided to have an abortion. At the time, she was pregnant with twins, but nobody knew this, not even her doctor. My tiny brother and I were both there growing in her womb, until that dreadful day. Before the abortion, we were both alive. Moments later, I was alone.
It's frightening to think I was almost aborted when my mom had a D&C abortion. Somehow, miraculously, I survived! My twin brother wasn't so lucky. Andrew was aborted and we lost him forever.
Several weeks later, my mother was shocked to feel me kicking in her womb. She already had five children and she knew what it felt like when a baby kicked in the womb. She instantly knew that somehow she was still pregnant. She went back to the doctor and told him she was still pregnant...that she had made a big mistake and that she wanted to keep this baby.
To this day, my mother deeply regrets that abortion. I know the pain is unbearable for her at times when she looks at me and knows she aborted my twin brother. Mom says 'the protective hand of Almighty God saved my life . . . that God's hand covered and hid me in her womb, and protected me from the scalpel of death.
After surviving the abortion, I was born with bilateral, congenital dislocated hips and many other physical handicaps. Nine days after I was born, I was taken to an orthopedic surgeon who applied a cast to each of my tiny legs. My mom would remove these casts with pliers every Monday morning and take me to the doctor to have new casts put on.
At six weeks I was put into my first body cast. Many surgeries and body cast followed over the next few years. Unfortunately, doctors are telling me that now I'll need surgeries about every 5 years (please pray for me).
Today, I thank God I survived the abortion, but the pain continues for everyone in my family. In memory of my brother Andrew, we bought a memorial gravestone and placed it in a cemetary in Southern California. It reads:
ANDREW JAMES SMITH, TWIN BROTHER OF SARAH -- IN OUR HEARTS YOU'LL ALWAYS BE ALIVE -- NOVEMBER 1970
Please share our story with others so the tragedy of abortion stops hurting babies and families. Everyone needs to know the truth about abortion. Thank you."
--Sarah Smith
For another article on Sarah Smith & other abortion survivors, click here.
On April 24, 1996, Sarah Smith gave the following speech at an international pro-life conference in Rome. The conference was called,
"My name is Sarah Smith and I wish to thank you all, your eminencies, and all of the wonderful Legionaries of Christ for allowing us to be with you today. I did not know of the abortion until I was 12 years old. I grew up feeling that I was the same as my friends, except for having numerous surgeries and physical complications. The only difference I felt was an incredible loneliness and a knowledge that something was missing. I never felt whole. I battled with severe depression and found myself dying of anorexia nervosa at age 12, when my mother knew it was time to tell me the truth.
She sat next to me and took my hand and looked me in the eyes and said, "Sarah, you are a twin. I aborted your twin brother and tried to abort you. Please know I did not know what I was doing and I pray someday you are able to forgive me. I love you and need you to know that you are a welcome part of our family."
At that moment I knew what I had been missing all my life and that I was called to something much greater than I had knowledge of. Immediately I felt the overwhelming pain of the knowledge that I should be dead. As I stand before you today I am painfully aware that this is only possible because my twin brother took a scalpel for me, and I stand in his place and memory, giving him honor and a face.
We have become bombarded with statistics in our fight for life. Thirty-two million babies are killed in the United States alone. Yet every one had a face, a life, a creator who loved them and created them in His image. As you look at me today, you realize that I am no different than you, yet I stand before you today a representative of the dead -- a representative of the innocent lives who today may lose their lives. Who will speak for them?
The words of Christ are clear - "What you have done to the least of these you have done unto me." You and I are called and commissioned to care for these little ones just as we would care for Jesus Himself. To walk away and say this is not my problem is to walk away from Jesus Himself.
Many people upon finding out about the abortion ask me how did I feel, or to what can I compare this to. The only thing I can compare my life to is that of an innocent Jew being made to walk down the streets of Germany naked in front of many people and into a room he knows he will never come out of. In my case, unfortunately, the people leading me into that room are my mother and father. Yet the people looking on at the sidelines are people like you. And I ask you today, will you speak up or will you silently look away as another person who needs your help is led to their death?
I have forgiven my parents long ago as I remember the words Jesus spoke as he hung bleeding and bruised from the cross, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do." His words pertain to the sins of abortion. Most men and women who involve themselves with abortion don't know what they're doing, as were my parents.
Many women who demand the right to an abortion say, "It's my body, it's my choice." Let me make one thing very clear to you today - my mother's choice was my death sentence. It is not only a woman's body we are discussing in an abortion. It is the entire flesh and blood of someone just like me.
Then we have the issue of medical personnel stating it is just tissue. For anyone who has ever studied biology, you know better. Before any woman even knows she is pregnant her child already has a beating heart at 20 days. Show me one piece of tissue or cancer you believe must be cut out with a beating heart. Show me a liver or kidney that has it's own blood type. That child is perfect from it's first day. All it needs is time, oxygen and nutrition.
Another startling fact is that in medical journals it states the fetus is capable of feeling pain at 8 weeks of gestation. In America, the vast majority of abortions are performed between 10 to 12 weeks, well after the child can feel the entire procedure. So don't tell me abortion is a simple procedure that expels a piece of tissue and doesn't hurt anybody. I was there. I was less then an inch away from my innocent twin brother when his body was ripped apart, and he felt the entire thing. We were 14 to 16 weeks along in the second trimester. That was how my life was meant to end.
Yet I was spared to stand before you today and tell you on behalf of those who have no voice that if you remain silent, in my country alone a person just like you and me will die every 20 seconds of every day. We have been commissioned by Jesus to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves and we have also been commissioned by the Holy Father, who I had the privilege of meeting a few hours ago.
As I told him my story he looked at me so intensely as if to say, "Speak the message! Proclaim the Truth!" And then he kissed me and gave me a blessing to go and speak about life. And that is what he says to all of you as he blesses and kisses us with his Encyclical. Preach the gospel - the good news of life. What is the greatest gift of all? When Jesus outstretched His arms and said, "This is my body given up for you". Imagine if Jesus had been selfish with His body and not given so freely of His life to you and me. Where would we be today? We would be nothing. The gift of a mother's body for 9 months of her life is one of the most beautiful gifts of all time. We must fight to protect it.
As I stand here alone knowing I have my brother as a precious guardian angel who is with me always, I know my life is a gift. And today I wish to give it back to you, the people and to the church, as a symbol of the consuming power of God's redemption and of His life and truth. You and I as a church represent life, and together we will extend that life into a hurting and dying world. We will give them the truth of life and we shall never be silent.
I love you and God bless you."
For another article on Sarah Smith & other abortion survivors, click here.
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warc | 201704 | Here is a tale of two retailers and a salutary warning to any business leader tempted to rest on past laurels.
A decade ago, Marks & Spencer and Woolworths faced similar predicaments. Both were ubiquitous presences on the high street. Both had lost their relevance to consumers and both were in serious financial trouble.
Fast forward and Marks & Spencer is thriving - it has even reopened the Champs elysees branch it was forced to close during the dark days of the early Noughties. By contrast, Woolworths has ceased to exist.
Why did one prosper and one go bust? The reason is M&S adopted a Thought Leadership approach and Woolworths did not. In 2007, M&S launched a bold, 100-point sustainability strategy, known as Plan A, which helped place this once frumpy brand at the heart of the ethical consumer zeitgeist. Woolworths, meanwhile, failed to innovate and define what it stood for, selling the same pick 'n' mix sweets for ever-diminishing returns.
There is a lot of discussion about who or what a Thought Leader is, as well as the benefits that this status confers, much of which frankly misses the point. Put simply, a Thought Leader is an individual, or business, that changes attitudes and behaviours.
Thought Leadership is a means to an end: a stronger reputation and, as M&S discovered, stronger business performance. That is why TLG has spent the past five years analysing the individual elements that combine to create Thought Leadership, as well as the practical steps needed to become a successful Thought Leader.
There is no silver bullet to a better reputation. There is, however, according to our research, a significant link between businesses that enjoy strong reputations and those regarded as successful Thought Leaders.
In particular, being a Thought Leader leads to higher scores on the crucial metrics that companies measure, such as trust. Thought Leadership can also help a brand transcend national geographies, a phenomenon that TLG is measuring in its ongoing research in the emerging BRIC nations. Our research with opinion formers suggests there are three types of Thought Leader firms: First, the 'category leader'. Think Apple. Second, the 'issues leader'. Think M&S. Third, the 'values leader'.
Think The Co-operative Group.
It is worth dispelling a few myths. First, Thought Leadership status does not inevitably follow from being a market leader. Many do not even feature in the TLG top 20. The omissions include the biggest players in the banking and FMCG sectors.
Second, being a 'challenger brand' does not equate with being a Thought Leader. Opinion formers do not regard brands such as Ryanair or comparethemarket.com as Thought Leaders.
Third: Knowledge capital firms such as management consultants should not assume that they are Thought Leaders just because they publish so-called 'Thought Leadership reports'. Too many of these are built around the repackaging of other people's views rather than genuinely original insights.
In conjunction with a leading business school, TLG has developed a methodology for measuring, evaluating and developing Thought Leadership.
This transforms an abstract concept into a tangible campaign tool to measure and build reputation. We call it the PROACtiv model(TM).
Underpinning the model are five elements critical to Thought Leadership: the Pioneer, challenging established wisdoms; Rigour, developing robust services; Objectivity, delivering benefits for stakeholders; Authenticity, what the business says reflects what the business does; Clarity, communicating clearly the core mission.
As our research among opinion formers shows, successful Thought Leaders can enjoy an enviable status as 'most trusted' and 'most admired' brands. If brands want to enhance their 'trust' rating, they should pursue a Thought Leadership strategy, rather than focusing merely on becoming 'trusted'.
In short, trusted brands can go out of fashion - and business.
Thought Leaders do not go out of business, they become market leaders. |
warc | 201704 | Spiritual Growth
In our modern culture, spirituality is too often linked with woo-woo, fantastical concepts like thinking your way to riches or manifesting success out of thin air. These simplistic views of spirituality miss the mark and more often than not, do not produce results.
Spirituality is not about waving a magic wand or simply believing that everything will be alright. The spiritual path involves deep inner work. It means exploring difficult places and integrating your shadow side.
If you’re feeling stuck in your life or feel that you are not living your purpose, but can’t quite put your finger on what is wrong, you may be having a spiritual emergency.
Spiritual Growth through Counseling
Believe it or not, spirituality and psychotherapy are intimately linked. By working through unconscious processes and exploring parts of yourself that you have disowned or denied you begin to integrate lost parts of yourself. This personal work is deeply spiritual in nature.
By stepping into the fire and integrating your shadow, you will suddenly find your life has more meaning and that you are able to clearly see your purpose and path in life. Obstacles that once seemed impossible to overcome will turn out to be doorways to new and richer experiences. The spiritual path is not easy and it requires hard work and dedication, but the rewards are more than worth the effort.
Work with Me
If you are on a spiritual path and would like the help of a mentor to guide you through your own unique process, I am here to help. Simply fill out the contact form to the right or call me directly at 1-425-488-5496 to schedule your free consultation.
I look forward to working with you.
All the Best,
Dr. Wayne Carr |
warc | 201704 | Annex 1
ENGLISH HERITAGE'S FUNCTIONS
1. CONSERVATION OF THE HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT
1.1 EH's first duty is to help protect important buildings, sites and landscapes for the benefit of future generations. It uses three main levers to protect and enhance the historic environment: statutory controls, technical advice, and financial assistance.
1.2 In 2000-01 EH spent £34.2 million in grant-aid to third parties and a further £32 million on the provision of advice to Government and others.
Statutory Controls
1.3 EH has two main advisory roles. The first is to advise the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport about historic sites meriting statutory protection. Although efforts have been made to minimise double handling, the separation of the advisory and executive components of listing and scheduling between EH and the DCMS still involves some bureaucratic overlap which is currently being addressed.
1.4 EH has recently begun to make use of new non-statutory ways to secure the protection of historic sites and landscapes. The expert capacity that it presently devotes to listing and scheduling advice will, however, still be needed to underpin those alternative approaches.
1.5 EH's second role is to advise Government and planning authorities about requests for permission to demolish or alter protected sites and buildings. Exceptionally, EH will itself contest unacceptable proposals at public inquiry, with the approval of its Commissioners and on the basis of advice from its own expert advisory committees.
1.6 Permission to alter scheduled monuments remains a duty of EH and the Secretary of State, but could potentially be handled more efficiently by local authorities who already have delegated authority to grant Grade II listed building consent.
Voluntary advice and guidance
1.7 Statutory protection is only one of the means of protecting the historic environment. Of equal (and in future of much greater) importance is the use of specialist advice and persuasion to secure voluntary support for the conservation of the historic environment. English Heritage carries these out in a number of different ways:
national leadership on behalf of the historic environment through policy formulation, campaigning and strategic advice to Government;
regional championing and capacity-building through Regional Development Agencies, Cultural Consortia, local development partnerships and other forums;
promotion and monitoring of national standards for the conservation of the historic environment and its associated documentation;
commissioning of technical conservation research and publication of specialist advice and guidance for the benefit of owners and developers;
provision of specialist advice and guidance to individual owners and developers delivered through EH's network of regional offices.
1.8 Following the publication of
Power of Place, EH intends to strengthen its policy and leadership role, and build its capacity to support the sector locally and regionally.
Grant giving
1.9 Alongside its advisory roles, EH provides grants to assist with the repair and enhancement of historic buildings and conservation areas.
1.10 Grant aid is awarded through a number of parallel schemes, each strategically targeted towards a particular category of building or area recognised to be at risk (eg secular buildings, places of worship, conservation areas). Grants of lesser value are allocated through EH's regions, while larger awards, including those to cathedrals are allocated on the basis of national priority.
1.11 EH's grant-giving functions sit alongside those of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF, administered on behalf of the DCMS through the National Heritage Memorial Fund) and the Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF, sponsored by the DCMS).
1.12 In 2000-01 the value of HLF conservation grants awarded in England was around £70 million. Since 1995 EH has served as a principal specialist adviser to the HLF and currently runs two grants schemes (for Places of Worship and for the economic regeneration of run-down Conservation Areas) in partnership with it.
1.13 As a follow-up to
Power of Place EH has been considering the effectiveness and value for money of its grant schemes compared with other methods of securing the future of the historic environment. In the light of this review EH is planning to shift a proportion of its current grant budget from direct repairs to projects that will encourage the better ongoing maintenance of historic properties.
1.14 In view of the backlog of repairs that already exist (£400 million alone is needed for the 1,600 Grade I and II* on EH's national Buildings at Risk register), the provision of a substantial fund for emergency repair will remain an inescapable priority for EH, the DCMS and the HLF for at least the next decade.
2. MAINTAINING AND PROVIDING ACCESS TO HISTORIC PROPERTIES AND COLLECTIONS
2.1 EH's second core function is to curate and provide access to historic properties and associated museum collections in its ownership or care.
2.2 In 2001-02 EH spent some £17 million on maintaining its properties and collections. The operation and capital development of its interpretation and visitor facilities costs around £29 million against an estimated income of £25 million.
2.3 EH is responsible for 409 historic properties in the ownership or guardianship of the state. These range from iconic national monuments like Stonehenge, Osborne House, Kenwood and Wellington Arch to a host of more modest medieval ruins and prehistoric burial mounds.
2.4 In the context of the public sector EH's property-management functions are most closely matched by those of Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) and The Royal Parks Agency. In the context of the voluntary sector its closest opposite number is the National Trust with whom it regularly shares expertise, as it does with the HRP.
2.5 Over the last decade the operational management of 149 of these properties has been successfully delegated to a variety of partners through Management Agreements. The remainder because of their size, complexity, conservational sensitivity, or lack of willing partners remain under EH's direct care.
2.6 Alongside its core portfolio, EH will on occasions take on temporary ownership of exceptionally important but terminally neglected buildings in order to bring them into good repair and then sell them back into beneficial use.
2.7 EH's role as a custodian, operator of historic properties and owner of last resort has allowed it to build up a core of practical expertise in conservation and presentation that contributes directly to its parallel role as an advisory and standard-setting body for sector.
2.8 Almost all EH properties are open to the public, making it the country's second largest operator of heritage attractions. In 2001-02 some 11.5 million people visited its staffed and open-access sites. As well as providing a wide range of catering and retail facilities, EH mounts an extensive programme of exhibitions, concerts and special events to encourage new and broader audiences to its properties.
2.9 EH is aware that it needs to encourage new audiences to its properties through better interpretation, marketing and access facilities. At the same time it knows that to maintain its market share it will need to continue to invest in better catering, retail and toilet facilities at its most popular properties.
2.10 EH is currently reviewing the way in which it manages the conservation, public presentation and commercial exploitation of historic properties, with a view to introducing by the end of the calendar year a streamlined structure that allows more focused and transparently accountable operation.
3. PROMOTING EDUCATION AND UNDERSTANDING
3.1 EH's third core function is to support research into the origins and significance of the historic environment, maintenance of a national information base for the heritage, and dissemination of that knowledge through education.
3.2 In 2000-01 EH spent some £19 million on its research and survey work (including £4.6 million awarded in grants and contracts to third parties), £4 million on maintaining and providing access to the National Monuments Record archive functions transferred to it from the RCHME in 1999, and circa £2.5 million on school education and skills training for the sector.
Research and Survey
3.3 EH sponsors scientific, technical and academic research because conservation of the historic environment and its enjoyment by the public depend on a constant supply of authoritative and up-to-date information and knowledge about the origins, significance and condition of the historic environment. Prior to their merger in 1999 EH and the RCHME each maintained their own specialist teams of surveyors, archaeological scientists and architectural historians.
3.4 One of the key purposes of merger was to allow the integration of those teams and the development of a national centre of scientific and technical excellence for the sector. This has now happened and EH is currently in the process of reviewing the entire range of its research activities to ensure that they are focused on the key priorities identified through
Power of Place and A Force for Our Future.
3.5 One key strand is the development of a more robust framework of national and regional evidence about the character and changing condition of the historic environment. Another is the assembly of more reliable statistical information about the social and economic contribution of historic buildings and landscapes.
3.6 Data of both kinds are crucial to the development of strategies for the sustainable conservation and economic exploitation of the historic environment and EH intends to give them heightened priority in the wake of PoP and AfoF.
3.7 In addition to its in-house research EH sponsors archaeological and technical research carried out by others. Unlike its natural environment counterpart, the historic environment sector has no dedicated research council of its own. In future EH will thus need to play a key role developing and co-ordinating an integrated research strategy for the sector.
Archives and Information
3.8 The National Monuments Record (NMR) is the central archive and database for the historic environment of England. Previously curated by the RCHME, it comprises 12 million photographs, drawings and written reports and a computerised record of more than a million historic buildings and archaeological sites.
3.9 As well as serving as a primary source of information for official and professional conservation purposes, the NMR is a major but under-exploited educational resource that can open the door to the history of every street, village and neighbourhood in the country. Its contents are freely available through its London and Swindon search rooms and in future the NMR will be concentrating on the development remote-access electronic services to increase its public accessibility.
3.10 Since merger, significant progress has been made with integration of the separate sets of heritage records previously maintained by EH and RCHME. Substantial investment in Geographical Information System (GIS) software has also begun to allow much more powerful spatially-based retrieval of information about the location and significance of the sites and buildings that make up the historic environment.
3.11 As well as curating its own collections and databases, EH has led the development of data standards for the wider heritage sector. It has also played a crucial role in the development of the network of local Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs) that provide historic environment information to the local authority planning system.
3.12 In the context of
Power of Place, the NMR will remain central to EH's advisory, information and educational role. Over the next five years its priorities will be: networked on-line access to all sources of historic environment information;
public access to the contents of the NMR through Culture Online;
additional secure storage for nationally-important archive collections at risk.
Education
3.13 EH is statutorily obliged to provide educational services and to promote public understanding and enjoyment of the built heritage. It does this by providing free access to more than 400,000 school children each year, by publishing resource material for schools, and by promoting the curriculum-related teaching of heritage-related subjects in schools and to the life-long learning community. Over the past 10 years EH's Education Department has earned an international reputation for the quality of its publications and support for schools.
3.14 EH has recently begun to provide its educational services to the heritage sector as a whole, and in line with government policy and in the spirit of
Power of Place proposes to extend its general educational activity beyond the classroom and into the heart of the community.
3.15 In parallel with its work with children, EH sponsors professional training for the historic environment sector. Drawing upon its own expertise and that of its partners, its outreach activities range from the promotion of traditional craft skills to the continuing development of architects, archaeologists, planners and other conservation professionals.
3.16 In terms of technical education, EH recognises that as lead body for the sector it will need to make a greater investment in the coordination and development of craft skill and continuing professional development programmes for the sector.
4. REVENUE GENERATION
4.1 EH is empowered by the 1983 Act to generate revenue in support of its core purposes. In 2000 it appointed a Business Director to significantly increase the profitable return from its trading and fundraising operations. Currently revenue is generated in the following ways (2000-01 gross receipts in brackets):
charges for entry to its historic properties (£8.2 million);
in-house and franchised retailing and catering operations (£6.9 million);
English Heritage membership scheme (£7.5 million; 459,000 members);
concerts, events, corporate hospitality, royalty charges, etc (£3.7 million);
fundraising and donations (£0.4 million);
grants from non-DCMS sources (£3 million).
4.2 EH currently maintains in-house operation all of its visitor, marketing, membership, retail, corporate hospitality and fundraising functions, but contracts out its catering operations and the management of its commercial concerts programme.
4.3 EH considers that charging for access to its properties and to certain of its services is consonant with its statutory duties and public service obligations. It also believes that offering free admission to its own properties, or sponsoring free admission to those of third parties, will have a distorting affect on the historic attractions market and may be contrary to the long term interests of the sector. |
warc | 201704 | Previous Section Back to Table of Contents Lords Hansard Home Page
Baroness Darcy de Knayth: My Lords, I support these amendments most warmly. I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, said, with a few reservations. We all want the same thing: to remove the arbitrary line. Of course, I acknowledge that the number went down from 20 to 15 in December. We disagree on when this should be removed. In Committee on 4th February (at col. 1672 of Hansard) the Minister said that she felt the Government needed to find out more about how the courts and tribunals were interpreting the concept of reasonableness so as to help them to inform and reassure the small employers. Indeed, that was very much what the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, had in mind.
However, there is another side to the argument. Indeed, it was compellingly argued by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on the second day in Committee on the Disability Discrimination Bill on 15th June 1995. She said--and I shall paraphrase her remarks to begin with in the interests of time--that all organisations were protected from having to make adaptions which were unreasonably costly. She went on to say that if the small firms were excluded at that stage, then what counted as unreasonably costly would actually be determined by the larger firms to which the Act would initially apply. So the concept of reasonableness would be determined by the larger firms. Therefore, smaller companies might have lost their voice and might actually lose out.
Earl Russell: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Addington has fully dealt with the human rights aspect of the amendment. I should like to address rather tentatively the area to which the noble Lord, Lord Ashley, drew our attention; namely, the agreement between the two noble Baronesses on the other two Front Benches. He is not the first person to composite them. Indeed, I think it was the Guardian at the beginning of this Parliament which composited them under the title of, "Baroness Tessa Blatch". The common point that they have brought forward is the belief in flexibility and in keeping down business costs. This is the area about which I want to think tentatively and in an exploratory way.
We all agree that business must be able to make a profit; if it does not, there is no future for any of us. We all agree that costs which are impossible to bear are likely to have serious effects. The real question is how far one goes in that direction. If one studies views about labour market flexibility over the past century or so, it will be seen that those views have always been cyclical. We have periods of unregulated competition; then the tide swings back the other way; and, finally, it goes round the circle again.
I do not know how many noble Lords present in the Chamber today watched the television programme "Newsnight" on the day when the Fairness at Work White Paper was published. The programmed claimed--and its research is, I think, quite often good--that among people working in business schools there is now a tendency to suggest that firms that have a rather less unregulated approach to their employees and which are rather more generous about pay, tenure and holiday conditions, and so on, in fact do rather better in profit terms. I do not know what is behind that suggestion. I hope that the Minister does. However, if she does not, she may possibly find out and ascertain how seriously the Government want to take it.
It seems to me that we may be at the beginning of another turn in the cycle of views on the question. It will not be the first; indeed, I am sure that it will not be the last. There obviously must be a limit as to how far labour flexibility can go. In the first place, there is clearly a potential truth in the fact that a satisfied workforce may be capable of putting more effort and more loyalty into the business than a dissatisfied one. The other point of real substance is that if labour market flexibility goes too far and wages go right down and conditions get harder, in the end the employees of these firms will find difficulty in buying others' products.
Last summer there was the prospect of a world recession. It seems to have stopped just short of that, but it was a fright which caused many people to do a certain amount of thinking. We might wonder whether flexibility may perhaps go too far. Of course, the key point is that we are dealing with measures which are designed to enable people to enter the labour market who might otherwise be unable to do so. The general
If we do the costings of all this properly and we consider the overall effect on the national economy and on the world economy, the balance may not be quite as much in favour of flexibility as we think at present that it is. I say this with great tentativeness, but I shall be interested to note whether other people who know much more about this than I do also start thinking about it.
Lord Swinfen: My Lords, I am not a lawyer and I have absolutely no legal training, but I have always understood that it was a principle of law that all should be equal under the law. As the situation stands at the moment disabled people employed by smaller firms are not in an equal position to those employed by larger firms, and that is wrong. It is morally wrong. The fact that allowances have to be made for those people and alterations made to premises is protected by the concept of reasonableness. The reasonableness will depend on the firm concerned. Some small firms will struggle to exist and therefore it would be unreasonable for them to pay the cost of installing a ramp. Other small firms will make huge profits with no trouble at all and therefore in their case it would be unreasonable for a ramp not to be installed. Each case must be considered on its own merits. That can be done quite easily by considering the firm concerned and the disability of the person concerned. The same also applies to the large firms. It is, in my view, quite wrong that this discrimination--for that is what it is--should be allowed to continue. To misquote George Orwell, I am reminded of the situation that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. I strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Ashley.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, I hope that Members of your Lordships' House will forgive me if at this time on a Thursday evening I do not pick up some of the rather broad points that have been made in this debate. While I endorse what the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said about the need for joined-up policy thinking, the importance of considering matters such as the Fairness at Work White Paper and the social security Bill, and seeing how they all fit together, I do not think an amendment at the Report stage of the disability rights Bill is perhaps the right vehicle to address such issues.
As with the similar amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Ashley in Committee, the purpose of Amendment No. 25 is to try to have another consultation about the small firms threshold before 1st January 2000. My noble friend wants to ensure that the Government reduce the small employers' threshold without necessarily waiting for the commission to be established. I know how strongly he feels about that.
Baroness Blackstone: My Lords, I am grateful for that clarification. However, the commission would have to be consulted, as we intend, because that requirement in the Bill would not be amended. The noble Lord's purpose is therefore to ensure that a consultation takes place as early as possible while trying to meet our concern that the commission should be involved. I have considered again the comments that a number of noble Lords made in Committee, but I am afraid to say that I have not been entirely persuaded by them as to the virtue of beginning a consultation before January. That does not mean to say that I and the Government are not extremely sympathetic to lowering the small firms threshold again. However, the question concerns when that should be done.
We have made clear our commitment to achieving comprehensive civil rights for disabled people. Where we differ from noble Lords who have spoken on this is on the timing of implementing further change to the exclusion threshold. We believe that effective rights for disabled people require the support and understanding of business. Seeking the involvement of the commission in the future is entirely right given that we are establishing it in part to advise us on reviewing the working of the DDA and in improving awareness of disability issues among employers.
The noble Baroness, Lady Darcy de Knayth, quoted what my noble friend Lady Hollis said when the Disability Discrimination Act was going through this House. I follow that by saying that in December we made a reduction in the threshold from 20 employees to 15. That is a significant step forward. We did that fairly soon after coming into government. I reiterate that it has widened the coverage of the employment provisions of the DDA to bring in 45,000 more employers with around 800,000 employees--that is an awful lot of additional people--any of whom may need protection in the future and 70,000 of whom are currently disabled. Every disabled applicant for a job in these firms is also covered. Over 75 per cent. of disabled employees are now covered by these provisions. Of course I agree with my noble friend that eventually we shall want to reach those who are not covered.
The concept of reasonableness which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Blatch, will certainly help to ensure that small employers are not unfairly burdened. However, at the moment we do not know how the courts will interpret the meaning of reasonableness. Preliminary findings from research that will be published soon shows that there is concern about what might count as reasonable, even among those employers covered by the DDA since December 1996. There was an expectation that case law would probably make the
No one will benefit from the very smallest employers having to learn by trial and error how this law applies to them. Such employers rarely have specialist personnel who can devote time and expertise to dealing with some of the issues that are involved here. There is a fear--which I think we should recognise--among very small firms that relatively small mistakes will prove costly at a tribunal. It is not so much that the costs of employing disabled people need necessarily be high, although I have to say that I do not think we should completely dismiss those costs either. There are sometimes costs. That is, I believe, recognised by everyone who has spoken.
Although many small firms already employ disabled people, a number do not. Even some of those that do know less--I think perhaps understandably--about disability than larger firms, and they do not always know how to respond effectively, as they should, to the needs of individual disabled people. All the information and advice that the commission will provide ought greatly to help in this process.
Some small firms may know about a particular disabled employee but if another develops a disability or someone with an uncommon condition applies for a job, the circumstances may not always be quite so clear. That is the reality we need to accept.
That said, disability issues are often fairly straightforward. Everyone, whether disabled or not, has their own requirements. Most can be met relatively simply and cheaply. Employers are generally quite skilled at getting the best from their employees in any event. However, the legislation is new; it is in places quite complex. We believe that difficulties in understanding and applying the law may be rather greater for those businesses that are currently below the threshold. We do not want extended protection of employees under the Disability Discrimination Act to create unjustified fears for smaller businesses which we are, through various measures at present, trying to encourage. Our economy very much depends on them. It would be unfair and, I think, would cause some employers either to avoid their duties or make very poor attempts to ensure compliance, perhaps leading to bad employment relations.
One of our key objectives is to ensure that evidence is available on the effects of the provisions on very small employers. Some of that will remove uncertainties and provide both the Government and the commission with a really informed basis for considering further change. Once again I want to reassure those noble Lords who feel strongly about the matter that we are very supportive of that. Our comprehensive programme evaluating the Disability Discrimination Act will produce findings which should help us further reassure and help business and underpin future decisions
It is also important that those businesses are aware of the assistance available, whether it is in a case requiring expert help or simply seeking more routine information. We have already begun the process by improving the Disability Discrimination Act helpline. That provides an increasing range of information on the Act and can help businesses and others by giving advice and helping them to make contact with specialist organisations. It is very gratifying and significant that so many voluntary organisations have joined with us to try to make this system work.
The Employment Service will continue to provide specialist help to employers who want to take on and keep disabled employees. The DRC will also help to ensure that there is appropriate awareness raising and provision of information and advice. As noble Lords will recall, we are also developing a communications strategy in co-operation with the National Disability Council and disability and employer bodies to help ensure that small businesses and others are more informed and aware. That is a very important step on the route to the wider coverage that we all seek through this legislation.
I recognise the great passion of my noble friend for making change in this area. We want to bring down the small firms' threshold further, but I hope that I have made clear why the Government believe that they should take the matter gradually and not in too much of a rush. We feel that we must await the establishment and full involvement of the DRC before we consider further change. Our proposals will ensure that the threshold is monitored and lowered in an effective and appropriate way. I make that pledge to my noble friend. I hope therefore that those noble Lords who have put their names to, and supported, these amendments--my noble friend in particular--will feel able to withdraw them.
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warc | 201704 | APPENDIX 3
THREATS TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH POSED
BY TRANSGENIC OILSEED RAPE
THREATS TO
BIODIVERSITY THROUGH
OUTCROSSING AND
GENETIC POLLUTION
The large-scale growing of genetically engineered
crops has given rise to a number of serious concerns including
the effects on volunteer and feral populations and wild relatives
of the crop. Genetically engineered (GE) oilseed rape is a particular
threat since the crop is a member of the Brassica family, which
has its centre of origin in Europe. Nine hundred species of the
Brassica family can be found in Europe. This means that Europe
is an important centre of diversity and there are many related
plants growing in close proximity to cultivated oilseed rape.
Natural biodiversity could be placed at special risk by gene flow
from GE oilseed rape to wild relatives.
Local cultivars, called "land races",
and isolated populations of wild species, are particularly vulnerable
to genes crossing out from new crop varieties. Gene transfers
could lead to the loss or permanent alteration of these wild species
or landraces. Smaller populations might literally get swamped
by the incoming genes (Ellstrand 1992). Such hybridisation has
been implicated in the extinction of five wild species, including
the wild ancestors of maize, hemp, pepper, date palm, and sweet
pea (Small 1984). Recent studies suggest that significant levels
of gene flow could occur from genetically engineered oilseed rape
fields following their full commercial release (Wilkinson
et
al 1995). Therefore, hybridisation is a major concern with
GE oilseed rape when introduced into its centre of origin in Europe.
If the introduced gene gives a competitive advantage
over other plants, for example by enabling the plant to resist
diseases or habitat influences such as droughts, the gene is likely
to persist and the likelihood of becoming a damaging weed in the
ecosystem is increased (Ellstrand
et al 1990). This is
of particular concern with GE oilseed rape. Studies in France
have shown that hybridisation occurs between oilseed rape and
hoary mustard ( Hirschfeldia incana). It was found that,
under competitive conditions, these hybrid plants do better than
hoary mustard (Lefol et al. 1995).
In addition, Danish researchers observed that
hybrid plants resulting from crosses between genetically altered
oilseed rape and a weedy relative (
Brassica campestris)
were highly fertile (Mikkelsen et al 1996). Furthermore,
genetic modification may result in unintended side effects which
can give a competitive advantage. For example, Monsanto's GE tomato
for delayed ripening sets more seed than the unmodified parent
(USDA/APHIS 1995), and the delayed softening trait in Calgene's
GE tomato has conferred increased resistance to fungi which normally
infect ripening fruits (Kramer et al 1992). AgrEvo's/PGS's
GE oilseed rape contains a gene for herbicide tolerance, a gene
for antibiotic resistance, a gene for male sterility and a fertility
restoration gene, any of which has the potential to trigger unexpected
side effects in the varied environmental conditions in which it
will be grown.
There is also the potential that a transferred
gene reduces the fitness of a native plant, leading to the eventual
demise of a population. Such an effect has been implicated in
the extinction of wild rice in Taiwan. The transfer of genes from
cultivated rice could have made the wild rice less adapted to
reproduction under varying conditions (Oka 1992). Similar concerns
apply to the GE oilseed rape. The GE oilseed rape, although fertile,
still carries the male sterility gene together with the fertility
restoration gene. It is possible that in case of crossbreeding
with another species the gene recombination could not be complete,
meaning that part of the transgenes might get lost. For example,
only the male sterility gene without the compensating fertility
restoration gene could be transmitted, resulting in a male sterile
plant which is no longer able to produce pollen. Possible negative
effects such as loss of feed for pollen-feeding insects, or threatening
endangered plant species by reducing their fitness, cannot be
ruled out and have not been assessed.
3.1.1 Gene transfer from GE oilseed rape to related
species
AgrEvo claims that the risk of cross pollination
with wild relatives under natural conditions will be minimal (Rasche
et al 1995). However, recent research suggests that the
risks of cross pollination are significant. Oilseed rape is pollinated
by both bees and wind. Scientists at the Scottish Crop Research
Institute have show that significantly more pollen escapes from
large fields of genetically engineered oilseed rape than is predicted
from earlier experiments on smaller plots. They found that escaping
pollen fertilised plants up to 2.5 kilometres away (Timmons et
al 1994).
In addition, researchers have found that gene
flow occurs between fields of crops sown in the spring and autumn,
and between field and experimental feral populations. They conclude
that significant levels of gene flow will occur from genetically
engineered oilseed rape fields following their full commercial
release (Wilkinson
et al 1995).
Studies have shown that gene dispersal from
genetically engineered glufosinate resistant rapeseed to weedy
species like
B. campestris or B. juncea occurred
under field conditions after just two generations (Frello et
al 1995, Joergensen et al 1994, Mikkelsen et al
1996), suggesting a possible rapid spread of foreign genes from
oilseed rape to its weedy (and non-weedy) relatives.
Other studies show that the release of herbicide-resistant
oilseed rape can lead to spontaneous hybridisation between the
crop and its weedy relatives. Research at INRA in France demonstrates
that hybridisation can occur in the field between oilseed rape
and wild radish
(Raphanus raphanistrum). The progeny of
the crop/weed hybrid exhibited characteristics of both parents
(Darmency et al 1995).
Other studies in France have shown that hybridisation
occurs between oilseed rape and hoary mustard (
Hirschfeldia
incana). It was found that, under competitive conditions,
these hybrid plants do better than the hoary mustard (Lefol et
al 1995). Danish researchers also observed spontaneous hybridisation
between oilseed rape and another weedy relative ( Brassica campestris)
under field conditions. The hybrid plants were highly fertile
and carried a transgene from the oilseed rape (Mikkelsen et
al 1996).
Another recent French study on the gene flow
from GE oilseed rape to wild radish (
Raphanus raphanistrum),
which was performed under field conditions over four generations,
has shown that under natural conditions an intergeneric (between
different species) gene flow might mainly occur, although slowly,
by transgene introgression within the genome of the weed (Chèvre
et al 1997).
In Germany, the Robert Koch Institute, the competent
authority for authorising the marketing of glufosinate resistant
oilseed rape, states that "the introgression of genes from
oilseed rape into related species such as
Brassica campestris
is possible. Hybridisation of different oilseed rape lines and
thus the transfer of herbicide tolerance from the genetically
engineered oilseed rape line to other oilseed rape varieties is
also possible." (Robert-Koch-Institute 1996)
Once transfer occurs an introduced gene may
become a permanent feature of the genetic make-up of the plant,
with unpredictable effects.
3.1.2 GE oilseed rape becoming established in
ecosystems
Oilseed rape (
Brassica napus) has escaped
cultivation to become widespread in many parts in Europe (Sukopp
et al 1993). Adolphi (1995) reports on a frequent incidence
of the wild growth of Brassica napus (in Germany). Unharvested
and incidentally spilled seed can give rise to huge populations
of oilseed rape. In growing amongst subsequent crops in rotation,
at the edges of fields or on roadside verges, it is likely to
escape cultivation and become established in ecosystems in many
parts in Europe. The impact this will have on the environment
has no precedent and is unknown.
Once a crop escapes cultivation, it may become
a permanent plant in the non-agricultural environment, with totally
unpredictable effects.
3.1.3 Conclusion
Current scientific studies and knowledge demonstrate
that GE oilseed rape, when commercially released in Europe, may
inevitably transfer genes to other oilseed rape and wild related
species. These hybrids and the GE oilseed rape itself may become
a permanent feature of ecosystems and fields. Their overall effects
are unpredictable, and once these species are introduced it may
take tens or even hundreds of years to recognise their effects.
EU Directive 90/220, under which the authorisation
for GE rape was granted, requires that adverse effects on the
environment must be prevented. The commercial growing of GE oilseed
rape bears the potential for serious environmental harm. Europe
is the centre of origin of oilseed rape and gene transfer from
GE rape to wild species is very likely. This means the authorisation
allowing large-scale release of GE oilseed rape in Europe should
be withdrawn immediately. Europe should base its decision-making
on the precautionary principle. |
warc | 201704 | Hanging Things Up
Whether you are a visual person who likes to see everything or you are just trying to make the most efficient use of your limited space, it is hard to beat the functionality and versatility of a hanging system. As you can see in Table 3.1, hanging systems are commonly used for storing many of the items commonly found in the garage. From conventional pegboard, standalone hooks, and multi-item holders, to the gaining popularity of slatwall systems, which will be discussed in Chapter 4, there is a hanging system to match everyone's budget.
TIP
Whether you have decided to hang your folding chairs or stack them upright on the floor, it can be a chore to keep them clean between each use. Consider putting a slipcover over them to keep them from getting dusty and having to clean them every time you use them. One easy way is to cut open the bottom of an old garment bag and slip it over the stacked chairs. You can also use a large plastic lawn-and-leaf bag for this purpose. Slipcovering is also an excellent way to keep luggage and other less frequently used items clean while they're stored. To protect your clothing, hang it in a cloth garment bag rather than a plastic one, so the clothes can breathe.
A slatwall system is a grooved panel or series of panels installed directly onto the garage wall. A wide variety of accessories (hooks, shelves, and baskets) are manufactured to fit into the slotted grooves that hold just about anything. More than likely, you have already seen them in clothing stores and other retail establishments, but only recently have they become prominent in higher-end garage systems as well.
Things You'll Need
Hammer and nails
Cup hooks
Bungee cords
Furring strips
Utility hooks and/or wall-mounted holders
Pegboard and hooks
Simple, Inexpensive Hanging Storage Solutions
You don't have to break the bank to create a simple hanging storage system. Here are some economical ways to hang things in your garage:
The most inexpensive way I know to hang any object from the wall is by hammering a nail into the stud and using the nail head as a hook. Most "hangable" items have a hole in their handle specifically for this purpose, so use large finishing nails with heads small enough to fit through the holes. If an object you want to hang has a solid wooden handle, drill a hole through it. If you find it difficult to drill a big enough hole for it to fit over the nail, insert a piece of string or cord through the hole, tie a knot, and hang the item up.
Another easy way to hang something is to hammer two nails in half way, side by side, spaced far enough apart to accommodate the width of the handle. With the tip of the handle pointing downward, as shown in Figure 3.1, the nails will support the larger end of the object.
In an unfinished garage, you can make good use of the exposed studs and slats by hanging things on nails or hooks attached to the fronts or sides of the studs themselves or from the support ledge between the studs, as shown in Figure 3.2. Another clever way to hang things from the support ledge between the studs is by using large screw-in cup hooks.
Nailing clothes pins to a stud with finishing nails enables you to clip small items, such as goggles, to the stud, as shown in Figure 3.3.
If you are storing items between the studs, suspend bungee cords between two nails or nail small braces (1''x2'' furring strips cut to the desired length) into the studs to hold the items in place, as shown in Figure 3.4. This is a great way to store long items such as rakes, skis, and lumber, keeping them out of the way and off the floor.
CAUTION
Be careful to hang sharp objects safely. Sharp objects such as hoes or rakes can harm you if you brush up against them or if they fall and strike you. This danger is increased when you hang these objects with the handle pointed down.
Figure
3.1 This is an economical way to hang shovels, brooms, and rakes. Figure
3.2 If your garage has exposed studs, you can store many items on hooks or
shelves. Figure
3.3 Using clothes pins is another way to maximize storage space between
exposed studs. Figure
3.4 Adding support braces enables you to store items between exposed studs
with no risk of them falling. Hang It with a Hook
Many types and varieties of durable hooks are available at hardware and discount stores. These can be purchased individually or in assorted packs, as shown in Figure 3.5, to hang items large and small. Some are specifically designed to hold tools, whereas others are better suited to hold larger items such as ladders, brooms, and bicycles. The most common types are rubber coated to protect your items from getting scratched and damaged. The opposite end is threaded like a large screw. After pre-drilling the appropriately sized hole, simply screw the hook in to a stud, and it is ready to begin working for you.
Figure
3.5 The utility hooks in this multipack are designed to hang a wide variety
of items.
And trust me, ladder hooks (the largest hook in the package shown in Figure 3.5) aren't just for hanging ladders. It is amazing how something so inexpensive can have so many uses and be so versatile. By screwing ladder hooks in to ceiling joists, you can hang a multitude of large items on them, including bicycles, tires, fans, and lawn chairs, just to name a few.
CAUTION
When using screw-in hooks to hang items, be sure to follow manufacturer recommendations for weight limitations. If you are in doubt, use a stronger hook than you think is necessary; better to err on the side of safety. This will ensure that the item won't fall and injure someone and damage your car or other nearby items.
Now that your creative juices are in overdrive in your quest to utilize every conceivable place on the garage ceiling and walls to hang things from, be cautious about hanging heavy items from exposed pipes. These pipes are not designed to support much weight and can easily be damaged. However, by exercising a little common sense, these pipes can be utilized to hang lightweight items such as dust mops, dust pans, paint rollers, and empty buckets with the use of large S-hooks.
Hose hangers are a relic from the past that many have discarded in favor of portable hose reel carts. However, they are a great example of how, with a little ingenuity, we can find new uses for something old. By attaching a hose hanger to the wall of your garage, you can store heavy-duty extension cords on itand even the flexible tubing from your shop vacuumwithout damage.
Other Types of Wall Holders for Hanging Items
There are many different types of wall-mountable holders commercially available and designed to hang tools, cleaning items, sporting goods, and lawn and garden equipment in a variety of ways. The simplest types, as discussed earlier, involve a peg or hook from which you can hang the handle of the item. Wall-mounted holder grips are another option; you press the handle of items into the grips, which lock it into place. Another type of wall-mounted holder allows you to slide the handle through the holder's opening.
The holder shown in Figure 3.6 accommodates handles that have been outfitted to hang from pegs, as well as handles of varying sizes which fit in nonslip rubber-coated hooks.
One of the newest and more innovative types of holders is the Grook Tool Holder, shown in Figure 3.7, made by Casabella products (http://www.casabella.com). It has nonslip rubber rings that accommodate handles in three ways: through the rings, between the rings, and on hooks in front of the rings. The Grook is durable and guaranteed not to rust. The smaller 11'' size retails at around $20, whereas the larger length (17.25'') retails at around $29.
Hanging on Pegboard: New Systems for an Old Favorite
Nothing seems to come close to matching the popularity, flexibility, convenience, and low cost of pegboard. Pegboard is a Masonite sheet perforated by regularly spaced holes through which you can insert specially designed hooks, as shown in Figure 3.8.
Figure
3.6 This inexpensive wall-mounted holder is one of the many types available
to hold brooms, mops, and shovels. Figure
3.7 The durable aluminum and rubber Grook holder offers three options to
maximize hanging storage and is guaranteed not to rust. (Photo courtesy of
Casabella.) Figure
3.8 There are many specialty hooks you can use with pegboard.
Pegboard is used to hang everythingtools above the workbench, sporting goods, extension cords, and large lawn and garden items. Hooks are available in a large variety of shapes and sizes, and many are designed specifically to hang certain types of items. They are sold in combination packages and can sometimes be bought individually.
Hooks are available in lengths up to a foot, and you can hang several lightweight tools on each one and conserve even more space. Although this is a great space- saving idea, there is a downside. To get to the fifth paint brush, you would need to remove the four in front of it first. Only you can decide if this minor inconvenience is worth the space savings.
Many people choose to leave pegboard unpainted in its natural state, but some prefer to paint it a light color, to help make hanging items easier to see. Some even go a step further by outlining the shape of the hung object with a dark marker to ensure that each item gets returned to its proper place.
How to Install Pegboard
If your garage doesn't already have pegboard on one or more walls, you can install it yourself. One of the easiest ways to install pegboard is in an unfinished garage. You simply nail the sheet of pegboard over the exposed studs and you are ready to go. If you are lucky enough to be in this situation, you can create an entire wall of hanging space in no time! However, don't overdo it. One 4'x8' sheet is ample for most people.
If you are going to put pegboard on top of finished garage walls, you will first need to install spacers on the wall to create a gap between the pegboard and the wall in order for the hooks to hang properly on it. The inch of space needed between the wall and the back of the pegboard is most easily attained by nailing 1''x2'' furring strips to the wall at designated intervals.
One of the newest innovations in the world of pegboards is the Bunjipeg, shown in Figure 3.9. Winner of the most outstanding product at the 2003 National Hardware Show in Chicago, the Bunjipeg can hold tools and items of virtually any size or shape firmly to the pegboard, with no custom metal hangers, hooks, or adaptors needed.
Figure
3.9 The Bunjipeg system provides a whole new way of hanging things on
pegboard. (Photo courtesy of Bunjipeg.)
To set up the hanging system, you simply insert a forked peg over the elastic cord at one end of the pegboard, as shown in Figure 3.10, and continue this process in a straight line, skipping a couple holes between each peg to hold smaller items and skipping three or four holes to hold the larger ones. Slip the tools in behind the cord so they are held snugly in place. The pegs hold the elastic cord in place, and they are easy to move and rearrange as your needs change. The Bunjipeg system is especially great for tools with no ready-made holes for hanging or that common pegboard hooks won't accommodate.
Currently, the Bunjipeg system is only available online at http://www.bunjipeg.com. Ten feet of the elastic cord can hold anywhere from 25 to 50 tools. A set of 24 pegs with 10' of cord sells for $9 and is enough to hold 50 tools. The best deal is a set of 40 pegs with 18' of cord, which is sold for $10 and holds up to 80 tools. The budget pack includes 100 pegs with 40' of cord for $20. Plans are in the works to offer the Bunjipeg system as a set with the pegboard included.
A new and innovative soft-sided product manufactured by Case Logic is a modular storage solution called Space Logic, which is designed to hang from just about anywhereincluding pegboard! The tool and accessory organizer shown in Figure 3.11 has two easy-access sturdy shelves to store bulky items easily and two large tear-resistant mesh pockets below. The complete Space Logic system is available at Target, ShopKo, and Fred Meyer stores nationwide and online at http://www.stacksandstacks.com. Prices range from $10 to $30 per component. You learn more about this system in Chapter 4.
Figure
3.11 This tool and accessory organizer installs in seconds and provides a
unique and quick solution for garage storage. (Photo courtesy of Space
Logic.) To Do List
Use shelves to your best advantage.
Keep things organized on shelves.
Use shelving in cabinets or closets. |
warc | 201704 | The number of cases of 'fronting' when buying a car has increased, according to figures.
The Finance and Leasing Association (FLA) says it has seen an increase in the crime, which involves an individual with a good credit record applying for motor finance in place of the real driver, who typically cannot getcar insurance or has a poor credit score.
However the FLA also warns that the practice is often an organised crime, with criminals using a stolen identity to secure the finance agreement.
Companies assess the risk of providing finance to a driver based on their credit record as well as their driving record. A driver who has previously committed a motoring offence or cannot get insurance poses a risk to lenders and may be turned down.
However, despite the rise in 'fronted' crime, the value of all motor fraud cases in the third quarter of 2010 was £3.1 million, down by 17.7% on the same period last year. There were 188 cases of motor fraud in the third quarter, a drop of almost 24% on the same period in 2009.
Copyright © Press Association 2010 |
warc | 201704 | Matukituki Charitable Trust
Stu Thorne with a trap that has caught a stoat, and Gillian Crombie with a tracking tunnel (all images: A. Ballance)
The Department of Conservation recently declared a Battle for the Birds, in anticipation of a mass seeding event in New Zealand’s southern beech forests this summer. The mast seeding could lead to an explosion in predator numbers next summer, and conservation groups such as the newly-formed Matukituki Charitable Trust are monitoring the situation to work out what response they will need to mount.
Alison Ballance joins the Trust’s founder Gillian Crombie, and volunteer and ex-DoC ranger Stu Thorne, on the Rob Roy Glacier track (left) just off the West Matukituki Valley, an hour’s drive from Wanaka. In September 2013 the Trust began a monitoring and trapping programme in the valley, using tracking tunnels to monitor mice, rat and stoat numbers, beech seed funnels to collect and measure beech seeding. They are also adding to the existing network of stoat traps run by DoC. Depending on the results of the latest monitoring the Trust and DoC will decide whether an extended network of traps is sufficient to deal with the expected explosion in stoat numbers, or whether the best solution will be an aerial drop of 1080, which is the main tool DoC will be using to counter the expected stoat plague. |
warc | 201704 | When it comes to a job interview, the first few minutes may be the most crucial. A new survey from CareerBuilder finds that nearly half (49 percent) of employers know within the first five minutes of an interview whether a candidate is a good or bad fit for the position, and 87 percent know within the first 15 minutes.
The national survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive from Nov. 6 to Dec. 2, 2013, and included a representative sample of 2,201 hiring managers and human resource professionals in the U.S. across industries and company sizes. The survey results were released Thursday, Jan. 16.
When asked to share the most outrageous mistakes candidates made during a job interview, employers gave the following real-life examples:
Applicant warned the interviewer that she “took too much valium” and didn’t think her interview was indicative of her personality Applicant acted out a Star Trek role Applicant answered a phone call for an interview with a competitor Applicant arrived in a jogging suit because he was going running after the interview Applicant asked for a hug Applicant attempted to secretly record the interview Applicant brought personal photo albums Applicant called himself his own personal hero Applicant checked Facebook during the interview Applicant crashed her car into the building Applicant popped out his teeth when discussing dental benefits Applicant kept her iPod headphones on during the interview Applicant set fire to the interviewer’s newspaper while reading it when the interviewer said “impress me” Applicant said that he questioned his daughter’s paternity Applicant wanted to know the name and phone number of the receptionist because he really liked her
The top most detrimental blunders candidates make in interviews are often the most common, according to employers:
Appearing disinterested – 55 percent Dressing inappropriately – 53 percent Appearing arrogant – 53 percent Talking negatively about current or previous employers – 50 percent Answering a cell phone or texting during the interview – 49 percent Appearing uninformed about the company or role – 39 percent Not providing specific examples – 33 percent Not asking good questions – 32 percent Providing too much personal information – 20 percent Asking the hiring manager personal questions – 17 percent
Employers weighed in on the worst body language mistakes candidates make in job interviews:
Failure to make eye contact – 70 percent Failure to smile – 44 percent Bad posture – 35 percent Fidgeting too much in one’s seat – 35 percent Playing with something on the table – 29 percent Handshake that is too weak – 27 percent Crossing one’s arms over one’s chest – 24 percent Playing with one’s hair or touching one’s face – 24 percent Using too many hand gestures – 10 percent Handshake that is too strong – 5 percent
“Employers want to see confidence and genuine interest in the position. The interview is not only an opportunity to showcase your skills, but also to demonstrate that you’re the type of person people will want to work with,” said Rosemary Haefner, VP of Human Resources at CareerBuilder.
“Going over common interview questions, researching the company, and practicing with a friend or family member can help you feel more prepared, give you a boost in confidence, and help calm your nerves.”
Owned by Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), Tribune Company and The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI),
CareerBuilder and its subsidiaries operate in the United States, Europe, South America, Canada, and Asia. Photo courtesy: CareerBuilder |
warc | 201704 | April 8, 2005 Mummies Undergo CT Scans at Calif. Museum SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) -- This much experts know: One was a priest from a wealthy family. Another was a young girl who sang during religious rituals. A third was a child, buried in a finely carved wooden coffin.
But there is much more to learn about the six Egyptian mummies that were wrapped and buried in strips of resin-encrusted linen thousands of years ago to protect them from the elements.Using 21st century medical technology, curators and radiologists in Southern California are examining the relics of the ancient world on loan from the British Museum to learn more of their secrets.
"It's a virtual autopsy," said Dr. Linda Sutherland, a radiologist who has volunteered her services for the project. "We get to see what's inside the mummy without destroying it."
The project is preparation for "Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt," a Bowers Museum exhibit that opens on April 17. It features some 140 objects from the British Museum, which has the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside Egypt.
Researchers at Bowers hope their scans will add to what has already been learned about the mummies from archaeological analysis and standard X-rays. They believe it's the largest collection of CT scans ever performed on Egyptian mummies using the latest scanning technology.
All six mummies are believed to be 2,000 to 3,000 years old. On Wednesday, team members carried them to a tractor trailer parked behind the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, where each was subjected to the powerful, rotating X-ray detectors of a mobile CT scanner.
In a live human, a CT scan can pinpoint infections, tumors, fractures, internal bleeding and developmental problems such as curved spines. With mummies, however, there is little left except dried skin and bones, so there's no guarantee the process will yield a definitive cause of death.
On Thursday, the researchers announced their initial findings. Dental analysis showed the child previously thought to be about 18 months old was at least 4 when its body was compressed to fit into a coffin. They also found the body of a man from 700 B.C. had been crushed at the time of burial and a wooden pole had been placed in his chest in an apparent attempt to correct the problem.
The radiologists and curators will analyze the images further in the next several months in search of more information, said Daniel Weissberg, chairman of MRD Inc., the radiology practice that donated its services to the project.
Last month, experts in Egypt announced that a CT scan conducted on King Tut contradicted two theories of his death, showing he wasn't murdered by a blow to the head and that his chest wasn't crushed in an accident.
The analysis of Tutankhamun didn't establish a cause of death but it did yield his age as 19 and other previously unknown details.
Archaeologists have been able to make some conclusions about the six mummies in the Bowers exhibit based on archaeological evidence. The gilded plaster face mask and ornate, beaded vest on the one known as Irthorru suggest he was a priest. Others, such as the wooden coffin of the child, are more mysterious.
The thousands of CT images should provide more clues to how these ancients lived and died as well as more information about the mummification process.
"It will tell us more about what is inside those wrappings than anything else we've done before," said Nigel Strudwick, a British Museum curator who supervised the operation.
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warc | 201704 | For rent to own homes for sale, there are many unique challenges and opportunities in financing the actual purchase of the home. One of those unique opportunities is the ability to include a down payment in a monthly rent credit fee paid over a long period of time. In other words, you can actually stretch out the down payment over the length of the contract in part or in full.
The major reason that people borrow money, whether it is for a car or for rent to own homes, is simply because they cannot currently afford the lump sum value of the home but still want to make that purchase. For many who involve themselves in a rent to own financing option, this is taken a step further.
As discussed in many of the other articles within this site, the rent to own finance option allows you to lengthen that time required before making a down payment or making a full commitment on the house.
One of the major decisions in purchasing a home, whether using the rent to own homes for sale model of financing or not, is how much to put down for a down payment on the home. It is well known that the best rates on mortgage loans can be had when the down payment is at least 20% of the overall home purchase price. But not everyone can afford that 20%.
One of the things to consider is your own stability in terms of geographical movement when purchasing a home.
Why is this so important?
Because if you put down a very large down payment, say for example 20%, and you have the tendency to move every few years the larger investment as a down payment makes less sense than if you were to have a smaller down payment and simply pay a higher interest rate in the beginning.
Think of it this way; if you are only required to pay a down payment and then pay a mortgage based off of the interest rates that the loan has provided you, and the loan and the down payment are directly related, it would make sense to simply lessen the down payment as an upfront payment, knowing in advance that you will leave after a short amount of time, and simply eat the cost in the monthly mortgage payment which will end up being much less expensive.
If you are someone who has an emergency financial cushion that would not withstand a large down payment, this also makes sense to avoid paying a 20+ percent down payment. You do not need to put yourself in an emergency financial situation just to get a half percent lower interest rate. It just isn’t worth it.
Particularly with the rent to own homes financing option, you should consider tax implications on your future mortgage. It is certainly true that mortgage interest is actually tax-deductible, you need to do the math and find out if the interest rates that you are receiving on the mortgage match the deductions that are possible as tax breaks.
Conclusion
Rent to own homes for sale are fantastic opportunities for many future homeowners. Being able to navigate through the sometimes confusing and complex world of obtaining a mortgage, and purchasing a home will allow you the confidence that you need to move forward in making your dream home purchase. |
warc | 201704 | Wider use of anti-retroviral drugs has helped to stop a sharper rise, a study by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) and a number of universities found.
They found a 26% rise, from 1990-2010, in the proportion of men who have sex with men who did not use condoms.
The report said the figures showed it was vital to promote safe sex.
Rates of HIV have been rising in recent years with latest figures showing cases among men who have sex with men (MSM) in the UK reaching an all-time high.
A recent report from the HPA found that nearly half of the 6,280 people diagnosed in the UK in 2011 were MSM.
“They see HIV positive men like myself and think it is just a matter of popping a few pills if they catch it, so they are not that fazed about becoming HIV positive or not using condoms.
“There also seem to be more bisexual men or curious men around now who are used to not bothering with condoms with heterosexual encounters so prefer not to use them elsewhere too.
For this study, resarchers analysed data from 1990 to 2010. They concluded that, without the introduction of anti-retroviral drugs to treat those with HIV, infections would be 68% higher in MSM.
Therapy with anti-retrovirals lowers the risk of people with HIV infecting others.
The report suggested the incidence of HIV could be 32% lower if all anti-retroviral treatment were prescribed from the moment of diagnosis rather than when health declined.
Informed choices
Further analysis showed that, if all MSM had stopped using condoms from 2000, rates of HIV in this group would now be 400% higher, the journal PLoS One reported.
The data also showed that the incidence of HIV could have dropped by a quarter if more HIV testing had been done.
But the researchers said the results showed that even a modest increase in unprotected sex was enough to erode the benefits of other interventions.
Study leader Professor Andrew Phillips, from University College London, said: “By better understanding the driving forces behind the trends we’ve seen in the past, it will allow us to make informed choices to reduce new HIV infections in the future.”
Co-author Dr. Valerie Delpech, who is head of HIV surveillance at the HPA, said: “Everyone should use a condom when having sex with new or casual partners, until all partners have had a sexual health screen.
“We also encourage men who have sex with men to get an HIV and STI screen at least annually, and every three months if having condomless sex with new or casual partners – and clinicians to take every opportunity to recommend HIV testing to this group.”
Sir Nick Partridge, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust, said condom use by gay men had played a key part in containing the spread of HIV in the UK.
“Without it, there would have been 80,000 more gay men with HIV between 2000 and 2010.”
He added that the study showed the impact of the combined HIV strategy of promoting condoms, increasing regular HIV testing and encouraging the earlier use of anti-HIV drug therapy.
He added: “At a time when funding for local HIV prevention programmes is under threat, this only reinforces the important role which local authorities can and must play in funding local HIV prevention.”
– BBC News |
warc | 201704 | Jazz is one of the most influential American art forms of our times. It shapes our ideas about musical virtuosity, human action and new forms of social expression. In Going for Jazz, Nicholas Gebhardt shows how the study of jazz can offer profound insights into American historical consciousness. Focusing on the lives of three major saxophonists—Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, and Ornette Coleman—Gebhardt demonstrates how changing forms of state power and ideology framed and directed their work.
Weaving together a range of seemingly disparate topics, from Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis to the invention of bebop, from Jean Baudrillard's Seduction to the Cold War atomic regime, Gebhardt addresses the meaning and value of jazz in the political economy of American society. In Going for Jazz, jazz musicians assume dynamic and dramatic social positions that demand a more conspicuous place for music in our understanding of the social world. |
warc | 201704 | Assessment Questionnaire
See what questions
a doctor would ask.
There are many versions of a low fat-diet. Diets that get zero to 19% of their calories from fat are considered very low-fat diets. These include the Scarsdale Diet and the Hip and Thigh Diet. Diets that get 20-30% of their calories from fat are considered low-fat diets. These include Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, The Rice Diet, and the Three Hour Diet. Recommendations of these diets vary widely, and there is a continuing debate amongst various health professionals and groups as to how much fat is needed to maintain health and a healthy weight. However, there is general agreement that decreasing bad fats, such as trans fats, cholesterol, and saturated fats, and increasing good fats, such as Omega-3 fatty acids and unsaturated fats, are important to good health and to weight control. In addition, current research is demonstrating that excessive calorie intake, and not just fat, is responsible for weight gain. Credible low-fat diets encourage a well balanced diet that includes unprocessed fruits, vegetables, 100% whole grains, low-fat dairy products, plant proteins (i.e. beans, tofu) and lean meats and fish. Because some fat in the diet is necessary for proper functioning of the body, good low-fat diets should encourage the use of healthy fats, such as those form olive oil and Omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish and flax seed. They also restrict or eliminate foods high in saturated fats, trans fats, processed "white" grains that are not 100% whole grain, and sugar. Credible diets also do not promote or encourage rapid weight loss, generally considered more than one to two pounds per week. For the best chance of safely losing excessive weight and keeping it off, low-fat diets should also include components that address exercise and healthy lifestyle changes.
An extremely low-fat or no-fat diet is unhealthy and can be dangerous. Fats supply energy and essential fatty acids and promote the absorption of some fat-soluble vitamins like A, D, E, and K. Current research has found that a deficiency in essential fatty acids can raise cholesterol and the risk of heart disease. Healthy low-fat diets should include unsaturated fats and minimize saturated fats, trans fats, and cholesterol. This helps to decrease the risk for a vascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke, metabolic syndrome, and some forms of cancer. All diets have the potential to be harmful for some people, so consultation with a health care provider before starting a diet plan and exercise program is recommended.
Other diets similar to Low Fat Diet include:
Conditions associated with Low Fat Diet include:
The following foods may be restricted or excluded from Low Fat Diet:
The following foods may be focused on as part of Low Fat Diet:
The following are potential risks or complications of the diet (Low Fat Diet):
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warc | 201704 | BASEL – The Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), which monitors and examines broad issues relating to financial markets and systems with a view to elaborate policy recommendations to support the central banks, has published three reports analysing the financial market turmoil that began in summer 2007.
The papers cover private equity and leveraged finance markets; ratings in structured finance, looking at what went wrong and what can be done to address the shortcomings; and central bank operations in response to the financial market turmoil.
Donald Kohn, chairman of the CGFS, says these reports highlight the role the Committee has played during the market turbulence to inform central banks' assessments of risks to financial stability and provide appropriate policy recommendations. Earlier versions of the reports on central bank operations and credit ratings in structured finance served as input for the April 2008 Financial Stability Forum report to the G-7 finance ministers and central bank governors.
Private equity and leveraged finance markets was prepared by a working group chaired by Henk Brouwer of the Netherlands Bank. It was written against a backdrop of rapidly deteriorating conditions in leveraged finance markets and addresses two broad questions: What have been the important trends during the period of rapid growth in the markets for leveraged finance, private equity and leveraged buyouts, and how has market growth affected corporate finance? And how have leveraged finance markets performed since mid-2007, which risks have surfaced, and what preliminary lessons can be drawn for financial stability?
The report highlights a number of risks, including short-term risks associated with the unwanted expansion of arranger banks' balance sheets due to undistributed leveraged loans, medium-term risk resulting from the refinancing needs of highly leveraged corporations and long-term risks for the availability of leveraged finance.
The
Ratings in structured finance: what went wrong and what can be done to address shortcomings? paper was prepared by a CGFS study group led by the Bank of England’s Nigel Jenkinson. The report draws on the lessons learnt during the turmoil about the vulnerabilities of ratings of structured finance products. While emphasising that credit rating information should support, not replace, investor due diligence, the report provides a number of specific recommendations on how the information provided on ratings of structured finance products could be improved. It also includes a summary of the feedback received during a consultation process with credit rating agencies and investors. A number of initiatives to enhance the information provided on structured finance ratings are already under way. In the light of these initiatives, the CGFS will follow up with credit rating agencies and investors on the recommendations made in the report.
The final report,
Central bank operations in response to the financial market turmoil, examines how central banks have adapted their liquidity operations in response to the money market tensions that emerged during the turbulence. The report was prepared by a study group, chaired by the European Central Bank's Francesco Papadia, which included senior central bank market operations experts from seven major currency areas.
The report discusses the various measures taken by central banks, assesses the outcome of these measures and sets out seven recommendations for central bank liquidity operations. The report was drafted during a time when central banks were closely monitoring market developments and, more or less simultaneously, needed to respond to the evolving challenges. Some of the specific recommendations discussed by the study group had already been implemented during the drafting period. |
warc | 201704 | With student loan figures soaring, debt-saddled students and graduates are desperate for any strategy that may help them escape their burden. For many, the prospect of debt forgiveness may seem like a dream come true. In reality, only some borrowers may be eligible for forgiveness – and their window of opportunity may be closing.
Earning Debt Forgiveness
Student loan forgiveness can be earned in two ways: by working in public service or by making payments through income-contingent payment plans for a (long) period of time. Each has its own conditions, requirements and limitations. Neither route is quick or easy.
Still, borrowers have rushed to get on board. According to figures released by the Department of Education, there are currently more than 2.2 million Americans enrolled in income-based repayment plans that offer a chance of forgiveness. These borrowers account for a total outstanding debt of more than $108 billion.
The surge in enrollments can likely be attributed to the two-pronged appeal: the possibility of lower monthly payments now, plus the chance for balances to be forgiven later.
Potential Pitfalls
Experts and lawmakers fear there might now be an unintended consequence of these plans, in that borrowers will take forgiveness for granted and intentionally incur more debt than they can afford to repay. At the same time, there’s the worry that colleges will take advantage of this mindset and charge students more or coerce them to take on debt by promoting these forgiveness programs.
In an apparent attempt to limit the potential financial fallout, the President proposed a cap of $57,500 in total forgiveness per borrower.
How Public Service Forgiveness Works
In order to get some debt forgiven under the public service program, you must first make 120 qualifying payments (meaning, required payments made on time). These payments must be made while you are working for a qualified employer – generally, a government organization or a non-profit with tax-exempt status. Only payments made after October 1, 2007, qualify towards earning eligibility so borrowers won’t reach the 120-payment milestone to qualify for forgiveness until 2017.
Other Debt-Forgiveness Programs
If you aren’t working in a public service position, you may still be able to get some of your student debt forgiven – but it will take longer. Federal income-based repayment plans allow for some debt forgiveness after a minimum of 20 years (terms and conditions vary by program).
Which Loans Are Eligible?
Only direct loans made by the federal government are eligible for forgiveness. If you have other federal loans, you may be able to consolidate them all into one Direct Consolidation Loan that would make you eligible. Non-federal loans (those handled by private lenders and loan companies) aren’t part of this program.
Finding a Plan
All federal repayment plans allow for eligibility for public service forgiveness. The income-based repayment plans also include forgiveness for borrowers not in the public sector after a certain period of time. These plans include:
Income-Based Repayment (IBR): Maximum monthly payments will be 15% of discretionary income. Forgiveness eligibility after 25 years of qualifying payments. Income-Contingent Repayment: Payments are recalculated each year based on gross income, family size and federal loan balance. Forgiveness eligibility after 25 years of qualifying payments. Pay as You Earn Repayment (PAYER): Maximum monthly payments will be 10% of discretionary income. Forgiveness eligibility after 20 years of qualifying payment. How to Enroll
Your student loan servicer handles the repayment for your federal student loans, so work with the servicer to enroll in a repayment plan or change your current plan. You can usually do this online via the company’s website. To apply for the public service forgiveness program, both you and your employer need to complete and file a specified form.
The Future of Forgiveness
As with anything related to the federal government, the terms related to student loan forgiveness are subject to change. As mentioned previously, the President is already proposing a limit to the total that can be forgiven for each person.
Mark Kantrowitz, senior vice president and publisher of Edvisors.com and author of “Filing the FAFSA,” suspects it’s unlikely that this particular provision will pass. However, some changes are possible – and it’s not known how they will affect borrowers currently in repayment. “It is unclear whether or how existing borrowers will be grandfathered in,” he says. “Congress could make changes effective only for new borrowers as of July 1, 2015. So it isn’t clear whether borrowers can do anything to retain eligibility for the current version of public service loan forgiveness.”
Regardless of any changes that may be on the horizon, Kantrowitz warns borrowers against betting their financial future on the hope of debt forgiveness, especially the kind that’s tied to public service. For one thing, there’s a rigid time limit: “Public service loan forgiveness occurs after 10 years of full-time service. It is an all-or-nothing benefit, so borrowers who stop working before reaching the 10-year mark will get no forgiveness.”
Other Considerations
Income-based plans can also have another downside – more interest will accrue because the repayment is stretched over a longer period of time. “Loan payments under IBR and PAYER can be negatively amortized, digging the borrower into a deeper hole,” Kantrowitz notes. “Borrowers who expect to have a significant increase in their income a few years into repayment should perhaps prefer a repayment plan like extended repayment or graduated repayment, where the monthly payment will be at least as much the new interest that accrues and the loan balance will not increase.”
Reyna Gobel, author of “CliffsNotes Graduation Debt: How to Manage Student Loans and Live Your Life, 2nd Edition
,” puts it more bluntly: “If you’re currently racking up more debt because you expect these plans in the future: stop! You never know what will or won’t exist for graduates if the law changes in the future. Ask yourself, ‘Could I afford to repay this on a regular extended repayment plan?’ If not, you could be getting yourself into very high debt and a difficult situation. Also, remember payments change annually based on income. When your income rises, your payment can, too.” The Bottom Line
Student loan forgiveness might be a welcome possibility, offering some relief to student borrowers toward the end of their repayment period, but its future is uncertain. Students should be wary of incurring debt beyond their means based on the assumption that a good chunk of it will be forgiven. |
warc | 201704 | The TOBACCO CESSATION program consists of:
Quit Smoking Now, a six week program with a Certified QSN Cessation Clinician.
One-on-one counseling sessions with a Certified Tobacco Cessation Clinician.
Proactive telephone counseling to assist you in remaining tobacco-free.
Pharmacotherapy recommendations based on your medical history, tobacco questionaire and person preference.
Social support as part of your treatment and assist you in securing social support in your daily life.
Smoking Cessation referrals:
Physician and Health Care Providers: Contact 850-416-7764 or by fax to 850-416-7246
Self-Referrals: To initiate the referral process or to obtain more program information, call us at 850-416-7764 or call toll free at 1-888-461-6653
Contact Us:
Program Options
Individual Consultation is a one-on-one consultation that will assess your individual level of nicotine addiction and the stage of readiness to quit. Working in conjunction with your physician, this may or may not include medications to help ease the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. The rest of the follow-up will be done by telephone with a trained tobacco cessation facilitator at scheduled times for a year. This consultation can be done while you are a patient in the hospital or on an outpatient basis through physician referral.
Tobacco Cessation Classes Classes teach you step-by-step how to replace the nicotine habit with healthy alternatives. These six-week sessions are held five times a year at different times of the day for your convenience. They are held in a supportive, stress-free environment on Sacred Heart Health System property. You will receive information about nicotine addiction, how it works and pharmacological therapy used in treating it. The group will be given enough time to learn the skills to stop using tobacco and put them to use as well as build a support system before they stop smoking. Relapse prevention techniques will be discussed the weeks following the quit day.
Help With Withdrawal Relieving the symptoms of withdrawal from nicotine can make it easier to stop smoking. Studies have shown that when you use medications with an intervention program, stop rates increase significantly. The programs are less effective if used alone. Nicotine replacement therapy is available in five forms:
Nicotine Gum
Nasal Spray
Nicotine Patches
Oral Inhaler
Commit Lozenge
Which form you choose to use will depend upon your level of addiction, your lifestyle, and your desire to use the product. Two non-nicotine drugs, Zyban (Wellbutrin SR) and Chantix have been found to be effective as well. Zyban (Wellbutrin SR) can be used alone or with nicotine replacement therapy.
Benefits of Quitting After only. . .
8 hours: Carbon monoxide level in blood drops to normal. Oxygen level in blood increases to normal.
48 hours: Nerve endings start regrowing. Ability to smell and taste is enhanced.
2 weeks to 3 months: Circulation improves. Walking becomes easier. Lung function increases up to 30 percent.
1 to 9 months: Coughing, sinus congestion, fatigue and shortness of breath decrease. Cilia regrow in lungs, increasing the ability to handle mucus, clean the lungs and reduce infection. Body’s overall energy increases.
1 year: Excess risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker.
Did You Know?
Nicotine is the most addictive drug per milligram dosage.
There are 4,000 ingredients in a cigarette other than tobacco.
Smoking kills more people in the United States per year than anything else combined.
More Information
Start to Stop!
Becoming a NON-SMOKER is a process, not just a single act. YOU can make choices and changes that affect your lifestyle and these changes will lead to the goal of a TOBACCO-FREE life.
Let Us Show You How to Quit for Good!
Many smokers who try to stop on their own are successful. However, 95 out of 100 people who try to stop cold turkey are not successful. Research shows that the best success is achieved by getting help in dealing with all three parts of the nicotine addiction (physical, psychological, and habitual). The more help you get, the better your chances of stopping for good. Your success will be greatly influenced by how much you want to stop using tobacco.
Success Rates
Our programs have been proven to work better. The Tobacco Cessation Program tracks the smoking status of everyone who uses its
services for a full year. One-year stop rates reported by participants in the Sacred Heart Tobacco Cessation programs are double the national average quit rates.
For More Information,
please call
850-416-7764 or 1-888-461-6653 |
warc | 201704 | While San Francisco's overall office market has been strong, subleasing has become more prevalent in the Bay Area recently as tech companies aren't hiring as fast as they once were. For example, this month Twitter listed over 180,000 square feet of its San Francisco office for sublease, a sign, some say, that indicates the social media giant's growth plans aren't coming to fruition.
And it appears that trend is also playing out in Chicago, where subleases have also spiked as tech firms are no longer hiring at breakneck speeds.
Sublet supply in Chicago increased by nearly 20% in the last year, and could continue to rise as tech firms re-evaluate their hiring needs, according to a report from commercial real estate services firm Savills Studley. Avant, a Chicago online lending startup that announced plans to lay off 60 employees and will scrap plans to open new business lines in credit cards and refinanced auto loans, is among the tech companies currently listing sublet space in Chicago, Savills Studley said.
"Some companies we’re seeing put their space on the market for sublease are those that were in a scaling mode and were really focused on growth, and anticipated growth through acquisition of talent and headcount needs," said Savills Studley Chicago Region Co-Head Robert Sevim. "When that growth doesn't necessary materialize, you have to mitigate. And that's where we are..."Chicago Office Subleases Spike as Tech Hiring Cools, Report Finds
Related Stories2016 Savills Effective Rent Index National Office Sector Report (Q2 2016) |
warc | 201704 | GENERATOR TYPES There are two basic types of generators used for on-site power generation, synchronous generators and induction generators. These generators differ in the way they produce power and how they are used for on-site power generation. SYNCHRONOUS GENERATORS Synchronous generators are most often used for "emergency" or "standby" power, but in many cases may be used to provide all of the power requirements of a facility. The customer who must, or desires to, be completely "power independent" from the utility company must use this type of generator. When using a synchronous generator as the sole source of power, the generator must be sized large enough to provide for the highest peak loads occurring when starting equipment being powered by the generator, even though the peak load may only be momentary. However, paralleling equipment and switchgear may be installed to allow the synchronous generator to be operated in parallel with the utility. This allows the customer to use their on-site generators to provide most or all of the "base load" for the facility, using the utility company only for the short "peak loads" or for power during "off peak" hours when power is cheaper, while providing the customer the peace of mind of having power available during utility power outages. INDUCTION GENERATORS Induction generators are most often used for "peak shaving" (providing the power needed for starting large motors, additional air conditioning load on hot days, etc.), or for "base load displacement" (the power normally used to operate a facility). Induction generators will not produce power without the "excitation" drawn by the generator from a synchronous power source (another generator) or from the utility, and is always run in parallel with one of these power sources. One advantage of induction generators is that since they cannot produce power absent the utility load, much of the protection equipment required for synchronous generators may not be required when using induction generators, thereby reducing equipment acquisition costs. |
warc | 201704 | May 22 (Bloomberg) -- West Texas Intermediate crude dropped from a one-month high as more Americans than projected filed applications for unemployment benefits last week. Brent was above $110 a barrel.
Prices slid after the Labor Department reported jobless claims increased to 326,000 in the week ended May 17, more than the 310,000 median forecast by economists surveyed by Bloomberg. WTI advanced 1.7 percent yesterday on a government report that U.S. supplies tumbled as imports dropped. Brent touched an 11- month high on stronger Chinese manufacturing before retreating.
“The rally is looking a little overextended, and unless we continue to see good economic data, the market is going to meet greater and greater resistance,” Gene McGillian, an analyst and broker at Tradition Energy in Stamford, Connecticut, said by phone. “Does the market have enough momentum to go up without another week of sizable drawdowns? I am not convinced.”
WTI for July delivery slid 17 cents to $103.90 a barrel at 12:41 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Front-month futures climbed to $104.07 yesterday, a one-month high. Volume was 28 percent below the 100-day average for the time of day.
Brent for July settlement fell 12 cents to $110.43 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. It touched $111.04, the highest intraday price since March 4. The volume of all contracts traded was 17 percent above the 100-day average.
Brent was at a $6.53 premium to WTI. The spread closed at $6.48 yesterday, the narrowest in a month.
Jobless Claims
The jobless claims figure for a week earlier was revised up to 298,000 filings, the Labor Department said. The four-week moving average, a less volatile measure than the weekly figures, fell to 322,500 from 323,500.
“The U.S. number was bearish for WTI and that kind of tipped the balance,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts, said by phone. “The Chinese data is overall bullish for Brent.”
U.S. crude stockpiles decreased 7.23 million barrels to 391.3 million in the week to May 16, the Energy Information Administration reported yesterday. Crude imports fell 658,000 barrels a day as U.S. output climbed to a 28-year high.
“A large part of yesterday’s inventory draw was due to the drop in imports,” McGillian said.
Brent climbed as much as 0.4 percent in intraday trading after a preliminary Chinese purchasing managers’ index from HSBC Holdings Plc and Markit Economics increased to 49.7 in May, the most in five months and exceeding the 48.3 median estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The number remained below the expansion-contraction line of 50.
Chinese Manufacturing
“China’s manufacturing is now only barely contracting,” and today’s data are a welcome improvement, Harry Tchilinguirian, head of commodity markets strategy at BNP Paribas in London, said by e-mail.
A similar figure from the National Bureau of Statistics and China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing will be published June 1. That gauge rose to 50.4 in April from 50.3 in March.
“The jobless claims are kind of offsetting the supportive China data,” Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group in Chicago said by phone. “We’ve gone up a lot and the market is reluctant to move higher right now.” |
warc | 201704 | Is Your PIN at Risk from Revalidation
The revalidation process has seen a large spike in the amount of concerns amongst practicing nurses and midwives that their PINs could be at risk.
Brought in as an attempt to rectify the failures of institutions such as Stepping Hill by improving standards of care amongst all practicing nurses and midwives, it also means that a more thorough approach to renewing your membership/PIN has been introduced.
The NMC backed process will require nurses and midwives to submit online evidence that they are:
Keeping up to date with the industry’s ever changing procedures and medicinal developments Maintained a safe and effective practice in their work Show they have undertaken means to improve their caring standards
During the revalidation process these seven key requirements must be demonstrated and submitted to the NMC's online portal.
Practice Hours – a minimum of 450 hours over a three year period Continuing Professional Development (CPD) – 40 hours of professional development (20 of which is participatory learning) Practice related feedback – Five pieces of practice-related feedback Reflection & Discussion – A minimum of five written reflections on the Code of Practice and your professional development or feedback. Health & Character – An acknowledgement of any formal cautions or criminal conviction imposed during the last three years. Professional indemnity Arrangement – Demonstrate you have an IA in place. Confirmation from a third party – Have a third party sign off the fact you have completed the previous six steps.
With this new structure in place, all nurses and midwives must keep on top of their registration details including when their renewal date is due. This is because of a more robust enforcement of lapsed and incomplete registrations by the NMC.
Currently nurses and midwives who allow their registration to lapse are immediately stricken from the register with their PIN removed in the process. They are then made to undertake a four to six week period of readmission during which they cannot work. Those who do continue to practice without a PIN could face criminal charges and long term suspensions from the NMC. So an inability to complete revalidation fully and submit it on time will result in your PIN being removed from the NMC registration resulting in a loss of income and money after paying the re-entry fee.
Revalidation may seem overly complicated at first but do not worry as in practice the process is very simple and we are happy to assist you with any problems you encounter.
If you have any questions regarding the revalidation process please contact a member of the Search Medical team in your nearest England office or visit our specialist revalidation page - go.search.co.uk/revalidation
By Jason Paterson |
warc | 201704 | The Top Technology Trends of 2017
The only thing constant in the IT industry is that technology trends are never static and are always changing.
Spotting the next key trend is vitally important for businesses and individuals in order to maximise their revenue or career opportunities. Things that have been gaining underground traction are either ready to emerge in the mainstream or become essential for IT professionals to know.
Leading market research firm Gartner and other think tanks have been releasing their predictions for the upcoming 12 months. Here is our summation of what we think could be the key 2017 technology trends to look out for.
AI & Advance Machine Learning
Blade Runner and AI are no longer science fiction. AI is now a reality and is being used routinely in Cloud platforms by the likes of Google and Microsoft.
This phrase still triggers visions of ‘The Matrix or ‘The Terminator’ style machines becoming more intellectual than humans. But according to Jerry Kaplan, a Silicon Valley lecturer at Stanford, AI in today’s world is more about the “continuation of longstanding efforts to automate tasks.”
In practical terms, both established brands and startups are recognising that AI-infused analytics software and algorithms vastly increase their operating potential.
The advanced techniques can potentially “create systems that understand, learn, predict, adapt and potentially operate autonomously,” according to Gartner.
AI probably still won’t be able to do all the things the current hype machine suggests in 12 months. Even so, 2017 could be the year that it finally becomes a normal or desired business service.
Blockchain
The buzz surrounding Bitcoin might have subsided but the technology behind the digital currency called blockchain has enormous potential.
Blockchain is a way of distributing a database across many far-flung computers, keeping track of digital ledgers, transactions and possibly coins. These entries – or blocks - are digitally signed off ensuring their authenticity and integrity and are then distributed across an established infrastructure.
Significant cooperation still needs to occur in order for blockchain to be become the favoured transaction for digital businesses. But seeing as blockchain can be configured to work in a variety of supply chain industries – such as healthcare - Gartner estimates the first $1bn blockchain corporation will exist by 2022.
Conversational Things
One of if not
the most favoured technology trends in the 21 st century has been the ability to personally communicate with devices. This has mainly been possibly through our own voice or through ‘chatbots’.
2017 promises to be a year where interfaces will be become increasingly intelligent and conversational. Not only will we be able to routinely verbally interact with Siri or Alexa but also text apps asking them to carry out tasks.
These conversational things can understand anything from predermined commands to complex inferences depending on the complexity of the interface.
In the long term, these conversational bots could streamline the multitude of apps that are routinely rolled out by major companies into one easy to use service.
VR & AR
Pokemon Go demonstrated how Augmented Reality could become mass market. It made millions of children go outside and explore the ‘real world’ – albeit still through a screen.
Suddenly the lampooned VR/AR trend that has never come close to matching the buzz it has generated for over two decades has arrived and is almost mainstream.
Giants such as Facebook, Samsung and Sony have launched a raft of headset devices in time for the Christmas season. These are now not only user friendly but affordable for the consumer – in line with the long established games consoles.
Media companies like the BBC are also committing to launching VR programming on Google’s Daydream app.
Cloud Computing
Although recognised as potentially significant and important, businesses are still unsure how to integrate the above technology trends into their daily operations. On the other hand, Cloud Computing is the trend that the majority of public and private businesses
will be trialling for the first time in 2017.
Cloud Computing in theory will allow businesses to set up what is essentially a virtual office providing connective flexibility in terms of location and time. With the IoT on the rise, the number of web-enabled devices used in today's business environment means access to data has never been easier.
Migrating to a Cloud based system could also improve IT maintenance costs, business continuity and efficiency.
Companies are expected to increase their spending on software and services - as opposed to hardware - as they all rush to buy technology via the cloud computing model. Here, tech is hosted in the vendor's data centre and delivered as a service over the Internet.
Search Consultancy is a champion for IT evolution and dynamic new innovations! We are currently recruiting for a wide range of jobs within the IT sector, focusing on IT & Digital and IT & Business Change. Contact your nearest office today to find out more about how Search's team of IT consultants can help you. |
warc | 201704 | Find fellowships, conferences, grants and awards deadlines, workshops and networking opportunities, crowd-sourced leads to job banks, reporting toolkits, hundreds of MOOCs and more.
GO >> Environment 101 for Freelancers
The Professional Writers’ Association of Canada in partnership with the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) presents
WHEN: Thursday, April 14, 2011; 7:00-9:00 p.m.
WHERE: University of Toronto, Health Sciences Building: 150 College Street, Room 106 (wheelchair accessible), Toronto, Ontario
Is climate change having an impact on the stories we tell? With school boards renovating their buildings for energy efficiency, and municipal governments spending millions to clean up sewers and promote local food, and the entire financial world watching Japan’s nuclear crisis unfold, there’s no escaping the environment. The environment may not be in the very best shape, but the flip side is that there’s a bumper crop of stories to be told.
How, then, might you find information that’s under-reported, or navigate often-conflicting scientific evidence, bogus claims, or efforts to downplay environmental concerns? And, how can you successfully pitch your ideas to editors? Our panel of experienced journalists from both the reporting and the editing sides of the business will discuss strategies the country’s top environmentally-minded writers are using to tell and sell their stories.
Victoria Foote is director of communications for Ontario Nature, a leading non-profit conservation organization that has been at the forefront of numerous high-profile environmental campaigns to save important habitats and wildlife in Ontario. Victoria is also editor-in-chief of ON Nature magazine, published by Ontario Nature and widely regarded as the definitive source of information for current issues of provincial environmental concern. Under Victoria's tenure as editor-in-chief, ON Nature has won numerous National Magazine Awards for excellence in coverage of environmental issues. Stephen Leahy is an independent journalist who has covered international environmental issues in the public interest for the past 15 years. He now mainly writes for Rome-headquartered Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS), the world’s sixth-largest global news agency. Stephen has been published in dozens of publications around the world, including New Scientist, The London Sunday Times, Maclean’s Magazine, Earth Island Journal, The Toronto Star, Wired News, Audubon, BBC Wildlife and Canadian Geographic. In 2008, he was a Green Party candidate in the federal election and appears poised to do so again in 2011. Sharon Oosthoek is a Toronto-based freelance science and environmental journalist. Her work has appeared in New Scientist, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, cbc.ca, Today’s Parent, Canadian Family, ON Nature and Canadian Wildlife. Sharon has more than 20 years' experience working for daily newspapers, magazines and online news services. The Canadian Science Writers' Association has twice honoured her with the Science in Society Journalism Award, and she is also the recipient of a Western Ontario Newspaper Award for feature writing.
Moderator:
Saul Chernos is a Toronto-based freelance journalist specializing in environmental issues.
FREE for PWAC (Professional Writers’ Association of Canada) members and students – MUST PRE-REGISTER ONLINE
$10 for members of associate writers’ groups – online advance registration only
$15 for non-member – online advance registration only
PLEASE NOTE: Advance registration up to midnight before the event
$20 for registration at the door
For more information, and to pre-register: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=nyq9xqcab&oeidk=a07e2zmohvbe5cb6e5a |
warc | 201704 | I’ve been meaning to blog about your desperate need for sucky links for some time, because I have not seen this aspect of link quality discussed anywhere.
People approach me all the time asking for high-quality links. Not surprising – who would want low quality links? But if you ask an SEO consultant to build you only PR6+ links, consider what message that sends to the search engines.
At worst, Google will assume you are buying links to buy PageRank…and we all know how much Google loves link-buying to boost PageRank, don’t we. At best, the search engines will think your site appeals only to some kind of an elite. How else would you explain that only high PageRank (high traffic, high-trust, etc.) pages link to your website? Why do smaller blogs not link there? How come your website is not included in any normal directories? Why does this website have no appeal to normal people…and why should we rank it if it has no popular appeal?
No, the search engines won’t ask these questions outright. But remember that all algorithms are created to simulate what would be normal linking and trust patterns that real people would follow. Having links only form high quality, top-ranked websites does not look normal. It’s a giant red flag.
Ironically, the more high-quality links you have, the more poor quality links you need.
CAUTION: By “poor quality”, I do not mean spammy websites. I do not mean you should be on pages full of words related to enhancing body parts and gambling away the kids’ inheritance.
But I do mean, that you want links form websites with a variety of linking profiles, ones that might be new or might not be running any link-building campaigns, ones that we might consider much less significant. In short, you want a normal linking pattern.
The ideal way to build links is still the tried and true…
Step one, create awesome content such as useful articles, instructional videos, samples and demos, all the things that are generally called “link bait”. Step two, publicize this content. If it really is good, many websites will link to it, including top-rated websites and many smaller less significant websites. They will do it naturally. So you will have a natural linking pattern.
To answer the obvious question, yes you will surely want to put extra effort into publicizing your content to high-trust, authoritative websites. But those links are the kind of links that less-significant website owners will follow, read and link to, as well.
So don’t forget to get links form a wide variety of insignificant websites as part of your link-building campaign. With algorithms designed to simulate something like democracy, votes from “the little guys” count, too.Written by David Leonhardt
Grab The Bookmarketer For Your Site |
warc | 201704 | CARI is a Geographic Information System (GIS) dataset of wetlands, streams, and riparian areas consisting of polygon and line features with data-rich attributes that can be used for developing broad- or fine-scale landscape level summaries of aquatic features. Its associated editor is an online browser-based interface that facilitates the careful editing of aquatic feature locations by the public. The innovative interaction with the dataset and submission for review values ease of use and accessibility.
This statewide dataset is hosted online through EcoAtlas, an online toolset that supports the State’s three level monitoring and assessment framework described in the Tenets of a State Wetland and Riparian Area Monitoring Plan (WRAMP), which in-turn advances the State’s Wetland and Riparian Area Protection Policy (WRAPP). The WRAMP framework employs the Federal Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recommended three level monitoring and assessment framework for wetlands of which the first level includes landscape level assessments and profiles. CARI is the statewide base-map for those assessments.
Additional Background
EcoAtlas tools are being developed to support data management and information dissemination for aquatic resources statewide. CARI was initiated in 2009 by the California Wetland Monitoring Workgroup (CWMW) with the goal of achieving an updateable, standardized map that could be used by environmental managers, planners and the public to assess the diversity and abundance of wetlands across the State. EcoAtlas employs the CARI base-map to visualize the location of wetland projects (with links to detailed project information), monitoring assessments (based on the California Rapid Assessment Method [CRAM]), and summarize the diversity and extent of wetlands via a Landscape Profile tool.
Pre-CARI mapping efforts for California contained varying levels of detail, vintages, coverage, and classifications, which made comparisons of wetland diversity and extents across the state challenging. To improve wetland and riparian map data across the state, CARI has the following goals:
Develop detailed and standard mapping methodologythat can be applied ( and adapted) to all regions across the state. This includes developing region specific methods for specific wetland types as warranted. Maintain a standardized classification systemthat can be applied (cross-walked) to different datasets in order to incorporate them into the statewide CARI base-map. This allows ongoing updates to the CARI base-map when new GIS datasets are identified that improve the accuracy and detail of the current CARI map. Be supported by a statewide technical advisory teamof GIS and aquatic resource experts so that the mapping standards and classification system can expand and adapt to support the scientific monitoring and assessment goals of the WRAPP and associated tools
Current Version
The current version of CARI (CARI v0.2, released in May of 2016), is available on SFEI's Data Center and is a compilation of local, regional, and statewide aquatic resource GIS datasets into a seamless, statewide coverage of aquatic resources that employs a common wetland classification system. Although the dataset varies in detail, and represents different time periods for different areas across the state,
CARI is the only statewide aquatic resource dataset that has been compiled and standardized to a common classification system, which can be used to develop landscape level profiles of aquatic resources at a local, regional, or broader scale (as seen with the Landscape Profile tool). The CARI v0 dataset includes: the National Wetland Inventory (NWI, last updated in 2010) of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD, high resolution dataset at 1:2400 scale, last updated in 1999) of the US Geological Survey, three regional datasets developed by SFEI’s GIS team using CARI’s standardized, and more detailed, mapping protocols and used to demonstrate the WRAMP framework. Links to more information about these mapping efforts are listed below under "Subprojects" (below). Six County Aquatic Resources Inventory (including Sacramento, Placer, Yolo, El Dorado, Yuba, and Sutter Counties, California) developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers (Sacramento District) through federal funding - 2010. |
warc | 201704 | Fisherman's penalty for undersize crab overturned Updated 12:22 pm, Tuesday, August 27, 2013 (08-27) 11:04 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Catching undersize Dungeness crabs is a crime, and it's no defense to claim you didn't know they were too small. But it's not much of a crime, a San Francisco appellate panel said, and the penalty must be modest as well - not a fine that ate up a commercial fisherman's profit for the day.
In a ruling published Friday as a precedent for future cases, the Appellate Division of San Francisco Superior Court upheld Tim Estes' misdemeanor conviction for hauling in too many crabs below the legal minimum size, but overturned a judge's $47,000 forfeiture order and said Estes must be resentenced.
Estes, a Fort Bragg (Mendocino County) resident, has operated a crab boat for more than 20 years, piloting the vessel and directing placement of crab pots but leaving the measurement of crabs to his crew.
After taking in about 44,000 pounds of Dungeness crabs in offshore waters one day in November 2010, he was told by state Fish and Game wardens that some appeared to be below the minimum breadth of 6 1/4 inches, a level set by state law to help preserve the species.
After measurements in which Estes cooperated, the wardens found that crabs weighing 991 pounds, or 2.2 percent of the total, were undersize, and returned them to San Francisco Bay. Estes was charged with violating a law against catching more than 1 percent undersize crabs in any single haul.
He said he had no way of knowing the crabs were too small, but Superior Court Judge Andrew Cheng said Estes' mental state was irrelevant, and a jury convicted him in March 2012. Cheng placed him on probation, fined him $1,000, and added a $47,000 forfeiture, about as much as Estes' profits from the trip.
In upholding the conviction, the appellate court said the crime was a "public welfare" offense, a violation of a law passed to protect community health or well-being, and can be committed regardless of the lawbreaker's knowledge or intent.
The criminal penalties are relatively low - up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine - and requiring proof of conscious wrongdoing would create an "incentive toward ignorance" for the captain and crew, Judge Charlene Kiesselbach said in the 3-0 ruling.
On the other hand, she said, the added $47,000 forfeiture, though not technically part of the criminal sentence, was a punitive order that was "grossly disproportionate to the gravity of (Estes') offense" and violated the constitutional ban on excessive punishments.
Estes' lawyer, Michael Linscheid, said the ruling could discourage Fish and Wildlife officials from seeking excessive penalties, but might also motivate captains to pay more attention to the size of their catch and less to safe navigation. |
warc | 201704 | The sun-soaked days of summer require us to constantly check our skin for any changing freckles or moles, a telltale sign of skin cancer. Most of the time we're solely focused on our own skin — since we're the most familiar with our own bodies — but a British mother's heartbreak shows that we should be paying attention to the skin of others.
Especially children.
Jennifer Nicholson's daughter, Freja, was just 18 when she died from skin cancer in November 2015. Her melanoma came from sun damage, the grieving Nicholson told
The Mirror.
“There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t wish I could go back and just take five minutes to put suncream on her delicate young skin when I mistakenly thought there was no danger," she said. The family, from Leeds, was diligent about applying sunscreen on vacation, but didn't think twice about sun dangers in the cloudy British weather.
“In Thailand, Turkey and other places I was ultra-careful. I’d make the girls wear factor 50 and full-body swimsuits," she said. "But it was sunny or even cloudy summer days in England when perhaps I wasn’t quite so diligent. You think the sun isn’t strong enough to do any damage. I was so foolish.”
Sunscreen is necessary in all types of weather because the damaging UV rays can break through the clouds. "It may not feel the same as a bright and sunny summer day, but always apply sunscreen to any exposed skin when leaving the house," says Dr. Purvisha Patel, owner and dermatologist at Advanced Dermatology & Skin Cancer Associates in Memphis, Tennessee.
Nicholson said she first noticed a problem with Freja when a mole started to change.
“Since she was born Freja had a small mole in the middle of her back, no bigger than a press-stud. But as she got bigger, it grew too and in 2012 we noticed it had gone lumpy and black," she told the newspaper. Tests came back as benign, meaning it wasn't dangerous, but eventually the teen found a lump under her arm.
“It was only then I remembered that mole on her back. I asked if they were related and doctors gently told me I should in no way have let our guard down. During these last few years cancer had rampaged through Freja while we carried on, blissfully unaware," she continued.
Skin cancer comes in three main types. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, melanoma is the least common but most deadly. An estimated 76,380 cases will be diagnosed in 2016 with over 10,000 estimated deaths.
It's not clear if Freja suffered from melanoma, but the cancer eventually spread to her brain. Doctors removed a brain tumor, but the cancer came back and ultimately took the teen's life. “I feel I failed her," Nicholson said. "I could have stopped it. Don’t make the same mistake because you will never ever forgive yourself.”
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warc | 201704 | Imagine a scene 25 years from now. Or 50. Or even a hundred, at the start of the next century. A family time capsule is discovered. The dust is blown off, the seal broken. And inside, are the pictures and writing of your ancestors. Discover here how you can preserve your family history!
Reaching Out to the Future
The concept of the time capsule as we know it was invented by G Edward Pendray of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Pendray's capsule was buried at the site of the 1939 New York World's Fair on September 23, 1938, and is scheduled to be opened in 6939.
You can make a time capsule by using a kit, such as the Ark to the Future kit -- which includes a metal capsule, memory album and scrapbook, family tree chart, decorative labels and an instruction book. Alternatively, buy something like a watertight cashbox and carefully place your memories inside! Actual burial isn't recommended simply due to concerns about weather, exposure, construction, etc. But if you do keep it tucked away deep in a closet or the attic, be sure it's sealed and the date to open is clearly marked on the outside!
It was the intention of the organizers to "represent all the enormous variety and vigor of life" and to deposit "information touching upon all the principal categories of our thought, activity, and accomplishment; sparing nothing, neither our wisdom nor our foolishness, our supreme achievements nor our recognized weaknesses."
Since that time, numerous capsules have been buried, placed in the foundations of buildings, or catapulted into space. Now, at the turn of the millennium, it seems a particularly poignant time to speak to those who will inhabit the earth in the future.
What should go inside?
The variety of material that can be included in your time capsule is almost infinite. It includes:
Copies of birth certificates, marriage certificates, driver's licenses, diplomas, report cards, college IDs, passports, deeds, mortgage papers, awards, certificates, military papers and other official documents. (Note: Unfortunately, you need to be careful about including documents that could potentially lead to identity theft if the capsule is "discovered" before its time.) Cards, letters, postcards, telegrams, stamps, envelopes and printed email. Notes describing your take on current events. Clean and dry packaging from your favorite products. A pic of your computer setup. A printed screenshot of your MySpace page. Pressed flowers, leaves, feathers, and locks of hair. Maps, ticket stubs, tour attraction brochures, travel itineraries and hotel stationery. Wallpaper or fabric swatches. Special scrapbook pages. Menus, wine labels, matchbook covers and business cards. Favorite quotes, song lyrics, poems, and prayers. Heirloom or other favorite recipes. Children's drawings and other family artwork. Tags, ribbons, and wrappings from gifts. A DVD or flash drive with documents, photos and other scans. Maps and house plans. Photocopies of your hand or a group of hands; thumbprints or hand prints. Political or current-events memorabilia, such as newspaper clippings. Professional and candid portraits, vacation photos, pictures of the inside and outside of your home and your family members' homes, reproductions of antique photos, and school or team photos. Jewelry and other small items or family heirlooms. Personal items that individuals might have carried with them, such as a wallet, medallion, religious object, key or keychain, lucky coin. Household items such as pipe, pen, paperweight. Small articles of clothing such as a scarf, tie or handkerchief. Items that document an era -- such as a fax, a computer mouse, train schedule, advertisements for clothes or cars, the cover of a contemporary magazine, paper money or coins (which some experts feel will be obsolete in the future). The dedication ceremony
Usually, when community time capsules are dedicated, the mayor gives a speech, the local clergy recites an invocation, and a band plays the national anthem. The 1939 World's Fair capsule was lowered into the ground at exactly noon, as a gong tolled.
You and your family will probably opt for a somewhat less elaborate ceremony, but it is an event that should be attended by all available family members. If there is a prayer, poem, or quotation that has personal meaning, you might have the oldest or youngest person recite it, and someone should read aloud the text of the dedication page.
When to close and open the capsule
You should select a day of significance, either universally or personally. Some obvious days are January 1, Christmas Day or another religious holiday, the vernal equinox, July 4, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Mother's Day or Father's Day, or a day of historical importance.
How long you choose to keep the capsule closed is entirely up to you. We feel that twenty-five years is the minimum length of time. To a child, that will seem like an eternity, but most adults realize that it passes in a veritable blur.
Each year the time capsule is in transit will add to its power and mystery, as time and events reveal the secrets of the future. Today's society craves instant gratification, and so this concept is entirely contradictory to our present way of life.
Be patient. It will be worth the wait. |
warc | 201704 | China Pushes the Use of Clean Coal in Hopes to Curb Air Pollution
Chen Jining, China’s environmental protection minister said that the country is now promoting the clean use of coal in hopes to curb air pollution. The air quality in China is mainly caused by the energy structure, specifically coal consumption. China attaches great importance in adjusting the energy structure and is part of one of the tasks in the drafting of the 13
th five year plan.
The country is promoting the use of clean coal which is now being boosted by low emission facilities for coal fired power plants that rival gas powered or fired plants. Considered a revolutionary effort that will overturn conventional wisdom that coal is not clean and will positively help efforts in curbing smog. China is also cutting down emissions form household bulk coal, as emission from one ton of coal is already equivalent to five or ten tons of coal that is used on power plants. Since living standard is rising, so is the bulk coal consumption increases as well.
Emissions coming from bulk coal contribute to the heavy smog last year, and the government is now looking for ways in curbing them. Experts are saying that there will be a long period of adjusting to the energy consumption structure wherein they are prompting the use of clean energy, strengthen adjustments to energy consumption and to further promoted the use of clean coal. |
warc | 201704 | Each February, the nation observes a ritual around a ground hog
and his shadow. Then he and all of us with him retreat back into the shadows of
winter. Now that spring is blooming, have we come out of the shadows?
Peter reminds us that God has called us out of the shadows into
his wonderful light (1 Peter 2:9). A timid creature may fear his own shadow
because he doesn’t understand the darkness that appears to be following him. We
know, however, that shadows are powerless images. They appear when we stand in
the light.
What shadows are
provoking fears for you? Remember shadows are just an outline of what is in the
way of your light. The Bible describes shadows cast by the frustration of labor
(Job 7:1-3), busyness and vanity (Ecclesiastes 6:11-12), entanglement with sin
(Isaiah 59:9), the encroachment of enemies (Psalm 11:2) and the ultimate
obstruction between God and us, the shadow of death (Psalm 23:4).
Like our friend the ground hog, many of our daily encounters with
shadows are exaggerated images of us. They are distortions of our problems and
our inadequacy to deal with them. Looking at the shadow only magnifies the
problem. But where there is a shadow, there is light shining upon us from the
opposite direction. When shadows creep up, we can retreat into the darkness of
our hole like the ground hog or we can turn into the light.
Nice illustration, but how do we really turn into the light? It’s
not easy. We know more than a ground hog, but we too live in shadows of
spiritual ignorance. Jesus anticipated our struggle. “Do not let your hearts be
troubled,” he said, “trust in God; trust also in me.” (John 14:1). When shadows
frighten me, I have to say his words over and over again to myself. In my
ignorance, I can’t see where the light is coming from, but I know he is my light
source. His word leads me to the light.
God is calling us
out of the shadows into his light. In Greek the word for “church” means “those
who are called out.” We are his “church” because we have been called out of our
shadows to meet Jesus in the light. To experience the support of a church is to
be brought together into the “royal priesthood” Peter describes walking into his
marvelous light. We are that royal priesthood to one another! In this priesthood
we are, over and over again, reciting, praying, forgiving, caring, building up,
encouraging and serving one another with Jesus’ words of life.
There is one
shadow in the Bible that is cast with peace rather than fear. God repeats
himself several times calling us out to retreat into “the shadow of his wings”
(Psalms 17, 36, 57 & 63 and Isaiah 34:15). When God gathers us together in
community as a church he is extending those wings over us. As we reflect on the
shadows provoking fear in our lives, may we as a church family reach out to one
another, calling one another to huddle under that canopy of God’s peace. As
spring and summer time draw us out and about, don’t let the seasons give us a
false sense of independence. Where there is sunshine and many opportunities—good
though they may be—the shadows appear also. We need one another to stay centered
in the light. Our church family is called to be that retreat center in the
shadow of his wings.
“You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, a people belonging to God,
that you may declare the praises of him
who called you out of darkness
into his wonderful light.”
(1 Peter 2:9)
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warc | 201704 | Mastery’s great accomplishments require time and a willingness to release a sequence of prototypes. Perfectionism means you don’t ship until it’s perfect. Which means you never ship or what you ship has not learned from problems or needs that only visible post deployment.
Randall Munroe’s “The General Problem” embeds this observation:
“I find that when someone’s taking time to do something right in the present, they’re a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they’re a master artisan of great foresight.”
Randall Munroe in “The General Problem“ No Significant Accomplishment Was Easy
When we look back at a significant accomplishment we miss all of the groundwork, the necessary trial and error, the sequence of working prototypes giving way to working solutions that were successive approximations to the final masterpiece. Eric Hoffer captured this in “Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.”
Bootstrappers make this same mistake either when they try and proceed directly to a business model that maps to a large and successful business or they focus only on the final fully instantiated version of their idealized business or product. We have to become comfortable with making things viable and then better over time.
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warc | 201704 | A bizarre new episode in the legal fight against terror is playing out right now in a federal courthouse in New York City. An American family, Yekutiel and Sheryl Wultz of Miami, lost their 16-year-old son Daniel to a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist attack in Tel Aviv in 2006. In 2008, they filed a $300 million civil lawsuit against Iran, Syria, and the terror group’s state sponsors.* But in an unprecedented move, the Wultzes also named the Bank of China in their suit. They accuse the state-backed bank of serving as a knowing conduit for the funds used to finance the attack. But the case has hit a snag and the Wultz family suddenly finds itself fighting this legal battle on two fronts: Against the Chinese government and its unlikely ally, the state of Israel.
Even the U.S. government has now positioned itself against them. Why did a victim’s quest for simple justice turn into an ugly legal gunfight? Because when it comes to battling global terror, civil suits by American citizens often do more harm than good.
Wultz v. Bank of China hinges on simple facts. In 2005, a year before the attack, Israeli intelligence allegedly informed Bank of China officials that terrorist operatives were funneling money through the bank’s accounts to Gaza and the West Bank. The bank took no action. Under federal and state tort law here in the United States, if the Wultzes can prove the Chinese had foreknowledge, courtesy of Israel, they stand a decent chance of convincing a New York jury to hold the bank liable for civil damages.
Following the attack, the Israeli government reportedly encouraged the Wultz family to seek justice in the American legal system.* According to court proceedings and press statements by the family, Israel pledged to provide a former intelligence official from the 2005 meeting with the bank, to testify on their behalf. The family would gain a crucial piece of evidence, while the Israeli government would get a low-cost, nonpolitical mechanism to pressure China to change its policies. The mutual interests of the Wultzes, who are U.S. citizens (though Yekutiel also holds an Israeli passport), and the state of Israel seemed self-evident. But shared interests between states and foreign citizens can break down. Especially when you are dealing with a small state like Israel that must balance competing legal and diplomatic priorities.
The case began to run off the rails last spring when an irate Beijing threatened to cancel a much-desired state visit from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because of the lawsuit. In response, the Israeli government officially declined to allow the plaintiff’s star witness to testify in U.S. court. Underscoring the sensitivity of the matter, former Israeli National Security Adviser Yaacov Amidror submitted a notarized affidavit to the federal court in Washington, D.C., in late October to testify to the national security concerns at play should this witness testify.* The Israeli government promptly filed suit to quash the subpoena.
The Wultz family is, needless to say, furious. So are pro-Israel American lawmakers, such as Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., who has publicly criticized Israel’s actions.* The case puts Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., who is a first cousin of the Wultz family, and initially acted as a broker between the family and the Israeli prime minister's office, in a delicate position.
And just as the Wultzes were being abandoned by Israeli officials, they hit a wall with the U.S. government. Like their Israeli counterparts, the U.S. Treasury Department had also reportedly negotiated with the Bank of China to stop its facilitating illicit money transfers. Hence, in theory, American foreign policy interests naturally aligned with the logic of the Wultz lawsuit. Staunch the flow of funds through the global banking system and you hit terrorists in the pocketbook. Name and shame the financial enablers in an open legal action, and you claim a just recompense. But here, again, individual civil lawsuits can come into conflict with larger-scale government foreign policy.
So the Treasury Department has thus far resisted providing the Wultz family with all the information they need about the finances of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. American authorities tell the court that disclosing too much confidential intelligence will compromise clandestine methods and scare away the many countries and banks that voluntarily comply with U.S.-led efforts to keep terrorists out of the banking arena.
It is too soon to tell what will happen with
Wultz v. Bank of China. The pre-trial proceedings have dragged on for more than five years. Neither side seems ready to throw in the towel. The family may yet succeed in forcing Israel back into the courtroom. Other pending federal lawsuits could alter the law involved. But the victims might only, at best, achieve a pyrrhic victory: Should they win, they would still have to collect a judgment. In one of the final paradoxes of this litigation, the U.S. government has for years blocked financial judgments awarded to American plaintiffs against Iran and other foreign governments. Why? Such judgments are seen as conflicting with American foreign policy interests. So even if they succeed, the Wultzes will remain enmeshed in an ugly fight with the very governments who are supposed to be fighting alongside them to defeat terror.
American victims of terror deserve justice. But they will not achieve it through ad hoc partnerships with foreign governments. Nor can countries like Israel outsource their larger political battles to private U.S. citizens. The U.S. Congress, in turn, should consider drafting legislation to limit the jurisdiction of U.S. courts in civil suits concerning terrorist acts committed abroad. This will avoid placing judges directly into the most fraught global political issues of the moment. When it comes to transnational terrorism, U.S. domestic courts are the wrong tool for political action.
No one is denying the high human costs of terrorism. The legal challenges of meting out justice to terrorist groups with shadowy ties to states and banks worldwide are immense. So we instinctively cheer every new attempt to expand the legal arsenal to address terrorism in friendly courts. But a lawsuit of this kind brings huge risks for both vulnerable victims and the U.S. judiciary. It thrusts private U.S. citizens and U.S. judges into the awkward roles of international legal diplomats for which they are ill equipped. And when things go wrong, as they did in the Wultz case, it is usually because even our friendliest allies may prove fickle partners in civil lawsuits with international implications. All the more reason to hold the executive, and not the courts, responsible for combating terrorism.
Correction, Feb. 19, 2014: This article originally misstated the damages sought and plaintiffs named in a civil lawsuit brought by the Wultz family. They sought $300 million, not $10 million, from Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's state sponsors, and the Bank of China. This article also initially attributed Israeli government actions to the Netanyahu administration; Netanyahu's predecessor was in charge at the time. In addition, the article stated that Israeli National Security Adviser Yaacov Amidror appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C. He submitted a notarized affidavit to the court. Finally, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's last name was originally misspelled. |
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Validation of Forensic Computing Software Utilizing Black Box ...
1.Validation of Forensic Computing Software Utilizing Black Box Testing TechniquesTom Wilsdon & Jill SlayUniversity of South AustraliaSouth Australiatom.wilsdon@unisa.edu.auAbstractThe process of validating the correct operation of software is difficult for a variety of reasons. The need tovalidate software utilised as forensic computing tools suffers the same fate and is hampered to a greater extentwith the source code of said tools usually not being accessible. Therefore a testing regime must be developedthat offers a high degree of correctness and high probability of finding software faults with limited ability toview source code. Software testing is a complex component of software engineering in its own right. Thiscomplexity is encountered with an infinite number of environments posed by hardware, and cohosted software;one can never determine an absolute range of tests to determine the software in each potential environment orcustom setting. Therefore a finite set of tests are developed to validate the software. As the software being testedis not disclosed to the source code level the testing is developed around the functions of the software. Usingtechniques categorized in the black box methodology this regime must attempt to tender a validity status to thesoftware’s functions.KeywordsForensic Computing, Software, TestingINTRODUCTIONThe variety and number of digital devices available to the domestic user is growing at a phenomenal rate(Grabowski 1998; Etter 2001). Unfortunately such technology is not solely being used for the betterment of life.The misuse of devices to either conduct, or be used as a tool to conduct, crime is well publicised. Theunfortunate reality is people embrace, interpret and abuse the added ability one can inherit from the acquisitionof digital devices.To date the significance of encountering digital devices by law enforcement agencies has yielded the creation ofdedicated investigators dealing with the interrogation of said devices. A common misconception is that aninvestigation involving digital means is isolated to a high tech crime when in reality quite the opposite of this istrue (Etter 2001).One such example of this is the uptake and usage of mobile phones. A seemingly isolated device can produceassociations between individual parties by reviewing incoming and outgoing communications on the handsets.Any two or more devices offer the ability to identify relationships between devices and subsequently theirrespective owners. Mobile phones are only one example and similar processes can be applied to computers,personal digital assistants (PDA), fixed line telephones (billing), email accounts, websites, closed circuittelevision cameras. All devices and many more, potentially offer the investigator the ability to create a series ofrelationships between individuals via their devices. The usual caveat of proving the individual used the devicefor a specific message, call, etc still exists.What this translates to is the fact that evidence exists on countless devices and there must exist some way toextract this in a sound manner. Forensic computing investigators are in the frontline of the analysis of thedevices. With this knowledge, law enforcement agencies have equipped their digital forensic investigators with avariety of tools and training to seize, analyse and report relevant information from a truly infinite number ofsources.
2.Most of the tools utilized to conduct such investigations are proprietary software applications developed byspecialised application vendors. As the trade secret is the application, they are not willing to disclose source codefor testing and evaluation. It is unrealistic to expect companies to do so to law enforcement community, or otherparties, to evaluate the ‘under the bonnet’ as the risk of is too great.NEED FOR EVALUATIONThe need for the evaluation of all forensic computing software is well documented (Reust 2006; Meyers &Rogers 2004. Evaluation frameworks for computer forensic tools do exist, such as NIST Computer Forensic ToolTesting programme and SWGDE, and their work is extremely comprehensive and scientifically sound. However,the output of such organizations is failing to satisfy the demand of the rapidly developing industry. It is thereforeproposed that an alternative testing framework be developed and implemented to offer a similar, if notequivalent, level of testing but be more efficient with respect to time, output and financial requirements. Suchtesting alternatives have been proposed by numerous sources in the Australian context as no such evaluationexists beyond an individual’s environment (Armstrong 2003; Wilsdon 2005). This papers proposes a high levelarchitecture for such a streamlined framework.It is important to reiterate that this evaluation is concentrated on the accuracy, reliability of forensic computingtools and not the processes associated to the investigation. The discipline is well documented with theseprocesses and guidelines for investigators but evaluation of tools is lacking in comparison. The underlyingreasons for this are not documented but the authors assume to be a lack of skills in the computer science domain,the financial burden, experience & time.The technical component of forensic computing can be seen as the most critical with respect to the effectivenessof an investigation. Without the correct tools a tradesman can only deliver a substandard product – this does notdiffer from the physical to the digital world. So what constitutes a forensic computing tool? To the authorscurrent knowledge there is no definition as to what a forensic computing tool is. Many may have their opinionson this but for the purpose of this research a forensic computing tool is ‘a software application, or a componentof an application, that is utilized to perform some function on a digital device as part of a forensic computinginvestigation.’While this definition is broad and non specific so to is the real world of forensic computing tools being embracedby investigators. Mainstream tools such as Guidance Software’s EnCase or Access Data’s Forensic Toolkit (FTK)are well known and utilised by most agencies. Further to these mainstream suites there are countless scripts andinhouse developed applications that perform forensic tasks. Also the adoption of software developed for anotherpurpose is being utilized more and more. Examples of this include system administration tools, scripts and evenoperating systems.Such a range of tools with a variety of purposes increases the problem of testing – if we have one common toolwith one clear objective the testing requirements is clearly defined. Unfortunately quite the opposite exists withmany tools such as EnCase and FTK providing numerous functions. Complicating this further is the ability forusers to create their own functions to extend the existing application. The creation of, and utilisation of existing,tools is growing at a phenomenal rate. It is naive to assume each tool and its functions can be evaluated. Thecurrently testing of tools is a mere drop in the ocean suggesting we must optimise the process and harness allresources to address this shortcoming. Compounding this is the need to examine new devices regularly and theirimplications.Holzmann explores the economics for software developers to include as many functions/features into theirsoftware and charts a graph suggesting the greater the features the greater the defects. It is then the onus of thedeveloper to employ sufficient quality assurance mechanisms within the development life cycle to identify suchdefects and address these as required. According to the DFRWS 2005 Workshop Report one vendor of softwaresuggested ‘vendors cannot anticipate all uses in all situations therefore they can only test a finite set ofpermutations of systems and uses’ (Reust 2006). This raises the question whether proprietary software is more
3.reliable and accurate than open source software. Numerous observers actively participate in this debate and atthis time there is no clear evidence to suggest to the authors that one model is better than the other.Holzmann also documents the benefit of testing to identify all defects to suggest there exist some point of timewhere a majority of defects have been identified within the software development life cycle. Testing beyond thispoint is unviable for the developer, as the main defects identified are the more likely to occur and causepotentially less impact. Unfortunately the remaining defects within the software are less likely to occur but ifthey do materialize the impact will be greater. (Holzmann)So if the vendor is potentially distributing software tools with defects residing within their applications, why is itthe forensic computing community’s responsibility to identify such defects?To address this question we must determine what the software, and its results, are utilised for. The word forensiccan be categorized as suitable for use in courts of judicature, or in a public discussion (AAFS 1996). We mustsatisfy the most stringent standard. Therefore it is imperative the processes and procedures undertaken to deriveresults from a forensic computing investigation is sound in its foundations and execution ensuring results areadmissible within the court room as evidence.Software testing is a science that exists within the discipline of software engineering and computer science. It isa major component of the software development lifecycle and all software engineering methodologies havestrong emphasis on testing in various stages of the lifecycle. Within the field of evaluation we have a limitedcapacity to test software as the lifecycle has evolved from development to deployment. While the testingcomponent is still available, the ability to conduct testing to the same rigor as is available during thedevelopment stages is significantly reduced. In addition the accessibility to the source code is dubious at best.Within this research an assumption has been made that testing is occurring on proprietary software and thereforesource code is not available. The debate between open source and proprietary software is active and the authorsdo not wish to discount the added benefits of an open source testing model but this decision has been made tothe following rationale:•It is acknowledged open source applications offer a greater ability to truly examine the working of theapplication (due to the ability to examine the source code) but a standard or common denominator mustbe identified. The reason why a common standard must be identified is due to the objectives of thetesting process to validate and verify forensic computing tools correctly and efficiently with as muchstandardisation as possible. Separating standards between open and closed source does have benefitsbut also introduces complications which will impact on the efficiency of the framework.•Individual organizations can conduct lower level examinations to either independently validate or verifyresults from the validation result achieved.•Crystal box testing has more available processes in place which may identify defects but it is hopedsoftware engineering methodologies will identify these. The level of familiarity is greater to thedeveloper than an independent party performing validation with constraints of time and resources.•Creates a universal or standardised testing environment for both open source and proprietary solutions.TESTING REGIMEThe following sections refer to various standards to guide the testing procedure. The definitions of some testingterminology must be clarified prior to continuing – the IEEE Standard 610.121990 provides the followingdefinitions;Test – ‘An activity in which a system or component is executed under specified conditions, the results areobserved or recorded, and an evaluation is made of some aspect of the system or component.’Validation – ‘The process of evaluating a system or component during or at the end of the developmentprocess to determine whether it satisfies specified requirements.’
4.Validation and Verification (V&V) – ‘The process of determining whether the requirements for a systemor component are complete and correct and the final system or component complies with specifiedrequirements.’It is assumed some independent agency will undertake the role of the tester for this process. Such an agencywould have to be funded from either a consortium of government and potentially software companies. Thisstructure suggests bias to vendors and developers that contribute to the consortium but the task of establishingsuch an agency will require major support from vendors and practitioners alike. Therefore their contribution maynot come in the form of a monetary value but an inkind contribution to establish an agency and its processes.The role of the independent agency acting as the tester is assumed to be the following. Acquire software toolsalong with all documentation and knowledge required for the evaluation of the product. With respect to ISO170252005 standard appropriate logging of this acquisition is mandatory and must be developed by the agencyto suit their business model. Once acquisition is achieved the testing process begins. It is important that the goalof the testing is made apparent before the process evolves to any subsequent state. The goal of the testing is toevaluate a software product to act as a forensic computing tool and determine whether the tool’s function(s)operate correctly and accurately within a prescribed environment. The software product is referred to as acollective form but may consist of a set of functions and each of these functions are required to be identified,documented and tested.Whittaker (2000) suggests the starting point prior to conducting tests is to plan the testing environment. Insummary the four categories described are1. Modelling the software’s environment2. Selecting test scenarios3. Running and evaluating the test scenarios4. Measuring testing processWhile this process appears self explanatory it is important that each of these categories are explored andcustomized to the proposed forensic computing evaluation architecture.1. Modeling the Software EnvironmentKnowledge of the software must be included when preparing for the testing of a forensic computing tool’sfunction(s). This environment must be created with minimal possibility of contamination from any sources. Suchsources of contamination may include remnant data, conflicting software, ill equipped testers, etc. ISO 170252005 describes clear guidelines to achieve such a state which should be considered when undertaking theprocess. It is imperative the environment must be able to be recreated (To recreate testing is discrepanciesidentified). Therefore the documentation must be precise and blatant. A process to document and achieve thisrequirement will be created along with testing to ensure the environment is uncontaminated prior to the testing.2. Select Test ScenariosThe selection of applicable test scenarios is potentially the most important component of validating forensiccomputing software. A process to identify functions, requirements and test cases is examined later in this paper.The ability to select appropriate scenarios to be tested requires experience and knowledge of the tester (andagency). As the assumption for this research is that all applications will be tested as closed source the variety oftest types is reduced considerably and limited to black box testing.3. Running and Evaluating the Test ScenariosThe undertaking of the tests as selected in stage 2 and executed in the environment as derived from stage 1requires careful observation and consideration in preparation, execution and evaluation. The preparation phaseensures the tester is familiar with the objectives of test and interacts with the system in a prescribed anddocumented manner. It is assumed that this prescribed manner is obtained from documentation supplied with thesoftware or determined in stage 2. Complete logging of the execution of the tests is required and ISO 17025
5.2005 provides framework for this requirement. Results must be recorded to allow the evaluation against expectedoutcomes and judgments must be considered to determine whether the function/feature has achieved the desiredoutcome. Results evaluation is explored in a later section of this paper.4. Measuring the Testing ProcessWithin the context of the Whittaker publication the measurement of the testing process suggests that aprogression of the testing is monitored and updated to reflect the actual state at any one time. Within the contextof the testing of forensic computing tools it is deemed that the measuring testing process will have an alternativeuse. As forensic computing tools have the potential to contain multiple functions it is naive to assume that the allfunctions should be tested collectively. The reasoning for this judgment is due to the fact that some obscurefunctions offer no benefit in the real world or the process of testing these functions is too complex to consider ifthe demand does not exist. Within the context of forensic computing tool evaluation, it is therefore proposed thatthe measuring testing process tracks the functions tested and displays identified functions which have not beentested (Whittaker 2000).The Process of EvaluationThe process for evaluating software applications will consist of the following:1. Acquirement of software2. Identification of software functionalities3. Development of test cases & reference sets4. Development of result acceptance spectrum5. Execute tests & evaluate results6. Evaluation results releaseIt is imperative that all phases of the evaluation are transparent in the form of acquirement, testing, resultsreporting and evaluation. The process may consider input from a number of sources such as practitioners,vendors and academics to assist in each of the phases. An example of where such input will be beneficial is todetermine the function(s) of a software application if no documentation is supplied, or is of substandard nature.The process of testing will generate documentation which then may be considered as an standard operatingprocedure (SOP) of types. This is just one such side effect of such a community engaging architecture.The phases of evaluation are:1. Acquirement of SoftwareThe process of acquiring the relevant software applications to be evaluated is the beginning of the evaluationlifecycle. Once an application is ‘acquired’ the documentation begins satisfying ISO 170252005 and AS 40061992.Once the initial documentation is acquired a signature of the software must be developed to ensure that anysubsequent versions, patches or modifications are not misinterpreted as already tested. It is expected a MD5checksum or similar could be used to generate such a unique signature.2. Identification of Software FunctionalitiesOnce the acquirement requirements are satisfied the identification of a set of the application’s functionality isrequired. Only the identified functions will be tested.If documentation is available when acquiring the software then this phase is much simpler. If no documentationis available then the tester must identify functions to be tested by whatever means available. This may include,but is not limited to, execution and trialling of the application, community input, vendor input or mininginformation about functions from other sources such as websites, discussion boards, guidelines etc.
6.A function is considered some component of the software which delivers a result when executed. This functioncan be complex in its nature or simple – but only functions identified in this phase will be tested and given anevaluation result at the completion of the subsequent phases.If all functions are not identified within this phase the application can be retested at a later stage. Newlyidentified or untested functions can be appended to the test documentation.All functions must be clearly documented as an item to be tested. This requires an experienced tester withknowledge of how the tools functions are utilised. It is imperative that any functions that act as a dependency toanother function are documented as this will be reflected within the next phase of evaluation.3. Development of Test Cases & Reference SetsThe development of test cases and reference sets is critical to determine the correctness of the application.When all functions to be are identified during the previous phase, tests must be developed to determine thecorrect operation. The assumption has been made that all testing will be on applications treated as proprietary access to the source code is not available. Therefore all tests will be based on black box testing techniques wherethe data is organised to test as many functions as identified into an image referred to as a reference set. Thereference set will differ for each evaluation process determined by the functions being evaluated. Differentapplications with the same functions may use the same reference set.Utilizing the black box testing technique the data in the test case is known and determined to be an example ofreal world scenario. The reference set will be developed by the tester and must not only test the real worldexample in isolation but must also test the true operation of the software. Examples of this may includeencryption, modification of file headers, placing keywords across clusters, modifying data so that the expectedformat is not within standards – these are just a few examples of such tests that may be included.Due to the critical nature of this testing phase input maybe sought from outside the test organization to determinewhat the real world case is and how to truly test the extent of the function. As with all phases the test phasereference sets will be made available so individuals can verify the software, and its functions, within their ownenvironment.It may become practice that once a reference set has been developed and documented this is shared with thecommunity. The community can then assess whether the tests are appropriate and comprehensive enough tocover the real world usage. Request for comments would expire prior to the penultimate phase and all feedbackwould be considered before undertaking any subsequent phases of evaluation.Test cases and reference sets not only are designed to test the functions identified but also the operation of theapplication as a whole. Focus is predominantly on determining the correctness of functions identified but it isacknowledged if the host software is incorrect then it must be determined whether this impacts on the functionsoperations. Therefore environment testing, hardware configuration, co hosted software and processes may beconsidered and tested to determine their impact. Such testing must be included within the documentation asfaults or defects may directly, or indirectly, be attributed to the environment hosting the test bed.As within the previous phase if a function is determined to be excluded on an evaluation cycle this can added at alater time – it is essential once again that any dependants on this function(s) are evaluated together.4. Development of Result Acceptance SpectrumResult acceptance spectrum is a metric used to assess the test results against what was expected. As the testingmethod is black box and the reference sets and test cases have been developed all results of tests are known.Dependant on the environment (law enforcement, military, civil, etc) of tool use determines the level of accuracyrequired. It is therefore expected that numerous levels of acceptable ranges will be identified allowing a greaternumber of practitioner domains benefit from the evaluation process.ISO 14598.12000 provides a methodology to document the result acceptance spectrum by dividing the potentialresult set into 4 mutually exclusive groupings; exceeds requirements, target range, minimally acceptable and
7.unacceptable. How these groupings are determined must include previously undertaken phases including phases2 & 3. From these phases the metric of acceptance and expected can be identified and documented – this maydiffer for example between law enforcement and military domains and this would require input from therespective communities.If a function does not meet the acceptance range then that function and all dependant, and codependantfunctions, will be rendered as incorrect. Therefore it is essential that dependencies of functions are recognized inthe prior phases as this may cause one function to a ‘pass’ evaluation status when coupled with the incorrectfunction will render the outcome as invalid.5. Execute Tests & Evaluate ResultsThe execution of the tests is undertaken by the tester and each process of testing will be documented as per ISO170252005 and AS 40061992 requirements. Any unexpected intervention required will be documented andassessed as this may bear impact with results.All results from all tests will be collected and assessed against the acceptance spectrum compiled in the previousphase. All functions found to be below the acceptable range will be evaluated as ‘failed’ and documented. Allfunctions found to achieve in, or above, an acceptance rating will be evaluated as ‘passed’ with alldocumentation included.It is possible for a function to pass evaluation without passing all test cases. As described in phase 3 extraneoustests will be executed with the intention to identify limitations of the application. These will be included withany evaluation and have a significant component of the documentation exploring the limitation so all users canrecognize this.6. Evaluation Results ReleaseUpon conclusion of the previous phases all results must be made available to the community. Once a tool isevaluated it is not immune from future evaluation or reevaluation.Furthermore if the application is modified in any capacity (patches, updates, etc) the evaluation is notautomatically inherited. Therefore software patches usually released by vendors to address identified defects willrender their already evaluated application as unevaluated. If this evaluation framework is adopted it will forcevendors to supply a product with a greater emphasis on quality to the consumer. If patches are frequent the use ofan unevaluated tool may motivate a consumer to select a competitor’s product due to more ‘uptime’.DiscussionAs highlighted in the DFRWS Final Report 2005 (Reust 2006) the ability to test tools in a variety ofenvironments is limited due to both the financial and time constraints. The current models of tool testingframeworks (NIST CFTT, etc) do not offer a solution to this as there methodologies are testing in isolation.Whittaker (2001) documented the invisible user in a paper highlighting the fact that it is difficult for testenvironments to truly recreate all potential live environments. Furthermore systems, particularly operatingsystems, are prone to react in unexpected manners and these actions are difficult to identify and simulate.Although software is deterministic in isolation once the interaction occurs with the host and other software theresults can vary.The evaluation framework proposed offers an evaluation of a software application identified as a forensiccomputing tool at one point of time in one environment. Therefore, by releasing the evaluation framework phasesto all, this allows for individual organizations and practitioners to undertake the same testing process within theirenvironment. This is referred to verification and their results should resemble the evaluation results which arereferred to as validation results. If they do not correspond it must be determined if the error lies within thevalidation/evaluation process, the verification process or both. If the error is determined to exist in the validationprocess then the evaluation status of the software tool, and all functions, must be revoked immediately untilrevalidation is completed and verified.
8.With this knowledge it is imperative that tools are tested in the greatest combinations of environments aspossible. A study being conducted by the authors of digital forensic laboratories currently within Australiahighlighted that no two laboratories used examination workstations of the same specification. An example issome workstations using single core processors while others used dual core within the same organisation. Writeblockers varied in brand and connectivity along with countless other hardware and software variations.Other beneficial side effects of the proposed framework are that it offers a centralized agency the ability toregister practitioners to create a community. This allows for the collection of input from numerous domains andthis can be included within the validation process. Documentation maybe created, or extended, if new functionsare not already documented and practitioners maybe exposed to a library of tools if these are free for use.Further workEstablishing an Testing AuthorityThe formation and allocation of resources to implement the described evaluation process is requiredimmediately. The funding for a project such as this should not be solely the onus of a government but should be aconsortium of government, private industry and academia to put in place the processes to create such anauthority.Automated Reference Set Generator ToolAn automated tool to create mountable disk images with dynamic content is the concept behind this tool. Whena tool is to be validated the functionalities are identified and represented in the preceding screens of theautomated tool. Once all functionalities are included at the initial execution of the software the applicationgenerates a dynamic image creating custom reference set for the image and embedding these into a disk image.Upon completion of execution a unique identifier for an image is created and a corresponding reportdocumenting all embedded test cases such as keywords, partition types, file structures, deleted files, slack space,cross cluster files, etc.When this image is used for validation the corresponding report is available to testers to allow for acomprehensive assessment of the tool being validated. This will significantly improve the efficiency of theevaluation process; particularly phase 3 of the previously described framework.The automated reference set generator tool can also be used by vendors to increase their testing domain withminimal increase in time and cost.CONCLUSION:The proposed evaluation framework utilizes black box testing techniques via reference sets and test cases todetermine the correctness of software applications utilized as forensic computing tools. While the testingtechniques are fully described it is important to describe the process that encompasses the tests to appreciate thebenefit this offers to the forensic computing community.The proposed framework has numerous benefits such as a streamlined process, community input, multipleenvironment testing and a community point of contact. It addresses shortcomings of other similar frameworksand extends their capabilities. Is must be determined if such a framework will function and be a truly completesolution to the needs of the forensic computing community. Whether this framework is the solution or not thegap between tools and their evaluation is widening at an alarming rate.REFERENCES:AAFS. (1996) What is Forensic Science? [online], American Academy of Forensic Sciences,http://www.aafs.org/Armstrong, C. (2003) Developing A Framework for Evaluating Computer Forensic Tools, Curtin University ofTechnologyAS 40061992 Software Test DocumentationEtter, B. (2001) The Forensic Challenges of ECrime. Australasian Centre for Policing Research. |
warc | 201704 | A year ago my colleagues and I in the Program in Physical Therapy piloted a wiki project to thread concepts from earlier and current coursework. We have continued with this project, albeit with some improvements. This project stretches the students to scaffold previously learned information in order to move from recall to application into clinical practice. The objective of the wiki project is to assist the students in recognizing “why” the content is pertinent for their future practice. Because each medical condition is multifaceted, the wiki assists the students to recognize the complexity of the disease process and all of the factors that impact patient care.
For those of you unfamiliar with a wiki, it is a website in which a community of users can add and delete content collaboratively. Wikispaces is a secure dedicated wiki website that remains private until the collaborators are invited by the designer. No one outside of the classroom has access unless invited. For this wiki project, four students are randomly selected into a group and assigned a topic/pathology. The students are required to recall, integrate, and apply information when discussing the pathophysiology, diagnostics tests, pharmacologic treatments, and implications to physical therapists. The students are assessed on content, citations, ease of navigation, and grammar. Students are required to collaborate and integrate key concepts necessary to developing their clinical reasoning utilizing technology.
Last year, I reflected on several barriers, which resulted in the limited success of the project.
These included:
Poor understanding of the purpose or value of the project Poor recall of previously learned concepts Inability to accept imperfection and learn from their errors
After meeting with a focus group and reflecting on comments from a mid-year review by the Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning and on course evaluations, my colleagues and I implemented several changes. The following will reveal lessons learned and the steps we took to improve the project.
We made a number of changes early in the semester to improve student understanding regarding the purpose of the project. These changes included an email sent collectively to the students explicitly stating the purpose of the wiki project. In addition, we developed detailed directions on each of the course webpages and syllabi. On the first day of class, we provided an overview of our expectations and resources to address frequently asked questions from the previous year. We enhanced the rubric to model our expectations for the project. Finally, we provided a sample project with a sample rubric. This sample project illustrated common errors and how points would be deducted. As a result of these changes, we have had fewer questions regarding the purpose or how to complete the project. The projects are improved with enhanced content and details. Students have stated the project assists them in realizing the importance of the course content in becoming better practitioners. Overall, the student feedback reflects a more positive experience with the changes. As one student commented, “Great way for many people to view created ‘web-pages’ and an easy way to work as a group on a project since we have such different schedules.”
To assist with recall, I had several students, who were physiology tutors, and had successfully completed the course, construct study guides or mini Tegrity lectures on previously learned concepts. A study by Cortright et al (2005) found that peer instruction enhances meaningful learning of information and therefore, improves a student’s ability to problem solve. Students who had previously completed the course guided and enhanced the learning of students currently enrolled in the course. In addition, these students, acting as peers, could provide insight on why the content would be meaningful for future coursework and clinical practice.
We attempted to address student imperfections and learning from errors by providing more written feedback. The students receive feedback from each course coordinator through a collaborative rubric on Blackboard Learn. This technique helps to clarify expectations from content experts. In addition, students provide feedback on the collaborative learning experience, which facilitates the development of self, and peer assessment. As students move toward clinicals or employment, it is imperative they develop the skills to receive formative feedback and implement this feedback into their daily practice. Our goal is to have students move from reflection
on action to reflection in action by the time they graduate. This project allows for students to begin the process for critical thinking by giving real-world relevancy in a safe environment.
The wiki project offers flexibility of access and fosters autonomous student learning. Although we utilize wiki spaces for a pathophysiology course, it can be applied to any course content. The implemented changes have guided the students towards greater success in problem solving. This use of technology provides the students a multimodal approach to learning. By modeling expectations and explicitly stating objectives, we can focus students on their development through integration of coursework into current practice.
To read about Kim’s earlier wiki-teaching experiences, please visit her December 2012 blog post, “Helping Students Connect the Dots Using a Wiki” . |
warc | 201704 | It’s hard to believe, but Jay-Z’s
99 Problems turns 10 years old this month. The song, which was ranked #2 on Rolling Stone’s top 100 songs of the ’00s, recounts a real-life anecdote from when the rapper was stopped by police in 1994 while transporting cocaine in a secret compartment in the sunroof of his car.
To commemorate the anniversary, Caleb Mason, author of “Jay-Z’s
99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps“, agreed to provide some insights about his essay and what Jay-Z’s song has to say about the criminal justice system. What inspired your essay? Are you a Jay-Z fan?
“As it says, it was a teaching tool for my class, to help them learn the constitutional rules governing searches. Michael Morse and Jennifer Duval, I believe, suggested it. I’m not an academic and haven’t been teaching for awhile, and have forgotten 99% of their names, sadly, but those two I remember. Duval I haven’t kept up with, but Morse I still talk to. He’s a finalist for a DA position here in LA.”
Are there other examples of things that pop culture gets wrong about criminal justice that you think are important to correct?
“Yes. Lots. Some shows do better than others, of course. I don’t watch enough to really give you a catalogue, but I think the original Law and Order was pretty good on the law. Obviously it compressed the hell out of the process, but at least they gave you those “Trial Part 43” cues so you could infer that there was a lot going on that you didn’t see. I am currently pitching a pilot for a lawyer/doctor-themed drama, and we will get everything right! (My co-author is a doctor.)”
Do you have any plans to write about any more legal-themed lyrics? Maybe do a series?
“Sure! When I was teaching I had some others that I used. And it would certainly be fun to write more essays like this. Which reminds me, you probably don’t know that the one vacation I’ve taken in probably five years happened to be kayaking in Alaska in July of 2012, which happened to be the week the piece went crazy on the internet. I was out of contact for eight days, and then I came back to find I’d missed an invitation to be on Morning Edition, as well as a publishing agent who wanted to talk about a book of law-and-culture essays. Fortune being what it is (fleeting, fickle, whatever), neither one was interested in me anymore when I called back. I shouldn’t say not interested– they were polite and friendly, but I wasn’t the flavor of the month anymore. I did make Lawyer Hottie of the Week or something for one of those Above-the-Law-clone websites, but I’d rather have the book deal. That’s all a long way of saying yes, that sounds like a great idea.”
Did this idea ever make it into your Crim Pro class before publishing? It would have been a difficult exam problem.
“Yes. I collaborated with my class throughout the writing process.”
Now that you are back in practice, have you given the article to any of your clients?
“I don’t do much criminal work now, and what I do is white-collar stuff.”
Have clients come to you for advice after reading the article? You provide your phone number in the final footnote – have you received any phone calls as a result?
“I get a lot of calls. I’m mostly surprised at how positive the feedback is across the political/legal spectrum. One week I had the Salt Lake City FBI field office and the Oklahoma ACLU office both calling asking for permission to use it in trainings. I would estimate that it’s been used in several dozen professional training programs that I’m aware of. I’m in the middle of a trial now, and the other day one of the deputies working the courthouse came up to introduce herself and tell me that they’d used it in her classes at the Academy. I am thrilled and delighted that legal professionals find it useful. That’s the highest praise a piece of legal writing can have.”
Could you give us some traffic stop advice (in the form of a short rap, of course)?
“There’s only one piece of advice, and it’s easy, but people forget it so easily. Keep your mouth shut, and call a lawyer.”
What is the most interesting piece of feedback you’ve received from your article?
“I’ve gotten a ton of feedback on the various state laws governing recording of police-citizen encounters. (You may recall I cautioned that in a number of states, recording the stop might violate state law.) And the federal constitutional law has developed a bit here, too. I think in a couple more years we may have a definitive Supreme Court case on whether you have a First Amendment right to record the activities of police in public (and I think the answer will be yes).”
Any idea if recording of police-citizen encounters is common practice, and whether it causes any controversy? Does the recording have to be concealed or can it be outright in the officer’s face? It seems like that could make for a very awkward situation and could be distracting for police officers.
“See answer above. As for policy, my view is that police work should be recorded. This should be done via body cameras worn by the officers. The public should do it, too, and as noted above, it’s likely a First Amendment right.”
In states that require two-party consent, what is the reasoning for requiring the officer’s consent in a traffic stop to film it and what do you think that reasoning? Furthermore, in those states, if the consent is two-way, does the officer need to get the driver’s consent as well before recording the interaction?
“See above. I suggest openly recording the stop, and if the officer tells you you can’t, make a record of it and get a lawyer.”
In your paper you advise police to arrest for the traffic violation and impound the vehicle. You cite a Supreme Court case that upholds such arrests under the Fourth Amendment. I was just curious if you knew how many states actually had laws in place allowing for arrests for minor traffic violations? If state laws did not address these types of arrests, would the arrests nonetheless be okay since they are constitutional or do they also need to be specifically authorized under a state statute? Do these arrests happen often and has there been any backlash to such laws that you are aware of? It seems like a lot of power in the hands of the police.
“Virginia v. Moore. Supreme Court case. Interesting case. Answers all your questions. Here’s the rule: sure, some states do have state laws specifically prohibiting arrest for minor traffic violations. But unless the state law *also* has an explicit provision specifying a suppression remedy, there’s no implied suppression remedy under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment, says the Court, does not incorporate individual state statutory law. It permits arrest for any offense based on probable cause. So if you are on a legislative committee and want to draft a “no arrest for minor traffic infractions” law, you should put the suppression remedy right there in the law. (Then suppression would come under state law, not the Fourth Amendment. Of course, in a federal prosecution– e.g. a referral to federal court for a gun or drug charge– your perp is still out of luck.)”
You mention probable cause several times throughout the article (in fact, you say that Jay-Z should have replaced the line “you go’n need a warrant for that” with “you’ll need some p.c. for that”) – is there a bare minimum for probable cause? If so, what is it?
“Well, that’s your Crim Pro course, isn’t it?”
Along this same lines, would refusing an officer’s order to step out of the vehicle be enough for probable cause?
“Almost certainly, in front of nine judges out of ten, including me. The next question, though, is “probable cause for what offense”? Is it probable cause to search the car for drugs? Probably not on it’s own.”
You mention racial profiling and biases by law enforcement when it comes to drug busts and prosecutions – what is your opinion of sentencing guidelines that punish crack cocaine offenses (typically done black and other racial minority offenders) harsher than powder cocaine offenses (typically done by white offenders)?
“I’m glad they’re finally going away, albeit slowly. Should have been much quicker, and they should never have been written that way. AG Holder is doing great work on this.”
Did you ever hear from Jay-Z on anyone affiliated with him?
“No, but I’m easy to find.” |
warc | 201704 | Saint Louis University Studies a Medical Food for Alzheimer’s Disease
George Grossberg, M.D.
ST. LOUIS – In a new multicenter research study, Saint Louis University is studying the use of a medical food for Alzheimer’s disease. Investigators want to know if increasing ketone body levels will improve memory and other mental skills.
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive brain disease that impairs orientation, memory, judgment, decision-making, problem solving and activities of daily living.
The illness is currently incurable and is the leading cause of dementia in the elderly, says George Grossberg, M.D., director of geriatric psychiatry at SLU and principal investigator for the study.
There are over five million older adults in the United States with dementia, two-thirds of which have Alzheimer’s disease.
One of the side effects of Alzheimer’s disease is glucose hypo-metabolism – or a glucose deficiency. The brain uses glucose as its primary source of energy for neurons. As Alzheimer’s disease progresses, the glucose hypo-metabolism worsens.
Researchers will test a medical food as a source of ketone bodies, which can substitute for glucose as an energy source for neurons.
“Ketone bodies can supplement glucose in brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, where there is a shortage of glucose for brain cells to utilize,” said Grossberg.
Investigators will enroll men and women who are 66 to 90 years old who have been diagnosed with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease in this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Participants will take a daily dose of the study medication or a placebo.
The safety and effectiveness of the investigational drug will be evaluated through five clinic visits and three phone calls over the course of 26 weeks. All participants must be accompanied to the clinic visits by a caregiver.
After the 26-week study medication period has ended, participants will have the option to take part in the open-label phase – where all participants receive the study medication. The open-label phase will last an additional 26 weeks.
Saint Louis University hopes to enroll 12 participants for the trial and is the only study center in the St. Louis area. A total of 480 patients will participate in the study at approximately 60 different clinics across the country.
All study medications and tests will be provided at no costs to participants. This study is sponsored by Accera, Inc.
To learn more about the study, call Saint Louis University at (314) 977-4900 and reference IRB number 23360. |
warc | 201704 | The great divide over detox
It is midday and the mood in the room is intensifying. Separated by flimsy hospital curtains, three men are battling to push an addiction out of their bodies and the fight is getting physical. Tom moans and mutters as he paws at the wall. Rafik flings his bare legs repeatedly against the metal barriers around his bed. Jonathan tries to haul himself away.
Their detoxification from opiate dependency will peak within the next hour as the drug naltrexone purges the body's sensitivity to heroin or its synthetic substitute, methadone. It is like going cold turkey on fast forward, with all the symptoms of withdrawal packed into a couple of hours.
The men are sedated, so they will remember nothing of this afternoon's struggle in the small treatment room behind an Ultimo medical centre. But they are conscious enough to breathe and swallow independently and respond to instructions.
A doctor and a nurse calm them, repeatedly whispering in their ears, stroking and soothing them, taking their blood pressure and checking vital signs. They lie quietly for a moment, then the fight starts up again.
When they wake they will feel exhausted and wrung out. Insomnia, appetite loss, aches and pains and possibly nausea and diarrhoea, will persist for a week or two. But the soul-tearing agony of withdrawal itself will be behind them. Before they leave, each will have a slow-release pellet of naltrexone implanted in his abdomen. For the next three months it ensures that even if they were to take an opiate they would feel no effect from it.
Long considered the rogue in the addiction treatment pack, rapid opioid detoxification is back. With revised treatment regimes, heavy-duty psychological support to keep the recently detoxed on track, and $150,000 in grants from health minister Tony Abbott, its proponents say it has a new legitimacy.
Certainly its old image was thoroughly tarnished. The last time the technique was in the news was in 1999, when Dr Siva Navaratnam's Liverpool clinic, which had conducted an aggressive publicity campaign, offered to waive its $7000 fee for people referred by an MP. The local state MP, Paul Lynch, complained in Parliament: "Heroin addicts have quite enough difficulties without being exploited in this fashion." The clinic later closed its doors.
The people Ross Colquhoun treats in the Ultimo clinic, Psych n Soul Addiction Treatment and Psychology Services, are far removed from stereotypical street users. At least a third want to be free of methadone - the government-funded maintenance drug for addicted users- rather than illegal heroin. Almost all hold jobs and have family responsibilities.
For one young father recently detoxed at the centre, "not even his wife knows what's going on," says psychologist Colquhoun. "Each of them reports being overwhelmed by an addiction that's hard to beat and has the potential to destroy their lives. There's a whole lot of issues, particularly for men. They find it difficult to confront mental health issues."
Colquhoun says the ethical way to offer rapid detox is to select patients who are highly motivated to succeed, maybe only 10 per cent of those wanting to go drug-free. They must commit to counselling to tackle their addiction psychologically as well as physically, and they need good social support.
They also need to be able to pay. The package of six counselling sessions and the detox costs $3500, plus $1000 for an implant, which is not registered for medical use in Australia and is imported under a waiver.
Counselling costs $150 a session. It is critical because naltrexone wipes out the drug-tolerance patients have built up, so there is no safety net if they start using again. Overdosing at this stage is a real risk, and can be fatal.
Colquhoun says he will soon publish a study of his patients that found 80 per cent of 41 patients given an implant had not returned to drug use six months later, compared with 55 per cent of 42 who took naltrexone orally.
So in the range of treatments for addiction, where does naltrexone fit? "In a museum," says Dr Alex Wodak. "In a glass case, with a panel on the front saying this treatment was popular from this period to this period .. The evidence tells us it's expensive, it's ineffective and it kills people."
Wodak, the director of alcohol and drug services at St Vincent's Hospital, says methadone service providers have a responsibility to help people off the treatment, but only if they are medically, psychologically and socially prepared. "You tell me you've been on methadone for four years and haven't been on heroin for 18 months, and you're back with your husband, and your parents see you again, and you've paid off your debts, and you've got your little girl back, and you think you can manage; then we'll make out a plan and I'll help you to do this - slowly and carefully," he says.
Phasing methadone doses down to zero typically takes three to six months, says Wodak.
Statistics do not say who is in methadone maintenance, or for how long or how successfully. Of about 50,000 in NSW who have ever been treated since its debut in the 1970s, 16,000 are receiving treatment now. The NSW Health Department says 38 per cent of people who start methadone treatment are still in the program a year later. It is apparent that many people do quit methadone; whether this is a happy transition to a drug-free life or through death and disaster is unclear.
According to a pooled analysis of 13 Australian drug treatment trials, conducted by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in 2001, rapid detoxification was the most effective way of getting people off drugs in the short term, but in the longer term many dropped out of naltrexone treatment. By contrast, methadone was judged the most cost-effective therapy and patients were more likely to remain in treatment.
For every 100 people retained on methadone for a year there are 12 fewer robberies, 57 fewer break and enters and 56 fewer vehicle thefts, according to an estimate last year by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
If Abbott's largesse to the naltrexone camp is meant to express disapproval towards services like methadone, which keep people away from crime and unsafe injecting, then Wodak is livid. "What's wrong with the guy? Rapid opioid detoxification has failed as a science - there isn't a study he can quote that shows it works - and it's failed in the market."
But Wodak says drugs policy may be very different from drugs politics.
"Publicly they attack harm-minimisation. Then discreetly, when no one's looking, they're very supportive they've given $70 million over seven years to enhance needle and syringe programs, and that's a wonderful policy. Thank God they didn't walk the talk. I far prefer them being hypocritical than being ideological."
When Dr Andrew Byrne saw Abbott's cheque go to naltrexone, he called the minister's office in dismay. If anyone could use a cash infusion it is Byrne, a Redfern GP whose methadone clients suffer horrendous poverty and social dislocation on top of their addiction.
"The naltrexone implant industry apparently continues unchecked, uncontrolled and largely unreported, despite hundreds of Australians having these implants every year," says Byrne. "It's distressing to think that either it's a good modality that you can't extend [because there is insufficient scientific evidence to convince authorities], or you believe good doctors shouldn't be touching it with a barge pole. We're dealing with a life-threatening condition. It's not the place for amateurs, enthusiasts or people with a good hunch."
That does not move Colquhoun. He detects a lingering view in some quarters that, "if you don't do a hard detox you're not going to appreciate it".
But every patient he treats has made previous attempts to come off drugs - in residential facilities, where the dose is agonisingly scaled down, or alone in bed. Rapid detox, he says, "gives them a positive start to their recovery. They've suffered enough in my view. They deserve an option." |
warc | 201704 | Knowledge can be successfully transmitted and received only by those who recognise its value. If our governments have regarded education as valuable, however, it is usually as a means to some political goal unconnected with knowledge. As a result, our school system, once the best in the world, is now no better than the average developed country for numeracy and literacy.
Many on the left see schooling as a form of social engineering, the purpose of which is to produce a classless society. Equality is the real value, and when knowledge gets in the way (as it often does) it must be downgraded or set aside. Many on the right look to education for the skills that the country needs in order to maintain our economic position in a competitive world. On this view, those children who show no aptitude in hard subjects, or who take up too much classroom time to achieve too little, should not be allowed to hold back the ones whose skills and energies we all supposedly depend upon.
Those two visions have fought each other in the world of politics, and descended from there into the classroom. Teachers meanwhile have been forced to take a back seat, spectators of a quarrel that can only damage the thing that is most important to them, which is the future of the children in their care.
The abolition of the 11-plus examination and the destruction of state grammar schools, the amalgamation of the CSE and O-level examinations, the flight from hard subjects at both GCSE and A-level, and the expansion of the curriculum into areas where opinion rather than knowledge sets the standard: all those changes were motivated by the commitment to equality. Until recently very few reforms stemmed from the desire to support the high-fliers, or to improve the country’s standing in the hard sciences. And right-wingers will say that our standards have declined because the left has triumphed. In Kingsley Amis’s words, more means worse.
But one thought should now be obvious, which is that ideological conflicts have undermined the real motive on which education depends. This has nothing to do with social engineering, of the leftist or the rightist kind. Education depends on the love of knowledge and the desire to impart it. The ones who suffer most from the refusal to recognise that simple truth are the children. Our country is full of people who know things, and children who want to learn things. A successful education system brings the two together, so that knowledge can pass between them. That is how the system grew during the 18th and 19th centuries, and why it was, until the politicians got wind of it, one of our national treasures.
The conclusion to draw is that schools should be liberated from the politicians and given back to the people. The school is a paradigm of the ‘little platoon’ extolled by Edmund Burke. It ought to be a place of free co-operation, in which each member has a shared commitment to the collective purpose. It should be a place of teams and clubs and experiments, of choirs and bands and play-acting, of exploration, debate and inquiry. All those things occur naturally when adults with knowledge come into proximity with children eager for a share of it. It is in the classroom that the relation of trust between teacher and pupil is established, and it is when the school can set its timetable, its budget and its educational goals that an ethos of commitment will emerge.
Of course, it has been acknowledged for two centuries that schools must account for their results to the state — which is the highest legal authority. But accountability to the state does not mean control by the state. Schools thrive in the way that other enterprises thrive, by assuming responsibility for their activities and planting in their members the seeds of a shared commitment.
For this reason we should surely welcome the present government’s policy of creating schools outside the control of local authorities. A free school can settle its own curriculum and contracts of employment. It can open the way for those with unused knowledge to impart it in the classroom, and for volunteers to help with extra-curricular activity. Anyone can apply to set up such a school, provided they have sufficient educational and financial expertise in their team, and the willingness to make a substantial time commitment. Parents, local businesses and volunteers can all join in the enterprise, whose goal is to rescue children from disadvantage and once again to open the channels through which the social and intellectual capital of one generation can flow into the brains and bodies of the next.
The educationists complain that these free schools provide a free education to the middle classes, and that they do so by withdrawing the more able children from the state schools on which the poorer social strata depend. You still hear this kind of complaint from the Labour front benches, including from the mouth of education spokesman Tristram Hunt who, as the Oxford-educated son of a lord, can just about maintain the fiction that he is not middle class. But it has no relation to the realities.
Free schools take in children of all abilities and backgrounds. I have visited Greenwich Free School, which is in a deprived area, with 30 per cent of pupils on free school meals and the characteristic ethnic mix of an inner London borough. I encountered the same atmosphere of co-operation between pupils and teachers. To set up a free school in such an area, with the goal of taking children of all abilities, is to take an undeniable risk, and it is too early to say whether the risk has paid off. Nevertheless, the venture has the support of parents in the neighbourhood, with seven applicants for every place. And touring the school with two little girls who wanted me to see into every classroom, I felt the vibrations of their manifest joy that this place with real lessons, real teachers and real after-school activities had come to rescue them. And let’s be clear: in our inner cities, rescue is what education means.
My guides bombarded me with questions about my own career. The ability to present oneself freely and engagingly to a person with useful information is part of what these two children had learned. They had absorbed from their school its fundamental meaning, which is that we live and prosper by taking responsibility for our lives. For too long our education system has been opposed to that fundamental principle, regimenting the classroom, the curriculum and the ethos of our schools according to a frankly antiquated idea of social progress. When schools have become locked into goals that are both futile and unachievable, it is surely time to liberate them, to give them back to the parents, teachers and children whose property they are.
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warc | 201704 | Tag Archives: Essay Questions August 9, 2016
While answering only one essay question for your Darden MBA application essay may seem simple, it requires discipline to highlight all of the important parts of your profile for the admissions committee in one short …
While answering only one essay question for your Darden MBA application essay may seem simple, it requires discipline to highlight all of the important parts of your profile for the admissions committee in one short essay. Writing a successful essay with such limited space requires you to focus only on your most compelling attributes.
Think about the other areas of your application and what they cover. Your academic potential should be highlighted through GMAT or GRE scores and your academic transcripts, leadership and professional accomplishments should come through clearly from your recommendations, and finally your essay is a chance to outline your personal qualities.
When considering which personal qualities to highlight in this essay, consider that leadership is crucial to future Darden MBAs. Your ability to work well within a team of peers is also important to Darden, a school with a small, tight-knit community.
Darden, similar to HBS, is devoted to the case method of teaching business subjects. Learn more about the school by visiting the Darden website, attending events and speaking with current students and alumni.
MBA Application Essay Question: Describe the most important professional feedback you have received and how you responded to this feedback. (500 words)
In this question Darden is seeking to understand how you take feedback and how you process and learn from feedback. Feedback is often the first stage to grow and develop as a professional and as a leader. Learning to take all feedback – both positive and critical – and examining and incorporating the lessons from that feedback into your development is a sign of maturity.
As you describe the professional feedback you will want to set the stage for the feedback by describing your relationship with the person who gave you the feedback and any background facts. Take the time to describe how you felt while receiving the feedback, and don’t be afraid to talk about having uncomfortable feelings about it.
It’s a normal reaction to feel threatened by criticism, which is often what professional feedback is perceived as. If the feedback was positive make sure you can use the story to demonstrate development and growth.
If you can’t think of the most important moment of feedback you have received, think about working backwards from a professional accomplishment you are proud of. As you think about the areas where you have excelled you may find that the trigger was a piece of important advice or feedback from a manager, peer or customer.
Make sure your feedback story enhances the overall package of your application. This essay is one of your few opportunities to show how you think, what your leadership approach is, and how you improve as a result of input from other people. Think about the situations that showcased your best performance at work, or that taught you something about your interests or future career goals.
Because you have only one essay question to present yourself, make sure you have a trusted reader to tell you if you are effectively communicating why you are going to be a strong leader who deserves a spot in the UVA Darden MBA class.
Looking for perspective in your approach to your Darden MBA application? Contact us to discuss how Stacy Blackman Consulting can help.
August 2, 2016
Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management is a close-knit community that values a diverse community and philanthropy. At the same time, diversity in experience, background and thought is important to the Kellogg admissions committee. Do …
Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management is a close-knit community that values a diverse community and philanthropy. At the same time, diversity in experience, background and thought is important to the Kellogg admissions committee.
Do your research on the programs, activities, clubs, classes and professors at Kellogg as you approach your essays. While you are reading and conversing with students and alumni, envision how you will contribute to the community.
Kellogg has two mandatory video essays as part of the application process. After you submit your essays you will receive the questions, one of which will focus on Why Kellogg and another will be a general “getting to know you” question. The video essay is an opportunity for the admissions committee to see the person behind the accomplishments you will describe.
Prepare as if you would for an interview, drafting the topics you want to cover and practicing your presentation. The video should accurately portray your personality and demeanor, and extensive preparation will help you be comfortable and be yourself.
Video essays can be daunting, and Stacy Blackman Consulting has developed customized preparation to help you practice for this important component of the application and provide our expert feedback. Contact us to learn more about how we can prepare you for the entire Kellogg application.
REQUIRED ESSAYS Essay 1: Leadership and teamwork are integral parts of the Kellogg experience. Describe a recent and meaningful time you were a leader. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn? (450 words)
This essay focuses on leadership and teamwork using a behavioral essay framework. By seeing the details about exactly what you did and said in your leadership story, Kellogg admissions will understand how you are likely to perform in the future.
When approaching this essay spend some time on set up to explain the background, and then use the majority of the space describing specifically what you did, thought, felt and how you behaved.
As the question specifically asks about challenges, it will be useful to show how you have overcome difficulty as a leader or learned from a tough situation. Don’t be nervous about showing weakness here. Every leader has to learn and develop, and willingness to be open to feedback and improve will be an asset to your profile.
Do not neglect mentioning teamwork, which is a core value of Kellogg’s culture. Your leadership experience is likely part of a team at work or in an extracurricular activity, and sensitivity to teamwork and collaboration in any leadership story demonstrates maturity and people skills.
Essay 2: Pursuing an MBA is a catalyst for personal and professional growth. How have you grown in the past? How do you intend to grow at Kellogg? (450 words)
This essay question is a hybrid of a classic career goals essay and a personal essay. Kellogg is interested in candidates who are able to integrate their personal and professional goals and show how a Kellogg MBA will serve both sides of life.
When you describe professional and personal growth in the past, make sure it is relevant to your plans to pursue an MBA at Kellogg. The story you tell in this essay should provide insight into your decision to pursue an MBA and allude to your future goals. Because this isn’t a question about your entire career thus far you can choose just one or two main experiences to share.
The topic of this essay should also be an experience that did show growth over time. Something like starting in an entry level position at work and progressing into a management role comes to mind easily, but also consider something like developing leadership skills over time and personal investment in your career.
You could also focus on a passion outside of work that has developed over time and led to personal growth.
Dual-degree applicants: For applicants to the MMM or JD-MBA dual degree programs, please explain why that program is right for you. (250 words)
Doing your research on Kellogg MBA’s academics and resources will help you answer the question about why you need a dual degree to achieve your goals. If you are applying to the MMM program, you’ll have to show how the degree will prepare you more effectively for your career goals than the MBA alone.
Be able to articulate what is different about the Kellogg MMM program as compared to the MBA and other joint degrees. Know the classes you want to take, the professors you hope to work for, and how the MMM experience will be an asset in your future career.
Similarly, the JD-MBA at Kellogg is a highly competitive admissions process and will require a very clear explanation of what you will do with both degrees after school. Consider the unique attributes of the Kellogg JD-MBA program as compared to others, and also why you specifically need both a JD and an MBA to achieve your career goals.
Re-Applicants Only: Since your previous application, what steps have you taken to strengthen your candidacy? (250 word limit)
In answering this question make sure you provide tangible evidence that you have improved the overall package you are submitting this year. Some of the most tangible improvements are a stronger GMAT score or grades from new quantitative classes you attended since the last time you applied.
Other steps that you can describe include a promotion at work, new volunteer activities, or increased responsibility at work or in your activities. If you don’t have something tangible and external to report, it’s reasonable to discuss how your career goals have changed or your personal aspirations have been refined as you revamped your applications.
Additional Information (Optional) If needed, use this section to briefly describe any extenuating circumstances (e.g. unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, inconsistent or questionable academic performance, etc.) (no word count)
If there are any areas of concern, this is the correct place to address them. Strike an upbeat tone here and avoid excuses. Explain your issue clearly and focus most of the essay on the correction for the issue. For example, if you had a disciplinary issue in college, spend most of the essay demonstrating that you learned from the experience and have been an ideal citizen ever since.
Low GPA issues should be explained here, and if there is a grade of C or below on your transcript the admissions committee will want to know why and feel comfortable it is an outlier in your overall academic record. For academic questions make sure you emphasize your improved performance either later in your college career or in subsequent work or classes since college.
Image credit: Mike Willis (CC BY-ND 2.0)
August 2, 2016
The set of essays for admission to UC Berkeley Haas School of Business is a holistic exploration of personal to professional topics. A clear understanding of your application strategy, particularly your career goals and strengths/weaknesses, …
The set of essays for admission to
UC Berkeley Haas School of Business is a holistic exploration of personal to professional topics. A clear understanding of your application strategy, particularly your career goals and strengths/weaknesses, is the key to putting together a cohesive application. While challenging, this is also an opportunity to demonstrate several different aspects of your personality to the admissions committee.
Note that Haas describes four defining principles for the community: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself. Which of these principles do you identify with? Make sure you have strong examples that illustrate how you have demonstrated these principles and use them in the following essay set.
Stacy Blackman Consulting has successfully coached applicants to the Haas MBA program for 15 years. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you set a winning application strategy.
REQUIRED ESSAYS Essay 1: If you could choose one song that expresses who you are, what is it and why? (250 words maximum)
This is a creative and open-ended question that invites you to show your personality as you open this set of essays. Take the opportunity to think about your favorite music and what song most represents you.
Perhaps it’s a song that you grew up listening to with your family, that reminds you where you came from. Maybe it’s a song that helps you feel optimistic about your future. Music often evokes emotion, and the essay should capture that feeling and describe why it is meaningful to you.
Essay 2: Please respond to one of the following prompts: (250 words maximum)
All three of the potential essay prompts for Essay 2 deal with change, growth and transformation. This essay is seeking to understand how you handle challenges to your own status quo, and what you learn as a result. Flexibility, curiosity and the ability to handle change would be positive personal qualities to demonstrate with whatever example you choose.
Describe an experience that has fundamentally changed the way you see the world and how it transformed you.
If you decide to answer this question think about the moments that have truly changed you. One approach is to think through transitions. Perhaps the transition from high school to college showed you a different way of life, or the transition to working from college exposed you to new people and new ideas.
Traveling for the first time outside your home country may have been another transition. If none of those transitions lead to a topic for this essay you can delve into the smaller incidents in your life. A friendship, family experience, or volunteer opportunity could have opened your eyes to something new about yourself and the world.
Once you have selected a topic for this essay you will need to explain how you were transformed. What was your attitude like before the experience and what are you like now? Was the transformation internal or did you change how you approached other people? Ideally you learned something from this transformation and explaining that lesson learned would be a strong finish.
Describe a time when you were challenged by perspectives different from your own and how you responded.
The brainstorming process for this question can be similar to the option above. Consider the transitions in life when you have been in a new environment or culture that didn’t quite fit with your past experiences.
Those could be the moments when you were exposed to new perspectives and were forced to respond. Another possible scenario would be a new person introduced to your school or workplace, one who brought a new perspective or culture.
While it is normal to be taken aback or threatened by new perspectives, ideally you were open minded and tried to understand and learn through this experience. Describe the experience, your initial reaction, and then use a significant portion of the essay to describe what you learned and how you changed as a result.
Describe a difficult decision you have made and why it was challenging.
Difficult decisions are often a moment to reflect again upon your values. What were the stakes of your decision and why did you struggle to make a clear choice? Perhaps you were choosing between priorities in your life, family or work, where to study for university or what career path to pursue. No matter what the decision was it will be important to talk a bit about your process for making it. Why did you choose one option over another and what did you learn about yourself?
Essay 3: Tell us about your career plans. How have your past experiences prepared you to achieve these goals? How will Berkeley-Haas help you? (500 words maximum)
This is a short career goals essay and asks you to describe your path to business school along with your future goals. As you describe your path you don’t need to recite your resume here – rather highlight the key experiences that will be relevant in your future career. Think about the cover letter you would write to explain your background for a desired next job, and tailor your approach accordingly.
Describe your future goals in a succinct manner, considering what aspects of your background to explain in the “path” section that will support your goals development.
Be specific about why the Haas School of Business is the right program to pursue your goals as well. As you consider past experiences and your future goals you will be able to see what you want to gain from the Haas experience to fill any gaps.
If you have an advertising background and want to become a brand manager you’ll likely need classes in operations and finance to understand the analytical side of brand management.
Other goals will require specific skills gained from an MBA and your own unique background will inform how you take advantage of the Haas experience.
Make sure you have determined exactly what courses make sense for your career goals and the programs and clubs that you will participate in to reach your personal and professional goals. Thorough school research will be invaluable in approaching this question.
OPTIONAL ESSAY Use this essay to share information that is not presented elsewhere in the application, for example: Explanation of employment gaps or academic aberrations Quantitative abilities For re-applicants, improvements to your candidacy
Haas recommends using this space to address any information that was not adequately covered elsewhere, specifically suggesting that any employment gaps or lack of apparent quantitative skills be covered.
A short gap between school and a secured job is not necessary to explain, but an unexplained gap of several months between two jobs should be addressed. If your resume has significant employment gaps you should describe what you did between jobs in this space. Ideally you can point to additional education, training, volunteering or traveling that you engaged in while unemployed.
If you have a strong quantitative background like an engineering or hard sciences degree, or you work in a quantitative field like finance, it is likely unnecessary to further explain your quantitative skills.
Otherwise, you may want to take one or two examples to demonstrate that you have an analytical mind and can take a quantitative approach to problem solving and evaluating data. As the question specifically asks you not to focus on the grades on your transcript, use this space to describe projects at work, additional post-graduate coursework, or your plans to strengthen your quant skills before you enroll at Haas.
Reapplicants can describe hard improvements to your candidacy such as an improved GMAT score, new grades from quantitative classes, or a promotion. Other improvements might include refined career goals and additional leadership responsibilities at work or within a volunteer activity.
July 26, 2016
UCLA Anderson School of Management is a small and close-knit school with particular focus on entrepreneurship, entertainment, real estate and other major industries in Southern California. While UCLA has a dominant position in the region it …
UCLA Anderson School of Management is a small and close-knit school with particular focus on entrepreneurship, entertainment, real estate and other major industries in Southern California. While UCLA has a dominant position in the region it is also a nationally known program that will position you well in whatever career you pursue.
Anderson is highly selective about the composition of each MBA class, therefore your fit with the values and principles of the school is of primary importance. When approaching this set of essays make sure you understand what Anderson will do for you and what you plan to bring to the community.
We have helped countless applicants achieve their UCLA Anderson dreams. Contact us to learn how Stacy Blackman Consulting can help you.
FIRST-TIME APPLICANTS—ONE REQUIRED ESSAY: We believe that the best results are achieved when you share success, think fearlessly and drive change. With this in mind, what are your goals at UCLA Anderson and in your short-term and long-term career? (750 words maximum)
He also elaborates on the three phrases in the video and essay question: “At UCLA Anderson, three principles form our foundation. First, we SHARE SUCCESS within our community, which is to say we collaborate to achieve our goals. While working together, we THINK FEARLESSLY to go past the obvious, to go around the obstacles — with our sights set on making a real impact. And with the opportunity for impact comes our desire to DRIVE CHANGE as a result of all that we do.”
Thorough school research will provide examples you can use to describe why these values and principles drive your goals while attending UCLA Anderson. Your career goals should be examined through the filter of Anderson’s values and how you plan to use those values in your post-Anderson life.
When structuring this essay consider telling one or two pivotal stories to illuminate who you are. UCLA is looking for personal expression in this essay, and to understand how you are different from other applicants. Consider the turning points or moments that triggered reflection for you.
Have you experienced a significant personal setback? What is your family background? Have you lived outside your home country? When did you face a turning point or make a big decision about your career? What were some of your proudest accomplishments? What moments have called upon your need to collaborate, lead or innovate?
For the second part of the essay briefly explain what you plan to do immediately after graduation, and then what you want to accomplish over the long-term with your career. A career path that focuses on demonstrated passions and interests throughout your life is going to be most compelling as you write this essay and each section should bridge seamlessly into the next.
For the part of the essay focusing on UCLA Anderson’s part in your plans, UCLA specifically requests citing specific classes, professors and programs. To express a bit more on the personal side it will be helpful to include the social and extracurricular aspects that attract you to the small and close-knit experience at Anderson. Be specific as you discuss the clubs and conferences that are unique to the UCLA MBA.
OPTIONAL ESSAY: The following essay is optional. No preference is given in the evaluation process to applicants who submit an optional essay. Please note that we only accept written essays. Are there any special circumstances or life experiences that you wish to share with the Admissions Committee? Please use your best judgement on what is pertinent to share. (250 words maximum)
It is important to focus on explanations rather than excuses in this essay. Potential extenuating circumstances may be a very low GPA, academic probation or using a recommender other than your current supervisor.
Clearly explain the situation, and if it is a situation from the past, explain why you have changed. Providing evidence that you will not repeat the actions in question will help to solidify your answer.
RE-APPLICANTS—ONE REQUIRED ESSAY: Reapplicants who applied for the class entering in 2015 or 2016 are required to complete the following essay:Please describe your career progress since you last applied and ways in which you have enhanced your candidacy. Include updates on short-term and long-term career goals, as well as your continued interest in UCLA Anderson. (750 words maximum)
If you are a recent re-applicant this essay gives you the opportunity to highlight improvements since your last application. You have room to add other “ways in which you have improved your candidacy” such as an improved GMAT score, academic updates or extracurricular activities. While most MBA programs are focused on quantitative improvements to your profile, keep in mind that here UCLA Anderson is expressly asking for an update on your career.
July 19, 2016
The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth has a small student body and a rural location, combined with world-class faculty and academic focus. As you approach your Dartmouth Tuck MBA application it will be important …
The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth has a small student body and a rural location, combined with world-class faculty and academic focus. As you approach your Dartmouth Tuck MBA application it will be important to consistently show how you will fit into the school values of leadership, teamwork and collaboration and bring your own unique qualities and experiences to the community. This revised set of essays focuses on global approach as a significant value as well.
The Tuck admissions blog offers the following advice: “There are no right or wrong answers. We encourage applicants to limit the length of their responses to 500 to 700 words for Essay #1 and 500 words for Essay #2. Please double-space your responses.”
Stacy Blackman Consulting has worked with many successful Tuck applicants, contact us to learn more about the customized assistance we can provide for your application.
Essay One (Required): Tuck educates wise leaders who better the world of business. What are your short- and long-term goals? How will a Tuck MBA enable you to become a wise leader with global impact?
Tuck has updated the career goals essay to include a question about your global vision and impact on the world of business. Consistent with a standard MBA career goals essay you must also outline your short- and long-term career goals. Your short-term goals are the aspirations you have for your job immediately after graduation, while your long-term goals may be 10 or 20 years after you complete your MBA.
As you consider how you will make a global impact in your career, you should incorporate “Why Tuck” as a crucial element. Make sure you have researched the school’s programs and determined how your education will help you achieve your goals.
For example, Tuck has multiple global business programs, including a class where you can consult to an international company and short Global Insight Expeditions. By reaching out to current students and alumni you can learn more about the experiences and classes that would inform your development as a global leader.
Essay Two (Required): As a diverse and global community, our students arrive at the same place from many different paths. Tell us about an experience in which you have had to live, learn and/or work with other people very different from yourself. What challenges and/or opportunities did you experience, how did you respond, and what did you learn about yourself as a result?
The new required Essay Two also seeks to understand your global awareness and ability to learn and grow from those with different backgrounds. This essay prompt is open ended and allows you to choose an example from work or from an extracurricular experience. Think broadly about your background and when you have expanded your world by interacting with someone very different.
A compelling narrative will demonstrate learning and growing through interacting with others. Think about a time when you were truly challenged by a person or group of people different from yourself, and how you resolved the experience.
What did you learn about yourself and others? Interacting with your Tuck classmates may challenge you in a similar way, and showing a growth mentality would be attractive to the admissions committee.
This essay is not only an opportunity to discuss your ability to learn from others, you can also show that you are a leader in the Tuck tradition. The Tuck School of Business definition of leadership is inherently collaborative. Team based experiences are preferable, and as you describe working with someone different from yourself you can likely work in a strong leadership example.
Essay Three (Optional): Please provide any additional insight or information that you have not addressed elsewhere that may be helpful in reviewing your application (e.g., unusual choice of evaluators, weaknesses in academic performance, unexplained job gaps or changes, etc.). Complete this question only if you feel your candidacy is not fully represented by this application.
This is your opportunity to discuss any perceived weaknesses in your application such as low GPA or gaps in your work experience. When approaching a question of this nature, focus on explanations rather than excuses and explain what you have done since the event you are explaining to demonstrate your academic ability or management potential.
You could potentially use this space to add something new that was not covered in the previous essays or in the application, resume or recommendations, however use your judgment about the topics as Tuck asks that you only complete this question if you “feel your candidacy is not fully represented by this application.”
Essay Four (Required from Reapplicants): How have you strengthened your candidacy since you last applied? Please reflect on how you have grown personally and professionally.
If you are re-applying to Tuck this essay is the place for you to showcase any developments since your last application. Ideally you have concrete improvements like a stronger GMAT score, grades from business classes, or a promotion. Even if nothing quantitative has changed in your profile you likely have developed more leadership activities or progressed in your job responsibilities.
If you are struggling to think of any clear improvements you can describe refined goals or deeper thinking about your future that has led you to apply again to Tuck. Demonstrating growth in maturity or introspection can be a huge improvement to your application and absolutely should be highlighted.
July 12, 2016
Duke Fuqua is a community focused MBA program that seeks “leaders of consequence.” Fuqua sees a new business environment, where impeccable ethics, a disruptive attitude and other personal attributes are more and more important. This …
Duke Fuqua is a community focused MBA program that seeks “leaders of consequence.” Fuqua sees a new business environment, where impeccable ethics, a disruptive attitude and other personal attributes are more and more important.
This set of essays provides significant room to explain who you are and why Fuqua is the right next step for you, both personally and professionally.
In this essay set you are asked for 25 new facts, to outline your career goals and explain why Fuqua to round out your resume, academic profile and recommendations.
As always, it is important to demonstrate that you know Duke Fuqua well and are a strong fit with the program. Starting your research and personal networking now will put you in a solid position to prepare the most specific and effective essays.
Stacy Blackman Consulting can help you prepare a compelling, individualized strategy to approach your Duke Fuqua application this year, contact us to learn more.
REQUIRED SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS Instructions: Answer all 3 of the following questions. For each question, respond in 500 characters only (the equivalent of about 100 words). 1. What are your short-term goals, post-MBA? 2. What are your long-term goals? 3. Life is full of uncertainties, and plans and circumstances can change. As a result, navigating a career requires you to be adaptable. Should the short-term goals that you provided above not materialize what alternative directions have you considered?
This career goals essay asks for your plan in three parts. First, you should describe what you plan to do immediately after your MBA. Then you’ll explain the long-term vision for your career. Finally, Duke admits that many career paths are forged through circumstance, and asks you for your Plan B.
Think big picture and focus on the overall story trajectory. What would be the most logical (and interesting) progression from your current skill set and MBA education? How will your next step flow from the combination of those experiences? And your alternative path ideally isn’t a massive departure, but simply shows the areas you could see yourself exploring if your primary plan doesn’t materialize.
For example, perhaps you are focused on becoming a marketing executive within the consumer packaged goods industry, such as General Mills. If you don’t find the suitable position after Duke, maybe you would consider marketing for a retailer, such as Target, as your alternate career path because marketing is still the function you are interested in developing a career within.
Alternatively, you may have two disparate interests and want to consider both of them. Perhaps your Plan A is to join a strategy consulting firm after graduation, but if you don’t receive a spot among your top choices you would think about co-founding a start up as another possible path. Think about your range of interests and go from there.
Because you have limited space, you’ll have to boil your plans down in a clear statement of what you plan to do, but ideally any plans are supported by the information provided in your resume, recommendations, and other essays.
FIRST REQUIRED ESSAY: 25 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF Instructions: Present your response in list form, numbered 1 to 25. Some points may be only a few words, while others may be longer. Your complete list should not exceed 2 pages. The “Team Fuqua” spirit and community is one of the things that sets The Duke MBA experience apart, and it is a concept that extends beyond the student body to include faculty, staff, and administration. When a new person joins the Admissions team, we ask that person to share with everyone in the office a list of “25 Random Things About Yourself.” As an Admissions team, we already know the new hire’s professional and academic background, so learning these “25 Random Things” helps us get to know someone’s personality, background, special talents, and more. In this spirit, the Admissions Committee also wants to get to know you–beyond the professional and academic achievements listed in your resume and transcript. You can share with us important life experiences, your likes/dislikes, hobbies, achievements, fun facts, or anything that helps us understand what makes you who you are. Share with us your list of “25 Random Things” about YOU.
This essay is entirely open ended and you can cover topics spanning your personal background, work experiences, values and hobbies. If you have a particularly interesting story in any of those areas, this is the place to tell that story.
Whatever areas you choose to highlight, make sure you are following the admissions committee’s advice to share what makes you a dynamic, multi-dimensional person.
Coming up with 25 random things to list in this essay may seem daunting at first. To jumpstart your creative process you may want to brainstorm with friends and family about what is most interesting and memorable about you. Or keep a notebook with you to record thoughts as you go about work and personal activities.
Once you have 25 random things, how do you structure your list? There’s a few possible ways to proceed: chronologically, chunking the list into themes, or even alphabetically.
You may want to organize the list so that it builds from shorter to longer items, or you may want to intersperse some of the 25 random things that require a paragraph explanation between sets of things that are easy to understand in one sentence.
Structuring the list to make it easy to read and follow will be appreciated, but resist the urge to package the list too perfectly. Content is always the most important factor and remember that the primary purpose of this essay/list is to show Duke your multi-faceted life and interests.
SECOND REQUIRED ESSAY Instructions: Your response should be no more than 2 pages in length. Fuqua prides itself on cultivating a culture of engagement. Our students enjoy a wide range of student-led organizations that provide opportunities for leadership development and personal fulfillment, as well as an outlet for contributing to society. Our student-led government, clubs, centers, and events are an integral part of the student culture and are vital to providing you with a range of experiential learning and individual development experiences.
Based on your understanding of the Fuqua culture, how do you see yourself engaging in and contributing to our community, outside of the classroom?
The best essays will be both specific and personal, while demonstrating you have done your homework on Fuqua. While everyone benefits from a diverse alumni network, what specifically do you want to give and receive from your classmates?
If you describe clubs and classes you are attracted to, also offer specific examples from your past experiences to show your consistent personal or professional passions.
Your fit with the program is crucial, and therefore you must exhibit the qualities Duke is seeking as well. The Duke MBA program is especially interested in your role within the community, and will place significant weight on this factor. If you research thoroughly and are specific, you should be able to clearly demonstrate why you are going to be strong contributor and teammate.
This essay can also be a place to talk about how the Duke MBA fits into your career goals. What do you know now that will be enhanced through your MBA education? And what crucial aspects of the skill set required for your future career will be augmented by attending Duke?
However, the main focus should be your community involvement and how you plan to improve the experience of others at Duke both in and outside the classroom.
Optional Essay If you feel there are circumstances of which the Admissions Committee should be aware, please explain them in an optional essay (such as unexplained gaps in work, choice of recommenders, inconsistent or questionable academic performance). • Do NOT upload additional essays nor additional recommendations in this area of the application. • The Optional Essay is intended to provide the Admissions Committee with insight into your circumstances only. • Limit your response to one page.
As with most optional essays, the Duke MBA asks that you use this space only to explain extenuating circumstances. If you have a low GPA, lack a recommendation from your current supervisor or have gaps in work history this is the correct place to address those issues. If you do not have any of those areas to explain, it’s best to skip this question and focus only on the previous three essays.
When approaching any concerns about your background in the optional essay it’s important to focus on recent performance, whether academic or professional, and what such performance demonstrates about your ability.
Your goal is to remove questions from your application and to address in a factual manner any information the admissions committee needs to know to fairly evaluate your application. The essay should convey, in a positive manner, that you know there could be questions about your background but you have thoroughly improved in any areas necessary. |
warc | 201704 | It said lower-income and rural drivers are losing mobility faster than better-off motorists as motoring taxes rise.
The AA is now urging Chancellor George Osborne to revert to the old system of setting annual fuel duty, which takes into account current economic and social conditions and not the "automatic turning of the screw based on inflation".
The AA said that earlier AA/Populus surveys of AA members showed that less well-off drivers had suffered more since the price of fuel peaked at 137.43p a litre for petrol, with diesel at 143.04p. Petrol has since remained within 3p of that record.
A May 2011 survey of 11,548 members showed that those cutting back on car use, other spending or both rose dramatically with lower income.
Also, a poll of nearly 16,000 in July this year "exposed the knife-edge that lower-income drivers endure budgeting on a set amount on fuel".
Of the 28% who say they spend a set amount on fuel, the impact of pump prices which were 16p-18p a litre higher than a year before showed it was the poorer motorists who were being hit the most.
In a letter to Mr Osborne, AA president Edmund King said: "The private car is, for most people, a necessity not a luxury. It is their means to a job, healthcare, doing the shopping, visiting relatives and friends, and also for improving the quality of their lives.
"We were disappointed that the January fuel duty rise went ahead at a time of rising oil prices and higher VAT. The AA firmly believes that business and households should be given a break from the annual cycle of fuel duty increases."
Mr King continued: "Motorists do not understand the logic of high fuel duty rises which further increase RPI and force demand down at a difficult time for family and business budgets which need mobility to stay afloat. Although we fully recognise the need to balance the books we also believe the time has come for activity to be stimulated through lower pump prices."Reuse content |
warc | 201704 | If you experience alcohol dependency, you may delude yourself into thinking that you’re just consuming alcohol. The fact is that it is alcohol addiction that’s consuming you, your hard earned money, time, energy and most importantly your health.
Alcohol dependency means addiction to consuming alcoholic beverages in-spite of the knowledge of their detrimental physical and social effects. Doctors define alcohol dependency as a disease which disables somebody from controlling the urge to take alcohol. Alcohol dependency, therefore, implies a tendency for addictive consumption of alcohol and a failure to acknowledge its unwanted effects. Alcohol Abuse Many people consume alcohol, have issues with it but suppress its characteristics and symptoms. This is termed as “alcohol abuse”, classified as indulging in excessive drinking of alcohol without completely losing control over, although, becoming totally dependent on it like an alcohol addict, is not necessarily the case. A Widespread Problem Based on the estimates of the National Council of Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, around 18 million People in America abuse alcohol. More than 100,000 American die of alcohol generated health issues. Half of road accident deaths are caused because of driving under the influence of alcohol. Symptoms Of Alcohol Addiction Even the hardened alcohol drinkers quite often refuse to admit they’re addicts. They, therefore, try to drink stealthily, keeping their quota of drinks hidden in unlikely places round the house, place of work or in the car. Once they start drinking, they find it difficult to control their urge to drink more, and will begin gulping down liquor greedily, while ordering “doubles”.
They tend to forget their social promises and conversations, termed as “blacking out”. They lose their interest in healthy entertainment, activities and hobbies which would normally bring them pleasure. They expose Pavlovian symptoms as their drinking time nears, and their desire for drink becomes irresistible as the minutes pass by.
They become irritable if they’re denied their daily doze of alcohol. Alcoholics, generally, get into legal disputes with their relatives, employers and financiers. They build a kind of tolerance towards alcoholic beverages, and the more they drink it, the more they want it to really feel its effects.
Physical Effects Of Alcohol Addiction Alcohol addiction or physical dependence on alcohol takes place gradually. The rise in intake of alcohol alters the balance in brain chemicals such as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which impedes its impulsiveness while glutamate excites the nerves.
Alcohol also elevates the dopamine level in the brain which is associated with the excitable aspects of drinking alcohol. Too much and continued intake of alcohol affects the status of the chemicals by either raising or depleting them. This process causes the body to crave for alcohol to restore the enjoyable feelings and to avoid the negative feelings without it.
Contributory Factors – There are many other factors that contribute to the problem of alcohol dependency, such as…
Hereditary – Dependence on alcohol may be genetic, so it may be in somebodies genes making them vulnerable to alcohol addiction.
Emotional Causes – Some times high levels of stress, anxiety, tension or emotional trauma compel a person to look for diversion in alcohol. Certain stress hormones are meant to promote alcoholism, so people take to drinking to fight out the mental turmoil.
Psychological reasons – Inferiority complex, low self respect or acute depression may lead a person to take to alcoholic drinking to distract his negative obsessions in life. |
warc | 201704 | Scheduling is a fundamental operating systems function. Almost all computer resources are scheduled before use. CPU is one of the primary computer resources uses scheduling to design the processes in an operating system. The operating system can make the computer more productive by switching the CPU among processes called CPU scheduler.
a) Explain what is CPU scheduler? State FOUR (4) goals of the CPU scheduler in an operating system.
CPU scheduler is to selects from among the processes in memory ready to execute and allocates the CPU to one of them. CPU scheduling decisions may take place when a process:
• Switches from running to waiting state (by sleep).
• Switches from running to ready state (by yield).
• Switches from waiting to ready (by an interrupt).
• Terminates (by exit).
Four goals of the CPU scheduler:
1. Utilization and efficiency – to keep the CPU as busy as possible all of the time with useful work. 2. Turnaround time - from the time of submission to time of completion, minimize the time batch users must wait for output. 3. Response time - time from submission till the first response is produced. A scheduler should minimize response time for interactive users. 4. Fairness – to make sure each process gets a fair share of the CPU and no process can suffer indefinite postponement.
b) Briefly describe some important concepts related to scheduling algorithms that exist in several operating systems below:
1. First-Come, First-Served Scheduling (FCFS)
In First Come First Served the job that has been waiting the longest is served next, simply queues processes in the order that they arrive in the ready queue. • Since context switches only occur upon process termination, and no reorganization of the process queue is required, scheduling overhead is minimal. • Throughput can be low, since long processes can hog the CPU • Turnaround time, waiting time and response time can be low for the same reasons above • No prioritization occurs, thus this system has trouble meeting process deadlines. • The lack of prioritization does permit every process to eventually complete, hence no starvation. 2. Shortest-Job-First Scheduling (SJF)
• Shortest Job First scheduling algorithm is a nonpreemptive scheduling algorithm that chooses the job that will execute the shortest amount of time. • Maintain the ready queue in order of increasing job lengths. When a job comes in, insert it in the ready queue based on its length. When current process is done, pick the one at the head of the queue and run it.
3. Priority Scheduling
• In priority scheduling, processes are allocated to the CPU on the basis of an externally assigned priority. The key to the performance of priority scheduling is choosing priorities for the processes. • Scheduling method where at all times the highest priority process is assigned the resource. • Allows CPU to be given preferentially to important processes. • Scheduler adjusts dispatcher priorities to achieve the desired overall priorities for the processes, e.g. one process gets 90% of the CPU.
4. Round-Robin Scheduling (RR)
• Round Robin scheduling is a scheduling method where each process gets a small quantity of time to run and preempted for the next process gets to run. • This is called time-sharing and gives the effect of all the processes running at the same time. • Run process for one time slice, then move to back of queue. Each process gets equal share of the CPU. 5. Multiple-Processor Scheduling
• CPU scheduling more complex when multiple CPUs are available due to load sharing. • Each processor schedules itself, dealt with a single processor. • Homogeneous processors within a multiprocessor (CPUs must be the same). •... |
warc | 201704 | Quote:
Originally Posted by
ajv
DWFII, I am not sure to fully understand and in order to improve our deconstruction methodology I would be grateful if you could explain what the gemming exactly is and how it differs from cememting.
According to J.H Thornton there are 12 recognized methods of bottoming and attaching an outsole. Not all of them are applicable to high quality...or perhaps better to say...high priced shoes. Among the foremost is "Goodyear welted." (Parenthetically, no one, including myself, seems sure if this applies to hand inseamed as well as machine inseamed shoes). Shoemakers, trained in Traditional techniques, attach the welt directly to the insole in a process that cuts a channel into the insole and then hand stitches the welt to the leather "holdfast" that is created in the substance of the insole. Done properly this is the most secure and long lasting means of attaching welt. It will never compromise the fit and the welt can be replaced whenever wear or overzealous repair has left it too narrow to be usable. There are even machine techniques that can create the holdfast from the substance of the insole and the welt can subsequently be sewn, by machine, to it. All of this is, of course, predicated on a high quality insole with some thickness that can be incorporated into the inseam. But if done by hand, it takes time...far more time than almost any other production method...which is why it is almost never found in anything other that really high quality shoes (forget about price and the cache of brand name...I'm talking
quality
not $$'s). That said, there simply is no other method that creates a better, more stable shoe. Although to be fair, Blake/rapid probably comes close provided it is done with the same high quality materials. Gemming is a process that involves laying down a canvas rib around the perimeter of the under-surface of the insole. The rib is called gemming. And its purpose is to substitute for the leather holdfast...and to do it cheaply and quickly. It can be recognized by the white strip you see in most of those photos...sometimes "pinked" sometimes not. The gemming is cemented to the insole. That is the only thing holding it (and the shape of the shoe) in place. The welt is machine stitched to the gemming and the resultant insole cavity is filled with cork. Now, it bears repeating...in almost all instances, the gemming is held in place solely by cement. And that is its first weak spot. The cement
will
fail, probably even before the shoe is in need of a resole. When the cement fails the gemming slips and the shoe will walk out of shape. And anyone attempting to resole without the original last, faces the nearly impossible task of trying to re-position the gemming. Moreover, canvas is far more fragile than leather. If cotton canvas is used, it is subject to bacterial action--rot, in other words. Stitches pull through, the welt itself comes loose, and moisture and dirt enter the shoe. Gemming also frees the manufacturer to select thinner and cheaper grades of leather for the insole...or eschew leather altogether and use fiberboard insoles. Nothing visible, nothing immediately apparent will alert the customer to this further debasement of sound shoe technologies. Many manufacturers put a Poron or other cushion insole on top of the fiberboard insole and tout the whole as a "comfort" insole. If an insole is made of good leather it will last for literally decades. If the shoe is inseamed directly to the leather, the inseam...and therefore the shoe...has the potential to be worn frequently, repaired regularly and might still be passed onto the next generation. What is more, a leather insole will form a "footbed" under the foot that will ensure comfort for the life of the shoe. Gemming creates the need for cork filler. That cork is fugitive and will move away from pressure points. Insoles filled with cork are nearly always bare of cork under the ball of the foot. And if the insole is fiberboard or thin, poor quality leather, the insole itself may wear out (developing a hole)...it certainly will not provide any cushioning to the foot nor will it mold itself to the bottom of the foot. Gemming is the cheapest and quickest way to get a shoe together. It literally is the default method for bottoming on the cheapest (think $40.00 a pair) shoes on the market--think Walmart. Even cement construction is a better alternative simply because it is not masquerading as anything other than what it is--quick and easy...and ultimately short-lived. And everyone knows it--you cannot pass off a cement construction as a really high quality shoe. |
warc | 201704 | One of the most fundamental questions any human being can ask is: are we alone in the universe? The knowledge about the existence and characteristics of exoplanets is indispensable for giving us an answer. Everything that we have learned up to now indicates that life might exist on millions and billions of other planets in our galaxy alone: there is the pure mind-blowing number of exoplanets that orbit other stars in the habitable zone; in the entire universe there is an abundance of water, oxygen, carbon and all the other main elements that make up life as we know it; and life on Earth itself evolved relatively quickly after the formation of the solar system was completed. Anyhow, our current instruments do not yet allow us to detect life on other planets, but there is a whole lot of other information that we have been able to find out already. So let's have a closer look at exoplanets to better understand them.
Introduction
Types of exoplanets Rocky Planets Super Earths Ocean planets and desert planets Gas Giants Hot Jupiters Rogue Planets How to detect exoplanets How many exoplanets have we found so far? How many planets there are in the entire universe? A gallery of exoplanets
As with the planets in our own solar system, exoplanets come in various sizes and compositions from small rocky planets to huge gas giants. But, in addition, other stars are orbited by types of exoplanets that do not exist in our solar system: hot Jupiters, super-Earths or ocean planets enlarge the spectrum of exoplanets beyond the rocky planets and gas giants that we know so well from our solar system.
As in our own solar system, rocky planets (also called terrestrial planets), are very common in other planetary systems. Rocky planets are mainly composed of heavier elements such as silicate rocks or metals and their solid planetary surface makes them especially suited for harbouring complex life. Most of these planets have a similar structure, caused by the effects of differentiation: immediately after its formation the planet was completely molten, thus most of the heavier elements (mainly metals) sink down to the core of the planet and the lighter elements (such as silicon or oxygen) float above the metallic core. After millions of years of cooling the rocky planet is composed of a metallic core and a silicate mantle and crust. This same process of differentiation even works for many of the smaller asteroids. You can hold the proof in your own hands since we are very fortunate to have found iron meteorites and stony meteorites that have fallen on Earth. The iron meteorites were once part of the core, and the stony meteorites part of the crust of asteroids or protoplanets that were formed 4.5 billion years ago and were later destroyed by one huge or several smaller collisions. You can acquire some of these 4.5 billion-years-old contemporary witnesses yourself in our meteorite shop.
All terrestrial planets are born without any significant atmosphere. During the planet's formation the light and volatile gases were blown away by the stellar wind of the host star. Thanks to outgassing from volcanic activity (mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide) and the delivery of frozen gases and water by comet impacts, the planet can slowly build up a dense atmosphere, provided that its mass is sufficiently large to gravitationally bind the atmosphere strongly enough. A strong magnetic field also helps to preserve the atmosphere since it protects the planet from stellar winds which could otherwise strip molecules from the upper parts of the planet's atmosphere. If a planet loses its magnetic field it may also lose its atmosphere as you can read in the last paragraph of our Mars article.
Super-Earths are planets of between 1 and about 10 Earth masses. The term super neither means super-habitable nor does it say anything about the surface conditions of the exoplanet, in this context it merely means larger than our Earth. Anyhow, super-Earths might be even more suitable for life than our own planet Earth - mainly due to their favourable tectonic activity. There are no super-Earths in our own solar system.
Super-Earths with a low bulk density are mainly composed of hydrogen and helium; those with higher densities are water-rich (ocean planets) or silicate-rich (rocky planets). After evaluating about 70 super-Earths it turns out that the density increases with the planet's radius up to a value of about 1.5 Earth radii; for larger planets the density rapidly drops. That means that super-Earths of up to 1.5 Earth radii are likely to be ocean planets or rocky planets with a thin atmosphere, still larger planets tend to have a rocky core with a massive and very dense atmosphere; they start to resemble smaller versions of gas giants.
Ocean planets (or water worlds) are planets with enough water to completely cover the entire surface of the planet with oceans. Potentially all rocky planets, including super-Earths, can become water worlds provided that the planet resides in the habitable zone of its star (where the surface temperature is between 0 and 100 °C) and comet impacts or volcanic outgassing have delivered enough water. Ice giants (like Neptune in our solar system) also have the opportunity to become ocean planets; they just have to migrate from further outside to a closer orbit in the habitable zone. This phenomenon is called planetary migration and it is not uncommon in planetary systems. Since the formation of our own solar system Jupiter has migrated towards the Sun whilst Uranus and Neptune have moved to more distant orbits. So, any ice giant moving into the habitable zone becomes an ocean planet that is almost entirely covered by water. The water will be liquid up to depths of 60 to 130 km; still deeper it will be solid due to the high pressure.
The other extreme is a desert planet; a planet without any surface water. Such planets are quite common too; Mars is a good example inside our own solar system and Earth will become a desert planet in about a billion years due to the slowly increasing luminosity of the Sun that will cause all water to evaporate.
All planets with masses exceeding 10 Earth masses are called gas giants. These planets probably have a small rocky core, but they are mainly composed of hydrogen and helium. We have four gas giants in our own Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (even though Uranus and Neptune might also be categorized as ice giants due to their high water and ammonia content). Since huge gas giants are easier to detect than smaller rocky planets, the first exoplanets to be discovered were all gas giants.
Rogue planets (also called nomad planets or orphan planets) are planets without a central star; they are free-floating throughout our galaxy. Since there is no star around them they are dark and very difficult to detect. It is estimated that the number of rogue planets in our galaxy exceeds the count of stars,so at least 200 to 400 billion rogue planets are now floating through the Milky Way. Rogue planets come in all sizes from small rocky planets to huge gas giants, but since they are so difficult to detect all the rogue planet candidates discovered up to now (such as, for example, CFBDSIR 2149-0403) have been huge gas giants. They can be directly imaged - especially in infrared - or they can be detected via microlensing. Microlensing causes a background star to appear a tiny bit brighter when a massive object passes in front of it.
Why are there so many planets without a central star? There are two main reasons why a planet can become an orphan planet.
Our best theoretical calculations show that the vast majority of the rogue planets are failed stars. There could be many of these rogue planets for every star that forms, leaving us with the possibility that in our galaxy alone the number of rogue planets could exceed the above-mentioned 200 - 400 billion by far. It's also very interesting to follow Earth's destiny if our own planet suddenly became a rogue planet. Don't miss reading our article about Earth as a nomad planet!
Exoplanets orbiting other stars are too far away to be directly imaged from Earth with currently available telescopes. There are a few exceptions of huge planets orbiting far away from their host star and some of the future telescopes currently under construction will be much more able to image exoplanets than can be done today. But direct images of exoplanets are currently exceptions and, in any case, we will not be able to see much more than a dot of light; nothing that could reveal any surface details of the planet.
But here is the good news: we are able to detect these planets anyhow, and in some cases we will even be able to analyse the composition of their atmospheres! So let's have a look at the two main methods for detecting exoplanets.
To be very precise: a planet does not orbit around a star as we usually tend to say. The reality is that both the star and the planet orbit around their common centre of mass. Since the star is much more massive than the planet this centre is very close to the star or even inside its volume - but it is never the centre of the star itself. This means a star with planets around it is never completely motionless; it is orbiting around the common centre of mass of the entire stellar system. This wobbling of the star can be observed from Earth with help of the Doppler effect. You all know the Doppler effect since it causes the sound of an approaching object like a car or a train to sound high-pitched (the frequency of the sound waves are higher) and that of a departing object to appear lower (lower sound frequency). This effect works not only for sound waves but also for electromagnetic radiation. During its orbit around the centre of mass, the star moves towards us and away from us, thus the emitted light of the star slightly changes its frequency periodically as seen from Earth. The magnitude and frequency of the wobbling points to the existence, and even the minimum mass, of the planets in orbit around the star.IMAGE A star that is wobbling around the common centre of mass. Credit: wikipedia.org, user: Zhatt
The transit method measures the slight drop in brightness when a planet transits in front of the star (as seen from Earth).
With this method we can only find a minor fraction of the existing exoplanets since the Earth, the exoplanet and its star have to be perfectly aligned in order to observe an exoplanet's transit. For example, the odds of detecting the Earth from any random position outside our solar system with the transit method are just 0.3%, the chance of discovering Mars would be just 0.18%. Nevertheless, space observatory Kepler has continually measured the light curves of 145 000 main sequence stars over a period of several years, finding hundreds of exoplanets using the transit method.
With the help of the transit method we can not only detect one or more planets in a stellar system, we can also gain other valuable information:
As of February 2014 the Kepler space telescope has discovered 961 exoplanets in more than 76 stellar systems, the number of planet candidates (not yet confirmed as exoplanets) exceeds 2900. The graph below illustrates the sizes of planet candidates Kepler has found:
The total number of confirmed exoplanets discovered by Kepler and other telescopes is 1779 as of 20 March 2014. This number is constantly increasing as more and more exoplanets are discovered. All officially confirmed exoplanets are listed in the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.
The short answer is: no one knows. When you read there are at least 200 billion planets in our galaxy alone then this is not the best estimate, this is just a lower limit. But we can try to estimate the data of space telescope Kepler combined with the probability of detecting planets from a random position (remember: using the transit method the chances of detecting Earth from any random position outside our solar system are just 0.3%). So, if you give an estimate - based on probability calculus - of the total number of planets it is closer to 10 trillion planets in the Milky Way alone! If we were to expand these considerations to the observable universe we would come up with 10
24 planets, or if you prefer the number written out: 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 planets. Again, the universe reveals its majestic size! If you are interested this article will show you the estimation in more detail.
Now let's have a look at some of the exoplanets we have discovered so far and what these planets might look like. Our special section about exoplanets presents some of the most beautiful artists’ impressions. |
warc | 201704 | Do you know what PPI is?
PPI can be helpful to some people, but for others may be an unnecessary drain on funds.
07:52 09 September 2013
Insurance is a touchy subject for some people. Most insurance is helpful to people because it simply offers protection in the event an individual suffers from a negative setback. Insurance covers many things, and it’s usually wise to protect your most important investments such as vehicles and homes. Anyone who has been out of work due to medical related issues would probably tell you that Payment Protection Insurance is helpful, but not everyone feels the same way. Here are a few ways to know if
Payment Protection Insurance is right for you:
Eligibility—makes sure you understand and meet the eligibility requirements. If you are unemployed, self-employed, or a contract worker at the time you think about applying for Payment Protection Insurance you would never be able to receive the benefit. If you fall into any of those categories it is a safe bet that you would be wasting money to purchase the protection.
Big-ticket items—if you don’t have mortgage payments to make, a vehicle payment, or significant credit card debt, then you do not need Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). PPI won’t actually replace your income, it only makes partial or full payments directly to loans that you have. If you don’t have any loans and don’t intend to acquire any, you would be wasting your funds.
Ideal protection—in order to reap the benefits of paying into Payment Protection Insurance you would need to be employed according to the acceptable guidelines. This protection is meant to prevent your credit rating from suffering, and to take over some key loan payments so you don’t lose a vehicle or home if you have an issue that reduces or depletes your income, like a layoff.
Remember that Payment Protection Insurance is voluntary, so if you believe you don’t need it or shouldn’t have it, cancel it and fill out forms offered by the government for refunds. |
warc | 201704 | Senate’s Secret Bill Will Cost More Than Half a Trillion, and You Should Know About It
An F-35 fighter jet is a pricey little piece of aviation innovation, with each plane costing around $159 million, part of a $400 billion program run by the Pentagon—the most costly program in the history of the world. How many new ones do we need and why? It’s unclear. How many more of them will we buy in the future? Again, who knows.
But it might be worth noting that, by comparison, the cost to provide health care services to all veterans through the VA is estimated to be $69 billion to $85 billion.
The government is in the midst of deciding how to spend more than half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money, and much of it is happening in secret. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee met Wednesday to debate and amend the National Defense Authorization Act. To the frustration of government transparency advocates, the meeting—or markup, as it is known in political parlance—is behind closed doors.
Defenders of the process argue that keeping it private is a matter of protecting classified information and national security interests. However, the House Armed Services Committee has proved that it’s possible to steward the bill through committee in a much more open and participatory way. All of the House markups of the bill are streamed online and archived for the public to see. To get the Senate to change its tune, the Project for Government Oversight, along with dozens of other groups, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Americans for Tax Reform, are lobbying the committee “to bring the NDAA into the light of day.”
TakePart chatted recently with transparency advocate Angela Canterbury, director of public policy at POGO, to discuss why this is such a big deal. These excerpts from the interview have been edited for clarity.
TakePart: It’s fairly routine for Washington to spend a ton of money. Why is it important for us to know more about this bill? Angela Canterbury: This is one of the few bills that Congress passes every year, and it authorizes more than $600 billion dollars in Pentagon spending. It includes many important wide-ranging policies. For the Senate to mark up any of the unclassified provisions of this bill in secret shuts the public out of how a huge chunk of taxes are spent and policies are made.
Last year, not even other members of the Senate were able to influence what eventually became law. There was not, in the end, an opportunity for senators who are not on the Armed Services Committee to amend the bill. There was a lot of frustration around that.
TakePart: What’s the justification for keeping it so secret? Canterbury: When they vote to close the markup, the impetus is the fact that national security issues and classified information are discussed. On the House side, they don’t see any reason to close the markup. They are able to conduct the vast majority of their business on the bill completely in public. In our estimation, there is not a lot of legitimacy around the national security concerns when the House can do it transparently. In the end, it’s probably just because it’s harder to the do work when you have to more carefully segregate the classified discussions, as the House does. TakePart: Is this an unsavory power grab by the senators who want to keep the process behind closed doors? Canterbury: No. I think it’s just been a tradition for Chairman [Carl] Levin [D-Mich.]. Most people think the process yields good results. The committee members feel they are very well staffed. But now that Chairman Levin is going to retire, there is a real opportunity for the incoming leadership, whether its Democratic or Republican, to increase transparency and public participation in the NDAA and in the Senate in general. TakePart: What are some examples of controversial programs that were funded by the NDAA and disclosed after the fact? Canterbury: There was frustration on a handful of issues last year. There weren’t any votes taken on Iran or drones and other hot-button issues. The one issue that did get a public airing was the epidemic of sexual assault in the military. That was a real exception.
An open hearing was held on sexual assault—it was the only part of the NDAA that the full [Senate] committee debated in public. We got to see very thoughtful deliberations. It was an example of how it should work on other aspects of the bill.
TakePart: What issues are you most concerned about going forward? Canterbury: The coalition we have assembled, which includes 56 organizations from across the political spectrum, have different perspectives. Some fiscally conservative groups are most concerned about the amount of money that’s being wasted on ineffective programs. Other members are really concerned with war spending in general. These are groups that care about peace and security and would like consideration for a faster drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, for instance. |
warc | 201704 | BROOKSVILLE — Michael McHugh walked out of Tuesday's County Commission meeting with a few new lures in his tackle box.
McHugh, the county's director of business development, hopes to use the bait to reel in some much-needed new business, industrial and manufacturing growth.
Commissioners on Tuesday unanimously approved a new program that will pay employers for creating jobs paying modest and high wages, expands the kinds of companies that would qualify for county incentives and adjusts some of the rules to qualify for such help.
The Job Creation Incentive Program gives a company $2,000 for every job it creates that pays the average Hernando County wage of $13.29 per hour. That goes up to $3,000 for every job that pays 115 percent of that average.
For new businesses setting up in the south Brooksville Enterprise Zone, the payment will be $3,000 per job paying the average wage.
Targeted industries include aviation and aerospace firms, corporate headquarters, green technologies, research and development, and distribution and warehousing businesses.
The commission also gave McHugh the go-ahead to work with the county's other departments to make sure that infrastructure such as roads and utilities are ready in the areas of the county set aside in the Comprehensive Plan for business and industrial growth.
Commissioners praised the new measures.
"That gives us a leg up compared to surrounding counties,'' said Commissioner Dave Russell.
Businesses want to see what a county has to offer, said Commissioner Rose Rocco. "It's important that we get information out there that we are a business-friendly community,'' she said. "They don't want to start from zero.''
Commissioner Diane Rowden questioned whether there is enough educational opportunity available locally so that new businesses could find educated workers.
McHugh said opportunities are here and more are coming through the school district's career academies and expanded offerings at Pasco-Hernando Community College.
He also said the county is drawing up a development agreement for the large tracts of land on Kettering Road slated for big-box industrial development and hopes to see more infrastructure investment for another future business area at U.S. 301 and State Road 50.
Rocco, who has been meeting with existing small-business owners who say they need help, too, asked what was in the package for them.
Any existing business can get the same incentives if they are expanding their operation and meet certain qualifications, McHugh said. These vary by the kind of company and other criteria.
Rocco has also been working with the small businesses on questions about their appraisals for tax purposes. Their complaint has been that, even though the market is dropping, their property values have gone up.
Also during Tuesday's meeting, a report from Property Appraiser Alvin Mazourek and his staff shed some light on why that is. Nick Nikkinen, special projects director for Mazourek, gave a presentation about how the office does its appraisals.
He also showed information that indicated that the values residential properties saw on last year's bills peaked last year. Commercial properties appear to have peaked this year.
Property taxes are charged based on last year's values.
Barbara Behrendt can be reached at behrendt@sptimes.com or (352) 848-1434. |
warc | 201704 | National Journal: Premiums Rising Under Obamacare National Journal is one of the most respected political and news reporting organizations in Washington. As of August 29, that influential voice is firmly on the side of Tea Party activists when it comes to the higher premiums Americans will pay under Obamacare:
Republicans have long blamed President Obama’s signature health care initiative for increasing insurance costs, dubbing it the “Unaffordable Care Act.”
Turns out, they might be right.
For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they’re currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a
National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers’ monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.
The analysis from
National Journal is absolutely devastating to Obamacare’s effects on costs. Here are a few highlights:
First, employers are likely going to continue dropping employee insurance coverage – despite what the law’s supporters say:
Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won’t apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that’s only if employers continue to offer that coverage–something that’s looking increasingly uncertain.
In other words, you can keep your doctor if you want, unless your boss can’t afford to provide insurance, at which point you’ll either have to find a new doctor or pay more to keep your doctor.
Second, the Administration is claiming lower premiums – but only compared to prior projections, not to current premiums. Emphasis added:
“In 16 states that HHS studied, premiums were on average almost 20% lower than what the Congressional Budget Office projected,” [HHS spokesperson] Peters wrote in an e-mail.
Premiums may be lower than predicted, but they’re not competitive with what workers are now paying for employer-sponsored care.
On average, a worker paid between $862 and $1,065 per year for single coverage in 2013, according to Kaiser’s numbers. For the average family plan, defined as a family of four, insurance cost between $4,226 and $5,284.
Fewer than half of all families and only a third of single workers would qualify for enough Obamacare tax subsidies to pay within or below those averages next year.
National Journal points out that while 81% of employers don’t plan on dropping employees, according to a report by Deloitte, there exists a great level of uncertainty, as the state exchanges and subsidies haven’t been implemented yet. And dropping employees is, to quote National Journal, “just logistically easier than trying to meet the law’s employer mandate”:
The truth is, Obamacare is doing what it was intended to do: make health care affordable for the nation’s lowest earners by spreading out the costs among taxpayers.
The trap is that the exchanges also present a savings for some employers but a rate hike for their employees.
And shifting employees to the exchanges also is just logistically easier than trying to meet the law’s employer mandate.
Finally, the crux of the problem with Obamacare is identified in the closing of the article:
Perhaps the biggest obstacle Obamacare faces today isn’t getting people in the system, but making sure those who do get in actually receive affordable care.
Exactly. Getting people into a system is easy – first, incentivize employers to drop care. Next, incentivize individuals to sign up for the system by providing “free” money for enrolled people.
Under Obamacare, both systems have been set up. The problem now is, as it was long predicted to be, actually finding affordable having health insurance. Therein lies the problem – government-controlled health insurance and health care cannot compete with free market-based systems. Obamacare needs to be repealed before there’s nothing left to compete with. |
warc | 201704 | So much money is on the line, so many departments are involved, and so little time remains before the deadline. This statement could describe too many information technology projects. In this fast-paced and stressful environment, planning is essential, and IT project managers have little room for error.
Perhaps that’s one reason why several organizations are targeting the IT industry by offering classes and certifications for project managers. Download a list of project management certifications for a compilation of the essential information you’ll need to select the project management coursework and certification that fit your needs.
Back by popular demand
This download is actually the second version of the project management certification list. Earlier this year, TechRepublic compiled a list of project management certs into a download that was so popular we wanted to update it with new certification programs.
Project planning is one of the most-discussed topics on TechRepublic. In a recent article on project management, several members explained how they often struggle with management issues. One member,
mary.dempster, described the internal battle within her organization:
“It is extremely difficult to be successful in large corporations that want the moon, and they want it now. We keep hearing, ‘We're on Internet time, we don't have time for processes.’
All of us that have earned the stripes the hard way know you cannot be successful with a chaotic project where the decision makers don't want process and at the same time want everything NOW.”
—mary.dempster
What to expect
Planning techniques are the cornerstone of project management and the certification programs reflect that reality. For instance, here’s an outline for scope definition and planning classes that comprise half of the cert program from the Gartner Institute:
Scope definition
Identify stakeholders' needs and expectations including boundaries for project budget, duration and risk. Identify and define high-level business-related requirements, outcomes, and criteria for success. Perform a project-requirements analysis to determine if the requirements are complete, achievable, and within the defined project scope. Define the project manager role/authority in various business environments. Create a scope document that accurately represents the project size and specifics. Build consensus among stakeholders and obtain written approval from stakeholders.
Planning
Create an accurate and realistic work breakdown structure (WBS). Demonstrate the ability to perform risk assessment and mitigation. Recognize and explain the issues considered in project effort, time, and cost estimation. Identify and list the components needed to generate a workable project schedule. Create and manage a project budget. Identify selection criteria for project team members. Perform an analysis of vendor tasks and deliverables and create the plan. Create and manage an appropriate communication plan. Determine the quality performance measures. Organize a comprehensive project plan.
The Gartner Institute coursework provides a list of action items for two more project phases: execution and closure.
Earlier this year, Gartner Institute awarded the maintenance and development of their certification program to Wave and Prometric. However, the program will retain the name, Gartner Institute.
The Gartner Institute program is one of 11 project management certification programs we’ve outlined. To learn more, download the informative list now.
Do you have a project management certification? Would you recommend this to other IT pros? Post a comment to this article or send us an e-mail. |
warc | 201704 | When the UK government isn't losing its databases, it's plotting to create new ones of unprecedented scale and reach. Indeed, the word ‘database' might turn out to be the term that defines its whole period in office.
It started in 2004 with proposals for a national ID card scheme to makes machine-readable passports look like museum pieces, building on various pieces of legislation that had since 1997 widened the collecting scope of the UK national DNA database used by police to fight crime.
This week came confirmation from Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, of plans to create a massive database of every phone number dialled, ever website visited, and every email address contacted, by everyone in the country.
What would not be in this new database is the content of these communications, a feat of storage beyond even governments for now, though it's hard to rule that out for the future once the basic infrastructure is in place.
The next step? Tie them together with the UK's huge surveillance camera network and make DNA profiling a necessary element of biometric passports. This would give the UK government a level of informational power beyond that found in even the most totalitarian of today's states.
What makes this extraordinary is that nobody in the UK government actually wants to create such a state. They propose these ideas in good faith, sure in their conviction that checks and balances are in place, that the databases themselves would not be compromised, and that it is all necessary to fight the evils of terrorism and organised crime.
It's disquieting that the UK could be the template from which other states develop their own plans. They might not admit it, but there are plenty of people in the free and non-free world beyond the UK who are watching what happens with great interest.
The overbearing older sibling of Orwellian nightmare this is not because his totalitarians wouldn't have wasted time telling people what they were about to do. Power, and the fear it illicits, should always remain partly latent and undefined the better to stop people knowing what to try to topple.
But it seems to me the greatest failure of these databases is that they will work, but only in the wrong ways. They will spread their negative power over the vast majority of innocents while failing to counter the ability of the determined criminal to circumvent them.
The government knows as much when it admits it has no easy way through the minefield of encrypted communications such as Skype, for instance. And Skype is only one of the many ways that communications can be hidden or scrambled.
The answer is to accept that the police need enhanced powers to monitor communications in a targeted way but not by building databases of information on the whole population and creating a new layer of weakness. |
warc | 201704 | The social workers of Haringey are notorious for having failed to prevent the deaths of Baby P and Victoria Climbié. But in their zeal to avoid any repetition of these tragedies, they are now at the forefront of those councils which have pushed the number of children taken into care to an all-time high. In all the cases I have been following where children have been taken from their families for what seem like dubious reasons, no single instance has been more disturbing than the plight of a 10-year-old girl seized by Haringey last year, who seems in the past 10 months to have vanished off the radar.
“Girl X”, as I shall call her, was taken into care on the basis of three allegations. One turned out to be so laughably erroneous that it was soon dropped; a second was likewise dropped when medical tests completely disproved the council’ s claims. The third, highly questionable, has still not been put to any evidential test.
The last time Girl X was seen by her mother was at a supervised contact session last August. Having complained of sexual abuse by her foster carer’s 19-year-old son, she asked to be given, as a birthday present, a journal with a lock in which she could record her “secret thoughts”. Since that day she has not been seen by her parents or, since the autumn, by her siblings, who are also in care. It seems she has since been interviewed by three people – an independent social worker, an independent psychiatrist and her guardian, all of whom reported that she wished to see and be reunited with her mother.
No one representing the family has been allowed to see her, including the girl’s grandparents, who came from abroad specifically to visit her. Her parents have been forbidden to telephone her or even send a Christmas card. Her whereabouts are a mystery. When I put questions about her to Haringey last year, the council’s only response was to ask for a court order forbidding me to refer to the case at all. (It was not granted.)
What makes all this particularly disturbing is that, in several respects, it seems to defy the Children Act, which insists that councils must do all they can to encourage contact between children taken into care and their parents, who continue to share parental responsibility until a child is adopted. “The responsible authority,” says the Act, “has a duty to endeavour to promote contact” with the parents and “any relative, friend or other person connected to the child”. In particular, parents must be allowed to see medical or school reports relating to their child. The law also insists that, if children are old enough, they should be allowed to appear in court to express their wishes. None of these things has happened.
Why – when even Baby P’s mother was last year allowed out of prison to enjoy supervised contact with her surviving children – has Girl X been shut away as a silent prisoner, seemingly denied her rights? What has happened to Girl X?
For legal reasons, comments on this story have been disabled. |
warc | 201704 | Confidence tricksters who take as much as £20,000 from vulnerable victims are likely to be handed a community sentence according to planned advice by the Sentencing Guidelines Council (SGC).
Even those who con as much as £100,000 from easy targets could avoid jail.
The proposals, which provide advice to courts, also suggest benefit cheats who claim up to £20,000 unlawfully could be handed a community order as should criminals caught with computer programmes or technology designed for internet or credit card fraud.
The sentencing proposals come despite the SGC, which is chaired by the Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, admitting fraud is not a "victimless crime".
It said: "The monetary cost is significant, but fraud offences also cause considerable social and economic harm beyond their immediate financial impact.
"Fraud can be used to fund organised crime that may target vulnerable victims (drug and people trafficking for example) and fraud offences that target individuals can ruin lives, close businesses or take life savings."
The SGC consultation document proposes sentence ranges for a series of fraud offences.
Confidence fraud includes bogus charity collectors and the fraudulent sale of goods and services such as cowboy builders or workmen who charge for work not done, unnecessary or shoddy work.
The starting point for a court dealing with a first time offender who has targeted a vulnerable victim of goods between £20,000 and £100,000 is 26 weeks in jail but could fall to a community order with mitigating factors.
Similarly, the starting point for a similar fraud of less than £20,000 is six weeks in jail but could be a community sentence.
However, the SGC pledged to get tough on those guilty of so-called "advance-fee" cons - commonly originating through some from African nations such as Nigeria, where victims are urged to send money to claim a cash prize or to help someone transferring money abroad by sending cash advances in return for a share.
It emerged yesterday that Justice Secretary Jack Straw was targeted by Nigerian internet fraudsters.
Requests for money were sent by email to hundreds of the Blackburn MP's contacts, claiming that he had lost his wallet while on charity work in Africa and needed 3,000 US dollars to get home.
Fraudsters who steal other people's identities, including deceased people, can also expect tougher penalties as it will be classed as an aggravating factor when sentencing.
Under the SGC proposals anyone guilty of such offences can expect a prison term ranging from 26 weeks to eight years depending on the scale of the fraud.
However, benefit cheats who claim up to £20,000 could be handed a community sentence, although the starting point for courts would be 12 weeks in jail.
The same applies to those guilty of credit, banking or insurance fraud.
But those found guilty of possessing equipment to commit hi-tech fraud are likely to be handed a community sentence although the most serious offenders can expect custody.
It includes those who use false fronts on cash machines, computer programmes that generate credit card numbers and technology for internet fraud such as phishing and pharming or using a "Trojan" virus which can capture credit card details entered in to the computer targeted.
SGC member, Sir Christopher Pitchford said: "Fraud is not a victimless crime. Economic crime, including the bills for detection and prosecution is a huge burden on the economy. |
warc | 201704 | Life can seem so hard when your relationships are out of balance, especially when someone is always jumping over your fence and intruding in your life with unwelcome expectations, criticism, or impositions. It happens to all of us at some time or another and it can turn our lives upside down. We all want to be valued, respected and loved by the people in our lives, but the truth is that has to start within ourselves first.
The key to great relationships, including the one we have with ourselves, is good fences, or boundaries. Building healthy boundaries with each person in your life creates a sense of wellbeing, a solid respect for yourself and others, and it allows you to be your most confident and genuine self.
Terry Barnett-Martin’s award winning book, Tending Fences is a timelessly insightful collection of parables that explore relationship boundaries through the adventures of its main character, Avery Soul. Avery discovers that in order to feel safe and happy, he must build and maintain the fences that run between his ranch and his neighbors’ land.
"Good fences make good neighbors.” Robert Frost
“Tending Fences is quietly brilliant. The stories get into your heart, sort out complicated relationship boundaries, and make a real difference.”
Ann F.
“I read Tending Fences when I was struggling to find a balance in some difficult relationships in my life. These parables put them into a concrete light, and by seeing them that way I was able to create the boundaries I needed to make my life more secure. This is a book you want on your bookshelf to go back to again and again.”
Phyllis L.
“What I appreciate about Tending Fences is that the stories are not about blaming someone for problems in a relationship. Rather, they are focused on fixing or building a fence that creates a safer, more respectful connection.”
Joseph F. M. |
warc | 201704 | A renewed rise in the jobless rate is likely to worry Australians more than a delay in the vague promise of being better off when the carbon tax goes.
The unemployment rate jumped to six per cent in June, coinciding with a state of confusion in the Senate that ended in the government having to sit out a few more days before it can scrap Labor's fixed carbon price.
Employment Minister Eric Abetz was adamant that rising unemployment demonstrated the need to abolish the tax.
"Getting rid of the tax is essential to rebooting the economy and promoting jobs growth," he said on Thursday.
The jobless rate returned to six per cent, a level last touched in February and rising from an upwardly revised 5.9 per cent in May.
The increase came as more people sought work and despite the number of people being employed growing by 15,900 in June.
A 19,700 increase in part-time workers was partly offset by a 3800 decline in full-time workers.
Senator Abetz put that down a soft labour market, arguing it underpinned the urgent need for the government's plan to create jobs and build a stronger economy.
But opposition employment spokesman Brendan O'Connor says the government has no plan for jobs, just plans for cuts.
The government was cutting $1 billion from training programs when youth unemployment has risen to 13.5 per cent, while telling young people to "learn or earn".
"Under this prime minister, unemployment rate has a six in front of it ... yet this government has no plans to create jobs," he said.
Data this week showed that while business has taken a downturn in consumer confidence in its stride, there's no rush to hire people.
National Australia Bank senior economist Spiros Papadopoulos expects the unemployment rate will get worse before it get better, forecasting a peak of 6.2 per cent by the end of the year.
That's roughly in line with government predictions in the May budget.
It also means the Reserve Bank will be holding its line on interest rates for "some time".
The government's carbon tax repeal legislation returns to parliament's lower house on Monday.
The government continues to predict its end will ease cost-of-living pressures on households by an average $550 a year.
It will be a year before consumers can gauge how close to the mark is that estimate, and even then it is only an average.
That suggests many people will get less. |
warc | 201704 | TENS of thousands of Victorian children have been ordered to stay home from school today in an unprecedented act of caution as the state braces itself for its most dangerous fire conditions since Black Saturday.
Authorities have also stepped up their warnings to residents in threatened areas, telling them to leave their homes before 10am or be prepared to stay and fight if fires flare up.
With several big fires still burning near populated areas, including Daylesford, authorities fear the return of strong northerly winds and temperatures up to 40 degrees across the state today could create another major emergency.
There are also fears that lightning strikes later in the day could spark new fires.
As a day of total fire ban was declared across the state, Premier John Brumby repeated his dire message from the lead-up to Black Saturday, warning people not to travel unnecessarily and to stay away from the bush, including the Great Ocean Road.
"We all need to exercise common sense. If you don't need to go out then don't," he said. "If you do need to go out, then leave early, but carefully consider your travel plans."
In an unprecedented step, the Government ordered the closure of almost 400 schools and children's centres for the day in bushfire-prone areas.
Education Minister Bronwyn Pike said 192 public schools and 176 licensed kindergartens, day care centres and creches would be shut.
Another 16 Catholic schools and 10 independent schools will also be shut.
Ms Pike said it was a "precautionary action" following advice from the Country Fire Authority and the State Emergency Service.
Three primary schools - Marysville, Strathewen, and Middle King Lake - were burnt down in the Black Saturday fires three weeks ago.
So far, the official death toll from the disaster stands at 210. But experts say the fatalities could have been much higher had the fires occurred on a school day.
"There will be several thousand people affected by (the closures), but that's a small price to pay compared to the risk that people potentially are at," Ms Pike said. "This is an extraordinary set of circumstances. We've got a tinder dry environment, we've got existing fires and we of course are now working through the process. This just happens to be an extraordinarily large number of schools."
School principals were working frantically last night to notify families of today's closures, sending home letters with students or calling parents individually. Posters will also be placed on school buildings today, and some principals will be at school gates turning children away in case families had not been notified last night.
At Daylesford Secondary College, principal Heather McIntyre said that after a week of imminent danger, staff and students were relieved about the decision to close today.
Of the school's 495 students, about 200 had already stayed away this week because of the fire threat.
Tension has also been high at Deans Marsh Primary, where the school's 42 students have spent the week practising fire drills. "The Otways has been pretty dry - any spark and I think it'll go," principal Iain Stoddart said.
Of the closed state schools, 61 are around the eastern metropolitan region, including Healesville High School, Emerald Secondary College and Ferntree Gully North Primary School. A further 35 public schools have closed in the Gippsland area, 30 in the Grampians, and 29 in the Loddon Mallee region.
Sixteen Catholic schools will close in areas including Bunyip, Belgrave and Yarra Junction. A further 10 independent schools will close on the advice of the Association of Independent Schools.
CFA deputy chief fire officer John Haynes said today was "prime fire weather", with temperatures nearing 40 degrees and a strong northerly wind, followed by a dangerous south-westerly change in the afternoon. "If you are going to leave, go to some of the relief centres set up in some of the high fire-danger areas or, if you want to, go to the movies for the day, see family members in the CBD."
"If you are going to stay, be prepared, make sure you drink plenty of water, wear your long sleeves, long pants, sturdy boots and listen to the radio for urgent threat messages."
Fears are greatest for towns in the Yarra and Warburton valleys, including Healesville, Yarra Glen, Warburton and Steels Creek, which are as close as four kilometres to the edge of a massive, uncontained inferno that has been looming over them since Black Saturday.
Other areas that could come under threat include Daylesford and surrounding towns near the Muskvale fire, which has been contained but could flare up. Residents of Whittlesea, Wallan, and those threatened by the Upwey blaze on Monday should also be alert.
The dangerous weather could resume next week, with strong winds forecast for Tuesday, as well as 32-degree heat, before a showery change.
Acting Superintendent Michael Sayer said traffic police across the state would be on the roads today to help motorists deal with the bushfire threat.
Information on road closures is available at the VicRoads website, www.vicroads.vic.gov.au, and on ABC radio updates. |
warc | 201704 | Jeremy Grantham, the 74-year-old chief investment strategist of Boston-based investment fund Grantham Mayo van Otterloo (GMO), has made his career forecasting market bubbles--with remarkable success. When writing an article on the slowing pace of global growth last week--for which Grantham's ideas provide significant fodder--my colleagues and I were spellbound by one statistic: of the 36 major bubbles GMO says it tracks, 33 have completely popped, or returned to their prior trends.
GMO won't say what most of these are, and according to the firm's quarterly letters, it also tracks a lot more less-major bubbles: 330 by its February 2013 count. For GMO, a "bubble" is simply when the price of an asset in relation to its real value (usually just the "price-to-earnings ratio" in investor-speak) has exceeded its average by a certain amount, and a "major bubble," a bigger amount (two standard deviations, for statistics aficionados.)
Among Grantham's accurate predictions: the 2006 housing bubble, the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the Japanese stock bubble of the late 1980s. More recent predictions: the Australian and UK housing market bubbles, which have yet to pop. Perhaps most worryingly, GMO has been warning of what fellow strategist James Montier calls (pdf) the "foie gras" bubble or the "near-rational" bubble, in which "investors are being force-fed higher risk assets at low prices"--a product of central banks' loose monetary policies.
The 36 major bubbles GMO follows are pretty improbable, statistically speaking--but in real life, they turn out to be less improbable than expected. In an interview with US TV host Charlie Rose (pdf) earlier this year, Grantham explained (the transcript is unedited):
A bubble we had to make a definition long ago and we decided to have a statistical definition of the kind that would occur every 44 years in a random world. It isn't a random world but it's closer than you think. The kind of event that would occur randomly every 44 year occurs in the real world every 30 years. It's much closer than we expected.
In other words, based on his calculations, markets are more volatile than mathematics says they should be. Grantham accurately predicted the housing bubble--which went along with a bubble in profit margins for corporations--in 2005 (pdf). According to his statistical methodology, this was a 1-in-5,000 year event (pdf). He wrote in February:
It is just statistics, full as always of assumptions, which in this case we hope approach rough justice. What it does definitely mean, though, is that it was extraordinarily unlikely that the extremely diversified U.S. housing market would shoot up like it did and, frankly, even more remarkable that Bernanke and his timid or incompetent advisors could miss it.
According to Grantham, the Federal Reserve (among the world's other central banks) has gone about its business ignoring bubbles, at least for the 15 years leading up to the financial crisis. He criticizes this approach (pdf, registration required), arguing that central banks should be tasked with mitigating bubbles before they get out of control, instead of focusing on strengthening economies.
In the real world, major asset bubbles are easy to see. They are nearly impossible to miss, in fact. But we travel in a world with a systemic bias to optimism that typically chooses to avoid the topic of the impending bursting of investment bubbles...[The Fed] doesn't want to move against bubbles because Congress and business do not like it and show their dislike in unmistakable terms.
GMO's remarkable track record of spotting bubbles--not to mention the severe and lingering economic impact of the US housing bubble--does lend credence to this view. The Fed was thoroughly embarrassed by its failure to treat the US housing bubble before it got out of control. But perhaps, with its threat to dial back its easy money policy in the near future, the Fed is taking a page from GMO's book.
GMO declined to provide more details about its methodology or current bubbles it's tracking because those data are proprietary. |
warc | 201704 | Doctors Warn Brazilian Women: ‘Don’t Get Pregnant’
An outbreak of Zika virus, a relatively new mosquito-transmitted infection, has caused substantial alarm in Brazil.
Since its appearance in spring of this year, thousands of people have become infected. Though the disease is annoying, it is not really dangerous, causing aches and fever and rash for a few days.
Zika, though, may be contributing to a much more substantial problem. Brazilian authorities are concerned that it is causing not just a self-limited disease but rather is profoundly affecting fetal development.
In 2015, the country has seen a greater than tenfold increase—from 147 cases to more than 2,400—of the devastating neurologic and developmental condition called microcephaly (literally “small head”). This neurologic calamity is characterized by incomplete brain development, and profoundly compromising intellectual and motor-sensory development.
The connection between the two epidemics is only circumstantial right now; indeed, the United States’ CDC regards it as “under investigation” because no cause-and-effect link is yet established.
The facts favoring Zika as the cause of microcephaly are this: The virus has been found in a few placentas of children born with the condition and, more compellingly, at autopsy of one baby with microcephaly who died. In addition, according to CNN, “most” of the mothers of microcephalic infants reported developing the symptoms of Zika early in their pregnancy.
Against Zika being the cause of the 2,400 infants with microcephaly is the brief history of the virus in humans. First described in 1947 in monkeys from Uganda’s Zika Forest, the disease was identified in humans in the 1960s.
To date, there have been a few large outbreaks. The first was in the Yap Islands in Micronesia, where a 2007 outbreak affected about three-fourths of the population, including dozens with well-documented active viral infection. Of note, no abnormalities were seen among babies born during and after the outbreak.
A second large outbreak occurred in 2013 in French Polynesia. Here, an estimated 28,000 of the 270,000 residents of the French territory were sick enough to seek medical attention; likely tens of thousands more had mild or symptomless infection. But once again, there were no descriptions of an uptick in microcephalic births. (And the diagnosis of microcephaly does not require medical training: The baby is born with a tragically cartoonish tiny head. The intense emotionality of such an event too increases the likelihood that local medical or public health authorities would be informed.)
Though Zika is a virus from an admittedly rough family—its genetic cousins include the viruses that result in yellow fever, West Nile, dengue, and chikunguna—none of these is known to cause fetal defects.
Why then, after Zika outbreaks in two previous areas with no reports of microcephaly, do we now see it in Brazil and a concurrent surge of infant cases of the condition? Viruses usually cause the same things here as they cause there despite the rapid genetic turnover of any pathogen. Therefore, the possibility is low that that the Brazil Zika has a previously microcephaly-causing genetic twist not seen before.
So perhaps the sheer scale of the Brazil outbreak, with overall cases likely to number in the hundreds of thousands, explains the spate of microcephalic newborns. Maybe Zika-microcephaly occurs only in 1 percent or fewer of pregnant women and the number of pregnancies occurring in the Yap Islands and Polynesia during the Zika outbreak was too low for the association to be seen.
Perhaps the two rare events are coinciding in time for still-uncertain reasons. Though this seems unlikely, it remains plausible given the lack of microcephaly cases in previous outbreaks. The implications for the country would be enormous—the smoking gun they are investigating may be a false first step and another cause, still not investigated, may be behind the condition. Plus, there are all of those headlines.
It may be too late for rational discourse though. Consider the ripple claiming that Brazil is calling on women to not get pregnant: This is a tough admonition and one even more difficult to trace to the source. To my read, a single infectious-disease practitioner, Dr. Angela Rocha, who, by her titles is not a public health or government employee, has made the suggestion.
It is unclear whether Dr. Rocha is speaking out of exhaustion since she is caring for so many with the condition or indeed is the person whom Brazilian authorities have identified as a spokesman (my fierce Google search failed to find out anything about her). No matter—this has become semi-official Brazilian policy, despite incomplete evidence on causality.
Welcome to the impossible world of public health decisions where leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The urge is always quite strong to do
something, especially in the long shadow cast by the Ebola outbreak. Then, many felt the WHO and the CDC and other groups dawdled long after compelling evidence was in. And indeed the CDC and others have met Zika with a dull and sober “avoid mosquito bites” bromide given to everyone heading to areas with dengue or malaria or chikungunya—an intervention unequal to the tragedy unfolding in Brazil.
Yet to react to incomplete evidence creates a problem—to tell women not to get pregnant for a while (in a mostly Roman Catholic country and just months from the Summer Olympics, which will bring hyper-focus on the country) is a mighty big deal. Should Zika turn out to be unrelated to microcephaly, well, that is some advice that will be tough to explain.
So in this holiday season, as you are thanking those who make the world a better place, consider sending a little love not only to the panic-stricken families of Brazil but to the poor decision-makers who have to decide just how far to go to prevent another case of microcephaly. For them, tonight will be conspicuously lacking in dancing sugarplums. |
warc | 201704 | Sclerosponges are sponges with a soft bodythat covers a hard, often massive skeleton made of calciumcarbonate, either aragonite or calcite. Because of their long life span(500-1,000 years) it is thought that analysis of the aragonite skeletons of these spongescould extend data regarding ocean temperature, salinity, and other variables farther into thepast than has been previously possible. Their dense skeletons aredeposited in an organized chronological manner, in concentriclayers or bands. The layered skeletons look similar to reef corals. Therefore sclerosponges are also called coralline sponges.
Sclerosponges were first proposed as a class of sponges,
Sclerospongiae, in 1970 by Hartman and Goreau. [1]However, it was later found by Vacelet that sclerosponges occur indifferent classes of Porifera. [2] Thatmeans that sclerosponges are not a closely related (taxonomic) group of sponges.Like bats and birds that independently developed the ability tofly, different sponges developed the ability to build a calcareousskeleton independently and during different times in Earth history. Fossil sclerosponges arealready known from the Cambrianperiod. [3]
Sclerosponges include the species
Ceratoporellanicholsoni, Stromatospongia vermicola, Hispidopetra miniana, S. norae, Goreauiellaauriculatra, and Merlia sp., which were described indetail by Lang et al. in 1975. [4] |
warc | 201704 | A new report on justice reform in British Columbia is recommending sweeping changes that would drag the system into the modern age and address chronic failings that have led to backlogs, infighting and diminishing public trust.
The report – titled
A Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century – was written by lawyer Geoffrey Cowper and released Thursday. More than six months in the making, it contains more than 40 recommendations that impact every aspect of the justice system.
The report was commissioned in February amid a growing outcry from judges and others that the system was woefully underfunded and understaffed, particularly on the bench. A lack of resources was being blamed for producing an unconscionable trial backlog, which, in turn, was being held as the reason a growing number of cases were being stayed on the grounds of undue process.
In his review, Mr. Cowper proposes a number of reforms that fall across the entire system. They include a province-wide crime reduction plan, measures to resolve criminal cases earlier and reduce the number of delays and backlogged cases and a major overhaul of how prosecutors handle files.
Perhaps the most significant recommendation is the establishment of a new Criminal Justice and Public Safety Council that would exist within the justice ministry. It would be responsible for development of an overall strategy for the criminal justice system, one that ensures effective collaboration among the various stakeholders.
It is Mr. Cowper’s view that previous efforts at justice reform failed because of the institutional “silos” that have been established over the years among judges, prosecutors, defence and government itself. Consequently, the justice system has never truly operated as one overarching body but instead as several independent structures and quasi-institutions.
“What is fundamentally needed is a clear vision for the justice system as a whole,” Mr. Cowper writes in his report. “... A true systems approach to reform and project management discipline across the board.
“This means at the start that there must be clear and accepted goals, disciplined execution and clear performance measures that are monitored and evaluated.”
Despite falling crime rates and a decline in the number of cases going into the court system, Mr. Cowper says the court structure in B.C. is failing to meet the public’s expectations of a modern justice system. The public is particularly frustrated by how long cases take to get to trial, he says.
Mr. Cowper said the new council would establish system-wide measures and standards of performance.
“I think we need timeliness measures that will encourage early resolution of cases and I think we need to change systematically how we do our business in order to make that possible,” Mr. Cowper said in an interview.
One method to achieve that is by changing the way the Crown handles cases. Right now, one case can go through the hands of several different prosecutors as it winds its way through the system. The report recommends the same prosecutor handle one file from start to finish.
“That way they will have a stake in resolving it earlier than later,” he said.
The report also recommends that trial dates be set much sooner after charges are laid. Today, it can take a year to 18 months before a trial takes place, but in the meantime the accused can make several perfunctory appearances in court to deal with housekeeping matters related to his case. This is usually a complete waste of a judge’s time.
Mr. Cowper said a pilot project in Kelowna that experimented with an early trial date approach was extremely successful. Those dates were set within 60 days of the accused being charged. Out of 68 cases, all but two were resolved by way of a guilty plea or a stay of the charges.
“When you have a trial date that is only a couple months away the accused will come to the realization that there is no real benefit to him or her not addressing the charges now because they’re just going to have to deal with them in a few weeks anyway,” said Mr. Cowper.
“Whereas, if the system is delayed the accused can sit there and say: ‘I can think about this for a year and then make up my mind when the trial comes.’ If you’re a defence lawyer, what’s in your client’s best interest?”
Meanwhile, during that long delay the accused is usually subject to bail conditions that are routinely breached. Almost half the charges in the court system aren’t of a serious criminal nature but instead are related to breaches of bail conditions. This is another big waste of a judge’s time.
“In my view that is a huge dysfunction in the system and we need to get rid of them,” said Mr. Cowper.
At the time the report was commissioned, it was widely accepted that the number of judges on the provincial court was down by as many as 20. The government, however, disputed this figure. Mr. Cowper recommends that there be a “definite judicial complement” based on the best available evidence of the current and expected workload of the court.
“Such an approach should reduce the tension between the court and the government and enable both to focus on the challenges at hand,” the report says. That complement would be reviewed every three to four years.
The provincial court has suggested that 18 new judicial appointments be made to reduce the backlog of cases in the system. While not supporting that number, Mr. Cowper did agree with the court’s suggestion that the appointment of five judges immediately would enable an aggressive reduction of the case backlog.Report Typo/Error
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warc | 201704 | WASHINGTON -- Fifty-five colleges and universities -- big and small, public and private -- are being investigated over their handling of sexual abuse complaints, the Education Department revealed Thursday.
The department's release of the list is unprecedented and comes as the Obama administration seeks to shed greater light on the issue of sexual assault in higher education and how it is being handled.
Going forward, the department said, it will keep an updated list of schools facing such investigations and make it available upon request.
The schools range from big public universities including The Ohio State University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Arizona State University to private schools including Knox College in Illinois, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Catholic University of America in the District of Columbia. Ivy League schools including Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth also are on the list.
About half of all states had schools under investigation.
Massachusetts led with six schools on the list. They included Amherst College, Boston University, Emerson College, Harvard College, Harvard University Law School and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Pennsylvania had five schools listed. California, Colorado and New York each had four.
The agency previously would confirm such Title IX investigations when asked, but students and others were often unaware of them.
Catherine E. Lhamon, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in a statement that a school's presence on the list does not mean that it has violated the law but that an investigation of complaints is under way.
Some investigations were prompted by complaints directly to the federal department; others were initiated by the department following compliance reviews triggered by other factors, such as news stories. The department did not release specifics in the cases, and only sparse details in many of them have emerged.
Details in some cases are known, however. For example, one at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor involves allegations of mishandling of a matter involving a student-athlete. The investigation began after federal authorities received complaints related to the expulsion of Brendan Gibbons, a former kicker on Michigan's football team.
A student group examined the school's student sexual misconduct policy and last month determined the university failed to explain a four-year-long delay between the alleged incident and Gibbons' expulsion in December. Spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said the university has been "fully cooperating."
At Dartmouth, where investigators visited the Hanover, New Hampshire, campus in late January to speak with students, faculty and alumni, university officials there said they were working to make improvements.
"We are hopeful at the end of this there will be a resolution that will strengthen our internal processes and result in a safer community," Dartmouth spokesman Justin Anderson said Thursday. "There's always something we can learn and ways to get better."
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said there had been "lots of internal debate" about whether to release the list but that he believes in transparency; he said the more the country is talking about the problem of sexual assault, the better. Duncan said there is "absolutely zero presumption" of guilt in his mind for schools being investigated.
"No one probably loves to have their name on that list," Duncan said during a White House media briefing. "But we'll investigate; we'll go where the facts are. And where they have done everything perfectly, we'll be very loud and clear that they've done everything perfectly."
Duncan said while being on the list might feel difficult for schools, it pales in comparison to the difficulty and trauma borne by sexual assault victims on American college campuses.
"In terms of what's morally right there, the moral compass, whatever we can do to have fewer young women and young men having to go through these types of horrific incidents, we want to do that," Duncan said.
Title IX prohibits gender discrimination at schools that receive federal funds. It is the same law that guarantees girls equal access to sports, but it also regulates institutions' handling of sexual violence and increasingly is being used by victims who say their schools failed to protect them.
Citing research, the White House has said that 1 in 5 female college students is assaulted. President Barack Obama appointed a task force comprised of his Cabinet members to review the issue after hearing complaints about the poor treatment of campus rape victims and the hidden nature of such crimes.
The task force announced the creation of a website, notalone.gov, offering resources for victims and information about past enforcement actions on campuses. The task force also made a wide range of recommendations to schools, such as identifying confidential victims' advocates and conducting surveys to better gauge the frequency of sexual assault on campuses.
The department publicized guidance on Title IX's sexual assault provisions in 2011, and complaints by students have since increased. Complaints, however, don't always lead to an investigation.
The department can withhold federal funding from a school that doesn't comply with the law, but it so far has not used that power and instead has negotiated voluntary resolutions for violators.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., have said non-compliance under the law is "far too common." They say a lack of federal resources is partly to blame for that, and they've sought more money to ensure timely and proper investigations.
Another law that campus sexual assault cases fall under is the Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to report crime statistics on or near their campuses. It also requires schools to develop prevention policies and ensure victims their basic rights. Investigations under this law are not included in the list that was released.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/01/education-department-releases-names-55-schools-facing-sex-assault-probes/ |
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