text:
Get Straight Hair Without The Damage
Kiss those summer beach waves goodbye—straight hair is having a major moment this fall. But before you fry your ends with a flat iron, know that there's a better way to get sleek strands with less damage. Here are some quick tips to save you time, energy and split ends.
The Blow Dyer — Your New BFF
With the right products and tools, you won't need to flat iron after you blow dry–which means you'll cut the amount of time you expose strands to heat.
Prep damp hair with a product like Bumble and Bumble Straight Blow Dry ($28, bumbleandbumble.com), which has a gel-like consistency that helps loosen your hair's natural curves. (A similar product we love: Fekkai Coiff Controle Ironless Straightening Balm ($25, Beauty.com).)
Add an anti-frizz serum, such as Yes To Carrots Anti-Frizz Serum ($7.99, Yestocarrots.com), if your texture is coarse or prone to flyaways. This 99 percent natural cream uses avocado and mango butter to naturally soften and tame strands. And be thorough: "Frizz can be reduced by making sure the hair is completely dry before leaving the house," says Harmonie Redman, a stylist at NYC's Butterfly Studio Salon.
If you're going for a pin-straight look, use a flat brush to blow out hair. Want a little movement and volume? Opt for a round brush. The bigger the brush, the bouncier the blowout.
Finish off with hairspray, like TIGI Catwalk Sleek Mystique Look-Lock Hairspray ($21, Drugstore.com), which has a blend of honeysuckle and lychee to resist humidity and keep locks sleek.
Enjoy Straight Strands For Days
Now that you've got those straight locks, focus on making them last—after all, fewer blowouts means less damage in the long run. Swap your daily moisture-stripping wash for dry shampoo, like Oscar Blandi Pronto Dry Shampoo Spray ($21, Beauty.com).
To prevent frizz and static during sleep hours, switch to a silk pillowcase. Silk prevents split ends, doesn't tangle hair like cotton (cotton actually tugs at individual strands, causing breakage), and even helps reduce the production of sebum, decreasing the chance of greasy hair.
And most importantly, hands off. "Avoid touching your hair frequently, as that can create friction," Redman explains.
If You Must…Still can't resist the flat iron? At least protect your hair. "Look for a treatment-based product, such as Kérastase Fibre Architecte ($42, Kerastase-usa.com), to apply to dry hair when using hot irons to insure optimal hair health. This not only protects your hair from the heat but also promises healthier hair over time, as the heat actually helps the nourishing ingredients penetrate deep into the cuticle layer of your hair."
Will you forego the straightener for healthier, happier strands?


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Blessed John Paul II loved the Christmas season. Guests in the papal apartment during his pontificate found the seasonal decorations up early in Advent; and, following Polish custom, they stayed up until Feb. 2, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. The Christmas meal was traditionally Polish. Every year, John Paul would call his lay friends in Cracow, all assembled in one apartment, and they would sing Polish carols together for hours, over the phone.
Thirty years ago, however, the season took on a more somber tone. For on the night of Dec. 12-13, 1981, the Polish state, through the Polish army, invaded Polish society and imposed martial law throughout the country. There was no provision for martial law in Polands communist legal code, so what the Jaruzelski regime declared was, technically, a state of war. It was a fitting phrase, if unintentionally ironic.
On Christmas Eve, John Paul II placed a lighted candle in the window of the papal apartment, a gesture of solidarity with an international initiative begun in Switzerland by two clergyman, to protest the communist attempt to crush the Solidarity movement. The papal World Day of Peace Message for Jan. 1, 1982, condemned the false peace of totalitarian regimes and at the Angelus that day, the Pope asked everyone to pray for Poland, for what was at stake there was of great importance, not only for a single country, but for the history of man.
With the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, it now seems clear that the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 was not an act of strength but one of weakness, by a regime so incapable of commanding the allegiance of those in whose name it claimed to rule that it could only compel obedience by violence. It took some time for this to become clear in Poland, a country frequently burdened by crushed hopes; John Pauls second pastoral pilgrimage to his homeland, in June 1983, did a lot to raise the spirits of his countrymen"who rallied their energies such that, by 1987, the Pope could spend his third pilgrimage home laying the cultural and moral foundations for a post-communist Poland, which was born two years later in the Revolution of 1989.
Two days after the imposition of the state of war, President Ronald Reagan hosted a lunch at the White House for the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. As I report in The End and the Beginning , it was Cardinal Casaroli who, over the course of a 90-minute discussion, took the Realpolitik view: however unfortunate martial law might be, there were likely reasons of state that compelled General Wojciech Jaruzelski, concerned about a possible Soviet invasion to crush Solidarity beneath Red Army tank treads, to behave as he did. And it was Ronald Reagan who, speaking in the tones of John Paul II, was the voice of moral outrage over this latest usurpation of Polish liberties. As the historical record now makes clear, John Paul and Reagan had it right, and the veteran Vatican diplomat had it wrong: there was no invasion threat in December 1981 (although there had been one in December 1980); the Jaruzelski regime was a hollow, if brutal, shell; the power of moral conviction, aroused, could be an effective antidote to communist tyranny, forging hitherto unimagined and effective tools of resistance; there was nothing permanent about the post-Yalta division of Europe.
The lessons, 30 years later? Solidaritys triumph ought not be universalized as a one-size-fits-all model for coping with tyrants. Still, John Paul IIs instinct for reading history through cultural lenses has much to commend it. Politics and economics are important. What drives history over the long haul, however, is culture: what men and women cherish, honor, and worship; what men and women are willing to stake their lives, and their childrens lives, on.
The truest realism, therefore, is one shaped by truths and ideals, not only by calculations of power. If you doubt that, ask General Jaruzelski.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook , subscribe to First Things via RSS , and follow First Things on Twitter .
Blessed John Paul II loved the Christmas season. Guests in the papal apartment during his pontificate found the seasonal decorations up early in Advent; and, following Polish custom, they stayed up until Feb. 2, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. The Christmas meal was traditionally Polish. Every year, John Paul would call his lay friends in Cracow, all assembled in one apartment, and they would sing Polish carols together for hours, over the phone.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Space Dust and Stars
by Joshua Bauchner
In 2002 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston there was a traveling show of Eli and Edythe Broad's contemporary art collection, called "Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons." In a stunted hall towards the end of the gallery, I first met Anselm Kiefer, in three massive paintings.
germany's spiritual heroes
I remember feeling betrayed by the exhibition's guide, which described Kiefer's gallery as one of Germans influenced by Pop art. It was summertime, and I had left my pencil grinding job of reviewing health surveys early that day to attend. Koons' Michael Jackson and Bubbles greeted my friend and me. The show, heavy in Ruscha and Lichtenstein, was a sugar overload. Kiefer's hall stuck out, emitting fumes of a forest, rank with dead undergrowth, ready for a blaze.
The back wall was filled entirely by his 1973 painting, Germany's Spiritual Heroes, which at a size of roughly ten by twenty feet is one-and-two-thirds times me by three-and-a-third times me. The painting represents an attic and a meeting hall, a heavily wooded enclosed space with few windows, lit by torches. Walking forward, the attic's small doorway seemed to recede as the torches grew in strength—the entire painting threatening to incinerate itself and me and the whole paying audience. My breath was catching, and I stepped back.
falling stars
Kiefer's work is visceral, for obvious reasons: their size, heavy palette and splintered texture, from the weight of the materials. They are too large, too heavy, too thick, too textured. They are merciless. Reviews of his work tend to read like a twilight of the gods, caught up in his tar pit for misery of straw, mud and lead paint. For 40 years these have remained his immediate hallmarks, and they are fully present in two prominent displays of his recent work, at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Louvre, in Paris.
Of course, half a lifetime of leaden books and crusty enormous paintings do not automatically qualify one for a permanent appearance at the Louvre. On top of his wallop, Kiefer clearly seeks a deeper target: a larger sort of German mythohistory. Kiefer is often grouped with Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass as Germans preoccupied with a memory through art and literature of the rubble. The ferocious director RW Fassbinder may be his closest compatriot; both are of a later generation than the others, both were born in spring of West Germany's Year Zero, 1945.
To describe this sort of cultural work there is the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a German supercompound conveying a 'coming to terms with the past,' but Fassbinder and Kiefer do not engage so directly with this historical processing, a strategy that gives their work such immense, if subtle, power.
For Fassbinder, there is In the Year of the Thirteen Moons, in which the trauma of World War II is inscribed onto the body of the protagonist, the transsexual Elvira.
For Kiefer, there is Germany's Cultural Heroes, representing at once the attic, a space of forgotten items for the postwar bourgeoisie, as well as both the great halls and claustrophobic crematoriums of the Third Reich. Germany's massacred and missing Jews are a persistent subject, without either ever falling into Schindler's List.
hortus conclusus
Kiefer described this task of the artist in bald, provocative language: "I do not identify with Nero or Hitler, but I have to reenact what they did just a little bit in order to understand the madness. That is why I make these attempts to become a fascist." His often-cited first project is a quasi-literal attempt. In a series of photographs, Besetzungen (Occupations), the artist gives Nazi salutes in front of well-known German landmarks.
The landmarks include Brandenburg and Siegessaule. The photos are small and grainy, amateurish. In them, the artist looks frumpy, like a five year old woken early from his nap to play dress up. The use of Nazi symbols, illegal in West Germany, is strangely neutered in the photographs, transformed into the snap-shot detritus of any family vacation to Berlin.
But Kiefer's historical 'coming to terms with' went beyond the Third Reich into older Germanic mythology. As Andreas Huyssen writes, he "insisted that Nazi culture's exploitation and abuse of traditional German image worlds had to be worked through." In Kiefer's world, one descries Wagner and Bismarck alongside Nordic legends Yggdrasil, Arminius, Kyyfflhäusser.
At MASS MoCA, A.E.I.O.U (Elizabeth of Austria) invokes the motto of 15th-century Austrian king Frederick III 'Austria est imperare orbi universo,' or, 'Austria's destiny is to rule the world'; across the room, we hear from classical Greece, and see Die Nachricht Vom Fall Trojas (News of the Fall of Troy).
This union of myth and history has won Kiefer great plaudits, especially among American academics; in 1987, the former New York Times art critic John Russell casually noted, "In the opinion of many a good judge [he] is the most remarkable artist to have emerged from Europe in the last quarter of our century."
In both North Adams and Paris, Kiefer occupies spaces unconventional for contemporary art most used to a gallery's temporary, white drywall. At MASS MoCA, the former home Arnold Print Works' textile industry, six paintings and a massive concrete sculpture sit in Building 4's gigantic, empty shell of a second floor. The sculpture, Etroits sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow are the Vessels), is 82-feet long and indeed narrow; its strips of wavy concrete, stacked in a manner that strains to be haphazard but is exceedingly deliberate, sprout stained rebar like track marks exiting an arm.
Four of the paintings are recent (2005‑2006). These are of a regular Kiefer scale, roughly 10 by 25 feet each. They all play on the same visual scheme, with varying palettes: from one point near the top of the canvas, cords of thick paint radiate at all 180 degrees. Halfway down the canvas, these cords splotch into exploded bullets of paint. It looks like an explosion or contraction, inexorable either way.
Sol Invictus, 1995
At the Louvre, a painting and two modest piece-meal sculptures are pasted into the corners of a stairwell connecting the Egyptians to the Sumerians. The `painting, titled Athanor, features a whitish, naked man lying in a cloud of mud at its base. A thin line stretches straight upwards from his bellybutton, into an expansive night sky, swirling with space dust and stars. From both sculptures spring sunflowers, a gaggle of them in Hortus Conclusus and a solitary, almost drooping one in Danaë. The base of the former is a speckled hump, with the texture of papier-mâché; that of the latter, a stack of lead dipped books.
Die Nachricht Vom Fall Trojas
These installations give the lie to the most serious criticism of Kiefer. First, that he is a one trick pony of doom and gloom. His colors are mostly in the same territory of ash to char to spittle to clay, but there is something distinctly positive, almost affirming, about these works. The flowers in the Louvre and the speckles of light blue and purple in the Massachusetts paintings offer the prospect of rebirth and growth.
But more importantly, Kiefer builds on this prospect and manages something awesome: a tying together of place and art to create spaces of levity. He reclaims the scale necessitated by the buildings' historical tasks, bringing the sites' histories and his Germanic ones into the present and amplifying them once more. The visitor experiences the weight of the multiple histories as a sort of "feeling and formlessness," the characteristics that the august philosopher and critic Arthur Danto pinpoints as the sublime.
twilight of the west
Throughout his career as a Teutonic brooder, Kiefer maintained such rigid form in his paintings—the size, the dirt, the symbols, the brimstone, the paint, the lead, the scrap pile—that, at one point, to call his work formless would have been an impossible contradiction, let alone feeling, a response which the exhibition glossaries that always follow Kiefer swiftly deny. But that is precisely his accomplishment with the two centerpieces: Etroits sont les Vaisseaux and Athanor.
Describing the crippled concrete of Etroits sont les Vaisseaux most reviews probably use the word 'wreckage' and imagine the horrific tempest that produced it. Such imagination is unnecessary—the shuddering presses of industry are long silent, but the sculpture itself reverberates in the cavernous brick oven. The recent paintings, with their visual sameness, coat the walls, the radiating lines of paint marching with the sculpture's reverb into the gaping ceiling.
The walk through the Louvre's medieval basement and moat-like Egyptian tomb gallery to reach Kiefer's stairwell is a quiet relief from the throngs; its length and sparse signage amp up the payoff.
Below, the stairwell is not marked, but the reddish base of Athanor which peaks down is obvious, a visual stain on the prevailing washed limestone. Ascending the stairs, the painting reveals itself, and the eye immediately follows the paint strand from the figure to the sky. I almost tripped on the stairs, my neck craned to reach the ceiling. The three works sit in carved out spaces, giving them a decorative feel—they are celestial palace decoration, but for us plebeians.
Of course, quoting Danto to ascribe to Kiefer sublimity has its own irony, as the philosopher is one of the artist's most notable detractors. In his 1989 review of Kiefer at MoMA, Danto cast the artist as wanting nothing more than to be Wagner in a smock: "And there we have the good old command to think with the blood." With the bracing aesthetic package, it is not difficult to see why Danto made this judgment. But here, at MASS MoCA and the Louvre, Kiefer has retooled.
Still resolutely unafraid of his double legacy of culture and barbarism, Kiefer seems to understand that he must take a step away to honestly look that legacy in the face. Nearly 20 years later, he lives among the same vulgar material, yet his brushes with history are no longer dizzying — they are open, soaring even. Leaving the MFA in 2002, I had in my gums a distinct, ashy taste, deposited by Kiefer.
Six years later, walking from his exhibitions in Massachusetts and Paris, I again carried a distinct impression, though not from any type of forge. I felt small—the concrete and stars, the rebar, the sunflowers and I, we were diminished together, all swept into the same slipstream.
Joshua Bauchner is a writer living in Massachusetts. He is a member of the Some Young Jerks collective. This is his first appearance in these pages.
portrait of the artist on a young cell phone
"Royal Flush" – Big Boi ft. Andre 3000 and Raekwon (mp3)
"Film Music" – Family Fodder (mp3)
"Ich und Dich" – Grauzone (mp3)
"Love In This Club" – Usher ft. Young Jeezy (mp3)
"That's How Strong My Love Is" – The Rolling Stones (mp3)
"Da Art of Storytelling Pt. 4" – Outkast (mp3)
"Ice Cream" – Raekwon (mp3)
"Josephine" – Ghostface Killah (mp3)
"When You Smile" – Roberta Flack (mp3)
Danish introduced you to Rocktober.
The joy of Bret Easton Ellis.
Blogging's tough work.
the milky way


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Republicans in Congress, still licking their wounds from November's losses, have unveiled a "law and order agenda" that they hope will prove more popular with voters than their 2006 campaigns. One of the bills introduced as part of the package, sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), resurrects two proposals that have been strongly opposed by civil liberties groups.
Following the Congress's tradition of giving bills patronizing acronyms, the legislation is titled the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act—"Internet SAFETY" for short. Like the 2006 SAFETY Act introduced by Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ), the legislation requires the creators of commercial websites to include a warning if a site contains "sexually explicit material."
Civil liberties groups have raised free speech concerns about such proposals in the past. The official definition of "sexually explicit material" would appear to include non-pornographic sexual education materials. There's also ambiguity in the requirement that there be no "sexually explicit material" in the part of a website that is "initially viewable." That may simply refer to a site's homepage, but with deep linking, any content on a website can be the first content a visitor might see. Such ambiguity is troubling when the penalty for getting it wrong is up to five years in prison.
Also tucked away in this year's version of the SAFETY Act is an item from the FBI's wish list. The bill requires that e-mail and Internet service providers retain records about their customers' online activities for use in law enforcement activities. Failure to comply with regulations issued by the attorney general will get you a year in the slammer.
The legislation gives the executive branch essentially unlimited discretion to determine what data must be retained, and for how long. Indeed, the bill appears to open the door to requirements that ISPs retain records of their customers' activities indefinitely. That raises serious privacy concerns, because once the records are available, there will inevitably be pressure to increase the number of people who have access to them. For example, the movie and recording industries would undoubtedly love to get their hands on the traffic records of those suspected of illicit file trading. Indeed, one member of Congress, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) was so concerned about the dangers of mandatory data retention last year that he proposed legislation requiring ISPs to delete personal data within "a reasonable period of time."
Such regulations could be especially burdensome to small organizations and individuals. The law appears to apply to anyone running a web or e-mail server on the public Internet, even an individual running a server in his basement. The law is too open-ended to predict how burdensome the resulting regulations would be, but it would certainly upset many Ars readers if they were required to hire a lawyer to verify that their log rotation policies wouldn't land them in jail.
The effectiveness of both provisions is likely to be hampered by the global character of the Internet. Although the requirements are not explicitly limited to the United States, it's unlikely that the law could be enforced on those residing outside of U.S. borders. That means that there would still be a large quantity of pornographic material online that lacked the required notification, limiting the usefulness of the notification scheme for Internet filtering. Similarly, lawbreakers would likely sign up with Internet service providers based outside of the United States to escape the grasp of American data retention laws.
With Democrats in control, there may be little danger of Smith's legislation passing this Congress. However, it's worth remembering that the last major legislative attempt to restrict online pornography, the Child Online Protection Act, was passed 98-1 in the Senate and signed by President Clinton. Spurred by the bogeyman of child pornography, restrictions of civil liberties online can easily become a bipartisan affair.


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Mar, John Erskine, 6th (or 11th) earl of
Mar, John Erskine,
6th (or 11th) earl of, 1675–1732, Scottish nobleman, leader of the Jacobites. He was nicknamed
Bobbing John,probably because of his political vacillation. He succeeded his father as earl in 1689 and in the following years was generally a member of the court party. He was twice secretary of state for Scotland under Queen Anne and played a leading part in promoting the union (1707) with England. After the accession (1714) of George I, he made an effusive offer of his services but was dismissed. He then withdrew secretly to Scotland, where he raised (1715) the standard for James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, without orders from him to do so. The rebellion failed, largely through Mar's incompetence. He was defeated at Sheriffmuir and fled (1716) to France with the Pretender. He was attainted of treason in England, but his active dissatisfaction with the Jacobite court and his suspected treachery caused the Pretender also to break with him in 1724. Mar remained in exile until his death.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: British and Irish History: Biographies


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Review & Download Cadenza – Modern WordPress Theme
On this post, we are discovring one of the best WP Creative & Modern Theme in 2018, Cadenza – Modern WordPress Theme from ignitethemes having more than 357 purchases on Enevato Market !
1. Review
Title : Cadenza – Modern WordPress Theme
Type : wordpress/creative
Designer : ignitethemes
Publishing date : 2012-04-24T01:38:50+10:00 and updated at 2015-06-30T15:17:18+10:00
Price : 50 $
Sales : 357
Review & Rating : 4.03
Download this template
2. Description
Cadenza – Modern WordPress Theme
Cadenza is a WordPress theme for creative professionals or businesses. It is a fully HTML 5 Valid theme, it comes with many features and has several home page options. See more features below:
Theme Features
- Fully HTML 5 Valid theme
- 3 Sliders and 4 homepage variations
- 11 Predefined skins
- Includes dark theme, with ability to change the body and content background from admin panel and make additional changes to css to create a white skin
- Unlimited portfolios
- Unlimited sidebars
- A fair amount of shortcodes
- Over 200 Fonts
- Translation ready
- Powerful custom administration panel
- Skin constructor. Changing the look of theme is extremely easy
- 16 page templates
- 6 custom widgets
- 5 variations of portfolio view
- Threaded Comments
- Very detailed documentation
- 2 Custom types for slider and portfolio management
- Numerous CSS3 Enhancements
- Ajaxified Contacts Page
- Lightbox with Video support
- Under Construction Page
- Table generator from admin interface
- PSD files for main elements
Update June 30th 2015
- Updated to latest PrettyPhoto
Update Sept 15th 2014
- Fixed incompatibility issues with WordPress 4.0
- Minor fixes and improvements
Update Aug 6th 2013
- Fixed compatibility issue with WordPress v3.6
- Fixed twitter widget issue
- Fixed toggle shortcode error
- Removed displaying video automatically in portfolio single view
- Added a section in admin panel for custom css and java script so that custom changes are not overwritten with the updates
- Optimized Google fonts inclusion
- Fixed default avatar not showing issue
- Updated the documentation
Update Oct 22nd 2012
- Fixed twitter widget not showing bug, set according to latest API
- Improved child theme support
Update Sept 3rd 2012
- Fixed slider links issue, now the links custom field is displayed for slide post in admin panel
- Fixed deprecated warning for contact form in servers with newer version of php
- Improved the blog posts listing shortcode
- Improved contact form handling, now you can use commas for success/error messages
- Improved twitter widget, now you can set own caption for follow button
Files affected:
- library/functions/shortcodes.php
- library/functions/widgets.php
- contact-template.php
- contact-form.php
- library/admin/custom-fields.php
Update June 13th 2012
- Fixed the issue with homepage with blog template not showing the blog entries
- Fixed twitter widget "Follow" button link
Update June 11th 2012
- Fixed portfolio categories not displaying issue
Update May 20th 2012
- Added support for portfolio with hierarchical categories
- Fixed bug with homepage with blog pagination
- Fixed bug with coda slider missing correct javascript path
- Fixed multible tab conflict in tab shortcode
- Fixed background issue, added support for fixed/non-fixed backgrounds
- Changes in the documentation – Fixed toggle shortcode description and added a guide on creating child themes correctly
Update April 28th 2012
- Added drag & drop sorting for Slider and portfolio items
- Added alternative blog layout with sidebar
- Fixed Google fonts preview issue
- Fixed custom background issue
- Improvements in admin panel


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Parturition is the act of giving birth to a baby. It consists of many different stages which interact to provide delivery of child and the placenta. Childbirth usually occurs after 38 weeks of gestation (in clinical terms 40 weeks since amenorrhea). Parturition tends to last between 8 hours (in multiparti mothers) to 14 hours (in primipari mothers), although longer labours are not unusual.
Organs Involved
The primary organ involved is the uterus. This contains a layer known as the myometrium which contains bundles of non-striated (smooth) muscle as well as connective tissue (collagen), nerves and blood vessels. The muscles of the inner wall of the myometrium are circular, whereas the muscles on the outer wall are longitudinal. During pregnancy this layer increases in mass approximately 20 fold, with hypertrophy increasing from 50 um to 500 um, hyperplasia increasing and glycogen deposits increasing.
The muscle cells act as a syncytium, in which spontaneous depolarising pacemaker potentials occur. If these are above a certain threshold (known as the action potential) then a wave of calcium is released and a contraction occurs.
During labour the uterus can be divided into two regions, the upper, muscular region and the lower region which generally acts to provide a passive fibromuscular birth canal.
Cervical Softening
The cervix consists largely of fibrous collagen in a proteoglycan matrix. It is normally hard, and needs to be softened to allow passage of the baby. The presence of keratan sulfate decreases the amount of collagen, whereas dermatan sulfate increases the amount of collagen.
There are several chemicals which allow the softening of the cervix, including:
- Metalloproteinases
- Proinflammatories such as cytokines which induce an inflammatory response
- Nitrous oxide (although not directly responsible it is the product following the catabolism of inhibiting NOS)
- Prostaglandins
Contractions are high amplitude shortening and relaxing of muscles which occur with increasing frequency throughout labour. These contractions are responsible first for dilating the cervix, moving the foetus through the pelvis and eventually expelling the baby. The primary hormone involved is oxytocin, a protein (9 amino acids long) which is released following a nervous response which results from the weight of the baby on the cervix, among other things.
Oxytocin stimulates the decidual layer to release prostaglandins (which in turn enhance the effect of oxytocins). These act on the myometrium to produce a contraction by initiating the release of contraction associated proteins (CAP's) which:
- increasing gap junctions between cells to increase the effectiveness of the synctium and increase the likelihood that an action potential will occur
- increasing ion channels for calcium to increase the effect of an action potential
- increasing oxytocin and prostaglandin receptors to enhance the above two effects
Calcium activates myosin light chain kinase, which in turn induce contractions.
A high estrogen:progesterone ratio is required for contractions, as this results in an increase in the release of prostaglandins (by stimulating the release of phosphorlipase from lysosomes) and increasing the number of oxytocin receptors.
Labour is the clinical process of parturition. A mother tends to become aware of labour with either 2-4 rapid contractions within a 10-minute period or the breaking of the amniotic membranes (the "water breaking").
Although the process is not entirely understood, scientists believe the hormone CRH and CRH binding proteins are responsible for regulating labour, as they induce placental release of estrogen and localised release of prostaglandins. Levels increase exponentially throughout pregnancy, and tend to be higher in mothers who give birth preterm.
Stage One is associated with the start of painful contractions and the dilating of the cervix. Contractions are initially slow until the cervix reaches a diametre of 3 cm, then the increase in speed until the end of stage one, at which point the cervix is at a diametre of approximately 10 cm. Each muscle cell does not completely relax, and therefore shortens with each contraction. The retraction ring gradually moves upwards.
Stage Two is associated with the delivery of the foetus. As the foetus moves down it is rotated due to the dimensions of the pelvis (ellipsoid laterally at the pelvic inlet, circular in the middle and ellipsoid medially at the pelvic outlet). This generally results in the baby's head facing the mother's rectum. Abdominal contractions assist with the expulsion of the child. A breach birth occurs if the baby is delivered feet first.
Stage Three is associated with the delivery of the placenta. Because of the importance of completely removing the entire placenta (abandoned villi can result in maternal haemorrhage) this stage is usually assisted with steady traction on the umbilical cord and doses of oxytocin.
Procedures Associated with Parturition
This section does not cover Cesarean sections
Episiotomy - a surgical incision to assist the passage of the baby
Preterm and Post-Term Parturition
Children born before 35 weeks gestation are known as preterm, and children born after 40 gestational weeks are known as post-term. The former are susceptible to higher rates of mortality and morbidity (due to underdeveloped organs such as the lungs) whereas the latter can damage mothers during birth (due to their increased size).
Risk factors associated with preterm birth include:
- age (mothers younger than 17 and older than 35)
- infection
- history of preterm births
- multiple pregnancies
- foetal abnormality
- growth restriction
- male foetus
- maternal factors (drug and alcohol use, smoking, extreme stress, vigorous exercise, low BMI)
Management of preterm labour includes providing corticosteroids (to increase surfacant in the lungs, hence increasing the ease at which the newborn can survive) and relaxin.


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Chef Blaine Wetzel's Quest to Become the Ultimate Locavore
Chef Blaine Wetzel has one rule for his 18-course dinners at Washington's remote Willows Inn. Whether it's geoduck or fried moss, everything is foraged, fished, or farmed on a nine-square-mile patch of rocky coast.
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In the winter of 2010, Riley Starks was in trouble. A fisherman and organic farmer, the 59-year-old owned a small inn on Washington State's Lummi Island, a nine-mile ridge of fir and hemlock rising out of the sea near the Canadian border, with a year-round population of 964 weathered souls. Starks and his wife had bought the eight-room Willows Inn in 2001, and for a while they lived out their fantasy. Starks supplied fish and veggies to the restaurant, while his wife handled the inn and the cooking. But the economic downturn had clobbered both the inn and their marriage. His wife left in 2009, and Starks was forced to place an ad for a chef on Craigslist. He wasn't looking for anything special, just a warm body to keep the place alive, and that was largely what he got among the 25 responses. Most were from restaurant-crazed Seattle, as he'd expected, but one reply jumped out at him. It was from Copenhagen, Denmark.
"To whom it may concern," the email began. "Please consider my application for the chef position posted. I am originally from Washington State and, although for the last eight years I have been working around the country and in Europe, I would love the opportunity to return to the Northwest again. I am particularly interested as timing and the description of the restaurant seem like a possible perfect fit, a small chef-driven kitchen with the emphasis on the garden."
In a sweetly passionate 1,000-word cover letter, the applicant explained that he was a chef at Noma, which he described as "a small restaurant with a biodynamic farm where the focus is exclusively on seasonal, farm-to-table dining. If radishes are on your section, you are the one harvesting them almost daily, and chefs are responsible to forage for various wild plants, herbs, mushrooms and berries that make up a huge part of the cuisine. I have totally refined my palette, to a more fresh, natural, juicy type of food full of texture." The cover letter was signed, "Kind regards, Blaine Wetzel." He was 24 years old.
Starks had never heard of Noma, but he checked it out online. What he found was a restaurant that had blown up the culinary world by going local with a vengeance. "They wanted foie gras. He gave them cloudberries," said one Swedish restaurateur about René Redzepi, Noma's chef. In 2009, after three years of steady climbing, Noma had claimed the number-three spot among the world's top restaurants, as chosen by the food critics and restaurateurs at the World's Fifty Best Restaurants Academy, and its complete reimagining of Scandinavian food would soon send it to first place, a position it still holds.
Starks scanned the Noma menu, the sea urchin powder and hay ash and Icelandic puffin eggs, and realized that Denmark had nothing on Lummi Island. He spoke with Wetzel, whose greenness did not give him pause. ("I wanted youth. Think about it: Alexander the Great was 24 when he conquered the world.") Then he wrote to offer Wetzel the job. "Blaine, I would like to do all we can to encourage you to become our chef. If you have the same sensibilities of René Redzepi, we could thrill you with ingredients that very few restaurants can get. We keep live spot prawns, large and from right here, and I can say that there is likely no other restaurant that does this on the West Coast. Since I have been a commercial fisherman all of my life, I can source the best of the best from friends. I am not a chef or even a cook, but my job is to source ingredients, which I do well. Reading reviews of Noma, I have become inspired to reach higher, keep going, try harder. Though our location is pretty amazing, with west-facing marine views, the element that brings people here is our food. It would be so much fun to take that to a new level! It gives me energy just thinking about it."
Blaine proposed that they revamp the kitchen and dining room and give America something it had never seen before. Starks agreed to go for broke; he borrowed and bartered $100,000 from his Lummi Island neighbors. "It was a Hail Mary pass for me," he says. "I was going to lose this place anyway. I promised him all this stuff. But I really saw this as the salvation of the restaurant. I said, 'You come, I'll make this work somehow.'"
Blaine Wetzel saw Lummi Island for the first time in August 2010. For centuries, the Lummi Indians had visited for the good eats; little had changed here. One of the greatest salmon runs on earth slid past the western beaches every summer. The place was lousy with berries. Raspberries, huckleberries, salmonberries, Saskatoon berries. Rubenesque blackberries spilled along the roadsides, shining like purple Christmas lights. Wetzel recognized seaweeds and beach plants from Noma, and he knew that a lot of the ones he didn't recognize would be edible, too. A few might even be delicious. The waters brimmed with oysters, mussels, and clams. Starks' organic vegetable farm was a five-minute hike up the trail from the 100-year-old inn, the only public business on the island besides the Beach Store Cafe, also owned by the inn, and a small grocery store. The simple wooden building perched above a beach looking due west across the Rosario Strait, the arched backs of the San Juan Islands breaching the horizon like a pod of orcas.
"It was such a rare scenario," Wetzel told me. "This little restaurant in the middle of nowhere, right on the ocean, only 25 seats, with its own farm and its own fishing boats. You don't hear that very often. It caught my attention right away, and then it sparked my imagination." Still, the inn was two hours from Seattle, reachable only by ferry, and the kitchen was a wreck. Noma it was not.
"The first thing Blaine did was start clearing counters and drawers," Starks says. "We'd had an accumulation of 10 years of different people's ideas of what a kitchen should be. He put everything in boxes and put it all down in the basement. Pretty soon there was nothing. The breakfast cook would come in and couldn't find anything. And Blaine said, 'Look, if you need something, bring it back up. But if it stays in the basement, it's gone.'"
Working alone, relying on the farm, Starks' fishing, and what he could forage himself, Wetzel began offering five-course meals, one seating per night. Word spread that a Noma disciple was experimenting on Lummi Island. "We had the best fall we'd ever had," says Starks. "The Noma connection was everything."
In January, they closed to renovate. Wetzel lured another young American chef named Aaron Abramson from Noma. "We renovated the kitchen on no budget," Abramson says. "It was Blaine, me, Riley, a carpenter, and his nephew. It was comical, but it was a fun time. I did not see the restaurant getting so big so fast." During the renovation, The New York Times featured the Willows Inn in an article titled "10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride."
"It went crazy after that," says Starks. "Everybody wanted a reservation, and we were closed. We realized we needed to staff up, all the things you don't want to do when you're closed and you have no money coming in. But we had to. It was either that or fall flat on your face."
When they re-opened in March, Wetzel began offering 18-course tasting menus. Sometimes that meant 10 courses of seafood. Sometimes it was tartare made from the heart of an island deer. ("Heart of the hart," as the menu put it.) Sometimes you were stuck with fried moss. That was just fine with the foodies who beat a path to the Willows Inn door, dropping $85 apiece for dinner, plus wine. (It's now $150.) "Nowhere else could this food exist," enthused the Chicago Tribune. "Like wine that decants, Wetzel's cooking improves with time, when the floral aromas outside your room trigger memories of the wild cherry blossom ice cream and lemon verbena granita, adorned with velvety edible quince blossoms, wood violets and wild rose petals."
EARLY ON A CRISP October morning, I found Wetzel in the Willows Inn kitchen, disemboweling wild plums with tweezers. "I just want the skins," he explained. "They get a nice leathery texture when you bake them." He brushed juice from the inner flesh over the skins. "The pectin protects them from blistering." The skins would be served that night alongside a frozen granita of wheatgrass and wild herbs.
Pale and fit in that Pacific Northwest way, with dark hair and the soulful black eyes of a harbor seal, Wetzel could have been a college kid, but he had an inner stillness, a Zen confidence, and he told me that he never questioned his decision to leave Noma. "After two years, I felt like I'd got the rhythm, the style. I'm not saying I learned everything, just the bulk of what I had to learn from another person. If you see the seasons twice, especially spring and summer, you get the gist of it." He was also homesick. "It's definitely isolating being a foreigner on your own. I felt out of place at all times."
His place, he knew, was the Pacific Northwest. He was still not so many years removed from being a skate punk in Olympia, Washington, fishing and foraging around Puget Sound. "Growing up, I was exposed to ingredients that a lot of other kids probably aren't. It was normal to have oysters or salmon or steamed clams for dinner."
The six other chefs who work under Wetzel were all busy prepping—simmering seaweed, dissecting chickweed into elfin pieces, and transforming smoked smelt, kelp, and smelt roe into a sort of Lummi Island dashi. The order of the courses for that night was posted on the wall in shortened form: "1 Roots. 2 Roe. 3 Oyster. 4 Kale/Porcini. 5 Beet. 6 Crab. 7 Shit. 8 Grains. 9 Salmon. 10 Onion. 11 Bread." (Mysteriously, there was no 12.) "13 Squash. 14 Skin. 15 Frisée. 16 Plum. 17 Huck. 18 Flax." I was a bit concerned that with number seven they were taking the foraging concept too far, but I kept my mouth shut.
Food & Wine had recently named Wetzel, who turns 27 in March, one of its Best New Chefs in America, and the Willows was slammed for the foreseeable future. But there was no sense of urgency in the spotless kitchen, just focus and determination. The baby-faced chefs could have been an order of culinary monks. Most restaurant kitchens seem to be staffed by a toxic gumbo of ex-cons, merchant marines, and Tourette's cases, but there wasn't a can of Red Bull in sight, and the place was quiet as a church. Anthony Bourdain would have broken into a clammy sweat.
Everyone at the Willows calls Wetzel Blaine, not Chef. When I asked him to explain the hierarchy of the kitchen, he had to stop and think, as if considering the question for the first time. "Basically none," he said. "We work collaboratively. I trust these guys."
Living in various rented houses on the small island, the chefs spend a lot of their free time together. Most of them are single, though Wetzel's Paraguayan girlfriend of seven years, Raquel Ruiz Diaz, manages the restaurant. They have fires on the beach. Crab boils. Basketball games. Wetzel snorkels, kayaks, bikes, and skateboards—the latter with difficulty. ("The cement's atrocious.") Many of the chefs forage on their way to work, and the menu evolves from what they find.
"We're always keeping our eyes open for what's growing here," Abramson told me as we slipped out of the kitchen to gather some sea beans he'd spotted near his old house. "The island pretty much tells you what to do." Sea bean, also known as Salicornia, is an intensely salty, crunchy succulent that grows in salt marshes. It turns up pickled, deep-fried in tempura batter, and as a garnish on a variety of the restaurant's dishes.
Back at the Willows, I caught Wetzel walking down to the beach with a bucket to collect seawater. "We use a lot of seawater in our cooking," he explained. "They say 3 percent salt water is the same as seawater, but you can't match the flavor—the brininess." Sniffing the air, I realized that oceans smell surprisingly different from one another. The North Atlantic smells like oysters; the North Pacific smells like miso soup.
Wetzel returned to the kitchen, set some Dungeness crabs simmering, and then showed an apprentice how to hang a geoduck's feeding tube upside down to make it relax. "If it's long, we get 30 portions out of it; if it's contracted, we get 15." Geoducks, which are found only in the Pacific Northwest, are the world's largest burrowing clams. They resemble, as many new observers point out, horse weenies, which may or may not explain why they reportedly sell for more than $100 per pound in China. The siphon, sliced thin and eaten raw, is the sweetest, crunchiest sashimi you will ever taste.
"I used to eat geoduck when I lived here," Wetzel said, "but I'd been away for 10 years. When I came back, I met it with new eyes. It was shockingly good. It's everything I like about food. This amazing texture—a mixture of creaminess and crunchiness—with a superclean marine flavor. They grow right across the water in Samish Bay. As far as geoduck, there's not a better specimen than what we get here. These are the kind of things I try to put on the menu."
The island has also renewed his appreciation for salmon. "Working with your own fishing boats opens your eyes to the potential for what salmon can be," he says. "Pink salmon is a good example. It's such an oily fish that it's good for only about 24 hours after it's caught, but when you work with the fishing boats, and they take such good care of the fish, then all of a sudden something that usually gets thrown away becomes your favorite ingredient."
Not everything works out, however. "Like sea cucumber. Really unique item that the Lummi tribe dives for right around the island. They're known for it. Man, I couldn't find any way to make those things taste good. They're so gross. The texture is very challenging."
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE WHAT a pain in the ass it is to serve food from "only here, only now," as the Willows advertises. When we realized that we needed some beach mustard for dinner, Wetzel grabbed a colander and we set off for a beach where he knew the peppery succulent grew amid bleached driftwood. He worked quickly, plucking the tips and the flowers like a tea picker, and then we followed the beach to where it turned into a continuous slope of rock in the crashing waves. He was hoping for sea lettuce, his favorite seaweed. Wetzel took the contours like a skateboarder, running over the slick rock with the colander tucked under his arm, using his momentum to keep him pressed against the curved slope. There were sea anemones (not tasty) but no sea lettuce. They were done for the season.
Although the Willows Inn is not above using ingredients from outside producers (coffee, flour, and sugar are pretty much deal breakers), the menus can still be punishingly seasonal. Sure, summer is a cakewalk, but by December the edible moss has reared its head. ("I usually hold off on that until there's not much left to cook with. If you simmer it and then deep-fry it, the moss gets crispy, with a nice forest flavor.") The inn closes for January and February, and Wetzel guest-chefs at other restaurants, looking for new ideas. He had plans to head to São Paulo to chef at D.O.M. (the number-four restaurant in the world) and work with wild Amazonian ingredients. In March, when the Willows reopens, he says, sourcing is "quite difficult. Every plate is green things that just poked out of the ground. All shoots and leaves and tiny herbs." So he's taking a page from the Lummi Indians, smoking, curing, and pickling half the island's foodshed.
Slowly the stockpile of pickled fiddleheads, bladderwort capers, and smoked salmon is dispelling seasonal deprivation. Wetzel and a group of investors recently bought the inn and farm from Starks, who will be devoting himself to raising heirloom chickens and fishing, and Wetzel will soon have the kitchen of his dreams. First up: converting the basement into a root cellar and filling it with venison prosciutto.
Why bother? I asked. What's wrong with beef off the Sysco truck? "Using things from right here on the island helps give context to the meal," Wetzel said, "makes it something that you couldn't replicate. I'm not the best chef in the world, and this is not the Ritz-Carlton, but maybe we're a little more thought provoking."
Provocative enough to catch the attention of the World's Fifty Best Restaurants Academy. Mitchell Davis, one of the three academy chairs for the U.S., visited the Willows Inn a few days before I did. "He's cooking with a level of sophistication you only expect to find in the global capitals—and even there it might be difficult to make such a project a success," Davis told me. "It's brave of him to do—not many chefs in America would be confident or activist enough to serve a lettuce 'steak' as a main course."
By the time we returned to the Willows, two fishermen were waiting outside with 14 salmon. Wetzel had requested all females, so he could extract the roe. "We don't normally sex our fish," one said. "You'll have to tell us how successful we were."
Wetzel paid the full beach price of $3 per pound for all 76 pounds of salmon. "That enough?" he asked. "I want to make sure you're getting enough."
"Oh yeah."
"Can we keep this going the rest of the season?"
"You bet."
It was late afternoon, and dinner suddenly loomed large. Most of the season, the chefs try to finish prepping in time to slip away to the beach for a plunge in the icy Pacific, to, as one put it, "focus themselves before service." But it was October, and the water seemed more likely to paralyze, so they skipped the swim.
Wetzel drew his trusty tweezers again, ribboning strands of bull kelp into individual bowls as if they were lasagna noodles, tucking lumps of crabmeat into the folds, then sticking flowers and leaves of St. John's wort to the sides of the gummy kelp. I kept pressing him to justify the wild ingredients. Wouldn't parsley do just fine? "All I'm trying to do is reflect a moment in nature," he said. "These little herbs and plants don't necessarily define the dish, but they can give you a better sense of Dungeness crab." Then he smiled sheepishly. "Also, it's for me. I've been mushrooming and fishing and being outside my whole life. I'd rather have part of my day be going to the beach or chopping wood instead of standing at a stove in a basement in New York."
DID I MENTION DINNER? For me, it began on the Willows deck with a Pacific gin fizz (gin, wild pineapple weed, egg white). It looked like green-tinged skim milk and tasted like medicine and made me very happy. The sun was dripping into the sea, bouncing a wall of light into the dining room, and a dozen couples, young Seattle hipsters and well-appointed white-hairs, gradually filled the tables. Then the food started coming out, delivered by the chefs themselves.
The meal commenced with a lidded cedar box placed on the table. When I lifted the cover, a puff of smoke escaped, as if there were some miniature Lummi Indians inside trying to send a signal. Nestled in a bed of smoldering moss was a single fire-roasted sunflower root, sweet and creamy and smoky. Down the hatch, and instantly a little cylinder appeared, rolled from a wafer of a crêpe and capped with chives. I popped it in my mouth, bit, and salmon roe exploded out of it. No sooner had that plate been whisked away than a bowl piled with rocks and frozen seawater was plunked down before me. It was a bonsai Lummi Island coastline, and clinging to the top rock was a pickled oyster on the half shell. Each course was a little diorama, a meditation on some piece of the island, stripped to its essence. An ultracrispy kale chip came dotted with spiky caterpillars—actually porcini concentrate bristling with tiny shards of rye toast—and then came the intertidal community of crabmeat hiding in kelp. After that, I nervously awaited the dreaded course number seven. It arrived on a slab of slate—one innocent, and delicious, grilled shiitake mushroom.
From there the evening was a blur. The geoduck arrived, sitting in an emerald pool of seaweed oil, like sushi from an alternate universe. There was smoked sockeye on a cedar plank, and a farm scene of delicata squash sitting in a muddy smear of pureed truffles from the Cascade Mountains. At some point a silvery blue halibut skin appeared, crisped like a tortilla chip, studded with pickled razor clams and dusted with seaweed powder. The plum skins made an appearance late in the evening, paired with the grassy granita, and then the huckleberries, cuddling up to a scoop of woodruff ice cream.
This was not an approximation of how the Lummi or any other hunter-gatherers had ever eaten. It was more of a fever dream of the possible, shot through with bright revelations. For me, those revelations came after I floated from the dining room, feeling strangely invigorated, and glided down the path onto the beach. I gazed out at the black Pacific, the briny wind scudding across the waves, and realized that I would never again question whether or not some ingredient was good, not even the lowly sea cucumber. I let my eyes adjust until I could make out the white edge of the waves curling in the moonlight. The place swirled around me. I could smell the rose hips and beach mustard. And in my mind's eye, I gazed upon the waving kelp and the scuttling crabs, the green herbs and the creeping things and the little fishes, and I saw that it was all good.
Contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen is the author of American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields.


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Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito Found Guilty of Murder
Amanda Knox has her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty of killing her roommate in Italy, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Knox, 26, and Sollecito, 29, were originally convicted in 2009 of sexually assaulting and murdering Meredith Kercher, who was stabbed to death in her bedroom. Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison, Sollecito to 25. A third person, Rudy Hermann Guede, was convicted separately. Knox and Sollecito had spent four years in jail before their convictions were overturned in 2011.
Kate Beckinsale to star in movie based on Amanda Knox trial
In the retrial, Knox was sentenced to 28-and-a-half years, while Sollecito's sentence was 25 years. Knox declined to fly back to Italy for the retrial, fearing she would be "wrongly convicted." Sollecito was instructed to hand over his passport so he would not leave the country before Italy's supreme court confirmed his sentencing.
A legal expert told CNN that it's unlikely Knox would be extradited back to Italy because of the United States' Double Jeopardy laws that state a person cannot be tried twice for the same charge. Knox's lawyer also pointed out that the supreme court will likely not hear the case until April or May of 2015 because of backlog of cases.
"I am frightened and saddened by this unjust verdict," Knox said in written remarks, according to CNN. "Having been found innocent before, I expected better from the Italian justice system. The evidence and accusatory theory do not justify a verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. ...There has always been a marked lack of evidence. This has gotten out of hand. Most troubling is that it was entirely preventable. I beseech those with the knowledge and authority to address and remediate the problems that worked to pervert the course of justice and waste the valuable resources of the system. "
In 2011, Hayden Panettiere played Knox in a Lifetime movie called Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy.
View original Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito Found Guilty of Murder at TVGuide.com
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Discussing the varients of mysticism, which is benevolent and what is manevolent.
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Have you taken a look at Kodak's stock today? Get a good look while you can, because it's shitting the bed worse than a disemboweled E. coli patient-already down 60%, to less than a dollar. This is how it ends.
We've known the company's in dire financial shape, but this looks like the beginning of the crew abandoning ship. You can't even order off the Dollar Menu with a share of Eastman Kodak. At a certain point that I doubt is too far off, there's not going to be any value left. Their lawyers might soon be charging up their camera phones for bankruptcy court. [Michael von Poppel]


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A Portland Disaster App Preps for the Big One
Two years ago this month, a massive quake unleashed a tsunami and nuclear crisis on Japan. Thanks to the Cascadian fault line, Oregon will get a similar shake—some say any day now—destined to devastate Portland's infrastructure.
At least there's an app for that.
"If Portland was hit by some sort of natural disaster or an earthquake, the likelihood of being able to communicate via cell is slim to none," says Lindsay Bell, the president of Hillsboro's Darkwater Studios. The firm created Survive!, a free app for iPhone, for a competition last year. A just-released version incorporates input from the city's Bureau of Emergency Management. Key features for the quake prepper:
TEXT Users can create prearranged text messages and contact lists. A preset "I need help" alert even sends out GPS coordinates. (SMS puts less strain on networks than voice calls.)
10-4 Users can monitor police, fire, and weather services with the app's built-in emergency and weather band radio scanners.
DOT DASH DOT The app includes an International Morse Code translation chart and allows users to tap out Morse messages with their phone's "flashlight" mode.
NAVIGATE Survive! maps rally points set up by local governments, like the network of neighborhood emergency communication nodes launched late last year by the City of Portland. Users can map their own gathering spots, landmarks, or just where the wreckage of the Fremont Bridge has washed up.
Frightened townsfolk will, of course, have to plan their Survive! use strategically. Those iPhone batteries may not last much longer than civilization itself.


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Color Palette: Deep Teal, Green, and Gold
Space: Foyer
Color Tip: True to the Ankasa design philosophy, I believe in the beauty of contrast; I frequently use elegant, understated pieces combined with rich pops of color to complete the look of a room.
More From House Beautiful
Where I Used Color: It's all on the walls. My husband Sachin and I are Indian. We like that the entrance to our home shows our native inspiration. We bought this piece of art in Mumbai. It was painted by Manjit Bawa, an Indian painter known for his use of color.
Must-Have: Souvenirs! The accents on the table are treasures we've picked up on some of our travels.
Styling Advice: The mirrored table adds an interesting depth to any objects placed on it.
The Most Colorful Spot in My House: Judi Roaman>>
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Want a free Rob Zombie track? Then play 'Find The 13'!
We all like a freebie don't we? So why don't you take part in the 'Find the 13' game from Universal Music, and find the 13 Zombie cats to get a free track to download.
Just be careful, not all kitties are zombies. Here's the link: http://www.findthe13.com/


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The Land Development Agency (LDA), in partnership with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, has broken ground on the largest public housing scheme in the state in recent years – a passive house scheme at Shanganagh in Shankill, Co Dublin.
The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Leo Varadkar, TD, has launched Construct Innovate – a new Enterprise Ireland Technology Centre hosted at University of Galway which may play a key role in the transition to sustainable building in Ireland.
The energy used to heat, cool and light our buildings is responsible for almost a quarter of Ireland's national carbon emissions – with the carbon embodied in the buildings themselves representing over an eighth of the total, a new report has revealed.
The Irish Green Building Council (IGBC) today launched a new version of its Home Performance Index (HPI) sustainable home certification system at its annual residential conference, Better Homes 2022. The focus of the event was on delivering low carbon homes at scale.
Do thicker insulated walls, triple glazed windows, & MVHR ventilation systems tip the scales unfavourably for passive house when it comes to embodied carbon?
As Russia weaponises gas exports, the European Commission has proposed a gas demand reduction plan, to cut use in Europe by 15 per cent until next spring.
The world's first passive house hospital has been certified by the Passive House Institute – showing that the standard can be applied to even to the most demanding building types.
The AECB conference 2022 will focus on practical solutions to decarbonising buildings, with a particular emphasis on timber-based approaches with the potential to deliver low energy, healthy buildings at scale while minimising the use of precious resources and impact on the environment.
A new online hub aimed at upskilling the construction sector is now live.
New radon maps, launched by the Environmental Protection Agency today at the National Radon Forum, show an increased risk from radon in Ireland, with 170,000 homes now predicted to be at risk of radon exposure above the national reference level.
Some one-stop-shops will not take on projects with new build extensions.
Latest climate report calls for more e cient use of floor space in buildings
Green groups criticise lack of focus on embodied carbon. The European Commission is proposing sweeping changes to the way in which energy ratings for buildings are allocated, in a bid to stimulate the retrofit of the worst performing buildings across Europe.
Leading sustainable building association the AECB has secured funding to create an international resource to share detailed information on low energy buildings in the UK, Ireland and, ultimately, internationally, via a rebuild of the Low Energy Buildings Database (LEBD).
Passive House Plus editor and publisher Jeff Colley's TEDx talk on the passive house standard is now available to view online.
The Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI) has launched its 2030 Climate Challenge, calling for urgent action to be taken by architects and the wider construction industry to tackle the climate emergency.
Ireland's new climate action plan, which was published on Thursday 4 November, contains the country's first official targets for limiting the embodied carbon of construction materials.
Coventry University research has found that 40 per cent of primary school classrooms examined in a study did not have an adequate ventilation rate to combat the spread of Covid-19.
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While understanding wall and roof insulation is relatively straightforward, insulation under the ground floor can be a bit of a mystery by comparison. Not only is it buried in the ground, but there are notoriously tricky spots like the wall-floor junction that need to be detailed and insulated properly. And the design of your foundation often depends on site conditions and the type of structure you're going to build, too. In this guide, we explain some different ways of insulating one of the most challenging parts of the building envelope.
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Grant Engineering is Ireland's leading heating manufacturer and has been providing efficient and reliable heating solutions for over 40 years.


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Banabila & Machinefabriek
Squidco: Improvised, Composed & Unusual Music from around the globe
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The 4th collaboration between electronic artists Michel Banabila and Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuydervelt), in captivating music exploring the concepts of macro and micro: how insiginificant we become when zooming out, and how small worlds can be found when zooming in.
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Label: Tapu Records
Catalog ID: 018TR
Squidco Product Code: 22646
Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2016
Country: Netherlands
Packaging: Digipack
Recorded by the artists.
Field recordings recorded at the nature reserve Biala Woda, Poland.
Michel Banabila-field recordings, composer
Rutger Zuydervelt-composer
Ilya Ziblat Shay-doublebass
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and click here to Search for albums with that instrument.
Artist Biographies:
• Show Bio for Michel Banabila
"Michel Banabila, born 1961, is a sound artist, composer, and producer. Banabila releases music since 1983 and has produced musical scores for numerous films, documentaries, theatre plays and choreographies. He worked / performed in The Netherlands, Poland, Lebanon, UK, South Africa, Russia, Japan, Spain, China, USA and Belgium. Banabila is especially keen on mixing disciplines and music styles, using elements and influences from jazz, electronic music, classical and world music. Therefore there is no particular genre to categorize Banabila's music. In addition to acoustic instrumentation, Banabila uses electronics, field recordings, and snippets from radio, tv and internet. He collaborated with different types of artists like Anton Goudsmit, Erkan Oğur, Hanyo van Oosterom, Holger Czukay, Joshua Samson, Machinefabriek, Mete Erker, Oene van Geel, Radboud Mens, Salar Asid, Sandhya Sanjana, Scanner, Yaşar Saka , Eric Vloeimans, and Zenial, among others.
Besides making albums and musical scores, Banabila works with theatre, dance and visual art on more conceptual artistic projects. He builds a database with samples; uses the city environment as a recording studio, collects fragments of spoken texts, which he composes into soundscapes, audio/visual installations and performances. Using recordings of speech in several languages Banabila experiments with the tonality of words and the "sound system" of languages. Banabila worked on various projects with video artists Geert Mul, Olga Mink, and photographer Gerco de Ruijter. With Geert Mul he has an audiovisual set, Big Data Poetry, which they performed live in venues like The Barbican (London) during the Logan Symposium 2014, Yukunkun (Beirut) during the Global Week For Syria 2014, and TENT (Rotterdam) during Sound Spectrums 2012. With Olga Mink he performed at the LUX Festival (Sevilla), the VAD Festival (Girona) and the State Of The Image Festival (Arnhem) in 2006. For Gerco de Ruijter he did sound design for several stop-frame animations, like the critically acclaimed Crops, shown in the Hirhshorn Museum (2013 / Washington DC) and Ringdijk at Panorama Mesdag (2016 / The Hague)"-Michel Banabila Website (http://www.banabila.com/biography)
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• Show Bio for Rutger Zuydervelt
"Machinefabriek is the alias of Rutger Zuydervelt. Rutger's music combines elements of ambient, noise, minimalism, drone, field recordings and electro-acoustic experiments. His pieces can be heard as an attempt to create sonic environments for the listener to dwell in. Finding tension in texture, tone and timing, the result can be very minimalistic at first glance, but reveals itself upon closer listening. The devil is in the details.
Rutger was born in 1978 in Apeldoorn (The Netherlands) and now resides in Rotterdam. He started recording as Machinefabriek in 2004. After a series of self released cd-rs, his official debut Marijn was issued in 2006, with great critical acclaim. Since than, a solid stream of music was released on labels such as Type, Important, Home Normal, 12K, Entr'acte, Dekorder, Miasmah, Consouling Sounds, Experimedia and Staalplaat. He performed all over the globe, from Canada to Israel and from Russia to Japan.
Rutger collaborated (on record and/or live) with numerous artists, such as Steinbrüchel, Jaap Blonk, Aaron Martin, Peter Broderick, Frans de Waard, Mats Gustafsson, Steve Roden, Gareth Davis, Stephen Vitiello, Michel Banabila, Dirk Serries and Dead Neanderthals, amongst many others.
He frequently works with film makers, like Makino Takashi, Mike Hoolboom, John Price, Paul Clipson and Chris Teerink, for whom he composed a soundtrack for his documentary about Sol LeWitt. Rutger also recorded the music for the Canadian drama The Cold and the Quiet from 2014. Furthermore, his music was used in Edward Burtynsky's Watermark, the drama Stone (with Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton) and Josh Fox' influential Gasland and Gasland Part II documentaries. Besides films, Rutger also composes music for dance pieces, like Alix Eynaudi and Kris Verdonck's EXIT (premiéred at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin), Alexander Whitley's The Measures Taken (for the Royal Opera in London) and Beheld (for Candoco Dance Company), and multiple pieces by Spanish/Dutch choreographer Iván Pérez. Then there's Rutgers installation work, in which the dialogue with the environment plays an important role. He did projects for Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAi (Dutch Architecture Institute), the new Armando Museum MOA, Sounds Like Audio Art in Saskatoon (Canada), the Into the Great Wide Open Festival, Netwerk in Aalst (Belgium) and children's museum Villa Zebra in Rotterdam."-Machinefabriek Website (http://www.machinefabriek.nu/about/biography)
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
^ Hide Bio for Rutger Zuydervelt
• Show Bio for Ilya Ziblat Shay
"lya Ziblat (1975) is a composer and a performer (bass / electronics).His music relates to both composition and improvisation. He creates works for other musicians and groups, or as being involved himself as a performer. Most of his works are for instruments in combination with electronics.His main interest is how musical freedom could be expressed within- and triggered by- composed structures. He has collaborated in various projects together with dance and choreography, (live) video art, film and visual art.Ilya plays contrabass and bass guitar both as an improvisor, and as a performer focusing on a repertoire of contemporary composed works.After studying composition and contrabass in Tel Aviv University, he continued to the Netherlands to study at the Royal Conservatory, the Hague. Currently working towards a PhD in artistic research (Leiden University / Orpheus Institute)."-http://www.ilyaziblatshay.com/bio/ (Ilya Ziblat Shay Website)
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^ Hide Bio for Ilya Ziblat Shay
1. Kaleidoscope 04:39
2. Stokjes 03:32
3. Upwards 04:58
4. Awake 06:29
5. Macrocosms 03:39
6. Prey 06:15
7. Turmoil 05:03
8. Oxide 05:12
9. Echo Chamber 04:38
sample the album:
"Macrocosms is the fourth collaboration album by Banabila and Machinefabriek. Again, Michel Banabila and Rutger Zuydervelt spent a few concentrated weeks swapping sound files and sculpting ideas to fully form tracks. This intuitive way of working and open-minded approach resulted in an album that harks back to the rhythmic playfulness of Travelog, while also maintaining the abstract tendencies of Error Log.
The overall theme deals with the macro and micro - how incredibly tiny and insiginificant we become when zooming out, and how wondrous small worlds can be found within ours when zooming in. Artist Sarah Payton describes it beautifully in her spoken word section of the title track. Field recordings made by Banabila at the nature reserve Biala Woda in Poland are an important addition to the music, reinforcing the sense of place, and invoking intricate, detailed worlds of their own. Combining elements of ambient, musique concrete, noise, and even the 'fourth world', this Rotterdam duo created a unique sonic world expanding their oeuvre with another fine album."-Tapu
Organized Sound and Sample Based Music
Sound, Noise, &c.
Field Recordings
New in Experimental & Electronic Music
Search for other titles on the label:
Tapu Records.
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iOS apps
June 11th Minutes: Using iPad/Android Devices for Business & Education.
At our last meeting on June 11th, 2014, we discussed how to use Tablets and other mobile devices for presentations.
Stateline Women in Technology
June 11th Meeting Minutes: Using Tablets for Business & Education.
|Marsha Ackerman, Tara Cook, Sylvia Emerson, Diann Jabusch, Tina Leinbaugh, Glenda McCarty, Cathy Niliaram, Denise Popp, Stephanie Wascher
|Next meeting:
|September 10, 2014, 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m., Rock Valley College WTC141/142
1. Announcements
June 19th, 2014. Rockford Chamber Women in Business Expo and Luncheon at Cliffbreakers from 10 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. For more information, follow this link.
June 25th, 2014. Entre is holding an Educational Luncheon from 11:30 am – 1 pm at Forest Hill's Country Club. They will be discussing Cisco Network Switching, Cisco ASA Security, and Meraki Product Information. It's free to attend and included lunch, just Register Here.
2. Discussion
Demonstration of a few iPad apps created by students. Click here to read about the iOS apps students have created. One of my favorites is the Tap Tuning app created this spring. Rock Valley is offering an iOS development class (CIS280) and an Android app development (CIS245) class this fall.
Demonstration of using Air Server (installed on PC) to display iPad/iPod/iPhone screen on the PC. Then Stephanie used the Explain Everything app to show how you can use this for presentations. Here is a link on how to use it for Podcasting.
Member's favorite or most beneficial apps:
- Explain Everything – Record podcasts of PDF, Powerpoint, Keynote, images, drawings, etc. and share via YouTube, Google drive, Photos.
- Duolingo – Free app to learn new languages. Here's the list of languages.
- Flipboard – Place to find, collect and share the news you like.
- Pulse – A news app similar to Flipboard.
- ScanBizCard – Here's link to reviews on business card scanning apps.
- Wink – An app for connecting, controlling, and interacting with smart home products by GE. iOS and Android
- Airwatch – for enterprise level mobile security. Video Demo
- Concur – Business and travel expense app.
- Overdrive – Borrow eBooks and audiobooks with your Rockford Public Libaray card.
- iOS/Android app reviews link


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Big 12 commish suggests modern recruiting changes
IRVING, Texas (AP) — Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby believes now is a good time to look at modernizing parts of the college recruiting model.
"We haven't looked at the recruiting model in its entirety for a very long time," Bowlsby said Thursday at the conference's spring meetings. "We haven't really looked at how we recruit (with) the changes in technology."
The commissioner suggested possibly using Skype or FaceTime for initial recruiting interviews.
"It's just one example of an area where the world has changed and the architecture around college athletics hasn't changed with it," he said. "I think we need to constantly be reminding ourselves and each other, that there's change afoot and it's a good time to look at everything we're doing in light of modern circumstances."
Bowlsby also said that maybe it is time to allow recruits more than one paid official visit to a campus, and allow for the expenses to be paid for parents or family members to make visits.
The NCAA is working on a new governance structure that would allow autonomy for the five major football conferences — the Big 12, SEC, Pac-12, Big Ten and ACC — to make some rules without the support of smaller Division I schools. The NCAA board of directors is expected to vote on restructuring in early August.
Bowlsby said he expects the Big 12 to seat a task force "within our league to spend time looking at the rules, thinking about the environment and beginning the process of putting an agenda together of things that we think we ought to take a good look at."
The Big 12 board of directors meets Friday, when the 10-team conference will reveal its revenue numbers for the 2013-14 school year. That number is expected to exceed last year's record revenue of $198 million.
Among other items discussed before the athletic directors finished their portion of the spring meetings Thursday:
—The structure of the Big 12 men's and women's basketball tournaments, which next March will be held in different cities and a week apart for the third year in a row. Bowlsby left open the possibility that the tournaments could be played in the same city again.
—Some Big 12 basketball teams could play their first conference games before Christmas.
—After being allowed to experimentally use eight football officials in games last season, the Big 12 expects to again use eight officials again this season.
"It was exceedingly positive. I think it was good in every respect I could name," Bowlsby said. "We felt like it gave our referee and our umpire, particularly, a better opportunity to manage the game. Especially the flow of the game, the substitutions. ... With speed of the game, it makes some sense."
—The conference finalized football television selections and times for those games the first three weeks of the season, plus its four Thursday night games that are part of its joint television agreement with FOX and ESPN.
Two Big 12 teams play season-opening games at neutral sites Aug. 30. West Virginia plays Alabama in Atlanta in the afternoon in a split regionally on ABC or ESPN2, and Oklahoma State takes on Florida State in Arlington, Texas, that night on ABC. Baylor's first game in its new stadium will be a Sunday night kickoff Aug. 31, on Fox Sports 1. Texas' home game against TCU on Thanksgiving night will be on Fox Sports 1.


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AP: The Obama administration is weighing whether to offer Iran the chance to recoup billions of dollars in frozen overseas assets if it takes steps to scale back its nuclear program, U.S. officials and congressional aides said Friday.
The Associated Press
By Bradley Klapper and Matthew Lee
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is weighing whether to offer Iran the chance to recoup billions of dollars in frozen overseas assets if it takes steps to scale back its nuclear program, U.S. officials and congressional aides said Friday. The proposal would face a skeptical Congress determined to make the end of Tehran's uranium enrichment activity the condition for any sanctions relief.
The brainstorming comes after two days of nuclear negotiations between Iran and world powers ended this week in Geneva. The talks – the first since Iranian President Hassan Rouhani took office – ended on an upbeat note although it fell short of specific and concrete commitments by Iran to stop enriching uranium or ship out its stockpiles of higher-enriched uranium.
The proposal is one of several under consideration to spur negotiations to ensure Tehran can't produce atomic weapons. Enriching uranium can produce material for peaceful energy purposes or nuclear arms.
Under the plan being weighed, Iran would be able to access money from oil sales overseas that it currently can only barter with because of U.S. and international sanctions. Senate aides put the total between $50 billion and $75 billion. It's not clear what Iran would have to do in return to prompt the Obama administration to allow banks to release the money.
The premise behind providing Iran with cold cash is that opening and shutting such a valve would be far easier than beginning to take apart years of complicated, international financial and oil sanctions that would also be difficult to put back together if Iran failed to live up to the bargain. Finding a formula for sanctions relief is important if President Barack Obama is going to be able to offer the Iranians good reason to be open about their nuclear program before they reach the point of nuclear weapons capability. A nuclear-armed Iran could prompt a U.S. or Israeli military intervention.
"Iran will have to agree to meaningful, transparent and verifiable actions before we can seriously consider taking steps to ease sanctions," White House spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said. Meehan and State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to comment on specific types of sanctions relief, calling such questions "premature and speculative."
Officials who confirmed the cash reserves approach weren't authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.
Congress is already weighing in. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, a key proponent of Iran sanctions, plans to introduce an amendment to a new package of international restrictions on commerce with Iran that would seek to provide the administration with more sticks and carrots for talks through Iran's cash reserves, a Senate aide said.
Kirk's plan would freeze any remaining assets overseas that Iran can still access by threatening to cut off from the U.S. market any foreign banks that continue doing business with Iran. At the same time, it would also give Obama the flexibility to allow Iran to access some of the money it can only use for limited purposes today, said the Senate aide, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the pending legislation and demanded anonymity.
There's a catch, however. Kirk's legislation would allow Iran to get the money only if it agrees to end all uranium enrichment and reprocessing, activities that even Rouhani's new reformist government has vowed to continue. Iran insists its program is solely for peaceful energy production and appears unlikely to accept such an offer.
Thus, the proposed legislation may actually constrict the administration's negotiating ability rather than give it more leeway.
"Now is a time to strengthen, not weaken, U.S. and international sanctions," Kirk and fellow Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said in a statement. "The U.S. should not suspend new sanctions, nor consider releasing limited frozen assets, before Tehran suspends its nuclear enrichment activities."
The strategy to leverage Iran's cash reserves is the brainchild of Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Dubowitz, who often advises Congress and the administration on sanctions policy, said the strategy offers the administration an easy way to raise or ease pressure on Iran.
"If Iran were to cheat in fulfilling any of its obligations, the quarantine would be re-imposed," Dubowitz said. He contrasted his idea with the tactics employed earlier this year by the Obama administration, which, he said, offered Iran a major concession allowing Iran to sell petroleum abroad in exchange for gold.
"It ended up permitting Iran to earn billions of dollars in gold in exchange for no nuclear concessions," Dubowtiz said.
As this week's talks in Geneva finished Wednesday, demands in Congress grew for a speedy escalation in sanctions.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced a Senate resolution calling for more pressure, echoing a statement by six Democratic and four Republican senators insisting that Iran end all uranium enrichment activity.
That demand could put them at odds with Obama, who has recognized Iran's right to nuclear energy as recently as September, when he spoke to Rouhani by phone. Obama, however, hasn't said enrichment is acceptable in Iran, as Tehran demands. The issue remains a key one for international negotiators to resolve.
The sanctions debate is likely to continue between Congress and the administration ahead of another round of Iranian nuclear talks in November and in the months ahead.
The Senate Banking Committee is expected to take up a new sanctions package soon, largely mirroring a House bill that passed by a 400-20 vote in July. It seeks to blacklist Iran's mining and construction sectors and calls for all Iranian oil sales to end by 2015.
The Senate's bill may narrow that timeframe, block international investment in more economic sectors, try to close off Iran's foreign accounts and tighten Obama's ability to waive requirements for allies and key trading partners who continue to do business with Iran, according to an aide involved in the process.
The Obama administration has expressed concerns that countries may ignore sanctions they deem excessive, undercutting international unity against Iran. They've also expressed concern that moving too quickly with additional sanctions packages also could undermine Rouhani with hardliners in his own country and not give him adequate chance to prove his seriousness in the nuclear talks.