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Presentation on theme: "THE EPIC HERO. WHAT IS A HERO? 1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated."— Presentation transcript: WHAT IS A HERO? 1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods. 2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life 3. A person noted for special achievement in a particular field 4. The principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic presentation. WHAT DO HEROES TEACH US? The heros quest helps us understand our own journey through life. The hero is a social icon that represents the values important to a society. CHARACTERISTICS OF A HERO Imposing in statue (physical or social) Their style is grand, yet simple The setting of their story is vast Super-human courage and strength Faces supernatural forces THE HEROS JOURNEY BIRTH: The hero comes from humble origins or a disadvantaged situation. INITIATION: The hero discovers that he has a special calling. THE HEROS JOURNEY THE QUEST: The hero sets out on a journey which is both physical and spiritual. The hero will face temptation, and have obstacles to overcome and a foe to vanquish. A mentor may help them achieve their goals. THE HEROS JOURNEY ROMANCE: The hero will meet a romantic counterpart. THE JOURNEY HOME: The hero achieves his goal, then returns home where his exploits are celebrated. THE HEROS JOURNEY LEARN MORE ABOUT EPIC HEROES These links will take you to websites where you can learn more about heroes, and get examples of heroes from different time periods: http://teacherweb.com/VA/HeritageHS/KarenEDiGiorgio/h3.stm http://www.folkstory.com/articles/petersburg.html http://www.pantheon.org/areas/heroes/articles.html http://www.towson.edu/~flynn/heroes.html Now that youve learned the characteristics of an epic hero, you will use your knowledge to identify the heroes that exist in our culture today! YOUR TASK PICTURE REFERENCES Spider-man: http://free.of.pl/l/linuks/original/2035-Wallpaper-Spiderman.jpghttp://free.of.pl/l/linuks/original/2035-Wallpaper-Spiderman.jpg Lara Croft: http://www.sonyplaystationcheats.com/Images/Lara3_3164.jpghttp://www.sonyplaystationcheats.com/Images/Lara3_3164.jpg Batman: http://xavprods.free.fr/xavprods/PIX/GALLER2D/BATMAN.GIFhttp://xavprods.free.fr/xavprods/PIX/GALLER2D/BATMAN.GIF Zeus: http://www.uco.es/~ca1lamag/Galerias/zeus-posidon.jpghttp://www.uco.es/~ca1lamag/Galerias/zeus-posidon.jpg Odysseus: http://www.bemyastrologer.com/odysseus.jpghttp://www.bemyastrologer.com/odysseus.jpg Conan: http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/pics/conan.JPGhttp://www.tallarmeniantale.com/pics/conan.JPG Superman: http://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/news/superman-5/superman- 5-movie.jpghttp://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/news/superman-5/superman- 5-movie.jpg Luke Skywalker: http://www.tsr.org/StarWars/characters/luke/images/skywalker.jpghttp://www.tsr.org/StarWars/characters/luke/images/skywalker.jpg The Bride: http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/movie/kill_bill_2/03.jpghttp://www.hollywoodjesus.com/movie/kill_bill_2/03.jpg The Incredibles: http://www.henrysheehan.com/reviews/ghi/incredibles.jpghttp://www.henrysheehan.com/reviews/ghi/incredibles.jpg

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Ian Jukes in his presentation yesterday, talked about the need for students to be able to keyboard to the point of transparency. (This video features this idea) He also talks about using a word processor as the format. He also talked about this in terms of the ability to write. Something is missing. This story (via Lorne Henklemen) suggests texting might be something we should be teaching. But I’m not sure we even need to teach this. The key idea here is about communication: not writing exclusively, not keyboarding, not even texting. Warlick and Fyer are among the many who talk about storytelling and information and avoid focusing on the tools or even the means. It’s interesting to me that we continue to dredge up old and tired issues that focus on format and tools rather than the content and communication and sharing of ideas. Image: Ilsa’s first text message http://flickr.com/photos/supergolden/139216745/… Read the rest Last week, the CBC asked for viewer feedback on the recent ban of Toronto school boards on cellphones. I weighed with this comment: Cellphones have the potential of computers. Good and bad. Good teachers understand how to use technology for learning. The cellphone is already being used in powerful learning ways. I understand most readers think of them as disruptive and in no way educational. A desktop computer is no different. In addition to the potential for learning, the recent events in Virginia will likely prompt increased use. To those that talk about potential of cheating….I would hope that good teachers are not spending most of their time having kids answer questions that require rote answers. Learning needs to go deeper than that. Why are we asking kids to learn the provincial capitals when Google gives you that answer in less than 1 second? I’m not saying knowledge isn’t important but the emphasis on assessing and evaluating students shouldn’t be here. It should be on … Read the rest The Kathy Sierria story is to cyberbullying as 9-11 is to terrorism. It’s not that cyberbullying has never taken place but having it happen to someone as high profile as Kathy Sierra brings attention to the problem in a light many have not considered. I’ve got two concerns about the way things are unfolding. One is the tendency of the media and even bloggers to blow this out of proportion. The other is the focus on cyberbullying as a unique, stand alone issue. Most of us are aware cyberbullying has always taken place and will always take place. Evil exists. Many have taken this particular incident to perpetuate fear and hysteria around blogging. One reaction certainly to emerge from this is a continued push to ban or restrict the freedom many of enjoy. Some are advocating cyber cops. What is the cost of protection against cyberbullying going to be? I look at what has become of airport security and the cost behind that and question if it’s really necessary. Those who call for zero tolerance at any cost have to be questioned. The 9-11 and Kathy Sierra incidents are the extremes. We need to keep that in perspective. My … Read the rest I wonder how long schools will continue to fight technology. This recent article from the CBC via teachinghacks, continues to shed light on the inevitable: “YOU CAN’T STOP IT SO JUST SAY UNCLE!” The article, in case you don’t read it, deals with teenagers who provoked a teacher into a tirade, recorded it on cellphones and posted it on youtube. As has been mentioned many times in various discussion around the blogosphere, our feeble attempts as educators to block students from using technology in any number of ways is being proven futile. But still we try: A teacher approached me following a talk I recently gave and said something like, “Jeez, don’t tell all of them about YouTube. We’ve been doing our best to keep it out of our school. We don’t want our teachers and students to even know about it.” via Rick Schweir It’s just way too easy; and whether or not your school removes its computers and network, you’ll still be dealing with the issue. I read Wes Fryer’s blog the other day and he talked about about being photographed and having his pictures posted on Flickr. It was quite harmless and fun. … Read the rest I sat in a meeting of teachers today when someone in the crowd made reference to a clause about consultants and made the statement that she felt “there were too many consultants anyway”. This made me upset for two reasons: - I wouldn’t want to suggest, espescially in public that I felt a school or some other area of the division was overstaffed. - More importantly, it upsets me because it reflects an attitude that exists that would suggest that solving the challenges of education lies in increasing the number of teachers. I believe that the role of the consultant is largely two fold;support teachers in the classroom with their current situations but also to present possibilites, ideas and support for change. I’m certain a survey of teachers would reveal that few would suggest that the current model of education is in a good state. Everyone’s talking about the changing student, the changing world and the lack of change in education. This conversation is taking place as much outside the blogosphere as it is in it. It’s clear that we need to continue to help teachers see the need for change and that the solution is much more complicated and involved than … Read the rest

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Hurricanes: Witness Account This chart shows the hourly wind and pressure trace for Hurricane Floyd at Duck, North Carolina. See how the pressure is inversely proportional to wind speed? In September 1999, Hurricane Floyd dumped 60 inches of water on North Carolina and forced 48,000 people to seek emergency shelter. Kaleatha Vines, 14, saw her home destroyed, her town in chaos, and her best friend disappear. For several days as Hurricane Floyd approached, the TV news ran constant flood warnings. But nobody in my town of Tarboro, North Carolina, thought it would really happen. Soon, we learned how terribly wrong we were. On September 15, at 3 a.m., a policeman knocked on our door and told us that the water was coming. The dam that held back the river two miles behind our house was near the bursting point. They had to release it. They asked us to evacuate. My parents and I got in the car, but after only a few minutes on the road, we turned around. "It's not really going to flood," my dad said. But I barely slept that night. THE WATER'S RISING By the morning, the water had already come. I looked out the window, and saw the sun shining. But people were walking by my house, up to their knees in water. Families were trying to make it up to the road, carrying anything they could. I screamed, "Mom, Dad, we need to get out! The water's rising!" I packed one outfit in my book bag, and my parents grabbed a few things. We couldn't find our dog, Bear. But we just had to leave. As we drove through the water to a shelter at Tarboro High, I looked back at our house and cried. I had to leave my posters on the wall, my school supplies, my books... everything. LOVED ONES MISSING When we got to the shelter, it was already crowded. I could not find my best friend, Maquita. Only one question was in my mind: Did she survive? I heard there were people paddling in boats seeking refuge on dry land. Some people had drowned. The army was bringing survivors to the shelter in helicopters. I went over to the football field where the choppers were landing, hoping I'd find Maquita there. The helicopters overhead sounded like thunder. When they landed, people started streaming out of them. Everyone was soaking wet. Many people were crying. As each person climbed out of the helicopters, I thought, "Here's my friend!" But none of them were her. She didn't show up at all that day. I called her house but the phone was not working. I thought for certain she was dead. A TOWN DESTROYED I cried so hard over Maquita. She was my best friend. But my parents and I had to move on. The next night we drove to my aunt's apartment in town. The flood didn't damage her home, but the town looked horrendous. Everything was out of place. There was debris everywhere. The remaining trees had furniture hanging from their limbs. And the smell was horrible there were dead fish and dead animals all over. After the water receded, my family and I were allowed to go back to our house to try to rescue some of our things. When we opened the door, we had to move furniture just to get in. During the flood, all of the furniture had floated to the front door. I could see my shoes in the living room, and I just grabbed them and left. I couldn't bear to see my ruined bedroom. Everything I'd ever owned was in that room even my blanket and pillow that I'd had since I was a baby. That blanket was my heart. That pillow was my heart. And the water destroyed it all. One week later, I finally learned what happened to Maquita. Thankfully, she was safe. I found her by chance. We had both gone to the same store in town, and I spotted her. We ran to each other and hugged. Neither of us had any idea the other was even alive until that moment. I had found my friend, but I was about to lose my home. Our house had to be torn down. There was no way to fix the damage from the flood. So when it was time, we went over to watch. They had a tractor that just broke it apart and demolished it. We'd been at that house ever since I was born. My mom was crying really hard. It would have taken too long to build a new house, so we bought a double-wide trailer to put down on our property. We moved in last February. If I could give advice to someone who lives where a hurricane or flood is about to hit, I would say, "Please evacuate!" It's truly better to spend a night at a shelter and have nothing happen than to put yourself at risk of death. I think that might be why some people died during Hurricane Floyd. They didn't believe it was going to happen. They said, "If there hasn't been a flood or a hurricane here before, we don't have to worry about it." But sadly, they were very wrong. I am really thankful that my family survived the flood, and didn't have to move back into a wrecked house. Fifty-two people died in the flood. Others didn't have anywhere to go after the shelter closed, and had to return to destroyed homes. We were able to get a new home, and I'm very grateful for that. Scholastic Scope. New York: Nov 27, 2000. Vol. 49, Iss. 7; pg. 13, 3 pgs

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This coming week I will be lecturing about Main Street, a National Trust for Historic Preservation initiative that began in the 1970s as a way to help preserve historic downtowns throughout America in communities of every size. This was in the era when suburban shopping malls had become the centerpiece of American life, drawing attention and dollars away from the smaller shops and services of the old downtowns. not quite a 30,000 foot view but you get the idea The invention of Main Street by my dear friend Mary Means marks for me a major shift in historic preservation, the shift toward a pragmatic approach to economics. The first shift took place in the 1960s when a half-century of community efforts to save historic residential neighborhoods became a vital part not only of municipal preservation ordinances, notably New York City in 1965, but also the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Georgetown, arguably the first historic district not designed for tourism Historic districts have a history that goes back to the early 20th century, and the first to be legislated – Charleston and New Orleans – did it to help control a tourist economy that was threatening to kill the golden goose. A wave of other historic districts followed in the 1940s and 1950s but it wasn’t until Georgetown in 1950 and Beacon Hill in 1955 that historic districts actually became community planning tools dealing not with tourism but the basic economics of residential neighborhoods. Now, the immediate impulses that led to historic districts were the massive government programs of urban renewal and highway construction that were decimating cities and towns, but these threats were only countered in communities that had already organized around their built environment. For me it marks an important departure from the curatorial model that previously held sway. Greenwich Village. A really long long story. Main Street took an even more radical step by reducing the traditional preservationist focus on architectural design to a mere 25% of the program, focusing equally on Organization, Events, and Economic Restructuring. Not only that, but the design piece was even less curatorial because the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties had not yet been codified. The goal was to save buildings but Mary and the others knew that would only happen if they made economic sense. and that was before sidewalk cafes, so you had to be creative Also in the 1970s, the first historic preservation tax credits appeared, helping to address an imbalance (mostly in finance) between old and new buildings in terms of commercial real estate development. This trend toward economic pragmatism and community organization took a further step in the 1980s as large government subsidies for real estate development became extinct. The early 1980s were the era of the public-private partnership. this is where I enter the story – 25 years before this picture I began my career 33 years ago Monday working on the very first heritage area in the United States. Like Main Street, traditional historic preservation was only 25% of the goal, along with Natural Area Conservation, Recreation, and Economic Development. Now historic preservation was taking on the massive de-industrialization affecting the economy. It was the brainchild of my first boss, Jerry Adelmann and it was bold. We held a conference in Joliet in 1984 when the city had 23% unemployment. We saw the future – accurately as it turns out – and saw the value of our historic built environment to that future. I’m so old I have literally been a museum piece – albeit one that “isn’t about museums” The heritage area thing took off big time – there were over 40 across the country in 20 years time. The public-private partnership aspect worked very well in an era of diminishing government resources and of course still does. Like historic districts and Main Streets, it also prioritized the community’s role in self-organization for its own improvement, on its own terms. Then my mentor, Jerry Adelmann, took his heritage area idea to China, and I followed. this is the Weishan North Gate (1390) that burned a year ago. It is now rebuilt. Yunnan. See, it turns out that the pragmatic approach to the development of our built environment developed by “historic preservationists” over a half century was eminently transferable . Why? Not complicated. You identify the resources and assets of a place, determine how they function in an evolving economy, create vibrant sustainable models, and then scale them. The last part is the hardest, but time has proven the sustainability of our model. choose your poison I’m not saying that there aren’t big massive developments that ignore these principles. They are everywhere. They are generally less sustainable, but the real difference is community. See all that stuff above about historic districts and Main Streets and heritage areas has a component of community control. Even more importantly, heritage development insures that MORE MONEY stays in the local community. It doesn’t go flying off to some faraway corporate HQ. maybe you can ‘splain this to the MI and WI legislators who either A) don’t understand economics, or B) are being paid to send your money out of your local economy. I’m very fortunate I was able to participate in, contribute to, and chronicle much of this fascinating half-century and I look forward to sharing it in Indiana next week!

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Exoplanets is a medium-light game, where players create their own planetary system on the table. Players add to the common star, tiles which represent various planets or moons (that protect planets or help create life). Each of these tiles/planets give a different number of tokens (water, atmosphere, asteroids and light) and each planet has their climatic condition, which allows us to create life on these planets. Players can also interact trying to interrupt opponents planets by using space effects, by space tales or fulfill goals to earn more points at the end of the universe. But the players need to know that they are all creating mutual planetary systems. And we already have an expansion…! Exoplanets: The Great Expanse The expansion to Exoplanets contains the Gravity, Stars, and Space expansions all in a single box. Gravity is another Special Effects Tile that comes into play along with the Creation, Solar Storm, and Black Hole tiles. Whenever a player creates a planet, they receive one Gravity marker. Gravity markers may be used along with any resource to turn that resource into any other resource. Players may also use 3 (or 2 in a 4-player game) Gravity markers to remove a space tile from beneath one planet. It’s an anti-take that play! The Gravity expansion also comes with a plastic holder for the Gravity markers. The Stars expansion can change the game rules depending on the Star core that is chosen. The Dynamic Star provides an extra resource when a player creates a planet, depending on where around the Star the planet is placed. The Blue Giant provides resource advantages, but at a cost; when a player creates a planet, they may either remove a life marker from a planet to take resources equal to that planet’s life creation cost, or discard a Space tile to take 3 resources of any kind. The Chaotic Star allows flexible tactics, as players may move a life marker from one planet to another, as long as that planet has the same life creation requirements. Finally, the Red Dwarf allows players to exchange one Space tile in hand for another after creating a planet. The Space expansion provides more Space tiles for added variety! These special tiles provide no goals, but they do have two effects to choose from, such as taking a tile underneath a planet and transferring it to another planet, or protecting a planet from any Space tiles that might affect it. Many of the effects are powerful, and will require the player take both a Solar Flare AND a Fusion marker! In the most distant reaches of the world, magic still exists, embodied by spirits of the land, of the sky, and of every natural thing. As the great powers of Europe stretch their colonial empires further and further, they will inevitably lay claim to a place where spirits still hold power – and when they do, the land itself will fight back alongside the islanders who live there. Spirit Island is a complex and thematic cooperative game about defending your island home from colonizing Invaders. Players are different spirits of the land, each with its own unique elemental powers. Every turn, players simultaneously choose which of their power cards to play, paying energy to do so. Using combinations of power cards that match a spirit’s elemental affinities can grant free bonus effects. Faster powers take effect immediately, before the Invaders spread and ravage, but other magics are slower, requiring forethought and planning to use effectively. In the Spirit phase, spirits gain energy, and choose how / whether to Grow: to reclaim used power cards, to seek for new power, or to spread presence into new areas of the island. The Invaders expand across the island map in a semi-predictable fashion. Each turn they explore into some lands (portions of the island); the next turn, they build in those lands, forming settlements and cities. The turn after that, they ravage there, bringing blight to the land and attacking any native islanders present. The islanders fight back against the Invaders when attacked, and lend the spirits some other aid, but may not always do so exactly as you’d hoped. Some Powers work through the islanders, helping them (eg) drive out the Invaders or clean the land of blight. The game escalates as it progresses: spirits spread their presence to new parts of the island and seek out new and more potent powers, while the Invaders step up their colonization efforts. Each turn represents 1-3 years of alternate-history. At game start, winning requires destroying every last settlement and city on the board – but as you frighten the Invaders more and more, victory becomes easier: they’ll run away even if some number of settlements or cities remain. Defeat comes if any spirit is destroyed, if the island is overrun by blight, or if the Invader deck is depleted before achieving victory. The game includes different adversaries to fight against (eg: a French Plantation Colony, or a Remote British Colony). Each changes play in different ways, and offers a different path of difficulty boosts to keep the game challenging as you gain skill. Yu-Gi-Oh! Code of the Duelist Booster Packs You’ve learned how to Link Summon with this year’s new 2017 Starter Deck, now put your newfound skills to the test with Code of the Duelist! This 100-card booster set combines Fusion, Ritual, Synchro, Xyz, Pendulum, and the newest member of the family, Link Monsters, to kick off a brand-new era of Yu-Gi-Oh! Link Monsters and the newest changes to the official rules ask you to think about where you play your cards on the field. Code of the Duelist introduces the first new Deck strategies where the position of your cards matters just as much as which cards you play! There are endless possibilities for new strategies thanks to Link Monsters, and Code of the Duelist starts with 3 new ones, along with more cards to enhance the strategy from the new 2017 Starter Deck. - The new 2017 Starter Deck converted today’s digital technology into Dueling technology! In Code of the Duelist, more new techno-monsters are headlined by a Link Monster that lets you replace your destroyed monsters with fresh ones from your hand. Build the right formation, and you can Special Summon a monster from your hand by destroying your opponent’s monster in battle! - Steal the spotlight with a chart-topping Link Monster! These monsters aren’t just the same old song and dance. With careful choreography, each Summon you make can reduce your opponent’s Life Points and increase your own Link Monster’s Attack Points! - Step into the ring with a heavyweight Link Monster so intimidating, it takes the fight out of any monster with a DEF stat! Only monsters with no fear, or no DEF, can take on the champ, but it won’t be easy to Summon them because this Link Monster has 3 arrows that all point towards you! That’s just a small taste of what’s waiting for you on the Link Summoning side of things! Code of the Duelist also features the first brand new “Lightsworn” monsters since 2016’s Minerva, the Exalted Lightsworn. A mysterious shadow has fallen across the Realm of Light, infusing the Lightsworn with new powers…at a price. You can also revamp your Pendulum Domination Structure Deck with upgraded versions of cards like D/D/D Gust King Alexander or D/D/D Wave King Caesar, learn the terrifying origins of monsters like Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon, and add an adorable new monster to the Rescue Squad! The Code of the Duelist booster set contains 100 cards: 48 Commons, 20 Rares, 14 Super Rares, 10 Ultra Rares, 8 Secret Rares. Pokemon Sun & Moon Burning Shadows Booster Packs Minions of Team Skull and a cavalcade of new Pokémon stand ready to battle in the Pokémon TCG: Sun & Moon—Burning Shadows expansion! Slug it out with new titans like Necrozma-GX and Tapu Fini-GX, or battle with trusty allies from Machamp-GX and Charizard-GX to Darkrai-GX and Ho-Oh-GX. A dozen new Pokémon-GX are ready for action in this expansion. Fight for what’s right with the Pokémon TCG: Sun & Moon—Burning Shadows expansion! The Pokémon TCG: Sun & Moon—Burning Shadows expansion includes: - Over 140 cards - 12 new Pokémon-GX - 6 new full-art Supporter cards featuring important human characters

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Recall that in our discussion about the early bullets, we noted that they were mainly made out of pure lead because the material is easy to shape, cheap, readily available and extremely dense. The problem with lead is that it is also very soft and melts easily. Lead balls performed satisfactorily for a few centuries when gunpowder was low quality and velocities of the bullet were not that high. However, as the gunpowder quality and power began to improve and as the bullets began to fit the gun barrel more tightly, the velocity of the bullet began to increase and the pressure and temperature in the barrel was also higher. The temperature of the bullet would rise not only because of the hotter burning gunpowder, but also due to the friction generated by rubbing against the barrel. This meant that the lead bullet had a good chance to melt and deform due to the extra temperature and pressure. This would cause the bullet to leave a good bit of lead behind inside the barrel and it would have to be cleaned often. The deformation of the bullet would also cause a loss of accuracy. One solution that we've already seen when discussing the manufacture of shotgun pellets earlier, is to add a bit of antimony to the lead. This increases the hardness of the lead alloy and makes it resist higher pressures. However, adding antimony did not solve matters much, especially after more powerful gunpowders such as cordite came out. The bullet would be stripped due to the rifling and the lead would deposit on the inside of the grooves, making the weapon useless very quickly. The next solution was invented by Lt. Colonel Eduard Rubin at the Swiss Federal Ammunition Factory and Research Center in Thun, Switzerland in 1889. His solution was to make a thin outer layer of copper which would be filled on the inside with lead. Since copper melts at a higher temperature than lead, is harder than pure lead and has a specific heat capacity higher than lead, the outer layer prevents the bullet from getting deformed too much. The inner layer of lead adds to the weight of the bullet. Such a bullet is called a jacketed bullet. The jacket may extend throughout the front and sides of the bullet, in which case it is called a full-metal jacket (FMJ), or it may only extend around the parts that fit tightly around the barrel and the tip may be of softer material, in which case it is called a soft-point bullet. Note that the jacket is not always made of copper these days. Cupro-nickel and other copper alloys, steel and gilding metal are all commonly used these days. Nylon and other synthetic materials were also tried out without much success. Note that a pure lead bullet expands on striking the target because the lead in the back mushes the lead at the front of the bullet and thereby causes much more damage to the target after it expands. A full-metal jacket bullet does not expand much on striking the target, because of the jacket constraining the target, hence there is generally less tissue damage. On the other hand, the harder jacket allows it to penetrate further into the target. One way to counteract the lack of expansion is to unbalance the bullet (make it heavier at the back) so that when it hits the target, it yaws in different directions as it penetrates the target. This is done by making the front of the bullet of lighter material, such as aluminium instead of lead. A soft-point bullet expands when it strikes the target, since the front of the bullet is a softer material. Hence it generally causes more tissue damage than a full metal jacket bullet. However this expansion is limited by the outer jacket as well. Another solution is to make the jacket cover the entire bullet, but make the tip of the bullet hollow, so that it expands when it hits the target. These bullets are called hollow point bullets or Jacketed Hollow Point (JHP). They were first manufactured in 1890 in a factory in Dum Dum, West Bengal, India and hence these bullets are also known as "dum dums." These bullets were quickly outlawed for military use by 1899, but they can be used by civilians and are used by hunters in many parts of the world. GFDL licensed image from wikipedia.com The above illustration shows three modern cartridges. Note how tapered these bullets are. The one on the left of the picture is a hollow point, as can be seen by the hollowed out shape at the tip. The bullet in the middle is a full metal jacket bullet. The one on the right is a soft-point bullet. Notice the tip of the soft-point is of a different color than the rest of the bullet, because it is a different metal. As you may have noted above, the bullets of the three cartridges are extremely pointed This innovation in bullet design came from the French in 1898 for their Lebel 8 mm. rifle. They made the tips of their bullets more pointed, to improve the aerodynamic characteristics of the bullet and increase its range. Shortly after, the Germans copied the same idea in 1905 and called their bullets Spitzgeschoss or "pointed bullet". This gave rise to the term spitzer bullet, which is the generic English term for any bullet with a pointed tip. This concept was rapidly adopted through-out the world and now, virtually every country uses spitzer type bullets for rifles. GFDL licensed image from wikipedia.com In the above image we see two types of cartridges. The one on the left is a rifle cartridge that operates at higher velocities and hence it has a spitzer-type pointed bullet. The one on the right is a pistol cartridge. As you can see, it is a shorter cartridge and has a bullet with a rounded tip. This shape does not offer as much range or penetration as a spitzer-type bullet, but it is optimized for reliable feeding in an automatic pistol.

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The Concord, California region has a rich and colorful history, with notable characters being an integral part of the story. From its beginnings on a land grant named Monte del Diablo, to the vital Bay Area center it is today, Concord and the surrounding region will always appreciate its significant past. A small tribe of Bay Miwok Indians (native in Northern California) from the Chupcan tribe were the first inhabitants in Diablo Valley, where herds of deer, elk, bear and antelope roamed. The tribe lived along the salmon-filled streams and shared the valley with the wildlife. In 1772, Captain Pedro Fages and Father Juan Crespi led a group of Spanish explorers into the area, becoming the first outsiders to enter. The Spanish continued to explore the valley for the next 50 or so years, but did not settle there. By the 1810s, the Chupcans were missionized at San Jose and San Francisco missions and disappeared from the valley. In 1828, Don Salvio Pacheco petitioned Mexico for land in the valley and in 1834, received a 17,921-acre land grant called “Monte del Diablo,” a name used by Spanish soldiers in describing the valley area. The grant covered the Walnut Creek channel east to the hills, and from the Mount Diablo foothills north to the Bay. Fernando Pacheco, Don Salvio’s son, occupied the grant and began a cattle-raising business on the family’s new Rancho; in 1846 the Pacheco family joined Fernando there. Don Salvio’s grand adobe became a focal point as a business and social center of the region, and is still located in downtown Concord. Don Fernando’s adobe, built a few miles north on the hills, is now a registered historical landmark. Soon a new town named Pacheco grew neighboring the Rancho, but fell on hard times due to flooding, fires and the 1868 earthquake. In 1868, the Pacheco men created a new town and named it Todos Santos (All Saints). The following year, in 1869, they offered the town for free to the residents and merchants of Pacheco, but the name Todos Santos would not last for long. The town’s residents recorded the name “Concord” as the official name of their new town; the Contra Costa Gazette announced it on April 17, 1869. The name Concord was cheered for the harmonious spirit of the name, as Concord means “harmony.” In spite of Don Fernando’s published reminders of the Todos Santos name, the Concord name remained. The 1870s saw the new town of Concord forming, as businesses opened along Salvio Street and around the town square. By 1879, the Concord population had hit 300. The 1900s saw residential expansion. In 1901, Mount Diablo Union High School opened. The school would become California’s longest continually operating high school. In 1905, Joseph Boyd became the first mayor of Concord. By the same year, 1905, Concord’s population had again doubled, and on February 5, 1905, the “Town of Concord” incorporation was officially approved by a two-vote margin. Over the next 35 years, the population would again double. By the start of World War II, small town Concord had a full-service commercial downtown area and a comfortable residential lifestyle. In 1948, Concord became a California City with a population of 6,500. The 1950s and 1960s saw a growth explosion while the original downtown began to deteriorate, yet new development was on its way. During this time, the First Concord Summer Jazz Festival was held, and the original town square was officially renamed Todos Santos Plaza. From the 1970s through the 1990s, and onto the end of the millennium, Concord saw great growth and change. BART operations came to the city, the Concord Pavilion was established, June Bulman became the first woman mayor, the Tishman Building opened to become Contra Costa’s tallest high-rise, the City adopted its Art in Public Places and Gateway Art Program, Brenden’s 14-screen movie theater megaplex opened and an elevated BART line extended to North Concord, among other notable happenings. The 2000s’ new millennium sees Concord, now the largest city in Contra Costa County, with a diverse population approaching 125,000. The city’s social, artistic and economic developments continue, with more on the way. Visit CBS Sacramento’s section Introducing Diablo Valley to continue planning your next East Bay adventure Melanie Graysmith is a writer, artist and educator based in San Francisco. She writes on adult education, art and lifestyle topics, and enjoys writing short stories and poetry. She is also a member of an independent filmmaking group. Her work can be found at Examiner.com.

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The theme of the interior space is increasingly diverse. One theme that is still up to date and happy to be used by many people because these styles are timeless is the Oriental style. Not only the interior of houses, office, and even commercials space such as hotels, restaurants, cafes, and so forth. Oriental style is inherited from the Eastern culture that developed covering an area of China, Japan, Korea, to Vietnam, Thailand, to Persia. Culture at heyday in the Palace of the Chinese Empire and Japan eventually have strong cultural roots and a life of its people. This culture continued to grow and develop in society in various forms including architectural aspects of buildings. The concept of oriental buildings usually come in the form of a physical building / exterior and interior. Includes roof form, space layout, building form / elements of the building wall, the gate / entrance, to the types of furniture and accents / ornaments space. In the style of today's modern home, this oriental concepts experienced remarkable evolution. Wealth of forms that continue to be explored by the designers made the impression of an oriental easily applied to other types of modern buildings. Form of gate / gate and walls of processing elements in the room / building is one example of a direct physical looks from the outside. While the selection of accents / ornaments and furniture locks on the interior will facilitate the creation of an oriental style in your room. For example, in Japanese style interior, the use of interior decoration materials and furniture from wood. Oriental style tends to jell with natural color. Natural elements such as wood, natural stone, bamboo, and frescoes of the paper more often used. Another popular element in the Oriental style interior is known as the Chinese alphabet or Conji (Kanji), which is usually written into China calligraphy on sheets of paper displayed on the wall and into the accents / ornaments on the space key. A touch of oriental style is also reflected in the choice of red, gold, black, and white for the theme of space. Some Oriental items that can be used to decorate the house such as bamboo, a symbol of religious, ethnic ornaments and wall hangings picture / painting of a dragon or lotus flower. For the small house that still want to use the concept of oriental but also did not abandon the concept of a green home, try to organize a small dry patch of garden in the house. Because the concept of inner garden layout is already on the Japanese home of the past. Element for the inner garden, with or without the element of water is a natural stone both large and small size, sand / gravel, bamboo / other plant space efficient, and where the light from the stone. Additional lighting will enhance your inner garden in your home. Today we send a message to Modern, minimalist bedroom design,bedroom design that look is usually a mixture of simple furniture and those out of this world artistically designed Pieces.In modern, the bed is a modern style room is often side.In in which the platform new series of Beds. design.s rooms Like you liked this room design ideas, and give you injoy this House and House Design Ideas .. Want to change the atmosphere of the bedroom is normal for each individual owner. Various ideas for bedroom interior design can be found on the website. There is information provided by gratid and some are paid. However, the picture that I present to you here free. May be an idea for a new atmosphere in your bedroom. There are many things you can talk about interior design tips. But here we will talk about arranging the room. About how the wall color corresponding to the color of furniture that will be placed there. First, you must know how to adjust the color. In this case you can find information on interior magazine. The color of the walls, floors and furnishings must be harmonious. At least when viewed looks beautiful. Second, the furniture must be put right. Between furniture from one another not cover each other. All furniture can be seen and neat. Lastly, put a wall decoration also be appropriate. Not too down or up, and not skewed. In order for the beauty of your wall hangings can be enjoyed. That isa littleinterior designtipsthatIgive. Rexa must have been born recently, but its collections are par excellence. With a vision to have a bathroom durable, this Italian company carved out a niche for themselves in a world manufacturer of bathroom. Introduced new materials, the bathrooms are a part of the collections are spacious with free standing, built-in bathtubs. These bathrooms concept is inspired by space travel on "," in which the entire collection is beautifully together as each part of life is defined by the curves and softness. Everything contained in these bathrooms are made of Korakril ensures robustness, hygiene, protection and static resistance of lighting and stains. Rexa designs are powerful and effective. That encapsulates the essence of good taste and high quality. Kitchen wall clocks are nice because there are literally thousands of styles and designs to choose from. You want your clock to match the colors and decor of your kitchen so that it looks like it fits right in. In other words, if your kitchen is elegant with dark wood cabinets and granite, a clock that is a modern style might not look quite right.

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"Foods to be avoided: beefe, venison, hare, heavy wines, cabbage, fresh-water fish." With these words the 17th-century Oxford don Robert Burton outlined – in The Anatomy of Melancholy – his recipe for avoiding depression and achieving mental wellbeing. What you ate determined your happiness and soundness. Hare was to be shunned with particular vigour, he argued. It is "hard of digestion, breedes incubus… and causeth feerful Dreames. So doth all Venison". By contrast, lean meats are best, as are "all manner of brothes, pottage, with borage, lettuce and such wholsome herbs are excellent good". For good measure, "egges are justified, butter and oyle may passe, while… sugar and hony are approved". Similarly, "the thinnest, whitest, smallest wine is best, not thicke, not strong". Burton's book is a comprehensive analysis of the state of knowledge in the 17th century of the condition we now call depression and it assumes that diet is crucial to mental health. "Burton took it for granted, as did the rest of Britain, that a healthy body and a healthy mind went together," says Erin Sullivan, an expert on Burton, at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. "The right meat and drink were therefore seen as being crucial to mental wellbeing." Medicine has since made remarkable progress in revealing the origins of illness – with the possible exception of understanding how food might influence mood. Great claims are made for dietary supplements as depression treatments but they are controversial. As Paul Fletcher, a professor of health neurosciences at Cambridge University says: "Most claims made on behalf of isolated supplements and dietary components are unsubstantiated." The jury is out, in other words. Nevertheless, many scientists remain convinced of a link. Dr Sadaf Farooqi, of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, believes research supports the idea that food can influence our moods and emotions. "Consider the naturally occurring enzyme monoamine oxidase which our bodies use to break down amino acids in our food," she says. Some individuals suffer from an inherited lack of that enzyme and so cannot properly metabolise products like cheese and red wine and have extreme reactions to themt. They have headaches and act aggressively. "Now that is an extreme reaction, I admit," Farooqi adds. "However, levels of monoamine oxidase differ widely among people. These subtle variations could therefore contribute to predispositions to all sorts of behavioural and mood problems. So yes, food does affect mood and in different ways. It is just very difficult to pinpoint the mechanisms involved." These points are backed by Professor Andy Smith, of Cardiff University. "Men and women certainly act as if they expect food to affect their behaviour – by consuming products that have virtually no nutritional value, such as alcohol or caffeine, because they know these are going to affect their moods." Smith also believes foods affect mood though he is equally sure these effects are delicate and tricky to isolate. Certainly the field of nutrition and emotion is bedevilled with methodological problems. "Often, when we appear to have isolated a food that seems to trigger a change in mood, we find what is really going on is the reverse. Mood is affecting choice of food." Smith looked at studies which suggested that individuals who sat down for carefully cooked breakfasts tended to have more positive outlooks on the day ahead compared with those who did not have breakfasts. From this, it was argued that a good meal sets you up for the day. The idea does not survive detailed scrutiny, however. "We examined those people who had positive outlooks and found they had them whether or not they had breakfast. They were just that kind of person. They had a big breakfast because they were feeling good and were ready to get on with the day. Other people don't feel like that when they get up and there is no good trying to persuade them to sit down and have a leisurely meal." Similarly, research on chocolate has shown that this also has an over-rated impact on the psyche. "There is some slight evidence that chocolate triggers the release of opiate-like chemicals in the brain but really its relationship with our emotions operates in the reverse direction," says Smith. "We seek out a chocolate snack when we feel upset or are emotional because, in the past, we have had pleasant associations with it. That is why it is a comfort food." Professor David Benton at Swansea University split subjects into two sections and played "jolly" music (from Delibes's ballet Coppélia) to one while the other was subjected to Prokofiev's despair-inducing Russia under the Mongolian Yoke. "It was a toss-up between Prokofiev and Leonard Cohen," Benton admits. "Prokofiev only won narrowly." Then the two groups were shown how to obtain chocolate drops by pressing a keyboard button on a computer linked to a dispenser. Those that just endured the Prokofiev clicked their computers almost three times more often than those that had listened to Coppélia, so desperate were the former to cheer themselves up. Mood clearly has a strong role in food choice. To further complicate the picture, our beliefs about food can lead us to exaggerate any real nutritional impact they might have on our emotional state, adds Smith. "In one experiment, subjects were given a choice of cereal or a muffin to eat. Those taking the former believed they selected the healthier choice and their moods tended to be better afterwards. In fact, the researchers had picked muffins and cereals that were of almost identical nutritional value. The elevated moods of those who ate cereals were merely the result of their beliefs – or delusions, if you prefer – about what they had eaten." US researchers who fed pieces of carrot to children found that the subjects rated those presented in McDonald's fries wrappers as being tastier than bits of carrot that were plainly wrapped. In reality, there was no difference. Given these problems, establishing any kind of causative link between food and mood might appear near impossible. Nevertheless researchers have unearthed connections. Doris Stangl, at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, does research on the adult hippocampaus, one of the few areas of the brain where new neurones continue to form throughout life, a process known as neurogenesis. The level of neurogenesis is closely linked to cognition and emotional states: essentially if new neurones are encouraged to grow, memory will improve while the likelihood of depression decreases. Crucially, Stangl's research has found that diet can affect the growth of neurones in the hippocampus. "We found that intermittent fasting – eating fully one day and taking no food the next day – had a substantial impact on the growth of new neurones," she says. "In addition, reducing calorie intake by around 30% also boosted neural growth. In other words, meal frequency and calorie intact can affect neural growth. Now we are investigating meal content to see if that has an impact." Stangl also points to studies that suggest that omega-3 fatty acids, found in high levels in fish, can alleviate depression. "I am convinced that the food we eat has an impact on our emotions," she adds. "I am not saying specific foods are going to be cures for depression but equally I do think that diet can have an impact on our moods." Other research focusing on the neurotransmitter serotonin suggests this confidence is not misplaced. Low levels of serotonin in the brain are associated with depression. Indeed, most antidepressants act by raising serotonin levels. And this is where foods could play a role in mood regulation, some scientists argue. They say that diets rich in carbohydrates will raise blood glucose levels and trigger a cascade of chemical changes that will increase levels of the amino acid tryptophan, a key component of serotonin, which would then raise amounts of the neurotransmitter, boosting mood. "It's a convincing argument – though my studies suggest the amounts of carbohydrate needed to trigger a noticeable change in mood would be unrealistically high," added Benton. "On the other hand, our studies do back the idea that carbohydrates improve mood. We asked 650 people what they had eaten that morning and found there was a distinct correlation between those who said they were happier and those who had eaten pasta or other carbohydrate-rich foods. I think there is a link though the mechanism involved is not yet clear." It is not just what you eat that is important, says Ursula Werneke, a Swedish psychiatrist, it is the manner in which you consume it. "Meals give you a chance to stop and take a break from the stress of the day," she says. "More and more people eat at their desks and that is not healthy. You should take half an hour out of your schedule and relax. Grabbing a bite out of a paper bag is not going to do your mental health much good." And similarly, when you get home, you should cut out the grazing, adds Werneke. "Have proper meals, relax and improve your general well-being – that is what food can do for your mental health." Robin McKie is introducing A Feast to Cure Melancholy at Wellcome Collection, London NW1 on November 11 and 12

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Slavery is America’s permanent Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which our country carries a cup it can never pass. The closest that white America has ever come to experiencing what James Baldwin described as “the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape … fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone” was in 1861, when the country tore itself in half over race and money. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s incredibly affecting “Photography and the American Civil War” is a shocking view of a pain so deep, destruction in blood and psyche, that seeing these 200 or so photographs installed in eleven galleries amounts to a silent scream. Viewers walk through this show—its galleries painted charcoal, its walls covered in canvas—in hushed silences, reverent, shaken, respectful of the ineffable suffering and almost mystical sickness depicted. D. H. Lawrence’s words come to mind: “Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark tress of America. Doom!” I do not remember experiencing a more poignant and pathos-filled photography exhibition at any museum. The catalogue looks cheesy, like a gift book, but in its prologue, the excellent curator Jeff L. Rosenheim writes that this is “not a history of the Civil War, but rather an exploration of the role of the camera at a watershed moment in American culture.” This is true and not true. It is astonishing to think about the medium of photography, barely twenty years old, thrown into this cauldron of death and history—approximately 1,000 photographers producing hundreds of thousands of albumen silver prints, collodion-on-glass-plate negatives, daguerreotypes, cased ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, and stereographic scenes, some of them the most memorable pictures ever made. Still, there’s no way to separate photography’s history from history itself. Most viewers will look past the formalist notion of a medium rising to the occasion and will instead behold horror, pain, and endless sadness. This is as it should be. The show begins with a startling 1860 William Marsh portrait of Abraham Lincoln. He becomes an instant stand-in for the unspeakable distortion the country was about to enter. It is jolting to see how young he looks, but he’s not innocent. He is already gaunt, as if he knows what is to come. The only bone I have to pick with this show is that it would have been useful to see one of the last pictures taken of Lincoln in order to see how the war devastated his face in only four years, aged him, drained him of life, and made him a cursed ghost. The place names depicted read like haunted poetry. Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Fort Sumter, Appomattox. At the Met we see images of slaves and slavers, whipped runaway slaves, branded slaves with metal cages on their heads, pens where slaves were held for sale. There are torn-up tracks, blown-up bridges, troops marching, cannon and cannonballs, boy soldiers, 33,000 Union prisoners in the Confederate stockade prison of Andersonville, an emaciated prisoner who looks like the living dead we see in Holocaust pictures, piles of amputated body parts, dead horses, assassins, abolitionists, an empty-eyed woman holding pictures of young soldiers, the war-destroyed cities of Richmond and Atlanta. Cameras couldn’t yet capture the fast action of war, so photographers depicted scenes in the wake of battle. We see the aftermath of the 1862 battlefield at Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American history, when more than 26,000 Confederate and Union soldiers were killed or wounded or captured, or went missing. A country doesn’t recover from this. The next year, in Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, we see bloated corpses, their mouths agape. Also from Gettysburg is Alexander Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, a picture of a dead man in a trench with his rifle standing nearby. Many protest that the rifle was set up and thus demeans the picture. It doesn’t matter; the scene sunders souls either way. From the last year of the war is John Reekie’s A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, a stretcher full of skulls, a severed foot, and black men doing the ghoulish work of hauling the dead from a ravaged field for proper burial. By the show’s final gallery, with its images devoted to Lincoln’s assassination, even Gardner’s tragic Execution of the Conspirators becomes just another soul-shattering picture. As it should be. This is what Baldwin meant when he wrote, “Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them.” Photography and the American Civil War. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through September 2. *This article originally appeared in the May 6, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

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The Green Society: America's Next 100 Days Promoting a new American dream through trails, recycling, riding bikes and walking, reducing energy use, and developing a national system of greenways. By Jeff Olson, R.A. As America's new era beings in January, 2009, the new Presidency offers an historic moment to change our nation from crisis into opportunity, from fear to hope, from the past into the future. We are faced with unprecedented challenges in our economy, the environment, and in our ability to achieve America's vision of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now is the time for everyone in this nation to work together. What we have to do will not be easy. We need solutions that can happen today – we don't have the time to "drill baby drill" or build new power plants. We must work together, with leadership in the public, private, and non-profit sectors to encourage government, business and individuals to be a part of an historic change. As Bruce Springsteen has said during these difficult times, "we want our America back." It is time for America to lead the world by finding solutions at home. The $10 billion dollars that we are spending each month on war must be redirected to get our nation back on its feet. In previous generations, President Franklin Roosevelt and President Dwight Eisenhower both turned to rebuilding America's infrastructure as a solution. Today, we must re-invest our resources in creating a Green Society: an America with a sustainable economy, energy independence, and a new vision of the American dream. As a first step, starting today, we will reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 10% within 100 days. This effort will be called "10 Percent NOW." We will all share this responsibility by turning out extra lights, adjusting our thermostats, driving less, and making the personal choice to conserve. Like Rosie the Riveter, "Yes we Can!" We can choose to walk, bike, carpool or take transit for one out of every 10 trips we take. We can telecommute one day a week, change our work schedules, take the stairs instead of the elevator, turn off appliances that aren't in use, recycle cans, bottles and paper – these simple actions will save individuals money and reduce our energy consumption immediately. I will lead by personal example, reducing my carbon footprint by purchasing carbon credits for my energy usage. We will direct federal agencies to reduce their energy use by 10%. If we work together, this change will not require a tremendous sacrifice – if millions of individuals can each save 10 percent, together we can reach this goal as a nation. But this is just a start – and in the next 100 days we will launch a range of new initiatives to make America a Green Society, including: One Billion Trees: We will plant trees throughout this country - on our neighborhood streets, in our parks, at our schools, libraries and public buildings, along our highways, where we work, in our backyards and on our public lands. These trees will be a catalyst for our new Green Society. They will help remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, they will add beauty and shade to our communities, and they will provide a cost effective, lasting symbol for the future. We will establish a Green Corps modeled after the CCC to plant trees and encourage conservation. Complete Main Streets: We will build a new infrastructure to make our nation's Main Streets into "complete streets," that are safe for residents, visitors and the customers of local businesses. We will create new bike lanes, transit shelters, sidewalks and crosswalks – simple, cost effective improvements that can be implemented quickly to help reduce our nation's automobile dependence. We will bring wind, solar and other sustainable technologies into our homes, businesses and communities. We will establish a Green WPA to create green jobs building our new green infrastructure. National Greenways: We will connect every region of this country with a National Greenways System –a new green version of our interstate highways. Forty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Trails System Act, and now we will work together to build our nation's scenic and historic trails into a network from city to city and border to border, from sea to shining sea. This initiative will connect visionary projects such as the East Coast Greenway, the Mississippi River Trail, the American Discovery Trail, the West Coast Greenway and urban trail systems so we reach a goal of having a trail within 15 minutes of all Americans. President's Council on Physical Fitness: We will encourage all Americans to meet basic levels of physical fitness to improve our lives and reduce our nation's health care costs. Obesity, heart disease and diabetes are at epidemic levels, and each of us can be part of the solution by eating well and getting more exercise. We will work with the "No Child Left Inside" initiative to improve outdoor opportunities for our youth to improve their physical, psychological and emotional health. Green Days: We will encourage the celebration of Green Days – days where people celebrate living without depending on fossil fuels. We can enjoy 'car free days' and 'Sunday parkways' where roads are opened to people walking and bicycling – we've done this in Chicago and I know it can work in communities throughout the nation. Freedom Gardens: We will create more community gardens and farmers' markets to include healthy food and a connection to the land in the lives of more Americans. This effort will be modeled after the Victory Gardens of the 1940's and will help bring a more green into our neighborhoods. Safe Routes to Schools: Our schools are struggling with the costs of energy and transportation, and we will work with the National Safe Routes to Schools Program to get more children walking and bicycling to school. This program will improve health and safety in our communities and engage the next generation in the simple solutions that we can all be part of. Sustainable Buildings, National Parks and Public Lands: We will make sure that solar, wind, geothermal and alternative transportation solutions are integrated throughout our nation's public places. Our lands and buildings will become models for saving energy, recycling and environmental stewardship. As our national parks system moves towards the celebration of its centennial in 2016, we will create catalyst projects such as putting the solar panels back on the roof of the White House, building the new Greenways system at Grand Canyon National Park, and making sure that our National Forests are sustainably managed. These efforts are just the beginning, but we have to start with a new beginning. Today, I chose to walk here to demonstrate that every choice we make is part of the change. We all must walk in the footsteps of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, who inspired the world to create peaceful change. We must work together as individuals, organizations and as a nation. Every step we take matters, every gallon of foreign oil we save is an act of patriotism. Join me as we move forward into the future, as we add green to our great red, white and blue nation, as we create the Green Society. Read more about debates on trails and bike/ped facility funding: SecretaryPeters' remarks at 2004 Trails Symposium Sen. Coburn's proposal to redirect federal bike funds Rep. McHenry opposing bicycling and trails funding Need trail skills and education? Do you provide training? Join the National Trails Training Partnership! The NTTP Online Calendar connects you with courses, conferences, and trail-related training Promote your trail through the National Recreation Trails Program Some of our documents are in PDF format and require free Adobe Acrobat Download Acrobat Reader |American Trails and NTTP support accessibility with Section 508: read more.| Updated December 8, 2008

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COMMENT: Sixty-three years on: still India’s vital interest —Aparna Pande Mistrust is bridged by opening borders and improving visa regimes, by championing trade and commerce and above all by the willingness to listen to the other person and to continue talks despite disagreements and differences India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao recently stated: “I believe that dialogue is the most effective means to tackle outstanding issues with Pakistan and the abandonment of dialogue; the interruption of the dialogue, by no means serves the interest that we seek to pursue in getting Pakistan to stop its pursuit of terrorism against India.” In light of Secretary Rao’s statement let us analyse why, 63 years after independence, India and Pakistan need to keep talking. In June 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stated: “I sincerely believe it is in our vital interest therefore to try again to make peace with Pakistan…If the leaders of Pakistan have the courage, the determination and the statesmanship to take this road to peace, I wish to assure them that we will meet them more than halfway.” Dr Singh was not the first Indian prime minister to express a desire for peace between the two countries; premiers from Jawaharlal Nehru onwards have stated similar views. A stable democratic and peaceful Pakistan is in our vital interest, not just for altruistic reasons but for selfish national security reasons as well. Stable neighbours lead to secure borders and secure borders are vital to national interests. India is the only country in South Asia that shares borders with all its neighbours — Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and a water border with Sri Lanka. Any problems in these countries will automatically spill over into India. The Maoist problem in Nepal, including the fact that today they are the largest political organisation in that country and are vehemently anti-India, has led to continuous frictions between India and Nepal. Any breakdown of law and order in Bangladesh will only add to the already steady flow of illegal immigrants into India’s north-eastern states where religious and ethno-linguistic tensions between the Muslim Bengalis and the mainly Hindu Assamese natives are already at a flash point. The impact of Sri Lanka’s two decade long civil war in India can be seen not only in the key role the ‘Tamil issue’ plays in local elections in Tamil Nadu but also in that one of our prime minister’s was assassinated by a Tamil suicide bomber. Hardliners in India believe that Pakistan is a state waiting to collapse and India should just wait for the inevitable to happen and hence do nothing. A majority also assert that it does not help India to talk to any civilian government since the only institution in Pakistan that functions properly is the army, which is by definition anti-India. Hence, their policy is that India should continue to build ties with the US and convince the Americans to put more pressure on Pakistan and ignore talking directly to Pakistan. When the Americans insist that India should talk to Pakistan to solve issues, the hawks have a readymade answer. India can always point out that until and unless Pakistan changes its anti-India attitude and stops exporting terror to India, the Indian domestic opinion will not allow any Indian government to move forward with Pakistan. However, burying your head in the sand and saying that Pakistan’s implosion is inevitable and will not make a difference to India is fallacious and dangerous. Pakistan is a country of 175 million and if the country starts to collapse, the most likely venue for these immigrants will be India, not Afghanistan or Iran. If Pakistan collapses to the extent that even the Pakistani army is not able to hold on to the country, then the security of the nuclear weapons is something India needs to be concerned about. And if the jihadi menace is a problem right now, what will the situation be like when it is jihadi sans control, i.e. when the Pakistani security forces are unable to keep any check on these groups. The best way to ensure that there is no mass immigration, that terrorists and extremists do not take over the territory of such a large state and that the nuclear weapons are in safe hands is if Pakistan is stable, democratic and peaceful. For that to happen, as Pakistan’s largest neighbour it is in India’s vital interest to help stabilise Pakistan and hence stabilise and secure the neighbourhood. Stating that the civilians are weak in Pakistan and hence not talking with them has only ensured that the vicious cycle of military power-civilian weakness continues. With India and Kashmir holding such a sway in Pakistani politics, if any civilian government is able to build long-lasting ties with India and move forward in solving the Kashmir dispute, this will boost democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan. However, just as Pakistanis will judge India by its actions, not its intentions, similarly Indians too will judge Pakistan by its actions. President Zardari has oft stated that India is not a threat to Pakistan and Pakistan’s civilian government has often expressed the desire to have peaceful ties with India. These intentions have not yet been actualised. When Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took over as president of Argentina, her first call was to Brazil. If states want to build ties with their neighbours, they make talks with them their priority. Pakistani hardliners assert that India has never accepted partition or the creation of Pakistan and they point to India’s immense conventional military capabilities as a reflection of Indian intentions. Indian hardliners point out that until and unless the entire military — technocratic-intelligence establishment changes its perception of India as an existential threat, things will not change. Pakistani and Indian moderates would like India to support the civilian government and the liberals in Pakistan. There is no denying that the India-Pakistan peace process will be cumbersome, that there will be setbacks — like during the last foreign ministers’ talks in Islamabad — but there is no other option. India and Pakistan need to continue talks because the main underlying problem is ‘mistrust.’ On the eve of the July 15 talks both countries recognised the need to bridge this mistrust and move ahead. Mistrust is bridged by opening borders and improving visa regimes, by championing trade and commerce and above all by the willingness to listen to the other person and to continue talks despite disagreements and differences. For centuries France and Germany fought over a piece of territory; today the two countries are so closely allied economically that it is difficult to imagine they were ever enemies. India and Pakistan have close civilisational ties and yet have fought four wars in the last six decades. The weight of history is on the side of those who want to build ties between the two countries. Let us hope our leaders hear this call. The writer has a doctorate in political science and is a research fellow at Hudson Institute. Her book on Pakistan’s foreign policy will be published by Routledge in March 2011

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Donald Trump’s advent as the Republican nominee could make the 2016 presidential election the most expensive in history. The most costly presidential race in U.S. history was 1896, when a populist rabble-rouser named William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination. Like Trump, Bryan was a celebrity, a popular lecturer, the 1890s equivalent of a reality TV star, who used his star power to attack the nation’s elite and promoted policies that scared Wall Street to death. Bryan’s policy was free silver, which would have devalued the currency and wiped out most of Wall Street’s wealth. Trump’s is tariffs, particularly a 45% duty on all Chinese imports, which would destroy the business of some of America’s biggest companies, including Amazon and Apple. Like Trump, Bryan was a popular figure who attracted huge crowds of rabid supporters. And like Trump, Bryan scared many of the nation’s leaders, particularly the super wealthy robber barons, the 1% of their day, to death. Once he captured the Democratic nomination, the super-rich and the giant corporations went all out to destroy Bryan by using their most potent weapon, money. What Happened in 1896 The amounts the elites were willing to spend to crush Bryan were astronomical. Atlantic writer Matthew O’Brien estimated that the 1896 presidential campaign consumed .05% of America’s gross domestic product (GDP). If the same amount were spent today, the price tag would be around $8.96 billion, more than the cost of all the national elections in 2012, which cost around $7 billion, according to The Economist. That would also mean the election would cost more than four times more than the last presidential election which cost around $2 billion. Most of this money was spent on behalf of Bryan’s Republican opponent, William McKinley. McKinley’s supporters paid for the publication of 200 million pamphlets, which is astounding, considering the fact that the U.S. population was 76.2 million in 1900 four years later. Some historians have noted that almost every household in the United States received at least two pieces of McKinley campaign literature in 1896. They also financed 1,400 stump speakers, who crisscrossed the country ferociously, attacking Bryan at every opportunity, which was hardly a small feat when the only form of long distance travel available was by train. Business interests also mounted a third-party challenge to deliberately split the vote of the so-called Gold Democrats. The purpose of the Gold Democrats was to take the votes of Southern Democrats from Bryan, which they did. They were called Gold Democrats because they opposed free silver, Bryan’s controversial signature policy. The money was well spent. McKinley won in a landslide, receiving around a third more votes in the Electoral College than Bryan. McKinley also won a majority of the votes of ethnic group in the United States, except the Irish. His victory established a Republican domination of U.S. politics that lasted until the Great Depression 34 years later. 2016 is 1896 All Over Again The situation in 2016 is much the same as it was in 1896: a popular candidate with a radical agenda that threatens business is about to take control of one of the two major political parties. That candidate, Trump, like Bryan back in 1896, is generating lots of media attention and popular support. Trump, like Bryan in 1896, took advantage of a lousy economy – the country had been in depression for three years – and the fears of working and middle class voters. Bryan’s anti-business rhetoric resonated with rural white Protestants, who saw their traditional country life under threat from the big city, big business, immigrants, and Catholics. Trump appeals to working class whites who feel threatened by free trade, China, big business, big government, immigrants, terrorism, technological progress, a growing non-white population, and a declining economic position. Trump has already picked fights with some of the nation’s richest people and largest corporations. The Donald actually tweeted out this threat: “Trump on Amazon: ‘If I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.’ • $AMZN 12:13 PM – 26 Feb 2016.” The candidate is mad at Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) because its CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, which has been ferociously attacking him lately. Bezos is the world’s fifth-richest man, worth $45.6 billion, while Amazon itself reported a TTM revenue of $107.01 billion and $19.81 billion in cash and short-term investments on Dec. 31, 2015. Trump, in contrast, has around $4 billion. That money could pay for a lot of attacks on Donald, and Amazon is just one fantastically rich company Trump is going after. He’s also attacking Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) for refusing to help the FBI break the encryption on an iPhone seized from one of the terrorists behind the San Bernardino atrocity last year. How Trump Threatens Big Business Apple and Amazon already have a very good reason to oppose Donald. Their business model is dependent on easy access to low-cost manufacturing in China, something obviously threatened by Trump’s trade proposals. Nor is it just Apple and Amazon that would be threatened by this. There’s also Walmart (NYSE: WMT), which reported revenues of $482.13 billion on Jan. 31, 2016. To this list of those potentially threatened by the Trump tariffs, we can also add Costco (NASDAQ: COST) with $116.55 billion in revenue and Disney (NYSE: DIS), which reported revenues of $54.32 billion on Dec. 31, 2015. Disney needs access to foreign markets, particularly China, in order to turn a profit on its films. After Disney, there’s almost every tech giant in Silicon Valley, including Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Facebook, and Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google. Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) reported $73.07 billion in cash and short-term investments on Dec. 31, 2015, and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) reported $18.43 billion. Some right wing business interests are also hostile to Trump. Reuters reported that the Koch Brothers; who are collectively worth around $100 billion, have around $400 million in their political arsenal that could be deployed against Trump in the general election. What happens if the Koch brothers, Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook team up to stop Trump and rope in other billionaires such as Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison to help? Back in 1896, a dream team of robber barons, including John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan, were among those fighting back against Bryan. What does Trump do if the biggest names in American business line up behind Hillary? The result could be almost unlimited financing for Hillary and anybody else who wants to run. Politico reported that somebody has already paid Data Targeting, a firm of Republican political consultants, to study the possibility of a third-party conservative challenge to Trump – shades of the Gold Democrats. The $20 Billion Election Vast amounts of cash could be unleashed because the U.S. Supreme Court’s much maligned Citizens United decision allows for unlimited campaign spending by almost anybody. One has to wonder how Trump, who has vowed to spend $300 million to reach the White House, could compete with that. He has only $4 billion, according to Forbes, and his opponents could conceivably collect a war chest of $10 or even $20 billion. A strong possibility is that Donald Trump could become the Republican nominee and end up out of money. Once he burns through his cash, Trump will either have to start taking public funding or go begging to the GOP establishment and probably have to renege on all his campaign promises to get a few dollars. Another possibility is that billionaire Donald could end up begging for cash from his supporters to keep the repo man from taking his private plane away. Back in 1896, Bryan eventually ran out of money. He ended up scurrying from train to train, traveling the country in a frantic effort to counter the McKinley juggernaut. How would somebody used to getting own way like the Donald react to that? Thanks to Donald Trump, the man who is running as an alternative to big money establishment politics, more money could be spent in the 2016 Presidential election than in any year since 1896. One has to wonder how the public will react to that and the level of cynicism it will add to our politics. For an interesting view of the 1896 presidential election from the perspective of a modern political operative, see Karl Rove’s excellent book The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters. Ironically enough, that book is available through Amazon.com.

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There had been on-going discussion about the need for a railroad out of Vancouver for quite some time since the completion of the trans-continental railroad. The first person to take action was L.M. Hidden, a Vancouver businessman. Hidden was involved in farming, brick making, hotel operation and philanthropic endeavors. Hidden was also involved in Clark County activities and helped form the Clark County Fair Association. There is an unverified story that Hidden and his family, along with several friends and their families, went on a picnic at Moulton Falls. They were so impressed with the abundant timber in the area that they decided to build a railroad to gain access to it. In any event, on 7/8/1886 Hidden and 5 associates left Vancouver to survey the proposed route to Yakima. Hidden felt that the route would give him access to the timber, the wheat growing country around Yakima and there might be coal and other minerals along the way. They were gone a month and returned with estimates of timber and mining resources and certain that a practical route could be laid out. On 9/22/1887, the Clark County Register announced that the Vancouver, Klickitat and Yakima, Vancouver’s first railroad, had recently been incorporated with one million dollars in funding. L. M. Hidden was vice-president. On 1/31/1888, work began, and the first locomotive for the line arrived in Vancouver on 12/20/1888. The goal of the railroad was to serve Vancouver and Yakima by way of the Klickitat Pass. It was envisioned that it would ultimately connect with the Great Northern Railroad and the Manitoba line of the Canadian National Railway at Yakima creating a transcontinental connection. The line was eventually built to Brush Prairie, but the country fell into an economic depression and money ran out for further expansion and operations. Finally, on 11/25/1897, the railroad was broke and had to be sold. It was renamed the Portland, Vancouver and Yakima Railroad by the new owners. Within four months under the new ownership, the railroad was bringing 50,000 board feet of logs a day from Brush Prairie to Vancouver. In November of 1898, the stockholders increased their capital stock from $50,000 to $250,000 and sought right of way to extend the line to Chelatchie Prairie. By September 1901, there were 4 work camps working on extending the rail line to Yacolt. During that period, crews were working on a 300-foot long tunnel between the Lewis River and Battle Ground at Moulton Falls. The summer of 1902 was exceptionally dry and by the second week in September, there were fires all over the Northwest. One fire started near Bonneville, in Skamania County and moved through the timber covered hills taking 10 days to reach the Yacolt area. The wind changed and Yacolt was spared. By the time the fire burned out near Mt. St. Helens, the loss in property and resources reached approximately 13 million dollars. Much of the burned land was owned by the Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., which mounted a huge salvage operation, based in Yacolt. Operations were conducted by the Weyerhaeuser subsidiaries Clarke County Timber Company and Twin Falls Logging Company. The Twin Falls Logging Company laid track and ran logging trains through the woods. In 1903, the railroad was completed to Yacolt, and the town boomed. The Vancouver Independent wrote: "Keep your eye on Yacolt and Battle Ground. Both of these little towns are now experiencing booms that are almost phenomenal. During the past month there has been quite a movement in real estate in both places and a number of new buildings have been erected. The booms in both towns are occasioned by the increase in the logging business. The Columbia River Lumber Company have just established three camps on a spur near Battle Ground and in the Yacolt Country preparations are being made for an extensive logging business." Also in 1903 the P,V&K merged with the Washington and Oregon Railroad and they became the Washington Railway and Navigation Company. This company lasted only 3½ months and it was transferred to the Northern Pacific Railroad on 11/11/1903 to be under control of that company’s Pacific Division. The new owners immediately began regular passenger service to Yacolt, with one passenger coach making the trip each way daily. A one-way ticket from Yacolt to Vancouver cost $1.07. Prior to the addition of passenger coaches by the Northern Pacific, passengers rode wherever space was available; in the caboose, on freight cars, even on the engine. The salvage of burned timber was completed by 1910, and by the mid-1920's, logging of green timber in the area was winding down. On December 4, 1929, George S. Long, general manager of Weyerhaeuser, wrote the stockholders of the Clarke County Timber Company regarding the closure of operations in the area. The area had been logged off, he wrote, and that there was no demand for the land for agricultural purposes as it would cost more for the purchaser to clear the land of stumps than he could buy an already cleared and cultivated parcel for. As for Yacolt, Long wrote: "At Yacolt we have two or three worn out buildings, all vacant and without any perceptible value whatever, these including an old warehouse, a residence formerly occupied by our logging Superintendent, a hospital building, which has been robbed of much of its equipment, and one or two very small buildings of no value, in fact none of them have any value today for Yacolt is absolutely dead with no promise for a future life." After the departure of Weyerhaeuser, The Northern Pacific continued to operate logging trains on the line to serve the remaining small-scale operations in the area, but there was no longer any need for passenger service. By the mid-1940's, the Northern Pacific was only running one train a week to Yacolt. In 1948, Harbor Plywood completed the long planned extension to Chelatchie Prairie, opening that area to logging. Two years later, the Longview, Portland and Northern bought the rail line Harbor Plywood and later bought the remainder of the line from the Northern Pacific. International Paper Company, the parent company of the L,P&N, built a huge lumber and plywood plant there in 1960. Even though the Northern Pacific sold the line, it was not the end of NP involvement in the area. In the late 1950’s NP was running one log train a day from Kelso to Yacolt. The train would leave Kelso at 7:00am, pick up empty cars at Longview, stop at Battle Ground where the crew would eat lunch, and arrive at Yacolt at 12:30pm. On the return trip, the train would drop off the log cars at Longview and be back in Kelso at 7:45pm. When the mill was closed in 1979, the entire line was put up for sale. Three Vancouver businessmen bought the line in March 1981 and changed its name to the Chelatchie Prairie Railroad. It was used both commercially and for passenger traffic until January of 1984 when the owners filed for abandonment in order to tear it up, sell the tracks and ties and 340 acres of right-of-way. Clark County purchased the railroad and leased it to the Lewis and Clark Railroad, which had run excursion service and continues to use a portion of the line for commercial purposes. Over time, with severe winter weather, lack of maintenance and changes in ownership, the track-bed, rails, bridges, and buildings north of Battle Ground have deteriorated. A group of community volunteers came together in 1998 with the goal of restoring the line and building the Chelatchie Prairie Railroad into a functioning historical railroad. Working with the support of Clark County, the track from Moulton Falls to Chelatchie Prairie has been restored, and excursion service resumed on May 26, 2001. Work continues on improving the track and upgrading equipment with the goal of restoring service to Battle Ground.

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Are memes calling the Irish “the first slaves” an attempt to derail conversations about slavery and modern-day racism? A St Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago [Getty Images] This year, as acting Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny meets Barack Obama at the annual St Patrick’s Day dinner, talk of slavery will be far from the agenda. Yet, as the Irish diaspora celebrate their culture, many are falling prey to a myth sweeping the internet that the Irish were themselves slaves in the US. It has given rise to a plethora of racist memes, and is gaining traction among some white Americans despite the objections of historians. These “Irish slave” memes are frequently used to derail conversations about slavery and racism. When they proclaim that “Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the US”, they attempt to diminish the history of the slave trade, the popular Black Lives Matter movement and calls for reparations for slavery in the US and the Caribbean. So where is this coming from? The most popular online article that falsely equates indentured servitude or penal slavery with racialised slavery is hosted by the Global Research website. It has been shared nearly one million times. The online diaspora website, Irish Central, published an article based solely on this source, which has, in turn, been shared more than 149,000 times. Irish historian Liam Hogan is at the forefront of efforts to debunk the “Irish slave” myth. He says the position of the unfree Irish in the New World was one of “indentured servitude” and describes articles like that on Irish Central as “ahistorical”. More needs to be done to stop the spread of this inaccurate mythology, Hogan suggests. “These articles have created an Irish slave trade timeline, ostensibly a fantasy, which runs from 1612 to 1839,” he explained. “This is to make it appear that there was a concurrent transatlantic slave trade of Irish slaves that historians have covered up because of liberal bias. “Historically, the majority of Irish prisoners of war, vagrants and other victims of kidnapping and deception – thought to have numbered around 10,000 people – were forcibly sent to the West Indies in the 1650s. Those that survived were pardoned by Charles II in 1660. “In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted for four centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of Africans who were completely dehumanised, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. So this neo-Nazi propaganda is false equivalency on an outrageous scale,” he said. In fact, it is well documented that there were Irish involved in the slave trade and that some were even slave owners – not only in Irish-dominated Montserrat but also in all the slaveholding states in the US, Jamaica, Barbados, British Guiana, Haiti, Trinidad, Antigua, Haiti, Martinique, the Danish West Indies and Cuba. The plight of the indentured Irish, however painful, was not racialised and their status was sometimes voluntary, with a migrant working for free for a period of time to pay off the cost of their trip across the Atlantic. Indentured servitude was a widespread practice at the time, so it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of Irish affected by it. But in his book, The Irish Diaspora, Andy Bielenberg estimates that between 1630 and 1775, 165,000 Irish migrated from Ireland to the British colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. Of course, not all of these would have been indentured. Matthew Reilly is an archaeologist at Brown University who has researched slavery in Barbados. He says the idea of Irish slaves has no historical foundation. “The Irish slave myth is not supported by the historical evidence. Thousands of Irish were sent to colonies like Barbados against their will, never to return. “Upon their arrival, however, they were socially and legally distinct from the enslaved Africans with whom they often laboured. “While not denying the vast hardships endured by indentured servants, it is necessary to recognise the differences between forms of labour in order to understand the depths of the inhumane system of chattel slavery that endured in the region for several centuries, as well as the legacies of race-based slavery in our own times,” Reilly said. Many of the memes circulating online justify police brutality against black Americans, which has raised concern considering the high percentage of Irish Americans in the US police force. The powerful NYPD Emerald Society – whose goal is “to help foster Irish heritage and tradition within the department – is more than 60 years old and is just one example of the Irish diaspora’s influence on US policing. There is even an “Irish Lives Matter” meme featuring the tags “Irish Power” and “Irish were the first slaves”, while the white supremacist media outlet Stormfront features links to books and articles published on the topic. Facebook groups have sprung up propagating the myth, which has also been widely circulated on Twitter, most recently in response to the singer Beyonce’s Super Bowl appearance, with its nod to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter campaign. Aidan McQuade, the director of Anti-Slavery International, says he feels that the memes actually diminish Ireland’s painful history. “While indentured servitude would be regarded by contemporary standards as slavery, it was less violent than the transatlantic slave trade out of Africa. The Irish, because of the colour of their skin, had preferential treatment and pathways out unavailable to black slaves,” he explained. “Unfortunately, the Irish slave idea seems to be coming from a point of division and not from one of empathy. These memes actually diminish the Irish experience of indentured servitude in the Americas by turning a sad history into a token of race oppression.” Source: Al Jazeera

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Wondering how we can scale up progress towards achieving equitable learning opportunities? The Millions Learning team at the Center for Universal Education has compiled a list of recently-released scaling must-reads that offer tips and tools for increasing impact in global education. In the wake of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly and the launch of two major education reports, the 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report and the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity’s report on the Learning Generation, the urgent need to dramatically accelerate progress in order to reach the Sustainable Development Goals has never been more apparent. Despite significant progress, today an estimated quarter of a billion children and youth are out of school, and another 330 million are not learning basic literacy and numeracy despite being in school. Thus, scaling up effective education interventions remains a critical factor in ensuring that every child has access to quality learning and in achieving the ambitious education targets set forth in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Back in April 2016, the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution released the report, Millions Learning: Scaling up quality education in developing countries, with findings and recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, academics, and funders grappling with how to scale up quality learning opportunities for children and youth around the world. As we embark on the next phase of Millions Learning focused on advancing recommendations in the report—specifically the need for better learning and scaling data—we continue to review broader scaling literature. So, let’s see what’s trending in some of the most recent tools, blogs, and reports: “Innovating is the Easy Part” – Larry Cooley Larry Cooley, President Emeritus of Management Systems International, highlights the importance of approaching innovations with a vision for scale, a realistic assessment of scaling challenges, and a plan for addressing potential scaling obstacles. In doing so, he presents a series of tools available for assessing an innovation’s scalability potential and designing an effective scaling strategy. “When Innovation Goes Wrong” – Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair, visiting scholars at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, explore the potential and limits of innovation to ultimately identify six “pathologies” that prevent organizations from successfully scaling up their innovations. Such pathologies, as worded by Seelos and Mair, include never getting started, pursuing too many bad ideas, stopping too early, stopping too late, scaling too little, and innovating again too soon. “Scaling Innovation Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint” – Ann Mei Chang Ann Mei Chang, Executive Director of USAID’s Global Development Lab, offers three essential recommendations for a successful scaling process: building user demand for the innovation, finding a sustainable revenue stream, and realizing that those who created the innovation may not always be the best-equipped to take it to scale. “How do you scale up an effective education intervention? Iteratively, that’s how.” – David Evans David Evans, Senior Economist at the World Bank, discusses the iterative nature of the scaling process and its potential for integration into government systems, either completely or partially, to help improve learning outcomes. In order to demonstrate this concept, Evans explores Pratham, India’s largest education NGO, and more specifically, a recent study by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Pratham on scaling its “teaching at the right level” approach through testing, diagnosing challenges, retesting, and ultimately achieving significant improvements in literacy and numeracy through different delivery channels, including teachers, volunteers, and local government officials. “Journeys to Scale” – Center for Education Innovations (to be released October 10) A team from the Center for Education Innovations at Results for Development Institute tells the story of five education innovations—from Brazil, Ghana, Ethiopia, Peru, and Sudan—as they attempt to scale and ultimately improve accountability, access, quality and ultimately learning. Drawing from the experiences of these five innovations, which range from a play-based early childhood development program to a community-driven school accountability platform, priority recommendations for supporting the scaling of innovations emerge. A few key themes emerge from the above scaling resources, the first being the importance of planning for scale from the outset. That is to say, if scaling is the goal, it must be baked into plans from the start, which may include building up organizational capacity, securing sustainable funding, and planning for potential challenges. This idea is reinforced in the Millions Learning study as well, which finds that planning from the outset requires a clear vision of what the endgame is and a theory of change about the best way to get there in order to successfully achieve scale. However, simply designing for scale does not guarantee large-scale impact. Implementation at large scale can be messy and complex and may require new expertise and capacity. For example, those who were involved in the initial design of the innovation may not always be the best-equipped to take the innovation to scale. Thus, it is vital that an organization remains flexible in order to prepare itself for the shifting demands of the scaling process. Furthermore, scaling can take on many different forms and look different in various contexts. Regardless of the path to scale, it is clear that scaling does not follow a linear path but is an iterative learning process. While a first attempt to scale may fail, it is important to learn from the process and have space to iterate and evaluate once again. Therefore, it is vital to continuously monitor and evaluate efforts to scale to learn from mistakes and adjust to rapidly changing environments. This echoes our own recommendations in the Millions Learning report, which encourages a stronger culture of research and development in global education. This scaling resources list is by no means exhaustive, but rather, a snapshot of some reading that we found helpful as we are developing plans for the next phase of Millions Learning. Given the need to collectively build up the state of knowledge around scaling in education, we welcome your feedback and recommendations of additional materials in the comments section below. Happy reading! Jenny Perlman Robinson is a Nonresident Fellow with the Brookings Institution, Center for Universal Education, where her work focuses on improving quality education and learning for children and youth in developing countries at large-scale. She is the co-author of Millions Learning: Scaling up quality education in developing countries (Brookings Institution 2016) and the author of Global Compact on Learning: Taking action on education in developing countries (Brookings Institution 2011). Kathryn Norris is a Project Assistant at the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution where she works on the Millions Learning project. Priyanka Varma is a Research Assistant and Project Coordinator at the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution where she works on the Millions Learning project. Photo Credits: WorldFish, Georgina Smith ; UN Photo/Cia Pak ; Larry Cooley ; Warchild Sudan

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Top Fertilizing Mistakes Gardeners Make Fertilizer is good nutrition for lawns and gardens, but just like human food, fertilizer diets must be strictly controlled. Gardeners often use too much or too little fertilizer or simply the wrong product, with potentially disastrous results. Here are the effects of the top fertilizing mistakes gardeners make. Too much fertilizer The most common mistake is overfeeding the lawn or garden. Excess fertilizer is bad for plants and the environment. Too much fertilizer may burn a plant’s roots and make the plant more vulnerable to insects and diseases. A soil test will show if you are using too much fertilizer. Short of that, you can see the signs of excessive fertilizer in vegetable plants with yellow leaves, spindly stems or plenty of green leaves but no fruit. Even organic fertilizers, such as compost, can be overdone. The soil lab at Colorado State University recommends no more than 5 percent organic matter, but this can be easily exceeded with regular and substantial additions of compost. It is best to focus on fertilizing before planting for the season. If adding liquid fertilizer, take care not to pour too much on or near the leaves as the leaves can burn. In the bigger picture, excess fertilizer will wash into the groundwater, potentially contaminating water supplies or spilling into rivers and eventually creating algae blooms and dead zones such as the oxygen-deprived spread at the mouth of the Mississippi. It is expected to exceed 8,500 square miles this summer, and is largely the result of fertilizer and agricultural waste runoff. Moreover, wasted fertilizer is also wasted fossil fuel. A Cornell University study estimated that a single ton of nitrogen for fertilizer requires burning about 33,000 cubic feet of natural gas. Too little fertilizer Not using enough fertilizer also is a mistake. Though external environmental damage from using too little fertilizer is unlikely, your garden cannot thrive without the right soil mix. It is particularly a mistake to under-fertilize before planting. This could lead to an over-reliance later on liquid fertilizer, which is less effective and, as noted above, can burn leaves. In the lawn, a lack of specific nutrients or organic matter can attract weeds. Help crowd out crabgrass by adding compost to the lawn, as crabgrass is an indicator of bacterial deficiencies in the soil. Citrus trees with yellow leaves are another sign of too little fertilizer. The wrong fertilizers Of course, it’s not all about volume. Different fertilizers add different nutrients to the soil at different rates, and the wrong fertilizer is bad for plants. Though nitrogen is one of the primary additives for vegetable gardens, too much nitrogen can result in large, healthy vines and no tomatoes or potatoes. Similarly, slow-release fertilizers and manure can push fruit production late into the season for a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. In lawns, the wrong fertilizer mix can actually encourage some weeds and diseases even while helping healthy grass crowd out other invasives. For example, purslane and Japanese clover will attack a lawn deficient in calcium and nitrogen, but a high-nitrogen fertilizer is not always the answer. Excessive nitrogen invites fungal diseases such as brown patch. Poorly timed fertilizers Finally, fertilizers must be timed correctly for optimal growth. Nitrogen is most effective for about three weeks after applying, so it may be wasted if applied long before planting, or it may delay fruit if applied too late. Fertilizing a lawn too early can encourage new growth before temperatures remain warm enough for the new grass to survive. Wait until the lawn comes out of hibernation and starts to grow on its own in the spring. Similarly, late fall lawn fertilization can encourage new blade growth rather than letting the grass start to go dormant and focus its energy on root growth and storage. For best results There are plenty of ways to go wrong with fertilizer, but one simple way to fertilize correctly: follow a professional soil report. Contact your local cooperative extension office for detailed sampling instructions. Get a separate test for each area of the garden and lawn. Start early to allow a couple of weeks to get your results back, then allow time to amend the soil before spring planting. Even if you have used basic home soil tests before, you may be surprised by the information in the professional soil test, which goes far beyond measuring pH. For example, I had planned to mix in my annual dose of compost to my vegetable garden, but my test for my veggie bed showed 9.3 percent organic matter (OM), and a recommendation against more compost: “You don't need to build up the OM content of this soil beyond existing levels, but rather focus on protecting and replenishing the OM content, e.g. by using organic mulch.” Instead, I needed to increase nitrogen and add perlite to improve the drainage in my heavy clay soil. Spread any fertilizer evenly into the soil, and follow label instructions for best results.

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The fast-growing field of digital health is transforming healthcare by bringing together digital communications technology, electronic health information, electronic prescribing, connected medical devices, and telehealth. These technologies are being deployed by healthcare entities ranging from small health tech startups to large, established hospital systems, medical device companies, and other traditional healthcare companies. Telehealth systems are already in use for applications as varied as direct-to-consumer urgent care and remote provider-to-provider consultations for treatment of complex conditions such as strokes or rare genetic diseases. With these exciting new developments comes a new set of regulatory challenges and concerns for companies in the space. This alert provides a brief overview of some of the laws and regulations that may apply to health companies engaging in digital health. Regulation of Medical Devices by the Food and Drug Administration Digital health apps may be subject to regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA guidance has stated that the agency intends to regulate health apps that qualify as medical devices and could pose a risk to patient safety if they do not function as intended. The FDA is actively engaged in developing a modern regulatory regime that regulates digital health technologies without stifling innovation. In July, the FDA rolled out a new Digital Health Innovation plan that aims to efficiently enable the delivery of safe and effective digital health technologies. For more on this topic, please see the Venable Healthcare Alert, FDA Launches Action Plan for Digital Health Regulation. State Law and Regulation of Corporate Practice of Medicine and Professional Fee-Splitting Many states have corporate practice of medicine (CPOM) laws, which prohibit a general business corporation from rendering medical care or employing physicians to do so. State laws may apply to different types of licensed healthcare providers, such as physicians, dentists, and chiropractors. Digital health companies that provide healthcare services must take care to comply with any applicable state CPOM laws. In addition, some states have "fee-splitting laws" that prohibit licensed healthcare professionals and facilities from sharing fees with unlicensed individuals and entities. The State of New York, for example, has fee-splitting rules that make it unlawful for physicians to share professional fees with many other persons and entities. Digital health companies must ensure that any arrangements involving licensed healthcare professionals comply with applicable fee-splitting laws. State Medical Licensing Requirements and Telehealth Digital health companies that provide telemedicine or telehealth services face an array of licensure requirements that differ from state to state. Most states require that a healthcare professional, such as a physician, who renders care to a patient residing in a particular state be licensed in that state. As such, digital health companies serving patients in multiple states must have a process in place to ensure that affiliated healthcare professionals are appropriately licensed in all applicable states. Many states also have laws specific to telemedicine and internet prescribing. California law, for example, prohibits providers from prescribing certain drugs through the internet without first conducting an appropriate medical examination of the patient. Healthcare Fraud and Abuse Laws Federal healthcare fraud and abuse laws that could impact digital health companies include the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS) and the Stark Law. The AKS prohibits knowingly offering, paying, soliciting, or receiving any remuneration to induce referrals of items or services reimbursable by a federal healthcare program. The Stark Law makes it unlawful for physicians to refer Medicare patients for designated health services to an entity with which the physician has a financial relationship and prohibits the submission of a claim for reimbursement for services rendered pursuant to an unlawful referral. Digital health companies should take care to ensure that business arrangements comply with these complex laws and their associated regulations. In addition, many states have comparable healthcare fraud and abuse laws. State laws can be broader and may apply to all payers, not just public healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. For example, digital health services that engage in marketing or lead generation must carefully evaluate their business arrangements to ensure compliance with state and federal healthcare fraud and abuse laws. Federal, State, and International Health Privacy Laws The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Health apps are surging in popularity as customers seek online tools to help them set health and fitness goals, track progress, and manage long-term health concerns. A digital health company that builds or operates a health app must be aware that apps that create, store, or transmit HIPAA protected health information (PHI) on behalf of a covered entity such as a hospital, clinic, physician practice, or health plan, or a business associate of such businesses, will be subject to HIPAA. As such, they will require a comprehensive HIPAA privacy and security program. Foreign and State Health Privacy Laws Many states and foreign jurisdictions have health privacy laws that impose more stringent protections than HIPAA. These states and foreign jurisdictions may, for example, cover broader categories of information or impose stricter requirements such as shorter breach notification timelines. Digital health companies must be aware of the laws in the states and foreign jurisdictions where the company is based and where its customers are located. Consumer Protection Regulation by the Federal Trade Commission and State Attorneys General Federal Communications Commission Regulation The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates communications devices, which may include some digital health technologies. Medical devices that use radio frequency communication may come under FCC jurisdiction. The FCC works with the FDA to promulgate consistent regulations and standards for the use of technologies that may be subject to regulation by both agencies.

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Isotopic fractionation of stable carbon isotopes Carbon-13 (13C) and Carbon-12 (12C) involves alterations in the ratios of isotopic species as a function of their atomic mass as a result of natural biochemical processes. 1 Variations as such are unrelated to time and natural radioactive decay. It is common practice in Carbon-14 laboratories to correct radiocarbon activities for sample fractionation. The resultant ages are termed “normalized”, meaning the measured activity is modified with respect to -25 o/oo (per mille) with respect to VPBD. The correction factor must be added or subtracted from the conventional radiocarbon age. Beta Analytic’s fees already include δ13C measurements in conjunction with C14 analysis. The lab also provides δ13C measurements NOT in conjunction with C14 analysis except for water samples. Please email the lab for the rates. In order to provide radiocarbon determinations that are both accurate and precise, it is necessary to correct for “isotopic fractionation” using the stable isotopes 13C and 12C. This correction factors out error introduced from metabolic and respiratory pathway differences between the modern reference standard material and the sample material. The unit of measure is termed “δ13C”. Two δ13C values are measured at Beta Analytic: – One is the value applicable to correct for total fractionation (natural, chemistry and AMS). This value is not reported but it is used to produce the correct “Conventional Radiocarbon Age”. Important: Reporting conventions using “Conventional Radiocarbon Age” terminology indicate the result has been corrected for isotopic fractionation. – Beta also measures a second δ13C value in an isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS δ13C). This value is representative of the sample itself and is reported. This is the value the literature expects. In comparison, reporting the “AMS δ13C” is misleading and open to misinterpretation. Radiocarbon users should always be aware whether the δ13C they are using in their research is the IRMS δ13C or the AMS δ13C. If it is the AMS δ13C, it cannot be used for dietary or metabolic pathway studies. Reported δ13C values from Beta are always the values measured in the IRMS. Fractionation during the geochemical transfer of carbon in nature produces variation in the equilibrium distribution of the isotopes of carbon (12C, 13C and 14C). Craig (1953) first identified that certain biochemical processes alter the equilibrium between the carbon isotopes. Some processes, such as photosynthesis for instance, favors one isotope over another, so after photosynthesis, the isotope C13 is depleted by 1.8% in comparison to its natural ratios in the atmosphere (Harkness, 1979). Conversely the inorganic carbon dissolved in the oceans is generally 0.7% enriched in 13C relative to atmospheric carbon dioxide. The extent of isotopic fractionation on the 14C/12C ratio (which must be measured accurately) is approximately double that for the measured 13C/12C ratio. If isotopic fractionation occurs in natural processes, a correction can be made by measuring the ratio of the isotope 13C to the isotope 12C in the sample being dated. The ratio is measured using an ordinary mass spectrometer. The isotopic composition of the sample being measured is expressed as δ13C which represents the parts per thousand difference (per mille) between the sample’s carbon 13 content and the content of the international PDB standard carbonate (Keith et al., 1964; Aitken, 1990). A δ13C value, then, represents the per mille (part per thousand) deviation from the PDB standard. PDB refers to the Cretaceous belemnite formation at Peedee in South Carolina, USA. This nomenclature has recently been changed to VPDB (Coplen, 1994). The δ13C value for a sample can yield important information regarding the environment from which the sample comes or the mixtures of materials used to produce it because the isotope value of the sample reflects the isotopic composition of the immediate environment. In the case of shellfish, for example, marine shells typically possess a δ13C value between -1 and +4 o/oo (per mille), whereas river shells possess a value of between -8 and -12 o/oo (per mille). Thus, in a case where the precise environment of the shell is not known, it is possible to determine the most likely environment by analysis of the δ13C result. Fractionation also describes variations in the isotopic ratios of carbon brought about by non-natural causes. For example, samples may be fractionated in the laboratory through a variety of means; incomplete conversion of the sample from one stage to another or from one part of the laboratory to another. In Liquid Scintillation Counting, for example, incomplete synthesis of acetylene during lithium carbide preparation may result in a low yield and concurrent fractionation. Similarly, the transfer of gases in a vacuum system may involve fractionation error if the sample gas is not allowed to equilibrate throughout the total volume. Atoms of larger or smaller mass may be favored in such a situation. If, however, the entire sample is converted completely from one form to another (e.g. solid to gas, acetylene to benzene) then no laboratory-induced fractionation will occur. A radiocarbon measurement, termed a conventional radiocarbon age (or CRA) is obtained using a set of parameters outlined by Stuiver and Polach (1977), in the journal Radiocarbon. A time-independent level of C14 activity for the past is assumed in the measurement of a CRA. The activity of this hypothetical level of C14 activity is equal to the activity of the absolute international radiocarbon standard. The Conventional Radiocarbon Age BP is calculated using the radiocarbon decay equation Where -8033 represents the mean lifetime of 14C (Stuiver and Polach, 1977). Aon is the activity in counts per minute of the modern standard, Asn is the equivalent cpm for the sample. ‘ln’ represents the natural logarithm. A CRA embraces the following recommended conventions: 1. Royal Ervin Taylor, Radiocarbon Dating: An Archaeological Perspective (1987), Academic Press

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1. (stative) be sacred, prohibited, restricted, set apart, forbidden, under atua protection - see definition 4 for further explanations. I taua wā ko Te Riri anake te tangata o Ngāti Hine e kaha ana ki te noho i aua whenua. Ko te mea hoki e tapu katoa ana te whaitua nei, pokapoka katoa ana ngā hiwi i ngā rua tūpāpaku (TTR 1998:82). / At that time Te Riri was the only person of Ngāti Hine who wanted to live on the property, because the area was tapu and the surrounding hills were riddled with burial caves. 2. (modifier) sacred, prohibited, restricted, set apart, forbidden, under atua protection - see definition 4 for further explanations. Kei te maumahara tonu ngā uri o Te Whiti ki te tūruapō, arā, te maunga tapu kei te tonga, kei tōna ātārangi he rākau, e pae rua ake ana i tōna peka ngā manu mōhio a Mumuhau rāua ko Takeretō (TTR 1994:172). / It is remembered by Te Whiti's descendants, namely that there is a sacred mountain to the south and in its shadow there is a tree with a branch and on this branch are two birds of knowledge, Mumuhau and Takaretō. 3. (modifier) holy - an adaptation of the original meaning for the Christian concept of holiness and sanctity. Otiia hei minita anō rātou i roto i tōku wāhi tapu, hei tiaki i ngā kūwaha o te whare, hei minita ki te whare (PT Ehekiera 44:11). / Yet they shall be ministers in my sanctuary, having charge at the gates of the house, and ministering to the house. 4. (noun) restriction, prohibition - a supernatural condition. A person, place or thing is dedicated to an atua and is thus removed from the sphere of the profane and put into the sphere of the sacred. It is untouchable, no longer to be put to common use. The violation of tapu would result in retribution, sometimes including the death of the violator and others involved directly or indirectly. Appropriate karakia and ceremonies could mitigate these effects. Tapu was used as a way to control how people behaved towards each other and the environment, placing restrictions upon society to ensure that society flourished. Making an object tapu was achieved through rangatira or tohunga acting as channels for the atua in applying the tapu. Members of a community would not violate the tapu for fear of sickness or catastrophe as a result of the anger of the atua. Intrinsic, or primary, tapu are those things which are tapu in themselves. The extensions of tapu are the restrictions resulting from contact with something that is intrinsically tapu. This can be removed with water, or food and karakia. A person is imbued with mana and tapu by reason of his or her birth. High-ranking families whose genealogy could be traced through the senior line from the atua were thought to be under their special care. It was a priority for those of ariki descent to maintain mana and tapu and to keep the strength of the mana and tapu associated with the atua as pure as possible. People are tapu and it is each person's responsibility to preserve their own tapu and respect the tapu of others and of places. Under certain situations people become more tapu, including women giving birth, warriors travelling to battle, men carving (and their materials) and people when they die. Because resources from the environment originate from one of the atua, they need to be appeased with karakia before and after harvesting. When tapu is removed, things become noa, the process being called whakanoa. Interestingly, tapu can be used as a noun or verb and as a noun is sometimes used in the plural. Noa, on the other hand, can not be used as a noun. Kāore he kai maoa o runga i tēnei waka, i a Tākitimu, nā te tapu. He kai mata anake (HP 1991:9). / There was no cooked food on this canoe, on Tākitimu, because it was tapu. There was only raw food. Ko tēnei i muri nei he karakia whakahorohoro i ngā tapu o ngā tāngata (TWMNT 3/4/1872:58). / The following is a ritual chant to remove the tapu of people. (Te Kōhure Textbook (Ed. 2): 237-240; Te Kōhure Video Tapes (Ed. 1): 6;) See also rāhui

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- “They are exceptional beasts. Magnificent cousins to the mighty dragon. My only advice: beware their poison. It's the deadliest thing about them. As well as the most valuable.” Appearance and behavior Edit An adult wyvern is nearly the size of a full-grown dragon, but where a dragon is saurian and lithe, a wyvern has thicker musculature and a more sinewy bulk. A wyvern’s head is stout and squarish with a split-mandible mouth and protruding fins. These are colorful creatures, garish and fierce. Although historically categorized as smaller cousins of drakes and dragons, wyverns differ distinctly from other dragon-kind in both physical form and demeanor. Wyverns lead solitary existences, stubbornly defending their territory against trespass by other creatures, including other wyverns. Bullish wyverns even defend their turf against dragons that might well be able to best them in battle. Wyvern territories sometimes overlap with each other, as multiple wyverns may be drawn to the same feeding grounds or water source, but not for long. Showy, noisy displays of dominance and foulsmelling wyvern spoor serve to settle most contests between their kind, driving each wyvern to ferociously defend whatever ground it can claim. The wyvern’s natural habitat lies within only a few mountain ranges of Thedas, although wyverns are most numerous in the lands of Orlais; they prefer rocky lands, in some places barren, in others verdant, where they can dwell as an apex predator. Wyverns typically do not discern between intelligent and unintelligent prey. They are as likely to eat ranging cattle, feral wolves, family pets, and civilized folk, if given the need and the opportunity. Often, wyverns inflict their venom on prey and then leave them to wander and die, perhaps as some base animal sense of sport or perhaps out of simple ease. Wyvern wings are hardy but imprecise things. A wyvern does not truly fly, but glides. With a suitable perch and favorable winds, a wyvern can glide over many miles, stalking prey and surveying its territory. With their strong claws they can grip and climb even vertical stone to achieve good perches and altitude. A wyvern can also leap many times its own body length, not unlike a dragon. They are quick, powerful skirmishers, seldom staying put during a contest of might. Despite all that, the most dangerous aspect of a wyvern is its venom. When provoked, wyverns spit poison out to a range of several yards. Left untreated, this poison is fatal. Wyvern venom slows prey and kills gradually. Once afflicted, a target is in mortal danger. After a few moments, however, venom exposed to air becomes far less dangerous. Thus it is essential to harvest wyvern venom quickly and carefully if it is to be stored for future use by, say, poisoners or for use in alchemical concoctions. Venom and its uses Edit Its venom makes the wyvern widely sought by potionmakers, alchemists, and crafters of a potent liquor called aquae lucidius. A miniscule quantity of wyvern venom remaining in the aquae after distillation results in a unique hallucinatory effect. Just how effective wyvern venom is at enhancing potions and alchemical recipes is either a closely guarded secret or a continuing mystery; opinions differ. There exists an antidote to the venom, and it requires three herbs that are not particularly rare, in general; Andraste’s mantle, drakevein, and winterberry. However, should one be bitten by a wyvern and the herbs be unavailable (or out of season), the venom will continue unabated, leading to nothing but misery, pain and eventually death. The Wyvern chase Edit Wyvern defensiveness is legendary. Orlesian hunters tell tales and sing songs of female wyverns killing even high dragons that wandered too close to their nests. As ferocious, territorial creatures, they are often compared to knights or depicted as wild warriors. From Orlais to Gwaren, wyvern symbols and devices mark the heraldry of knightly lords and ladies both low and lofty. Bandits and brigands who draw on wyvern imagery for their strength do so to elevate their own station or to mock landed lords. Some realms even consider the image of a wyvern to be so cherished and fearsome as to make it a crime to bear a wyvern banner or standard without proper authority. The wyvern is so prized and celebrated by some, in fact, that it has been hunted nearly to extinction. The Monfort Family in particular, hosts an annual wyvern hunt at Chateau Haine in order to keep their population down, a spectacle which has become a popular social event in itself. Wild wyverns are feared and honored creatures, full of portentous meaning. To slay one is a kind of trial by combat. In parts of Thedas it is considered shamefully presumptuous (or even illegal) to hunt a wyvern and fail… but dashing and praiseworthy to succeed at it. To think one’s self worthy of the wyvern hunt shows a bit of smirking arrogance. To succeed in the hunt shows that one is worthy. The rich gentry and nobility of Orlais are particularly fond of the wyvern chase, a festive and competitive hunt for the rare creature. It is a drawn-out affair involving feasting and pomp and sharp rivalries (some friendly and some not). Many participate in the chase with little hope of actually finding (much less besting) the beast. Separating legend from lore is one part of the challenge; keeping one’s wits when near wyvern territory is another part. Often it is servants and hunting dogs that undertake the true work and notorious risk of the chase, as they attempt to flush out or track the famed creature. They strike out into the countryside to rile or pursue the powerful, poisonous beast while their noble masters lead from the rear, sipping wine and accepting the praise of a successful kill. While it is rare for people or hounds to be killed during a wyvern chase (wounded hunters are often left to die by the wyvern, but not by fellow hunters), casualties of the hunt are not so shocking as to break the tradition. Brewing draughts of antidote to the wyvern’s venom is part of the festive tradition, too. Wyverns, proud and fearsome as they are, have made their way into folklore and legend throughout all of Thedas. Perhaps no wyvern tale is so well known as the one concerning the beasts and the beloved Andraste. The Chantry considers the tale a wild superstition. Andraste and the wyvern Edit The armies of Andraste and Maferath gathered in the West. And the Prophet went alone into the mountains to sing to the Maker. She would take no one but Justinia and Maferath with her. They climbed until they came to a hanging valley with a small lake - still and clear, perfectly reflecting the sky - and there Beloved Andraste said they would rest. She sat down on the lakeshore and said to her dear companions, "Wait with me, my friends. And whatever happens, have no fear." Then she began to sing. As she sang, the mountains bent to listen. Stars came down from the heavens to be near her. Birds and beasts of every variety came forth and knelt at Andraste’s feet. Justinia and Maferath witnessed this and were afraid. Then from the sheer cliffs a great wyvern appeared, baring its fangs and drowning out the Prophet's song with its roars. The beast descended from the cliffs like a thunderbolt from the sky. Maferath drew his sword and struck at the wyvern, slicing off part of its hood. But the Prophet put her hand on Maferath's sword arm and stopped him. And the wyvern came to Andraste's feet and knelt, and when it rose, it left blood on the ground, dripping from the wound Maferath had given it. And Maferath was ashamed that he had given in to fear despite Andraste's words. He drew his hand along the blade of his sword, spilling his own blood and adding it to the wyvern's. At this, the beast nodded once in acknowledgement and then vanished as swiftly as it had appeared. Dragon Age: Origins Edit Dragon Age II Edit Mark of the Assassin EditHeart of the Many Dragon Age: Inquisition Edit Wyverns can be found in the Hissing Wastes, especially in the Golden Oasis. Additionally, there is a quest in Crestwood (Wyrm Hole) that involves killing three wyverns. Once the lake is drained in Crestwood, a couple of wyverns spawn in the abandoned Old Crestwood village, along the lake shore. - Poison Breath Notable wyverns Edit - Alpha Wyvern - Snowy Wyvern See also EditCodex entry: Wyvern - "Creatures of Thedas: The Wyvern", by Green Ronin

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Macedonia, independent since 1991, is comprised of an ethnic Macedonian majority and ethnic Albanian minority (among others). Despite years of discrimination against ethnic Albanians, the Macedonian national media has shied away from objective reporting of these issues. This media misrepresentation has led many ethnic Macedonians to question why a conflict, led by ethnic Albanian rebels calling for liberation of their ethnic group, broke out in 2001. While the country’s ethnic Albanians fought for grievances relating to socio-economic discrimination, a lack of equitable political representation, and rights to an education in a minority language, the prevailing narrative among ethnic Macedonians is that the 2001 war was fought for greed. Instead, ethnic Albanians hark back to the words of Stojan Andov, then speaker of the parliament, who said, “the only way Albanians will get their rights is by the barrel of a gun.” An internationally-brokered peace deal called the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) brought the conflict to an end, and 14 years later, ethnic Macedonians in power assert that the agreement has been fully implemented. Meanwhile, ethnic Albanians see that the agreement is no longer the government’s priority and that the OFA is inconsistently implemented through the affirmative action quota system, decentralization, and language laws it created. By deriding or dehumanizing ethnic Albanians, ethnic Macedonians attempt to delegitimize ethnic Albanian human rights claims. Many ethnic Macedonians do not see how ethnic Albanians or other minorities have contributed to Macedonia’s existence, and believe they should not benefit from affirmative action. This mentality can only be opposed by rigorous inter-ethnic peacebuilding courses starting in elementary school. The state’s education system must teach about the mosaic of Macedonia’s citizens, and show that Macedonia’s citizens share equal basic rights and responsibilities. As recently as 2010, David Phillips, Director of the Program on Peace-Building and Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University noted the following, “Per capita expenditures for education and health care to Macedonian communities is more than double expenditures for Albanian communities. The teacher-pupil ratio is three times greater for Macedonians than Albanians. Infrastructure investment is four times greater in Macedonian communities. The employment rate of Macedonians is double that of Albanians.” Macedonia’s government, via the media they control and expensive ad campaigns, reinforce the idea that Macedonians are disappearing and under attack. This due to a growing Albanian minority and the governments of neighbouring countries refusing to recognize Macedonia’s constitutional name (Greece) and distinct history & language (Bulgaria). The government has also significantly raised the stigma of abortion and implied it is a patriotic duty to grow the population with ethnic Macedonian children. By weaving declining population numbers with genuine concerns about the country’s relationship with its neighbours, there is a heightened sense of ends justifying means to preserve ethnic Macedonian ethnicity. In February 2015, Macedonia’s lack of democratic integrity was exposed by Zoran Zaev, leader of the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) opposition party, who revealed government-wiretapped conversations. Prominent members of the government and ruling party, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization–Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE; thus forth VMRO) are recorded: influencing judges, stifling the media, rigging elections, and intimidating VMRO party members. Prime Minister Gruevski claims that Zaev is instigating a coup against him, and, with foreign forces, Zaev is attempting to destabilize Macedonia. Macedonia’s ally, Turkey, has employed similar narratives to tarnish anti-government protesters in 2013. Two European Union envoys have noted the blatant discrimination in leaked conversations. The calls reveal government officials’ use of the derogatory term for Albanians –shiptari–and equivalent insults to the Roma ethnicity. The Minister of Interior is recorded saying that it is all right to keep a particular 11 ethnic Albanians in jail, despite there being no evidence of their guilt (and the head of secret services saying they signed confessions because they were tortured), because, “anyway, the jails are full of shiptari.” Occasionally, an ethnic Macedonian politician advocates for equality between the ethnic majority and minority but even in ethnic Macedonian opposition parties, minority rights are not a priority. Two officials in Zaev’s tapes have verified the accuracy of transcripts in which they appear, but there have been no high-profile public defections from the government. The government remains Macedonia’s largest employer in a country where more than a quarter of the population is unemployed. Citizens depend on connections with the party in power, so despite corruption being exposed at all levels, up to PM Gruevski himself, the revelations have not led to protest. Despite growing tension, few Macedonian organizations employ a peacebuilding lens to bring narratives together to counter conflict. Praise for war criminals and nationalist myths must be retired, by acknowledging the history of all peoples of the country; and narrative must reflect the reality of all Macedonian citizens. Since the government has underfunded civil society, the organizations left to make change are either foreign NGOs or local ones with foreign grants. Even then, many grant recipients struggle to remain active between funding cycles. Inter-ethnic and peacebuilding issues are dealt with by functioning professional associations, student and womens’ organizations, but they have other priorities. Macedonia’s civil society is enfeebled in part due to VMRO claiming that many who defend United Nations (UN)-enshrined human rights are “Sorosoids”—followers of George Soros that are part of a global conspiracy against Macedonia. The opposition wants reform, often along the lines of what foreign NGOs support, so VMRO accuses the opposition of working in foreign interests. This is similar to Russia‘s approach to NGOs, and Tajikistan‘s new stance. By closing NGOs, governments quash their citizens’ attempts to form interest groups that advocate for their rights. For reasons mentioned here, Macedonia has dropped from 34th in the world for media freedom in 2009, to 123rd in 2014. A headline in Vecer, a government mouthpiece newspaper, reads, “Rejected by the citizens, Zaev incites religious jihad on the streets,” and features an inflammatory report that SDSM, with Kosovar political parties, is plotting incidents in Macedonia. Slandering Zaev also serves to remind Macedonians that ethnic Albanians (in popular discourse) are “Muslim terrorists” or uneducated villagers. This is perpetuated in online narratives as “internet patriots” bog down video comments sections and forum boards with what equates to hate speech. Divisive narratives are a distraction from the deep political and economic crisis Macedonia is facing. Macedonia’s political decline could exacerbate political polarization across the Balkans although Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are experiencing their own versions of negative peace. Results-oriented peacebuilding could derail cycles of physical and structural violence through monitoring and evaluation. It will be difficult for Macedonia to restore confidence in its government institutions, so to do so, it must implement rule of law without selectivity. Macedonians should become more politically active in their communities and hold their government accountable for its attempts to delegitimize dissenters. Coalition building, within society and political parties, will help identify priorities for the country moving forward. This could start with a re-structuring of the country’s political parties and basing them on political ideology rather than ethnic affiliation. Concurrently, as said in 2013, Macedonia must lead by example to the region by protecting its minorities—rather than falling prey to internal and international inter-ethnic squabbling. Sign up here for the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s May conference, “Peacebuilding and Democracy in a Turbulent World” which will explore the global struggle between civil society voices and government repression that is giving rise to violence, extremism, and toxic politics. (Feature Photo Credit: “Ohrid Town (as seen from Car Samoil’s Castle)” by fabulousfabs Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC-BY 2.0). Accessed 04/28/2015.)

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de Waal D* University of Vermont Medical Center, USA Received date: December 02, 2015 Accepted date: December 06, 2015 Published date: December 14, 2015 Citation: de Waal D (2015) Medical Nutrition Therapy delays Dialysis and Improves Biomarkers. J Kidney 1:106. doi:10.4172/2472-1220.1000106 Copyright: © 2015 de Waal D, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Visit for more related articles at Journal of Kidney There is a high economic burden for kidney disease. Healthy People 2020 has a major goal of reducing new cases of kidney disease and its related complications, disability and early death . The basic function of the kidney is the removal of waste products from the blood while regulating body water and electrolytes. As kidney disease progresses, altered nutrition biomarkers are observed which may be related to poor dietary habits . Patients with kidney disease are often prescribed diets that are low in potassium and provided handouts that focus on limiting fruits and vegetables. Patients become confused and frustrated as this recommendation is at odds with prevention diets such as heart healthy and diabetes diets which emphasize fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The typical North American diet is high in protein and processed foods which can affect the balance of the body’s electrolytes, minerals and contributes to the uremic environment of the digestive system. Evolving evidence has found a link between the gut and kidney health suggesting a need for emphasis on nutrition for the care of a patient with compromised kidney function. A poor diet is a major contributor to disease and early death . Nutrition has become a mainstream social issue and the public’s interest in nutrition and wellness has exploded . In response, the Affordable Care Act supports preventative health services and has included access to wellness programs including Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT). The key practitioners of MNT are the registered dietitian (RD) and registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN). They use an evidenced-based application of the Nutrition Care Process which includes all domains of nutrition intervention including food and/or nutrient delivery, nutrition education, nutrition counseling, and coordination of nutrition care [7,8]. Nutrition and MNT is crucial in current and emerging health care models for wellness, health promotion, disease prevention, and disease management. Given the exploding interest in nutrition and health, television, magazines and the internet have become popular sources of information . Unfortunately, material on the internet often lacks editorial oversight and is replete with misinformation about nutrition and health. When faced with the prospect of kidney failure, patients are increasingly turning to alternative therapies. One of the fundamental principles of dietetic practice for an RD/RDN is to recommend nutrients from food sources as first line therapy. Supplements are only recommended if diet change is insufficient. RD/RDN’s help coach patients make food and nutrient choices that are beneficial and help clear up any misconceptions. The public has acknowledged that the RD/RDNs are a reliable source of reliable information on nutrition who are the food and nutrition experts who can translate the science of nutrition and provide practical solutions for healthy living . My renal nutrition clinic started in 2003 and over the years patients would comment that they felt the practical nutrition advice they received contributed in keeping them off dialysis longer than expected. This inspired me to do a 10 year retrospective study which was recently published in the Journal of Renal Nutrition . Results demonstrated that the decline in kidney function was less in patients who received MNT at follow-up compared to those not receiving MNT. The participants who received MNT were less likely to start dialysis and had more favorable biomarkers. Albumin and biomarkers of chronic kidney disease- mineral and bone disorder were more likely to be within normal limits in the MNT group. Patients received individualized nutrition counselling with visits taking at least 60-90 minutes. The study did have some limitations but the results were very encouraging. The kidney diet is one of the most challenging obstacles patients face. Diet is often entrenched as part of a person’s lifestyle and they do not feel an immediate negative physical response with poor diet choices. An RD/RDN with experience in kidney disease is uniquely qualified to coach patients with positive dietary choices that can help preserve their kidney function. The diet does not need to be an empty plate. Medicare has supported MNT provided by an RD/RDN for kidney disease since 2002 but is presently underutilized. Strong evidence supports optimal nutritional status as the cornerstone in health maintenance . With costs of kidney disease rising, it seems prudent to recommend a therapy that has been shown to delay the progression of kidney disease and improve biomarkers [9,11]. Medical Nutrition Therapy by an RD/RDN specializing in kidney disease should be recommended as one of the first therapies as soon as a medical diagnosis of kidney failure or even proteinuria has been made. Quality of life is dependent on the ability to make choices, and offering broader dietary choice provides patient empowerment contributing to greater enjoyment of life with a better nutrition status. MNT has the potential to improve quality of life of patients with kidney disease by improving their nutritional biomarkers and keeping them off dialysis longer. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Hippocrates.

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At one time, any surgery under general anesthesia practically mandated a stay in the hospital, often to recover not from the surgery but from the effects of the anesthesia used during the operation. Patients were woozy for hours, unable to get out of bed, nauseated and vomiting, and even if they wanted to eat, they couldn't because their digestive systems were paralyzed. People receiving anesthesia were also at risk; a significant number died not from their disease but from the anesthetic drugs themselves. But new drugs and procedures developed in recent years have made anesthesia not only more comfortable, but much safer. Despite two recent highly publicized deaths from anesthesia in a New York hospital, such events, shocking as they are, do not constitute a trend. On the contrary, deaths from anesthesia in generally healthy patients have made a startling decline in the last two decades, decreasing to an estimated 1 in 250,000 cases from 1 in 10,000, according to the American Society of Anesthesiologists. And new drugs have become so easy to tolerate that many patients can undergo general anesthesia in the morning and be home, completely recovered, in time for dinner.Continue reading the main story In fact, almost half of all surgeries are now done on an outpatient basis, either in a hospital, an ambulatory surgical facility, or a doctor's office. Only general anesthesia knocks the patient out completely. Monitored anesthesia, sometimes called ''conscious sedation,'' ''sedation analgesia'' or ''twilight sleep,'' is widely used for breast biopsy, vasectomy, colonoscopy and endoscopy, among other procedures. The patient is conscious, but sleepy and relieved of pain. Regional anesthesia involves the injection of an anesthetic near a nerve bundle to numb a specific region of the body. This is the kind of anesthesia that numbs the patient below the waist for childbirth, prostate surgery and leg or hip operations, and can also be used to numb other regions of the body. Local anesthesia numbs only a part of the body, like the hand or the foot, leaving the patient completely awake. In many surgeries, patients have a choice of anesthesias -- local, regional or general. In picking one, suggests Dr. Karen B. Domino, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, ''Ask your anesthesiologist what he would choose if it were his child, parent or spouse having the surgery.'' The increasing comfort and safety of general anesthesia are largely explained by vast improvements in operating room equipment over the past two decades, in particular the development and wide use of techniques called end-tidal capnography and pulse oximetry. End-tidal capnography detects the level of carbon dioxide the patient is exhaling, which is essential in determining the correct position of the breathing tube. Intubation is a tricky procedure, and there is a danger of putting the tube into the esophagus rather than the trachea -- a mistake that can cause brain damage and death from lack of oxygen. End-tidal capnography minimizes that risk. Pulse oximetry gives the anesthesiologist a precise measure of the oxygen saturation of the patient's blood by sending light pulses through the skin at specific wave lengths that are absorbed in different amounts, depending on the oxygen content of the hemoglobin. A pulse oximetry clip is attached to the patient's finger or earlobe. Another advance is the technique of tracing brain waves to chart the patient's state of wakefulness, though there is debate about its usefulness. In a study published in the May 29 issue of The Lancet, Dr. Paul S. Myles, director of research in the department of anesthesia and pain management at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, demonstrated the effectiveness of using an electroencephalograph, or EEG, to prevent one of the nastiest experiences in surgery: waking up during the procedure, feeling pain and being unable to move or communicate. The technique, called bispectral index monitoring, or BIS monitoring, is used in only about a quarter of operations in the United States, and much less elsewhere. But Dr. Myles thinks it should be more widely used. ''My personal view,'' he said, ''and this is open to debate, is that BIS monitoring should be used in all patients having a general anesthetic with a muscle relaxant, because a muscle relaxant removes the most reliable indicator of awareness: patient movement.'' The additional cost of using the technique is about $20 per case. Nausea and vomiting after anesthesia are not just uncomfortable, but dangerous because accidentally inhaling vomit can lead to pneumonia and life-threatening complications. But new anti-nausea drugs, as well as anesthetics that themselves have anti-emetic properties, help anesthesiologists to minimize this problem prophylactically. Dr. Myles said clinical trials had identified at least five types of anti-nausea drugs ''that are quite effective and we often give a combination of these during surgery, before the patient wakes up.'' Doing this, he added, ''has reduced the risk of nausea and vomiting from about 40 percent to less than 10 percent.'' When patients undergo general anesthesia, they usually first receive a drug called an induction agent that makes them drift off and lasts only a few minutes. A muscle relaxant may also be given. Then the anesthetics that keep patients asleep through the procedure are administered, either through a mask as a gas or through an intravenous line in liquid form. Other drugs may be used to regulate vital functions -- breathing, heart rate and rhythm, kidney function and so on. All are administered in precise amounts, and a patient's reactions to them are monitored. Despite the technological improvements, anesthesia is not completely benign, and mistakes are still be made. Dr. Domino said the most common problems were drug errors, mistakes in the administration of fluids, and the misinterpretation of information delivered by the monitoring equipment. But even these errors are preventable. For example, Dr. Domino said, ''Drug and fluid administration errors are prevented by vigilance and ritualized routines for labeling, checking and administering drugs.'' ''As in every area of medicine,'' she said, ''there are technical limitations and adverse effects of drugs.'' Most patients, even those careful about choosing the right surgeons, do not choose their own anesthesiologists, even though the skill of the anesthesiologist may be just as important. In hospitals, the anesthesiologist is usually chosen by a system that takes into account call schedules, vacation times, and specialty -- slightly different skills and expertise may be needed for pediatric surgery, neurosurgery, cardiac surgery or regional anesthesia. In general, Dr. Domino said: ''If the anesthesiologist weren't capable, the surgeon would refuse to work with him. So if your surgeon is comfortable with your anesthesiologist, then you can be comfortable as well.''Continue reading the main story

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"Until one tries to write about it, the work of art remains a soft of aesthetic blur... After seeing the work, write about it. You cannot be satisfied for very long in simply putting down what you felt. You have to go further" (p.14) The Function of Critical Writing: "1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware. 2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough 3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall. 4. Give a "reading " of a work which increases my understanding of it. 5. Throw light upon the process of artistic "Making" 6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion etc." by W.H. Auden, from "The Dyer's Hand" (1963) pp. 8-9 - Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing; 13 edition (January 3, 2008) - Language: English - ISBN-10: 0495093076 - ISBN-13: 978-0495093077 - Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 9.4 x 2.2 inches on 31 Oct, we've talked about the 4 steps in art criticism: Here is a useful link on this topic: (I've also handed you the printouts last time.) 1. A Comprehensive handout on this topic by Mrs. K. Wood:http://www.fcds.org/faculty/KWood/Visual%20Arts%20Foundations/Art%20Criticism%20handout_revision.pdf This is an oil painting on canvas by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) in the impressionist period. This was painted in between 1890 and 1895, and was titled as “Reading (La Lecture).” It was painted with short and casual brushstrokes, without strong texture. The color tone of the background in general is quite cold, with a lot of fuzzy and short strokes in many different values of green and brown. The foreground mainly consists of the half body portraits of two girls in a warmer color hue. The focal point of the painting lays the faces of two girls. The girl sitting closer to the viewers is in a pale yellow dress, while the one next to her is in a pinky-orange dress. Following the gazes of the girls, a viewer can find a book at the bottom right corner. The book is held by the girl in the front. The other girl in pinky-orange has her right arm across the back of the girl in yellow, and has her left hand holding her chin. The painter has positioned the two subjects in a triangular shape, with the two faces as the top of the triangle, the book at the bottom right and the end of the hair at the bottom left as the bases of this triangle. This triangular shape, sitting in the very front, occupies almost one-third of the painting. Besides, this triangle is well balanced and symmetric. In spite of the causal brushstrokes, the girls are in good proportions and comparatively realistic. While the subjects in the foreground formulate a stable triangular shape, the brushstrokes in the background seem to be in a flowing movement. The color chosen for the background on the left-hand side is darker (mainly in dark green and brown) in order to allow the girl on the left front becomes more outstanding. In contrast, the color for the background on the right-hand side is lighter (mainly in light green and muddy yellow) in order to allow the girl over the right foreground to stand out. With the structural composition and careful layout of the subject matters, this painting depicts a quiet moment of reading. The girls concentrate very much at what they are doing. The brighter and warmer color tone of the subject matters seems to convey a comfortable reading atmosphere. However, the two girls are not facing the light when they are reading. The light, in fact, is only shinning on the backs of the girls. Despite the comfortable atmosphere, the girls seem be trying to read in secrecy. This interesting scene perhaps reminds a lot of viewers about their childhood in which everyone probably have had some little secrets hidden from the adults around them. Many Renoir’s paintings embrace and celebrate different small moments from lives. By focusing on the ‘here and now’ of his time, Renoir has captured these fleeting moments and turned them to be nostalgic memories. Although this painting may not be about any heroic stories, it does successfully build up a connection with the viewers in a subtle way. It reminds the viewers those interesting moments from childhood that they may have long forgotten. Besides, the painting does have a nice composition. First of all, the focal point with the girls’ faces is well organized. Following the gazes of the girls, one can find the book that is well connected with the arms and then the hair the girl in the front. The triangular shape does a nice job of keeping the viewers’ eyes looking around and around the subjects; therefore, able to build up a deeper relationship with the painting. l IB Assessment Higher level (HLA) (240 hours) Standard level (SLA) (150 hours) l Studio refers to the studio work the student selects for inclusion in the candidate record booklet. Studio work involves practical exploration and artistic production. l External Assessment: The student prepares a selection of his or her studio work in the form of an exhibition. This is externally assessed by a visiting examiner following an interview with the student about the work. l Investigation refers to the selection of pages from the investigation workbooks for inclusion in the candidate record booklet. Investigation work involves independent contextual, visual and critical investigation and reflection, both visual and written. l Internal Assessment: The student presents selected pages of his or her investigation workbooks that have been produced during the course. This selection is internally assessed by the teacher and externally moderated by the IBO at the end of the course. During the interview, the examiner will encourage the student to talk about the technical aspects of the studio works, his or her own aims or intentions, and the relationship between the studio works and the investigation workbooks. The discussion should focus on the student’s experiences in making the studio works exhibited and how these relate to the investigation work undertaken. The student is not expected to make a prepared speech. l Candidate record booklet / Visual Journal 1. The candidate record booklet must contain: I. · a statement by the student (no more than 300 words. Describe briefly in his or her artistic growth and development throughout the course. He or she should illustrate these insights with specific examples.) II. related to studio work and the investigation workbooks III. · a short written comment by the teacher IV. · a photographic record of the selected studio work V. · A4 copies of the selected investigation workbook pages. VI. Two additional photographs of the overall exhibition should be provided for inclusion in the candidate record booklet. The two photographs can be taken at the time of the interview. This can provide a useful record of the exhibition. VII. The student must select carefully the stated number of copied investigation workbook pages and ensure that the work meets all the assessment criteria. It is important that the student includes pages that demonstrate how his or her investigation led to the development of some of the studio works photographed for inclusion in the candidate record booklet. The selection can include some consecutive pages. It is also important that students demonstrate evidence of: n · their investigation and strategies for organizing its content n · first-hand responses to such content n · exploration of ideas both visually and in writing. S4 VISUAL ARTS Assessment Guides 334 ASSESSMENT (270 hours) | || | I. Public examination Choose either Paper 1 or Paper 2. Paper 1 – Visual presentation of a theme Paper 2 – Design In each Paper, candidates are required to attempt BOTH of the following sections: (a) Written presentation on critical appreciation of reproductions of artwork provided (10%), and (b) Art making (40%) | || | Submit TWO portfolios consisting of: (1) Research workbook (Presentations on art appreciation and criticism in context in relation to art making/critical studies, and research process)(20%); and (2) Artwork/Critical studies (Three pieces of work in each portfolio) of a theme (30%) | || | All through the course of learning, students should be engaged in the following activities: (1) Building up and keeping their visual journal; (2) Participating in research : searching, selecting and compiling materials for broad / in-depth I. Gathering information, develop ideas and apply them to their own work; II. Understanding the importance of planning and sequential development of ideas; III.Learn from masterpieces the ways to express in relation to their origin, cultural background, personal inclinations etc. (3) Participating in interactive dialogue; (4) Developing personal views and concepts; (5) Experimenting with ides, media and techniques; (6) Reflecting on and adjusting their own learning. l For each portfolio, students are encourage to: (1) Discuss in groups and discuss with the teacher on proposed ideas, (2) Show the idea development with reference books and pictures (3) Show the process of thinking in used of Mind-Map (4) Study the style and characteristics of the artwork of the famous artists (5) Evaluate the process and the final artwork in groups before hand in to the teacher.

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Dealing With Cat Urine Spraying Inappropriate feline urination can be caused by a number of very different reasons and diseases. These include behavioral issues, urinary tract problems, and excessive drinking (secondary to a myriad of medical conditions). If you notice your cat leaving little puddles around the house, we recommend that you consult a veterinarian, so they can determine which of these is the cause and can provide appropriate treatment. Bear in mind that the vet will probably want to collect a urine sample to help with the diagnosis, so giving the cat a drink before a visit can help the process a lot. Try to observe the cat when it does go to the toilet in the house and watch what it does while passing the urine, as this will also provide important clues as to the cause of the problem. Some cats will start urine spraying when they are stressed due to changes in their environment. New babies, moving house or even a new cat in the neighborhood can trigger this problem. Most cats who spray do not posture in a squat as they normally do when going to the toilet. They stand straight up with their tail pointed upwards, twitching before spraying on vertical surfaces. The purpose of the spraying is to scent their environment to indicate that it is their territory. There are always exceptions to the rule and there are a few cats who will urinate due to behavior problems, for example "puddling". Owners may notice other changes in the behavior of their cats as well. Some may become more affectionate, other cats more aggressive. Urinary tract problems will normally emerge with a cat having difficulty going to the toilet. These cats frequently pass small quantities of urine, crying when doing so. The urine may have a reddish tinge or a pungent odor. This can be caused by crystals in their bladder or a bacterial infection. Cats will often lick at themselves after passing urine due to the discomfort. When crystals are the cause, the disease can quickly become very serious if the urinary tract becomes completely blocked and the cat is unable to pass any urine. Blocked cats are a veterinary emergency and can die if not attended to quickly. "Blocked cats are a veterinary emergency and can die if not attended to quickly." The third common cause of inappropriate urination is excessive drinking (polydipsia). More liquid going in means more that needs to come out, and occasionally cats may have accidents trying to get out to the toilet, particularly when they are older and not as nimble as in their younger days. The urine will often be found near doors or litter boxes. Increased drinking can be very difficult for owners to detect and can be indicative of several underlying problems. Two of the most common causes in older cats are kidney disease and an overactive thyroid gland (hyperthyroidism). Both of these diseases are often be accompanied by weight loss. Cats with kidney disease often go off their food, while those with hyperthyroidism will eat more than normal. Your vet will most likely want to take blood tests to confirm these problems. Sometimes, several of these problems can overlap, making a definitive diagnosis a little more difficult. For example, cats who have had urinary crystals and which find it painful going to the toilet in their litterbox may associate the litterbox with an unpleasant experience and avoid going there in the future, instead going in other areas of the house. These cats are not necessarily anxious cats and are not marking territory, but they are still urinating in an inappropriate place and their behavior will need to be modified just the same. The first step in a case of inappropriate urination due to a behavioral cause is to thoroughly clean the area where the cat has urinated to remove all odors of the urine. The residual smell of the urea in urine acts like a beacon, telling the cat to go there again. Enzymatic laundry detergents followed by a rinse of water are fairly effective. There are also odor removing sprays, such as "Oops Away" or "Anti Icky Poo", which can be very useful. The next step is to remove access to the place where the cat has been urinating inappropriately, and to ensure that the cat has access to two clean litter trays (clean these at least once per day). Try different types of litter if the cat does not restart using the tray, as it may be an aversion to the odor or the texture of the litter which is cause. Generally, a small, easily-cleaned area is the best place to keep the cat initially. Then, when it begins to urinate in the appropriate place, increase the area the cat can access. Ensure that the cat is supervised when allowed back into the area where it was previously urinating inappropriately and give it lots of attention in this area, petting and playing with it. "The residual smell of the urea in urine acts like a beacon, telling the cat to go there again." Ultimately, the aim is to make that particular area unattractive to the cat and the appropriate place a much more desirable place to go. If the cat has been spraying for a long period, it may not be possible to ever retrain the cat completely, and it may be necessary to permanently deny access to some areas (closing doors to the bedroom or lounge for example), or to cover furniture with plastic. If the cat is very anxious, your vet may also recommend medications to reduce its stress level and initially calm the cat down. There may also be other changes, such as pulling down a blind if your pet is stressed by seeing all the neighborhood cats wandering past the house. Remember to be patient and understanding with your cat, as this problem may take some time to resolve. It is imperative to involve your vet as they can help to identify the cause of the problem and ensure that it is being treated in the appropriate manner. |1. Swinney G, Seksel K. Medical Causes of Behavioral Problems. Proceedings Australian Veterinary Association Conference 2006. 2. Perry G. Behaviour Problems in Older Cats - Are They Different? Proceedings Australian Veterinary Association Conference 2006. 3. Meadows G, Flint E. Your Cat. New Holland Publishers, London, UK, 2004. 4. Fatjo J, Amat M, Manteca X. Elimination Behaviour Problems in Cats:The Interplay Between Behavioural and Physical Causes. Proceedings WSAVA World Conference 2006

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Posted : April 2014Author : Dr. B. Green This is an article from TheMedicineJournal’s Dr. B. Green. Cramps come in four categories: True cramps, Rest cramps, Tetanic cramps, and Dystonic cramps. The most common of these is the True cramp. While there are different causes of muscle cramps, like the involuntary contractions associated with seizures, we’ll focus on muscle cramping related to athletics, as this is the most common. Our bodies are composed of over 700 muscles that work together. Occasionally, involuntary contractions of one or more of these muscles will cause a cramp or spasm. A muscle cramp may involve a single muscle, part of a muscle or a number of muscles that work in synergy. Although most skeletal muscle cramps occur in foot and calf muscles, other muscles such as the thighs, arms, hands, and abdomen are also prone to spasms. No one knows for sure the exact mechanism that causes people to cramp during exercise, but there are two main theories, the second of which is generally accepted as the principle cause, though not definitively proven yet. Although not supported by scientific evidence, dehydration is often given as an explanation for why muscle cramps occur in athletes. The lack of evidence might seem difficult to believe because every high-school sports coach preaches hydration as a way to ward them off. The truth is, the only studies showing dehydration, and by extension some of the electrolyte abnormalities associated with dehydration, is the cause of cramps have all been called in to question due to small sample sizes, or that they relied on anecdotal clinical observations. In fact, several studies have shown athletes who cramped during events have the same levels of dehydration, and the same levels of electrolyte concentrations, as those who didn’t cramp. Even though dehydration and electrolyte problems, as a cause of cramping, is not well accepted in the medical field, due to the fact no one has definitively shown the exact cause, this can’t be ruled out altogether. Further, sodium depletion and low blood levels of either calcium or magnesium have been associated with an increased risk of cramping. A quick online search will yield several medical professionals who still hold fast to this line of thinking and some have suggested, even though electrolyte abnormalities may not be the main cause of the cramp, it might predispose you to getting a cramp. The second, and arguably most accepted, theory behind why we cramp during exercise involves muscle fatigue and spinal reflexes. In 1997, Professor Mortin Schwellnus and colleagues proposed this new theory after an extensive review of the studies involved in cramping did not yield any clear cause. Normally when you want your muscles to contract, like when you choose to push down on your bike pedal, the signal comes from a grouping of nerves called your alpha motor neurons. These neurons can be stimulated in three ways. The first is voluntary, and the second is caused by signals from what are known as spinal inter-neurones. The third, and arguably most important when it comes to cramping, involves involuntary reflexes. Muscles have within them tiny structures known as muscle spindles. The main purpose of these spindles is to prevent damage from our muscles being stretched too far. Every time your muscle is stretched, the spindle activity increases with the level of stretching, and causes the muscle to contract when that stretching reaches a certain point. When we doctors hit you in the knee with a tiny hammer-of-torture, this is the cause of the reflex contraction. Your doctor stretches your quadriceps with the hammer, the spindles cause your alpha motor neuron to fire, and your leg muscles contract, and you kick your doctor in the shin! The second reflex involved with cramping comes from what is known as your Golgi tendon organ. This organ is responsible for keeping your muscles from contracting too forcefully, preventing tearing. When this organ is stimulated, it causes the alpha motor neurons to stop firing, forcing your muscle to relax. If you prevent the Golgi tendon organ from working, like in a marathon when you want your legs to continually churn out the miles, the result will be increased firing from your alpha motor neuron, and increased contraction. So knowing how your alpha motor neurons cause your muscles to contract, the theory of cramping goes a little something like this: you’re running a marathon, your alpha motor nerves are consistently fired off by you telling your legs to keep churning. Due to the fact your muscle is fatigued, and your control over it decreasing, this causes the involuntary reaction of your muscle spindles to increase, while simultaneously causing the Golgi tendon organ activity to decrease. The net result of these two reflexes is increased involuntary firing of your alpha motor neurons. You then start jumping around like you’re on hot coals because your calf muscle is contracting like a uterus in labor! Giving credence to this theory as the main cause of cramping is what relieves the cramp. Every athlete knows that stretching will help the contraction. Passive stretching has been shown to decrease Alpha motor neuron activity, thereby relieving the contraction. If electrolyte abnormalities were the cause, stretching would not change the concentration of electrolytes, thus not affect the cramp. Whether you subscribe to the less-accepted dehydration and electrolyte abnormalities theory, or the increased alpha motor neuron proposal, we do know some people are more prone to cramping than others. This suggests a genetic predisposition. Although it’s true no one has ever identified a specific gene that causes you to be a ‘Cramper’, family history of cramping does increase your risk of being one who cramps more than others. Other risk factors for cramping include: increases in intensity and duration of exercises; inadequate conditioning for the activity; and previous occurrences of cramping during or after exercise. In the end, if you want to prevent cramping, time honored practices like a cool down period after the exercise; stretching and warming up well before the activity; and knowing you body’s limits while performing have all been shown to help prevent cramps. If you count yourself one of the unlucky who seem to get cramps more often than a woman in labor, sleep a little more uneasy knowing you’re also more likely to get the dreaded leg-cramp-while-sleeping!

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SHAFAQNA-The world experienced a great leap in science when Einstein proposed his theories of Special and General Relativity. For about 200 years physics depended on Newtonian laws. It was thought then that time was constant; an hour is the same all over, under any conditions. Understanding of time soon changed, and time was different ever since. Let’s view the way Newton thought of time. It was said that time can be related to the running of water in a river. Should the speed of the water be measured at any point, it would yield equal results. The same was thought of time; if time was measured at any point in the universe it would be the same. Suppose George and Bill synchronised their watches. George left on a super fast spaceship, and came back an hour later (according to his own watch). Newton would say that Bill would have waited an hour for George to come back, and their watches would read the same time. Einstein disagrees! According to his theories, time is relative, and it depends on the speed at which one travels. Suppose that George left earth on the same spaceship at 1:00 p.m. travelling at a speed close to that of light, and suppose that Bill was in some way was looking at George’s watch. Bill would realise that George’s watch is advancing very slowly compared with his. So if Bill’s watch said 2:00 p.m. then George’s watch would have said 1:05 p.m. for example. On the other hand, George would see that Bill was acting a bit strange; he would see him doing everything pretty fast, as if he was in a movie that was being fast forwarded. Strange indeed! This time difference applies to everything surrounding both George and Bill. If George returns one year later (according to his own time), he would find out that Bill aged 12 years. Not only this, but both George and Bill, separately, feel normal; George does not feel that his life was moving any faster than normal, nor does Bill feel that his life was moving any slower than normal. Scientists used a Muon (a particle smaller in size than an atom) to prove the idea of time relativity. A Muon lives for about 2.2 microseconds, after which it changes into an electron. This short life, is measured for a Muon at rest. When a Muon is travelling, on the other hand, at speeds very close to the speed of light, it was noticed that it lived 30 times longer than it did when it was at rest. It was the same with George and Bill. Bill noticed that George’s life was prolonged. There were other tests that scientists conducted that proved this theory correct, and they can be found in physics books all over. Einstein discovered this idea in 1921, but before this discovery by about 1330 years, God, in His Holy book (The Holy Qur’an), mentioned the idea of relativity in clear terms. It was not understood until God revealed the same idea to one of his creatures in a mathematical form. God says in the Holy Qur’an: “He will plan His ordinance from the heaven unto the earth, then will it go up to Him in a day the duration of which is a thousand years according as you reckon.” (32:5) “The angels and the Spirit ascend to Him in a day, the measure of which is fifty thousand years.” (70:4) Notice that the first mentioned verse offers four phrases and words that constitute the heart of the special theory of relativity, and they are: “go up,” “a day,” “a thousand years,” and “according as you reckon.” The verse indicates that God’s ordinance is moving upwards, and that it’s not static. Then it tells us that one day equals our understanding of 1000 years. When these orders leave earth upwards they experience one day of travel themselves, but 1000 years would have passed by us before the orders reach their destination. That is to say, if you were travelling in a spaceship alongside these orders and looked at your watch when you reached the target you would have experienced one day of travel, but look out the spaceship’s window, and you’d see generations and generations had passed on earth. If you had left your kids on earth, then you would have become a grand grand grand grand? father. The second verse shows that the angels and the spirit ascend into the heavens in a day equal to fifty thousand years. How could there be a day that is equal to 1000 years, and another that is equal to 50,000 years? is this reasonable? Absolutely! Time is relative, and it depends on the speed of moving objects relative to each other. The faster the object the larger the time difference. Which means that the angels and the spirit are faster than the orders in their ascensions. If we try to calculate the speed of the angels using the equation Einstein developed we would find out that we need a calculator that operates with a large number of decimal points. I have tried to calculate their speed once, but I couldn’t. The computer I am currently using is not precise enough, and I couldn’t get enough decimal points. The reason for this is because the speed of angels is very close to the speed of light. (You can find these equations in books of physics. They are not hard to find!)

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